Prayer for the Dead (33 page)

Coasting with his foot off the gas, he counted seconds from the moment the car started downhill. It had taken a count of twelve when he did it in the daylight. At eleven he geared down into second, using his handbrake to slow the car so that the flash of red brake lights would not betray him. His right front tire slipped over the edge of the roadside ditch, and Becker compensated accordingly with the wheel, pulling the car onto the access road. He was moving beneath the shelter of the corn now and was hidden from the view of the house, but still he drove with his lights out. If he turned them on, they would splash off the corn and into the air like a warning beacon for Dyce. If Dyce was there.

Becker waited for a flash of lightning, fixed the path in his mind, and drove straight ahead until the image faded from his retina. Then he stopped and waited for the next flash. When he was within a few yards of the entrance to the farmyard, he stopped. Timing his move with a clash of thunder, Becker opened the car door and stepped into the corn.

Gold’s voice had been running through his mind like a tape since he got into the car and started toward the farm.

“It’s a function of will,” Gold had said. “We all have fantasies. It’s whether we act on them that matters. Most of us don’t. You don’t, Becker.”

“Don’t I?” thought Becker.

“What you do, what you have done—the experience with Bahoud in New York, the incident in Washington, the other times—they
cause
the fantasies. It is not the fantasies that cause the incidents.”

“Incidents. You mean the killings.”

“All right, the killings,” Gold said.

Becker bent between the corn rows and rubbed dirt on his forehead and under his eyes. The turtleneck rolled up to just under his mouth. Lightning flashed and thunder roared so close it seemed to be over the cornfield itself Becker could smell the electricity in the air. Strangely, there was still no rain.

The wind was beating against the corn stalks so fiercely they sounded like acres of crackling cellophane. The earth itself was so noisy there was no need for caution, but Becker moved silently, anyway, from long habit.

Cutting diagonally through the field, Becker came to the edge of the cultivated ground where the corn stopped and the farmyard began. Kneeling, he studied the house and the barn.

His heart seemed to have ascended in his chest and was beating rapidly just beneath his collarbone. Becker recognized the excitement for what it was—an eagerness for action and a tingling of anticipation. There was no fear involved in it. Caution, prudence, but no fear.

“They were all justified,” Gold said. “You were in danger every time. You did what you had to do to save yourself”

“Justified?”

“Justified. Absolutely.”

“But were they necessary?”

Becker approached the barn from the rear where there was nothing but blank wall to watch him. He did not expect to find anything in it, but this was not the time to go on assumptions alone. That was Hatcher’s way, not Becker’s.

“Why are you so sure he’s at the farm?” Hatcher had asked.

Becker said, “I’m not sure of anything,” but he was. He could not say that he was sure because he had come to understand Dyce on a level that Hatcher could not begin to comprehend. The man’s life had fallen apart on him and he had fled to the place where it had all begun, the cruel, twisted injury that had made him what he was. He could not tell Hatcher that he understood the man’s thoughts and needs and darkly contorted emotions just as he had understood Bahoud’s and all of those since then.

He could not tell Hatcher, but he had told Gold.

“Don’t be so damned hard on yourself, man,” Gold repeated now in his mind. “You don’t want to do it; it happens because of circumstances. These are not pussycats the Bureau sends you after. These are multiple murderers, hardened killers who would have killed you in an instant.”

“How do you know I don’t want to do it?”

“How do I know? Because you don’t do it any other time, that’s how I know. What you experience isn’t joy; it’s a final release of adrenaline. You are in great danger, under terrible stress—you are feeling the sense of release, not pleasure. You were brought into this by accident. It turns out you’ve got great skills, but having empathy or understanding for these people does not mean you
are
these people, understand? You have the empathy to be a great shrink. I understand my patients, most of them. That doesn’t mean I am them, doesn’t mean I share their problems—but I understand them.”

The farmhouse had two stone chimneys, one at either end of the house on the exterior. The stone walls had been breached as if a tank had driven through them, but those sections that still stood were enough to hold up the roof beam and the unburned portions of the roof.

There was no blind side from which to approach. Becker counted on the darkness and moved swiftly across the yard. When the lightning struck, he dove for the ground and lay there motionless, hoping that if Dyce had seen his movement he would attribute it to a trick of the night.

He lay still until his heart stopped racing. It was a job he had to do, he told himself. Nothing more. A job. There was a maniac to find, possibly a friend to save if he wasn’t already too late for that.

Becker tried to turn off the tape in his head, but Gold’s voice insisted on being heard.

“I can’t give you absolution, I’m not a priest. I can forgive you, I can understand you.”

“I don’t want that.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to
stop
it.”

“You have stopped. Just keep stopping.”

“And if I go after Dyce? … I do have to go after him now.”

“Good. Find the bastard.”

“And then?”

“He’s killed at least eight men. He may have killed your friend … Find the bastard.”

“And then?”

The first rain hit him as he lay and it felt like the initial gush from a faucet. The clouds opened as if rent asunder by the last lightning bolt. By the time Becker got to his feet, he was already soaked to the skin.

Dyce was talking nonstop from his island in the air, but Tee was not listening. With every ounce of concentration he could muster he tried to move his foot toward the ladder. It was precariously balanced; it would only take a nudge to make it fall, but he could not move, he could not move. It seemed just a fraction away, as if a final effort could awaken his nerves and make them speak to his muscles, but it was a fraction he could not bridge. Tee did not think beyond the ladder. What would happen then, what he hoped to accomplish he could not say. It was an action, the only one available to him, or nearly available, and he had to do something before Dyce sucked him dry and left his husk in the deserted attic of an abandoned shell of a house. If only it didn’t make him so terribly tired to even try to think.

Rain hit the roof over Tee’s face as if a firehose had been trained on the house.

Dyce’s voice rose, claiming Tee’s attention over the noise of the rain. “I’m ready now,” he said.

Tee turned his eyes to look at the maniac. Dyce was standing on his little space of floorboards, his arms spread as if to say, look at me. The container of talcum powder was still in his hand and sprinkles of the white powder drifted off his body. He was completely naked and white as snow. When lightning flashed it illuminated him as if he were lit from inside, but even in the dark he gave off an eerie glow.

The son of a bitch has an erection. Tee thought. He’s mad as a hatter and hard as a rock.

“Remember now, try not to move when you breathe and keep your eyes closed.”

Tee did not need to be told. His eyes were already squeezed shut. Whatever was going to happen, he didn’t want to watch.

From the ground the chimney looked wide enough to hold a man. They had built them large in the last century. Not that Becker expected to find Dyce squirreled away in the chimney—although it was a possibility he did not reject. He had mentioned it to Hatcher just as an example of what he might have overlooked. Even if he had hidden there when the FBI came by, he would probably not be there now, not on a night when he could come out and move without much fear of detection.

The night is better for all of us, Becker thought.

A noise that didn’t come from the storm teased Becker’s hearing, something not wind nor rain but more familiar, chased by the tempest so quickly Becker was not sure if he had heard it or imagined it. He crouched by the side of the first chimney, his shoulder pressed against the stones, readying himself to look into the house itself The porch was dangerous: too many charred boards that could break under his weight or groan to give away his presence—if any noise that weak could be heard now. He skirted the porch, crawling on his stomach to the edge of the wall where it had partially crumbled away.

Lightning like a row of flashbulbs crackled in the sky, giving Becker a full view of the house. He looked up at the space Hatcher had not investigated. Many of the rafters were still intact, but the flooring across them was scattered and broken, a board here, two or three there running only a few feet. It looked like a net with bits of flotsam stuck to the webbing in places. One section was severed by fire into the shape of the letter
C;
another section, three boards wide and tucked against the junction of roof and rafter, was a bit over six feet long. A man, lying perfectly still, could stretch out unseen on that platform. The C might hold a person on his side, but Becker could see why Hatcher had dismissed the attic, or what remained of it, as a hiding place—it could be a sanctuary only for the very imaginative and desperate. But then that was what made Hatcher the way he was. He never credited desperate men with being bold enough to take truly desperate measures. Hatcher judged the men he chased by himself, and assessed their hearts by what he found in his own. And I judge them by myself Becker thought. Which is why I would have looked in the chimneys and Hatcher didn’t. Hatcher is too sane to track the mad.

The light vanished, swallowed by the storm, but Becker had seen something in the last faint illumination, a movement of a ghost against the blackness of the night.

Crouched, he waited for the next flash, which seemed to take forever in coming. Even without the lightning, he thought he could almost discern the movement under the roof on the C section of flooring, something flapping, like the wing of a huge moth. But he could not be sure if he really saw it or simply willed it. Willed it because he wanted it to be there, he thought. I want him, Becker thought. I want Dyce as badly as I have wanted any of them. Running from it, hiding away in Clamden had done no good. They are all around me, the Dyces, in small towns and large. Whether they are attracted to me or I am attracted to them, we will find each other. The silent, secret killers and the one who hunts them down. We are bonded together, Becker thought. Opposite sides of the coin—or perhaps the same side, he didn’t know and right now it didn’t matter. He was here, where he wanted to be, where he had yearned to be despite his struggles against that desire ever since Tee told him of the disappearance of the men. And Dyce was here, where he, too, must have known he would end up, waiting for the man who would put him out of the misery of his madness.

Maybe Dyce was here above him, caught in the web of roof and rafters, flailing like an insect. Be there, Becker urged. He willed him to be there.

At last lightning struck again, followed by a roar so loud and instantaneous it seemed to come from the earth under his feet, and in the flash Becker saw it clearly, a specter in white, thirty feet up, arms raised and flecks of snow or dust wafting down. It was looking straight at Becker.

When the light faded, Becker moved, knowing he had already been seen. The only way up was the walls themselves. He removed his shoes whose soles would be as dangerous as if he had greased them. Although he hadn’t paid any attention to the weather for several minutes, Becker realized now that the rain was still coming in torrents. Slender cascades of water rippled off the stones and into his face. He felt for his first handhold, pulled himself off the ground and began to climb.

Dyce had seen the headlights on the county road minutes earlier, had seen them disappear behind the screen of the corn, and had not seen them reappear. They’re coming to try again, he thought, but still he had not been ready to see the man crouched beside the wall. He was there too soon—but then Dyce realized who he was. He did not recognize him, but he knew, remembering the sense of dread and respect from the hospital bed.

“He’s here,” Dyce said softly to Tee. “Your friend is here.”

Once past the turnoff to the access road. Hatcher had the three vehicles shut off their lights. Agent Reynolds was sent to walk ahead with a focused flashlight to lead them on the dirt road, but even with a guide the road was treacherous with mud. The panel truck with the electronic equipment slid into the ditch and had to be pushed out, wasting valuable time.

Did they bring ladders this time? Dyce wondered. He was safe if they did not. The policeman would need another injection to insure his cooperation in any case. Dyce looked at himself and saw that his erection was still huge, despite the dangers. He giggled at himself as he sought his syringe.

It would have been an easy climb without the rain, an ascent so simple that Cindi would not even deign to make it. Even now, with the stone face as slick as if it had been iced, Becker could imagine her lithe body shooting upwards as if each irregularity in the rock was a rung on a ladder. But for Becker, the climb was torturously slow and difficult. He felt horribly exposed, clinging by his inexpert fingertips to holds awash with pouring rain. If Dyce looked down the walls, if Dyce had a weapon of any kind—a loose board would do—Becker was finished. It was only the darkness that lent any safety and that could vanish in an instant if Dyce happened to be looking in the right direction when the lightning flashed.

He climbed looking upward toward the gaps in the roof squinting against the rain in his face. There was no point in looking for handholds; he couldn’t see them anyway. The climb had to be made solely by feel. He was looking for Dyce, hoping to see him peering down in the next flash of lightning to give Becker time enough to do something to save himself. There was little he could do but let go of the wall and fall to the ground below. He might break a leg in the fall, but at least it was an action, something better than clinging to the stones like a fly to be swatted.