“You have your opinion; I have mine,” I said. “Now, I doubt if you came all the way up here just to argue with me and insult my witnesses. What is it you want?”
He shifted in the chair and rolled his head. When his chin dropped, it disappeared completely into the rolls of fat.
“I want to make you an offer you can’t refuse,” he said. “I want to give you an easy out, an opportunity to save face. I’m offering you a gift.”
“I’m listening.”
He took a deep breath and straightened his tie.
“In exchange for the dismissal of all of the felony charges, my client is generously offering to plead guilty to one count of misdemeanor assault,” he said dramatically. “He’s also willing to pay a fifty-dollar fine plus the court costs on three conditions. One, he doesn’t have to register as a sex offender. Two, you agree to unsupervised probation, and three, you agree that the charge will be expunged from his record after one year. Those are our terms. They’re not negotiable.”
I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. The offer was ridiculous, but it was the way he delivered it that amused me. It made me think of a huge, animated purple blow-fish, pompously spouting his vastly superior intellectual theories to all the little shrimps around him.
“Sorry,” I said, trying to stop laughing. His face was darkening, and even through all the layers of fat, I could see he was becoming angry. “I can’t do that, Mr. Snodgrass. It’s out of the question.”
“Then rather than sitting there doing your impression of a hyena, perhaps you’d care to make some kind of reasonable counteroffer.”
“I thought you said your terms were nonnegotiable.”
“I might be willing to negotiate on the amount of the fine,” he said.
I could see the conversation was pointless, so I decided to end it. Besides, he was beginning to get on my nerves. I leaned back and rubbed my face, as though I were giving his suggestion due consideration. Finally, I rested my chin on my fingertips and looked him directly in the eye.
“All right, Mr. Snodgrass. I’ll make you a reasonable counteroffer. If your client will agree to undergo a simple procedure, I’ll dismiss the charges. He can walk away clean.”
“Procedure? What do you mean?”
“A medical procedure. I believe it’s called castration. If he’ll let a doctor remove his balls so I’m sure he won’t do this to any more young girls, I’ll dismiss the case. Those are my terms, and they’re nonnegotiable.”
I noticed his hands tighten on the arms of the chair and his face went another shade darker. Slowly, he began to hoist himself to his feet.
“I’ll be speaking to your superior about this matter,” he said. “I’m sure he would want to be aware of your cavalier attitude, especially after I grind you into the dust. You might want to think about seeking alternative employment.”
“Have a nice day, Mr. Snodgrass,” I said without bothering to get up. “I’ll see you in a couple of weeks, provided you’re still with us.”
He glared at me one last time and slammed the door.
Sunday, October 5
I knew I’d be spending most of Monday at the hospital with Caroline, so I called Tom Short and asked him if he’d meet me at my office in Jonesborough on Sunday afternoon. Tom was a forensic psychiatrist I’d known for years and whom I’d used as an expert witness in several cases I’d defended. He had an uncanny ability to diagnose personality disorders, but more important, he could analyze a set of facts or circumstances and make reliable predictions about future behavior. I wanted to show him the file and see what he had to say about the killers we were looking for.
He walked in wearing jeans and a red flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was just under six feet tall, with veiny blacksmith’s forearms and a perpetual gleam in his astute pale blue eyes. He wore oval-shaped glasses and a two-day stubble. The worn stem of a tobacco pipe stuck out of his shirt pocket. The part in his thinning hair may have been a little closer to his ear than the last time I’d seen him, which was more than a year ago.
“You don’t look any different,” he said as he shook my hand.
“What were you expecting?”
“I don’t know, maybe a jackbooted Nazi. I couldn’t believe it when I read in the paper that you’d become a prosecutor, a minion of the government.”
“I’m not a minion. I’m a civil servant, a proud representative of the people of Tennessee.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “You have too much compassion to do this job for long. My guess is you won’t last a year.”
“I appreciate your confidence,” I said, motioning to a chair and anxious to get started. “Now, if you could find it in your heart to focus your laser beam on something besides me, I need your help.”
I lifted a folder out of the file and spent the next half hour laying out everything we knew. The last items I showed him were the photographs from the crime scenes and the autopsies. He leaned back and took his pipe out of his shirt pocket and stuck it between his teeth, unlit.
“They’re young,” he said. “And they’re angry. Most likely male.”
“You’re sure of it?”
“Relatively. Crimes of this kind, where there are multiple killers, tend to involve younger people. There’s something going on here besides anger, though. Something a little beyond. I think you’re dealing with a competition of some sort.”
“Competition?”
“For attention, approval, that sort of thing. The number of wounds tells me they’re trying to impress someone, maybe each other, with the amount of damage they’re willing to inflict, the lengths they’re willing to go to. Maybe they’re still establishing a pecking order of some sort. And the mutilation, the carvings and the broken legs at the first scene, the positioning of the bodies, they’re taunting you, but at the same time, they’re paying homage to someone, probably their leader.”
“Do you think Satan is their leader?”
“I think the leader is flesh and bone.”
“But do you think it’s some kind of Satanic cult?”
“Maybe, but more likely it’s a group of fledgling sociopaths, obviously outcasts, rabidly angry, perhaps experimenting with how best to express their feelings to the world. Satan may be of some symbolic value to them, but I doubt they’re dedicated in any meaningful way.”
“How could anybody be dedicated in any meaningful way to Satan?”
Tom removed the pipe from his teeth and regarded me curiously. “I don’t remember religion as being one of your passions.”
“Why is everyone suddenly so interested in my feelings towards religion?” I said. I was thinking about the remarks Sarah had made to me just before she left.
“Is someone else interested?” Tom said.
“Never mind. Do you have any suggestions on how we catch them?”
“I assume you’ve checked out the Goth bars.”
“There’s only one. The TBI agents have been there more than once. They came up empty.”
“The only other way I could suggest, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend it, would be to call them out. You could go public and insult them openly. Set yourself up as a target. They’re obviously arrogant, so it wouldn’t sit well with them. Of course, you’d be putting yourself, and probably your family, at extreme risk.”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m not ready to die for the cause yet, and I’m not willing to put Caroline in any kind of danger.”
He didn’t say anything when I mentioned Caroline. He obviously hadn’t heard about her illness, and I didn’t feel like discussing it.
“Don’t worry; you’ll catch them,” he said.
“What makes you so sure?”
“Like I said, they’re arrogant. Arrogance breeds sloppiness. It’s just a matter of time.”
After Tom left, I walked back down to my truck, which was parked on the street beside the courthouse. As I approached, I noticed something had been tucked beneath the windshield wiper blade on the passenger side. It was a manila envelope with nothing written on it. I got in the cab and opened it up.