Free Mind Prey by John Sandford Page A

was no match for a trained psychiatrist.
    Andi had peeled him like an orange.
    Mail’s father had never married his mother, had never lived with them; last heard of, he was with the Air Force in Panama. Mail had never seen him.
    When he was a baby, his mother would leave him for hours, sometimes all day and overnight, stuck in a bassinet, alone in a barren room. She married a man when he was three—three and still unable to talk—who didn’t care much about her and less about Mail, except as an annoyance. When he was annoyed, when he was drunk, he’d use his leather belt on the kid; later, he moved to switches and finally to broomsticks and dowel rods.
    As a child, Mail found intense pleasure in torturing animals, skinning cats and burning dogs. He moved up to attacking other children, both boys and girls—the class bully. In fourth grade, the attacks on girls had taken a sexual turn. He liked to get their pants off, penetrate them with his fingers. He didn’t know yet what he wanted, but he was getting close.
    In fifth grade, big for his age, he started riding out to the malls, Rosedale, Ridgedale, catching suburban kids outside the game rooms, mugging them.
    He carried a t-ball bat, then a knife. In sixth grade, a science teacher, who also coached football, pushed him against a wall when he called a girl a cunt in the teacher’s hearing. The teacher’s house burned down a week later.
    The fire was a trip: five more houses went down, all owned by parents of children who’d crossed him.
    In June, after sixth grade, he torched the home of an elderly couple, who ran the last of the mom-and-pop groceries on St. Paul’s east side. The old couple were asleep when the smoke rolled under the door. They died together near the head of the stairs, of smoke inhalation.
    A smart arson cop finally found the pattern, and he was caught.
    He denied it all—never stopped denying it—but they knew he’d done it. They brought Andi in, to see exactly what they’d caught, and Mail had talked about his life in a flat lizard’s voice, casually, his young eyes crawling around her body, over her breasts, down to her hips. He scared her, and she didn’t like it. He was too young to scare her…
    Mail, at twelve, had already shown the size he’d be. And he had tension-built muscles in his body and face, and eyes like hard-boiled eggs. He talked about his stepfather.
    “When you say he beat you, you mean with his fists?” Andi asked.
    Mail grunted, and smiled at her naivete. “Shit, fists. The fucker had this dowel he took out of a closet, you know, a clothes rod? He whipped me with that. He beat my old lady, too. He’d catch her in the kitchen and beat the shit out of her and she’d be screaming and yelling and he’d just beat her until he got tired. Christ, there’d be blood all over the place like catsup.”
    “Nobody ever called the police?”
    “Oh, yeah, but they never did anything. My old lady used to say that it was none of the neighbors’ business.”
    “When he died, it got better?”
    “I don’t know, I wasn’t living there anymore; not much.”
    “Where’d you live?”
    He shrugged: “Oh, you know: under the interstate, in the summer. There’s some caves over in St. Paul, by the tracks, lots of guys over there…”
    “You never went back?”
    “Yeah, I went back. I got really hungry and fucked up and thought she maybe had some money, but she called the cops on me. If I hadn’t gone back, I’d still be out. She said, ‘Eat some Cheerios, I’ll go get some cake,’ and she went out in the front room and called the cops. Learned me a lesson, all right. Kill the bitch when I get out. If I can find her.”
    “Where is she now?”
    “Took off with some guy.”
    After two months of therapy, Andi had recommended that John Mail be sent to a state hospital. He was more than a bad kid. He was more than unbalanced. He was insane. A kid with the devil inside.
     
    T HE GIRLS HAD stopped weeping when Mail opened