“So?”
“I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem right.”
“Do you think this dirty little bitch cares about you? She’s a cheap whore. That’s why she screwed you, and made you think she enjoyed it.”
Wayne had turned into a statue, his eyes unblinking, his body coiled like a spring. Renaldo watched him out of the corner of his eye. If Wayne didn’t silence the FBI agent, Renaldo would have no choice but to shoot him. He could not have a son who felt compassion for others.
“Do it,” Renaldo whispered.
The punch came out of nowhere, and snapped Vick’s head straight back. There was no mistaking its power, or intent. Vick’s eyes closed, and her body went limp.
Renaldo slipped the Taurus beneath his armpit. He hog-tied Vick’s arms and legs together, slamming the trunk when he was done. Putting his arm around Wayne’s shoulder, he walked the teenager to the passenger door.
“Still hungry?” Renaldo asked.
“Starving,” Wayne said.
Chapter 51
The Florida heat was a shock to Linderman’s nervous system. Sweat poured down his neck as he hurried across the yard with Jenkins.
“You’re going to show him cartoons?” the warden asked, puffing hard.
“That’s right.” Linderman clutched a stack of stiff white composition paper beneath his arm. “I drew them during the flight from Pittsburgh. It’s the best way for Crutch to understand the situation he’s in.”
“That sounds mighty unorthodox. I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“I do, warden. Trust me.”
While in college, Linderman had interned at his uncle’s advertising agency in New York. His uncle, an artist, would take ad copy written by the agency’s copywriters, and draw cartoons that would tell the story. These cartoons were called a story board, and often determined if an advertising campaign got off the ground.
Linderman had utilized story boards as an FBI profiler. When dealing with a difficult case, he would sketch cartoons depicting how a killer might have murdered and disposed of his victims. The technique had proven helpful in breaking several cases.
They came to a sun-bleached building with a guard posted at the entrance. Jenkins had already explained to Linderman how Crutch had bitten another inmate and killed him. In all his years, Jenkins had never seen anything like it, and hoped he never did again.
“Why did he become a vampire?” Jenkins asked.
Linderman knew a great deal about Crutch’s personal history, yet his penchant for drinking human blood remained a mystery.
“I have no idea,” the FBI agent said.
They went in. The interior was cooler than outside, but only by a few miserable degrees. Walking down a short corridor, they passed a line of cells that made up solitary. Each cell had steel door with a number painted on it. Through the doors they could hear inmates talking to themselves and crying.
At door #6 they stopped. The guard threw back a sliding panel on the door and peered inside. He shook his head sadly.
“I thought I knew this guy,” the guard said.
“Let me see,” Linderman said.
He switched places with the guard. Through the window he saw a windowless room with a naked light bulb dangling from the ceiling. A cot was attached to the wall, a thin mattress the room’s only comfort. A true hell hole.
The room had been transformed by a madman’s hand. Every square inch of wall space was covered in grotesque charcoal drawings of human depravity and suffering, the pictures traveling straight up to the ceiling. It was as if the artist had taken Dante’s Inferno and a Nazi concentration camp, and put them in a blender.
Crutch sat on a chair in the room’s center, naked save for a pair of red underwear.
Behind his chair was the largest drawing of all, a life-size rendering of Surtr holding a bloody sword over his head as he waged war on the world and killed all that stood in his way, the landscape around him littered with headless corpses and engulfed in flames.
“Who gave him the charcoal?” Linderman asked.
“We don’t know how he got it,” the guard replied.
“Please open the door.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I can’t let you talk to him by yourself this time,” Jenkins said. “He’s too dangerous.”
Linderman did not have a problem with that. He didn’t want to be alone with Crutch, and have a repeat of his earlier experience. With others present, Linderman knew he had a better chance of walking away from the encounter unscathed.
The guard unlocked the door and went in first.
“Put your muzzle on,” the guard said.
Crutch picked up the dog muzzle lying on the floor, and secured it around his face. Once finished, he dropped his hands into his lap.
“It’s on,” Crutch said.
The guard checked the muzzle, then made Crutch stand up to be searched.
“He’s clean,” the guard said.
“Make him sit on his cot,” Linderman said.
The guard led Crutch to his cot. Crutch sat down and began to twiddle his thumbs. Linderman and Jenkins entered, filling the small space.
“Woof, woof,” Crutch said.
Jenkins and the guard leaned against the wall. Linderman dragged the chair in front of the cot, and stuck his foot on it. He took the cartoons he’d drawn, and propped them up onto his leg. The first cartoon showed a crude rendering of a three-story Victorian house.
“Oh, boy, a dog and pony show,” Crutch said.
“Yes, and it’s just for you,” Linderman said.
“How wonderful.”
“This is your family home in Oakmont, Pennsylvania. I went and visited there. The house is exactly as you left it.”
Crutch squinted. His eyes, normally still, darted from side-to-side.
Linderman let the cardboard drop to the floor. Next up was a cartoon of the dining room table with Crutch’s mother at the head, his three sisters occupying the other chairs.
“This is the dining room with your mom and sisters having a meal,” Linderman said. “As you can see, there isn’t a place setting for you. Your mother made you eat your meals in the basement, where she’d banished you. You must have done something truly awful to have gotten her so angry with you. Was it to one of your sisters?”
Crutch cursed under his breath, his eyes fixated on the cartoon.
“You probably enjoyed living in the basement,” Linderman went on. “It was a perfect teenager hangout. But then, the exclusion started to bother you. You didn’t like how your mother and sisters seemed to enjoy your absence.”
Crutch lifted his eyes to look at Linderman. They were filled with pain.
Linderman dropped the cardboard to the floor.
“This next drawing shows you bludgeoning your mother and sisters to death with a baseball bat,” the FBI agent said. “The main course was done, and your family was about to eat dessert. You came up from the basement and heard them talking. Something inside of you snapped, and you decided to kill them.”
Crutch let out a pitiful noise, the last of his resolve slipping away. The drawing landed atop the others.
“This next picture is more a guess than an article of fact,” Linderman said. “It shows you and your mother on the front lawn, with you biting your mother on the neck. I’m guessing your mother ran from the house, and you chased her. You bit her on the neck so hard, your teeth went through the skin and broke her collarbone.”
“You must have found her body,” Crutch mumbled.
“Yes, I did. Was this the first time you ever drank human blood?”
Crutch stared long and hard at the picture of him biting his mother.
“Yes,” he whispered.
“What inspired you to do that?”
“I was angry with her,” he said.
“But what compelled you to bite her?”
“A voice in my head told me to.”
“Had you ever heard this voice before?”
“No, it was the first time.”
The cardboard hit the floor.
“This is a drawing of your mother and sisters bodies propped on the picnic table in the barn,” Linderman continued. “You put the bodies there in an attempt to reenact their last meal inside the house. Why did you do that, Crutch?”