He stood and began to move restlessly around the basement. He paced past the bookcase, distractedly running his long fingers lightly over the spines of one row of books. He paused before a second set of shelves and touched various little mementos displayed there. Most weren’t biological, but the few items that had once been parts of living things were the most exciting to him.
He picked up a lock of hair and inhaled. The shampoo scent had faded in all but his memory, where it came back to him now as clearly as the night he had captured the dark, silky curl. The woman who had been sitting in front of him in the theater hadn’t even known he’d taken it.
At least, not at first.
He carefully replaced this small treasure and kept walking until he reached the computer again. He stared at his reflection in the darkened monitor.
He had been using the Internet to search for more details on the big story. The newspaper and television reports hadn’t told him much. If you entered “Nicholas Parrish” in any news search engine, you got thousands of hits. Since this morning, when the story came out in the Express, the number had increased.
The recent stories started with the predictable phrases. “Convicted serial killer… perhaps as many as fifty victims, including six members of the Las Piernas Police Department…”
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, forced himself to relax. He glanced at his watch. His mother was upstairs, waiting for him to make dinner. She would have to wait a little longer.
He smiled to himself, savoring his rebelliousness.
Others had always seen his mother as a docile creature, but he knew that she had a way of getting what she wanted. His very conception had epitomized her acts of passive aggression. She used to be fond of telling him that it was a miracle she had not miscarried after the beating his father gave her on learning of the pregnancy. One of these days he would ask his father and find out if that story was true. He was inclined to believe it. To him, the story was just another indicator of her ability to endure hardship in order to get what she wanted.
He did not consider this trait to be heroic in any way.
He paused, wondering if she had what she wanted, these days. She couldn’t make it down the stairs now, which made him savor his hours in the basement all the more. Still, it was time to have dinner. He locked the room and slid the false wall back into place.
He climbed the stairs with some anticipation, but not for the meal, which would be something he would prepare without real effort, and would be exactly like the meal he had prepared the previous day, and the day before that.
His anticipation came from the knowledge that today’s issue of the Express would be upstairs. His mother had been a subscriber for years. He didn’t usually read it, but this morning he had noticed the name Parrish in the headline, and instead of his usual routine of putting the paper straight into the recycling bin, rubber band and all, he took it to the kitchen and opened it carefully, with something approaching reverence.
This regard was not for the newspaper itself, of course. Not the reporting, not the photos, not the layout. It was the subject of the article that entranced him: Nicholas Parrish.
The story had changed his whole day.
Kai grinned and took the stairs two at a time. He went to the freezer, removed a frozen dinner, and put it in the microwave. He grabbed a can of a nutritional shake from the refrigerator and fitted it with a straw. The evening meal would be the usual silent affair. Afterward, he would read the story about Nicholas Parrish aloud to his mother. Her current state of health would force her to listen to it, like it or not. She would not. For him, this would be as good as dessert.
He stood in the kitchen, listening to the hum of the microwave. The air began to smell of steaming broccoli, melting cheese, and warming plastic.
He felt contentment as he looked out the window and watched dusk fall. It would be dark soon. As pleasant as his dinner plans were, he didn’t expect to spend an evening at home. He had a game to begin.
He got a hard-on just thinking about it.
THREE
I dozed off just before the six o’clock news came on. I had caught about fifteen minutes of sleep before Nick Parrish’s name was mentioned by a talking head-that woke me up enough to do some math. Fifteen minutes of sleep in the last thirty-eight hours.
Not good.
I listened to Parrish’s surgeon, full of pride in his medical accomplishment. Parrish had jokingly told him he wanted to run a marathon. “Other than his incarceration, there is really no reason why he couldn’t do so one day,” the doctor said. He pointed to a diagram of a spine and indicated sites of injury, talked about the repair rate of nerves, and quoted statistics on central cord syndrome. I couldn’t stop myself from wishing that he had found some other-any other-paralyzed individual to be his miracle man.
The newscast changed focus to the patient’s notoriety, and Nick Parrish’s face filled the screen. I aimed the remote at him and sent him off into television oblivion. If only it were so easy to ship him off to real oblivion.
But in real life, Nick Parrish clearly wasn’t ready to sign off.
Despite my lack of sleep on Monday, I was at my desk by eight Tuesday morning. The room was buzzing-apparently someone on the Moths’ blog had said that I’d soon be hearing from the friends of Nick Parrish, and that I’d recognize the message when I got it. The phone started ringing with interview requests. John asked me to write a follow-up exclusive for the Express but promised other outlets I’d be available the next day at a press conference. The paper had its own need for publicity. But at least I’d be spared one day of repeating empty phrases:
“Yes, I heard his doctor say that Parrish wants to train for a marathon.”
“No, I know he’s not getting out anytime soon.”
“No, I don’t know what the Moths have in mind, and I’m really not too anxious to find out.”
“No, I don’t think I would feel better talking it over, but thanks all the same.”
I understood why John wanted the story and why I had to write it. What would have been a small item in other papers, one more bizarre note in the bizarre life of Nicholas Parrish, would take up most of the A section of the Express. Parrish had taken his victims from a number of communities, including several in other states, but no city had suffered as much horror at his hands as Las Piernas.
Writing the story brought back more memories, of course. Of being hunted by Nick Parrish. Of bodies. Of bones. Of betrayals.
It took me all day-most of that time spent staring at a blank computer screen, or fending off overly protective colleagues. After about the tenth “Are you okay?” I picked up my laptop and scouted the building. I found an empty desk in a place full of empty desks-our now almost vacant features department. But it was a sunny, airy room where I could hide out while I wrote, so I finished the story there.
Just before I left, Lydia Ames offered to come over that evening. But Lydia was recently engaged, and I knew her life was crammed with wedding plans. My mood wasn’t exactly going to be a good match to hers in any case, so I told her not to worry. On the way home, I tried calling my therapist, the one who had helped me deal with my PTSD after my first experience with Parrish.
She was on vacation. “Is this an emergency?” her answering service asked.
“No,” I said quickly.
Not yet.
I could handle this.
After forsaking the news, I distracted myself by watching old Marx Brothers films. When I’d reached my limit with that, I thought about playing games on my computer but knew that would only keep me wired. So instead I went through the newspapers in our recycling pile, pulled out the crossword puzzles, and took them to bed with me. Before long, I grew drowsy and dozed off.