Sin-Eater (Damir Salkovic)

 

There was something about the rattle of the prison gate sliding shut that evoked finality, even if you knew you were only visiting. Some atavistic sense screamed in alarm, sent panic signals from your very marrow, urging you to get out.

Past the gate, the forbidding stone edifice of the main prison wing shrank the yard to the size of a postage stamp. Lonnie Chalmers steered the Chevrolet sedan into the visitors’ parking lot, the high walls pressed closer, cutting out the powder-blue sky and the panoramic cityscape. Less than a stone’s throw away, Lonnie reminded himself, gulls cried and wheeled over the bay, traffic bumped and crowded along the Coastal Highway, machinery roared and hammered down in the shipyard. But once you set foot inside Crescent Dune State Prison, the outside world ceased to exist. Only thick stone and iron bars remained, steeped in misery and suffering, a miasma of rage and hopelessness that hung over the prison like a suffocating fog.

The lot was crammed with cars. Lonnie had to drive around it twice to find a spot. He nosed the Chevy in with exaggerated care. The car was a loaner from Dick Granville, who’d sworn bloody vengeance if he found so much as a scratch on its glossy body. Bad enough we’re sending a goddam greenhorn to cover the scoop, he’d complained to anyone within earshot, he’s doing it in my ride, too.

Lonnie killed the ignition, sat in silence marred only by the ticking of the cooling engine. He took several deep breaths, trying to control the anxiety that crawled up his chest like a cold tide. The parking lot was full, so the viewing room would be full too, the city’s top reporters jostling for the front of the pack. As a cub reporter for the San Diego Chronicle, Lonnie didn’t belong among them, had no experience covering stories this big. His beat, if he could be said to have one, extended to fender-benders and council zoning decisions and melodramatic human-interest pieces. But Granville was in Washington D.C., attending a press conference on the Japanese oil embargo, Beckett was stuck in Benicia covering the munition workers’ strike, and Sargisian had begged off sick, most likely with the bottle flu. That left Bob Rafferty, the Chronicle’s Chief Editor, with precious few options. He’d summoned Lonnie to his office, briefly explained the assignment, and sent him out the door with a growled don’t cock this up. As far as parting words of wisdom went, Lonnie had been on the receiving end of worse.

There was no time for contemplation. The show was underway, with or without him.

He locked the car, crossed the prison yard and went up two flights of concrete steps, presenting his credentials to a guard who had a cruel brick-colored face. The noise was enough to guide him, droning mutter, high, nervous laughter and the scrape of chair legs on a cement floor. Another dour-faced prison screw ushered him into a shadowy chamber filled with seated people, most of them middle-aged men in cheap suits. Lonnie murmured a few greetings, nodded a few more and was roundly ignored. The front row was taken up by who he assumed were the families of the victims, elderly men and women holding hands, bodies twisted with grief, tearful faces blurry reflections in the ceiling-to-floor window that formed the room’s far wall.

The space on the other side of the glass didn’t look like much: a concrete box eight or nine feet across, painted in institutional pastels. Bright overhead lights burned above a heavy chair in the center of the room, slatted in the back, adorned with wrist and ankle clamps, a metal cap perched above it. Lonnie felt a sick queasiness in the pit of his stomach. When the time came, a man would be brought to sit in that chair and would never get up again.

The reporters around Lonnie shuffled and coughed and conversed in low voices. The acoustics picked up their whispers, fanned them around the gallery like flames. Several of the women in the front row were sobbing with quiet desperation, their sobs somehow all the more painful for their effort not to be heard.

One of the reporters next to Lonnie grunted out of his seat and peered over the bowed heads. “That’s the families,” he said to his neighbor, a heavyset man with a bulbous drinker’s nose. “All four of them. Plus the Kersch girl’s father.”

“That was the last one?”

“Last one they found,” the first man said in an ominous tone. “Can’t imagine what that feels like. I got two kids of my own.”

“I hope something goes wrong,” said a thin type with a pencil mustache, tapping his notepad on his knee. His voice carried around the gallery like a shout. “I hope they have to fry the sonofabitch three times over. If anyone deserves it, it’s him, the goddamned animal.”

Lonnie suddenly felt trapped in this ugly, stifling room with its competing stenches of hatred and pain, filled with the shadow of impending death. He stood up and put his hat on his chair to save his seat. Walked out of the gallery and down a long, straight corridor, trying to find a secluded spot. A smoke would help him rein in his runaway thoughts; there was still plenty of time until the main event took place. Yet the simple fact of being here was unsettling: roaming these tunnels, imagining the prisoners inside their cells, wailing, complaining, threatening, praying. Their cries soaking into the thick masonry. What a place.

He reached the end of his cigarette and the hallway almost simultaneously and was steeling himself for the return when an elevator door clattered and a uniformed guard appeared, seemingly from nowhere, to open the door. A shadow slipped out of the box, or what looked like a shadow: thin and angular, moving as if its feet never touched the ground. Of course it wasn’t a shadow, but a man in a dark three-piece suit, an equally dark hat slung low over his brow. There wasn’t much light in the passage, but his eyes were shaded by glasses that hid most of his sharp face.

Not a word was exchanged. The guard pivoted on his foot to open another door, this one set in an alcove, dark green and made of thick metal. Lonnie saw the man in the suit disappear through it, heard what sounded like a key in a lock, turning massive bolts. The guard picked at his teeth, leaned against the wall and sighed.

Moved by some urge he couldn’t quite understand, Lonnie flattened himself behind a protrusion in the wall, his heart beating fast. He thought that way lay Death Row. The man in black was probably a visitor for the prisoner – a priest, or a doctor about to oversee the execution. Yet something kept him rooted to the spot: a nose for the story, he would later try to convince himself, or just one of those once-in-a-lifetime flashes of inspiration, the kind that struck like lightning from a clear sky.

If only the guard would step away for a moment.

No sooner had he thought it   the uniformed man frowned, patted his bulging belly, cast a quick glance at the door and exited stage left. Lonnie waited until he heard another door close on the guard’s footsteps, then went to the end of the hallway, moving as quickly as he could without making noise.

A panel in the green door showed an antechamber where another guard sat behind a desk, reading the funnies and looking bored. On the far wall was another, almost identical door. Lonnie pressed his face to the glass, praying for the guard’s attention to remain on the paper. The double reflection made it hard to be certain, but he could see the cadaverous man sitting at a table, perfectly still. Someone was sitting across from him. Lonnie squinted into the gloom. Surely it couldn’t be-

Then the other man leaned forward, a faint smile on his face. Lonnie felt his morning coffee and donut rush up form the back of his throat. It was Carl Bierhof, the La Jolla Strangler. The man who, if Lonnie’s watch was right, had less than forty-five minutes of life left.

Lonnie forgot all about the reporters in the visitor room, all about the other guard, who was probably already on his way back, who would be here any minute. Even the big scoop seemed inconsequential now. Although he couldn’t hear any of it, the two men were engaged in conversation: Bierhof rocking in his chair, evidently pleased, talking, the thin man listening, nodding, adding a word here and there. The inside guard was bent over the page, studying the cartoons with rapt attention, his face blank, almost imbecilic.

Not for the first time in his twenty-three years, Lonnie Chambers felt the stomach-hollowing sensation of being in the wrong place and knowing it. But this time it was different. Something inexplicable was happening in the room, something his subconscious mind recognized and recoiled from. But he couldn’t look away, no more than he could kick the prison walls to rubble, or tear the iron bars with his hands.

Vision shrank to a pinpoint. Time stretched into a thin, infinite line. If Lonnie tried, if he really put his mind to it, he could invent an exchange between the prisoner and the strange visitor, imagine a dialogue. Their voices buzzed in his skull like a bad radio broadcast.

Do you remember what brought you here?

Why wouldn’t I remember? The killer laughed softly. They said I was competent at the trial. Can’t argue with that. I killed five before they caught up with me. I wish I could’ve killed more. Drowned this city in blood.

Good. The man in black nodded, looking satisfied. I would like you to tell me all about it. Mind, we don’t have much time.

All about it?

Spare no detail. Begin at the beginning. How did you find the first one? What told you she was the one?

She was just a girl. Bierhof seemed mildly puzzled by the question. She was just there. Around the neighborhood. Once I got her alone, I’d know what to do. I was sure of that.

Even though the conversation was only taking place in his head, Lonnie was appalled by the man’s indifference. Carl Bierhof had strangled five young women from the middle-class neighborhoods abutting La Jolla, each time arranging the body in a lifelike pose for the family to find. Just thinking about it was enough to make Lonnie’s skin crawl.

Yet instead of revolting, his mind dredged up every gory detail from the papers and the news, spewed it out in Carl Bierhof’s reasonable, entirely imagined voice. With each atrocity, with each new horror, the man in black seemed to change. His face shone greasily, his eyes burned brighter, his grin wider, revealing more and more teeth. Even his body was distending, bulging in odd places, until Lonnie was no longer sure he was looking at a human being at all, but a hole in his vision, a blind spot in the approximate shape of a man.

I’m dreaming, he thought. I’m dreaming and I’ll wake up soon.

Then it was over. The man in black pushed himself from the table, looking satisfied, like he’d just had a great meal. The killer, on the other hand, seemed dazed, as if unsure where he was.

You did well, the visitor said, or rather Lonnie imagined him saying. You did everything right. Now your work is done.

Bierhof didn’t look convinced. I haven’t finished. There is more I could do. I know there is.

But the man in black stepped around the table, quick as a flash and seized the prisoner’s head in his hands. Startled, Lonnie stepped back from the window. Surely the guard behind the door would do something now. But the man remained glued to the paper, indifferent.

Lonnie saw the visitor bend over – no, fold himself over, like some species of giant, hideous insect - and bring his face close to Bierhof’s. Closer and closer, until their lips were almost touching. It should have looked like a kiss, but for some reason that was the last thing that came to Lonnie’s mind.

Green light flared between their almost-touching lips, left bright spots floating in Lonnie’s eyes. Dazed, he stumbled away from the door, into the broad chest of the first guard, who was hurrying back to his post.

“You ain’t s’posed to be here,” the guard said, shoving Lonnie against the wall. He jabbed a thick finger at a DO NOT ENTER sign. “Don’t they teach you hacks how to read no more?”

Pressed against the rough stone, Lonnie heard a clang, saw the green door swing open. The inside guard was escorting the man in black out of the antechamber. Past their shoulders, Lonnie caught a glimpse of the La Jolla Strangler, his head lolling over the back of his chair, his mouth hanging open.

Then the sharp, pallid face of the visitor filled his sight, its eyes glittering so brightly that Lonnie’s stomach twisted.

“He’s with the press,” said the guard holding Lonnie. Fear and disgust mixed in his voice as he addressed the visitor. “He didn’t see nothing.”

The man in black didn’t respond. For a long, terrible moment, his eyes bored into Lonnie, as if trying to memorize every detail of his features. Then he smiled, nodded and tipped his hat. Without a word, he was gone, the elevator door closing behind him, sending him into the abyss.

The guard let out a long, shuddering breath, took off his hat and dabbed at his sweaty face with a not-overly-clean handkerchief.

“Get lost,” the inside guard said to Lonnie. He raised his nightstick in threat. “Forget whatever you think you saw, pal, and do it in a hurry.”

Lonnie didn’t need to be told twice. He beat a hasty and undignified retreat to the gallery, where he found his seat taken and his hat tossed into a corner of the room. Disturbed as he was, he barely noticed. He took refuge at the back, where he dusted off his hat and tried to work out what had just happened.

What had he seen? Already the memory felt faded and uncertain, like something seen from afar, never fully comprehended. At most, he felt as if a vague wrongness at the center of his being, as if a mark had been seared on his soul, the recollection of vast, unimaginable pain. Had it all been a hallucination, a daydream with open eyes? It didn’t bear thinking about, yet he couldn’t move on from it, kept going back to the incident like a tongue to a broken tooth.

There was no time for contemplation, the show was about to start. The gallery lights dimmed, throwing the death chamber into stark focus. A low murmur passed through the crowd, broken by crying. Led by two guards, a shackled Carl Bierhof walked into the chamber, taking his last half dozen steps. Lonnie made an effort to pull himself together, to focus on the story. But the look on the condemned man’s face undid him. It was an expression of deep contentment, as if its wearer had seen into the heart of a cosmic mystery and moved past this world, toward some great revelation.