Abandoned

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I am at the prison, watching Douglas Hollister as he sits across from me. The rest of my team are busy at their assigned tasks; I want to spend some time with Hollister, so I can continue to fill in the picture of the man who’s behind all this.

We still know remarkably little about our perpetrator. He’s done an excellent job of hiding himself from view, whatever his anomalies in that regard. He’s kept contact at a minimum, controlled all points of communication. He’s mutilated most of our best witnesses, and Heather Hollister is too damaged to be much help right now. Douglas Hollister is the most tangible link we have.

I take some time to study Hollister before speaking. He’s a broken, beaten man. It permeates his body language and his silence. He stares down at his own hands, meeting my eyes only once, when he entered the interview room. He’s aged overnight; his skin is sallow, and his face sags in exhaustion and depression.

“Why are you here?” he asks, listless.

“Two reasons. I want to talk more with you about the man you dealt with. And I wanted to see how you were adjusting to prison life.”

He raises his head at that last. “Adjusting? Is that a joke?”

“Not at all.”

He snorts, but it’s halfhearted. “I’m trapped in a building filled with rapists, murderers, and thieves. Almost all of them are bigger and stronger than I am, and almost all of them are unfriendly. How do you think I’m doing?”

“Has anyone threatened you?”

“Not overtly. But it’s coming. I can feel it.”

“You can request protective custody.”

“Oh sure.” His tone is derisive. “Someone told me about that. You’re put in another building with a different set of rapists and murderers and thieves, except now you have a target on your back forever, because everyone assumes you’re a snitch. No thanks.”

“If it comes down to a choice between that or death, I’d advise you to choose that, Douglas.”

He sighs, rubs his face rapidly with both hands, as though he’s trying to wake himself up from a hangover or a nightmare. His skin glows red from the rubbing, then returns to its normal color. “I’m not all that concerned with living or dying right now. Why should I be? I killed one of my own sons, and the one who lived will know that eventually. Dana’s a … thing now. And Heather wins, after all. Death? I really don’t care.”

Heather wins?

I fight the instinct for anger. However many years I spend with sociopaths, with all their malignant narcissism, they still have the ability to surprise me. They have a twist in their mind that I can’t understand in the root of me.

“You will,” I say. “You feel that way now, but it will pass.”

“How do you know?”

Because I know you. Because you care more about yourself than any other human being in the world. Because you are what you are pathologically, by reflex. You couldn’t be otherwise any more than you could choose to stop breathing.

“Because I’m familiar with the phenomenon of shock,” I tell him instead. It’s a true-enough answer. “I’ve dealt with men and women in your situation. Suicide or death wishes are a common first stage. Survival asserts itself eventually.”

“Really?”

The self-pitying sound in his voice makes me want to say ugly things, to hurt him in his weakness. Poor baby, I want to say. Is life unfair for poor widdle you? I slam down the window on these thoughts and continue to wear my own mask.

“Really. Just hang in there, and don’t close any doors you might need to open later, okay?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Thanks.” He raises his gaze to mine and I witness naked gratefulness. Who knows if it’s real or calculated?

“You’re welcome. Let’s talk about this man, this Dali. Are you willing to do that?”

“Why not? He’s the reason I’m here.”

“That’s exactly right,” I say. “You don’t owe him anything.”

He seems to take courage from this idea. He sits up straighter and nods to himself a few times. “Yeah. Yeah. Fuck him. Okay. What do you want to know?”

“When you talked, did he ever explain what his name meant?”

“Dali?”

“Yes.”

“I never asked. He wasn’t the kind of man you question a lot.”

“Fair enough. What else can you tell me?”

Hollister frowns, thinking. “He was very careful about giving me any details. I never spoke with him face-to-face, only by cell phone and email, and those numbers changed regularly. He was always the one to initiate contact. I had no way of reaching out to him.”

“How about his voice? Was there anything distinctive about it? High-pitched, low-pitched, rough, smooth, anything?”

“Sorry. He used some kind of voice scrambler. It made him sound like a robot when he talked.”

I bite my lip, frustrated. “How long were you posting and chatting on that website before he first contacted you?”

“On beamanagain.com?”

“Yes.”

He considers it. “Not long. A week and a half? I think that’s right.”

“What kind of things were you saying just before he contacted you?”

Hollister gives me an appraising look. I glimpse the first return of shrewdness. “Why?”

“Just trying to get a full picture.”

The barest smirk ghosts his fetid lips. I prefer the beaten-down Douglas to the man I see returning to himself now. Sometimes the mask slips. “It was pretty specifically after I said something along the lines of I wish I had the guts to just make her go away.”

“You said it that openly?”

“Sure. I was just one of a bunch of other guys venting. I didn’t feel like I was risking anything.”

“That’s when he contacted you for a private chat?”

“Right.”

It makes some sense, I think. No reason to tiptoe around something like this. When you’re selling kidnapping, torture, and murder, you have to be aggressive. Dali would watch for the indicators of more than mere discontentment and then he’d approach and be blunt about it. Most of the time, I bet, he gets turned down. The majority of the human race is all bluster when it comes down to the nitty-gritty of harm. It’s one thing to say to your wife, “I wish you were dead,” and another thing entirely to bury an ax in her skull and dump her body in a lake. The distinction might seem a hop and a jump to the uninitiated, but in reality the difference is a distance from here to the sun.

“Then what happened?”

“Exactly what I said when the black man was interviewing me. Dali told me he could make my problem disappear. He offered proof and he warned me that if I breathed a word, he’d kill Avery and Dylan.”

“Why’d you agree to go ahead? What was the tipping point?” I ask the question without really thinking about it. It’s the common need, the most visceral one: a desire to understand why. We need why; it helps us sleep at night. Too many times, there is no why, there’s just madness.

Hollister seems to have a need to understand it himself or perhaps to make me understand. He leans back in his chair and ponders my question. The silence in the room settles in as I watch him struggle to unravel his own reasoning.

“I just … I guess I just didn’t see any other way out. Divorce meant giving her my house and my sons and half my money for God knows how long. This was a way for me to get the happiness I deserved.” He points to his chest and the expression on his face is hurt, bewildered, petulant. “I deserved to be happy too.”

I think I hate the ones like him the most. The serial killer is a simpler, more honest monster. Ask them why they did it, and their answers boil down, in the end, to the same thing: because it makes me feel so very, very good.

Douglas Hollister and his ilk live in a world of mirrors that reflect their own rightness and rationalizations back to them. They’re worse, in some ways, because they’re too close to the rest of us. They lack the elegance of the serial killer’s mandate. Why’d he do it? For money. For a house. Because he is a spoiled, failed, psychotic child.

“Did Dana know, Douglas? Was she in on this with you?”

His face falls, and his eyes grow hostile. “No. Fuck you for asking.”

So she was another victim of your narcissism, in the end.

“Thanks for your time.” I stand up and head toward the door.

“That’s it?”

I turn to him. “Just one more question, Douglas. Are you happy now?”

I’m pleased by the rage that profuses his face. I’ve grown crueler, and I question it less and less. Should I be worried?

I reach my car without an answer. By the time I hit the highway, I’ve forgotten the question.