The two women showed their badges at the entrance to the correctional facility, and the detective handed over her service weapon. Then the two women, accompanied by a guard, went through an airlock.
Elizabeth hated the moment when the airlock, the first door behind them, closed and the second door in front of them had not yet opened. And that in a tiny room that could hold just three people. That in itself was a kind of prison. Elizabeth had once asked one of the guards what would happen if both doors were blocked, so one was locked in that tube, and she had only received a shrug of the shoulders as an answer.
But at that moment, the second door opened.
They entered the courtyard, accompanied by the guard. To the right rose the façade of the prison with its barred windows; to the left, the high wall with its barbed wire into the gloomy sky whipped by the storm. They crossed the courtyard at a run, for the first drops had already announced a terrible downpour. Leaving the yard behind, they entered a long corridor.
"Prison cell fifteen," said the guard, unlocking the door.
Elizabeth saw one of the typical detention cells she had seen so many times before.
A bed, a chair, a table, a toilet, and a small window.
Nothing else.
And no one.
Elizabeth looked at Katherine - at the moment, the guard was also looking at her in wonder.
"This is Carl Martinek's jail cell, isn't it?" Elizabeth looked at the guard, and he nodded. "Is he still being interrogated?"
"No," the man said, puzzled, "he must be here.
But the cell was empty.
The cell was not empty, however.
They had found him under the cot that served as a bed.
From the corner of her eye, Elizabeth had seen earlier that part of the bed sheet had been torn off.
From which Carl had tied a noose.
Now he was lying under the bed. Or what was left of him.
He hung and lay there in his prison clothes.
"My God," the guard whispered.
So that he would never be delivered again, Carl had shown himself to death.
Half lying on his stomach, half hanging from the noose he had attached to the slatted metal frame of the bed. He had hanged himself.
His head had snapped off, his neck torn upward by the rope.
The rope had pressed on the muscles of the floor of his mouth so that his tongue had been forced out of his throat and hung out the side of his mouth. It was slightly dried in the front but not yet black, as was the case with the hanging, which was found only after some time. Here, probably only an hour or two had passed. A long thread of saliva stretched from the mouth to the gray floor of the cell.
Elizabeth pulled out a latex glove and joined Katherine in loosening the rope. With combined strength, they pushed the bed forward and turned the body onto its back. Lividity had already formed on the face. Massive cyanosis of the face with numerous closely packed stasis blood leaks, as the MEs called it.
That meant it was over. Finally and irrevocably. There was no longer any need to call a doctor.
They did it anyway and notified the prison doctor in charge and the prison administration.
There was a letter on the small table of the cell. Elizabeth had seen the note earlier, but only now she took it in the hand on which she wore the latex glove and unfolded it.
With trembling hands, she read, with Katherine looking over her shoulder.
Patere legem, tuam ipse tulisti.
Patience the law which thou hast given thyself.
I have passed away.
What have I gone through?
First, my father died. It was not a pity for him.
Then my mother was murdered.
Her killer got away unpunished.
And my dead mother was a dead bitch, according to the court.
Years later, my girlfriend was raped.
Her rapist got away with it.
And my raped girlfriend was a raped slut, according to the court.
She killed herself.
One woman was dead and was declared a slut by you; the other woman was a slut to you and was driven to her death by you.
You protected the wolves and hunted the sheep. You made sure that my life was taken away from me again and again. I became, again and again, the little boy who is hurt, allowed to be broken, and whose loved ones are allowed to be murdered without the perpetrators fearing consequences.
I saw with my own eyes how my mother died as an innocent and went to the afterlife. And so I made sure that the relatives of the guilty died. And that they witness their loved ones going to the afterlife.
And now I die, innocent, and follow them. I don't know what awaits me there, where I am going now, but my vengeance is complete.
Those who deserved punishment never went to prison. But I have spent my life in prison, without parents, looking up to the strongest of all father figures, vengeance. I put the guilty in my dungeon. I have let Jason Walton, the cowardly cop, watch his wife suffocate. I've allowed Joseph Hurts, the snake-tongued defense attorney, to watch as his elderly mother hung from a noose and died writhing. I have had Samantha Conway, the protector of perversion, share in a perversion of others by watching her son bleed out.
I made them all face death, which they denied. I made them watch with the dead so that they would see the horror of murder before them and the loss of life. I wrote with burning letters that would make even the blind see. If I had given them time, they would have judged themselves. But I wouldn't grant them that merciful death.
I beheaded Jason Walton, cut up Joseph Hurts, broke Samantha Conway, and executed her on her pathetic sickbed as she deserved no better. Kevin Burns, I poisoned and broke his bones. Tom, who injected his filthy semen into my Sophia, I poured boiling bleach down his gullet - a penetration of an extraordinary kind.
What justice was I supposed to wait for? For what pity to hope? Is pity not merely the last excuse for not having to help actively? Isn't pity the latest weapon of the weak to inflict pain on others?
I will never again arouse pity, never again have empathy. Everyone is the most distant from themselves.
I know that I am the only one I can judge. I went from being a victim to being a perpetrator, never to be a victim again. I've killed myself. And you don't have much time left before you all kill yourselves and your false system implodes.
You want to kill me? You can't because I'm already dead. I have been dead all my life, and I have lived in a grave that you have dug.
Everyone who has built a new heaven has found the tools for it in hell.
I've cleansed the system as I cleansed the greedy throat of Tom with boiling lead. Because the lower, dirty can never defeat the higher, pure in battle, the lower contaminates the values of the higher. But I have destroyed the lower.
In a system where perpetrators become victims, I had to become a perpetrator as a victim.
You think that's all now? No, it isn't. There was a second trial. With Sophia, my girlfriend. And there was a judge and a lawyer there too. And Ernest, Tom's friend.
Think about them where they are. And if they're still alive.
Maybe you'll find them. Perhaps you won't.
Maybe they're dead. Perhaps they're still alive.
But if they were alive, they would kill themselves as soon as possible.
Look at them. Their life. Their deaths.
Your children. Attacking you with knives.
I am gone.
Nothing more will happen to me.
For I am done!
Elizabeth lowered the letter; her eyebrows furrowed deeply.
Thunderclaps came from outside, a dull rumble, accompanied by the crackling of lightning flashing behind bars, while a downpour fell on the prison roof.
Then the memory of the image was back. The image of a boy lying on the floor, his dead mother beside him. And now the detective saw a body lying on the ground here, too, the body of a man who had brought suffering and death when he was alive as an avenging angel. A little boy who had become a man shouldn't have evolved.
Elizabeth took the picture Nick had given them earlier.
The picture showed young Carl lying on his mama's lap. She placed it on the dead man's chest, covering the shot with his right hand. She would ensure it was established in his coffin on his journey to the world beyond death.
She looked at the young man's features, which now showed a semblance of peace. He had killed, and he had let innocent people die cruelly. And he had made no exception for himself. Now his soul was carried away on the wings of death.
As she looked at the dead man, shaking her head in disbelief, and his life and tragedy passed before her inner eye, she felt at one with all the dead whose final journey she couldn't prevent. And she stood there, with her sister, in the dreary prison cell next to Carl's corpse.
Thunder rolled across the sky again. Elizabeth took Katherine's hand, and together they stood in silence beside the corpse of the Guardian of the Dead, who, sometime in the last few hours after the first interrogation, had decided to end this game.
Now he was the one who had seen his death and was on his final journey to another world.
The Guardian of the Dead, the last player in his own game.
Who never again wanted to be a victim and thus had also become a perpetrator against himself.
Who had judged himself in order not to sit on the wrong side in a courtroom once again.