Killer Year

by Lee Child

  “Hey! Hey!” he yelled into the fort. “I told you, Auden!”

  He yanked at the blue tarp but lost his footing and elbowed the ground strewn with twigs and sharp-edge rocks. Blood on his fingertips, but he didn’t know from where—maybe from the way he dug at the nail-riddled walls inside, finding nothing but the empty vodka bottle he’d left there overnight. The empty fort creaked and leaned when he shouldered it, and the second time it overturned, snapping nails and folding upon itself like a box cut down for bailing. There on the ground was the phantom shape of the fort etched in raw earth, crawling with worms and grubs and stunted white roots. In the center of that shape was the naked maw the boys had dug last summer. It was littered with empty candy wrappers and dirty magazines and nothing else but the scattered action figures laying open-eyed like corpses on a battlefield. Jeremy slid down into the hole and pushed at the ground with his fists until he was gasping, until he was convinced that there were no secret gateways to be found. All he unearthed was an old clawed hammer with a duct-taped handle. It was the same hammer he’d used last summer to drive those nails that had kept his hideaway upright for so long now.

  “Auden!” he screamed as he rode one-handed. “Auden!”

  Bare feet torn apart on the aluminum-traction bike pedals, and his head throbbing with leftover alcohol and too many adrenaline doses by the time he reached the site and coasted downhill across freshly laid blacktop. Doors and windows were pressed into their cavities with brand-name stickers still affixed, fancy doors with coats of varnish and etched-glass portholes. The few houses still without siding wore silver insulation panels, and every acre of ground had been treated with spray-on grass of a shade he’d never seen before in nature. He dumped his bike against a front yard electric box and trudged on foot across the driveway full of gravel shifting underfoot as if it meant to topple him.

  “Auden!” he yelled at the second-story windows, though he didn’t know why this house over the others, this house with its pastel blue siding and two-car garage like so many of the others. The front door was in place, but it was a petty defense with its routered hole where the doorknob should go. He pushed through the door and screamed up the main staircase, “Where are you?” His voice snapped from the force and now it was nothing but a rasping whisper.

  Without speech he turned to other means, first in the living room where a bay window showed a neighborhood vista that curved up the blacktop toward the main road. He smashed his hammer blunt end first into that window and the glass dropped like ice sheets drifting over a waterfall. The drywall he assaulted with the hammer claw, two-handed strokes that punctured and then tore away the paper skin and chalky white chunks. He breathed the white dust and kept swinging until the wound he’d made could be clotted with a Frisbee, then he ripped away the exposed pink fiberglass, handfuls of cottony tufts concealing nothing but solid wood paneling behind it. He punched the wood but it was just as real as the ground below his fort had been.

  “Where are you?” he wheezed.

  In the bathroom he lifted the ceramic slab off the toilet tank and rammed it through the window. He kicked plumbing pipes with no effect but a record of his bloody footprints. With both hands he grappled the showerhead, snapped it off the wall, tossed it in the corner. He caught sight of his image in the vanity mirror looking wild and wet and electric, and for one frantic second he finally recognized himself. The fat kid in the mirror was him, and he was just that kid’s reflection caught in glass, just a shadow. He knew if he just kept smashing he’d break through, and then he could also be in that place where Auden and Rhonda had gone.

  He raised the hammer to shatter himself, but the echo of a dog bark stopped him. Back in the hallway, heaving asthmatically, he inched open the basement door and looked down into the pitch-black nothing. The barking was clearer now, set to the rattle of a chain dragging over concrete. It was down there, but distant, much farther than just one story.

  Outside, a cruiser siren squawked once. The swirling red-and-blues made Jeremy squint when he looked out the window of his new dream house he’d ransacked. Deputy Coolidge opened his driver door and stepped out onto the gravel. He took off his sunglasses and Stetson hat on his way up the porch steps. In the doorway he said, “Come on, Jeremy. What is this? Why’s it have to be you doing this? Why don’t you put down that hammer now, will you? I don’t like this any more than you, so I’d rather just make it smooth without no handcuffs or nothing. You don’t want me to have to use handcuffs, do you?”

  But Jeremy didn’t answer. Instead, he looked down into the dark and decided for himself that, yes, he did want Randy Coolidge to have to use the handcuffs.

  The Crime of My Life

  by Gregg Olsen

  Gregg Olsen’s debut novel, A Wicked Snow, has stuck with me for well over a year. It’s one of those atmospheric, darkly suspenseful stories that hits you hard because it could be true. Gregg’s gift as a writer is to set the stage so vividly and create characters so real that you believe you are right there in the middle of the story, seeing what they see, feeling what they feel.

  What is truly amazing is that Gregg can bring out the exact same reader reaction in a short story. In “The Crime of My Life” he shares his own story.

  I’ve never met Gregg in person, but through numerous emails over the past few years I feel like I’ve known him most of my life. His compassion is unmatched, as is his strong sense of right and wrong, his need to expose the truth no matter what that truth holds. And really, what is fiction except shining light on human nature? Sometimes we refuse to look at the dark side. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

  I’m certain “The Crime of My Life” will send a chill up your spine just like it did mine.

  –Allison Brennan,

  New York Times bestselling author of Fear No Evil

  Book ideas are born in any number of ways. Some come to authors in a burst of happenstance and brilliance. Some come in the throes of a good dream. A few, I’m told, come from God. I have never been so lucky. My books have always been born of the truth. I am a writer of true crime, a much-maligned genre, but one in which I felt I could stake a claim for a career. Or something that resembled a career. It seemed that there were a million stories out there that given some shaping and research—could make for interesting reading.

  The ideas come from television, prisoners who write me, fans who show up at book signings (though I can’t say I have enough of those to provide much of a stockpile) and, of course, newspapers.

  “The Crime of My Life” is different. This is a story hatched of my own experiences; my own life.

  About a year ago my wife, Valerie, retrieved a carton from under our bed amid rolls of Christmas wrapping paper and white and brown tufts of dog hair. She set the box, with its ill-fitting, strapped-down lid, next to the computer where I did most of my writing. She smiled reluctantly and said only three words.

  “Honey, it’s time.”

  I understood what she meant. I knew it even if she had said nothing. I had tried to avoid the idea of telling the story contained in the beat-up box. I had resisted it for all the right reasons, though deep down I knew it was beyond my ability to do so. Beyond my need. Beyond the necessity of supporting my family.

  I had a dozen such boxes in various spots in my house. In the garage, too. Three that had been stacked and draped with a cheery chintz fabric passed as a bedside table in the guest room. The boxes were the remnants of the books I had written. Inside each were the unspeakable and the unbelievable. I had been writing true crime books for nearly a decade and the memorabilia I had collected was suitable for a murder museum, if such a place existed. I had letters from Betty Broderick; a signed page of sheet music from Charles Manson. I even had a sketch by John Wayne Gacy (he made a far better killer than an artist). Inside the box of source material I saved about a woman who had killed her husband for insurance money, was the killer’s video store card, her purse (a blue and white nautical shoulder bag), and love lette
rs to the man she had conspired with to commit the murder. I even had the convicted woman’s shopping list and a brush entangled with her Clairol Frivolous Fawn-dyed hair.

  Each was a Pandora’s box of sorts, a repository in which I was the keeper, the jailer of little murderous memories. All had been tagged with the name of the book that I had regarded as a potential bestseller.

  The carton my wife put near my desk was labeled with the name of a story I had started to write, but had never seemed destined to complete. It read: “The Crime of My Life.”

  I took an X-Acto knife from Val’s art bin and sliced the silver duct tape I had used to seal the box. Even the tape rekindled a recollection of a terrible night. The glint of silver. The flash of steel. A kind of coldness and fear I had rarely known seized me once more. Some things, I know all too well, are too powerful to forget.

  I slid the lid aside and drank some coffee before looking further. The contents were remarkable, not only in their diversity, but in their very familiarity. The top was blanketed by a green leotard, a Halloween costume worn by one of my twin daughters. A small but unmistakable crescent of blood had stained the garment’s neckline.

  I drank more coffee and pushed the green fabric aside. At first, I used a pencil to do so. Almost instantly, I felt clinical and foolish. Embarrassed. I was the little girl’s father. Her blood was mine. I had carried her and her twin from the delivery room like two peachy footballs; one in each arm. I was the daddy who saved her spit-up cloth because I knew that the smell would always remind me of my baby.

  I gently folded the leotard and peered deeper inside. The contents had come so close to being the province of someone else’s collection; some other writer who made his or her living out of the anguish of others. It had been too damn close. The interview tapes, the photos of the players in the drama, a photocopy of fingerprints done up like a black-and-white rendering of a row of Chinese lanterns. Everything was in there. Everything that had nearly cost me all I held precious in my life—the lives of every member of my family.

  And so I agreed with Valerie, it was time. I fiddled with the yarn-covered pencil holder little Teddy Bundy had made for his mom for Mother’s Day in 1964. (I purchased it along with other personal belongings from the Bundy family’s garage sale after Ted was electrocuted in Florida for the murder of a schoolgirl.) I had reglued the uncoiling rainbow yarn twice before, as if keeping it intact somehow mattered. And I wondered.

  I have always been fascinated by crime. I have always wondered what brings a child like Teddy to seek the dark side of murder. How a child, born seemingly perfect, is transformed into the embodiment of evil. Before the events took place in the book you are now holding, I pondered the why of a crime from a distance. A safe distance.

  I’ll never forget that summer day when the wheels of homicide had been set in motion, when my own story would become enmeshed and entangled and, ultimately, greater than Love, Lies and Murder—the crime I thought I was chronicling.

  Once I opened the box, I knew that I had to see the perpetrator, face-to-face. Maybe through the smudged glass that separates the free from the trapped, held there like one of those hothouse flowers under a dome of turgid air? Maybe in a cafeteria-style visiting room? I wrote a letter addressed to the inmate and waited.

  Two weeks later, word came that the perp would see me and I parked the only luxury I’d ever allowed myself, a white BMW, in the dusty lot of the prison. I’d ended up using the car almost as much for storage as for transportation. File folders, tapes, and the kind of ephemera that true crime writers collect without even trying: a high school annual that I needed to return; family photos that always looked like they’d been plucked from the nicest family in the world—that is, the nicest family that spawned a killer—and reams of MapQuest printouts that led me from trailer park to suburbia and back again.

  I was processed with the other visitors. We all stood there—moms, dads, girlfriends, children—and blinked back the shame of having to come to visit someone in a place like this. I always acted a little smug, just because I could.

  “Working on a book,” I’d say.

  This morning I filed in with the others. I had a pencil and four sheets of notebook paper—ostensibly allowed for tallying Scrabble or some other time-filling game. The best games were always the ones that allowed for more concentration and less small talk. Gaps in conversation during a prison visit were always chilling. They allowed the visitor that moment of reflection that ultimately came in a burst: I’m in a fucking prison talking to my husband, brother, whatever. Games that commanded attention put the focus on a triple-word score, and not, say, a double homicide. In the prison visiting room, no lulls are welcome.

  I saw him from across the room. Being a writer, I was never good at math sans calculator. Nevertheless, I computed the age he’d been when charged and the years that had passed since then. It made him about seventy. I realized at that moment that I should know his age, birth date, and the simple info that create the framework of character.

  I didn’t extend my hand when he offered his. “You don’t look like your picture,” I said, taking a seat on a bolted-down bench across the table.

  “Neither do you,” he answered, puzzling me for a moment, before I remembered I’d actually sent him one of my books years ago. It came from my publisher directly because no author can send a book into a U.S. prison. Not since someone soaked pages in meth.

  An inmate review came to mind: “An intoxicating read. It kept me turning the pages well into the night.”

  I always thought of my books as kind of a business card, proof that I was a writer and I was going to tell a real, true story. Like it or not, here I come.

  “A Coke?” I offered, knowing that buying an inmate a Coke—with ice—is like giving the incarcerated a whiff of what the freedom might taste like. Or rather, tasted like.

  “Nice, thanks.” His blue eyes were enveloped by crinkly folds, but they sparkled at that moment. He still wanted to charm. He knew he had to.

  I got up and put in a few of the quarters of the roll I’d been allowed to bring inside in the institution. The cup fell. Then the ice. I caught his eye and shrugged as the brown foam swelled to the edge of the cup and spilled over. He smiled, but it was forced, slightly unnatural. Like a mimic.

  “So, you’ve finally decided to tell me your story.” I winced at my own opening line.

  The smile, real or imitation, vanished. “So, you’ve finally decided to come and see me.”

  He was being coy, so I returned the affect. “I’m interested in your story,” I said. “I always have been. You’ve been silent. Why now?”

  He tilted the paper cup and poured the cola down his throat. I noticed he wore dentures. I wonder if that’s why the smile seemed so false.

  “I guess now’s time. Obviously you’re the right author.”

  A baby from across the visiting room started to cry.

  “I wish they didn’t bring babies in here,” he said. “Doesn’t seem right to me.”

  I nodded, but couldn’t resist taking a chance by giving the man a little jab. “I guess you know a lot about right and wrong.”

  His stare was hard. The crinkly lines around his eyes looked like snakeskin, not the result of happier times. If he ever had any. That is, before he did what he did.

  With the door ajar to allow him to speak, he started unloading. He wanted to make sure I wouldn’t “screw” him over. I almost laugh out loud whenever a killer makes such a request. I’ve written about women who’ve tossed their kids off freeway overpasses; men who’ve raped the babysitter; or the occasional gold medalist of the true crime genre, a serial killer. Whether A-lister or D-lister in the annals of true crime, almost all seem worried about their image. They worry that someone like me—someone with a keyboard and a mouse—could actually screw them over.

  “I’ll write the truth,” I said, knowing those words always sound so pretentious, no matter how many times I’ve uttered them. The truth was, of cou
rse, my version of it. My Magic Bullet-machine with all the condiments of the crime set on high speed and morphed into the pages of the book that I’m writing. “Always, the truth.”

  But this one was different, and I knew that it was from the moment I’d finally had the courage to open the box after Valerie uttered:

  “Honey, it’s time.”

  I peppered the man across the table with questions. This wasn’t the real interview, of course. This was my way of gaining trust, scoping out what he might actually tell me.

  “You don’t deny that you did it?”

  “It?”

  It felt like a kind of stare down, but I didn’t care. He had it coming.

  “Killed her,” I said, not saying her name. Killers never like you to say the person’s name.

  He doesn’t miss a beat. “No. But there was a reason for it. One no one knows. One you don’t know.”

  “Really? For instance?”

  “I’m not ready for that.”

  They think they are so smart, so cunning. What the killer never considers is that they are in prison and no one cares about them. Their power is only a blip, not a tsunami. You don’t need them. They need you.

  “Okay. Fair enough,” I said, a little too rotely. The meeting, the preinterview, was coming to its conclusion. The sizing-up was over.

  He crunched the last of his ice. “Okay. I’ll see you next week.”

  He puts out his hand. I grabbed it in a quick surge that I wished transmitted all my mixed feelings.

  The TV was playing an episode of Law & Order and I saw the blond heads of my daughters riveted to the screen. It passed through my mind that my girls were as fascinated by crime as I was. They grew up on Judge Judy, L & O in all its incarnations, and the work of their father.