David Wiltse - Into The Fire

"Under certain circumstances."

"Why didn't you just get in your car and drive out here yourself, why bring Karen into it at all?"

"One, I don't have a car. I live in New York-who needs a car?"

"Try again."

"I was hoping that if I came in under Karen's auspices you'd at least give me a hearing."

"Well, there you go, finally. Confession is good for the soul, right, Doc?"

"I'm sneaking around like this because Hatcher would have my ass if he knew about it. If he knew what I was about to do, he would probably consider it highly disloyal."

"I realize I'm being suckered-but I'm all ears," said Becker. "Anyone disloyal to Hatcher has earned my attention."

"I know that," Gold said, "but I didn't just say it for effect."

Gold placed a pocket tape recorder on the table and positioned two minicassettes beside it.

"You know they caught this man Cooper, the cellmate of the prisoner who wrote to you and warned you about him."

"Yeah."

"The Behavioral Sciences people are having a field day with him. He's told them about killings that go back years.

We're going to have local cops cleaning up their records all over the place. The Bureau's national crime statistics are going to go down. I mean, this person is a one-man crime wave. He's stuffed bodies in culverts and tossed them out of moving cars and left them for dead right and left, mostly marginal types, migrant workers, drifters, the kind of people who wind up dead in the parking lot of some roadside tavern in Tennessee and are never investigated very heavily."

"So you've got him-what's the problem?"

"As far as the Behavioral people are concerned, no problem at all.

They're delighted to talk to him and to adjust their profile of serial killers. And of course Director Hatcher has been able to deliver the guy who kidnapped and killed the niece of Congressman Beggs. Cooper has become a sort of Golden Boy amongst villains."

"As long as Hatcher is pleased."

"Everybody is pleased. Cooper is talking like a guest on 'Oprah." He can't say enough bad things about himself.

He's a little vague on the details, sometimes, but he's sure as hell willing. Prompt him a bit and he can remember most of it, at least enough to fry himself several dozen times over."

"You've been in on the questioning?"

"John, everybody's been in on the questioning. This is the prize bull, they're walking him around the ring for everyone to have a look. I mean, there's a cachet involved in being in on it; if you get a chance to watch it, you take it. Cooper's like tickets to the Super Bowl. You can't pass them up even if you don't like football. I was invited to watch an interrogation session. Somebody thought it would improve my understanding, I guess, give me more insight into what our agents have to deal with, something like that. I was just pleased someone thought I was important enough to invite."

"He confessed to the two girls in the coal mine?"

"Absolutely. Told us where he snatched them and when and how he tortured them with cigarettes and matches until they finally died. That was a revelation in itself They only found skeletal remains of the girls and no indication of how they died. They found a number of cigarettes and candle wax on the site but assumed they were being used just so the girls, or someone, could see.

He had a lot of details like that, stuff that only the killer would have known."

"So Hatcher has an easy conviction, gets national headlines-and you know that somehow they'll be his headlines-and gets in tight with the head of the Oversight Committee, all at the same time. Gosh, I'm glad you paid me this visit, Gold. Just what I need to hear."

"John, I'm not on the law enforcement side of things, you know that. I spend my time trying to help you agents adjust to what you have to deal with. Once in a while I make a contribution to a psychological profile of some unknown perp. You tell me I'm usually wrong with those."

"Only in the important details."

"Thank you. So I'm no expert on the criminal mind, granted. But I'm not an idiot, either. I know a deeply violent, dangerous man when I see one, and Cooper is a deeply violent, dangerous man. A very stupid man, too.

Plus he's got a system of values that he picked up from being in and out of penal institutions from the age of fifteen on. He makes my blood run cold. He uses his strength-and the guy's as big as a gorilla-to get his way. He's got a frustration level of practically zero, cross him and he'll throw you through a window because he can't figure out a better way. Of all the guys I've heard about in the years I've been in the Bureau, this one is at the head of my list of people I wouldn't want to be stuck in a blind alley with. His violence quotient is enormous.

He even dreams about pulling people's heads off. I mean literally pulling their heads off their shoulders."

Becker sat quietly, listening attentively while keeping his eyes on the tape recorder. He knew that Gold had not yet come to the point. He also knew that when he did, Becker was not going to like it.

"There are a lot of very nasty men I wouldn't put on that dark alley list, by the way. Dyce, the one who took men home and drained their blood because he liked to look at corpses..

"I remember Dyce," Becker said almost inaudibly. He had captured Dyce himself and come within a breath of killing him. Becker's restraint was considered by Gold to be a signal mark of improvement. Becker was far less certain.

"Of course you do. I'm sorry if that's a painful allusion, but my point is, I wouldn't be afraid to be in a dark alley with Dyce. I wouldn't feel comfortable about it, mind, but I wouldn't feel in immediate danger because Dyce was not randomly violent. He was basically a very passive man. When he acted out his awful fantasies, he did it with a purpose, he didn't just lash out at the nearest male. He had something very specific in mind. So do all serial killers… Am I right about that?"

Becker nodded slowly.

"If you saw Dyce on the street, you wouldn't even notice him. If you saw Cooper coming, believe me, you'd step aside to get out of his way."

"Just play the tape," Becker said.

"Right. Cut to the chase."

"With respect, Gold, I don't need a primer on serial killers."

"Sorry. I need to convince myself, I think. It helps to hear my arguments aloud. Not that they're arguments. I just don't quite understand."

"Play it."

"Right. Okay, this is what I consider the relevant part of the session I sat in on. He's already told us what and when and where about the girls in the coal mine, very specific as I said. The voice you recognize is mine. I only asked the one question. They looked pretty annoyed that I spoke at all."

Becker nodded and Gold started the recorder. A deep voice came from the machine. Even in this form and despite the masculine timbre, there was a quality of childishness in the speaker that came through clearly "I took her into the cave so we could be alone," Cooper said.

"Why did you want to be alone with her, Darnell?"

Becker did not recognize the voice of the interrogator.

"So I could hurt her," Cooper said.

"You could hurt her anywhere. Why did you take her into the cave?"

"So I could hurt her for a long time," Cooper said.

There was a pause, and then Becker recognized Gold's voice.

"What did it feel like when she died?"

"What did it feel like?" Becker could almost see the shrug of shoulders implicit in Cooper's tone. "I didn't care. She didn't mean anything to me."

"Do you like to hurt people, Darnell?" another voice asked.

"Yeah," said Cooper.

"Does it excite you to hurt other people?"

"Sometimes."

"Tell us how you feel when you hurt someone."

"I feel good."

"Do you feel better when you hurt men, or women?"