The Serial Killer's Wife

by Robert Swartwood

  “So, what, you resent me for leaving?”

  “You could have stayed. You could have faced everything. But no, you ran away.”

  “What do you want me to say? I was a coward. I never should have left. I never should have put you or Michael in that position.”

  “Michael and I getting together was a mistake. We were completely wrong for each other. But then we had our son and I ... I thought maybe things would be okay. But then our son died. Our son died and three weeks later I get your message telling me that everything is great and you’re safe and all that blah blah fucking blah. It literally made me sick. I was furious at you for what happened. If it hadn’t been for you, Michael and I would not have gotten together, and if we hadn’t gotten together, we never would have had our child. Christ, Elizabeth, I lost custody of my own children because of what happened. And then ... and then you tell me that you’re fine, that you’re motherfucking fine, and what am I supposed to do with that? How am I supposed to react? I was pissed—I was fucking pissed—and so yes, I tracked your ISP number and then went on Clarence Applegate’s board and posted your location. The day after I did it, I regretted it and tried to take it down but he wouldn’t allow it. So I tried to forget the entire thing. There now, are you happy? I confessed. Have them handcuff me and throw me in jail. I don’t give a shit. My life fucking sucks anyway so you would be doing me a favor.”

  A moment passed, and Elizabeth said, “To get what I needed to save my son, I had to dig up your child’s grave. When I was done we refilled the hole, but you might want to have someone take a look at it and have it redone. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  And she turned her back on Sheila and walked away.

  • • •

  “SO HOW’D IT go?” Julia Hogan asked once Elizabeth was back in the car.

  Elizabeth stared through the windshield at Sheila still standing in the doorway of her townhouse. She clipped in her seatbelt and leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes.

  “It’s over with,” she said. “Now please take me to see my husband.”

  EPILOGUE:

  SIX MONTHS LATER

  EDWARD PICCIONI WAS released from Graterford Prison on a bright crisp Wednesday afternoon in March. There was no preamble to his release, no press waiting outside with microphones in hand, not even a freelance photographer standing with a camera wrapped around his neck and his hands bundled in his pockets to keep warm. Only Elizabeth and Matthew waited outside, watching the entrance tentatively.

  The reason for the lack of turnout was all thanks to an agreement between the prison and the FBI. Her husband’s official release was not scheduled for another two weeks. Then the prison parking lot was guaranteed to be a circus of news vans and reporters and cameramen jostling for the best shot and opening question. But the FBI had talked with the warden and the warden agreed to release Eddie two weeks beforehand. Only a few people knew the extent of this change in procedure, for fear that someone might leak it to the press and cause an even crazier circus than the one they no doubt already had planned.

  Over the past six months Elizabeth had gone to see her husband exactly thirty-nine times. She took Matthew with her only nine of those times. She wished she could have taken him more—she knew Eddie wanted to see him as much as possible, and Matthew had quickly warmed up to the father he had never known existed—but she didn’t like taking her son into the prison. Eddie understood, and didn’t blame her. Besides, he said, he had the rest of his life to spend with his son.

  At 12:47 p.m. Eddie emerged from the entrance doors. He squinted into the light. All he had on were jeans, a gray Champion sweatshirt, and a pair of Reebok sneakers she’d purchased the week before.

  Despite the three dozen or so cars parked in the lot, he spotted hers at once. She and Matthew were already stepping out of the car when he started toward them. Matthew reached him first. He ran into his father’s open arms and allowed Eddie to pick him up. Elizabeth stood smiling, tears in her eyes. Finally Eddie set Matthew down and turned to her. She stepped into his embrace. She held him tighter than she had ever held him before, kissed his cheek, kissed his lips, and ignored the tears threatening to form in her eyes.

  They stood together in the parking lot for at least a minute, just holding each other, before Eddie said, “Ready to go?”

  Her head on his shoulder, she nodded.

  Despite the short distance to the car, Eddie picked up Matthew and carried him. “Jeez, feel how heavy you are! Is that fat or all muscle?”

  “All muscle,” Matthew said matter-of-factly, and Eddie burst out laughing.

  They got into the car, Elizabeth up front in the driver’s seat, Eddie and Matthew in the back. She started the engine and then just sat there, staring at the prison.

  “Liz?” Eddie said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” She put the car in gear and backed out of the parking space. “Just lost in my thoughts, is all.”

  Except it wasn’t nothing. The past six months had been a continuous onslaught of meetings with FBI agents and lawyers and people from the press. The nice and quiet life she had always envisioned would never exist. She had actually considered running away again—this time all three of them, creating new identities and everything—but she couldn’t do that. She wasn’t running anymore.

  What was worse was she hadn’t heard from Julia Hogan in weeks. There had been review meeting after review meeting and Julia Hogan had gone to each one expecting to lose her job. Finally she did. Julia was given a chance to appeal the decision but she told Elizabeth it wasn’t worth it. Her career as an FBI agent was over and there was nothing she could do to change that. “Hey, it was a nice run while it lasted,” she had told Elizabeth the night of her dismissal over the phone, and then promised to call Elizabeth sometime later when she felt ready to talk. That was the last time Elizabeth had heard from her.

  Eddie said, “You know what I want?”

  They had just passed through the prison gates and were headed down the drive toward the main road.

  Elizabeth glanced in her rearview mirror. “What’s that?”

  “A Big Mac. A nice juicy and cholesterol-inducing Big Mac. The more calories, the better.”

  “McDonald’s!” Matthew said. “Happy Meal, Happy Meal!”

  Elizabeth didn’t want to go to McDonald’s. She didn’t want to use the drive thru or, God forbid, actually park and go inside. What she wanted to do was just go home, be with her family, but still, she wasn’t about to deny her two boys.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” she said. “If greasy food is what you want, greasy food is what you’ll get.”

  Both Eddie and Matthew started cheering and high fiving, and Elizabeth couldn’t help but smile. It felt great. No, that wasn’t right. It felt even better than great, whatever that was, and as she drove down the drive she glanced in the rearview mirror at her husband and son and, between them, the prison that grew smaller and smaller until she turned the corner and then it was gone.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Robert Swartwood is the USA Today bestselling author of The Serial Killer’s Wife, The Calling, Man of Wax, and several other novels. His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Daily Beast, Chizine, Space and Time, Postscripts, and PANK. He created the term “hint fiction” and is the editor of Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer. He lives with his wife in Pennsylvania. Visit him online at www.robertswartwood.com.

  To stay updated on Robert’s latest ebook releases, sign up for his newsletter (you’ll immediately receive an exclusive ebook) or follow him on Twitter: @RobertSwartwood.

  Continue reading for an excerpt from Robert Swartwood’s newest thriller Legion

  THEY ARE EVERYWHERE

  An estranged father shoots himself in the head.

  THEY KNOW EVERYTHING

  A message courier is pushed in front of an oncoming subway train.

  THEY WILL NOT BE STOPPED

  A young woman kills her fam
ily before jumping off the roof of her apartment building.

  THEY ARE LEGION

  Your name is John Smith. The Legion is coming for you. They want you dead, because you have a secret.

  You just don't know what it is.

  Talk about bad luck.

  I’m in some office building on Fifth Avenue—after a while they all start looking the same—on the twenty-seventh floor, and I’ve just picked up a package that needs to make it downtown in forty-five minutes. It’s only eighteen blocks, so it’s really no sweat, and I’m in the hallway headed toward the elevator when the lights briefly flicker and an alarm starts going off. I look around, just like everyone else, wondering what the hell this is about, when a voice comes on over the intercom, one of those calm but scary voices, informing everyone in the building to please stop what they’re doing and go to the nearest stairwell and head down to the street.

  “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” says a guy in a suit in front of me, standing right in front of the opened elevator.

  My sentiments exactly.

  So then everyone’s up on their feet, headed down the hallway, past the elevators toward the stairwell. And, for the most part, everyone does so in a nice and orderly fashion. Except we’re twenty-seven stories up, and there’s another ten stories or so above us, and the stairs, they’re not very wide. Everyone could probably squeeze two at a time going down, but for some reason everyone goes single file, and the lights keep flashing and that alarm keeps blaring and that calm but scary-as-fuck voice keeps asking everyone to please stop what they’re doing and evacuate the building right this second.

  I’m conscious of the time as we descend, checking my watch every thirty seconds, as if that will move things along any quicker.

  Murmuring works its way up and down the line, people speculating what could be wrong—fire, terrorists, the usual bit of scariness—and to break the tension I contribute the possibility that we’re in the midst of a zombie attack.

  Nobody seems to think that’s very funny.

  The stairwell quickly fills with the overbearing stink of aftershave and perfume, the combined odors making it almost impossible to breathe. One of the suits in front of me, bored now with the speculation of what’s causing the evacuation, mentions Timothy Carrozza, and like that, it starts off a chain reaction of questions and comments, these jokers being lawyers, after all, even if they are corporate. One of them mentions ADA Baxter, and another says he saw her on the news and boy oh boy is she a fox, and something inside of me starts to stir, a big brother impulse to stand up for his little sister, which is strange because she’s three years older than me, and besides, I don’t even know her well enough anymore to feel as if I need to stand up for her in the first place. And besides, this guy isn’t badmouthing her; he’s just commenting on how good looking she is, and really, is that a crime?

  Still, the last thing I want to think about is my sister and her big career-making case, so I tune out the guys in front of me and listen in on what the women behind me are talking about, which happens to be a bachelorette party one of them attended over the weekend. Okay, now we’re talking. Only, it seems, this bachelorette party is the lamest bachelorette party of the year, the girls going shopping and having dinner at a fancy restaurant (the kind, one of the girls says, where they use a brush to wipe the breadcrumbs off your table), then going to the movies to see the new Matthew McConaughey flick, because, apparently, the bride-to-be is a recovering alcoholic (one year next month), and the girls wanted to make sure she had a good time.

  “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” I mutter without realizing it.

  Behind me, the women stop talking as we continue our exodus (what floor are we passing now, the seventeenth?), and I glance back and see a few of them giving me the kind of glare that’s supposed to signify just how much of an asshole I am.

  I smile back and shrug. “Fucking zombie attack, huh?”

  Nothing. Not even an eye roll.

  I glance at my watch, just like I did thirty seconds ago.

  Like I said, talk about bad luck.

  • • •

  Except no, I’m wrong. Bad luck isn’t getting stuck on the twenty-seventh floor of an office building, moments before getting on the elevator, before an emergency alarm sounds out and then being forced to hoof it down those twenty-seven floors with a bunch of suits to the street. No, bad luck is going through all of that to come outside to find someone has stolen the wheels off your bike.

  “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me!”

  Nobody even notices my outburst. Why would they? They’ve all just escaped the terrifying clutches of their office building, and no, the reason is not a zombie attack but a fire. At least I have to assume it’s a fire based on the two fire trucks parked out front, their rooftop lights flashing, a couple firemen directing people out of the building while a few others head inside, decked out in all of their gear.

  Everyone crowds around on the sidewalk, while taxis and buses and cars go zooming past, while tourists and the usual Manhattan hustlers and bustlers walk on by like there’s nothing wrong.

  I hurry over to the bike, fall to my knees, grab hold of the titanium frame, as if it’s just an illusion that both of my wheels are missing. Nope, they’re still gone. The son of a bitch who did this—and who the fuck does something like this, really?—used wire cutters. No, not wire cutters—bolt cutters. Surprisingly, they didn’t even touch the chain keeping the frame secured to the pole. Sure, my bike isn’t the most expensive piece of equipment currently gracing the streets of Manhattan (it’s not even halfway expensive, really), but I’ve had it for two years and, fuck, it’s mine.

  “Shit, shit, shit, shit!”

  Again, nobody notices my outburst. Well, that’s not true. One of the women who was behind me on the stairwell, one of the women from this past weekend’s lame bachelorette party, notices, and is she trying to suppress a smile? That bitch, I think she is! I’m half-tempted to give her the finger, but I have to remember I’m representing my company right now, and the last thing I need is for her to complain to Hank, my supervisor, because he’d just love a reason to get rid of me. I’m good at what I do, no doubt about it—in fact, I’m one of the best, always deliver my packages on time, never lose my manifest—but I’ll admit, I’m not the easiest person in the world to get along with, and Hank is the kind of supervisor who would love for his entire crew to be trained yes men and yes women. My only saving grace is Reggie, my dispatcher, who like most dispatchers is a retired courier who knows the city, who knows the streets, who tracks our locations when we pick up and drop off, so we don’t have to go far out of our way when he sends us to the next client.

  My mind races. What am I supposed to do now? Take a taxi? It could work, but we’re talking about the noon rush hour, and quite honestly, all day is rush hour from here to my intended destination. There’s a subway entrance three blocks up, and if I’m not mistaken, it’s headed downtown. Won’t let me off right on the block I need, but it would be close enough.

  Fuck it. I reach into my pocket for my cell. I dial Reggie’s number, and listen to it ring two times in my earbuds before he picks up.

  “Yo,” he says.

  “I have a problem.”

  “What’s up?”

  I fill him in.

  He says, “Shit, dude, are you serious?” I hear voices in the background, typing, the usual dispatcher noises. “That sucks.”

  “Tell me about it. I’m pretty much fucked for the rest of the day. But this package, someone needs to come pick it up.”

  Reggie’s silent for a long moment as he types. “Sorry, dude, but I don’t have anyone near your location right now.”

  “So what should I do?” I close my eyes, take a deep breath. “Can you call and tell them I’ll be late?”

  Reggie doesn’t answer right away. I don’t expect him to. My request isn’t something I’m proud of. In fact, it’s something I really hate to ask. In this business, you de
liver packages on time. That’s it. Your reputation—and, more importantly, your company’s reputation—all hinges on the fact that you’re faster and more prompt than the other guy. Because there’s always another messenger company to hire, and if a business gets screwed over enough times by a company they’ve grown a relationship with, they’ll cut ties and go elsewhere. So calling and telling them their package won’t arrive on time, even if there is a valid excuse? Not a good idea.

  “Reggie?”

  “I’m thinking, I’m thinking. Who’s the package going to again?” Before I can answer, he says, “Shit,” no doubt reading the name off his screen.

  I nod, knowing exactly what he means. The firm I’m taking this to—Bachman Payne—is one of the top firms in the city. They’ve been using us for the past five years, if not longer. They’re always satisfied, because we always deliver on time. But one screw up? They’re a business that’s apt to walk away just on principle.

  Through the phone I hear typing and voices, but I also hear a new voice, a deep, throaty voice tinged with a Brooklyn accent, sounding like it’s coming closer.

  “If that’s Hank, don’t tell him it’s me.”

  It’s a risky move, trying to keep the supervisor out of the loop on an issue like this, but the truth is I just don’t want to deal with his bullshit right now.