The Devil's Dream: Book One (7 page)

Brand used to watch the
cops for hours, just like other serial killers. He would get their
entire routine down. He memorized every second, every deviation,
every similarity. He followed them, oftentimes sitting a few booths
over from them, wearing some kind of disguise that he created. Then
when they left, he would talk if someone was willing to listen. Most
people went to the police, each of them telling a different story, a
different piece of what Brand wanted the world to know. Except this
man, he had kept his mouth shut and Jeffrey had only found him
because he researched where the third cop, Terrel Whitney, used to
hang.

The bar was one of
those places where you ate peanuts and threw the shells on the floor,
so that when you walked anywhere you could feel the crunch of
someone's last meal. Wooden tables and wooden booths and a bar with
more graffiti on it than any dilapidated bridge Jeffrey had ever
seen. He didn't mind being in the bar—even then, he didn't mind
being in any establishment that served up booze, although now he
preferred drinking at home.

Jeffrey began with his
questions, his yellow pad right there with him: who knew Terrel
Whitney? Anyone see him in here often? Anyone ever say anything
strange about Terrel?

* * *

"I did."

For an early Friday
afternoon, the bar was still pretty full. A dozen or so people
hanging around the pool tables, another half dozen at the bar itself,
and a man and woman throwing darts. Jeffrey always started the
questions with the bartender but the answers came from a man sitting
to Jeffrey's right.

"Six months ago or
so."

Jeffrey looked at him,
trying to judge the man's intoxication and whether there might be
danger in talking with him. The man kept his eyes on the small
television behind the bar, watching two baseball teams play. A golden
beer sat in front of him though his hand dipped into the bowl of
peanuts more often than it reached for the drink.

"Would you mind
talking to me about it? What's your name, sir? I'm Jeffrey Dillan."
He extended a hand but the man didn't look over from the television.

"Are you a cop?"

"No, sir. I'm a
journalist."

The man nodded
slightly, seemingly more to himself than Jeffrey.

"Yeah, we can talk
then probably. If I find out you're a cop though, the conversations
done. Got it?"

"Yes, sir."

"I'm Gerard Willis
and I suppose we're talking about that Brand case, aren't we?"

Terrel Whitney was
known. His face, his funeral, all of it covering the news just like
the other three cops who Brand found. Whitney was dead and anyone
that asked questions about him was probably trying to ask questions
about Brand.

"We are,"
Jeffrey said.

"I didn't talk to
Whitney much and outside of him being a cop, I didn't have no hard
feelings towards him. After he killed that black kid, I almost felt
bad for him. You never know what blacks are going to do, pull out a
lighter or a gun whenever they reach into a pocket. Almost felt bad,
except he still killed a kid. You want to talk about him or the man
that spoke with me?"

"Probably both,
but the other man first. Do you remember what he looked like?"

"Like anyone else.
I think he had blonde hair and blue eyes. He had a little scar on his
chin like he'd fallen as a kid. Nothing abnormal."

Jeffrey jotted down the
description, knowing that Matthew Brand kept his head as bald as Lex
Luther's.

"What did he talk
to you about?"

"He asked if I
knew the big guy in the back, and I said 'Terrel? I know of him.' I
guess after that he told me a lot of what was going to happen next.
I'll be honest with you, the man sounded fucking crazy. I guess he
was, huh?"

"He talked about
the murders?"

"Yeah, I mean, he
said Terrel would die soon although he didn't say how. Someone else
came on the news a few weeks later saying someone told them how each
of these cops were going to die, so I guess I wasn't the only one he
talked to. For me though, he didn't get down into the details of
exactly what he'd do."

"You didn't go to
the police?" Jeffrey asked.

"I was legit torn
about that. He said he was going to kill Terrel, said he was going to
snatch him right away from his family and he promised me that he
would never see them again." Gerard turned for the first time
from the television and looked at Jeffrey. "Who was I going to
tell though? The cops? My elected representative? Terrel himself, who
had probably killed more people than his fair share? It wasn't my
business and even now, with the man dead, I still don't feel it was
my business. You can let yourself be pulled into things or you can
sit them out. That guy, if it was Brand, he wanted to pull me into
whatever game he was playing but I didn't let him. Now Terrel's dead
and I'm here alive talking to you."

"I'm not judging,
Mr. Willis. That's not why I'm here."

"I wouldn't care
if ya did. I wouldn't be talking to you if I cared." He looked
back to the baseball game and a song started up on the Jukebox behind
them. "He said something else too, and maybe I should still go
to the cops about it. Maybe by telling you, I am. You going to run
and tell the police about what I'm saying here?"

"The only way
they'll know is if they read what I'm writing, and I certainly won't
be sending any free copies to police stations."

"I guess it
doesn't matter. The man's caught and isn't going to be doing too much
to anyone else in the near future. A few beers in and he really
opened up. I shouldn't have sat there listening to it all, should
have told someone to kick him out, but you don't meet someone insane
every day and I guess I wanted the experience. He said he would get
even with them all, but that it still wasn't justice. That even
though they would die, that was very different than watching their
children die. He said he wished he could do both. Kill them and show
them what it felt like to have their children killed."

* * *

Jeffrey talked to the
man ten years ago and stashed the notes in this room. He'd kept it
out of the book because writing about a cop hating racist wasn't
going to lend much credibility to his story. That didn't mean he was
lying though and it made sense when you put the pieces of what Brand
said together. The story was a weave of tapestry, and when all the
parts connected, it would resemble a work of Da Vinci. Complex and
beautiful for the person who put it together. Brand had, in his own
way, told Gerard Willis about the long game. About what he wanted to
do when Stage One ended.

Stage One never reached
completion. He never finished his art. Almost morose, but Jeffrey
felt the world had never really seen his greatness because of that.

Jeffrey didn't know how
Brand would understand that he needed to begin in Florida, but
Jeffrey didn't know how to bring back the dead either. Brand did. So
if he escaped with any kind of plan, he would head to Florida. If
there was no plan, Brand would create one quickly. All roads would
lead to Florida then.

The
Devil's Dream

By Jeffrey Dillan

Chapter
3

At
the age of eighteen, much of the world considered Matthew Brand a
waste. He should, by all accounts, have already made significant
contributions ranging from a cure for cancer to space colonization.
At eighteen, Brand still attended school, working on his fourth
PhD—while the rest of society his age would be beginning their
undergraduate degree if not heading to the workforce.

His former professor, Marigold
Caris, told me:

"It was shocking and a bit depressing. I taught him when he
was twelve, out of high school for just a couple of years. I haven't
seen a mind like his before or since, and even at that young, I knew
the boy would change the world. There are always kids that run
through high school and college, becoming the next youngest PhD ever,
but then they dive so deep into their field that they're never heard
outside of it. They may do some pretty big things in whatever area
they focus in, but they're not going to make large changes in the way
society functions. Matthew was different. He was, for lack of a
better term, the Second Coming. You knew after you taught him for a
few days that no single area of focus would hold him, that he would
take the world and remake it as he saw fit. And then you go on with
your life, understanding that, and six years later he's still in the
classroom learning from people who have studied their entire life to
accumulate the knowledge he held at fourteen. It was depressing
watching that."

He'd
graduated high school at ten, not quite the youngest person to ever
do it—that honor is held by an Indian woman named Something or
Other. Eight years later he was producing little, rarely even the
coveted peer reviewed papers that PhDs thrive on. It didn't matter to
the schools he applied to, they knew his name, and that his
attendance at their university could do a lot. He went to class; he
wrote the papers necessary to graduate—all of them being accepted
to whichever journal he submitted to, but none of them meaning much.

I talked to another professor who
taught him at his final university, Yale, where Brand was gaining his
PhD in advanced mathematics, specifically non-communicative geometry.
I sat in Dr. Codie Quinlan's office on a day so cold that my nipples
could nearly cut glass. He said this about Matthew Brand:

"I'm fairly certain he already knew the theorems I was trying
to teach the class. He had his computer on and rarely looked up at me
as I went through formulas on the white board and with PowerPoint
lessons. Sometimes I would call on him, early on, to show him that he
needed to listen to me, but he always knew the answer. He barely even
looked up from his computer to talk when I did it. You begin to
wonder if he's listening or not, but then when he always knows the
answer, you begin to wonder why he's there. It wasn't a good thing
for other students to see, for sure, but what could I do, kick him
out? No one else in the world was collecting PhD’s as quickly as he
was, no one else could even attempt it. The kid probably brought in a
million dollars a year by himself from donations. I think he already
knew everything that I had to teach in that class and I think he was
lazy. I never knew what he was doing on that computer, but as far as
I know cancer still isn't cured, so he wasn't working on that."

Laziness.
It’s a word that seems ridiculous to speak about in connection with
Brand, especially after everything that transpired. Still, most of
his professors would use the adjective to describe him. Matthew's
laziness didn't affect his grades because he wasn't challenged. The
only thing it affected was his production. He withheld his gift from
the world, and didn't care.

Matthew Brand lived with a woman
named Dawn White, a twenty-eight year old PhD candidate studying
biology. They shared a three-bedroom condo just a bit off campus and
Dawn was quite open when it came to discussing her old roommate.
She's now sixty-two and about to retire from her position as full
professor at the University of Georgia.

"Matthew didn't care about any of it. That's easy to say and
it's easy to write down in your book, but if you haven't been through
a PhD program you can't really understand what that means. They are
all encompassing, years of one hundred hour weeks. You truly have to
fall into your work and hope you don't drown. Not for Matthew. He did
no work outside of class. I asked him once when he wrote his papers,
he told me he wrote them during class. I just kind of looked at him
like he was insane and then he laughed. He said something like,
'Sorry, I'd give it to you if I could.' I thought about his offer a
lot later, at least while we lived together. Whether or not he would
give me that gift if he could and whether or not I would take it. The
answer I think is clear now, no on both accounts. Someone like him
can't care, because if he begins to, I'm not sure there's anything
that can stop him."

Eight
years of our man's life were spent in college classrooms with
everyone he met simultaneously amazed at his incandescent brilliance
and startled by his stunted work ethic. How many more years and how
many more degrees would he have piled up if not for Jerome Watson?
The world owes Watson a great debt and perhaps a prison sentence. It
can be assumed everything that came after Jerome Watson, both the ten
years of miraculous discoveries until Hilman's murder and the ten
years of Frankenstein-like science after, couldn’t have happened
without him.

The
class was Complex Function Theory, which I tried to understand and
couldn't. It contained a total of ten people including the professor,
Dr. Watson. A black man nearing fifty, he had heard about Brand and
what to expect in class. Virtually no participation and yet an
effortless A. Dr. Watson didn't like the idea of that.

"I
was, honestly, just appalled admissions let someone like that into
Yale University. It's like you think this place is prestigious, is
supposed to have some real merit behind it, and here is this lazy,
brilliant kid making a mockery of what we were trying to do. We're
all smart but what separates us from other universities is our
ability to work hard for long periods of time. Then this student
comes in and keeps his head down because he's too busy looking at
Facebook or some other nonsense, and yet is able to basically tell us
how to do our jobs. That wasn't going to work for me."

He
changed the parameters of the class on the first day. There would be
no papers. There would be no tests. The only grade one received would
be based on one's contribution to the class. Basically, class
participation would make up the entire grade. That meant for three
hours a week, Matthew would need to be actively engaged in the world
around him. Not lost in his computer, not in his own head, but
actually contributing to the university in some form. Or else he
would fail. If he failed, Yale might keep him, but most likely not.
Most likely he would get the boot the same as any other PhD candidate
after failing a required course.