by Chaz McGee
That’s when it hit me with an absolute certainty: Otis Parker had known this was going to happen. He had been waiting for it.
FIVE
Every crime scene I have ever visited is different, yet somehow the same. Invariably, the body seems smaller than you ever expect. Death itself seems smaller, almost like a let-down. Is the absence of life really this quiet, this ordinary? How is it that the world can go on around it, as if nothing has happened at all? Would death even matter if the living were not there to mark it – and fear its cold finger one day?
It was no different with the scene by the river. The area had been quickly taped off from onlookers. State troopers and county deputies were holding back the curious that had started to gather. The body had once been a young girl. Her denim miniskirt and gauzy white peasant blouse were bunched up, as if she had been dragged back toward the river by her ankles, exposing long arms and legs. Her skin seemed impossibly pale in the afternoon light. She lay face down on the grassy bank, her head and hands extending upward as if she were trying to crawl away from the river. The undisturbed grass around her made it clear that she had been killed elsewhere and left by the river to be found.
Usually when a body has been moved, I feel nothing at the dump site. The essence of the person whose life has been taken has long since wandered beyond to the place I cannot find. But that was not the case with this girl. I could feel a trace of her essence lingering nearby. I wondered if she, like me, was looking on from a twilight world, unable to move beyond, and if she, like me, wondered why she had been given so little time to live, so very little time to become who she had wanted to be. Yes, there was regret surrounding her body, a sadness and recognition of loss, but there was something else there, too: relief, perhaps, or maybe resignation. A sense of weariness and a burden put down. It seemed a heavy load for one so young. Whoever she was, she had not had an easy life.
I moved closer. Her body sprawled half in mud and half in tall grass that ruffled in the breeze. Butterflies flittered from wild flower to wild flower, only inches from her body. Her death had not disturbed the spring.
Her hair had been bleached weeks ago and her dark roots were obvious. That and her clothing told me she was probably from the neighborhood in our town that was, quite literally, ‘on the other side of the tracks.’ A hundred years ago, train-loads of coal from Pennsylvania had sped through that side of town, dusting the area with a black rain so sooty and persistent that the residents had named the neighborhood Helltown. These days, trains still roared through a half-dozen times a week at most, ferrying manufacturing supplies from Wilmington to New Jersey and back, still splitting the town into two sides: one for those who had everything and one for those who had almost nothing. Only people without the money to live elsewhere called Helltown home. It was filled with young girls like the one lying before me, girls whose only tickets out were their youth. This one had not even had a chance to trade hers for a better life. And now her life was over.
I heard the slam of a car door on the roadway above, followed by the sounds of someone moving fast through the bushes. I knew it must be Maggie, my replacement on the squad. Maggie always arrived at a crime scene moving as fast as she had driven there, exceeding the speed limit in both cases. She would leap from her car and be halfway across the crime scene before her car door even shut behind her. Her natural speed was surprising, given her stocky build. She was muscled with plain features and ordinary brown hair that looked as if it had been cut by someone more used to trimming men’s hair. But the way she moved, parting the world around her as she claimed her way in life, made her beautiful to me. She was emphatically alive and always absolutely focused. I think she loved being alive; I think she loved being here. And I loved her for it.
Sure enough, Maggie arrived on the scene full speed ahead, taking in the girl’s body and its arranged posture immediately. She wasted little time talking to the uniformed cops who had arrived at the scene before her. She liked to pick up her own first impressions. She vetted a small grassy area for evidence and then knelt by the body, running her hands over the girl meticulously, as if she were blind, consulting with the forensic technician about body and air temperature, humidity and the effect of the sun on the girl’s exposed skin. From what they could tell, the body had been dumped there the night before, and discovered when a pair of retired postmen broke through the brush in search of a good fishing spot.
Though only a few yards from the edge of the road, bushes obscured the body from the view of passers-by. Yet it lay close to a path well traveled on weekends. Had that been the killer’s intention, I wondered, that the body be discovered, but only after a few days of wind and sun and the forest animals had done their job? Had the fishermen spoiled his plans?
If there was anything on the body the killer had hoped might be destroyed by the elements, I knew that Maggie would find it.
Within fifteen minutes, Maggie had directed that dozens of photographs be taken and nearly as many bags of trace evidence be cataloged for transport to the lab. Finally, she was satisfied that the body could be moved. A technician helped her gently roll the dead girl over on to her back. It was impossible to tell what the kid had looked like while alive. Her eyes were closed and her features weighed against her face as if melting in the afternoon sun. A gold ring in her nose and her heavy make-up reinforced my suspicion that she was from Helltown. A bulge of white stomach peaked out from between her ruffled blouse and miniskirt, revealing a gold ring in her belly button. She had wanted to be different, to be special and stand out. There was something inexpressibly sad about the way she had been reduced to a lifeless mound of flesh and chemicals sprawled beneath the afternoon sky instead. She was too young for such a fate. However poor she was, how little educated, she should have been given a chance to make a better life for herself.
The breeze shifted and the smell of new grass wafted past. All trace of the dead girl’s essence was gone. She had moved on, leaving her body to the care of others.
A huge crashing through the bushes distracted Maggie. She winced when she saw that it was her partner, Adrian Calvano. He tried hard, but his emotions often got the best of him, especially when the victim was a woman. He’d arrived at the crime scene with all the finesse of a water buffalo.
Calvano pulled up short when he saw the girl’s body. He stared, gauging her age. Anger rose in him like heat. Maggie could feel it, too.
‘She looks to be about fifteen years old,’ Maggie said, pulling him back to the job.
Calvano pulled out his notebook and dutifully wrote the detail down. He’d have made a hell of a stenographer.
‘Do you recognize her?’ Maggie asked.
Calvano shook his head. ‘Maybe we can take her photo around to the high schools and see who knows her?’
Maggie nodded and examined the girl’s body from this new angle, receiving an assessment of the wounds that had been inflicted from the hovering medical examiner – it was likely she had been strangled and she most certainly had been assaulted. Maggie did not ask for more details yet. She had caught a glimpse of a red scar peeking out from beneath the girl’s muddy blouse. Carefully, she pulled the hem up and revealed an angry red swirl the diameter of a coffee cup burned into the girl’s torso. There was a puncture wound at the center, where the concentric circles ended, as if a pattern had been fashioned from a coat hanger, heated and burned into her skin – the kind of crude, home-made brand I’d seen on prison inmates marked by others.
With a start I realized I had seen the exact same symbol before. On every single one of the victims Otis Redman Parker had been accused of killing.
‘That was likely done post-mortem,’ the medical examiner noted softly.
Maggie nodded. She had already figured as much. ‘You see this?’ she asked Calvano. He nodded, looking slightly green around the gills. ‘See how it’s one continuous circle winding in on itself. Check out the puncture wound at the center.’
‘You’ve seen it before?’ Cal
vano guessed.
Maggie nodded. She had realized the importance of it, I knew, by the way her whole body stiffened. I could feel her fighting off the disbelief. Though the Otis Parker case had occurred before she joined the detective squad, Maggie would know the details of it by heart. One of the first things she had done, when named to take my place, had been to pore through my old files. Her reason, she said, was simply to get a better feel for the types of cases my small town’s police force faced. But I had known with a certain shame that she felt the need to read through my case files for one reason only – because she knew that neither I nor my partner had done much to solve any of our cases in at least the last eight years of our careers. We’d been sloppy, we’d made mistakes, we’d filed cases away as ‘unsolved’ without ever really trying to solve them. Maggie had been cleaning up after me. She knew about Otis Parker because of it and as soon as she checked the symbol against our database, she would be certain. And probably afraid that I had to put the wrong man away. It had happened before.
‘Where?’ Calvano finally asked when it became obvious Maggie was lost in thought. ‘Where have you seen it before?’
‘It was mentioned in an old case of Fahey’s from about ten years ago. They got the guy who did it. It was a series of murders, all teenage girls, two from around here and the rest up by Wilmington and over the line in New Jersey. The guy beat the rap in court. The jury bought his insanity plea and he’s up on The Hill now.’ Maggie nodded toward Holloway where the central building loomed like a faraway castle set on a hill, an illusion destroyed by the squat buildings on either side of the mansion and the security fences marking the limits of its perimeter. Below Holloway, the hill fell off sharply, exposing patches of red clay and crumbling cliff. A huge drainage pipe protruded out through this cliff, like a terrible dark eye that could see all.
From where we stood, Holloway looked more like a mirage then a mental hospital. But I knew that Otis Redman Parker was up there, staring down at us, pressed against the fence that held him in, watching Maggie examine a reprise of his life’s work.
Calvano stared at Maggie, not quite understanding. ‘What should we do?’ he asked.
‘Well, if I were you, I’d take a drive up to Holloway and make damn sure that Otis Parker is still inside.’
SIX
I hated Calvano’s expensive suits. I hated his expensive loafers. I really hated the way he combed his hair straight back. Most of all, I hated the way women loved how he looked. But I didn’t hate the actual guy. Calvano does a decent job of looking after Maggie and is as good a partner as a dumb-ass can be. So I decided to hitch a ride with him back up the hill and see how Otis Parker reacted when he realized they had connected him to the crime below.
Thanks to his badge, it didn’t take long for Calvano to be processed through the gates that segregated the maximum security unit from the rest of the hospital grounds. The guard manning the entrance seemed more interested in trying to pump Calvano for details on why so many cops had gathered along the riverbank than he was in checking his credentials. Calvano was learning and knew enough to keep his mouth shut. Instead, he asked the guard if Otis Parker had been transported outside of Holloway recently.
‘Why are you asking?’ the guard wanted to know. ‘Don’t tell me Parker’s got something to do with what’s happening down by the river?’
Calvano shrugged. ‘You tell me. When’s the last time he left the grounds?’
‘About six months ago,’ the guard replied. ‘And it’s going to be another decade before we take that asshole out again. He’s one of those guys you can barely contain when he’s on the inside who goes straight to Looney Tunes territory when he’s on the outside. Last time we brought him out of here, he broke my buddy’s jaw on the way back from court, and this was after he tried to jump a bailiff. Time before that, he busted out a window in a dentist’s office. The guards caught them right before he made it to the highway with his thumb out. Parker’s not going anywhere but to the bathroom now, not if we can help it. His lawyer’s a pain in the ass about it, but we deal.’
‘What about visitors and phone calls?’ Calvano asked.
The guard shook his head. ‘He gets requests all the time from the crazies who send him money and want to see him, but he turns them all down flat. His scam is to place lonely hearts ads online and get women to put money in his defense fund, whatever the hell that means. You can bet his lawyer worked hard to get that scam cleared so he could get paid. But Parker doesn’t even bother to thank the suckers who contribute or reply to their letters that we can see. He’s a stone-cold user and he makes no bones about it. He doesn’t give a crap about anyone except himself.’
‘No family visitors?’
The guard shook his head again. ‘Would you want to admit you were related to the guy?’
I thought he made a good point.
Calvano quickly found his way to the right hallway. Otis Parker was waiting for him. I was certain of it, and not just because Maggie had called ahead. Flanked by two orderlies, Parker wore a shit-eating grin when he entered the visitors’ room and he gave off the air of a man who has a secret he just can’t wait to share with others. His bravado was all the more remarkable considering that he was restrained. Although Parker was allowed to move freely within the confines of his unit, thanks to his lawyer, the orderlies took the precaution of handcuffing him to a chair bolted to the floor of the visitors’ room for the interview. They didn’t quite pull out the hockey mask and wheel him in on a dolly, but it was clear that they were wary of Parker.
If crazy could be evaluated by appearance, Parker was certainly insane. He had shaved and oiled his head and, although he was built like a linebacker, he had plucked his eyebrows until they were as thin as a woman’s. His nose had been broken more than once and jutted to the right. He was missing teeth on both sides of his mouth, giving him the look of a jack-o’-lantern when he smiled. It was that grin that made him look so nutty and was probably what had convinced a jury that he belonged at Holloway instead of on death row.
The orderlies chose to sit as far away from Parker as protocol and security allowed. There were two of them, one a stocky black man with muscles as large as Parker’s. The other orderly looked small next to Parker, though he was of ordinary build. He had red hair that badly needed cutting, his skin had a yellowish cast and his eyes were red from lack of sleep. He was rubbing his knuckles in a nervous gesture that betrayed his fear of Parker. But he was also glaring at Parker with undisguised hatred. There was bad blood between them, for sure, and I suspected the orderly probably took every opportunity to rub his authority in Parker’s face. If so, it was a dangerous game to play. The first thing I had learned about Otis Parker, back when he was a suspect, was that he loathed authority of any kind.
Today, Parker was in charge and full of swagger. There are things I can see that others miss, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that there are things that I can feel that others miss. Parker radiated a sense of triumphant self-satisfaction. He was in fine spirits. His crazy ass smile grew even wider when he spotted Calvano and he tracked his every move as Calvano took a seat and opened his notebook.
Calvano was annoying and had bungled his fair share of cases, but under Maggie’s guidance he had ceased to be a complete idiot. He was not about to give away the reason why he was there. But the thing was – he didn’t have to. I could tell by Parker’s smirk that he knew full well why Calvano was there.
Calvano played it smart. Ignoring the issue of the murder being investigated in the valley below, Calvano began to ask Parker questions about the murders that had landed him inside Holloway. As Calvano continued to stubbornly avoid the subject of the new killing, Parker’s cool facade began to crumble. He was not good at waiting for what he wanted. If Calvano did not bring up the new murder soon, I knew Parker would tip his hand one way or the other.
Sure enough, as the minutes passed, that insane smile of his faded and Parker began to throw specific details of t
he prior crimes into his answers to Calvano, choosing details that matched what had happened to the girl below, as if daring the detective to tell him why he was really there.
‘I didn’t choke those girls like people say, but I heard whoever did kill them choked them out,’ Parker finally said. His breathing was as steady and controlled as ever, but his eyes had narrowed and his right hand kept jerking in an unconscious spasm, as if it longed to relive the experience being described. ‘If I had been the one, I’d have done it slowly. Killing them quickly is a waste. I hear tell that the real fun is watching them fight their way back to a breath. That’s when you start choking them again. The things I’ve learned in here.’
Calvano decided to provoke him. ‘I don’t give a shit if you did those murders or not. Maybe we have evidence you committed another murder and we’re going to bring you up on that. Maybe you’ve been cured just in time to be sent away for life or to get that special cocktail right up your tattooed arm.’
Parker struggled against his restraints and the orderlies tensed, ready for anything.
‘What’s your name?’ he spat at Calvano.
‘Listen, dude,’ Calvano said, rising as if he’d heard enough. ‘My name doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I’m not the sorry sack of shit who investigated you the first time. I’m not about to let you off easy this time.’
Well, excuse me.
‘I’ve got a partner who will haunt your dreams until she brings you down,’ Calvano added. ‘I don’t know what you think you’re pulling, but you won’t get away with it. Not this time.’ Calvano locked eyes with Parker. ‘You’re gonna need ten high-priced lawyers by the time I get through with you. I’m gonna wipe that stupid grin right off your face.’
Parker’s mood changed abruptly. He leaned toward Calvano and whispered, ‘Face down, crawling from the mud, marked with the symbol of a harlot’s lust. Another whore bites the dust.’ Then he threw his head back and roared with a laughter that just as suddenly subsided into giggles that filled the room with a high-pitched, jangled frenzy. That was when I saw it: a dark and terrible shadow bloomed on the wall behind Parker, one with an elongated snout, thick body and ragged wings that beat in slow motion, as if in time to Parker’s laughter.
