Psychopath (16 page)

Help me fight this battle.  My Armageddon.  Help me be reborn, good and decent, as I once was.  Be my healer.

I am male.  I am in the middle of my life.  I have never been imprisoned.  I have no history of psychiatric treatment.  I hear no voices.  I see no visions.  I use no alcohol nor any illicit drug.  I have no medical illness.

My IQ is in the range of genius, yet my intellect is no shield from the base needs that overcome me.  Were I sitting with you now, I would tell you that I feel a crushing loneliness, a gaping, raw hole inside me.  The pain is simultaneously physical and psychological.  It makes me weep like a child.  And it is this excruciating isolation that leads me to take the lives of others.  Something in witnessing the purity and truthfulness of death connects me to all living things and brings me peace.  I am laid to rest beside each of my victims.

They are luckier than I:  my rest is never permanent.  My hunger begins anew, sometimes hours, sometimes days, sometimes weeks later.

I cannot feed my soul in the usual ways.  I have no friends, no loving family.  I keep no pet.  I have no home.  I wander endlessly.

My mother was kind and gentle, a woman beyond reproach.  My father was a monster.  Perhaps I embody that dichotomy.

I was the product of a normal pregnancy and delivery.  I was psychologically and physically healthy as a child, save for having experienced paralyzing school phobia.

I had few interests as a young man, but achieved academically with ease, dated frequently, but never married.

I have had over 300 sexual partners in my life.  I am heterosexual.

Since you were, no doubt, briefed on my case by the FBI, you know that I take blood from each of my victims.  I carry that bit of them with me.  A talisman, perhaps.

But I also carry their souls inside me.  And in that way, they are still alive.

To save you the energy of wondering, I will tell you that I learned the skill of venipuncture as a decorated army medic.  Honorable discharge.  No disciplinary action.

My proposal:  You may put any question to me.  I will tell you everything I can, without risking my freedom (which is simply the freedom to find God, something I do not believe I could achieve while incarcerated, likely on death row).  I would like you to try to be equally open with me, to minimize the chances that you and I remaining strangers would cause me to feel even more alone and more in need of the lifeblood of others.

To trust you, I need you to trust me.

You solve crimes?  What crimes have been perpetrated upon you?  Of what crimes, great or small, are you guilty?

You adopted a troubled boy.  Were you a troubled boy?  Are you still that boy?

Are you, like me — and like young Billy Bishop — struggling to be reborn?

Hold my hand, look into my heart, let me see into yours.  Unearth my demons and help me exorcise them from my soul.

—A Man of God

They Call the Highway Killer

There are moments in a person’s life that are like chemical titration points, that crystallize everything that has come before them and change the very nature of everything that will come after them.  They are life-altering and life-defining.  For Clevenger, reading the words of the Highway Killer was such a moment.  His skin turned to gooseflesh.  Shivers ran up the back of his neck.  He walked to North Anderson’s door.

"What do you think?" Anderson said, swiveling in his desk chair to face him.

"It’s for real.  He’s reaching out."

"What are you going to do?"

"Part of me would like to keep my distance, just to burn Warner, but I don’t see how I can anymore."

"Neither do I.  If I were you, I’d get down to Quantico and learn everything there is to know about this guy.  Visit the crime scenes.  View the bodies.  Don’t take anyone’s word for anything.  If it’s your case, make it your case top to bottom.  I’ll help any way you need me to."

Clevenger nodded.

"You look worried."

"I don’t like the part about Billy," Clevenger said.  "I don’t want him dragged into this.  He’s been doing great.  At work every day.  Clean drug screens.  And he’s really starting to open up."  He shrugged.  "He came into my room last night and talked about how much he still craves the pot — and the coke.  And he told me more about this girl Casey he’s been hanging around with."

"Great."

"But I can never be sure the next tox screen won’t turn up dirty.  I can never be sure of anything with him."

"I’m sure of one thing about him," Anderson said.

"What’s that?"

"He knows what it is to lose someone to murder.  Deep down, he knows why you do what you do."

"Think about how many reporters are outside already.  Day one.  It’s only going to get bigger.  I don’t want him to feel like he’s losing me.  Nothing would be worth that."

"I think if you tell him that he’ll see he never could."

Clevenger dialed Kane Warner.  The secretary put him right through.

"Doctor," Warner said.

"If we’re going to work together," Clevenger said, "no more surprises.  I get blindsided again, I’m gone."

"Fine," he said stiffly.

"Did the Times publish everything the Highway Killer wrote?"

"They held nothing back."

"I expect the same."

"I understand," Warner said.  "But it will be important to work closely with the team you met here."

"I’d like to come down tomorrow."

"I’ll expect you."

"One more question," Clevenger said.

"Okay."

"Why did you decide to print it?"

"It wasn’t my decision," Warner said.

"I’m supposed to believe that?"

"I asked the
Times
not to publish it.  I think it’s much too dangerous for you to play Freud from a distance.  If you happen to hit a psychological hot button in one of your little ‘sessions,’ we might pay for it in body bags."

"If you weren’t the one who gave the green light," Clevenger said, "then..."

"The newspaper went over my head," Warner said.  "To the director’s office."

"Jake Hanley?"

"Jake’s a friend of the publisher of the
Times
, Kyle Roland.  He’s also considering a run for Senate back home in Colorado.  A serial killer on the loose doesn’t do much for his popularity.  He wants this thing to be over — no matter how it ends."  Warner paused.  "May I ask you a question?"

"Shoot."

"You wouldn’t work with me a month ago.  You turned me down cold.  So what gives?  Is there finally enough publicity in it for you?"

Clevenger was too angry to answer with anything other than obscenities.  So he stayed silent.  And in that silence he had to ask himself the same question Warner had put to him.  Had he been seduced?  Had his fee in narcissism finally been paid?

"You probably aren’t sure of the answer yourself," Warner said.  "It doesn’t matter.  We’re on the same team now — just a couple bodies later."

Clevenger cleared his throat.  "I’ll be there by 10:00
A.M.
tomorrow."

"Whitney McCormick will meet you in the lobby.  She can start updating you."

Clevenger hung up.  He looked out his window at the crowd of reporters.  He stood up, drew his blinds, then sat back down at his desk.  He reread the letter from the Highway Killer.  Then he turned on his computer and began to plan how he would respond.

His goal was clear.  He believed all killers had been emotionally murdered themselves.  In taking one life or many lives they were replaying their own deaths, casting themselves as aggressors, rather than victims — as powerful, rather than weak.  He wanted to slowly, methodically trace the roots of the Highway Killer’s violence back to whatever early life traumas had spawned it.  He wanted to make him grieve over his own destruction, instead of reenacting it again and again.

This would indeed be a resurrection, a rebirthing of the tortured child inside the killer.

That child had a conscience, could experience guilt, and might be coaxed either to surrender the killer or trip him up.

The child craved intimacy.  To have any hope of stemming the Highway Killer’s violence, Clevenger would have to provide that intimacy.

But the child was also consumed by fear.  Trying to get too close too fast would make him flee.

Clevenger started to type:

I agree to respond to each of your letters.  I understand you will tell me everything you can without risking your freedom.  I will tell you everything I can without violating the privacy of others, including my son.

I know you are not a killer at heart.  Your goodness has been overtaken again and again by something foreign to you.  A parasite inside you causes hunger so unbearable that you feed it the lives of others.  I will call that parasite the Highway Killer.  How shall I address the rest of you ?

How did you become infected?  What in your life caused you the worst pain?  What do you remember being most frightened of as a child?  Did it ever become clear why you experienced ‘paralyzing school phobia’?  At what age was that condition worst?  What was happening at home at that time? 

What did your anxiety feel like — physically and emotionally? 

To say that your mother was beyond reproach and that your father was a monster leaves much unanswered.  In what specific ways did she demonstrate her goodness, and in what specific ways did he cause you to suffer?  Did they divorce?  If not, what kept them together?  Are they still alive?

To whom were your 300 lovers attracted — the Highway Killer or you?  Did they help satisfy his appetite or yours?  Is this an appetite for emotional union, sexual union, or both?

What war did you serve in?  If in Vietnam, in which provinces?  Did you see combat?

If we succeed in exorcising the killer inside you, what will be left?  Who are you, absent the Highway Killer?

When were you first aware of his existence?

How do you feel immediately after the Highway Killer strikes?  How many times has he killed?  List all the places where bodies lie.

You asked several questions of me.  To answer the first, the crimes perpetrated upon me include having been beaten and humiliated by my father.  Like you, I know something about monstrous men.  To answer the second, the crimes of which I am guilty include trying for years to quell my pain with alcohol and drugs.

What drugs have you used to try to subdue the Highway Killer?

What do you do with the blood you take from victims?

Because you obviously have read the words of great men, I close with Thomas Hardy’s:  "If a way to the better there be, it lies in taking a full look at the worst."

So we begin, two men against one killer.

—Frank Clevenger, MD

Clevenger returned home that evening to find Billy Bishop sitting at the dining room table, in jeans and no top, his "Let it Bleed" tattoo looking especially stark across his perfectly defined back, a pile of books and dozens of photocopied newspaper articles in front of him.  "What’s all this?" he asked, walking up behind him.  Then his heart fell as he scanned the newspaper headlines, all of them about the Highway Killer.  The books were about serial killers.  A sense of foreboding gripped him.

Billy swung his dreadlocks out of his face as he looked up at him.  His eyes were pure excitement.  "I figured I might as well help out in my spare time."

"Help out..."

"A bunch of reporters found me at the shipyard," he said, speaking a little too quickly.  "I told them I had nothing to say.  Then I ran and got the
Times
myself.  I know you’re taking the case.  How could you not?"  He winked.  "By the way, there are about twenty messages from reporters on the machine."

Clevenger looked at the articles, again.  They were from papers across the country.

"I’ve got all the coverage on this guy," Billy said.  "Everything from the
Oregonian
to the
Washington Post
."

One thing Clevenger hadn’t expected was that Billy, far from resenting his involvement in the Highway Killer case, would be drawn to the case himself.  But it made sense.  The biggest event in his life had been the murder of his infant sister.  And before that tragedy, his own brutal father had victimized him again and again.  The snuffing out of lives would always resonate with him.

Clevenger sat at the head of the table.  "I don’t think this is a good idea," he said.  "You’ve got to focus on staying healthy and getting yourself ready for school."

"I couldn’t exactly stay at the shipyard with television crews surrounding me.  Mr. Fitzgerald told me to take the day off."

"I understand that," Clevenger said.  "And I can see you’re trying to be helpful."  He took a deep breath and tried to collect his thoughts so he could share them in a useful way.  "But I also know what you’ve been through in your life.  And I think you need to build a stronger foundation before getting involved in something like this."

"I’m not
involved
.  I’m just..."

"I don’t want you becoming preoccupied with it."