by Mike Markel
That’s why he raped me from behind. So I don’t have a face. Only people have faces.
That’s what it was with this murderer. He knew from Ricky I was a cop, but that wasn’t why he raped me. It was about Dolores Weston. Not primarily that I wanted to put him away. I sensed that he’d be okay martyring himself to his glorious cause. What he couldn’t tolerate was me not understanding why she deserved to die, why killing her was the only way to put things back in balance. So I was just some woman from the wrong tribe, a mutation that had to be eliminated from the body politic.
That’s what I was thinking, anyway, although I have to admit I wasn’t thinking all that well. I did know that my crotch was pretty bloody, and it hurt like hell.
Last few years, with my drinking, the anonymous sex, and losing my family, I’d been headed right toward this place. Sitting on a cement floor, ankles roped together, hands tied behind me, leaning against the wooden wall in a cold, dank room in a neo-Nazi compound, I had reached the end of the line. I was now completely powerless. But it would not be long. They’d see to that. Through the pain, knowing I had to endure only a few hours more, I breathed freely for the first time in many years.
* * * *
After a while, I was able to talk Ricky into letting me get dressed.
“Someone guarding the Reverend now, Ricky?” I asked him.
He just looked at me.
“You told me yesterday that someone’s with him 24/7. You’re here. Is there someone there?”
I didn’t see any guilt or remorse on his face—no human emotion of any kind, really. Guilt would call for a brain at least as big as a dog’s, and I just didn’t see it in Ricky. He’d have to be able to think or at least know in some way that an action was right or wrong. We had a case about five or eight years ago where this middle-aged guy with a 55 IQ killed his mother one day when she pissed him off somehow. The court found him incompetent and put him in an institution. Ricky had the same look on his face: he was so deep-down stupid that when you took him out of his element, which was watching cartoons on the black-and-white TV in Christopher Barry’s living room, he was too confused to be held responsible for what happened next.
“Someone’s there with him,” Ricky said. He turned his face away from me when he said it.
My son, Tommy, used to do that when he was eight and I caught him lying. I made a mistake telling Tommy how I knew, and he learned how to mask it. Nobody had told Ricky, or he wasn’t sharp enough to learn.
I wanted to get as much information as I could from him before the murderer came back into the room. Yesterday, Ricky’s world was peaceful and well-balanced, but something must have upset that stability. There were only three possibilities for that something: me, Nick Corelli, or the murderer.
“Did it bother you that I talked to the Reverend Barry yesterday?”
He shrugged his shoulders, still looking away.
“Last night, when that man came—you know, the one in the suit and tie?—were you there in the house with the Reverend Barry when that man came to talk to him?”
He was facing the wall, but I could see him nod his head.
“Did you like that man, Ricky?”
He turned to face me. “No,” he said.
“Why didn’t you like him?”
“Because he argued with the Reverend.”
“He made the Reverend get mad?”
“Yeah, I don’t like to see the Reverend get mad. When he gets red in the face, he starts coughing and he has to sit down.”
“Do you know what they were arguing about, Ricky?”
“Somebody got killed.”
“Do you know who got killed?”
He put his hands up to his temples. “I don’t know,” he said. “I get confused when they talk fast.”
“Do you know if it was a man or a woman who got killed, Ricky?”
“You shut up or I’ll gag you.”
“All right, Ricky. Take it easy. I’ll be quiet.”
My wrist hurt from the rope digging in. I don’t remember who tied me up, but he did it tight. My arms and shoulders were getting real sore, deep in the muscles. Ricky walked over to the card table and sat on one of the folding chairs. I let him sit for a few minutes.
“Do you have a father, Ricky?”
He looked down at his hands on the card table. “No,” he said.
“I guess the Reverend Barry is kinda like your father, isn’t he?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I love the Reverend Barry.”
“Who is the other man, Ricky? You know, the other man who was in the room here with you and me? What’s his name?”
“His name is Leonard.”
“Do you know his last name?”
He shook his head no.
“Did the Reverend Barry tell you to help Leonard?”
Ricky shook his head again. “Leonard told me the Reverend said I should help him.”
“Okay.” Ricky was looking a little agitated, so I decided to stay silent for a while. I didn’t know what time it was, maybe early afternoon. “Ricky, I haven’t eaten in a long time. Do you think you could go over to the house and get me some food? Just some bread or something?”
He shook his head no. “Can’t do that.”
“Why is that, Ricky? I’m really hungry.”
“Leonard told me to stay here and watch you.”
“Does Reverend Barry know I’m here?”
“Leonard told me the Reverend Barry is doing something very important and I’m supposed to stay away from him. Just watch you and do what Leonard says.”
“Okay, I understand.”
I tried to add up what I got from Ricky. Nick Corelli and Reverend Barry were fighting about something, but I already knew that from watching the picture window in the living room. The subject was a murder, but Ricky didn’t know whether it was a man or a woman. So I didn’t know if it was Dolores Weston or Willson Fredericks—or both of them.
I was getting no closer to understanding what was happening. Was Willson Fredericks killed for the reason he had told me and Ryan: that the patriots wanted to keep him quiet now that we were looking at him? Did he have information that would threaten the Montana Patriot Front? Did Corelli kill him? Was that what the fight with Reverend Barry was about? Did Corelli do it without the Reverend’s authorization? Or was Corelli the boss, coming out to the boonies here to make sure things didn’t get out of control?
And who was Leonard? I was certain, without any evidence, of course, that he had killed Dolores Weston. The way he hit me before he raped me—the suddenness, the absolute lack of any human feeling, from anger to fury—he was Weston’s killer. I could see him taking a rock and carving 1488 on her chest. And the incredible force of his right hand. With just his open palm he’d taken out one of my teeth. Give him a brick and I’d be dead now.
But I couldn’t get a read on his relationship with Reverend Barry. Was he the Reverend’s rough boy? Did he kill Willson Fredericks, too? Did the Reverend okay him and Ricky picking me up and raping me? Or was Leonard operating on his own? He could be one of the faithful Nazis who hangs around out here, in which case Ricky would know him. That way, when he comes up to Ricky and says the Reverend wants him to hang with Leonard, Ricky would do it, no questions asked. Ricky doesn’t ask questions.
X + y + z = 1488. There was no way I’d be able to solve this one unless I could get out of this room, but I had complete confidence that Ricky was up to the task of preventing that, me being tied up and beat up, him being more than twice my weight.
Leonard opened the door and stepped into the room. He looked at me, then at Ricky. “Everything okay in here?” he said to him. Ricky just nodded.
“Leonard,” I said.
He turned his head slowly to me. “You think that’s my name?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Why is that?” he said to me.
“Ricky and I’ve been talking.”
Leonard nodded his head, like he was giving me so
me points for having the brains to try to learn what I could from the idiot. He walked over to Ricky. “I want you to leave this room, now, Rick,” he said to him.
Ricky didn’t look worried or offended or anything.
“And from now on, you don’t say anything to her, okay? You talk only to me. That’s what the Reverend wants.”
Ricky nodded, got up, and left the room, closing the door behind him.
“You want to talk?” Leonard said to me as he sat in one of the folding chairs.
“Yes, I do. There’s some things I’d like to understand before you kill me.”
“I’m going to kill you?”
“That’s my guess. You’re not gonna rape a cop, then let her live. Plus, you took off my blindfold. So either you’re pretty confident the other cops will never track you down, or I’m not walking out of here.”
“You haven’t considered one other possibility.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“That there aren’t any cops who’d be willing to help you track me down, or even believe you were raped.” He did have a point: for all I knew, he might have more buddies on the force than I did. He could be on the job. A decorated member of the Lake Hollow Police Department.
“Okay, so why don’t we move this along? You let me walk out of the compound, give me a couple hours head start, and we’ll see what happens. If you’re up for it, I mean.”
He pulled my ID card out of his shirt pocket. “To be perfectly honest, Detective Karen Seagate, Rawlings Police Department,” he said, looking at my ID, “I’m not interested in playing games with you. Maybe you could track me down. I know I could track you down. But the fact is, unfortunately, you were right the first time. I am going to kill you.”
I had known this since he’d conked me on the head out behind the big rock just north of the compound. And throughout everything they’d done to me since that moment, I hadn’t forgotten it. The effect it had on me was to make me super aware of what was happening. Which makes sense: you’ve got only a few hours left, you want to use them productively. For that reason, even though I’d held open the possibility of getting the hell out of here if the chance presented itself, mostly I’d been thinking of fully experiencing these last few hours.
So hearing him say he was going to kill me didn’t shock me, didn’t make my heart thump in terror, didn’t make me start crying or pleading for my life. What it did was make me intent on figuring out what was going on. I figured he owed me that.
“When you killed Dolores Weston, why’d you dump her in the industrial park? And what the hell did you carve on her chest?”
He looked a little disappointed that I was pretending to not understand what the symbols meant. “Ricky will be back in a minute, then we’re going to kill you. You want to waste your remaining time talking about things you already know?”
“So you killed Dolores Weston because she wanted to let that pharmaceutical company build a facility in Rawlings? What’s so wrong with that?”
“Maybe I should make clear the terms of our discussion,” he said. “I’m willing to provide some information, but I’m not interested in debating you.”
“Okay, let me ask the question a different way. Did you kill Dolores Weston because she wanted to let that pharmaceutical company build a facility in Rawlings?”
“Thank you,” he said. He was a rapist and murderer, but you couldn’t accuse him of being rude. “Yes, that is correct. That company has spent a considerable amount of money in New Jersey lobbying on behalf of human cloning, euthanasia, and various other practices that violate God’s will. I do not have time to explain to you which people they intend to clone, although you might want to scan the list of their board of directors for clues, and which people they intend to euthanize. Senator Weston was inconsequential. I held no personal animus toward her. She was a non-entity. However, she represented the lack of courage that pervades our modern state.”
“Help me understand that.”
“She was a prostitute, willing to do or say anything in order to satisfy her obscene lust for money. In exchange for payoffs, she was willing to enable that company—that unholy union of Jews and non-Christians from around the world—to spread its tentacles to this portion of the country.”
“Since she was a prostitute, you raped her.”
“Since she was a prostitute, it wasn’t rape.”
I saw nothing to be gained by asking him why he raped me. “You do know that after the death of her husband, her estate was estimated at three billion dollars?”
“Your belief is that because she already had enormous personal wealth she did not desire more?”
“And therefore it was your right to kill her?”
“I saw it more as a responsibility.”
“A responsibility?”
“Are you familiar with the phrase ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing’?”
“And carving the 1488 on her chest?”
“That was to make clear the reason for her death.”
“Make clear to who?”
“First, to the police. Second, to the others who were tempted to violate God’s will.”
I was thinking of Lakshmi Kumaraswamy, the new professor at Central Montana that the pharmaceutical company had installed at the university to carry on their research. There would be many others. “Do you want to name names?”
“No,” he said. “I do not. When they are eliminated—a process that will begin very soon—it will be impossible for the police to cover up the motives for the murders. The story will be told. At that point, nobody will have anything to do with the company. And then the company will abandon its efforts to establish a facility here in Montana.”
“Is that why you killed Willson Fredericks? Was he involved in spreading the reach of the company, or was it that he knew too much about you and the Montana Patriot Front?”
I thought I saw a hint of confusion in his eyes. “I’m tired of this. I’ve explained it to you in sufficient detail. If you don’t understand what I have told you, it is because you are not sufficiently intelligent.”
* * * *
“Got the things?” Leonard said to Ricky when he entered the room a couple minutes later.
Ricky nodded. He was holding two old shovels and a length of rope.
Back in high school I’d read In Cold Blood. The two murderers were hanged. I know the correct word is hanged, not hung, because my teacher, Mr. Jessep, had corrected me. “Pictures are hung,” he had said. “People are hanged.” This was when people were in fact hanged in a lot of states out west, before the needle. Mr. Jessep was in his forties when I was in his class more than twenty-five years ago. He’d be retired now, or dead. I liked him. He wanted us to see how exciting and interesting all those books were. He worked real hard at it, and even though most of us didn’t have the brains or the patience for it, nobody made fun of him. He never tried to make us feel stupid or inadequate, which we all felt anyway about almost everything. Back then, none of us were sensitive enough to wonder about how he got where he was, what had gone wrong. He was smart enough to go to graduate school and maybe work in a university, where at least some of the kids wanted to learn something. But there he was, year after year, trying to get us to read books there was no way most of us would ever read. Everybody has a story, I guess. The question is, does anyone want to take the time to listen to it?
I couldn’t remember whether it took a long time to be hanged, and therefore whether it would hurt a lot. I decided I’d try to throw my weight down to make it go faster.
“Okay, let’s do it.” Leonard got out of the chair, reached inside his jacket and pulled a .45 out of his waist. He ejected the magazine and looked at it, then slid it back in and put the pistol back in his pants. This helped me clarify my options. I could try to run away—with my hands tied behind me—and take a bullet in the back.
Leonard walked out the door, followed by me and then Ricky. We went down a dark
hall at the back of the church, then out an exterior door. Down three steps. It was good to get out of that room, with its dank air and the mattress that stank of BO.
We crossed the twenty yards to the chain-link fence at the northern boundary of the compound. The one guard tower was off to my left, the other to my right. I glanced at each one in turn. The guards were on duty. They looked at us, curious but apparently unconcerned.
I looked over to the Reverend Barry’s house. I didn’t see Nick Corelli’s rental that was there last night. All I saw was a beat-up old Ford Ranger pickup, which I remembered from when I walked up to the Rev’s house what seemed like years ago but was really just a little more than twenty-four hours.
I tried to look in the windows at the side of the house, but they had heavy curtains pulled shut. When we made it up toward the gate in the fence, Ricky started fishing in his pocket for a key to the heavy padlock. I turned around and was able to look in through the picture window in the living room. The angle was pretty sharp, though, and all I could see was a reflection from the woods to the north.
Not knowing if Leonard and Ricky were taking me out to kill me on orders from Reverend Barry or if Leonard was a freelancer, I thought it couldn’t hurt to shout out Reverend Barry’s name as loud as I could. So I did, and Leonard spun around, pulled out his .45, and said “Shut up” at a low volume but with plenty of dramatic emphasis. Then Ricky the wordsmith jabbed me hard in the kidney with the handle of one of the shovels, sending me sprawling to the ground.
I landed on my beat-up face. Almost immediately, I could taste the warm blood trickling down onto my lips. I was wrong again—about how it couldn’t hurt to shout out the Rev’s name. But I got the sense that Leonard and Reverend Barry weren’t on the same page about what to do with me. Which might turn out to be useful.
