“You’re a detective, aren’t you?”
“Calvino. Homicide.”
“I confessed days ago.”
“Yes, I know.”
“The evidence proves I did it.”
“Yes, it does.”
“Then what do you want?”
“To understand.”
Less than a full smile, a suggestion of amusement shaped the boy’s expression. He was fourteen, the unrepentant murderer of his family, capable of unspeakable cruelty, yet the half-smile made him look neither smug nor evil, but instead wistful and appealing, as though he were recalling a trip to an amusement park or a fine day at the shore.
“Understand?” Billy said. “You mean – what was my motive?”
“You haven’t said why.”
“The why is easy.”
“Then why?”
The boy said, “Ruin.”
The windless day abruptly became turbulent and rattled raindrops like volleys of buckshot against the armored glass of the barred windows.
That cold sound seemed to warm the boy’s blue gaze, and his eyes shone now as bright as pilot lights.
“‘Ruin,’” John said. “What does that mean?”
For a moment, Billy Lucas seemed to want to explain, but then he merely shrugged.
“Will you talk to me?” John asked.
“Did you bring me something?”
“You mean a gift? No. Nothing.”
“Next time, bring me something.”
“What would you like?”
“They won’t let me have anything sharp or anything hard and heavy. Paperback books would be okay.”
The boy had been an honor student, in his junior year of high school, having skipped two grades.
“What kind of books?” John asked.
“Whatever. I read everything and rewrite it in my mind to make it what I want. In my version, every book ends with everyone dead.”
Previously silent, the storm sky found its voice. Billy looked at the ceiling and smiled, as if the thunder spoke specifically to him. Head tilted back, he closed his eyes and stood that way even after the rumble faded.
“Did you plan the murders or was it on impulse?”
Rolling his head from side to side as though he were a blind musician enraptured by music, the boy said, “Oh, Johnny, I planned to kill them long, long ago.”
“How long ago?”
“Longer than you would believe, Johnny. Long, long ago.”
“Which of them did you kill first?”
“What does it matter if they’re all dead?”
“It matters to me,” John Calvino said.
Pulses of lightning brightened the windows, and fat beads of rain quivered down the panes, leaving a tracery of arteries that throbbed on the glass with each bright palpitation.
“I killed my mother first, in her wheelchair in the kitchen. She was getting a carton of milk from the refrigerator. She dropped it when the knife went in.”
Billy stopped rolling his head, but he continued to face the ceiling, eyes still closed. His mouth hung open. He raised his hands to his chest and slid them slowly down his torso.
He appeared to be in the grip of a quiet ecstasy.
When his hands reached his loins, they lingered, and then slid upward, drawing the T-shirt with them.
“Dad was in the study, at his desk. I clubbed him from behind, twice on the head, then used the claw end of the hammer. It went through his skull and hooked so deep I couldn’t pull it loose.”
Now Billy slipped the T-shirt over his head and down his arms, and he dropped it on the floor.
His eyes remained closed, head tipped back. His hands languidly explored his bare abdomen, chest, shoulders, and arms. He seemed enravished by the texture of his skin, by the contours of his body.
“Grandma was upstairs in her room, watching TV. Her dentures flew out when I punched her in the face. That made me laugh. I waited till she regained consciousness before I strangled her with a scarf.”
He lowered his head, opened his eyes, and held his pale hands before his face to study them, as if reading the past, rather than the future, in the lines of his palms.
“I went to the kitchen then. I was thirsty. I drank a beer and took the knife out of my mother.”
John Calvino sat on the arm of a chair.
He knew everything the boy told him, except the order of the killings, which Billy had not revealed to the case detectives. The medical examiner had provided a best-guess scenario based on crime-scene evidence, but John needed to know for sure how it had happened.
Still studying his hands, Billy Lucas said, “My sister, Celine, was in her room, listening to bad music. I did her before I killed her. Did you know I did her?”
“Yes.”
Crossing his arms, slowly caressing his biceps, the boy met John’s eyes again.
“Then I stabbed her precisely nine times, though I think the fourth one killed her. I just didn’t want to stop that soon.”
Thunder rolled, torrents of rain beat upon the roof, and faint concussion waves seemed to flutter the air. John felt them shiver through the microscopic cochlear hairs deep in his ears, and he wondered if perhaps they had nothing to do with the storm.
He saw challenge and mockery in the boy’s intense blue eyes. “Why did you say ‘precisely’?”
“Because, Johnny, I didn’t stab her eight times, and I didn’t stab her ten. Precisely nine.”
Billy moved so close to the glass partition that his nose almost touched it. His eyes were pools of threat and hatred, but they seemed at the same time to be desolate wells in the lonely depths of which something had drowned.
The detective and the boy regarded each other for a long time before John said, “Didn’t you ever love them?”
“How could I love them when I hardly knew them?”
“But
