ancient, gray-barked apple trees stood with branches crabbed like scarecrow fingers.
An old farmhouse waited at the end of the lane: a dying house, shot through with rot, the paint peeling off the clapboard siding, a front porch falling off to one side. Behind it, down the far side of the hill, a barn's foundation crouched in a hollow. The barn itself was gone, but the lower level remained, covered by what had been the floor of the old structure, and by a blue plastic tarp tied at the corners with yellow polypropylene rope. An open doorway poked into the dark interior, like the entrance to a cave. Around the barn foundation, two or three other crumbling outbuildings subsided into the soil.
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,
An old farmhouse waited at the end of the lane: a dying house, shot through with rot, the paint peeling off the clapboard siding, a front porch falling off to one side. Behind it, down the far side of the hill, a barn's foundation crouched in a hollow. The barn itself was gone, but the lower level remained, covered by what had been the floor of the old structure, and by a blue plastic tarp tied at the corners with yellow polypropylene rope. An open doorway poked into the dark interior, like the entrance to a cave. Around the barn foundation, two or three other crumbling outbuildings subsided into the soil.
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,
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