had no doubt that the man crumpled on the floor was dead. Bloody human
garbage. Garbage alive, now garbage dead.
At the sight of the torn and battered corpse, a savage elation grip him,
a furious righteousness that was both thrilling and frightening. He
wanted to be sickened by what he had done, even if the dead man deserved
to die, but although the carnage nauseated him, he was not merely
repulsed. He had encountered purest evil in human form.
Both the bastards deserved worse than he had been able to do to them,
deserving long and slow deaths with great suffering, much terror. He
felt like a avenging angel, come to judgment, filled with a holy rage.
He knew he was teetering on the edge of a psychosis of his own, knew
that only the insane were unreservedly certain of the virtue of even
their most outrageous act but he could find no doubt within him. In fact
his anger swelled as if he were God’s avatar into whom flowed a direct
current of the Almighty apocalyptic wrath.
He turned to the closed door.
The bedroom lay beyond.
The mother and child had to be in there.
Lisa. . . Susie. . .
But who else?
Sociopathic killers usually operated alone, but sometimes they paired as
these two had done. Larger alliances, however, were rare.
Charles Manson and his “family,” of course. There were other examples.
He couldn’t rule anything out, not in a world where the trendiest
professors of philosophy taught that ethics were always situational and
that everyone’s point of view was equally right and valuable, regardless
of its logic or hate It was a world that bred monsters, and this beast
might be hydra-headed He knew caution was called for, but the
exhilarating righteous wrath that filled him also gave him a sense of
invulnerability. He stepped to the bedroom door, kicked it open, and
shouldered through, knowing he might be gut-shot, not giving a damn,
shotgun in front of him, ready to kill or be killed.
The woman and child were alone. On the filthy bed. Bound at wrists and
ankles with sturdy strapping tape. Tape across their mouths.
The woman, Lisa, was about thirty, slim, an unusually attractive blond
But the daughter, Susie, was remarkably more beautiful than her mother
ethereally beautiful: about ten years old, with luminous green eyes,
delicate features, and skin as flawless as the membranous interior
surface of a eggshell. The girl seemed, to Jim, to be an embodiment of
innocence goodness, and purity-an angel cast down into a cesspool. New
power informed his rage at the sight of her bound and gagged in the
bedroom squalor.
Tears streamed down the child’s face, and she choked on muffled sobs of
terror behind the tape that sealed her lips.
The mother was not crying, though grief and fear haunted her eyes. Her
sense of responsibility to her daughter and a visible rage not unlike
Jim’s-seemed to keep her from falling over the brink of hysteria.
He realized they were afraid of him. As far as they knew, he was in
league with the men who had abducted them.
As he propped the shotgun against the built-in dresser, he said, “It’s
all right. It’s over now. I killed them. I killed them both.”
The mother stared at him wide-eyed, disbelieving.
He didn’t blame her for doubting him. His voice sounded strange: full
of fury, cracking on every third or fourth word, tremulous, going from a
whisper to a hard bark to a whisper again.
He looked around for something with which to cut them free. A roll of
the strapping tape and a pair of scissors lay on the dresser.
Grabbing the scissors, he noticed X-rated videotapes also stacked on
there. Suddenly he realized that the walls and ceiling of the small
room were papered with obscene photographs torn from the pages of sex
magazines, and with a jolt he saw it was filth with a twisted
difference: child pornography. There were grown men in the photos,
their faces always concealed, but there were no grown women, only young
girls and boys, most of them as young as Susie, many of them younger,