Very Bad Deaths Page 8

  “What does he plan to do with them, now he’s located them?”

  “They apparently have a weekly family ritual. Every week on the same night, and God I wish I knew which night, they order pizza and all eat together. Next week they’re going to get a special pie. The last truly free choice any of them will ever make in their lives will be whether to fall on their faces or land on their backs.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I murmured.

  “A couple of minutes after they make their choice, he’ll enter their home. He’ll cut each of them out of their clothes, superglue the backs of their hands to the outsides of their thighs, and wire their ankles together. Once he has all four secured and gagged with tape, he’ll pack them into his van, and drive it up the Sea to Sky Highway to a tract of woodland he has, miles from anywhere. He’ll drive a few miles into the woods, carry them one at a time from the van into a small log cabin, and hang them up on the hooks meant for that purpose. And then he’ll wait, controlling his eagerness, for them to wake up.”

  “Zandor,” I said, “I think we can stop here, okay? I don’t think I need those specifics after all. I think I’ve got the picture. As much of it as I need, anyway.”

  “Almost,” he said. “I will spare you the details. In part because if I try to s-s-speak them I believe I will vomit on your carpet. Repeatedly. But the general outline of the…event, at least, I believe you have to know. You do not yet grasp the kind of mind I am talking about. You are imagining mere de Sadean nightmares. This man is much worse. You need to have some sense of how much worse.”

  “Okay,” I heard myself say.

  “You are thinking in terms of torture, rape, murder, perhaps some sort of gruesome post-mortem mutilation.” He shook his head. “Think horror. Think maiming—physical and mental. Think total psychological breakdown, annihilation of the personality, catastrophic ego collapse. Think heartbreak, despair.

  “And when you think of mere physical pain, think first of the absolute maximum agony that a human nervous system can endure before dying. And then square that, or cube it, because he has drugs. Magical drugs—blackest black magic. Some he found in the more obscure parts of the standard pharmacopoeia and adapted to his purpose, and some he developed himself. A drug that makes it impossible to lose consciousness, to pass out from pain. A drug that keeps the heart strong under sustained stress. A drug that makes pain hurt more—two or three times as much, he thinks. Another that enhances fear, promotes panic. Another that makes time pass much more slowly than normal. Whatever was the worst excruciation ever visited on any human by another since the dawn of time, that is where Allen begins.”

  I closed my eyes and probed at them with my fingers until the rainbow kaleidoscopes came. “Jesus, Jesus. Zandor, I can’t—”

  “Broad outlines only, we agreed. All right. He will take two full days to kill each one. First the father, then the daughter, then the son.”

  I opened my mouth to say, stop, no more, and he abruptly stopped talking.

  He was silent for so long I stopped rubbing my eyes and opened them. He had his eyes closed, and was rubbing them with his fingers to make the kaleidoscopes work.

  “Saves the mother for last,” I said, just to be saying something. “Let me guess: he takes three days to kill her.”

  He let his hands fall to his lap. “Oh, no. No, not at all. I’m telling this wrong if you take him for so kind a man. No, he doesn’t kill her.”

  I felt my stomach shriveling up inside me. “Aw Jesus—the dirty, dirty, dirty—that’s sicker than—how can he possibly take the risk of leaving her alive? Is he that scary? Can he really break someone so totally that for the rest of his life he can absolutely rely on their silence?”

  “Probably he could,” Zudie said. “But why depend on it? He will use a combination of injury and drugs to render her permanently quadriplegic and aphasic. How ironic, the highway patrol will think: she managed to leap from the family vehicle just before it went over that cliff, and then ruined herself for life when she landed. And she won’t be able to tell them any different. She will be placed in some institution somewhere, with absolutely nothing to do but go over her memories. For years and years. Allen plans to visit her regularly—”

  The thing about having a swivel chair in your office, you really don’t actually need the swivel feature a whole lot, but then when you do, it’s gold. I managed to get nearly all the vomit into the wastebasket.

  “Now, you’re getting it,” he said. “I’ll stop now.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and heaved again. “Really.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  I wiped my mouth, drew in a big breath, and screamed, “What kind of a—”

  And stopped, stymied.

  “Yes, that’s the worst of it,” he said after a while. “You want to use a word like ‘animal’ or ‘reptile’ or ‘beast’…but you know no animal is capable of such behavior. It’s hard to admit, but the only word that applies is ‘human.’ So your question is, what kind of a human being can do such things to another human being?”

  “Yes, I guess it is.” I cracked a fresh half-liter of bottled water and rinsed my mouth.

  “The only answer is to point to him and say ‘That kind.’ There is no kind. He’s one of a kind. We all are, but he more than most. He may very well be literally one of a kind. If that kind of brain mutation is a one-in-six-billion freak, then he’s probably the one we have this season. If it’s only a one-in-a-billion freak, there could be enough of him to form a basketball team. Or perhaps it occurs once every ten trillion births, and he’s the only one in recorded history. I doubt that.

  “But I don’t know. And I don’t think it matters. He is the one I know about. He is the one we have to stop.”

  I took another long drink of water, wiped the neck of the bottle, and offered it to him. He took it, drank deep, handed it back. I looked over at the empty top of the bookcase just to the left of the office door. It is the place where I used to keep a large framed photo of Susan, back when I could bear to. Removing the photo had probably been pointless, because every time I saw the bare top of that bookcase I thought of the photo. And therefore of Susan. I could imagine what she’d have made of all this. She’d have been as horrified and demoralized and sick at heart as I felt now, of course. But underneath that would have been a substratum of a strange primitive excitement. The thrill of the hunt—all the cleaner because this prey needed killing. She’d have turned us into Nick and Nora, or Simon Templar and Patricia Holm, insisted that we make laconic wisecracks as we went along, made the whole thing an adventure. Thinking about that, I started to feel faint stirrings of that excitement myself.

  “All right,” I said, “let’s bag this bastard. Tomorrow I’ll go into town, downtown to the cop shop, and start what I confidently predict will be one hell of a lot of talking. We’ll have them run his background—if he’s as sick as you say he is, there has to be something there—and we’ll make up enough lies about things we’ve supposedly seen in his house to let them get a search warrant—God knows what they’ll—what?” I had finally noticed the expression on his face.

  He cleared his throat. “I didn’t say this was going to be easy.”

  3.

  I closed my eyes, took in a long, slow breath, let it out. “What’s the problem?”

  “I can’t…you don’t…it isn’t like…” He stopped talking until he had a sentence he was prepared to go with to the end. “What I did, what happened to me was like looking over somebody’s shoulder as he works at his computer. He may have twenty gigabytes of data in there, but all I can see is what he’s working on—the couple of hundred megabytes or so that’s the maximum his computer can keep in RAM.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  “I got a lot of information about Allen. But all I got was what he chose to think about, during the half minute or so I was reading him—plus some of the inferential and referential links to other things. I know a great deal about his relationship w
ith God, tons about his idea of the perfect sexual experience, and enough of what he calls his philosophy of pain to gag Hugh Hefner.

  “But during the brief time he was in my range, he never happened to think his last name. Or his home address. I know where his remote forest horror hideaway is—but not where he lives. I know the full names of some of his most recent victims—but not his last name.”

  “Shit.” Then: “Shit!” And: “Shit!”

  “How often do you think of your last name?”

  “Okay. Okay, you said he was a software designer with some success. We’ll get somebody to give us a giant stack of mug shots and wade through them until…you’ve got that look again.”

  “During that minute or two I was in his head, he did place himself in a fantasy more than once—but when he did, he never bothered to fill in his face. Actually, his whole body was really just a sketch. Except for the—”

  “You’re telling me you don’t know his last name, his address or what he looks like. Just that he butchers people with extreme savagery and ingenuity. And has issues with God.”

  He nodded. “That’s what I’m telling you.”

  “And you want me to tell this to the police for you.”

  He nodded again. “I’d do it myself if I could.”

  “What’s wrong with the mail?”

  He shook his head. “It’s hard enough to believe a story like this if someone looks you in the eye and tells it with great sincerity. On paper…they wouldn’t read past the first page. Not to mention the fact that we probably don’t have a week to wait while Canada Post transports a piece of paper ten miles. And e-mail gets even less attention and less respect from cops than regular mail.”

  I noticed for the first time that I’d had a pounding headache for several minutes now.

  “Zudie, I literally wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  “You’re a journalist.”

  I sighed. “A lot of people make that mistake, because my work appears alongside that of journalists. What I am is a columnist. I don’t break stories, investigate leads, cultivate sources, or any of that crap. What I do, I read the papers, and when I notice something that pisses me off, I think about it awhile, do a little research, and then write a thousand words about it and get paid. The paper I write for is the national newspaper—but it’s published in Toronto. I don’t have a single connection in local government, either municipal or provincial, and I don’t know a soul in the Vancouver police force or RCMP, and I don’t have any savvy reporter buddies to ask. If I did, all they could tell me is how such things are done in Toronto. I don’t—”

  He raised his voice slightly; the effect was as if any other man had bellowed. “God damn it, Russell, stop dodging and let’s get this thing done. Okay?”

  I was not used to this aggressive and proactive a Zudie. But then, I wasn’t used to a stenchless one, either. In my memory Zudie was a figure of fun, not someone who told you to be a man. Most annoying of all, he was right.

  “I will if you will,” I said finally.

  “What are you—oh, no! Forget it.”

  One thing about conversing with a telepath: you don’t waste many words making yourself clear. “Who’s dodging now?”

  “I can’t, Russell.”

  “Dammit, be reasonable! If I want the police to go on a snipe hunt for the Marquis de Sodom, I have to bring them something. You are absolutely all I got.”

  “I told you, I—oh. Oh. Brilliant! I see what you—”

  “You said you have satellite web access out there on your island…”

  He nodded. “And a webcam. I could put together a software package and e-mail it to you. It’ll let us set up a closed two-way, live video and audio. Oh, shit. Really? Why?”

  I shrugged. “What can I tell you? I’m a Macintosh guy.”

  He grimaced. “Okay, I can still do it. Take a little tweaking, that’s all.”

  “So if I can—somehow—persuade a cop to talk with you—”

  “As long as I don’t have to physically be anywhere near him, yes, I can manage that. Very good thinking, Russell. You see my problem. I’m not used to thinking of ways of communicating with people. I think of ways to avoid it.”

  I had my eyes closed. I was running a little mental movie of Zudie in closed circuit converse with The Man, and it did not please me. “Ah, you know, cops are freaked out by good computers, maybe it might be better if, just to start, we kept it to audio-only—or maybe even just text, for the first—”

  I opened my eyes and found him glaring at me.

  “Russell, what is the point of trying to be diplomatic with a mind reader? I’m not offended. I know what I look like. And sound like. And you’re right, put them together, I come across like exactly the kind of guy that calls up the cops and says I can read people’s minds, you gotta arrest this rich guy. Text it is.”

  “No, I’m wrong,” I said. “Text-only is worse than nothing at all. Why do people communicate online by text-only?”

  He saw my point at once, of course. “So they can lie if they want.”

  I nodded. “Even cops know that by now.”

  “Would it help if I altered my voice?”

  I flinched. He had asked the question in Bill Doane’s voice, still instantly recognizable over a gap of decades. “Maybe. But don’t alter it that much, or it’ll sound phony. A slight variation on your own voice is the way to go.”

  “Okay. So we avoid the internet altogether, and just do this by phone then, right? Aw jeeze, Russell, make up your mind, okay?”

  “I know, I know. Forgive me: you’d think by now I’d have a simple thing like connecting mind readers to The Man down pat.”

  “I’m sorry. I know this must be—”

  “It’s just I was thinking that disembodied voices on the phone don’t carry much more weight with cops than a chat room typist does. If your testimony is going to count for anything, it’ll be because you delivered it to his face, looking him in the eye, prepared to answer questions about your story.”

  “Even if I do look like Baby Huey and sound like Marvin the Martian?”

  He was right: there was no sense even pretending to be diplomatic with a telepath. I spread my hands. “Yeah. That makes it tougher, but yeah.”

  “Okay, I’ll send you the software tonight. What time is it?”

  I glanced up at the clock over my office door. “Half past broccoli.”

  Susan found the clock at a yard sale on another island, even more remote than ours. The numbers are all represented by farm products. One is a carrot. Two is a pair of onions. Twelve is a dozen eggs. And so on. Four o’clock is represented by four little clumps of broccoli.

  Anyone else would probably have stared at me as if I’d lost my mind. Zudie just nodded, of course. “I have to be out of here by a quarter to turnip at the latest.”

  Turnips are five. “So soon?”

  He nodded. “People start getting up by then. I want to be in my boat, pooting home, when they do.”

  “Where are you moored? Not down at the marina.”

  “Of course not. I tied up to a sheltered little dock at an empty house not far from here, about a mile up the road that way.” He gestured.

  “How could you be sure the house was…I withdraw the question with as much dignity as I can muster. What kind of boat do you have?”

  He looked at me. “Would the answer mean anything to you at all?”

  He had me there. “Not a thing.”

  “So why ask?”

  “To keep the conversation going. That way after you’re gone and I think of the dozen intelligent questions I should have asked you, at least I won’t be remembering any gaping holes in the conversation during which I could have asked them if I’d thought of them yet.”

  He rummaged on my desk and located one of those little pads of white notepaper that no handheld computer is ever going to replace, found a pen and started scribbling. “I already have your private and work email addresses, and your phone num
ber.” Well, of course he did. “I’ll give you my e-mail, a couple of URLs and my phone code. Anything we forget we can deal with later. I presume you have broadband?”

  “Just,” I agreed. “They only got the cable out here to us a few months ago. I still can’t get over how fast everything loads. You must have some kind of fancy satellite rig, eh? How does it…you’re right, forget it, the answer would mean nothing to me. Is it expensive? That’s what I do want to know, I guess. How well off are you, Zudie? How do you pay for things? I seem to remember your family had money.”

  “They’re all gone now, and so is that money,” he said. “I support myself.”

  “Do you mind if I ask how?”

  “Not when you phrase it that politely. These days I gamble online.”

  My eyebrows rose. “Ah. I see.”

  He reddened slightly. “I don’t cheat. Exactly.”

  I nodded. “But you know a hell of a lot more about the mathematics of probability than anybody else in the game—including the house.”

  “A hell of a lot more. Thank God for the Indians.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Most of the online gambling outfits are the same people that own casinos in Vegas and Atlantic City. They share information. As soon as one house notices that your luck is literally incredible, they all know it, and what you look like and your Visa number and your ISP. But lately some of the Indian tribes with casinos of their own have been going into online gambling too, in a big way. And they don’t share information. They hate each other more than they fear people like me. I exploit this error.”

  I nodded. “Terrific. That’s going to really impress the cops. You’re Bret Maverick, the riverboat gambler of cyberspace.”