[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
reported last September.
Before you woke up, I did some figuring on that, I said. Taking in the
fact a lot of the reports came in late, they were probably all kidnapped
sometime in the early part of the last week of August. Personally, I think
that s a little too big a coincidence.
This is August, Leonard said.
Yep. And week after next is the last week of the month.
So what s with the last week of August?
I don t know. It sounds like a pattern, but I also got to thinking about the
smell that was in that grave. That s fresh, or seems to be. So maybe all this
late-August stuff is just coincidence and he got started a little early this
year, but I don t think so. Stink could be due to slow disintegration. Soil
like that, sometimes it happens, something gets buried just right.
Another thing that jumps out at me is all the children were illegitimate. No
fathers. The mothers were all teenagers. Couple of the kids had been shuffled
around to foster homes, had been in some kind of trouble almost before they
were out of diapers. Little robberies. Drugs. Stuff kids ought not to even be
thinking about. See the pattern?
I don t know that s a pattern, Leonard said. Not the way you mean, anyway.
Just shows they re the type of kids to be at risk.
Well, we ve already got our good Reverend in mind here, due to the church
connections, coupons, recycling which explains all those goddamn newspapers
Uncle Chester had. And if you remember, Fitzgerald really had a hard-on for
illegitimate children. Do you recall anything he said that stuck with you?
It all stuck with me. . . . Yeah, when he was talking about the mothers of
illegitimate children, he said the mothers had produced baby boys. He didn t
say girls, or children. He said baby boys without fathers. Something like
that.
It didn t mean anything to me then, I said, not really, but I caught it.
What I think is, we got a religious nut serial killer. He s somehow tied his
religion in with his sex and power urges. I don t know, maybe something that
happened to him in his childhood.
Shit, Hap, I don t give a damn what happened to him in his childhood. I
mean, he got fucked by his next-door neighbor who was a scout leader, I m
sorry for the kid he was, but for the man he is, I don t give a shit. He made
his own choice.
I don t know some people have a choice, if certain things happen to them.
Cancer does what it does because it s got no choice, but I get a cancer, I m
not going to psychoanalyze the little bastard. I want it cut out. This guy s a
cancer.
Even so, if we understand what drives him, we got a better chance of nailing
his ass. Obviously, he doesn t care for illegitimacy. Gets him worked up.
Page 111
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
OK, Hap, I ll play. He s got a thing for boys, so he was maybe nine, ten,
when he was raped by a man. Good guess?
Probably a person of authority.
A preacher like himself? That what you re driving at? Something that links
God, religion, sex, and abuse together.
If Fitzgerald was illegitimate, I wonder if he knew who his father was and
what his father did for a living? Preach, maybe? And think about the position
Fitzgerald s in. It s perfect. He s trusted. He has access to children. He has
all these youth programs. Kids like the ones in this file, neglected, probably
not wanted, they d be raw meat for this wolf. And I think this guy s a
psychotic, not a sociopath. Or he s both. He gets off on the power of
controlling the kids, and he thinks he s doing God s will. He controls them to
some extent through positive services. Baseball, soccer, what have you, but
It s not enough.
For certain illegitimate children, it isn t enough. The ones that maybe
remind him of himself at that age. If he can control them, destroy them, he
can control his past, destroy it. At least for a year at a time.
But why a year? We re talking a pretty perfect pattern here.
I don t know.
OK, Hap. When he was nine or ten, he was raped by a man, his father maybe,
who was a preacher. Or he was raped by a preacher. If not a preacher, someone
in authority he trusted. It warped him. And he s a religious nut. That your
track?
Yep.
OK. He s tied fanaticism in with his deviance. That s why there s a page of
Psalms stuck in each of the porno mags we found. The two are linked with him.
Or maybe a part of him knows what he s doing is evil, and somehow the Psalms
consecrate it in his mind. Say he s a psychotic. That he s killing for God.
Any of that s true, it doesn t take us one whit closer to nailing the bastard.
Let s just try and put together the hard evidence, and you can play Freud on
your own time. Come on. What have we got?
That s the problem, I said. I don t know it s such hard evidence. But
here s what I think we ve got, and what I speculate. Your Uncle Chester and
Illium were friends, Illium worked with the church. That s why Uncle Chester s
poor addled mind thought the coupons were important. He was trying to point a
finger at the church. The painting led us to the Hampstead place, and what s
under it. We ve already established what the book s connection was.
Illium, Leonard said. And maybe with the title of the book, he was trying
to give us the nature of our criminal. Dracula ain t nothing compared to this
guy.
I think your uncle and Illium, probably because of something Illium saw at
the church, got onto Fitzgerald. Perhaps the way he dealt with the boys in the
programs there, the illegitimate ones especially. And somehow Chester and
Illium connected him to the Hampstead place. Could be the good Reverend makes
a pilgrimage up there to worship the water stain or something, Illium
followed, watched from hiding. Fitzgerald went home to memorize his sermon,
Page 112
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
and Uncle Chester and Illium poked around and found the bodies. Six of them
anyway. I bet the other two are up there.
So my uncle took one of the bodies and hid it here while he and Illium did
their own investigation. Probably in case the old boy moved the remains.
That s where they screwed up. They should have gone to the cops.
Yeah, Leonard said, and by not going, the body being found here, it just
helped give the Reverend a way out.
That s right, I said. Your uncle loses his memory, dies, so he s out of
the picture. Add Illium into the equation, dead at the bottom of his pond with
porno mags and kid s clothes on the couch, and the Reverend isn t going to
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]