Chapter 28
All good things end. That is the truth of the human condition. Our lives are straw houses, so carefully built, too easily blown down.
Life goes from good, to bad, to worse.
Put that on a fucking Hallmark card and mail it to yourself, because you may need reminding.
The best thing that ever happened to me ended on a bitter-cold winter morning five years before Cameron Finke and Honey came into my life to seriously fuck up a good comfortable rut.
I asked Elizabeth, Beth, out a week after our surprise reunion on the campus where we went to college. I expected her to say no, because it was me asking, but I thought she’d do it kindly, because she was kind. She surprised me by saying yes, and before I’d even finished bumbling out the awkward request.
A year after graduation, me working as an engineer for a local outfit with a lot of nice, fat government contracts and her teaching at the same private school she’d attended after her parents pulled her from the public puberty madhouse where we’d first met, I asked her an even bigger question. Again she answered in the affirmative before I’d gotten all the words untangled from my stupid tongue.
She always seemed to be a step ahead of me, waiting for me to catch up, always ready with the answer before I had the question. In the years since, I sometimes forget the power of my love for her, and how she used it to make me a better man. Tiny little thing that she was, she eclipsed everything that happened before, all the bad stuff. None of it mattered when she was there.
Then our daughter came, Daphne Quick, Beth used to joke that it was the name of a comic book super heroine, and her power over me was much the same, except bigger. She was my entire world.
Sometimes the memory of their power, their enormity and absolute centrality in my personal universe faded into the gray of the angry, everyday humdrum. But it always comes back to me, and it’s like having them die all over again.
It was winter, it was cold, and I hadn’t slept the night before. Beth and Daphne had spent a week on the Oregon Coast, Christmas with her retired parents in Oceanside, and I had stayed behind. I’d told Beth I couldn’t get the time off, but it was a lie. I hadn’t even tried. Her parents remembered me from all those years ago, not as the boy who had rescued her from a group of bullies, but as the troublemaker who had gotten her into trouble with them in the first place.
I don’t know how they arrived at that conclusion, parents are weird when it comes to their children and maybe they just wanted to believe that bad things could never happen to their Elizabeth, that her purity blinded evil to her, protected her. Who knew? They hated me, always had and always would, and I thought they were a couple of self-satisfied, sanctimonious, worthless, clueless prigs.
I thought it would be better for everyone if I just stayed behind.
I think Beth probably knew I lied to her about getting that time off. Whether or not she agreed with it, she went with it.
The hour of her return passed, then several hours. I called her cell phone and got the voicemail. Her parents called me, yelled at me for her not being there, and I hung up on them. A few more hours passed and I called them, asked if they’d heard from her, and they hung up on me.
When darkness fell and I was still alone I called the police.
They asked if we’d been having marital problems, if she’d maybe run away. I gritted my teeth and answered all their questions as politely as I could.
Early the next morning they called, and an officer in the field asked me for any identifying features. Something on her body, maybe a c-section scar or distinctive mole.
As it happened she had both.
That was when I knew something was wrong, something that would be wrong forever.
I heard the distant chuff of airbrakes, the single warning blat of a cop’s siren.
And I ran to my car, the old Ventura I’d fallen in love with at my Uncle Higheagle’s classic car lot and picked up on a generous family discount. I ran every red light and shattered the speed limit, out of the East Valley where we lived and loved in a modest home in a good neighborhood and through the West Valley to Redwolf Bridge.
Redwolf had been in and out of the news for three years by then, local and national. Paradise Valley’s very own serial killer. He took women, raped them, then destroyed them and arranged what was left of their used-up husks on the long arch of concrete called Wawawai Bicentennial Bridge, more popularly known as Redwolf Bridge these days. He displayed them.
The bridge was blocked at both ends by police cars, so I parked in the road and ran. They tried to stop me but there was no way they could have, short of blowing me away.
I found Beth and Daphne where Redwolf had left them.
The details are in the files, not that I need the files to remember. Every drop of blood, ragged scrap of flesh, every dust mote and sparkle of frost was burned into me forever.
The next couple of days however are still a blur. I oscillated from a near comatose grief to murderous rage, and they’d had to sedate me, stick me in that fabled 5th floor of Saint Joseph’s Hospital, the one where they keep the funny backward coats and soft rooms, the place where doctors whose false concern masks their impatience to get through another shift so they can spend some quality time at Quail Ridge hitting golf balls and having drinks with the cream of the Paradise Valley crop.
And when they finally let me out it was only to stick me in another cell, where the dead hooker’s daddy would try his damndest to take what little was left of my life away.
Of course you know that didn’t happen.
Gina White happened instead.
Gina White was a local representative of the FBI, newly installed on the Redwolf case before I was jailed, and somehow no one had missed her for the few days she was absent following my breakdown.
She turned up later, beaten, tortured, raped, but alive, and with the first and only physical evidence ever to turn up in the Redwolf case.
She had escaped, and easily enough she said, but only after he’d raped her. After she had allowed him to rape her, for the DNA evidence she’d brought them in a used condom.
Her evidence set me free and pointed the long arm of the law at Roy Dickie.
Roy Dickie, who also had a taste for classic cars, and who Uncle Higheagle had customer files of, credit checks and the likes.
That was how I found him before the cops, even before the FBI. It was the mention in his files of his part ownership in a family run horse stable in the mountains near the Rattlesnake Summit, just a few miles from the Washington-Oregon border. They stabled and cared for animals that belonged to city slickers who liked to pretend to be cowboys on the weekend. It only took a little research to discover the place had been closed for years, shut down when his parents died, and his sibs showed zero interest in helping him run the place.
I found him there, even found Beth’s no-style Chrysler Neon parked in the unused stables along with a half-dozen others, all belonging to Redwolf victims as it turned out.
You know what happened then.
We went for a little ride, what was supposed to be our last ride. It was his last, but not mine. If there was a reason I survived, it presented itself not long after they let me out of Saint Joseph’s for the second time.
Another broken body arranged on Redwolf Bridge, an arrangement that the serial killer groupies and buffs called artistic expression; and the killer’s calling card, the leather wolf’s head mask, soaked in the victim’s blood and watching over the scene from the footpath’s handrail. This time there was a personal message, short and jolly and to the point. A great big Ha...gotcha!
Roy Dickie had not been working alone. He was not the brains behind the Redwolf crimes, wasn’t even the killer. He was only an assistant, a willing accomplice and rapist. A sick fuck, but not the sick fuck.
The real killer was still out there, still is to this day.
If there was a reason I survived it was because I still had someone else to kill, but I don’t think reason had anything to do with it. Only dumb, blind luck.