It’s the same story I’ve heard before, too many times. Monsters who were made by monsters who go on to make monsters themselves. A chain stretching both forward and back into darkness.
Sometimes the link breaks, the light abides. Too many times it does not. I think about Hawaii, about the blackness between the stars, about how there will always be more darkness than points of light.
“What did you do with the women you kidnapped once you received payment from their husbands?”
“I killed them, of course.”
“And the bodies?”
“They were cut into pieces and the pieces were burned. The bone was ground to powder and everything was scattered.”
I sigh inside at this. Though it wasn’t entirely unexpected, I’d held out hope for reuniting at least some of the remains with their loved ones.
“How many victims did you take in total?”
She doesn’t have to think to come up with the number. “Forty-seven, including the women you would have found when you raided my other facilities.”
Forty-seven. It sounds like such a small number until you extrapolate it. Heather Hollister, forty-seven times. Avery and Dylan and Douglas again; all the world in a water drop.
I consider the number and something occurs to me.
“If you’d gotten up to forty-seven, why was I number 35?”
“Obfuscation. I didn’t number in sequence. If someone escaped, they wouldn’t be able to give an accurate count.”
“Very careful of you.”
She shrugs, dismissing the praise. “You can’t control all the factors in life necessary to guarantee survival, but failing to control every single one you can is simple incompetence.”
“I can see that.” I consult my notes. “The next set of questions has to do with some apparent inconsistencies in what you called your retirement plan. There are some actions that don’t add up, at least on the surface.”
“Go ahead,” she says, infinitely agreeable.
“First, broadly: How did you plan to ensure we’d find your Los Angeles location? I get the factors you put into play—Heather, the messages, kidnapping me—but none of those in and of itself was a guarantee. I’d assume you’d want a lock.”
She nods. “The plan was to continue to drop clues that would lead you to me—or Eric as me—and to do it in a believable fashion.”
“Believable how?”
“By laying the groundwork for the apparency of what you call decompensation.”
Decompensation means, literally, “the deterioration of a structure.” In the area of profiling serial offenders, it’s used to describe a pattern of devolvement. Many serial killers, even those who begin their careers as extremely organized individuals, eventually fall victim to their own underlying insanities. They start to deteriorate. To fall apart.
Words come to me:
I flipped a coin.
I’m not a cruel man.
Mercy said these things to me when I was imprisoned in her custom gulag. They contradicted her profile at the time. They might make sense now.
“Forcing me to make that choice about Leo, trying to convince me you cared about seeming cruel—those were a part of it, weren’t they? They were supposed to make you look a little bit off.”
She smiles, but not in pleasure or cruelty; those emotions appear absent in her. “That’s correct. The messages and the deviation with Heather were a part of that framework as well. They were illogical changes to a formerly flawless methodology. My plan was to continue increasing evidence of my ‘aberrant behaviors’ until a huge and obvious mistake became a believable act. You’d assume I’d decompensated, and you wouldn’t question the incompetence that led you right to me.”
“That’s also why you left some victims behind for us to find, right? To show us that, as far as you were concerned, it was just business as usual and you were unaware you’d started losing your marbles?”
She shrugs. “As I’ve already said.”
I tap a pen on the notepad in front of me. “That’s all very elegant, Mercy, but it leaves a big question unanswered: Why go through any of it at all? No one even knew you existed. Why not just walk away?”
She gives me a tolerant, almost pitying look.
“What I said earlier applies: Failing to control all the factors you can control is simple incompetence. If I ‘walked away,’ as you put it, I would have left uncontrolled factors behind that might have become detrimental to me. No one knew I was there then, but that could have changed in the future. Someone like yourself might have seen a pattern, become suspicious, and started looking. It’s always possible I forgot something or made a mistake, however slight.” She shakes her head once in the negative. “Hope is not a viable scenario. Certainty is.”
I take all this in, almost as dumbfounded as I am enlightened.
What does this remind me of? Some computer phrase. Ah, right: garbage in, garbage out.
Mercy had locked herself into the necessity of calculating every possibility. In the end, it was that need to control all the variables that undid her. Pragmatic simplicity was defeated by an overabundance of complexity. Her brilliance became her psychosis.
Another question occurs to me now. I hesitate before asking it, not sure I really want the answer.
“Mercy, what would you have done if I’d told you to take me instead of Leo?”
“Oh, I still would have selected him. You were a necessary part of my plan. He wasn’t. It wouldn’t have mattered; going against my own rules for no apparent reason would have only made me seem more irrational in the end.”
I have spent time dealing with my grief and rage about Leo. I’ve plumbed my own depths, and while I haven’t found peace, I’ve managed to restore my equilibrium. This revelation threatens to unseat me. I feel the anger rising, and it speaks to me in tongues, hinting that it might not be so bad to kill Mercy Lane, after all. I struggle against it and manage to push it back down.
Something to deal with later, not here.
“Let’s move on.” It comes out a little bit hoarse. I clear my throat. “I want to discuss your methodology.”
“Certainly.”
I spread my hands palms up, in a gesture of query. “Why did you keep them?”
She frowns. “I don’t understand. Why did I keep who?”
“The victims you kidnapped. Why keep them? We had our theory, but I want to hear what you have to say. If the motivation was money, wasn’t that an unneeded expense?”
“I considered that for a long time when I was doing my initial business plan,” she says, nodding. “In the end, I realized that keeping them alive was the best form of control when it came to the husbands. It has to do with what they really needed.” She cocks her head at me. “Consider it. I’m sure you’ll get it if you do.”
It’s a riddle or a test. They rarely give up everything for free. When they’re locked away, mind games are the last games they have.
I think about the words she said. What they really needed. I turn them over in my mind, again and again, and then it comes, like a flare of light. This, I think, was the extra piece, the motivation James and I had sensed but not seen.
What was the one thing, above all others, the husbands had wanted when it came to their wives, more than money or freedom or custody?
They wanted them dead.
It was all about hate at the bedrock. Mercy had withheld this prize until payment, like a carrot on a stick.
I consider her with new eyes. I’d assigned a certain heavy-handedness to her methods before. Now I see she had a genuine gift for understanding all these emotions—revenge and rage and fear—for how to grow each one and make them move where she wanted.