Psycho Save Us (28 page)

“Details.”

At first, Agent
Porter appeared reluctant.  He looked over his shoulder, perhaps to make certain
that his fellow agents were adequately busy for the moment.  He touched Leon’s
elbow, a gesture that no one had done since his mother when he’d been in
trouble, and started to guide him away from the hubbub.  Hennessey and his SWAT
team were now on the scene and were moving through the nearby woods with search
dogs.  Townsley Drive, a bleak zone of forgotten prospects before tonight, now
had life churning through it again.

“I don’t see any
reason why I can’t shed a little light on some of the details,” Agent Porter
said.  “But there are parts that…well, aren’t something we want as public
record.  I’ll tell you which parts those are and why we don’t want them known
yet.”

Leon nodded. 
This was a start, at least.

“Spencer Adam
Pelletier killed his first victim when he was thirteen years old,” Porter
said.  “He attacked and killed a kid named Miles Hoover after he had said
something to some other kid named Roberto Castillo.  Castillo was new to the
country, fresh over from Mexico, and Hoover thought it was funny to mock his
thick Spanish accent.  Now, there is absolutely no indication that Pelletier
and Castillo were ever friends, but one day, in science class, Pelletier told
Hoover to lay off Castillo.  Hoover was a pretty big kid, but Pelletier had
been held back a bit in school even though he’d shown to be very smart in
previous grades, so he was as big as Hoover.  But Hoover didn’t take his threat
seriously.  He laughed at Pelletier and started calling him a fag and shit like
that.  Then one day, Pelletier attacked Hoover in the school library.

“Now, Pelletier
didn’t just
attack
this kid.  He moved in a way that showed careful preplanning
and finesse.  See, once a week, second period classes were required to take the
kids to the library to get a new book.  To promote reading, right?  Well, according
to other students, Pelletier had noticed that Hoover always asked to go to the
bathroom right as the class was returning from the library.  Pelletier had
checked out a book a week previously, and neglected to exchange it.  We believe
it was intentional neglect, because he used it as an excuse to return to the
library very quickly, alone, to drop the book back in the return box, sparing
him a late fine.

“Pelletier had a
plastic zip tie in his pocket when he left the classroom.  He timed it so that
Hoover would be on his way to the bathroom—Hoover was one o’ these kids who
always tried to get outta class all the time, for any reason, for any amount of
time he could finagle.  Always asking to go to the bathroom when he really
didn’t need to, complaining he was sick, shit like that.  Pelletier knew that
Hoover would cut through the library on his way back from the bathroom, like
most kids did.

“There wasn’t
anybody in the library at the time.  It was closed during those hours, but the
door was almost always left unlocked.  Again, something Pelletier knew.  All
the kids knew it.  He was
counting
on it.  And when Hoover dipped into
the dark library, we can imagine Pelletier probably stepped out from behind a
bookshelf or a desk, and then put the zip tie around Hoover’s neck and squeezed
it tight before Hoover could put up much of a fight.  Hoover suffocated to
death while Pelletier watched.  Pelletier used a pair of scissors from the
librarian’s desk to cut the zip tie off and then returned to his classroom.

“Miles Hoover’s
death was determined a murder right away—the ligature marks, right?—and after a
few weeks’ worth of investigation a detective got it out of a few kids that
Hoover and Pelletier had been upset with one another, and Pelletier had been
gone at that exact time of death.  When asked what he’d done, Pelletier didn’t
deny it.  In fact, he laughed.  According to the reports, he laughed until
tears came out of his eyes and he couldn’t catch his breath.”

Leon and Agent
Porter had been walking very slowly away from the crime scene, over to the
rundown home on the opposite side of the street.  The large detective pulled to
a stop, nodding thoughtfully.  “They try him as an adult?”

“Nope,” said
Porter, smiling strangely.  “See, Pelletier was a psychopath before very many
people really understood that psychopaths are
born
, not grown.  They
can’t be changed, can’t be made to empathize with anyone—they have absolutely
no empathy.  And since a person can’t just grow a conscience, there was no hope
for him.  Not ever.  But, people didn’t know it back then, and even today many
counselors and shrinks are reluctant to curse a kid for life by branding him or
her a psychopath.  They wanna believe all kids can get help.

“Pelletier was
able to convince people that it was all innocent, that he was just playing a
game with Hoover, that they were even doing ‘something gay together’ as he put
it.  Erotic asphyxiation, shit like that.  It had just gone too far, that’s
all.  And since he’d been held back in school, he was able to play like he was
partially touched in the head.  Confused the courts bad enough that he was
first placed into a wilderness therapy program in Utah—that’s, you know, where
they take kids out in the middle o’ the woods and try to analyze them while
reconnecting them with nature, gets them away from drugs, or their lives as
prostitutes, all that shit—and then from there he went to a boarding school.

“Pelletier
fucked up in boarding school, too.  Stabbed an instructor in the cheek with a
pencil.  Then he was sent to a youth reformatory in Roarke, Colorado, which he
stayed at until he was eighteen.  It was his last chance, and he did
incredibly
well there.  Of course this was long, long before people fully understood that
psychopaths are incredible liars and manipulators—there’s evidence that, while
at the reformatory, he got a few of the guards upset at one another, convinced
one of them that another guard was lying about some money borrowed, or some
such.  Just like a psychopath to spread discord, pit one friend against another.

“So, he got out
of the reformatory a model inmate-patient,” Porter went on.  “It’s not
entirely
clear what happened next—the file on his life at the bureau has been mostly
pieced together by me since I took this case—but it seemed he hooked up at some
point with an old friend of his from school named Hoyt Graeber.  Now, Graeber
was just one o’ these kids who got involved slinging dope early, a jab here, a
jab there, and eventually developed enough skill at it that he got recognized
by Rico Nashton.  Heard of him?”

Leon squinted,
thinking.  “Sounds familiar.”

“Nashton was one
of the guys who—”

“Oh, right!  The
Gold Club.”  The Gold Club was a strip joint in Atlanta that received national
attention back in 2001 for the indictments of several of the owners, managers
and employees.  The place had been shut down for a while now, but another place
called the Gold Room had opened in its place.  “Nashton was caught moving drugs
through some of the strippers there, right?”

“That’s right,”
Porter said.  “Pelletier and his friend Graeber were involved with Nashton’s
operation for a number of years, just long enough for Pelletier to pick up a
few tricks.  First he started driving cars full of heroin across from Mexico
into the States, and through these interactions he met the kind of individuals
who could teach the fundamentals and advanced techniques of the criminal
lifestyle—useful info like robbing a bank on Fridays because that’s when they
got their money, to using knock-off capecitabine, which is a chemotherapeutic
pillthat makes your hands peel and makes it so that you never leave any
fingerprints.

“In 2001 Nashton
takes a hit, gets sent to the pen for a dime, and the Gold Club shuts down. 
Graeber overdosed on his own H six months later.  That left Pelletier alone.  At
that point, he disappeared from all public records.  He probably had fake
IDs—maybe taken from this O’Connor fucker, or somebody like him.  We don’t know
where he went, but when he reemerged on the grid a few years later he was armed
with all sorts of new techniques.  We called him Musashi for a while after
that.  You know who that is?”

Leon thought for
a moment.  “Japanese swordsman, right?  Samurai?”

“Yeah.  A
ronin
. 
A wandering samurai with no master.  One of the guys at the bureau, Hector
Freedman, was a history buff, did some shinkendo—that’s a Japanese
sword-fighting style—and read all about Miyamoto Musashi.  Apparently Musashi
was only a decent swordsman, but then he disappeared into the wilderness for
several years, and when he came back he was unstoppable.  Nobody knows what
happened to Musashi during that time, just like we don’t know what happened to
Pelletier during his little self-imposed exile.  He was into this and into
that.  One minute it was a counterfeit scheme that netted him a hundred grand,
then it was a sizable drug deal that gave him two hundred more.

“Pelletier was
all over the map with his scams.  He’s one mercurial son of a bitch, this guy. 
Fickle.  Changes his game constantly.  The bureau first picked up on him doing
this scam where he created this website for men living secretly with
homosexuality.  He sent out fliers and shit.  He got a few dozen responses. 
Pelletier pretended to be a conflicted young man looking for an older gay
gentleman to show him the ropes.  He would get replies from all over,
everything from dirty old men living in log cabins and poring over the Internet
for company, to some wealthier, established guys with families.  He focused on
the wealthy family men because they had more to lose by being exposed.  He
revealed who he was to them and started blackmailing them, threatening to
expose their secret unless they paid X amount.  Got away with this for a full
year, made some good cash and then split when one of his victims finally got up
enough guts to go to the police.  FBI figured out who it was by tracking the IP
addresses of the websites he created, finding where his base of operations was,
which was some apartment building in Biloxi, and then getting a copy of his
photo ID from the landlords and running his face through facial-recognition
programs.

“Pelletier’s
face was now in the FBI’s National Registry system.  His face popped up all
over the Bible Belt over the next two years in video surveillance—auto theft,
mail-order scams, confidence scams, and some other shit.  It wouldn’t be until
after he escaped Leavenworth that we were able to work out a timeline that
matched all of this activity perfectly with a series of murders committed
throughout the southern U.S., with a couple up north.”

One of the
ambulances was leaving with a load of three bodies in body bags.  They had just
closed up the back of the ambulance and blared their siren just once to tell a
few cops to get out of their way.  Leon and Agent Porter pressed up against a
patrol car to let it pass.  “Who were the victims?” he asked.

“Nobodies,”
Porter said.  “Absolute nobodies. 
But
, Pelletier’s face popped up on a
security camera here, a cell phone camera there, and the first few times that
it happened to be in the vicinity of a murder that the bureau was investigating
was considered a coincidence.  But coincidences are only coincidences for so
long.

“First one that
we
know
of was Kevin Baxter.  Forty-two-year-old father of three and
devoted husband to a wife dying of stage III-A lung cancer.  There’s every
reason to believe that Pelletier knew this, because he had loaned Baxter some
money for unknown reasons—my theory is that Pelletier was trying to break into
the loan shark business at that time—but none of Baxter’s wife’s problems or
their children mattered much when, if you believe the forensics guys, he lured
Baxter to a meeting in a dark parking lot and beat his brains in with a
baseball bat, and then took his body out into the middle of a swamp and dumped
it.”

“What was the
motive?” Leon asked.

Porter didn’t
answer.  Instead, he moved on to the next victim.  “Six months later a nurse
named Miriam Downey turned up in the Tennessee River outside of Huntsville,
Alabama.  She was shot twice in the head.  She was last seen in the company of
a white male by four witnesses who described a person matching Pelletier’s
description.  After forensics came up with an approximate time of death, it
matched with the time that Pelletier was confirmed to have been Huntsville,
stealing cars for a chop shop that Huntsville PD have since busted up.

“There are four
other bodies that we can line up with Pelletier’s criminal run through the
South.  The shit that happened in Baton Rouge was a result of what happened
when he was back in CRC, before he was sent to Leavenworth.  All signs begin to
show that Spencer Pelletier is the most active serial killer in the U.S.  A
monster that none of us predicted, not even Drew McCulloch, the psychologist at
Leavenworth, who we believe was his last victim before Baton Rouge.”

Leon’s eyes
widened.  “He killed his prison shrink?”

Here, Porter
made a face.  “I told you that I would tell you when you were hearing things
that haven’t been confirmed and shouldn’t be repeated.  This is one of them. 
Dr. Drew McCulloch died in excruciating pain a week and a half after Pelletier
escaped prison.”

“He tracked him
down after escaping?” Leon asked incredulously.

Porter shook his
head.  “No.  Poisoned him.  At least, a lot of us think so.  See, amongst the
other two thousand inmates at Leavenworth, Pelletier had kind of
vanished
in a way.  He receded into the background, didn’t cause any trouble.  He was
assigned prison work, did it, and didn’t complain about it.  And sometimes he
helped out in the kitchen.  The day before his escape, a few prisoners had been
caught smuggling in some leaves from rhododendron plants.”  Leon shook his
head, not understanding.  Porter explained, “They can be ground into powder,
put into a drink or in some food, and they cause excruciating death.  You’ve
got them all over Georgia here, especially up north.  Indians sometimes used
the leaves to commit suicide.  Anyways, we
think
Pelletier managed to
get some of that into McCulloch’s food or drink somehow when he appeared for
their last session.  Pelletier knew he was getting out, but made sure he took
care of McCulloch first.”