The Murder Artist

by John Case

  Cromwell. Most days, I drive out to join the core volunteers, the ones who continue to show up every single day, even in the stultifying heat, to search. I make the long drive willingly; it feels good to get out of the house and do something.

  Although I realize, one day, struggling through the underbrush in the area outside the fairgrounds, that I’m participating in the search with no hope of finding any trace of the boys – but also with no fear of doing so. I don’t believe I’m going to see a small crumpled form, the clothing intact, the flesh melting into the leaves and sticks. Liz is different. When she makes the trip, she searches with a stricken intensity that conveys all too well what she expects to find.

  Me – I think the boys are with The Piper, whoever he may be, and although by now the dangers of “denial” have been pressed on me many times and I know I may be fooling myself, I still think Kevin and Sean are alive. This makes searching with the volunteers in Cromwell almost a kind of ritual, a form of devotion to the cause of finding the boys, like saying a prayer or making a pilgrimage.

  Some of the Cromwell volunteers alarm me. I wonder about their ardor for the task, their willingness to wade into yet another patch of the poison ivy-choked, bug-infested terrain. By now, I’ve grown to know many of them. Although most have just latched on to this search the way others might fasten their efforts to fund-raising for breast cancer or lobbying for a new playground, there’s something unsettling about a few of them. The dark fervor in the eyes of one man disturbs me, as does the quasi-religious devotion of a couple of women.

  I wonder what the rest of their lives are like, that they can afford this huge investment of time. Once in a while, I find myself thinking one of them might be involved with the abduction, an accomplice, reporting back to The Piper. Although I feel guilty for harboring such thoughts, I’ve compiled a file of their names and addresses, their jobs and marital histories, their quirks and hobbies. I’ve turned it over to the P.I., Mary McCafferty.

  The situation between Liz and me continues to deteriorate. During the first few days after the boys were abducted, what happened was so terrible, we took some comfort in our common loss.

  That’s long gone, replaced at first by a Jack-like formality from Liz that’s slowly segued into something even less friendly. When we’re in the same room now, she can’t seem to stay in her chair. When our eyes meet, hers skid away from mine.

  Behind it all is the undeniable fact that at rock bottom, she blames me. This comes up more and more, in the form of “if only” scenarios.

  I tell myself it’s the same in the aftermath of any disaster: Once over the shock, the loved ones of victims look around for a way in which the event could have been prevented. I remember this from many assignments, the anguished faces of mourners after preventable disasters (the Rhode Island nightclub fire, the Florida Valujet crash, the explosion of the shuttle): “It’s such a tragedy because it didn’t have to happen.” It plays out in our legal system – suits are filed before the flames die down. The litigation of blame.

  In this case, there’s no need for inquiry or reconstruction. I’m the embodiment of “human error.” And as the agent who could have prevented the catastrophe, I am slowly becoming – in the heart and mind of my wife – its cause.

  We attend a fund-raiser sponsored by the Center for Abducted Children. It seemed impossible to refuse, but the event itself is tough to stomach. Liz and I sit at the dais, along with other celebrities of misfortune. Some of the parents wear laminated photographs of their children pinned to their chests like identity badges, a heartbreaking gallery of winsome smiles and sparkling eyes.

  Dozens of strangers offer help and sympathy but there’s something about all this that sets my teeth on edge. In some cases, I get the impression that it’s a weird kind of stardust they’re really after.

  The main speech is delivered by a single mother named Melinda. She tells the harrowing tale of her eight-year-old daughter’s abduction in the simple but powerful way of a born storyteller. She makes all the right pauses for effect. Eight years after the girl went missing, her remains were discovered buried in a neighbor’s yard.

  “All told, about one hundred children a year are kidnapped and murdered by strangers,” she tells us. “Despite the saturation coverage such abductions and murders get from the media, that makes it one of the rarest of crimes. A child is more likely to be hit by lightning.” She pauses. “Some of us have been hit by that kind of lightning.” She crosses her hands over her heart, according a sad nod to some of us seated at the head table. One of the women lets out a lone sob. “When it does happen,” Melinda tells us in a husky voice, “it’s lightning fast. 74 percent of these kids – my daughter Bonnie was one of them – are killed within three hours of their abduction.

  “Of the children who were abducted,” Melinda continues, “the vast majority, seventy-six percent, were girls, with the average age being eleven. In eighty percent of the cases, the children were grabbed within a quarter mile of their homes. So don’t feel your child is safe in your front yard, or riding her bike down your block. It’s the same with car accidents, most of which occur within a mile of home. The vast majority of other types of accidents occur in the home as well. Our homes, ladies and gentlemen, may be our castles – but they are not fortresses.”

  While she pauses for effect, I think: Kevin and Sean don’t fit. They’re not girls, they’re much younger than the average age, they were more than fifty miles from home. And there were two of them.

  “So we need the resources to act fast, too,” Melinda says. Her timing, as she launches into the plea for funds, is impeccable. I’m not surprised to learn that she’s pursuing a new career as a motivational speaker or that she’s written a book, Keeping Our Children Safe, full of pointers about how to protect children from predators without at the same time scaring them silly. The book is available outside the banquet room. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the center.

  After the public departs, there’s a prayer circle for parents and relatives of the missing. We sit on folding chairs, holding hands. My neighbor clutches mine with such a ferocious grip, I almost lose feeling in my fingers. After the minute of silence, we take turns reciting aloud the details of our personal catastrophes.

  I walk out when I realize that most of those in the circle are in fact grieving. They’ve come to share coping strategies for what they regard – except for the ritual nod to an unlikely miracle – as the permanent loss of their children. Like the parents and spouses of MIA victims lost in Vietnam, they no longer seek their “loved ones.” What they’re after is something else, something always referred to as “closure.” In other words: the remains. Evidence of death.

  “I can’t stay here,” I whisper in my wife’s ear. “They think their kids are dead.” When I stand up to leave, she comes with me, but not because she wants to. “Excuse us, please excuse us,” she mutters as I yank my hand out of my neighbor’s and careen toward the door.

  In the car, her eyes are hard and unforgiving. “Who do you think you are, Alex – judging them about how they were handling their loss?”

  “They think their kids are dead. I don’t.”

  Liz bursts into tears.

  That night, she makes the announcement: “I’m going back to Maine,” she says. She looks at her fingernails and, once again, starts to cry.

  The next day, she’s gone.

  Work. Although Al told me from the moment he heard about the boys that I could forget about work for “as long as it takes,” last week I got an e-mail asking me to “clarify” my plans. Either I should come back soon, at least on a part-time basis, or I should request a formal leave of absence, one that specified a time frame and a date of return. The fine print noted that given the circumstances, the station would continue to provide benefits even if I did choose to remain on “compassionate leave.” Benefits, yes, but since my absence would require the hiring of a replacement – no “remuneration.”

  Almost everyone agrees t
hat returning to work is “the best thing.” The basis for this conclusion is some sketchy if universal notion of work as distracting and therefore therapeutic. It boils down to this: If I’m too busy to think about my missing sons, I’ll be less depressed.

  I doubt this.

  Getting up, getting dressed, the old familiar commute – it seems so strange to resume this routine. And the station itself feels like foreign terrain. TV stations are crazy places, loud and frantic with energy, everyone always careening toward or recovering from a deadline. Me? I feel inert and idle amid the hive of activity. I exist within a kind of insular bubble created by everyone’s elaborate courtesy. Voices lower when I walk by, glances slide away, no one knows what to say to me or how to act in my presence. I can see the wheels turning – should I mention it, or not? When I explain that nothing they can do or say could make me feel worse, they feel rebuffed.

  One day, after I return to work, Shoffler drops by. He arrives with a six-pack of Sierra Nevada and a huge soggy pizza. “Health food,” he says, with his high-pitched stuttery laugh. “Stick with me and you, too, can be a fat slob.”

  I’m glad to see him. In fact, I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather see at my door – except my sons. For openers, Shoffler is just about the only person in the world who’s always ready to talk about the one thing of actual interest to me. Besides, he’s cynical, funny and, I’ve come to realize, very smart. We usually end up going over and over the busted leads to see if there’s something we missed: the origami rabbit, the whippet, the witnesses who saw the man getting into a black panel van, the latest Elvis sightings, the chicken blood, the “enemy” list of folks I’d attacked on the air. Shoffler checks his notebooks – he’s on his third now. The case file, he tells me, is seven binders thick. Each case, he’s explained, starts with a single three-inch loose-leaf binder. The binders – which Shoffler has allowed me to look at – contain copies of every piece of paper generated by the investigation: report, witness statement, interview, crime scene photo, forensics tests, search warrant, search warrant inventory, evidence receipt, and so on.

  We eat the pizza, watch an O’s game, and shoot the breeze for a while before he gets around to the reason for his visit.

  “I hate to tell you this, Alex,” he starts, then stops. He’s uncomfortable, tapping his fingers against the top of the pizza box, jiggling his foot. At the look on my face, he pushes his hand toward me. “Don’t worry. It’s not about the boys. There’s nothing new. It’s about… me: I’ve been taken off the case.”

  “What?” Shoffler is known as a bulldog, who never lets go, who sacrificed two marriages to work, who spends any spare moment pounding away at his cold cases. “What do you mean? You don’t ever close a case. You’re famous for that. Taken off the case? Why?”

  A big sigh. “Here’s the deal. It’s not just you – all my cases are being reassigned. There’s this new thing been in the works ever since 9/11 and it’s finally happening: Metro Area Counter-Terrorism Unit.” His hands fall open, like a book. “Officers from every jurisdiction, plus a coupla Bureau designates, folks from Customs and INS. I’m the guy from Anne Arundel. Look, I’m sorry.”

  I say nothing. It’s a real blow.

  “Your case has been handed over to a young detective named Muriel Petrich. I may be a bulldog, but she’s as smart as they get. And ambitious. That’s a good combo.”

  “Right.”

  “Look, I know…” He shakes his head. “You can count on me to keep my hand in, right? And call me anytime, any reason. You get an idea, a lead, whatever, I’ll do what I can. But give Petrich a chance – she’s a tiger.”

  “Right.” I can’t keep the bitterness out of my voice. I feel Kevin and Sean are being abandoned.

  I’ve fallen into the habit of sleeping in the family room. Half the time, I crash on the futon, dozing off while still in my clothes, to wake at two or three or four, the TV still playing, the lights still blazing. Tonight, as soon as Shoffler leaves, I clear away the beer bottles and pizza debris, I put all the dishes in the dishwasher, turn it on, wipe the counters. Then I make the rounds of the house, turn off the lights, lock the doors, then strip down to my underwear and get into bed.

  This is the white iron bed Liz scrimped and saved for. She ought to have it in Maine. It seems terrible that I can’t picture where she lives or the things that surround her, that I should be in the midst of all the objects she so lovingly accumulated. The bed: I remember nights when one of the boys or even both would come in at night, waking from bad dreams, or lonely or sick, and stand at the foot of the bed and say, “Mom?” Not “Dad,” never “Dad,” I can’t fool myself about this. It was always Liz they turned to because she was always there. I remember weekend mornings when the kids came in to wake us, piling onto the bed, the four of us launching into a brand-new day.

  I lie in the dark. Every now and then, a car turns up Ordway and a pair of lights slides up the wall and across the ceiling. I lie in the dark and come to a decision. Going back to work, stumbling through the hours in a preoccupied fog – I can’t do that.

  I’m going to find my sons.

  CHAPTER 14

  When I turn in my resignation, everyone tries to talk me out of quitting. I should give it more time, etc. I guess they think I’ll fall apart entirely without the structure of work.

  Big Dave wags his huge head and turns my written resignation over, placing it facedown on his desk. “I’m going to call this a leave of absence,” he says. “Let’s say three months.”

  “I can’t promise that,” I tell him. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take.”

  When Dave says something he really doesn’t want to say, he lowers his head, furrows his brow, and peers up at you, something like a giant turtle. I prepare for some kind of ugly comment when I see his head go down, but what he says is this: “What are you planning to use for money?”

  Dave is familiar enough with my financial situation to realize this is going to be a problem. We’re close enough that he’s been to the house a few times for Liz’s carefully crafted dinner parties. He knows we’re not rolling in it and that the separation has been an additional hardship.

  “Look, if you get pressed,” he says, “just ask.” The way he squeezes this offer out tells me it’s causing him pain.

  I thank him. “I’ve got a little set aside,” I say.

  In fact, I’m not sure what I’m going to do about money. There’s no way I can ask Liz to let me open an equity line on the house, for instance. Technically, according to the terms of our separation agreement, I can’t even take a leave of absence because it diminishes my ability to provide support for her. I have to find a way to search for the boys and keep up the support payments for Liz. I can’t leave her short.

  I’ll have to hit up my father for a loan – even though, like everyone else, he’ll think leaving my job is a mistake. I’ve got a couple of friends, Michael and Scott, good for a few grand.

  And that’s how I’m going to have to do it. Beg. Borrow. Whatever it takes.

  “I still think you’re making a mistake,” Dave says, shaking my hand. I can tell, though, that behind his discomfort, he’s relieved that I’m off his hands.

  It starts with Dave, but it doesn’t stop there. Everyone tells me I’m making a mistake. What can I do that hasn’t already been done? What goes unsaid is that most of them think I’m chasing smoke, that my children are dead and that I should face that likelihood – while not abandoning hope, of course.

  Miracles do happen. Elizabeth Smart comes up a lot.

  Even Shoffler tries to dissuade me. “Alex,” he says, sounding like a disappointed parent. “Don’t do it. I’ve seen it before, and I’ll tell you, it’s nothing but heartbreak. You do this and you’re gonna burn yourself out – emotionally and financially.”

  “So what?” That’s the thing. The second I decided to abandon the idea of “work,” I couldn’t believe I waited this long to do it.

  The detective sighs
. “Most of these cases, if they get solved – which most of them don’t, I’m sorry to say – it’s something coming in from the outside, you know? You can investigate the hell out of it and still get nowhere. And then some guy mutters something to a cell mate, or the perp gets caught in another jurisdiction committing a similar crime and the computer makes the match, and there you go.”

  “I know that.”

  “I know what you’re thinking – that you’re gonna bring more energy and focus to the search than any professionals could and so you’ll succeed where all the rest of us have failed. You think that just because you care more, you’ll find your boys. What I’m saying-”

  “I will find them,” I interrupt. “Or I’ll find out what happened to them. And if it burns up all my resources, if it burns me out – so be it.”

  Shoffler lets out a long sigh, but doesn’t speak for a long moment. In the background, I can hear people talking, phones ringing, the clacking of computer keyboards. “Well,” he says finally in a weary voice, “keep in touch.”

  Kevin and Sean. Sean and Kevin.

  In many ways, I’m much better equipped for the task of searching for them than most parents would be. I’m a reporter: finding out things is what I do.

  But before I start asking questions, or seeking advice, the first thing I do is try to think about the why, not that I haven’t thought about it a thousand times. Still…

  I go over it all again.

  Starting with The Piper. By the time the cops were done, they’d found more than a dozen witnesses who saw them – the boys and The Piper – heading out into the parking lot.

  The Piper. I still think of him that way, despite Shoffler’s caution about the costume being a disguise. The problem is that he has no dimension for me. He’s an idea, not a person. He’s not real.