The Tower

"His father and mother," Jade said. Dr. Yung was quiet, so Jade continued. "I think there's already a history there that we haven't begun to penetrate. In one of his interviews, he said that he's lived all the fantasies. He said something like, 'I'm the only one to do it without a Greek wrap'-pointing at what Oedipus did. I think he's talking about intercourse. I think he actually raped his mother."

Dr. Yung was quiet for a long time. "It could be. But we shouldn't take anything he says literally. You never know how much the lines between fantasy and reality have blurred, Mr. Marlow."

"That's exactly what I'm concerned about."

Jade hung up the phone. He had been studying Allander's files ever since he'd gotten back from Dr. Lithemeir's office. The sleep he'd missed last night was starting to affect him. His eyes ached and his head was throbbing. He felt as if he'd just finished a boxing match.

But he was fitting pieces into the puzzle, getting a full picture of Allander's mind. Now that he felt he was really getting to know how Allander thought, he needed a plan. The first killings had happened before he'd been called in on the case. But now the game was live.

His breathing tightened and he felt a sudden heaviness across his shoulders. He was disgusted with its familiarity. A flash of cold tickled across his lower back and he shivered, shaking it off. He was hired to track Atlasia. There would be more bodies before he got to him, but that's just how it worked. They could pile up for all he cared, as long as he let blood in the end.

Allander peered back at Jade from his mug shots, his voice rattling around in Jade's head. Jade looked around the living room and saw only Allander. And corpses.

The pain in his head intensified and he grunted out loud, pressing his fists to his forehead to slow the dull throbbing. He stumbled toward the study, accidentally stepping on the remote control and turning on the TV. Allander's trial tape continued.

The mother of the molested girl sobbed on the witness stand, her cries following Jade down the hall. He banged through the study door and fell into his chair. He took deep breaths, counting them backward. He started with twenty and worked his way down. As he counted, he pulled himself slowly to the desk.

Above his pounding heart, his mind carried him back to a place from his youth, a place that smelled like wood sweepings and burning leaves. It carried him across a field where foxtails waved in the wind, catching the sun in all its yellow splendor and reflecting it back so brightly one needed to raise an arm against the glare.

Four boys cut a path through the high weeds, leaving a small trail behind them as foxtails fell beneath their feet. Looks of preadolescent cruelty sat across their freckled faces. Raised on country breakfasts and yellow school buses, boys like these were too naive to have empathy. All four had the same haircut, a side part with hair flared across in the front so that it spiked up or dangled over their foreheads.

They were voiceless to Jade as they screamed, though he noticed the strain in their necks and the rise and fall of their Adam's apples. With a sweeping aerial view, he saw up ahead to where the children were running.

The field led to an enormous mound with a large scarecrow planted in the middle. The scarecrow's arms cast a fierce shadow from its ten-foot perch. The enormous clothes hanging limply from the wooden frame were the product of hours of Mrs. Joe Allen's work on the sewing machine.

The scarecrow was stitched for the town fair back in '61, and the Allens left it out among the weeds as a sort of eerie landmark about which the locals could weave stories to entertain travelers. Mr. Hollow, they called him. He was surrounded by a circle of rocks, making the mound look like some mystical shrine to an ancient deity. Large crows would settle over the vast span of Mr. Hollow's arms, setting him alive with fluttering motion.

Mr. Hollow didn't come down until '79 when Slick James and a crew of his friends ran him over during a drunken ride in their Ford pickup. He was so big he left a dent in Slick's front bumper and Slick bragged for weeks about the size of the deer he hit on Highway 74.

In the vast expanse of weedland between the four running boys and the scarecrow there was a smaller figure, an animated dot in Jade's view. It was another boy, about eleven years old, whose run was clumsy with fear. A silver chain with medical tags bounced around his neck as he moved.

Jade could see his face more clearly now, the droop of his cheeks, the full upper eyelids, and the lolling lower lip. It was a miracle that his awkward legs found footing at all, but he lurched along with a spastic rhythm. A thin line of drool spun from the retarded boy's lip, draping across his shirt, and he grunted like an animal fleeing a predator.