When they stopped, Andi thought in the recesses of her mind there would be three of them, only one of him. She could take him on, hold him while the girls ran. A cornfield bordered the farmhouse plot. There was no fence. Grace was fast and smart, and once in the cornfield, which was as dense as a rain forest, she could escape…
John Mail stopped the truck and they all rocked back and forth once, and Grace got to her knees and looked out the dirty window. Mail turned in his seat. He had an oddly high-pitched voice, almost childlike, and said to Andi: "If you try to run, I'll shoot the little kid first, then the next one, then you."
And the streak of possibility died.
Genetics had made John Mail a psychopath. His parents had made him a sociopath.
He was a crazy killer and he didn't care about labels.
Andi had met him as part of her post-doc routine at the University of Minnesota, a new psychiatrist looking at the strange cases locked in the Hennepin County jails. She'd recognized a hard, quick intelligence in the cave of Mail's mind. He was smart enough-and large enough-to dominate his peers, and to avoid the cops for a while, but he was no match for a trained psychiatrist.
Andi had peeled him like an orange.
Mail's father had never married his mother, had never lived with them; last heard of, he was with the Air Force in Panama. Mail had never seen him.
When he was a baby, his mother would leave him for hours, sometimes all day and overnight, stuck in a bassinet, alone in a barren room. She married a man when he was three-three and still unable to talk-who didn't care much about her and less about Mail, except as an annoyance. When he was annoyed, when he was drunk, he'd use his leather belt on the kid; later, he moved to switches and finally to broom sticks and dowel rods.
As a child, Mail found intense pleasure in torturing animals, skinning cats and burning dogs. He moved up to attacking other children, both boys and girls-the class bully. In fourth grade, the attacks on girls had taken a sexual turn. He liked to get their pants off, penetrate them with his fingers. He didn't know yet what he wanted, but he was getting close.
In fifth grade, big for his age, he started riding out to the malls, Rosedale, Ridgedale, catching suburban kids outside the game rooms, mugging them.
He carried a t-ball bat, then a knife. In sixth grade, a science teacher, who also coached football, pushed him against a wall when he called a girl a cunt in the teacher's hearing. The teacher's house burned down a week later.
The fire was a trip: five more houses went down, all owned by parents of children who'd crossed him.
In June, after sixth grade, he torched the home of an elderly couple, who ran the last of the mom-and-pop groceries on St. Paul's east side. The old couple were asleep when the smoke rolled under the door. They died together near the head of the stairs, of smoke inhalation.
A smart arson cop finally found the pattern, and he was caught.
He denied it all-never stopped denying it-but they knew he'd done it. They brought Andi in, to see exactly what they'd caught, and Mail had talked about his life in a flat lizard's voice, casually, his young eyes crawling around her body, over her breasts, down to her hips. He scared her, and she didn't like it. He was too young to scare her…
Mail, at twelve, had already shown the size he'd be. And he had tension-built muscles in his body and face, and eyes like hard-boiled eggs. He talked about his stepfather.
"When you say he beat you, you mean with his fists?" Andi asked.
Mail grunted, and smiled at her naivete. "Shit, fists. The fucker had this dowel he took out of a closet, you know, a clothes rod? He whipped me with that. He beat my old lady, too. He'd catch her in the kitchen and beat the shit out of her and she'd be screaming and yelling and he'd just beat her until he got tired. Christ, there'd be blood all over the place like catsup."
"Nobody ever called the police?"
"Oh, yeah, but they never did anything. My old lady used to say that it was none of the neighbors' business."
"When he died, it got better?"
"I don't know, I wasn't living there any more; not much."
"Where'd you live?"
He shrugged: "Oh, you know: under the interstate, in the summer. There's some caves over in St. Paul, by the tracks, lots of guys over there…"
"You never went back?"
"Yeah, I went back. I got really hungry and fucked up and thought she maybe had some money, but she called the cops on me. If I hadn't gone back, I'd still be out. She said, 'Eat some Cheerios, I'll go get some cake,' and she went out in the front room and called the cops. Learned me a lesson, all right. Kill the bitch when I get out. If I can find her."
"Where is she now?"
"Took off with some guy."
After two months of therapy, Andi had recommended that John Mail be sent to a state hospital. He was more than a bad kid. He was more than unbalanced. He was insane. A kid with the devil inside.
The girls had stopped weeping when Mail opened the van door. He took them out, single file, through the side door of the old farm house and straight into the basement. The basement smelled wet, smelled of fresh dirt and disinfectant. Mail had cleaned it not long ago, she thought. A small spark of hope: he wasn't going to kill them. Not right away. If they had a little time, just a little time, she could work on him.
Then he locked them away. They listened for him, fearful, expecting him back at any moment, Genevieve asking, over and over, "Mom, what's he going to do? Mom, what's he going to do?" , A minute became ten minutes, and ten minutes an hour, and the girls finally slept while Andi put her back to the wall and tried to think…
Mail came for her at three in the morning, drunk, excited.
"Get out here," he growled at her. He had a beer can in his left hand. The girls woke at the sound of the latch, and they crawled across the mattress until they had their backs to the wall, but curled, like small animals in a den.
"What do you want?" Andi said. She kept looking at her watch, as if this were a normal conversation and she was on her way somewhere else. But the fear made her voice tremble, as much as she tried to control it. "You can't keep us here, John. It's not right."
"Fuck that," Mail said. "Now get out here, goddamnit."
He took a step toward her, his eyes dark and angry, and she could smell the beer.
"All right. Don't hurt us, just don't hurt us. Come on, girls…"
"Not them," Mail said. "Just you."
"Just me?" Her stomach clutched.
"That's right." He smiled at her and put his free hand on the door-sill, as though he needed help staying upright. Or maybe he was being cool. He'd teased his hair into bangs, and now she realized that in addition to the beer, she could smell aftershave or cologne.
Andi glanced at the girls, then at Mail, and at the girls again. "I'll be right back," she said. "John won't hurt me."
Neither of the girls said a word. Neither of them believed her.
Andi walked around him, as far away as she could. In the outer basement, the air was cooler and fresher, but the first thing she noticed was that he'd dragged another mattress down the stairs. She stepped toward the stairs as the steel door clanged shut behind her and Mail said, "Don't move."
She stopped, afraid to move, and he walked around her, until he was between her and the door. He stared at her for a moment, a little out of balance, she thought. He was seriously drunk, and his eyes looked closed in, heavy-lidded, and his lips curled in an ugly, contemptuous smile.
"They don't have any idea where you're at or who took you," he said. He nearly laughed, but somewhere, under there, he was a bit unsure of himself, she thought. "They been talking about it on the radio all night. They're running around like chickens with their heads cut off."