Acceleration Read online

  Fire-starting. Arson gives the young serial killer a rush, not just from the destruction of property, but from how he can manipulate so many people. Firefighters, cops, victims— whole crowds of men and women under his control.

  This triad is all about power, and the warped ways these guys go around trying to obtain it.

  The shiver that settles between my shoulder blades is only partly from the Igloo air. The guy in the diary, the roach, has shown at least two of these behaviors. The fires and the animals. He didn’t share any news about his bed-wetting problem—probably wouldn’t want to admit that kind of lack of control even to himself—but seeing all these indicators laid out in print confirms my fears. This is for real.

  There's a sudden commotion a few rows over, shaking me from my thoughts. Out of sight from where we’re sitting, I hear what must be the librarian saying, “You can’t look that up here. That's disgusting.”

  “What? I’m, like, doing research.” It's Wayne's voice, and when I look over to Vinny, he just rolls his eyes to the ceiling. Wayne is being Wayne. Can’t take him anywhere.

  “You’re going to have to leave now,” the disgusted woman tells him.

  “Hey, what about freedom of speech?”

  Wayne appears, walking down the aisle with the librarian's hand on his shoulder guiding him to the exit. I don’t know if libraries have bouncers, but she's definitely got the build for one. She has the shoulders of a linebacker.

  “Come on.” Wayne tries to shrug her off. “I'll be good. I’m with those guys,” he adds, pointing in our direction. As if that's going to help him.

  The woman pauses a second, looking over to where we’re sitting.

  Vinny shakes his head. And I say, “I’ve never seen this guy before.”

  Wayne gets dragged off toward the doors. The last thing I hear before he's bounced is: “Man, I’m gonna sue.”

  And then the cool silence falls again.

  “Well, that didn’t take long,” Vinny says. “I think he's got ADD.”

  “Add?”

  “Attention deficit disorder,” Vin informs me.

  I grunt. “All I know is he's a P.E.R.V.”

  Someone knocks on the window behind our chairs. Wayne gestures us to come out, mouthing “Let's go.”

  I grab one of those little midget pencils you always find in libraries and scrawl a note on a slip of paper: WE’RE STAYING WHERE IT'S COOL ! I think for a second, then add SUCKER at the end. Holding it up against the window, I watch Wayne read the note, and I swear I can see his lips moving. Then he leans in, pressing his nose against the glass to make a pig face, at the same time giving us the finger— actually a double finger, both hands up against the window. Wayne holds the pose for a second, then pushes off and walks away.

  After the excitement, I go back to my book. The FBI guy talks about how serial killers grow up. He says they learn from their own abusive situations how to dominate and control a weaker person. It's like they’re in training all their lives. Getting a feeling of power from the torture of small animals, they escalate to bigger things. A lot of them move from abusing pets to fire-starting, where they can finally control and manipulate people. Until they find that even this power isn’t enough. It's like my Roach realizing that his experiments in fire and torture are just “kids’ stuff.”

  Mason Lucas has a name for this “escalation of increasingly destructive aberrant behavior,” this demented growth pattern moving from pets to fires to people.

  He calls it acceleration.

  “So how's your murder book?” Vinny asks, breaking into my reading. “Is it the feel-good story of the year?”

  “This is mind-blowing stuff,” I tell him.

  “I thought you only read Stephen King and sci-fi.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not really reading this for fun,” I say.

  I’m dying to tell somebody what's going on. And Vin is the only somebody on the planet who might get what I’m trying to do.

  “Let me ask you a hypothetical question,” I say.

  “Hype away.”

  “Suppose you knew somebody was going to be killed?”

  “What, am I getting psychic visions?” Vin cracks.

  “Suppose you found the killer's plans, like written down somewhere.”

  “What, like: ‘Dear diary. I think I'll whack the pizza delivery guy. He forgot the garlic bread again.’“

  “Be serious. Make an effort,” I tell him.

  “Oh, serious. Right. I don’t know. I’d give his secret plans to the cops. They’d pick him up. End of story.”

  “And what if you couldn’t go to the cops?”

  “Why not?” Vin asks.

  “Lots of reasons. Maybe they wouldn’t take it seriously. They’re busy solving real crimes. They’d just think it was made up or something. And it's not like the guy who wrote it signed his name and address.”

  Vin shrugs. “I give up, Batman, what do I do?”

  “You try and catch the killer yourself,” I say.

  “With what? My Swiss Army knife and my library card?”

  “You know, for a sidekick, you’re not very supportive.”

  “I always thought you were the sidekick,” he says. “What's this supposed to be about, anyway? Is this from a movie or something?”

  Now I pull out a wad of folded pages from my back pocket, photocopies I made of some diary pages. Flattening them out, I hand them over. Vinny gives me a look like he thinks I’ve been smoking some seriously mind-pretzeling substances, but he tosses his book on the table and takes up the copies. The top one has writing scrawled around a Polaroid of a dead cat hanging from its neck on a length of chain.

  “What's this, your new hobby? It's…” His voice trails off halfway through the remark.

  Holding the pages closer to make out the writing, he finishes one and moves on to the next. No wisecracks from him now as he reads. I ran off a handful of pages from the diary, not wanting to carry the book around with me. It's hidden in my closet behind a pile of old hockey equipment, like a stack of Playboys I don’t want Mom to find.

  “Is this from one of those true-crime books?” Vinny asks.

  “It's from some kind of diary that showed up in the lost and found. I was looking for a book to read and saw this.”

  “No way.”

  “Yeah. Seriously. Look at the last page.”

  He shuffles to the page that lists the killer's targets.

  “You’ve got to turn this in,” he tells me.

  I shake my head. “Who knows if they’d even believe it? They’re not going to waste time on a crime that hasn’t happened, that might never happen. Besides, my prints are all over that thing, and they’ve already got those on file from that B and E I did with Wayne. They might even think I just made it up myself.”

  “Do you know what graphology is?” Vinny asks out of nowhere.

  “Sure. It's the … ology of graphs.”

  He sighs. “It's the study of handwriting. All they’d have to do is compare a sample of your writing to this and they’d see it wasn’t you who wrote it.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I know! You gotta turn this in.”

  “But maybe I found this diary for a reason. Maybe I’m supposed to find this guy myself.”

  “Okay…,” Vin says, giving me a look. “That's definitely crazy. This is some serious crap here. If this is right, then a woman's going to die.”

  I take the pages back from him. “I know,” I say. “I know.”

  Vinny's right, of course. He's like the voice of sanity. But damn, it's hard to give this up.

  “So?” he says.

  I slouch back into the cushions. “So I gotta turn it in.”

  FIFTEEN

  I told Jacob I had to get off early for a doctor's appointment.

  “Make sure you clock out, then,” he said.

  Like it's a major felony if I rip off the city for a couple hours of minimum wage.

  “And keep whatever you’ve
got to yourself,” he added.

  As if I was going to sneeze and turn the lost and found into a hot zone.

  I chose the fifty-second division downtown, because it's on the other side of the city from the twelfth, where I got arrested with Wayne. I’m being a little paranoid; I’m not exactly public enemy number one. But if they recognized me—who's going to believe a guy who tried to steal a toilet?

  The rank smell of the fifty-second hits me as I step through the doors. Stale sweat smothered with pine air freshener. My already queasy stomach does a back flip.

  If there's an air conditioner in this building, it must be on its last legs. The place is like an oven. My heart's gunning, and my sweat-drenched shirt sticks to me like plastic wrap.

  I make way for a couple of cops heading for the door.

  Turn and run, my brain's screaming at me. But instead, I force myself to step up to the counter that stretches half the length of the room. There seems to be only one cop on the desk, a middle-aged black woman talking to a red-faced old man.

  “You can’t post bail until he's been arraigned,” she says.

  “I just want to take him home.”

  “I understand. But see, your grandson isn’t even here in this building. He's down at central holding. Here.” She grabs a slip of paper and writes something on it. “This is where you have to go.”

  “Can’t I just take him home?” he says.

  She hands him the slip and he studies it like it's written in hieroglyphics.

  “Next,” she calls out.

  I glance around at the half-full benches that face the desk. Nobody stirs from their seats. They must be waiting for something else.

  “I need some relief from this heat,” a drunken voice shouts out from the benches.

  “And I need you to shut up now, Clarence,” she tells him. “You can sit there till the detective is ready to see you. If you start mouthing off, your butt's on the street.”

  Clarence grumbles, but his mouth stays shut.

  “Next,” she says.

  I step up. “I need to talk to somebody.”

  She picks up a miniature fan from the desktop and holds it in front of her face. Her eyes have the glazed look of someone who's been lied to all day long. “I’m somebody. Go ahead.”

  “I guess I want to report something.”

  She squints at me through the little draft the fan's stirring up.

  I reach into the Safeway bag I’m carrying and take out the diary. My palms are slick against its smooth cover.

  “I think someone's going to get hurt. Maybe even killed.”

  “Yeah?” she says. “Who?”

  “I don’t know who exactly. See, I found this diary. I’m working at the transit lost and found, and this got turned in.”

  I set the book down on her desk, reluctantly letting it go. I don’t know what I was expecting—I mean, I didn’t think they were going to immediately call in a SWAT team—but it would help if she was actually paying attention.

  Instead, she's focused on the old man who wants to take his grandson home. He's counting out money from his wallet onto the counter.

  “Sir, what are you doing?”

  He looks up, confused. “I—I’ve got the bail money here. But now I lost count….” He trails off, mumbling.

  “Okay, you have to listen to me now,” she says. “Put your money away. Grab a seat, and I'll get somebody to run you over to central holding. Sit. Over there.”

  She points him to the benches.

  “Good. Now you stay there,” she tells him when he finds a spot.

  Then she turns back to me. “Okay. So what's in this book?”

  “Well, it's like a diary. This guy's been stalking women. He's a real nut—gets off on killing animals and setting fires. And I think maybe he's going to kill someone.”

  “What's his name?” the cop asks.

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t say what his name is.”

  She lets out a gusty sigh and uses her pen to flip open the diary. She turns a few pages, her face expressionless.

  “You make up this scrapbook all by yourself?”

  “What? No. It's not mine. I just found it.”

  I knew this would happen. And I’m sure I look nervous and guilty as hell.

  “So what do you want me to do with this?” she asks, flipping it shut.

  “I thought you could…uh, find out who wrote it.”

  “No name. No address. A few clippings anybody could have cut out of the paper.”

  “You could get fingerprints off it, right?”

  “Right. Listen here, you don’t seem like a bad kid. But maybe you should find a better way to spend your summer vacation.”

  I’m stunned. I’m speechless. I don’t know what I expected, but nothing like this. She doesn’t believe me, doesn’t believe the diary.

  “You’re not even going to take it?” I ask.

  Those glazed eyes stare back at me for a long second.

  A man in a sports jacket comes down the stairs to the right, at the end of the desk. Glancing over at the benches, he says, “Clarence, what do you got for me? Better be good.”

  “Jack.” The desk cop calls him over. “Can I borrow you for a second?”

  Jack comes over on my side of the counter, giving me the cop stare that drills right into me. Sweat trickles down my back.

  “My turn,” Clarence whines, standing by the benches. “Supposed to be my turn now.”

  “Did you take a number?” Jack asks the drunken man.

  “Didn’t know there were any numbers,” Clarence says.

  “There aren’t,” says Jack. “So you get your turn when I say you get it. Got it?” Then he turns to the desk cop. “What's up?”

  “We’ve got a guy here says he found this diary, says it's written by a crazy man who's out to hurt somebody.”

  “That right?” he says, standing a little too close. He's got a few inches on me and I instinctively move back a step. “A crazy man's diary?”

  The phone rings and the desk cop answers it.

  “Well, yeah,” I say. “I mean, I don’t know how crazy he really is, but I think he's out to hurt someone.”

  Jack reaches over and picks up the book. Leaning against the counter, he flips through it, stopping for a moment to squint at Roach's scribbled handwriting, then moving on past the newspaper clippings and some crude drawings of naked women.

  If you just skim the diary you don’t get the same impact as if you study it and follow how Roach's mind works. If you only glance at the pages, it looks like nothing but a big mess. It takes time to see past that.

  Jack snaps the book shut and sets it on the counter. “You know how many seriously deranged people we’ve got in the greater metropolitan area?” he asks me.

  I shrug, shaking my head.

  “Upwards of fifty thousand. And a lot of them like to scribble down the diarrhea that runs through their brains.”

  “Yeah. But this is serious. I mean—”

  “Can I use the bathroom?” Clarence calls out, holding up his hand like a little kid in a classroom.

  Jack ignores him, scratching at a drop of sweat that runs down his left temple.

  “I really gotta go,” Clarence pleads.

  “Should I leave this with you?” I ask. “Can you look into it?”

  “Yeah. Sure.” Jack shoots an irritated look at the desk cop that says, Why did you bring me into this? “We'll put the whole squad on it,” he tells me. “Just leave it here.”

  Then he turns away and points at the drunken man. “You got some information for me, Clarence? Let's do it.”

  Jack leads him up the stairs.

  The desk cop finishes up on the phone.

  “So?” she says to me now, hanging up.

  “I guess I should leave it with you?”

  “Right.” She shifts the diary over with her pen and sets her fan beside it. “Leave your name and number and we'll get back to you.”

  She pushes a slip
of paper over to me but doesn’t give me a pen. Yeah, they'll get back to me. How about never?

  “Next,” she calls out.

  I stand there dazed, trying to think of anything I can say to convince her. Make her believe.

  Then she gets up from her chair behind the desk. “Hey, Matthew,” she says to a passing cop. “Wait up.”

  She walks to the end of the counter. “Can you run the old man there down to holding? He's got to bail out his grandson.”

  “What am I, a cabbie now?” the other cop says.

  I’m still standing here, paralyzed. They’re going to file this thing in a drawer somewhere. This is what I told Vinny would happen. Absolutely nothing. A dead end.

  I can’t just let this thing gather dust while Roach is out there hunting every night.

  I glance at the diary, then over at the two cops. And with my eyes on them, I reach up and grab the book. Then, as calmly as I can with my heart seizing up, I walk toward the doors.

  They’re still arguing about giving the old man a ride when I step outside. Street noise crashes down on me. Expecting a hand on my shoulder any second, I rush down the sidewalk with enough adrenaline pumping through me to outrace a cheetah.

  SIXTEEN

  There are a lot of passages where Roach writes about the “old bitch.” At first I thought it was his mother he was talking about, but a couple of times he slips up and calls her Gran. Here's what he says about his grandmother:

  I know what it's like to be a mouse, with no key to the cage. When I was 12, the old bitch put a lock on the door to my basement room. Every night she’d lock me in. Said she knew what filth boys got into. “Rape on the brain,” she said. Like 1 was going to come after her or something. Some mornings she’d forget about me down here. I’d scream at the crack under the door, beat my knuckles raw on the wood. But that's useless. She's near stone deaf. 1 made plans to kill her. So many ways. I’d picture her face, how it would look when she saw it coming. But she's an old witch and she's got power in her. Five feet nothing, a rack of bones, 1 could break her so easy. But she's like the creature in that movie Alien—you cut it and it bleeds acid, burns a hole right through you. Last week she cut her finger sweeping up a broken glass. 1 was shocked to see how red her blood was, just plain human red. 1 expected something blue, like antifreeze, to come pouring out. But it was red like mine. Like the blood 1 spilled the night 1 finally broke the lock on my cage. I’d been working on it awhile, bruising the crap out of my shoulder, throwing my weight against the wood at night until it finally gave way. The whole door jamb splintered and 1 gashed my arm on a screw. Lying there on the floor slippery with my blood, 1 felt like 1 was born again.