The Killing Type (23 page)

Chapter 25

Pauley, Tony, the last one.

Chapter 26

Some crimes have no resolution and
some provide no solace when they are resolved. The victims are
still victims, and the people who have suffered only vicariously
and vacuously in front of the television are no better off knowing
who the killer is and why he did what he did. That, I fear, is the
case here. I came to this town with a plan in mind and did not just
flail into murder out of frustration. Academia was the forum that I
believe I was destined and gifted to perform in, and at the risk of
sounding melodramatic I will tell you that my rejection by brutes
because of my theories, because of the research I had worked so
diligently on and had hoped to work on with even more industry in
the years to come—that broke my heart. I decided on a path of
murder with the same defeatist resolve as the man who decides on
suicide. I concluded that it was all over, that I was not going to
get the life that I wanted after all, and that I would give it all
up and at least go out with some degree of integrity, however
factitious. I did have some fun contriving all those emails from
the supposed killer, but apart from that I really did not get much
of a chance to exercise the writing and research skills which
generally fester in me.

I feel worst about Tony, who
is the only non-random victim in this decimal, alphabetical little
rampage of mine. She was a convenient
P
in my traverse across the
QWERTY
row of the keyboard
(
you I owe
in
between), a fine accident, a nice way to end the run, wrap it all
up, make my point, as they say, and then move on, as they say some
more. She’s been a good distraction for both writer and reader
in—what shall I call it?—this memoir (sounds kind of grand and
innocent)? story (a little plain)? confession? I wish I had never
met her, frankly, so that my tally could have been pure and
unsullied by anything resembling personal vengeance. Other days,
though, I revel in the serendipidity of it: the one person who had
more details about me and about the murders—and who might have put
it all together—and that person turns out to be alphabetically
correct as well. Maybe there is a God.

It’s a small thing that I have done, a
petty insistence on making my point about the value of keyboard
research by choosing victims whose last names began with a letter
along a row of that very keyboard. A big bully pushes me down in
the mud, and I push ten other smaller people off a cliff. There are
big issues implicit in all of this though: academic freedom,
general decency ... Perhaps the trumpetting of those ideals may
seem disingenuous from the mouth (the pen, the keyboard) of a
killer, but I don’t think that the abdication of one tenet of
civilized humanity disqualifies a person from all of
them.

I wish I felt better about
the whole project, I sincerely do. Or, to put it more accurately: I
wish I felt either better
or
worse. I wish I felt
something
. These ten bodies, these
scores of lives I have ruined—it all is just so much past history,
typed pages, nothing but things that are now complete and which I
plan to move away from with the same slow haste I have carried out
my atrocities in the first place.