He tilted her face toward the place where Travis’s head would have been. Her left cheek lay in the pool of congealed blood that had oozed from the damp stump.
“You’ve kept yourself in very good shape, so that should help. Not as much body fat to insulate you. You’ll be with Travis soon.”
Despite her paralysis, she was able to make a soft gasping sound that might have been a weak attempt to call for help.
The sounds reminded Giovanni of the ones his grandmother had made so many years ago. That day in the kitchen.
After finishing the dishes, he’d called the police and asked them to come because his grandmother wasn’t moving, and he’d told them that he thought he might have killed her with the knife and that there was lots of blood on the floor, all spreading away from her.
And as he waited for them, he carefully dried the glasses and put them away just like his grandmother had asked him to do before he pushed the knife into her stomach and she drifted, twitching to the floor.
“He poses no immediate threat to himself or to anyone else, Your Honor. We recommend that the boy receive counseling and be monitored until his eighteenth birthday, and if he appears to be mentally stable, that he be released under his own recognizance. That’s all, Your Honor.”
“Any closing comments from the prosecution?”
“We maintain that the boy is extremely disturbed and agree that he be institutionalized and receive the necessary psychiatric care, but this state has a mandatory life sentence for first-degree murder. We request that upon his release from psychiatric care, he serve the remainder of the sentence in prison for this egregious crime.”
“All right. We will take a brief recess, and I will announce my decision when we resume at one o’clock. Court is now in recess.”
Over the next few years Giovanni’s lawyers and the judges and all the doctors and counselors told him again and again that he really didn’t understand what he was doing that day in his grandmother’s kitchen. And after a while he almost started to believe them.
But in truth, deep down, he knew they were wrong. He did understand.
Yes, he did.
He had killed his grandmother because he wanted to see what it would be like to watch someone die. To see if it would matter to him, if it would make him feel sad or not.
And it had not.
As Giovanni took the sheet that had been covering Travis’s corpse and spread it over Kelsey, tucking it up to her neck, he thought fondly of that summer he’d spent in Kansas when he was eleven. The sunlight and the crickets and the memories. The books that he’d read. The stories he’d learned.
He rolled the gurney into the freezer and paused to brush a stray lock of hair away from Kelsey’s face.
For a moment, he listened to the moist sounds coming from her throat, sounds that reminded him of his grandmother, then he left the freezer and latched the door shut behind him.
After changing back into the custodian’s uniform and placing the doctor’s scrubs in the duffel bag Giovanni drove home, carefully avoiding all traffic light cameras.
Tomorrow was going to be a busy day.
18
Saturday, May 171833 Cherry StreetDenver, Colorado4:59 a.m.
I did not have pleasant dreams.
I saw myself in the slaughterhouse again, tracking Basque. The stiff, rigid smell of blood in the air. The distant drip of a leaking pipe echoing through the darkness.
Meat hooks hung beside me. Swaying, clanking, even though there was no breeze.
In the dream, I stabbed at the black air with my flashlight, and as I did, a woman emerged. She took one step and then paused and gazed at me with cold, lifeless eyes. I recognized her as Basque’s last victim, Sylvia Padilla. Her torso was ripped open like it had been when I found her. Her face doubly pale, drained of blood by death and washed of color by the flashlight’s beam.
“Why didn’t you save me, Patrick?” She only mouthed the words, but in the dream I heard them as if she spoke them aloud.
Cold lips.
Whispering.
“Why, Patrick?”
And then, footsteps behind me. I whipped around, and my light shone on the faces of more walking dead, all approaching me.
“Why, Patrick?”
Crowding around me, reaching for me.
“Why?”
I pushed them aside, felt my hands smear against their warm, moist wounds, began to run through the dark, my light swinging wildly, shadows splintering, then re-forming, then splintering around me again.
And then I was sprinting through a field and through time and I was in the tunnel of the gold mine again and I was leaning over Heather’s body and she opened her eyes and then grinned a dead smile and held the terrible heart out to me.
Her lips, cold lips.
“For you.”
But then it wasn’t Heather’s face anymore, but Lien-hua’s, and she was offering me the heart. “Here is my heart, Patrick. For you.”
The heart reeked of death.
“No,” I yelled in my dream.
I stumbled backward.
She stood up, joined the corpses.
“No!”
And they all called to me, their words beating like a dark heartbeat over and over in my head. “Why, Patrick? Why?”
And then I awoke to a pale shroud of sunlight soaking through the curtains of my room.
I tried to relax, to let the dream fade away, but it refused to let go of me. I looked at the clock, and even though it was just after five, I didn’t want to go back to sleep and chance tipping into the dream again, so I climbed out of bed.
The images kept playing like a movie in my head. I slipped into some workout clothes and my rock-climbing shoes and went to the bouldering cave I’d built in our garage-a mini climbing gym with holds bolted to the walls and across the ceiling.
Since Tessa was sleeping over at her friend Dora Bender’s house, I didn’t have to worry about waking her, so I pulled out my twenty-yearold boombox, popped in some U2, turned it up loud enough to help me forget the dream, moved my car to the driveway, and laid some bouldering mats across the concrete so I wouldn’t hurt myself any more than necessary when I fell.
After traversing the walls for ten minutes to warm up, I began to cross the ceiling, hanging upside down, fingers gripping the climbing holds, toes wedged into small cracks or against the holds I’d passed.
Across the ceiling and back.
Arms pumped. Abs screaming. My side throbbed from meeting the axe handle yesterday, but it wasn’t as sore as I thought it’d be, so I guessed that no ribs were broken. However, it still ached, especially each time I lost my grip and fell from the ceiling onto my back.
The bouldering pads helped a little, but I could definitely feel the impact.
I worked the routes for forty-five minutes, but as much as I cranked on the moves, I couldn’t clear my head. So finally, I gave up and went back upstairs to get ready to meet Cheyenne.
Some people think that an investigator will be immediately reassigned to a different case if a killer mentions his name while corresponding with the authorities or does something to threaten him or his family.
And while the scenario might make for a good plot for a crime novel or cop buddy movie, it’s not the way things work in real life. Once you start on a case, especially a high-profile case with a serial killer, you stay on it, regardless of how many threatening phone calls, photographs, or recorded messages the killer might send you.
It has to be this way, otherwise as soon as an investigator started closing in, a killer could simply leave a threatening message or make a taunting phone call and-voila!-the one person who has the best chance of catching him would be reassigned. That’s just not the way it is.
It’d be too easy for the bad guys.
However, it is true that if they mention your name, it gets personal.