by D. K. Greene
“My identity,” Peter lies. He makes it a point to rub the edge of the wallet in his front pants pocket.
“Did she steal your credit cards?” Jeanne’s face is open again. Expectant.
Tipping his chin agreeably, Peter says, “Ran them up good. She bought all kinds of kinky junk. For her clients, I guess. Whatever she bought didn’t do me any good. That’s for sure.”
Jeanne frowns. “I’m sorry to hear she took advantage of you. Having our financial security stolen from us can totally destabilize us emotionally. It makes us feel taken advantage of, and worthless all at the same time.” She leans forward and pats Peter on the knee, a physical token of her concern. “What will you do now?”
“I’m focusing on this volunteer stuff I have going with my dad,” Peter answers. He’s caught off-guard when he realizes his voice has taken on an almost excited tone.
“That’s great. Put that energy into something positive. How are things working out there?”
Peter glances up at the clock, making sure he has enough time to get through what he wants to tell her. “He wants me to work on a project with him. I’ve never done it before. I don’t know for sure if I want to.”
“What kind of project?”
Peter looks around the room, nervous. He wants so badly to be honest with her, but he can’t bring himself to say the words. He blurts out the next best thing. “Taxidermy.”
“Taxidermy?” Jeanne repeats, surprised.
Peter smiles through his anxiety. “I mentioned it before, I think. It was his hobby before he got arrested. He was great at it. Now, he wants me to see if I can be good at it, too.”
Jeanne contemplates his answer. “It’s an art form, from what little I understand. But it doesn’t seem easy to take on.”
“No, it sure isn’t.” Peter shakes his head. “Just thinking about the preparation is getting to me. I mean, maybe if I get in the middle of it, I’ll be able to figure it out. But getting started is so...”
“Gory?” Jeanne scrunches her nose. She’s probably thinking of roadkill and poisoned squirrels.
Peter watches her, but the image in his mind is of the blank stare of the victims in Ollie’s court files. “Yeah. I don’t know if I can stomach it.”
“Well, Peter, I guess there’s only one question to ask yourself. Do you genuinely want to reconnect with your father?”
Peter swallows a knot of anxiety. It feels like a brick sitting in his chest, pressing him into the seat cushions. He tries to summon the courage to answer her, but can’t get the words to roll over his tongue. Instead, he nods his affirmation in silence.
“It’s understandable if you feel you need to protect yourself, given his history. But do you think you can try it? See how it goes? Giving your father the opportunity to share his talent with you could be a wonderful way to break down the barriers between you and open a door to better understanding.” Jeanne’s smile is warm and innocent.
Peter looks at the floor. Guilt and shame rush through him. He wonders if she’d give him this same advice if she knew what Ollie wants to teach him. Panic rises, filling his lungs and squeezing his heart until he feels his insides might burst. He glances at her and hopes she senses the anguish tearing him apart. “I want to understand him, and I want him to love me. But there has to be another way.”
Jeanne frowns and shifts in her seat. “Given enough time, maybe there will be something else the two of you can do to bond. But this is the opportunity he’s offered. Unfortunately, we never know how many second chances we’ll get. Sometimes, it’s better to deal with a bit of discomfort today than wait for another occasion that may never come.”
“You’re right.” Peter feels tears stinging his eyes, threatening to tumble across his skin. He inhales, the action in his chest ragged and difficult. He forces air into his lungs before he loses the ability to breathe altogether. He focuses on Jeanne’s open expression, so earnest and full of love. She’s trying so hard to help. “I’ll do it.”
Sixteen
Ollie guides Peter around a museum parking lot in the high desert outside Baker City, Oregon. The structure overlooks the rugged Oregon Trail, a path cut through scrubland that’s hardly as romantic as historians make it sound. The early November air bites Peter’s neck. He pulls his coat collar up to keep the wind off.
His father is in his standard orange jumpsuit. Someone loaned him a light jacket, but it can’t be doing much to fight off the cold. It doesn’t matter, though. Ollie seems oblivious to the thermometer reading two degrees above freezing on the museum’s information ticker.
He hasn’t said what kind of marker the search crew should look for. Oliver promised the group of U.S. Marshals scattered around the property that they’d find Sasha here. She was a twenty-two-year-old office assistant when she was last seen, almost thirty years ago.
“I’ve been thinking about our talks,” Peter says, speaking as low as he can while still allowing his father to hear him. The way the wind howls, he doubts anyone outside arm’s reach could hear him even if he were shouting. “I think I might try things your way.”
“Oh?” Peter’s dad stops and looks at him with intense interest. “Do you mean...”
Peter nods once. He hopes his father understands. Ollie smiles and Peter ducks deeper into his jacket. Just because he’s decided to give Ollie’s scheme a try doesn’t mean he has to feel good about it.
“Do you know how you’ll do it?” Ollie moves closer and acts as if he’s chilled. Peter puts his arm around him.
“No. Well, maybe. I don’t know.” Peter trembles as the conversation takes hold. Ollie pushes closer against him, giving him a nudge of sympathy.
“The anticipation is the worst part,” the older man offers. “Once you’ve done it a few times, you know, gotten a system down, it gets easier.”
Peter backs away from him abruptly. “Whoa there, Dad. Calm down. I said I was thinking about it. Not blazing the trail to become a career killer.”
Ollie wobbles his head sarcastically, then apologizes. “Sorry. Was just trying to let you know I understand how hard it can be.”
The wind pelts Peter in the side, guiding him close to his father again. “How did you do it the first time?”
Dropping his head back on his shoulders, Ollie laughs. “She fell in my lap. I never did learn her name. I was running away from home for the millionth time. She got on the bus, drunk and mean. An old lady sat across the aisle from me. The drunk woman wanted her seat. The old lady got pissed and whacked her in the head with her purse. Knocked the drunk clean out. She landed on me when she fell. Smelled like turpentine and piss. She had a swastika tattooed on her neck. It wasn’t hard to tell she was an immoral person.”
The wind gusts, pushing the men toward the edge of the parking lot. They let it carry them a few feet, then resume their slow, circular walk. Peter glances over the collar of his jacket to make sure no one has noticed the added distance between them and the rest of the group. “Then what?”
“She blacked out. There wasn’t a thing on this earth that would have woken her up. When no one was looking, I shoved her tongue down her throat.” Ollie winks.
“Holy shit, Dad. What made you do that?”
Ollie twitches his nose. “When your granddaddy got drunk, he’d pass out. Mammy used to make us kids roll him on his side and check that his tongue was loose so he wouldn’t choke.”
“So, you didn’t plan your first one at all?” Peter gives his father a sideways glance.
“Nope. God just gave her to me. That’s when I figured out what he put me here to do. Watching her resting on her back, dying in my lap on the bus... it was the most peaceful feeling I’d ever experienced.”
“You didn’t get caught?” Peter’s voice cracks with surprise. If they’d stopped Ollie the first time, maybe Peter wouldn’t be haunted by the faces of his other victims.
Ollie shakes his head, laugh lines deepening as he grins. “They all blamed it on her being a drunk. Nobody figu
red out what was happening until it was too late. They pulled her off me after she died. Who’d blame a ten-year-old for killing some lady on the bus? The driver even bought me ice cream to make me feel better. Vanilla with double chocolate fudge and sprinkles.”
“You were ten?” Peter’s eyes go wide, the story making his father both more terrifying and intriguing. Peter hadn’t even known how to buy a bus ticket at that age. “Jesus Christ, Dad.”
Ollie looks at him with an angry spark in his eye. “Don’t use the Lord’s name in vain, Son. He doesn’t like it.”
Peter looks at the pale sky above them. “Sorry, Jesus.”
“Don’t be patronizing, Hen.”
They walk a moment more before Peter asks, “Do you think it could be that easy for someone to die on me?” Peter probably looks more hopeful than he should, but he can’t help it.
“Not everyone’s that lucky.” Ollie gives Peter a quick hug of forgiveness under his jacket. “Besides, adults have a lot more to think about. You’ve got to make sure you arrange events in such a way that it doesn’t come back on you. The courts don’t give a hoot if you can be rehabilitated once you’re older than seventeen. You’re a lost cause, then.”
Inspector Douglas suddenly appears from behind them. Peter pops his head above his upturned collar and looks around innocently. He and Ollie have drifted beyond the wagons arranged in an old-west circle on the edge of the hill. They’re almost out of sight of the others.
“Sorry,” Peter calls out to Dougy. “I didn’t realize how far we’d wandered. That wind...”
A suspicious look fills the inspector’s face, but a gust of wind comes barreling over the vacant lot and blows him backward a step. He nods, coming closer to talk. “Oliver, I need to know what we’re looking for. It’s freezing out here. The boys are walking around in circles looking at scrub brush and asphalt.”
Ollie nods. “You know, it just occurred to me they probably wouldn’t keep her exhibit out here where it’d get ruined.”
Peter and Inspector Douglas share confused expressions.
“The elements,” Ollie says in explanation. He gestures to the world around them. “The preservation would deteriorate quickly outside. My guess is, with how much they paid for it, they’d probably want to keep it intact for a generation or two.”
“What in the hell are you talking about?” Inspector Douglas’s wind-blown face takes on a deep shade of red. Between the freezing air and the anger simmering below the surface, he looks like he’s about to lose what little patience he has.
Oliver gives him a calm smile. “Yes. The more I think on it, the more I figure a museum that spent eight thousand dollars on a stuffed bear would likely keep it somewhere inside. Don’t you think?”
“A bear?” Dougy and Peter ask in unified surprise.
Frowning as if he has an awful taste in his mouth, Ollie says, “I don’t know how happy they’ll be with you ripping it apart, having been so expensive and all. But if you put the Grizzly through an x-ray machine, you might find reason enough to convince them to let you cut it open.”
The inspector slaps his forehead with the palm of his hand. He waves Special Agent Jones over and instructs her to take Peter’s dad and four Marshals back to the hotel they rented in town. They won’t need Ollie again unless they can’t verify Sasha’s location. If they find a bear in the museum with a body inside, they’ll pack everyone up and send Oliver back to his cell in Sheridan in the morning.
“Good luck,” Ollie calls to the inspector over his shoulder as Mac pulls him away. “And have a little fun once you pull her out. Lots of photos for the papers!”
Dougy watches him leave with disgust. “He couldn’t have told us that three hours ago?”
“I think he was enjoying the fresh air,” Peter says. He takes in a deep breath of the icy atmosphere.
Special Agent Jones opens a door for Ollie and soon he’s secured inside the van behind black windows.
“He’s the only one,” Inspector Douglas grumbles. He marches toward the museum’s entrance, shouting orders as he goes.
“Guess I’m on my own, then?” Peter asks the empty space around him. He walks back to Dougy’s car and lets himself in. He settles into the frigid back seat, closing his eyes, listening to the howling wind as he waits.
Seventeen
Peter stirs his spoon through the sugar-saturated milk in a half-eaten bowl of Alphabet Apes cereal. It’s been a week since Baker City, and he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about murder. The doing it. The not doing it. All the ramifications of either decision.
His father is right about him. Peter’s spent his entire life trying to be normal. But how could he ever be normal?
The sad truth is, Elsie isn’t the first reporter to play him for a story. There’d been a substitute teacher his junior year who was actually a newspaper man. A pair of black suits that tried to convince him they were F.B.I. instead of writers for a conspiracy website.
Repeatedly, Peter’s had to change identities, moving to a different city whenever an encounter got dangerous. Each time told to start over. Each time, losing more of himself through the experience. How could anyone be normal with a life like that?
Peter swirls the milk. Though he’s not the murderer his father hopes he’ll be, maybe he can keep his dad interested in closing more cases by pretending. He won’t have to go through with hurting anyone. But he might learn enough about the process to understand what his dad is trying to teach him.
Maybe things will be clearer if Peter can learn more about the world the way his father sees it. And besides, it would give him a chance to help a few more families along the way.
But he can’t just say he’s plotting a murder. Oliver Roberts is far too smart to fall for that. He’ll have to go through the planning, so when they talk over details he won’t get caught in a lie.
The germ of an idea manifests in Peter’s mind. He pushes himself away from the table and snatches his grocery list off the side of the refrigerator. Clicking the top of a ballpoint pen, he flips the list over to a blank page and starts writing. He doesn’t stop until his cereal is bloated and soggy. Bunched together like tiny letter-shaped inner tubes.
Peter can plan a cereal prize giveaway. It wouldn’t be hard to print up some fake prize codes and wait for someone to claim the reward. He can tell his dad their prize will be an axe to the face instead of a little plastic toy. That should do it.
He winces at the bloody image painted in his head. The imagery makes him queasy. He has to figure out some way of pulling it off without chopping people up.
Peter goes back to writing, continuing until his hand cramps. He takes the sheets of rambling thoughts and looks for a safe place to keep them. He settles on hiding the papers under the socks in his dresser. When he closes the drawer, he keeps his fingers on the handles. A sudden, unexpected wave of relief pours out of him. He closes his eyes as every tense muscle relaxes.
Years of aching shoulders, cramped guts and pressurized brain matter seem to melt away. It’s like trying to be good all these years has been suffocating him, but he’s been too intent on succeeding to notice. Now that he has the beginnings of a plan for murder, it’s just as his father described.
Peter feels a deep, soothing peace he’s never felt before.
He collapses on the nearby bed, a smile on his face. After a while, his cheeks ache from the effort, but the fact that he’s able to smile genuinely for the first time makes the expression expand. He closes his eyes and lets the serenity wash over him. He melts into the mattress and feels himself drifting to sleep.
It’s dark when he wakes up again. A storm howls outside the apartment and it looks like midnight, even though it’s hardly a quarter after four. Peter rubs the sleep out of his eyes and turns his head to glance at the dresser.
He feels a connection to his make-believe project that’s different from anything he’s ever felt before, even with another person. He gets up and caresses the top of the drawer holdi
ng his secret. The wood grain seems to curl against his palm like a cat stretching into its owner’s hand.
Peter opens the closet and pulls a dark hooded sweatshirt off its hanger. He tugs it over his head and marches out of the room, grabbing his keys off the counter as he makes his way to the front door. Peter turns the knob to lock it, and for the first time since he moved in, doesn’t have the urge to double check it when the door slams closed behind him.
His windshield wipers have a hard time keeping up with the rain once he gets out on the road. As much as he’s ready to get to the bank, an accident would delay the entire project. Even with the downpour, it’s only a fifteen-minute drive.
He enters the sparsely populated lobby, glad he made it in before closing. The teller nods a silent hello. Peter has to hold himself back, so he doesn’t skip to the counter.
“Good evening. Can I help you?” The teller is polite, but judging from the startled look on his face, Peter realizes he must look like a crazy person. Lord knows, he feels like one.
Peter passes him his bank card and driver’s license. “I want to withdraw the balance of my savings, please.”
The man glances at the identification. “I’m happy to help with that, Mister Wilson. Let me pull up your account.”
The teller’s nametag catches Peter’s eye. “Thank you, Sam.”
His fingers dance across the keyboard with a practiced flourish, Sam’s face scrunched in concentration. He bites his lower lip and his eyes flit back over the counter. “Mister Wilson, you’ve done a wonderful job building up this savings account. Unfortunately, I’m not able to handle this much cash in a standard transaction. Can you wait a minute while I get my manager?”
Nodding, Peter agrees to wait. What kind of person would have considered the bank wouldn’t have twenty thousand dollars stashed in the vault? Peter stomps his foot on the thin carpet, frustrated at his inability to think ahead to something as important as this.
He watches Sam hurry to a grouping of desks near the back of the bank. He whispers to a woman seated behind one of them. She bobs her head, slowly rising as Sam gestures in Peter’s direction. The woman approaches with a wide smile. Even from across the lobby, Peter can tell she pays way too much attention to her dental hygiene. Her teeth glow from behind muted red lips. Peter feels compelled to force a carafe of coffee over them to make them seem less perfect.
