David Wiltse - Prayer for the Dead

He could not tell Hatcher, but he had told Gold.

“Don’t be so damned hard on yourself, man,” Gold repeated now in his mind. “You don’t want to do it; it happens because of circumstances. These are not pussycats the Bureau sends you after. These are multiple murderers, hardened killers who would have killed you in an instant.”

“How do you know I don’t want to do it?”

“How do I know? Because you don’t do it any other time, that’s how I know. What you experience isn’t joy; it’s a final release of adrenaline. You are in great danger, under terrible stress-you are feeling the sense of release, not pleasure. You were brought into this by accident. It turns out you’ve got great skills, but having empathy or understanding for these people does not mean you are these people, understand? You have the empathy to be a great shrink. I understand my patients, most of them. That doesn’t mean I am them, doesn’t mean I share their problems-but I understand them.”

The farmhouse had two stone chimneys, one at either end of the house on the exterior. The stone walls had been breached as if a tank had driven through them, but those sections that still stood were enough to hold up the roof beam and the unburned portions of the roof.

There was no blind side from which to approach. Becker counted on the darkness and moved swiftly across the yard. When the lightning struck, he dove for the ground and lay there motionless, hoping that if Dyce had seen his movement he would attribute it to a trick of the night.

He lay still until his heart stopped racing. It was a job he had to do, he told himself. Nothing more. A job. There was a maniac to find, possibly a friend to save if he wasn’t already too late for that.

Becker tried to turn off the tape in his head, but Gold’s voice insisted on being heard.

“I can’t give you absolution, I’m not a priest. I can forgive you, I can understand you.”

“I don’t want that.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to stop it.”

“You have stopped. Just keep stopping.”

“And if I go after Dyce?… I do have to go after him now.”

“Good. Find the bastard.”

“And then?”

“He’s killed at least eight men. He may have killed your friend… Find the bastard.”

“And then?”

The first rain hit him as he lay and it felt like the initial gush from a faucet. The clouds opened as if rent asunder by the last lightning bolt. By the time Becker got to his feet, he was already soaked to the skin.

Dyce was talking nonstop from his island in the air, but Tee was not listening. With every ounce of concentration he could muster he tried to move his foot toward the ladder. It was precariously balanced; it would only take a nudge to make it fall, but he could not move, he could not move. It seemed just a fraction away, as if a final effort could awaken his nerves and make them speak to his muscles, but it was a fraction he could not bridge. Tee did not think beyond the ladder. What would happen then, what he hoped to accomplish he could not say. It was an action, the only one available to him, or nearly available, and he had to do something before Dyce sucked him dry and left his husk in the deserted attic of an abandoned shell of a house. If only it didn’t make him so terribly tired to even try to think.

Rain hit the roof over Tee’s face as if a firehose had been trained on the house.

Dyce’s voice rose, claiming Tee’s attention over the noise of the rain. “I’m ready now,” he said.

Tee turned his eyes to look at the maniac. Dyce was standing on his little space of floorboards, his arms spread as if to say, look at me. The container of talcum powder was still in his hand and sprinkles of the white powder drifted off his body. He was completely naked and white as snow. When lightning flashed it illuminated him as if he were lit from inside, but even in the dark he gave off an eerie glow.

The son of a bitch has an erection. Tee thought. He’s mad as a hatter and hard as a rock.

“Remember now, try not to move when you breathe and keep your eyes closed.”

Tee did not need to be told. His eyes were already squeezed shut. Whatever was going to happen, he didn’t want to watch.

From the ground the chimney looked wide enough to hold a man. They had built them large in the last century. Not that Becker expected to find Dyce squirreled away in the chimney-although it was a possibility he did not reject. He had mentioned it to Hatcher just as an example of what he might have overlooked. Even if he had hidden there when the FBI came by, he would probably not be there now, not on a night when he could come out and move without much fear of detection.

The night is better for all of us, Becker thought.

A noise that didn’t come from the storm teased Becker’s hearing, something not wind nor rain but more familiar, chased by the tempest so quickly Becker was not sure if he had heard it or imagined it. He crouched by the side of the first chimney, his shoulder pressed against the stones, readying himself to look into the house itself The porch was dangerous: too many charred boards that could break under his weight or groan to give away his presence-if any noise that weak could be heard now. He skirted the porch, crawling on his stomach to the edge of the wall where it had partially crumbled away.

Lightning like a row of flashbulbs crackled in the sky, giving Becker a full view of the house. He looked up at the space Hatcher had not investigated. Many of the rafters were still intact, but the flooring across them was scattered and broken, a board here, two or three there running only a few feet. It looked like a net with bits of flotsam stuck to the webbing in places. One section was severed by fire into the shape of the letter C; another section, three boards wide and tucked against the junction of roof and rafter, was a bit over six feet long. A man, lying perfectly still, could stretch out unseen on that platform. The C might hold a person on his side, but Becker could see why Hatcher had dismissed the attic, or what remained of it, as a hiding place-it could be a sanctuary only for the very imaginative and desperate. But then that was what made Hatcher the way he was. He never credited desperate men with being bold enough to take truly desperate measures. Hatcher judged the men he chased by himself, and assessed their hearts by what he found in his own. And I judge them by myself Becker thought. Which is why I would have looked in the chimneys and Hatcher didn’t. Hatcher is too sane to track the mad.

The light vanished, swallowed by the storm, but Becker had seen something in the last faint illumination, a movement of a ghost against the blackness of the night.

Crouched, he waited for the next flash, which seemed to take forever in coming. Even without the lightning, he thought he could almost discern the movement under the roof on the C section of flooring, something flapping, like the wing of a huge moth. But he could not be sure if he really saw it or simply willed it. Willed it because he wanted it to be there, he thought. I want him, Becker thought. I want Dyce as badly as I have wanted any of them. Running from it, hiding away in Clamden had done no good. They are all around me, the Dyces, in small towns and large. Whether they are attracted to me or I am attracted to them, we will find each other. The silent, secret killers and the one who hunts them down. We are bonded together, Becker thought. Opposite sides of the coin-or perhaps the same side, he didn’t know and right now it didn’t matter. He was here, where he wanted to be, where he had yearned to be despite his struggles against that desire ever since Tee told him of the disappearance of the men. And Dyce was here, where he, too, must have known he would end up, waiting for the man who would put him out of the misery of his madness.