The Darker Side

nothing but bad news to give to the survivors.

'Suck it up,' I tell myself.

I dial the cell number she'd given me. She picks up after just three rings.

'Smoky?'

'Hi, Rosario.'

'It's bad news, isn't it?' No hesitation. This makes it a little easier for me, that she's expecting it. Not a lot easier, but a little.

'Very bad.'

Again, no hesitation. Her voice is firm. 'Tell me.'

So I do. I explain about the Preacher, the video clips, and the pages he'd torn from Lisa's journal. She is silent throughout and after I am done.

'I remember Jacob Littlefield,' she says. 'A sweet boy. And I remember Mark Phillips too. A little monster who grew into a big one. He was in jail by the time he was twenty. Poor Dexter. My poor, poor son.'

Her voice cracks, the first time I've heard it do so. This is how loss hits us sometimes, I know, by making an irrelevance of time. She hadn't lost her composure when her child was murdered, but she loses it now, thinking of her young son and the death of his Saturday mornings.

'Are we any closer to knowing who this monster is?' she asks after a moment.

'Yes, in the broader sense. He's provided us with video recordings of his earlier victims. The more data we have, the greater the odds that we'll catch him.'

'Why would he do this? Why would he tell Lisa's secret to the world? Wasn't it enough to murder her?'

She wants to understand, and I try to help her, though I know it won't give her any comfort.

'It's always about power, Rosario. Power over life and death and all the components thereof. I can't give you an exact picture of his motives, not yet, but the short answer is--no, murdering her wasn't enough. He wants to feel in control of everything that was the most personal, the most private, the most guarded. That's sex for him. Great sex.'

'And his speech about 'truth' and God?' Her voice quivers with distaste.

'He believes that he believes. I'm sure of that. But he's insane, so he misses the real truth.'

'Which is?'

'He tells himself his joy comes from using the deaths to forward a purpose. The real truth, the ugly bottom line, is that the deaths are the only purpose he needs.'

She is silent for a moment. 'How do you know something like that?'

I consider the question. It's not the first time I've been asked it.

'I guess I let myself feel what they feel.'

More silence.

'And what is he feeling right now? This monster that killed my baby?'

'Joy,' I reply without hesitation. 'Joy at its apex.'

When she speaks again, her voice is rough and husky. 'I want him to feel agony, Smoky, not joy.'

'I know. All I can do is catch him.'

'Don't worry about me or how this getting out will affect my family. It will be difficult, but we'll deal with it. Concentrate on finding this . . . thing. Please.'

'I will.'

ALAN HOLDS UP A SHEET of paper as I walk back into the office.

'He's giving us the names in every case,' he says. 'Some of these go back a long way, I'm thinking up to twenty years based on the clothes, hair, stuff like that.'

'It's all the same basic format too,' Callie says. 'He gets them to admit to a deep, dark secret and then makes it clear he's going to kill them.'

'But each clip ends before the actual death,' James notes.

'Strange,' I murmur. 'You'd think the moment of death would be more important than that to him.'

'Perhaps it's a part of his rationalization framework,' James says.

'He's telling us, and himself, that he's doing what he's doing to forward a concept of truth that brings one closest to God. He's trying to share this truth with the world so that others can be saved. Showing the murder, perhaps he feels it would make him look voyeuristic.'

'I bet he did film the murders, every one of them,' Alan says. 'He just didn't include them in the clips. He probably sits at home and jacks off to them regularly.'

'I don't know,' I say. 'I think he'll be into self-repression. The holy man who resists his own vices successfully, that kind of thing. That fits with the identity paradigm he's trying to assert to us. Let's keep going through the clips and noting the names. If he's willing to give them to us, let's use them.'

I fill them in on Jezebel Smith and the rest of my conversation with AD Jones.

Alan checks his watch. 'We should be seeing her soon. She'll be setting up the number?'

He's referring to the tip-line phone number that we'll be putting out.

'Yes. She'll run that whole show--and knows how to, apparently. Anything else?'

No one says a word.

'Then let's keep at it.'

Moments later I am back in my office. James had downloaded all of the clips, and split them up between us. I pop in the CD he'd given me. The clips are in number order, four digits each. I sigh and click on the first one. I watch as the black screen appears, followed by the white letters: The Sins and Death of Maxine McGee. I note the name down on the pad. A woman's face appears. It's a pretty face, though not a beautiful one. She's got brown, shoulder-length hair, and it's feathered in a style that tells me this was probably shot in the 1980s. She has big brown eyes and her face is just short of chubby. Those brown eyes are surrounded by black, the eyes of a raccoon, because she's sobbing and terrified and her mascara has turned her tears to dirt.

I note down her physical characteristics next to her name. I try and use this to distance myself from the fact of what I'm seeing. This is a woman who once was alive and now is dead. She's living her last moments, she knows it, I'm watching it. It makes me tired.

'Maxine McGee,' the Preacher says, in that pleasant voice I'm growing to hate. 'Tell the people watching about your sin.'

Maxine can't stop sobbing.

'W-w-what are you talking about?' she blubbers.

'Maxine.' The voice has a chiding tone, the verbal equivalent of a friendly but cautionary finger wag. 'Don't you want to sit at the right hand of God? Tell them about your baby. Tell them about little Charles. How old were you then? Sixteen?'

The change in her demeanor is instant and amazing. Her eyes go wide, her tears quit, and her mouth drops open. She's become a caricature of shock and surprise.

'You see? You do know what I'm talking about.'

That chasm of unease in my stomach has opened back up. Maxine blinks rapidly. Her mouth closes, opens again. Closes. She looks like a dying guppy.

'Come, Maxine. Charles. You remember Charles, don't you? Little baby Charles, who gasped his last in an alley trash can, thrown away like garbage.'

The expression that passes over Maxine's face horrifies me. It is violation, so deep and so profound, so absolute and authentic, that I almost stop the clip right there. He's hurt her by knowing this and by showing her he knows. He's slipped past her most entrenched defenses, and this is worse than being tied to a chair, maybe even worse than knowing she's going to die.

This, I realize, this right here, is what he craves. That moment of abjectness.

She begins to cry again, but it's a slower, deeper grief. This is shame, not fear. Her head hangs forward and those black, dirt-tears patter onto her naked legs, staining them.

'I was only sixteen,' she says in a small voice. She sounds sixteen saying it.

'True,' he says. 'But then, how old was baby Charles?'

'Minutes,' she breathes. 'He was just a few minutes old.'

'What did you do with him?'