by Hadena James
in The Fortress. He was a mass murderer. I hadn’t seen him since his incarceration. When I became a member of the Serial Crimes Tracking Unit, I was granted access to all prisoners inside the massive prison for the not so insane. It had been nearly six months and I had never forced my way into an interview room with him. I was thinking it might be about time.
Twenty-Two
A teenage girl with brown curly hair and deep brown eyes opened the door for Xavier and me. We identified ourselves and she handed us masks that were sitting next to the door. They looked like the type we wore in the morgue. I slipped the elastic straps over my ears and pinched the metal piece down around my nose. The lower half of my face was now fully covered. Xavier did the same and we were led into the living room.
In a recliner, knees drawn up under him, sat Dr. Ericson. He also wore a mask, but his forehead and cheeks were flushed where we could see them. His eyes were blue and bloodshot with dark rings around them. He didn’t look like a man in pain; he looked like a man with a serious infection raging through him.
“Dr. Ericson,” Xavier sat down on the couch. I sat next to him. The girl, whom I assumed was his daughter, sat in a chair across from us.
“Dr. Reece,” his voice sounded congested and abnormal. I tried not to sigh.
“We just need you to answer a few more questions. The rest of our team is out looking for your wife,” Xavier assured him.
“Whatever you need,” Dr. Ericson answered.
“You said you woke up around two this morning and she wasn’t home?” Xavier started.
“Yes. We agreed that Grace, that’s my daughter, should go to her friend’s house tonight. I’m getting better and I’m unlikely to be contagious at this point, but it never hurts to be careful. Hilary then sent me a text that said she was having dinner out with a co-worker. So I had some soup and went to bed. I woke about two and got up to see if Hilary had remembered to pick up some more soup and she wasn’t home.”
“Do you know what co-worker she had dinner with?” Xavier asked.
“No, I didn’t ask, but she has several co-workers that we go out with.”
“Where did Grace spend the night?” I asked.
“With my family,” Sheriff Rybolt came out of the kitchen carrying a tray of coffees and teas. He set them all out, giving them to everyone but me. He pulled a can of soda out of his pocket and handed it to me. “We thought it’d be you two that would come for the interview.”
“Thank you,” I told him. “So she spent the night with your family?”
“Emily and Grace are on the basketball team together,” Sheriff Rybolt told me.
“What happened to your neck?” Dr. Ericson asked.
“Run in with a bad guy,” I told him, since I was the only one wearing a bandage on my neck. “Tore a hole in it. No big deal, just another scar.”
“Daddy,” Grace looked at Dr. Ericson with wide eyes. “You should tell them.”
“Tell them what, honey?” Dr. Ericson replied.
“About mom,” Grace pressed. “I know already. It’s basic biology information.”
Dr. Ericson visibly changed. His composure fell some, his face seemed to age. The disgraced man closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
“My wife may be having an affair,” Dr. Ericson finally said. “I don’t know who with, but it wouldn’t be the first time. However, she has always come home at a decent hour. Her lateness tonight has never happened before.”
“We’ll make note of it,” I said.
“How did you know?” Dr. Ericson asked his daughter.
“I have brown eyes, so did Henry. You and mom both have blue,” she frowned. “When we started doing biology this year we had a class on genetics. The teacher assured me that it couldn’t happen. So I talked to Henry about it.”
At this point, she broke down crying. Deep sorrowful sobs that shook her small body and made her curls bounce. I didn’t know who Henry was, but it was something to look into.
“I asked Henry if I was adopted and he told me that no, he’d been at my birth. There was no way I was adopted. Then I told him what my teacher said about the eye colors. He confronted mom after Thanksgiving dinner,” the sobs got worse and snot began to drip from her nose. I turned away from the scene. It was obvious her pain was great.
This brought Dr. Ericson into full view. He too was crying. Gentle tears that ran down his face and dripped onto his shirt. He wiped at them right handed and shook his head.
“Grace, you weren’t supposed to know. I’m so sorry,” he finally told his daughter.
“Why are you sorry? It’s her that should be sorry,” his daughter told him, anger suddenly flashing in her eyes. I watched as the anger continued to smolder even though she dropped her father’s gaze.
“Grace, why don’t you come help me with some stuff in the kitchen,” Sheriff Rybolt said.
Grace got up and left the room. Xavier looked at me for a moment. He had seen the anger too.
“Who is Henry?” I asked.
“My son, he died in December, killed himself a few weeks after Thanksgiving actually,” Dr. Ericson looked older still.
“Do you know who fathered either child if it wasn’t you?” Xavier asked.
“My brother,” Dr. Ericson answered. “He’s quite a bit younger than I am. He got married a few years after Grace was born. His family doesn’t know, but he and I have talked about it.”
I remembered a Tolstoy quote about dysfunctional families and tried not to smile. Dr. Ericson was proof that no matter how perfect your life seems to be, there is always something. Dr. Ericson relaxed a little with Grace out of the room.
“I’m sterile, accident when I was a kid. My brother and I agreed that at least this way, I got to have children. There were hard feelings in the beginning, but both of them were a blessing. Henry graduated valedictorian from high school, joined the military. He came back after his second tour a changed man. At twenty, he was no longer the son I knew. He was distant; his discharge papers said he had PTSD. I think there was more going on, but he wouldn’t talk to me about it. The serial killer case we are working on had just started. Sheriff Rybolt and lots of others were patrolling the woods as much as possible. Tucker found him. He’d slaughtered a moose, decapitated it, removed the eyes and then turned the knife on himself and slit his own throat. As far as the vet could find, he caught the moose off guard. He hadn’t shot him with a bow or a gun, just stabbed him in the leg, and severed one of the tendons the moose needed to run. When the moose collapsed, well, we can only guess what he was thinking at the time. As I said, he was changed by what he saw over there.
“Now, there’s just Grace and she’s following in her brother’s footsteps. She’s an overachiever with big dreams of becoming a researcher and curing diseases. She’s already started taking college classes through correspondence courses in association with her high school. She plays basketball, volleyball and softball. Has tons of friends. Even when the rest of us were at our worst, sick with Henry’s death and the grief, Grace managed to put on a smile and help me get through it.”
“And you have no idea who your wife might have been having an affair with now?” Xavier pressed him again.
“Oh, I’m sure I could point a finger at a few people, but it would just be speculation,” Dr. Ericson took a cigar from the table next to him, clipped off the end and lit it. I watched the smoke curl up from it.
“Well, we won’t keep you,” Xavier stood up. “We’ll go join the search. I’ll let you know as soon as we have something.”
“Thank you,” I said, standing and looking at Xavier.
Outside was freezing, dawn was just over the horizon. We climbed into the SUV. Xavier started the motor and we sat for several minutes in the cold silence.
Anchorage has the same problem as other cities, too much light pollution to see anything but the brightest stars. The moon seemed far away. It was waning t
o just a sliver of silver in the darkened sky. Two or three nights and there would be no moon.
“Dr. Ericson is left-handed,” Xavier said finally. He pulled away from the curb.
“So?” I asked.
“So, he lit his cigar right-handed and he wiped his face with his right hand. Why?”
“Because he could.”
“We unconsciously use our dominant hand for almost everything, unless we can’t. Then we become conscious of our lack of ability to use it and use the opposing hand with more difficulty.”
“I eat left-handed, but I’m right-handed.”
“You eat with a knife and fork, knife in your dominant hand. Unless you don’t have one, without a knife, you eat with your right hand.”
“I still don’t see your point. Maybe he’s ambidextrous.”
“No, I’ve seen him work, Ace. He’s not. He’s clumsy right-handed. When you smoke, you smoke right-handed. You lit your cigarette lighter with your right hand. You hold the cigarette with the right hand. I can tell which hand is dominant based on the nicotine stains.”
“Get there already.”
“If you were on top of him or vice versa when you stabbed, you would have hit his left arm and left shoulder. He wouldn’t be using them because of the pain.”
“So now you think he is our serial killer.”
“It would clear up a lot of questions. The killings started just after Thanksgiving. What if it wasn’t a partner but a son? Henry Ericson Junior kills himself and his father takes over, that’s why the
