by Ted Dekker
“Are you . . . are you okay?”
She leaned into the wall and started to cry again. “He’s got Daniel, Brit.”
MAN OF SORROW:
JOURNEY INTO DARKNESS
by Anne Rudolph
Crime Today magazine is pleased to present the eighth installment of Anne Rudolph’s narrative account of the killer now known as Alex Price, presented in nine monthly installments.
January 7, 1992
ONE WEEK after accepting Bruce’s proposal of marriage in Lovers’ Park, Jessica looked forward to a walk in the same park to discuss wedding plans that evening at ten.
Alex had accepted the news with as much grace as she could have expected of him. In fact, with more than she’d expected. He’d withdrawn after his initial outburst and subsequent apology. They talked each day, and he showed no concern about Jessica’s relationship with Bruce. She referred to it once and he changed the subject. Best to give him space to adjust, she thought.
Jessica’s shift was supposed to end at ten, but an irritated customer who refused to pay his bill delayed her fifteen minutes. By the time she stepped into the cool night outside the restaurant, it was almost 10:20. And no sign of Bruce.
Lovers’ Park was only a block away. She made her way across the quiet street to find him by the swings, where they often met. He’d once surprised her from the bushes at the entrance to the park, and although he’d rolled on the ground laughing, she found the fright not the least bit funny. Still, the thought of it now made her smile. She kept her eyes on the bushes as she approached.
Life with Bruce would be an adventure she could hardly imagine. Like a trip to outer space for most people. She might even be able to have children with a man like Bruce, although the thought terrified her.
She walked into the park with a wary eye and angled for the swings. There was no one else near that she could see. When she reached the swings and saw no sign of Bruce, she became concerned. He’d never been late, and it was now twenty minutes past the time they’d agreed to meet. Had he left already? What if he’d gone to their apartment?
A moan from the slope to her right made her spin around. There in the draw was a form. Bruce? She rushed over, calling his name.
Bruce lay prone, trying to move, groaning. She dropped to her knees beside him and only then saw the extent of his injuries. His face was mangled and bloody. His shirt was torn to ribbons, revealing long gashes on his chest and sides and forearms.
Through sobs, she tried to help him, but he slipped into unconsciousness. She raced back to the restaurant, screaming for an ambulance, then returned to Bruce’s side.
All the while one word kept drumming through her mind. Alex. Alex had done this. Alex had beaten Bruce and whipped him with a cat-o’-nine-tails. Jessica ran to the bushes next to Bruce’s prone body and threw up.
The ambulance arrived at 10:31 and rushed Bruce to the emergency room. Jessica watched the paramedics roll him into the ward, hardly able to think for the rage she felt. She’d told the doctor on duty exactly what she’d seen, which was nothing more than he could see. Someone had attacked Bruce in the park and left him battered and bruised.
He would live, the doctor said. The blood made the wounds appear worse than they were. They would keep him in the hospital overnight and probably release him sometime the next day.
Jessica rushed home. “I was a crazy mess,” she recalled. She entered the apartment and eased the door shut. As expected, no Alex in the living room. Several candles were burning on the table. He was there, in his room.
Blinded by rage, Jessica stormed to his door. She tried the handle but it was locked, so she threw her shoulder into the door, screaming at Alex. Surprisingly, the door frame splintered, and she spilled past the opened door, past the black curtain, and into Alex’s room.
She pulled up, panting. For the first time, her brother’s private space filled her eyes. Two dozen candles on candelabras and pedestals lit the room. All four walls had been painted black. A table with holes drilled in each corner sat against one wall. Dozens of upside-down crosses had been nailed to the walls, intermixed with the heads of chickens with pins sticking into their eyes. See no evil.
More books than Jessica could have imagined filled three large bookcases. Legal and medical volumes. Books on religion and philosophy. A rocking chair sat in one corner, a mattress on the floor to her left. One sheet only, no blanket. No pillow. The closet door opposite the mattress was closed.
Alice might have lived here. Jessica saw it all in a glance and froze. It was as if she’d stepped back into Alice’s coven.
Her brother sat at a desk, stripped to his waist. Several fresh cuts on his back seeped blood. He turned slowly and stared at her with sad eyes, showing no concern or shock at her sudden intrusion.
Jessica marched over to the closet and threw the door open. At least a dozen whips hung from a wooden spindle. Knives and razors and rattraps lay among other paraphernalia, all neatly placed.
She spun around and faced her brother. “You’ve become her!”
Alex stared at her wide-eyed.
“I’m protecting you,” he said.
“No, this is Eve’s doing! The unholy spirit is making you do this!” she cried.
Alex’s face changed, eyes narrowing to slits, skin stretching tight. When he spoke, his voice growled. “You ever try to stop me, sow, and I’ll kill more of them than you know how to bury. And I’ll know. I’ll know if you breathe a word. Because I can see you, sow.”
Jessica watched, frozen to the floor. Slowly Alex’s face reverted to its normal form and he stared at her, lost.
“The fear that filled me . . . I’d never felt it, not even when we were kids. I knew then that I couldn’t touch Alex without paying a terrible price.”
Realizing that he’d made a mistake, Alex dropped to the floor and begged her forgiveness. But this time it was too much even for Jessica, who understood his terrible wounding and loved him the way only someone who’d suffered Alice’s horrors could. She ran from the room, threw her most important belongings in a bag, and fled the apartment.
WHEN ASKED why she didn’t report the incident to the police, Jessica’s answer was simple: “I was terrified!”
And the events of the next few days only strengthened her fear. Returning to the hospital, she found Bruce sleeping, so she checked into a motel nearby and waited for morning. Exhausted from the ordeal, she fell asleep in the dark morning hours, and without an alarm clock, slept until the maid pounded on the door at noon.
She rushed down to the hospital and discovered that Bruce had been released. He’d left a note for her at the nurses’ station. It was written on the hospital’s stationery in his handwriting. The blood drained from her head as she read the note.
My dearest Jessica,
I have to leave for a while to get my head straight. My heart is crushed, but I don’t know what else to do.You mean too much to me.
Please know, my love, that I am doing this for you. I really don’t think we can be together for now.You must know why.
Maybe some day. Please forgive me. I am so sorry.
Bruce
Jessica left the hospital numb and made a series of frantic calls in an attempt to find Bruce. She finally reached his sister, Jenny, who told her that Bruce had left the state and didn’t want to be reached. Every other path led Jessica to a dead end.
She knew what had happened. Alex had threatened Bruce with something that drove a stake through his heart. Or had it been Eve who terrified Bruce?
Surely there was a way to stop her brother, but everything she thought of ended in a no-win scenario. She was afraid that if she went to the police, Eve would know. The danger to her and Bruce was too great.
She wanted to go to Father Seymour. The priest had made several attempts to pull Alex back into attending Mass, but Alex refused to talk to the man. Father Seymour had expressed his concern and comfort to Jessica. Surely he would understand.
But Jessica tho
ught going to the church would only force her to the police. Surely not even a priest could hold all these things in confidence. A crime had been committed. And she had no confidence that the very clergy who’d thrown Alex out of seminary could protect her or Alex from Eve.
Jessica’s inability to go to the police—a course that any normal human being would surely have taken given her circumstances—perhaps illustrates better than any other evidence just how deep her wounding and fear ran. For two long days, Jessica paced and fretted in the motel. She finally took the only course available to her: she returned to the apartment on Holly Street.
Nothing had been disturbed in the living room, the kitchen, or in her room. The place was immaculate, and it appeared as though the carpets had been shampooed. Jessica hurried to Alex’s room and pushed the door open.
The room had been stripped and scrubbed down. Not a speck of dust, not a stray hair, only black walls and shampooed carpet. Alex was gone. Jessica sat in the doorway, lowered her head into her hands, and wept.
The next two weeks passed like a nightmare for Jessica. She knew Alex wasn’t coming back. He had fled for her sake, not for his own, she realized. Protecting Jessica from himself had been his final gift to her. He knew she was right, that he couldn’t be trusted any longer. The only solution was for him to remove himself from the one person whom he loved more than life itself.
But she couldn’t bring herself to move out of the apartment on the chance that he might have a change of heart. She felt sick with guilt, and disgusted for feeling sick with guilt.
No amount of searching turned up Bruce. He was simply out of her life, at least for now.
After two weeks, Jessica finally went to Father Seymour and told him that Alex had moved out of the apartment and threatened to never come back. They’d had a fight, she said, and she didn’t think she could stay in the apartment with all the memories.
Father Seymour allowed her to stay in a small studio flat off the parish house, where she lived for four months. On May 17, 1992, the father received a call from the manager at the Denny’s Restaurant where Jessica worked. She’d missed two shifts.
He approached her flat fearing the worst. When he opened the door, he found an empty apartment. He immediately began placing calls to anyone who might know of her whereabouts. When the calls turned up nothing, he filed a missing-persons report and began walking the streets.
Over the next week, Father Seymour and a handful of trusted confidants kept an eye out for the pretty girl who’d come to them off the streets. The week stretched into a month, then two.
Two years later, he received a letter bearing a North Dakota postmark that simply read:
Wanted you to know that I am alive and well and studying to be a teacher. Please don’t try to find me. Thank you for all you have done.
Jessica
Father Seymour’s search for a Jessica Trane from Oklahoma turned up empty. He would not see her again until many years later, long after Alex had become Eve, the killer who had taken the lives of so many women.
TWENTY-NINE
THEY SAT AROUND THE conference table, haggard from two days of late nights and little sleep. Brit Holman wore a loosened blue tie that lay askew, white shirt rolled to his elbows, his chin rough with two days’ growth. Montova stared at Heather with cutting eyes. She’d always thought that his shiny face and slicked hair were a better fit for a Mafia movie poster than a recruitment poster for the FBI.
Darkened shadows edged Lori Ames’s brown eyes. Her hair was disheveled and stringy. The lines of concern etched in her face made Lori look ten years older than the woman Heather had met in her house a week earlier. Lori cared for Daniel, and Heather felt surprisingly comfortable with the knowledge. Perhaps because she was now an ally.
Heather sat at one end of the table after a two-hour debriefing in the LA field office. A Colorado Highway Patrol officer had taken her to a local Wal-Mart for clean clothes and then to the Trinidad municipal airport, where she’d waited for her ride back to Los Angeles. They’d let her freshen up and suggested she rest before the debriefing. But she had no inclination to rest.
“So that’s it then,” Montova said after a long pause. Several agents had come and gone during the meeting, but only the four of them remained. “What do we have, Brit?”
The special agent now in charge of the Eve case tapped his pen on the yellow pad in front of him. “He’s in a root cellar. Crickets and other night sounds Heather heard indicate a forested region. Within fifteen hours—”
“No, twelve,” Heather interrupted. “That’s three hours less. Of search area.”
Brit peered up at her without lifting his head, a gentle expression of the frustration he felt at her constant interruptions. Heather knew she was on edge, but she made no attempt to hide or change the fact.
Daniel was out there. And over the hours since her release, one fact had drummed itself into Heather’s mind: although the FBI could be an enormous help, she, not they, was the only one who could actually save Daniel’s life, however unlikely that was.
Two things you should know. The disease takes three days to set in. If the FBI gets lucky and finds us before those three days have passed, I’ll kill him before they arrive.
“Best estimate is that it took Daniel at least half a day to find the location. Say fifteen hours.”
“We still don’t know if he was on the move the whole time,” Lori said. “He left the hospital at roughly 2:00 a.m., but he could have stopped anywhere for any length of time.”
“If we believe what he told Heather, we have three days,” Brit said. “Less now. We have to make certain assumptions. Until we know better, we assume he was on the road.”
He pushed himself up, walked to a map of the United States on which they’d pinpointed Eve’s victims with small red pins. Three yellow pins marked Laramie, Wyoming; Trinidad, Colorado; and Long Beach, California.
“A fifteen-hour drive from Laramie . . .” He made a large circle with a pencil. “We’ll get more precise measurements later. Twenty-four hours from Long Beach . . .” Another circle. “Twelve hours from Trinidad . . .” A third circle.
Brit dropped the pencil in the tray and returned to his seat. “The overlapping areas of all three circles are our search grid. Most likely at the perimeters.”
“Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas . . .” Montova broke off. “He could be anywhere.”
Brit nodded, then turned back to his pad. “We know the root cellar is someplace Eve’s known for a long time. Eve’s Holy Coven is new, but the marks were old. Our boy’s returning to his roots.”
“He was going to be a priest,” Heather said.
Another look from Brit. “We know that he wanted to be a priest. That his motivation is clearly religious. We’re already running searches on Eve’s Holy Coven and the Daisy Ringwald case he cited to Heather. The goat in Manitou Springs and the table in the root cellar indicate that animal sacrifice is part of his shtick. All long shots that confirm Daniel’s profile but may do little to help us isolate his current location.”
There was something about the business of Eve wanting to be a priest that gnawed at Heather, but she couldn’t narrow it down.
“We still don’t know what triggered Daniel’s departure in the first place,” Brit said. “He found Eve, which means he had access to critical information that he decided not to pass on.” He shook his head. “Makes no sense.”
“A near-death experience,” Lori said.
“So he saw something in his mind while he was dead. Like I said, makes no sense.”
“Eve seems to have a unique appreciation for near-death experiences,” she said.
“Does that help us locate either of them? Is there anything in that fact at all that might shed light on who he is, where he is?”
Lori shifted her eyes from the man. “No.”
Brit leaned back and sighed. “There’s a handful of smaller considerations. We’ll run with everything we have. I hate to say this,
but it doesn’t look too encouraging.”
“So that’s it then?” Heather demanded. “That’s all you can pull out?”
The other three looked at her without responding. Brit was right, of course, but Heather refused to accept it. There was something else here that Daniel would have fished out. A clue to Eve’s childhood, his personality, his likely rearing. Something. Anything!
“You sound like it’s over,” she snapped.
Brit shook his head. “It’s never over.”
Lori stared at the map, eyes glazed over. The confidence she’d carried a week earlier had vanished.
Montova stood. “I want every possible resource on this. Update me with anything you get, I don’t care how insignificant.” He glanced at Heather, then left the room.
Brit blew out some air. “I’m sorry, Heather. Don’t think I’ve given up hope. And don’t count Daniel out. He’s still our best shot at this point.”
Heather stood and headed for the door. “I was there, Brit. If Daniel’s our best shot, he’s dead.” She pushed through the door, leaving Brit and Lori to sit in their own hopelessness.
But they’re right, she thought. It is hopeless.
HEATHER SPENT THE NEXT three hours in her basement, poring over analyses of near-death experiences from every conceivable perspective. And there were a lot of them, mostly dismissed. The pictures on the wall had new meaning to her now, but none of that meaning slowed time or brought her any closer to Daniel.
She knew what they’d gone through. What Daniel was going through right now. Although Eve hadn’t infected her with the disease, she’d lived through the terror of anticipation, strapped to the chair, bagged, hearing his voice.
It was three in the afternoon. Eve was still driving back to the root cellar, where Daniel lay sweating on the floor.
Hello, Adam.
What would Daniel make of what they’d learned? No one could climb into his mind the way she could. He might understand Eve better, but she thought she understood Daniel better than he himself did.
Eve was replaying the fall of Adam and Eve, infecting his victims’ virginal minds with a disease. But more than that, he was offering them up as a way to find atonement for his own sin. For losing his faith. They were his sacrificial lambs.
