“Will you talk to me?” John asked.
“Did you bring me something?”
“You mean a gift? No. Nothing.”
“Next time, bring me something.”
“What would you like?”
“They won’t let me have anything sharp or anything hard and heavy. Paperback books would be okay.”
The boy had been an honor student, in his junior year of high school, having skipped two grades.
“What kind of books?” John asked.
“Whatever. I read everything and rewrite it in my mind to make it what I want. In my version, every book ends with everyone dead.”
Previously silent, the storm sky found its voice. Billy looked at the ceiling and smiled, as if the thunder spoke specifically to him. Head tilted back, he closed his eyes and stood that way even after the rumble faded.
“Did you plan the murders or was it on impulse?”
Rolling his head from side to side as though he were a blind musician enraptured by music, the boy said, “Oh, Johnny, I planned to kill them long, long ago.”
“How long ago?”
“Longer than you would believe, Johnny. Long, long ago.”
“Which of them did you kill first?”
“What does it matter if they’re all dead?”
“It matters to me,” John Calvino said.
Pulses of lightning brightened the windows, and fat beads of rain quivered down the panes, leaving a tracery of arteries that throbbed on the glass with each bright palpitation.
“I killed my mother first, in her wheelchair in the kitchen. She was getting a carton of milk from the refrigerator. She dropped it when the knife went in.”
Billy stopped rolling his head, but he continued to face the ceiling, eyes still closed. His mouth hung open. He raised his hands to his chest and slid them slowly down his torso.
He appeared to be in the grip of a quiet ecstasy.
When his hands reached his loins, they lingered, and then slid upward, drawing the T-shirt with them.
“Dad was in the study, at his desk. I clubbed him from behind, twice on the head, then used the claw end of the hammer. It went through his skull and hooked so deep I couldn’t pull it loose.”
Now Billy slipped the T-shirt over his head and down his arms, and he dropped it on the floor.
His eyes remained closed, head tipped back. His hands languidly explored his bare abdomen, chest, shoulders, and arms. He seemed enravished by the texture of his skin, by the contours of his body.
“Grandma was upstairs in her room, watching TV. Her dentures flew out when I punched her in the face. That made me laugh. I waited till she regained consciousness before I strangled her with a scarf.”
He lowered his head, opened his eyes, and held his pale hands before his face to study them, as if reading the past, rather than the future, in the lines of his palms.
“I went to the kitchen then. I was thirsty. I drank a beer and took the knife out of my mother.”
John Calvino sat on the arm of a chair.
He knew everything the boy told him, except the order of the killings, which Billy had not revealed to the case detectives. The medical examiner had provided a best-guess scenario based on crime-scene evidence, but John needed to know for sure how it had happened.
Still studying his hands, Billy Lucas said, “My sister, Celine, was in her room, listening to bad music. I did her before I killed her. Did you know I did her?”
“Yes.”
Crossing his arms, slowly caressing his biceps, the boy met John’s eyes again.
“Then I stabbed her precisely nine times, though I think the fourth one killed her. I just didn’t want to stop that soon.”
Thunder rolled, torrents of rain beat upon the roof, and faint concussion waves seemed to flutter the air. John felt them shiver through the microscopic cochlear hairs deep in his ears, and he wondered if perhaps they had nothing to do with the storm.
He saw challenge and mockery in the boy’s intense blue eyes. “Why did you say ‘precisely’?”
“Because, Johnny, I didn’t stab her eight times, and I didn’t stab her ten. Precisely nine.”
Billy moved so close to the glass partition that his nose almost touched it. His eyes were pools of threat and hatred, but they seemed at the same time to be desolate wells in the lonely depths of which something had drowned.
The detective and the boy regarded each other for a long time before John said, “Didn’t you ever love them?”
“How could I love them when I hardly knew them?”
“But you’ve known them all your life.”
“I know you better than I knew them.”
A dull but persistent disquiet had compelled John to come to the state hospital. This encounter had sharpened it.
He rose from the arm of the chair.
“You’re not going already?” Billy asked.
“Do you have something more to tell me?”
The boy chewed his lower lip.
John waited until waiting seemed pointless, and then he started toward the door.
“Wait. Please,” the boy said, his quivering voice different from what it had been before.
Turning, John saw a face transformed by anguish and eyes bright with desperation.
“Help me,” the boy said. “Only you can.”
Returning to the glass partition, John said, “Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t do anything for you now. No one can.”
“But you know. You know.”
“What do you think I know?”
For a moment more, Billy Lucas appeared to be a frightened child, unsettled and uncertain. But then triumph glittered in his eyes.
His right hand slid down his flat abdomen and under the elastic waist of his gray cotton pants. He jerked down the pants with his left hand, and with his right directed his urine at the lower grille in the glass panel.
As the stinking stream spattered through the steel grid, John danced backward, out of range. Never had urine smelled so rank or looked so dark, as yellow-brown as the juice of spoiled fruit.
Aware that his target had safely retreated, Billy Lucas aimed higher, hosing the glass left to right, right to left. Seen through the foul and rippling flux, the boy’s facial features melted, and he seemed about to dematerialize, as if he had been only an apparition.
John Calvino pressed the button on the intercom panel beside the door and said to Coleman Hanes, “I’m finished here.”
To escape the sulfurous odor of the urine, he didn’t wait for the orderly but instead stepped into the hallway.
Behind John, the boy called out, “You should have brought me something. You should have made an offering.”
The detective closed the door and looked down at his shoes in the fluorescent glare of the corridor. Not one drop of foulness marred their shine.
As the door to the guard’s vestibule opened, John walked toward it, toward Coleman Hanes, whose size and presence gave him the almost mythological aura of one who battled giants and dragons.