We are junkies, all of us who work in this profession. We walk through blood, decay, and stench. We toss and turn with nightmares caused by horrors the mind has trouble encompassing. We take it out on ourselves, or our friends and family, or both. But then it comes toward the end, and we arrive in the zone, and it is a high like no other. It’s a high that makes you forget about the stench and blood and nightmares and horrors. And once it is behind you, you are ready to do it again.
Of course, it can backfire on you. You can fail to catch a killer. The stink remains, but without the reward that cleanses it away. Even so, those of us who do this thing continue, willing to take this chance.
This is a profession where you work on the edge of a precipice. It has a high suicide rate. Just like any profession where failure carries such a terrible weight of responsibility.
I think of all these things, but I don’t care. For now, my scars have no meaning. Because I am in the zone.
I have always been fascinated by books and movies about serial killers. Writers and directors so often seem dedicated to the idea that they must lay out a path of bread crumbs for their hero to follow. A logical array of deductions and clues that lead to the monster’s lair in the blazing light of an aHA!
Sometimes this is true. But much of the time it’s not. I remember a case that was making us crazy. He was killing children, and after three months we didn’t have a clue. Not a single, solid lead. One morning I got a call from the LAPD—he had turned himself in. Case closed.
With Jack Jr., we have exhausted the gamut of physical evidence and the search for the esoterics of “IP numbers.” He has costumed himself, planted bugs and tracking devices, enlisted confederates, been brilliant.
And in the end, the resolution of it all will probably come down to just two factors: a piece of cow flesh and a twenty-five-year-old unsolved case gathering dust in VICAP.
I have learned to need only one truth over the years, and it provides all the order I require: Caught is caught and caught is good. Period.
Alan’s cell phone rings. “Yeah,” he says. His eyes close, and I am fearful, but they open again, and I can see his relief. “Thanks, Leo. I appreciate you calling me.” He hangs up. “She’s not awake yet, but they’ve upgraded her condition from critical to stable. Still in ICU, but the surgeon told Leo specifically that death wasn’t on the table anymore, unless something really unexpected happens.”
“Callie’ll pull through. She’s too damn stubborn,” I say.
James says nothing, and silence rules again. We keep driving.
“Here it is,” Jenny murmurs.
The home is old and just a little shabby. The yard’s uncared for but not quite dead. The whole place has the same feel: on its way out but not yet gone. We get out of the car and walk up to the door. It opens before we can knock.
Patricia Connolly looks old, and tired. As tired as she looks, her eyes are awake.
With fear.
“You must be the police,” she says.
“Yes, ma’am,” I respond. “As well as members of the FBI.” I show her my credentials and introduce myself and the others. “Can we come in, Mrs. Connolly?”
Her brows knit together as she looks at me. “You can as long as you don’t call me Mrs. Connolly.”
I hide my puzzlement. “Certainly, ma’am. What would you prefer I call you?”
“Ms. Connolly. Connolly is my name, not my late husband’s. May he burn in hell.” She opens the door wide for us to enter. “Come on inside.”
The interior of the house is clean and neat, but devoid of personality. As though it is cared for only through force of habit. It feels two-dimensional.
Patricia Connolly ushers us into her living room, indicating for us to take seats. “Do any of you want anything?” she asks. “I only have water and coffee, but you’re welcome to either.”
I look around at my crew, who all shake their heads in the negative. “No thank you, Ms. Connolly. We’re fine.”
She nods, looking down at her hands. “Well, then, why don’t you tell me why you’re here.”
She continues to look at her hands as she says this, unable to meet my eyes. I decide to follow my instincts. “Why don’t you tell me why I’m here, Ms. Connolly?”
Her head snaps up, and I see I was right. Her eyes glint with guilt.
Not ready to talk yet, though. “I have no idea.”
“You’re lying,” I say. I’m startled at the harshness of my own voice. Alan’s face registers surprise.
I can’t help it. I’m done fucking around. I am filled to the brim, and the anger inside me is overflowing. I lean forward, catching her eye. I stab a finger at her. “We’re here about your son, Ms. Connolly. We’re here about a mother, a friend of mine, raped and gutted like a deer. About her daughter, tied to her mother’s corpse for three days.” My voice is rising. “We’re here about a man who tortures women. About an agent, another friend of mine, laying in the hospital, maybe crippled for life. We’re—”
She jumps up, hands against her head. “Stop it!” she screeches. Her hands drop to her sides. Her head falls forward. “Just…stop it.” As suddenly as she has reacted, she deflates. It’s like watching an air balloon sink to earth. She sits back down.
Patricia sighs, a long exhalation that seems to signal the letting go of something older than this moment. “You think you know what you’re here about,” she says, looking at me, “but you don’t. You think you’re here about those poor women.” She looks at Don Rawlings. “Or about that poor young lady from twenty-some years ago. They are part of it. But you’re here about something a lot older than both of those things.”
I could interrupt her, tell her about the cow flesh in the jar and Jack Jr., but something tells me to let her speak at her own pace.
“It’s funny how you miss the most important things in people sometimes. Even in people you love. Doesn’t seem fair. If a man is cruel inside, someone who’s going to turn into a wife beater or worse, there should be something you can see that would tell you that. Don’t you think?”
“I’ve thought the same thing many times, ma’am,” I reply. “Doing what I do.”
“I suppose you would,” she says as she regards me. “Then you also know that’s not how it works. Not at all. In fact, many times it’s just the opposite. The ugliest people can be the most decent. The charmer can be a killer.” She shrugs. “Appearance is no index, no index at all.
“Of course, when you’re young, you don’t worry about things like that. I met my husband Keith when I was eighteen years old. He was twenty-five and he was one of the most handsome men I had ever seen. And that’s no exaggeration. Six feet tall, dark hair, face of an actor. When he took his shirt off…well, let’s just say he had the body to go with the face.” She smiles. A sad smile. “When he showed an interest in me, I was bowled over from the word go. Like many young people, I was convinced my life was boring. He was handsome and exciting. Just what the doctor ordered.” She pauses her narrative, looking at all of us. “This was down in Texas, by the way. I’m not native to California.” Her eyes look faraway. “Texas. Flat and hot and boring.
“Keith pursued me, though it wasn’t a marathon pursuit. More of a sprint. I made him run just far enough to let him know I wasn’t completely pliable. I didn’t know it at the time, but he saw through me like I was made from glass. He always knew he had me. He just put up with it, went through the motions, because it amused him. He could have grabbed me and told me to come with him right away, and I would have said yes. He knew it, but he took me on the requisite few dates anyway.
“He was good at what he did. Good at pretending not to be a monster. He was a perfect gentleman and as romantic as anything I’d ever seen in the movies or read in the books. Kind, romantic, handsome—I thought I had found my perfect man. The one every young woman is certain they deserve and are destined to find.” Her voice and smile are both bitter.
“Now, you have to understand, my home life was
difficult. My daddy had a short temper. It’s not as if he beat on my mother every day, or even every week. But it happened every month. I’d been watching him backhand her or punch her for as long as I could remember. He never laid a hand on me, but in later years I understood that this wasn’t because he didn’t want to hit me. It was because he knew if he touched me, it would be for a reason other than violence.” She raises her eyebrows. “You understand?”
Unfortunately, I do. “Yes,” I say.
“I think Keith understood too. I’m sure of it. One night, just a month after he met me, he asked me to marry him.”
She sighs, remembering. “He picked the perfect night to do it. There was a full moon, the air was cool without being cold. Beautiful. He brought me a rose and told me he was going to California. He wanted me to come with him, to marry him. He said he knew I needed to get away from my daddy, and he loved me, and this was our chance. Of course I said yes.”
She closes her eyes and is silent for a span of moments. I get the idea she is remembering that as the point where she took a wrong turn and plunged into darkness, forever.
“We left four days later, in secret. I didn’t say good-bye to my parents. I packed up what little I had and snuck off in the middle of the night. I never saw either of them again.
“That was an exciting time. I felt free. Like life had gone my way. I had a handsome man who wanted to marry me, I’d escaped the dead end that I’d been born to, I was young and headed toward the future.” Her voice drops to a monotone. “It took us five days to get to California. We got married two days later. And the night of our honeymoon is when I found out that the future I had headed into was a place made in hell.”
Her face has gone expressionless. “It was like the opposite of Halloween. Instead of being a human wearing a monster mask, Keith was a monster wearing a human mask.” She shivers. “I was a virgin when I married him. He stayed sweet, right up to the point he carried me across the threshold of that cheap hotel room. Once the door closed, the mask came off.
“I’ll never forget that smile. Hitler might have smiled like that when he thought about Jews dying in one of his horrible camps. Keith smiled and then he backhanded me across the face. Hard. It spun me around; blood flew out of my nose. I landed facedown on the bed. I was seeing stars and was still trying to convince myself that I was dreaming.” She purses her lips, grim. “No dream. A nightmare, maybe. ‘Let’s get a few things straight,’ he said to me while he started tearing my clothes off. ‘You’re my property. A breeder. That’s all you are to me.’ I think it was his voice, more than what he was doing, that scared me. It was calm and flat and—normal. It didn’t fit with what he was doing, not at all. He put me on my knees and…you couldn’t say he had sex with me. No. I don’t care that we were husband and wife. He raped me. Tied a gag around my mouth to cover up my screams while he raped me.
“The whole time, he kept talking in that calm voice. ‘We’re going to spend a few days in here teaching you your place, breeder. You’re going to learn to do what I say without hesitation or question. The penalty for disobedience, no matter how minor, is going to be more pain than you can bear.’”
She is quiet for a long time. We wait out her silence, respecting it. I’m in no immediate rush. There’s no longer any doubt she’s leading us toward what we need to know.
When she begins to speak again, her voice is almost a whisper.
“It took him three days to break me. He cut on me. Burned me with cigarettes. Beat me. By the end of it, I would do anything he said, no matter how disgusting or degrading.” Her mouth twists in self-loathing. “Then, the final lie was exposed. He took me from that hotel room to this house.” She nods. “That’s right. He had this home all along. He hadn’t lived in Texas. He’d been out hunting. Hunting for someone to bear him a child.”
“Peter.” I say it as a statement.
“Yes,” she says. “My sweet little boy.” She gives the “sweet” a sardonic twang. “Keith kept me tied up at night to keep me from running away from him. Beat me, used me. Made me do things. Then I got pregnant. That was the only peaceful time I had. While I was pregnant he didn’t lay a hand on me. I was important to him, I was carrying his child.” She puts a hand to her forehead. “I used to thank God it wasn’t a daughter. He would have killed her at birth. Now I know that having a son was just as bad, in its own way.”
She takes a moment to compose herself before continuing. “He made me have the baby at home, of course. Delivered it himself. Gave me a rag to clean up with while he marveled and cooed at little Peter. Once I was cleaned up and had slept a little, he handed Peter back to me. And that’s when he gave me his ultimatum.” She rubs her hands together, an unconscious gesture of nervousness. “He told me that he would give me a choice. He could kill me now and raise Peter himself, or I could stay and raise Peter with him. He said that if I stayed, he would never raise a hand against me again. He’d even sleep in a separate bed. But if I did stay, and I ran…he said he would hunt me down and that it would take me weeks to die.” Her hands have a death grip on each other. “I believed him. I should have said yes and killed myself and Peter right then and there. I still had hope then. I still thought things would change.” Her eyes, her face, her mouth, all are bitter.
“So I agreed. He was good to his word. He never hit me again. He slept in his own room, I in mine. Of course, Peter slept in a room with him. Just to ensure that I wouldn’t steal him away at night. He was devious and careful like that. Peter started to grow, and by the time he was five, I had almost begun to make myself believe that things were better. Life was normal. Not wonderful, but livable. What a silly girl I was then. Things became bad again soon enough. And even though he wasn’t abusing me anymore, what he did start doing was much, much worse.” She pauses now. She gives me a weak smile. “I’m sorry, but I need a cup of coffee before I go on. Are you sure none of you wants a cup?”
I sense that this would make her more comfortable. “I’d love one,” I say to her, smiling.
Jenny and Don concur, while Alan asks for a glass of water. Only James abstains.
“You believe all this?” Alan whispers to me while Patricia is in the kitchen.
“I think so,” I say after a moment. I look at him. “Yeah. I do.”
She comes back in with our drinks on a tray and passes them out. She sits back down and looks at Alan. “I heard what you said.”
He looks surprised and flustered. Either one is a rarity for Alan. “I’m sorry, Ms. Connolly. I didn’t mean any offense.”
She smiles at him. “None taken, Mr. Washington. One thing you get from living your life with an evil man, and that’s the ability to spot a good one. You’re a good man. Besides, it’s a fair question.” She turns around in her chair so that her side is facing us. “Do you mind pulling the zipper on the back of my dress down, Agent Barrett? Just halfway should do it.”
Brows knitted, I stand up. I am hesitant.
“It’s all right. Go ahead.”
I pull the zipper down. I have to close my eyes, for a moment, at what I see.
“Quite a sight, isn’t it?” Patricia asks. “Go on, pull it open, let them see.”
The area of Patricia’s back that is revealed is a mass of ancient scar tissue. The part of me that is not horrified, that is clinical, observes that these scars were made in different ways, at different times. Most likely over a period of years. Some are circular burn scars, made by cigarettes. Some are long and thin. Cuts. I can guess that many are whip marks. Everyone looks; no one lingers. This provides proof of her story, gives it three dimensions. It is a terrible sight. I pull her dress closed and zip her back up.
The silence that follows is somber and uncomfortable. It’s Alan who breaks it.
“I’m sorry for what happened to you,” he says. “And sorry I questioned your story.”
Patricia Connolly smiles at him. It is a smile that hints at the girl she used to be. “I appreciate your kindness, Mr. Washington
.” She folds her hands in her lap. Takes a moment to gather herself.
“You need to understand that I didn’t know what he was doing until later. By then it was too late. Keith started to spend hours at night in the basement with Peter. He’d always keep it locked. At first, Peter would come back upstairs looking as though he’d been crying. Within a year, he’d come back up smiling. A year after that, he had no expression, no expression at all. Just a look in his eyes. He looked arrogant. By the time he was ten, the arrogance went away. He seemed like any normal ten-year-old boy. Bright, funny. He could make you laugh.”
She shakes her head.
“I see all of this in retrospect, of course. At the time, those changes he went through, they didn’t quite register. They settled in the back of my mind and festered there.
“Through all of these years, Keith kept his word. He didn’t touch me. Didn’t try and sleep with me. It was as if I didn’t exist for him. Which was fine with me. Except—except—”
The emotion that grips her has arrived with the suddenness of a summer thunderstorm. Tears begin to run down her face.
“Except that was selfish, so, so very selfish. He’d left me alone, sure. But that was because he was busy with Peter. And me, I never questioned or pried, or tried to do anything. I just gave my son over to him.” Her voice is filled with self-loathing. “What kind of a mother was I?”
The storm passes. She wipes her eyes with the back of a hand.
“Because when I look back, I saw the changes in my son. I saw his father’s smile, that smile he’d given me years back in that hotel room on our honeymoon night. I sensed that coldness in him.” She is silent for a long time once again. Heaves a deep sigh. “When he was fifteen, it happened.” Her eyes grow distant again.
“So many years of not being beaten or raped. Years where I had time to look inside myself, think without distraction. In some ways, it was like being trapped in a tower. But that isolation began to bring me back to myself. So I decided. Then I began to plan. I was determined that it was time for me and my son to be free. At some point, the sorrow inside me had begun to change to anger. I started to plan Keith’s murder.”