The Serial Killer's Wife

by Robert Swartwood

  “This is all my fault,” she repeated.

  He stroked her hair, telling her to hush. Then he asked, “What should we do now?”

  She didn’t answer for the longest time. She kept thinking about Matthew and that explosive collar around his neck and those bright red digits counting down. She kept thinking about David Bradford’s son, the explosive collar around his neck, too. She kept thinking about what Van had said, what Bradford himself had said, and how they were all probably right—Matthew was already dead.

  “I don’t know,” she murmured, stepping away from him. They stared at each other for a long moment. Then her gaze shifted past Todd. Something must have changed in her face, some kind of tell, because Todd immediately stepped back and glanced in that direction.

  “What is it?”

  She walked past him toward the oak chest. At the pictures on top. Only six in all: one of Foreman’s first wife, one of Sheila, one of Foreman and Sheila together taken at some beach during sunset. The other three were of a baby. One showed their son as a newborn, the kind where his eyes were barely open. The other showed Sheila and Foreman holding the baby together. The last showed the baby in his crib, asleep, curdled up next to a plush purple dragon.

  • • •

  IT WAS A man who answered the phone. The first thing he said was, “Listen here, asshole, how many times do you have to be told not to call here anymore?”

  For an instant Elizabeth didn’t know what to say. She had known Foreman still had feelings for Sheila after all these years but couldn’t imagine his infatuation had gotten this bad. Just how far it had gone, she had no clue, but here was a man—no doubt Baldy from two days ago—sounding like he was ready to come over here and kick some ass.

  She glanced at the alarm clock on the bedside table, doing everything she could not to look at Foreman. It was almost five o’clock. How it had gotten this late so quickly, she didn’t know, but time was running out.

  “This isn’t Michael. This is Elizabeth Piccioni. I need to speak with Sheila.”

  Despite the fact the man didn’t say another word, she could tell he had instantly deflated. There was the sound of the phone changing hands, a quick whisper, and then Sheila was on the line.

  “Elizabeth? What are you doing calling from Michael’s?”

  “Sheila, I need to ask you something very important, and I need you to think about the answer.”

  There was a slight hesitation. “What is it?”

  “Your ... son?” Her throat had suddenly gone dry.

  “What about him?”

  “Did he have a purple dragon?”

  “Yes ...” Sheila sounding suddenly guarded. “What about it? Michael was the one who gave it to him. He called it ... Dennis, I think. Yes. Dennis the Dragon.”

  Elizabeth couldn’t help but smile at that. As far as she knew, Foreman hadn’t even known what she and Eddie had named the stuffed animal. But it had been among the others left behind—she hadn’t wanted to take a thing from their old life except what was needed, just the necessities—and she imagined him wanting to do something to please not just the newborn baby but Sheila, the love of his life. Maybe he had been on some kind of deadline, rushed, and hadn’t had time to pick out a toy at the store. Maybe he had felt picking one of the toys in the basement would hold some kind of sentimental value. Whatever the case, in the end he had taken the dragon, given it to Sheila and the baby, and even named it.

  “What happened to it?”

  “What?”

  “Denny the Dragon. I mean, Dennis the Dragon. What happened to it?”

  Sheila released an agitated breath. “Why don’t you ask Michael? You’re right there in his house, aren’t you?”

  “Because Michael’s dead,” Elizabeth said, saying the words before she could stop herself, and the sudden silence on the other end of the line confirmed that it was the last thing Sheila had expected to hear.

  “What ... what did you say?”

  “Sheila, I don’t have time for this. What happened to the stuffed animal?”

  There was dead silence on the line again, and Elizabeth was sure Sheila had hung up.

  “Please, Sheila, I need to know. It’s important.”

  “Is he really dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “Sheila, the dragon. What happened to it? Did you ... throw it away?”

  Another silence, this one lengthier, and Elizabeth wanted to scream.

  “No,” Sheila said finally. “We didn’t throw it away.” She sniffled. “It was our baby’s favorite stuffed animal. He loved it. Whenever we took it away from him, he would cry, so we always kept it with him. So ... so when he died, we did what we knew he wanted.”

  Elizabeth closed her eyes. “What did you know he wanted?”

  “To be buried with it,” Sheila said, crying openly now. “It’s with our baby, God bless him, and will be until the day Jesus comes down and takes his body to heaven.”

  CHAPTER 58

  “WE CAN’T DO this.”

  “Elizabeth ...”

  “We can’t, Todd. It’s wrong.”

  “What about Matthew, then? What about that FBI agent’s son?”

  “I don’t care. This ... this is going too far. We just can’t.”

  • • •

  THEY WAITED UNTIL the sun had started to make its decent, until it was dark enough with the overcast sky, to enter the cemetery. Weaving through the motionless grave markers along the narrow drive, deeper and deeper into the grounds, they came to the spot in the back corner, mostly obscured by trees, known locally as the Baby Lot. Here Todd parked the Prius and got out. He went to the back and pulled out the shovel they had found in Foreman’s garage. He paused to look at Elizabeth still sitting in the passenger seat, then continued forward, carrying the shovel in one hand, a flashlight in the other hand, the dull beam of light illuminating each chiseled name until finally he found the one he was looking for and clicked the light off.

  • • •

  “WE’VE COME THIS far already,” Todd said. “It’s insane to stop now.”

  They were still in the master bedroom. Foreman was still on the bed. Elizabeth sat on the floor, her back against the wall, her knees pulled up to her chest. Her vision was blurry. Todd hadn’t moved from the doorway this entire time, but now he began to slowly make his way toward her.

  “Are you listening to me? I don’t want to do this either, but after everything that’s happened, after everybody that’s died, we just can’t give up now.”

  She stared down at the carpet, refusing to meet his eyes.

  Todd came to stand before her, bending down, placing a hand on her knee. “Elizabeth?”

  Her gaze shifted up to meet his, and she shook her head firmly. “Absolutely not.”

  • • •

  SHE DIDN’T MOVE for the next several minutes. She watched the dark silhouette that was Todd working. Her mind raced, thinking about everything that had happened since Friday afternoon. She thought about Matthew and she thought about Van and she thought about David Bradford and she thought about her husband, and the BlackBerry dinged and she withdrew it from her pocket and opened the picture and saw her son there, the bright red digits reading 07:00:00. Seven hours left and here she was, sitting in the car while Todd worked. She started to dial a number, hesitated, then decided no, it was too soon. So she undid her safety belt, opened the door, and stepped outside.

  • • •

  TODD STARED AT her for a long time, then nodded and stood back up. “So then what do you want to do? You want to call the police? You want to call that FBI agent and his girlfriend? You think any of them are really going to help us?”

  He waited for her to say something, and when she didn’t he muttered, “Screw it,” and turned away and started toward the phone on the bedside table, the one she had just used not five minutes before to speak to Sheila. The keypad was on the handset itself, and when he dialed the first number she spoke.
r />   “Don’t.”

  He paused, staring back at her.

  She said, “The police will just make it worse.”

  “How can they possibly make it any worse than it already is?”

  Elizabeth didn’t answer. Todd kept his stare level with hers, waiting, and when it was clear she wasn’t going to speak, he dialed the second number.

  “Don’t,” she said again, pushing herself off the floor and onto her feet. She kept her back against the wall, leaning into it. “Just hang up the phone for a second. Let me think.”

  Todd stood motionless for a long moment, then placed the phone back in the cradle so gently it didn’t make a sound.

  • • •

  TODD PAUSED ONLY briefly to regard her as she approached. She came to stand by the pile of dirt that was growing with every shovelful. There was no telling the exact length and width of the coffin below them, so Todd was digging a wide enough hole to hopefully accommodate. Above her the sky was thick with clouds, hiding the moon and stars and, if he was up there, God himself. Stop, she said after a moment, her voice cutting like a scalpel through the darkness. Todd didn’t stop. Take a break, she told him, I’ll dig for a little. He continued with one more shovelful before stepping out of the hole and handing her the shovel. It felt extremely heavy in her hands. She stared down into the hole for another half minute, then stepped in and started working.

  • • •

  “IF WE DO this,” Elizabeth said, “we need to be respectful of the body.”

  “Of course.”

  “We can’t just tear it up and take what we want. We’re not grave robbers.”

  “Nobody’s saying we are.”

  “It’s just—”

  She felt it then in her stomach, working its way up her throat, the taste suddenly vile and disgusting. She hurried out of the bedroom and made it to the bathroom in time, throwing the toilet seat up and vomiting straight into the bowl. She was aware that in a normal instance her hair would be in the way and that she would have to hold it back, and here she tried doing that out of instinct but of course there was no reason to, not with her hair cut short just today, and the irony of it all (and was that even the right word for it?) made her want to laugh. And kneeling there at the porcelain throne, something she hadn’t done since college, Elizabeth did begin to laugh. She couldn’t help it. Then when Todd came into the bathroom, asking her what was so funny, she threw up a little more and began to laugh even harder.

  • • •

  THEY WORKED FOR over an hour in silence, one only pausing to switch off with the other. Their eyes had adjusted enough that they didn’t need the flashlight anymore to see.

  It was Todd who made contact with the coffin, the wedding of the shovel tip and the casket lid making a dull and hollow thud. They worked even faster then, Elizabeth digging with her hands, which seemed incredible because they were already working as hard and as fast as they could. They weren’t even going to try to pull the casket out of the ground, and so Todd positioned his feet on either side and bent down and undid the clasps while Elizabeth shined the flashlight. Todd paused only once before opening the lid, and he turned his face quickly away, his eyes squeezed tight and his nose wrinkled. Elizabeth smelled it, too, that awful odor of decay, and had she not already thrown up everything in her stomach, she may have just gone for a second round.

  “Give me the flashlight,” Todd said, and when he had it he bent again and aimed the beam into the casket.

  Elizabeth looked away. She didn’t want to see the nearly four-year-old remains of a child. Nobody did.

  “Here,” Todd said, and when she looked again he was holding it out to her, Denny the Dragon, that mythical purple stuffed animal that had once been trapped in the confines of an arcade crane game to then eventually become trapped in the confines of a child’s casket.

  She took it from him, hesitantly, forcing herself to forget that it had just been with a decaying child.

  Todd climbed out of the hole. “Well?”

  She stared down at the dragon in the dark. Because of the flashlight, her eyes needed time to adjust again. She felt around the animal, first its feet, then its wings, then its nose ... before she remembered something.

  Right now he’s the answer you’re looking for, Eddie had said to her before she left the interview room. He knows.

  “He knows,” she whispered.

  Todd came to stand beside her, holding the flashlight. “He knows what?”

  “Not he knows,” she said, reaching out to direct the flashlight to shine on the dragon’s face. “His nose.”

  She grabbed the tip of its nose and began to pull. It was surprisingly easy. Of course it was. After all, not too many years ago, it had been removed for a reason and then either glued or stitched back in place.

  “Holy shit,” Todd murmured, as she extracted a key from the stuffing filling the nose. It was a small key, with the number 49 written on the side in black marker. “Do you know what it goes to? I mean, do you know what it unlocks?”

  Staring down at the key in her hand, turning it around and around with her fingers, she nodded. “Yes.”

  “Great.” He used the flashlight beam to glance at his watch. “Then let’s go. We don’t have much time.”

  “No,” Elizabeth said, her voice forceful. She slipped the key into her pocket and gave him a hard stare. “Not yet. Not until we fill in the hole.”

  CHAPTER 59

  THERE WAS A gate blocking the entrance to the U-Store-It, We-Protect-It facility just off the highway. This was a standard gate, and to open it one needed to use the standard ten-digit panel beside the gate. You could reach out the driver’s-side window and punch in the numbers.

  When Todd pulled up to the gate, he said, “Please tell me you know what the code is.”

  Elizabeth hadn’t remembered there being a gate here before. Or maybe that was wrong; maybe she did remember there was a gate and forced herself to forget. All that was written on the key was the number 49, and from the look of the panel hanging just outside of Todd’s window, four digits were required.

  “Elizabeth?”

  She closed her eyes, took a breath. “Try zero three two one.”

  Todd lowered his window and stuck out his hand. His fingers punched the numbers. Nothing happened.

  “Any other guesses?”

  Her eyes shifted to the dashboard clock. It was just after eleven. The last picture she received informed her she now had four hours left. She’d hoped the numbers she’d given him would work—it was her and Eddie’s wedding anniversary, the first day of spring—and now she was at a loss.

  Until she thought again about Matthew and said, “Try zero six zero five.”

  Todd punched in those numbers. This time, the chain-link gate in front of them began to roll back. Powering back up his window, Todd said, “How did you know that?”

  “It’s a date. June fifth. Matthew’s birthday.”

  Todd drove them through the gate.

  • • •

  THE STORAGE FACILITY was broken up into six long cinderblock buildings. Of course, they weren’t buildings at all, just rooms ranging from small to moderate to large. Elizabeth couldn’t remember how big the facility had been years ago, but it appeared as if they had expanded. Each section was clearly marked, each door’s number visible. They found 49 two rows back, halfway down.

  When they pulled up to the door—it was a moderate-sized unit, the door the kind you had to lift up—Todd turned off the Prius.

  “Ready?” he said.

  She wasn’t. Ever since they entered the facility her body had begun to tremble. For the last three days they had been working toward something, and that something was right here beyond this door. Or so she hoped.

  Elizabeth remembered coming here with Eddie once. They had just gotten married. They were still in that phase of their marriage where they liked to take risks, even if it was something done in public. One evening they had come to pick up a few things and Ed
die had closed the door and taken her in his arms and kissed her hard. They had ended up making love in the storage unit, nothing at all romantic, both of them on their feet while he took her from behind, but the thrill of it all—the fact that this wasn’t a safe place, like their apartment—was the fun part. And now that she thought about it, strangely enough it had been the only time Eddie had been spontaneous like that, almost reckless, knowing that on the off chance they were caught they might get arrested. Maybe that was the only time she had been spontaneous and reckless, too.

  Beyond that storage door were, supposedly, her husband’s trophies. The pieces of flesh and bone he had cut off each of his victims. Saving them for only God knows what. Saving them for his own perverse pleasure.

  And now here she was, the serial killer’s wife, ready to enter this storage unit and retrieve the things that had forced her to come here in the first place.

  “Yes,” Elizabeth whispered finally. “I’m ready.”

  • • •

  OUTSIDE THE HYBRID, the world was quiet except for the rush of traffic on the highway just beyond the facility. Nobody else appeared to be here. They were alone.

  They stood in front of the door, neither saying a word. Todd looked at her. She looked back at him. He nodded, and she reached into her pocket and extracted the key. It was such an innocuous thing, so simple and insignificant, yet right now it carried a mighty power. Once, long ago, she had had a key just like it (so had Eddie), and that was how she had recognized this one so easily.