The Truth Factory Read online

  The Truth Factory

  Cody McFadyen

  Copyright

  This ebook is licensed to you for your personal enjoyment only.

  This ebook may not be sold, shared, or given away.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The Truth Factory

  Copyright © 2016 by Cody McFadyen

  Ebook ISBN: 9781939481412

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this work may be used, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Dedication

  To my friends of old. I will never forget your faces.

  Part One

  Birth

  I Believe

  We are born;

  we run through the grass, hoping;

  and then we die.

  —CWM

  Chapter One

  Once upon a time, I think, a family lived here—and they were still alive.

  I wrinkle my nose at the odors of decay. They hang in the air, heavy and solid; and I realize (as I always do) that in a very real way, I am drawing the dead into my lungs with each and every breath I take.

  It’s a useless, unhelpful thought, but as always, I’m unable to shake it off. It had occurred to me the very first time I’d ever smelled the dead, and had been compelling enough to send me running pell-mell out the door and onto the front lawn.

  I’d made it to the grass before barf started shooting between my splayed fingers. I had preserved the crime scene, but out front was also where the world had been. A healthy mix of cops and feds watched as I fell to my knees and retched out three-quarters of a cheeseburger and a large order of fries. The nickname “Pukenstein” had followed me for months.

  I swallow, imagining that it feels, somehow, greasy—and shiver. The nickname was long gone. The thought remains, though, and it still compels.

  “Stinks,” Alan mutters, reading my thoughts with his own. His nostrils flare, while his eyes narrow. He shakes his head. “Dead people are damn gross.”

  “They are inconvenient,” I murmur in agreement.

  The murdered dead are the most inconvenient of all, of course. Murder is unexpected. It catches you while you are busy living your life, as opposed to planning for your death. Any project still not completed stays that way, undone; and every murder, everywhere, is always the end of dignity.

  I stand in place, unmoving, and let it all roll through my senses. It’s one thing to arrive at a murder scene, another entirely to accept its reality in more than a passive state. The desire to be elsewhere is really more of a need, and it feels instinctual.

  The first time I saw the murdered dead is a memory devoid of emotion, and though I know the memory is true, it never feels real. The images comprising it are compositions of washed-out color, soundlessness, and tunnel vision. I can’t remember what color the carpet was, but the body is always blinding in its unbearable detail. I can see the pores on her nose; the color of her painted toenails; I can even close my eyes and count the knots in that small, cotton rope that had been coiled around her neck until it cut into the skin.

  This is why I learned to stand, and wait: as a preparation for the coming onslaught of denial, so that when it’s time to look, I can actually see.

  “Okay,” I breathe, nodding as much to myself as to Alan. “Let’s go.”

  I leave the small foyer that the home’s front door had delivered me to, and walk directly forward, without turning my head. I stop when I reach the middle of the room. I can see them now—the dead—from the corner of one eye. I wait where I stand for another few moments, forcing myself to savor the weight of my own reality. I count my heartbeats and recite the mantra: Their death is never your death. You are the living. You are alive.

  I pause for a short moment, take a single deep breath, and turn. I feel the blink of the missing moment—my name for that split second of rejecting what’s in front of me—as a camera flash of bright, white nothing. Last chance, my mind is telling me. If you don’t want to know this, last chance to look away. Then—blink—again, and the white light’s gone. My eyes adjust, as does my mind, and I’ve arrived. No tunnel vision, no washed-out colors. Just the murdered dead, in all their truth, and me.

  I study the dinner-table tableau. Dead faces stare back at me, expressing their endless horror in silent screams. Something I read somewhere, once, comes to me: Some things can’t be understood. They can only be described.

  I move closer, examining the gravy boat that’s been placed next to the dead mother’s hand, and recoil. “Is that blood?” I ask.

  Alan frowns, bending forward to take a look. He grimaces in distaste and nods. “Seems so.”

  We are in Colorado, north of Denver. It is the first week of October, and it’s a hell of a lot colder here than in Southern California. Drier, too. The bodies have begun to turn, but the smell is not what it would be in SoCal’s humidity.

  I read aloud the words spelled out in blood on the far wall. “Avoiders must pay,” I quote. “Help us with justice, Smoky Barrett. Come and learn.” A chill runs through me again, cold little feet jogging down my spine.

  It must have shown. “Never comforting to see your name spelled out in blood,” Alan says quietly, watching me closely.

  “No shit.” I raise my eyebrows and give him a small smile. “I’m fine, Mr. Wart. That’s the nature of the beast. So let’s concentrate on catching him.”

  He gives me a hard look, searching for cracks. Finding none, he raises a single eyebrow. “Mr. Wart?”

  “Yeah—you know, as in Worry Wart.”

  “Huh. Guess it’s true what they say. Pregnancy doesn’t make you funnier.”

  “Just funnier-looking.”

  “Nope, no comment,” he says, shaking his head. “I’m not that dumb.” He pulls out the small, battered notepad that’s never far from his reach, speaking as he flips through it. “I confirmed this is the only one of the three houses with a message on the wall.”

  Alan calls the notepad Ned, because, he said, a notepad is an investigator’s best friend, and a best friend should have a name. I don’t care what he calls it. All I know is that whatever goes in Ned gets followed up by Alan, period, and is never forgotten. “I need to check up on that word,” he murmurs, half to himself, writing this down on the first blank page he finds. “Avoiders. It rings a bell for some reason.”

  I look at the word again, spelled out so carefully on the wall in two-foot-high, sticky-tacky red. “You’re right. I’ve heard it somewhere, too. I think.” I will the memory to reveal itself, but it eludes me. “I’m not sure. It may be just a feeling.”

  “Probably more than that,” he observes, writing in the notepad. He glances at me, smiles. “According to Ned and the Neds that came before him, you have a pretty good memory.”

  “Really?”

  “Fact, Jack.” He holds the pad up and shakes it back and forth in his hand. “Ned doesn’t lie.”

  Alan stretches for a moment, creaking and sighing, and it’s like watching a mountain make itself more comfortable. He is a big man, my friend and colleague. Not fat, not athletic, but formidable and huge. I realized, once, that his size informs my perception of almost everything he does, a kind of semantic creation. Alan doesn’t think—he ponders. He doesn’t walk—he lumbers. I think if Alan had been a professional football player, he would have had one of those nicknames lik
e “The Refrigerator” or something.

  He is African American, and once told me that while being big and black didn’t guarantee you’d be a good interrogator, it sure didn’t hurt. This may be technically true, but it’s far from a real explanation. Alan’s size is camouflage; his true abilities lie between his ears. He was a homicide detective for more than ten years before being headhunted by the FBI, and was known for his ability to get confessions that stood up in court. He and I have worked together for more than a decade, and I trust him with my life.

  Alan is close to mandatory retirement age for the Bureau. His face, in profile, still looks young to me, even with all that encroaching white hair. But a certain tiredness has settled into his eyes that I’ve never seen in them before, and I know in my soul that soon, it will be time for Alan to go and live the quiet life he has earned.

  For now, I’m just glad Alan’s here. It’s my first time in this new spotlight, and truth be told—I’m nervous. I’m riding a new horse, and while it is the same as my old horse, in many ways, it is also bigger, stronger, and more dangerous to sit on.

  I spent most of my FBI career running the Los Angeles branch of the NCAVC—the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. The NCAVC proper is based in Quantico, but every FBI office has someone in charge of local liaison for that function. In Los Angeles, we had enough work to keep a four-man team busy. We hunted the worst of the worst: serial killers, rapists, more.

  Two months ago, we were uprooted. The director of the FBI, Samuel Rathbun, decided to put together a kind of strike team, a critical response unit tasked with the same functions we’d performed in LA, but on a national level. This decision was the result of what he perceived as growing momentum for the idea of dismantling all the satellite functions of the NCAVC, as well as reducing the size of the central unit. There were powerful voices hinting that the FBI should be worrying more about terrorism within U.S. borders than the one-on-one murder of individuals, in terms of resource assignment.

  “Someone’s gotten people who matter to start considering the notion that the NCAVC involves too many duplicative functions,” Director Rathbun said with a snort and a shake of his head, when he’d originally offered me the position. “Never mind the fact that if you stack our post-9/11 antiterrorism budget up against the NCAVC budget, it’s like comparing a skyscraper to a shack.”

  The director obviously didn’t agree with these views, but he was a pragmatist, and he’d decided to put the strike team together on a “just-in-case” basis. If the worst came to pass, he reasoned, we’d still have a way to put boots on the ground.

  “It’s going to get bloody. I’ll fight, but I have a pretty good political nose.” He smiled without humor. “They’re just softening me up. Once they figure out where I lie, the gloves will come off.”

  “Figure out?” I asked, surprised. “You haven’t voiced your objections about this to them?”

  “Right now, they’re being very friendly, Smoky. Amiable deals are much better than war, in politics, any day. So if I, for example, was to want to put together a task force, strike team—whatever we end up calling it—and I hinted or allowed others to assume that the formation of such a team was my way of cooperating with their agenda . . .” A single eyebrow was raised; he shrugged and half smiled. “I’d guess that intra-governmental cooperation on the matter would be at an all-time high.”

  I whistled, then grinned. “I thought a hint was the same as a promise in DC, sir. Isn’t welshing a bad move in politics?”

  He waved this off. “I keep my promises, but I’m only a politician to the degree it helps my agency and agrees with reality.” He gave me a look of incredulity. “Pardon my French, but I have no fucking intention of going down in history as the director who amputated our capacity to assist in the apprehension of serial psychopaths. You don’t trade the ability to catch one devil in order to catch another, not when they both still exist.” He shook his head once, in emphasis. “That’s stupidity. I can be dumb, Special Agent Barrett, but I do try hard not to be stupid.”

  “You’re preaching to the fully converted, sir.”

  He nodded. “Yes, and that’s exactly my point. That level of . . . depravity will always be doubted to some degree, as a complete picture. But we don’t doubt, do we?”

  “No, sir,” I answered, and kept it at that. Director Rathbun was on a roll. I wouldn’t call it passionate, more . . . intense. But for a man with a thousand (outward) faces, it was a mesmerizing moment of truth, and I didn’t want to interrupt it.

  He gave the desktop an aggressive tap with his finger. “Those monsters are our responsibility. Mistaken assumptions aren’t, and I don’t give a raisin of a rat’s turd about anyone’s bent feelings on the matter.” He leaned back, smiling. “In a manner of speaking, of course.”

  He’d asked me to head it up, and to bring my team along for the ride. We’d all agreed, for now. This was our first real case. The nation was watching, and not in a metaphorical sense.

  Three families had been butchered, all on the same block, all on the same night. One of the local cops had recognized my name on the wall and had contacted the FBI. They asked for help right away, which I regarded as a good sign. It meant they were more interested in solving the case than worrying about who got the credit. It also meant they knew they were out of their depth. Which they were.

  We were on a private jet within the hour, and landed at Denver International Airport a little less than three hours later.

  I contemplate the diorama the killer has prepared for us. The Wiltons had been an intact family of five, with three children—two girls and a boy. The oldest daughter had been fourteen, the youngest twelve. The boy was only five. The dining table is medium-size and made of some kind of smooth, dark wood. The mother’s and father’s corpses have been seated at either end, naked, and their severed heads have been placed back atop their respective necks. The killer either didn’t care about lining up the necks, or the heads had slipped a bit. It gives each of them a stretched, disjointed look, an image that follows you out of the room. The father and daughters were all brunettes. Mrs. Wilton was a blonde.

  The table has been set for two. Mr. and Mrs. Wilton each have a white china plate in front of them, and the killer has placed forks in their hands.

  “They’re holding the special dinner silver,” I say, pointing at the forks.

  “How can you tell?”

  “My mom had a set of antique formal ware she got from my grandmother. She never put it in the dishwasher, always used silver polish to clean every piece by hand. Silver reflects light differently. It has . . . I don’t know—it shines with more . . . depth.”

  “Formal ware,” he quoted me, teasing lightly. “You never mentioned those aristocratic roots.”

  I snorted. “Great-grandma was a prostitute for five years, after the untimely death of great-grandpa. That silver was payment for a ‘weekend of pleasure,’ so the story goes.”

  “Bull.”

  “No, it’s true,” I replied, smiling. “When she died, the silver was one of the things specifically willed to my grandmother, as the oldest daughter. It came with a letter that told the story of how and why my great-grandmother came to be a prostitute. It said that the silver was to go oldest daughter to oldest daughter, unless there were no daughters, in which case it could go to the oldest son. But,” I raised a finger, “you could only accept it on the condition you promised never to sell it, unless selling it would prevent you from having to sell yourself.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. My mother never gave it to me formally. Dad gave it to me after she died.”

  I remember reading the letter, and how much like a bar of solid, precious light it was to me. I was a teenager, alone in the world without a mother, but that silverware and that letter connected me to the last of the oldest who’d been forced to sell off a part of herself to survive the rigors of being a human being in a world that couldn’t care less. And she’d taken a pile of that
blood money, and her story, and sent them off into the future in the hopes that another of her line wouldn’t have to do the same. It was as though I could feel her hand on my shoulder, rooting once again all the parts of me that had become rootless.

  “Strong woman,” Alan observed, quietly.

  “You never stop worrying about what will happen to your children after you die,” I murmur. “No matter how old they get.”

  “Suppose not,” Alan agrees, his eyes moving back to the Wiltons.

  The children hadn’t been mutilated. The killer had stripped the daughters’ bodies and then laid them lengthways on the long table.

  I sigh. “They were so beautiful,” I murmur.

  “Yeah,” Alan agrees, and leaves it at that.

  They had skin like cream, still flawless with youth, but it lay far, far too still against their bones. That always constant, almost imperceptible tension of life that results from a constantly shifting balance of the physical self no longer fills them out, and so they seem less real somehow. They remind me of two supine and exquisite statues, chiseled from white alabaster and polished to cold perfection. The back of each one’s head rested on a dinner plate, and they stared up at their parents with eyes that had already begun to cloud up and sink back into their sockets.

  The girls each have the same face—their mother’s—but at different ages. Nude, the contrasts and similarities are stark, painful in every incarnation of lost possibility. An image flashes into my mind: one of those ape-to-man pictures, designed to visually demonstrate evolution. If Mom had been a brunette, she’d complete the set.

  “They have bruising around their necks,” I notice. “And petechial hemorrhaging in the eyes.” I frown. “Where’s the boy’s body?”

  “In his bed.”

  “Killed the same way? Nude?”

  Alan consults the notepad again. “He was smothered with a pillow, but the killer didn’t undress him.”