“I really can’t. But none of this is your fault.”
Silence.
“If I’d only remembered earlier…”
“We’ve had to work very hard to get to this point, Ted. The treatment and the medication have helped a lot, but in the end you did it yourself. You did it for Holly, for the girls.”
He nodded. His family seemed to belong to some galaxy far away.
“Do you remember how you found out, Ted? Was it through your dreams?”
“I don’t think so.” Ted didn’t seem completely convinced. “The dreams had always been there. I think it was because of Blaine. When I saw him on TV and recognized him as my brother, I thought that maybe my father had murdered his girlfriend, that he’d done it as a favor or something. It was a thought. Unconscious, I guess. I don’t know. I thought, My father’s been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Maybe he did it.”
“I see. And that raised your suspicions—that thought.”
“Yes, I think so. That’s why I followed Blaine. I needed to investigate him, find out if he’d played any part in it. But by then, I already knew my father had done it. It was the chess tournaments, Laura—that’s how I discovered all the murders from back then. He took advantage of our trips to kill defenseless women.”
“Look at me, Ted. We know everything now. Your father is dead, and your family needs you. Look at me.”
“You know it isn’t that easy. I’ve hurt them.” Ted’s eyes filled with tears. “How is Justin?”
“I’m afraid he’s still in a coma. But the doctors are optimistic.”
“I assaulted my friend, almost killed him.”
“You were in a fog, Ted. The burden of guilt for those murders had overwhelmed you. You felt responsible and you reacted irrationally. Because Justin found out somehow, didn’t he?”
“Yes, I think so. I learned he was following me. I saw him one night when I slipped into Blaine’s house; he was outside, in his car. I hired a detective to follow him, and that’s how I learned that he and Holly were seeing each other.” Ted smiled with resignation. “The poor detective must have thought that he’d blown the lid off something big, but their affair was no big deal for me. My problem was that Justin had also followed me here, and he may have seen what I had in the room upstairs that you got into.”
“Did Justin call you to his office to talk about the murders?”
“I really don’t know. Maybe he wanted to talk about something else. But it was too late. Me, I wasn’t seeing things clearly. Now I understand.”
“Justin will get better, and he will understand—I’m sure of it. Your illness was severe at that time, Ted.”
“Yes, I know. I had already decided to kill myself. I’d gone to see Robichaud about the will, and I thought a brain tumor was going to kill me.”
“Don’t you think things are much better now?”
Ted knew things would get better only if his friend recovered.
“I guess so.”
Laura stood up. Ted watched her incredulously, unable to comprehend what the doctor meant to do. Even when she held out her hand to him, he wasn’t exactly sure what he was supposed to do with it.
“You’ve done very well, Ted.”
He clumsily got to his feet and shook her hand.
“Thanks for everything, Laura.” He was speaking in a whisper. His voice was about to break.
Just then they heard a loud noise in the back, too loud for rats to have made it. Laura jumped. Ted, for his part, felt a chill as he recalled that he had left the guard tied up back there. My God, he had allowed a heap of typewriters to fall on him! Before leaving him there, Ted had made sure he was still breathing, but he might have suffered internal injuries or something of the sort. These thoughts were going through his mind when the figure of Lee Stillwell rose up like a gray effigy, beyond the cone of light that illuminated only Ted and Laura.
A gruff voice emerged from the shadows. Laura turned and got the fright of her life when she saw Lee standing there. She had all but forgotten about him.
“Let us out of here right now, you goddamn bastard,” Lee said.
The guard had his fettered hands at chest level and was holding a small object. There was no way to tell what it was at that distance, until a tiny flame emerged with a soft click.
82
Present day
Marcus took the passenger seat. Bob drove. They talked for the first half hour; afterward the drive passed in silence, interrupted only by calls from the FBI team that had set out from Albany at the same time and would reach the factory first.
When they were half an hour away they got the last call. Bob listened to what they were saying on the other end of the line; it didn’t sound good to Marcus.
“There was a fire, apparently intentional,” Bob said after he hung up. “An accelerant was used. The flames propagated very rapidly.”
“A fire?” Marcus couldn’t understand. He didn’t want to ask the question whose answer he most feared.
“The Albany team arrived and found the firefighters at work. Somebody noticed the smoke and called it in, but they got there too late.”
“What do you mean, ‘too late’?” Marcus couldn’t restrain himself. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“They recovered two bodies. There was only one survivor.”
Marcus covered his face.
“Who?” he asked in the darkness of his own hands.
83
Present day
For some reason, Lee thought that threatening Ted with his cigarette lighter would be a good idea. Either the blow to his head kept him from thinking clearly or he had never heard that gasoline fumes are explosive. When the small blue flame from the lighter ignited a huge fireball, he seemed taken aback. Staring first in surprise at what he had caused, the guard dropped the lighter and began dancing frenetically, screaming in pain and unable to escape the circle of flames.
Laura and Ted had little time to react. A wall of fire was heading toward them, its blue tentacles of flame racing ahead. They quickly got as far from the fire as they could, running in opposite directions. Lee’s screams grew more bloodcurdling. The smell of burning flesh filled the air.
The basement was divided in two, and Laura was trapped on the side opposite the door. As the guard let out his dying screams, she tried to find a way to cross to the other side, but the fire had formed a barrier that was advancing toward her; the smoke was growing dense. Lightbulbs exploded one by one, their light replaced by the new reality painted in pulsing orange. The rats shrieked.
Ted shouted at Laura to get back while he tried to move the green sofa, which the flames had not yet reached, to form a bridge between a table and a pile of rusty furniture. It didn’t work. The flames nearly caught his shirt, and he had to take it off and cover his mouth with it in order to breathe. He shouted something unintelligible.
“What?” Laura was a good ten yards away, but instead of moving closer, she was forced to retreat. She also removed her shirt and breathed through it, but even so, she felt her thoughts growing sluggish.
Ted shouted again, this time taking the shirt from his mouth. “The trapdoor, Laura! Get in and close the top.”
This time Laura understood. But she saw that it would be impossible for her to do this under these conditions. The flames stood between her and the opening in the floor.
“Ted, I can’t reach it!”
He shouted something else, but his voice was muffled by the crackling flames. The smoke had become too thick, and it was all but impossible to breathe even through the filter of her blouse; Laura took it from her mouth. A fit of coughing brought her to her knees. She hadn’t been conscious of the stinging in her eyes until she discovered that the air was somewhat more breathable close to the floor. She again covered her face with the fabric and crawled toward the side door. She told herself that her only chance of making it out alive would be by creeping along the base of the wall. A series of steel tables formed a sort of tunnel thr
ough which she could move relatively easily. The fire impeded her progress two or three times, forcing her to squeeze as close to the wall as she could get or even to exit her improvised tunnel. The closer to the door she got, the thicker the smoke grew, even at floor level.
Altogether she had another twenty-five feet or so to go. It seemed simple, but halfway there she started thinking she would never make it. A curtain of red flames blocked her way completely. If she wanted to keep going, she would have to leave her tunnel, but the situation wasn’t much better out there. When she looked behind her, she saw she couldn’t even go back.
She shouted to Ted but got no answer. Had he left the basement, or was he unconscious? The police were on their way; they might arrive at any moment. If she could get to the trapdoor, she might be able to hold out in there and yell long enough to be heard by anybody who was outside.
But first she’d have to reach the trapdoor; she didn’t have much time. Either she tried leaving the tunnel and circling back to it, or she kept going straight ahead and jumped through the wall of fire. She had to try to break through, for Walter’s sake.
She wrapped her head in her blouse, held up her arm to shield her face, and raced forward as fast as she could.
Epilogue
Two years later
Randall Forster was greeted with warm applause. For the past three years he had been the public face of crime reporting on Channel 4, and the exposure had made him immensely popular. The Frank McKay case had been key to his meteoric ascent: as a young, charismatic reporter, he had straddled the thin line between popular interest in the morbid details and the forensic technicalities of that salacious story.
Projected onto the screen dominating one side of the stage were the penetrating eyes that everyone had come to know. Underneath them, the title:
THE BUTCHER OF BARSTON FALLS
Frank Edmund McKay
1951–2011
The auditorium fell silent. The reporter’s voice came solemnly over the address system.
“A middle-class home in the small hamlet of Barston Falls. A father who worked long hours at the machine tool factory. A mother who was cook, seamstress, shop assistant, and maid. Young Frank, growing up almost unsupervised to the age of twelve, when his baby sister, Audrey, came along.”
Randall moved around the stage with the conviction of a practiced speaker. Gazing alternately at the audience and at the air above their heads, one hand in his pocket, he seemed to be peering into a distant, revealing past.
“That is as much as we know about his early years. What happened in the heart of the McKay family is, and perhaps will always remain, a mystery. In nineteen sixty-four, Ralph and Tess McKay moved to Boston with their two children, leaving little behind to be reconstructed years later.”
A black-and-white photograph of a group of schoolchildren appeared on-screen. Two faces were circled, one of them with those unmistakable large, deep eyes.
“Frank learned early on to hide his true nature and to manipulate those around him. He was a model student, far above average in intelligence, and he never started any trouble. He knew how to go unnoticed. Andrew Dobbins, perhaps his only friend during his years in Barston Falls, has provided what is almost certainly the only characterization of Frank McKay that reflects the true essence of this prolific serial killer.”
Randall paused purposefully. He had given this talk a handful of times before, though under different circumstances, and he knew how to rouse his audience’s interest.
“When the truth came to light, everyone who had known Frank McKay over the course of his lifetime seemed shocked and horrified, including his sister, his former wife, his neighbors, his business partner. Everyone except Andrew Dobbins. Andrew Dobbins, who had not seen Frank McKay since he moved away from Barston Falls with his family at the age of thirteen, was the only one who immediately believed the news that was beginning to spread across the country. When others were unsure what to think, Andrew Dobbins knew—in his heart, he knew—that Frank McKay was guilty. Because Andrew Dobbins was the first and, as I have suggested, perhaps the only person ever to have peered into the abyss and seen this man’s true face.”
At some point the image on the screen had changed. It now showed a young Frank posing next to a red car. He looked about twenty, and at first sight there was nothing particularly remarkable about his smiling face. As the image drew closer, however, something about his eyes seemed to cross the barrier of time and space and to rest on each one of those present, revealing his genuine intentions.
“Frank McKay was not a perfect husband or a model neighbor, much less a good father. But in the view of those who knew him, he wasn’t a murderer. He couldn’t be a murderer. He was a temperamental man, certainly. An impulsive man, perhaps. But a murderer? Not at all. How many times have we heard this about others like him? Because when people such as McKay learn to hide behind the mask of sanity, they become undetectable. They walk among us with impunity. And it is this, it is precisely this ability to get away with things over and over again, to feel superior to everyone else, that drives them to go farther and farther. It is not only the unstoppable desire to harm and kill, but also the ego of a man who thinks he is above everyone else.
“Andrew Dobbins lived a few houses down from Frank. They walked to school together, came home together, became friends. One day Frank invited Andrew over to his house. It was summertime and his parents were both at work, so the boys were home alone. Frank told Andrew he didn’t want to ride bikes that day or do any of the things they normally did. He led him to the backyard and showed him a number of jars that held spiders, beetles, and other large bugs. Frank had his pocketknife with him; he had bought it from an older boy, and no one knew about it except for Andrew. It was their shared secret. On that day, in that backyard, Frank asked his friend to pick out one of the trapped bugs. Andrew chose a medium-sized spider that seemed a little sluggish. He figured Frank was planning to kill the spider with his pocketknife—by then, he knew Frank was capable of such a thing, and the truth was that it didn’t really bother him. Who hasn’t killed a spider at one time or another? Andrew was willing to join in the game, never imagining that he was actually being put to the test.”
Though the case of the butcher of Barston Falls had been the subject of exhaustive reporting and analysis, most commenters focused on the killings that would come later. Journalists loved portraying the monster, but they often forgot the person. Randall had discovered that certain details, such as those he was about to reveal, could have a much deeper impact than even the most aberrant murder. The audience had fallen completely silent.
“Frank didn’t kill the spider with his knife. Not right away. He cut off four of its legs. Then he and Andrew watched as it tried to run away, laughing to see how it could only crawl in circles. Then Frank cut off another leg, and then another, all the while explaining that he shouldn’t cut them off too close to the body because then the spider would die too fast. At last the poor spider had only one stub of a leg left, with which it could barely scratch the ground and spin in circles until it died. It was not merely a wicked game but, as I have said, a test.
“Late that summer, Frank asked Andrew to come over to his house. He told him he was planning to do some ‘special tests’—that was what Frank called the bug mutilations that they had both taken part in three or four times by then. Andrew was delighted. He was beginning to feel a sort of worshipful fascination with his friend. Frank led him back to the yard, but this time there were no jars of bugs. Instead, there was a basket with a tiny kitten of about three or four months, as Andrew Dobbins would recall many years later when he recognized with some guilt that, though he guessed at Frank’s intentions at the time, they didn’t especially trouble him. He had never been especially fond of cats.
“Frank spread the kitten’s legs using four slender ropes. When he had it immobilized, and as the animal yowled in desperation, he gouged out its eyes with his pocketknife, then used a cigarette lighter to
burn it on the stomach, the ears, the nose, until the kitten could no longer resist, and it died. Andrew stopped playing with Frank almost immediately thereafter, and his reaction may have served young Frank as a warning. A warning as to what could happen if he let others see his true nature.”
There was no photograph now on the screen. Randall waited a few seconds, until the face of a twenty-year-old woman appeared.
“It is unlikely that Elizabeth Garth was his first victim, but she was undoubtedly one of the first, because McKay never again committed his murders so close to Boston.”
Randall paused thoughtfully, slowly shook his head, and added, “What I just stated is not the absolute truth, of course. But we’ll get to that. After all, it is the main reason we’re gathered here today.
“The way in which Frank McKay killed Elizabeth Garth, a young single mother, shows that he was still on a learning curve. It is even likely that he was acting rashly. Not only did he kill her relatively close to home, but he had also made contact with her in a way that could have led to his capture. In addition, though Elizabeth’s body revealed a few knife wounds on her arms and legs, a deep gash in her throat was sufficient to cause her death in a matter of seconds—a very different pattern from the type of sadistic torture found in his later murders.
“What was McKay thinking after he killed Elizabeth Garth? I would wager it was something along these lines. First, he had experienced tremendous pleasure from torturing and ultimately killing a defenseless young woman, so he knew he would want to do it again and again. Second, he realized that if he continued acting as recklessly as he had done on that day, he would ultimately be caught. He needed to come up with a system to guarantee his ability to continue indefinitely.
“There were at least seven killings between nineteen eighty-three and nineteen eighty-nine, and every one of them was committed out of state. The victims were young women, but that is where the commonalities end. Frank killed with a knife, with a hammer, even with his own hands. He selected his victims at random, keeping his contact with them to a minimum. During those years he took advantage of his son Ted’s chess tournaments to justify his absences. He would travel more than an hour’s drive from the tournament site, pick out a victim, and torture and mutilate her over the course of two to three hours. Few killings display such a level of cruelty, and yet discovering a pattern to connect these crimes would have been all but impossible.”
Kill the Next One Page 34
