Once she got back to her house, she’d taken out her laptop and looked up everything she could regarding the Cooper/LeRoy murders. Wikipedia entries about each of the twelve victims—among them a teenage couple on prom night, a property master for TV shows who volunteered for children’s charities in his spare time. A young police officer. An elderly man and his paid caregiver. A four-year-old girl . . .
Each killing more senseless than the previous, the couple’s motives a complete mystery. Robin had looked online for The Inland Empire Killers: ’Til Death Do Us Part, but had only been able to find one three-minute clip: Gabriel LeRoy—the TV actor version of him—shooting a bound and gagged middle-aged man who lay prone at his feet. A slick of bright red blood on the floor. The TV actress version of April Cooper squealing with delight. “Get him, baby.”
She’d watched the clip again and again, to the point of where it worked its way into her dreams. You’d think it was pure Hollywood hackery—Natural Born Killers strapped onto an after-school special. But to Robin, it seemed like it may have been an accurate portrayal. She had read eyewitness accounts describing the gleam in April Cooper’s eyes, the serene smile as she watched the bodies fall. Some speculated Stockholm syndrome, but every article, every police report she could get her hands on, every credible account of the killings described the girl—a fifteen-year-old high school freshman—as not only a willing accomplice but an enthusiastic one. April’s former classmates and teachers spoke of someone who was almost disturbingly standoffish, a middling-to-poor student frequently caught daydreaming in class, a girl who rarely spoke, even when spoken to. A dead-eyed girl whose feelings remained a mystery.
Had she always been that way, or was the antisocial behavior the result of the untimely death of her mother, Grace, killed in a car accident just one year earlier? Hard to say, but according to one article, when April met Gabriel LeRoy—in the parking lot of a McDonald’s that was walking distance from both their high schools in Santa Rosa, California—the evil within her blossomed.
The more her stepfather, Peter Cooper, objected to their budding relationship, the more April and Gabriel drew closer to each other. The same article described them like this: two dry sticks rubbing together, insistently enough to create a lethal flame.
Throughout her search, Robin had only been able to find one photo of the couple—that same faded prom picture she’d seen days ago, April’s and Gabriel’s pale features ravaged by years of exposure, barely distinguishable on the screen. For the longest time, Robin had stared into the unsmiling face of that young girl as Eric lay sleeping beside her, enlarging it until it looked like a mess of pixels. She didn’t like the thoughts that kept running through her head. She refused to put a name to them.
Robin plucked the piece of paper from her nightstand, unfolded it, stared at the number. Her father’s handwriting. April. No last name. Quentin Garrison’s name and phone number, another name: Kate Sharkey. And then April. Simply April. All written on a fresh piece of paper, untouched by the elements, most likely the same day Garrison had called Robin. The day of Dad’s death.
And Garrison was still here. She’d seen him in the cemetery parking lot, just after the funeral. Standing next to his silver Chevy Cruz. Talking to CoCo.
Robin didn’t know a lot about this investigation. When it came to discussing details with her, the cops all seemed squeamish about it, even Morasco. The investigation is still active, they would say, which may indeed have been part of the reason. But Robin still sensed that there was something else going on. A great big elephant in the room that threatened to crush her memories to a pulp, to subvert and destroy everything she thought she’d understood about her family. And even a bunch of cops didn’t seem to want to be part of that just yet. They had time, after all. Mom wasn’t going anywhere.
Mom.
One of the doctors in the ICU had told her. She wasn’t sure which one. Everything was such a blur these days, lack of sleep and grief and wine and pills muddying the line between dreaming and waking, between nightmares and reality to the point of where she felt like she had to grab hold of events and stare at them, just to make sure they were real. But this doctor, whichever one, had told her that Dad had been shot through the lung, shoulder, leg, and abdomen, while Mom had been shot just once, in the abdomen. Just once. Robin hadn’t thought much about it then. She’d figured the shooter, the murderer, had gotten scared and run. But that was before she learned that the gun had been registered to her mother. And it was before she’d learned that no one had broken into the house. It was also before she’d found Quentin Garrison’s phone number, written in her father’s handwriting, along with those other two names . . .
She grabbed her laptop from her nightstand. Googled Kate Sharkey. Then Kathryn Sharkey. Then Kathleen. She found a lot of them. She added Quentin Garrison’s name and California and that’s when she found the obituary: Kathleen Sharkey Garrison, dead at the age of fifty-seven at the Mountain View Sober Living Facility in San Bernardino, California. Her gaze settled on her survivors: Kate’s father, Reginald, and her son, Quentin.
She recalled the one conversation she’d had with Quentin Garrison. The podcast title, Closure. How he’d explained it: I have a relative who was one of their victims, hence the title. She googled Inland Empire Killers + Names of Victims + Sharkey. And then she stared at the screen. “My God,” she whispered. “The four-year-old girl.”
Had Quentin Garrison and Dad discussed Mom’s connection with the Cooper/LeRoy murders? Had he told him what had happened to his mother’s little sister? Had he confronted Mom with that information and had she . . . No. She wouldn’t.
Still, she couldn’t tell the police about this. Not until she knew more.
Robin grabbed her phone from the charger and tapped in the number. The 213 area code.
“Hello?” The voice on the other end of the line was quiet.
“Quentin.”
“Yes?”
“What did you say to my father?”
“Oh. Ms. Diamond. I didn’t . . . I didn’t recognize . . . Listen, I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“You talked to my father on the day he died. He wrote down your number and your mother’s name.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What is my mother’s connection to April Cooper? What did you tell my father about it?”
“This isn’t a good time.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Can we meet? Maybe in an hour?” His voice cracked. “Please. I’ll meet you anywhere you’d like.”
Robin thought for a few moments, listening to Quentin Garrison’s trembling breath, louder than it should be. She heard noises in the background. Children shouting. A park?
“Okay,” she said. “I can meet.” Robin directed him to the same place she’d eaten nearly all her meals in the past few days: the cafeteria at St. Catherine’s, two floors down from the ICU, where her mother still lay fighting for her life.
Eighteen
June 16, 1976
9:00 P.M.
Dear Aurora Grace,
We’ve moved motels. We’re now in Pico Rivera, in a place called the Drop Inn that makes the Motel 6 in West Covina seem like the Beverly Hills Hotel. Papa Pete would have called the Drop Inn a fleabag, though “roachbag” would be more accurate. Every time you go in the bathroom and turn the lights on, hundreds of them scurry under the cabinets, into cracks in the walls, behind the toilet, down the drain. It’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.
“Live with it.” Gabriel keeps saying that to me. And I suppose I have to. We both have to. Someone saw us walking up to Ed Hart’s door and told the police—so now there’s a composite sketch of us that’s all over the nightly news and probably in the papers. I don’t know if anybody has connected Papa Pete’s murder with Ed Hart’s, but I do know that even more people are searching for me and Jenny. There are search parties. Gabriel and I heard that in the car. (That name. Search parties. Like they’re making a big
celebration out of looking for my sister and me.) As soon as the report finished, Gabriel turned off the radio and punched the steering wheel so hard it made my insides jump.
We’re both fugitives now, Gabriel says, so we have to live like fugitives. We’re at the roach motel because the guy at the front desk didn’t ask for ID. We’re eating food from drive-throughs so no one behind any counter will see us in full. We wear baseball caps and sunglasses when we go out, and we’re driving a pickup truck that Gabriel stole out of the parking lot of a strip mall because it has a different license plate than the one on Papa Pete’s car. And Gabriel keeps his gun loaded all the time, because if the cops do come for us, we’re not going to go willingly.
I feel so strange—as though I got dragged into someone else’s bad dream, and since I wasn’t able to fight my way out of it, it’s my dream now too.
I don’t hate Gabriel anymore. I’m not even that scared of him—not unless I see the lava, and I haven’t seen that in days. I can’t get myself to leave him, though. And that’s the thing that DOES scare me. Gabriel LeRoy is all I have in the world. Well, him and Jenny, but I’m not allowed to talk to her. Gabriel says for all we know, the police could have tapped the phones of the people watching Jenny, so we have to lie low until we can sneak back and steal her away.
Aurora Grace, my school’s senior prom is tomorrow night. Back when I was getting ready to break up with Gabriel, I was secretly hoping that this one senior boy would ask me to go with him. He’s tall and quiet. Blond curls like Peter Frampton. Blue eyes like David Soul. He isn’t like the other boys at my school, tripping me when I walk past, wolf-whistling and snickering or whispering stuff like “slut” or “white trash,” just loud enough for me to hear. When this boy passes me in the hallway, he says, “Hey, April, how’s it going?” Sometimes, he even carries my books.
He has a girlfriend. She’s rich and beautiful and mean. I think if she ever saw him carrying my books, she would pitch a fit. But then again, so would Gabriel. “Love makes you crazy,” Gabriel says. “I think of someone else touching you, my heart crumbles into dust.”
What’s strange about that is, Gabriel never touches me. He never even kisses me anymore. He says that if we were to kiss, he might not be able to stop himself from going further. But we used to kiss a lot, so I don’t think that’s the reason. I think it’s because of Ed Hart. I think that when Gabriel looked him in the eyes again after all this time, it was like stirring up a hornet’s nest. Those ugly memories that he’d put to sleep got woken up—and they’ve been buzzing around in his head ever since, stinging him and stinging him, making him confused and weak. I know he’s done some bad things, but I’m not sure that even Gabriel deserves to be in this much pain.
Anyway . . . Like I was saying, prom is coming up soon. That boy will buy his mean, rich girlfriend a corsage. Wrist, so she won’t poke holes in her fancy dress. Orchids or red roses, because they are the two most romantic flowers in the world. He will wear a tie to match her dress, and she’ll stash little airplane bottles of booze in her beaded purse. The two of them will sneak out of the gym and drink those bottles so quickly they won’t even taste them. And then he will take her face in his hands, and he will gaze into her eyes. He will tell her she’s the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen. And she won’t even say thank you.
I believe that if you think about someone hard enough, they can feel it. My mom used to say that when she was at work and I was missing her, she always knew. And these days, I feel Jenny thinking about me all the time—it’s how I know she’s still alive. So here is what I’m going to do: After Gabriel falls asleep tonight, I will lie on my back in bed. I will stare up at the ceiling of our motel room as though it were a sky full of stars. And I will think about that boy. I will think about him so hard that he will appear to me in three dimensions and in my mind, I will call out his name: Brian Griggs.
He will feel my thoughts, and that will make him think of me. And no one else will ever know.
Love, Future Mom April
June 17, 1976
8:00 A.M.
Dear Aurora Grace,
This morning, Gabriel woke me up with a glazed donut from Winchell’s and a Styrofoam cup full of coffee with cream and lots of sugar, the way I like it. Then he got down on one knee and asked me to be his prom date.
At first, I was scared that he’d read my letters to you. But when I looked into his eyes, I didn’t see the lava—not the slightest sign of it.
It turns out Gabriel’s prom is tonight too, which makes sense. His school is a Catholic boys’ school called St. Xavier and it’s practically walking distance from mine. Our teams play each other all the time and girls from our school can audition for their plays and we can even take certain classes there if we want.
Gabriel had been thinking about his prom just like I’d been thinking about mine. But unlike me, he was imagining us going to it together—and the images in his brain were so beautiful, he said, it made him know that it was meant to be.
If Gabriel ever joked about anything, I would have assumed that was what he was doing. His school is just a few miles away from my house, where Papa Pete’s body was discovered. And obviously, he knows all about the police investigation, the unnamed witness, the search parties. He’s said it himself: we’re fugitives.
But Gabriel doesn’t joke. “I know we can’t go to the actual prom because we don’t have tickets,” he said. “But we can go to the park afterward.” He was talking about Pullman Park, which is a big field on the outskirts of town with a baseball diamond on one end, tennis courts on the other. After prom every year, the seniors from both our schools crowd into that park and stay there till dawn, drinking six-packs and blasting their car radios and fooling around. “We can stay on the outskirts where no one will see us,” he said. “We can watch everybody and it’ll be like we’re there.”
I was worried about Gabriel, and also a little frightened. His baseball cap was pulled low over his forehead and as he spoke, his eyes shone out from under the bill in a strange way I’d never seen before. Had he lost his mind? It sure seemed like it. And the panic I felt right then . . . It made me realize again how much I need him and what a sorry, sad state my life is in that Gabriel is the only person in the world who can keep me safe. I said his name quietly and calmly, as though he had a bomb planted under his skin and if I spoke too loudly, he’d explode and kill us both. “Don’t you think someone might spot us?”
He started laughing. And then he pulled off his baseball cap. His hair, close to shoulder-length before, was cut very short and bleached so blond it was nearly white. I still can’t get over it. He looks like a different boy entirely. “You’re next,” he said. He showed me the scissors. The box of drugstore hair dye in Darkest Copper. Gabriel’s in the bathroom right now, mixing up that dye. He says I’ll make a gorgeous redhead.
Love,
April Your Future Mom
5:00 P.M.
Dear Aurora Grace,
I am in a dressing room at Mervyn’s right now. I am trying on a pale green dress with spaghetti straps. I’m not crazy about it. It makes me look sickly white and it clashes with my hair (although you can’t really blame the dress for that. Everything clashes with my hair). But the good thing about it is, it fits under my clothes.
Gabriel is standing right outside the dressing room, and I am looking at myself in the mirror. My haircut is horrible—like I’ve got a copper bowl on my head. My skin is broken out from all the fast food I’ve been eating, and I’m so pale, like someone who’s been living in a cave her whole life. I don’t recognize my reflection, and I’m about to shoplift my own prom dress. Gabriel just asked how it’s going in here and I have no idea what to say.
I just took the picture of Jenny out of my jacket pocket. I am looking at her smile and her pink stuffed dog, Todd, in the hopes that it will make me feel stronger like it has in the past. But the only thing I can think of is that if Jenny were to see me now, she wouldn’t know who I was.
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I don’t know how to steal. I’m going to get arrested for shoplifting, and the cops will find out who I really am, and Gabriel and I will be tried as murderers.
“We’re both in this together.” That’s another thing Gabriel says a lot, and he’s right about that. If someone pulls you into a room with them and locks the door and sets the room on fire, it’s still true that you’re both in it together.
Love,
Your Future Mom
6:00 P.M.
Dear Aurora Grace,
I didn’t get caught! I wore the dress out of the store under my biggest T-shirt and jeans and no one stopped me.
This is going to sound weird, and I know I shouldn’t say this to my future daughter. But I found it kind of thrilling. There’s something about walking past a department store security guard, a stolen dress under your clothes, that makes you feel both powerful and invisible at the same time. And it’s been so long since I’ve felt either of those things.
Gabriel says that we’re transforming into true outlaws, the two of us. He believes that we’ll be folk heroes, like Bonnie and Clyde.
I don’t know about that. But it is true that I’m becoming someone else—a different person, unlike anyone I’ve ever known.
Love,
April
Nineteen
Robin
“HOW LONG CAN she be like this?” Robin asked the nurse.
The nurse, whose name was Verity, didn’t say anything right away. They were in the ICU at St. Catherine’s, the two of them, watching Robin’s mother, pillows propped up behind her head, her chest rising and falling, the ventilator working away. Over the past few days, Robin had asked this question repeatedly of doctors, but every response had been both hasty and tentative. “It varies.” “There are many factors.” “I can’t predict the future.”
One doctor had offered up “Time will tell,” which had possibly been the most infuriating answer of all. Couldn’t even be bothered to come up with a noncliché.
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