Soft Targets

Wendy’s handwriting is curt and graceless, block printing like an engineer’s. Her letterhead is crisp, but her note to him only takes up a fraction of the page; the rest is creamy blank space. Nancy Tench sends flowers with her card, but the scent makes Holden’s head ache, and the nurses take them out of his room about an hour before the rest of the mail makes the rounds, and two hours before any of his visitors show up. There isn’t much correspondence for him; the violence of his illness has shocked even law enforcement into radio silence, go figure.

The last card opens like a hinge. The inscription is in pencil. Agent Holden Ford, it says. I was sorry to hear you are feeling under the weather. Head injuries can be very serious; so much of the personality is located in the brain, don’t you think? Come and see me sometime. I’m still waiting for those insights of yours. There is no signature.

The white Hallmark envelope lies on Holden’s lap like a shed skin; the return address is a stamp. Holden drops the card like it burns him.

*

Three, four years of radio silence — Tench intercepting Kemper’s letters, maybe, after what happened at Vacaville, giving Holden the rundown in indirect terms to sustain a barrier between his partner and the truth. He’s cried more in the last week than in his entire life up until this point — go figure. There’s no equilibrium in his brain. Everything is difficult. Everything hurts. Everything feels wrung out of him, and now Debbie is here.

“They want me to quit taking Valium. They think it’s making the inflammation worse.”

Debbie is not really paying attention to him, per se, but rather the wreckage that surrounds him. This is a hospital room like every other hospital room, anonymous apart from the signs of the staff’s comings and goings.

“What the fuck is this?”

“Fan mail,” Holden says.

Debbie squints at the card. “Is he making a pass at you?”

“It’s a power play.”

“What’s the difference? When a pack of guys start hooting and hollering at some girl outside the bike shop, they don’t actually expect to get her number. They’re trying to intimidate her. He’s trying to intimidate you.”

“I don’t disagree. Wendy Carr’s writing a book on that right now, she sent me the proofs but I haven’t had a chance to read them, what with all the… business. If you could retrieve my files for me while you’re here, I’d really appreciate it. Did that really happen? At the bike shop.”

Debbie’s eyes skim over the card’s inscription again, like she might have missed something. The picture on the outside is a landscape in watercolor. Get well soon. “Holden, I think this guy has a crush on you.”

You’re deflecting the question."

“It’s none of your business. Do you want to tell Bill Tench about this? I can call him. You don’t have to tell him about the specific vibe of it, just that Kemper got in contact—”

Holden makes a fist on top of his blankets. “No, I don’t want to talk with Tench about this.”

Talking to Debbie is different. They’re not lovers. They’re not coworkers. They’re just — colleagues. Holden hasn’t really kept up with any of his ex-girlfriends — mostly at their request, and he can respect that, he might be clueless but he knows enough to know when he’s beat. He knows enough to know when ‘we can still be friends’ means ‘I never want to see your face again’. But Debbie still loves to pick his brain. She just doesn’t want to fuck him any more.

Not that he could. He never wants to have sex again, not in a body that betrays him at every turn.

“What happened back in Vacaville? Nobody ever called me back in ‘77. I didn’t know until you mentioned it — maybe a year later. I knew about the Valium, though. Bill said you kept them in your shaving kit so you didn’t feel like a junkie. He thought I’d want to know.”

That was when it looked like things were on the mend. When it looked like things would be different from then on out, like the Valium was helping. But things weren’t all that different, and now here the two of them are on the opposite sides of a plastic table.

Holden tries to sit up. “You didn’t take any, did you? I need those.”

“I’m strictly an uppers girl these days. I feel like a long-haul trucker.” Debbie shakes out her hair with her hands — she wears it short these days, sort of butch, and it suits her. “But you’re deflecting.”

“I guess I am.”

“You don’t have to tell me if it got bad. You can say whatever you like. I’m ready to hear it.”

Why, Debbie, that’s downright sensitive. “It was after we broke it off, right after I got called up by Internal Affairs. I got a call from the infirmary at Vacaville, saying I’d been specified as Kemper’s medical proxy. I didn’t know why he’d pick me. I just thought he had no one left. But it turns out he wasn’t dying, he just wanted to talk.”

“To talk? About what?”

“He’d read the piece about what we were doing. He was angry, but he wasn’t showing it. He felt like I’d condescended to him. He felt violated.”

And who wouldn’t feel violated, seeing themselves pieced apart into anonymous data, seeing the specifics erased until they were just one of dozens of men, nameless men, defectives — except Kemper hasn’t gotten his hands on their papers and findings, he can’t have read them, people in prison don’t generally have free access to psychiatric literature concerning themselves. What had incensed him was the idea. The pop-psych version. The blurb.

The sensitivity drops off of Debbie like a silk robe. Underneath she’s keen to analyze. “Violated by the study?”

“Violated by what we’d talked about. He felt like I was saying I understood him, but there was some — ambivalence about that.”

“Was he under observation?”

“We met in his hospital room. I thought he was shackled, or sedated, or something, but I guess I was wrong.”

He can feel his voice start to slip and shake. He can feel the cliches rising up, the way he’s told this story since then to other people besides Debbie, enough to blunt the edges. Now Kemper is a big guy, or I look up at the observation booth and all I see’s a cup of coffee, something like that. The bullshit version. The bullshit edition.

Debbie’s voice is steady, which is good because his vision is starting to strobe away. “What do you remember about the room? Sights? Smells?”

“Kemper had bare feet. I remember being struck by that. It smelled like lemons. That hospital smell. I remember how big Kemper looked, even lying there in that bed. I remember he never raised his voice. I remember his arms.”

The soft flesh, the wound. In his mind’s eye, it’s all there, and it’s more vivid than an image on film, more potent than a photograph could be. He can remember how it felt, running his fingertips along the thorny line of fresh stitches, only that’s preposterous. Holden never touched him until Kemper touched him first.

Debbie speaks again, quietly, intently. She really ought to have a notepad open in front of her — no, a tape recorder. “How did you know Kemper was angry?”

“At first I thought he was uncomfortable being physically vulnerable — he was lying in a hospital bed, wearing one of those gowns, he had no way of bargaining with me for anything. All those times in the prison commissary when he’d bully me into buying the right kind of lunch, that was his way of being the big man. It was a power play. Right then he had nothing.”

“Ed salad sandwich,” Debbie whispers.

“Ed salad sandwich. Then I thought the room might remind him unfavorably of the state hospital in Atascadero, where they sent him after killing his grandparents. I wanted to put him at ease. I wanted him to be comfortable. I didn’t want him to be in unnecessary pain.”

Holden’s voice is starting to slip worse, there’s a tremor in it. His head is beginning to hurt, his eyes are beginning to well up a little.

“And then what happened?”

“He told me he’d tried — less dramatic methods of getting my attention. He’d sent me cards, but he thought I hadn’t been reading them — no, I’m sure he knew I read them, he thought I wasn’t taking them seriously. He’d attempted suicide with the metal casing of a ball-point pen. The wound was neat, sort of curved, but deep. He called it showmanship.”

“Are you sure he did it to get your attention?”

“No, I’m not sure. Not any more. It must have struck a blow to his… self-concept, when he read about our work in the Atlanta Constitution. He thought we had something special.”

“For him, it was social hour, but for you it was just a job. Men resent strippers for pretending to care about them. Waitresses, nurses. Job interviewers.”

“He told me he wouldn’t share information with me any more after I’d been talking about him behind his back. His face, Debbie, goddamn — his face. He asked me what my conclusions were. I told him. He asked me if I thought I was an expert. I told him no. And he got up — he got up out of the bed, he was shackled to the bedframe but there was enough give in the chain — or he’d come unstrapped, or something, I just remember how his bare feet sounded when they hit the floor. Suddenly he was vertical again. He had the advantage again.”

Vertical and huge.

“And then what happened? If you’d like to tell me. We can stop here, come back to it later.”

“They don’t have an alarm system in the hospital suites. Or they didn’t, back then. The guards — all that time he’d been stringing me along getting me to trip over myself and my back was to the guards. They were changing shifts.”

“Holy shit.”

“It’s not like here. I don’t know why they do it that way in Vacaville — I thought maybe I’d write them a letter, but…” Holden laughs, a nervous crazy sound. “Prison reform is a touchy subject. He told me about, um. He told me about the blood. What blood does on a cold day. He told me about why he killed those girls. He said their spirits stuck with him because of what he did, and he could make mine do that too. He said they were his wives. I had reason to believe…” Did he have reason to believe? Would that have been compliant with Kemper’s prior behavior? He hadn’t only murdered women — he’d murdered his grandfather, hadn’t he? But he hadn’t fucked him. “Tench told me not to wear a gun when I interviewed Kemper, or else he’d take it off me and kill me with it. And he’d have sex with my face.” He means his brief impression of Bill to defuse tension, not to increase it, but the flicker that crosses Debbie’s face is pain, is real pain. “I don’t know why I didn’t shout for the guard.”

“You never know why you didn’t shout. That’s how it works. Your body freezes. Will calling out help you or hurt you? You couldn’t have known that, Holden.”

“So he told me about his spirit wives, and I thought I was going to die. I thought it was all over. Nothing happened, is the problem. I just got a good scare, that’s all. Spent the night in a psych ward. Not the same psych ward as Edmund Kemper.”

“Sometimes that’s bad enough. I’m glad you told me, Holden.”

“You must think I’m an idiot.”

“No, I think you’re an FBI agent. Which is the same thing, most of the time. Did you take time off of work?”

The paperwork, the signatures, the permissions, the boilerplate, all in a flurry, plastering the insides of his brain to make a wall. “Not related to Kemper.”

“Did you think you were going to be raped?”

“Maybe.”

“Did you think you were going to be killed?”

“Yes.”

Debbie sucks her lip in for a moment, and bites. “That really fucking sucks, Holden. That’s not nothing.”

“Relative to what Edmund Kemper did to women, yes. I’m confident in saying that it wasn’t worse.”

“Bullshit, worse. You’re trying to be objective about this stuff but really you’re just selling yourself short. What would you be saying if it happened to Bill?”

“If it happened to Bill, I would be sympathetic — I would try to withhold the appearance of judgment. I would encourage him to seek psychiatric intervention.”

“Would you wonder if he brought it on himself?” Debbie’s lip is no longer being bitten, but her hand rests on the tabletop, her posture is open. There is an accusation in the way she holds her body. Holden’s eyes hurt.

“I would not. I would wonder if he thought he brought it on himself, or if he was concerned being threatened with sex crimes by a man made him a homosexual.”

Debbie cocks her head, her shaggy dark hair falling away from her cheek. “Would you tell him to suck it up and take a Valium?”

“Of course not.” Holden might be tone-deaf to a broad spectrum of social niceties, but he’s not a monster — he’s not some macho bullshitter who likes to pretend he’s too tough to be affected by what he sees. That hurts.

“What if it happened to Wendy Carr?”

“That’s different. Wendy Carr is a woman in a field primarily made up of men, she would never have met with Kemper alone or at all.” Because she wasn’t stupid. He doesn’t want to think of that happening to Wendy.

“Women navigate a different set of obstacles than men. Wendy Carr is a woman who’s spent thirty or forty years trying to dodge unwanted sexual attention. The risk of sex assault wouldn’t be new to her. Was it new to you, then?”

“Well, not now. We didn’t talk about it much in the Academy, but it obviously happens in certain environments. In war zones…”

“In prisons.”

“I’m supposed to interview Elmer Wayne Henley in a few months. God knows where I’m going to find the time, even without my brain trying to murder me. The director’s afraid there’ll be riots. But never mind — it happens. I know it happens to men and boys. That’s not the problem.”

It happens to men and boys in mass numbers. All those dead boys wrapped in plastic, buried under the sandy ground. All those dead boys— all those dead boys in Houston and Atlanta. Just parts.

“Do you feel like you have an adequate framework for understanding the psychology of same-sex sex crimes? Or opportunistic ones, like what might have happened with Kemper.”

“No, I don’t. I don’t even know if he really meant to follow through or if he was just trying to rattle me. I don’t really have a corpus of interviews with men who kill men, unless you count Sirhan Sirhan.”

“That depends, did he get a boner killing Bobby?”

“You know, I didn’t ask.”

“But let’s crack into this a little. Let’s unpack your recollections. What made Kemper stop, do you think?”

Holden clears his throat painfully. He wants to gesture with his ams, but can’t. “He knew he couldn’t really get away with it. He’s been a model prisoner, there would be penalties for harming a federal agent. Maybe he wanted my respect more than he really wanted to harm me. Maybe he wanted to throw me a curveball. Maybe he liked me.”

Maybe that’s what someone like Ed Kemper does when he likes you. Maybe it’s never been about power and control at all, maybe it’s been the clammy crushing hand of all-encompassing like. The kids in Atlanta — they were likeable. They were loved. They were wanted. Did the cops know that?

“Maybe he saw you as more of a contender than his victims, because you were a man. He cared more about your respect, because you were a man of higher status. Didn’t he used to suck up to cops?”

“He used to suck up to cops, big time.”

“Ed Kemper was a textbook misogynist. He envied other men in positions of authority. He didn’t like or trust women, but he still wanted their attention and approval. He saw the women he killed as his possessions — they couldn’t disobey him if they were dead. You disobeyed him by blabbing all his secrets to the Associated Press. He wanted to remind you he could possess you too.”

“Debbie, this is too much. This really isn’t your discipline.”

“I learned all about this stuff in college, before I ever met you. When I was doing undergrad, I went on a couple dates with a guy and then lost interest. He used to follow me home from the library every night, or he’d wait till I left the radio station and watch me walk down the road to the shuttle stop. I’d go home and he’d broke in and dumped out all the ashtrays on my bed. He never did anything to me, personally. He just wanted me to know he could have done something if he wanted to.”

Holden feels something distinct from his own distress, a weird twisting feeling somewhere beneath his stomach. “That’s terrible. You never told me about that. You never told me you did radio, either.”

“That’s the important part. Nothing even happened to me, but it scared the shit out of me. It changed the way I did things. I had nightmares, I had to drop a bunch of classes. Now that guy wasn’t a serial killer, he was just an asshole.”

“That could easily have been the precipitating incident—”

“Maybe. Maybe not. He felt slighted, he felt like we had more going on than we did, and when he found out I didn’t feel that way he wanted to cut me down to size. Of course it was scary as shit. It was about reminding him I was never as safe as I thought I was. It was about power. Do you really think men never turn that around on other men? Do you really think Ed Kemper was less scary than some dickhead from the Russian Literature department?”

This is Debbie to a tee — it’s a challenge, it always has to be a challenge with her.

“You hadn’t been, you weren’t — you hadn’t been directly antagonizing that guy. That part was in his head. I’d been picking Kemper’s brain for months.” It’s Holden’s fault. It’s Holden’s fault. It’s Holden’s fault. “It wouldn’t have happened to Bill, because Bill wouldn’t have let it happen.”

Bill was tactical — a thinker, not a feeler. He knew how to build up walls. And it doesn’t feel like it now, but back then all of Holden’s walls had just been bulldozed. He should’ve gone and gotten blitzed in a Vallejo dive bar, instead of giving Ed Kemper the time of day.

“Why do you think it couldn’t have happened to Bill?” Debbie asks.

“Because — Bill didn’t let himself get close. He kept his distance.”

“What happened with Kemper wasn’t punishment for your misdeeds as a profiler. Getting in the shit with Internal Affairs, that was punishment for your misdeeds. If something else happened while you were too stressed out to think straight, that wasn’t your fault any more than it would’ve been Wendy’s. Or Bill’s. It sucked, but you survived it. You’re busting your ass for the FBI and Ed Kemper’s gonna die in federal prison. How does that make you feel?”

Holden chokes with laughter. It makes every part of his body that ever had a needle stuck in it hurt.

“Jesus Christ. Debbie, are you trying to psychoanalyze me?”

“That’s not my line and you know it. I want you to think of me as your buddy.” She’s so self-consciously goofy with that line that it makes Holden smile the most anemic smile in his life — it’s some inside joke, some school counselor or college professor being impersonated.

“You didn’t have to drive all this way. I mean it. The nurse holds the phone up to my ear when I need to take a telephone call.”

“I wanted to see you. I miss seeing that dopey look on your face.” Debbie’s eyes are crinkling at the corners.

“You mean you like it when I look like shit?” Brightly — Holden drags a hand over his face, trying to feel the bags under his eyes with the soft pads of his fingers. They won’t let him look in a mirror except to shave. He feels as intangible as water. “You look great, by the way.”

“These are my only clothes.” Debbie crosses her legs, bracing her boots against her knee. “I left in such a hurry I didn’t even slap on a bra. Do you want me to smuggle you in anything?”

“No, Jesus, no. I’m hooked up to so many things, you can’t imagine.”

“I could get away with it, too. The lady at the front desk still thinks I’m your wife.”

“Wouldn’t that be weird.” Another time, another place. Another Holden and another Debbie, ideally, Ken and Barbie versions of them that wouldn’t be bothered by wearing rings on their fingers. The card is still there between them, figuratively and literally, resting on its open face with a splitting hinged spine. It’s something Kemper has touched, something that’s passed under Kemper’s attentive hands. Kemper chose pencil on purpose.

“I know, right? I can’t wrap my brain around it. I’m not going to tell anyone what we talked about today. If you want me to take that card and burn it, I’m down to do it. If you want me to tear it up in little pieces and throw it out the window on the interstate, I’ll do that too.”

“You know, I need to have it documented. Bill kept all the old ones in a box somewhere. We can take some pictures and make copies, make a study.”

“Then after that it can mysteriously go missing from storage, and mysteriously catch on fire in an ashtray. Whatever you want to do, Holden. This shit sucks.”

“It sure does.” The ache in Holden’s head is receding a little, but only a little. His scalp still aches. “I’m sorry — about what you told me. I didn’t know about that when we were dating, and it seems significant. I wasn’t trying to make you confess something difficult. Unless you were making that part up, which seems plausible now.”

“Good God, you’re still a fucking asshole.” Debbie tilts forward for a second, as if she’s hinging at the waist over the edge of the bed, and her face comes into focus in a frightening flash just before her lips graze Holden’s cheek. A wash of smoke-smell comes with her, semi-painful, and the scent of jasmine. “Take care of yourself, for fuck’s sakes. Good luck with your doctors.”