A Long Way Down

by Randall Silvis

  The sheriff leaned back in his seat. “You spoiled a perfectly good lunch.”

  Jayme said, “We’d like to take a different tack. Go a different direction than Detectives Fascetti and Olcott are going.”

  “You have any idea what that direction might be?”

  DeMarco said, “Ask us in a day or two.”

  Sheriff Brinker shook his head. Took a sip of tea. “I respect your observations,” he told them. “Do what you need to do. But I’m not pulling Fascetti or Olcott off the scent they’re tracking.”

  Jayme said, “Freddy’s scent is a hard one to forget.”

  DeMarco slid his hand closer to Brinker’s plate, tapped the table a couple of times. “I have some questions about the security cameras.”

  “In particular?”

  “How extensively did your guys check them? The only reference to a camera is in Samantha Lewis’s file.”

  Brinker made a popping sound with his lips, three little pops as he considered the question. Then he said, “Give me a lift back to the office. You can ask them yourself.”

  Twenty-One

  In the conference room, Brinker sat at one end of the long table, Fascetti at the other. Jayme and DeMarco sat facing Olcott, who had brought along a tall, thin bottle of sparkling water. Fascetti nibbled from a bag of smoked almonds.

  In answer to a question from DeMarco, Fascetti said, “What do you think we did? We checked every camera available.”

  “But what were you looking for?” Jayme asked. “Were you looking for Costa? Because if that was your focus…”

  Fascetti licked the salt from his lips, then turned his eyes on DeMarco. “You think you’re hot shit, don’t you? You think because you got lucky on a couple of cases you can come in here and tell us how to do our job?”

  Olcott didn’t wait for DeMarco’s reply. He told him, “There are no cameras outside Hufford’s place. It’s all blue-collar, lower-middle-class residential. The cameras outside Brenner’s apartment are aimed mostly into the parking lot. We have him exiting the building, but then we lose him half a minute later. It could be the killer picked his victims for that very reason.”

  “But not Lewis,” DeMarco said.

  “We have her car leaving her home—the whole neighborhood is covered with personal security cameras—and then we pick it up on the street a couple more times. Once she leaves town, though, we’re blind.”

  DeMarco knocked his knee against Jayme’s.

  “So that’s the thing,” Jayme said. “That difference. Even though you weren’t able to follow the course of her vehicle that night, she’s the only one of the three who lived in a neighborhood with lots of cameras. The only one who came from an affluent neighborhood. And she’s the only female. The only one under thirty. The only student. The only one who was fully dressed. The only one on which gray hairs were found. The only one asphyxiated with a plastic bag and not tape. The only one who wasn’t dismembered.”

  “He did start the decapitation process,” Brinker said.

  “But couldn’t finish it,” said DeMarco. “Why not? Why her and only her?”

  “Because he was interrupted,” Fascetti said. “We already covered this crap, didn’t we?”

  “That’s speculation. Nine distinct differences have to be important,” DeMarco answered. “Jayme and I want to focus on her. Just her.”

  The sheriff asked, “You’re suggesting she had a different killer?”

  “She’s the anomaly,” Jayme said. “In every way. Which might mean that she had a different killer. Or might mean that there was something special about her. Special to the killer. Maybe she was the true target. Brenner and Hufford were killed just to get us all looking in the wrong direction.”

  They sat in silence for a few moments. Fascetti scowled and shook his head.

  “At least it’s something,” Brinker told her. “Her family is holding a memorial for her Friday night. You might want to check it out. At her old high school in Canfield.”

  “She went to public school?” Jayme asked.

  Brinker nodded.

  Olcott said, “I can meet you there if you want.”

  Fascetti jerked back as if slapped. “So you’re throwing in the towel on Costa too?”

  “I don’t see it as an either/or situation.”

  “So go,” Fascetti told him. “Go to the dark side. I could care less.”

  “You could care less?” Jayme asked with a smile. “Or you couldn’t care less?”

  In an instant the room grew hot for everyone except Jayme. Her smile remained cool and confident.

  DeMarco asked Olcott, “Is your face well-known in that area?”

  The detective wagged his head back and forth. “Yeah, maybe. I hear what you’re saying.”

  “Thanks for the offer, though,” DeMarco told him. “We’ll probably get around to interviewing her family before then, so we won’t be total strangers either. But still, the lower the profile, the better.”

  DeMarco turned to Jayme. “So that’s it, partner. We have our assignment.”

  “Yeah,” said Fascetti. “One you made up for yourself.”

  “Detective,” Sheriff Brinker told him, “eat your nuts.”

  Twenty-Two

  They had to go back to the beginning. Treat it like a new investigation. Forget the Cleveland Torso Murders unless a very clear link presented itself. Forget Freddy Costa. Look harder at the case files. What wasn’t done that should have been done? What could be done differently?

  Visit the victims’ homes. Talk to the families. Ask all the usual questions and several unusual ones and check against the earlier answers for inconsistencies. Push harder. Look through the victims’ rooms, journals, laptops, social media. Confirm family members’ alibis and timelines. What wasn’t asked that should have been asked? What wasn’t searched that should have been searched? Push harder.

  Check the victims’ phone logs. Review cell phone tower data.

  Check arrest records for anyone who could fit the profile. Any parolees in the area at the time of the murders? Any media accounts of similar killings elsewhere in the country?

  Ask the sheriff’s office if any cars were pulled over around the estimated time of the murders and placement of bodies. Anybody pulled over and/or captured on security camera who fits the rather ambiguous profile of a serial killer? Of a sexual predator? Of a, what else…scorned lover?

  Double-check DNA taken from victims and crime scenes. Any areas of the scenes where DNA should have been collected but wasn’t?

  Push forensics to zero in on type of blade used for dismemberment of bodies. Is it possible to discern a specific brand? If that brand is available locally, get purchase info from merchants. Push harder.

  Push harder.

  Push harder.

  After running through all this in his head during the drive back to Pennsylvania later that afternoon, DeMarco summarized his thoughts for Jayme. She was seated with her laptop open, reading Samantha Lewis’s Facebook page while ignoring Interstate 80’s usual high-speed parade of eighteen-wheelers rumbling past, shaking the sedan in their back drafts. “We need to start at the beginning,” DeMarco told her. “Treat it like a whole new investigation.”

  “Which in a way it is,” she said. “Change the perspective, change the way the information looks.”

  He nodded. Glanced at the laptop. “Getting to know our girl?”

  “Not as well as I would like to. She hasn’t posted anything in a couple of years.”

  “Years?” he said. “That seems odd. Maybe it’s all on her private page.”

  “The only photos or events on her timeline are from her first week of college. And she would have been a senior this fall.”

  “Interesting. The case file said her mother is deceased. Do you remember when that happened?”

  “Not
the exact date, but I remember it said she was a junior in high school.”

  “So sixteen or seventeen years old. Bad time to lose a mother.”

  “The thing is, most young people use social media more when they’re distressed, not less.”

  He shook his head. “Just what we need—another enigma.”

  Jayme closed her laptop and watched him for a few moments. “You seem tired,” she told him. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m good,” he said.

  “No…I can hear it in your voice. You’re hiding something from me. What is it?”

  It took him a while to answer. “I’ve been feeling a little short of breath lately.”

  “What do you mean? You’re having chest pains?”

  “No, nothing like that. I just can’t seem to get my breath sometimes. Just a heaviness, you know?”

  “How long have you had this?”

  “I guess I noticed it not long after we came back to Pennsylvania.”

  “You need to see a doctor,” she said.

  “You know how I feel about doctors.”

  “I’m going to make an appointment for you.”

  “I won’t go.”

  “You’d rather die than have a doctor listen to your heart and lungs?”

  “You see? I never should have told you. It’s not a big deal.”

  She kept looking at him, her mouth grim.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “Baby aspirin is supposed to be good for you. I’ll start taking one every day.”

  “Baby aspirin,” she repeated. “Well, I guess that’s appropriate, isn’t it?”

  “I’m fine,” he told her, and softened his voice. “My heart’s strong, lungs are clear. Blood pressure is maybe a point or two above normal, but otherwise I’m an amazing specimen of perfect health.”

  She scowled but said nothing more on the subject. They returned home, where she took a long, tepid shower while he lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Then he showered while she made a salad for dinner. They listened to Bob Dylan’s Fallen Angels on the CD player while eating, and sometimes commented on the music, of the strangely hypnotic effect of that nasally, gravelly, often mumbling voice paired with the orchestral harmony of vintage love songs. But neither DeMarco nor Jayme seemed interested in discussing the case any further that day. After dinner they silently watched two episodes of Mindhunter on Netflix.

  Not until they were undressing for bed, after she watched him match up the seams on his khakis, fold the slacks in half and lay them over the back of the chair, did she ask, “Is it because I started talking about having a baby?”

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  “Your chest pains.”

  “I told you, there’s no pain. Just…a little soreness and heaviness. I must have pulled a muscle somehow.”

  “I know it’s stressful for you. Because you don’t want one.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Subconsciously,” she said. “Deep down in your heart of hearts. You don’t want another baby, do you?”

  He smiled. “I’m not conscious of anything my subconscious is doing.”

  She did not return the smile and continued to frown at him until he went into the bathroom to brush his teeth. He closed the door and looked at himself in the mirror. And asked himself, What if?

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, they delved into the box of Huston’s papers for the first time. Jayme had never met Thomas Huston, had seen him only briefly the previous summer when he came to the barracks to do research for a novel. But she remembered the way DeMarco had changed as his and Huston’s friendship bloomed over the next few months, how much mellower he seemed after every lunch with the writer, then how obsessed he became when Huston’s family was slaughtered, and how broken he was when he returned from holding his dying friend in his arms. Jayme knew all this, and now, with the box between them on the bed, she felt like an interloper.

  She and DeMarco sat side by side against the headboard, pillows stuffed behind their backs, Jayme in a silky maroon shorts and cami set, DeMarco in black basketball shorts and a gray T-shirt, the box wedged between their hips. Just before they began, a few minutes after ten, she expressed her doubts.

  “I haven’t read nearly as much of his stuff as you have,” she told him. “Just the last novel.”

  “You said you liked it.”

  “I did. But you have to admit it was kind of depressing.”

  “I thought it was a very hopeful novel. Considering what the characters went through.”

  “Okay, you’re right,” she said. She lifted a composition book from the box and tossed it onto his lap. Then took out the next one for herself. “All I’m saying is, maybe my reactions to his writing won’t be as well-informed as yours.”

  “Yours will be more objective. Which makes them better than mine.”

  “If you say so,” she said, and laid a small box of sticky colored flags within reach. “I’ll use the yellow flags, you use the green. Full go for your choices, caution for mine.”

  “Actually it should be the other way around.”

  “Do you want to argue or do you want to read?”

  “If you don’t want to do this…” he said.

  “Shut up. I’m reading.”

  They read.

  Near the end of the first half hour, DeMarco told her, “I’m out of green flags.”

  “So go blue,” she told him.

  Twenty minutes later, he said, “I’m so tired I can’t tell if these two pieces are supposed to go together or not.”

  “We can quit if you want to.” The tone of her voice was smoother now, without the earlier strain. “Though I’m enjoying this more than I expected.”

  “Can I read these to you? They’re not long. The first one is dated, but the second one isn’t. And they’re separated by a blank space.”

  She marked her page, then closed the composition book. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Okay, here’s the first one,” DeMarco said. And he read:

  In a letter to Aldous Huxley’s older brother Julian, Huxley’s wife Laura wrote of the writer’s final hours as he died of cancer, and how she, with his permission, administered LSD to ease his transition, which she described as “beautiful and peaceful and easy.” The process leading to his final breath, she wrote, “was not a drama at all, but like a piece of music just finishing so gently in a sempre più piano, dolcemente.”

  A piece of music finishing more and more slowly. If only death could come to each of us as a song.

  “Gee, that’s not depressing at all,” Jayme said. “What’s the second one about—hellfire and damnation?”

  He read:

  What I have come to understand is that this life is not about this life. It is about the true life—the life of spirit. We must learn to look at each of our actions here in that light: How does each of my actions affect my spirit, and what will all too soon become of it?

  “Hmm,” Jayme said. “I don’t think they go together, if that’s what you’re asking. Don’t they sort of contradict each other?”

  “Maybe each one is an isolated observation. He does that a lot.”

  “Yeah, in mine too. You said it’s dated?”

  “The first one is. Third of October last year. Why?”

  “It almost sounds as if he knew he was going to die soon.”

  DeMarco peeled off a little blue arrow and stuck it to the edge of the page. “Aren’t we all?” he said.

  And a chill shot up her spine.

  Twenty-Three

  In the dark of morning, but with the eight candle-flame bulbs of the chandelier hanging above the dining room table providing a chapel-like illumination, Jayme, sitting, and DeMarco, standing behind her, both highly caffeinated, again studied the display they had taped to the wa
ll.

  The display was divided into thirds, with more or less equal space accorded to each victim: Justin Brenner, Samantha Lewis, Jerome Hufford. At the top of each space, the victim’s pre-mortem photo. Below that, an index card with, printed in Jayme’s neat block lettering, DOB, date, time, and place of discovery of body. Beside that, a photocopy of a postmortem photo, date, and approximate time of death.

  Below that, more index cards: names of family members, names of friends and known associates. Most of the names had a red checkmark in the corner of the card, meaning that their alibis had been corroborated. Those corroborated by only one individual, whose own alibi was corroborated only by the individual whose alibi they corroborated, bore a question mark. Those individuals who claimed to have been alone at the time of the murder were marked by a double question mark.

  Phone data had established that the cell phones of three of those questionable individuals, at the approximate time of their friend’s or associate’s death, were in places significantly distant from where the victim was last seen and where the body was later deposited. The remaining five phones were, at those times, located somewhere near that individual’s home.

  “Which might or might not support the alibis,” Jayme said.

  “Somebody as careful as the killer has been,” DeMarco said, thinking out loud, “would know to leave his phone at home.”

  “So we start with those five. And get their alibis for all three dates.”

  DeMarco nodded. “And anybody with three uncorroborated alibis goes under the microscope.”

  Jayme, still on her first cup of strong coffee, turned the mug in her hands. “What are the odds,” she asked, “that we’ll find the killer on this board?”

  “Zero to zero point oh oh one percent.”

  “You’re still convinced it’s a stranger.”

  “If a single thread tied the three victims to each other,” he said, “I might think differently.”

  “So we made all this for nothing.”

  “Art is good for the soul,” he said.

  She raised a hand beside her head, touched him, then lightly scratched his chest. “I can hear the cogs turning.”