*
Four weeks earlier, May:
Darryl Hiller was as anxious to break the silence of his jail cell as the city was to learn what made him tick. One catch: He would talk only with Sandra Riley. His mentor. ActioNews 8 gained clearance from the police and the prosecutor’s office, whose primary stipulation was that the interview be conducted after the verdict, so as to fuel no claims of publicity interfering with his right to an impartial trial. Post-trauma stress behind her, Sandra set about the task of producing a week-long series of special reports on the mind of the Tapeworm.
The interview was conducted in a sterile room in the county jail, unfurnished except for a scarred table. Kevin set up two cameras and lights; sound levels were monitored. Darryl Hiller was the last to arrive, manacles on his wrists and ankles, with a pair of Rushmore-faced deputies standing guard a few feet away in case he got frisky.
roll tape. three, two, one
“I forgive you,” was the first thing he said to her. “I don’t hold it against you that you turned me in. I was disappointed at first, sure. But you played it well. Now I understand it had to be this way.”
“Did you want to get caught six months ago?” she asked.
He shook his head, eyes full of visions no one else in the room could perceive. “No.” A smile. “But it had to be that way. I’d gone as far as I could staying anonymous. I had to go to the next level. Beyond. And now?” He beamed. “Everybody knows Darryl Hiller.”
Sandra thought he still looked so unremarkable in that chair, across that table. Still pale. His hair was trimmed shorter and he looked boyish, his face still plain. Only a small scar marked his forehead to commemorate contact with her camcorder. His hands fidgeted on the table, more out of idleness, she thought, than nerves. She decided it was better to let him ramble and free-associate rather than try to direct him in an orderly flow of Q&A. They had plenty of tape to roll.
He told stories of childhood. What went wrong? Everything. Nothing. He said he’d been a sometimes bedwetter in gradeschool and that his mother used to tape his prepubescent penis to his lower belly every night as punishment, and whip him in the morning if he had freed it. Then he laughed and said he’d made it all up. The truth could’ve been anything.
“Sixteen women raped and suffocated,” Sandra cut in at one point. Properly outraged, under control. Professional. “Why did you do it? Your core reason.”
He tilted his head back, let his gaze rove over the ceiling. He had a habit of avoiding eye contact when answering.
“The worst crime a man can inflict on himself is anonymity. It eats people alive inside if they go too long with their grubby little lives, not counting for anything, good or bad. They just exist. No one should have to live an anonymous life. Me? I had the courage to become known. That’s all. How else could I do it? I don’t have a cure for cancer or zits. I can’t balance the federal budget. I’m not Tom Cruise in some new movie. So I had to use my imagination. And the tools at my disposal.” Now, finally, eye contact. “And you. You inspired me. Because you’ve got it down to an art. You know what it’s like to be public property.”
“Did you believe you had some sort of moral superiority?”
He looked irritated, as if she’d missed the point entirely. “It doesn’t have anything to do with morality. Or superiority. It’s a question of economics. Supply and demand.”
“Economics,” she repeated.
“Right,” he said. Most natural thing in the world. “When does newspaper circulation rise? When does everyone tune in TV news? Not when the doctor with the cure is on. Not when a budget analyst is on. Not when Tom Cruise is on. No. It’s when there’s a killer on the loose. You know … we’re not so different, you and me. There’s a symbiosis. You need me as much as I need you.”
She was about to formulate a rebuttal, but he broke in: “Do you believe in cancer?”
She flubbed her first try, flustered. Have to edit that out later. “Of course. Everyone knows someone affected in some way by cancer.”
He nodded. “And do you believe in rats?”
She didn’t like this track of inquiry. “Of course I do.”
“So you’ll acknowledge the cause-and-effect relationship between them.”
“Rats cause cancer?” Her voice was incredulous.
“No, that’s backwards. Cancer causes rats.”
“You’ve lost me with this, Darryl.”
He hunched forward, toward Sandra and camera one. “Cancer’s out there. It’s out there. Feeding on people. All these food additives and chemicals and crap in the environment? Cancer has a field day with that stuff. For cancer, it’s like rocket fuel. Now. You got all these labs everywhere, right, scientists looking for new drugs to fight cancer? Places breed all these lab rats just for experiments. That’s all the rats are good for. They wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for cancer.” A deep breath, reloading. “That’s the way it is between you and me. All this crap wrong with cities today, and small towns, the world at large? You people are like cancer, feeding on it with your cameras, poking your mikes into it, stirring it. Pretty soon, you just have to expect rats like me popping up to give you more to work with.”
“There’s nothing cancerous about meeting the public’s right to know. You’re making a perversity out of something inherently noble.”
“Keep thinking that, if it helps.” He chuckled. “Do you think pharmaceutical companies want to cure cancer? Not in a million years. They won’t wipe it out because of economics. Get rid of a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry? All they want is to cure some individual patients … and keep the hope alive in everyone else.” He settled back in his chair with a grin. “So save the self-righteousness. I may disgust you, and you may hate me. But your job would never be the same without me.”
“And how do you feel about the continuing cycle of murder? By now you must know about the copycat killer who started imitating you last month.”
Darryl’s forehead creased. “I feel honored,” he said slowly. “I influenced a stranger’s destiny.” A broad, dawning grin. “For once, I was the inspiration. The growth cycle continues.”
Fifty minutes later, once the interview was concluded, Sandra hurried to the nearest bathroom and hung over the toilet with dry heaves. She’d eaten nothing all day, but the rejection reaction was the same.
The following week — after editing, rearranging, splicing, and redubbing — the five-part series on Darryl Hiller was shown on the eleven o’clock news.
And drew the largest audience in ActioNews 8’s history.
*
November is the cruelest month, but ActioNews 8 weathers it well. They’re top of the heap in a nine-station market, no small thanks due to Sandra Riley and her considerable drawing power. She’s now a weeknight anchor with a hefty salary kicked up into six figures, and management’s only cause for fretting is that her agent would contract her new position for no more than a year. She has to be free to jump when those inevitable network offers start to materialize.
The copycat Tapeworm gives them a body every few weeks. It’s not the original rapist-murderer; the DNA evidence he leaves behind proves that. Of the original, no one knows. But Tapeworm is as Tapeworm does, and the public tunes fearfully in, dreading another dose of reality, enthralled when they get it. Sandra anchors the footage shot in the field by a younger protégée who idolizes her, and every time, Sandra dies a little more inside. Remembering her role. But her makeup never runs.
The package arrives via courier one afternoon, brown paper wrapper, neatly handlettered and marked to her attention at ActioNews 8 studios. No return address, but the paperwork was done across the country on the west coast.