The Murder of Janessa Hennley

by Victor Methos

  She seemed on edge, speaking quickly and not finishing her wine before filling the glass again. She took a long pull from it.

  “I’m leaving tomorrow,” he said.

  “You’re leaving? Now?”

  “I’m not going to be part of the interrogation, and I’m not a lab guy. My part’s done.”

  “So that’s it? You’re just gonna go back to DC and forget you ever saw us small town folk, huh?”

  He finished stirring the sauce and wiped his hands on a kitchen towel. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Fine.” She sat at the table and ran her finger along the rim of the glass before taking a drink.

  Mickey put the pasta in boiling water and then sat at the table with her. He sipped his wine as his watch went off, and he pressed the alarm button to silence it.

  “When I was twelve,” she said, “my grandmother told me that people aren’t born to hate other people. For whatever reason they hate them, religion, race, whatever, she said hate was taught.” Suzan’s eyes glistened. “And if hate could be taught, then love could be taught, too. And it was even more powerful, because love is easier to feel in the human heart.” She covered her mouth as tears rolled down her cheeks.

  Mickey rested his hand over hers as she wept.

  Suzan grabbed some tissues out of a box. “You must think I’m so stupid. The sheriff that can’t handle crime scenes.”

  “I don’t think that at all.”

  “I bet I know some of those girls. I bet I’ll see them and I’ll have to tell their parents…”

  “You can just let the Bureau handle it. You don’t have to be involved if you don’t want to.”

  She wiped the tears away. “This is my town. People will come to me for answers.”

  “You won’t have any. There’s no explanation for this.”

  His phone rang; it was Kyle Vidal.

  “I have to take this.”

  “Right. I’m, ah, going to go have a quick shower.”

  Mickey stepped out onto the front porch and sat down on the steps. “This is Parsons.”

  “Mickey, I just had a pow-wow with the Anchorage SAC. Fantastic job. I have to be honest, I didn’t think you still had it in you.”

  “I couldn’t have done it without the sheriff. When you’re giving the press conferences, don’t forget that.”

  “What makes you think I’ll… Never mind. We both know it’ll be me.”

  “What’s the status of Mathias?”

  “He’s confessed to at least fifty rapes so far. He’s trying to cut a deal in exchange for the info of the other people in the ring. He says there’re over a hundred men throughout the state, and he’s met some from the California chapter, too.”

  “What about the girl in the basement?”

  “He says that was an accident. They were playing too rough, and she died. He panicked and put her in cement. He wants immunity for that, too, in exchange for what he’s got on everybody else. He’s talking high-level people. Mayors, doctors, lobbyists… This could be huge.”

  “And the Hennleys?”

  “Says he doesn’t know anything about that, but the boys down there think he’s holding back a lot. They’re still working him. He waived his right to a lawyer if the U.S. Attorney came down and they talked deal, so I think a lot more’ll come out in the next few days. It’s him though, right?”

  “Janessa was a young girl, same age and body type as the ones I saw. I’m willing to bet he’s on the video of her rape, too. She rejected his offer to be part of this thing and get traded around. I think he’s good for it.”

  “Me too. When you flying back?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Well, beers on me when you get back. Actually, why don’t you take a day or two and relax out there? Go fishing or something. I would.”

  “I’ll think about it. Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Suzan leaned against the front door. She’d changed into an Icedogs sweatshirt and jeans; her arms were folded over the mascot on the shirt. Her hair wasn’t wet.

  “He confessed to the murder of the girl in the basement,” Mickey said, guessing what she was about to ask. “Not to the Hennleys’ yet, but they’ll get it out of him.”

  “What’s gonna happen to him?”

  “He says he has information on men worse than him. Same as Nathan. He’ll probably cut some sort of deal.”

  “And just get off?” she said, a flash of anger in her voice.

  “That’s not really how the federal system works. When we bring a case, we know it’ll stick. He’ll probably cut a deal in exchange for minimum security. A lot nicer facilities with more amenities, not really any violence.”

  She sat down on the steps. They watched a red Buick drive by, a mother in the driver seat yelling to four children piled into the back.

  “I bet you can’t wait to get back to civilization,” she said.

  “Actually, I really like it here. The pace. I was thinking I wouldn’t mind getting a time-share up here or renting a condo now and then. I think my daughter and her husband would love to come up for the hiking and boating, too.”

  “You’re always welcome to stay here if you like.”

  He smiled and placed his hand over hers again. She turned her hand and interlaced their fingers. His heart beat faster. It’d been so long since he had touched a woman that way that he didn’t know what it felt like anymore. His guts balled up. It was silly that, even at his age, a woman’s touch could make him feel like he was thirteen again.

  Water fizzled behind them, bubbling over a hot stove.

  “The pasta,” he said, jumping up.

  “Uh oh. I’ll help.”

  After they ate, they stayed up and watched a movie on television. Something starring Keanu Reeves. Mickey couldn’t pay attention as Suzan’s head rested on his shoulder. The anticipation, the thrill, was killing him. But it was pointless. Nothing could happen between them. He was only torturing himself.

  “I better get to bed,” he said. “I’m taking the noon flight out.”

  She leaned in and kissed him without a word. Her lips were soft, and her touch made his heart jump. He closed his eyes and thought, for the first time since he’d come here, that he never wanted to leave.

  34

  David Shyam sat on his bed. Behind him, the bedroom window looked down on the street where he had lived his entire life. His sister and the youngest of his brothers left the house over a decade ago. He was thirty-two now and would live with his parents for the rest of his life.

  Before him lay an open laptop. On one screen was a photo of Mickey Parsons with a blurb about the recent arrest of a man thought to be the head of a child prostitution ring. Several other people circled Agent Parsons, and more photos lined the left and the right, but David couldn’t see the people. Faces held no meaning to him. The hazy outlines of blobs may as well have been spilt milk on linoleum or clay unmolded on a table.

  But he could see Mickey Parsons. He saw the face, the eyes, and the nose, and he felt a connection to him. He could also see Sheriff Suzan Clay, something he’d only discovered yesterday when the news website posted a photo of her. He could look at photos of both and see two separate people. It made him feel… almost normal. Maybe they could help him? No one could see him, he didn’t exist, but maybe if they saw him like he saw them, they could help him.

  The door to his bedroom opened, and he closed the laptop. An indistinct figure stood at the door.

  “David, it’s time to eat. Will you please come down and eat at the table with your father and I?”

  David didn’t answer. The figure walked across the room and sat down next to him. It ran its hands over his head and came away with clumps of hair and dying skin.

  “The tube can only get you so much nutrition, sweetheart. You have to eat,” it said desperately. It began to sob, its face in its hands, but David couldn’t understand what it was doing.

  “Please talk to me, David. Say somethi
ng. Tell me you hate me. Tell me this is my fault, that I have rotten genes that did this to you. Say something to me, sweetheart. Please. I can’t take the silence. I can’t take it.”

  He knew the entity in front of him was crying, but what did it care about a man that was dead?

  He let it cry, and then it got up and left. He turned back to his laptop and stared at photos of Suzan Clay.

  35

  Mickey lay in bed in the dark, Suzan’s hair over his shoulder, her head gently resting on his biceps. They had done nothing more than kiss, hold each other, and talk, but he couldn’t remember when he had been so happy.

  Moonlight glowed through the windows. The room smelled like fruit body wash and clean sheets. The last time he had been in a woman’s bedroom, he had sealed his life. How it would work and how it would end. The disease coursing through him slowly chipped away at his body until his immune system couldn’t defend him anymore, and pneumonia, a cold, or the flu would kill him. He had seen those with full-blown AIDS withering away to nothing in hospital beds, slowly and painfully, before the end.

  That wasn’t going to be him. He would take his own life before that happened.

  But now, with this wonderful, openhearted woman lying next to him, he no longer wanted to. He wanted to fight for the first time in years.

  Tears rolled down his cheeks, and he wiped them with the back of his hand. He watched her sleep before planting a kiss on her soft, smooth forehead.

  But if he stayed with her, it would destroy her life. She was at least twenty years younger and still able to have children. But they wouldn’t be able to. Even with condoms, the risk of infection was so great he would never attempt sex. A young, healthy woman deserved better than that. The love inside her poured out of her like a river. She was genuine in a way that Mickey believed most people weren’t. She would make a great mother someday.

  He wouldn’t allow her to devote herself to him. He couldn’t let that happen.

  He slid his arm out from under her and slipped out of bed. She stirred but didn’t wake.

  In the guest room, he packed his bag and put on jeans and a T-shirt with his leather jacket. He took the keys to the truck and locked the bottom lock on his way out. At the door, he looked to the hallway leading to the bedroom where she lay. Every part of him said to go back, to not throw something like this away when it just falls in your lap. That it was rare and precious and couldn’t be ignored.

  He stood there a long while, part of him hoping she would wake and stop him from leaving. She never did.

  He shut the door and drove off.

  The hotel was nice enough, with a grill that was still open though it was nearly midnight. The drive to Anchorage took several hours because of a traffic accident, but it was time he wanted to spend alone. He needed to think. He wanted to call his daughter, but it was late, so he let it alone. He texted her instead and just said, “I love you--Dad.”

  He sat at the grill and ordered a cheeseburger. He took his medications. His eyes nearly closed from fatigue, and he had to force them open. Every muscle felt like it was full of lead. All his movements slow, accomplished only with effort. He rolled up his sleeves and dipped a couple of fries in ketchup. Mickey asked for the special fry sauce, but the cashier didn’t know what he was talking about. He ate his burger in silence.

  Sipping a Coke, he regarded the television above him. Two people discussed a controversial photo of the Boston marathon bomber looking seductively at the camera on an issue of Rolling Stone.

  He finished only half his burger before going to his room. After undressing, he removed a mini-bottle of whiskey from a small fridge, which would cost him twelve dollars, and sat in the chair by the window. He stared at the mountains off in the distance.

  He took out his phone and nearly dialed the sheriff’s number. His finger hovered over the last digit a few seconds before he turned his phone off and grabbed another bottle out of the fridge.

  36

  Dr. Martin Boyack drove his Mercedes to Alaska Regional Hospital at six in the morning. He wanted to catch a colleague of his, a psychiatrist named of Collin Hopp, before he began his rounds.

  As soon as he walked in, an iPad under his arm, the scents of a hospital brought back all the years of rotations and his four-year stint as a resident in a hospital in Chicago. Originally from Anchorage, he had always wanted to get to a big city. Then when he actually did, all he could think about was coming back. Being a staff psychiatrist in one of the biggest hospitals in one of the largest cities in the country—not to mention one of the most violent—changed the way he viewed medicine and his place in it.

  Often, he saw the same patients over and over again. Schizophrenics that fell off bridges, were struck by cars, or shot. Those out of work and between jobs were robbed and assaulted. One man, homeless and without a penny to his name, was beaten to within an inch of his life for his worn sneakers. The world, it seemed, had mercy for no one. With no space in the already overcrowded jails and prisons, the state routinely placed the mentally ill in a psychiatric unit for thirty or ninety days and then released them. Unsupervised, they stopped taking their medication and quickly fell back into a pattern of either the perpetrators or victims of crime.

  Boyack genuinely thought he could help change that his first year as a resident. By his second year in Chicago, he no longer believed it. So, as soon as he completed his residency, he moved back to Anchorage and began a private practice. Few psychiatrists lived here, and he quickly built a reputation for himself as one that catered to disorders not commonly understood. Paranoid schizophrenia, Stockholm syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder, and body dysmorphic disorders were common in his practice. But he had never seen anyone like David Shyam.

  In many ways, David was the most mysterious and the most difficult patient he’d ever had. Even with paranoid schizophrenics, the therapist delved into them in their moments of clarity, when they could speak rationally about their disorder. But David didn’t speak. He wondered if this was what veterinarians felt like in trying to diagnose a patient that couldn’t communicate what was wrong.

  Boyack checked in at the front desk of the psychiatric unit on the fifth floor and waited a few moments before Dr. Hopp gave him the okay to come back. Dr. Hopp’s office was as antiseptic as the rest of the hospital. His walls were bare except for degrees, and a fake plant sat in the corner as the only decoration. Medical texts took up two bookshelves, and his desk was spotless.

  “Caught me just in time,” Hopp said. He shook his hand. “You look well, Martin.”

  “You too. You’ve lost weight.”

  “Bella has me on a low-carb diet. Truth be told, I can hardly think sometimes, but the waist is going down.”

  Boyack placed the iPad on the desk and sat down.

  “If your brain doesn’t get the glucose it needs from food, it’ll get it by breaking down your muscle tissue.”

  He shrugged. “I know. But it makes Bella happy.” Hopp picked up a pen and placed the end on his lower lip. “What can I do for you?”

  Martin flipped the cover off the iPad and opened a photo of David Shyam. He slid it across the desk.

  “Who is this?”

  “Thirty-two-year-old patient of mine. He’s a mystery to me, Collin. You can see he’s decrepit. He won’t eat or bathe. His mother told me at his first session that he doesn’t sleep for a week at a time. Then his body will just faint, and when he wakes up twenty or thirty hours later, he’ll go until he faints again. He’s got muscle on him from steroidal injections, but he’s extremely unwell.”

  “What does he tell you?”

  “Nothing. We’ve had two sessions, and he stared at my desk the entire time. His mother told me he hasn’t spoken a word for three years.”

  “Leprosy?”

  “I had him tested in the lab. Negative for mycobacterium.”

  “Hmm,” he said, considering the photo. “He looks like… a corpse.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it.
He’s being treated by a neurologist, Williams from up here, actually, and all the tests are coming back negative. Physically, there’s nothing wrong with him. But look at this.” He pulled up PET scan results. “Look at the brain function. It resembles someone who’s asleep or under anesthesia. He shouldn’t be awake.”

  Hopp considered the scans further and then handed the iPad back. He turned to the window and watched the sky for a long time. Boyack, when Hopp had been one of his professors in medical school, had seen this on plenty of occasions. Hopp would stop mid-lecture and hold up his hand, indicating no more questions until he finished his thought.

  Boyack stared at the photo on the iPad.

  “Have you contemplated Cotard’s syndrome?” Hopp said after nearly two minutes of silence.

  “I’ve never even heard of it.”

  “It’s extraordinarily rare. I myself have never seen it in person, but I did have an attending that did. He described a patient with the appearance of a zombie. They would lurk in cemeteries, and their family would have to go retrieve them frequently. The origin is unknown, but from what little research we have, it seems to involve some sort of misfiring in the limbic system. Though we’re not even sure of that. The brain is still a mystery to us, Martin.” He bit the end of the pen. “But it does have a more colloquial term you may have heard.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Walking Corpse Syndrome.”

  37

  Mark Gilbert pulled on Vanessa’s hand as they walked through Kodiak Basin Cemetery. Late at night, there was nowhere in the town more secluded.

  The cemetery sat on five acres of rolling grasslands. Allegedly, video cameras monitored the four entrances, one on every side, the official ways to get in. But without fences, you could enter anywhere you wanted as long as you came in on foot.