Novels 11 Adam Page 14

  Before leaving to meet with Heather, they’d spent an hour poring over interview transcripts and several investigative reports filed from the Phoenix office. Brit was hauling in the data as fast as he could get it, but sixteen months on the case had convinced them all that when the break did come, it wouldn’t be from an expected source.

  The FBI estimated that at least thirty serial killers operated in the United States at any given time. At least half of those would never be caught. Unless a pattern killer broke and decided he’d had enough, he only became more elusive with each killing, contrary to what the public believed.

  Yes, the FBI did gather more evidence with each event, and yes, as a pattern became evident, anticipating a killer’s next move became easier. But a killer who remained at large after killing fifteen women did so by being good in the first place, and he refined his evasive skills with each kill.

  On a one-to-ten scale of skill sets, most garden-variety killers operated at a two or a three. Most successful serial killers operated at a five or six.

  In Daniel’s estimation, Eve operated at a nine or ten.

  “You ready?” Lori asked.

  Daniel took a deep breath and blew it out. “As I’ll ever be. Tie me down.”

  “Do you mind taking your shirt off?”

  Daniel pulled his knit shirt off, dropped it on the floor, and sat on the couch dressed only in jeans.

  “Arms by your legs,” she said. “You can lie down.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier on the floor? More room.”

  “If you want.”

  He lay down on his back, spread his legs a little, and pressed his hands flat against his hips. Lori slipped a belt under his upper thigh and cinched it around his wrist.

  “You can pull your hand out if you try, but this will keep your movements restricted.”

  “Good to know, Doctor.” He tried to smile.

  “Other hand.” She tied his left wrist down to his side, then looped the last belt around his ankles.

  Using a cotton swab and some alcohol, she cleaned the peripheral vein on his right arm, speaking as much to fill the silence as to give him any useful information.

  “The sample I have was synthesized using dimethylamine, lithium aluminum hydride, and oxalyl chloride. I’ll be injecting one cc of the drug into your vein. You’ll feel the initial effects within twenty seconds and probably black out within the first minute as the DMT spreads to the capillaries in your temporal lobe.”

  “So out in five minutes?”

  “Up to thirty minutes. Don’t worry, I’m right here.” She put her hand on his chest and slowly moved it down to his belly. Her eyes followed her fingers as they touched his skin.

  She looked into his eyes. “I never told you how it was. Bringing you back to life.”

  “How was it?”

  “Words can’t describe what I felt. When your breath filled my mouth . . .” She smiled, and Daniel ignored a sudden urge to sit up and kiss her.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  She exhaled, patted his stomach lightly, and reached for the surgical rubber band. Working quickly now, she twisted the tourniquet around his upper arm, pulled it tight with one end in her mouth. She inserted the syringe’s needle into the bottle of DMT, withdrew one cc, set the bottle back down, and cleared the syringe.

  “Close your eyes.”

  He did. His heart was hammering already.

  The prick on his arm was hardly more than a mosquito’s bite. And then the needle was out.

  Daniel began to count the seconds down. He got to twelve before the first hammer fell on his mind.

  He felt his body jerk once as a bright light exploded before his eyes.

  A second blow seemed to strike him between the eyes, then a third in rapid succession. Two more white-hot eruptions made him gulp air.

  Then a fourth hammer fell, and this one brought pitch-black darkness.

  He began to thrash.

  FIFTEEN

  DANIEL HAD BEEN ON two drug-induced trips in his life. The first: when his brain dumped DMT into his system upon death, spawning a so-called near-death experience that he could not remember.

  The second: when Lori injected a small amount of synthetic DMT into his right arm two hours after he’d promised Heather to think about dropping the Eve case—a promise he had no intention of keeping, not until Eve was chained down on death row.

  He knew that both trips were induced chemically, triggering reactions in the mind that called up euphoric emotions, lights, sounds, colors—a plethora of sensations that nature had perfected to ease severe trauma to the mind.

  He knew that neither had any bearing on a future or other reality except for their ability to reach backward into memory and project what had once been seen, heard, smelled, touched, or tasted by the brain.

  Daniel knew all of this, but all of it became meaningless in that moment of darkness. Whatever memory the fear was accessing to flesh itself out hardly mattered in the moment.

  What did matter was that the bouts of fear he’d experienced throughout the day paled next to this new fear. He was dimly aware of his own screaming. His violent convulsions.

  And then a starburst of blue-and-white light filled the darkness. In the space of a single breath, the fear fell away. Euphoria swelled through his chest and boiled over in what he thought might be real laughter, bubbling from his own lips.

  Wow. Now, now . . . now this is a trip, he thought, grinning stupidly.

  Images flew past him: A long tunnel of light, swirling with lazy light. His mother, smiling, kissing his father. A large white limousine with a smiley sticker on the rear windshield.

  Heather staring at him with dark eyes.

  Daniel’s laughter stilled.

  And then here it came, another sledgehammer, swooping down from the sky, black as oil. It hit his chest.

  I see you, Daniel . . .

  His world turned dark and he began to scream.

  And the trip ended. The fear dissipated like spent steam. The pitch-blackness was replaced by a slightly red darkness that he realized was the back of his eyelids.

  Daniel opened his eyes and looked up at Lori, who was kneeling over him, staring into his face.

  “Sh, sh, sh, it’s okay, really. It’s going to be okay.”

  “What . . . what happened?” He was breathing hard. Hot. Wet with sweat. “What happened?”

  “You okay?”

  Daniel tried to push himself up and succeeded only when she helped him. “How do you feel now?”

  “Besides a headache, not terrible. How long?”

  She glanced at her watch. “Twelve minutes.”

  “That long? It felt like a minute.” He shivered. “Man, that was a trip.”

  “Let’s hope you didn’t wake the neighbors.”

  “I was that loud? Man . . .” He stood shakily, walked to the couch, and eased himself down. “Man . . .”

  “So?”

  “So.”

  “Did you see him?”

  The intense emotions had pushed the objective from his mind. “No.”

  “No? Nothing at all?”

  He thought about it as carefully as he could, head throbbing as it was. “Nothing except some pretty radical emotions. I saw things from my past. Light. Darkness. But mostly I just laughed like a fool or screamed bloody murder.”

  Lori sat down and leaned back. Crossed her legs and arms, lost in thought. “Well, that’s not terribly helpful. Is it?”

  The failure of the experience hit him then. “Unless it’s taken my fear. That’s possible, right?”

  “Possible. But you didn’t see Eve. I realize you want to relieve yourself of this fear, but I was hoping . . .”

  “Yeah. Well, now I know.”

  “Know what?”

  “What an NDE feels like. I saw the light, the tunnel, the whole works.” He took a long pull from his bottle of water, noted that his fingers were still trembling. “Heaven and hell in the space of one minute. You shoul
d try it.”

  “No thanks.” She sat forward and began putting the drug paraphernalia back in the white box.

  “You seem pretty disappointed,” Daniel said.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “If the fear returns . . . more than you can know.”

  She nodded. “Something else is bothering me.”

  The sweat on his chest had dried. He considered putting his shirt back on but decided to wait until he’d taken a shower.

  “What if it was just a bad trip?” Lori said.

  “It was. I don’t follow.”

  She shrugged. “A synthetically induced drug trip that approximates the effects of death.”

  “A fake NDE,” he said. “All NDEs are essentially fake. Illusions created by a flood of electrochemical reactions.”

  “That’s not my point. When a brain dies, as yours did in Colorado Springs, it suffers trauma we can only guess at. The neurotransmitters and receptors are in synaptic chaos. The hippocampus and amygdala die. The entire nervous system is flooded with DMT, like you just were, but there’s more. Somewhere between the chemistry of the temporal lobe and the lack of oxygen to the rest of the brain, the critical processes become acutely confused. It’s like developing a thirty-year case of Alzheimer’s in a minute and a half.”

  “Not just a bad trip induced by a few chemicals.”

  “Chemicals can kill the brain, don’t get me wrong. A higher dose of DMT, for example. Which is the problem.”

  “The dose of DMT I would need to recreate what I lost in death would probably kill me,” Daniel said.

  “Exactly.”

  They watched each other for a few long seconds.

  “You going to take your wife up on her offer?”

  “Heather’s not my wife. We’ve been divorced for two years. Do I have a choice?”

  “She seems like a sweet lady.”

  He let the comment pass.

  “No, I suppose you don’t have a choice. You couldn’t give up on Eve if a gun were put to your head.”

  “Is there?” he asked. “A gun to my head, I mean.”

  Lori stood, walked around the coffee table, and stepped up to him. She stopped with her toes resting gently against his foot.

  “There is. A gun to your head.” She leaned over and kissed his forehead, then stood, picked up the white box, gathered her jacket and shoes without putting either on, and strode toward the front door.

  “Sleep well, Dr. Daniel Clark. No nightmares.”

  Daniel locked the door after her, took a shower, and threw on his sweats before realizing that an hour had passed since his DMT trip.

  The fear hadn’t returned. He went to bed at midnight, feeling relieved and grateful. For peace and other small things in a world of chaos. Like friends. Like Lori.

  Like no nightmares.

  His sentiment honored him with six sweet hours of sleep. And then the fear returned. And when it did, he might not have been able to keep himself from slitting his wrists if he’d been awake and a razor had been within reach.

  He woke in a full-throated scream, vocal cords already raw and raspy because he’d worn them out screaming at the dark, faceless form standing at the end of his bed.

  I see you, Daniel . . .

  MAN OF SORROW:

  JOURNEY INTO DARKNESS

  by Anne Rudolph

  Crime Today magazine is pleased to present the fourth installment of Anne Rudolph’s narrative account of the killer now known as Alex Price, presented in nine monthly installments.

  1986–1989

  NEITHER ALEX nor Jessica knew their actual birth dates, only those assigned to them by Alice, but they’d estimated approximate dates which ended up being quite accurate. They decided that they weren’t both born in October, as Alice had said, but in September, she on the seventeenth and he on the nineteenth, one year apart.

  Alex had just turned twenty-two, roughly a month after his breakdown in Jessica’s arms in the fall of 1986, when he walked in one afternoon and made an announcement.

  After much thought and deliberation, he’d decided to become a priest.

  Jessica didn’t know what to think about his idea, but when he explained his reasoning, she thought he might be on to something.

  He was convinced that becoming a priest would be a kind of absolution for past sin. It would be a clean break from Alice’s twisted religion, which turned out to be an amalgamation of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, secularism, and Satanism that Alice called Eve’s Holy Coven. Alex needed order in his life, he said, and the priesthood was all about order. In fact, he urged Jessica to consider becoming a nun.

  But was he qualified? She wanted to know.

  If he wasn’t, he would become qualified. He had his GED and was an excellent student. All he needed was four years of seminary. It fit his love for the truth, he said. And he certainly wouldn’t have a problem with the vows of chastity. The very idea of marriage made him queasy. If ever there was someone cut out to be a priest, it was him. Watching Alex’s burst of enthusiasm, Jessica thought the priesthood might be exactly what her brother needed.

  He’d talked to Father Seymour about the idea, and although the priest didn’t agree to sponsor him, he didn’t reject the idea outright. “The idea was a little outrageous,” Father Seymour recalled. “Alex was a tortured soul. But the Catholic church doesn’t hold past sins against those who seek to serve God. God knows I would never have qualified if it did. You don’t decide on a whim to accept this sinner over that sinner; it’s a matter of the heart. If Alex could prove his heart, the rest would sort itself out. As it did.”

  When pressed about his failure to recognize and stop Alex then, while there was still time, Father Seymour only shrugged. “If we all recognized evil for what it is, the world would be a utopia, yes. But the Maker of all this is winning handily despite our ignorance. There’s cheering, not cowering, in his corner.”

  Alex embraced Father Seymour’s challenge that he prove his heart by returning home with a pile of theology books from the library. He began to read these on the couch by lamplight rather than in his room. “He even brought a Bible home,” Jessica recalled. A whole Bible, not the one Alice had introduced them to, which had all the New Testament except for the book of Revelation torn out.

  Alex was on his way. He didn’t relax his insistence on cleanliness and order, and his nightmares didn’t stop, but his new focus eased his depression. He began to see himself as a priest and bought himself several black shirts, which he wore buttoned to the top, though he didn’t go so far as to wear a collar.

  But even in those first few weeks, Jessica noticed signs that studying for the priesthood would prove to be a difficult road for her brother. With increasing frequency he would slam a book closed, mutter something about sloppy thinking, and retreat into his room without the books.

  She came home one night to find pages from the Bible torn out and scattered throughout the living room. Hearing her enter the apartment, Alex came out of his room and picked up the pages without speaking. When she pressed him for an explanation, he muttered something about cleansing the room. The next day Alex moved all of his theology books to his sanctuary, where he claimed he could study without distraction.

  “Destroying all forms of light is evil’s primary occupation. Its secondary purpose is to do so without being detected. I would say that every human brushes up against the most abject form of evil at least once a day. But they might notice only once every ten years.”

  —Father Robert Seymour Dance of the Dead

  In late November, 1986, Alex finally convinced Father Seymour that he was fit to earn his sponsorship at the St. Peter’s Seminary College in Pasadena. “It was like he’d won the lottery,” Jessica said. “He was going to be a priest. The fact that he was having difficulty studying those theology books never seemed to be an obstacle for him. He was going to be a priest and nothing else mattered to him.”

  Two hundred seventy-three students were enrolled in St. Peter’
s Seminary College for the spring semester in 1987, and many of them remember the shy student dressed in black who sat at the back of his classes. “He wore this black shirt, same one every day, buttoned tight around his neck,” recalls one student. “He looked like a gangster with his hair slicked back all clean.”

  But it was Alex’s demeanor that drew the attention of most students. He wasn’t only shy; he generally refused to look others in the eye, shifting his attention to other parts of their face when he was forced to talk to them. And by all accounts he had a very difficult time talking to women.

  Sister Mary Hickler remembers an incident that struck her as curious that year. Studying in the library one day, she had a question about a course assignment. Seeing only Alex seated at a table in the back, she approached him. She sat across from him and pulled out her book. He immediately stood and moved to another table. Offended by his behavior, she approached him again. This time he sat still but refused to look at her.

  “I was young and a bit feisty back then. And I wanted him to tell me if he always ran away from women. When he didn’t answer, I asked him to look at me, which he also refused to do. He didn’t blush or show signs of embarrassment as I expected, but irritation. His jaw muscles tightened and his breathing seemed more deliberate. Even for me, it was a rather frightening experience.”

  Two months later, Sister Mary Hickler was walking behind Alex when he dropped a book. She picked it up for him. Evidently recognizing her from the library, Alex turned and walked away, leaving her with the book. She hurried to catch him, and placing the book into his arms, she gave him a piece of her mind.

  “If you want to be a priest, you’ll have to learn to love more than yourself. Including women.” Then she left.

  Jessica remembers the day as well. It was in the fall of 1987, Alex’s second semester at the seminary. He came home pacing and chewing his fingernails as he’d taken to doing as part of his cleanliness routine. He wanted to know if she thought he loved her. Of course, she replied.