LITMIR.BIZ

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having an answer for himself, he asked the question of the Rock, speaking without looking up from the shining cards.

      ‘Did I do this?’ he said.

      He heard Decker sigh, but there was no answer forthcoming, so he chanced a glance at his accuser. As the photographs had been laid out before him he’d felt the man’s scrutiny like a crawling ache in his scalp. But now he once more found that gaze averted.

      ‘Please tell me,’ he said. ‘Did I do this?’

      Decker wiped the moist purses of skin beneath his grey eyes. He was not trembling any longer.

      ‘I hope not,’ he said.

      The response seemed ludicrously mild. This was not some minor infringement of the law they were debating. It was death times eleven; and how many more might there be; out of sight, out of mind?

      ‘Tell me what I talked about,’ he said. ‘Tell me the words –’

      It was ramblings mostly.’

      ‘So what makes you think I’m responsible? You must have reasons.’

      ‘It took time,’ Decker said, ‘for me to piece the whole thing together.’ He looked down at the mortuary on the table, aligning a photograph that was a little askew with his middle finger.

      ‘I have to make a quarterly report on our progress. You know that. So I play all the tapes of our previous sessions sequentially, to get some sense of how we’re doing …’ He spoke slowly; wearily. ‘… and I noticed the same phrases coming up in your responses. Buried most of the time, in other material, but there. It was as if you were confessing to something; but something so abhorrent to you even in a trance state you couldn’t quite bring yourself to say it. Instead it was coming out in this … code.’

      Boone knew codes. He’d heard them everywhere during the bad times. Messages from the imagined enemy in the noise between stations on the radio; or in the murmur of traffic before dawn. That he might have learned the art himself came as no surprise.

      ‘I made a few casual enquiries,’ Decker continued, ‘amongst police officers I’ve treated. Nothing specific. And they told me about the killings. I’d heard some of the details, of course, from the press. Seems they’ve been going on for two and a half years. Several here in Calgary; the rest within an hour’s drive. The work of one man.’

      ‘Me.’

      ‘I don’t know,’ Decker said, finally looking up at Boone. ‘If I was certain, I’d have reported it all –’

      ‘But you’re not.’

      ‘I don’t want to believe this anymore than you do. It doesn’t cover me in glory if this turns out to be true.’ There was anger in him, not well concealed. ‘That’s why I waited. Hoping you’d be with me when the next one happened.’

      ‘You mean some of these people died while you knew?’

      ‘Yes,’ Decker said flatly.

      ‘Jesus!’

      The thought propelled Boone from the chair, his leg catching the table. The murder scenes flew.

      ‘Keep your voice down,’ Decker demanded.

      ‘People died, and you waited?’

      ‘I took that risk for you, Boone. You’ll respect that.’

      Boone turned from the man. There was a chill of sweat on his spine.

      ‘Sit down,’ said Decker. ‘Please sit down and tell me what these photographs mean to you.’

      Involuntarily Boone had put his hand over the lower half of his face. He knew from Decker’s instruction what that particular piece of body language signified. His mind was using his body to muffle some disclosure; or silence it completely.

      ‘Boone. I need answers.’

      ‘They mean nothing,’ Boone said, not turning.

      ‘At all?’

      ‘At all.’

      ‘Look at them again.’

      ‘No,’ Boone insisted. ‘I can’t.’

      He heard the doctor inhale, and half expected a demand that he face the horrors afresh. But instead Decker’s tone was placatory.

      ‘It’s all right, Aaron,’ he said. ‘It’s all right. I’ll put them away.’

      Boone pressed the heels of his hands against his closed eyes. His sockets were hot, and wet.

      ‘They’re gone, Aaron,’ Decker said.

      ‘No, they’re not.’

      They were with him still, perfectly remembered. Eleven rooms and eleven bodies, fixed in his mind’s eye, beyond exorcism. The wall Decker had taken five years to build had been brought down in as many minutes, and by its architect. Boone was at the mercy of his madness again. He heard it whine in his head, coming from eleven slit windpipes from eleven punctured bellies. Breath and bowel gas, singing the old mad songs.

      Why had his defences tumbled so easily, after so much labour? His eyes knew the answer, spilling tears to admit what his tongue couldn’t. He was guilty. Why else? Hands he was even now wiping dry on his trousers had tortured and slaughtered. If he pretended otherwise he’d only tempt them to further crime. Better that he confessed, though he remembered nothing, than offer them another unguarded moment.

      He turned and faced Decker. The photographs had been gathered up and laid face down on the table.

      ‘You remember something?’ the doctor said, reading the change on Boone’s face.

      ‘Yes,’ he replied.

      ‘What?’

      ‘I did it,’ Boone said simply. ‘I did it all.’

       II Academy

      1

      Decker was the most benign prosecutor any accused man could ask for. The hours he spent with Boone after that first day were filled with carefully plied questions as – murder by murder – they examined together the evidence for Boone’s secret life. Despite the patient’s insistence that the crimes were his, Decker counselled caution. Admissions of culpability were not hard evidence. They had to be certain that confession wasn’t simply Boone’s self-destructive tendencies at work, admitting to the crime out of hunger for the punishment.

      Boone was in no position to argue. Decker knew him better than he knew himself. Nor had he forgotten Decker’s observation that if the worst was proved true, the doctor’s reputation as a healer would be thrown to the dogs: they could neither of them afford to be wrong. The only way to be sure was to run through the details of the killings – dates, names and locations – in the hope that Boone would be prompted into remembering. Or else that they’d discover a killing that had occurred when he was indisputably in the company of others.

      The only part of the process Boone balked at was reexamining the photographs. He resisted Decker’s gentle pressure for forty-eight hours, only conceding when the gentility faltered and Decker rounded on him, accusing him of cowardice and deceit. Was all this just a game, Decker demanded; an exercise in self-mortification that would end with them both none the wiser? If so, Boone could get the hell out of his office now and bleed on somebody else’s time.

      Boone agreed to study the photographs.

      There was nothing in them that jogged his memory. Much of the detail of the rooms had been washed out by the flash of the camera; what remained was commonplace. The only sight that might have won a response from him – the faces of the victims – had been erased by the killer, hacked beyond recognition; the most expert of

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