The Pale Man Rises

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

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Once Carter and Sheriff Trumbo returned to the front porch they saw a gray sedan approaching down the dirt road. It turned out to be Special Agent Mabry. His driver was an agent from the local FBI office in Sayerville who chose not to leave the comfort of the sedan. He spoke with Mabry momentarily and once the senior agent left the sedan he lifted up a paperback book, which he commenced to reading.

David Hayes Mabry was a tall tanned man 55 years of age and at present a 25-year veteran of the FBI. He could've retired recently with a nice severance package if he had wanted. It had been part of one of the Bureau's cost cutting initiatives that they periodically came up with to pacify critics in Congress. They weren't necessarily interested in getting rid of him per se. It just so happened the Bureau was top heavy with agents that were soon scheduled to retire and they saw this as an opportunity go ahead and make room for new blood in some departments. And they could not hope to accomplish anything if they did not include everybody that was eligible in the consideration. That and the fact not to do so would cause no end of controversy just as that old dog and recently deceased Hoover was trying to tiptoe around the legislative branch of government, namely politicians he had as yet not accumulated a dossier on concerning certain perverse peccadilloes they might be guilty of and which he could use to blackmail them with. This then was the main reason he had been able to contemplate retirement. And too he was reluctant to because he really enjoyed working in the Behavioral Psychology Unit that he'd been with for some time now.

And his decision to decline the offer was much to the delight of his immediate superiors. Yet he had not made the decision out of any real consideration for them, but more so because he knew that if he could not work he would atrophy both mentally and physically. He was a widower and his two children were grown and living on the West Coast. Worst of all was that they were estranged from each other. The children had come to blame him for his wife's death, as if somehow he had inflicted her with the cancer. The truth of it however was they were angry because he had not been there with her every day as she wasted away.

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He had continued to work even into the worst of her illness, but he had done so with her blessing. He told her he would do as she wished. He would be there with her every day if it would give her comfort.

But she knew he could not have taken it. He would have broken down from the strain of it and the knowledge he could do nothing to save her. He was a doer, he was a man of action and the role of passive witness to someone's death, most especially someone he loved would be too much of a burden for him to bear.

He needed the distraction of work, and so she had encouraged him in it. She was a saint in that way always putting others before herself. And his kids resented him for it. They thought he should not have even brought it up. It was his way of letting her know he did not want to go through the ordeal with her. They insisted she would have been clever enough to figure that out. And so they wanted to punish him for not being there by their side to watch her go.

He had worked the last seven years at the FBI Training Academy in Quantico, Virginia. He worked in the MULTIPLE DEATHS DIVISION of the BPU where he and other seasoned agents such as Robert Ressler, who would some time later coin the term "Serial Killer", profiled psychotic killers and what caused them to commit such heinous acts.

These were the toughest killers to apprehend because there often seemed to be no apparent motive for many of them.  Their murders were usually not your typical homicide. Oh they usually were sexual in nature and the assault is most times rather obvious. But sometime it seemed the only purpose for some of these killing was the killing itself. And most often these killings too actually did have a sexual element to them. The pleasure derived comes from the homicide itself. The act of killing becomes a sexual act. But you had to catch the little hints the subtle clues that confirmed it for you.