Spider

12

Florence, Tuscany Were the nightmares always the same? Was he frightened of going to sleep after them? During the waking hours did he have flashbacks of what happened in the dreams? The questions came thick and fast but Jack didn't duck any of them, not even when Elisabetta Fenella asked if he was depressed, tearful, overly emotional or even impotent.

Eventually, she managed to persuade him to take her through his childhood. Unlike that of those he had pursued in his professional life, his own past contained no trauma, no abuse or deprivation, just the solid love and support of two parents who had been teenage sweethearts. They stayed married for more than thirty years, inseparable until five years earlier when a hit-and-run driver killed his father soon after his retirement. Jack Snr had been a New York City cop all his working life and his mother, Brenda, had been a night sister at the Mount Sinai Medical Center near Central Park. His mother had died alone, in her sleep, just over three years ago of a heart attack. Jack still thought it was probably as much to do with being broken-hearted as with the high cholesterol that doctors believed had clogged her arteries.

'Would it be fair to say…' said Fenella, checking dates in her file, '… that just before your collapse, the stress was at its peak?'

'Stress comes with the job,' said Jack. 'I'm not sure I felt significantly pressured then.'

'But if we look at the timings, we see your mother dies, and then weeks later you collapse at an airport. You think they are entirely unconnected?'

Jack hated easy-fit psychology. Life was full of shitty coincidences and sometimes lots of good things happened all at once, sometimes you got dealt several crappy hands one after the other. 'I don't for one moment buy the idea that my mother's death in any way contributed to my illness,' he said, sounding slightly annoyed. 'Of course I loved her, of course it saddened me deeply, but I'd dealt with that. I'd understood that part of my life was over. Listen,' he continued, more sharply than he'd intended, 'every working day of my life, I was up close and personal to some form of death. I saw all variety of dead mothers, dead children and even dead babies. I met death in binders of crime scene photographs, on slabs down at the city morgue, under the buzz of a cranium bone saw in an autopsy and I saw death in the eyes and souls of all the evil bastards who had taken a life. Death and I are no strangers, we've been in close contact for a lot of my life.'

Fenella paused. She let the heat from his monologue cool in the air around them. She knew she needed to give him some space. In time he'd come to recognize that even he should have given himself the opportunity to grieve properly for his parents. She decided to move on and opened the file on the coffee table. She found herself swallowing hard and steadying herself for what lay ahead. The details of the Black River Killer's reign of terror made horrific reading, even for a hardened professional. 'This was the case you were working on when you were taken ill. Sixteen victims, maybe more, going back at least two decades?'

'Undoubtedly more,' said Jack. He glanced at the file papers and the gates to his memory burst open: victims' faces, glazed dead eyes, corpses mutilated as the killer hacked off the body part he always kept as a trophy; all the abominations rushed through again.

'Tell me about him,' urged Fenella.

There was so much Jack could say that he barely knew where to begin. 'BRK, that's what the press called him, started like so many of them do. His first prey, or at least what we think was his first, was a young woman living in an isolated area. Somehow he abducted, murdered and killed her, then he dumped her body in the Black River, hence his nickname. Once he realized he could kill and get away with it, he developed a taste for it. He grew more confident and started to experiment. His paraphilias probably widened, his fantasies grew deeper and we started to discover evidence that he tortured the women before he killed them.'

Fenella took a sip of water and made notes as Jack continued.

'It became part of BRK's MO to keep the corpses for as long as possible. Then, as soon as decomposition set in, he moved quickly to get rid of them, disposing of their bodies in the Black River. As time passed and he grew more experienced, he began dismembering the bodies and weighing down their severed limbs in plastic refuse sacks before scattering them miles apart. With every kill he'd become harder to catch.'

'How often do you think about the Black River Killer?'

'A lot. I still think of him a lot.'

Fenella glanced at some dates in her notes. 'It's more than three years since you worked on the case, what makes you still think about him so much?'

Jack shrugged.

'Is it when a new murder occurs, or do you find yourself just thinking about him without any reason?'

'He's not killed since I was working the investigation. His last victim was the one I was handling when I had the collapse.'

Fenella made more notes, then added, 'So it isn't news about him that triggers your thoughts and your nightmares?'

'No. He's always there at the back of my mind, I never lose his shadow, it's always around somewhere.'

'Tell me, during the day, when your mind turns to him, what are you thinking?'

'I wonder about what he's doing, who he might share his life with, how he manages to live with himself. How normal he may be, or appear to be.'

Fenella knew he was self-censoring, holding back the full force of what was filling his thoughts. 'And do you think about how he actually felt while committing those acts?'

'No, not as much as I used to,' he answered. 'When I was working on the case, I used to think about that a lot. We are trained to think like that, to put ourselves in the shoes of those we hunt. We have to think how they think, feel how they feel, and understand what it's like to do what they do.'

'And what do you think it's like?'

'For them? What do I think scum like BRK feel when they do these things?'

'Yes.'

Jack's face hardened. 'I think, for them, the experience is amazing. Godlike. They literally have the power of life and death. And that, for the BRKs of this world, killing is the ultimate thrill. Nothing on earth compares to it and, once they have experienced it, they are addicted as surely as if murder were a narcotic.'

The flashbacks came again: blood splatters, floaters in the river, fingertip searches. Jack mentally dammed the flood of images.

Fenella leant forward on the couch and lowered her voice. 'You don't sound judgemental. How do you do that?'

'Do what?' He gave her a puzzled look.

'Suppress the disgust, the repulsion that you must feel?'

Jack was thrown for a minute. The honest answer was that he didn't feel anything any more. The endless diet of homicidal horror had bludgeoned his senses into dullness. But how could he say that out loud and not sound inhumane? How could he admit that victims and killers had ceased being people and had been reduced in his mind to objects and puzzles, a mere algebra of violence? 'It's a good question,' he conceded. 'To be judgemental would be to blinker myself as an investigator, and I can't afford to do that. I can't afford any killer or rapist I interview to see any sign of that. Whatever they've done, however they've taken a life, I have to show them that I'm there to understand why they did it, rather than condemn what they've done.'

Fenella noted that he still spoke, and to a large extent behaved, as though he were an FBI agent. It was something she'd come back to, perhaps at another session, if indeed there was one. 'I want to move on now to the exact content of your nightmares. Are you comfortable doing that?'

Jack shifted defensively in his seat. 'You going to go all Freudian and Jungian on me?'

'Maybe a little. Freud described dreaming as "the royal road to the unconscious" and I think it's a route worth going down.'

'Then, let's go.' Jack was surprised to see that he'd clasped his hands and was bracing himself. He felt his temperature rise and his heartbeat quicken. He closed his eyes for a second and stared into the grey-black eggshell darkness of his mind. 'I'm at an autopsy. It's being held in the middle of a night, in some dead-end town I've never been to before. It's not my case; the cop in charge has asked me to step in at the last minute. We're all downstairs, in some kind of basement; looks more like a cellar in a house than an autopsy room. It's cold and has the sweet stink of old sump oil and running damp. The walls are brick and painted white, the floor is black and hard and your feet crunch when you move, as though you are walking on broken glass. Rusty pipes run along the ceiling and hiss and rumble in a way that makes you think they are going to break and burst at any minute.'

She noted the vividness and starkness of his language, how even in his dreams Jack had a sharpened sense of observation, was aware of sounds, smells and even things under his feet that he couldn't see.

'The ME's working like crazy, almost as though he's a surgeon trying to save a life, rather than a pathologist methodically opening up a body. He's moving so quickly around the slab I can't see who he is. Every time I reposition myself to try to say something, the guy shifts on to another part of the body. The girl on the slab is sixteen-year-old Lisa Maria Jenkins, BRK's last known victim. She'd been butchered like a piece of meat. Head, hands, legs, feet, all cut off. Her left hand was never discovered, BRK had kept it as a trophy. But in the dream, Lisa's intact; looking as beautiful as her last birthday picture, when her long brown hair was tied back in a pony-tail.'

Jack struggled to go on. Clearly the cognitive experience was troubling him, but Fenella did nothing to fill the silence or give him a way out. He pinched his eyes for a second, then continued. 'As I look at her face, I realize something's wrong. She's still breathing. I shout "Hey, look, look, she's alive!', but the ME ignores me and just carries on cutting her open, pulling intestines and organs out of a huge cavity in her stomach. Suddenly, the pipes break free from the wall and start pouring blood on to the floor, as if they're giant veins. I'm screaming now, "Stop! For Christ's sake, stop cutting her, she's alive!" But he blanks me. As I rush around the table to try to get hold of him he runs the buzz saw across her neck, decapitating her. I recognize him now. I realize why he's been dodging me, not letting me see his face.'

'You say you recognize him. Who is it, Jack?'

He raised his head and stared straight at her. 'It's me. The monster in my dreams is me.'

It was Fenella's turn to sit in silence, pen motionless on the notepaper.

'Tell me, please tell me; how can I control these nightmares?'

Fenella's heart went out to him. She understood his dilemma and it was a dark and dangerous one. 'Jack, you already have control. The level of lucidity you describe indicates that you deliberately trigger these thoughts. Subconsciously you want to see these things, you have a need to re-examine the case that you walked away from and, in the absence of new evidence, your imagination is inventing it.'

Jack was staring at the floor. He nodded slowly. He understood now, but what was the way out? 'What exactly do I have to do to stop them?'

The psychiatrist waited until he raised his eyes to look at her. 'You already know that, don't you?'

And he did.

Jack fully understood that he could choose to stop the nightmares any time he wanted. But he could only do so by admitting to himself that his personal hunt to catch the Black River Killer really was over.