Ready. Set. Psycho.

Chapter Nine: Clive

           

Clive woke at 2:00 a.m. and slapped his clock. When that did not extinguish the bright red LED shining on him with the fury, he was certain, of the sun at midday, he took his pillow and flopped it onto the clock. He heard something crash off the table, but whatever it was did not break. He turned over and looked blankly at his ceiling, his hands in his curly and unruly hair. "You better not, you fuck," Clive said.

He picked up his phone and called Sol. There was no answer, but Clive spoke as if this was the type of answering machine that played your voice live for someone screening calls, the way they worked in the nineties. "Sol, you fuck. Sol, are you there? If you even think about killing yourself, I'll kill you." Clive paused. "You know what I mean."

He hung up and got out of bed. He went to his computer, logged into the NYPD VPN, and went to the Psycho file. A picture of Justin Graham greeted him. It was provided by his parents when their hope he was innocent had been dashed by their child's own detailed confession. He was the only suspect, and they only called him a suspect because he had not had his day in court. But everyone knew he was guilty. Absolutely everyone. And everyone who knew Sol knew that Justin would never have his day in court. It was their job — people like Lisa and Clive — to make sure that Sol and him shared the same air for a few minutes, and just a few minutes before the real police caught him. It would only take a few minutes, and Sol would kill Justin, and that would be the type of justice Clive could wrap his head around.

But Sol had to find Justin before the real police, Roger and Thomas. They had come to interview Clive at length, but not until after he had already spoken to Sol and given him the note he found in the girl's throat. They threatened him with evidence tampering. They said he could lose his license. But Clive put them off. "This kid needs to die," he said, "and you're not going to do it." Neither of them said another word on the matter, and Clive's indiscretion did not make it into their reports. They wanted the same thing everyone else wanted.

Clive read through some of the notes and watched the videos that Kevin insisted contained coded images. He did not understand it. He did not understand the three separate psychiatric assessments. He was a doctor of the dead. If his patients spoke to him, it usually meant he was more drunk than usual.

He pulled out a bottle of rum and drank straight from the bottle. He went back to his own notes from Vera Glenn. He checked and double-checked and triple-checked the chain of custody for her body, making notes about where she could have been exposed to Justin. If he found how the killer accessed the body, he would have a point, a node in a network of places and times Justin had been that Sol could follow. He had some ideas. But they were just ideas, and he was not convinced any of them were particularly good.

He went back to Justin's last known location: the truck stop in Connecticut, the day he set Greg's car on fire and made his attack on Sol personal. Or more personal. Conjecture said that he left the country. If Kevin's analysis of the latest video was correct, they could trace him to a dozen different spots across Europe over the last eight months. Places, but not times. Kevin did some additional analysis, testing light, weather, vistas for known locations and occurrences. It could shrink the potential times Justin visited those places. It could perhaps tell them when he was last known to be in Europe. Nearest Kevin could guess was July, but it was the end of September now, and two months is a long time for someone to be missing. That was a cold trail. But somewhere on that trail, Justin had gotten access to one of Clive's bodies and left him a message to give to Sol.

Clive worked until he passed out and woke up with his face buried in his arms across the keyboard. The bottle of rum was still mostly full, which made it a modest night of drinking compared to the usual. It was just after 7:00 a.m. He read the notes he had made the night before. He had forgotten writing most of them, so it was like thinking through his theories for the first time. He had drawn a timeline from May, Greg burning in the car, and July, Europe, to Vera. He had written in Kevin's best guesses about where and when Justin had been in Europe against a much smaller timeline of about a week — the total time in possession of Vera's body. At each stage of custody of the body, he had made notes about the potential for Justin to get access to the body.

Reading the notes and theories, in retrospect he seemed overly confident that night. He was dismissive of the idea that the security protocols, many of which he put in place, could be so lax. But Justin must have broken through, Clive thought as he reviewed his notes from the night before. Justin must have gotten access to the body. I'm not perfect, and neither is security.

At the bottom of the page, circled dozens of times — so many times, in fact, that Clive could hardly read it — were three words in the form of a question that helped him make sense of it all. He had written: Is he alone?

Clive went to his kitchen, still holding his pad of paper with the notes. He himself a cup of coffee. He drank the coffee black then added whisky and continued staring at the note. The question felt like a breakthrough. They were looking for Justin, but what if he was not alone? Maybe not a full accomplice but someone who could have put the note into the girl's throat and been paid for it? Someone who maybe did not even know what they were doing or who they were doing it for? Maybe someone hired through an intermediary — hell, wasn't Sol working for an intermediary now? These things happened. It was plausible. And when put together with Clive's steadfast belief that security could not have been compromised, it made sense.

So someone with access to the body put the note in, and they may not even have known what they were doing or why. Clive thought that was an idea he should take to Sol, so he called him.

He exhaled in frustration again as Sol's answering service chimed in, saying he was not available. "Sol, for fuck's sake, if you're alive, call me. If not, you better not be in Hell, because I will fucking flay you if I see you there before me."