She was a woman who might have just seemed matronly if it weren’t for her flirtatiously sly, oddly open air of welcome. She wore a red blouse, a dark skirt, stockings and lipstick that matched the blouse—all somehow both salacious and prim. She answered the door of her suburban Waltham home quickly after Null used the weather-beaten brass knocker to announce his presence. She was all smiles and seemed to recognize the trio upon opening the door.
“You’re Phyllis?”
“Oh, you must be Mr. Null. Yes, I’m Phyllis Goldstone. Do you want to come in, and your friends as well?”
“If it’s not any trouble.”
“No trouble at all. Come on in.”
Upon entering, Null’s Heckler was drawn and cocked. He pivoted about the room in an incidental dance. Boyd had hold of her Sig-Sauer and Janis also drew her Beretta.
“You don’t have to worry, Mr. Null. Manny’s not here. You can put your gun away. You too dear.” And she winked at Janis. “Who might you be, honey? Go ahead, take a seat at the table. I was just about to take the cookies out of the oven. You couldn’t have picked a better time to get here. You too, Detective Boyd. It looks like you and Mr. Null have had a very long day indeed. You should sit down too, dear. What did you say your name was?”
“I didn’t.”
They all sat down at the table and Null shoved the Heckler back in his coat.
Phyllis waved her red-lacquer-finger-nailed hand foppishly. “Oh, that’s all right, dear. You don’t have to tell me. Now, do you like milk or tonic with your cookies? I only have diet, though.”
“Listen, Phyllis, why we’re here—”
“No need to tell me, Mr. Null. I know why you’re here. Some vendetta against the Hebe Group. It’s all silly, Mr. Null. You seem reasonable to me. I’m sure it can be explained to you just what a decent and fine set of people Hebe Group is if you only take the time to listen with an open mind.
“My mind is as open as a casket.”
“Okay, everybody, how about some cookies?”
“You can stop that, Phyllis.”
“Why, Mr. Null, I was only being hospitable.”
“No, you were following out a plan.”
“Nonsense, Mr. Null. I really wasn’t expecting you.”
“Sure you were. You were told to. Legere set it up as a fallback position. It’s good in a way since he’s obviously too scared to confront me. Show’s me he knows what he’s doing. It’s an intelligent idea not to confront me.”
“I’ll go get those cookies and the milk and tonic.”
“No you won’t, Phyllis. You’ll stay put.” Null reached into his coat, pulled out the Hecker and Koch from its strained pocket and rested it in his lap.
“You’re not going to shoot me, Mr. Null. I’m just a harmless old lady. I’m the den mother for all the children I can fit into my schedule. I’m not a bad person, and Manny said you’d be reasonable when you got here, so, surprise! Here you all are.” Phyllis smiled beatifically, nodding her head.
“I am nothing if not reasonable.”
“Phyllis, you might want to be careful here.”
“Janis, this is going to go how it’s going to go. Null isn’t reasonable. Ever.”
“Wouldn’t you all like some cookies, tonic or maybe milk?”
“We don’t want anything you have to offer, Phyllis, except information.”
“Oh, I don’t think I know anything that can help you, Mr. Null. May I sit down?”
Null aimed the Hecker straight at her face.
“Keep standing, Phyllis.”
“Detective Boyd, will you stop this please?”
“Hell no. I want to see where Null is going with this. He’s dangerous and unpredictable, sure. Stupid? Not on your life.”
“I suspect it’s going to be on her life,” said Janis. “This time I know where he’s going.”
“I’ll bet you were a looker back in the day, right, Phyllis?” Null seemed ingenuous.
“Real men used to think so.” She smoothed her hands like red taloned claws down the front of her blouse—a sphinx with a bee-hive hairdo. “You’re a real man, aren’t you, Mr. Null?” She smirked.
“That’s a debatable point.”
“Why can’t I sit down?”
“Because I’m holding the gun.”
“What about the cookies that I—”
“You mean that you made special for us? Sorry, Phyllis, but your cookies aren’t so special, are they?”
“Well, it’s true. I make them for the kids. Batches and batches of them.”
“Yes, batches and batches of cookies laced with heroin and horse tranquilizer. Doesn’t really break down and degrade with the heat so much, does it?”
Phyllis pouted and frowned. “Fentanyl was cheaper, but it didn’t work. Harder to handle.”
“And the drinks?”
“Nembutal. Pretty easy to dose out. But listen, I’m not in charge of anything, and I really don’t know anything. I just do what I’m told, that’s all.” Phyllis was overtly nervous, breathing hard. “I’m really nice to the children. They think of me as a second grandmother.”
“I’ll bet they do, after those cookies,” said Boyd.
Null stared at her, blunt and dull as a lizard. He didn’t blink.
“Often, I’m their first grandmother, really. I’m kind to them. I sing to them, read them to sleep, going from house to house to do it, tirelessly. It’s kind of my role. My—contribution, even.”
“You do this for all the children?”
“Well, not for the ones old enough—”
“Old enough for what?”
“To be shipped off. But I do all the rest.”
“That’s a high body count.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“No, of course you wouldn’t,” Null said with a nod. “You get them ready. You prepare them.”
“Prepare them? I don’t understand.”
“For where they’re going. For what’s going to happen to them.”
“Well, yes. Certainly, but can’t you see it’s just a business? They’re well-taken care of, the little lambs, all nourished, groomed, their dental and medical paid for and provided, nothing to worry about, ever. You know what their only real alternative without us would be? A quick death out on the street. That’s what.”
“I understand.”
“You know, you can’t get sentimental about the little darlings. They’re like a commodity like—”
“Like bread someone once told me. Like little loaves of bread.”
Phyllis beamed and breathed a sigh of relief. The crow’s feet around her eyes took on a life of their own. “That’s right. What’s the harm? I’m really good to them, honest I am.”
“I believe you.”
Null shot her three times with the Heckler, hardly moving a muscle. He cut a line across her midsection. It looked like she was laughing as she fell to the floor. She wasn’t.
“Would you believe I saw that coming?”
“We both did, Janis,” Boyd said, lighting a cigarette. “It was almost predictable.”
“Why almost?”
“Because if she’d have just shut up, it might’ve gone the other way.”
“I’m glad she’s talkative. I have questions to ask her, and she’s going to answer every one of them before she passes out completely.” He paused thoughtfully. “Or dies.”
* * *
They were in Janis’s black Altima, heading back to Boyd’s condo in the Fens. When they were stopped at a red light, she banged her hands on the steering wheel and screamed, “Holy shit, I just can’t believe you went and did it again!”
“And he’ll continue doing it again and again, until he’s done,” said Boyd, sitting next to her in the front seat. Null was quiet in the back, staring blankly ahead with his classic fish-eye.
She went back to driving when the light changed and sped onto Storrow Drive. “I don’t know if he’ll ever be done with this gang. Kiddie porn is fucking huge. You know, Null, do you care that I’m probably going to lose half my income due to this vendetta of yours?”
“You should have thought about that when you stepped in and helped me take care of those gunsels.”
“I know. But I have to agree. Hebe Group is slimy and awful and thinking about what they do is like thinking about what they do to animals at a slaughterhouse, to livestock on a farm—”
“Well, isn’t that what they are, Janis? Livestock on a farm?”
“Yeah,” she said vacantly, maneuvering in traffic. “Kids.”
“Don’t ask him, Janis. Just. Don’t.”
“Why are you doing this, Null? Why bother? You’re not going to stop it. It’s too big for you to stop, no matter what you do.”
“Here we go. Once again, you get what you ask for.”
Null said nothing at first. Sat immobile in the shadows of the backseat. Boyd’s and Janis’s breathing were audible—not Null’s. It seemed like he wasn’t breathing at all. When he spoke, it sounded dry, hollow.
“Like everything in life, it all comes down to need.”
“I don’t follow. What is it that you need? It doesn’t even play that you want anything. You don’t want to get high, don’t want sex, don’t care what you eat, where you live. You have more money than you can spend, apparently, from your meth operation.”
“I put the meth in Methuen.”
“I guess you do, and you seem to part with it easily enough, like it makes no difference to you. You had no problem paying me off to help you do whatever the hell it is that you’re doing. What’s Boyd get out of it? You paying her off too?”
It was as if Boyd were fighting hard to suppress a belch. “Null—Do. Not. Go. There.”
“Kay has her own reasons, Janis. She feels it’s worth her while.”
“Yeah. I do. And that’s all anybody needs to know.’
“So, what’s this need, Null? What’s the point for a strange-o zombie fuck like you?”
“I have no needs, really, but what’s necessary for me to stay alive. The trouble with me is that I really have no actual reason to stay alive. No real need for that either. So, I have to think very hard about what would be the substantive need for me to exist, to be alive, to be in the world, functioning in this world. Boyd was good enough to provide me with some of that need. Her need. And then that led to an even bigger need, a very simple, basic need.”
“Well, what the hell is it?”
Null spoke softly, but clearly without hesitation. “The children. The soft, small, vulnerable little children, innocent of right and wrong even when they do either, innocent of the foulness and filth of this world even when its driven into their lives like an aggressive cancer. The goodness and decency missing from the world? Well, they have it in spades. They don’t know it, but they do. And what do we do with the ones who crush that—debase it, kill it? Listen, they need me, those kids, with a need that’s huge and palpable. A desperate need. This need is something I can satisfy with my unique skill set.”
“You only do one thing.”
“That’s right. Just one thing. And when I do it, I can make it stop. Stop the rape, stop the destruction, make the violence go away. Set the children free. Maybe keep a little goodness and decency in the world. I can actually do this, factually and very effectively. The need in Boston and all of New England is great. Vaster than anyone might have known. This is what we’re all signed up for, and this is what we’re going to do. And now, we have no choice but to do it, otherwise Hebe Group will slaughter all three of us as casually as snuffing out the life of a child.”
“Thanks to you, they will.”
“Setting them free. Through Ruth Coelacanth, you mean,” added Boyd with acid.
“That’s right. Ruth. She’ll help whether she likes it or not. But I think she likes it.”
“I don’t get how that satisfies your need, Null. Just what’s in it for you? There has to be something. You’re not a charitable organization.”
“The simplest need. The most basic human need of all. So deep and intrinsic I believed I never had it, and since having lost it, the act itself has in some way given it back to me.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You’ll get it, Janis,” Boyd said without sarcasm.
“To be needed, Janis, is the need. For human beings to need you to be alive for them, to rescue them from something terrible, to be there for them so their lives can be lived out. So that those with no chance can finally have a chance. Otherwise, no one else in this cesspool of a world, this abattoir of relentless filth and cynical violence, needs me at all for anything. I could be swallowed up by some Charybdian pit and it wouldn’t matter at all. Or it wouldn’t have. Because now it does. It matters that I’m alive, and it matters what I do.”
“You kill, therefore you matter.”
“Kay, I couldn’t have put it any better.”
“So, now you’re going to be the self-proclaimed savior of children tricked out for kiddie porn, sold burned, and snuffed? Is that it?”
“Yeah. That’s it. Can either of you think of anyone better suited to give these children what they need?”
“No,” said Janis with a lilt in her voice as parked the Altima in the back of Boyd’s condo building. “Not if what they need is corpses. When it comes to that, I really believe there’s no one better suited than you.”
Boyd chuckled quietly, shook her head.
“No Janis, not corpses, but justice. I am here to give the children justice.”
“What, by killing their kidnappers, torturers and rapists? By torturing them and killing them like you just did to Phyllis. Is that how?”
Null might have smiled, only he didn’t. His voice was like a low hiss.
“Yes, Janis. That’s exactly how.”