《The Dreamer》
Miller I
We were all scared senseless. He did not resist when we took him in. Not that we expected any resistance, but it added to our terror. We called him ?the dreamer¡° and we had a plan of dealing with him that just might see us still alive at the end.
Everything started as a routine investigation. Every suicide is followed up by a death investigation, typically to make sure everything is as it seems to be. At the university they teach to approach these investigations without prejudice, but years and years in the field and a typical workload too high for not taking shortcuts, and you get a feeling for what needs to be checked closely and what is actually a guy killing himself. There is a good three hundred or so suicides a year in the city, almost one every day. You just can¡¯t check them all properly, not with the cuts in the police budget.
Until you notice a pattern. It was November when my intuition jumped me. A rainy day. The case of Christopher Neal. Some poor guy who had jumped from the roof of his apartment building for no obvious reason, without leaving a letter or anything. His wife and teenage daughter were in shock and swore up and down that everything was fine in his life. We just had decided to close the file when I had a hunch and decided to pick up a number of old cases. We had a file for them, and we called them ?inside jobs¡°. Cases where you find no sign of foul play whatsoever, but anyway you cannot figure out why they jumped or shot or poisoned themselves. You might think the typical suicide victim leaves a note, but that is a myth. Around a third do, most do not. But the typical victim leaves other warning signs, and the psychological autopsy generally reveals them. Depression, substance abuse, changes in behaviour, such things. Some victims even start giving away their property before they end it all.
Our ?inside jobs¡° were cases not just without notes, but without warning signs. Suspicious cases, where we begin to think it might have been murder, but find no evidence of that, either. In the end, we conclude that whatever made the guy - it is typically men, rarely women - walk off the stage was entirely inside his head.
This is such a case. Except for one name that got stuck in my head. Robert Ricci, despite the name and distant Italian ancestors, was an introvert, slim, unassuming bloke. He appeared in the file on our current jumper as one of the co-workers we had interviewed for the psychological report. But I had seen his name before. So I searched through the ?inside jobs¡° until I found it. Computer technology makes it easier to reference old files and look for clues in them. Four years ago. The case of Sasha Davis. Stepped in front of a train on her commute home. No note, no warning signs, no reason anyone could figure out. We would have even filed it as an accident if it were not for three eye-witnesses swearing that she very deliberately walked right unto the train tracks and ignored their shouting.
Robert was on the interview list of that case as well. Friend of a friend or something. They had a shared social circle, and we had gone around asking everyone for signs of depression or recent changes or any of the other typical clues.
Unlucky guy to have two suicides around him in four years. For curiosity, I searched for him in the national database, and hit the lottery. Seems he moved in from another city about six years ago. And he is in their police records, this time as a suspect. His ex-girlfriend and her new lover died half a year or so after she left him for the other guy. Red flags all over that one, but Robert was on a long vacation in Asia at the time. His successor got up in the middle of the night, got a big knife from the kitchen and stabbed the girl a dozen times. Then he sliced himself open. The case got a good investigation, and a thick file. Despite samurai movies, very few people manage to murder themselves by knife. You may think you can cut your stomach, but the pain is excruciating and even the samurai had an aide standing nearby with a sword to finish the deal. But it was his prints, no evidence of anyone else being at the scene, so despite the mystery, the case was closed as a murder-suicide.
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Three is one too many.
Four and five, now that is beyond coincidence. Only marked for possible interview, without modern IT nobody would have ever found this. Both investigations closed as suicides before they got around to talking to him.
So that is how I figured out about Robert. The rest was hard police work. We went back on almost a thousand files from the past eight years. Trying to find any link to our guy. We actually pinned a bunch of pictures on a wall and drew lines between them. Everyone knows that from TV and movies, but in real police work it is rarely used. Some departments have software doing the same, and that actually gets some usage, but our department did not. So we used a wall, the only time in this decade.
Robert was somehow linked to almost twenty deaths. That would put him in the all-time top 20 list of serial killers, and near the top spot of those active in the new millennium, so far occupied by Ronald Dominique. But unlike the other guys on the list, Robert was a suspect only in that one case. Everywhere else he seemed to have known the victim, but that is all. Only in the four cases I already had on my table was his name in the files. The others we found by checking work places and social circles.
We went out to interview people, asking them flat out if they know Robert, and if so, whether or not he knew the victim. We added a couple more cases where we could not see a link but by location and date and people involved it was possible.
It was a few months of legwork. I always wonder about the police budgets in movies, where the hero has all day, for weeks or months, to investigate just one case. For us, there are typically a dozen cases running in parallel, so it can take days or weeks until you get around to interviewing that person or checking this file. And long-closed cases have the lowest priority, so it took months, despite the pure legwork involved was more like a couple days.
But we struck gold. There were now twenty-four cases on our wall, with another four we wanted to investigate more closely. Eleven cases we had discarded as unlikely. The gold, however, was in the seven cases we had found outside the homicide department. Attempted suicides with surviving victims. We found them after noticing that victim number eight, James Tokai, had an unsuccessful suicide attempt three weeks prior to his successful one. According to medical records, he claimed in hospital that he had no thoughts of suicide, and no history of sleepwalking, despite jumping out of his 6th floor window in his pyjamas. The second time, he jumped from the roof.
There was nothing in any of the cases that incriminated Robert.
We had to put the mystery aside for a few weeks to focus on a series of high-profile murders, and we were beginning to give up on it. Maybe he was really just the most unlucky guy in the universe?
Miller II
James turned out to be our key. Or rather, his pyjamas. Sometimes you do not see something that is right in front of your eyes, until it clicks.
Everything was related to sleep. It did not make sense at first - they had jumped from roofs, stepped in front of trains, were murdered or had accidents. But once it clicked, all the pieces fit together. In a few cases we had no evidence, like Sasha on her commute, but she got off at a stop two after her usual exit and might well have fallen asleep on the train. But in the vast majority of the cases, people had been in bed shortly before they became suicidal or homicidal. Maybe they never even woke up? All the suicide attempt survivors seemed puzzled about what had happened to them. All of them, and many of the victims, had attempted suicide at night. This had never raised any flags before, because most suicides indeed happen at night. But the totality of this pattern when linked to Robert was statistically unlikely. Looking at the whole picture, only three of the deaths occurred during day and in all three of them we were reasonably sure that the victims had taken at least a nap.
I felt like Sherlock Holmes, who famously said: ?How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?¡°
Robert, somehow, could make people kill themselves, or others, in their sleep.
How he accomplished that, we had not the slightest clue.
We could not possibly hope to get a warrant based on that, so we dug deeper. We confirmed the links on our wall, and gathered possible evidence. We came up empty. Our only somewhat plausible theory on the method was some kind of slow-acting drug. None of the autopsies had found anything like that, but it was not entirely impossible that an unknown substance, or one that decays rapidly after death, could have been involved. And while it was a long stretch, at least it was a theory.
The survivors made us dig through medical records. The evidence collected so far and our theory on an unknown psychoactive drug was enough, barely but enough, to convince a judge to sign the necessary paperwork. We could not dig deep, but we found three more victims of Robert, people we could link to him, who were alive but in psychological care. The woman had spent a night with Robert, but according to friends we interviewed rejected further romantic approaches. One of the men had tried to shoot his neighbour with a shotgun, and it turned out that this neighbour had just won a minor court case against our man. Something about an oldtimer car, not much by dollars but apparently of some sentimental value to Robert. The third one we could not figure out, but he and our man seemed to have frequented the same bars, maybe something happened there?
We could not figure out how Robert could have possibly drugged the neighbour. He was a pensioner who rarely left the house. He didn¡¯t know Robert and other neighbours described him as withdrawn and mistrusting. No plausible scenario would have made him take a drink or snack from our man at the door, and according to the file there was no evidence that anyone else had been in the house. In fact, according to the pictures, not for weeks and definitely not for cleaning.
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It started as a joke, but to remember Sherlock Holmes again, in the end we had no other working theory. Whatever Roberts game was, it affected the mind as evidenced by our mental patients and the claims of the suicide survivors. No physical force or presence had been involved in any of them.
Our research led us to hypnosis as the only rational explanation. There seem to be techniques that can put a victim into hypnosis in seconds, and even though we were not sure if these were real or stage trickery, we had run out of other explanations. All the evidence led us to the conclusion that our man could somehow implant subconscious orders into a victims mind, which they would then act out when they were asleep, when the conscious mind was switched off.
Nothing we could tell to a judge, but in all the cases we had not one where the acting person was definitely awake at the time they killed or attempted to kill either themselves or someone else. Not one. All of them were either certainly or likely asleep.
So we instead took our drug story to the judge and got a search and arrest warrant. The arrest was hard to get, because the search should have been enough, but we argued that due to the substance in question being unknown, collecting the evidence could be a difficult undertaking during which the suspect might likely disappear. He had moved four times in the past decade, and had no immediate family.
Among ourselves, we worried about protecting ourselves. None of us wanted to end up on the victim list and no matter how fantastical our theories sounded, none of us could answer the challenge to come up with a better explanation.
And many of the victims, as far as we could figure it out, had in one way or the other harmed or hurt our man. Rejected him, humiliated him, damaged his career or his relations, or maybe just hurt his pride. For some victims we had no clear indication, similar things were at least imaginable. It was a long stretch, but it was the only one that we had left. If we were right, he would certainly consider the people who arrested him to be of the same kind.
None of us believed in telepathy and mind control. That was only temporary terms that we used as our alternative last-ditch theory in case the hypnosis idea turned out to be wrong. A placeholder term to name what we could not yet explain. But the more we used these terms, the more they appeared probable. And if you allow for the possibility that he was somehow psychic, it opens the idea that he might even do it unintentionally.
That is why we began to call him ?the dreamer¡°, and when we arrested him, we took great care to always have him in our sights, to never be with him alone, and to avoid eye contact as much as possible. We worked under the assumption that he can manipulate us through a technique we did not know and as such could not hope to spot. We even got hypnosis to protect us against hypnosis, despite half of us thinking that was just a joke taken too far.
Robert I
All my nightmares came true. And they arrested me. Did it on my way home. Just outside my apartment door. Never expected that, not like this. Too surprised, too shocked, I just followed them quietly.
Remembered on the way to never talk to police without your lawyer. Do not have a lawyer. Needed one only once, for some small thing I forgot. What to do?
They said I murdered people. I said I did not. So they locked me up.
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Night was rough. At least I have a cell to myself. Not like they show on TV. Slept badly, no dreams. At least no dreams.
Woke me up early. Cold. Dark. Dry at least. Unfriendly. The cop guy. Asked me about the bossman. Mr. Neal. Fine Mister. Told them he was an asshole and that¡¯s all I¡¯ll say without a lawyer. Asked for a lawyer. Was told if I don¡¯t have one, they don¡¯t have to provide one. Cannot check if they are right, they took my phone. They tossed me back in the hole. Still early morning. Mr. Neal. Sleep. No dreams. Please, no dreams.
Dreams I
The fine Mr. Neal. I remember him exceptionally well. Trickery and deceit were his trademarks, which brought him to his position. He tricked me into doing all the hard work for him, more than my position required. Then he took all the credit and to cover his ass, claimed that I was lazy and fired me. Of course I explained that I had actually done most of the project, but I had underestimated Neal and his years of experience in tricking people. He made me look like a liar and a thief of company time. The HR guy I thought of as an ally said that if he could fire me twice he would.
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But payback time came to Neal as it came to the others. I just want a calm life. Why does everyone keep interfering with that? He turned my own work against me, I turned his own mind against him. He ended himself, good riddance. World 1, assholes 0.
Miller III
Robert was not talking. He kept asking for a lawyer, and aside from that made a disheveled and confused impression. If it was an act, it was very convincing. One of my boys had questioned him early the first day, but all we got was a confirmation that he knew the latest victim. We had to stop interrogating him after he asked for a lawyer, damn procedures.
We had to figure out how he did it. His papers, e-mails, browser history, everything stored on his notebook and phone, everything in his apartment, we picked apart looking for clues. We found one old encrypted file, dating back seven years. Our computer guys broke it open, something about the old software from back then having a known defect they could use. The file turned out to be a porn collection he was hiding from his girlfriend at that time.
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Some of his e-mails and instant messages confirmed what we already suspected - that many of the victims had in one way or the other harmed him. We found no evidence of any drug or psychological manipulation technique. No books, electronic or otherwise. No websites in his browser history or cache, no e-mails or messages, nothing at all.
However he did whatever he did, it scared us.
Robert II
Woke me again. Might be noon already? Felt tired, as so often. They only gave me something to eat and asked me if I want to call someone. I refused to answer even that. They told me they¡¯ll keep me locked up until trial. Should get a lawyer.
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No dreams this time, good. No clue how to get out of this, either. It isn¡¯t me! Cannot even explain to myself. Help! Lawyer! Drugs! Kill! No! No more killing. Please. No more! Met so many bad people in life. But doesn¡¯t everyone? How we deal with it - our choice. Can¡¯t do it this way. It¡¯s not right!
Dreams II
So much evil in the world. Is it right? Is it wrong? To deal them a hand from their own deck? Does it matter? I am a force of nature. Like a thunderstorm or an earthquake, if something simply happens and you are powerless to stop it, the moral dimension simply doesn¡¯t come into play.
Go to sleep Robert. Let me manage this. Didn¡¯t I manage your girlfriend nicely? Betrayed you with that pathetic excuse of a human being. Let them take their punishment into their own hands, slit them open, let them bleed, let them pay. Two less traitors in this world.
You have to kill them. Nothing else makes them stop and I know because I tried. Tried with Sasha. I remember how I asked her to stop it, and what did she do? Turn around, set on her most mocking voice and went right for it. Took it and turned it against me, humiliating me even more. In front of all my friends. My crime? I had asked her best friend out. Beautiful girl, but she had turned me down. Girls talk, something I should never forget again. They talk behind your back, in front of your face, they talk. And what they talk. Compared to how they talk about you behind your back, the most drunk group of construction workers is an example of brotherly love and forgiveness. Don¡¯t know how much of what Sasha told everyone I knew was from her friend and how much she embellished. When she was halfway through and I couldn¡¯t stand it anymore and stormed out, she had already gone well down the list of body parts and what insulting things you can possibly say about them.
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I¡¯m not the most handsome man in the world, but if she had given that description to the police, they would still be looking for me in a decade. Not to mention what she said about my character, despite we had met five times, maybe?
Made her pay the final ticket. She could have just stopped when I asked her, but she didn¡¯t. One less person to make the world this ugly hellhole that it is. If I clean them all out, life will be better.
Miller IV
We had to get our man to talk. He was not doing well, slept short and uneasy. Those are things that are really hard to fake, and it was chipping away at the mental picture I had, we all had. The man in our cell was not some stone-cold killer with a method we couldn¡¯t figure out.
We went through the list of family and contacts we knew and finally found someone who felt like helping him out. Strange how few of his folks were close enough to him to care. But a phone call later, Robert finally had a lawyer.
We connected a few more dots while we waited. We had a fairly good picture of the victims now, and their relations to Robert. Many we could place, but in a few cases we had to guess because there was nothing except a shared activity or location. One guy had nothing at all in common with our killer except some distance of the same commute and no matter how hard we looked, no common friends, acquaintances, not even friends-of-friends.
It all made no sense. The only thing all our victims shared is that there was a reasonable chance that they met our guy at least once in their life. We held a brainstorming session to explore fringe ideas of what¡¯s going on, and here is the best theory that explains all the facts. It is silly on the edge of madness, but again, like Arthur C. Doyle wrote in his Sherlock Holmes: ?Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.¡°
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So our working theory number two was that Robert was a genius-level contract killer, everything we saw about him was a persona, and he killed every victim on our list because they came too close to discovering the truth, or watched him doing something they shouldn¡¯t have seen. Making their deaths appear as suicides or sleep-walking was just a modus operandi.
A ridiculous theory. No better than mind control. Just crazy on a different level. It made some of us feel better, so we kept it around. But we didn¡¯t go out looking for his actual contract targets because it was so flimsy.
Me, I was scared. There is fear and then there is terror. You can be afraid of many things, and if you are smart, you go and do something about them. But this feeling of abject terror, when you are facing something you barely understand and that is completely out of your control, when you feel not just afraid but also helpless, entirely powerless, that drives you insane.
Robert III / Milller V
I don¡¯t want this! Don¡¯t want to sleep. Don¡¯t want more people dying.
So helpless. So tired.
No sleep! No dreams! Please!
Cannot stop it.
Terror turned into horror when Jonathan pulled out his weapon and pointed it around, with a grimace of utter pain and desolation on his face. A young cop, barely three years in the force. Two more experienced cops, both of them women, tackled him and got the gun out of his hands before a shot was fired.
One of our theories had just received a huge support. We woke up the psychologist and fetched him by patrol car. Jonathan had been one of the four who had taken Robert in. Whatever short contact they had with him in that time, it must have been enough.
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I used my authority and put the other three under supervision, and asked them to surrender their firearms. Two did, the third one I had to formally suspend. At night, when the chief is asleep, I have that authority. In the morning, I would have to get him to confirm it.
Robert had been in his cell, asleep, while all this went down.
Jonathan, it turned out, had been napping in a corner just before he rose to his feet and, for all we know, was trying to shoot us under some kind of outside control. He was a strong young lad, with a clear mind. Maybe that bought us the decisive few seconds.
I gathered the men while Jonathan was being examined, and told them a version of that famous line in From Dusk till Dawn. That I don¡¯t believe in ghosts, but what we are seeing is not normal. From now on, until the mystery is solved and a rational explanation found, we would consider all possibilities no matter how outlandish or paranormal and take preparations against them.
The first thing, and this I took on me, was that we would all sleep in cells, with our firearms out of reach in the hall, for our own protection. Only after a quick check by the door guard that we are of sound mind would they open the door.
The guys and girls were not a fan of that, but we were all still under impressions of what had just almost happened, and nobody spoke up against the measure.
Dreams III / Miller VI
Nice move, detective. I didn¡¯t know how much he knew and understood, but he and his men now protected the pigs that had arrested me. One of the features of prison cells is that they are designed to make suicide as difficult as possible.
I smile at his attempt. I rage at his insolence. I lash out.
The noise and the commotion is unbearable, but nothing compare to my insides. The police station is a madhouse and that is putting it mildly. Grown men and women are completely losing it, and I completely understand why because I am losing it as well. My patience, my sanity, my grip on what is real and what is a nightmare.
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We got the notices in the morning. Deborah, Thomas, George. Three good cops are dead because we saw the truth and refused to believe in it. They were not in my team. Just in the same department. They slept at home, did not even know about our case. Random victims. Revenge killings to frighten us.
And frighten us it did.
Some of us are on their way down to Robert right now. This is the first time we do something like this. But we don¡¯t have a choice.
Robert IV
They set me free. At first, happy. Then, terrified.
Three dead. Why? They were innocent!
Saw the look in their eyes. They hate me. Everyone hates me.
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Why? All I wanted is a calm life. It wasn¡¯t me! But they believe. Wasn¡¯t me! Nobody believes.
Don¡¯t believe myself.
But now, right now, I am awake. Not dreaming, not sleeping, awake. Right now, I am in control. This is my moment. I can end this. Will end this.
It is a long way down.
Miller VII
The picture was finally clear, or as clear as it would ever become. Not that we understood how it all worked, and Robert took that secret to the grave. But with his final act, he freed himself. We understood at least. Everything became clear, and very, very dark.
Robert had jumped to a clean death, 20 stories down. Asphalt road, landing flat. I don¡¯t need the doctors to tell me that death was instant. I finished up the paperwork just now, and the lamp on my desk is the last light that is on in the precinct. It is late. Whatever fight Robert had to win to make his final step, it took him the entire day to do it. We had him under observation, but our people did not follow him up the elevator, they had instructions to keep a good distance and should avoid being spotted at all cost, even if it meant losing him. They didn¡¯t. He hit the road not far from their car.
Only a few stars in the sky today. Probably cloudy. So many people died, and we could do nothing. Our own mind holds us captive, like it did for Robert. Blind to the truth, to what was waiting beyond the simple facade of our ordinary lives. We had suspected Robert of many things and had never seen what was so obvious on the outside. His dishevelled looks. His eyes. I cannot forget his eyes. Remembering them now it is so clear that they were screaming out for help in a language more clear than words. But he could not put it into words, and that is why he said nothing. A force beyond our understanding was there. The part we did not understand, that was not to be understood, at least not by humans.
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What else could lurk there in the shadows? Maybe inside all of us? Did it come from outside and took possession of the man, or from the inside and emerged for reasons unknowable? I contemplate these things and what they mean for all of us while I play with my gun absent-mindedly. Hiding from the truth of my life. The pointlessness of it all. The mistakes we made, and the price that others paid for us. For me. Why should I not pay my due?
And it is not just that. Far worse is the knowledge I gained. That the world is a so much darker place than I had ever imagined, beyond the most terrifying in literature and philosophy. I cannot return to it like this. Our existence but a toy for others to play with. Our lives playing pieces on the board of a game, and nobody even shared the rules with us. Extinguished on a whim. How many of the cases we closed, how many of the suicides and accidents in the city have a deep, dark shadow that we just don¡¯t see?
A lone moon shines on the city.
Slowly, calmly, the gun goes back into the holster. It is not hope that I have found. Just a stubborn attitude of not giving up. You can call it grit. I just thought too many people have already died, let¡¯s not add one more. But hope, there is none left. This shadow will over me till the end of my days.