The Storm Murders (39 page)

“I won’t.
É
mile!”

“Actually, you will. And don’t ask
É
mile to help. He’ll be dead by then. And anyway he’s tied up at the moment.”

“You fucking bag of crap.”

“The mouth on this girl,
É
mile. And you, some sort of good Catholic man. Do you know that your former colleagues call you the Pope? The ones who like you anyway. The other ones call you the Fucking Pope.”

“I’m not going to cut off his finger,” Sandra declared, finding her strength again.

Dreher smiled and returned to his feet again and paced in front of them, staying out of
É
mile’s kicking range. He allowed his calmness, his quietude, to parlay his menace. “I can understand how you might feel that way. And you do have a choice. Listen to your options first. Option number one, after I shoot him, you cut off his ring finger. After I shoot you, I’ll cut off yours. Then I’ll bury your two fingers together with your wedding rings in this sweet little graveyard I’ve got going. Down by a riverbank. Only the ring fingers of couples are buried there. Quite romantic, actually. The river flows by, day by day.”

“Oh God,” Sandra said. That he was monstrous and murderous had seeped through at the onset of their ordeal, but the breadth of his depravity struck home.

“That’s option one, which you say you won’t accept. It’s your choice, but that leaves us with option two. In this scenario, while he’s still alive, I saw off
É
mile’s head. You watch, and then, I saw off yours. Again, we’ll keep you alive for that.”

The couple gazed at each other. Tears flooded Sandra’s eyes that she couldn’t wipe away, and her shoulders and torso quivered violently now. She shook her head though, to try to persevere through this.

“Perhaps you understand now why option one has been the preferred choice, one hundred percent of the time. Should you renege on option one and refuse to honor your commitment after I shoot your husband, then we revert to hacking off your head. Hacking, of course, is the operative word. It’s not like I’m walking around with my own private guillotine. It’s a slow and difficult operation with second-rate tools. Whatever I can find in your kitchen, actually. Do either of you doubt my resolve in this matter?”

Reeling,
É
mile found it hard to think in any cogent way. “Yeah, actually,” he challenged Dreher. He had to keep him talking, keep him boasting, if necessary. “I do. In the past you’ve only cut off the fingers of dead people. That’s easier, I should think, than if someone’s alive and the blood is spurting everywhere. A neck, more difficult still. You might not have it in you, Rand. As I pointed out, you’re not a bottom-feeder. Don’t you agree with me?”

“But I dream about it,
É
mile. I can’t tell you how much. Anyway you’re wrong. Adele Lumen was still alive when I amputated her finger. I should have known she was still alive. Just didn’t believe it. But her hand bled more. I liked that. I still see it in my dreams.
É
mile, I will carry through on you and your wife’s decapitations if you want to test me. So go ahead. I’m begging you. Test me.”

Both
É
mile and Sandra endeavored to hold their heads up, Sandra weeping,
É
mile trying to remember to breathe. He struggled for a deeper breath, felt his lungs collapsing. He remembered his episode in New Orleans, when a panic attack had overwhelmed him, but here he needed to maintain, through all this madness, his composure. Even unto death. His hope, dissipating, still clung to that necessity.

“She’ll do option one,” he managed to say, his voice garbled.

Sandra nodded when Dreher looked to her for confirmation.

“Good. Good. This is important to me, actually, that you accept your roles as co-conspirators in one another’s removals. I don’t know why, I just prefer it that way.”

Removals.

É
mile took another shaky breath, his lungs like twin spikes inside him as they expanded. “So, Rand. If you’re not going to spare us, at least tell us, what’s your angle? You said you would.”

Dreher placed his right hand, which held the pistol, over his heart. “Happy to,
É
mile. Some criminals, I believe, and I’m sure you’ve seen this throughout your career, some criminals are only too happy to get caught. Why do you suppose that is,
É
mile?”

“I’m not a psychiatrist. I can’t say.”

“Take a wild stab at it. Entertain me and your life is extended for those few minutes. People like doing that, I’ve found, extending their pathetic lives that last little speck. Gives them hope, I suppose, even though it’s fleeting. People want to believe that rescue is on the way when so clearly it isn’t. They want to think that God will strike me down. Or that, miracle of miracles, I’ll change my mind. By the way, your wrists are tied, but I’ve left your fingers free. Do you want your prayer beads?”

He waited for Cinq-Mars to reply.

“It’s possible,”
É
mile began slowly, “that some men can’t really keep a secret. That they need for other people to know what it is they’ve done. In their minds, I suppose, they think of it as what they’ve accomplished. Even, in some cases, they want people to know who they are. Sometimes, men are proud of their crimes, and want other people to know that they were the ones who pulled them off. Later, they’ll regret being caught, but that’s just how things go.”

“I believe you’re onto something,
É
mile. I want people to know who I am. And what I’ve done. But confession, that’s out of the question. Incarceration? Let’s just say that I’m not going there. Still, I do experience a need for people to know. So, I tell them. I get it off my chest. Afterward, of course, I kill them.”

They waited. What they did know, between them, was that death was not imminent, not as long as he had a story to relate or a boast to advance.

“
É
mile, trust me, you’re going to love this.” He waved his gun with his rising excitement. “It’s just so cool. Inside the FBI, we have found a way, incrementally, but impressively, to augment our budget. At least, to circumvent certain budgetary constraints. The consensus being, if criminals’ funds are confiscated, why not use them to further our pressure against crime? But this is where it gets interesting. Within that program, a few have found ways for their personal aggrandizement. I’ll leave the rationalizing to them. Now that’s a big word I’m using but I prefer it to greed. But it’s true. Some people who walk this earth are atrociously greedy. I’m not naming names, you understand. By our own careful accounting,” and Dreher spoke ponderously now, as though his excitement required him to linger over his words to fully satisfy his impending pleasure, “we participate in, oh, nearly eight percent—” He shifted his attention to Sandra to augment his point, his eyes opening wide. “That might not sound like a lot, but trust me, it’s huge. Or, as you would say with that mouth of yours, it’s
fucking
huge!” Then his attention reverted primarily to
É
mile again. “Eight percent of the entire marijuana trade in the continental United Sates of America. We control. The supply end. Like you say, I’m not a bottom-feeder getting my hands dirty with distribution. But we grow weed, baby. In the cornfields of Nebraska. And Kansas. As far east as Kentucky. As far north as Idaho and Montana. We’ve got Mormons growing our pot amid their corn in Utah.” He laughed at that titbit. “We’ve proven that it’s less dangerous to grow pot under my auspices than for the mob, and we can protect the honest farmer against the mob. Not that anybody knows its for the Bureau, only that somebody seems to have power and the ability to move mountains. Even the mountains of Utah. So it’s a win-win-win situation all around. If I benefit to a certain extent, then so be it, mere humble servant that I am. I come from that milieu, you understand. We’re talking about my people. I was recruited into the FBI while my daddy was growing corn. But that wasn’t his only cash crop, if you know what I mean. He had a cash crop that essentially wasn’t very different from growing cash. Instead of threshing corn, although we did that too for the sake of appearances, we were mainly into plucking greenbacks from the stem. So you see, it’s all good.”

He observed them, shifting his gaze from one to the other, anticipating their praise.

“Of course,” he continued, “from time to time we have to protect our growers. So-called honest cops might arrest them, so we take them into witness protection. Or we have to show that we’re doing our job. We get our people to inform on their neighbors, who the mob controls, then we have to take them out of the operation even as our operation increases, because we’ve now taken over new fields from the mob. But you see my problem. It’s a chess game, that’s one thing. And some of that comes back on me. I have to play it five moves ahead or I’ll be behind. So I have people in witness protection who know me as a special agent in the FBI who has, shall we say, complicated ethics. So that leaves me with no choice but to go back through that field and cull the chaff from the wheat, so to speak. I know that sounds ass backward, but that’s what has to be done on occasion. It’s safer.”

É
mile could tell that Sandra was disinterested and losing hope. He could not allow that to happen. He had to buoy her up with his own enthusiasm for Dreher’s story.

“But the Lumens, Rand? Did they fit into that scheme? Up here in Canada?”

Dreher clicked his fingers. “You’re right,
É
mile. Different scenario entirely. By this point, somebody is noticing inside the Bureau that not only are we losing informants—usually they think our witness protection people are informants, and usually we do manipulate things to make it look that way—but we’re losing informants who were attached to me. We’re losing
my
informants. So I get to investigate, but also I have to find a way to take this off my shoulders.”

“It’s a tangled web we weave, Rand,”
É
mile encouraged him.

“Call it a web,” Dreher said, as if missing the familiarity of the remark entirely, “but for sure my operations created a pattern and that pattern was growing visible, for those with eyes to see. People associated with my work in the war against drugs and in my geographic concentration were being eliminated. One by one, spread out over time. Oh, I was clever in creating the storm motif, this wandering serial killer who struck in the aftermath of a strong wind or a quaking earth, but, nonetheless, the idea persisted that a pattern was forming that revolved around me. So, guess what I did?”

Cinq-Mars obliged him. “You struck outside your parameters.”

“Precisely. I blurred the pattern. That’s where you fit in. Lovely of you to come down to New Orleans, for example. To give yourself that exposure. Meet the troops. Too bad about Vira. She was an up-and-comer, but the connection, the bond that she was forming with you, and you guys finding out that the killer was a claims adjustor—” He performed a pantomime of shivering. “Too close for comfort. She had to go. And now you. Then I’ll solve these murders, Vira’s and yours, and dear Sandra’s, and that won’t be difficult, it just means shooting the killer before he gets to talk to anybody, then we’ll trace his movements after the fact to prove his guilt. Brilliant, all around. Puts me in the clear inside the Bureau. Our market share continues. Life goes on. Everything is put behind us. Hell, even your dog lives to die a natural death. What more can anyone ask for?”

That
É
mile managed, somehow, an incomprehensible smile, transfixed Dreher’s attention.

“Do you know what I enjoy the most about killing people,” he asked them. “There are many aspects I relish, but do you know what gives me the deepest, most gratifying satisfaction?”

“Of that, I have no clue,” Cinq-Mars whispered.

“You should know killers,
É
mile, if you want to be a cop when you grow up. Allow me to educate you. To be honest, there are many moments I love. I can’t tell you how much I enjoy it when the wife cuts her husband’s ring finger off. So much for that marriage! Ha ha. That’s what I say. It’s nearly orgasmic. But the moment I love though is when I see hope dissipate, when hope leaves the eyes to be replaced by despair. When I see them die before they are dead. I just so get off on that.” He resorted to his Scotch and that seemed to elicit a quieter, more philosophical moment. “You know, the phenomena has been studied. In a Russian movie theater, for instance, many hostages looked like they were dead already. But some didn’t, they clung to hope. Those who survived remarked on this. Once the shooting started and the bombs went off, it was those who looked dead ahead of time who ended up dead. Those who did not, did not. It’s an amazing phenomena about life and death, how one informs the other. Those who were going to die
knew
they were going to die. I love to see my people die before I’ve even touched them.”

In a way, Cinq-Mars noticed, Dreher had accomplished what he himself was trying to do, sparking Sandra back to life. She was not willing to yield her spirit to this mad man.

“But you two. Look at you. Go on! The two of you. Look at each other!”

É
mile and Sandra did as they were instructed. They each noticed the other’s pain, which instantly intensified their own suffering, as if that was even possible, and yet they each took strength and solace one from the other.

“Do you see what I see?” Dreher demanded.

They looked back at him.

“Neither one of you is dead yet. Why not?”

This time, when
É
mile and Sandra shared a look, they smiled. The gesture was faint and unremarkable, and not meant to be provocative, but it was there, perhaps only in the other’s eyes, perhaps only for themselves to see.

“So how come? You are both about to die. You have no hope. Stop dreaming in Technicolor. No god and no angel and no flying hero from any police department anywhere is about to rescue you. So forget about it.”

“We’ll get there. We’ll lose hope. But first, explain New Orleans to me.”