'You ought to have that looked at.'
'Your boyfriend did it to me,' he said. 'The one who beat me up in town.'
'Harold Kershaw? He always was a favorite of mine.
He let me set him on fire, he liked it so much he can't let me go. You sure you wouldn't let me try it with you?'
Swann pushed his can of beans from him and took Aural's from her hands.
'How about if I visit the little girls' room before we start again?' she asked.
'All right.'
He tied the rope around her waist and gave her a candle.
As she walked towards the graveyard, Aural thought of how she might slip a shinbone in her shirt when she squatted. If she kept it hidden long enough, she could pull it out when she got within range and hit him on the head.
Halfway there, the rope grew taut.
'I'm going in the right direction,' she complained.
'I know it,' Swann said. He was crossing quickly to her, holding the lantern. As she started to turn to face him, he kicked her legs out from under her and rolled her onto her stomach before refastening the handcuffs so that her hands were secured behind her back, making any attempt to get a bone impossible.
Swann grinned at her. 'You mustn't ever think I'm stupid,' he said.
'That would be a serious mistake.'
'I sure don't want to get on your bad side,' Aural said.
'You're just a little too eager,' he said, hauling her to her feet.
When she returned, he shackled her hands to her ankles once more.
'Let us pray,' he said.
'Praise be to Jesus,' said Aural.
He looked at her, pleased.
'Would you like to lead the prayer, sister Aural?'
'Not just yet,' Aural said.
'Or sing? Would you sing a hymn for us?'
'I'd rather get burned by cigarettes,' she said.
'Very well.'
He lit a cigarette and coughed at the smoke.
'I think this relationship is coming along nicely, don't you?' Aural asked. The last words were lost in her involuntary gasp as he touched her.
Becker lived with the tape of his meeting with Swann, turning it on in the morning after Jack was off to school and turning it off only when the boy had returned home.
During the late afternoon and the preparation for the evening meal, Becker acted as if nothing were different, joking and playing with Jack, helping him with his homework, trying to make the mysteries of beginning science and mathematics less arcane. When Karen came home he was still buoyant, almost jolly, but when Jack had gone at last to bed, Becker retired to the office and turned on the tape once more, playing it with the volume low. It was no longer the words he was listening to but the rhythms, the pauses, the stops and starts, the sudden, fleeting fermatas that bespoke lies.
You have a rep,' Swann's voice said on the tape.
'I'll bet,' came his own reply.
'I hear you climb, you climb mountains. You're a rock climber, right?' A pause, no response from Becker, then Swann's voice again, a trace of triumph. 'You'd be surprised how much they know about you.'
'You a climber, Swann?' Becker could hear the strain in his voice as though it were filtered through the discomfort he felt in the little cell, the unease he experienced in the presence of Swann. I was off balance already, Becker thought, pausing the tape. One minute into the interview and already so skewed by my problems that I wasn't listening right. Swann was telling him what he wanted to know. They always told him; they could not help themselves; they were always so pleased, so proud of their ghastly accomplishments that they could not help but reveal it in some way. The hardest thing for such psychopaths was keeping the secret to themselves; the great trick was to listen. In this interview Becker had listened only to himself But he could hear it clearly now.
'Well… not really. I worked with ropes a little bit, I know what's involved. That's scary work.'
He's'playing on your ego there, Becker thought. And why? To cover himself 'Not so scary if you know the safe way,' Becker said on the tape. In his own home, Becker squirmed with irritation at his own stupidity. 'You ever try it?'
'I believe in gravity,' Swann was saying. 'If it tells me to go down, I go down.'
Becker turned off the tape and glanced at the clock. It was close to four in the morning. He had run through the entire tape dozens of times, trying to filter his own ego out of it. He rewound it and played the same section over.
Karen was asleep, or pretending to be. Becker watched her for a moment from the doorway, then walked through the darkened house to Jack's room.
Becker looked lovingly at the boy asleep; innocence, all innocence. He turned away from the door and went outdoors to stand alone in the yard.
He felt like howling. He was giving it up, giving it all up as surely as if he were leaving the earth. When he returned, he would be too vile to live with them again, he thought. His hands would be too bloody, his soul too restless. Innocence deserved to be protected; it could not be entrusted to the ravening beast. Listening to the tapes, Becker had found Swann, but he had lost what he loved.
He was like a junkie with the needle in his arm, Becker thought. He had put it there himself when he had deciphered the first cryptic note from Swann; he had prepared himself for the fix as surely as if he had gone out and bought the narcotic and the syringe that same day. When he performed the actual injection no longer mattered because he was already gone, and he knew it, and anticipation was as much a part of the experience as the act itself He knew that he had taken the first step down the long, slippery slope and any subsequent flailing of arms or attempts at equilibrium were just posturing for the benefit of others, futile attempts to convince them, and himself, that he was an unwilling victim. In fact he could see ahead of time the terrible fall that awaited him as he gathered speed, and he knew he wouldn't stop until he hit the gutter. He shuddered, looking forward to the trip, his chest fluttering with excitement.
That was what Hatcher knew about him, understood better than Becker would admit to himself, and the real reason he hated Hatcher. In the long run, Becker could not resist the hunt, the chase. He could not ultimately deny himself the kill, which was just the plunging of the syringe.
He was like Swann in that, Becker knew. No, worse, he wasn't like Swann.
He was the same.
This time Pegeen Haddad was in acceptable Bureau costume. She met Becker at the airport dressed in a navy blue business suit with a white blouse closed at the collar by a red and blue foulard. Becker thought she looked like an airline stewardess.
'Well, Haddad, there you are,' he greeted her.
Pegeen tried to remember any of the witty remarks she had prepared for the meeting.
'Here I am,' she said.
Becker nodded several times as if he wanted to say something further and she waited before realizing that he had nothing clever to say, either.
'Okay, then,' he said finally. 'Let's get at it.'
As she led him to the car in the parking lot, Pegeen wondered if it was at all possible that Becker felt as nervous as she did. He was a hard man to read at the best of times, and seeing him again after several weeks was not the best of times. She had not expected to see him again at all, ever. His request to have her assigned to him as an assistant had come as a complete surprise and had raised more than a few eyebrows in the Nashville home office. The story of her presence in the motel room during Becker's unexplained shower had made the rounds of the rumor mill with great celerity, and her continual and increasingly weary explanations of innocence had finally begun to taper off when his sudden request came through, reviving and inflating the previous spate of salacious humor in the office.
