His Father's Son

by Bentley Little

  The room seemed cold. He had not noticed that until now, but he was chilly and there were goose bumps on his arms. Wasn’t cold a traditional indicator that spirits were present?

  He remained transfixed, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, his father’s head began to swivel toward him. The white face had been partially visible thanks to light from a streetlamp and moonlight leaking in from a crack in the curtains, and as the head turned in his direction, it entered an area of shadow before emerging once again into moonlight.

  Now Steve saw that his father’s nose was red and bulbous.

  Clownlike.

  I suitcase the five and clown you!

  Steve recalled his father’s nonsensical outburst, and suddenly there seemed something malevolent about it. The words no longer sounded like gibberish but like communication of some sort, a secret message, something he should understand but didn’t.

  The head stopped its slow pivot, shiny black eyes staring into his, and in the second before the figure of his father disappeared, Steve saw the mouth open wide in what looked like a scream but in what he somehow knew was a laugh.

  He could not fall back asleep for the rest of the night.

  At work the next morning, Gina was absent. She did not call in sick, was not answering her phone, and sometime around ten, McColl called a temp agency for a secretary.

  Nineteen

  It was a full week before everyone learned that Gina was dead.

  Steve was not sure who had discovered the body or how—he was afraid to ask—but Monday morning McColl called a meeting of the entire department and announced that Gina had been found in her condo and that the coroner estimated that she had been dead for at least a week. He did not say that she had been murdered, and Steve wondered whether that information had been released yet by the police or the coroner or whoever had contacted AlumniMedia with the news. Maybe they were trying to keep it a secret in order to flush out the killer, hoping that whoever had done it would give himself away by accidentally revealing something no one else could possibly know.

  Or maybe McColl was keeping the information to himself.

  But why? Steve wondered. What would be the point? What could he hope to gain by doing such a thing?

  Had the department head been involved with Gina?

  The thought stopped him short. Steve had never even considered the idea before, but it did make a strange kind of sense. McColl had always been unchar acteristically nice to the secretary, much nicer than he was to anyone else, and had not found her anywhere near as annoying as the rest of them did. Morever, he had not had as much contact with her in the office as a person in his position would be expected to—almost as though he were deliberately avoiding her in an effort to make others think there was no connection between them. If Steve had looked more carefully through Gi na’s nanny-cam tapes before destroying them, would he have found ones featuring McColl? He suspected he might.

  The meeting was dismissed after the department head read a policy statement from AlumniMedia’s human resources director saying that grief counseling was not available through the HR department but was partially covered by the company’s health insurance plan should any employee need to avail himself or herself of it. They all went back to their workstations sad and subdued, and Steve followed suit.

  “I can’t believe it,” Rod Zindel said as they walked together past the temporary secretary manning Gina’s desk.

  “Me either,” Steve said.

  Luckily, the work today was mindless: compiling names for a ten-year high school reunion. He was in no mental condition to concentrate on anything difficult or challenging, and throughout the morning, he found himself wondering how Gina’s body had been discovered. Had it been a neighbor who had noticed a bad smell coming from the condo? Or McColl or one of the supervisors who’d called the police and reported her missing? Or a friend or relative who had not heard from her and was suspicious? Any or all of those possibilities were viable.

  He was still concerned about the fact that her death was not being talked about as a murder. It had to be a trap, and he wondered if the police had any suspicions about who the killer might be. Being out of the loop and not privy to the process made him nervous, and he realized that no matter how careful he thought he had been, he might have slipped up somewhere along the line. He had to be extremely cautious and on his best behavior.

  After lunch, McColl called Steve into his office. “Close the door, please,” the department head told him.

  Frowning, Steve sat down in the proffered chair across from McColl’s desk. He had no idea what this meeting was about, but he didn’t like the fact that the two of them were alone and the door was closed.

  “I just wanted to get your take on Gina’s death. I know you and she were close.”

  Steve’s heart was pounding crazily, but he managed to maintain a calm exterior. “Close?” he said, sounding legitimately confused.

  “Yes. I noticed that she liked to talk to you, and . . .”

  Steve did not hear any more. McColl had noticed that Gina liked to talk to him? That was a flat-out lie. It was not physically possible for him to have noticed any such thing. Even if the department head’s nose weren’t buried in a newspaper for most of each day—which it always was—he could not see Gina’s desk or Steve’s workstation from his office. And he had never been nearby when Gina had stopped off for one of her annoying flirty chats. So either McColl had been spying on the secretary—skulking around unseen, using hidden security devices, asking questions of coworkers—or Gina had confided in him. Which meant that the department head was far more interested in and involved with her than he was letting on.

  Which meant that he probably had suspicions.

  “. . . so I thought maybe you would have some insight into what happened.”

  “What did happen?” Steve asked. “You told us that she died, but you didn’t say how.”

  “They think she was murdered.”

  They think? he wanted to say sarcastically. What gave it away? The fact that she was nude, bound and gagged? The fact that there was a noose around her neck? The fact that all of her Buddha statue spy cameras had been smashed?

  “I was wondering if she’d confided in you about anyone she might have been worried about or afraid of.”

  Steve didn’t respond at first, just sat there trying to look stunned. “Murdered,” he repeated.

  “I guess I assumed that you’d already been informed.”

  Here was his chance. “No. Of course not. Why would I be?”

  “I thought, since you were friends—”

  “I don’t know where you got this idea that we were friends. We weren’t. We both worked here. That’s it. To be honest—and I hate to say this under the circumstances—we didn’t even particularly like each other.”

  “Oh.” McColl smiled stiffly. “Then I guess I was mistaken.”

  But he didn’t think he’d been mistaken, and Steve walked out of the office troubled. He still wasn’t sure where McColl had gotten his information, but it was clear now that even if the police didn’t suspect something, the department head did.

  Which was why he had to die.

  It was getting easier and easier to make that leap, Steve realized, and as much as he hated to admit it, killing had almost become his solution of first resort rather than last when it came to dealing with problems. Was this the way it had been with his father? Had the idea of killing become as seductive to him as it was becoming to Steve? Had murder grown addictive? His father had been a serial killer. Had he eventually weaned himself away from that?

  Steve was a serial killer himself.

  No. He had murdered two people, true, but those killings had been necessary. There’d been legitimate reasons for both. Serial killers murdered randomly, for the thrill of it. There was no logic or thought behind their actions.

  What if he killed McColl? What would that make him?

  Nothing. The man was a danger to him, a threat, and needed to
be stopped. Even an objective observer could see that. What were his other options? None.

  He smiled politely at the temporary secretary as he passed by and returned to his desk, getting back to work.

  Sometimes the direct approach was the best, and he considered just walking into McColl’s office during his lunch hour, stabbing the man in the face, and returning to his desk. But he had liked the orderliness of Gina’s killing, the planning that had gone into it. It had felt right following her, learning about her, studying her before he did the deed. Such a tactic seemed professional, and he was sure that that was how his father would have gone about it.

  His father, the serial killer.

  Although perhaps the most professional strategy would be to observe the man first, make sure that he really was a threat, and do away with him only if there really was no other choice.

  He thought about it over the next few days. A real coup, he decided, would be pulling off a kill that looked like a complete accident, one that would arouse absolutely no suspicion whatsoever. That was his goal with McColl, if push came to shove, and though he wrote nothing down, so there would be no incriminating evidence, he made mental lists of various fatal accidents that could befall a man both at his office and at his home, everything from slipping on a wet floor and cracking his head open to choking on a chicken bone.

  Articles in the local newspapers spelled out the details of Gina’s murder, and her death remained a hot topic of conversation in the office for the next week. Steve took part in discussions so as not to draw attention to himself, from all outward appearances as horrified and fascinated as everyone else. He had no further interaction with the department head and was grateful for that, but he had not forgotten their encounter and neither, he knew, had McColl.

  As he had with Gina, Steve followed the man home in order to find out where he lived. It was a three-day process. McColl was smarter and no doubt more suspicious than the secretary had been, so Steve took extra precautions, remaining three cars behind and tailing him only part of the way the first evening, picking up from that point the second evening, and finally learning the last leg of the trip on the third.

  He was planning to just observe the man, keep tabs on him, but he needed to keep the other option open, just in case. So on the nights he didn’t see Sherry, he parked across the street from McColl’s house, a baseball bat on the floor next to him, a hatchet beneath a towel on the seat. It was a nice house on the edge of Newport Beach, on the inland side of the hills, facing Irvine. Two stories, with side bushes tall enough to afford privacy from the neighbors, it was a typical Mediterranean-style dwelling with a two-car garage and trendy drought-resistant landscaping.

  McColl had a family, which made things inconvenient. A wife and two daughters. Twins, from what Steve could tell. Fortunately for him, the McColls were part of that new breed of upper-middle-class suburbanites who didn’t believe in shades or curtains. Every first-floor window was uncovered, the lit rooms beyond exposed for the world to see, and from his shifting vantage points along the street, Steve saw a lot during his first few stakeouts, intimate scenes of family life that in previous generations had remained unseen even by the nosiest neighbors. He had never understood this compulsion of people to expose their day-to-day living to others as though it were some type of stage show, but he was grateful for it now.

  The daughters, he learned quickly, spent very little time with their parents. They appeared to be around thirteen or fourteen and spent most of their hours at home upstairs in the bedrooms—which did have shades. As the girls ate dinner at the dining room table, their body language bespoke hostility, and they sat as far away from their mother and father as possible. Steve witnessed two big blowups in the living room, one on Thursday, one on Saturday, and though he couldn’t hear what was being said, he could see the shouting faces, the gesturing hands, the stomping feet. So could the rest of the neighborhood.

  Those unshaded windows might cause him problems in the future.

  McColl, for his part, spent a lot of time in the living room watching television and in his exposed office working on his computer, while his wife ordinarily remained unseen from the street, probably in the kitchen or a room of her own at the back of the house.

  Bedtime for the family was reliably consistent, and Steve would watch as first the wife went upstairs, after turning off lights in the rear rooms of the first floor, and then McColl followed, his progression visible as lights went off in the downstairs living room and on in the upstairs bathroom and bedroom. Steve would wait at his post—for that was how he thought of it—from eight or eight fifteen until sometime around midnight. McColl generally went to bed around eleven or so, but Steve was never sure when he actually fell asleep, and he would remain parked across the street until he himself grew sleepy and finally headed home.

  Over the next few weeks, Steve grew to enjoy those vigils. There was comfort in the routine, and he liked learning about the family through watching their little habits, behavioral patterns and interactions with one another. It gave him a feeling of power as well, knowing that he could walk into the house at any time and put an end to McColl’s life, and at work he actually began to feel a little resentful for the thoughtless, offhand way the department head treated him. It was no different from the way he treated anyone else, no different from the way he had treated Steve before, but knowing that it was his own compassion and largesse that allowed the man to stay alive each day made Steve feel insulted and annoyed. If he wanted to, he could show up one evening and lop off one of the daughters’ heads—or both of the daughters’ heads. He could chop up the wife’s breasts and vagina or bash in her skull. He could cut McColl himself in half. But he did none of those things. He was magnanimous.

  And the man didn’t even appreciate it.

  Often, when Steve arrived home, he was still wide-awake and energized, and he would turn on his computer and write for an hour or so before his eyelids grew heavy and he finally headed off to bed. As it turned out, those pages were some of the best he’d ever written, and as soon as he finished a story, he would get out his copy of Writer’s Digest, find what looked like an appropriate publication and send it off.

  He felt more creative and inspired than he had in a long, long time—since college, really—and he wondered at the workings of the human mind.

  Had the prospect of killing fired up his father as well?

  He wanted to think so.

  During his sixth stakeout, Steve waited in his car for an hour or so after all lights save the porch light were turned off in the McColl home, absently stroking the handle of the hatchet, as he’d often found himself doing. Feeling tired, he started the car, checked in both directions to make sure no other vehicles were coming, then pulled onto the street, heading north. There was movement up ahead and off to the right. A pedestrian, it looked like. Steve wasn’t sure whether to slow down, speed up or maintain an even pace, but he opted for the latter, hoping not to draw attention to himself.

  As he drew closer, however, the vague display of movement that he’d seen in his peripheral vision became more concrete, and he did slow down. Through glimpses caught between the spaces of the parked cars, he could tell that that there was something familiar about the figure.

  Then came a no-parking zone, and he could see the man in full.

  A hillbilly dressed in bib overalls.

  Steve recognized the figure instantly. It was the same hitchhiker he’d seen on Gina’s street the week before he killed her. Standing alone on the corner of the intersection, and illuminated by a streetlamp, the hayseed was moving very, very strangely.

  Steve’s heart was pounding like a taiko drum in his chest. Was there meaning in that? Was it an omen? Or was it one of those freakish coincidences, like the Lincoln/Kennedy thing, or The Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon? He didn’t know, wasn’t sure, couldn’t tell, but the sight of the man frightened him. There was something about the odd in-place dance, and that weird windmilling thing he di
d with his arm before sticking out his thumb, that made Steve not just uneasy but scared. Now he did speed up. Once again, the man stared intently at him as he approached, and Steve had the distinct impression that the hitchhiker not only saw him through the darkened window and recognized him, but that he knew why Steve was here on this street and what he had been thinking about.

  Despite his fear, or perhaps because of it, he was tempted to give the man a ride, drive him wherever he wanted to go.

  And kill him.

  Steve sped past, not slowing for the stop sign but barreling through the intersection. That would be taking too much of a chance.

  Wasn’t it taking more of a chance, though, to leave the hitchhiker alive?

  He stared straight ahead, afraid to look back.

  He traveled well over the speed limit all the way home and fortunately was not stopped, as it would have been very difficult to explain the hatchet and the baseball bat. He was using a rental car and parked on the street instead of in his garage, but it was after midnight, and walking alone on the sidewalk back to his apartment building he began to feel jittery. He knew it was irrational and impossible, but he kept expecting to look over and see the hitchhiker across the street, shadowing him, doing that odd little dance. Steve quickened his step, and by the time he reached the entrance to his apartment, he was practically running.

  He wasn’t in the mood to write, didn’t want to stay up, wanted only to fall asleep and put this night behind him. Not even bothering to brush his teeth, he took off his clothes and climbed into bed. He tried to think about something else, anything else, but he couldn’t get the image out of his head. He kept seeing the hillbilly staring at him as he drove by, feet dancing in place, arm going up and over and out as his thumb pointed up the street.