Abandoned

“Oh, I still would have selected him. You were a necessary part of my plan. He wasn’t. It wouldn’t have mattered; going against my own rules for no apparent reason would have only made me seem more irrational in the end.”

I have spent time dealing with my grief and rage about Leo. I’ve plumbed my own depths, and while I haven’t found peace, I’ve managed to restore my equilibrium. This revelation threatens to unseat me. I feel the anger rising, and it speaks to me in tongues, hinting that it might not be so bad to kill Mercy Lane, after all. I struggle against it and manage to push it back down.

Something to deal with later, not here.

“Let’s move on.” It comes out a little bit hoarse. I clear my throat. “I want to discuss your methodology.”

“Certainly.”

I spread my hands palms up, in a gesture of query. “Why did you keep them?”

She frowns. “I don’t understand. Why did I keep who?”

“The victims you kidnapped. Why keep them? We had our theory, but I want to hear what you have to say. If the motivation was money, wasn’t that an unneeded expense?”

“I considered that for a long time when I was doing my initial business plan,” she says, nodding. “In the end, I realized that keeping them alive was the best form of control when it came to the husbands. It has to do with what they really needed.” She cocks her head at me. “Consider it. I’m sure you’ll get it if you do.”

It’s a riddle or a test. They rarely give up everything for free. When they’re locked away, mind games are the last games they have.

I think about the words she said. What they really needed. I turn them over in my mind, again and again, and then it comes, like a flare of light. This, I think, was the extra piece, the motivation James and I had sensed but not seen.

What was the one thing, above all others, the husbands had wanted when it came to their wives, more than money or freedom or custody?

They wanted them dead.

It was all about hate at the bedrock. Mercy had withheld this prize until payment, like a carrot on a stick.

I consider her with new eyes. I’d assigned a certain heavy-handedness to her methods before. Now I see she had a genuine gift for understanding all these emotions—revenge and rage and fear—for how to grow each one and make them move where she wanted.

“Very insightful.”

She shrugs again. “I found out early that I had a gift for estimating behavior.”

Except for your own, I think. But then, I guess that’s true for all of us.

“Next question: why that particular business plan? You say your motivation was money. Keeping someone for seven years seems like a very long time to wait for a payoff.”

She shakes her head once, impatient with me. “You keep saying that. The motivation wasn’t money, it was survival. Money just happens to be crucial to survival in this society at this time.”

“I apologize. But why that plan?”

She pauses for almost a full minute before answering. “I examined the subject of wherewithal in detail a long time ago. Unless you are very lucky and win the lottery, or inherit, or have a special talent such as an actor or musician, wealth is unlikely. The surest way is to take from those who have.”

Her face is almost animated as she talks. This is a subject she feels something about, at whatever level.

“Think about it. Commerce at its core is simple. It’s about finding someone with money and taking it from them. In the traditional non-criminal world, that translates into bargaining, and since force is not applied, the outcome is always uncertain. Perhaps he likes the car you’re selling but his wife doesn’t. Perhaps the stock market takes a downturn that was never expected and—worse—was beyond your control.” She shakes her head, dismissing the idea of being a victim to these scenarios. “As I said before, you can never control every factor in life. The key to survival is to control the ones you can, and criminal enterprises satisfy that paradigm. You identify the man with the money, and you take it from him. That’s the most controlled way, the most likely way, to acquire wealth.”

I interrupt her. “Why is wealth so important? If it’s all just about survival, like you say, then what’s the worry about an excess? Isn’t it enough to pay the grocery bill and the rent?”

“Factors, control. Better to have too much money and never need it. Abundance deals with probabilities. It increases the possibility of survival in the face of eventualities you can’t predict.”

It’s an answer to the question, but it seems empty somehow. In spite of everything I’ve heard so far, I still can’t feel Mercy. The intimacy I usually achieve, that sense of almost becoming what they are, is absent. When I try to understand her, it’s as if I’m peering into a void. It’s like trying to merge with nothing.

“Go on.”

“So I examined all the most direct methods. Theft. Bank robbery. Selling drugs or women. They all had their pluses and minuses, but one glaring fact stood out: Most criminals end up in jail. It’s almost inevitable. Rather than picking a criminal enterprise and planning how not to get caught, I decided to look at the factors that encourage that outcome and derive from there.

“I spent a lot of time listing the reasons a criminal ends up in prison. There were two I kept returning to as basic common denominators. One of them is partly an answer to your question about waiting. It’s also an answer, though you haven’t asked, about why I always had a plan for my retirement.”

Now we’re getting somewhere. This is important. I can sense it.

“What were they?”

She ponders me for a moment, as though she’s trying to decide whether or not to share these insights. “The first became a kind of axiom. I even wrote it that way: a greater or lesser inability to define and control the factors of the environment in which the crime is committed.”

It’s my turn to frown. “Sorry, I don’t follow.”

“Let’s use the thief who breaks into homes as an example. Each time he goes out to commit his crime, he’s stepping into someone else’s environment. It’s not his. It doesn’t belong to him. However much he plans, something could have changed the day before he enters the house. Perhaps the family bought a dog that morning, or the father finally gave in to his wife and signed that contract with the alarm company.”

“When you took those people, you were entering into an environment that wasn’t yours,” I point out.

“True. But remember what I said: You can never control every factor, you simply control as many as you can. If you look at my business, there were really only two times I had to leave the environment I controlled: when I kidnapped the women, or in the rare instance when I was forced to punish husbands who refused to pay. Everything else was done if, where, when, and how I decided, within the environment I had created.

“Of all the variables in a strange environment, the one that can be the most unpredictable is the human factor. The more people there are, the less control you’ll have, no matter how much you plan. In my business model, the human factor is kept very, very low. Me, the husbands, the wives. That’s it. Control of the environment.”

There are a hundred possible holes in Mercy’s logic, but I remember what Callie said about Mercy’s assessment of risk and reward, and decide she was right. Mercy had accepted that zero risk was impossible, so that wasn’t the goal; the goal was the least for the most.

“What was the second factor?” I ask.

“The answer to your original question: time. Kill once in a lifetime and you’re far more likely to get away with it than if you kill every year. Kill every year and your chances of getting caught are less than if you kill once a month, and so on. That encompasses going on too long, which is why I had a retirement plan envisioned before I even started.

“From another view, steal a valuable item and sell it a week later and your chances are worse than if you wait a decade. Speed is greed. My father used to say that.” She nods, partly to herself, caught in a memory. “My business model wasn’t perfect, because perfection is impossible, but it certainly solved the time factor.”