The Death Collectors

by J. A. Kerley

  “Listen, Mr -”

  “Ease out your ID, two-finger scissors. Move toward the weapon, you’ve bought yourself a headstone.”

  I plucked out my badge and ID, flapped it open, held it facing the rear.

  “OK,” he said. “Drop your drawers and fart ‘Moon River’.”

  “What?”

  I turned to find a man in his mid to late sixties, middle height, slender build. His eyes were pewter beneath a flop-brim hat. His shortsleeved shirt was plaid, his arms tanned even deeper than his face. Reading glasses hung from a yellow cord around his neck. Paint-spattered khakis fell to battered running shoes. He was leaning against a tree with his arms crossed. He didn’t have a gun.

  I felt my face redden with embarrassment and anger. “You were in the truck?”

  “I heard you coming and jumped inside. A smarter fellow would have checked there.” He shook his head. “You got a few things to learn yet, son.”

  “Your name would be one of them.”

  “Former Alabama State Police Detective Jacob C. Willow,” he said. “Follow me, Ryder. You look like you could use a drink.”

  We went inside. He ambled to the kitchen and left me standing in the living room. It was bright and sizeable, a small kitchen-dining area to the rear. I studied a nearby bookshelf; tomes on fishing and boating mingled with a dozen or so biographies. Three running feet of shelf was dedicated to true-crime volumes, hardcover mostly. A thick accordion file nestled against a copy of Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi’s account of the Manson Family murders. There was a low table between the couch and a couple of chairs. Willow reappeared with two glasses of lemonade.

  “Sit yourself down,” he said, pointing to the couch. “Don’t wait on me to be polite.”

  Willow handed me a glass and raised a gray eyebrow. “I take it you’re here because some old coot made a twenty-second call about a death in a motel, right? Are your leads that slim, Detective? Is it that kind of case?”

  “Maybe I should ask the questions here,” I said, fairly pleasantly, considering I’d been bushwhacked by an old coot.

  He appraised me with his eyes, nodded. “Fair enough. But first let an old timer establish his credentials…”

  He took the chair across from me. Jacob Willow was sixty-seven years old. He’d been with the State Police for twenty-five years, seven in uniform, the rest as an investigator, primarily in the lower third of Alabama. No one had ever offered an administrative position, knowing he wouldn’t have accepted. His retirement party had been a dozen years back and he’d left after thirty minutes. It took him three minutes to sketch his background and he signaled completion by rising and beginning to pace. I cleared my throat.

  “Art, Mr Willow. Remember? It’s the word that brought me here. You haven’t used it once.”

  “I wanted to establish my history, my credentials. It’s important.”

  “I’m backgrounded. Now I need foreground.”

  “The news reports of the dead hooker mentioned candles. I needed to know if you also found a piece of artwork.”

  “I’m obliged to tell you nothing. I will tell you no art was found in the room.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “The best technician at the Alabama Forensics Bureau worked the room. Nada on the art side.” I didn’t mention the art that dropped into Lydia Barstow’s hand, still considering it coincidence. “How about telling me why art is so important to you?”

  He walked slowly to his window, looked over the Bay. A wavering strand of pelicans skimmed past his dock.

  “I’ve been watching for things like this. Watching for years.”

  “For a dead prostitute tied to artwork?”

  “For Marsden Hexcamp to resurface.”

  The name was familiar, but vague, like a faded notation on an old calendar.

  “Hexcamp? Serial killer? Back in the sixties?”

  Willow walked to the shelf and retrieved the accordion folder, pulling a file from it, thick with what appeared to be newsprint. “Hexcamp’s first killing was a hooker. He left candles in the room. The similarity struck me.”

  “When was this murder, Mr Willow?”

  “July 17, 1970.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “This Hexcamp, he still alive?”

  “He was shot dead on May 15, 1972.”

  I resisted rolling my eyes. “Over a generation ago, Mr Willow. Maybe it’s no longer rele-”

  He tossed me the file. “A taste of poison from the past, Detective: news clippings from the Hexcamp days.”

  I politely studied a few articles, some with photographs. Though headlines repeated words like Maniac and Perverted, Hexcamp looked as threatening as a model for The Gap. The final and largest headline was Mysterious “Crying” Woman Kills Hexcamp, Commits Suicide in Courtroom.

  I said, “From what I see, the articles are long on speculation and short on fact. Sensationalism. Hexcamp and several of his followers do seem seriously deranged.”

  “The articles only hint at the madness. He killed slowly and with glee, claiming it was research into the last moment of life, the final beauty. And yet, he moved easily through society, having all the social graces, utterly charming, a gifted conversationalist, an artist who studied at a world-famous art school in Paris, the academy of something or other. The only American to win a full scholarship there, so I’ve heard. A fine mind powering an immense ego, horizon to horizon. Unfortunately, his charisma and good looks were in roughly the same proportion. He drew women and men like a flame pulls moths. But inside he was a dark force, a hellish mutation.”

  “Sociopathic. There’s a lot of it going around.”

  “The newspaper articles don’t come close to explaining the darkness festering in his brain, Detective. Or his effect on others. The effect may be lethal, even to this day.”

  I said, “Marsden Hexcamp is as dead as a sausage, Mr Willow. A difficult condition from which to be deadly.”

  Willow took a deep breath, dry-washed his face with his palms. “There’s a rumor Marsden Hexcamp kept a collection of his thoughts and deeds. Like an artist’s portfolio. A visual distillation of his thoughts on…death. It’s rumored his artwork is highly prized and moves in a small circle of people who revere its message. It’s hard to pinpoint - no one talks to the public about it.”

  “Twice I heard the word rumor.”

  Willow sighed, sat back. “There’s no solid confirmation such a collection actually exists.”

  “People obviously believe it does. Do you?”

  “I’ve heard people claim they held pieces from Hexcamp’s portfolio. They were adamant.”

  “Folklore often blooms from psychotic killers, Mr Willow. Think of Jack the Ripper. Or Jesse James, society turning the venomous into the misunderstood. It adds to the mystique, provides a thrill.”

  “I know that. But I also knew something about these people. They were, are…afflicted, in their way, but not given to exaggeration.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Collectors of serial-killer memorabilia.”

  Such folks weren’t unknown to me. My haphazard college career took me at last to the Psychology Department at the University of Alabama, where part of my study involved traveling to prisons and mental institutions throughout the South, interviewing some of the most horrifying psychopaths and sociopaths on the face of the planet. Nearly every one of them had a “fan club”: sick men and women who clamored for communications and souvenirs from celebrity murderers.

  “I’ve met a couple of them,” I admitted. “A guy who collected scribblings from incarcerated crazies. A woman who not only did the same, but proposed to every killer who sent her something. They were small, pathetic people. Sick, but harmless.”

  Willow nodded. “That’s the bulk of them. There’s another contingent - no less sick, but far wealthier, able to indulge themselves, to collect more esoteric and expensive memorabilia.”

  “Like what? David Berkowitz’s high chair?”

  “Ite
ms from the scene. Or used in the killing itself. A bloody hammer. A ligature. Clothing is big. If it stinks with shit from a death-released sphincter, so much the better.”

  I studied Willow’s face. “You’re not kidding, are you?”

  “I wish.”

  The typical homicide scene came to my mind: all involved items bagged, tagged, and locked away in the evidence room.

  “There can’t be much of that stuff around,” I said.

  Willow shot me a crooked smile. “Making it all the more valuable.”

  “Where does it come from?”

  “The trial ends, the evidence goes to a property room. Money changes hands. Pieces slip out.”

  I checked my watch; I’d put two hours into this already, another hour before I’d be back in Mobile. I stood, said thanks for the hospitality, jiggered the stiffness from my knees, and headed outside. Willow dogged my heels to the car and watched me climb inside. He stared through the open door, waiting for me to say something. I settled on the truth.

  “I don’t particularly know how to end this conversation, Mr Willow. It’s been interesting.”

  He frowned. “Interesting is what people say when they don’t want to call someone crazy.”

  I fired up the engine. “I’m not downplaying anything you’ve told me. All I could do today was listen. You were a detective. What would you do in my shoes?”

  “Keep an open mind,” he said, pushing the door shut.

  I stopped in Willow’s drive just short of the road and called the department. No news on our Jane Doe. Harry’d found nothing on large candle sales; not surprisingly, he added, since, “every fourth store in the world sells the damn things.”

  I turned west on Fort Morgan Highway and drove to the ferry, catching the timing perfectly and pulling on board just before the ramp lifted. The ferry went from Fort Morgan to Dauphin Island, crossing the battleground of the Battle of Mobile Bay. Wreckage from that fierce conflict still ghosted the waters beneath the waves, and no matter how hot the day, I never made the crossing without suppressing a shiver.

  I’d had my own form of passage over the Bay as well. Three years back, long after Jeremy had slain our father with a hunting knife, I found the weapon hidden in our family’s basement. I tucked it beneath my shirt and rode the ferry across the Bay. Midpoint in the journey I tossed the knife overboard, figuring the water had seen so much violence, one more small memento of horror would not be noticed. I’d felt better from that moment on, somehow cleaner.

  In my dreams I have thrown that knife away a hundred times.

  Since the ferry landed less than a mile from my home, I went to grab lunch before taking the strange tale of Marsden Hexcamp to Harry. Turning the corner to my place, I saw a car in my drive, white and nondescript. Someone was sitting on the picnic table beneath my house, staring out at the long blue of the Gulf.

  I knew that form. It was Ava.

  She’d returned.

  Her eyes startled when she turned to the sound of my wheels over shells. My heart dropped; it was evident she didn’t want to see me. The half-hearted wave confirmed it. I got out, walked beneath the house.

  “I thought you were in Fort Wayne,” I said.

  “I flew down to finish a few chores, legal things. I’m renting out my house down here until I…decide what to do with it. I rented a small place in Fort Wayne. It’s small, but windows everywhere, light. It’s by a place called Lakeside Park…”

  She was trying for cheery and up-tempo. I stared the notion away. “You weren’t going to tell me you were in town?”

  She closed her eyes. “Not this time, while we’re -”

  “While we’re what? Breaking up? Having a trial separation? What are we doing? Tell me.”

  Her eyes watered. A tear fell down her cheek. I wanted to reach out and brush it away, feel the warmth of her face, her hair. I had never felt this way about a woman; it was a foreign land and no one had taught me a word of its secret language. And yet somewhere deep within, I felt a sense of betrayal at her having kept me distant while she made decisions I’d thought were ours, not just hers.

  I said, “I can’t make sense of this, Ava.”

  “Maybe there isn’t any. Yet.”

  “I know you have horrible pictures in your mind. They fade. It takes time.”

  “Nothing’s fading, Carson. It’s getting louder. It terrifies me.”

  “A madman fixated on you. That was the sum of your involvement. Fate selected you and you can’t change it. No matter how fast or far you…” I caught myself, but not fast enough.

  “You were about to say ‘run’, weren’t you? No matter how far or fast I run?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes it does.”

  I jammed my hands in my pockets and watched the waves fall and retreat. “It’s not important.”

  “Don’t patronize me. Tell me the truth.” There was a note of anger in her voice. If she wanted the truth…

  “Here today, gone tomorrow. Sounds like running to me.”

  “That’s cold, Carson.”

  I felt a hard prickle of anger in my gut. “Cold is telling me you were leaving after you’d already decided to. Cold is cutting me out. Cold is showing up here when you were sure I wouldn’t be home.”

  Three days of frustration burned from my mouth so fast I didn’t hear it until it was over. “Just what was between you and me, Ava? A handy-dandy little pick-me-up? An extended nooner? Do I look different now you’re off the bottle? Hi, I’m Carson Ryder. I’d like you to meet my girlfriend, Ava Davanelle, but she sobered up and ran away.”

  I wanted to provoke anger from her, hardedged and visceral, a volcanic eruption of emotion that might carry with it a moment to understand, an explanation. Instead, Ava looked at the sea. Her eyes were greener than wet emeralds.

  “I’m leaving now,” she said. Her shaking hands started to cross between us, wanting to hug, to hold. Needing understanding, or just comfort.

  I kept my hands pocketed and turned toward the water, like there was something more interesting in the waves. She started crying and I listened to the sound of her retreating footsteps and the closing of the car door. I turned when she was a block gone and moving away.

  “What did you come here for?” I yelled. “Just to look at the damned water?”

  And then even the sound of her engine was gone.

  Chapter 8

  While a child I became a mental compartmentalizer out of necessity; good things up front, bad things in back. I jammed Ava into a far corner of my head, put on my work face and met Harry at the department. The tire on our regular ride was fixed, and while he drove us to the motor pool to exchange vehicles, I described my visit with Willow.

  He snorted. “Art coming back to haunt people, kill them? Sounds shaky, Cars.”

  “It’s a distance thing. It sounds strange here, but he makes it kind of interesting.”

  Harry dodged a bicyclist, drove up on the curb, banged back down. “Did he tell you who was doing this killing? People from the past, maybe?”

  “No. Most are dead, the important ones anyway. Willow thought it might have something to do with collectors of serial-killer memorabilia.”

  “Scrawled pages from prison, twisted little drawings? We’ve both seen that stuff.”

  “Willow’s talking about folks who collect grimmer stuff, like relics from crime scenes. Or bizarre, but high-caliber, art.”

  “Like this Hexcamp supposedly made.”

  I shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Yet there’s no solid proof, no evidence whatsoever, of anything. It’s just this old cop’s theories. Theories based mainly on rumors, no less. What’s the tie to today?”

  “Hexcamp’s first vic was a hooker. Evidently he and his jolly campers left her strangled to death in a candlelit motel room.”

  Harry gunned the engine, blew by a beer truck so close I could have snatched a sixpack. He said, “That’s what set the old cop off?”

  �
�I think so.”

  “It’s candles, Carson. Not real rare, right?”

  Ritual killers were often attracted to candles for various symbolic reasons. They were also, unfortunately, attracted to prostitutes, whose lifestyle made them among the easiest human targets on the face of the planet.

  “No,” I admitted. Willow’s tale was starting to sound eccentric to me, too.

  “It’s obsession, Carson; at least that’s how it feels so far. A case gets in a guy’s blood, goes unsolved, or he thinks it didn’t fall right. When he retires it turns into his life, just keeps replaying it.”

  “You don’t think anything’s there?”

  “I feel for the old guy, admire his devotion. But it sounds like obsession, pure and simple.”

  We pulled into the motor pool and went inside to pick up the car. It wasn’t much cooler inside than outside. Ranks of cruisers and unmarkeds waited in various stages of repair. The smell of paint and solvents soaked the air. The workers had pneumatic tools, painfully loud, a jackhammer concerto. A fiftyish black man with a blue uniform walked over, rubbing his hand on a rag. Embroidered across the pocket of his shirt was Rafael.

  He said, “Hey, Harry, whatcha need?”

  I said, “We have the sky-blue Maserati with the flame decals behind the wheel wells. You were putting in the microwave oven.”

  Harry sighed from beside me, gave the man look-what-I’m-burdened-with eyes. “It’s the dark blue Crown Vic that came in yesterday, Rafe. Flat tire.”

  Rafael nodded my way. “Your partner there, Harry - he make a lot of enemies being funny, does he?”

  “Don’t know. No one’s ever heard him say anything funny. Why?”

  Rafael come-hithered a forefinger at us and walked away, skinnying between two cruisers masked for painting. “Walk on over thisaway. Be careful not to rub up against any of the Maseratis.”

  We followed carefully, avoiding paint, stepping over various pneumatic tools and hoses, making our way to the rear of the cavernous building. An unmounted tire was propped up on a workbench. Rafael spun the tire toward us, slapped it with his palm.

  “Tire was cut in the sidewall. The slit’s about as wide as a hunting knife.”