* * *
I ran up the last half mile of road and crunched my way through the white gravel parking lot in the pelting rain as I approached the church. The lightning illuminated the entire night for seconds at a time, leaving me completely exposed. I still didn’t know exactly
why
Kinsey was the killer, but I didn’t care.
I couldn’t help glancing to my right as I ran across the parking lot. I wiped the rain out of my eyes and looked over the cemetery where Mara and I had shared our first kiss. A cemetery I hadn’t visited for a long time, and the same cemetery in which my father had buried my mother over twenty years ago.
I knew I had no time for such recollections, and kept running.
I continued toward the front steps of the church as the rain and wind continued, and another protracted flash of lightning crackled overhead. For a moment the face of the church reminded me of a skull, the two oval windows in the upper balcony and the dark glass doors reflecting the night like a gaping mouth. I walked up the steps and pushed open the sanctuary doors, scanning the vestibule. The outer chamber was immersed in darkness, and I slipped inside the foyer.
A muffled voice emanated from within the church, and I peeked through a small circular window in one of the doors leading from the outer vestibule into the dimly lit sanctuary. The church hadn’t changed much; three separate rows of pews still stretched into the dark front of the church, toward the altar area. The only difference was that the floor had been carpeted, in contrast to the hard, wooden floors of my childhood.
My eyes traveled toward the end of the sanctuary. Two lights at the base of the large pulpit were glowing. And there, atop the pulpit, stood my father. His head tilted awkwardly, his arms at his sides. He mumbled what sounded like a sermon.
I pushed the middle doors open and cautiously entered the darkened sanctuary.
I swept my eyes constantly to the sides and walked rapidly toward the pulpit, my gun drawn. As I came closer, I could see two ropes ascending into the night above my father, twisting garishly like a gallows, illuminated by the lights at the base of the pulpit. Both ropes were looped as a double noose around my father’s neck.
I walked rapidly toward the pulpit and whispered harshly, “Dad!”
My father stopped murmuring as a second head appeared behind him in the shadows, and a flash of metal suddenly appeared beneath my father’s chin.
“Dr. Madden? A little early, but we’ve certainly been waiting for you.” Kinsey emerged from behind my father, holding the cruel instrument of the Snow White Killer against my father’s throat.
“Don’t, Kinsey.”
Kinsey kept the hunting knife tight against my father’s throat as he spoke in a calm voice. “Drop your gun, and remove your ankle gun, too.”
I considered my options, which quickly boiled down to none. The steel blade of the knife glinted against my father’s neck, reflecting the moonlight streaming through the stained glass windows. I accepted the cold reality that I could never reach them before Kinsey could draw the blade across my father’s throat. A tremendous crash of thunder rang out and lightning lit the entire sky for a few seconds.
“Agent Madden,” Kinsey said, “you, of all people, should believe that I have no problems with killing people. Drop them in three seconds.” He pushed my father forward roughly. “Three, two…”
“Okay, okay!” I dropped my Luger to the floor and removed the snub-nose from my ankle holster. I kicked both guns down toward the altar, where they tumbled to a stop on the carpeted floor.
In a matter of mere seconds, my best-laid plans had been ruined. I stood weaponless before Kinsey, unless I counted my father’s pocketknife in the inside pocket of my jacket. In the shadows, I slipped my hand inside and retrieved the small knife.
“Raise your hands and come up here into the light. Slowly.”
I did as he commanded, instantly fearing that even the pitiable pocketknife I’d just grasped would be detected. I held my hands up as casually as I could, hiding the pocketknife between my thumb and the fleshy part of my hand. I walked up the steps and toward the two men behind the pulpit.
“Not too close. Stop right there.”
I paused only four or five feet away. Kinsey still held the jagged blade of his knife tightly against my father’s throat. He removed one of the two nooses from around my father’s neck and swung the free end of the double noose toward me.
“If you’d be so kind as to put that noose around your neck.” He tilted his head, regarding me curiously. “As before, you have three seconds to do as I say, or I’ll toss you your father’s head.”
I slipped the noose around my own neck, feeling the rope pull slightly taut. I looked upward and saw that, as I feared, it looped over a rafter in the ceiling of the church and connected to the other end of the rope around my father’s neck.
“Much better. Now turn around and put your hands behind your back.”
I turned slowly around, facing the entrance to the church. I couldn’t think fast enough, but I needed to do something before I was incapacitated for good. It had only been five minutes; I needed to stall him until Woodson showed up, then pray that she could stop him. I instantly regretted bargaining with her for a head start, but it was too late for hindsight now.
As I lowered my hands behind my back I rotated my palms to shield the jackknife, and an instant later my wrists had been cinched tightly together with a plastic cuff. Too late, I whirled around and tried to pull them free. With cinched hands behind my back and a noose around my neck, I wobbled unsteadily in the darkness. For a moment I imagined falling backwards off the altar and hanging both my father and myself with one misstep. Though I’d feared Kinsey would push me off the precipice of the pulpit immediately, he didn’t. Instead, he simply retreated to a position near my father, staring at me in silence.
The adrenaline surged through my frightened body and made me impatient, angry, and desperate. Another blast of thunder shook the rafters and split the night. The wind picked up outside, and the stained glass windows shuddered slightly around us. “What do you want, Kinsey? What exactly is it that you want?”
Kinsey didn’t answer, but rather smiled and walked down the altar to where I’d kicked my guns. He picked them up, never taking his eyes off me, and then walked back up the altar and on into the choir loft behind us. He withdrew the curtains and dropped both guns into a newly installed baptismal. The guns plunked as they hit the water and quickly sank to the bottom.
Kinsey stepped back down out of the choir loft and took up his position beside my father. He smiled. “What I want? I want you and your father to watch each other die.”
The sanctuary fell silent, save for the sound of the wind outside.
“Why are you doing this, James?” my father whispered.
“Because of you, Pastor Madden. Or maybe because you presumed that my own piece-of-shit father deserved the so-called forgiveness you were selling.”
Kinsey turned toward me, looking about the sanctuary. “Yes, Lucas, good Pastor Madden brought the good news of salvation to my own piece-of-shit father, good old Jim. I believe it was a certain sermon entitled ‘The Devil’s Orchard’?” At that point he opened his eyes wide toward me. “Is it maddening to realize that if you’d only listened to your father’s sermons, you might have put two and two together sooner?” He smiled. “All these innocent women sacrificed on the altar of an object lesson designed just for you and your father.” He paused as he let his words sink in. “All those innocents could have been saved, if only you’d paid attention to your father so long ago.”
“James. Please don’t do this.” My father breathed the words. “We never knew that Jim did anything bad to you.”
Kinsey started to respond, but I spoke up first and cut him off. “Don’t bother, Dad.
James
has a little problem, I bet. He can’t help himself. Right,
James
?”
The smile left Kinsey’s face. “Please, enlighten me.”
I was baiting him, hoping that he’d become distracted as I continued to saw the pocketknife ever so gently back and forth across the plastic cinch binding my hands together. It was slow work, but within a couple minutes, the knife was already gliding into a small groove I’d cut into the plastic. “I bet you have a tiny little genetic alteration in one of your genes, don’t you, James?”
Kinsey laughed. “And so the famous profiler finally begins to profile. Yes. I sequenced my own DNA a few months after your first article on the ripper gene appeared, in fact.
Madden, Madden,
I remember thinking as I read your article in the seclusion of my office in Atlanta.
How utterly ironic.
“So yes, I carry your little ripper mutation, Dr. Madden. Both copies.” He paused. “Leave it to the son of Madden to come up with the truth. A biological basis for behavior that, for centuries, had been ascribed to an imaginary devil by men of the cloth.”
I tried to distract Kinsey from focusing on my father. “So why go around killing innocent women?” Even as I spoke I felt the groove in the plastic cinch grow deeper, but when I tested the ligature behind my back, my hands were still bound tight. I returned to the painstakingly methodical work of drawing my pocketknife back and forth, as Kinsey answered.
“They were simply object lessons,” he shrugged. “Your discovery—the biological basis of deviant behavior—inspired me. The same way your father’s words had tortured me, all these years. His predestination rhetoric doomed me to hell before I was even conceived, and I could do nothing about it. And then, twenty years later, you came right behind him and proved it, Lucas, with science. Even if all that Biblical tripe your father preached to us in our childhood was false, I was still condemned by my own genetic code, over which I had no control.”
At this point his eyes grew wild. “Don’t you see? You can’t escape predestination, whether you’re predestined by a God or by your own nature. Which one doesn’t even matter anymore. Now, nothing matters.” He touched the tip of his knife with his finger, and his teeth broke into a threatening smile. “I’m blameless. We’re all predestined.”
“Your father changed his ways, James. You could change, too.” My father spoke the words from the pulpit as though a challenge.
“My father?” Kinsey’s voice suddenly trembled with an uncharacteristic fury. “You embraced my father, the same man who used to hold me underwater if I cried during my bath. Or cut me with his hunting knife if I missed a shot while hunting.”
“Oh. I get it,” I said, in an innocent voice that belied my condescension. “So it was
your father
who is to blame. Not God. Not the ripper gene. Your father.” It was a calculated risk. If he could just focus his anger on me, perhaps I could save my father—if Woodson showed up in time. “You’re in a win-win situation, James. It’s everybody’s fault except your own. You can’t be blamed. You’re the only one who’s golden.”
He wanted to come at me, I could feel it; the way his entire angry being, all of his focus, concentrated on me. He stepped toward me, flipping the knife back and forth in his hands. The nick in the cinch where I’d been gently sawing the pocketknife felt even deeper, but still the cinch held when I tested it. I decided that if he came at me before I could free my hands to remove the noose from my neck, I’d kick straight forward into his knee and try to shatter his shin, then kick the toe of my boot straight up into his throat and hope for incapacitation.
And I had to hope that I wouldn’t fall off the altar during the scuffle, hanging my father and myself in the process. It was a sadly deficient plan, to say the least, but it was all I had.
I steeled myself for the final confrontation as Kinsey’s twisted features emerged from the darkness and he staggered toward me.
However, as quickly as he’d begun to advance, Kinsey stopped. His anger dissipated and he addressed me as if we’d been carrying on a pleasant conversation. “Wait a minute. I can’t kill either of you just yet. I have a secret, and I haven’t yet told you what it is.”
I let out a breath, and suddenly felt how tired I really was. Tired of all the deduction, guesswork, strife, games—tired of everything. I needed to stay focused and try to keep him distracted, but it was so draining. I just wanted everything to be over. “So what’s your big secret?” I finally asked, continuing to saw the pocketknife’s blade back and forth behind me.
Kinsey smiled affably. “The secret? Oh, the secret. Yes. Well, for starters, I killed your mother.”
My stomach went sour. I almost dropped the pocketknife as the blood swirled in my head. I struggled to assimilate his last statement in my mind. Having tried so desperately to protect my living family in the last twenty-four hours, I’d completely forgotten my original theory, that the Snow White Killer of today was somehow linked to my mother’s murder more than two decades ago. Could it really be him? Once I’d accepted that Kinsey, and not my brother, was the present-day Snow White Killer, I hadn’t given my previous theory another thought.
Kinsey continued. “I killed her that night. You want to know what really happened? I didn’t even plan on it.”
My mother’s face filled my mind; not the way I remembered her that final night, leaning into the car and reassuring me with a smile that everything would be okay. Instead, I could only recall her terrified visage in Kinsey’s painting from the art gallery. My heart filled with a black poison, and I knew that Kinsey was telling the truth. He was the last person to see my mother alive; the last to see the look of terror, the wild-eyed searching of her fearful eyes in the last moments before she died; the painter of her final portrait.
Kinsey kept talking, and I struggled to listen. “My friends and I had a motorcycle wreck that night on Halloween. They left to get help. And then what to my wondering eyes did appear, but Pastor Madden’s bitch wife? You could imagine my surprise. That was only a few weeks after Mean Jim’s baptism, wasn’t it, Pastor?”
I looked over at my father, but he looked dead. As much as the sick revelation hurt me, I could only imagine what it had done to him. My father was wholly unprepared for the revelation. His knees sagged and the noose was the only reason he stayed standing. His face had gone a sickly white, which glowed eerily, pathetically, in the darkness.