Abandoned

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

“What was your father’s name?”

“Thomas Richard Lane. Corporal Thomas Richard Lane.”

Here we are again, I think. Back to the center of the circle.

I am sitting across from Mercy Lane in a cold, concrete interview room. We are alone. The walls soak up all the sound, and this gives me goose bumps, reminding me of the dark and the meadow behind my eyes.

But I hide my discomfort.

“Your father was in the army?”

“He fought in Korea.” She pauses, mulling something. “He was really made for it.”

“For what?”

“Surviving.”

I had reached out to Mercy with the offer of a standard interview, the kind I’d done for the BAU ten or more times before. She’d accepted, whether out of boredom or because she was, in the end, no different from all the rest of them, I don’t know.

It’s an opportunity to try to understand this person who almost turned me into a murderer. It’s also a chance to get the answers to some questions. There are some loose ends. They’ve been gnawing on the soft parts of me at night and interrupting my sleep.

“Why was survival so important to him?”

“Because survival is the only thing that is important. Everything else is a bonus, not a necessity.”

She’s impatient with my question, even a little hostile. I consider her reaction and change gears. “Fair enough,” I say, keeping my voice agreeable. “But your father seemed especially attuned to that truth. Why do you think he was able to recognize it so clearly?”

She relaxes. I’ve told her that her father was not just right but a visionary. This is comfortable ground for her. It doesn’t matter that he hacked off her breasts and twisted her spirit. She’s a cripple who thinks she can run.

“Various reasons. He grew up very poor, I know that. His mother was a prostitute and his father was a drunk who molested him. He had a younger sister and a younger brother. His mother died when he was still young, and then his father pimped out the children to keep himself in booze. It all prepared him for an understanding of the realities of life. He passed those understandings on to me.”

It’s a terrible story, but I find myself unmoved. I’ve heard of worse things happening to good men and women, people who didn’t grow up to abuse their children or become serial killers.

“That must have been difficult,” I allow.

She shrugs. “That’s life. Eat or be eaten.”

“How did they get through that?”

“Two of them didn’t. The sister killed herself. The brother was murdered by a john.”

“And your father?”

A glint of pride appears. “Once his brother died, he decided he’d had enough. He killed his father and buried him in the woods with the rest. Then he went into the army.”

“Why do you think he chose that path? The military, I mean.”

“Pragmatism. The army would house him and feed him and teach him how to kill skillfully. Also, the Korean War was happening.”

“Was that a major factor?”

She nods. “My father said that war is a bloody crucible. You go in human. You come out with death in your veins. You become stronger. He’d learned the necessity for strength.”

“Stronger why? Because you’ve lost your humanity?”

She looks into my eyes and I look behind hers. I try to see into the emptiness, but there’s nothing to see.

“Are you familiar with Buddhism?” she asks me. It’s a strange, abrupt question.

“Not very.”

“At its essence, Buddhism is based on the idea that the spirit is the only thing that’s true. Everything else that we see or feel”—she slaps her chest with her hands, indicates the hushed concrete walls that surround us—“all these material things are just illusion. Mara. According to Buddhism, as long as man believes that Mara, is what’s real, rather than the soul, he’s trapped. Doomed to the cycle of rebirth, life, and death, what they refer to as Samsara. Reincarnation.”

I say nothing, fascinated at this story of the soul from a monster’s mouth.

“But Buddha had it backward,” she continues. “Don’t you see? It’s not Mara that’s the illusion. It’s the soul.” She slams a fist down on the table. “This table is real. The pain I feel when I hit it too hard, that’s real. The soul?” She shakes her head. “Just a dream. Buddhism, Christianity, they all put you to sleep.” She leans forward, excited and grim. “War wakes you up.”

I stare at her, speechless. I can’t help it. She looks off, seeing something invisible to me.

“He loved it there, you know. In Korea. He told me a story one time about strangling a man in a rice paddy while the sun rose and the rain fell. That man died with water in his eyes and rice in his ears, hearing thunder. That’s what my father said.” She pauses. “All the lies are stripped away in war. All those illusions about beauty and ugliness, or goodness and badness, about any of them being important. In war, it’s meat against meat, to the death. The naked truth.” She sounds almost wistful. My stomach turns a little.

I gather myself and continue.

“What happened to your father?”

“He died of cancer.”

“Were you sad when he died?”

“I was regretful. He was my teacher. If he’d lived longer, I would have learned more.”

Nothing rises in her eyes at this. No hint of grief, no longing for the man who raised her. I try to picture him in my mind, but he is faceless, a burning man, branding his child as he’d been branded, scarring her deepest where it would never show.

It’s the same story I’ve heard before, too many times. Monsters who were made by monsters who go on to make monsters themselves. A chain stretching both forward and back into darkness.

Sometimes the link breaks, the light abides. Too many times it does not. I think about Hawaii, about the blackness between the stars, about how there will always be more darkness than points of light.

“What did you do with the women you kidnapped once you received payment from their husbands?”

“I killed them, of course.”

“And the bodies?”

“They were cut into pieces and the pieces were burned. The bone was ground to powder and everything was scattered.”

I sigh inside at this. Though it wasn’t entirely unexpected, I’d held out hope for reuniting at least some of the remains with their loved ones.

“How many victims did you take in total?”

She doesn’t have to think to come up with the number. “Forty-seven, including the women you would have found when you raided my other facilities.”

Forty-seven. It sounds like such a small number until you extrapolate it. Heather Hollister, forty-seven times. Avery and Dylan and Douglas again; all the world in a water drop.

I consider the number and something occurs to me.

“If you’d gotten up to forty-seven, why was I number 35?”

“Obfuscation. I didn’t number in sequence. If someone escaped, they wouldn’t be able to give an accurate count.”

“Very careful of you.”

She shrugs, dismissing the praise. “You can’t control all the factors in life necessary to guarantee survival, but failing to control every single one you can is simple incompetence.”

“I can see that.” I consult my notes. “The next set of questions has to do with some apparent inconsistencies in what you called your retirement plan. There are some actions that don’t add up, at least on the surface.”

“Go ahead,” she says, infinitely agreeable.

“First, broadly: How did you plan to ensure we’d find your Los Angeles location? I get the factors you put into play—Heather, the messages, kidnapping me—but none of those in and of itself was a guarantee. I’d assume you’d want a lock.”

She nods. “The plan was to continue to drop clues that would lead you to me—or Eric as me—and to do it in a believable fashion.”

“Believable how?”

“By laying the groundwork for the apparency of what you call decompensation.”

Decompensation means, literally, “the deterioration of a structure.” In the area of profiling serial offenders, it’s used to describe a pattern of devolvement. Many serial killers, even those who begin their careers as extremely organized individuals, eventually fall victim to their own underlying insanities. They start to deteriorate. To fall apart.

Words come to me:

I flipped a coin.

I’m not a cruel man.

Mercy said these things to me when I was imprisoned in her custom gulag. They contradicted her profile at the time. They might make sense now.

“Forcing me to make that choice about Leo, trying to convince me you cared about seeming cruel—those were a part of it, weren’t they? They were supposed to make you look a little bit off.”

She smiles, but not in pleasure or cruelty; those emotions appear absent in her. “That’s correct. The messages and the deviation with Heather were a part of that framework as well. They were illogical changes to a formerly flawless methodology. My plan was to continue increasing evidence of my ‘aberrant behaviors’ until a huge and obvious mistake became a believable act. You’d assume I’d decompensated, and you wouldn’t question the incompetence that led you right to me.”

“That’s also why you left some victims behind for us to find, right? To show us that, as far as you were concerned, it was just business as usual and you were unaware you’d started losing your marbles?”

She shrugs. “As I’ve already said.”

I tap a pen on the notepad in front of me. “That’s all very elegant, Mercy, but it leaves a big question unanswered: Why go through any of it at all? No one even knew you existed. Why not just walk away?”

She gives me a tolerant, almost pitying look.

“What I said earlier applies: Failing to control all the factors you can control is simple incompetence. If I ‘walked away,’ as you put it, I would have left uncontrolled factors behind that might have become detrimental to me. No one knew I was there then, but that could have changed in the future. Someone like yourself might have seen a pattern, become suspicious, and started looking. It’s always possible I forgot something or made a mistake, however slight.” She shakes her head once in the negative. “Hope is not a viable scenario. Certainty is.”

I take all this in, almost as dumbfounded as I am enlightened.

What does this remind me of? Some computer phrase. Ah, right: garbage in, garbage out.

Mercy had locked herself into the necessity of calculating every possibility. In the end, it was that need to control all the variables that undid her. Pragmatic simplicity was defeated by an overabundance of complexity. Her brilliance became her psychosis.

Another question occurs to me now. I hesitate before asking it, not sure I really want the answer.

“Mercy, what would you have done if I’d told you to take me instead of Leo?”

“Oh, I still would have selected him. You were a necessary part of my plan. He wasn’t. It wouldn’t have mattered; going against my own rules for no apparent reason would have only made me seem more irrational in the end.”

I have spent time dealing with my grief and rage about Leo. I’ve plumbed my own depths, and while I haven’t found peace, I’ve managed to restore my equilibrium. This revelation threatens to unseat me. I feel the anger rising, and it speaks to me in tongues, hinting that it might not be so bad to kill Mercy Lane, after all. I struggle against it and manage to push it back down.

Something to deal with later, not here.

“Let’s move on.” It comes out a little bit hoarse. I clear my throat. “I want to discuss your methodology.”

“Certainly.”

I spread my hands palms up, in a gesture of query. “Why did you keep them?”

She frowns. “I don’t understand. Why did I keep who?”

“The victims you kidnapped. Why keep them? We had our theory, but I want to hear what you have to say. If the motivation was money, wasn’t that an unneeded expense?”

“I considered that for a long time when I was doing my initial business plan,” she says, nodding. “In the end, I realized that keeping them alive was the best form of control when it came to the husbands. It has to do with what they really needed.” She cocks her head at me. “Consider it. I’m sure you’ll get it if you do.”

It’s a riddle or a test. They rarely give up everything for free. When they’re locked away, mind games are the last games they have.

I think about the words she said. What they really needed. I turn them over in my mind, again and again, and then it comes, like a flare of light. This, I think, was the extra piece, the motivation James and I had sensed but not seen.

What was the one thing, above all others, the husbands had wanted when it came to their wives, more than money or freedom or custody?

They wanted them dead.

It was all about hate at the bedrock. Mercy had withheld this prize until payment, like a carrot on a stick.

I consider her with new eyes. I’d assigned a certain heavy-handedness to her methods before. Now I see she had a genuine gift for understanding all these emotions—revenge and rage and fear—for how to grow each one and make them move where she wanted.

“Very insightful.”

She shrugs again. “I found out early that I had a gift for estimating behavior.”

Except for your own, I think. But then, I guess that’s true for all of us.

“Next question: why that particular business plan? You say your motivation was money. Keeping someone for seven years seems like a very long time to wait for a payoff.”

She shakes her head once, impatient with me. “You keep saying that. The motivation wasn’t money, it was survival. Money just happens to be crucial to survival in this society at this time.”

“I apologize. But why that plan?”

She pauses for almost a full minute before answering. “I examined the subject of wherewithal in detail a long time ago. Unless you are very lucky and win the lottery, or inherit, or have a special talent such as an actor or musician, wealth is unlikely. The surest way is to take from those who have.”

Her face is almost animated as she talks. This is a subject she feels something about, at whatever level.

“Think about it. Commerce at its core is simple. It’s about finding someone with money and taking it from them. In the traditional non-criminal world, that translates into bargaining, and since force is not applied, the outcome is always uncertain. Perhaps he likes the car you’re selling but his wife doesn’t. Perhaps the stock market takes a downturn that was never expected and—worse—was beyond your control.” She shakes her head, dismissing the idea of being a victim to these scenarios. “As I said before, you can never control every factor in life. The key to survival is to control the ones you can, and criminal enterprises satisfy that paradigm. You identify the man with the money, and you take it from him. That’s the most controlled way, the most likely way, to acquire wealth.”

I interrupt her. “Why is wealth so important? If it’s all just about survival, like you say, then what’s the worry about an excess? Isn’t it enough to pay the grocery bill and the rent?”

“Factors, control. Better to have too much money and never need it. Abundance deals with probabilities. It increases the possibility of survival in the face of eventualities you can’t predict.”

It’s an answer to the question, but it seems empty somehow. In spite of everything I’ve heard so far, I still can’t feel Mercy. The intimacy I usually achieve, that sense of almost becoming what they are, is absent. When I try to understand her, it’s as if I’m peering into a void. It’s like trying to merge with nothing.

“Go on.”

“So I examined all the most direct methods. Theft. Bank robbery. Selling drugs or women. They all had their pluses and minuses, but one glaring fact stood out: Most criminals end up in jail. It’s almost inevitable. Rather than picking a criminal enterprise and planning how not to get caught, I decided to look at the factors that encourage that outcome and derive from there.

“I spent a lot of time listing the reasons a criminal ends up in prison. There were two I kept returning to as basic common denominators. One of them is partly an answer to your question about waiting. It’s also an answer, though you haven’t asked, about why I always had a plan for my retirement.”

Now we’re getting somewhere. This is important. I can sense it.

“What were they?”

She ponders me for a moment, as though she’s trying to decide whether or not to share these insights. “The first became a kind of axiom. I even wrote it that way: a greater or lesser inability to define and control the factors of the environment in which the crime is committed.”

It’s my turn to frown. “Sorry, I don’t follow.”

“Let’s use the thief who breaks into homes as an example. Each time he goes out to commit his crime, he’s stepping into someone else’s environment. It’s not his. It doesn’t belong to him. However much he plans, something could have changed the day before he enters the house. Perhaps the family bought a dog that morning, or the father finally gave in to his wife and signed that contract with the alarm company.”

“When you took those people, you were entering into an environment that wasn’t yours,” I point out.

“True. But remember what I said: You can never control every factor, you simply control as many as you can. If you look at my business, there were really only two times I had to leave the environment I controlled: when I kidnapped the women, or in the rare instance when I was forced to punish husbands who refused to pay. Everything else was done if, where, when, and how I decided, within the environment I had created.

“Of all the variables in a strange environment, the one that can be the most unpredictable is the human factor. The more people there are, the less control you’ll have, no matter how much you plan. In my business model, the human factor is kept very, very low. Me, the husbands, the wives. That’s it. Control of the environment.”

There are a hundred possible holes in Mercy’s logic, but I remember what Callie said about Mercy’s assessment of risk and reward, and decide she was right. Mercy had accepted that zero risk was impossible, so that wasn’t the goal; the goal was the least for the most.

“What was the second factor?” I ask.

“The answer to your original question: time. Kill once in a lifetime and you’re far more likely to get away with it than if you kill every year. Kill every year and your chances of getting caught are less than if you kill once a month, and so on. That encompasses going on too long, which is why I had a retirement plan envisioned before I even started.

“From another view, steal a valuable item and sell it a week later and your chances are worse than if you wait a decade. Speed is greed. My father used to say that.” She nods, partly to herself, caught in a memory. “My business model wasn’t perfect, because perfection is impossible, but it certainly solved the time factor.”

She smiles at this, and then she stretches, her bones creaking comfortably. She settles back, regarding me. She seems as she has since I came here: relaxed, patient, neither striving nor avoiding. “The thing is,” she says after a moment, “I’ve answered your question, but I don’t think you’ll ever understand it. Not really.”

It’s an echo of my own earlier doubts. I want to understand, I really do. I’ve spent my life hunting these creatures. In the end, whatever the twists or turns involved, I’ve always come to that understanding, deep and intimate, of who they are. It’s what’s kept me sane. Shine the sun on them and they lose their power over you. Fail to drag them out of the shadows …

“Try me,” I say.

She leans forward, intent. “All we are is our next breath, and joy is everything that comes after survival. As long as I had sufficient funds to keep a roof above my head and to eat my next meal, time wasn’t important. It wasn’t about acquiring wealth quickly. It was about knowing it would be there one day and not getting caught in the meantime.”

The last part of that gets my attention, and I pounce on it. “Where does freedom fit with your philosophy, Mercy? If it’s all about meals and a roof, what’s the big deal about jail? You’ll go on breathing, sleeping. You have your three hots and a cot right here.”

Regret flashes in her eyes. “I was right,” she says, shaking her head at my apparent obtuseness. “You’ll never understand.” She rubs her eyes with one hand, like a teacher with a difficult student, searching for patience. “We’ll try it one more time. Listen. Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

She speaks slowly, enunciating the words as if she were talking to someone a little slow on the draw. “The only thing wrong with prison happens to be the most important thing that can be wrong: It’s an environment you can’t control. A lack of control always includes the possibility of death. It’s not about the freedom, it’s about the variables and how they could affect your ability to draw that next breath.”

I stare at her, and suddenly I do understand. The sun bursts out, and the shadows die, and there she is: strange, but no longer scary. I understand why she was trapped by her own brilliance. I grasp her endless need to calculate every variable and why she needs to control every factor to the point of obsession. Mercy was a new kind of monster, that’s all. It had taken me a little more time.

“You’re a machine,” I murmur, a little bit amazed, a little bit sickened. “A machine tasked with reducing the factors that could result in nonsurvival to as close to zero as possible.”

She blinks, surprised. Then she smiles, and it’s the first genuine smile I’ve seen from her. It’s almost beautiful. Maybe it just seems that way because it hints at the truth: Once upon a time, this was human.

“Yes!” she says. “That’s exactly right.”

I spend the next few hours asking about her childhood and her life, but they only serve to confirm what I already know. She is an empty box of air, a moving mannequin, three dimensions outside, two dimensions in. She has become what she preaches and what she was made: just meat, devoid of love or hatred, a machine with legs, calculating the problem of bare survival for as long as she continues to breathe.

She’s lost her power over me. I will file her away with the others, in that vault inside my mind. Her folder will be crisper and newer at first, but it will fade in time.

I finish and gather my papers into my satchel. I stand up to leave but turn around before reaching the door.

“One last question.”

“Go ahead,” she answers, endlessly agreeable.

“Did you love your father?”

I know the answer, but I want to hear it spoken.

“Thanks to what my father taught me, I am still alive. I’ll go to sleep tonight. I’ll get up tomorrow. I’ll eat three meals. I’ll piss and shit and breathe. I’ll do that the next day and the next, until the day I don’t.” She smiles. “I’m surviving. It’s all that matters. To answer your question directly, I didn’t love him, because there is no such thing as love. But I am thankful.”

I walk out the door, leaving her with her perversity of peace.