Something lunged at him—a flash of movement, a slap of hands against his chest, a clenched wet grip on his neck. Ben stumbled backward, digging his heels into the dirt to keep from pitching over the edge of the cliffside. He ripped a hand from his throat and flung the thing off him—pointing the muzzle of his gun blindly into the darkness until his eyes adjusted and he saw him, the killer, cornered at the back wall of the cave, balancing on his haunches.
He was a shocking sight—shirtless and covered in his own blood, as small as a child but malformed. Crouched as it was, his body—all ribs and wiry muscles—looked like a coiled spring. The killer watched him, but his eyes seemed unfocused, as though he were staring out blindly. He spoke a gibberish, a ramble of inarticulate vowels and consonants.
“There’s nowhere to go,” Ben said, the gun shaking in his hand.
The killer’s eyes seemed to adjust then, locking on Ben. “You knew where to look.” His voice sounded almost pleased, an air of relief in it, Ben thought.
“Come with me, no bullshit,” Ben said, “and we’ll get you to a hospital.”
Maybe it was Ben’s beat-up head or the adrenaline still pumping from the attack, but the gun wouldn’t stop shaking.
“Then you’ll lock me up.”
“Yes,” Ben said.
The killer spoke gibberish again, turning his face away from Ben. There was something almost intimate about the voice, as though he were talking to another person inside of himself. “Throw away the key,” he said suddenly in English.
“I know what happened to you,” Ben said. “I saw the basement.”
“Everyone knows what happened to me,” he said, a sharpness in the voice now.
“Those people,” Ben said. “The ones you killed were innocent.”
The killer smiled disdainfully. “Innocent,” he said. “Innocent, innocent…” spinning his good hand in the air now, “innocent, innocent, innocent…” until the word broke down into meaningless sounds.
“They weren’t the ones that knew what was happening to you. They didn’t do anything to you.”
“Innocent, innocent, innocent…No one’s innocent.” He ran a bloodied hand through his hair. “I wanted the woman next door,” he said. He was panting with exhaustion now. “She saw me when he brought me home from the doctor.” He paused, his breath growing shallower. “But I couldn’t go back to that place.”
Ben remembered the elderly woman watering the fuchsias next door to the Norwalk house. “Those people never bothered us,” he remembered her saying.
“To punish her?” Ben said. Killing her would have made sense: a clear motive, revenge for letting it happen to him. But not the others. “The last girl was twenty. She didn’t do anything to deserve your punishment.”
“I needed them,” he said. He let out a long breath. “You know what it feels like? To take them?”
A rush of feeling overcame Ben; he remembered his fingers around Wakeland’s windpipe, the incredible adrenaline high he felt knowing he could kill the man.
“No,” Ben said.
In the days since, when he remembered the terror in Wakeland’s eyes, Ben had buzzed with the feeling, like the aftereffects of a powerful drug.
“You do,” the killer said. “You know what it is to take someone. To make them nothing.”
He shuffled forward.
“Stay where you are,” Ben said, the gun pointed straight at the killer’s chest, his finger hooked on the trigger. Ben was terrified of the feeling, terrified that some part of him understood this killer.
“You’re the one who shot me,” the killer said.
“Yes,” Ben said, “and I’ll do it again if you move another inch.”
“Wade,” a voice called just below the cave. “You up there?”
“You’re me then,” the killer said, sitting down in the dust.
He’d come up to finish the job—to arrest the killer, to find him dead, maybe. But what he really wanted was the satisfaction of blasting a final hole into him, that was true; that was why he’d driven up here this morning, that was why he’d climbed up this canyon wall. And he had maybe a few seconds to do it, to pull that trigger, before Davis was witness to it. He had been attacked; no one would question him.
“You’re my me,” the killer said. Then he leaned back against the cave wall and spoke to himself with the incoherent syllables, as though trying to calm himself.
No. Ben wasn’t this malformed thing, this murderer. He wasn’t.
“Wade?” The voice closer this time.
The killer looked toward the sound, watched the entrance, his eyes blinking slowly.
“You can walk out of here with me,” Ben said. “Or we can put another bullet into you right now.”
“See,” the killer said, “you do know what it feels like, to take someone.” He let out a long breath, as though clearing the air from his body. “I can see it in your eyes.”
Then the killer bit into the bloodied shirt wrapped around his arm, unraveling the knot with his teeth and good hand. When he did, the blood pumped out of the hole, slicking his arm. Ben should have held him down, cuffed him, and retied the tourniquet.
“There was a boy,” the killer said, his voice growing quiet. “In the field.”
“What?”
A shuffle of feet kicked up dust at the entrance to the cave. “Wade,” Davis said, out of breath. “Got anything?”
“Stay there,” Ben said to Davis. “A boy?” he stepped toward the serial. “Did you kill him?”
The killer smiled and shook his head slowly, watching his blood run down his arm, puddling useless around his hip.
“Fight or flight,” he said.
“Did you kill him?” Ben said, kneeling in front of him now. He should have retied the tourniquet, but it was too late now. The killer’s breath was strained and smelled like congealed syrup—the sweet stink of coming death.
“Jesus,” Davis said, kneeling now at the opening of the cave, his gun drawn. “That’s him? That’s the guy?”
“Did you kill him?”
“There was a boy…” the killer said, his body slumped in the dirt, his voice fading now. He gazed up at Ben, but his eyes were unfocused and lost, veiled by what was closing between them. Ben leaned in to hear, trying to make out the words, but he heard only a withering of confused syllables that revealed nothing.
20
THREE DAYS AFTER THEY’D HELICOPTERED the serial’s body out of the Sinks, bled out from Ben’s gunshot wound, Hernandez called and asked if Ben wanted to ride along. They’d gotten the warrant, they’d searched Wakeland’s apartment, they’d found the box in the back of the closet, even in the chaos of press conferences following the capture of the killer. Ben was surprised. He thought he had more time—thought it would sit on the back burner with so many resources on the serial. He had spent the better part of the past two days speaking to the media, fielding questions about how he got the shot off that would eventually kill the serial. It’d only been in the dark hours of the morning he’d been able to think about Wakeland, about Lucero and Phillip.
“You’ve been keeping busy,” Ben said. He was riding shotgun in Hernandez’s unmarked cruiser, following Marco’s patrol car down Serrano Canyon, where Ben had chased the serial’s Tercel just last week.