Abandoned

She nods. “My father said that war is a bloody crucible. You go in human. You come out with death in your veins. You become stronger. He’d learned the necessity for strength.”

“Stronger why? Because you’ve lost your humanity?”

She looks into my eyes and I look behind hers. I try to see into the emptiness, but there’s nothing to see.

“Are you familiar with Buddhism?” she asks me. It’s a strange, abrupt question.

“Not very.”

“At its essence, Buddhism is based on the idea that the spirit is the only thing that’s true. Everything else that we see or feel”—she slaps her chest with her hands, indicates the hushed concrete walls that surround us—“all these material things are just illusion. Mara. According to Buddhism, as long as man believes that Mara, is what’s real, rather than the soul, he’s trapped. Doomed to the cycle of rebirth, life, and death, what they refer to as Samsara. Reincarnation.”

I say nothing, fascinated at this story of the soul from a monster’s mouth.

“But Buddha had it backward,” she continues. “Don’t you see? It’s not Mara that’s the illusion. It’s the soul.” She slams a fist down on the table. “This table is real. The pain I feel when I hit it too hard, that’s real. The soul?” She shakes her head. “Just a dream. Buddhism, Christianity, they all put you to sleep.” She leans forward, excited and grim. “War wakes you up.”

I stare at her, speechless. I can’t help it. She looks off, seeing something invisible to me.

“He loved it there, you know. In Korea. He told me a story one time about strangling a man in a rice paddy while the sun rose and the rain fell. That man died with water in his eyes and rice in his ears, hearing thunder. That’s what my father said.” She pauses. “All the lies are stripped away in war. All those illusions about beauty and ugliness, or goodness and badness, about any of them being important. In war, it’s meat against meat, to the death. The naked truth.” She sounds almost wistful. My stomach turns a little.

I gather myself and continue.

“What happened to your father?”

“He died of cancer.”

“Were you sad when he died?”

“I was regretful. He was my teacher. If he’d lived longer, I would have learned more.”

Nothing rises in her eyes at this. No hint of grief, no longing for the man who raised her. I try to picture him in my mind, but he is faceless, a burning man, branding his child as he’d been branded, scarring her deepest where it would never show.

It’s the same story I’ve heard before, too many times. Monsters who were made by monsters who go on to make monsters themselves. A chain stretching both forward and back into darkness.

Sometimes the link breaks, the light abides. Too many times it does not. I think about Hawaii, about the blackness between the stars, about how there will always be more darkness than points of light.

“What did you do with the women you kidnapped once you received payment from their husbands?”

“I killed them, of course.”

“And the bodies?”

“They were cut into pieces and the pieces were burned. The bone was ground to powder and everything was scattered.”

I sigh inside at this. Though it wasn’t entirely unexpected, I’d held out hope for reuniting at least some of the remains with their loved ones.

“How many victims did you take in total?”

She doesn’t have to think to come up with the number. “Forty-seven, including the women you would have found when you raided my other facilities.”

Forty-seven. It sounds like such a small number until you extrapolate it. Heather Hollister, forty-seven times. Avery and Dylan and Douglas again; all the world in a water drop.

I consider the number and something occurs to me.

“If you’d gotten up to forty-seven, why was I number 35?”

“Obfuscation. I didn’t number in sequence. If someone escaped, they wouldn’t be able to give an accurate count.”

“Very careful of you.”

She shrugs, dismissing the praise. “You can’t control all the factors in life necessary to guarantee survival, but failing to control every single one you can is simple incompetence.”

“I can see that.” I consult my notes. “The next set of questions has to do with some apparent inconsistencies in what you called your retirement plan. There are some actions that don’t add up, at least on the surface.”

“Go ahead,” she says, infinitely agreeable.

“First, broadly: How did you plan to ensure we’d find your Los Angeles location? I get the factors you put into play—Heather, the messages, kidnapping me—but none of those in and of itself was a guarantee. I’d assume you’d want a lock.”

She nods. “The plan was to continue to drop clues that would lead you to me—or Eric as me—and to do it in a believable fashion.”

“Believable how?”

“By laying the groundwork for the apparency of what you call decompensation.”

Decompensation means, literally, “the deterioration of a structure.” In the area of profiling serial offenders, it’s used to describe a pattern of devolvement. Many serial killers, even those who begin their careers as extremely organized individuals, eventually fall victim to their own underlying insanities. They start to deteriorate. To fall apart.

Words come to me:

I flipped a coin.

I’m not a cruel man.

Mercy said these things to me when I was imprisoned in her custom gulag. They contradicted her profile at the time. They might make sense now.

“Forcing me to make that choice about Leo, trying to convince me you cared about seeming cruel—those were a part of it, weren’t they? They were supposed to make you look a little bit off.”

She smiles, but not in pleasure or cruelty; those emotions appear absent in her. “That’s correct. The messages and the deviation with Heather were a part of that framework as well. They were illogical changes to a formerly flawless methodology. My plan was to continue increasing evidence of my ‘aberrant behaviors’ until a huge and obvious mistake became a believable act. You’d assume I’d decompensated, and you wouldn’t question the incompetence that led you right to me.”

“That’s also why you left some victims behind for us to find, right? To show us that, as far as you were concerned, it was just business as usual and you were unaware you’d started losing your marbles?”

She shrugs. “As I’ve already said.”

I tap a pen on the notepad in front of me. “That’s all very elegant, Mercy, but it leaves a big question unanswered: Why go through any of it at all? No one even knew you existed. Why not just walk away?”

She gives me a tolerant, almost pitying look.

“What I said earlier applies: Failing to control all the factors you can control is simple incompetence. If I ‘walked away,’ as you put it, I would have left uncontrolled factors behind that might have become detrimental to me. No one knew I was there then, but that could have changed in the future. Someone like yourself might have seen a pattern, become suspicious, and started looking. It’s always possible I forgot something or made a mistake, however slight.” She shakes her head once in the negative. “Hope is not a viable scenario. Certainty is.”

I take all this in, almost as dumbfounded as I am enlightened.

What does this remind me of? Some computer phrase. Ah, right: garbage in, garbage out.

Mercy had locked herself into the necessity of calculating every possibility. In the end, it was that need to control all the variables that undid her. Pragmatic simplicity was defeated by an overabundance of complexity. Her brilliance became her psychosis.

Another question occurs to me now. I hesitate before asking it, not sure I really want the answer.

“Mercy, what would you have done if I’d told you to take me instead of Leo?”