The Absence of Mercy (21 page)

“You're in for it this time, Stevenson,” Devon warned him. “I've got Big Joe on my team.”

Joe Dashel stepped forward from amid the cluster of teens. Joe had played college football for Ohio State during his freshman and sophomore years, but a knee injury had sidelined his athletic career for the final two years of college. With his bum knee, Big Joe wasn't as fast as he used to be, but at 240 pounds he could still pack one hell of a wallop. “Sorry.” He shrugged. “He's been asking me all week.”

Thomas gave Devon a disparaging look. “All week, huh?”

“
Hey, what can I say?
” Devon responded. “I've got a score to settle.”

Marty Spears ran at half speed onto the field, cutting to the left in a cross pattern twenty yards out. “Hit me,” he said, and Russell Long threw a spiral pass into his outstretched arms.

Devon looked down at him. “What d'ya say, T? The teams are all set. We're just waitin' for you.”

“Well, let's do it,” Thomas replied, stuffing his tennis shoes into the duffel bag and getting up from the grass. He turned to Monica. “You okay?”

“Mm-hmm,” she said with a nod, then took a seat beside Lynn Montague and Cynthia Castleberry.

The boys fanned out across the field, already talking smack before the game had commenced. “Remember,” Devon called out to his teammates as they prepared to receive the initial kickoff, “if you catch the ball, lateral it to Big Joe.”

“Okay, here it comes!” Bret Graham yelled, and with a
whumpf
the ball was punted high into the air, turning once end over end as it traveled deep into the other team's territory.

“It's great of you to come,” Lynn commented, leaning over and giving Monica a sideways hug.

“Thanks.” Monica smiled. “It feels good to get outside. I really missed that, being in the hospital.”

“How do you feel?” Cynthia asked.

“Okay. Not great, but okay,” Monica replied, trying to remain upbeat but honest. The truth was, her days were still overshadowed by pain and stiffness much of the time. Her physical therapy sessions were often agonizing. The medications the doctors had prescribed only went so far to alleviate those symptoms. And, of course, there were the nightmares.

“You cut your hair short,” Lynn observed. “It used to be down past your shoulder blades.”

Monica reached up with her right hand, fingering the short black locks. “It was just easier,” she said, “less to deal with.” She kept her other hand tucked into the front pocket of her hoodie, self-conscious of the two prosthetic fingers, despite the meticulous attention the plastic surgeon had paid to their aesthetic appearance.

“I like your hair this way,” Lynn told her. “I think it's cute.”

“Thanks.”

On the field, there was an audible crunch as Big Joe made his first hit, sending Bret Graham to the earth like a wet towel. Cynthia winced. “You okay?” she called out.

“Fine, fine,” Bret assured her, getting up slowly and lifting a hand in her direction. He looked a little dazed.

“Hey,” Devon admonished him. “No fraternizing with the spectators.”

Monica looked at Cynthia. “So you and Bret are a thing now?” It was amazing how much she'd missed. There was something profoundly distressing about emerging from such a prolonged incapacitation to find that the world had moved on without her. It was an emotional sucker punch she hadn't quite anticipated.

“We've gone out a few times,” Cynthia told her. “It doesn't mean we're going steady or anything.” She turned an appraising eye in Monica's direction. “What about you and Thomas? You two seem pretty close lately.”

Monica blushed, and there was only so much her pale skin could do to hide it. “We're just friends,” she said. “He's been very kind to me.”

“Seems like more than that to me,” Cynthia remarked, but she didn't press her further. “
Run, baby, run!
” she yelled as Bret made a mad dash down the sideline toward the end zone.

They watched for a while longer, alternating cheers and protests as the game went on. Paul Dalouka took a hit from Big Joe that knocked the wind out of him hard enough that he elected to sit out most of the third quarter. Monica began to feel her limbs stiffening as she sat there on the grass, and there was a mounting pressure within her bladder that she was able to ignore for only so long. She considered going home, but it felt good to be among her friends in a setting where she was not the frail and beleaguered center of attention. She glanced around. There was no public restroom in the vicinity, just the field, surrounding woods, and a small parking lot to the north. She decided to hold out a while longer, but after another fifteen minutes there were few remaining options.

“I've got to go pee,” she whispered to Cynthia, and she stood up and made her way toward the woods at the outskirts of the park. She stood at the lip of the forest, peering in. The fall season had already robbed the trees and much of the underbrush of their leaves, making for a less effective visible curtain from the vantage point of the field behind her. She would have to go in a ways to ensure her privacy. She took a step forward, and from beneath the sole of her shoe the leaves and small sticks crackled loudly in her ears. She closed her eyes.
I can do this,
she thought to herself.
I'm just gonna go in a few yards, is all
.
I'm perfectly safe here.

She opened her eyes and took another step forward, and another, willing herself to go on. A tree branch jutted out at her, and her hand went instinctively to her throat to protect herself. The pace of her respirations quickened. She was finding it difficult to breath. In her mind, she pictured herself lying in a frozen pond beneath the ice, trapped only inches from the surface as her hands and mouth searched desperately for an opening. Her lips and fingers began to tingle. She could hear her own heartbeat smashing wildly against her chest. To her right, something dark and furry darted across the ground. She followed it with her eyes, and when she looked up he was standing there in the forest waiting for her, beginning to move silently in her direction. She turned to run, turned to escape, but it was too late, too late because he was directly behind her now, the tips of his fingers brushing against her dark black hair, grasping for a purchase, and she opened her mouth to scream and this time she found her voice in time, and she screamed and screamed for them to come and find her before it was too late, before she felt the first slice of the instrument into her chest. There was warmth now sliding down the inside of her leg and she knew she was bleeding heavily but she couldn't find the wound. She stumbled out of the woods and fell to the ground, curling herself into a tight ball, her arms wrapped protectively around her head as she continued to scream, waiting for the searing pain that would descend upon her and the blackness to follow . . .

. . . commotion now, the sound of footsteps running toward her, someone yelling to give her space. She'd made it to the side of the road somehow, and they had found her, lying here in the mud and rain . . .

“Monica.” Someone's voice, a hand stroking the side of her head. “Monica, honey. You're okay. You're okay.” But she wasn't okay—wasn't okay at all.
Can't they see what he did to me?
She could feel the paramedics hoisting her body into the rig, could feel the sharp pinch of a needle as it entered her arm.
Hang on, girl. You stay with us now, do you hear me?

“Monica.” Again in her ear, a female voice, calm and reassuring. “Open your eyes. We're all right here with you. You're safe, honey. It's okay.”

She opened her eyes, and the bright sunlight flooded in. Here was the face of Lynn Montague, and the others behind her. They looked down at her, all of them, their expressions uncertain and apprehensive. “Do you want me to call an ambulance?” someone asked in a hesitant voice, and Lynn shook her head.

“No. No, she's fine. She's okay.” She continued to stroke Monica's hair, gently brushing away the leaves and broken strands of grass that had taken refuge there. “Leave us alone. Go back to your game.”

They went, the sounds of their voices fading in the distance, and Monica began to cry. Her body shook, and she turned her face into the grass, drawing her legs up farther into a fetal position. Lynn wrapped an arm around her shoulders, trying to soothe her. “Shhh, it's okay. You're safe,” she whispered. Monica looked up at her with supplicating eyes. There was something beaten and naked in her expression. “I wet my pants,” she said, as if she were a young child standing shamefaced in the doorway of her parents' bedroom.

And once again she began to cry.

“Come in. It's open,” the chief of police called out from behind his desk in response to the light rapping on his office door. He gathered the few papers scattered in front of him, sliding them into a manila folder. As his years of service on the force continued to march along, he was finding himself increasingly trapped in this somewhat depressing administrative office attending to an ever-growing assortment of paperwork. It was certainly one of the downsides of the elected position he'd held over the past twelve years, and it was a chore he would be happy to relinquish once he retired. As far as he could tell, all of those forms over the course of his career—literally
thousands
by now—hadn't ever done anyone any good.

The door to his office opened, and Detective Schroeder stepped inside. “You got a minute, Chief?” he asked.

“Sure, Carl. What's up?” Sam leaned back in his chair and gestured for the man to take a seat.

Carl pulled a small notebook from his inside suit pocket as he sat down. “The body they pulled out of the west bank this morning doesn't look like the work of our guy,” he reported.

“No?”

“Single gunshot wound to the right temple. Powder tattooing of the skin. Very close range. Most likely self-inflicted. We've made a positive ID and the wife's been interviewed. Guy lost his job six weeks ago. Wife says he's been acting pretty depressed lately. Almost certainly a suicide, although we're still waiting for the ballistics report.”

“What's he doing washing up on the bank of the Ohio River?” Sam asked.

“The guy lived in Newell, West Virginia, about thirty minutes north of here. Right off the river. We've got a witness says he heard a gunshot near the bridge to East Liverpool two nights ago. He called it in to West Virginia State Police, who sent an investigating officer but found nothing. The most likely scenario is the guy shot himself on the bridge, fell into the river below, and was swept downstream in the current, surfacing two days later on the west bank just south of Brown's Island.”

Sam nodded. “I suppose he could've still been murdered and dumped in the river, but I agree that a single gunshot to the head doesn't sound much like our guy's work.”

“Nope.”

“So . . .” Sam mused. “It's been five months since the second attack. Maybe he decided to move on. For all we know, he could be somewhere in southern Arkansas by now.”

“Yeah,” Carl agreed, but without much enthusiasm. “Maybe.”

“But you don't think so,” Sam observed. It was not a question.

“No. I don't.”

Sam sighed. “Neither do I.” His face looked tired, carrying within it the accumulating effects of more than a few sleepless nights since this whole mess had begun. “What about the psych patient who escaped from the hospital? Any word on him?”

“He hasn't turned up yet, although we've certainly been out looking for him.” Carl frowned. “The FBI's forensic profiler doesn't think he's our man.”

“Why is that?”

“She says that psychosis is not usually the primary issue with serial killers. Let's see, I have a quote from her somewhere in here . . .” He flipped back several pages in his notebook. “Okay, here it is. ‘Medically speaking,' she says, ‘psychosis involves a loss of contact with reality. Symptoms include delusions and hallucinations, which are false perceptions of reality. Serial killers, on the other hand, usually have a fairly accurate perception of reality. They often seem normal, even charming, and they understand right from wrong. They just don't care.' ” Carl looked up. “The way she explained it to me, Chief, is that psychotic patients get better with treatment and medication. Serial killers don't.”

Sam folded his hands in front of him. “They can't be fixed.”

“No,” Carl replied. “Which is why they continue to kill people—”

“Until they're stopped.”

“Right, Sam. Until they're stopped.”

The big man was silent for a moment, his eyes focused on the desk in front of him. “The Dressler girl give us anything useful yet?”

“Nothing helpful to the investigation,” Carl answered. Following her return to consciousness, he'd visited her twice a week in the hospital. She'd been nonverbal during the first two of those weeks, and his questions had been met with dull stares interspersed with episodes of sporadic sobbing that had escalated, in a few unsettling cases, into outright screams requiring administration of a hefty dose of sedative by the hospital staff. The girl's nurse had cast a disapproving look at Carl enough times for him to give it a rest for a while. As time passed, however, Monica
had
begun to talk, first in single-word utterances and later in more normal sentences. When she did speak, it was mostly to her parents and friends, and although Carl's face had become a familiar one by now, she'd said very little to him—none of it pertaining to the night she'd been attacked. He'd tried a few more times since she'd returned home, but eventually her mother had asked him, politely, if it wouldn't be better to let Monica recover some more before paying her any further visits. “I'm sorry,” she'd apologized. “It's just that she seems to do better on days when you're not here.”