Chapter
24
* * *
On the Casuarina Coast of Indonesian New Guinea lives a tribe called the Asmat. They are twenty thousand strong and the terror of every other tribe near them. In their language Asmat means “the people, the human beings,” and if they define themselves as the only humans, then all others are relegated to the status of nonhuman, with all that that entails. The Asmat have a word for these others: they call them manowe. It means “the edible ones.”
Hyams had no answers that would have indicated why Adelaide Modine behaved as she did, and neither did Walt Tyler. Maybe she, and others like her, had something in common with the Asmat. Maybe they, too, saw others as less than human so that their suffering ceased to matter, was below notice apart from the pleasure it gave.
? ? ?
I recalled a conversation with Woolrich, after the meeting with Tante Marie Aguillard. Back in New Orleans, we walked in silence down Royal Street, past Madame Lelaurie’s old mansion, where slaves were once chained and tortured in the attic until some firefighters found them and a mob ran Madame Lelaurie out of town. We ended up at Tee Eva’s on Magazine, where Woolrich ordered sweet potato pie and a Jax beer. He ran his thumb down the side of the bottle, clearing a path through the moisture, and then rubbed his damp thumb along his upper lip.
“I read a Bureau report last week,” he began. “I guess it was a ‘state of the nation’ address on serial killers, on where we stand, where we’re goin’.”
“And where are we going?”
“We’re goin’ to hell is where we’re goin’. These people are like bacteria spreading and this country is just one big petri dish to them. The Bureau reckons we could be losing a couple of thousand victims a year to them. The folks watching Oprah and Jerry Springer, or subscribin’ to Jerry Falwell, they don’t wanna know that. They read about them in the crime mags or see them on the TV, but that’s only when we catch one of them. The rest of the time, they don’t have the least idea what’s goin’ on around them.”
He took a deep swig of Jax. “There are at least two hundred of these killers operating at the present time. At least two hundred.” He was reeling off the numbers now, emphasizing each statistic with a stab of the beer bottle. “Nine out of ten are male, eight out of ten are white, and one in five is never goin’ to be found. Never.”
“And you know what the strangest thing is? We’ve got more of them than anywhere else. The good old U.S. of A. is breedin’ these fuckers like fuckin’ Elmo dolls. Three–quarters of them live and work in this country. We’re the world’s leading producer of serial killers. It’s a sign of sickness, is what it is. We’re sick and weak and these killers are like a cancer inside us: the faster we grow, the quicker they multiply.”
“And you know, the more of us there are, the more distant from each other we become. We’re practically livin’ on top of each other but we’re further away from each other in every other way than we’ve ever been before. And then these guys come in, with their knives and their ropes, and they’re even further removed than the rest of us. Some of them even have cop’s instincts. They can sniff each other out. We found a guy in Angola in February who was communicating with a suspected killer in Seattle using biblical codes. I don’t know how these two freaks found each other, but they did.”
“Strange thing is, most of them are even worse off than the rest of humanity. They’re inadequate — sexually, emotionally, physically, whatever — and they’re taking it out on those they see around them. They have no” — he shook his hands in the air, searching for the word — “no vision. They have no larger vision of what they’re doing. There’s no purpose to it. It’s just an expression of some kind of fatal flaw.”
“And the people they’re killing, they’re so dumb that they can’t understand what’s happening around them. These killers should be a wake–up call, but nobody’s listening, and that widens the gap even more. All they see is the distance, and they reach across it and pick us off, one by one. All we can do is hope that, if they do it often enough, we’ll spot the pattern and put together a link between us and them, a bridge across the distance.” He finished his beer and raised the bottle up, calling for another.
“It’s the distance,” he said, his eyes on the street but his gaze beyond it, “the distance between life and death, Heaven and Hell, us and them. They have to cross it to get close enough to us to take us but it’s all a matter of distance. They love the distance.”
? ? ?
And it seemed to me, as rain poured down on the window, that Adelaide Modine, the Traveling Man, and the others like them who roamed the country were all united by this distance from the common crowd of humanity. They were like small boys who torture animals or take fish from tanks to watch them squirm and gasp in their death throes.
Yet Adelaide Modine seemed even worse than so many of the others, for she was a woman and to do what she had done not only went against law and morality and whatever other titles we give to the common bonds that hold us together and prevent us from tearing each other apart; it went against nature, too. A woman who kills a child seems to bring out something in us that exceeds revulsion or horror. It brings a kind of despair, a lack of faith in the foundations upon which we have built our lives. For we believe that women should not take the life of a child. Just as Lady Macbeth begged to be unsexed so as to kill the old king, so also a woman who killed a child appeared to be denatured, a being divorced from her sex. Adelaide Modine was like Milton’s night hag, “lured with the smell of infant blood.”
I cannot countenance the death of children. The killing of a child seems to bring with it the death of hope, the death of the future. I recall how I used to listen to Jennifer breathe, how I used to watch the rise and fall of my infant daughter’s chest, how I felt a sense of gratitude, of relief, with every inhalation and exhalation. When she cried, I would lull her to sleep in my arms, waiting for the sobs to fade into the soft rhythms of rest. And when she was at last quiet, I would bend down slowly, carefully, my back aching from the strain of the position, and lay her in her crib. When she was taken from me it was like the death of a world, an infinite number of futures coming to an end.
I felt a weight of despair upon me as the motel drew closer. Hyams had said that he had seen nothing in the Modines that would have indicated the depths of evil that existed within them. Walt Tyler, if what he had said was true, saw that evil only in Adelaide Modine. She had lived among these people, had grown up with them, perhaps even played with them, had sat with them in church, had watched them marry, have children, and then had preyed upon them, and no one had suspected her.
I think that what I wanted was a power I could not have: the power to perceive evil, the ability to look at the faces in a crowded room and see the signs of depravity and corruption. The thought sparked a memory of a killing in New York State some years before, in which a thirteen–year–old–boy had killed a younger kid in the woods, beating him to death with rocks. It was the words of the killer’s grandfather that had stayed with me. “My God,” he said. “I should have been able to see, somehow. There should have been something to see.”
“Are there any pictures of Adelaide Modine?” I asked eventually.
Martin’s brow furrowed. “There may be one in the files of the original investigation. The library may have some stuff too. There’s a kind of town archive stored in its basement, y’know, yearbooks, photos from the paper. There may be something in there. Why d’you ask?”
“Curiosity. She was responsible for so much of what happened to this town but I find it hard to picture her. Maybe I want to see what her eyes looked like.”
Martin shot me a puzzled look. “I can get Laurie to look in the library archives. I’ll try to get Burns to look through our own files, but it could take a while. They’re all packed in boxes and the filing system is pretty obscure. Some of the files aren’t even in date order. It’s a lot of work to satisfy your idle curiosity.”
“I’d appreciate it anyway.”
Martin made a sound in his throat but didn’t say anything else for a while. Then, as the motel appeared on our right, he pulled over to the side of the road. “About Earl Lee,” he said.
“Go on.”
“The sheriff’s a good man. He held this town together after the Modine killings, from what I hear, him and Doc Hyams and a couple of others. He’s a fair man and I’ve no complaints about him.”
“If what Tyler said is true, maybe you should have.”
Martin nodded. “That’s as may be. If he’s right, then the sheriff’s got to live with what he’s done. He’s a troubled man, Mr. Parker, troubled by the past, by himself. I don’t envy him anything but his strength.” He spread his hands wide and shrugged slightly. “Part of me figures that you should stay here and talk to him when he comes back, but another part of me, the smart part, tells me that it would be better for all of us if you finished up your business as quickly as you can and then got out.”
“Have you heard from him?”
“No, I haven’t. He had some leave coming to him and maybe he’s a little overdue on returning, but I ain’t gonna hold that against him. He’s a lonely man. A man who likes the company of other men ain’t gonna find much comfort here.”
“No,” I said, as the neon light of the Welcome Inn flickered beyond us. “I guess not.”
? ? ?
The call came through almost as soon as Martin pulled away from the curb. There had been a death at the medical center: the unidentified woman who had tried to kill me the previous night.
When we arrived two cruisers were blocking the entrance to the parking lot and I could see the two FBI men talking together at the door. Martin drove us through and as we got out of the car the two agents moved toward me in unison, their guns drawn.
“Easy! Easy!” shouted Martin. “He was with me the whole time. Put them away, boys.”
“We’re detaining him until Agent Ross arrives,” said one of the agents, whose name was Willox.
“You ain’t detaining or arresting nobody, not until we find out what’s going on here.”
“Deputy, I’m warning you, you’re out of your league here.”
Wallace and Burns came out of the medical center at that point, alerted by the shouts. To their credit, they moved to Martin’s side, their hands hanging close by their guns.
“Like I said, let it go,” said Martin quietly. The feds looked like they might push the issue but then they holstered their weapons and moved back.
“Agent Ross is going to hear of this,” hissed Willox to Martin, but the deputy just walked by.
Wallace and Burns walked with us to the room in which the woman had been kept.
“What happened?” asked Martin.
Wallace turned bright red and started blabbering. “Shit, Alvin, there was a disturbance outside the center and —”
“What kind of disturbance?”
“A fire in the engine of a car, belonged to one of the nurses. I couldn’t figure it out. There weren’t nobody in it and she hadn’t used it since she got in this morning. I only left the door here for maybe five minutes. When I got back, she was like this …”
We arrived at the woman’s room. Through the open door I could see the pale, waxy pallor of her skin and the blood on the pillow beside her left ear. Something metal, ending in a wooden handle, glinted in the ear. The window through which the killer had entered was still open and the glass had been shattered in order to unhook the latch. A small sheet of sticky brown paper lay on the floor, with glass adhering to it. Whoever had killed the woman had taken the trouble to stick it to the window before breaking the glass, in order to muffle the sound and to ensure that the glass didn’t make any noise when it hit the floor.
“Who’s been in here, apart from you?”
“The doctor, a nurse, and the two feds,” said Wallace. The elderly doctor called Elise appeared behind us. She looked shaken and weary.
“What happened to her?” said Martin.
“A blade of some kind — I think it’s an ice pick — was thrust through her ear and into her brain. She was dead when we got to her.”
“Left the pick in her,” mused Martin.
“Clean and easy,” I said. “Nothing to tie the killer to what happened if he — or she — gets picked up.”
Martin turned his back on me and began consulting the other deputies. I moved away as they talked and made my way toward the men’s washroom. Wallace looked back at me and I made a gagging expression. He looked away with contempt in his eyes. I spent five seconds in the washroom and then slipped out of the center through the rear exit.
Time was running out for me. I knew Martin would try to grill me on the source of the hit. Agent Ross wasn’t far behind. At the very least, he’d hold me until he got the information he wanted, and any hope I might have of finding Catherine Demeter would disappear. I made my way back to the motel, where my car was still parked, and drove out of Haven.