The Soul Hunter (20 page)

Profane screams were punctuated by the cracked syllables of words in a language I didn’t recognize. He threw his head back again, knocking himself to the floor as his chair flew backwards. He struggled to his feet and leapt at the end of his chain, a mad, rabid yard dog. He lunged toward the mirror and looked me straight in the eye.

I flinched and took a step backward.

He screamed and lunged again at the mirror, slamming himself against his chain. Deep red stains began to spread at his wrists.

The man next to me touched my elbow and escorted me out.

He was a cop, I think, judging from his empty holster and the respectful brown suit he wore. He didn’t introduce himself, just said, “Wait here,” and went back in.

I found myself alone in the outer room, the fluorescent lighting buzzing in my ears. My legs were trembling and I was cold and dizzy. My heartbeat was loud and fast in my ears, my face hot, and I couldn’t stop shivering. There were no chairs in the room—only the table with the lone monitor—so I crossed my arms and sank to the floor, my back to the wall, and put my head down on my knees.

I huddled there for a minute or so, my head down, breathing. In and out, I told myself. In and out.

I could hear Pryne’s shrieks, tinny now through the monitor. He seemed far away, though in fact I’d only increased the cushion between us by a few feet and one locked door. The distance didn’t seem nearly enough.

I closed my eyes instinctively to pray, my head still down, breathing, though the words wouldn’t come.

The screaming stopped abruptly.

I looked up at the monitor.

Pryne had collapsed and lay motionless on the floor. Jackson and McKnight were leaning over him.

I stood and walked to the monitor.

“He’s conscious,” McKnight said. Then shouting to Pryne, “Can you hear me? Gordon?”

Pryne balled himself up and began to weep, his body heaving with each tormented sob. He began babbling, this time in English. I leaned in, straining to hear the words.

“Why can’t they leave me alone?” he said. “No, no, no. Leave me alone.”

The man in the brown suit entered the room and said something to Jackson and McKnight. They left the interrogation room and came to find me.

“Parkland’s coming,” Jackson said to me, without a hello. “Need to bring a stretcher through here.”

“Should I…?”

“If you could wait,” McKnight said. “We’ll have someone drop you back at headquarters. Couple of blocks from here. We’ll be about fifteen minutes or so.”

He opened the door to the hallway and stopped a uniformed cop walking by.

“Take Dr. Foster back to HQ and put her in the conference room on 5. And get her a cup of coffee or something, will ya?”

I rode with the cop, parked myself in the conference room, and declined the coffee, which infused the entire area with a burnt, acrid smell—like it had been sitting there cooking on that credenza for days. I waited alone at the large oval conference table, until McKnight and Jackson appeared.

They helped themselves to coffee and sat down at the table.

“What do you make of that?” Jackson said. “He got the DTs or something?”

I shrugged. “You mean delirium tremens. Maybe. He’s not
a drinker, though, is he? You know anything about his alcohol habits?”

“Uses everything else on the street,” McKnight said. “Assume he drinks. Would that explain it?”

“I guess if he’d stopped drinking a few days ago, just cold turkey, maybe. But that wouldn’t explain the…personal nature of his behavior. He seemed to be responding to me. Literally to me. It happened the minute I stepped behind the mirror. I don’t know how else to interpret ‘Get her out of here.’ And the fact that he looked me straight in the eye and lunged at the mirror.”

Jackson was shaking his head emphatically. “Gordon Pryne had no way of knowing you were in that room. No way. I didn’t even know you were back there. I just knew McKnight stepped out a couple of times and came back in. That’s it. Pryne had no access to that information. Zero.”

“Not through the regular channels, anyway,” I said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” McKnight asked.

“Look, just…throw away all your logic for a minute. Everything you know to be true about the normal rules and regulations of the planet.”

They looked at one another and then at me.

“What’s your gut feeling? What did you see in that room? You were standing right there.” I waited. “Didn’t you feel it?”

They were silent for a minute. The air in the room began to smell of sweat and tension.

“Evil,” McKnight said at last.

“Yeah,” Jackson said reluctantly. “That’s it. Evil.”

“Okay. So you guys, between you, have done how many interviews over your years on the force?”

“Hundreds,” Jackson said.

“At least,” McKnight said.

“Have you ever felt that before?” I asked.

They both considered the question, looking down at their
stained coffee cups.

“No,” Jackson said at last. It felt almost like an admission, he was so reluctant to say it.

McKnight nodded in agreement. He put his cup down and crossed his arms.

“I seen some very bad things,” Jackson was saying. “Some very bad things. Heard some terrible stories. What people can do to one another. You have no idea. But that…that evil thing. I never seen that before. Never felt that.”

“I think we’re dealing with something here that’s…beyond Gordon Pryne,” I said. “Something outside the bounds of…I don’t know…what you might consider normal reality. The ugly things people do to each other, as you say, that’s people doing it, right? Ugly, sick people, but people. But this thing, this thing that Gordon Pryne just showed us…that’s something else, I think. Something else entirely.”

“What?” McKnight asked. “What is it exactly?”

“I’m not sure it’s quantifiable in any exact sense. I think it might be—”

“You mean, like paranormal. Supernatural,” McKnight said.

“Something like that. Otherworldly, maybe. That might be a way to think about it.”

“How do you know that?” McKnight asked. “I mean, how could that possibly be true?”

“I don’t know. And if I hadn’t seen it myself, I would never have considered it as a possibility. I mean, the guy is just a serial offender, right? Just another in the long line of violent, angry people who shuffle through here, one after another. But didn’t you feel like you were watching something—”

“Like that
Exorcist
movie,” Jackson said. “It was like that.”

“Is it possible he’s just crazy?” McKnight asked. “Just crazy and loony and out of his mind from all the drugs and whatever other garbage he puts into himself?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Do you really think that’s what it is?”

McKnight shook his head, kicked the conference table and shoved his chair back.

“Anyone recognize the language he was talking?” Jackson asked. “Dr. Foster?”

“No. I’ve never heard anything like it before.”

McKnight got up and filled his coffee cup again, then put the cup down without drinking anything and paced the room.

Finally, he looked up at me. “What do we do now? I mean, what would you recommend?”

I shrugged. “Are they sedating him or something?”

“Probably,” Jackson said. “They should call us here in a minute and let us know.”

“They’re restraining him, I hope,” I said.

“Absolutely,” Jackson said.

“Do you guys have a chaplain?” I asked.

They looked at one another and shrugged. “Martinez,” Jackson said at last. “I think his name is Martinez.”

“You think I could talk to him?” I asked.

“We’ll try to find him,” Jackson said. He nodded and McKnight left the room. Jackson excused himself after an awkward moment, leaving me sitting there alone again.

I got up and turned the coffee pot off, then picked up the carafe in one hand and the rest of the machine in the other and walked down the hall, looking for a kitchen. I found one a few doors down and emptied the coffee into the sink. I peeled the wet filter away from the grimy plastic and threw it away, then searched the cabinets for something to scrub with. I found some crummy, industrial paper towels and a bottle of store-brand dish soap. Not my preferred weapons of choice, but sometimes you have to make do in a pinch.

I turned on the hot water, holding my fingers under the stream until I was satisfied with the temperature, and started scrubbing.

I
spent the next hour or so dissecting the video with officers Jackson, McKnight, and Martinez. As the tape began to roll, we stared at the dusty screen in silence, the grim, grainy images gripping us just as they had in real time.

Pryne started the interview like any other offender. Innocent. Wide-eyed shrugs, a studied look of bewilderment, and emphatic, unequivocal denials.

He didn’t know anyone named Drew Sturdivant. He’d never been to Caligula. Okay, maybe once or twice, but everyone goes to strip joints, you guys know how it is, and that don’t make you guilty of murder. That Arlington rap was a frame. He never broke into no apartment and he never raped no one. Some other dude must look just like him.

“The evidence,” McKnight reminded him, “all points to you, Gordon. We got fibers. We got footprints at the scene in your shoe size. You wear a size ten shoe? ’Cause unless I’m missing something, you got a size ten foot. I can see ’em right there.” McKnight pointed at Pryne’s orange jail shoes. “Am I right? Want me to take a look at the size for ya?”

Pryne scooted his feet farther under his chair.

“You wear lug-sole boots, Gordon? ’Cause we got people tearing up your place right now looking for ’em,” Jackson said.

“We got a witness that puts you with Drew Sturdivant right
before she was killed.” McKnight put his hands on the table and stared into Pryne’s eyes. “You were the last person seen with her before she died, Gordon.”

“That’s probably just a coincidence, huh?” Jackson said.

A frame. Somebody was always trying to frame him. He’d never done anything like that in his whole life. Not in his whole life.

“You were convicted of rape six years ago,” Jackson reminded him.

A frame. He was never there. That woman made that whole thing up. Women are always trying to trap you. You have to watch out for women. All they want is to trap you. Everyone knows that.

He didn’t own an ax. He wasn’t on Harry Hines that night. He hardly ever went down to Harry Hines. And he never killed no one.

Denials, lined up and ready to go. Prefab, packaged up, and portable.

The buzz of the coffee maker and the pall of the greenish flat lighting squeezed in on me as I watched the tape. I’d never seen a criminal interrogation before. It was more mundane than on television, of course, but also more depressing because it was real. I pressed my fingers into my temples to keep the headache out of my brain and tried to fight back the urge to give up entirely on any remnant of hope I held for humanity.

It was Martinez who pointed out the first sign of change in Pryne. He paused the tape about fifteen minutes into the interview.

“Anyone notice that?” he asked.

“I did,” I said.

“What did you see, Dr. Foster?” Jackson asked.

“He’s getting agitated.” I turned to McKnight. “What was the last question again?”

He rewound.

“Watch his hands,” I said.

Jackson’s voice came through the speaker. “You’re an innocent
man, then? That’s what you’re telling us. What do you think of that, Detective McKnight? We got us the wrong guy, we’re so dumb.”

We watched as Pryne began to twist his hands, the chains beginning to clink. His face contorted and he shuddered briefly but violently.

“Right. That’s it,” he said, nodding quietly. “The wrong guy. It’s not me. Not me.”

McKnight stopped the tape.

“So what?” Jackson said to us.

“He looked like he thought someone was behind him,” Martinez said.

We watched it again.

Sure enough, as his hands began to move, Pryne glanced back over his shoulder, just for an instant, and then turned back around and shuddered. He made a quick movement with his hands as if he was shooing away a pest.

“Keep going,” I said, feeling the now-familiar sense of dread.

As the tape rolled and the questions continued, Pryne began to deteriorate. I recognized symptoms of crystal meth detoxification. Twitchy agitation. Ridiculous grandiosity followed, rapid-fire, by quaking paranoia.

“You know what’s interesting to me?” I said to McKnight and Jackson. “As Pryne decompensates, you guys are picking up the tension in the room. Like it’s contagious.”

It was true. As Pryne became more agitated, McKnight, Jackson, and the cop guarding the door all started to shift uncomfortably. McKnight was the first to loosen his tie. Jackson began to pace, moving closer to the exit. The uniformed cop moved his hand to his gun and kept it there.

Martinez stopped the tape. “Normally you’d get calmer, right? As he got more upset? To settle him down?”

“Normally, yeah,” McKnight said.

I looked at McKnight and Jackson. They looked at one another, then back at me.