Fall from Grace (36 page)

But I still wanted to kill him. I wanted to wrap my hands around his neck and squeeze the life out of him the same way he’d squeezed life out of all of the women. I wanted to feel him struggle against me, kick and flail, squirm and struggle, see the life drain out of him and smell the shit and urine as his bodily functions collapsed at the point of death.

That’s what I wanted to do and could have done, because we are all capable of murder, we have all perhaps thought about killing someone. We are all capable of great evil because many times we believe that what we are doing is right. We can all be monsters. But at the same time, we are all capable of greatness, all capable of doing wondrous and incredibly good things in this world. And maybe if people will figure that out, they’ll stop killing each other for no good reason.

“You’re right,” he croaked, waving a hand. “I am dead. Cancer got me in the fucking prostate. They did all they could but nothing worked so I’ve got six month, tops.”

I hadn’t expected that. My hand dropped, and in that moment Gardiner surged to life, shifting his weight to his side, jerking his hand to his hip and pulling up his service revolver. He pressed it against my chin. He laughed.

“Does this gun look familiar? Remember when you were down in my office and you saw it in my desk?” he said, pressing me back with the barrel.

He stood up, and since he kept the gun pressed against my chin, I had to move and stand up with him.

“And you’re probably thinking that I have the cartridges somewhere else, and you’d be right. You can’t turn off twenty-seven years of police training just because you’ve retired. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that I didn’t have time to load my gun, because I did.

“I saw you drive around the block twice, watched you park your car to the side and walk around as if you were lost. You were good, I’ll give you that, so good that I actually thought you were lost. I was going to come out and see what you wanted, but then you went into the garage and I asked myself, What the hell does he want in there, all that’s there is my truck?

“And that’s when I realized that the truck was what you were looking for and that it might be a good idea to get my service revolver. And you were in there long enough for me to lock and load. Even after a decade of retirement, some things your body doesn’t forget.

“Barely took me fifteen seconds, a little slower than when I was younger but enough time to get ready for you.”

He smiled, set his finger on the hammer and pulled it back. Either the action was so deliberate or time slowed so much from my point of view that I could see the tendons flexing in his thumb. And each time the hammer clicked as it was pulled back, I could see each of its miniscule jumps as it passed each of the cocking mechanisms. When it reached the final cocking position, I could see the revolver turn so that a bullet slid into the chamber.

All Gardiner needed to do was lightly squeeze the trigger and my chin would be blasted through the back of my head. He jabbed the gun once against my chin and I imagined it was all over, in a split second I would be dead and there was absolutely nothing that would save me. A thin stream of urine trickled down my leg.

“That’s the one thing that I always remember and relish about all those other times,” he said, smiling again. “You hold someone’s life in your hands and there is nothing they can do except maybe piss their pants. Nothing beats that. But in your case, I’m going to make an exception. You get a choice whether to live or die, but first you have to convince me why I shouldn’t just blow your fucking head off. Sure, you could try something like ‘You’ll never get away with it’ but that would be stupid.

“You trespassed on my property, you assaulted me twice, and in order to protect myself from someone who has a history of mental illness, I was forced to shoot you. You don’t have to worry about any of the evidence you claim to have found because I can take care of that.

“Besides, most of the cops here will be more concerned about your body and how it got that way than a few bits of circumstantial evidence that may or may not be related to another case. So that’s it. If you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t shoot you right now, then I’ll let you go and we can both decide to let this matter drop. That sound all right with you?”

It did sound good to me, but I knew there was nothing I could tell Gardiner to convince him not to shoot me. Because when he’d faced the greatest challenge in his life, he’d called it quits. He hadn’t died, but his choice, blaming all those women for the loss of his son, was like just like choosing death. He was only messing with me. My only hope was to act as if I didn’t care. To play him the same way I played all those tellers and the same way I played Jackie’s neighbor.

“Sorry, I got nothing. You might as well pull the trigger,” I said with a shrug. I felt my face and body relax, and I leaned some weight into the gun, pushing him back a step. There was a moment of confusion, when he realized that the power he had had over those girls didn’t translate to me, and he faltered.

In that second, I slapped the gun hand away and hit him hard in the chest with the open heel of my hand. He fell back against the door frame and I pushed him to the ground. He tried to raise the gun again, but I pinned his wrist to the ground with my foot. With the other foot, I stepped on his other shoulder, bent forward and placed my hands around his neck and jerked his head up so I could stare in his face. “Told you, you son of a bitch,” I growled at him, my spit splattering his face, “you’re dead. You just haven’t figured it out yet. But you will.”

As my hands grew tighter around his neck, I witnessed complete helplessness in Gardiner, saw his total fear, saw the pleading and praying in his eyes, and I felt power. A surge rushed through my system, a mix of excitement, of strength, of control, and yes, a tingle of joy. This was how he had felt when he killed Grace; I knew it. This was how he had felt when he killed for the first time, when he killed Lydia, when he felt that dominion over somebody’s life, someone he saw as lower than him, weaker than him, and how that powered the endorphins into his pleasure center to create an ecstasy he had never before experienced.

When he realized that he would get away with it, that no one would suspect him, that no one would even think about him, when he realized that he could do it over and over again. It was powerful, and intoxicating, better than any game of chance or any visit to the bank.

And then I saw Grace, saw her face as she lay under the orange tint of a crime scene tent. Saw her as the forensic cops buzzed around her body, saw her graduation picture on the front page of the Insight section, and then saw her, probably less than six months after graduation, walking the streets for the first time, a scared little girl forced to give herself up because everyone else had given up on her.

She spoke to me, the same way she spoke to me that cold night in the middle of nowhere. She spoke to me in the voice from her voice mail message.

Stop,
she said.
Stop. Leo.

“No, Grace,” I said out loud. Gardiner’s eyes widened at the sound of my voice, and he pushed against me. I pushed back and squeezed harder. He jerked and twitched.

Stop, Leo,
Grace said.
Please stop. You don’t have to do this.

“
Yes, Grace. I do.”

No you don’t. You’ve done enough. Please stop.

“Sorry, Grace, but it’s not enough. It ends here whether you like it or not.”

Gardiner was right about his rules: Bad things happen and you can’t change it, even if you try. But like many cops, reporters, and others, Gardiner forgot an important and equal part of the equation: No matter how bad it can get, good things can and do happen. Despite her death, Grace was one of those good things. All those women who were killed were. Larry Maurizo was another and so was Mandy Whittaker. My wife, Joan, and how she protected our children, even from their father, was another. But in order to protect that good, I had to do this. I knew there were possible consequences: arrest, conviction, and prison; endless nightmares and guilt; and the knowledge that I could and possibly would do it again, but I was fine with that. It was a part of me, a part that hoped this story would end in this way.

42

“Okay, we have another body in a field,” Whittaker said, holding up a piece of paper, which probably had the location written on it. “Who wants it?”

I looked up from my desk. I had been reading that day’s issue of the paper, circling ads in the Suites for Rent section.

“You take it, Leo,” Anderson said. “You’re the ‘body in the field’ expert.”

I turned to look at Mandy. “What about Franke?” I said to the reporter who had the desk opposite mine. “He doesn’t look busy.”

Franke looked up, annoyed. Mandy looked in his direction and waved the suggestion away. “Sorry, this one needs someone who can drive and Franke is on month three for an impaired conviction. So it’s between you two.”

“Like I said, you take it, Leo,” Anderson said with a shrug.

I really didn’t want to take it because I knew what I would find out there: an old retired cop, shot dead, apparently by his own service weapon. That had been the hardest part, getting the shot off. Everything else had been relatively easy. Closing the garage door on his body and leaving it behind so I could return the car to the newspaper. Fudging the paperwork again, so it looked as if I had returned a half hour earlier. Going back by bus after work, loading the body onto the back of the truck, and driving it past the city limits to find a quiet farmer’s field. All that had been easy.

Whitford was right, there were so many quiet farmer’s fields that I had trouble deciding which one was best. Even leaving the truck behind and walking back into the city was relatively easy compared to getting his gun to go off.

Every time I tried to squeeze the trigger with his thumb in it, I pulled my hand away, like I did during that biology experiment in school when you had to prick your own finger to test your blood type. The second time, my prereaction knocked the barrel, and I had to reposition it in his mouth. And when I finally succeeded, the noise and violence of the event was greater than I expected. The shot exploded into the night, echoing across the fields like thunder from a bolt of lightning striking right next to you.

Gardiner’s head jerked and exploded out the back, and the recoil of the gun yanked on my hand so hard that my glove was ripped off and fluttered away into the dark. I danced about in pain, frantically searching for my glove as Gardiner’s body flopped back onto grass, looking, I hoped, like a suicide.

I expected every distant farmhouse to light up in surprise as the residents were jerked awake. But the sound and the surprise faded seamlessly in the distance. In less than a couple of seconds, the quiet and dark of a prairie night was back. I found my glove about ten feet away, and instead of putting it on, I tucked it into my pocket. Like the tarp that I had used to wrap his body, I couldn’t leave the glove there. I stuffed the tarp into a culvert a couple klicks away.

The truck, though, I had to leave behind. It had to remain near him to shore up the story of his suicide. It also held evidence that could tie him to the deaths of a number of women, at the very least to one of them, Grace. And if they tied him to just that one, that was okay with me. Even if they didn’t, even if they didn’t find any evidence, I doubted they would investigate his death any further. Despite what Whitford said about looking at every homicide with equal vigor, this one would not receive much effort. To many in the EPS, Gardiner was a rat, and it would only be suitable for such a rat to take his own life.

But even if they discovered he had been strangled before he was shot, there was little chance they would tie it to me. My gloves had been on when I strangled him and throughout all my actions afterward. However, I was ready just in case they somehow tied me to his death; I would plead self-defense. Gardiner had been a serial killer pointing a gun to my head, I would say. Fighting back and killing him was my only means of protecting myself.

As for taking his body to a field and trying make it look like a suicide, I would say I panicked because I was worried that some police officers had a vendetta against me. It also wouldn’t look good for the police to pursue too deeply the person who had not only discovered an ex-cop was a serial killer, but who was also threatened at gunpoint by that same serial killer. In the end, I would probably be charged with committing an indignity to a dead body and, based on the circumstances and my sometimes mental state, be given a complete discharge. That is, if they did connect me to his death.

Despite this, I didn’t think I had the strength to stand there like a nice quiet reporter and get the information about the situation without confessing that I was the one responsible.

“You take it, Brent,” I said with a sigh. “I don’t think I got the strength to deal with another body in the field. At least for a while.”

He nodded, understanding. “All right, all right. For you, Leo, I’ll take this one,” he said, pulling on his jacket and taking the piece of paper from Mandy. “But you owe me one,” he added as he stood up with his notebook.

“Who knows,” Mandy said, “maybe they’ll let you in the tent.”

He gave her the finger. “Yeah, right. Thanks to Leo, that’s never going to happen again.”