faded from his retina. Then he stopped and waited for the next flash. When he was within a few yards of the entrance to the farmyard, he stopped. Timing his move with a clash of thunder, Becker opened the car door and stepped into the corn.
Gold’s voice had been running through his mind like a tape since he got into the car and started toward the farm.
“It’s a function of will,” Gold had said. “We all have fantasies. It’s whether we act on them that matters. Most of us don’t. You don’t, Becker.”
“Don’t I?” thought Becker.
“What you do, what you have done-the experience with Bahoud in New York, the incident in Washington, the other times-they cause the fantasies. It is not the fantasies that cause the incidents.”
“Incidents. You mean the killings.”
“All right, the killings,” Gold said.
Becker bent between the corn rows and rubbed dirt on his forehead and under his eyes. The turtleneck rolled up to just under his mouth. Lightning flashed and thunder roared so close it seemed to be over the cornfield itself Becker could smell the electricity in the air. Strangely, there was still no rain.
The wind was beating against the corn stalks so fiercely they sounded like acres of crackling cellophane. The earth itself was so noisy there was no need for caution, but Becker moved silently, anyway, from long habit.
Cutting diagonally through the field, Becker came to the edge of the cultivated ground where the corn stopped and the farmyard began. Kneeling, he studied the house and the barn.
His heart seemed to have ascended in his chest and was beating rapidly just beneath his collarbone. Becker recognized the excitement for what it was-an eagerness for action and a tingling of anticipation. There was no fear involved in it. Caution, prudence, but no fear.
“They were all justified,” Gold said. “You were in danger every time. You did what you had to do to save yourself”
“Justified?”
“Justified. Absolutely.”
“But were they necessary?”
Becker approached the barn from the rear where there was nothing but blank wall to watch him. He did not expect to find anything in it, but this was not the time to go on assumptions alone. That was Hatcher’s way, not Becker’s.
“Why are you so sure he’s at the farm?” Hatcher had asked.
Becker said, “I’m not sure of anything,” but he was. He could not say that he was sure because he had come to understand Dyce on a level that Hatcher could not begin to comprehend. The man’s life had fallen apart on him and he had fled to the place where it had all begun, the cruel, twisted injury that had made him what he was. He could not tell Hatcher that he understood the man’s thoughts and needs and darkly contorted emotions just as he had understood Bahoud’s and all of those since then.
He could not tell Hatcher, but he had told Gold.
“Don’t be so damned hard on yourself, man,” Gold repeated now in his mind. “You don’t want to do it; it happens because of circumstances. These are not pussycats the Bureau sends you after. These are multiple murderers, hardened killers who would have killed you in an instant.”
“How do you know I don’t want to do it?”
“How do I know? Because you don’t do it any other time, that’s how I know. What you experience isn’t joy; it’s a final release of adrenaline. You are in great danger, under terrible stress-you are feeling the sense of release, not pleasure. You were brought into this by accident. It turns out you’ve got great skills, but having empathy or understanding for these people does not mean you are these people, understand? You have the empathy to be a great shrink. I understand my patients, most of them. That doesn’t mean I am them, doesn’t mean I share their problems-but I understand them.”
The farmhouse had two stone chimneys, one at either end of the house on the exterior. The stone walls had been breached as if a tank had driven through them, but those sections that still stood were enough to hold up the roof beam and the unburned portions of the roof.
There was no blind side from which to approach. Becker counted on the darkness and moved swiftly across the yard. When the lightning struck, he dove for the ground and lay there motionless, hoping that if Dyce had seen his movement he would attribute it to a trick of the night.
He lay still until his heart stopped racing. It was a job he had to do, he told himself. Nothing more. A job. There was a maniac to find, possibly a friend to save if he wasn’t already too late for that.
Becker tried to turn off the tape in his head, but Gold’s voice insisted on being heard.
“I can’t give you absolution, I’m not a priest. I can forgive you, I can understand you.”
“I don’t want that.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to stop it.”
“You have stopped. Just keep stopping.”
“And if I go after Dyce?… I do have to go after him now.”
“Good. Find the bastard.”
“And then?”
“He’s killed at least eight men. He may have killed your friend… Find the bastard.”
“And then?”
The first rain hit him as he lay and it felt like the initial gush from a faucet. The clouds opened as if rent asunder by the last lightning bolt. By the time Becker got to his feet, he was already soaked to the skin.
Dyce was talking nonstop from his island in the air, but Tee was not listening. With every ounce of concentration he could muster he tried to move his foot toward the ladder. It was precariously balanced; it would only take a nudge to make it fall, but he could not move, he could not move. It seemed just a fraction away, as if a final effort could awaken his nerves and make them speak to his muscles, but it was a fraction he could not bridge. Tee did not think beyond the ladder. What would happen then, what he hoped to accomplish he could not say. It was an action, the only one available to him, or nearly available, and he had to do something before Dyce sucked him dry and left his husk in the deserted attic of an abandoned shell of a house. If only it didn’t make him so terribly tired to even try to think.
Rain hit the roof over Tee’s face as if a firehose had been trained on the house.
Dyce’s voice rose, claiming Tee’s attention over the noise of the rain. “I’m ready now,” he said.
Tee turned his eyes to look at the maniac. Dyce was standing on his little space of floorboards, his arms spread as if to say, look at me. The container of talcum powder was still in his hand and sprinkles of the white powder drifted off his body. He was completely naked and white as snow. When lightning flashed it illuminated him as if he were lit from inside, but even in the dark he gave off an eerie glow.
The son of a bitch has an erection. Tee thought. He’s mad as a hatter and hard as a rock.
“Remember now, try not to move when you breathe and keep your eyes closed.”
Tee did not need to be told. His eyes were already squeezed shut. Whatever was going to happen, he didn’t want to watch.
From the ground the chimney looked wide enough to hold a man. They had built them large in the last century. Not that Becker expected to find Dyce squirreled away in the chimney-although it was a possibility he did not reject. He had mentioned it to Hatcher just as an example of what he might have overlooked. Even if he had hidden there when the FBI came by, he would probably not be there now, not on a night when he could come out and move without much fear of detection.
The night is better for all of us, Becker thought.
A noise that didn’t come from the storm teased Becker’s hearing, something not wind nor rain but more familiar, chased by the tempest so quickly Becker was not sure if he had heard it or imagined it. He crouched by the side of the first chimney, his shoulder pressed against the stones, readying himself to look into the house itself The porch was dangerous: too many charred boards that could break under his weight or groan to give away his presence-if any noise that weak could be heard now. He skirted the porch, crawling on his stomach to the edge of the wall where it had partially crumbled away.
