The Devil's Dream: Book One (3 page)

Matthew Brand hung up
the phone and went to his seat at the back of the bus.

The
Devil's Dream

By Jeffrey Dillan

Prologue

It
was so hot you almost wished they had waited until winter to have the
funeral. Everyone in the cemetery was sweating, some through their
clothes. Women fanned themselves even as they cried. Men hung their
heads low and continuously wiped their brow. The temperature had
risen to one hundred degrees, but still the gravesite could hold
little more. All of these people had come to watch a casket lower six
feet into the ground, to bury Sargent Michael Murray.

His
wife was dressed in the appropriate black, her child's hand in hers.
She didn't cry and I think that was mainly because of the seven year
old next to her leg. An effort I know I couldn't have matched.

I
didn't know Michael Murray but I stood and watched everyone sweating
and crying. Perhaps it's morbid of me, but the entire time, I kept
thinking that they need not have the funeral during the height of
summer. That, they could, because of the body's advanced
decomposition, have the funeral on Christmas Eve if they wished. They
didn't wish to though and I understood. Sargent Michael Murray had
been missing for a year, a horrible, horrible year for Mrs. Murray.
Now, she had her husband's bones and she wanted them buried so that
she and her son could finally begin to mourn.

"He
didn't mean to," Sophia Murray told me after the funeral,
finally letting the tears flow that she had locked up in her head for
most of the day. "He cried at night about it to me. It was a
legitimate accident and that's why he was found not guilty. He hated
what happened." She paused to blot her eyes. "I even
thought he might commit suicide over it."

A
fresh bout of tears appeared and I told her we could do this later.

"No.
No. We'll do it now. He didn't mean to kill that boy and that fucking
psycho deserves a lot worse than what he's getting. My husband was a
good man who made a mistake. That doesn't mean he deserves to die. It
doesn't mean I should have to bury him."

Mrs.
Murray broke down then and her crying didn't stop. I imagine, two
years after our brief interaction, a part of her is still crying.
Begging for her husband to return, begging to stop her husband from
going to work on the day he shot a black boy on a street in Atlanta,
Georgia. Gunned him down, because, in all honesty, he looked like a
thug that the police were after. A thug that had allegedly raped two
women the past week (both of them white, and did that play into any
of the officer's decision?). Four officers had been there that day,
and all four had unloaded their weapons on the boy heading home.

Did
the black kid, Hilman Brand, do everything he could to avoid dying?
Certainly not. He didn't listen to the police. He continued walking,
although he didn’t start running—but as many white, conservative
commentators made known after the shooting: he was dressed like a
'thug'.

Hillman
Brand wasn't a thug, though.

Does
any of it matter now? Does Hillman Brand's death matter at all? Does
Michael Murray's? Do the other three cops who opened fire matter?
People die every day and police officers kill plenty each year.
Trials are publicized weekly and crazies are born every day. This
story, when compared with the thousands of others in the past decade,
should float on as the rest have before it. Except it won't. Not even
the government, who ailed for years trying to find Matthew Brand,
will let this thing pass because they won't put him in an electric
chair and be done with it.

This
story isn't different because Hillman Brand was an adopted black boy,
or that he was adopted by a very wealthy family. This story isn't
different because the killer targeted only cops. This story, and thus
this book, is a love story between a father and his son, and the
depths that such love could take them. I didn't know that when I
began writing. I thought Matthew Brand was insane and the cops were
probably criminals.

Maybe
Matthew Brand is insane, but if so, love brought him there.

I
dedicate this book to the four cops that lost their lives.

I
dedicate this book to the person who killed those cops, Matthew
Brand, who lost his son.

The first night without
Allison and Jerry already wasn't sleeping. He spoke to her around ten
and told her he was getting in bed, which he had, but now he just lay
there with the television on in front of him. Around midnight, the
Brand stories began. He couldn't remember what he had been watching,
maybe reruns of Friends, but it was broken up by a news alert.

He changed the channel,
wanting to stay away from it, but that did little as every channel he
went to had basically the same story.

Matthew Brand escaped
from The Wall.

Matthew Brand last seen
in Texas.

Somehow though, they
managed to take those two sentences, the only thing they really knew,
and stretch it out into hour-long segments. They weren't simply going
to report the news and let it go until more information arrived. No,
they were going to whip the public up into a frenzy. He left the
television on, unable to find anything worth watching and unable to
fall asleep. He thought about grabbing the book off the nightstand,
but he finished it last night and didn't want to restart it.

Might as well learn
about what Allison was up against. He remembered a good deal of it,
more than he thought when she woke him up this morning telling him
she had to go. He was already sure that every major station would
have some kind of recounting of Matthew Brand's life playing within
the next couple of days.

What
Allison was up against.

The words echoed
through his head like it was a canyon. As if his wife was going into
hand-to-hand combat with Brand. She was directing a massive team
trying to monitor his whereabouts and all his communications. She
wasn't up against anyone. She was leading a large force against one
man, and for some reason, that made Jerry just the slightest bit
bitter. Maybe it was because by the time Allison called tonight, her
daughter was already in bed. Maybe it was because Marley didn't even
ask today if she'd be able to talk to her Mom. Maybe it was because
he sat here unable to sleep because she had left again.

He closed his eyes,
took a big breath, and let it out slowly.

None of that was fair.
He knew her career when he asked for her hand. He knew what it
entailed. None of this was a surprise to him. Even so, this time felt
different. It felt like what was supposed to be a rare thing. The
type of manhunt that made careers. These were becoming a regular part
of their lives. He didn't mention it to Allison this morning because
she knew as well as he, but this was the third in a year. The third
time she'd left him and Marley and gone off to another life that he
couldn't ever truly understand. Most spouses, they could relate to a
day at a job. They could relate to the reason the spouse went to that
job. Bills to pay, mouths to feed, and the all-consuming struggle to
make ends meet. Not in their case though. This wasn't about meeting
ends each month, not for Allison—he understood that part—what he
didn't understand was the nearly fanatical dedication for this job.
The willingness to sacrifice almost everything if need be for it.

It was dawning on
Jerry, after fifteen years of marriage, that he might not understand
his wife. That he might not know the person he slept next to each
night.

"Stop," he
whispered, his voice barely audible over the drone of the television.
You know Allison. You're just
upset because Marley and you are here and she's not. That's all.

He reached for the
remote and turned the television off. Brand would be on until Allison
brought him in and there wasn't any need to sit here and watch it
tonight.
Just lie in the dark
until you fall asleep.

Eventually his worrying
stopped and he found the sweet darkness of rest.

* * *

Ten years had passed
since Jeffrey Dillan wrote a book. Eight years since it was
published. He didn't need to write another book, didn't really need
to do anything ever again as far as money was concerned, but that
didn't mean he didn't want to.

He had tried to write.
Three separate times. Three separate murders in which he went to
three different towns and interviewed hundreds of people. Jeffrey did
the leg work, knew the murders inside and out, knew the murderers as
if he were their parents, and nearly wept for the victims. Months on
each project, collecting hundreds of pages of notes, all for naught.
He sat down to write countless times, on each of the novels, and for
a few days the words would come—once they even came for a week.
Then they stopped, just dried up. He thought it was something inside
him for a while, that he had lost the ability that he honed since the
age of twelve. It took him three novels to understand he had nothing
to do with it. Matthew Brand commanded his writer's block. After
The
Devil's Dream
what was the point of continuing? What could
he have to say, writing about second rate murderers, that hadn't been
said before? There were no other Matthew Brands and so there were no
more books for Jeffrey.

After the third try, he
put away the notes and retired.

He still wanted to
work, to reignite that passion that had consumed so much of his life.
He couldn't though, so instead he drank. It was a slow process,
replacing the research and writing with the bottle, but it was a
process that he enjoyed. If he wasn't going to be writing, he might
as well do something else fun. At eight in the morning, he had a
bottle of vodka and a bottle of orange juice sitting on the counter.
His head didn't hurt because he took it easy the night before. He'd
gone to dinner with his agent, out of friendship rather than any hope
of a book. He last spoke to Lecia six months ago and no mention of a
book had come up, nor had it last night. She no longer considered the
great Jeffrey Dillan a part of her work, he supposed. She would never
drop him, of course not, because if for any reason he decided to
actually put something out, millions of dollars would rain down on
everyone involved. So she never mentioned him writing but she never
mentioned him finding another agent, and Jeffrey was pretty much
determined that she would never need mention his drinking, either. No
one need mention that.

Looking at the juice
not yet poured and the vodka an inch deep in his glass, he thought
(not for the first time) that it might be a problem. Not just yet,
because obviously he hadn't had a drink last night, so he could stop
if he needed—or at least put it to the side. Plus, what did it
matter? He had no book in the hopper and he had the money to drink
Belvedere for the rest of his life. He could probably even hire a
little Mexican to come in here and squeeze fresh oranges for the
juice if he wanted. The checks weren't nearly as big as they had been
eight years ago, but were still deposited every single quarter.

For a long time,
Jeffrey had his work; now he had his drink.

What scared him was
that he seemed okay with his life now. He wasn't necessarily
disappointed with the way life had turned out, wasn't desperately
trying to find something to write about and wasn't hating the
headaches when he woke up with them or the nights when he fell asleep
on his living room floor staring at the ceiling fan with a beer
resting on the carpet next to him. It was, more or less, comforting.
It wasn't out of control, not yet, and maybe with some luck he could
lounge around all day at his pool and drink his cocktails without
developing cirrhosis of the liver or diabetes.

He liked drinking and
he was accepting the fact that he would never write again.

Jeffrey poured the
orange juice into the glass and didn't bother to stir it. He took a
sip, relishing the sweet bitterness. What Lecia didn't know wouldn't
hurt her.

He walked into his
living room and sat down on the couch.

Oh,
Matthew Brand, why did you have to go and get yourself caught?

Jeffrey smiled at the
thought. The two of them could have had a long life together if
Matthew could have kept his mouth shut a little better. Matthew
killing, creating his monstrosity, and Jeffrey following behind
writing book after book. A real life Nancy Drew series. Instead the
fucking idiot had gone and got himself caught a year after starting
and now Jeffrey wasn't going to be writing anymore books because how
do you follow up someone like Brand? Even O.J. Simpson and all that
hoopla looked as pale as an albino next to Brand.

He thought about a
follow up to
The Devil's Dream,
had even outlined the novel. He could focus on the lives
of the families whose father's had been murdered, could focus on the
science behind Brand's acts and where it was now (Jeffrey was pretty
sure the government had taken what he'd done and began working on it
the week after Brand was captured), as well as copy-cats that had
sprung up after him. Jeffrey even pitched it to Lecia, who of course
said yes. Again, the millions would rain down even if he shit on some
paper and put it between two pieces of cardboard and shipped it out
to bookstores. Without Brand the story just seemed empty. The thing
that mattered most was gone; the energy that created the national
furor was locked up, never getting out.

"Jesus Christ,"
he sighed. "Stop thinking about it. Brand's gone, your career is
gone, just sip your drink and maybe call over Rita in a little bit."