The almost ten-mile trip from Los Angeles LAX to the house he shared with Sharon in Venice took the cab driver just under half an hour. Twice Tom almost asked the driver to pull up by the side of the road. The stop and start motion, due to traffic lights and road congestion, brought him to the verge of being sick, but somehow he managed to hold it all in.
‘You OK back there?’ the cab driver asked, checking Tom through the rearview mirror. He was sloshing on the backseat with his head propped against the window, his eyes closed.
Tom’s reply was barely audible.
‘Buddy, you all right? Do you need me to stop? You don’t look so good.’ The driver asked again, this time reducing his speed.
Tom forced his eyes open. ‘No, it’s OK. I’ll be all right.’ His voice sounded hoarse and fatigued. ‘I just need to get home and get some sleep.’
‘Rough night?’ The driver followed the question with a dubious smile.
Tom saw it, and didn’t like it.
‘No, just bad food. I’ll be OK once I get home and get some sleep.’
The driver didn’t make any more small talk, but stepped on it and kept checking on Tom via the rearview mirror every couple of minutes. The faster he got to Tom’s address, the better. The last thing he wanted was to have to clean up puke from his back seat.
Tom stepped out of the cab and squinted at how bright the day seemed, even through his dark glasses. The glaring light made him feel sick again. He took an enormous deep breath, hoping that that would be enough to keep his nausea at bay.
‘I’ve gotta stop partying like this,’ he said to himself as he started toward the house. But that certainly wasn’t the first, and probably wouldn’t be the last time he’d recited those exact same words. The flesh was weak, he had admitted to that many times.
As he paused before his front door, his stomach roared so loudly he thought that maybe his large intestine was now devouring the small one. But despite how hungry he felt, Tom would think about food later. All he wanted right now was to collapse in bed and sleep until tomorrow morning.
He reached for his key and slid it into the door lock. His stomach roared again, this time louder and for longer, making him curl over a little with pain. OK, maybe he would have to eat a candy bar or something before heading for bed, just to try to calm the storm brewing inside his belly.
Tom tried rotating the key, but it didn’t move.
‘Hum!’
He tried a couple more times.
Nothing.
‘What the hell?’ He twisted the doorknob. The door was unlocked. Tom found that very strange. They never forgot to lock the door, not even when they were in the house. Venice wasn’t the most secure neighborhood in LA.
‘Sharon,’ he called, pushing open the door.
The first thing that hit him was the smell, an odd combination of putrid and bittersweet that seemed to rip its way though his nostrils before lodging itself at the back of his throat, choking him and making him gag. He felt a drop of bile come up through his esophagus and spill into his mouth. For some reason, instead of spitting it out, he swallowed it back down.
Tom squeezed his eyes tight behind his shades. The smell had also made his eyes water. He took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes.
‘What the fuck? Sharon?’ he called again. Had she left a whole chicken outside the fridge in this heat?
He coughed a couple of times before finally looking up and into his living room. His eyes were still half blurred, so it took them a few seconds to refocus.
For a moment Tom hesitated, his tired and confused brain struggling to make sense of the grotesque images his visual nerves were sending in. Reality had just morphed into the sickest nightmare he’d ever had.
‘What?’
His whispered voice caught in his throat as a rush of adrenalin took over his body. It fired bullets of uncontrollable fear down his spine and into his heart. Bitter bile shot back up from his stomach but this time it wasn’t only a drop, and this time it would’ve been impossible for Tom to swallow it all back down.
Sick exploded out of his mouth before he collapsed on to the floor and into the pool of blood his living room had become.
Thirty-one
‘Something changed him?’ Captain Blake asked with a frown. She was sitting behind her desk, nursing a fresh cup of coffee. ‘How so, Robert?’ Her hair was loose, tucked behind her ears, and she wore a black pencil skirt with a tight-fitting plum cotton blouse. She had asked Hunter and Garcia to come to her office as soon as she arrived at the PAB.
‘I’m not really sure how, Captain,’ Hunter replied. ‘But what I’m very certain of is that he chose the words he used on his note very carefully, doing his best to avoid doubt. He ends his third paragraph by writing: “Would they see what I have become, or would they falter?” He could very easily have written “see what I am?” Or “who I am?” Or “the monster in me?” Or something along those lines.’
‘But he didn’t,’ she said, leaning back in her chair.
‘No, he didn’t. I’m sure that he picked the word “become” for a specific reason.’
‘And you think that is because he wants us to understand he wasn’t always a psychopath. That something in the course of his life changed him. And whatever it was that happened to him, it made him decide to start killing people.’
Hunter nodded.
‘Like what, for example?’
Hunter shrugged. ‘He doesn’t allude to anything in his note, so right now that’s impossible to tell. Every individual reacts differently to different situations, Captain, you know that. Everybody’s got a different breaking point. For some people, it takes a lot for that switch to flick inside their heads, if it ever does. For others, not so much. Even a physical disease can potentially turn someone into a murderer.’
‘Wait a second,’ the captain said. ‘Physical disease?’
Garcia also looked at Hunter sceptically.
‘Yes,’ Hunter confirmed. ‘History is littered with different cases. In America, Charles Whitman is probably the most famous example.’
Captain Blake paused for a moment, searching her memory. The name finally came back to her. ‘Charles Whitman? Wasn’t he the Texas Bell Tower sniper?’
‘That’s right,’ Garcia said, now remembering it as well.
Charles Whitman was a former US Marine who became one of the most famous mass murderers in US history. On 1 August 1966, he started his killing spree by murdering his wife and then his mother. Once they were dead, he drove up to the University of Texas in Austin, where he was studying for a degree in engineering, and, armed with numerous firearms and several hundred rounds of ammunition, got up on to the highest point on campus, the main building’s clock tower. From there, he indiscriminately shot random passersby for almost two hours until he was finally shot dead by Austin police officer Houston McCoy. In those two horrible hours, Charles Whitman managed to kill fourteen people and injure thirty-two.
Understandably so, the press quickly branded Whitman a monster — but that was until the police discovered the note Whitman had left behind. A suicide note, or what essentially became a suicide note because Whitman was certain that he would die that day.
The note shocked everyone. In it, Whitman confessed that he himself found his behavior completely inexplicable. He began his note by stating that he adored his wife and mother, and that he had no idea why he was doing what he was doing. He went on to explain that in the past few months he had simply been consumed by excruciating headaches, like nothing he had ever experienced before, and those headaches brought with them overwhelming feelings of rage and destructive impulses which he found harder and harder to resist.