Where Bodies Lie

by D. K. Greene

  But... if he hadn’t gotten caught after murdering his mom, how many more people would have died?

  “My mom asked my dad to give up his hobby, so he stabbed her to death in our kitchen.”

  “Jesus,” Jeanne whispers as she rests her hand on her collarbone.

  “No shit.” Peter nods.

  “What was his hobby?”

  Peter feels cornered. He struggles to come up with an answer. He thinks of all the things his dad did then. He shuffles through lists of things other kids’ parents might have done. Ollie hadn’t kept many vices. Just the one.

  Peter is partially honest. That way, he doesn’t have to remember another stupid lie the next time they talk. “Taxidermy. It took up a lot of his time. She wanted him to stop.”

  “That’s an odd hobby.” Jeanne’s eyes shift in thought. “He must have been deeply invested to kill his wife over it.”

  Peter bows his head in solemn agreement. “I haven’t spoken to him since he went to prison. Now, he wants to get back in touch.”

  Jeanne sits in silence. Peter can see the wheels of thought turning in her head as she tries to decide what advice to give. None of the options are that great. Peter knows, because he’s been over them a million times. He can tell Ollie to go screw himself, but then he’ll have to carry the guilt of knowing he isn’t helping the family waiting to find their loved one. Or he can suck it up and spend time with him. See how it goes.

  “Do you think you father loved your mother?”

  “More than anything.” Peter pauses, then changes his answer. “Well, at least as much as the taxidermy.” He laughs, but Jeanne doesn’t seem to like the joke. He can tell she wants him to be more serious. “He didn’t fight the police when they came to get him. He cried a lot and promised he loved me. Swore he didn’t mean to hurt her,” Peter says.

  Jeanne scribbles on her notepad. “Do you believe your father committed a crime of passion?”

  The loud snort that comes out is involuntary. Jeanne’s severe expression reminds him to stuff any brewing sarcasm. Peter straightens up as best he can. “Yes. At least one.”

  Jeanne sets her jaw for a moment. Her pensive demeanor makes it seem she’s choosing her words carefully. “I think you should talk to him. People make mistakes. Sometimes horrible mistakes. They also change. All the time spent behind bars may have made him realize how much he’s lost from that one unforgivable act. If the courts say he’s paid his debt to society, then maybe you should give him a chance.”

  Peter stares at her. He’d expected she’d advise him to let his dad shrivel up and die in his own filth. “You really think so?”

  “I do.” She smiles and pushes a loose lock of hair behind her ear. “Besides, what do you have to lose?”

  After stopping at the front desk to schedule his next appointment, Peter walks to his car and drops into the driver’s seat. Before he starts the engine, he digs a business card out of his wallet and takes a deep breath.

  He taps the number printed on the front of the card into his cell phone and listens as the ringing ebbs and flows in the speaker. He hopes no one picks up.

  “Special Agent Jones.”

  “Hello, this is Peter Wilson.”

  “Mister Wilson!” There’s a rustling on the line and Peter imagines her scrambling to attention. “We didn’t think we’d be hearing from you so soon.”

  “I’ve been thinking...” Peter drifts off. He looks into the therapist’s lobby through the wide glass doors. Jeanne emerges from her office and leans against the reception desk, chatting with the woman who just set his appointment.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll do it.” Peter blows out a tense breath. “I’ll talk to my dad about Carol again.”

  Eight

  Peter sits at a table in one of the prison’s private interview rooms. Special Agent Jones suggested the change. The hope is Ollie will be more direct if he doesn’t have a visible audience. Peter also suspects it makes it easier for them to keep an open ear on the conversation. His dad lounges across from him, looking perfectly at home among the frigid steel and concrete. A fly has somehow worked its way into the room and buzzes noisily as it smacks itself against the two-way mirror.

  Peter’s only been in the room ninety seconds and already can’t stand the tension. “Where’s Carol, Dad?”

  “You’re asking already?” Ollie looks genuinely confused. “You just got here. We hardly had time to catch up last time. I thought we could get to know one another a little more before we talk business.”

  “This isn’t business, Dad. This is a conversation about a missing woman. Besides, you know everything you need to know. I’ve grown up. I became a man. I have a job and pay taxes. I’ve got a view that looks over the backside of the hospital on the hill. I drive a Honda. Ta-da!” Peter waves his hands in the air like a magician. The jazz-hands do nothing to relieve his frustration.

  Ollie leans forward and smiles. “Carol isn’t missing, Hen.”

  “No one knows where she is,” Peter asserts.

  Ollie’s self-satisfied expression shines as he casually shrugs his shoulders. “Agree to disagree.”

  “What do you want from me?” Peter fidgets in his seat as he glances at the camera high in the room's corner. He can’t tell if someone cranked the heat on to get Ollie to talk, or if his sweat is a warning of an impending panic attack.

  “Henry, what’s your most notable achievement?”

  “What?” Peter blinks a few times as his father crosses his arms. The buzzing thoughts that have been tumbling through his mind come to a screeching halt.

  “When people see you walking down the halls at Ronix, what do they whisper about you?” Ollie’s head tilts as he appraises his son like a used car.

  His face scrunches. “I don’t know, Dad. Maybe they talk about how I didn’t screw up this week’s big product push. They gasp and fan themselves because they know all my zeroes and ones are in the right order.”

  “Exactly.” Ollie’s fist pounds the table. “You’re a nobody, Hen. Pulling your weight like a good little mule. None of those people have a clue how special you are, because you never show them.”

  “I’m not a nobody. And it’s Peter now. Stop calling me ‘Hen’ like I’m a little kid.” Peter’s hands clench into fists under the table. “I haven’t been Henry since the first foster home I got sent to.”

  Ollie points accusingly. The wrist he lifts is thin beneath the bulk of his handcuff, but the gesture makes Peter flinch. “It doesn’t matter what the government tells you your name is. I named you Henry, and that’s who you are. And Henry comes from a family of exceptional men. That should make you an exceptional man.”

  Peter nods and gestures at his father’s orange jumpsuit. “Exceptional, huh? And you’re lumping Grandpa in with that statement? You told me he scared you.”

  “When I was young, he scared me. But he also taught me how to survive. His harshness made me the man I am today.”

  “I’m not so sure you should be proud of that, Dad.” Peter slowly shakes his head. He takes a couple deep breaths, trying to get his heart to stop knocking against his ribcage.

  Anger flashes behind Ollie’s eyes, and Peter knows he’s hit a nerve. “Great men have to be locked up so the world can’t see them. We threaten the simpleton’s perception of the ideal man. They can’t control or manipulate us. They keep us in chains because they fear us.”

  “Whatever.” Peter pulls a sheet of paper from the corner of the table and pushes it toward his father. He takes the soft, floppy, please don’t stab me prison pen and hands it over, too. “Just show me where Carol is so I can get the hell out of here.”

  “Prove you’re worthy of knowing where she is.” Ollie’s voice drips with disdain.

  “Fine.” Peter holds up the fingers on his right hand and starts counting them off. “I’ve got a great life. I’ve got a good job. I’ve got a girlfriend. Although my grandpa was a wife beater and my dad murders people faster than God can cr
eate them, I’ve never been in trouble with the law. And five... well, I guess five is that I pay my goddamn rent on time.”

  Ollie holds up just three fingers and flicks each one with his other hand. “You live alone in a tiny apartment with secondhand furniture. You’re dating some little girl who’s using you as a stepping stone to something better. You’re wasting the most virile days of your life working in a tiny cubicle. Gee, Hen, that’s only three worthless things. You’re not deserving of anyone’s time. Least of all Carol’s.

  “You sit there on your righteous high horse, but you’re nothing compared to me. People shiver when they hear my name. They think about me when they hike the woods. My handiwork haunts their dreams when they press their heads into their pillows at night. You’re just another drooling peon clocking in and clocking out every single day of your inconsequential life. I’m surprised you aren’t begging me to kill you right now just to make the banality of it all stop.” Oliver glowers at his son.

  “I don’t have to hurt people to be great, Dad.” Peter grips the edge of the table so tight, his knuckles go white. He wishes he could punch his father instead of taking the verbal abuse.

  “Uh huh. How about we start small? Maybe you can take care of something for me.” Ollie lifts his cuffed hands and gestures to the fly swirling in a lazy figure eight above their heads. “Think you could kill that thing? It’s annoying.”

  Peter sighs and rolls his eyes. He gets up and the fly veers back over to the glass on the wall. He follows the insect to the mirror and moves his hands through the air as he tracks its movements. Peter doesn’t know what the point of this is, but he’s swatted a hundred flies. The tiny black bug lands momentarily and Peter closes his hands around its fluttering wings. He brings it back to the table, sitting down without letting it go.

  “Well?” Ollie raises a demeaning eyebrow.

  Killing bugs is stupid. They’re simple pests, and their deaths shouldn’t arouse emotion. But Peter does feel something. Its wings flutter against his skin and its tiny feet scramble across his palm. It’s alive, whole, and in a moment, it will be forever broken. He thinks about getting up and having a guard escort him away from this place. He could take the bug with him. Let it go outside where it can find a dumpster to enjoy.

  As he looks into his father’s eyes, he feels helpless to stop this murder. The information at stake is worth more than the fly’s insignificant life. Peter closes his eyes and claps his hands together. When he opens them, he looks at the limp body. Its wings are bent, its legs askew, and its entrails drip across his palm. He wipes it off on his jeans and looks up at his father. “There. Happy?”

  Ollie shakes his head. Suddenly, Peter’s transported back. He’s a kid, pointing to the shattered glass of his mother’s favorite vase on the dining room floor. He half expects his father to pull a belt from his waist in preparation for a suitable punishment.

  “I’m not happy. Neither are you. You killed that fly the same way you do everything. Fast, efficient, and without purpose.” Ollie can’t fully cross his arms to express his resentment with his hands cuffed, so he crisscrosses his wrists and rests them on the table.

  Peter looks at the bug guts smeared across his pant leg. “I did what you asked me to. The fly is as dead as it can get.”

  “Sure, it’s dead. But you killed it the same way every other schmuck would. Where’s your sense of curiosity? Your creativity?” Ollie leans back in his chair and sighs. “If you have it in your mind to kill something, you might as well give it some finesse. Answer some questions. Find some pleasure in it.”

  “You want me to take pleasure in killing a fly?” Peter’s stomach drops.

  “My God, Son. Yes! If you’re going to steal a life, you both should get something out of the experience. Now, that poor fly will never know what it’s like to live without wings. It’ll never know how to survive with four legs instead of six. You’ll never discover how many of its guts you can squeeze from it without it dying. There was no benefit to either of you. That’s what makes it wrong.”

  Peter’s heart smashes into his innards as if it’s trying to escape. “Is that what you think you were doing to all those people? Teaching them a lesson? What exactly did you teach them?”

  “Son, I taught those people to have faith.”

  Peter should have known. During the trial, Ollie had said his victims had no god before they entered his truck. But he swore they had faith by the time they came out of it, no matter how many pieces they were in.

  It didn’t matter if you were Christian, Muslim, in a cult, or praying for aliens to abduct you from an empty field. Hell, as long as you wrote a sincere letter to Santa every year, you’d probably be safe. But if you didn’t have faith in something, well, The Godless Killer was on a mission to show you the error of your ways.

  “What if they lied to you? What if Carol and the rest of them told you what you wanted to hear because they hoped you’d let them go?” Peter usually tried ignoring thoughts of what his father’s victims’ last moments on earth had been like. Now, the image of Carol trying to negotiate with her captor was unavoidable.

  Ollie looks at the cuffs around his wrists. His thumbs twiddle with a practiced swivel that keeps the chains binding him silent. “Hen, do you remember Ted?”

  “You know I do.” Peter’s breath catches in his chest. What he hadn’t told Jeanne when she suggested he come here, and what most of the journalists and true-crime authors fail to print about Peter’s dad is taxidermy was much more than a hobby. Over the years, it had become a practiced art.

  While most families had pool tables and media centers with surround-sound and big screens in their basements, Peter’s father had a soundproof taxidermy workshop. Ollie was talented enough to have done the gig full time, but he said he enjoyed it too much to turn it into work. Decades later, his pieces are still scattered around museums in the Pacific Northwest. Bears, cougars, and coyotes dot the country’s natural history exhibits, the name “Oliver Roberts” tagged along a seam under the fur.

  Ted was Oliver’s most prized trophy. He’d been a big guy, standing over six feet tall. Ollie had said when he was still full of fluid and organs, he’d weighed well over two hundred and fifty pounds. How Ollie moved him from the basement shop to the cab of his long-haul rig without one of the neighbors noticing was still a mystery to Peter. Ollie kept the stuffed man under a false floor in his semi. As he hauled loads of freight over interstates and highways, he forced anyone who lied to him to ride with Ted until they decided they were ready to tell the truth.

  The thing about Ted, as Ollie told the story, was he’d been a notorious liar. Once preserved from hair to toenail, Ted couldn’t lie anymore.

  Peter only met Ted once. He was six years old. In a fit of boyish hyperactivity, he’d colored on the living room wall with his mother’s lipstick. When confronted with the evidence, Peter had done what any intelligent boy in his position would do.

  He blamed the dog.

  Peter hadn’t had to ride in the truck with Ted. As skewed as Ollie’s views of the world were, even he recognized it would have been too much for a six-year-old to handle. But Peter did have to take a long, unblinking look at him. The dead man had a passive face. His glassy eyes stared at nothing as Ollie told his story. Ollie warned Peter if he ever lied again, what happened to Ted might happen to him.

  Oliver clears his throat, breaking Peter’s memory and bringing him back to the prison’s tiny interview room. “Hen, do you think there’s a person alive who would lie to me after they got to know Ted?”

  Peter shakes his head. His voice is small and broken when he speaks. “No, sir. I suppose not.”

  “That’s how I know those people had faith.” Ollie smacks the table triumphantly with both hands and his mouth curls into a satisfied smile.

  Peter rises from the table and walks toward the door. He takes solace in knowing this is something his father will probably never do again without a police escort. If Peter refuses to search
the woods to uncover Carol, Ollie will sit in this cinder-block hell surrounded by like-minded monsters until he dies. He raises his hand in a silent wave toward the reflective glass set into the wall. The doorknob twists as he reaches the exit. Before he leaves, Peter turns back, raising his voice enough that he can almost pretend he feels confident.

  “Thanks for the talk. I hope you rot in your cell, alone with your lies. Just like Ted.”

  The door swings open and a guard guides him out of the room. Before the metal exit closes again, Ollie calls after him.

  “Hey, Hen. Just so you know... that guy they called Victim 32 didn’t have any kids. He had a couple ferrets he loved to bits, but no wife or toddler were running around that dump he called an apartment.”

  Peter shudders as he fights the urge to spin around and tell his father to leave Elsie alone. His father has taken so much away from him. He can’t allow his lies to steal her, too. Peter shakes his head in silence and walks away, allowing the layers of steel and brick to stamp out his emotions.

  Nine

  Inspector Douglas loiters on the corner at the edge of Peter’s apartment, standing sideways as he sneaks a cigarette before they make the drive toward Tillamook Forest. Peter shakes his head, wondering if Dougy’s one of those guys who blames the smell of cigarette smoke on his partner when he gets home to keep his wife off his back. Peter chuckles to himself, unsure if he’d be able to reconcile the man whose entire career centers on serial murder, with one afraid of his own wife.

  Special Agent Jones leans against the wall beside Peter’s front door, holding a drive-thru coffee between hands covered by black leather gloves. She sips loudly from the tiny opening in the lid, flinching when the too-hot liquid reaches her mouth. She lowers the paper cup. Her somber eyes peer from under another rakish cap. “You sure you want to do this?”

  Peter checks the door’s lock twice before he answers her. “No. I’m not.” He takes in the upturned collar on the agent’s fleece lined trench coat, the slim fitting slacks that jut out under the jacket’s hem and encase the tops of soft leather boots. “Why are you always dressed like that?”