by Somer Canon
“Okay,” Sgt. Blaniar said, leaning forward so that his elbows were on his thighs. His eyes were wide and full of concern. “I need you to recount that for me. Take your time.”
I didn’t want to recount that part. At all. I didn’t want to have to put into words what had happened to me at the hands of that gentle man. A gentle man who was under the spell of a lunatic fairy with a superiority complex. I dug deep and made myself tell Sgt. Blaniar about the hair pulling, the punches to the jaw, the raping, and the biting. I felt my throat tighten up when I talked about the rape even though I was doing my best to tell it in the coldest, most disconnected way possible. The fear that I felt when he started tearing away my clothes never left me. It sort of pooled in my being and seeped into tiny cracks to hide, always there, always punching me in the gut at the memory of it all.
“Can you tell me who stayed with me while we waited for the ambulance to come?” I asked Sgt. Blaniar when I had told the tale of my attack. He raised his eyebrows in surprise and then appeared to be thinking, trying to recount who it was he saw in there kneeling next to me when he walked into that room.
“I believe that it was Adam Wetzel who stayed with you. Why?” he asked.
“He was very kind to me,” I whispered, tears flooding my eyes. “I was going to send him some flowers.”
“Well that makes me happy to hear,” Sgt. Blaniar said to me, a small smile causing the corners of his eyes to crinkle. “I have one more question for you and then I’ll let you get some rest. There was a handgun in Mr. Knight’s living room that had been fired three times. Mr. Knight had traces of gunpowder on his hand and wrist and that is consistent with the theory that he had fired the gun recently. Do you know anything about that?”
I sure as hell did.
“No,” I lied. “I didn’t even see a gun. But I wasn’t looking around much, not after he started raving at me.”
“Alright,” Sgt. Blaniar said, putting his pad and pen away, standing up. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Cunningham. Get well soon.”
“Sergeant?” I said. “Could you wait a second?”
He stopped and looked down at me. I propped myself up on my elbows to try to look more dignified.
“My work isn’t done yet,” I said seriously. “Will it be alright to get the information on all of this so that I can close this file on my website?”
His mouth dropped open and he frowned down at me in disbelief.
“You have to be tenacious to make it in my line of work,” I said sheepishly. “Just because I got bit in the ass on this one doesn’t mean my job is complete.”
He scoffed at me and started for the door. When he got to the door, he turned back to me and regarded me for a moment.
“This will be the thing that makes you,” he said before leaving.
I kept hearing Grenadine’s parting shot at me the night before and I understood exactly what she meant finally seeing that my actions were already in motion to make her plan work out just as she wanted.
“How bad do you want it?”
Pretty badly, apparently.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I was released from the hospital the very next day. As far as the hospital knew, I was going to Parkersburg to my mother’s cramped, smoke filled trailer, but that wasn’t happening and my mom knew it. I promised to stay in touch and to take her out to dinner before I went home to Reading, and my mom went away from me quietly and beaten. Grenadine’s words to me about my being a bad daughter hit me when my mother left that hospital with her shoulders slumped forward and her head hanging. A momentary stab of guilt hit me, but I was again overcome with the need to make the most of my position. Mom would have to wait.
Anais was able to get a large suite at another nearby hotel and we holed up in there, talking for hours about the version of events to which I was committing myself. Anais was horrified that, according to the web of bullshit I was weaving, I had managed to find and bang the very murderer I had travelled down there to profile. It was true that my luck wasn’t reliable or even plentiful, as Anais kept saying, and given that I had been dealing with Grenadine pretty much the entire time I was there and not just having carefree sex with Terry, that was more than enough proof for me that I was carrying an empty bucket when it came to good luck.
“I want to go ahead and write my next entry on the site,” I told Anais suddenly. It was still my first day out of the hospital and Anais frowned at me.
“It can wait. I’ll update social media and say an emergency has come up and that it will be a few more days until you are able to submit a new entry,” she said to me sternly.
“No.” I said back. “This is important, Ana. I am not beaten, and I do not want to look beaten. I’ll look like a bad judge of character maybe, but think about it! This is going to blow us up. I was almost his next victim! We’ll take pictures of my face and body and I’ll write about my harrowing ordeal and this will secure our reputation. Nobody will accuse us of fan-girling killers anymore.”
“The hell they won’t!” Ana shot back. “Girl, you were fucking the killer! People are going to say that it was our foolishness and need to chase this shit that got you raped and beaten up. And Chris, I don’t know about you publishing about being raped and beaten. I’m really not comfortable posting pictures of your face either, mami.”
“We do it to other people all the time,” I said calmly. “How can we possibly look like we’re unfeeling and opportunistic if we treat my attack like we would any other?”
“We’ll look opportunistic because we’ll be profiting off of you being raped and beaten!” Anais shouted, throwing her hands in the air in frustration.
“We profit off of the suffering and beatings and rapings and even murders of total strangers, Ana.” I was sounding frustrated too, so I sighed and looked Anais in the eyes. “I’ll handle it with grace and care. I promise. This isn’t going to be a ‘look at me!’ kind of thing. I wouldn’t want that, and this is going to be public knowledge anyhow, you know. I want this file finished and closed.”
Anais stared at me, chewing her lower lip like she usually did when she was contemplating a hard call. I cocked an eyebrow at her, wincing when it pulled too hard on a cut on my forehead. I saw Anais wince at my wincing and I winked at her, causing her to scoff at me, smiling indulgently.
“This still makes me uncomfortable,” she said, making me smile knowing that I’d won that tug of war.
“Welcome to the other side where it’s about more than page hits,” I said, feeling stupid because I was very much making my being a victim all about the page hits. It was Grenadine’s gift to me and damn it, I was going to use it.
My cell phone started ringing and I was surprised to see that it was a call from Sgt. Blaniar.
“Hello, Ms. Cunningham,” he greeted me after I answered. “I’m calling you personally to let you know that Terry Knight has tried to commit suicide. I need you to come down here and have a sit-down with me today, would that be alright?”
Oh shit, I thought.
“Sure,” I answered confidently. “When is a good time?”
“The sooner the better, please,” he said.
“I’m leaving now,” I said.
Anais was looking at me quizzically and when I told her what Sgt. Blaniar had said to me, she offered to drive, which I had to accept anyway because I was still medicated, and driving wasn’t safe. The drive from the hotel to the police station took about 15 minutes and Anais was silent the whole time, emanating tension and anxiety. I was glad to get out of a cramped car with her and leave her in a seating area while I was escorted into an intimidating interrogation room. Sgt. Blaniar was waiting for me looking even more tired than the previous day.
“Tell me what happened,” I blurted even before sitting down.
“He tried hanging himself with his bedsheets,” he answered me blandly. “He was caught, but we aren’t equipped to deal with that kind of thing here.”
“What kind of thing? Surely, he’s
not the first guy to get locked up to try that,” I said, confused.
“Ms. Cunningham,” Sgt. Blaniar said, leaning forward and extending his steepled hands closer to me, “we’ve had to move Mr. Knight to a mental health facility. He’s being sedated and locked down.”
“Because of suicide?” I asked, aghast. “Hasn’t this state caught up with the times yet? You can’t treat competent people that way! You don’t lock people away like that just because their will broke!”
Sgt. Blaniar regarded me for a moment, making me very self-conscious about my badly bruised face.
“I want you to watch something,” he said, getting up and leaving the room. When he returned, he turned on the television in the room.
On the screen sat Sgt. Blaniar, another man I didn’t recognize, and Terry. Terry was handcuffed to a loop sticking out of the tabletop and he was slumped over, head hanging.
“Mr. Knight, can you tell me about the shed in your backyard?” Blaniar asked on the tape.
“It was clean.” Terry muttered. “I keep it clean. Always clean. No dirt. No dust. Can’t have mice. No, mice are dirty. I never liked Disney because of that mouse. No mice. Who says they’re cute? They’re not.”
“There was blood and bone all over that shed, Mr. Knight,” Blaniar said. “Can you tell me about it?”
“Clean. I keep it clean. I paid cash for it and I wouldn’t let it get dirty. Her eyes hurt me. Her eyes ate me. I’m eaten. I’m gone. You don’t see me. I’m gone.”
I saw the two officers glance at each other and shift in their seats.
“Did you know Martin Hamrick or Matthew Hart?” Blaniar asked.
“Eaten,” Terry repeated.
“Did you know them?” Blaniar repeated.
“I AM EATEN. GONE. EATEN,” Terry screamed, jerking upright and pulling at the chains that attached him to the table.
The two officers jumped in surprise at his outburst but remained seated.
“Did you murder Stephanie D’Agostino?” Blaniar asked. “Did you cut her hands off and put them in the ASPCA building?”
“She overpaid for manicures,” Terry said, hanging his head again.
“Is that why you murdered her?” Blaniar asked.
“There are too many sound waves. It’s the metal. Metal is bad for people to be surrounded by like this. I am consumed. Again,” Terry answered.
Blaniar turned off the television and resumed his seat across from me, looking deeply into me again.
“We questioned him for three hours and he made no more sense the entire time than he did there,” he said.
“You think he’s faking it?” I asked, my hands wringing on the tabletop.
“He has no history of mental health problems, not even for a prescription for an anti-depressant. We have dozens of people here on the force who knew him as a very average guy. He wasn’t sullen or withdrawn and he never displayed anything but typical behavior. Now, I know that I’m grabbing for stereotypes to explain this, but I’ve never seen someone go from seeming normal to ranting like that and making absolutely no sense quite as fast,” Blaniar answered.
“You don’t think he’s faking,” I said. “Is that it?”
“Never mind what I think,” he answered, waving a hand at me. “You are someone who saw him more intimately than his coworkers. I want to know if you ever noticed him come unhinged like that before. Did he ever drop off and stop making sense around you?”
“You mean other than when he raped me and beat the hell out of me?” I asked. I wasn’t going to shy away from what had happened to me. I was wearing it all over my face anyhow, so I thought that I might as well have been frank about it. My frankness made Sgt. Blaniar wince and shift in his seat.
“No,” I said. “He was always this really polite man who never once said a curse word and always offered to pay for meals even when I was the one who suggested going out. He never, ever struck me as a violent person and he sure as hell didn’t strike me as a person capable of all of this.”
Blaniar was nodding his head while looking down at the table.
“Can I see him?” I asked suddenly. Sgt. Blaniar’s head snapped up and he looked at me in shock. “I want to interview him,” I continued flatly.
“Absolutely not,” he answered just as flatly.
“I have rights,” I came back, indignantly. “All I need is the permission of either Terry or his next of kin.”
“And I can make sure that you don’t get that!” Blaniar shouted at me. “What is the matter with you? Are you really that hungry for attention?”
“It’s not for attention,” I said, working to retain my composure. “This is my job, Sergeant. This is how I make my living. Now how would it look to the public, a public who has shown in the past to be highly critical and un-approving of what I do, if I let this story go cold when, if the victim were any other person, I would be hunting down all of the interviews that I could? Why, in this case, should the victim be treated more delicately than in the past?”
Blaniar had no reply. He just sat in his hard metal chair staring at me with his eyes open wide and his head shaking from side to side. I assume he was thinking that I was a few pieces short of a complete chess set, but I didn’t care.
“What about his shed? I heard someone yelling about it that night,” I continued.
Sgt. Blaniar sputtered at me for a moment before he was able to answer me.
“It’s the evidence that we need to prove that you’re not his only victim,” he answered, trying to regain his composure.
“You mention on that video that you found blood and bone in there. How much? It was enough to make someone yell. And when will you be able to test to see if the materials match any of the previous victims?”
He didn’t answer me this time. He was sitting back in his chair with his hands lying flat on the table. He was staring at me with a look of complete disgust on his face. I knew I’d overplayed my hand.
“It would make both of our lives easier if you just helped facilitate an interview with Terry for me,” I said softly.
“No. Not only is it absolutely not within your goddamn rights, Miss Cunningham, it’s vulgar. It is not happening, I don’t care how seriously you take your career as a murder groupie with a blog.”
Okay, that hurt.
“Sgt. Blaniar, I know that maybe it seems lowly to you, but this is my livelihood.”
“Miss Cunningham, my mind will not be changing. The answer will always be no.”
He stood then and strode out of the room in a hurry, his disgust with me making him move fast. I should have been used to it. Cops got disgusted with me and told me “no” all the time. I shrugged and made my way to Anais. I had a first-hand account of an attack. I had plenty.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
When Anais and I got back into our room, Anais got onto her laptop and started checking emails. I sat and watched her fondly for a few moments before I realized that I was sick to death of being in a hotel.
“I want to go home,” I blurted.
“Well it’s about fuckin’ time.” Anais said, slamming her laptop closed. “We’ll leave tomorrow morning and be home before dinner.”
I nodded. I took a long hot shower, wincing in pain and trying hard to avoid touching the bite marks all over my body. They were in places that were already tender, and it hurt to move in certain ways because of that, but the hot water stinging the wounds felt oddly relaxing. It was like the hot water was eating away at the germs and dirt of what had happened to me. I’d only taken sponge baths after my hospital stay so that I wouldn’t disturb that bandaging on the bite marks but taking off those bandages and taking that shower made things immeasurably better.
I took my time standing in front of the big, granite-topped vanity in the bathroom looking at myself. My face was a multi-colored, bruised mess as was my body. The insides of my thighs were purple and there was a bruise on my hip that looked a lot like a thumb, probably where Terry had gripped me. There were tiny cuts a
ll over me from where my clothes had been ripped off and my scalp hurt.
I started crying, looking at the reflection and really letting myself see what had happened to me. Poor Terry, but poor me as well. I was dragged down a hallway by my hair, beaten, and brutally raped. Then I got to endure the shame of having a rape kit done. I’d have nightmares for the rest of my life about Terry’s dead eyes as he was on top of me as well as Grenadine and that goddamned scary as hell stew pot of hers.
But, thinking about that stew pot, I knew that I’d gotten off lucky. Look at how all of the other people who’d met up with Grenadine had faired. Skinned, boiled, chopped up, gutted, and added to a giant pot over a roaring fire.
A knock on the door startled a yelp out of me. It was Anais, making sure that I was okay.
“Come on, mami,” she said, walking me to my bed. “Get some rest. We’ve got a long drive home tomorrow.”
I smiled at her. Anais is Puerto Rican and expertly bilingual, but she only ever says a word or two of Spanish around me since I don’t know much more than the few things I learned in Middle School Spanish class. Even when she gets mad and rants she makes sure to mostly speak in English so that I can follow her on her little stream of consciousness. She’s awesome like that.
I resolved to try and learn a bit more Spanish when we got home. As a bit of affection to Ana.
