Exit Wounds, page 3
Naturally, the authorities would do whatever they could to stop a serial killer.
They found no other evidence and took me off the list – without an apology.
The sheriff grimaces. “After Ms Preston’s death, we reviewed the earlier CCTV footage again. Yes, you were in one tape. But so was Lawrence Keddle.”
“He was a friend. We hung out a couple times a week.”
“And we saw him in other footage, too, in places where Suzanne and Karen were. He was apparently checking them out as targets. And we’ve gone back and looked at things more closely. We’ve found footage from the gas station on the corner near Suzanne’s house two days before she was killed. And we found Parks Department footage near the grove where Ms Miller was killed. He was looking for something he must’ve dropped as he fled the scene the night of her murder.” His lips tighten, then he adds, “And we got video from an ATM near the Heron Inn. He parked there one night this past week, near where he could see Ms Preston leave.”
I look down for a moment and dab tears.
“So, sir, we dropped the ball on this one.” The sheriff’s office phone rings and he answers, then listens. “OK. Send him in.”
The door opens and the lead investigator in the Auburn Hills killings walks in.
Detective Stan Whitcomb.
The big man is grim-faced. He walks up to me and I stand. I glare and he, clearing his throat, looks away. “Sir, I’ve heard what happened. I want to apologize. I was wrong to dog you the way I did. You were cleared as a person of interest but I ignored that.” He inhaled deeply. “See, sometimes I get an idea and it won’t let go of me. I can’t see the forests in the trees.”
The expression’s wrong but I don’t say anything.
“It’s an instinct. I think somebody’s guilty, I can’t get that thought out of my mind.”
“But sometimes the people you think are guilty aren’t.”
“That is correct.” He glances toward the sheriff, looking on coolly, and then says to me, “You’re not the first person this’s happened to. I’ve agreed to talk to somebody about it. How I behave, I mean. A counselor the Sheriff’s Office works with. I have an appointment. I should’ve done it sooner. You complained to the department, and they talked to me a couple of times.”
Three.
“But that only made me madder. And I wanted to get you, make your life miserable.”
I snap, “If you hadn’t been so focused on me, you might’ve kept looking for the real killer and stopped Larry before he killed Sarah.”
He swallows. “That is a likelihood, Mr Larson.”
No longer “Little Hank.”
He continues, “I’ll wear this one for a long time.”
I look from Whitcomb to the sheriff. “You know, I talked to a lawyer about this. He tells me I could have a case.”
The other two return my gaze with emotionless expressions but I’m sure if you dug down, you’d find two very nervous law enforcers.
“I might have gone forward with that, too. But, you know, that apology? That’ll be enough for me. I appreciate it.”
My bully digests this with surprise. He offers his hand. It won’t be a bone crusher, I know instinctively, and it isn’t. His huge paw encircles mine gently and we shake.
* * *
Back home, I pull my mountain bike from the rack in the garage, don my helmet and pedal onto the quiet street where I live. Soon I’m on the bike path that runs along the Albemarle Valley river. The afternoon is overcast and cool, and I have the path to myself.
I’m on autopilot, as I often am when riding; it’s at times like this that I do my best thinking.
When I have a web design assignment, I spend days planning, planning, planning. This is critical; one can never spend too much time getting organized before the work begins. Mistakes are unacceptable to me.
When at last I’m comfortable that every eventuality has been taken into account, I execute the plan. And then I assess. I call that the post-completion phase, which is not a very artful term, since if a project is complete, nothing should come after it, right? But I’ve found that my clients like that portion of the PowerPoint; they seem to think I’m giving them special added service.
And now, too, it’s time to assess how my present project has gone.
This post-completion analysis will have to be particularly diligent.
Since my life hangs in the balance; this state has the death penalty.
First, I think about Stan Whitcomb’s face when he offered his apology in the sheriff’s office. Was it the face of a man who truly believed his heart-set belief was wrong?
I think so.
Which is quite a coup for me, since he was, of course, one hundred percent correct about me and the murder of Suzie and, later, Karen.
A fluke of circumstance – that ATM glitch – put me on the list of persons of interest, and at my first interview Whitcomb decided I was guilty. An investigation didn’t turn up anything else and the other detectives running the case moved on.
But not Whitcomb.
I was his boy.
I found him intolerable, intimidating. But one man’s bully is another man’s bulldog, and his persistence in investigating me, pushing me, hoping to make me crack or make a blunder, was understandable … even laudable to an observer.
And he might very well have succeeded.
But now, replaying the apology, I do believe he’s convinced I’m innocent.
So, post-completion item one: the bully? Check.
But he’s not the only one running the case, of course. Should I be concerned about the other investigators?
I certainly have been careful. I don’t satisfy my addiction willy-nilly, an expression of my beloved father’s. Murder, of course, is a task, like anything else, and requires a disciplined approach – if you want to get away. Judging by the stupidity of some murderers, I sometimes feel that I’m in the minority. Maybe there are those who don’t care about ending up in prison for the rest of their lives. Not me. With my stature, I don’t think I’d be treated very well. Besides, I enjoy my job; web design is quite creative and rewarding. I really do enjoy art galleries, like the one where I met Sarah.
And my bicycles. Oh, I live for riding.
As I pump my way up a seven-degree hill, I’m wondering if I have in fact tricked them all.
Nowadays, you simply have to have the forensic stuff down cold. Goes without saying. Gloves, booties, caps (and even then, always mousse your hair up nice and sticky – all your hair, everywhere, so not a single strand finds its way to the crime scene). Don’t park near CCTVs or walk past them. Change clothes often, use disguises. And pitch every garment and shoe in dumpsters bound for landfills. Burning’s efficient but, my, how smoke where smoke should not be makes people curious.
Then bleach, bleach, and more bleach.
Car washes are your friend.
But if you own a TV you know how to do all that. Anybody who gets nailed on forensics isn’t worthy of being a killer.
You need to do more. Like moving from town to town often. After three victims in Ridgefield, Connecticut, I went to Toledo. Only one victim there but still I thought it best to pack up and head to lovely Mammoth Falls.
And you must always have a Larry.
That is, a sacrificial lamb.
When I’m scoping out the victims, I never go alone. I always bring along somebody I’ve befriended – to be my fall guy. Because there will always be witnesses and CCTVs and random selfies that catch your image, so I make sure that they also capture the buddy. I borrow his car, as I did Larry’s, and drive it past security cams near the victim’s house – wearing hat and sunglasses – or park it outside places like the Heron Inn, evidence of stalking Sarah.
I lift a hair or something else DNA-rich from the fall guy and plant it at the murder. Always DNA, never fingerprints, since very few people are in the CODIS database and many, many people have been printed.
It’s tedious work, setting up a stooge. But so is writing code in C++. So is composing symphonies. Do it right, or don’t do it at all, my father told me.
Here in Mammoth, after the suicidal oak tree incident, when I met Larry, I decided he’d be my insurance. (I smile at the word, since that was, of course, his job. A pun that he probably wouldn’t’ve gotten.)
When I was checking out the particulars of Suzanne, whom I’d decided would be the first victim of the man who became the Auburn Hills Killer, Larry was with me, at the same bar she staggered out of.
I even said to him, “Is that girl OK?” Nodding to the door. And, bless him, he went to look. Some witnesses, a camera or two, I’m sure, saw him do so.
He said, “She’s got an Uber.”
“Good for her,” I offered.
“Nearly tripped getting in.”
“Poor thing,” I said. But I didn’t mean it. That’s the answer, by the way. I’m convinced that I was born drunk, thank you, Mom. And while I can easily control any urge to drink alcohol, I cannot control the need to scratch the itch to get even. I was very close to my father and have never gotten over the belief that I’m sure he died with two instantaneous thoughts in his doomed mind: that his wife, behind the wheel of the family sedan, had snuck copious vodka into her Starbucks cup; and that the airbags were going to do zero good against a Peterbilt tractor trailer. A shrink could explain the warm satisfaction I get when I go to work on one of those sad, sad drunk girls, but the fact is that shrinks exist to do one thing: to cure. And a cure is the last thing I want.
So Larry was with me as I checked out Suzie, and he was with me as I checked out Karen, who was even more of a lush than her predecessor. He also was kind enough to do me the favor of looking for that nonexistent Fitbit near where I’d slashed Suzie to twitchy silence, just to get another image of his face: on the Parks Department CCTV.
While I always do this – plan, plan, plan – until now, I’ve never had to actually rely on a fall guy.
But until now I’ve never run up against a bully like Stan Whitcomb.
Because of him, the Larry Plan had to go into effect.
Which required one more player. The fall guy has to die and the least suspicious way to arrange that is for him to murder his last victim, who in turn dispatches him.
I picked Sarah Preston for this role. And, being charming and funny and not bad in the bedroom, I must admit, I started seeing her. She was perfect: pretty and sexy – the sort Larry would be drawn to. And in good shape, which proved important to the plot.
The day they were to die, I called Larry and asked him to meet Sarah and me at her house for dinner. He was surprised, but pleased, and muttered that it’d be cool. Later, I left my phone at home and biked, not drove, over to Sarah’s – always watch that GPS stuff.
Sarah and I were sipping wine and diet soda when the doorbell rang. She frowned and I said I’d get it. I pulled on the gloves on my way to the door to let Larry in.
Neither of them were expecting the knife work, so they both went down fast. Larry was more horrified than Sarah was, I think. She seemed bewildered, though not for long. I set up the scenario to fit the MO of the other murders. In this case, though, it seemed that Sarah slipped out of the zip tie and fought back, grabbing the knife and slashing Larry’s throat.
I used a few precious minutes – the time of death can be calculated very accurately nowadays – to plant some hairs and tissue from the first two murders in Larry’s trunk. A bit of dirt from the murder scenes as well.
I eliminated evidence of my presence that night, though not everything (we were dating). Then I used Sarah’s bloody finger to dial 9-1-1 from her landline and let the receiver fall. I bolted, heading to Larry’s house. I had his key – from the goldfish favor – and planted some more souvenirs from the other murders in his basement, as well as an SD camera card of pictures I’d taken clandestinely of Suzie and Karen and Sarah at the hotel. They were reencoded – no metadata from the camera I’d used was present. The police would also find on Larry’s computer visits to Sarah’s website and those of galleries she’d shown her work at – as I’d suggested he should do.
Then I biked back home to await the call or the visit. I was surprised it took so long for them to show up. When they did I was ready for the performance to begin, complete with props – Tabasco on my fingertips for my eyes. I tried hard not to overact.
Now, speeding along a flat stretch on the bike path, I run through everything once more. Recalling where every bit of evidence was planted or disposed of. Where I was at every moment before, during and after the murders. I see no flags, no glitches. Yes, I think it’ll work. There will be a few questions in the minds of the investigators. Always are. But I’ve learned that the police vastly prefer to go with the most obvious explanation and close the case.
Occam’s razor.
Another pun, another smile.
I hit the ten-mile mark and turn my bike around to head for home.
Yes, feeling comforted that I’ve done all I can. But, in truth, there’s a little hollowness I’m feeling.
Thinking of Sarah.
Because now that she’s slashed to death the Auburn Hills Killer, I can hardly go on hunting here anymore. That makes me just a little sad. I’ve developed quite a liking for Mammoth Falls.
Picturesque. Quaint. And home to such wonderful bike trails.
DEAD WEIGHT
FIONA CUMMINS
“You’re not going to eat that, are you?”
Lula Piper paused, the forkful of cake halfway towards her mouth. She had not heard her mother come in from work and now there would be a Discussion. The taste of bitterness elbowed out the sweet kick of chocolate, but she forced herself to laugh.
“What else do you think I’m going to do with it?”
Her mother’s answer was to whisk away her plate and replace it with a selection of chopped carrots and cucumber from the fridge.
“A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips,” her mother said, scraping sponge and buttercream into the food bin. She smoothed her skirt over her own narrow hips. Mrs Piper did not eat. Eating was for the weak.
Lula counted the squares on the red-and-white chequered tablecloth. Sixty-four horizontal, two hundred and six vertical. The folds of her stomach pushed against the kitchen table, her thighs spilling over the sides of the chair. She often counted the squares. It was a way to quell the shame that seemed to rise in her every time she sat down to eat. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. She was fifteen years, five weeks and four days old. Sixteen thousand meals, give or take. Sixteen thousand cycles of loathing. Even during the birthday parties that marked out so many primary school weekends, her mother would swoop down and police the contents of her paper plate, tipping handfuls of crisps back into bowls, collecting up chocolate biscuits, and the most traitorous offence of all, confiscating party bags. Even ten years on, the injustice still burned inside her.
Mrs Piper sat on the kitchen stool opposite Lula and took a delicate nibble of carrot. “Dress fitting next week,” she said, adopting a tone of faux brightness that Lula found unbearable.
Lula did not answer. She did not like Uncle Malcolm. She did not want to travel to Leeds for a wedding. And most of all, she did not want to be a bridesmaid.
“Do you think you’ve lost some weight, dear?” Lula’s mother looked her up and down, frowning.
“I’m not sure.”
“Perhaps a pound or two?”
“Well, my skirt does feel a bit looser.”
This conversation was as familiar to Lula as breathing. Over the years, it had become a ritual. She murmured something mollifying in the gaps of conversation, her mother would smile hopefully and the dance would continue.
“Keep at it, dear. Peach is not an easy colour to wear. You don’t want to look like a stuffed sausage.”
Lula excused herself and went upstairs to finish her homework.
* * *
On the way to the dressmaker’s Lula chose to sit in the back of the car. She ate a packet of crisps and a Kit-Kat during the journey, although Mrs Piper had no idea because she hated driving, knuckles white against the steering wheel, eyes screwed up in concentration.
Lula had learned to silently retrieve a single crisp from its plastic bag and suck it until all the salt had dissolved on her tongue and the potato was wet and claggy. It took her fifteen minutes to eat a packet of cheese and onion in this way, but she didn’t mind, because the journey was almost forty minutes. As for the Kit-Kat, she broke it into pieces and held each one in her mouth until the chocolate and wafer had melted.
Mrs Andrews, the dressmaker, was a plump-cheeked and friendly woman, although the pins she held between her lips while tacking up hems gave her the appearance of a metallic-mouthed film villain.
She directed Lula to a changing room. The peach bridesmaid dress was waiting for her on a hanger. It had spaghetti straps and a nipped-in waist with a side zip that finished just below her armpit. Behind the curtain, Lula could hear her mother and Mrs Andrews chatting about the weather.
The girl kicked off her jeans and pulled the dress over her head. A month ago it had slid easily over her breasts and the satin had been smooth against her stomach. Now, the fabric strained and groaned beneath her flesh and the zipper’s teeth would not meet.
“How do we look, then?” Mrs Andrews came bustling into the changing room. The “oh” escaped her mouth like air from a deflating balloon. “What happened, dear?”
Lula remembered the empty crisp packets beneath her bed, the chocolate wrappers and biscuit crumbs, and thought it best not to answer that question. She wasn’t greedy. It was simply that these kinds of foods seemed to fill the empty space inside her in a way that vegetables could not.
Mrs Andrews was talking to herself. “We’ll have to let out the sides and the waist, I think. When’s the wedding? Two weeks from now. I can just squeeze it in, but the timing will be tight.”
