How does it feel to be taking your last injection?
“I am pleased. It is an unhappy experience.”
How long until the effects of this last injection wear off?
“I’m told it will be months. It will take my body many months to recover its former health.” And when it does, he thought, I’d like to pay a call to every last one of you...
Where are you going to live next?
“Somewhere I can be forgotten.”
Will you date women?
“I have no desire for the company of human beings.”
What about employment — what kind of work will you be looking for?
“I would be good as a lighthouse watchman, but there aren’t any lighthouses left.”
What will you do when your sexual desire returns? Will you turn violent toward older women again?
“I have not had sexual or violent thoughts for many years. I never intended violence, even as a confused young man. I will never harm another person as long as I live. This is both a fact and a promise to all of you.”
SEND the MONster
BACK to the PRISon
AI Holtz barged outside, waving his arms and shouting as he ushered Colesceau through the throng and into the building. “Sonsofbitches have no respect at all,” he said as soon as they got through the door. He clapped a heavy hand onto Colesceau’s shoulders. “How you holding up?”
“With difficulty, Al.”
“I’m so goddamned sorry it came down this way.”
“I’m sure you tried your best to avoid it.”
“Just between you and me, I wasn’t the only vote.”
“I expected no mercy from the women.”
“It’s old news now, Moros. But there’s good news for you, too. You’re ten minutes away from being a free man.”
Psychologist Carla Fontana and Sgt. Paul Arnett, a deputy from the Sheriff’s SONAR program, were waiting in Holtz’s little office. Carla extended her tanned and freckled arm, gave him her 200-watt smile. She smelled like skin cream. Arnett shook his hand and looked him steady in the eye.
On the desk were a small round cake with frosting and a six-pack of root beer. Red napkins and white forks. The cake said GOOD LUCK MOROS in a script so inept Colesceau knew it could only belong to Holtz himself.
Holtz arranged the seats, still jabbering about the media outside, then started cutting the cake with a plastic knife. Colesceau wondered for the hundredth time how the PA saw anything out of his grimy glasses, which slid down his nose as he peered at the cake. Carla poured the root beer and the sergeant sat back against one wall with his arms folded over his chest.
Colesceau looked around the office — neat and small, that of an inconsequential bureaucrat — and was happy to think he was seeing it for the last time. It was actually kind of pleasant to sit here and realize he was finished. Except for the imminent visit from the nurse — a large flabby matron who smelled of sterile dressings and worked the needle into his vein each week with endless deliberation and satisfaction — it was exciting to him to be sitting here, being processed out of the system. He half expected an erection to begin, but none did.
“I have gifts for you, and for you, Carla,” he said. “Sergeant Arnett, I had no idea you would be attending.”
“Carry on.”
He brought out a yellow turkey egg for Holtz and a pink goose egg for Carla. The yellow egg had small checkerboard flags on toothpicks protruding from each side near the top. It wore a snug muslin vest trimmed in gold piping and festooned with gold sequins. Thus a rococo high-performance racing egg or something. He shuddered at what his mother must have been thinking when she did it. She made it for him right after he got the job at Pratt. It was astonishing in its ugliness, and Colesceau had happily chosen it for AI Holtz. Fontana’s was hung with tiny strips of dangling frill, giving it the look of a rotund, headless flapper from the ’20s. Tiny silver slippers were affixed to its bottom. Pure Carla.
He presented them one at a time. Holtz’s eyes actually became misty behind his filthy glasses. Carla Fontana smiled at him with a smile so pitying and genuine that Colesceau wished he could smash her teeth out with a brick and make her swallow them.
He shook Holtz’s hand and then Carla’s. Sergeant Arnett nodded to him.
“Well,” said Holtz. “All I can say is you’ve a good man to me, Moros. You’ve abided by the rules and maintained a sense of good humor and cooperation about it all. Especially this last part. Good luck. And, I arranged with Corrections to send you out of here today without that last injection. It’s up to the Board physicians and they took my advice. After three years of it you don’t need any more. And if you do, one more’s not going to do you any good at all. So, to you, my friend. Cheers, salud and godspeed.”
He lifted his root beer cup for a toast. Colesceau raised his own and drank.
“Drink up and have some cake,” said Holtz. “When you’re done we’ll sign the papers and sneak you out the back.”
Thirty-Seven
Tim Hess sat in the mournful hush of the detective’s pen. He watched the fax machine print out Bart Young’s list of embalming machine buyers in Southern California over the last two years. It was arranged by date of purchase. The addresses and phone numbers and signing purchaser were conveniently listed, too. Mostly funeral homes and, presumably, their owners or managers: Marv Locklear of Locklear Mortuary... Burton Browd of Maywood Park... Peg Chester, Orange Tree Memorial Park and Cemetery...
Allen Bobb was on the list, signing for the Cypress College Department of Mortuary Science. Most of the sales were in Los Angeles County. There were nineteen in Orange, sixteen in San Diego county, fourteen each in Riverside and San Bernardino.
Lots of dead people to take care of, thought Hess. He was hoping for a match with the registered panel van owners or the customer list from Arnie’s Outdoors, one of which he flipped through with each hand as the fax rolled out its own list. His head moved back and forth as he went from one to the other.
He could feel the draft on the back of his head whenever someone walked behind him. The air conditioner coming on was like a freezer being opened. He was curious what the back of his head looked like without hair in a way he was never curious when his head was covered by it. At home, before coming in, he’d tried on half a dozen hats. They called attention to what he was hiding, but he decided on an old felt fedora that had been his rain hat for a couple of decades. He hadn’t figured on every little draft once he took it off indoors, however, or on the stares of the other deputies who worked around him. He could actually feel their eyes on his newborn skin. After an hour or two, he was getting a little irritated by them.
... D.C. Simmons of Simmons Family Funeral Home... Barbara Braun at Sylvan Glen... William Wayne of Rose Garden Home in Lake Elsinore...
Lake Elsinore, again, thought Hess. The Ortega. Lael Jillson and Janet Kane. Murdered LaLonde. The buyer of an electronic car alarm override, calling himself Bill. A Porti-Boy embalming machine delivered November of last year, three months before Lael Jillson, one month before the Deer Sleigh’R and rope purchased with cash at Arnie’s by a man who looked like the one described by Kamala Petersen.
But William Wayne wasn’t on the other lists. And no one else on Bart Young’s list was either.
Too easy, Hess thought, though easy things broke cases all the time. In fact, a surprising number of high-profile murder investigations turned on something like this — something simple and direct. Hess thought of the dead man sitting next to Randy Kraft in his car; the Atlanta child killer tossing a body off the bridge in view of the FBI; the bloody chainsaw returned to the rental yard by a killer whose name Hess could not at the moment remember. But that kind of good luck wasn’t something you expected. And it only seemed to come late in the game, when the casualties were high, when everything else you’d tried hadn’t worked.