by John L. Monk
One time, I’d missed just such a defect and the motor had burned out under too much load. Everything was fine until the second week, and then it was like someone detonated a stink bomb thousands of times more powerful than the one dropped on Mrs. Bloodworth’s English class in ’88. As much as I’d like to take credit for that senseless act of olfactory terrorism, that had been my buddy Simon’s doing.
With Sally out of the way, I rushed upstairs and took a long hot shower.
For all that Fred’s house was in disrepair, he wasn’t a slob. He had soap and shampoo, clean clothes, and deodorant. Another reason to stick around. Using the safety razor and old-fashioned cup of shaving soap was a special joy, almost like a cleansing ritual.
After affixing four little pieces of toilet paper to the cuts on my face, I went downstairs and checked out the refrigerator. No heads or eyeballs or jars of human ears. Just eggs, bacon, juice, bottles of condiments, no fruits and vegetables anywhere, and a small freezer with a carton of ice cream.
Not only was my ride a predator, possibly a serial killer, but he also enjoyed Chunky Monkey. It’s a small world after all.
With breakfast and grooming and cleanup squared away, I contemplated what to do next. What a great ride so far. Fred was sort of old, and slow from being way too overweight for his age, but he was strong enough to kidnap women, and he wasn’t in a wheelchair. After my last ride, maybe I didn’t need vigorous so much. Rest and relaxation—that’d do nicely. Something incredibly passive, requiring zero thinking on my part. No work, no guns or torture, and possibly a trip to the Dairy Queen if I found one in the wild.
“The mall,” I said, finally.
Though I knew all the roads, it didn’t mean I knew where all the malls were. But that’s why they have gas stations.
“I’m looking for a big mall,” I said to the guy behind the counter. “The biggest you got.”
He laughed good-naturedly. “We don’t sell any here, but if you head down to the light and hang a right…”
When he finished, I paid for my little apple pie and carton of milk, thanked him, and left. Ten minutes later I was parked outside a big mall, all boxes and elevations and tacked-on sections flung out in every direction. It was amazing.
I love malls—people from all walks of life coming together to engage in commerce, crowding from place to place, oblivious and preoccupied, yet somehow never actually colliding with one another. Malls were temperature-controlled, too, and nobody smoked indoors anymore so I didn’t have to deal with that.
One of the best days of my life was when I was sixteen and snuck off to ditch a low-calorie diet my parents had put me on when I’d gotten too heavy. I’d taken the bus to the mall and bought a mixed bag of jelly doughnuts and Boston Creams. Then I sat on a bench with a carton of milk and letched over an endless parade of other people’s girlfriends. Near the end of the bag, right when my body was telling me it wasn’t hungry anymore, I found a lemon-filled doughnut—delicious, tart, and sweet—and that stoked the fire a little longer. For the next thirty minutes, I sat there with my arms hooked over the back of the bench. Just me and my empty bag of doughnuts and an avalanche of powdered sugar decorating my shirt.
Ah, the good ol’ days.
After checking the backlit marquis, I hiked way to the other side of the mall and took the escalators up a level to the only bookstore they had.
The escalators were great, but that was a long walk for Fred. I had to sit on a bench for a while to catch my breath. A good time to resume my favorite mall pastime: staring at women.
One thing about Fred: the pigment around his eyes was darker than the rest of his face, giving him a faintly brooding appearance. I didn’t want anyone complaining to mall security, so I made sure to look around innocently whenever a woman passed by. I settled for two seconds coming, five seconds going, which I deemed a good gawking-to-looking-around ratio.
When I felt I was ready, I lurched to my feet and went into the bookstore.
First, I poked through the new releases, judging each book by its cover. Then I visited the little lounge and coffee area they had, bought a large cup of coffee and six different pastries, and found a table in a more or less central location where I could eyeball everyone coming and going. A tactical decision. People were less likely to catch me staring at them because it would be impolite to watch me eat.
A little social judo, that—using people’s good manners against them.
After finishing a peach danish and a bran muffin, I held off eating my next pastry—a huge creampuff, cold and heavy with cream. Needing something to read—part of my cover—I jaunted over to the newsstand to find something that wasn’t too boring: National Geographic, Scientific American, and a science fiction magazine. Just the basics. The Black Belt Magazine I added on impulse would teach me some neat moves in case I was ever attacked by ninjas.
Looking for anything cool I’d missed, my gaze strayed to the newspapers. If my eyes could have bugged out, they would have, but probably they just widened a little. And with good reason: every paper had a story about Ernest Prescott’s house of horrors plastered across the front page.
I put the National Geographic and Scientific American back, grabbed three newspapers, and returned to my table.
USA Today had a scary picture of Ernest on the front, captioned, “Truth or Scare?” It talked about the unidentified woman who’d been kidnapped and how she shot her way to freedom. It covered the wild parties Lana and Ernest threw at the mansion, and the cultish following that had sprung up since his first book, Clench, had hit the shelves.
What I found most interesting were the eleven bodies found decomposing in the mansion’s oversized septic tanks. Each news source confirmed the FBI was running DNA on the remains. One of the corpses had been fresh and easily identifiable—a security guard working for Lana Sandway named Sean Galloway. It turned out Sean and Brian had been ex-military security specialists who’d done mercenary work overseas, possibly for third-world dictators.
The press spent a lot of time focusing on reports of a “sex pentangle”—the phrase of the week, repeated in all three newspapers—between Sean, Brian, Lana, Ernest, and rising MMA star Jacob Sandway. The kinky pentangle rumors and the connection to Jacob’s father allowed the press to spread the sleaze so thin it covered and tainted everything. One paper went so far as to suggest it had really been a “sexagon” before the rich man’s death. Other than the names, almost nothing resembled the truth I’d experienced.
Recalling the bizarre events at the mansion, which to me seemed like only yesterday and would for as long as I existed, I suddenly didn’t feel like eating my last creampuff. I ate it anyway, though, because wasting food is a sin.
I paid for my magazines, and a book I snagged on the way to the checkout line, and left.
The mall had a theater, but Sliced wasn’t playing on any of the screens. Taken down, most likely, as an outward display of respect for the victims, though I doubted the self-censorship applied to online video sales or books.
It was a weird feeling, being the center of the nation’s collective astonishment. A real mover and shaker, I was. You line ’em up and I knock ’em down. A dangerous feeling, and faintly intoxicating.
I’d always thought serial killers left clues behind to see their names in the paper, to feel like big men and watch the world dance. Though that was obviously still true for many of them, I sensed an additional reason. In a weird way, knowing all those people were out there thinking about me and what I’d done at the mansion, I didn’t feel so alone.
“I’m not a serial killer,” I stated firmly, then glanced around to see if anyone heard me.
At some point in my wandering from store to store, I found myself in an open section of the mall on the ground floor occupied by an enormous jungle gym, safely contained with thick netting to keep kids from toppling out.
If I’d grown up with a jungle gym like that, who knows where I’d be today? All that self-actualization and delirious
joy. Maybe I would have lived past my first broken heart and become a movie director like I’d wanted. But then Denise and her baby, and all those other people over the years, wouldn’t be alive today.
Out of nowhere, the jungle gym offered up an altogether different sort of actualization, though very little joy.
In 2004, a man named Gerald Ross had been tried on multiple counts of possession of child pornography, counts of felony child molestation, charges of sexual misconduct with a minor, contributing to the delinquency of a child, aggravated sexual assault and, as if it were somehow on par with those other crimes, obstruction of justice.
Following the trial, after weeks of argument on both sides, Gerald beat most of the charges. But even his incredibly lenient judge, roundly criticized for siding so often with the defense, couldn’t rescue him from one of the counts of possession of illegal porn—because Gerald had been an active participant in the one picture the prosecution managed to rescue as admissible. That one picture should have been enough to nail Gerald on a molestation charge, but the child—a little girl, about eight years old—couldn’t be found.
After that, an expert witness said this little girl had never existed, that this picture had been doctored. No other pictures were examined by the expert because the defense proved (with the judge’s help) that the prosecution had severely botched the chain of custody.
Before the trial, Gerald had been something of a celebrity in his hometown. He’d had a kids’ television show called Gerald’s House on a local station. Gerald’s House featured puppets, games, singing, educational skits like on Sesame Street, and prizes for lucky kids who wrote in with answers to his weekly question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” When his show got picked up for syndication, People Magazine called him “the next Mr. Rogers.”
After the news broke about the real Gerald Ross, almost nobody covered the story. What finally brought the story to national attention wasn’t the crime itself, but the sentence. The judge presiding over the case, despite objections from the prosecutor and almost anyone with a conscience, sentenced Gerald to a mere thirty days in jail for his single count of possession of child pornography, going so far as to override the jury’s much harsher, maximum sentence.
The judge explained his verdict: “Almost nothing in the state’s sentencing request was crafted with the goal of rehabilitation. It appears to have been born out of a need for retaliation in a case they couldn’t carry, and I cannot in good conscience allow the establishment of another crime, as if the one will somehow cancel out the other.”
Gerald wouldn’t get off too easily, the judge added. As a condition of his release, he’d be forced to seek therapy for his condition.
For the next four days, the judge’s bizarre verdict was all the media would talk about. Then something happened in the Middle East and Gerald’s story got bumped to make room for talking heads, war correspondents, and ancient cities on fire.
Some months later, the story took an unexpected twist. The judge in the case, His Honor, Mark Simmons, had been arrested for possession of child pornography. But that wasn’t the interesting part. The pictures found on his computer were of the same victims in the Gerald Ross case—the very case he had so leniently presided over.
Judge Simmons went to prison, but there was nothing anyone could do about Gerald—the laws against double jeopardy forbade another trial. After release, he quickly disappeared from the scene, and the news moved on to whichever outrage made the most sense to cover next.
Nine years later, the world may have forgotten about the case, but I hadn’t.
Standing on the other side of the jungle gym was a slightly older Gerald Ross, about fifty now, and a little heavier than his showbiz days. He was carrying a teddy bear in one hand and a pink backpack in the other. He stood there with a patient smile on his face, as if waiting for his own child to finish playing so he could take him or her home. He chatted with nearby parents, laughing and getting along—even tussling the hair of the odd kid here or there. I stood out of his direct line of sight for about thirty minutes, waiting to see if a kid burst forth from one of the colored tubes and called him Daddy, but that never happened.
In time, Gerald stopped talking to parents and tussling hairdos. He drifted back from the circle of parents and nannies, turned around, and walked away.
And because I am who I am, I followed him.
Chapter Sixteen
Gerald didn’t look around at the stores, people, and colorful sale signs. He didn’t stare at other people’s big pretzels or soft-serve cones, like I did. He walked with purpose, too quickly, such that Fred’s large, aging body was having trouble keeping up. My heart sank briefly when I lost sight of him. He’d cut through a thickening in the crowd, then slipped around a corner jewelry store. When I finally turned the corner, I found to my annoyance he’d vanished.
He could have gone into one of the nearby shops, or he could have continued to where the corridor bent left about thirty feet down. If I continued on and didn’t see him, I could always double back and check the shops one by one.
Picking up the pace as best I could, I turned the bend and pushed through the glass doors leading outside.
I caught sight of him walking down the sidewalk alongside the building toward a big parking structure. He didn’t look back, and I tailed him into the garage.
Gerald took the stairs to the next level, and despite the possibility of a heart attack before my three weeks concluded, I kept after him—tiredly, doggedly, gasping for breath by the time I got even one flight up. No wonder Fred picked on scarecrows like Sally.
When I crested the third landing, Gerald had vanished again, and this time I knew I couldn’t catch him. Possibly he’d gone left around the numerous columns and parked cars. Or maybe he’d kept going up to the fourth floor. Maybe the fifth. Why not the sixth?
Wherever he went, I knew I was done.
“That’s that,” I said to myself, and stumped back down again.
Pausing at the bottom, leaning heavily against the concrete entrance, I wondered whether I had free will. It was interesting, me coming to the mall today and seeing Gerald Ross. Like I’d been guided here. And if I was guided here, and thus not under my own control, what was the point of the whole free will charade to begin with?
Back in the Great Wherever, if I’d taken the other portal to that innocent man, would I have found my way to the same mall? Perhaps that ride would have been younger with more endurance. And if I’d caught Gerald, killed him, and gotten caught in the process, an innocent man would have gone to jail.
Just when I pushed off the wall to resume walking, Gerald Ross pulled up next to me in a blue car, neither high-end nor a clunker. He slowed before turning onto the access road that led out, glanced casually at me, then faced back to the road. Then he calmly pulled away.
I couldn’t stop him, but I did note one distinguishing feature of his otherwise unremarkable car. On the back fender, positioned under the left taillight, was a bumper sticker reading: I Love Kids.
“Son of a bitch,” I said.
Twenty seconds later, he was gone.
When I got back in the mall, I found the food court, then went to a place with no line and ordered a large soda.
“And a slice of pizza,” I added.
Being in the body of an old heavy guy had become sort of a bummer. Fred was strong, but he tired too easily from walking. And his blood sugar had begun to crash when I’d taken those stairs in the parking garage. Dangerous signs in an older guy.
Now I was shaky and weak, and when I finished my pizza I went back to the counter for another slice. The soda helped replenish the sugar that had been sucked away by too much insulin. Fred didn’t do well with sugar, and I knew I’d have to reduce my intake. Diet sodas going forward, and no more than two pastries next time. No need to go cold turkey, right? I wasn’t trying to save Fred’s life, but I didn’t want to blow my ride through reckless gluttony, either.
The rest of
the day was spent watching back-to-back movies at the mall theater and reading my book on a bench just outside a Victoria’s Secret.
On the way back to the house, I picked up some groceries to go with all that ketchup and mustard Fred had. Then I took a nap. After I got up, I didn’t feel like cooking so I ordered Chinese food. For dessert, I had a technically smaller bowl of Chunky Monkey than normal—in light of Fred’s condition—then stayed up watching his surprisingly skimpy television setup. No DVD player, no cable TV, not even satellite, and no computer or Internet access.
Tired from the day and loaded with things to read, I was fine with that.
* * *
That night, just as I was thinking about heading to bed, a phone started ringing from somewhere in the house. I got up and followed the sound to the room with Harriet’s death certificate. I’d been too slow, and whoever it was gave up after eight rings.
A desk stood against the wall stacked with junk mail and boxes of Harriet’s Medicare papers. On it was an old yellow rotary telephone. I didn’t see an answering machine, and because it was a rotary, I assumed Fred didn’t have a service.
A minute later, from the kitchen, Fred’s cell began ringing.
I hurried to the kitchen, picked it up and said, “Hello?”
“Fred, where were you last night?” a man said. He sounded young, with a heavy New England accent. “Lucky for you I needed the hours, but I can’t cover you again. You wanna get fired or what?”
“I’ve been sick,” I said, then coughed for effect.
“Too sick to call Cliff and let him know?”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t get you,” he said. “You come in early every day, then every month or so you don’t show up and you don’t call. Something I should know?”
“Probably,” I said.
