Lasting Doubts (The Red Lake Series Book 2)

by Rich Foster

  “They were stupid! I hid a few things and they believed my story.”

  “So why the girls? What did they do to you?

  “They looked like her, isn't that enough? Once a year I would celebrate.”

  Harry picked up a snapshot probably taken with an Instamatic camera.

  “Was she the first?”

  “No, the other one. I grew a lot in junior high. One day I realized I was big enough to do what I was once too small to do. Lucy Reese worked at the market. She was convenient.”

  “She also looked a lot like your mother.”

  “As I said, she was convenient. It's hard to describe the pleasure I felt when I wrapped my hands around her throat, when I saw her fear of me, and to see her eyes bulge and hear her pleas choked off. It was so exciting that I came in my pants.”

  “So, you became just another impulsive serial killer.” Harry shook his head slowly as if pitiful disgust.

  “I was not impulsive!” Cox snapped. “I chose my victims carefully. I was disciplined. I waited. I rationed myself to one a year. One solitary celebration each year!”

  Harry blew out air between his lips as if spitting out something fetid. “You're just another pathetic, sexually inadequate murderer.”

  “I could kill you!” Cox threatened and moved forward as to threaten Harry. “You broke into my house. I shot an intruder.”

  “That won't get you far.” Harry bent forward and picked up a handful of pictures. “The sheriff knows about you. Kill me and you will be the first one he looks for. These phots will put you in the gas chamber.”

  “It makes me sad to hear that, Mr. Grim. It means I will need to destroy my little treasures. A little bit of vanity you might say? On the other hand, it might be satisfying to let you go, so you can think how you have failed and wonder who will be next. You can't stop me, you know? You're not clever enough by half!”

  “I could testify against you!”

  “As to what? It would be your word against mine. You broke into my house. Obviously, you are obsessed, not to mention criminally minded.”

  Harry knew it was true. And now the photos would not even be admissible in court. He simply said, “As I said, you're pathetic.” He tossed the pictures at Cox's feet.

  Cox instinctively followed their course. Before his eyes came up, Harry was upon him. He knocked the gun upward. Cox squeezed the trigger. The concussion was powerful in the small room and plaster dust fell.

  Cox spun in Harry's grasp. Harry's head slammed into the doorjamb and his world went black.

  Harry opened his eyes. He found himself lying on his side looking down a hall. His arms were duct taped behind his back. Within his sight in the living room, Randall Cox stood by the fireplace, tossing photos into the flames. Harry's head throbbed, but he thought he saw tears on Cox's face. As flames consumed the last photo, Harry heard sirens in the distance.

  *

  “What the hell were you thinking?” Gaines roared.

  Harry sat on the steel cot in the holding cell. On the other side of the bars the Sheriff paced. “I warned you Harry. Whatever you were thinking, I said do not do it. Do you you remember that?”

  Harry silently nodded. With each bounce his head hurt.

  “He did it. I saw the evidence, photos of every girl he killed.”

  “A lot of good that does us now. Besides, even if we recovered them, the courts would throw the evidence out, thanks to you.”

  Gaines' anger with Harry was at the boiling point. “Cox filed a formal complaint. You're being charged with breaking and entering. This will cost you your license.”

  “Did you find any evidence of forced entry?”

  Gaines shook his head no.

  “The door was open. I walked in to see if everything was okay.”

  “What about going through the closet?”

  “Through what? Did your officers find anything missing or disturbed? The worst I should get is a suspension.”

  Gaines shook his head being angry, disgusted, and frustrated.

  “After you're booked and post bail, stay away from Cox. Is that clear, Mr. Grim?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  *

  By the end of the month, Red Lake froze solid. Fishing shacks were towed out on the ice. Occasionally, ice boats zipped past, their sails a reminiscence of summer. Their world was cold and frozen.

  Harry's relationship with Paula also suffered a chill due to his ill humor.

  “The son-of-a-bitch is getting away with it!”

  “You've said that a thousand times,” she would answer. “There is nothing you can do about it, so will you please drop it?”

  So, he fell silent and moped around the house as he awaited trial.

  When he complained to Barton, he received less sympathy than from Paula.

  Dirk simply said,”The system works for most things, Harry, but for others you need to step outside it.”

  *

  Harry's case came up in January. Cox testified, smiling smugly at Harry as he did. Harry, for his part, perjured himself, swearing under oath that he came by and, finding the door open on such a cold day, entered the house. Evidently, Mr. Cox who he only recently met mistook him for a burglar and struck him from behind which Harry agreed was the only reasonable thing to do given the circumstance. The judge found him guilty of criminal trespass. He paid a five hundred dollar fine.

  People filed out of the courtroom.

  Harry's lawyer's parting words were, “I'll mail you my bill.”

  Harry nodded. Alone in the empty courtroom he stared at the judges bench and thought about justice and injustice. He thought about good and evil.

  “You okay?” Paula asked him once the courtroom cleared.

  Harry shrugged. “Alison Albright was as evil as they come, a liar, blackmailer, and totally amoral. But, isn't it ironic that her own machinations brought a greater evil upon her?”

  “What do you mean?”

  If she did not bleach her hair to seduce Dr. Oliver, it was unlikely she would have attracted Randall Cox's eye. Evil swallowed by evil! It almost makes me smile.”

  He pushed his chair back and walked past the bar that separated the public gallery from the prosecution and defendants tables. He opened the heavy oak courtroom door. On the opposite side, Randall Cox leaned against the wall.

  Harry turned and walked the other way. Cox hustled after him. A hand tapped his shoulder. Grim spun around. “What do you want?”

  Cox smiled broadly. “I wanted you to know I put you on my mailing list. I'll send you a copy of the photo next time.” He patted Harry's shoulder in an avuncular way, then turned around and strolled away, his heels clicking in the marble corridor.

  Chapter 28

  The State's disciplinary board suspended Harry's license for ninety days beginning February first, as a consequence of his misdemeanor conviction. He should have been relieved, but it failed to cheer him. With depressing frequency he spotted Cox around town so much so that he assumed it was intentional. He felt an urge to take a swing at Cox and wipe the self-satisfied smile from his face.

  Not unlike him and his mother, Harry thought. Then he found himself fantasizing how it might feel to wrap his hands around Cox's throat.

  When a week came where he failed to see Cox, it was so far outside of what had become normative that, he stopped by to see Gaines.

  “I told you leave it alone, Grim!” Gaines chided.

  “I have! It's Cox that keeps turning up around me. Now he's not. I think he's taken off.”

  “Maybe he is on vacation!”

  “Maybe he has moved and you should damn well find out where he went so you can warn somebody who gives a damn!”

  Harry slammed the door as he stormed out of the office.

  During the following week it was the same, he never saw Cox. He drove by the house on Birch. Newspapers littered the driveway, mail bulged from the mailbox. He knocked on the neighbor's doors. No, they had not seen Mr. Cox in a couple weeks. No, th
ere had not been lights on in the evening, now that he asked.

  *

  “I think he's gone to ground,” Harry complained, talking to Barton who was leaving on a vaguely defined trip.

  “Not your problem anymore then.” Barton was pragmatic about events over which he lacked control.

  “It troubles me. I'll have lasting doubts about when and where Cox will turn up. I worry about getting a photograph in the mail. The bastard is going to haunt my dreams.”

  “No, he won't. I guarantee you no lasting doubts, no fears.”

  Barton rang off.

  *

  Finally, to make things up with Paula and to get away from Cox's pervasive presence in his thoughts, Harry bought tickets to the Bahamas. For two weeks they stayed at Treasure Island basking in the sun, layering up a tan despite the danger of skin cancer, drinking cocktails by the pool, taking dips in the clear warm ocean water, and wallowing in a king size bed; guilt having caused him to book a luxurious suite. The beaches were good, the food excellent, and the sex better than ever.

  “I hate to be going home,” Paula said as the plane banked and Beaumont came into view. Snow covered the landscape.

  “Maybe we should move?”

  “Maybe,” she dreamily answered.

  The plane touched down.

  In the terminal, they stood out bronzed by their time in the tropics. Occasionally a person glanced their way with envy in their winter bound eyes. Harry loaded their bags into Paula's jeep. She let him drive, not caring to drive the pass if she could avoid it.

  An hour later they were in Red Lake. Harry stopped at the post office to pick up their mail that he put a hold on. The clerk pushed a plastic bin, stamped US Mail, across the service counter.

  “Just put the bin out by your mailbox, the carrier will pick it up.”

  They stopped at Willet's Market for fresh groceries. A half hour later they were home. When they pulled up to their house the drive was choked by unschooled snow and the entry was blocked by a mound piled up by passing plows. Paula trudged inside to turn up the heat and start something to eat.

  Harry spent an hour running the snowblower, while keeping his thoughts focused upon white, crushed-coral beaches instead of drifted snow. Finally, he was able to pull the jeep into the drive.

  He carried in their luggage. From the kitchen came the aroma of something delicious. He returned to the Jeep and brought in the box of mail, set it on the counter, and then shed his winter coat like an animal molting in spring. While Paula cooked, he sorted the mail that accumulated over two weeks. Advertisements and junk mailings went into the recycle box, bills onto the desk, and anything that appeared personal, onto the sofa beside him.

  “Here, try this” Paula said handing him a drink.

  “What is it?” he asked wary of her concoctions.

  “A bartender named Ted Fizio created it in Fort Lauderdale. It has vodka, peach schnapps, orange juice and cranberry juice.”

  “Hmm. What's it called?”

  Paula smiled suspiciously, “It's called Sex on the Beach!”

  “Aren't you a day late for that?”

  “We'll have to make do!” she chuckled.

  After diner Harry lit the fire. Outside a full moon fell bright on the lake ice. He returned to the mail and began to open envelopes.

  One envelope bore no return address. The postmark was Los Angeles, inside was something square and stiff. A momentary dread came over him. Taking no chances in case Cox had become careless, Harry put on latex gloves before he slit the envelope open; but what he pulled out was not the photograph he feared, only a square of white cardboard. There was a series of numbers, below this block letters in blue ink simply said, 'Sleep well Your doubts are gone!”

  It puzzled him. What the hell does this mean?

  He stared at the card and numbers for some minutes before comprehension showed in his eyes.

  “I'm going for a walk.!” he announced.

  Paula kissed him lightly, “Well, I'm off to bed.”

  Harry donned his winter coat and boots. In his pocket he carried his cell phone and in the other the odd note. The night air was sharp and his breath swirled in moist clouds around his face. He moved slowly through the deep snow down to the lake shore, but once he was on the ice it was easy going. The winds had pushed the snow toward shore and most of the lake was clear. Here and there, the dim light of lanterns glowed inside ice fishing huts. Overhead, Orion the Hunter was high in the night sky.

  He took out his phone and switched to the GPS tracking mode. Soon his latitudinal and longitudinal position appeared on the glowing screen. He watched the numbers change. Further west, he thought, and turned that direction. He was steadily moving toward the deepest part of the lake, a place where submarines trained during the last good war.

  Harry used the light of his phone to check the numbers on the mysterious card, they were almost a match. He walked around a bit more.

  Somewhere within ten feet of here.

  The hole someone chopped in the ice was frozen over again, but it was clearly distinguishable in the moonlight. It was far larger than a hole one would cut for fishing; it was as wide as a man's shoulders. Harry looked around in the still night. Suddenly, the world seemed a better and safer place, All was well with his world.

  Harry smiled, and turned toward home.