Read Online The German by Lee Thomas - Free Book Online Page A

enlist, and we all know if he’d succeeded he wouldn’t be back, and if he didn’t succeed he’d have been back a whole lot sooner. So I’d have to guess that he was kidnapped and the murder came later.”
    “But there was no ransom demand, was there?”
    “No, there wasn’t,” Tom confirmed. “I think we can trust Chuck and Ruth to have let us in on something like that.”
    “I would rather not consider why someone would hold a boy for that length of time, expecting no external gratification.”
    Tom didn’t understand the comment and he said so.
    “Well, this monster must have wanted something, and if it wasn’t a ransom or some other stimulus from outside the situation, then he must have been hoping to get something from Harold himself.”
    “Get something?” Tom asked. “Such as?”
    “I don’t know,” Doc Randolph said. “To the best of my observation I saw no signs of sexual interference, but who can say? So much of the boy is gone.”
    “Sexual interference?” Tom said, feeling a flush of heat in his cheeks. “What are you talking about?”
    “I’m trying to help you find a motive, and the motive may be a pronounced mental illness. If your theory is correct, Harold didn’t just stumble into a bad situation to get his throat cut and have his body discarded. There was planning to this, and there was a purpose. I’m suggesting that the killer may be compelled by certain stimuli – and that could be sexual – and if that’s the case, then it’s likely this will happen again.”
    “Look, Doc, I know the note said Harold was the third, but we don’t have the slightest idea what that means.”
    “The note is only part of it.”
    “Then where is all of this coming from?”
    “Jack the Ripper,” Doc Randolph said. “Albert Fish.”
    Tom knew about Jack the Ripper, he’d read about the killer in pulp novels and even seen a movie based on his crimes, but he wasn’t connecting a murderer of London prostitutes with the death of a local boy. He knew nothing about the other man Doc Randolph had mentioned.
    “Fish was a child molester, murderer and cannibal,” he said.
    “Oh for the love of God,” Tom interjected.
    “Hear me out,” the doctor said. “They executed Fish in New York a few years back. He is known to have killed three children but may have killed many more. The thing is, there are similarities between those cases and this business with Harold Ashton. The most obvious are the mutilations of the bodies and the pieces missing from those bodies, and the killer’s need to communicate what he’d done. In this case, the note you found in Harold’s mouth.”
    “How do you know about these cases?” Tom asked, feeling the doctor had more than one-upped him.
    “Psychiatric magazines,” the doctor said. “I don’t buy into a lot of the mumbo jumbo they throw around, but there are some interesting articles on deviant behaviors, and I remember reading about Fish in one of those journals right after he was executed.”
    “So did the article tell you how we catch this guy?”
    “No,” the doctor said, “I mean if we knew anything at all about Jack the Ripper, who he was, why he did what he did, or if we knew of other such cases we might be able to make some comparisons, but this Fish character was uniquely insane. For example, he shoved needles in his privates and beat himself with nails.”
    “Why in the name of God would he do that?”
    “He found pain sexually gratifying.”
    “You’re pulling my leg.”
    “It’s not uncommon. Masochism is a well-documented sexual perversion, like pedophilia, homosexuality, bestiality, and necrophilia. Generally it is believed that childhood factors play into the formation of these illnesses, and there are numerous people suffering them, but of course, the taboo nature of the diseases means the afflicted don’t go around talking about them.”
    Tom got the impression Doc Randolph was quoting from one of those magazines he’d