Murder by Moonlight

by Vincent Zandri

  “I loved my parents, Mr. M.,” he says through the Plexiglas after a time. “Love them, I mean…and I wanted them to love me. And I know they did, with all their hearts…me and my big brother. But…”

  “But…”

  “I hated them, too. I hated them because they hated one another and I hated them because they fought so much and because they frightened me and they made me hide in closets and they did anything they could to hurt one another inside that house. And then my mother…she…”

  “She did what, Chris?”

  “She and Detective Bowman, they…”

  “I know, Chris. I know.”

  “So I learned to hate them. My mom for what she did. My dad for letting it happen. I hated living inside that house.”

  Two miles.

  “Your dad…your dad knew about Bowman?”

  “Yes siree Bob, he did. And guess what he did about it?”

  I’m guessing the obvious. “Nothing. He did not a thing.”

  “Correctamundo, Mr. M.”

  One mile. Trees are already replacing houses.

  “And that bothered you.”

  “Well, ah yeah, ’course it did. But then…”

  He’s thinking now. Getting into it.

  “But then, maybe if my dad hadn’t disappointed my mom. Maybe if he had treated her better. Gone into his own law practice. Made something of his life. Become a rich man. My mother wouldn’t have had to go searching for something more.”

  Our eyes come together in the rearview. But not for long.

  “My mother always wanted to be rich, Mr. M. My dad wouldn’t let her. He thought rich people are pretentious and insulting. His answer to that was to spite himself and his own family by making sure we most definitely were not rich.”

  “Why didn’t she take a job? Your mom, I mean?”

  He laughs. “Oh no,” he says and exhales. “Joan Parker does not work. Work is beneath her. Work is viewed with contempt. It’s the husband who brings in the riches. It’s the wife who flaunts them.” Laughing again, like the sick, twisted bastard he is. “So Joan doesn’t work, but she fucks Mr. Bowman. Who isn’t rich, either, but at least he’s handsome and looks rich. My dad was just a portly, washed-up, beer-soaked nothing.”

  All thick woods now on both sides of the cruiser. A bitter earth, cold, gray, and uninviting.

  “What about the Great Society? Where does that figure in?”

  “The GS has been around for nearly four hundred years. Mr. Okey instructed me in their ways. They broke off from the church and found something far more powerful. What they believe in is making your own destiny, tapping into a far more powerful thing than something like hope and Christian prayer. With the Great Society, a man like me can wish for anything and achieve it.”

  “All it takes is sacrifice? Human sacrifice?”

  “It’s more than just that, Mr. Moonlight. It’s sacrifice, but it’s also putting at rest that which stands in your way. Having the guts to physically eliminate it, creating a clear path for you to achieve anything. Think of it as a guiltless existence.”

  “Chris, you believe you won’t go to prison for the things you’ve done, don’t you?”

  His smile in the rearview. “I’m entirely protected by the GS You just wait and see. Nothing will stop me from achieving everything I want. Wealth, power, even fame. Today is just the beginning.”

  The turn into Five Rivers, just up ahead. Thus far, no sirens. No sign of anyone on our tail.

  “You seem to very much love your mother, Chris. Despite what’s she’s done.”

  “I do. I do love my mother. But I don’t love what she’s done to me, to us. What my dad did to us. They had to be…sacrificed. I asked Dr. Robinson to do it for me, because he loves me, and I wasn’t ready for that kind of step. As angry as I was at my mom and dad, there was still simply too much love.”

  He starts to cry again. It’s an instantaneous reaction.

  “Did your parents fight a lot when you were a kid?” I ask. “Did they make you choose sides?”

  “If they could find us…find me. Soon as I got old enough, I would run away…run into the woods.”

  “How old were you when you started running away?”

  “Five.”

  “Where did you sleep?”

  “Sometimes with Mr. Okey. Sometimes in the Boy Scout camp in the woods.”

  I try to imagine a little boy sleeping all alone in that house.

  “When did you first know you wanted to hurt your mother and father?”

  “For as long as I can remember. I couldn’t shake the urge. It wasn’t a feeling so much as a physical thing, growing inside of me like a tumor, getting larger and larger each year. Until it grew too big and I had to cut it out.”

  “Did you kill Detective Bowman’s boy?”

  “He wanted to die anyway, Mr. Moonlight. He was manic depressive, and Bowman tried to hide it, tried to hide Chuckie like he was a freak. I told him to steal one of his father’s shotguns and to meet me at the camp. I put the barrel in his mouth in the upstairs loft. He didn’t fight me. I pulled the trigger. His head went splat. I felt lighter than air after that.”

  “And later on you would begin to kill others, like that little girl. What did you do, steal her out of the car when her mother went inside to answer a phone call?”

  “Sure, I’d been watching her. For weeks, actually. I just waited her out until the perfect opportunity presented itself, like it did on that hot afternoon. It was really quite an easy grab. Maybe too easy. I never understood why the police blamed her mom. Her very, very hot mom, I must say. I guess it had to do with her lifestyle, her taste in young men.”

  “You slept with her, didn’t you, Chris?”

  “I met her online. She liked younger men. Gee whiz, I think she was like six years older than me or something.”

  “You found the duct tape in her junk drawer.”

  “Yesiree Bob, I did.”

  “You killed the child and dumped her body behind the house. Or a portion of her body, anyway. Enough for the cops to uncover just a portion of the remains. Christina’s mother took the blame, and that blame crushed her to death. These killings would lead up to your ultimate goal: your parents. You would try to have them killed while you watched.”

  “With a fireman’s axe. And with the help of the GS and Doc Robinson.”

  “But people say you all seemed like such a happy family. Looks like no one knew the truth about you. How unhappy you all were.”

  “Take when I was in high school, for instance,” he says. “I knew kids who hated their parents because maybe they wouldn’t buy them a Wii, or maybe they wouldn’t put up the cash for extra cell phone minutes or a new iPod or whatever. It was real amateurish stuff, and I used to laugh at them, tell them my parents were rich, so I didn’t have such problems. I wanted them to envy me and they did. Perception is everything.”

  “Do you feel at all guilty about what’s happened? About your dad’s murder, your mom’s face? About the other things you might have done to people like Christina? Don’t you feel anything at all?”

  “I love my parents, Mr. Moonlight. But they raised me to want them dead. The Great Society has helped me deal with that reality without guilt, without remorse, without false hope. They made it real.”

  “But you failed. Robinson failed. Okey failed. The Great Society failed. Your mother lived. She. Lived.”

  His peaceful face goes taut, his smile turns upside down. He starts to cry again. “It just wasn’t her time,” he whispers.

  I’m almost breathless with rage by the time I pull into the Five Rivers parking lot, get out, and open the door for Chris.

  “The cops are following us here,” I say. “These things are equipped with LoJack. We gotta dump it and do the rest on foot.”

  “It’ll be a long walk, but I know a shortcut, Mr. M.” His tears have subsided. It’s all fun and games again. But with those chains on his ankles, it’ll take forever to get to the camp. I
need to find a way to remove them.

  Then something dawns on me. I take the key from the ignition, search the other keys on the ring until I find the one that unlocks the shackles. I unlock them. The chains fall to the ground. I pick them up, toss them into the backseat. Then, after slipping the .22 from out of the ankle holster, I reach into the glove box for the Maglite and stuff the end of it into my jacket pocket. I close the car door and aim the pistol at Chris.

  “Let’s get started.”

  ____

  We enter the woods to the faint sound of chopper rotors. Without having to look for it, I know the police and the state troopers will be combing the place for us. They’ll also start hunting the woods. They can’t be more than a few minutes behind or in front of us. That’s OK by me. All I want is for Chris to show me what he knows. Then it will be over.

  He moves quickly. I limp behind him, no crutches.

  We come to the end of the trail, begin bushwhacking our way through the woods. Chris moves through the heavy brush like it doesn’t exist. I follow right on his tail in a direction entirely different from the more roundabout way I took the other day. The pain in my ankle is shooting up and down my leg, making it difficult to keep up. But I suck it up and do it anyway.

  By the time we’re within a few hundred feet of the camp, the chopper is overhead and circling. It’s a yellow and blue state trooper job. I know that inside its belly will be a sharpshooter looking to plant a bead on Chris. Plant a bead on me, too, maybe.

  “There’s a building right beside the camp,” Chris says. “It’s just a basement covered over with roofing materials. It was meant to be a two-story building, a second cabin for the Scouts. But somehow, it never got built. No money or something.”

  “What’s the basement for?”

  “We used it for storage and other things. You wouldn’t know it was there, it’s camouflaged with so many leaves and pine needles. You might walk right past it or over it.”

  We come to a small clearing in the woods. It’s the Boy Scout camp. It seems to be free of cops. Behind the camp is a small, square mound that’s covered in foliage. It’s the basement.

  My heart begins to pound. My blood runs thick and cold. I’m walking, but I can’t feel my feet on the frozen ground. Can’t feel my sprained ankle anymore.

  Chris turns to me then. “You OK, Mr. Moonlight?”

  “Yeah.” I flick on the Maglite. “Let’s do this.”

  “Sure thing, Mr. M.” Pausing, standing there, just looking at me, a smile plastered on his baby face. “Hey, I just wanted to tell you how much fun I’ve had today. Most fun since the Scouts, in fact. I just wanted to say.”

  Over our head, the chopper, sweeping the woods. How he doesn’t make us out yet I don’t know, and this fucker thanking me for a fun day. Oh my Christ, I just want to shoot him dead now.

  Chris makes his way over to the square foundation. At the far right corner, he kneels down, pushes off some of the brush until he reveals a clasp that’s meant to hold a padlock. But there’s no padlock. He pulls up the clasp, uses it to pull up a plywood door. Shining the Maglite past him into the opening, I make out a wooden staircase. Without a word, Chris begins to climb down it.

  He looks back up at me, smiling. “Don’t be afraid,” he says. “Not a woods kinda guy, are ya? Come on in. Just me and the spiders.”

  You mean the demons.

  My mouth has gone dry. For a fleeting moment, I feel like shutting the door on the kid, locking him away forever. Tossing in a match and some gasoline, and burning the fucker. But I follow him, setting my left foot in first, then my right, the pain from my swollen ankle explosive.

  I climb all the way down, catch my breath at the bottom landing. The place smells like mold and rotten leaves. The smell of cat urine is pervasive, too. The cellar is wide open. In the center are wooden pallets covered in camping equipment, glass aquariums, hundred-pound bags of birdseed, bird planters, tools, fifty-gallon drums, and more junk than I can possibly recognize.

  Through the wooden ceiling, I can hear the rotors chopping the air. And something else now, too. Sirens. Not loud, but audible.

  “Come on,” Chris says with a friendly wave of his hand. “I really want to show you something.”

  While I shine the round beam of light out ahead of him, Chris leads me to an area in the far corner of the foundation. It’s covered with dirt. But just like he did with the foliage up top, he drops to his knees, begins to sweep the dirt away, revealing a wooden access panel.

  When Chris slips his hand under the latch and begins pulling up the door, I feel myself go dizzy, nauseous. I go down onto my knees, all the time holding the beam of light on the door.

  “Here we go, Mr. Moonlight,” he says, pulling the panel open. “Showtime.”

  When the white light shines on the red material, I know it’s hers. Know in my gut that it’s hers. It all happens in slow motion. He’s reaching into the hole, pulling out a little red dress. He’s setting it on the floor in front of me. He’s laying it out, like it’s a brand-new dress for little Christina to wear right now.

  I fall forward, catch myself with my left arm and the hand that grips the .22. Try to keep the light on the dress—the now-ratty, moth-eaten, filthy dress. I want to reach out, touch it. But I don’t have the courage, or the breath, or the balance.

  Inside my head, the orchestra warms up. Wet concrete blood pumps through my veins. Lungs sucked dry of air.

  Chris reaches back into the hole, pulls out a pair of black patent-leather shoes, along with a pair of torn tights. He sets everything on the dress.

  “Gee whiz, Mr. Moonlight, you look like you just saw a ghost.”

  I lift the Maglite up. I want to beat him over the head with it. I want to stuff the pistol barrel in his mouth. But I can’t. I won’t.

  The rotors are so loud now it’s like they’re landing on the flat roof.

  He breathes in and out carefully, as if to regain his balance or at least maintain his equilibrium.

  Reaching into the hole, he pulls something else out.

  A leather purse.

  A small leather purse, like a college-aged woman would sport. It’s blackened with dirt. Chris opens it, dumps its contents onto the red dress. A set of car keys spill out along with a tube of lipstick. A bundle of crumpled dollar bills, some change. A cell phone. A couple of sealed condoms.

  “The woman you abducted in Albany,” I whisper.

  “From out of the state university parking lot,” he says, smiling. “Mr. Okey helped me with that one. We took her here. Had some fun. She was a real screamer, let me tell you. Jeez.”

  I reach out with a trembling hand, pick up the cell phone. It’s an older model now. I can imagine the young lady’s parents buying this phone and giving it to her just before she left for college, not having any idea that they would never see her again. I close the cell, set it back down, hold back the tears that are pooling into my eyes.

  What faith I had in God and man, it’s now buried in the ground along with the remains of the innocent and the dead.

  I lift my heavy head. I don’t know how or why, but I start laughing. Through the tears and sobs. Laughing. “You didn’t even bother to take the money,” I say, the words tearing themselves from the back of my throat. “Just like leaving your mother’s purse on the table. You fucking twisted creep.”

  “Gee whiz, Mr. M. I’m not a robber.” The kid’s laughing along with me.

  “Not a robber.” I scoop up the money, clutch it in my hand. It’s as if his having stolen it would give some sense or meaning to a murder. But that’s the point. There is no meaning to it. Other than pure evil.

  In a haze of tears, adrenaline, hatred, and sadness, I watch the kid lay out a piece of skull, a tuft of dirty blonde hair, a set of earrings, a portion of thigh bone, a diamond ring, a silver necklace, a pair of now-filthy white socks, a pair of black cowboy boots with a hole in the left sole, a pair of black lace underwear and a matching black bra. He also lays ou
t a pair of little girl’s panties and a small silver bracelet, the name Christina engraved on it. And a few more fragments from his many kills.

  “You cut them didn’t you? You motherfuckers cut them up?”

  “Not me exactly, Mr. M. It hasn’t been my time yet, as you know. But I was there to partake in the ceremony.” Exhaling, happily, satisfied. “It was a sight to see, I tell you.”

  I stare at Christopher from down on my knees. I understand what he’s all about now. Because I feel the same evil in my own heart. I want to plunge a knife into his chest. I want to tear his heart out, feed it to him while he’s still bleeding. But all I can manage is to drop down onto my face and cry.

  Then, the sound of boots slapping the wooden treads.

  “Oopsies, I think your friends are here, Mr. Moonlight. They found us, all right.”

  When I look up, I see Daly stumbling down those narrow stairs. Uniformed cops on his tail. I’ve still got the .22 gripped in my left hand. I raise it up, press the cold black barrel up against Chris Parker’s smooth brow. I maintain a personal relationship with a .22 snub-nose revolver like this one. A history. I know the damage it can do to a human head when triggered point-blank. More than likely, the bullet won’t exit the skull once it penetrates it. But it will kill the fucker instantly.

  “Don’t be stupid, Moonlight,” Daly yells from across the dark basement. “Shooting that kid isn’t gonna bring any of them back. Not Christina. Not her mother. None of them.”

  I thumb back the hammer. Through tear-filled eyes, I look into Chris’s eyes. They just stare back at me, like a child who doesn’t quite understand what’s happening. But I believe he must understand what’s happening. He’s killed before. Who knows how many he, Okey, and Robinson killed altogether? Who knows how horribly people have died here?

  I feel my index finger squeezing the trigger, feel the weight of the pistol in my trembling hand. It was my plan all along. Whether I realize it or not. Put a bullet in the kid’s head, and then put one in my own. End it now. Just like I tried once before, but failed at.