“And if I say no?” his father asked. The old man seemed rather cavalier about being discovered, like he’d merely been accused of lighting a bag of shit on somebody’s doorstep back in 1983. We always thought it was you . . . you were such a little rapscallion in those days! Ennis had to throw his house shoes in the gosh darn trash!
“That’s obvious, isn’t it? I’ll go to the police with what I know. I don’t want to do it that way. There’s no reason for it, even if you’re still out there doing your thing. That’s your business.”
“I told you I wasn’t. You do realize it’s illegal to blackmail someone into killing your wife, don’t you?”
“Yes. It’s your word against mine, though, isn’t it? You’ll still go to jail anyway. You’ll get to look forward to dying in a prison cell. Is that what you want?”
“I’m just saying that killing her seems a bit extreme.”
He laughed again. “Look who’s talking.”
“Son, I’m almost in my seventies. Most people don’t even want me on the road, and you’re asking me to commit the perfect murder?”
“Not a perfect murder. She’s the perfect victim, according to you. ‘From now on, you’ll never know if I’m the one who butchered these hogs. All over the world, there are others like me. Our number grows every day, and soon there will be fewer and fewer of the whorish scum you call your wives and daughters on the streets, and more and more of them stuffed down drain pipes.’ You wrote those words, page 46 of Dr. Vincent’s book. I turned up a lot of other interesting similarities between you and the police profile of the Slave Killer, incidentally. Probably married, children. Some kind of security job because you weren’t good enough to be a real cop.”
“You watch that,” his father warned.
“The point is, you want ‘whorish scum.’ Well, she’ll be in my house Thursday night, practically gift-wrapped for you. Jana never misses her favorite show, even if she couldn’t ask for a better opportunity to go slutting around. Should have learned to program the VCR, right? It will still be early enough after the show for her to go out. You know how these ‘emergency staff meetings’ are.” He held up his fingers to create sarcastic quotation marks. “Follow her and take her when the opportunity presents itself. If she doesn’t leave, you’ll have no problem getting in. I brought you a spare key. I’ll take her car somewhere more appropriate and they won’t even know she vanished at the house. So you know what you have to do. Otherwise, I guarantee the police will be interested in your activities from twenty-five years ago, not to mention the past year and a half. It’ll be pretty hard for an old man who never leaves the house to come up with a good alibi on the nights in question.”
His father was silent for almost a minute, and then said, “Thursday?”
JOURNAL ENTRY: JULY 17 - JULY 22
(PAGES TORN OUT)
Jana was still there when he got home Thursday night. Most of her, anyway. For a moment, he thought he’d accidentally wandered into a slaughterhouse. He’d seen its like before, but never in such a refined setting as his own house. The kitchen looked like one of those avant garde paintings where the artist slings paint in all directions across the canvas, except this was apparently the work of a starving artist with only deep red on the palette. The bitter reek of sticky blood and lingering death clogged up his nostrils, heavy and sickening.
“You left out a few important points of your plan,” his father said from the living room doorway. Dr. Vincent was right—evidently the Slave Killer brought a change of clothes with him to avoid leaving a crime scene splattered with blood. He was clean in spite of the carnage all around.
He had a gun.
“Like the part where you tell the police your wife was supposed to meet me the night she disappeared,” his father continued. “I’m guessing you were going to leave her car somewhere near my house. It sure wouldn’t look good for me when the police showed up, especially when you suddenly noticed an eerie similarity between my handwriting and the Slave Killer’s. Those were your exact words in your journal, weren’t they? ‘Eerie similarity?’ Then it would be your word against mine, and they’d probably believe you. They wouldn’t know that the Slave Killer has nothing to do with the new killings. They have a profile of you, too, you know. They think you take out your rage for one woman against others because you’re too damned chickenshit to kill the source. That’s why you had to get me to do Jana; to ‘share needles.’” He mimicked the sarcastic quotation marks with his free hand.
“You also thought there was a good chance I’d take the fall for this business you’ve been getting up to with all these girls. You thought you could stop cold with Jana out of the way, and get away with all the ones you’ve done. You knew she’d been cheating on you for a lot longer than a week. That’s when it started for you. This all made for fascinating reading, though for the sake of dramatic license, I had to take any page that mentioned me in your plan. It’s funny. All this time, and I didn’t know my old issues of Shocking Crimes were the fuel for all your little wet dreams.”
He stood rooted to the spot. Like his father earlier this week, he denied nothing. Dad saw the journal. It was all in there. “Where’s Jana?” he finally asked, noting that while the kitchen was awash with blood so thick in some places he could see his own reflection, he saw no body.
“She’s in the bedroom. And the bathroom. And the linen closet. She’s on some of the stairs, too, I think. She’s the one who found your journal, by the way. She was fretting over what to do about it when I showed up. I didn’t need your spare key. I’m her father-in-law; of course she was going to let me in. She didn’t even get to the best part about how her husband hoped to drop her in the stack with the rest of the needles. I did, though. I’m bad about that—I have to flip to the end of a mystery to find out who did it.”
“I was at the Electra Complex,” he replied calmly. “I nearly got into a fight with some guy because I almost knocked his beer over. He told me to watch what the fuck I was doing and called me a ‘dicksucker.’ A bunch of people saw this. They say he has a habit of getting in people’s faces over nothing. They’ll remember me. What happens when the time of her death doesn’t fit in with when I could have killed her? Think about it.”
It was his father’s turn to laugh. “They’ve got a written confession for eight murders in your journal, and you think they’re going to let a little discrepancy like that bother them? I even used your knife on her. Found it right where it was supposed to be. Your Precious.”
“Look, Dad,” he said, almost smiling, “I swear . . . it’ll never happen again.”
“No,” his father said. “It won’t.” Channel Two News—Special Report on the Bartok Butcher
“How did he sound when he called you that night?” Geisha Hammond asked.
“He was hysterical. He didn’t say anything about what he’d done to Jana, but he said there was blood everywhere. He asked me to come over right away.”
“And what happened when you arrived? What did you see?”
“He opened the door, and he was just covered in blood. Like he’d been wallowing in it. That’s what I remember thinking when I saw him . . . He looks like he’s been wallowing in blood. And that’s when he started raving about all the other murders he’d done. I could see . . . I could see . . . Jana . . . I’m sorry.”