Chapter Fifty-Eight

Russell said nothing else after mentioning the little girl and her father. Instead, he turned to face the instruments table again, which Garcia quickly figured out wasn't a good move… at least not for him.

‘A little girl?' he asked. Keep him talking… just keep him talking. ‘Which little girl?'

Russell studied the instruments on the table, trying to decide which one to take this time.

‘Her name was Nancy,' he replied. ‘But I didn't know that at the time. I'd never seen her before. Like I said, I was never allowed out of this house. I was just in the park, trying to figure out what to do, getting my head wrapped around the idea that I was just about to leave my parents chained to a basement wall and go drown myself, when I saw this little girl and her father walk by. He was dragging her by the arm so firmly, she looked like a ragdoll. The poor girl was in tears… her tiny little legs trying so hard to keep up with how fast her father was dragging her. As they walked past the bench I was sitting on, he yelled at her and pulled on her arm harder. Her shirt hiked up a little at the back. That was when I saw the bruises. Right then, the little girl lifted her head and looked straight at me.' Russell nodded at nothing at all. ‘There was so much sadness and pain inside her tiny little eyes. The kind of sadness and pain that I understood. The kind of sadness and pain that I knew so, so well. She didn't have to say a word. One look and I knew exactly what her life was like.' His gaze met Garcia's. ‘Right then, I understood that I wasn't alone. I wasn't the only one going through the kind of hell that I had been going through. There were others… thousands of others. That was when I realized that the darkness that I'd been given by my parents – the darkness that lived deep inside me – didn't have to be a curse. I could make it into a gift – an eighteenth birthday gift.'

‘So you decided to become a vigilante?' Garcia asked. ‘At the age of eighteen?'

‘No,' Russell replied. ‘I decided to help them. I decided to help people like me… people whose family was never a family… people made of scars… just like I was. So instead of drowning myself, I came back to this house and started to re-plan my life. There was no mortgage on this house anymore. It had all been paid off by then, and my father had enough savings for me to live off for a few years.' A humorless chuckle. ‘At last my father had done something right.'

Garcia finally saw movement coming from Russell's father. He slowly turned his head to look at his son and some dormant muscle on his lower jaw twitched once.

Russell saw it too, but he didn't seem to care.

‘So,' he continued, ‘I used those years of savings to learn and train. I needed to get strong because at the age of eighteen, I had the body of a ten-year-old.' He gave Garcia a matter-of-fact shrug. ‘Gaining muscle was hard. It took me a long time and a lot of effort, but learning…' He shook his head while pursing his lips. ‘That was a different ballgame altogether. It turns out that I have a very logical and analytical mind, which means I learn fast. Certain subjects make more sense to me than others, like programming, medicine and anything to do with numbers, like the stock market. So I read – book, after book, after book – until I got good at all three. It took me a few years, especially to get good at medicine. For you to do that you need to practice.' He smiled. ‘Lucky for me that I already had a pretty well-equipped surgical room in my cellar. All I needed were practice subjects. Would you like to guess who my first practice subject was?'

Garcia blinked a thought. ‘The little girl's father.'

Russell's non-existing eyebrows arched again.

‘You followed them home that morning,' Garcia deduced.

Russell nodded. ‘I did, but this was four, almost five years later. I was just about to turn twenty-three at that time. I didn't know if they'd still be living in the same house or not.' He angled his head to one side. ‘He was. She wasn't.'

Garcia waited.

‘Her mother,' Russell explained, ‘his wife, had finally had enough and gathered the courage to walk away. It turned out that she was also being beaten up by him. He was a drunk. So I simply approached him at a bar one night, bought him a couple of drinks, and slipped a sedative into one of them. Once I got him down here, I hurt him in the exact same ways he'd hurt his little girl and his wife. And I did it slowly. Just one injury at a time. Until he was gone. It took him almost two months to die. But he was the one who gave me the idea of how to find others just like him.'

‘Support groups,' Garcia said.

Russell rubbed his nose. ‘On his first night down here, as he pleaded for mercy, screaming in pain, he told me that he knew that he had a problem… that he was trying to get better… and that he was attending support-group meetings. I hadn't thought of that by then, but it was so logical. I didn't have to go looking for them. They would come to me. All I needed to do was sit and wait… pay attention to what they were saying and ta-da – the practice subjects would, as if by magic, show themselves. It was perfect because we're talking about people who want to stay anonymous. They use fake names at the meetings, which doesn't actually matter because these types of support groups don't keep a record of who has attended their meetings. We are as anonymous as anonymous can be, and members tend to be the loner type too, just like my parents were – no friends… no real family that could give a fuck. They really aren't the type of people who are dearly missed, if you know what I'm saying.' Russell's face twisted into a new expression but, without eyebrows, Garcia couldn't quite decipher it. ‘Plus, disguising their deaths as accidental is a genius move, wouldn't you agree, Detective? I could hurt them in every imaginable way and still get away with it.'

The woman in the animal cage coughed again and Garcia's eyes moved hard right, but to no avail.

Russell used her cough as a cue. ‘Take her, for example.' He nodded at the cage. ‘Real name – Jennifer Mendoza – a fucking worthless junkie who kept her four-year-old daughter locked in a cage in her living room, while she fucked men for drug-money in the bedroom. Once she got high, she wouldn't feed her daughter for days. And for some fuck-knows-why reason, she would also smack her daughter on the soles of her feet. She was four years old.' He turned to address Jennifer in the cage. ‘How does all that feel now, Jennifer? Good?'

‘I… love… my… daughter.' It sounded like it had taken Jennifer the strength of gods to utter those four words.

‘But of course you do,' Russell said in reply. ‘I love my parents.'

‘How many?' Garcia asked, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end because he dreaded the answer. ‘You just told me that you claimed your first victim at the age of twenty-three – that's twelve years ago. How many have you killed in those twelve years?'

There it was again – the eyebrow movement without any eyebrows. ‘I prefer the word punished.'

‘How many have you punished?' Garcia rephrased the question.

A careless shrug. ‘I don't do what I do for numbers, Detective. I do it because these people deserve a dose of their own medicine. The things that they do to their own sons and daughters… you wouldn't believe.' Russell, once again, indicated the scars on his torso. ‘From scarring, to disfigurement, to breaking bones, to death. And I'm not even going to mention the mental health destruction that it causes. They bring a kid into this world, ideally, through an act of love. But that's not what they give out… that's not what we get. What we get is hate… and anger… and whiskey breaths… and mood swings… and punishment, for the simple fact that we exist… for the simple fact that we are here. But guess what, Mom and Dad?' With his arms opened wide, Russell turned to face his parents again. The next sentence was delivered through gritted teeth. ‘I didn't ask to be here. I didn't ask to look like a freak. I didn't ask for all this hurt… all this pain.' He smiled at them. ‘But you did.'

‘How many have you punished?' Garcia asked again, interrupting Russell's outburst at his parents.

‘Sixty-three.'

The reply caught everyone by surprise because it didn't come from Russell.

It came from his mother.