Moth paused. Andy Candy bent to hear everything.
“I don’t think so. No matter what they say, I don’t think so. You all, everyone here, you all knew my uncle Ed. He stood up here a hundred times and told you how he’d licked his drinking problem. Is there anyone here who thinks he would kill himself?”
No response.
“Anyone?”
No response.
“So, I need your help. Now more than ever.”
For the first time, Andy Candy could hear Moth’s voice start to quiver with emotion.
“I need to stay sober. I need to find the man who killed my uncle.”
These last words seemed high-pitched, as if stretched out and wrung tight before being knotted together.
“Please help me.”
She wished she could see the silence in the room, see the reactions on the faces of the people gathered there. There was a long pause before she heard Moth again.
“My name is Timothy and I have fifteen days sober.”
She retreated as she heard people begin to clap.
“How was your night?” Andy Candy asked.
“Okay, I guess. I’m not sleeping great, but that’s to be expected. And you?”
“Same.”
Moth was about to ask why but did not. He had many questions, not the least of which was why Andy Candy was home when she should have been finishing school. Moth thought he was using up his last bit of reasonable behavior by not asking Andy Candy to share her mystery. He guessed she either would or wouldn’t sometime in the future. He told himself to merely be glad-no, overjoyed-that she was helping him.
He shifted in the passenger seat. He was nicely dressed-khaki slacks, black and red striped sports shirt-and he had a student’s backpack on his lap. Notebooks. Tape recorder. Crime scene reports.
“So, where to first?”
“Ed’s apartment. Due diligence.” He smiled, before adding:
“Historians like going over and over the same thing. So retrace the cops. Then…”
He stopped. Then was a notion he wasn’t ready to explore. Yet.
9
A Second Conversation
Jeremy Hogan knew there would be a second call.
This belief was not based so much on the science of psychology as it was on instinct honed over years of trying to understand the why of crimes instead of the who, what, where, when that routinely bedeviled police detectives. If this killer is truly obsessed with me, he won’t likely be satisfied with a single call-unless he has it all planned out, and my next breath is my last. Or close to last.
He racked through his memory, picturing killers of all stripes. It was a gallery of scars and tattoos, a cavalcade of ethnicity-black, white, Hispanic, Asians, and even one Samoan-of pale men who heard voices and grizzled men who were so cold that the word remorseless seemed an understatement. He remembered men who writhed in their chairs and sobbed as they told him why they had killed and men who had laughed uproariously at death as if nothing could be a bigger and funnier joke. He could hear echoes of matter-of-fact murder reimagined as littering or jaywalking, reverberating off cinder block cell walls. He could see harsh, unshaded prison lights and gray steel furniture bolted to the cement floors. He could see men who grinned at the thought of their own execution and others who shook with rage or quivered with fear. He remembered men who’d stared at him with an undeniable longing to wrap their hands around his throat, and others who wanted a reassuring embrace and a friendly pat on the back. Faces like ghosts filled his imagination. Some names popped in and out, but most were lost in the flux of remembering.
They weren’t important.
What I said or wrote about them, that was what was important.
He took a shallow breath, almost like an asthmatic’s wheezy, near-helpless pull at the air, trying to fill stifled lungs.
He admonished himself as if speaking to himself in the third person: Once you finished your assessment and wrote your report, you didn’t think they were worth remembering.
You were wrong.
One of them is back. No handcuffs this time. No straitjacket. No injection of Ativan and Haldol to quiet psychosis. No heavily muscled armed guard in the corner fingering a truncheon, or watching in an adjacent room on a television monitor. No red panic button hidden under your side of the steel desk to protect you from being killed.
So, one of two things will happen: He will want to kill you right away, because making that first call was the only trigger he needs and he’ll be satisfied with getting on with the murder. Or he will want to talk and tease and torture you, prolong the entire performance because each time he hears your uncertainty and fear it caresses him, makes him feel more powerful, more in control-and after he has stretched the limits of your fear, then he will kill you.
He will want to do everything possible to make your death meaningful.
This obvious but subtle observation had taken him several days to reach. But once it flooded him-after his initial fears had dissipated-he knew there was only one real option left to him.
You cannot run. You cannot hide. Those are clichés. You would not know how to disappear. That’s the stuff of cheap fiction, anyway.
But you cannot just wait. You’re no damn good at that, either.
Help him enjoy your killing. Draw it out and draw him out. Buy yourself time.
That’s your only chance.
Of course, he had not decided what he might do with the time he purchased.
And so, he’d taken a few steps to ready himself for the second call. Modest steps-but they gave him a sense of doing rather than sitting around patiently while someone planned his death. He made a quick trip to a nearby electronics store to obtain an attachment to his phone, so he could record conversations. This was followed by a second trip to an office supply outlet to acquire several legal tablets of yellow lined paper and a box of Number 2 pencils. He would tape. He would take notes.
The recording device was a stick-on suction cup that picked up both voices in a telephone conversation. It attached to a microcassette recorder. The advantage to the setup was simple: It would not make the ubiquitous beeping sound that legal recordings made.
He wasn’t sure what purpose would be served by making a recording. But it seemed like it might be a wise move, and in the absence of any other forms of protection, it seemed to make sense. Perhaps he’ll make some overt, obvious threat and I can go to the police…
Jeremy doubted he would be so fortunate. He assumed the caller would be too smart. And anyway-what could the cops do to protect me? Park a cruiser outside? For how long? Tell me to get a gun and a pit bull?
He knew he had great ability to extract information from a subject. This capability had always come easily to him. But he also knew that his examinations had been after the fact-crimes had been committed, arrests made.
He understood crimes from the past. This was the promise of a crime in the future.
Predictions? Impossible.
Regardless, when he sat down at his small desk in his upstairs office, he had a feeling of confidence as he worked out some questions for that inevitable second call. This was frustrating, slow-paced work. He knew he had to do some rudimentary psychological assessments-he had to ask some questions that would ascertain that the caller was oriented to time, place, and circumstances in order to make sure he wasn’t schizophrenic and getting homicidal command hallucinations. He already knew the answer to that particular question was no, but the scientist in him demanded that he still make certain.