Binding Ties

'I'd appreciate that.'

'But just you, Captain. I don't…' Dayton looked back at Warrick and said, 'No offense, but you aren't anything to me. The captain and me, we go way back.'

'No offense,' Warrick said.

Brass nodded and Warrick did, too, and went out. The CSI would be on the other side of the two-way mirror and the uniformed man would still be just outside. Dayton had no more fight in him.

He just wanted to talk.

'I hate that guy,' Dayton said.

'Warrick?'

'What, that tall guy? No, no-that goddamn attorney of my dad's. He's the one who got me sent out to Sundown, and that place was a nightmare.'

'Really.'

'Locked up, doped up, no TV after ten, monitored everything you read-cancelled my Hustler subscription!'

Forcing any irony from his voice, Brass said, 'Sounds like cruel and unusual punishment to me, Jerry.'

'You know what the worst part was?'

'Tell me.'

'Nobody there but crazy people. Everybody was a damn…loon! Do you know what it's like to deal with loons all day long?'

'I can imagine.'

'I don't think you can.'

'But your father and his attorney, they got you out. Why are you mad about that?'

Dayton was shaking his head, staring into nothing. 'I told Deams what my father did to me, and he said he believed me, but I don't think he did. Otherwise he wouldn't have sent me back…there.'

'Tell me about your father.'

'Do I have to?'

'No. But it might help me understand you better.' Brass sat forward. 'We're connected, you and me, Jerry- you said so yourself. I think you understand me-I needed to stop someone who was very smart and clever, who was taking victims. It's my job to stop that kind of thing.'

'Sure. I…I was only mad at you because…I don't mean to insult you, Captain.'

'No, Jerry. We can be frank with each other.'

'I don't do well with…authority figures.'

'Like your dad?'

Dayton leaned his elbows on the table and put his hands on his face, looking out between his fingers, handcuffs jingling. He blew out a long breath. 'Let's just say he was a hard man to please.'

Brass nodded. 'Yeah-I had one of those.'

'Your father was mean to you?'

'Strict. And like you said, Jerry, hard to please.'

'Not like mine, I bet!' He assumed a sterner posture, pointed across the table at Brass with the index fingers of his bound hands. ' 'You're a disappointment, young man, a disappointment.' ' His eyes glistened with tears. ' 'We give you everything, and every opportunity, and you keep disappointing us! You're nothing but a weakling…a weak little girl. You know what weak little girls need, Jerry? Do you know what they need?' '

All the while the forefingers pointed and accused and waggled, and Jim Brass had no need for a court- appointed psychiatrist to explain the killer's fetish for taking his victim's forefingers as grisly souvenirs of his triumph over them.

The prisoner fell back in his chair, spent, the tears spilling, making wet ribbons down the narrow hawkish face.

'He beat you?' Brass asked. 'On your…bare bottom?'

Dayton laughed bitterly. 'Oh, is that what your 'hard' daddy did to you, Captain? You had it easy! Oh, but I had to bend over, all right…I bent over for Daddy, so many, many times….'

Brass frowned; Catherine and Nick had reported to him what the Sundown doctor had said about Dayton's stories of sexual abuse.

'Your father…violated you?'

'That's a nice word for it.' He sat forward and screamed: 'He made me his bitch!'

Brass shook his head.

Then he said something he never imagined to hear himself saying, much less truthfully: 'Jerry, I'm sorry for what you suffered.'

The killer's father, Thomas Dayton, had been a pillar of the community for decades, with nary a whiff of deviant behavior. Not that that was unusual-some of the most important people had kinks buried beneath their decent surfaces; bigger the secret, deeper the cover-up.

And as Brass recalled Tom Dayton, from the few times he'd met the man-once at the mayor's annual prayer breakfast-the detective suddenly realized that this heavyset white male had been the template for every one of CASt's victims.

'Your victims,' Brass said. 'They were your father.'

'Yes…yes. Those bastards, I made every one of them my bitch.'

'But you stopped. When you came back home, from Sundown. Did your father stop abusing you, was that it?'

'He did stop. I was too big. And, well…he knew what I'd done, after all; he was afraid of me, in a way…at least I had that much satisfaction. But they kept me on those meds, and I was like a dog with a shock collar, y'know?'

'Is that why you stopped, Jerry? The meds?'

'Maybe. And the doctors. I mean, I never came out and talked about what I'd done, not really. But like you said, I'm smart and I'm clever. I could find things out by just talking to them, hypothetically. And I came to learn something, from the therapy.'

'What was that?'

'That I couldn't make it right, I couldn't make what my father did not have happened, even if I made a thousand of him my bitches.'

'Did you ever think to do it to…him?'

'Captain, haven't you been listening? Every one of them was him!'

'I mean…the real 'him,' Jerry. You never thought of killing him?'

'Killing Daddy?' Dayton blinked; he seemed confused. 'How could I do that? He was my daddy. Didn't you love your daddy, Captain?'

'I did, Jerry. I did. But even if killing a thousand pretend daddies didn't help you heal, maybe…talking about it will be a start.'

'To you? You're not a doctor!'

'Is that who you want to talk to, Jerry?'

Dayton snorted. 'Not hardly. I can make them jump through hoops.'

'Then talk to me.' Brass shrugged. 'Can't hurt. Look, we both know you're going away for a long time. You want it to be a hospital or a prison? Maybe I can help you choose.'

'Hospitals,' Dayton said with a derisive laugh. 'I've already been down that road…. Do they let you subscribe to what you want to subscribe to in prison?'

'Depends on the facility. Did you say your father knew what you'd done? That you were CASt?'

'Of course he did.'

'How?'

'He was…bawling me out about something. He'd stopped doing the…act…with me, I was too big, too old, too much stronger than he was. But he still, you know…told me what to do, told me what a disappointment I was. So