As he played he closed his eyes and saw a boy materialize. He was a small boy in a dark wood on a winter night and he was very cold. He was tied up, perhaps to a tree. The boy was shivering and naked but did not cry anymore. There was an old church in the distance and maybe the boy heard its bells ringing. The night was clear and filled with stars. He felt terrible pain but even stronger were things he not could name, fear, confusion, sweet pleading love, anger, degradation, terror. Maybe he tried to speak but it’s not likely he could get a word out by then. He was not alone. The person who loved the boy the most, who had always taken care of him, who bathed him and dressed him, was there with him now, too. He could smell him close, a large shadow smiling in the darkness, near enough now to blot out the stars. The boy might have screamed then but it was not likely.
This was what happened. Walter was certain of it. The hidden story told by the condition of the body and the crime scene was incontrovertible. Dozens of good men had gone to their graves, afraid to face it. That was OK. It was natural. This darkest of shadows was death itself and men could only live by turning away. “The truth is, the cops just didn’t want to know.”
He saw into the present. He saw the old killer living alone on the edge of a city, a decrepit shell of wantonness and stale pleasure. He saw the old man who had committed the most diabolical of crimes, an especially depraved and merciless child sex murder that would shake any decent person’s soul. No doubt he was considered a little aloof or odd by his neighbors, a “funny old man,” it was a shame he had no family on the holidays, one of those old bachelors who stank of alcohol and cigarettes and showered once a week, not pleasant but nothing to worry about-if they only knew! It was many years later now and the old man had nothing left but his memories. Walter could see him in his dim row house turning the yellowed and crumbling newspaper pages with appalling arrogance to read about himself once again, reliving the sweet memory of the killing when he was young, the zenith of his power and achievement, the high point of his life! What kind of society allowed such a monster his freedom for nearly fifty years, while the nameless and innocent child, he would be a father now, perhaps a grandfather, moldered unknown and unmourned? Walter was offended to the core of his sense of decency. The old killer had exulted over his dark triumph for too long. It was time to go get him.
The piano thundered. This new creation of his seemed to summon shades from every corner of the parlor. It was thrilling to make but it was good he would never hear it again. It was the song of the beast.
Lost in his music, Walter didn’t detect the soft, dissonant tympanic beat in the darkness of the great house, the click of the door against the jamb.
A thick-shouldered man stood in the gloom. He had shining black eyes and the glint of a gun at his hip. His smile was brilliant.
The mighty music stopped, and the echoes faded in the lower rooms. A big hand clapped Walter on the shoulder.
“Nice!” the thin man exclaimed with a hoarse laugh. “I could have had a heart attack! I assumed I’d be enjoying libations alone. The least you could do is call.”
“I did! You were too busy being Beethoven to answer the phone.”
“I think not,” Walter shot back.
Stoud. Walter walked into the parlor turning on lights, and tossed a Hallmark-style card to Stoud with a smirk. It was the invitation to the fifth anniversary of the reburial of the Boy in the Box, also known as America ’s Unknown Child, in his prominent new grave at Ivy Hill Cemetery. Stoud hadn’t been able to go; Walter had brusquely declined the invitation.
Inside was a drawing of a baby being sung up to heaven and a poem, “Little Angels”; Stoud snorted. “Your cynicism is apt, check this out,” Walter said, reading: “From this day forth he becomes a symbol for every child in America who has paid the ultimate price for abuse.”
The thin man took a long drag on his cigarette. “Fleisher thinks my heart has finally turned to stone. OK, he may be right.” He smiled wickedly. “But first they bring him toys, fetishizing the joys of a childhood that was spent six feet underground. Now they’re quite happy to ignore what really happened to him.”
His eyes flared. “The child is not a symbol of anything. He was not a trendy victim of ‘child abuse.’ He was murdered, tortured and murdered. He was prey to the darkest, most complicated murdering personality type the human race has produced, and since we can’t bring a dead boy back to life, it’s not our job to imagine him playing second base. It’s our job to go get the S.O.B. who did it.”
Stoud grinned. There was nothing quite like Richard Walter reaching for the sword.
“AE,” the state trooper said. It was a statement, not a question. The boy had clearly been murdered by the fourth and most diabolical type of killer-the anger-excitation killer.
“Of course,” Walter said, as he spun the triple-digit combination of his silver attaché on the coffee table in front of him. Stoud watched the thin fingers carefully lift out an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper.
“The Helix,” Walter said, holding it up. “The map to the bottom, the black hole at the end of the continuum.”
Walter was loath to discuss the Helix, and was downright paranoid about showing it to anyone, even his protégé. When murder descended to the fourth personality subtype, AE, Walter’s schemata described a murderer who killed not for any tangible achievement-money or power or revenge-but simply for the unmatched excitement and pleasure of killing. The AE or sadistic killer murdered and tortured strangers, killed purely for secondary sexual enjoyment, and couldn’t stop. The complex pleasures of sadism drove him insatiably to kill and kill again until he was caught and incarcerated, was killed himself, or died of old age. It was the kind of killer responsible for the dark legends in all cultures of human beasts like Dracula and the werewolf-and in modern times men like Pedro Alonso Lopez, “The Monster of the Andes,” arrested in 1980 after killing more than three hundred women. Yet it was a monster rare enough in American civilization until the 1960s and ’70s, until it went by the names Bundy, Gacy, Boston Strangler, Night Stalker, Green River Killer, and dozens of others. Now the FBI said there were sadistic serial killers operating in every state.
The Helix was a hand-drawn illustration of a swirling spiral cone, marked all along its length by tiny neat handwritten legends in black ink.
“Richard,” Stoud teased. “Turn on that computer yet? Revolutionary papers in forensic journals are generally not handwritten.”
Walter scoffed at the idea he would publish it. “I do not even want to expose it to a hacker, or leave its impressions on a typewriter ink ribbon.”
Walter was right to be paranoid about the Helix and keep it locked away in the steel-ribbed attaché, Stoud thought. The thin man sounded grandiose when he described it as “the most dangerous knowledge in the world.” But he had a point. While it didn’t teach a man how to build a nuclear bomb, it showed him something more perilous-how to release the darkest evil in himself.
“I have to be careful,” Walter said. “The sadists are the first ones to attend my lectures, to order reprints of my papers. Like everyone, the sadist is eager to find out who he really is, how to achieve his dream. In the wrong hands, the Helix is a self-help guide for a serial killer or a mass murderer.” Once, when making his speech in Marquette, Michigan, “Sadistic Acting Out: A Theoretical Model,” at a forensic convention, Walter saw a suspected rapist in the audience.
Sadists take their work seriously, he said. Sexual sadists, like Ted Bundy, represent the class of criminals with the highest IQ, an average of 119. They are often very bright, charming, and utterly normal and trustworthy-until, being master manipulators, they get an unsuspecting victim alone, and the monster emerges. The learning curve is complicated and absorbs all the senses-touching, viewing, smelling, tasting, hearing. It’s difficult and time-consuming to figure out exactly what to do next. In Kansas, Walter spent a day consulting with the Wichita police helping them piece together a series of murders that police believed were caused by one man. That afternoon as he was about to lecture on sadism to the First World Meeting of Police Surgeons and Police Medical Officers, “a detective came up to me and said, ‘I just kicked the suspect out of your audience.’” The suspected serial killer had been prepared to take notes.