First Daughter - Eric van Lustbader [146]
"What?"
"I tracked him down last night to a residence hotel in Mount Rainier, Maryland. He's dead."
"What a relief."
"Brady wanted to die, Nina. I'll give you the details after the inauguration, okay?"
"It's a date," she said. "Now I've got to get back to work."
Downstairs, he pulled the suit Chief Bennett had waiting for him those long weeks ago when he was being prepped for his assignment to Hugh Garner's joint task force. He stripped off the dry cleaning bag. He turned on Emma's iPod. He wanted to hear more of her music while he dressed. Alli had said that she was always making playlists. Seeing a playlist category in the iPod screen, he clicked on it. Oddly, there was only one, called Outside. He set it to play. Immediately, "Life on Mars?"—David Bowie's famous song about alienation—started up.
As Jack listened, he put on a freshly laundered white shirt, buttoned it up. "Life on Mars?" segued into the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil." As he knotted his tie, on came Screamin' Jay Hawkins singing "I Put a Spell on You," a good deal more raw and powerful than subsequent versions.
After reknotting his tie three times, he got it right. He slipped on his jacket and was about to turn off the iPod when he heard Emma's voice coming out of the speakers. He stood, transfixed, listening to the aural diary of her three meetings with Ian Brady. This was how the entry ended:
"Finally, I said to him that if he saw me as his Myra Hindley, he was sorely mistaken because I had no intention of either fucking him or falling under his spell. This was the one time he surprised me. He laughed. I had nothing to fear. He said that he already had his Myra Hindley."
YOU'LL NEVER stop it.
Stop what? What had Brady planned?
Jack walked through the library's stacks. With each book he touched, he sensed a new door open to him. This was the place where his disability vanished, where he could read without the tension and frustration his dyslexia usually caused him. In the shadowed aisles he recognized Andre, Gus, Ian Brady, Emma. Each of their lives had meaning, a certain force that would remain with him even after death; of this, he was absolutely certain. Though they were beyond him now, still he sensed them, as an animal scents spoor and in its mind forms an image of what had once been there and has since moved on.
The truth was, Jack still felt the spoor of Ian Brady's mesmeric power, even though he was quite certain Brady had lied about his connection with Emma, had in fact been baiting him. Of course, this was precisely what Brady had meant to plant inside him, but Jack was only human, prey to human doubts and fears, just like anyone—anyone save Ian Brady perhaps.
Without quite knowing how it happened, Jack found himself at the section of the library that held the books of Colin Wilson. He ran his finger along the spines of the books until he found the intimidatingly thick A Criminal History of Mankind. Taking it down, he went over to a trestle table, sat down, and opened it up.
He was astonished to discover that the introduction was all about the real Ian Brady. Wilson had had a ten-year correspondence with Brady in prison. Wilson's conclusion was "that even an intelligent criminal remains trapped in the vicious circle of his criminality, and cannot escape."
Brady was involved in what Wilson termed a "dominance syndrome" with Myra Hindley, a young woman he seduced, deflowered, and somehow coerced into being his accomplice for a horrifying string of rape/murders over a two-year period. It was Myra who lured the teenage victims into her car so Brady could perform his acts of extreme cruelty and degradation. The real mystery was how he converted a young innocent like Myra Hindley into a criminal.
Jack paused. He could not help thinking of his Brady and Emma. Emma heard what I had to say, and it drew her like a moth to a flame. Too bad she died so young—I had big plans for her.