by Jeff Gunhus
“No, I mean I met him a few times before Garret figured out he was the guy. Before the standoff and the fire.”
This had her attention. She’d studied the case, of course. She’d studied every major serial killer case in the last forty years, but even in her world of aberrant behavior, Oswald Perkins stood out. He was special. And that meant he was doubly deranged and wicked in his killing ways.
“How did that happen?” she asked.
“Garret had the wrong guy at first, a preacher named Dan Jenks. Remember that? Brought him in for questioning but had to turn him loose. Didn’t have anything specific, just suspicions from some of the locals and a few circumstantial facts that gave him opportunity on some of the missing girls.” He paused, popped the lid from his drink and rolled an ice cube into his mouth.
“And Garret told you this while the investigation was still active?” Allison asked.
Mike crunched the ice with his teeth and shrugged. “Let’s just say I didn’t decide to drive out to Taylorsville, West Virginia all on my own.”
Allison shook her head. “Jeopardizing the case.”
Mike considered the comment. “Looking back, you’re right. I shouldn’t have gone up there. But not for the reasons you think. The case was fine. I knew enough from working with Garret not to make a mess of things. Hell, there’ve been a few times when I’ve helped him out and given him information I found on my own. But Oswald Perkins was another matter all together. Did you ever meet him?”
“No,” Allison said. “There was a plan for me to interview him. He’d been in custody for years at that point. I think Garret was playing out his Silence of the Lambs fantasy, but his Hannibal Lecter didn’t cooperate. Perkins hung himself before it happened.”
“Do you buy that it was a suicide?”
Allison nodded. “I read the report. Sloppy work by the on-duty guards to give him enough time to do it, but the investigation came out clean.”
Mike gave her a look showing that he didn’t buy it for a second. “Even if Perkins had turned up with three shots to the chest from the guard’s gun instead of dangling with his toes six inches off the floor, that coroner’s report would have listed it as a suicide.”
“Maybe.” She didn’t care for the insinuation that she was naïve, but she felt like he might also be right. After what Oswald had done, it was surprising it had taken as long as it did for something to happen to him. But that wasn’t the part of the story that held her interest. “Tell me about when you met him,” Allison said.
“It was at Pastor Jenks’s church, Taylorsville First Methodist. I knew the good pastor wasn’t there so I didn’t see any harm in looking around. I just wanted to see the church for myself, you know. Get the lay of the land. The caretaker was around back so I went around to say hi.”
Allison knew Oswald Perkins had been the caretaker of the Methodist church in Taylorsville. She realized her stomach was clenched tight as if she were walking with Mike up to one of the worst serial killers in recent memory.
“He was digging a hole in the back and he looked up with those blue eyes of his,” Mike said, staring out the window as if he were back on the church grounds. “And they just kind of locked on me. You’ve seen pictures, right?”
Allison nodded. “And video.”
“They don’t come close to capturing it. I shit you not, when that man looked me in the eye, every hair on my body stood on end. It was primal. The animal part of my brain knew the man was not like the rest of us.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“You know, I must have,” Mike said. “I probably asked him about the property. Maybe about Dan Jenks. But what’s crazy is that I don’t really remember what we talked about. It was like he drew the energy right out of the air.”
Allison thought about Sam Kraw, that last haunting look he’d given her right before she pulled the trigger and blew out the back of his skull. She remembered Arnie Milhouse and how his face had changed once the charade was over between them, especially on the catamaran as they fought to the death, the human mask stripped away so there was nothing left but the monster visible underneath. She’d seen the look Mike described and knew the power inside of it.
“And how did it make you feel?” she asked softly.
Mike looked away. She noticed him biting his lip. With a glance down, she saw one of his hands gripping the door handle and the other clutching his leg.
“I felt judged,” he whispered. “Inadequate. That somehow I was less than I ought to be. Less than I could be. But that’s not what bothered me.” His hand opened and closed on his leg, making a fist. “It’s more that I…I don’t know, it was like I…”
“Wanted his approval?” Allison asked, flicking her eyes from the road to her passenger, reading all the body language.
Mike nodded. “I didn’t just want his approval. Within a few minutes of talking to him, I needed it. I craved it.” He let out a short bark of a laugh. “How screwed up is that? Especially given who he really was. All those horrific things he did.” He looked embarrassed. “I don’t know why I’m even telling you this.”
“Nothing to be ashamed of,” Allison said. “Serial killers are often charismatic figures, especially ones that unite their personas with religious imagery.”
“Unite their personas with religious imagery?” Mike asked, the bitterness clear in his voice. “Is that what the textbooks say? ’Cause that’s a pretty fucking clinical description of what that asshole did to those little girls. Did you see photos in a class? Read a report? Well, I saw the girls in person, OK? What was left of them. I saw what he did. It was too much.” His voice trailed off. “Too much.”
The silence hung in the car between them. Allison realized that at some point in the conversation her hand had reached out and instinctively turned off the radio. The only sound was the thump of the tires on the road and the low whirr of the car’s heater. Allison had been in enough therapy herself to know it was best to let the moment breathe.
After a minute, Mike let go of the door handle and folded his hands across his legs. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. It came out in short shudders, as if he were suddenly cold. “Wow, didn’t expect to go there,” he said. “Sorry I got so worked up.”
“Don’t apologize,” Allison said. “The things we see, the world we live in, it wears on you after a while. I know, trust me. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it.”
“Then why do you do it?”
Allison considered the question, mentally clicking the dial on the level of honesty she was willing to give this strange man who had been in her life for less than a day. “It used to be so I could make them stop. You know, catch the bad guys.”
“Used to be?”
“I still want to stop them,” Allison said. She hesitated, knowing she ought not to say the next words. But she liked this guy and he’d shared something personal with her, so it felt like a betrayal holding back the truth. “When I shot Sam Kraw, I pretended to feel bad about it, but I didn’t. He deserved it. No, he deserved worse than what I gave him. I should have shot him in the gut and let him die slow. The longer I do this, the less I think about stopping them. What I really want, more than stopping them, more than putting them in jail…” She hesitated, but then decided to push through. “What I really want is to punish them.”
Mike nodded and looked out the passenger window. She glanced over, trying to gauge his reaction, immediately regretting what she’d said. But it was out there now and like he’d said earlier, there was no editing feature on the spoken word. Besides, it was true. And saying it out loud felt good.
“I’ve been trying to make sense of what I do for years now,” he said, shaking his head. His voice was distant and flat, so different from his usual tone. “I don’t know why I can’t stop.” So quiet now that she almost couldn’t hear. “It’s just something inside of me. It’s who I am. I don’t think it’s possible for me to stop, not even if I wanted to.”
Allison realized that
Mike’s beat covering serial killer cases, especially with the special access afforded him by Garret, put him on the front lines like any of them at CID. Only they were trained to deal with it and were surrounded daily by people who knew to look for the warning signs of someone burning out. Even so, there was a revolving door at the dark, murky corner of the Bureau where the worst cases ended up. Eager crime fighters came in, ready to find and arrest the big bads of the world. Months later, many of them left, cynical and damaged, wracked with nightmares no amount of self-medication could stop. She imagined crime reporters experienced the same thing.
She’d seen it happen both ways, either a slow build of too many crime scenes over a long period that wore someone down until their nerves were paper thin, or a single scene that broke them in two. The cases with children were the hardest, of course. The juxtaposition of the innocence of a child and the depravity of a diseased mind. The Oswald Perkins case had retired a few agents from the field.
The photos of the scene Allison had studied were stark and over-exposed from the powerful external flashes set up by the crime scene photographer. It was in a cave, an off-shoot of one of the old abandoned mines that dotted the area. The five girls had been positioned in a wide circle around a fire pit in the center of the cave. The pit was just a pile of ash and charred wood by the time the picture was taken, but it wasn’t hard to imagine a fire going, smoke going up a natural flue in the cave ceiling. Oswald Perkins had later described how he liked to sit next to that fire, crouched down on his knees in prayer, shuffling in a circle around the fire pit. As he did, he looked through the fire at each of his girls, arms spread wide, feet together, nailed to the rough-cut wooden crosses made from old mining timbers.
The heavy nails went through their ankles and wrists, both for historical accuracy and pragmatic reasons, as Oswald later explained. Even though the oldest of the five girls was only nine and well under eighty pounds, a nail in the palm of the hand wouldn’t support the weight. Bone was needed for that job. Otherwise the nail just ripped through eventually. And it needed to last because Oswald Perkins liked to keep the girls alive for as long as possible.
The suffering was necessary for their purity, he explained later in the interviews. I think they were thankful for it. Yes, come to think of it, I’m sure all my girls enjoyed their time with me. Why wouldn’t they? I made them pure.
Allison thought of the way Oswald had died, strips of his own clothing tied together into a hangman’s noose. Nothing in his profile suggested he would commit suicide. If anything, he loved the attention he was getting. It fit perfectly into his messianic complex, a prophet brought before the Pharisees for persecution. Maybe Mike was right. Maybe it was those lines about the girls liking it that finally did it for the guards who decided to personally reinstate the death penalty in West Virginia and save the taxpayers the expense of incarcerating Oswald for the rest of his life.
“Maybe we think we’re still doing good,” Allison said. “Preventing the next victim.”
“Maybe you are,” Mike said, his voice trailing off as he stared out the window.
They passed a rusted sign that proclaimed that the town of Harlow was only five miles away. Mike rubbed his face with his hands and shook his arms loose. He reached out and turned the radio back on. It was two parts country music and one part static, but it filled the air with something other than their own dark thoughts. It was a clear signal. Therapy was over. Time to get back to work.
“OK, boss,” he said, the over-confident bravado back in his voice. “What’s the plan?”
31
Some towns appear to be ghosts of their former selves. The kind of place where old, stately mansions crumble in their last stages of life, with sagging rooflines and flaking paint, segmented into apartments for working-class families. These towns usually have the vestiges of a downtown, a few blocks of plywood-covered brick storefronts, laid out in a grid with plenty of parking for non-existent shoppers. There might also be a wide public square with an oversized gazebo where the band used to play on Friday evenings, only it’s fenced off as a hazard of rusty nails and splintered boards.
The town of Harlow, West Virginia had none of these things. This wasn’t a town that had lost its grip on past greatness, nor was it one with greatness ahead of it, if the last hundred and fifty years were any indication. It had never been a trading post for settlers traveling westward in pursuit of a better life, nor had a railroad once made a fortuitous stop there, which was often the happenstance that turned once small, rural villages into full-blown towns. There had never been a strike of a coal vein rich enough to cause one of the large companies from Pittsburgh or Baltimore to pump investments into the town the way they had in nearby Evansburg and Falston Heights. Harlow was about as Podunk as a town could get and still have the balls to give itself a name.
Allison coasted through the tiny downtown, a collection of eight buildings, four on each side of the road. Three of them were shuttered. Two were diners with signs in the windows declaring their price war on breakfast. Coffee 50c! Hungry Man’s Breakfast $1.95. The other stores were a general grocer, a hardware store and a feed shop. All closed.
“Finally, a town without a Starbucks,” Mike said.
Allison pointed to one of the diners. In the corner of the front window was the ubiquitous green mermaid and the tagline: Proudly serving Starbucks coffee.
Mike pointed to the other diner. The owner of that establishment had the same logo and tagline, only there was a red circle and a line through it and the word “NOT” inserted between the words proudly and serving.
“The battle lines have been drawn,” Allison said.
“I know where I’m going in the morning,” Mike said, nodding at the diner with the negation sign over the mermaid. “That’s the owner I want to meet.”
She scanned the streets but didn’t see any sign of life.
“So, what are we looking for?” Mike asked.
“The bar noise is all we have to go on. Usually, even a little town like this has at least one watering hole.”
“The best dive bars are on the edge of town, not in the middle of them,” Mike said. “I’m sure even a place like Harlow once had its share of town mothers who didn’t want all the drunks and fast girls right where everyone could see them. Keep driving.”
“You seem to know a lot about dive bars.”
“My occupation requires it,” Mike said. “Look, up there. You can kind of see a glow. Bet you a buck it’s a sign that says something like Mike’s Place or Billy Ray’s.”
Allison drove by the last few houses in town and followed the road on a curve to the right. Sure enough, there was an old lit-up sign on a rusty pole in a parking lot with a dozen cars. It was an odd building that looked like three different shacks had been smashed together and had their common walls torn down to create enough space inside so most of the town could get drunk together if they wanted to. Half of the lights in the sign were out and those remaining flickered. Even so, it was possible to make out the name of the place. Billy Ray’s Saloon.
Allison looked over to a grinning Mike who held up his iPhone. “You know, they have apps for this stuff nowadays.”
“Anyone ever tell you you’re a smart ass?”
“All the time. Look, it’s one of your fellow law enforcement officers.”
Allison followed his gaze and saw a sheriff’s blazer parked next to the side door. She groaned. Locals weren’t always excited about the FBI poking around in their back yards. Sometimes you’d get an overeager FBI wannabe who fell over themselves to help out, but usually it was the exact opposite and they were just a pain in the ass. It was one of the few things the cop movies got right.
She parked the car. “He’s probably off-duty. No reason to bother him if it’s not necessary.” She turned off the ignition. “Don’t suppose you’ll stay here and wait for me?”
Mike nodded to the bar. “A single woman looking the way you do walks into a local dive bar alone at midnight
. How do you think that’s going to go?”
“You’re worried whether I can handle myself?” Allison asked. “That’s sweet.”
“I have no doubt you can handle yourself,” he said. “I’m just saying that if you go in alone, you’ll be fending off the sharks instead of doing what you need to do. Besides,” he added, opening the door, “there’s no way I’m staying in here.” He climbed out.
Allison got out and met him at the back of the car. “OK, but let me talk to her. Don’t forget you’re the guest on this trip.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
As they walked to the door, Allison noticed that the sheriff’s blazer was parked in the only handicap spot. Even better, a bumper sticker of a large-breasted woman with a police hat and handcuffs covered the rear fender. I Love Badge Bunnys, it proclaimed.
“Class act,” Mike said.
With a deep breath, Allison stepped into the bar.
Billy Ray’s Saloon was low-life enough to give dive bars a bad name. Poor lighting that cast long shadows. Musty air that smelled of stale beer, peanut shells and a faint whiff of urine. A dartboard. Pool table with so many stains on the felt that it looked like a work of splatter art. There were tables and booths spread throughout the place, few of them matching any of the others. While the mismatched look was popular in some trendy cafes, it didn’t take much to guess that Billy Ray, if there really was someone who still owned the place with that name, had simply pieced together a collection of furniture from whatever sources he could. An old jukebox hugged the wall near the pool table, pouting in the shadows with a thick power cord wrapped into a knot and thrown on top of it. Still, country music played in the background from speakers over the bar, probably plugged into someone’s phone. The ceiling height varied in elevation in the three sections, each eight feet or less, giving the space a compressed feel. Everywhere, that was, except at the bar.
The ceiling here soared to twelve feet which, after walking through the rest of the establishment, felt like a cathedral-sized space. In a way it was, and the supplicants here took their prayers seriously. Instead of rosaries and Hail Mary’s, they washed away their sins through other rituals.
