A Killer's Wife (Desert Plains)

by Victor Methos

  “Your paintings are getting . . . troubling, Eddie,” he had told him at the age of five. “I think we should focus more on happy things. You like happy things, don’t you?”

  Happy things . . . happy things . . . Cal had wondered for thirty-four years what exactly his uncle had thought that phrase meant, and why he’d assumed it would be the same from one person to the next.

  Cal had made a few more paintings, but the scam had ended when his father found out what Uncle David was doing, and he wasn’t allowed to take Cal to his apartment anymore, where he’d been making the paintings for him. Cal had later heard David died of a drug overdose somewhere on the East Coast at the age of forty-one.

  The drawing in his lap, sketched and without color, as the warden had only approved his access to a few supplies as a reward for helping the FBI’s investigation, was a nearly exact rendering of his ex-wife. Nude and lying on the beach. Her hair wet with the incoming tide, a hand to her breast, her gaze lost in some distant memory. Her body had no skin, revealing the exposed sinew and muscle underneath.

  On death row, the seventeen inmates that awaited execution knew each other, knew each guard, and understood that if they treated the staff well, they in turn would be treated well. In exchange for their good behavior, they were allowed to roam freely among the corridors. Cal had the additional security of protective custody, in case one of the other inmates tried to hurt him, but even he was allowed to roam if he desired.

  None of the other inmates ever spoke a word to him or looked in his direction.

  Cal rarely left his cell. There were no windows here, and one dark dungeon was as good as another, so he preferred to stay in his cell most of the time, though he liked having the cell door open. It reduced the sense of being trapped.

  “That bitch was hot,” a voice said from his cell door.

  A guard stood there, a man with a scar running down the side of his bald head. He demanded the inmates call him Sergeant, though Cal was reasonably certain he had no prior service in a police force or military unit.

  “I watched her on the cameras when she came. How the hell you lost a piece of ass like that I don’t know. I woulda dug in and hung on like a monkey over a crocodile pit. Guess that’s why your dumb ass is in here and I’m out there.”

  “You seem to be in here with me most days, Sergeant. You’re as trapped as I am, but you’re here willingly. Who’s the dumb ass?”

  The Sergeant approached Cal’s cot and spit a green glob of phlegm onto his pillow. “Gimme the drawing.”

  “I’m not finished yet.”

  “You finished when I say you finished.” He reached for the canvas.

  In a flash, Cal leapt at him and swung. The fist connected like a steel bat and knocked the Sergeant back against the bars of the cell. Cal grabbed his television off the stand by the cot and slammed it into the Sergeant’s head, knocking him unconscious and spattering blood over the walls. The television crashed onto the floor, a mess of broken glass and plastic.

  Blood flowed out of the gaping wound in the guard’s head and over the cement floor, drizzling toward the drain in the center of the cell. Cal stared at it. The darkness of it, the thickness, the way it slowly rolled and churned like a stream along the bumps and imperfections of the floor.

  He soaked the tip of the pencil in the blood before putting it to the canvas, coloring in Yardley’s face.

  As an alarm sounded through death row and boots stomped heavily in the corridor outside, a smile crept to his lips.

  He dipped the pencil into the blood again and continued his work.

  33

  Yardley had no sensation other than cold numbness, and the house felt like a cage. As Wesley watched the evening news from the couch, she went into Tara’s room and sat on her bed, elbows on her knees, her head down as she stared at a pair of Tara’s slippers. It felt like a limb had been cut off, and the shearing pain of the cut wouldn’t get any better until Tara was home.

  She’d spent the day obsessed with Dustin Watson, trying to find any sliver of evidence that could point to him being the copycat and wondering whether he’d gone so far as to plant his son in Tara’s school just to get her to come to him willingly. His criminal history—from petty theft to attempted sexual assault—made him no saint, but was he smart enough to have killed the Deans and the Olsens? The only way to know for sure was to search his home.

  Yardley had gone so far as to buy a lockpick and sit outside his house, intending to wait for him to leave and break in to make sure Tara wasn’t locked up in the basement, but she’d lost her nerve when his biker gang had shown up, and she’d left a message for his parole officer instead.

  Yardley looked at Tara’s walls. Her paintings were up. Three of them. All were exquisite—the lines perfectly drawn, the paint smoothed and angled just right—and if someone didn’t know it was a fifteen-year-old that had created them, Yardley was certain they would think it was a professional artist with decades of training and experience.

  Yardley had once asked her why she painted, and all Tara had said was that everyone needed a creative outlet. They had never spoken about it since.

  The parole officer had called her back and said she was out of town but would meet Yardley at Dustin Watson’s home tomorrow morning.

  Yardley had also explained everything to Baldwin when he had come to the house to check on her, and he had stationed two agents near Dustin Watson’s home, keeping tabs on who was coming and going.

  “If he leaves and there’s no one home,” Baldwin had said to her, “there might be a brief period where I could break into the home and search. But we don’t have enough for a warrant.”

  They’d stared at each other, an unspoken resolve between them.

  She had nodded, and he’d said nothing before he left.

  Yardley couldn’t be indoors anymore. After changing into yoga pants and a T-shirt, she said, “Heading out.”

  “Where to?” Wesley asked.

  “Just going for a walk. I’m going to go insane if I just sit here in between walls.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No, I’d like to be alone.”

  Outside, even though the sun was setting, the temperature stayed hot, and she could feel the heat coming off the pavement of her driveway. The mailbox out front required a code, and she input the numbers and retrieved two envelopes. One was a statement from her health insurance provider about her therapy sessions. The other, a plain white envelope with no return address.

  She took the letter out, and as she read the first few words, her mouth went dry and the hair stood straight on the nape of her neck.

  The FBI’s evidence response team had taken possession of the letter. Several of their forensic technicians were at Yardley’s house right now. She stood outside on the front porch, watching them lift the envelope with small stainless steel forceps and place it into an evidence bag.

  Baldwin paced the lawn, speaking with the Trace Evidence Laboratory in Washington. When he hung up, he came to her and said, “You okay?”

  Her arms were folded across her chest, not because she was cold but because she couldn’t be certain her hands weren’t shaking, and she didn’t want anyone else to see.

  “He has . . .” The words wouldn’t come. They were too terrible, and it was as if her body rejected them, refused to speak them for fear of making them true.

  “He doesn’t have her,” Baldwin said. “Tara running away and you receiving this letter are two unrelated events that happened in close proximity to each other. You said Tara probably snuck out last night. That wouldn’t have been enough time to send the letter.”

  “Unless he took her and dropped the letter off simultaneously. Made it appear as though it went through the mail.”

  “I doubt it, but I’m having Oscar check with the post office just in case. We’ll know soon. And how would he get into your mailbox without a code anyway?”

  As she watched a forensic tech with purple latex gloves put on
thick black goggles and run a heat lamp over the mailbox, the words of the letter ran through her mind over and over:

  So happy you’ve taken an interest in my work, Ms. Yardley. The Olsens seemed to particularly interest you, didn’t they? Happy family. About as happy as a family could be. Imagine her shock as that first spatter of her husband’s warm blood hit her face. I wish you could have seen it with me.

  With warm regards.

  It was the With warm regards that sent a shock like ice through her. No one but the guard at the prison who screened incoming emails, the warden, Baldwin, Ortiz, Newhall, and her had read the email to Cal. No one knew that the copycat had used that phrase in the closing of the email.

  Wesley came out of the house and said, “We can stay at my condo until they catch him. I’ll have to go clean it up first and get it ready, but it shouldn’t be a problem. Plenty of room.”

  Yardley shook her head. “Tara might come back. I need to be here.”

  “Jessica—”

  “No. I’m not leaving, Wesley. This is my home. You should go, though. This isn’t your fight, and there’s no reason for you to be put in danger.”

  He stared at her, and she could tell that she had hurt him. He said, “That’s a helluva thing for you to say to me,” before going back inside the house.

  “You can’t be here alone,” Baldwin said. “It’s good that Wesley’s here.”

  “I know. I don’t know why I said that. Just . . . reactionary, I guess.”

  “I think it might be best to have a patrolman up here at night. If the LVPD won’t do it, I’ll get someone from the Bureau.”

  “No. If you want to help, find Tara. Put every resource you have into finding her.”

  His hands on his hips, he glanced over his shoulder to two technicians chuckling about something. They saw him looking and stopped.

  “Cason?”

  “Yeah?”

  “He called me Ms. Yardley in the letter. There’s only one person in my life that calls me that.”

  Baldwin stared at her. She could tell he knew exactly who she was talking about.

  And it fit. Someone who had the technical and forensics knowledge. Someone perfectly placed to set up Austin Ketner.

  Baldwin dialed a number on his cell, his eyes never leaving Yardley. “Greg,” he said, “this is Cason Baldwin. I owe you dinner for that help with Austin Ketner’s laptop, and I’m free right now. Give me a call.”

  He hung up. “I’ll head over to his house,” he said. “If it’s him, Jess, if it’s been one of us this entire time, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  “Text me immediately if—”

  “Of course.”

  She watched him leave. While she waited, there was only one place she could think to go. One place that could give her answers.

  Once at the prison, she sat in her car a long time. Staring at the dark clouds rolling past the moon. She had texted Warden Gledhill’s private cell phone and asked for this arrangement, explaining that Tara was missing and she needed to see Cal right away. The warden hadn’t asked any questions, just told her to give them twenty minutes to prepare the safety precautions and get Cal out of ad seg.

  Yardley left her car. A guard, the massive hulk of a guard from the night Cal had been taken to the Olsens’, waited for her by a side entrance to the prison. A young, short guard, Native American, stood with him. He smiled at her and said, “Hey, I’m Anthony.”

  “Hello.”

  Walking down the long corridor to get to the second building, which housed death row, she remembered suddenly that Austin Ketner was incarcerated still. That he was not the man that had sent that letter to her, since all his mail was monitored, and that he was likely not the man that had killed the Deans or the Olsens. Roy Lieu would fight cutting Ketner loose. He would say he had a partner on the outside, which was a theory he could move forward on. There were two of them, and that was why Ketner had the mementos but someone else had sent the letter. A conviction against him would play well with the cameras and therefore with her bosses, even if the public thought another killer still lurked out there somewhere.

  “We had to put him in ad seg,” Anthony said. “Sick shit busted open a guard’s head real bad. Like, you could see skull and stuff,” he said with obvious glee. “And then get this: used his blood to keep drawing with. He was drawing—”

  “Shut up, Anthony,” the other guard bellowed. His deep voice sounded like the growl of a large animal.

  When they came to death row, they turned right toward some rooms Yardley had never been in before. Administrative segregation was the polite way of saying isolation. A barbaric practice, Yardley had always thought, but she didn’t know what a viable alternative was. When an inmate could no longer be trusted around others, what was the government supposed to do with them?

  The bare cement room had no windows or furniture, and Cal sat nude, leaning against the wall, his eyes closed in meditation. A bucket sat in the corner along with a roll of toilet paper. A thick, transparent plastic barrier separated inmate from visitor: transparent so that the guards could monitor inmates in ad seg around the clock for potential suicide attempts.

  “Repugnant, isn’t it?” Cal said, opening his eyes. “Seems like something they’d have done in the Tower of London five centuries ago, not today.”

  The steel bench in front of the barrier felt cool against her as she sat down. “They said you hurt a guard.”

  “Yeah, that will definitely leave a scar. It’s his own fault. I only have four months to live, and they still think threats work on me. I have nothing they can take anymore, no threats they can make to motivate me.” He stared at her, the darkness in his eyes piercing her. “What do you have to motivate me with, Jessica?”

  She swallowed. “Tara’s disappeared. And I got a letter today.” She took out her phone and pulled up the photograph she had taken of the letter. She rose and pressed it against the barrier. Cal stood, tall and muscular, and white as an albino from lack of sun for over a decade. The steel restraints rattled as he approached the barrier. They stopped him two feet from the plastic.

  “That’s interesting,” he said. “Is he right about your feelings toward the Olsens?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any idea how he knew you felt that way about them?”

  “I visited their home but not the Deans’. I didn’t think anything would be there anymore.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “So it’s someone that knows the case intimately enough to know you visited the Olsens’ home but not the Deans’. Only one group can know that.”

  “Law enforcement. I know.”

  He nodded slowly, his eyes never leaving hers. “I think you have an apology to issue to that boy at the jail.”

  “Maybe you should give him an apology, Eddie. For murdering his family. He had nothing after his parents. No relatives old enough to look after him. He and his brother disappeared into the foster care system.”

  Cal sat down cross-legged on the floor. “You think the letter and Tara disappearing are connected? I don’t think so.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I never hurt children. If he truly is a copycat, he wouldn’t either.”

  “Unless he’s desperate and we’re close.”

  “Possible, but why disturb you? There’s no particular skill you can bring to the table that the FBI doesn’t have. He should’ve antagonized the lead agent on the case, but instead he antagonized you. Why do you think that is?”

  “I don’t know.” She leaned forward. “If you know who it is, Eddie, please tell me.” The words tasted like foul rust in her mouth. “Please. He may have our daughter.”

  He inhaled deeply and closed his eyes. “You know what I’m going to miss most? The ocean breeze hitting my face while I’m on a boat. I haven’t felt that for two decades. I remember the ocean has a scent, but I’ve forgotten what the scent is and replaced it with something else. It’s a pleasant smell, like rain on freshly cut grass, but I know
it isn’t how the ocean smells. Isn’t it funny the things your mind makes up when you don’t have the real thing anymore?” He opened his eyes and watched her. “It’s only with smell, though. Why do you think that is?”

  “You have an eidetic memory. That’s why you could always paint so perfectly with no models. Many people with eidetic memories report that smells actually impact them more than sights, even though the sights are what they can recall with perfect detail. Didn’t you know that about yourself? Or did you just want to hear a compliment from me?”

  He smiled, and the smile was awful.

  “Are you enjoying my pain, Eddie? Do you hate me that much?”

  “No. I don’t hate you. I never have, not even for a second.”

  He had likely said it to show affection, but Yardley knew she would never feel affection for him again. The mask he had put on for her was off: the mask of a gentle artist who loved her, who loved the mountains and poetry and sunsets. With the mask off, it was hard to see him as even human.

  “You hated me by virtue of what you did to me. All those years we were married, all the time I gave you, the pieces of my life, were based on a lie. You were playing a role, and I bet you just thought it was hilarious that I fell for it, didn’t you? You must’ve thought I was the biggest fool in the world.”

  “No. I always told you your heart was too soft. You want to believe people are good so badly that it opens you up to be taken advantage of by people who are not.”

  “So it’s my fault?” she scoffed. “You’re no different than anyone else in here, Eddie. You’re not special. You hurt others because you’re weak, and you blame them for it.”

  “Not true, but I know it’s difficult for you to look at me now as I am, rather than who you remember. It wasn’t a role, Jessica. That person was me as well. Just a different part of me. And that part of me loved you.”