Kinsey kept talking, reliving the night aloud. I managed to remind myself that if he became completely engaged in the retelling, I might still have a one-shot chance. I went back to work on the sawing of the plastic cinch tying my hands, even as I dreaded to hear any more of his story. Another white sheet of lightning illuminated the stained glass windows above, followed by a tremendous blast of thunder that rattled the pews. The wind outside howled even harder, shaking the glass in the windows.
I momentarily wondered where the hell Woodson was, but I knew I didn’t have time to lose focus. I went back to my work on the cinch, and steeled myself to hear the rest of Kinsey’s story.
His voice became once again audible over the wind. “Those other two boys and I collided in the dark on that motorcycle trail. I wasn’t hurt as badly as I thought. But then, through the forest they came, leading a beautiful woman by the hand. And I couldn’t believe my eyes; the very woman who’d led the brigade to accept my piece-of-shit father into their church with open arms.”
I closed my eyes. My mother’s killer. All along. Suddenly it made a sick and disgusting sense. He’d been a few years older than me. He’d come to our church a couple of times with his mother. It all fit.
I looked across at Kinsey and saw him breathing heavily, a twisted smear of anger across his face as he relived the memory. He hated her even to this day. Kinsey held the knife in his hands and looked at me. “I killed her with this very knife. My own father’s hunting knife, the knife from the belt he’d whipped me with just a few hours before because I forgot to feed the dogs that day.” He looked backwards toward my father for a moment. “Did you catch that, Pastor? He beat me because I didn’t feed a goddamned dog.” He turned back toward me. “And then your mother, of all the fucking people in the world, traipses into the clearing to help me? Miss Holier-than-Thou, arriving to help? And before I knew it, I was killing her with that knife of my father’s, slashing her, over and over and over.”
“No,” my father said, the single word weeping out of his throat.
“And I had to kill those other two boys, after that. Just like I heard you say one time, Pastor Madden. One lie begets another. And another. And another. That night the true, gruesome killer inside me came out.”
My father groaned again in the darkness.
Kinsey glanced at him but continued, undaunted. “I walked my motorcycle back along the trail, dumped it in Old Moss Pond. Ironic, wouldn’t you agree?” At this point he looked at me. “I mean, ironic that I dropped the evidence linking me to your mother’s murder into the very same pond in which your father had baptized my own daddy only a few days before.”
Nausea assaulted me. My brother and I had swum in Old Moss Pond, even fished it with our father, and the whole time, the evidence that could have possibly led to our mother’s killer lay underneath its dark surface. That could have ended all the pain and uncertainty so long ago.
Another wave of nausea hit me as I considered the sheer irony of it all, even as Kinsey gloated over it. I couldn’t believe my father had baptized the father of my mother’s eventual killer in the very same water that Kinsey would soon use to hide his role in her murder.
“Eventually it was like nothing ever even happened.” Kinsey murmured the words, staring above our heads, not focusing on anything. “You keep telling yourself something never happened, and it approaches an asymptote, so close to truth. Pretty soon, maybe it never really did happen.”
I stopped listening to his attempts to rationalize his repression of my mother’s murder. Instead I focused more furiously on moving the pocketknife back and forth, back and forth, finding myself once again trying to calculate a way I might stop him or kill him. Once I sawed through the plastic ties on my hands, I’d only have a few seconds to reach up and work the noose free. If I could do that quickly enough, both my father and I would be out of danger. But even if I succeeded, I’d still need to deal with a man holding a ten-inch locking hunting knife, who wanted me dead more than anything else in the world.
I suddenly thought that if I got that far, I would probably be doing pretty well. I continued to saw the pocketknife back and forth, but I had to stop for a moment as the muscle beneath my thumb cramped up. In a moment I started again.
Kinsey walked over, but stopped a good five feet from me. “I could have been you. I could have had your life or your brother’s life.” He glanced toward my father.
I whispered in reply, “You chose your own path.”
He breathed heavily. “No. It was chosen for me. By my father, by my mother. By my DNA. By the ripper gene. By the Damnation Algorithm.”
“Everyone but you.”
Kinsey sneered at me. “You self-righteous piece of shit. You have no idea. You don’t have a clue because you never had to endure a life without a father.”
“James.” My father’s voice was hoarse and weak, but he spoke deliberately. “Neither I nor my son understands what you went through. Your father’s supposed to love you. It’s one of the first places you understand the true nature of a God who cares about you.” My father paused. “And despite everything you’ve done, God still loves you. I swear to this.”
Kinsey recoiled from my father’s words like a wary, rabid animal. I wanted to scream at my father and shake him, make him stop talking to Kinsey and redirecting his attention. But there was nothing I could do. Kinsey kept his eyes on me as he addressed my father.
“None of what you say is the truth, old man. You sell snake oil. There is no God, there is no love. It’s just a sickness inside me, inside my genetic makeup.” He cut his eyes toward me. “I’m a killer and there’s no escape. Your son knows it.”
“No, James. Forgiveness is real. And I can forgive you. Even knowing that you killed Mary…” at the sound of her name, my father’s voice broke, but he gathered himself and kept speaking. “Life is all about love, James, not hate. All hope isn’t lost. You can still find your own path to salvation. But do it while you still have the option, son. Don’t do this. Don’t hurt my boy just to get back at me. How does that resolve anything?”
I watched as Kinsey’s face, for the first time, frowned momentarily in doubt. Then the uncertainty left his face, and anger once again creased his brow.
“One last question, before you both die,” he said loudly, in a voice that reflected a renewed level of commitment after what may have been a momentary doubt. “Tell me. Is a serial killer made or born? Is the ancient idea of spiritual predestination nothing more than modern-day genetic predisposition, where our eternal destinies are simply wrapped up in the DNA you inherit from your father and mother?”
He paused and let the questions sink into the air of the sanctuary. My father mumbled incoherently, so Kinsey turned to me. “What do you think, Lucas? Do you even believe in anything anymore?”
I hesitated to answer him. I flexed my arms one last time, but the cinch still held tight. I looked up and realized that this might be the last time I’d ever communicate with another human being. I resolved to answer his question truthfully, and in so doing, answered a question that had dogged me since the night my mother died.
Kinsey smiled and raised his eyebrows encouragingly, urging me to speak.
“You kill because you think you have the right to kill,” I said. “And it’s a conscious decision on your part. Your genetics had precious little to do with it, you piece of shit. Every bit of the blame falls squarely on your head. You, Kinsey, are absolutely to blame, and no one else.”
Kinsey’s face fell into a mock smile of barely bridled anger as he realized I’d grant him no reprieve with my dying words. He stepped toward me and I instinctively retreated. “Well then, off you go,” he said with complete nonchalance, dooming me to death in an instant. He reached out to push me over the edge.
“Stop right there.”
Woodson’s voice rang out into the sanctuary from behind all of us as she emerged from the curtains behind the baptismal in the choir loft. “Nobody move.”
For a singular second, relief washed over me, but in the next moment, Kinsey rushed me anyway, his face twisted into a visage of maniacal rage. His final gambit.
“No!” he screamed, even as the report of Woodson’s gun went off and his body jerked violently as the bullet slammed into his back. He crashed into me, then fell off the altar to the right, spinning me around and knocking me backwards. As I stumbled toward the edge, I watched Kinsey tumble off the altar and fall hard and awkwardly, landing sprawled out and unmoving on the sanctuary floor below.
I couldn’t gain my balance. I tried desperately, to no avail. I pulled my arms apart until they felt like they’d pop out of their sockets, but the cinch still wouldn’t break. I felt the rope grow taut around my neck as my left foot missed the edge of the altar.
At that point, everything around me blurred into slow motion. I looked across at my father, who watched me with a calm sadness as I fell, knowing full well that the weight of my body would instantly lift him into the air as well.
In the next moment the pressure in my head soared to a skull-popping limit as the small amount of light in the sanctuary faded and my father vanished before my eyes. Everything blotted out, and blackness filled my vision. My brain stopped trying to make me breathe, and a calmness suffused me. A voice in my head, not at all cynical but simply observant, informed me that
this
was how you died.
I closed my eyes and succumbed to the black. But a different tiny voice inside my head whispered,
It can’t end this way.
I opened my eyes, and a few holes of light poked through the black curtain in front of my eyes.
And suddenly a tangle of arms gripped my chest and waist and pulled me backwards, back onto solid footing on the pulpit, back away from the void, back from the darkness.
As the hands clung to me, I looked on my rescuer as if detached from my body, watched as Woodson struggled to hold me aloft, holding me around the waist with one arm while desperately working her other hand between the rope and my neck.
When she succeeded in loosening the noose around my neck, the pressure in my head finally released. As Woodson pulled the noose away from my throat and lifted it over my head, air rushed into my gasping mouth, filling my lungs and slowly permeating my torso, my legs, my arms. Thin streams of fire raced into my heaving lungs, and a million needles of pain fired on every patch of skin as I drank the oxygen in great, ravenous gulps.
I fell to my knees. I opened my eyes, and darkness gave way to specks of light. I watched my father fall as the rope between us fell slack, and Woodson ran over to tend to him in similar fashion. I still clutched my pocketknife, so I sawed back and forth vigorously until the cinch binding my hands finally gave way. I struggled to my feet to join them, but needles of pain shot through my legs and I fell back down on all fours. I rested a moment as the feeling came back and looked down to my left to check on Kinsey’s body.
Nothing but a small, oblong bloodstain remained on the sanctuary floor where he’d fallen. An erratic series of blood splatters led back through the sanctuary, toward the exits, and into the darkness.
I debated whispering across the altar to inform Woodson that Kinsey was gone, as she continued to care for my father. Thankfully he was still moving, but he seemed incoherent.
I knew that Woodson would never let me go after Kinsey in a million years.
“Woodson,” I said, rising to my still-needling feet and limping quickly across the altar to kneel where she tended my father. “Thank you. How is he?”
“Amazingly, he seems okay. He’s out of it, but I think it’s the Marihypnol. He’s moving his neck and limbs on his own. He should be fine.”
“Thank God. Hang in there, Dad.” I touched him gently on the shoulder and glanced back toward the altar. I realized that from this position on the floor, we couldn’t see where Kinsey’s body had landed. The pulpit obstructed the view.
“Listen,” I said to Woodson. “I’m going to the front of the church. Did you call the police?”
“Yes, right before I came inside. They should be here any second.”
“Great. I’ll go outside and flag them down when they get here,” I lied.
“You sure you’re up to it?”
“Absolutely.”
“Okay, I’ll sit tight and take care of your father in the meantime.” She looked over my shoulder and tried to peer around the pulpit. “Is Kinsey dead?”
“Dead as a doornail,” I lied. “Finally, after all this time, it’s all over.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely. I’m indebted to you forever, Woodson. You saved me and my father.”
“Then go get those cops and let’s be finished with this fucking case once and for all.”
I smiled and she smiled back. With one last look at the two of them, I nodded. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Be careful,” Woodson said, as a matter of course.
She didn’t realize how relevant her simple admonition really was.
* * *
I hurried through the darkness of the sanctuary, cursing myself that he might have already gotten away. Kinsey’s blood trail led out of the sanctuary, into the vestibule, and stopped at an entry door to the church. I pushed the door open just as a spectacular flash of lightning lit the entire landscape for a full three seconds.
And then I saw him. He was staggering across the parking lot in the distance, making his way toward the entrance gates of the Farview cemetery. I ran after him, instantly drenched by great torrents of rain sweeping over me.
Lightning flashed all around, illuminating the erratic course that Kinsey followed as he made his way toward the old iron gates of the cemetery. He walked like a drunkard, probably weak from the loss of blood. But I could tell he was going to make the gates before I caught up to him.
I knew the single destination inside those gates that I dreaded, and I was equally sure Kinsey intended to lead me directly there.
* * *
A minute later I slipped through the gates and into the cemetery. Dark tombstones floated all around and a flash of lightning revealed Kinsey only thirty or so feet away to my left, bobbing in and around the shadowy shapes of mausoleums, grave markers, and statues scattered about the graveyard.