The Laughterhouse (27 page)

“Goddamn it! Why don’t you get it?”

But Caleb does get it, it’s just that it doesn’t change anything. It can’t. It’s not about the future, it’s about the past; it’s not about hypotheticals, it’s about payback, about an eye for an eye. It’s about being old-school biblical. He holds Melanie’s index finger apart from the others, puts the tip of the knife into the floor and slowly lowers the edge of the blade so it touches the skin.

“Wait!” Stanton screams, his voice sounding raw. “Just wait. Please, please, wait—”

“You took too long to decide,” Caleb says. “Somehow I knew you would. I sympathize with your situation, Doctor, I really do, but you’re not acting like a man who believes what I’ve been telling him. There’ll be some resistance, probably a hard crunch, but it’ll happen. I hope I can get right through in one cut. I don’t want to keep hacking at the same fingers over and over. Let’s hope she doesn’t wake up.”

Stanton, hysterical now, thrashes up and down, he looks like
some 1980s meth addict trying to break dance. “Wait, for the love of God, let me think!”

“No,” he says, curious as to why there is much more anger from Stanton now that he has to choose one of the other girls. However he’s running out of time to be too curious. He needs to get this done.

“I’ll fucking kill you if you touch her, I swear, I swear I’ll kill you.”

“We’ll see,” Caleb says, “but by then your daughters are going to be dead.”

He pushes down a little further. The blade starts to indent her finger, but there is still no blood. Just a fraction more and a bit of a forward and back movement too, then the bleeding will begin. He doesn’t want to do it, but what choice does he have? A puddle of snot and tears are pooling beneath Stanton’s face, dirt covering his skin, speckles of blood from his grazed cheek. And still he thrashes up and down, perhaps only a few more seconds from having a heart attack.

“I . . . I can’t. I fucking can’t.”

“You can, you’ve proven that already. Let’s see how many fingers we have to get through before you remember that. You’re condemning them both, Stanton, when all you have to do is give me a name.”

“Wait!”

“Simple arithmetic. It’s all about the greater good.”

“Don’t.”

“Now, Stanton, now,” he shouts. “Who dies? Who the fuck—”

“Wait—”

“—dies because I’m going to—”

“Please, please, just wait—”

“—start cutting, I swear I’m going to fucking cut them all into—”

“Don’t!”

“—little pieces, I’ll cut them all day long until—”

“No, no.”

“—there’s nothing of them left. Let’s start right now!”

“Melanie,” the doctor says, crying, blubbering like a baby. “Please, please, God forgive me, God forgive me for what I’ve done,” he says.

Caleb takes the pressure off the knife. “Good choice,” he says, and he steps away from the girl and tucks the knife into the side of his pants. “A very good choice. I’d have made the same one. Get rid of the one with the smart mouth.”

Stanton doesn’t answer. Caleb reaches him and swings a foot into his stomach. The doctor grunts, then Caleb rolls him onto his back. “This will help,” he says, and he jams a funnel into the doctor’s mouth and pokes five sleeping pills down it. They hit the back of the doctor’s throat, then Caleb follows it with water and another punch to the stomach. The doctor swallows them. Caleb takes away the funnel.

The doctor coughs and struggles to compose himself, and when he does he sounds short of breath. “You’re . . . you’re worse than Whitby,” he says. “Whitby was, was sick,” he says, puffing. “He had genuine mental problems, what you’ve . . . you’ve got inside you is, is evil. Whitby couldn’t help himself, but you, you’re making decisions to delib . . . deliberately hurt people. Whitby didn’t think about that, he didn’t think anybody would mind what he was doing. He just didn’t get the world. They should never have let you out.”

“Maybe,” Caleb says, “but they did, the same way they let everybody out at some point. You’re the one fighting to let the nutcases out earlier than anybody else.”

He picks Katy up and carries her out to the car, past the crying baby. He lays her across the backseat and throws a blanket over her. When he comes back in he can see the doctor is struggling so hard against the plastic ties that each of his wrists are bleeding. He’s also struggling hard to stay awake.

“Please don’t do this,” Stanton says, his voice sounding raw.

“No more debate,” Caleb says, and he shows Stanton the
knife. “It’s not the same knife I used on the others,” he says. “Your daughter, she gets her own. She won’t be contaminated by the blood of those monsters who let Jessica die. She won’t feel anything, I promise you.”

“No, no,” Stanton says, shaking his head, crying harder than Caleb has ever seen another person cry, and he’s trying to squirm toward him, kicking dust up off the floor, the rage and fear fighting off the sleeping pills. “Anything . . . I’ll do anything, anything you ask . . . it doesn’t matter what just anything, anything . . . please, oh God, please don’t . . . no don’t hurt her . . . just give me a chance to . . .”

“Jessica, she felt everything,” Caleb says, and he unzips Melanie’s jacket and opens it. “He stabbed her over and over, but your daughter, I’ll only cut once. I promise, she won’t feel it,” he says, and he lines the knife up.

He pushes it quickly into Melanie’s chest.

For a second there is nothing. No noise. No blood. Nothing. The girl doesn’t even move.

Then the second turns into a second second, and before it can reach a third Stanton begins to choke on his own vomit.

The base of the handle is flush against the girl’s chest. Caleb keeps his hands on it, holding it down, pressing firmly. Her face doesn’t twitch.

Cold blood pools out from around the knife.

It soaks slowly into her T-shirt and onto his hand.

He pulls away the knife and rests it next to her, then wipes his hand across the floor. He looks over at the doctor. He’s stopped squirming. His mouth and neck are covered in blood and vomit, and he’s struggling to breathe through it all. Caleb gets up and closes the distance. He reaches down and drags the doctor to his feet, but the doctor’s legs just buckle beneath him. He’s still sobbing. Loud sobs that Caleb doesn’t have the time for. He smells of piss and shit. The sleeping pills have been thrown up, the edges of them slightly dissolved, two of them hanging from Stanton’s chin. He drags Stanton out of the
room, and still he keeps crying, so he strikes him in the side of the head, once, twice, and the doctor goes quiet, the blows more efficient than the sleeping pills. He gets him out to the car and fits him into the trunk, and each time he lifts the man now it’s harder than the last. He wipes the rest of the blood off his hand onto the doctor’s pajama top.

He goes back and looks over Melanie. The police will be here soon to take care of her. He lays her more comfortably on the blanket. He rolls up the corner of it and props it under her head as a pillow. He places her hands across her chest in the blood and interlocks her fingers, then drapes another blanket across her. He tucks her in. He strokes her hair from the side of her face, trapping it behind her ears and brushing her fringe back. He has shown her a grace his own daughter never received.

He uses the marker on her before stepping away. Her young skin is smooth and easy to write on.

When he leaves the slaughterhouse with Octavia and Katy in the backseat, Stanton in the trunk, he knows it’s for the last time. The plan is changing, but the end result will still be the same. He’ll go and see Ariel Chancellor. He’s still unsure exactly what he wants to say to her, or do with her, but he has time to figure it out on the way.

The day is moving quicker than it should, partly because of the unfolding events, partly because of daylight savings, mostly because that’s what happens in a murder investigation when things start to fall in place. The day is still light, but with the sun heading toward the horizon a little quicker every day it’s only a matter of weeks until it’s dark by five o’clock. I’ve been given the use of an unmarked patrol car that doesn’t struggle to start and has a heater and window wipers that work.

While Schroder takes a team out to the slaughterhouse, I drive to Ariel Chancellor’s house and park out front. It’s taken me a little longer than I’d have hoped, the first of the boy-racers that Schroder warned us about are already warming up the streets for later on tonight. I don’t have Detective Kent with me because I don’t need help asking a bunch of questions, and I need to get through it quickly so I can see my wife. I have twenty minutes before my five o’clock appointment with Dr. Forster, and from here it’s a twenty-minute drive, longer if the boy-racers decide to circle the nursing home. I figure I can be
ten minutes late, maybe even twenty. It’ll take Forster half an hour or so to look over my wife. So that gives me ten minutes to talk to Chancellor.

I knock but nobody answers. If I were still a private investigator, then right now I’d consider breaking in. I weigh that up against my responsibilities as a policeman, then I weigh those up against my responsibilities as a human being who’s trying to save the lives of three young girls and their father. All that weighing pulls me around the side of the house where my feet sink halfway into the boggy lawn. There are patches of mold growing around the edges of the back door. I use a lock-pick set that has come in handy over the years and will continue to do so in the future, even in my role as a policeman.

I call out a
hello
before making my way inside. The air temperature drops a few degrees. Any damper and I’d need swimming trunks. I step into the living room. To the right is a kitchen with rinsed dishes forming a pile next to the sink. There’s mouse shit along the floor near the oven, and beside a rubbish bin is a dead mouse broken in half in a spring trap. On the dining room table are a couple of fantasy paperbacks that possibly help Ariel escape her past and present. Next to them is a small plastic bag with half a dozen white tablets in it, all on display for somebody to steal—or in this case eat, because there are holes in the base of the first bag and some of the tablets are scratched up and there’s a dead mouse on the table that got high really quickly and OD’d before he could share the find with his friends.

I take a look at the photographs I saw here earlier today. The edges have curled over the years, the colors have faded from the memories. I pick up one that has Caleb Cole in it, along with Jessica and Ariel. It can’t have been taken long before James Whitby destroyed all their lives. Ariel looks happy. There is life in her eyes that has since been extinguished. Back then she was a ten-year-old girl who dreamed of ponies and rainbows and watched cartoons on TV. Back then she had a
best friend and the world was bright and happy and she was a princess. Then a crazy man made that world dark.

Even at ten Ariel would have understood what happened. At eleven she would have understood it more. By high school it was probably ruining her life. The guilt, the shame, the knowledge she got away and her best friend didn’t. In this photo is a girl that never knew what lay ahead, would never need to know a world of drugs and prostitution, would never need to live in a run-down home with mouse shit on the floor and holes in the ceiling. James Whitby may not have killed her, but he took away her life.

I move through to the bedroom. My cell phone rings. It’s Schroder.

“Got an update for you,” he says.

“You’re at the slaughterhouse?”

“About five minutes away. You spoke to Ariel?”

“Just pulling onto her street now. So what’s the news?”

“It’s pretty moot now,” he says, “but fingerprints found under the hood came back as a match to Caleb Cole. And the court records have arrived. Want to have a guess at who was the jury foreman?”

“Albert McFarlane?”

“Try again.”

“Herbert Poole.”

“Bingo. Victoria Brown said Whitby had the mental age of a ten-year-old and wasn’t responsible for himself. Dr. Stanton was a critical piece of her defense. And, get this, she also had some character witnesses.”

“McFarlane?”

“Exactly. He used to be Whitby’s teacher. He spoke about how much Whitby had changed since the attack that hospitalized him. He told the jury that Whitby was basically a good kid, and everything he did was a result of the abuse.”

“Brad Hayward?”

“No mention of him. Has to be what you said earlier—he
was just a random guy Ariel Chancellor worked last night, which must have upset Cole. Listen, we’ve got people sitting on the other jury members making sure they’re safe, along with everybody else listed in the case. We got Cole’s mug shot out to the media—everybody by the end of the day is going to know who Caleb Cole is. We’ll find him soon. Look, I gotta go—we’re pulling up at the slaughterhouse.”

“Good luck,” I tell him, and he hangs up.

I tuck the phone into my pocket and Schroder is right about finding Caleb Cole soon, because when I turn around he’s standing right in front of me. Before I can react, he swings a fist and punches me in the face.

His fist gets me in the side of the jaw and the first thing that happens is one of my headaches explodes into existence. It feels much worse than earlier this year when the glass jar was smashed against my skull. The second thing that happens is I stumble backward. Another fists gets me in the forehead and it’s like somebody has set off a flashbulb inside my head, one of those old press ones that would flash white, then have smoke puff out from around it as it went dark. For two seconds I can’t see a damn thing, but I can hear him coming at me. I lift up my arms but he manages to hit me again. I fall onto the bed and then his face starts to appear from behind the dark clouds and he looks as surprised as I feel. He jumps on top of me.

“Who are you?” he shouts.

The room is spinning. My back is sinking into the mattress.

“Huh? You fucked her as well?” he yells.

He puts his hands around my throat and squeezes. I grab his hands but can’t push them away. Something inside my skull is
trying to break free, it’s stomping around and banging at the walls.