Dead of Night

Gun, he thought. Christ, he has a gun.

“How did you get this address?”

“Does it matter?” asked Trout.

“Yes,” snapped Volker, “it does. How did you—”

“DMV. The address on your license…”

“You shouldn’t have access to that kind of information.”

Trout spread his hands. Behind him, Goat shifted nervously and Volker’s pale eyes shifted toward him.

“Who is this?” Volker demanded.

“My cameraman. Gregory Weinman.”

“Weinman,” Volker repeated, his lip curling slightly into a sneer.

Great, thought Trout, he probably hates Jews. This is going to be so much fun.

“Doctor,” Trout said, “we would like to ask you a few questions. About Selma Conroy and Homer Gibbon.”

Volker gave him a flat reptilian stare, and Trout was already fishing for something to say to try to convince the doctor to let them in, when Volker suddenly stepped back. “Very well,” he said. He turned and walked into his house, leaving the door open.

Trout and Goat looked at each other. Goat raised his eyebrows in a “well, this is what you wanted” look.

They followed the doctor inside and closed the door.

The house was depressing and dry. The pictures on the wall were the kind you bought at Ikea. The living room was almost certainly picked without passion from a catalog and it was set up to match that page. It was technically attractive, but it lacked warmth and humanity. No magazines on the coffee table. No novels or even technical books. Nothing. It was a place, not a home. Volker waved them to chairs. Trout and Goat sat on opposite ends of the couch.

Volker surprised them again. “Do you want coffee?”

“Um … yes,” said Trout. “Thanks.”

“It’s instant.”

“Instant’s fine.”

“I don’t have milk or sugar.”

Of course you don’t, you sour old fuck. “Black works for me,” Trout said aloud.

“Me, too,” said Goat hastily, even though he was an eight packs of sugar and a quarter cup of half-and-half coffee drinker.

Volker set a tray with three steaming mugs on the coffee table. Two of the mugs had the logo of Rockview Correctional Institution on them. Very cheerful for home entertaining, mused Trout. The third had “Happy Birthday!” written in bright red cartoon letters. Trout took that one.

Volker lowered himself onto the La-Z-Boy across from the couch. He perched on the edge, elbows on his knees, holding the coffee cup between his palms. The vapor from the cup steamed his glasses.

“Before you ask your questions,” he said, “I want to explain something to you. When you called this afternoon it got me to thinking that I ought to record this. I was going to write it down, but now that you’re here I can see that this is probably a tale best told to real people. That way you can ask questions. I don’t want any mistakes, and there won’t be a chance later to get the facts.”

“Why not?” asked Trout as he set his small recorder on the coffee table.

“Because,” said Dr. Volker as he peered through the steam, “as soon as we’re done here I’m going to kill myself.”

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

WOLVERTON REGIONAL HOSPITAL

Dez and JT were climbing into her car when the radio buzzed. JT took it.

“Unit Two.”

Flower screamed at them. “JT! Jesus Christ … get back to Doc’s. Oh my god! The state police are there. They said … they said … oh my god!”

“Flower! Calm down and tell me what happened.”

“It’s the chief!” Flower wailed, her voice phlegmy with tears and shrill with panic. “Oh my god … the chief!”

Dez slammed the car in gear and stamped down on the gas so hard the cruiser shot away from the curb like a missile, burying JT and Dez deep into the backrests. She cut across the oncoming traffic, siren wailing, swung into the fast lane, and was doing ninety before they’d gone two blocks.

“Flower,” JT said, speaking as calmly as he could. “Tell me what happened.”

But he already knew. They both knew.

Flower said it anyway.

“He’s dead! They called it in. The chief’s dead! Oh my god, JT, what’s happening?”

What’s happening? Dez thought as she rocketed past cars that veered desperately out of her way. That’s the question everyone’s asking. What the holy fuck is happening?

She knew with perfect clarity that she absolutely did not want an answer to that question. And, with equal clarity she knew that she was racing toward that answer at over a hundred miles an hour.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

GREEN GATES 55-PLUS COMMUNITY

Volker’s living room was deadly still. Trout and Goat sat staring at the old doctor as motes of dust drifted like tiny planets through the air.

“Okay,” said Trout as reasonably as he could, “why do you want to kill yourself?”

“Want to?” echoed the doctor. “I don’t want to die. I would prefer to live out my remaining years somewhere quiet where I can spend my afternoons fishing and my evenings listening to Wagner. But as the saying goes, ‘that ship has sailed.’” He smiled. He had surprisingly bad teeth for a medical man. “However … I don’t care to spend the rest of my life in jail.”

Trout leaned forward. “Why would you go to jail?”

Instead of answering, Volker said, “And, there needs to be a record of this. For … after.”

“After…?”

Volker shrugged. “If there is an ‘after.’” He said it more to himself than Trout, but the words hung in the air.

“Okay, Doc,” said Trout, “if you’re fishing for the award for Best Cryptic Speech you’re a shoo-in.”

There was no trace of a smile on the old doctor’s mouth, but he nodded. “Very well. But I suppose I need to give you a little of my history so that you’ll understand the context of what I need to tell you.” He sipped his coffee. “I am not a very nice man. I am deserving of no compassion. I have done many questionable things in my life, and I make no excuses for them. All I can do is provide a reason.”

Trout nudged the recorder an inch closer. A passive gesture with just a touch of “hurry the fuck up” in it.

“I never wanted to be a prison doctor,” Volker said. “That is a side effect. I detest criminals and I have a special hatred for a certain kind of criminal. Serial murderers, especially those who prey on families. I have a … personal connection to that kind of person. My sister and her two children were the … targets … of such a person. This was in East Berlin, years ago. During the Cold War. Your news services always concentrated on the politics of that era, but there were other stories, other … horrors. The restrictive and oppressive nature of life under the Soviet heel tended to cultivate the worst qualities in people. Paranoia, of course, but hatred, suspicion, ruthlessness, lack of sentimentality, avarice, and a kind of anger fueled by such deep resentment that it struck to the core of who we were. Many people, even those who appeared to live a normal life since the destruction of the Wall harbor the fruits of those emotions. The incidence of spousal abuse, child abuse, and sexual deviance is shockingly high, even today. Back then … back when crimes were committed wholesale but never—never—admitted to the non-Soviet world … we were breeding monsters. So many monsters.

“Here in the United States you create a media circus around serial murderers. They are celebrities. They get book deals. There are people who collect their possessions. Murderabilia, it’s called. In your cinema, they are presented as charming and charismatic. Hannibal Lecter.” He shook his head in disgust. “In East Germany, when a serial murderer was caught, he disappeared forever. Sometimes it was a family member, perhaps a war veteran who understood how to kill, who hunted the monster down and did what was necessary. More often it was the police who removed the person. Justice was swift but it was unpleasant. And it was inconsistent. However, Justice was not always served. Many times a skillful and practiced murderer was taken to prison and then recruited into the secret police or the Red Army. There was always a need for a skilled killer in both. And don’t cock an eyebrow at me,” Volker said, directing the comment to Goat, “I was there, you were not. How old were you when the Berlin Wall fell? Six? Eight? I was already a medical doctor and a major in the army. By then I had seen death in every imaginable form, and I had become familiar with every possible permutation of human and institutional corruption. The Soviet machine ran on corruption.”

Goat held up his hands. “Didn’t mean any offense, Doc.”

Volker grunted.

“You were talking about your sister,” prompted Trout. “She was killed?”

Volker’s eyes swiveled toward him in a way that reminded Trout of the dead eyes of a crocodile. It was a strange blend of hostile potential and bland disinterest.

“Killed,” Volker said, tasting the word. “Yes. She was killed. And believe me when I tell you that ‘killed’ is so pale a word, so inadequate a description of what was done to her. She was destroyed. Her humanity was stolen from her, torn from her. Dear Kofryna. My only sister. My last blood relative, except for Danukas and Audra, her twins. Three years old. Babies. Too young to grasp politics or even the concepts of good and evil. All three of them … destroyed.”

“I’m sorry,” said Trout.

Volker’s lip curled in a sneer. “This was forty years ago. I was a young man then. A doctor, newly transferred from my hometown of Panevėžys in Lithuania. A medical officer stationed in East Berlin. Idealistic, a dedicated communist. A dedicated doctor.”

“And then your family was taken from you,” Trout said quietly.

“Yes. His name was Wolfgang Henker. You will not have heard of him. He was a sergeant in the Nationale Volksarmee. I did not know it at the time—how could I ?—but Henker was one of those monsters who had been arrested for heinous crimes and given over to the military as an asset. A tool. A weapon.” Volker shook his head. “Even after all these years, even after all that I know of the world, it still amazes me.”