Cain's Blood (15 page)

T

he address led to the home of frederic and Wendy Albaum
and their eleven-year-old adopted son, a few miles outside
of town, halfway between an abandoned auto-parts store
and the local cemetery. The two-lane country highway was
called Pickerington run by the locals, but the signs Castillo had fol

lowed read route 28. The last car had passed more than fifteen minutes
ago. A long dirt driveway ran up to the shadowed three-story farmhouse. It was night when Castillo and Jeff finally arrived, the darkness
adding to the town’s overall temper of barrenness and isolation.

he liked it. It reminded him of home. The trailer back in Thorough, New Mexico, shaded and lost at the foot of the featherhold
Mountains, the nearest neighbor an acre or more away on either side.
And it reminded him of northern Iraq or parts of Pakistan: Tranquil,
boundless. Like, he imagined, walking alone through eden. The whole
world laid out by God as boundless scenery for solely one man. Castillo
had paced off the perimeter of the house twice. Television light blushed
through a second-floor side window, steady blooms of silver and blue
against the closed curtain. The rest of the house appeared empty.
Lifeless. There were three cars in the driveway, each with Ohio plates.
Nothing out of the ordinary.

he knocked at the front door. Nada. rapped again harder. Glanced
in both directions at the outlying neighbors. Nothing there either. No
sounds within. Castillo was actually fine with that. All the possible scenarios he’d run through in case someone answered the door sounded
absurd.
Excuse me, Mrs. Albaum, I was hoping you could answer a couple
questions about your son’s genetic makeup.
Or
Hi, Eddie. Curious. Ever jack
off in the graveyard down the street?
honestly, the real openings he’d
come up with didn’t sound much better.

he tried the door. Locked. Bolted, too. Castillo examined the front
windows, chanced a peek inside. Nothing either. Thought about calling it a day. he’d simply head right back up the road into town and
the Motel 6 where he’d stowed the kid. Get some sleep. Double-check
some things with Stanforth. follow up on Albert McCarty, the missing
Delaware kid. Maybe visit the Albaums the next morning when . . .

But there
was
the giant snake, the monument fifteen minutes
away. And the Albaums. Who, upon furthering searching, had two
sons registered in the local school system: Austin (age 17) and edward
(age 12).

And Jacobson’s enigmatic notes were filled with data on a boy called
ed.
Jacobson, or DSTI, or whoever could have doctored up the boy’s
birth records and whatnot easily enough. Something that would take
less than thirty seconds and no more than a thousand dollars, if that,
depending on how far up the operation went.
This had to be right.
Castillo backed away from the porch and followed the side of the
house, keeping to the night’s shadows. Several blowflies were fluttering
in the back door’s window.
This door was also locked but proved a cinch to crack. Castillo
opened a gap.
The smell inside was immediate, faint, and too familiar.
Death.
Castillo drew his pistol.

•
•
•
On his bed, Jeff had laid out four sheets from the dozens Castillo had
printed for him to study while he went out to check on the house.

rich
Ardson
Size
More h Owell Gil
ronan

The last names, if they were right about Albaum, were easy enough:
richardson, Sizemore, howell, and Gilronan. But the stupid pictures
were nothing but a big bunch of maybe’s. Jeff scanned Castillo’s “Murder Map,” searching for any town that made sense. But there were thousands. Castillo had told him to focus mostly along route 50. Still, it was
hundreds of possibilities. “hundreds is better than thousands,” Castillo
had said when he’d left.

five hours ago! Jeff eyed the room’s small digital clock again.
Castillo’d said he’d probably be gone a while, but five hours? had he
found the boy? The clone? had something bad happened? he refocused on the printouts. he’d made his own lists and notes next to each
name and symbol, his blocky lettering right next to his fake father’s
scribbles. Beside rich
Ardson (was it a heart or a bow and arrow?),
he’d written down everything from Bowmansville, PA to Points, West
Virginia and Athens, Ohio. Then there was hunter. Or Sherwood forest? Or Center Point? Or maybe even Loveland? It was maddening.
The two birds could easily be Birdsville, Maryland, or the Baltimore
ravens, or Birdseye, Indiana. Maybe Odon, Indiana, because he had
two ravens as messengers. But then Jeff crossed it out because Odin was
spelled wrong. The other two symbols: something about a moon, and a
bug with a hat? No clue. None.

And besides, even if he could figure it out: Then what?
More of the clones would be found.
for the first time he stopped to think: But then what? What happens to them?

And me?
he brushed the printouts aside and eyed Castillo’s other files.
Castillo had left them in a pile on the chair on Jeff’s side of the room.
Almost like Castillo wanted Jeff to take a look. More and more, Jeff was
starting to believe that everything Castillo did was part of some kind
of test or plan. That there was a reason behind all of it. Jeff stood over
the desk. his fingers ran over the same folder again. JD658726h56-54
it read on top. he’d already peeked inside. Jeffrey Dahmer/5. The one
Castillo was after. Jeff had already flipped the folder open twice before.
enough to see the name. To see pictures of the boy he would soon be
come. Or was. Whatever else was within, he didn’t know.
Didn’t want to. And, at the same time, wanted to.
his eyes traced Castillo’s book instead. Castillo kept it in his duffel
bag, and Jeff had seen him reading it late at night when Castillo thought
he was sleeping. Jeff rifled through its pages, curious.
The Grace of the
Witch. The Beggar at the Manor
. he knew of
The Odyssey,
the Greek guy
trying to get home and Lotus people and all of that, but he hadn’t ever
read it. Castillo had made little notes throughout in the book’s margins.
underlined and bracketed stuff, too. A lot of the pages dog-eared. Jeff
read one of the underscored passages:

I am a man of much grief, but it is not fit that
I should sit in another’s house mourning and
wailing. It is wrong to grieve forever without
ceasing.

Then flipped to another, one Castillo had put a star next to:

Since it is not possible to elude the will of Jove
or make it vain, let this man go alone over the
barren sea.

Jeff wasn’t sure what it meant, but he inspected some of the other
marked passages.

To me, O stranger, thou appearest now a different
man from what thou wast before, thou hast other
garments, and thy complexion is no longer the
same. Thou art certainly one of the gods who
possess the whole of heaven.

Jeff closed Castillo’s book, swung his eyes and hand to the folder
again.
JD658726h56-54

he propped it open some. The first page was numbers and a picture. The numbers made no sense. The picture was . . . The picture was
what he would look like if he was cool. Cool? he cleared space on the
small desk and opened up the folder.

There were a lot of numbers. The next pa ge. More numbers.
Asymmetry scores, MMPI fmab, MAOA, karyotype levels. And so on. It
meant nothing to Jeff. his heart weighed a thousand pounds. his hand
was shaking. What would the next page reveal? he’d expected everything spelled out. Black and white.

ThIS IS WhAT We hAVe LeArNeD ABOuT Jeff.
ThIS IS hOW MuCh Of A kILLer Jeff reALLy IS.
ThIS IS WhAT Jeff SAID ABOuT WANTING TO MurDer AND eAT PeOPLe.

There was none of that. Only more numbers. A person reverted to
nothing more than a bunch of charts and graphs. No different, really,
than than a high school science class lab trying to figure out the ph levels
of Ivory soap or the density of tomato juice. No more than Mendel and
his stupid peas. he turned the pages over one after another. Nothing.

until the second-to-last page. There, a few notes someone had
typed.
His father?
Another one of the smiling shrinks at DSTI? Maybe
it was Mrs. Jamieson. She was one of the smiliest shrinks they had up
there. And apparently dead now.

That was all. Then another page of numbers. Jeff turned back to
the notes and looked for anything else to compare, or contrast, Jeffrey
Dahmer/5 and himself, Jeffrey Dahmer/82. It did not say if the
other
Jeff had musical talent. But he only played bass and not particularly
well. Maybe it meant nothing.
Or everything
. Jeff wondered if he had
any real long-term goals. Promiscuous sexual behavior? Stupid. he
hadn’t even kissed a girl yet. Or any guy either, for God’s sake! he
wondered if tapping his knee all the time was OCD. Or making sure
his books were lined up in certain ways on the shelf. Or that he would
never ever use the last bit of milk left in the jug but would pour it
out into the sink.
Did that count?
he’d never killed an animal. But he’d
found a snake once and picked it up with a stick.
Did that count?
he
and the kid in this folder were genetically, physically, the exact same
person. Beyond the blue eyes and blonde hair, what else linked him
to the original killer?

“Asshole,” he cursed his father—
their
father—in the empty room.
he closed the folder, stuffed the whole thing down to the bottom of
Castillo’s pile.

Jeff crossed the room and retrieved his scattered notes from the
floor and end of the bed. The last clue had led them straight to Serpent
Mound and, probably, a clone in Ohio. he’d seen it almost immediately once he’d really thought about it. his dad had taken him there.
he could remember walking up the high steel observation deck to look
down upon the ancient burial mound. Of all the little pictures to draw,
why that? had his father known his adopted son would recognize it?

And Jeff thought,
Serpent Mound was on purpose. For me to figure out.
And Jeff thought,
Maybe they all are.
And Jeff thought,
Why?
Something to ask later. If he ever got a chance.

•
•
•
The clone was named edward Albaum.

Like the others, he’d been manufactured at DSTI. he was eleven
years old. his family had been murdered. When Castillo found him, the
boy was watching television.

There was a folder of information in the kitchen. Notes left behind
by the others for edward to study when he was ready. from the files,
Castillo now knew that the Albaum boy’s DNA had come from the
brain tissue samples of ed Gein. The name wasn’t too familiar to most
people, which was kind of surprising. Maybe because the name was so
simple and ordinary; hard to remember. The actual guy, however, was
far from simple or ordinary. ed Gein’s acts became the true-life inspiration of such horror-movie legends as Leatherface in
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
Norman Bates in
Psycho,
and Buffalo Bill in
Silence of the
Lambs—
three of the most famous horror movies ever made. Period. All
from one guy. how was that for monster credentials?

But Castillo knew that the movies didn’t even share the whole
truth. That the truth was too horrible, even for horror movies. Women
dangling from meat hooks and necklaces strung with body parts. Skulls
in the kitchen stained with vegetable soup and pudding. Suits of skin
stitched from half a dozen bodies he’d dug out of a nearby graveyard.
reupholstered furniture of human skin, hearts in a pot in the kitchen,
organs in the icebox . . . all the rest.

All the rest. Castillo was already tired of looking up the historical
specifics. They always netted out to the same with these men, anyway.
Mutilation. Necrophilia. rape. Torture.

Pain. Fear. Death.
The detached freedom to do whatever they wanted, while also imprisoned by some Other inside that angrily demanded they act upon
those same freedoms. It was a contradiction—an enslaved freedom.
This little monster sat on the couch where Castillo found him, waiting. Waiting for what, exactly, the boy had no clue. Neither did Castillo.
he’d simply make the phone call. “found one. he’s not one of the six.”
And then give the kid’s address. DSTI would send people. After that . . .
After that, who knew? Castillo only needed to get through the next
couple hours.
he studied the boy. Cropped, dirty hair. The kid looked tired, like
he’d done a couple weeks fighting beside the 7th Cavalry regiment in
fallujah. his glossy eyes staring at eSPN on the television with little or
no recognition of what they were really seeing.
for ed Gein, aka edward Albaum, it had been four days A.C.
After Cain.
After the others had arrived in his driveway, as they had elsewhere
before, as they would somewhere again. After they’d burst from their
car like trolls breaking free from some bridge and raced up the steps
into his family’s house. Smashed his father’s face with a golf club as teeth
bounced and pinged off the living room wall. After they’d dragged his
mother and big brother upstairs.
In an hour, Castillo’d managed to piece together most of what had
happened.
After Cain.
five boys. One of them dressed like a clown. A single carload of the
most infamous serial killers in history on the ultimate road trip: Bundy,
Lucas, fish, Gacy, and Dahmer. But not the Dahmer waiting for Castillo back at the hotel room. The fifteen-year-old kid with glasses and
a kind voice, another kid altogether. Cloning was funny that way. And
these others had let this boy in on their little joke. They’d told young
ed—as they, themselves, had recently been told—who he was. how
he’d been born. Built. That the man who’d been visiting him every six
months for “games and tests” as an “education specialist” was actually a
geneticist named Jacobson who’d been paying his parents fifty grand a
year to keep their mouths shut about their nontraditional adoption and
his visits. They’d even showed him the bloody naked woman they’d had
in the trunk.
The five boys had left him with that information and then, as they’d
been finished with the rest of his family, had gotten back into their car
and driven off. Leaving him, for the first time, it seemed, to decide his
own fate.
The first thing the boy had done was to cover his family’s faces with
open notebooks to hide their vacant, glassy gazes, the steadily graying
skin. he’d emptied the pantry for food. found cash in his mother’s
purse. Gotten himself up each morning for the last week of school.
Afraid, he’d told Castillo, of where the police would put him if they
knew his parents were dead. Afraid he’d be blamed. Afraid they’d make
him live with strangers.
Afraid.
Castillo couldn’t worry about that today. he wouldn’t. he’d make
the call, and in a couple of hours, the good doctors from DSTI would
arrive. What happened then, where those men decided to reshuffle their
eleven-year-old lab rat, was not his concern. It wasn’t his mission. his
mission was explicitly to apprehend these boys, them and their genetic
brothers. To bring them back to DSTI. Back to the test tubes and computers. The neurochemical testing and mind games. Back to the lab
where they’d each been made. And how long before they authorized
other options if capture proved too problematic? he rememered his
empty threats to erdman about reporting them all if he suspected any
mistreatment.
My mission.
What would they really do with these kids?
Make the phone call.
I found one.
Me and Jeff.
After Cain.