The Ripper Gene (8 page)

“What other girl?”

Parkman frowned. “What other girl? The third victim of your Snow White Killer, about a hundred yards from the granny’s house, dumbass.”

I sat in stunned silence, taking that information in.

“Anyway, here’s the kicker. Your girlfriend claims that you
told
her to call you, because it would give you an alibi when you came back—and she says you told her that when you returned the second time you’d be playing the good guy, pretending to rescue her, protect her. That’s her story, at least,” he said, “and she’s sticking to it.”

A knock at the door interrupted us.

“What the hell’s going on here? Parkman, you—” The hulking form of Big Jim Raritan appeared in the doorway. “What the hell are you doing in here?”

Parkman pointed at me. “We’ve got problems here, Jim. We’ve got an eyewitness who puts Madden—”

Jimmy cut him off. “Yeah, I know all about it. What we have is a rape/kidnap victim who doesn’t know which day of the week it is. And Madden has dozens of alibis and witnesses along the timeline.”

“That’s exactly what I was trying to find out!”

“And the last I checked, you weren’t Internal Affairs. Get the hell out of here. Now.”

I started to make one last smart-ass comment to Parkman, but Jimmy jabbed a thick, meaty finger toward me. “And you shut the hell up, too. Stay put.” He stared at me long enough to make me uncomfortable, then followed Parkman out the door.

I lay back on the bed and tried to assimilate everything I’d just learned. Instead of acknowledging I’d rescued her, Mara was telling everyone I was the Snow White Killer? A piercing pain shot through my back and I suddenly wondered just how badly I was hurt.

*   *   *

Minutes or hours later—it was impossible to tell—a familiar voice awoke me. “Madden. Wake up.”

I couldn’t immediately focus. I could see the vague shape of Raritan on one side and a tall woman on the other.

Raritan spoke again. “I believe you’ve already met Agent Woodson?”

I sat up, but a dazzling burst of white shooting stars exploded before me. I lay back down slowly, desperate to avoid exacerbating the pounding in my head any further.

“We’ve appointed Agent Woodson as the profile coordinator in the Mississippi field office. She’s going to be taking over the Snow White Killer case from here forward.”

“What?”

Raritan leaned forward and spoke more loudly. “The Snow White Killer case. You’re in deep shit here.”

“Come on, the crap Parkman was talking about? It’s bullshit. Everybody knows that.”

Raritan nodded, but this time with a sad, repetitive motion. “Yeah, we do know. But we need to cover our asses, too. No matter how tough I sounded with Parkman, things don’t look quite as bright as I painted.”

I glanced at Woodson, who immediately looked away.

Raritan spoke again. “We have a victim who claims you did some pretty terrible things to her down in that basement. Everyone knows that it’s bullshit, but if it gets out, it could look bad for the Bureau. And a lot of people are asking questions. Like what the hell you were doing going into that house alone?”

“My job?”

“Maybe so, but you’re off this case, Lucas,” he said with finality. “Once you’re discharged, you can continue the rest of your casework, but you’re off this case.”

After that, Raritan droned on about the Bureau’s concern for my health, my mental status. How they knew I’d been working overtime, and so on. But I knew what he was really saying.

Ever since the first Behavioral Science Unit had formed in 1972, the FBI had a collectively recurring nightmare: When would one of their own snap and go off the deep end?

After all, I’d authored
The Killing Mind
and had published a controversial article proposing a tenuous link between DNA and serial killers’ behavior.

Everyone in the hospital room knew the real reason they’d taken me off the case. It wasn’t the PR bullshit. It was because the Bureau didn’t trust me with this case, now that Mara was involved. The potential for me to lose my mind or go off my rocker—that was the true subtext.

“Can I at least find out where Mara is?” I asked. “Is she even okay?”

Raritan glanced at Woodson before answering. “She’s okay. But she’s not around.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s over in Slidell. Your brother picked her up. He checked her into a mental health facility down there, somewhere she was already being treated on an outpatient basis. She was raped over a dozen times, Lucas. The other girl, the dead girl, wasn’t even touched.”

“What other girl? I didn’t even know anyone else had been found until Parkman told me.” But even as I spoke, I vaguely recalled Mara speaking of another woman when she called me on the phone. The woman with the letters on her forehead.

Raritan sighed. “The police didn’t just find you and Bliss in the basement. About ninety yards away in the woods the police found Snow White victim number three.”

So Parkman hadn’t lied, and Mara really had seen a woman with letters smeared onto her forehead. “Who, Jimmy? And what was on her forehead?”

Jimmy stared at me for a moment, glanced at Woodson, then flipped a small pocket notebook open. “Young girl from Lucedale, name of Patricia Swanson. You don’t happen to know her, do you?” he asked.

I shook my head before realizing I shouldn’t have even dignified him with a response. “What word did you find on her forehead?”

Raritan folded the notepad closed and put it back in his shirt pocket. “
Cat,
Lucas, although I don’t know why I’m even telling you, since you’re off this case. But it was
cat.
C-A-T.”

“A tan cat,” I said aloud, enunciating the growing message from the Snow White Killer. But then something else Raritan had said finally registered with me. “Wait a minute—did you say Mara was raped?”

“Yes. Repeatedly.”

I thought suddenly not about the Snow White Killer, but of Mara Bliss. The way Mara had been so terrified in the basement. Now I understood. “Did you guys get a rape kit?”

“Of course.”

“Have you done the semen analysis yet?”

Raritan glanced at Woodson again but didn’t say anything for a moment. “No, the semen analysis hasn’t been finished yet. It looks like her abductor used a condom. We don’t think a semen analysis will show us anything anyway.”

“Any nonself pubic hair?” I felt the sadness giving way to anger as it became more and more impossible to believe that the victim we discussed was my own ex-girlfriend, that I was an unofficial suspect, and that I was hoping a pubic hair test would exonerate me.

Raritan eyed me closely. “The examiners found no evidence of any nonself pubic hair. Like I said, it was a clean sex crime. Like the unsub knew how to clean a crime scene for evidence.” He let the statement hang in the air before continuing.

I closed my eyes as he spoke and wondered if my brother would believe Mara’s insane story, or if my father or sister knew about the accusations. I could just see them, talking in hushed whispers about the sad spiral of my life as they sat at the little kitchen table in my father’s house and spoke over coffee. A kitchen table I hadn’t seen for sixteen years.

Some sort of drugs began to kick in, and it suddenly became impossible to keep my eyes open. Eventually I felt a single tear course over my cheek. A moment later, a warm hand touched my shoulder.

As Raritan droned on and on, I managed to open my eyes, look down at the hand, and follow up the arm. Agent Woodson’s hand rested on my shoulder. She watched me with her blue-gray eyes as Raritan talked.

I stared at her without words, even as the seams and fabric of my life seemed to be unraveling and falling apart. Her eyes were soothing and her visage was like the glass surface of a calm and windless lake.

Eventually everything faded away. Raritan finished his long-winded spiel, and the utterly silent Woodson removed her comforting hand from my shoulder.

At the door, Raritan said he’d pick me up when the hospital released me the following day.

Too weak to protest, I fell asleep before the door closed behind them.

TEN

“It started in the Garden of Eden.” A familiar voice spoke the words into a darkness, and a fragmented, murmured conversation followed.

“A fruit was the first symbol of evil in the Bible.”

More hushed whispers. I couldn’t unscramble everything, and though I tried with every ounce of will, still couldn’t open my eyes.

“This isn’t about a serial killer. This is about the devil. It’s always been about the devil, and someday Lucas is going to have to accept it.”

And all of a sudden I recognized the voice—my father’s. It almost sounded like it emanated from a pulpit, but I knew I wasn’t in church. I was in a bed—in a hospital.

It all came back to me. Mara, the knife, Raritan, another victim, Woodson, and my dismissal from the Snow White Killer case.

Why was my father talking about the devil?

I managed to pull an eyelid open.

A dim bedside lamp glowed weakly beside me, leaving the rest of the room in a gray haze. Katie sat on the side of the bed and, to my great surprise, both my brother and my father sat in chairs on the opposite wall as well.

It had been a while since I’d seen my brother, Tyler, but he hadn’t changed. Longish blond hair and sharp facial features confirmed his status as the middle-child hybrid who shared the high cheeks of our mother along with the square chin of our father. His face carried cold blue eyes and the professional “unshaven” look that approximated eleven o’clock shadow. He sat in the chair uncomfortably, staring at the floor.

“You awake, sweetie?” Katie patted my leg. “How are you feeling?”

My brother and father leaned forward in their chairs, but neither said anything as they waited for me to speak.

“I’m okay. A little sleepy, but okay.”

“You in any pain, son?” my father asked.

I hated to admit it, but his simple inquiry sent a chill down my spine—the good kind of chill, one I hadn’t felt in years. We’d drifted so far apart after my mother died.… Actually, there was no drifting to it; we had fled from each other at full speed. Her murder had somehow strengthened his faith, while utterly destroying mine. We tolerated each other’s presence while I finished high school, and after college I never looked back.

Over the years the bitterness toward my father faded, just as the intense grief I’d once felt for the loss of my mother had equally diminished. He and I had spoken a few times after I moved back down South, but it usually ended awkwardly or just plain badly. We quickly discovered that we weren’t good at conversation. Religion often crept up, and whenever it did, things just didn’t work out between a religious father and a son wholly devoid of faith.

Lost amidst the swirl of memories, I finally answered his question. “No, Dad. No pain.”

“Good. That’s good, son.”

The room fell silent. “So what were you guys talking about?” I asked. “I thought I was dreaming.”

“Oh, nothing. Just a sermon I’m working on. You want to hear about it?”

“No thanks,” I said quickly.

My father smiled, but a genuine sadness resided behind his eyes. “You’ve always blamed God for everything bad in the world, Lucas. I wish you didn’t. Ever since your mother died. Someday I hope you understand that there’s something else to blame for that, and that God only wants us to—”

“Dad, for the trillionth time. Don’t bring her up. Don’t bring her up if you’re trying to tell me why a God supposedly exists. Believe me, it just doesn’t add up.”

My father fell silent, then glanced at my sister. “Sorry, Lucas, it’s probably best if I just let you rest. I’m sorry to upset you.”

“You’re not upsetting me,” I assured him. “You’re just not getting anywhere with me. But you’re right—God’s not to blame for Mom’s death. Just good old-fashioned shithouse luck. Just like what happened to me here. Cosmically pervasive shithouse luck. That’s all.”

Katie spoke up. “Lucas, when are you supposed to get out? The doctors told us you were lucky.”

Her forced cheeriness stood out like a red blanket on a line of white linens. “They haven’t said anything yet. Maybe tomorrow.”

“Oh, that’s good.”

The familiar silence returned. Katie, the only person with enough energy to try and keep us functional, spoke again. “Tyler? How’s Mara?”

Tyler spoke for the first time. “She’s still recovering at Memorial Oaks.”

“Is she still saying that I kidnapped her?” I asked.

My younger brother shook his head, but I could see he was lying. I could tell because when he used to lie about stealing candy or breaking a toy, he would frown. “No,” he said, with a furrowed forehead. “She’s just trying to work things out now. She’s confused.”

“I’ll say.”

Tyler stood, anger suddenly contorting his face. “Or maybe she isn’t. Who knows? Maybe all this profiling has finally addled your brain. Did you finally lose it? Again?”

“Tyler,” Katie said, but I spoke over her.

“Screw you, Tyler. Go tend to your psychotic girlfriend.”

“Fuck you, Lucas. I take better care of her than you ever did.”

“That’s enough. Right now, I mean it.” Our father stood between us. Tyler turned and stormed out of the room, and I suddenly felt like a ten-year-old all over again.

My father walked over and laid his hand on my shoulder. “Get some rest, Lucas. I’m sorry if all of this agitated you. We only meant for you to know we’re here for you. I’ll pray for your recovery. Hang in there, son.”

I almost told him not to bother, but finally relented, amazed at how tiring antagonism could be. “Thanks.”

He patted my arm, then left the room. Katie, my sole remaining visitor, regarded me with angry, smoldering eyes.

“Hi, little sis.”

“Don’t try to be cute. I don’t know why you just can’t make a little effort, Lucas. A modicum of effort. When will you just get over how our father deals with Mom’s death, or whether Mara and Tyler are together now? Believe me, you’re better off anyway.”

Her anger caught me off guard. “You think I’m the one who needs to get over things? I’m the one with a knife in my back here, in case everyone forgot. Don’t even start on me with a guilt trip. You heard Tyler, what he said. I honestly think he wishes Mara had been a little more handy with that knife.”