“God damn it!” I yelled in pain. I punched his face. He bit me again. This time on the back of my hand. Damn, it hurt!
The FBI agents had trouble pinning him down as he hurled a stream of curses and threats at all of us. They were afraid of being bitten.
“Now you’re one of us!” he screeched at me. “You’re one of us! Now you can meet the Tiger,” he howled, and laughed.
Chapter 51
MY HEAD was aching, but I spent the next four hours questioning Irwin Snyder in a bare, white-washed, claustrophobic room at a jail in Charlotte. For the first hour or so, Kyle and I interrogated him together, but it didn’t work out. I asked Kyle to leave the room. Snyder was shackled, so I felt safe being alone with him. I wondered how he felt.
My arm and hand were beginning to throb, but this was more important than my wounds. Irwin Snyder had known I was coming to Charlotte. How had he known? What else did he know? How was a vicious young killer in Charlotte connected to the rest of this mess?
Snyder was pale and unhealthy looking, with a scruffy goatee and sideburns. He stared at me with eyes that were dark, very active, intelligent enough.
Then he laid his head down on the Formica tabletop, and I lifted him right out of his chair by his hair. He cursed at me for a full minute. Then he demanded to see his lawyer.
“Hurts, doesn’t it?” I said. “Don’t make me do it again. Keep your head off the table. This isn’t nap time. It isn’t a game either.”
He gave me the finger, then put his head back down on the table. I knew he’d been getting away with this type of shit at school and in his home for years. But not here, and not with me.
I yanked him by his greasy black hair again, even harder this time. “You don’t seem to understand the King’s English. You murdered your parents in cold blood. You’re a killer.”
“Lawyer!” he screamed. “Lawyer! Lawyer! I’m bein’ tortured in here! I’m bein’ beaten by a cop! Lawyer! Lawyer! I want my fuckin’ lawyer!”
With my free hand I grabbed his chin. He spit on my hand. I ignored it.
“Listen to me now,” I said. “Listen! Everybody else from the house is at the station in the city. You’re the only one out here with me. No one can hear you. And you’re not being beaten. But you are going to talk to me.”
I yanked his hair again—as hard as I could without actually pulling out a clump. Snyder shrieked, but I knew I hadn’t hurt him
much.
“You killed your mother and your father with a claw hammer. You bit me twice. And you stink to high heaven. I don’t like you, but we’re going to have this talk anyway.”
“Better see somebody about those bites, pig,” he snarled. “You been warned.”
He was still talking tough, but he cringed and pulled back when I reached for his hair again.
“How did you know I was coming to Charlotte? How did you know my name? Talk to me.”
“Ask the Tiger, when you two meet. It’ll happen sooner than you think.”
Chapter 52
IT BECAME clear that Irwin Snyder couldn’t have committed the earlier murders. He had been out of North Carolina only once or twice in his life. Most of his contact with the outside world was over the Internet. And of course he was too young to have been involved in murders going back eleven years.
The seventeen-year-old had killed his mother and father, though. He seemed to have no remorse. The Tiger had told him to do it. That was all I had been able to get out of him. He refused to say how he had come into contact with the person or group who had such control over him.
While I was questioning Snyder, and then the others from the house, my shoulder and hand began to itch and then ache. The bites were puncture wounds, but there had been little bleeding. The bite to my shoulder was the deepest, even through my jacket, and had left prominent teeth marks, which I’d had photographed at the station.
I didn’t bother going to the local emergency room in Charlotte. I was too busy. The wounds soon became extremely painful. By late morning, I had trouble making a fist. I doubted I could pull the trigger of my gun. Now you’re one of us, Irwin Snyder had told me.
I wondered what group, or cell, or cult Snyder was part of. Where was the Tiger? Was it only one person? I attended a meeting with the FBI and the Charlotte police that lasted until eight that evening. The net result was that we were still nowhere near a solution. The FBI was scouring the Internet searching for messages relating to the Tiger, or any kind of tiger.
I flew back to Washington later that night and managed to sleep a little on the plane. Not nearly enough. The phone rang minutes after I stepped inside the front door of my house. What the hell?
“You’re back, Dr. Cross. That’s good. Welcome, welcome. I missed you. Did you enjoy Charlotte?”
I put down the phone receiver and hurried outside into the night. I didn’t see anyone, no movement up or down Fifth Street, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t lingering near the house. How else could he know I was here?