“My. . .” The child looked stricken, unable to complete her thought. She stood frozen, an unconnected look on her face. It was. . . familiar, in a way I myself could not articulate.
“Your grades, Zoë,” I said gently. “Weren’t they pleased with your grades?”
She did not respond. I had observed both catatonia and elective mutism in captured children previously, but this was neither of those states. Acting on some perhaps primal instinct, I wrapped her in a blanket and carried her over to the couch. She responded only by curling up in a tight fetal ball.
It was almost forty-five minutes before she stirred. If she was surprised at finding herself under the blanket, she gave no sign. “Are we going to study?” she asked.
“It seems you have already mastered the material in your own books,” I told her. “Perhaps you would be interested in learning something about computers. . .?”
“Sure!” she said enthusiastically, throwing off the covers and coming over to where I was working on the portable machine.
Two hours later, she was sufficiently familiar with the basics of programming to create a small module of her own. Once she did that successfully, I opened a modified version of a drawing program and showed her how she could use the electronic stylus to create freehand drawings on the screen.
She was still working on acquiring the feel of the stylus when I told her it was time for supper.
Oh, I knew him then. But I couldn’t figure out if he was testing me or telling me. I called for Xyla, playing out the lie that she couldn’t retrieve what had just disappeared from the screen.
“Want me to—?”
“Just a minute,” I told her. “There’ll be one of his questions next. Let me ask you something, what does this stuff mean?” I pulled a pad of paper off the desk and wrote down the symbols he’d been using.
“Oh,” she said smiling. “The ** marks around a word is the same thing as italics. Most computer programs won’t let you underline unless you’re connecting with someone using the same ISP. Some people use ###### for chapter breaks, like if they’re sending you something in segments. And the >> and <<, those are quote marks, but you only use them when you’re quoting something that’s already on the screen from another person, see? I don’t know why he uses them the way he does. You understand?”
“I. . . guess.”
“Oh, you’ll get used to it,” she promised brightly. “I wonder when he’s going to—”
His message interrupted her.
>>You ever conduit?<<
I was with him by then. I couldn’t see why, but I could see where.
yes
It was supposed to be a job. A job of lies. All liars. Every one of them. And I fit right in. I work for money, but I live for revenge. If I’d had a target, if I’d known who took Crystal Beth, I never would have gotten into this whole thing.
First I thought, this killer, maybe he had a list somehow. You want a list of all the neo-Nazis, you ask ZOG. But if you want a list of all the fag-bashers, who is there to ask? Maybe this guy? And, sure, I’d get him out of here in exchange for that list—Crystal Beth’s killers would have to be on it somewhere.
But once we connected, I could see it. He had no list, this Homo Erectus maniac. He had a fetish. Like any serial killer. That’s why they’re so hard to catch. Random hitters, triggered by something too common to protect—blondes, hookers, gay hitchhikers, red shoes, priests—symbols, not individuals.
Whatever he was, he’d started out snatching kids. Hard to tell if killing the kids was anything other than what he said it was—that he was an artist, and killing the kids was no more than keeping his paintbrushes clean. But all the record searches came up empty.
Was he some kind of insane fiction-writer, playing out his fantasy to thousands of people at once, me thinking I was the only one? Or just too much of a narcissist to keep his light under a bushel?
Why Wesley?
If I could get that, I could get him.
But it was hard to care, and I couldn’t figure out why I did. Whoever put Crystal Beth in the ground, that’s where they were too, thanks to the hit man—if what Strega said was true.
And I believed it was. Strega did things no man could understand, but she wouldn’t lie.
Responsibility isn’t a legal thing. If the hit man, the one Gutterball thought was Wesley, if he did the other two from the drive-by car when they got to the garage, then the only one in the crowd he took out himself was the guy on the spot, Corky. Crystal Beth, she was an accident. One of those “casualties of war.” Casual. No malice. Just. . . in the way. And the guys who had laid down the cover fire that claimed her were already taken care of.
The drive-by, that’s what had triggered this maniac. At least, that’s what I thought at first. But he didn’t come across as gay in his transmissions. He didn’t come across as sexual at all.
Like Nadine. . . With all her flash and fire, she didn’t have any hormones I could smell. Said she was gay, and maybe she was. And making people do what you want, that’s sexual, in its own way. But she had a piece missing. Like there was no “Nadine” at all, just some collection of parts.
No point me looking anymore. I had to wait for the end of his story. And the punch line.
“You kind of done admiring this guy, huh?” I asked Xyla, probing gently.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you used to talk about what a cyber-genius he is, all like that. Last few times, you haven’t said a word.”
“He hasn’t shown me anything new,” she replied, a little too glibly, her face slightly flushed.
I wondered what Trixie and Rusty and the rest of her crew thought. Because I was sure that whatever Xyla knew, they did too. I gave her the nod, and she opened his latest:
It is very important to me that my captives do not suffer. Infliction of pain would be an affront to my art. Physical pain, that is. I am not without comprehension that my art causes emotional pain, but I am deeply concerned that its practice never replicate sadism—a repulsive “disorder” which, upon observation, I refuse to characterize as such. That is, I consider sadism, especially sexual sadism, to be a conscious decision on the part of its wielder. Clearly, there is a market for such hideousness—witness the enormous pornography industry which has attempted to fill the vacuum created by demand. And my personal investigations have proven that the market is by no means limited to *staged* depictions of the most graphic, even terminal, torture. Even assuming, as I do, that many if not most of the proffers are from government agents—parenthetically, I do not consider such activity to be “entrapment,” as the essence of same is to induce conduct to which the “victim” is not otherwise disposed—there exists a significant demand for such product. A mental disorder, then? I think not. I suspect, if one were to seek venture capital for a magazine catering to schizophrenics, one would find the prospects bleak indeed.
Ah, so many “masters” out there, convinced of their superiority, never realizing that their obsession makes them as susceptible to manipulation as the “slaves” they “collar.” But such games are, in fact, just that. Games. To be played as children play: Immaturely, focusing on immediate, tactile gratification.
But when the jolt fades, when they require reality, when their sadism can only be satisfied not with the *appearance* of unwillingness but its actuality, then pain becomes the goal. Such humans are beneath contempt. They fancy themselves “superior,” but they are pitifully dependent creatures, fools who believe they *are* the power, but who come alive only when the power is supplied by others—proving them to be as self-determining as an electrical appliance.