Abandoned: A Thriller (53 page)

“Various reasons. He grew up very poor, I know that. His mother was a prostitute and his father was a drunk who molested him. He had a younger sister and a younger brother. His mother died when he was still young, and then his father pimped out the children to keep himself in booze. It all prepared him for an understanding of the realities of life. He passed those understandings on to me.”

It’s a terrible story, but I find myself unmoved. I’ve heard of worse things happening to good men and women, people who didn’t grow up to abuse their children or become serial killers.

“That must have been difficult,” I allow.

She shrugs. “That’s life. Eat or be eaten.”

“How did they get through that?”

“Two of them didn’t. The sister killed herself. The brother was murdered by a john.”

“And your father?”

A glint of pride appears. “Once his brother died, he decided he’d had enough. He killed his father and buried him in the woods with the rest. Then he went into the army.”

“Why do you think he chose that path? The military, I mean.”

“Pragmatism. The army would house him and feed him and teach him how to kill skillfully. Also, the Korean War was happening.”

“Was that a major factor?”

She nods. “My father said that war is a bloody crucible. You go in human. You come out with death in your veins. You become stronger. He’d learned the necessity for strength.”

“Stronger why? Because you’ve lost your humanity?”

She looks into my eyes and I look behind hers. I try to see into the emptiness, but there’s nothing to see.

“Are you familiar with Buddhism?” she asks me. It’s a strange, abrupt question.

“Not very.”

“At its essence, Buddhism is based on the idea that the spirit is the only thing that’s true. Everything else that we see or feel”—she slaps her chest with her hands, indicates the hushed concrete walls that surround us—“all these material things are just illusion. Mara. According to Buddhism, as long as man believes that Mara, is what’s real, rather than the soul, he’s trapped. Doomed to the cycle of rebirth, life, and death, what they refer to as Samsara. Reincarnation.”

I say nothing, fascinated at this story of the soul from a monster’s mouth.

“But Buddha had it backward,” she continues. “Don’t you see? It’s not Mara that’s the illusion. It’s the
soul.”
She slams a fist down on the table. “This table is real. The pain I feel when I hit it too hard, that’s real. The soul?” She shakes her head. “Just a dream. Buddhism, Christianity, they all put you to sleep.” She leans forward, excited and grim.
“War wakes you up.”

I stare at her, speechless. I can’t help it. She looks off, seeing something invisible to me.

“He loved it there, you know. In Korea. He told me a story one time about strangling a man in a rice paddy while the sun rose and the rain fell.
That man died with water in his eyes and rice in his ears, hearing thunder.
That’s what my father said.” She pauses. “All the lies are stripped away in war. All those illusions about beauty and ugliness, or goodness and badness, about any of them being important. In war, it’s meat against meat, to the death. The naked truth.” She sounds almost wistful. My stomach turns a little.

I gather myself and continue.

“What happened to your father?”

“He died of cancer.”

“Were you sad when he died?”

“I was regretful. He was my teacher. If he’d lived longer, I would have learned more.”

Nothing rises in her eyes at this. No hint of grief, no longing for the man who raised her. I try to picture him in my mind, but he is faceless,
a burning man, branding his child as he’d been branded, scarring her deepest where it would never show.

It’s the same story I’ve heard before, too many times. Monsters who were made by monsters who go on to make monsters themselves. A chain stretching both forward and back into darkness.

Sometimes the link breaks, the light abides. Too many times it does not. I think about Hawaii, about the blackness between the stars, about how there will always be more darkness than points of light.

“What did you do with the women you kidnapped once you received payment from their husbands?”

“I killed them, of course.”

“And the bodies?”

“They were cut into pieces and the pieces were burned. The bone was ground to powder and everything was scattered.”

I sigh inside at this. Though it wasn’t entirely unexpected, I’d held out hope for reuniting at least some of the remains with their loved ones.

“How many victims did you take in total?”

She doesn’t have to think to come up with the number. “Forty-seven, including the women you would have found when you raided my other facilities.”

Forty-seven. It sounds like such a small number until you extrapolate it. Heather Hollister, forty-seven times. Avery and Dylan and Douglas again; all the world in a water drop.

I consider the number and something occurs to me.

“If you’d gotten up to forty-seven, why was I number 35?”

“Obfuscation. I didn’t number in sequence. If someone escaped, they wouldn’t be able to give an accurate count.”

“Very careful of you.”

She shrugs, dismissing the praise. “You can’t control all the factors in life necessary to guarantee survival, but failing to control every single one you
can
is simple incompetence.”

“I can see that.” I consult my notes. “The next set of questions has to do with some apparent inconsistencies in what you called your retirement plan. There are some actions that don’t add up, at least on the surface.”

“Go ahead,” she says, infinitely agreeable.

“First, broadly: How did you plan to ensure we’d find your Los
Angeles location? I get the factors you put into play—Heather, the messages, kidnapping me—but none of those in and of itself was a guarantee. I’d assume you’d want a lock.”

She nods. “The plan was to continue to drop clues that would lead you to me—or Eric as me—and to do it in a believable fashion.”

“Believable how?”

“By laying the groundwork for the apparency of what you call decompensation.”

Decompensation means, literally, “the deterioration of a structure.” In the area of profiling serial offenders, it’s used to describe a pattern of devolvement. Many serial killers, even those who begin their careers as extremely organized individuals, eventually fall victim to their own underlying insanities. They start to deteriorate. To fall apart.

Words come to me:

I flipped a coin.

I’m not a cruel man.

Mercy said these things to me when I was imprisoned in her custom gulag. They contradicted her profile at the time. They might make sense now.

“Forcing me to make that choice about Leo, trying to convince me you cared about seeming cruel—those were a part of it, weren’t they? They were supposed to make you look a little bit off.”

She smiles, but not in pleasure or cruelty; those emotions appear absent in her. “That’s correct. The messages and the deviation with Heather were a part of that framework as well. They were illogical changes to a formerly flawless methodology. My plan was to continue increasing evidence of my ‘aberrant behaviors’ until a huge and obvious mistake became a believable act. You’d assume I’d decompensated, and you wouldn’t question the incompetence that led you right to me.”

“That’s also why you left some victims behind for us to find, right? To show us that, as far as you were concerned, it was just business as usual and you were unaware you’d started losing your marbles?”

She shrugs. “As I’ve already said.”

I tap a pen on the notepad in front of me. “That’s all very elegant, Mercy, but it leaves a big question unanswered: Why go through any of it at all? No one even knew you existed. Why not just walk away?”

She gives me a tolerant, almost pitying look.

“What I said earlier applies: Failing to control all the factors you
can control is simple incompetence. If I ‘walked away,’ as you put it, I would have left uncontrolled factors behind that might have become detrimental to me. No one knew I was there then, but that could have changed in the future. Someone like yourself might have seen a pattern, become suspicious, and started looking. It’s always possible I forgot something or made a mistake, however slight.” She shakes her head once in the negative. “Hope is not a viable scenario. Certainty is.”

I take all this in, almost as dumbfounded as I am enlightened.

What does this remind me of? Some computer phrase. Ah, right:
garbage in, garbage out.

Mercy had locked herself into the necessity of calculating every possibility. In the end, it was that need to control all the variables that undid her. Pragmatic simplicity was defeated by an overabundance of complexity. Her brilliance became her psychosis.

Another question occurs to me now. I hesitate before asking it, not sure I really want the answer.

“Mercy, what would you have done if I’d told you to take me instead of Leo?”

“Oh, I still would have selected him. You were a necessary part of my plan. He wasn’t. It wouldn’t have mattered; going against my own rules for no apparent reason would have only made me seem more irrational in the end.”

I have spent time dealing with my grief and rage about Leo. I’ve plumbed my own depths, and while I haven’t found peace, I’ve managed to restore my equilibrium. This revelation threatens to unseat me. I feel the anger rising, and it speaks to me in tongues, hinting that it might not be so bad to kill Mercy Lane, after all. I struggle against it and manage to push it back down.

Something to deal with later, not here.

“Let’s move on.” It comes out a little bit hoarse. I clear my throat. “I want to discuss your methodology.”

“Certainly.”

I spread my hands palms up, in a gesture of query. “Why did you keep them?”

She frowns. “I don’t understand. Why did I keep who?”

“The victims you kidnapped. Why keep them? We had our theory, but I want to hear what you have to say. If the motivation was money, wasn’t that an unneeded expense?”

“I considered that for a long time when I was doing my initial business plan,” she says, nodding. “In the end, I realized that keeping them alive was the best form of control when it came to the husbands. It has to do with what they really needed.” She cocks her head at me. “Consider it. I’m sure you’ll get it if you do.”

It’s a riddle or a test. They rarely give up everything for free. When they’re locked away, mind games are the last games they have.

I think about the words she said.
What they really needed.
I turn them over in my mind, again and again, and then it comes, like a flare of light. This, I think, was the extra piece, the motivation James and I had sensed but not seen.

What was the one thing, above all others, the husbands had wanted when it came to their wives, more than money or freedom or custody?

They wanted them dead.

It was all about hate at the bedrock. Mercy had withheld this prize until payment, like a carrot on a stick.

I consider her with new eyes. I’d assigned a certain heavy-handedness to her methods before. Now I see she had a genuine gift for understanding all these emotions—revenge and rage and fear—for how to grow each one and make them move where she wanted.

“Very insightful.”

She shrugs again. “I found out early that I had a gift for estimating behavior.”

Except for your own, I think. But then, I guess that’s true for all of us.

“Next question: why that particular business plan? You say your motivation was money. Keeping someone for seven years seems like a very long time to wait for a payoff.”

She shakes her head once, impatient with me. “You keep saying that. The motivation wasn’t money, it was survival. Money just happens to be crucial to survival in this society at this time.”

“I apologize. But why that plan?”

She pauses for almost a full minute before answering. “I examined the subject of wherewithal in detail a long time ago. Unless you are very lucky and win the lottery, or inherit, or have a special talent such as an actor or musician, wealth is unlikely. The surest way is to take from those who have.”

Her face is almost animated as she talks. This is a subject she feels something about, at whatever level.

“Think about it. Commerce at its core is simple. It’s about finding someone with money and taking it from them. In the traditional non-criminal world, that translates into bargaining, and since force is not applied, the outcome is always uncertain. Perhaps he likes the car you’re selling but his wife doesn’t. Perhaps the stock market takes a downturn that was never expected and—worse—was beyond your control.” She shakes her head, dismissing the idea of being a victim to these scenarios. “As I said before, you can never control every factor in life. The key to survival is to control the ones you can, and criminal enterprises satisfy that paradigm. You identify the man with the money, and you take it from him. That’s the most controlled way, the most
likely way
, to acquire wealth.”

I interrupt her. “Why is wealth so important? If it’s all just about survival, like you say, then what’s the worry about an excess? Isn’t it enough to pay the grocery bill and the rent?”

“Factors, control. Better to have too much money and never need it. Abundance deals with probabilities. It increases the possibility of survival in the face of eventualities you can’t predict.”

It’s an answer to the question, but it seems empty somehow. In spite of everything I’ve heard so far, I still can’t
feel
Mercy. The intimacy I usually achieve, that sense of almost becoming what they are, is absent. When I try to understand her, it’s as if I’m peering into a void. It’s like trying to merge with nothing.

“Go on.”

“So I examined all the most direct methods. Theft. Bank robbery. Selling drugs or women. They all had their pluses and minuses, but one glaring fact stood out: Most criminals end up in jail. It’s almost inevitable. Rather than picking a criminal enterprise and planning how not to get caught, I decided to look at the factors that encourage that outcome and derive from there.