A Good and Useful Hurt (21 page)

They spoke as a single entity, finishing one another’s thoughts.
There were no interruptions or disagreements as they spoke, just a constant stream of consciousness. Mike kept up as best he was able, but they seemed to know when he couldn’t: they’d repeat little details, like the depth of a crease in the man’s brow, or the way the skin underneath his eyes was discolored, until he got it right. When the drawing was halfway finished, Mike had been ready to abandon it, but instead soldiered on, adding new details and filling the sketch out.

The women kept refining the man as they spoke, bringing him to life in the way their little testimonies never could have. Those memories were pain and hate and death, the recollections were of the awfulness, not just the man. Now, focused just on the face, they were able to remember much more than any of them, even Mike, would have considered possible.

Mike knew, as the face took shape, that he was out of his league. Lamar would have been perfect—he’d spent his whole life drawing portraits. Mike had been more of an illustrator, his imagination designing life as it never was. He wasn’t sure he had the chops to pull this off. Still, he worked. There was simply nothing else to do; the women spoke, and he replicated what they said as best he was able. The face was coming together, Mike would have agreed with that, but did it look anything like the man? Spurred on by them, he pushed the thought aside and worked.

It was almost as if they knew exactly what to say and when to say it. Trimming down the final details now, Mike would wonder about a corner of the mouth, and three of the women would describe that part of the anatomy one after the other. The same happened for the width of the eyes—they looked too far apart to Mike, but they confirmed it to him, one after another.

All of the women were contributing equally, save for Hladini. She managed a few short, descriptive comments, but she added little to what she’d said earlier. It seemed more likely than not to Mike that she was dead before she hit the floor. The bits of memories she was culling seemed to come from some other place.

When Mike finally did turn over the sheet for them to see, their excitement rose even further, and the real refinement began. Mike laid a sheet of tracing paper that hadn’t been there before over the sketch, and he used this to build the man again, this time with the other paper as a base. He started with the hair, and with the paper lying flat and the other sheet as an example, they were able to help him refine it faster, to make it cleaner. The face, which had looked so wooden to Mike on the first page, now came alive. The eyes were lit, the mouth cruel and defiant. The nose was squared at the tip and just a little too small for the face. The cheekbones were high and protruding, the cheeks below them soft and sallow. The face lived, and when Mike held it up with a clean white sheet as the background, the stream of voices stopped.

One of them said, “That’s him.”

And the rest spoke in assent.

Mike sat back in the chair, his brain asking to keep drawing even while his hands ached. His body was finished, but his mind felt clean after being able to draw, as if a plug had been pulled in his brain, and Mike could feel that part of him that was art saying,
More. More
.

Deb interrupted his trance. “Now you have to leave us and draw it without our help.”

Mike sputtered, “What do you mean?”

“You don’t think you can take it back with you, do you? You’ll need to draw it when you’re awake so you have something to study, something you can show Doc. You’ll need it to be sure, so that you don’t hesitate. One more thing. Unless it becomes impossible to do on your own, don’t involve the police.”

“Why?”

“Because we want him.”

One second he was in the interrogation room with them in front of him, the women forming a loose semicircle before the table, the next second awake, panting and sweating in bed. Sheets and blankets curled about his legs like pythons as Mike struggled to wakefulness. He finally extracted himself from the bed, ignored the clock, and went to the kitchen.

Lying there waiting were all of his drawing supplies, set out just as he would have himself: the pencils shaved down to razor tips, the vellum and large pads of paper unfurled and ready. Mike looked at the bathroom. The door was open, but Sid was nowhere to be found. But she’d done this—he knew it as well as he knew the face he had to draw.

The first lines came easy, then sputtered into tentative scratches before stopping entirely. Mike took a deep breath, looked through the paper, and began to draw, really draw.

In his head their voices murmured, and Mike wasn’t sure if they were breaking through to his wakeful world or if it was just his memory speaking for them.

He drew and they paced him, a give and take during which he felt like he was running abreast with them towards some impossible target. They ebbed and flowed with his pencil, the voices or memories of voices jousting with one another more than they had in his sleep, not arguing but now not all polite correction, either. They refined the art as he worked, enough so that the man he’d drawn twice already was more vivid on the page than ever when Mike completed what he assumed would be the final draft.

The eyes were awful. Mike had thought them alight before, but now they blazed from the paper, though he’d yet to use anything aside from a gray scale to construct the man. The mouth he felt compelled to draw in a snarl; he couldn’t figure why at first, and then he realized that was how the women had seen him. Maybe docile for moments, but otherwise violent and enraged.

When it was done, Mike felt the true ache in his beleaguered hands and wrists, the muscles and tendons pushed to the brink. The beginnings of dawn surged at the windows, and for the first time in a long time Mike wished he had a cigarette.

On the table before him lay the face of a killer.

When true morning came around eight o’clock, Mike called Doc.
Doc had just been about to call him as well; apparently, the revelation of drawing the man had a twin in the dream world Doc lived in with them.

While Mike waited for his friend to arrive, he made coffee. Less than fifteen minutes later Doc walked in. Mike had cleaned up the table, removed all the pencils and other drawing supplies so that the sketch lay solitary on the table.

Doc walked to it and said, “Incredible. How?”

“I listened. Only this time, they had something to tell me. They’d all seen more than they’d thought.”

“Do you think that’s really him?”

“I do. I really do. He’s tall, about six foot five, and he has green eyes. They all believe that his hatred for women will follow into his personal life, but I can’t see how we’re to judge that. He was wearing a shirt with a nametag that said ‘Phil’ for at least two of them. Whether that means anything or not, I’ve no clue. One of the girls said that our guy smelled like a machine shop; her dad used to work in one. I think he’s over in that factory district where two of the murders took place, and I think if we wait and look long enough, we’re going to find some six-and-a-half-foot-tall machinist with a bad attitude named Phil.”

Doc eyed the picture and then said to Mike, “Did Hladini talk to you?”

“A little, why?”

“I engaged in some analysis with a couple of them, Hladini included. Yes, I know, I merely teach the subject, but I know my way around a psyche well enough to be sure she’s been holding out.”

“Can you get through to her? What do you think she knows?”

“I might be able to, I might not. For now, we’ll just have to hope the picture is enough. We can begin to narrow down potential factories today; there are a few factors that should make it easier. I’m quite certain he doesn’t work third shift, for starters; even second would be difficult.”

“How do you figure?”

“The killings have always been at night, and all different nights of the week. If he is working at a factory, his schedule is going to be regimented; I doubt he’d be able to take multiple days off without at least some notice. Our boy has been cool about everything else so far; it’s difficult for me to believe that he’d reveal himself in such a way. All it would take to draw attention to this activity would be for our friend to call in sick every time there was a murder, and for his shift manager to have even a mild interest in current events. We’ve already missed the arrival of the first shift today, but from here on we should be able to watch a minimum of two shift changes daily.”

Mike shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “If we’re wrong about the area, we won’t have time to check out any other industrial areas. And even if we’re right, there’s probably more than a dozen factories over there. What else did they say to you?”

“Not much of use, even though every single one of them was able to recall seeing him at least once before they were killed. To tell you the truth, I’d planned to come over and play police sketch artist with you, but it looks like that job’s been taken. This is an extraordinary image, Mike. I think all there is to do is to start staking out factories and hope for a breakthrough. There is one thing we need to discuss though, something I’ve been loath to talk about.”

“What?”

“When we catch this fellow, what do you imagine happens?”

Mike thought about that for a few seconds and said, “Well honestly, Doc, I hadn’t really figured on a whole lot besides shooting him. I don’t think the police would believe a word of this, and even if they do, I can’t see much of it standing up in court. I don’t think our guy is likely to leave any evidence around that would implicate himself, if he hasn’t yet. You had something else in mind?”

“If you shoot him and we’re wrong about him, then you’ll go to prison. Chances are, either way you’ll end up in prison. Could you deal with that? Not just prison, but with taking the wrong life and damning any chance to catch the man who is responsible? I know you better than that, no matter what you might say.

“I have another idea, one that I think could potentially both put him behind bars and, if he’s guilty, kill him. You could make ink with all of their ashes in it and tattoo him with it. You saw how they reacted when they were hurt. Imagine if they were stuck inside of him.”

“How would I get close enough to him to do that? He’s a pretty big guy, and I don’t think he’d take me up on the offer of a gift certificate. Even if I could do it, there’s no guarantee it would work.”

“That’s why we’re going to put a moratorium on that train of thought when we hit about twenty-four hours from the night when he’s supposed to kill again. That gives us five days to work that angle. After that, if you like, you can carry your gun. Until then, though, I just don’t see that as a safe enough option, Mike. I know my idea is tenuous, and has the possibility of having a less than successful outcome, but there is less to lose. We have to spare
some
thought for ourselves, don’t we?”

Mike sighed and ran his hand across the pencil sketching—the face of a killer, if he’d done it right. He thought about Lamar and Becky. What would be left for them if he killed the wrong man? The shop would close; there was no doubt about that. Lamar and Becky must not only be confused about what he’d been up to, but furious about the jeopardy his absence was placing the shop in. He hadn’t looked at his phone other than to call Doc since the last time he’d spoken with Becky, and he hadn’t been in touch with Lamar at all. He felt a flash of guilt at the thought that he’d yet to meet Rani. How many calls had he missed? Who was working in his stead?

“Alright, Doc, I’ll mix up a little bottle of ink and figure out something for the needles. But I’m still bringing the gun. When I poke this fucker, I need a backup plan, and a .357 seems like the best one possible.”

“Alright, that’ll be fine. I suggest we do some research, and then see if we can catch more than one shift change today. If it works out that different businesses let them leave at different times, we’ll be able to eliminate places faster. As much as I’d like to think Hladini holds some secret bit of information I can cull from her, it seems far more likely that she is too broken, too gone to give us anything helpful. In any case, it’s nothing we can count on.” He stood and brushed off the front of his pants. “Let’s get to it.”

They settled on three factories, all in close proximity to one another, to watch that afternoon.
As luck would have it, Doc’s work on the phone revealed that these three did indeed have staggered shift release times due to a traffic reduction agreement with the city.

Doc brought along a pair of binoculars. They sat camped out at the back of the parking lot of the factory with the earliest release time, about a hundred feet away from the next closest car. The lot was enormous, and Mike was thinking that there was no way they could properly eliminate everyone when the whistle blew. He raised the binoculars and sighted on the door Doc had pointed out for him.

“Remember, we’re looking for height first. If you see anyone who looks like our man, speak up and we’ll both give him a look before we approach him.”

Mike had shrunk the picture of the face, and both men had a copy sitting on their laps. Mike ranged in his binoculars and watched the door through them. At last it opened, and then a flood of men were streaming from it.

They all looked big to Mike, strong-looking, filthy denizens of a dank and dirty place that manufactured automobile parts. They wore similar clothing, but though they were all dressed in a similar fashion, they were not wearing any sort of uniform. If coveralls were used, they were left inside. A couple of men were in gray, but there were certainly no supplied work outfits. The flood slowed to a trickle as the men walked to their vehicles.

As the flood of workers came closer, Mike could see them more clearly. A great number of them revealed themselves to be women—women as filthy as the men they worked with. The sexes were difficult to differentiate, even at a distance. Gender didn’t much matter, Mike realized: Phil was so tall he would be easy to pick from a crowd.

When the sea of bodies had pushed its final ebb from the cavern and the new shift was starting its day’s work, they left, with no information save that, if he did work there, he hadn’t today. Not dejected, at least not yet, Doc put down his binoculars and drove them to the next building.

In the second lot the building and parking areas were just as voluminous as the last, but there were less than a quarter of the cars. Doc parked in the back of the lot anyway, and a few minutes later, they watched the doors open and the flood begin.

The workers here were different. Still no coveralls; these all wore white T-shirts and pants. There were fewer than at the last factory, but the only person close to matching the description was an extraordinarily tall woman with long blonde hair. The lot had yet to clear before they moved on, and the third proved to be no better.

Still not dejected, but sobered by the enormity of the task, the two drove back to the apartment. Doc dropped off Mike, and he went inside.

Mike’s sleep that night was fitful. Twice he found himself in the interrogation room, but he woke before he’d been able to talk to any of them. At four thirty, he quit bed, got dressed, and went to make a pot of coffee.

His cell phone was blinking that he’d missed three calls, and he shut it off. The coffee was bitter. Mike liked his with cream and he was out, was out of almost every comestible as far as that went. He was pretty sure he hadn’t eaten a decent meal since Deb had died.

That thought brought on a personal inspection.

His shirt and pants were ridiculous, huge things that seemed as though they’d been built for a different person. His belt was on the furthest hole from the buckle, though he couldn’t remember tightening it. He walked into the bathroom and looked into the mirror for the first time in weeks.

His skin was the first thing he noticed: he was pale and almost yellow in the indoor light. His gums appeared to have retracted from his teeth, and his eyes looked dull. Did the sleep he was getting even count as sleep? How long could he go like this? How long could Doc go?

Mike wondered if perhaps his body hadn’t allowed him to really sleep because sleep had become more mentally strenuous than being awake was. What was going to be the price for all of this, and could either he or Doc ever go back?

He waited two hours at the table drinking coffee and staring at Sid’s lifeless body on the bathroom floor before Doc arrived and they left.