The Chase

by Candice Fox

  In Dallas, they exorcised a poltergeist from of an old fishing trawler. In Long Beach, they shuffled a shadow walker out of a beachfront bar. In Chicago, they spent three days clearing an attic of a menacing presence that at first she thought was the ghost of a murdered girl, but turned out to be a demon masquerading as such while it built up its power reserves. Kradle thought Christine was taking the excitable young couple who were the owners of the attic for a ride. While Christine performed for the camera, got messages from the apparent demon in faux-Latin with her eyes rolled back in her head, he took a look at the roof joists and found some loose bolts, tightened them up on the sly. After all, he’d taken some people for rides in his life too, and these trust-fund kids seemed to get a kick out of all Christine’s processes – the runes and gems she taped to the walls and the incantations she made them recite while on their knees in the middle of the living room rug. People shared the videos via the internet, and the call-outs went nuts. They spent weekends on yachts in Bermuda, talking to sea spirits, and a month in Jackson Hole, performing sage ceremonies on the log cabins of millionaires. He worked only so he could get sweaty now and then, so his hands didn’t go all soft. Her money got so good they didn’t know what to do with it.

  So, they did with it what people usually do. They bought a house in north-west Mesquite, with a bullnose awning over a little tiled porch. They’d been in town trying to convince the ghost of an old Native American lady to cross over to the other side, and Christine liked the people there and he liked the noticeboard at the supermarket covered in requests for handyman services. They spread expensive lawn all over the yard around a river-stone pool, real thick lawn that was totally impractical in the desert sun. She recruited all the neighbours as friends, because these were the kinds of people she liked to surround herself with – regulars, normies, average Joes – people who were so fascinated by her stories about ghosts and so charmed by her tasselled Miu Mius and eyeball-shaped earrings that they couldn’t possibly talk about anything but her. They held backyard barbecues and she drank too much sauvignon blanc and started calling him her ‘rougarou’, her swamp werewolf, scratching the back of his head with her nails, making the hair stick up. The way she told it, he was a backwater illiterate with yellow teeth and a beard when she found him, the Quasimodo of the bayou, a creature she alone had been clever enough to see could be taught to stand on its hind legs and wear shoes. John didn’t mind her hamming up his story to make it seem as if she’d brought in a skinny street cat, tamed it, bathed it, taught it to meow on cue and made a fine husband out of it. Christine needed people to like her, and the fact that his houseboat had been half-sunk with books when he met her wasn’t as compelling a tale.

  Everything was fine until that day in August. Sure, he’d caught a faraway look in her eye sometimes and knew in his heart she was dreaming of diagnosing screams at midnight in San Francisco or vibrations in the bathroom mirror in Tennessee. But she got by on her tarot readings, her fifty-dollar copy-and-paste email consults, her newsletter membership programs. Then one afternoon she came to him in the garage, where he was taking apart a microwave, and handed him a pregnancy test with two red lines on it. He smiled, and she burst into tears.

  CHAPTER 16

  It was clear from the contents of their haul how panicked they had been. On a picnic table that bore cigarette burns made by workers from the nearby packaging warehouse, Kradle dumped the trash bags of things they had taken from Shondra’s house. Virgin River was a blinding strip of white through the long grass. He sorted through the items while Homer broke twigs.

  The most important item, a laptop Kradle had grabbed from the living room, he set aside. He devoured three slices of white bread from the half-loaf Homer had nabbed from the kitchen, his heart still hammering as he ate. They’d managed to grab a Coke, a package of sliced ham, a jar of cookies, three candy bars and a box of raw pasta in the way of food. Other supplies included two cell phones, a kitchen knife and three dollars in cash. A hairbrush, a sock, a label maker and a ball of twine had also come along for the journey in the trash bags, gathered up in the sheer madness of knowing Shondra was half-naked and screaming through her gag and running god-knows-where to get help.

  ‘How the fuck did it happen?’ Homer was shaking his head, his fist full of tiny twig pieces.

  ‘You know how it happened.’ Kradle pushed open the laptop and sat down. ‘I ripped off her tape and she grabbed the clock radio from the nightstand, smacked me in the head with it. Jumped out the window. Simple as that.’

  ‘Why did you take her tape off?’

  ‘I needed to so I could . . .’ Kradle looked at the lake. ‘You know. God. Man, you’re making me feel like an idiot here.’

  ‘You are an idiot,’ Homer said. Kradle watched him. There was a meanness in his eyes for a moment that made all the air leave Kradle’s lungs and the fine hairs on his arms stand on end, his primal warning system kicking in. And then it was gone. The tiger in the tall grass just a trick of the light. ‘Sorry. Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that, buddy. That wasn’t right.’

  Kradle nodded, tried to look chastened.

  ‘Women have got away from me before.’ Homer shrugged. ‘It happens.’

  They sorted through the clothes they had managed to snatch from the floor and closet. Two of the shirts were obviously Shondra’s, and two must have belonged to the boyfriend. Kradle pulled on a blue T-shirt with a logo he didn’t recognise, while Homer stretched a black Nevada Wolf Pack baseball jersey over his bulky frame. Disregarding the filthy jeans and boots, they might have been two regular people standing by the water behind a warehouse.

  ‘What’s the computer for?’ Homer asked.

  ‘I’ve got to get numbers for my guys. Look up their details. See if I can call in some help.’

  ‘You didn’t stay in touch while you were on the inside?’

  ‘No,’ Kradle said.

  ‘Why not?’ Homer asked. Kradle rubbed his neck. ‘I thought you mob guys got an easy ride in prison. I thought you took care of each other.’

  Kradle tried a new strategy: ignoring the questions, rather than trying to provide answers for things he couldn’t account for. Clam up. It had made the detectives go away for a while in the seventh or eighth hour of his questioning after Christine and Mason and Audrey were murdered. Homer wandered down to the water and Kradle started to breathe freely again.

  He opened the wi-fi app on the computer, the way he’d seen his lawyer do in the Pronghorn visitors’ centre, and fished around for a free internet source. He found a signal coming from the packaging warehouse, clicked it and crossed his fingers. When the icon went green he opened a window and started googling.

  A search on Homer Carrington brought up hundreds of articles about the breakout at Pronghorn. Kradle shifted the parameters to exclude links that had been posted within the past twenty-four hours. All the things he didn’t want to see flooded onto the screen. Naked girls lying in desolate fields, their bodies looking strangely deflated and impossibly white in the flattened grass, faces turned towards grasping, lifeless hands. There was an image of a missing person poster, the young woman grinning at the camera. Big brown eyes. A labrador puppy cradled in her arms. Crime scene photographs of a car abandoned mid-tyre-change in a shopping mall parking lot, still up on the jack, the tyre lying on its side. There was an old couple lying side by side on floral carpet, the coffee table knocked over, the front door of the house ajar. The most recent news article was a week old, headed Attack on Guard: North Nevada Strangler Rehoused at Pronghorn. Kradle clicked. A CCTV still image of Homer in a prison hallway – not Pronghorn, somewhere older. The huge serial killer had his hands around the throat of a small, plump male guard. Kradle clicked out of the article, scrolled down, reading headlines.

  NN Strangler Homer Carrington Pleads Insanity

  Carrington Sentenced to Death

  Carrington Victims May Be Dozens, Expert Says

  Carrington Trips to Mexico May Reveal More Victi
ms

  Twelve-year-old Missing Girl Linked to NN Strangler

  Kradle knew he didn’t have much time before the cell phone and laptop both became weapons against him. When Shondra found help, she would describe him and Homer to the police, and it wouldn’t be long until someone somewhere decided they sounded just similar enough to two of the top-classified fugitives that they should prioritise tracking them down. He had minutes, not hours. He punched in a name that echoed loudly into the dark halls of his past.

  Patrick Frapport.

  Mentions of the detective online were scarce. No social media. Images of the heavy-set, bald police officer were also rare. A blurry image of him receiving a medal from some police boss. A profile shot of him sitting in a courtroom, waiting to testify, the bulge under his chin tucked uncomfortably into the collar of his shirt, red raw from being recently shaved. Kradle read quickly over an article announcing Frapport’s promotion in the Mesquite Sun, and clicked on a picture of the man and his slender wife, her the decidedly friendlier-looking of the two, with warm, rosy cheeks and a sharp brunette bob cut.

  Shelley Frapport. Kradle clicked on her Instagram page. He knew Instagram only from television shows he’d watched inside prison, couldn’t navigate the site for precious minutes, trying to figure how it worked. Unlike her husband, Shelley’s online activities were full of breadcrumbs leading to her location. He recognised the caramel-leather-lined booths of Eden’s Diner in one of the happy selfies of the woman, and noticed a slice of a public pool with a big yellow water slide in the background of another. He knew that pool, had taken Mason there when the boy was young for the birthday party of a schoolfriend. For a moment Kradle was swamped with memories: standing with other dads in the shade of the kiosk, Mason tugging his arm, begging for candy money, a puddle of water pooling at his feet and his black hair plastered to his fleshy forehead. The pool and the diner put Shelley Frapport in the neighbourhood of Beaver Dam. When Kradle clicked on the second-most-recent image he saw Shelley Frapport sitting on a porch swing. #afternoon #suburbanbliss #pinotgrigio. In the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, a little brass number was affixed to the front fence of the house. Number seven. Kradle stared hard at the image, trying to determine the angle of the sun, the style of house, anything that could provide a hint as to where it lay. In the background of the image, over Shelley’s shoulder and past the side of the house, he thought he could see the top of a structure in the distance. A red-and-green water tower.

  ‘My seatbelt was undone,’ Homer said.

  Kradle looked up. The serial killer was standing just near him, the big knife from Shondra’s kitchen clutched in his fist, the blade glinting in the light bouncing off the lake.

  ‘What?’

  ‘In the plane,’ Homer said. ‘I remember buckling it. I remember shoving the buckle closed, hearing it click, pulling on it to make sure it was tight. It stuck in my head because at the time I was thinking to myself, What if this guy is lying? What if he can’t fly? But you weren’t lying about being able to fly. You were lying about being my friend.’

  Kradle felt all the blood rush out of his head, face, neck, as if a plug had been pulled somewhere and all the life was draining downwards at a dizzying speed. For a moment he just gripped the table and stared at the man holding the knife.

  ‘There’s no money, is there?’ Homer asked.

  ‘No,’ Kradle said.

  ‘Because you’re not a mob guy.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘You let that woman get away, didn’t you,’ Homer said. It wasn’t a question. ‘And if you’d had the chance, you were going to push me out of that plane.’

  Kradle didn’t answer. All his focus was on his body, his limbs, his breath, keeping the blood flowing, keeping his wits about him. But for all his focus, all his planning, he was tired, dehydrated, probably concussed, and half-crazed with terror that at any moment he was going to be seized again by any one of the half-a-dozen government agencies that were after him. The fear that he was going to wake up back in his cell on the row, staring into the deep dark forever, was suffocating. So when Homer lunged at him, Kradle dove sideways off the bench, staggered backwards. But the big man’s arm seemed to have infinite reach, and he wasn’t fast enough to move out of that reach before it was coming forwards, enveloping him, consuming him. That big arm that had swept around so many throats, those killer hands, those knuckles misshapen and scarred and scraped by fingernails trying to claw them away, including his own only hours ago. Kradle felt the blade slash through his arm as if it was butter.

  ‘So, let me get this straight.’ Celine folded her arms. ‘You had a grab all set up for Kradle, and a dog blew your cover?’

  She stood in the parking lot of the Mesquite Police Department office, which seemed to have become a kind of field command centre for fugitive-related activity. In the shade of a huge navy-blue US Marshals intelligence van, Celine addressed an audience of four men – two sheriff’s deputies and two marshals, who had reluctantly turned from their maps, laptops, charts and radios to examine the two interlopers in their midst. Keeps was trying to disappear into a nearby bush, the recently released felon standing as close to it as he possibly could while sheltering a cigarette against the breeze.

  ‘Sorry.’ The biggest marshal flicked his head at Celine. ‘Who are you again?’

  ‘I’m Captain Celine Osbourne, death row supervisor from Pronghorn Correctional.’

  ‘So you’re not a cop, a marshal or a fed,’ the guy said. Celine didn’t answer. ‘Captain Osbourne, we appreciate your interest in this matter. But my line to you is the same as it is to all civilians. We’re doing the best we can to round up any fugitives who might come into town, but—’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Lowakowski.’ The guy gave a heavy sigh, looked at his colleagues. You hearing this?

  ‘Lowakowski,’ Celine said. ‘Those journalists over there by the vending machine just told me you had John Kradle in your hands and you fumbled it. I want to know what you have on his current location.’

  ‘Please step back, Captain Osbourne.’ Lowakowski put up a fleshy palm. ‘You’re in an operational area here.’

  ‘The guy who was with him,’ Celine said, scrolling through apps on her phone to find her saved photos. She held up a picture of Burke David Schmitz. ‘Did he look like this?’

  ‘I can’t reveal—’

  ‘Or this?’ Celine held up a picture of Homer Carrington. The marshals glanced at the sheriffs. Celine nodded, then walked over to where Keeps was trying to turn himself inside out to avoid being looked at by the swarm of authorities.

  ‘It’s bad news,’ Celine said.

  ‘Oh, excellent.’

  ‘Kradle has Homer Carrington with him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The North Nevada Strangler,’ Celine said.

  ‘Okay, look,’ Keeps said. He took Celine’s car keys out of her pocket. ‘This is where I bounce. All I wanted was a goddamn burger and a beer, and now somehow I’m miles from where I wanna be, chauffeuring your ass around while you chase Hannibal Lecter. I’m not going to end up in a hole in the ground putting lotion on myself. I’m done.’

  ‘If you’ve got such a big problem with being the driver, I’ll drive,’ Celine said. ‘We’ll drop by a bodega and I’ll grab a Red Bull and you can get a beer and then you’ll be halfway to—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Keeps, I need—’

  ‘You need therapy,’ he said. He tapped his temple with his finger. ‘You need your head checked out, because you ain’t a cop, okay? You don’t fight crime. You don’t solve mysteries. You don’t hunt fugitives. You’re a jailer, okay? Man, I’ve seen some egos on screws in my life, but this takes the cake.’

  ‘Egos?’ Celine scoffed.

  ‘Yeah,’ Keeps said. ‘You’re acting as if this is all your doing. Like you let them out and you’ve got to get them back again. This. Ain’t. About. You!’

  Celine couldn’t s
peak. She stared at her boots on the asphalt and felt far from home in an upside-down world.

  ‘All I’ve been doing for the past fifteen years is keeping them boxed up, away from the world. Keeping people safe from them. This is me,’ she said. ‘This is who I am.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’ Keeps eased smoke from between his lips.

  Celine held up her phone. ‘You happen to notice how many people are not calling me on this thing?’ she asked. ‘A normal person finds herself at the centre of a history-making fuck-up at work, and she has all kinds of people calling her. Friends. Family. Why aren’t people calling me and asking if I’m okay? What’s happening. What I’m doing about it. If I need help.’

  ‘Because you don’t have any friends or family.’

  ‘Why have I got a goddamn inmate I don’t know from Adam helping me out on this thing?’ She gestured to him.

  ‘Because you promised me beer.’

  ‘Death row is what I’ve got, Keeps, and I’m just trying to get it back.’

  Keeps laughed, and a puff of smoke came out of his mouth that was snatched away by the breeze. ‘Look, I’ve heard guys talk like that on the inside. They spend so much time surrounded by prison walls they start to think that’s all there is. You’re just as institutionalised as I am.’

  ‘It’s more than that,’ she began. But Celine didn’t know how to tell him that driving home at night to her empty, immaculate house, knowing that all the men she was responsible for were locked away safely, was the warmest feeling in the world. That she liked to think that every minute, every hour they weren’t on the street causing more pain to the people whose lives they had already devastated was due in part to her. That, somewhere out there, there were men and women and children going to bed safely because she spent her days checking green lights, turning keys in locks, punching codes into alarm systems, watching shadows of humans move about on security cameras. There were men on Celine’s row who had climbed into the bedrooms of little girls in the dark hours and carried them away from their warm sheets, and their bones were still unlocated, their faces remembered only in photographs. There were men on her row who had wrung the life from desperate women working the streets, who had watched from the roadside as cars with whole families in them burned, who had fired shots on panicked crowds from on high, indiscriminately cutting down souls. And there was John Kradle, who had one day decided that his family didn’t deserve to go on living.