“Yes. I’m very, very sorry, Vera.”
“Was it about sex? Some twisted sex thing?”
“No.”
“Who killed him?”
“An old couple. Rodney and Emily Harris. They killed four others that we know of. You’ll be informed by the police. You can tell them I was here first. Say I wanted to be the one, because… well…”
“Because you saved my life. Because we have that connection.” Still perfectly calm, but her eyes have filled with tears. “Yes. Yes. Yes.”
She reaches behind herself, finds the arm of the chair in front of the television, and sits down. Only it’s more of a fall.
Jerome kneels in front of her like a suitor about to propose marriage. He takes her hands, which are dead cold. None of this was planned, he’s just winging it. Did she say they had a connection? It’s true. He knows that much. He feels that much. His voice is steady, and thank God for that.
“The Harrises were insane. Stuff will come out about what they did, bad stuff, but you need to know one thing.” It’s time for the lie, and it might not even be a lie, because he doesn’t know. “It was quick. Whatever happened to his body… whatever they did… happened afterward. He was gone by then.”
“To wherever we go.”
“Yes. To wherever we go.”
“He didn’t suffer?”
“No.”
Her hands tighten on his. “Do you swear to that?”
“Yes.”
“May your mother die and go to hell if you’re lying?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“Pathologist’s report.”
Her hands loosen. “I need a drink.”
“I’m sure you do, but don’t take one. Honor your son.”
Vera gives a shaky laugh. “Honor my son? Do you hear yourself?”
“Yes. I hear myself.”
“I need to call my sponsor. Will you stay with me until she comes?”
“Yes,” Jerome says. And he does.
August 4, 2021
Holly is at home watching a Netflix comedy without really seeing it, just marking time until she can take another pain pill (or she may double-dip), when her buzzer goes. It’s Isabelle Jaynes, and she has company: Herbert Beale and another FBI man named Curtis Rogan. Rogan, a profiler who specializes in serial killers, flew in with the FBI team.
Izzy asks Holly if she’s seen that day’s paper. Holly read the headline on her iPad—WERE THEY CANNIBALS?—and that’s enough for her. “I guess the DA will have to have that press conference now.”
“He and Chief Murphy are set for noon. The coverage won’t just be local, either. I have to believe Randall Murphy is thanking his lucky stars that he was still in Minneapolis when all of them except Bonnie Dahl were taken. The reason we’re here is because of what our forensics guys and the FBI team found in the Harris bedroom closet.”
“What?” Thinking, what now?
“Diaries,” Herbert Beale says. “Hers. She started keeping them in October of 2012, shortly before the murder of Jorge Luis Castro. Agent Rogan here has been studying them.”
“I’ve got a long way to go,” Rogan says. “There’s over a thousand pages.” He’s a soft-spoken man with short, thinning hair and rimless spectacles. “Fascinating stuff.”
“Terrifying stuff,” Izzy says. “I’ve read enough to say that while they were both crazy, she was the crazier of the two. By far.”
“I think further study will bear that out,” Rogan says. “I don’t believe Rodney Harris would have done much more than… what’s the word? Fume, perhaps? He wouldn’t have done much more than fume at how hidebound his colleagues were and how irrational the taboo was against eating human flesh.”
“She talked him into the first one, didn’t she?” Holly says. “She pitched him on using Castro as a way for her husband to go from the theoretical to the practical. Conception to execution. Because she disliked Castro.”
“Disliked?” Izzy says, and laughs. “Oh, Holly, you have no idea. She hated him. And not just him—she had plenty of hate to go around. Beneath that well-groomed and pleasantly authoritative surface, Emily Harris was a balls-to-the-wall psychotic. Let me show you an example of the Ms. Hyde that was underneath Professor Jekyll.”
She turns her iPad to Holly. On the screen is a photo of a diary page. Written over and over again, like a bad child who has to write I will not throw spitballs in class, is this: I HATE THAT SPIC I HATE THAT FUCKING SPIC I HATE THAT FAGGOT SPIC I HATE THAT BUTT-PUNCHING FAGGOT SPIC… and so on.
“Four more pages of just that,” Izzy says.
Rogan says, “In these diaries is an Emily Harris who never attended the English Department meetings. And I’m just getting started.”
“Here’s another one,” Izzy says. She swipes to a new photo. On this page of her diary, Emily has written the n-word over and over, in big, screaming capitals. There are other pejoratives, as well.
“We’re thinking she kept her hate-diaries even from her husband,” Herbert Beale says, “but we’ll never know for sure unless she says so in here.”
“This stuff is gold,” Rogan says.
“I’d use another word for it,” Holly says.
“I mean from a psychological standpoint. One thing seems clear. She participated in the… the ingestion of Mr. Castro to please her husband. He insisted on it. But she speaks of it as a miracle cure for her back and for her husband’s arthritis. There were other imagined benefits, as well, including increased brainpower. Some of this stuff is like high-cable infomercials in hell. Eventually, though, the effects began to wear off.”
“So they did it again,” Holly says flatly. “And again.”
“They should have been caught after Castro,” Izzy says. “And if not after him, after Dressler. The wheelchair ploy was clever enough, and they did some background work, but their attempts to clean up afterward were strictly slipshod.”
“They were old,” Holly says quietly. “No one expects old people to be serial killers. Let alone cannibals.”
Izzy says, “If not for you, Holly, they’d probably still be living in that house and eating their hellish meals. ‘Oh,’ people would say, ‘he’s a little dotty and she’s a little crotchety, but they’re basically all right.’ ”
“Barbara figured it out quicker than I did.”
“Some truth to that, but you did the spadework.”
“And her friend helped,” Holly says. “Olivia Kingsbury. The old poet. I think she was the one who tied it together for Barbara.”
Beale looks at Rogan and gives him a nod. They stand up. “You’re going to be besieged by the press, Ms. Gibney.”
“It won’t be the first time.” Then, with no idea she’s going to say it until the words pop out of her mouth: “The nuts are complimentary.”
Beale and Rogan look puzzled, but Izzy laughs and Holly joins her. It feels good to laugh. Damn good.
August 18, 2021
There’s a balcony outside Holly’s apartment, just big enough for two chairs and a small table. At eleven o’clock on this Wednesday morning she’s sitting out there, having a cup of coffee. She’d like to have a cigarette to go with it, but the urge is fading. It’s been over three weeks since her last one, and with God’s grace there will never be another. It’s a warm morning, but not oppressive; the heatwave that blanketed the city for most of July and the first two weeks of August seems to have broken.
Ordinarily Holly would be in the office at this hour, dressed in one of her many pantsuits and wearing light makeup, but this morning—and most other mornings since her enforced twenty-four-hour stay in Kiner—she’s in her pajamas and slippers. According to the answering machine and the website, the office is closed for staff vacations and will re-open on September 6th. In truth, Holly’s not sure Finders Keepers will ever re-open.