That was the thing about embracing an existential lifestyle, Sunday mused as he shut the doors and started to drive. With an existential lifestyle you ascribe no meaning to anything, even your identity, so you can be anyone you want, at any moment you want.
A corollary of this philosophy was that the writer did not believe in good or evil. Nor did he believe in justice. Like crime, justice was an abstract, something cooked up by men. It wasn’t intrinsic to the universe. Life just was. It happened, sometimes meagerly, sometimes abundantly, sometimes in violent excess. There was no right or wrong about any of it.
As far as Sunday was concerned, there was no recipe that ensured a good life, and virtue was a joke. So was Karma. Life slapped down the righteous and the spiritual just as easily as the wicked and the free. The trick was to embrace this reality wholeheartedly. In so doing the smart man, the perfect man, the free man could act without fear of consequences.
Bolstered by these thoughts, Sunday drove to Purcellville, Virginia. It took him an hour. He drove another fifteen minutes toward Berryville before he took a side road south through farm country.
As the writer drove the Berryville Road, he kept thinking back to Acadia and how wild she’d become sexually after they’d let the computer genius’s body crumple to the floor between them, as if murder was her aphrodisiac, which of course it was. It was Sunday’s aphrodisiac, too. Once you were free, killing became a turn-on, the strongest he’d ever known.
Reaching the four-mile marker, Sunday pulled into a grassy lane on the right and drove into the woods far enough not to be seen. He put on a headlamp, turned on the red light, and got out, aware of a familiar, terrible smell almost immediately. Cutting Preston Elliot’s body free of the garbage bags, he turned off his headlamp and got the corpse up on his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. He set off into the wind toward the stench.
With a half-moon to guide him, Sunday soon reached the edge of a clearing. He peered out at a farmhouse a solid half-mile away and down the hill. A farmyard light shone, but no other, and he knew there likely would not be any real activity for another hour, maybe longer. It was only three thirty, after all.
Turning his attention toward the long, low-roofed building in front of him, Sunday hurried to a door, dropped Preston’s body, and pushed the door open. He heard only a few muffled grunts as he dragged the corpse up onto a narrow catwalk with rails and low steel mesh fencing on either side.
The smell inside was ungodly. Closing off his nasal passages with practiced ease, Sunday pulled the programmer’s body a solid twenty-five feet across the catwalk. Sweating, he turned on the red headlamp again and saw more than a thousand young pigs crammed wall to wall below him.
Most of the shoats in the feedlot were lying all over each other, less than a hundred pounds each, covered in crap and sleeping. But then a few of the pigs that were awake saw his light and began grunting noisily, waking others.
As Sunday struggled to lift the programmer’s body up onto the catwalk rail, he flashed again on himself at eighteen, fighting to get another body over into the pigsty on the farm where he grew up in West Virginia. Both bodies tipped and fell over the side.
The stutterer’s corpse landed on pigs that screamed and squealed in alarm. But other young hogs sensed a meal and began to crowd in.
Sunday remembered how the pigs his father fed for years had attacked the old man’s dead body with similar enthusiasm. Pigs will eat you—clothes, skin, meat, and bones—if you give enough of them enough time. Not even a piranha will do that.
It’s the endless story, he thought, turning off his headlamp. One life takes another, consuming it, ending it. There’s nothing good or bad about that at all.
Creeping from the building, Sunday listened as the squealing and grunting behind him built into a blind bloody riot that seized the pigsty from one end to the other. But he crossed back to the forest relatively unconcerned, knowing from personal experience that the farmers would not come out to investigate.
This kind of feeding frenzy went on all the time inside commercial hog operations, especially when one pig died and the others turned cannibal.
Chapter
21
The problem with cases like the Mad Man Murders, as the New York tabloids were now calling the killings, is that there are too many angles, too many potential avenues of investigation to run down in that critical first forty-eight hours, especially if there is only a team of two working full-time.
Which is why I was at work early Saturday morning with Sampson, waiting for Captain Quintus to arrive.
“Tell me something good, Alex,” Quintus said by way of greeting.
“We need help,” I said.
“Still bucking for that slot on Letterman?”
Sampson grimaced, said, “Guess you’re ready to take the heat, explain why the killing of Pete Francones doesn’t merit more manpower?”
“It’s the damn murder rate,” Quintus fumed. “If I put more people on him, I’ll have relatives of every victim we got in here ready to wring my neck!”
“You don’t get it,” I said. “The Francones murder is the murder rate, at least to everyone else in the world. You give us the legs, we’ll close the case. And everyone will think you’re acting boldly.”
Quintus studied me. “Comedian and master strategist?”
I smiled. “A man of many dimensions.”
The homicide captain sighed. “I’ll give you two more men part-time, in their spare time.”
“Cap,” Sampson started to complain.