The Soul Hunter (29 page)

Without looking at me, he picked up the phone.

I picked mine up and waited, wishing I’d brought along some hand-sanitizer gel.

He mumbled through the line, his voice scratchy, like he hadn’t used it in a while. “Will you tell them to leave me alone?” His expression was sheepish, obsequious. It was hard to believe this was the same man who had lunged at the mirror and howled at me in the interrogation room.

“Tell who? The police?”

His hands shook violently, his face screwed up, and he began coughing and heaving, doubling himself over his knees for a minute.

The coughing stopped and he asked it again. “Will you tell them to leave me alone?”

“I don’t understand what you’re asking me, Mr. Pryne.”

“They’re watching me,” he said. “All the time.” He yawned, showing me a mouthful of brown, rotting teeth. “They won’t let me sleep.”

“Who?” I asked. “Who is watching you?”

“They got eyes on me. Inside my head.”

If I hadn’t seen what I’d seen on that interrogation video, I’d have talked to him a second, patronized him just enough to assure him I’d deliver his message to the intruders in his head, and then walked down the hall and asked the sergeant on duty to take him to a Parkland shrink for evaluation. In another setting, he would have been just a run-of-the-mill psychotic drug
addict who needed a script for 500 milligrams of Seroquel and seventy-two hours of observation.

As it was, I said, “Do you know who they are?”

“You know who they are,” he spat. “I don’t care to know. Don’t matter no more. Not to me.” He called me a name I won’t repeat.

“Mr. Pryne,” I said firmly, reflexively whipping out a set of well-oiled clinical skills, “if you want me to help you, you’ll need to speak to me respectfully.”

He ducked his head like a beaten animal and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “No offense.”

“I don’t know who they are,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re a liar,” he said quietly.

Martinez started to interject, but I held up a hand to stop him.

“What makes you think I’m lying?” I asked.

“I know all about you. Liar. Lyin’ scheming…” There was that word again. “Everyone knows how women lie. Trying to trap you and trick you and keep you down. Thinkin’ they’re better’n you.”

“Mr. Pryne, I thought we agreed you would speak to me respectfully. One more outburst and I walk out of here and never come back. Understood?”

He ducked his head again and shuddered.

“What makes you think I know who they are?” I asked.

“You was at the lake, wasn’t you?”

“What lake?”

“The lake. Where the spirits are.”

I felt the room get cold. I looked over at Martinez, whose eyebrows had come together, his expression sharp, alert. His hand had moved to his holster.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Pryne,” I said.

“You’re a liar,” he said again.

He was right, of course. I knew exactly what he was talking about.

“What do they want with you, Mr. Pryne? Why won’t they leave you alone?”

“You tell me. You’re the one knows ’em.”

“I don’t know any spirits, Mr. Pryne.”

He cursed at me and spat at the window, aiming a big wad of contempt right at my face.

I pushed back my chair and stood up. “I told you I’d leave, Mr. Pryne. I meant it.”

I picked up my bag and motioned for Martinez to follow me.

Pryne started screaming. “Don’t you walk away from me, you…” I sighed, wishing he’d choose another word. “You think you’re better’n me?” he yelled. “That I ain’t worth saving? I never killed nobody! Ask the rats! They’ll tell you. Ask the rats!”

He stood up and screamed obscenities at me until the guards on his side of the world caught him from behind, slamming his face down on the tabletop to subdue him. He was still screaming when we walked out of the room, the eyes of the other visitors and prisoners following us silently as we left.

Neither of us said a word as we walked down the hall to the exit. It wasn’t until we were standing outside in the cold sunshine that Martinez said, “Coffee?”

We walked around the block and found a coffeehouse. I ordered the largest possible serving of Earl Grey with cream and sugar. Martinez had a small coffee, black. Though it was cold outside, we both headed for a sidewalk table. I wanted to breathe some air and feel the sun on my face.

“You okay?” he asked after we sat down.

I nodded and took a sip of my tea. Too hot.

“You?”

He nodded. “Any idea what that was about?”

I shrugged. “What do you think?”

He shrugged back. “Beats me.”

I took the top off my tea to let it cool, releasing a wisp of steam into the crisp afternoon.

I think we both knew that something was going on with Gordon Pryne. Something more than a psychotic break. I’d felt the evil in the room, that ominous and now alarmingly familiar feeling I get when Peter Terry comes around. I suspected Martinez had felt it too. He’s sensitive that way like I am. But I sure didn’t want to be the one to bring it up.

Martinez saved me the trouble.

“You feel the room get cold?”

I nodded.

“Like Jackson and McKnight said.”

“And Yaya,” I said.

“God rest her soul.” He crossed himself. “Same thing happened when I saw him yesterday.”

“The room got cold?”

He nodded. “Kept talking about someone watching him.”

We waited for a bus to rumble past us.

“He’s in terrible shape,” I said.

“Yep.”

“It’s the meth,” I said. “Dries people up from the inside.”

“Wicked drug. No doubt about that.” He took a drink of his coffee and looked up. Jet contrails had crisscrossed a big
X
in the bright blue sky over the city.

“Who do you think’s watching him?” he asked finally. He leveled his eyes at me. “He seems to think you know.”

I looked back at him. “I’m not sure.”

“But you have a theory.”

My turn to nod. “I do.”

“Want to let me in on it?”

“Do you have a copy of the tape at your office?”

“The interrogation tape? Sure.”

I scooted my chair back and stood up. “Let’s go.”

One perk of the job is that chaplains get real offices, not just cubicles. For privacy, I guess. Martinez’s office is not unlike mine. He has more books than he knows what to do with. His desk is tidy, the pending business of the day stacked in neat little piles. His coffeemaker is a spotless stainless steel number, extra coffee cups sitting beside it, along with a variety of sweeteners. The coffee cups were clean and unstained, unlike every other vessel I’d seen in this building. A crucifix hung on one wall. Photographs of children were everywhere, a dozen or so little versions of himself, framed and propped up where he could see them. Three kids appeared as a group more often than any of the others—two beautiful dark-skinned, brown-eyed boys, and a little pig-tailed girl, who was always between them. I wondered if any of the children were his. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might be married. He didn’t wear a ring.

He reached onto one of his shelves and pulled out the tape, then walked me down the hall to a conference room and shut the door behind us. He put the tape in and turned on the TV.

I picked up the remote and fast-forwarded to the end, starting the video where the howling began, letting it roll with the sound off. We sat back and watched again as Jackson and Martinez backed away from Pryne, who threw himself against his chains and collapsed. We waited a few more minutes as the officers scrambled to get the situation under control.

“We’re almost there,” I said.

We watched together as Pryne was strapped to the gurney and rolled out of the room.

And then the screen went black.

“What happened?” I said.

“I guess that’s the end.”

“No, there was more. The tape rolled for another ten minutes or so. What happened to the rest of it?”

“They probably stopped the copy as Pryne left the room. The interview was over at that point. Why?”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. I thought I’d seen something at the end of the video.”

“Want me to call A-V and see if they still have the original?”

“That would be great.”

He stepped out and made the phone call, returning a minute later with a fresh cup of coffee. I was still nursing my tea.

“No dice. They erased it already.”

I sighed. It was probably just as well.

“What happened at the lake?” he asked.

I looked at him, trying to decide whether to trust him. Not that he wasn’t a trustworthy person—he didn’t have that vibe about him at all. I mean, whether to trust him with my own vulnerability. Whether to expose the weird reality I’d found myself in the middle of or, alternatively, to lie through my teeth and maintain some reasonable facade of normalcy.

I opted for a toned down version of the truth, telling him about the day two summers ago when I’d met Peter Terry at Barton Springs in Austin, and about selected bits of the chaos that had followed.

“You think this guy’s the one watching Gordon Pryne?” Martinez asked me.

“Put it this way,” I said. “I think Gordon Pryne thinks Peter Terry is watching him. And somehow Gordon Pryne got wind that I’ve met him.”

He took a sip of his coffee. “This is some creepy stuff.”

I nodded. “And where’s Yaya when we need her?”

He smiled. “Talking to St. Jude. I told you.”

“Well, she’d better talk fast,” I said. “’Cause the way this is going, we’re going to need the help.”

An airplane roared overhead. As we watched the plane bank
to the right over downtown, I noticed the contrails had faded above us and the X had dissipated into the afternoon sky.

“What did you say he’s in charge of?” I asked.

“Lost causes.”

I raised my paper cup and we toasted. “To St. Jude.”

D
avid Shykovsky had graduated summa cum laude from Sugar Pie School, so even though he wasn’t speaking to me, he’d done his homework assignment and checked on the autopsies of Drew’s father and husband. By the time I left Martinez, David had left me a message on my work line and faxed over the reports. I called to thank him, but of course he didn’t pick up. I drove over to the office to get the pages off the fax machine before anyone else saw them. No need to let my colleagues in on the drama du jour. I had enough reputation problems already.

I fixed a cup of tea and let myself into my office and sat down at my desk. I reached over to my bookshelf and flipped on the stereo, letting the sound of Vivaldi into the room. Listening to classical music was a new affectation for me, and one I’m a little iffy about. Mainly because I sometimes worry I’m starting to get stodgy. Teaching at a university is a bad enough influence on me. Scholars are not fun-loving, if you get my drift. Everyone is just so serious and self-important. As if our work is actually crucial to anyone’s existence but our own. As though we’re discovering how to make fuel from orange peels or inventing air conditioning in a can or saving the Giant Panda. Well, there are probably academics somewhere doing things like that, but nobody in my department, that’s for sure.

Classical music and university life—either one of them, if
you’re not careful—can, I believe, be the death of an otherwise vital, interesting personality. While you’re not paying attention, they eat away at your citizenship in the culture, one snobby little bite at a time. Pretty soon I’d be hosting poetry readings and using
bird
as a verb, if I didn’t watch out. I’d already tanked my social life, which had been on a slow dive since I’d signed up for graduate school a couple of presidential administrations ago.

I reached back and flipped the station until I heard a boot-scooting Bruce Robison song that made me want to go dancing. Much better. I snapped my desk light on and spread the papers out in front of me, reading every word of each report.

When the events were considered separately, both men had died unremarkable deaths. Both were involved in one-car accidents, late at night, while driving alone. Toxicology on both men was negative. Neither had been using alcohol or any other drug that might impair their ability to function. Neither man had any history of brain injury or seizures. Both had perfect night vision.