On the day of her funeral, up in the TV room where she’d died, I was having drinks of my own, wishing I had some facts to tell me what I should be feeling now... when Jeff came in and sat down next to me and put his arm around my neck the way he used to when he was three or four. “You can’t cry, can you, Dad?” All I could do was sigh. He’d been watching me. “You should cry, Dad. You really should. You didn’t even cry when Debbie was killed. Mom told me.” He said all this in the young man’s voice I still couldn’t quite get used to — the voice he used so successfully with ninth-grade girls on the phone. He wasn’t quite a man yet but he wasn’t a kid, either. In a moment of panic I felt he was an imposter, that this was a joke; where was my little boy? “That’s all I do, Dad. Is cry, I mean. I think it helps me. I really do.”
So I’d tried, first there with Jeff in the TV room, later alone in my bedroom. But there were just dry choking sounds and no tears at all. At all. I would think of Debbie, her sweet soft radiance; and of my wife, the years when it had been good for us, her so tender and kind in the shadows of our hours together; and I wanted to cry for the loss I felt. But all I could see was the face of William K. Dexter. In some way, he had become more important to me even than the two people he’d taken from me.
Jeff died three years later, wrapped around a light pole on the edge of a country park, drugs and vodka found in the front seat of the car I’d bought him six months earlier.
Left alone at the wake, kneeling before his waxen corpse, an Our Father faint on my lips, I’d felt certain I could cry. It would be a tribute to Jeff; one he’d understand; some part of the process by which he’d forgive me for being gone so much, for pursuing William K. Dexter while Jeff was discovering drugs and alcohol and girls too young to know about nurturing. I put out my hand and touched his cheek, his cold waxen cheek, and I felt something die in me. It was the opposite of crying, of bursting forth with poisons that needed to be purged. Something was dead in me and would never be reborn.
It was not too long after this that I met Frank Slocum and it was not long after Slocum took the case that we began to close inexorably in on William K. Dexter.
And soon enough we were here, at the apartment house just outside Des Moines.
Eleven years, two months, and five days later.
iii
The name on the hallway mailbox said Severn, George Severn. We knew better, of course.
Up carpeted stairs threadbare and stained, down a hallway thick with dusty sunlight, to a door marked 4-A.
“Behind me,” Slocum whispered, waving me to the wall.
For a moment, the only noises belonged to the apartment building; the thrum of electricity snaking through the walls; the creak of roof in summer wind; a toilet exploding somewhere on the floor below us.
Slocum put a hefty finger to his thick mouth, stabbing through a thistle of beard to do so. Sssh.
Slocum stood back from the door himself. His Cobra was in his hand, ready. He reached around the long way and set big knuckles against the cheap faded pine of the door.
On the other side of the door, I heard chair legs scrape against tile.
Somebody in there.
William K. Dexter.
Chair legs scraped again; footsteps. They did not come all the way to the door, however, rather stopped at what I imagined was probably the center of the living room.
“Yeah?”
Slocum put his finger to his lips again. Reached around once more and knocked.
“I said ‘Yeah. Who the hell is it?’ ”
He was curious about who was in the hall, this George Severn was, but not curious enough to open the door and find out.
One more knock. Quick rap really; nothing more.
Inside, you could sense Severn’s aggravation.
“Goddammit,” he said and took a few loud steps toward the door but then stopped.
Creak of floor; flutter of robin wings as bird settled on hallway window; creak of floor again from inside the apartment.
Slocum held up a halting hand. Then he pantomimed Don’t Move with his lips. He waited for my reaction. I nodded.
He looked funny, a man as big as he was, doing a very broad, cartoon version of a man walking away. Huge noisy steps so that it sounded as if he were very quickly retreating. But he did all this in place. He did it for thirty seconds and then he eased himself flat back against the wall. He took his Cobra and put it man-high on the edge of the door frame.
Severn didn’t come out in thirty seconds but he did come out in about a minute.
For eleven years I’d wondered what he’d look like. Photos deceive. I always pictured him as formidable. He would have to be, I’d reasoned; the savage way he’d mutilated her... He was a skinny fortyish man in a stained white T-shirt and Levis that looked a little too big. He wore the wide sideburns of a hillbilly trucker and the scowl of a mean drunk. He stank of sleep and whiskey. He carried a butcher knife that appeared to be new. It still had the lime green price sticker on the black handle.
When he came out of his apartment, he made the mistake of looking straight ahead.
Slocum did two things at the same time: slammed the Cobra’s nose hard against Severn’s temple and yanked a handful of hair so hard, Severn’s knees buckled. “You’re dead, man, in case you haven’t figured it out already,” Slocum said. He seemed enraged; he was a little frightening to watch.
He grabbed some more hair and then he pushed Severn all the way back into his apartment.
iv
Slocum got him on a straight-backed chair, hit him so hard in the mouth that you could hear teeth go, and then handcuffed him, still in the chair, to the aged Formica dining-room table.
Slocum then cocked his foot back and kicked Severn clean and hard in the ribs. Almost immediately, Severn’s mouth started boiling with red mucus that didn’t seem quite thick enough to be blood.
Slocum next went over to Severn and ripped his T-shirt away from his shoulder. Without a word, Slocum motioned me over.
With his Cobra, Slocum pointed to a faded tattoo on Severn’s right shoulder. It read: Mindy with a rose next to it. Not many men had such a tattoo on their right shoulder. It was identical to the one listed in all of Severn’s police records.
Slocum slapped him with stunning ferocity directly across the mouth, so hard that both Severn and his chair were lifted from the floor.
For the first time, I moved. Not to hit Severn myself but to put a halting hand on Slocum’s arm. “That’s enough.”
“We’ve got the right guy!” It was easy to see he was crazed in some profound animal way I’d never seen in anybody before.
“I know we do.”
“The guy who killed your daughter!”
“I know,” I said, “but—”
“But what?”
I sighed. “But I don’t want to be like him and if we sat here and beat him, that’s exactly what we’d be. Animals — just like him.”
Slocum’s expression was a mixture of contempt and disbelief. I could see whatever respect he’d had for me — or perhaps it had been nothing more than mere pity — was gone now. He looked at me the same way I looked at him — as some alien species.
“Please, Slocum,” I said.
He got one more in, a good solid right hand to the left side of Severn’s head. Severn’s eyes rolled and he went out. From the smell, you could tell he’d wet his pants.
I kept calling him Severn. But of course he wasn’t Severn. He was William K. Dexter.