Relentless

Jerry kept a gun in the house. And I searched and found it and loaded it with one round. I was going to kill myself.”
    I had not said anything to Clitherow in a while. Nothing I could say would make any difference. He didn’t need to hear me speak to know that I was listening.
    His voice sounded more lifeless than ever: “Maybe I didn’t have the courage for suicide, or all the years I believed in the sanctity of life made suicide impossible. And gradually I started wanting to kill Waxx more than I wanted to die. So I put nine more cartridges in the gun. And I waited for him. And three days passed. And the phone rang. Waxx said just ‘Porch.’ And on the back porch I found a DVD.”
    Evidently Penny determined from my expression and my posture that I was in the thrall of an abhorrence so absolute that it nearly paralyzed me. My left hand was fisted on my thigh, and she closed her right hand tightly over it.
    “And for a day I could not look at the DVD. And then I did. And my daughters were chained to a wall. And they must have been coached, promised mercy for cooperation, because they cried and pleaded to the camera, ‘Daddy, don’t hurt us again. Daddy, please let us go.’ And then. And then they. And the horror began, and I turned it off. And the DVD was evidence, but evidence that falsely incriminated me.”
    Speeding into the cold rain, fast into the black night, we would eventually come head-on to a wall not of stone but of a solidified darkness, the iron-dense and perfect evil of Shearman Waxx.
    “I don’t know what he did with their remains. Since then I’ve stayed alive. Hoping to find him, kill him. Now I realize that was a delusion. He is untouchable, Cullen. He is the night itself.”
    John hesitated, and then wandered into an alley of depressive philosophy: “The innocent die, the wicked prosper. With a cunning ability to invert the truth, evil men claim to be noble, and people abandon reason, bow down to them, and accept all kinds of slavery.”
    Once a man with faith, with confidence in the common sense of the average man, Clitherow seemed surprised to hear himself speakthose dismal words, for he inhaled sharply and after a pause returned to Waxx: “He’s untouchable, relentless. Cullen, you think you escaped him. But he didn’t want any of you to die in the house explosion. He wanted only to take it from you. If I hadn’t phoned when I did, if I hadn’t told you to get out, he would have called to warn you.”
    Implicit in that statement was the assumption that Waxx had been monitoring my phones, and not only knew that Clitherow had called but knew as well what he had told me.
    “Cullen, he didn’t want any of you to die in the explosion, because he breaks us down to ruins, step by step, not all at once. And now I am in the tower
de Paris
with—”
    A noise both wretched and pitiable came through the phone line, and at first I thought that emotion had returned to Clitherow in a sudden stroke, that he was choking with grief.
    A moment later, I realized this was more agony than anguish. It had been precipitated by a sound not made by the writer: a ripping noise, vicious and wet. I was listening to a man being murdered.
    His phone dropped from his hand, clattered on the floor, did not disconnect. Briefly, his death throes issued from a distance.
    But then came the thud-and-clump of a body falling. Perhaps his head was again close to the phone, because I heard him clearly. He seemed to be trying simultaneously to gasp for breath and to vomit.
    I imagined that his throat had been slashed, that he was choking on his own blood.
    I prayed for an end to his misery and at the same time hoped for one last gargled word, a revelation.
    In mere seconds, Clitherow was finished and silent.
    Earlier, when he became emotional and I suggested he call me back later or not at all, he said something that now had new meaning:
“I have to tell you. You don’t understand. I
have
to tell you.”
    He had not been surprised during the call by his murderer. Theyplaced the call together. At the point of a knife, John Clitherow was forced to repeat the hideous story of his family’s destruction both for my benefit and for his humiliation.
    Before me, hard shatters of rain rattled off the windshield.
    At some point after the calls that John made to me at our house earlier in the day, he fell into Waxx’s hands. He used a disposable phone, but he called my listed number, not knowing that Waxx was already