The Laughterhouse

CHAPTER FIFTY

Caleb Cole stares at the ceiling, then closes his eyes for a few seconds and stares at the ceiling again. The view between the two doesn’t change much. He thinks about Jonas Jones. Whether or not the psychic is a fraud it doesn’t matter. Jones is in custody. He’s as impossible to get to as Mrs. Whitby.

He thinks about Mrs. Whitby, about how satisfying it would be to cut her into a thousand pieces. It’s an idea he often falls asleep having.

Most of all he’s thinking about the man from the cemetery-Theodore Tate. An idea is starting to come to him. An exciting idea that came from his conversation with Tabitha earlier when he suggested that she kill Mrs. Whitby for him.

He gets off the bed and walks to the kitchen, this end of the house getting some of the street light so he can see better. He fills a glass of water and sits in the living room and uses his cell phone to quickly go online. If the police didn’t have his number before, they will have it after he phoned in for the pizzas. It’s amazing how much technology can fit into one small phone, but it is a pain to use.

He looks up Theodore Tate. They were in prison at the same time-four months they were in the same complex, but Caleb doesn’t remember ever seeing him. They must have been in different wings. An ex-cop, he would have been put into a section of jail where he didn’t have the life kicked out of him every day. It would have been a good gig for him. At least comparatively. It meant he never would have had the real prison experience. Caleb is envious of that.

Three years ago Tate lost his daughter in an accident. A drunk driver ran her down, along with her mother, when they were walking out of a movie theater through a public parking lot. The mother survived, if that’s what you could call it. The man who hit them was released on bail and went missing. He skipped the country, so the articles say.

Caleb keeps reading. There’s the Burial Killer case from last year, where a psychopath was replacing interred corpses in a cemetery with fresh victims. Then there’s the case from earlier this year where some whack job was kidnapping people and taking them to Grover Hills, the same institution James Whitby was taken to, only Grover Hills closed down a few years ago.

Theodore Tate. Ex-policeman turned private investigator, turned inmate, turned private investigator again, turned police consultant, and somewhere in there a killer of bad men.

The more he reads, the more he begins to relate, and the more he relates, the more his excitement builds. This is working out better than he hoped. Theodore Tate-husband and father, but so much more, perhaps even a man with his very own monster who hunted down the man who killed his daughter.

Yes. Theodore Tate will do quite nicely for what he has planned.