by Ed Gorman
The third of the rooms was where I found the blood and the excrement, the blood splashed all over the walls, the way slaughterhouses sometimes look, the floor covered with large feces of the human variety. This is the way a lot of jail cells look in Latin America, after prisoners have been held there for a month, and been beaten regularly during the process.
Somebody had been held prisoner here. No doubt about it.
The air was dead and stifling in the small dusty room; cobwebs sticky to touch. The lone window high on the wall was pebbled glass to begin with. Filth made it even more opaque. You could hear screams echoing in here, what it must have been like for whoever had been kept here, crawling on the floor, clawing at the door like a sick animal. About knee-high on the door you could see fingernail scratches. She'd probably pleaded with them. Please please please. I wondered how old she'd been, or rather they'd been. Plural. There'd surely been many more than one here over the months designated on the rent receipts. Somebody's little daughter; somebody's little sister.
I went back out to the main room and looked around again. A few dozen businesses had probably been housed in this place over the past forty or fifty years—a few dozen dashed hopes of the small business person—until it had spiraled ignominiously down to this, a place where children were exploited for reasons of greed and some dark and unimaginable predilection of the human spirit.
A white Lincoln, I thought. A white Lincoln.
15
When I stopped by the motel office to check for any messages, a woman I hadn't seen before said, "You've got a visitor."
"Oh?"
"He said he wanted to surprise you."
"He did. I see."
"Your father."
"My father?"
My father had died fourteen years ago.
"He's in your room. Waiting."
"Thanks."
At my door, I put my ear to the wood and listened. No sound. I pushed the door open and went inside.
He sat in the same chair he'd been in the other day. He wore a blue sport coat and gray slacks and a white button-down shirt without a tie. His white hair almost glowed in the sunlight streaming through the door.
"I hope you don't mind," he said.
I closed the door behind me.
"I've decided to tell you the truth," he said.
"I see."
"Or aren't you interested?"
"Oh, I'm interested. If that's what I'm going to hear. The truth, I mean."
He smiled. "I don't blame you for being cynical. In your line of work, I don't imagine you hear the truth very often."
"Are you going to start by telling me about your son being in prison?"
The smile again. "I should have figured that a resourceful man like you would have done some checking on me."
"He died in a prison escape."
This time the smile was bleak. "He died a long time before that, Mr. Hokanson. A very long time before that."
"I don't understand."
"I'm speaking spiritually, Mr. Hokanson. Spiritually, he died a long time before that." His fingers touched a manila envelope placed across his lap.
"One day I came home from work—this would have been back in the early sixties, when my son was probably seven or eight, and I saw my wife in the kitchen with our Mexican maid. They were arguing. I'd never seen my wife—who had always been a frail and quiet woman—this angry before. Then my wife slapped her. I couldn't believe it. My wife just wasn't a physical person. She hated machismo in particular—you know, settling arguments with physical force.
"The maid was in tears and ran out of the kitchen. I went over to my wife. She seemed to be in some kind of trance. I wasn't even sure that she knew I was standing next to her. I tried to touch her, but she jerked away from me. Upstairs, I could hear the maid opening and slamming doors. Then she came downstairs carrying her bags and went out the side door to her car. She had a little VW Bug she was very proud of.
"I asked my wife why they'd been arguing but she wouldn't even look at me. I really did wonder if she was in some kind of trance.
"And then without a word, she left the kitchen, went upstairs to her room.
"I just stood there looking out the window at Maria, the maid, backing her VW out, and then pulling away. I never saw her again.
"I was just about to go upstairs, and try and get my wife to talk to me, when I noticed the blood on the top of the stairs leading to the basement.
"It was very dark, and there was this iron odor to it.
"I knew enough to be afraid—knew enough to sense that I was about to find something that I would be better off not knowing—but I couldn't help myself.
"I went over and turned the basement lights on and followed the blood all the way downstairs.
"Six months earlier, we'd had new tile put in, the same kind of tile we had on the stairs, a kind of amber color, and the blood was very stark against it. There was a lot of it—the blood, I mean.
"The basement had been turned into several rooms, one of which was my son's 'den,' as we called it. He had his TV, his stereo and all his comic books there. He was a great comic-book collector.
"That was when I saw the first piece of flesh, just outside his door, flesh and white hair soaked with blood.
"I knew right away what I was looking at. A few weeks previous, my son had stopped by a pet shop and found these two rabbits he really liked. He called them Dean and Jerry. He loved Jerry Lewis movies. He kept the rabbits in a large cage in his den.
"You can guess what happened.
"Craig had killed the rabbits. And not cleanly. Didn't just shoot them, or put a blade into their hearts. From the pieces I saw, and especially from the way their eyes gaped when I found their decapitated heads, he tortured them first and then started cutting them up into chunks while they were still alive.
"Later that night, I learned what the argument between my wife and Maria had been about. Maria had found the rabbits and gone to my wife and told her that Craig had killed them. My wife absolutely refused to believe this. Of course, this wasn't the first time we'd had troubles like this with Craig. When he was eight, he'd been playing with a little girl he'd invited home from school. He was out in the old barn—this was when we lived outside of Des Moines—and he took a hammer and nails and nailed her to the ground. Even at that age, he was smart enough to gag her so we wouldn't hear her.
"We sent him away to a school where he spent half his time with psychiatrists and the other half on his schoolwork. But even then my wife wouldn't admit that there was anything fundamentally wrong with Craig. She always said it was just a 'stage' he was going through. She also clung to the idea that Craig didn't fit the general profile of disturbed young boys. We'd never brutalized him—we were very obedient disciples of Dr. Spock and didn't even spank him—and we certainly expressed our love to him. I spent at least a dozen hours a week doing all the things you see fathers in movies do—we played baseball, we went fishing, we rode horses.
"But Craig was never much interested in anything I suggested. He didn't hate us exactly, but he certainly didn't love us either—not in any way we understood.
"When he was sixteen and home for the summer and adamant about us letting him get his driver's license and giving him a car, he brought a girl home to walk down by the lake on the east end of our property.
"I woke up in the middle of the night. I heard somebody screaming, and I threw on some clothes and ran out of the house. I knew I shouldn't call the police; I don't know how I knew, I just did.
"He had her tied to a tree and stripped completely naked. He was cutting her with a switchblade. She had a gag on, but it must have slipped off for a few moments, and that's how I heard her scream.
"He wasn't killing her; he was marking her up for life.
"I knocked him out. It took a rock to do it—he was a very slight boy, but he had incredible strength and energy—and I got both of them up to the house.
"After that, my wife didn't have any choic
e but to see Craig for what he was. We were able to settle a great deal of money on the girl and her parents to keep them quiet, but we had Craig committed to a sanitarium right after that." He stayed four months, and then escaped. Believe me, people had been trying for twenty years to escape from that place but nobody before or since Craig had been able to.
"We had no idea where he went, but about eight months after he escaped—and by this time his mother herself was in very serious therapy, and she was also drinking a lot—about eight months afterward, we started getting Polaroid photos of girls who were eight to twelve years old . . . and they were cut up and sexually mutilated beyond belief.
"There was never any note. Just the photos.
"After the sixth photograph, each of a different girl—and we always knew who was sending them—his mother overdosed on gin and barbiturates.
"I was in Phoenix at the time.
"Craig didn't come back for the funeral.
"In fact, I didn't hear from him again for two years.
"You know the way I heard from him again?
"Polaroid photos started arriving.
"Very young girls again. Tortured and maimed in ways I can't ever quite get out of my mind.
"He was going all over the country—just the way Ted Bundy did—slaughtering young girls.
"I wanted to stop him—I wanted to tell the police what was going on—but I . . . couldn't. I'd come very close but then I . . . couldn't.
"Pride, I suppose, though I hate to think I'm that selfish and venal.
"Anyway, one day I got a letter from a law firm I'd never heard from. Out-of-state.
"Craig was being tried for several crimes unrelated to the murders. I flew up to see him. I hardly recognized him. There was such a . . . strange . . . aspect to his face. If I said 'diabolical,' that would sound very melodramatic, wouldn't it? But that's the only way I can describe it. Very handsome; very handsome . . . yet even being around him made me nervous.
"He asked me for help, but I turned him down. I told him that he was going where he belonged. He was very angry. He cursed me.
"I didn't see him for years. He wrote me a few letters, but I burned them. His lawyers would call from time to time and ask me if I'd go visit him but I said no . . . I no longer wanted to see him.
"A few years later, his lawyers wrote me and told me about his relationship with this woman who had apparently fallen in love with him in prison. They told me she was planning to marry Craig.
"I checked her out. She'd been in and out of mental hospitals most of her life. Ravishingly beautiful, but totally unable to deal with life. She lived on a huge trust fund from an old San Francisco banking family. This wasn't the first time she'd married inmates. She'd done it twice before Craig.
"Then came the escape, when Craig was killed.
"I brought him back to Iowa and buried him. And that was that. Or so I thought, anyway."
"So you thought?" I said.
"So I thought."
"Other things happened?"
He sat in his chair, a prim, composed man who looked uncomfortable sharing secrets.
"The photos," he said.
"The dead girls?"
"Yes."
"They started arriving again?"
"Yes. I burned each one right after it arrived. But there were always more coming."
"Who was sending them?"
"I assumed this woman, the one you met as Nora."
"You assumed?"
"Who else would be sending them? Who else would have known what my son was doing?"
"I guess that's a good point."
"And then someone broke into my house and stole somethings from my office. Nothing very valuable—just some records relating to Craig."
"And you assumed the thief was Nora, too?"
"At first, but I hired an investigator, one recommended to me by a judge on the California supreme court."
"And he learned what?"
"He learned that Craig hadn't died."
"What?"
"I know. That's how I reacted at first, too. Total disbelief. Oh, he'd been badly injured, but then this woman decided to take advantage of the situation. She paid off all the right people—remember, she had a great deal of wealth to draw on— and his death was faked with the help of the prison doctor. The investigator secretly had Craig's grave opened up and found that it was empty except for a few heavy sacks of feed."
"Was Craig with Nora?"
He shook his head. "No. The investigator learned that they'd spent eight months in Mexico together where Craig had a series of plastic surgeries. He bore no resemblance to the old Craig."
"Did the investigator get a photo of the new Craig?"
"No. He didn't have time. Right after returning from Mexico, the investigator was murdered."
"By Craig, you think?"
"Who else?"
"Why did Nora contact me?"
He shrugged. "According to my investigators, Craig was tired of her. He wanted to get as far away as possible from her. So he came back to Iowa."
"And where is he now?"
"Here."
"In town?"
He nodded. "In town." He took the manila envelope from his lap and held it up to me. "The last investigator found three men who could possibly be Craig—men who showed up here four years ago, just about the time when Craig was running from his lady friend, men who have very hazy pasts."
"What's in the envelope?"
"Background on the three men."
"On what three men?"
"Reverend Roberts, Kenny Deihl, and Richard McNally."
"You're sure one of them is Craig?"
"Positive. The last three letters I got from him were postmarked from here. And that's very like Craig. To taunt me like this. Dare me to come and get him." The bleak smile again. "Find him, Mr. Hokanson. For everybody's sake—find him."
1
An hour later, I was driving past the New Hope town square. The temperature had dropped several degrees since I'd left, and the sun had vanished completely, leaving a gray sky that was boiling with storm clouds to the west.
Even though all I could think of was the white Lincoln the two black men had described, I needed to stop by and see Eve McNally first. I wanted to know about her daughter and if she'd heard anything from her husband. I was beginning to suspect how McNally and Sam Lodge fit in with the good reverend.
After leaving the small shopping area, I swung left to pick up an asphalt drive that would take me straight to the northeast edge of town, where Eve McNally lived.
The sky was getting so dark that several oncoming cars turned on their headlights. Then the rain came, spits and fits at first, then a rumbling grumbling downpour.
I heard the siren before I saw the spinning red cherry. Then I noticed my speedometer. I was traveling 46 in a 35 mph zone.
I pulled over on the shoulder of the road, set the gear in neutral, heeled on the emergency brake.
It was a long minute before anybody got out of the squad car behind me. In the downpour, it was hard to make out any face, just a person with a campaign hat and a fold-up plastic raincoat on.
I watched the cop approach in my rearview mirror. Then the mirror was empty.
Where had the cop gone?
Knuckles rapped the window on the passenger side. A finger pointed to the door lock. I leaned over and unlocked it.
The cop got in, smelling of rain and chilly but very fresh air.
"You were speeding."
"I'll say one thing: getting stopped by a cop as pretty as you is a real pleasure."
"Yeah, I look great in this campaign hat," Jane Avery grinned. "Like Smokey the Bear's daughter."
"You look fine to me."
"I saw you coming in from the highway."
"Yeah."
"So you were out of town?"
"Uh-huh."
"You going to tell me about it?"
"Boy, you're really relentless."
"Your friend Karl in
the hospital?"
"Yeah?"
"He died this morning."
I looked through the steamy window at the rain. It danced like bouncing nail heads on the asphalt. Headlights appeared and faded, appeared and faded, in fog and rain.
"Something terrible's happening to me," she said after our mutual silence.
"Yeah? What?"
"I'm starting to like you."
"Well, for what it's worth, I'm starting to like you, too."
"But I can't trust you, and that scares me."
"Of course you can trust me."
"Then you're going to tell me what's going on? Who Eleanor Saunders was, and who Karl was, and what's going on with Eve McNally?"
"This doesn't have anything to do with trust—not the way you mean it." I turned toward her in the seat. Her eyes looked more hurt than angry—she really was taking this personally; as perhaps I would, too—and her otherwise-full mouth was pursed tight. "This isn't personal, why I'm not confiding in you—it's professional. And there's a difference."
Now it was her turn to stare silently out the window.
"I saw Joanna Lodge," she said after a while.
"Did you ask her why she was out at the Brindle farm this morning?"
"She gave me a reason but not a very believable one. She said she felt like going for a walk in the country and that the Brindle place was nice because it was deserted."
"You're right. Not very believable."
"She wasn't any more cooperative than you've been. She knows what's really going on, too. That's you and Eve McNally and now Joanna Lodge. Who else knows what's really going on?"
I sighed. "You're making this harder than it has to be."
"I'm a cop. A good one, I think—at least a dedicated one. I need to know what's happening in my town. And you can tell me."
I shook my head, said, in barely a whisper, "No, I can't, Jane. No, I can't."
She stared at me silently for a moment and then said, "I think we'd better skip tonight."
