I went to Marci’s house every day that week, and we traded theories and combed through every piece of evidence we could remember. At first we sat in the kitchen, but Marci got nervous with the little kids so close by, so we took our talk of serial killers and dismembered corpses outside.
“What about the poles?” Marci asked. “That’s got to mean something, right?” It was Saturday, and we were still no closer to an answer.
“It’s a message,” I said, “but that doesn’t tell us much. Most of the time when a serial killer leaves a message like that, it’s just the standard ‘here I am, you can’t catch me.’”
“Even if it’s just to get attention,” said Marci, “the fact that the killer needs attention is still a pretty good clue, right?”
“Absolutely,” I said. I don’t know if Marci was a natural psychologist, or if it was just the fact that she wasn’t sociopathic like me, but she was really getting good at this. Sociopathy is defined as the lack of empathy: we can’t identify with other people, which means we can’t really understand them either. Marci didn’t have that handicap, so she was finding connections I’d never thought of.
“The poles are like flags,” she said, thinking out loud, “to make sure people see the body. One of the poles in the mayor was an actual flagpole.”
“But with the flag ripped off,” I said. “If they were supposed to be flags, why would she strip it down?”
“It was an American flag, so maybe she hates America. Or maybe she loves America and didn’t want the flag associated with the murder.”
“Serial killing isn’t murder,” I said, the words slipping out before I could stop them. It was a pet peeve of mine, but from the shocked look on Marci’s face I knew she’d misinterpreted it. “I mean, it is murder, but it’s not just murder. It’s like saying … computer hacking is theft. It is, but it’s got its own set of reasons and methods that make it so different from any other theft that you have to look at it differently.”
“That seems like a weird distinction,” said Marci. “Killing someone is murder. That’s that.”
“It is,” I said again, “but it’s a very specific kind of murder that needs to be looked at very differently.” She was still looking at me strangely, so I tried to change the subject. “Look, it doesn’t matter—let’s get back to the flag. You think the killer loves America and doesn’t want it associated with … killing.”
Marci watched me silently for a moment longer before speaking. “Could be a war protest.”
“Clayton County is a weird place for a war protest.”
“I know, I’m just thinking. The poles really do act like flags, though, and I’m trying to think of why she rips the actual flags off. Maybe it’s just the poles—she doesn’t want something up there to distract from the poles themselves.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, remembering the shot I’d seen on the news. “When the mayor died, she hung plastic sheeting on the poles. It was like she was making her own flags.”
“Did they look like anything?”
“Kind of like wings, actually. But it was a flagpole, and she hung her own flag on it.”
“So she’s replacing America.”
“Or removing it.”
“Removing it?”
“Maybe not completely,” I said, “but from the crime scene, at least. How about this: the Handyman always puts poles in the victims’ backs because that’s how she sends her message. This time, because she was in city hall, the only pole she could find was a flagpole, but she didn’t want the flag to interfere with her message: it’s not about America, it’s about something else. So she had to take the flag off so people wouldn’t get the wrong idea.”
“That works,” said Marci, “but it means there’s probably more to her message than just ‘here I am.’”
“There you are,” said Marci’s mom, opening the screen door and stepping out onto the porch behind us. Marci and I were sitting on the porch, our feet on the steps, and her mom set down a plate of buttered bread on the floor between us. “This isn’t fresh out of the oven or anything, but I thought you might like a snack.” Marci’s mom was large—not fat, just big—and her hands were weathered and calloused from constant work in the yard and garden. She was nice enough, but it was obvious Marci had gotten her good looks from somewhere else.
“Thanks,” said Marci, smiling widely. She seemed grateful for the interruption, though I wasn’t sure. She picked up a piece of bread. “Mom’s bread is great, John, you’ll love it. This is, what, like five whole grains?”
“Six,” said her mom. “I added another one.”
I took a piece and held it up to inspect it. It looked like a slab of birdseed.
“Wow,” I said. “I didn’t know you could get that many whole grains into one piece of bread.”
“I don’t want to interrupt,” said her mom, opening the door and stepping back in. “Just bringing a snack. Have fun!”
“‘Have fun,’” said Marci, laughing. “She thinks we’re out here talking about our favorite bands or something.”
I held out my bread. “Do you seriously eat this?”
She laughed. “Of course we eat it, what else would you do with it?”
“You could hang it from a tree and feed every bird in the neighborhood.”
“It’s good for you,” she said, in a voice that meant she knew exactly how stupid that sounded, but then she took another big bite. She obviously enjoyed it.
I took a bite; it was rough and chewy. I tried to say something, but it took so long to chew I couldn’t form any words.
“Mom’s been perfecting this recipe for years,” said Marci. “You should have tried it when she first started—it was pretty heavy duty.”
I finally managed to swallow, and shook my head in disbelief. “Holy crap, that’s like a buttered granola bar.”
“We eat it all the time,” said Marci, “it’s totally normal to us now. Anything else feels too flimsy—Wonder Bread’s practically tissue paper compared to this.”
“Wonder Bread’s like tissue paper compared to anything,” I said, “but if I can reverse the metaphor, this is like titanium compared to Wonder Bread.”
“That’s actually a simile, not a metaphor. You can tell because it has ‘like’ in it.”
“And this is actually a construction material, not a food,” I said. “You can tell because it has wood pulp in it.”
“Poor baby,” said Marci, making an exaggerated frown. “Wood pulp is good for you—it’ll put hair on your chest.”
“And you’ve been eating this for how long?” I asked. “That’s horrifying.”
Marci laughed. “Shut up!”
I heard a car engine rumbling closer, and looked out to the street just in time to see Marci’s dad pull up to the curb in his squad car. I set the bread back down on the plate and tried to look innocent. I wasn’t afraid of cops, I actually quite liked them, but I’d never met one at his own house before. The last thing I needed was for him to freak out and tell me to stop corrupting his daughter.
“Hey, Dad,” said Marci, swallowing another bite of bread.
“Hey, babe,” said Officer Jensen, stepping out and closing the car door behind him. “And the venerable John Cleaver—it’s an honor.”
“Hi,” I said. I gave a small wave, uncertain what else to do.
“What brings you here?” he asked, stopping a few feet away with his hands on his hips. He seemed cheerful enough. Would he stay cheerful if he knew we were talking about the Handyman?
“We’re talking about the Handyman,” said Marci.
“Cool,” he said.
Well, I guess that answers that question.
“We’re doing our own investigation,” said Marci. She sighed, long and fake. “Just a little criminal profiling. You know, nothing big.”
Her dad laughed. “Well, John’s the one to do it with. A little too much personal experience with psychos, huh kid?”
I’m sure he didn’t mean anything rude by it—he didn’t know I was a psycho too.
He folded his arms. “So, what do you have so far?”
Marci glanced at me quickly, then turned back to her dad. “How much do you work with the profilers assigned to the case?”
“Not at all,” he said. “I’m only marginally involved with the Handyman case.”
“Well,” she said, “we’ve got some stuff you might want to pass along.” She glanced at me again. Why did she keep doing that? “For example, we know that killing makes her angry.”
So that’s why she keeps looking at me: she told him the thing I wanted to keep secret. I kept my face impassive. Did she tell because she didn’t trust me, or just because she didn’t understand my reasons for secrecy? It’s not like I could tell her my plan: that we could find the killer on our own, and then I would go after her myself. Having the police and the FBI running around following the same leads would make my plan a lot more difficult.
“‘Her?’” asked Officer Jensen. “You think the killer is female?”
Oh come on, she was giving away everything.
“That’s another thing,” said Marci, nodding. “We’re pretty sure she is.”
“A woman who gets angry when she kills, but does it anyway,” he said. “Interesting.” He smiled, just barely, with the corners of his mouth, and spoke again. “So what have you deduced about the hands?”
That smile meant something—it meant he knew something. They had evidence about the hands they hadn’t shared yet, or more likely new evidence that had just come in; if it was a secret, he wouldn’t have mentioned it. But would he share the whole thing? I had to frame my answer carefully.
But what could I possibly say, when the only real answer was, “the killer’s a demon who uses the stolen hands and tongue for an as-yet-unknown supernatural purpose?”
I spoke slowly, cautiously. “The killer removes the hands and tongue very carefully, almost surgically. This is probably after the bout of rage that comes from the initial kill, because she’s obviously very calm when she does it. She takes off the hands with a hatchet, a single blow for each one, and the tongue with … some kind of scalpel, I think.”
“And what does he—or she, if you prefer—do with them?”
“Most serial killers keep souvenirs of their kills,” I said, trying to spin a plausible lie, “because they like to remember them. They can pull out a piece of jewelry or a driver’s license even months later and relive the crime. Body parts don’t last that long, especially soft tissue like the tongue, so it’s more likely, statistically speaking, that the Handyman is eating them.”
“Gross,” said Marci.
I was positive that wasn’t the case here. If the demon was just looking for food, she wouldn’t need to be nearly this careful about it. There had to be some other purpose. But if I gave Officer Jensen a false answer, I gave him an opportunity to prove me wrong, and the natural human response to that opportunity would be to take it, to show what he knew. I had to hope it worked.
“It’s the only explanation that has any real precedent,” I said. “Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, Albert Fish; the ones who take body parts are usually cannibals. Usually. There are some we don’t know much about, like Charles Albright—no one ever found out what he did with the body parts he stole.”
“What did he steal?” asked Marci.
“Eyeballs.”
“I knew I shouldn’t have asked.”
Officer Jensen wasn’t smiling anymore, but he wasn’t frowning either. His face was flat, his mouth turned down. He wasn’t mad, he was … professional. I’d slipped him into lecture mode. He was going to take the bait.
“So you think he eats the hands and tongue?” he asked.
“It seems likely,” I said. I watched him carefully.
“And what if I told you that he didn’t?”
Perfect! It was exactly like I’d hoped—they’d found some new evidence. Having a friend with ties to the police was awesome.
“What have you found?” I asked.
He lowered his voice. “We got a call this morning: two hikers out by the lake came across a firepit, with the fire still burning. They got there just in time to hear someone running through the trees toward the road. A few seconds after that, a car started and drove away. They didn’t think anything of it until they smelled meat in the firepit and poked it with a stick.” He looked down at the sidewalk. “It was the mayor’s hand.”
No, I thought, that doesn’t make any sense. She had to be saving the hands for some kind of special purpose. What purpose did it serve to save them, and then turn around and destroy them?
“So she was cooking them to eat,” said Marci. “Just like John said.”
“Only if she likes meat really, really well done,” said her father. “These weren’t on a grill or a spit—they were down inside, under the logs.”
From my years of pyromania, I knew that the area in the center, under the logs, was the hottest part of a campfire. That’s where the fire pulled in new oxygen, and it burned like a furnace. Anything in there would be incinerated.
But why? What could the demon possibly gain from burning the hands? Was she destroying evidence? Was someone too close? But if she could absorb them or disintegrate them the way Crowley had, she wouldn’t need to burn them. I couldn’t believe it. It had to be something else—they were unrelated hands from an unrelated attack.
“You can’t possibly have ID’d the hands already,” I said. “The fingerprints would be unreadable, and you haven’t had time for a DNA test.”
Officer Jensen smiled grimly and held up his wrist, tapping the knob of bone. “This is called the pisiform bone. The blow that took the mayor’s left wrist—probably done with a hatchet, like you said—bounced off of this bone the first time, and then cut slightly through it on the second stroke. It left a very distinctive cut, and the bones we recovered from the fire match perfectly.”
“Did the hikers see the killer?” asked Marci.
“Not a thing,” he said, shaking his head. “Not even a silhouette or a flash of color through the trees. Certainly not a confirmation of gender. I’m afraid your female theory is still just a theory.”
“What about the car?” she asked.
“Our hikers didn’t see anything,” he said, “but we’re still questioning everyone we can find who was out by the lake today. Someone may have seen it, so we might be able to get a description.”
No. This was wrong. It didn’t jibe with anything I thought I knew about the killer. Why would a demon need to burn evidence? Why would the killer save the hands so carefully just to destroy them later? Did the destruction imply more rage, or more control? More planning, or less? It didn’t make sense.
“What about the tongue?” I asked. “Did they find the tongue?”
He nodded. “There was some kind of charred lump in addition to the hands, which was probably meat and might be the tongue, but there’s no way to confirm that yet. The Feds have it; we’ll see what they come up with.”
The tongue too. So it was the same killer. I wracked my brain, searching for any explanation, but nothing came. What was I missing? We needed another victim, and we needed it soon, so we could find the next piece of the puzzle.
“Are you okay, John?”
I looked up and saw Marci looking at me, her face marred by a frown. She was concerned. How bad did I look?
“He’s probably just squeamish,” said her dad, but Marci snorted.
“John’s the most unsqueamish person in the world,” she said. “I’m the one who gets grossed out, he’s only bothered by … by letting the bad guys get away, I guess.” She looked into my eyes. “We’re not going to make it, are we?”
“Make what?” asked her father.
“We wanted to predict the next victim,” she said, “so you could try to warn him, but there’s only a few days left, and your new evidence changes everything. It sets us back.”
Here I was upset about being wrong, and she thought I was worrying about the victim we wouldn’t be able to save. I was desperate for another killing, and she only thought the best of me.
Just like Brooke had, before she’d learned the truth.
I was a killer. I had known when I first called Nobody that she would kill people here, and I’d been willing to accept it as the only way of tracking her. I followed corpses like bloody footprints, and when I reached the end I made another corpse of my own. I’d killed two men—two demons—but how many more bodies had I left in my wake? How many people had died so that I could pretend to be a savior?
Was I really a savior at all? Or just another killer?
“You gonna be alright?” asked Officer Jensen.
I looked up, shrugged, and nodded. “Yeah, I’ll be fine.”
“It’s probably just Mom’s bread,” said Marci, laughing halfheartedly. “Six whole grains today.”
“Six,” he said, and whistled. “No wonder you look like that, I can barely handle four—but don’t you dare tell her I said that.”
He stepped up to the porch, passing between us and reaching for the door. He was already pulling it open when Marci stopped him.
“Hey, Dad?”
“Yeah, babe?”
Marci shot me another quick glance, but different from before. That had been a guilty look, when she had known she was about to tell our secret. This was more searching, more … nervous. She looked back to her father.
“Did you have a chance to follow up on that teacher I told you about?”
“Mr. Coleman?”
“Yeah, the one who … leers at me all the time.”
So, she’d told someone after all. Good for her.
“Of course I did, honey. I thought you’d heard.”
“Heard what?”
He looked at her, then at me, as if surprised we didn’t know something. Officer Jensen’s eyes went grim as he spoke.
“The vice-principal checked his classroom after I mentioned your concern,” he said, “and it turns out Mr. Coleman’s computer was filled with pornography, most of it depicting underage teens. Girls and boys. He was fired this morning.”