The Prettiest Feathers (29 page)

“What else did he do with his time?”

“He was fascinated with birds,” she said. “I mean, it wasn’t like a hobby or anything. It was just something else he talked about a lot. Birds could fly way above everything and kind of see a whole place all at once—that was part of it. And he said he liked how secretive they are—living out their lives in the brush, migrating thousands of miles to different places every year.”

Her face brightened, enlivened by a memory. “His big thing was ravens,” she said. “Because they could make all these different sounds, imitate other birds. He loved how smart they are. They know when someone means them harm, but they can be sociable, too. They come right up to people when they know they aren’t in any danger. I could go on a quiz show with all the stuff he told me.”

Sarah looked down again. Her expression changed.

“There was a sad part, too. There was always a sad part with Paul. The birds they carried in cages into the coal mines to test for poisonous gases—if the birds lived, it was okay for the miners to go in. Paul hated that. He said he used to think about those birds late at night when he was locked in the coal bin—said he felt like Dad had sent him down there to see if there were any poisonous gases.”

The cloud seemed to pass and Sarah brightened again.

“He always had to do things the same way. I thought it was funny, but he didn’t like it when I joked about it. If he had a ten-page paper to write for class, he’d open his notebook and number the pages one to ten before he even started writing. I’d say, ‘Paul, what if you can think of only nine pages to write?’ He’d get all upset. Or when he had to do the dishes—he’d spend four or five minutes just lining them all up beside the sink before he started. Then he always did the glasses first, then the cups, then the saucers, then the dinner plates—or something like that.”

Sarah Humphrey was lost in her thoughts, her memories. I reminded her that I wanted to see the picture of Paul that she had mentioned to me earlier.

She pulled a handful of loose snapshots out of a cabinet drawer and sorted through them until she found the right one.

It was a black-and-white photo of a young boy, snapped from behind, with his face turned away from the camera. He was outdoors, kneeling down in front of what looked like a miniature town.

“Paul built that, and he also tore it down—all those buildings that he spent so much time working on. He smashed the whole thing the same day he pulled the knife on my father. It was like he was trying to hurt himself.”

She glanced away for a moment.

“I remember what he did to the animals,” Sarah said. “It was so sick.”

I prompted her. “What animals? What do you mean?”

“All the boys hunted. They’d put on their hunting clothes and their boots sometime in October and I swear they lived in them until after Thanksgiving. At least it smelled that way in school. Paul never owned a rifle. My father would never have let him have one. There wasn’t any money anyway. But Paul hunted. He said all he needed were his hands, a knife, and a length of twine.”

Sarah seemed to slip inside herself with her memories. She was trembling.

“I went up to his place on the hill one time. I wasn’t very old. I was out playing, and I was curious. I knew that he spent most of his time up there. There was a path that led farther up the hill, beyond the clearing by the three old apple trees. So I followed it, going deeper and deeper into the woods. That’s when I saw them. Red squirrels, chipmunks, a rabbit, some woodchucks—they were strung up with twine, hanging from the pine trees. They hadn’t been shot or cut or anything. They were alive when he did that to them.”

Tears rolled down Sarah’s face, and I had to fight my own
reaction. Twine in a secluded forest. Yellow nylon rope in my closet. Animals swinging in the breeze. Sheila swaying when I touched her.

“I don’t know why I kept going, but I did,” Sarah said, “and I saw him. He was down in a ravine, crouching over something. At first I couldn’t see. He was tearing at it with his knife. Maybe a twig snapped—I don’t know—but he turned around. The knife and his hands were soaked with the blood of a small deer. At first I thought that he had blackened his face. The kids sometimes did that. But it wasn’t face paint. It was more blood. It was even in his hair. He looked like a savage, like something primitive. When he stood, I could see that he was naked, and the blood was smeared all over his body. He didn’t see me. I backed away and went down to the house. When Paul came in for supper, he was clean. His clothes were clean. He was my brother Paul again, not whoever he was up there on that hill.”

She turned and looked at me. “Is that what he did? To people?”

I didn’t respond.

She shook her head, shuddering. “I remember something else,” she said. “That night on the mountain when I was naked and I thought he was going to do something? He cut himself on that broken bottle—kept digging at himself with it. It was as if he didn’t even know that he was doing it.”

Sarah’s eyes met mine. “It was as if he couldn’t feel any pain. His eyes were blank, like empty holes.”

I handed the photograph back to her.

“Mom snapped that one,” Sarah told me. “It’s ironic, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Even then, Paul was a builder. But when he created that little city out of scraps, none of us had any idea what he would become.”

I
don’t do well with people. Never have.

As I crossed from Massachusetts into Vermont on Interstate 91, I wondered if there were still more cows than people in the Green Mountain State. Probably not. Politicians were killing farms to make room for malls and parking lots. Last I heard, Vermont, with its half million people, was the last holdout against Wal-Mart in the lower forty-eight—if elected representatives with IQs about equal to their belt size hadn’t given it up.

Maybe it was all symbolic anyway. McDonald’s had run out of street corners and was turning up inside Wal-Marts. What would turn up inside McDonald’s?

No, I guess I don’t have the warmest feelings for people. Most of the years of fifty-minute hours weren’t a problem. Therapy is a unique situation—an intense involvement between two people that defines its own structure. We share a direction, some goals, and we work together to get there.

It’s the world without that structure—the way people pass time—that I don’t tolerate well. People in the wild, with
their passionate championing of one cause or another, the way they fling insults or lawsuits about, or tell us all to have a nice day. I don’t get it, and it frightens me—keeps me awake nights.

Toward the end, even the office became a problem. I was burning out—scheduling two people for the same time slot, leaving at three when I’d scheduled a four o’clock. The symptoms were clear. There were days when I’d open my day book, see a name, and have no idea who the person was. It didn’t have to be a new client; an old one would do.

I’d go office to office on the chance that one of my partners would know who Barry W. was. That usually got shrugs all round. It was either early dementia, or time to get out of the business altogether. I opted for the latter diagnosis, and walked away.

I was doing a lot of profiling work then. It was loner work—cerebral and visceral—and I had no idea the toll it was taking, the trap I was falling into (one which I had fashioned for myself). The techniques I had developed required that I extend myself into the worlds, the minds, of the most savage people we had created. I knew the intellectual fascination; I just didn’t recognize the dangers to the soul.

Now there was a new danger—to Lane. Nothing else could have pried me from my own lair in Michigan, putting me on the road into the mountains of northern New England.

I exited the Interstate above Brattleboro and continued north on Route 5. Bullet holes in the road signs and the profusion of decorative lawn derrieres reassured me—I was in Vermont. I hadn’t taken a wrong turn anywhere.

Hunters clad in Day-Glo orange jumpsuits, and black-and-red wool plaid outfits, emptied out of pickup trucks and ambled into the woods with deer rifles and six-packs. Someone would either get a trophy or become one.

The last time I was in Vermont was on our honeymoon. Before I met Savvy, I was the epitome of the confirmed bachelor, true to the stereotype in every way. Not only did I
do my own cooking, cleaning, and laundry, I actually enjoyed it. When I proposed, Savvy said that I had her blessing if I wanted to keep on handling the domestic tasks. We compromised. We’d cook on alternate days, do our own laundry, and split the cleaning chores in half.

On our honeymoon, we stayed at the Woodstock Inn, where we played at being lovers and tourists, sipped cognac in front of the fireplace, and, without knowing it, began to drift apart. In those early days, we were inseparable, but both of us were elsewhere, too.

Savvy
had her world of animals—caring and curing—and I had my world of murder.

I got my first police case by accident. We had a neighbor, Ray Bolton, who was a detective with the Boston police department. When he and his wife were at our place for dinner one night, Ray mentioned a homicide case that he was working on. He was stymied.

I plied him with questions, and all of us played a game of Clue involving an elderly woman who had met a gruesome stabbing death, apparently at the hands of a stranger in her fashionable Beacon Street home.

Finally I’d had enough. “It’s elementary, my dear Bolton,” I said, getting laughs all around.

“No, I mean it. It’s common sense.”

Ray bristled. “I’ve been working this case for ten months.”

“Ray, it isn’t a stranger. The woman opened her door to her killer—probably someone she knew well, maybe even a relative.”

“How do you figure?”

Ray pushed his coffee away and helped himself to a beer.

“She had a heart condition,” I said. “A serious one.”

“Right.”

“She wasn’t supposed to climb stairs.”

He nodded.

“And she was a good patient—took all her medications, kept all her appointments. But you found her in an empty
room upstairs. There was no bruising on her body. Her half slippers were still on her feet. So no one dragged her up those steps. She walked. Why?”

“The perp showed her the knife,” Ray said.

“And why didn’t he use it downstairs?”

“He was looking for something. He needed her to go along.”

“To a closed, unused, empty room?”

“The grandson,” Ray said. “She’d go up there with the grandson. He’s a strange guy. In his twenties, no real job, no real place to call home.”

“She had a soft spot for him, didn’t she?”

“Yeah,” Ray said. “She’d take him in.”

“And show him the room that was going to be his.”

“Why’d he kill her?”

“Hey, I gave you who. You take it from there.”

Two weeks later Ray showed up at the door with a case of Heineken—my first fee as a law enforcement consultant. We sat at the kitchen table.

“They’re probably gonna cop an insanity plea with the grandson,” he said. “The story he tells is they were in the room and she suddenly changes her mind, says he can’t stay there after all. He loses it, and stabs her eighteen times.”

“It’s a sex crime,” I said.

He opened a bottle of beer. “Educate me,” Ray said.

“He’s probably psychotic. Either he touched her in some sexual way, or he opened his pants or something. She says that’s it, out, you’re not staying here, and he goes into overkill mode.”

I expected Ray to resist that line of thinking, but he didn’t. “We’ve got this guy who does amazing things analyzing blood stains. He says her dress was raised up, then put back in place, after she was down.”

“What do you know about the grandson?”

“Saw a shrink for about three years. We can’t find out anything there. He was diddling around with a niece, a five-year-old.
They handled it in the family. Set him up with an apartment and all he had to do was keep his appointments.”

“The sexual curiosity of a child,” I said. “And maybe the mind of one, too.”

Savvy said she could see it coming then. Sometimes Bolton or someone else in his department called or came by, or a detective from another department would call on Ray’s recommendation. I read the latest books on criminology and psychopathy, studied cases, and spent a lot of time thinking about them.