Life Penalty (7 page)

In the days immediately following Cindy’s death, it was the first of her illusions to vanish.

“W
e’d like you to keep an eye out for any unfamiliar faces at the church, even at the cemetery,” Lieutenant Cole was saying.

“What? What are you talking about?” Gail’s voice was unsteady, her fingers ice-cold as she twisted her hands one inside the other.

The lieutenant reached over and took Gail’s hands in his, a gesture she was sure was nowhere in the police instruction manual, an instinctive act of compassion. The move was typical of Lieutenant Richard Cole, a man Gail had come to regard in the last seven days as more than just an investigating officer and something of a friend. He was in contact with Gail and her family every day, keeping them apprised of what the police were doing, of any leads they were following, of the crank confessions they had received and discarded, the standard debris of any murder investigation. On more than one occasion, he had dropped over on his way home from work just to talk. He had even sat with Gail and Jack as they pored over old photo albums, filled to overflowing with pictures of their dead child. He had listened to their memories, and even if Gail had recognized in the back of her mind that he was hoping to hear something that might provide him with much-needed clues to the killer’s identity, she was grateful
nonetheless for his attention, for his willingness to listen. So many of her friends, those who called to voice their concern or who dropped over to the house, grew quickly uncomfortable as soon as Gail tried to talk about Cindy. They kept telling her it was better for her not to think about such things, and so Gail had stopped talking about Cindy, for their sakes, not for hers.

“It’s not uncommon for murderers to show up at a victim’s funeral,” Lieutenant Cole was explaining. “It gives their sick minds a sense of power, I guess, kind of like the author of a play sticking around to catch the audience’s reaction after the last act. Part of him is daring everyone to catch him; the other part is relishing in the misery he’s caused. When has he been that powerful before?”

Gail felt sick to her stomach. “You think he’ll be there?”

“It’s just a possibility. We’ll have men all over, of course. If you spot anyone you don’t recognize, or think you see someone that looks uncomfortable, a little off in some vague way, someone who smiles maybe or who does something equally out of place, point him out as soon as you can. I’ll be right at your elbow.”

Gail nodded, forcing herself to concentrate on what the lieutenant was saying. The man who murdered her little girl might also come to her funeral! The thought was too grotesque, too appalling. Her mind quickly sifted through the many crank phone calls she had received this past week: the angry voice which condemned her as a parent, the religious quacks who told her it was God’s punishment for her sins, the simply vicious who taunted her in little girl voices with cries of “Mommy!”

A week ago she would not have thought such monsters existed, that people could be so willfully cruel to another human being already suffering so much pain. And yet the week had shown her that there was nothing human beings were incapable of doing, no level to which
they could not descend. How had she failed to live in this world for almost forty years and not realize this before?

Exactly seven days had passed since the thirtieth of April.

Gail looked toward the coffee table in the living room. The morning paper lay stretched open across it. “The paper said there might be some connection between what happened to Cindy and that little girl who was killed a year ago …”

“There’s no connection,” Lieutenant Cole stated immediately. “I don’t know where these reporters get their information sometimes. Karen Freed was run over by a hit-and-run driver. There was no sexual assault, nothing at all to connect the two cases.” Gail winced to hear her daughter referred to as a case, and looked back toward the newspaper.

All the papers were making a great theatrical show of anger, screaming at the police in large black headlines to find the child killer before he struck again. But the effect of all that anger was only an increase in sales for the people who put out the papers. Perhaps the killer had purchased a copy.

Perhaps the killer would be at the funeral.

The television cameras followed them from the car to the church and later to the cemetery. Gail watched them with the detached curiosity of a spectator, which, she realized, in the last week, was the way in which she had come to view her life. Only when her thoughts turned to finding the man responsible for her daughter’s death did she feel any stirrings of life within her. Outwardly, she was there for those who needed her, to put her arms around Jennifer, her hand into Jack’s, her cheek against her mother’s. Inwardly, she watched her every move as if she were watching someone else, observing herself as if she were the central figure in a
foreign film with subtitles she was unable to follow or to understand. She moved from room to room on cue, ate when she was directed to do so, even managed a smile when supplied with the proper motivation; but inside, she felt nothing.

She listened to the words of the minister with seeming concentration, and if pressed, could probably have repeated his sermon word for word, and yet she had no comprehension of anything he had said, just as the minister, for all his kind words, had no idea of anything she was feeling. How could he? she asked herself. She was feeling nothing.

The church was filled with flowers. Gail spotted the arrangement from Nancy immediately. It was the biggest. Nancy had dropped by the house several days before to explain that she wouldn’t be able to attend the funeral because it would just be too painful for her, and she hoped, she
prayed
, that Gail would understand. Gail had tried to talk about Cindy, but Nancy had promptly burst into tears and begged Gail to talk about something else. Gail had grown silent and let Nancy do the talking.

And now the minister was speaking about her child in the safe way one can talk about someone one never really knew, and Gail was unable to listen.
We’d like you to keep an eye out for any unfamiliar faces at the church … it’s not uncommon for a murderer to show up at his victim’s funeral.
Gail twisted her head around. Was he here?

Gail’s eyes drifted purposefully over the rows of people, the degree of whose grief seemed to magnify the closer they got to the front. The church was crowded, and Gail was initially astonished to find that there were many faces she didn’t recognize at all. She spotted Cindy’s teacher, the young woman’s face a tear-streaked wall of pain, and Gail quickly turned away, feeling the sharp stab of the invisible knife at her chest. Gail also saw, even nodded at,
several of her neighbors. When she caught sight of the slightest quiver of a lip or the first swallow at a throat, she turned immediately in another direction.

She felt safer with the members of her family. The last week had numbed all of them somewhat. Waiting for the police to release the body for burial had been strain enough on everyone, and today, Gail recognized, was thought to be some sort of conclusion, as though the act of putting Cindy’s body in the ground was a signal for the rest of them to start picking up the threads of their own lives and begin carrying on again. In the next little while, she knew, probably in the next few days, Jack would be returning to work, Jennifer would be going back to school, her parents would be disappearing to Florida, and her sister would head back to New York. Routines would be reestablished.

The public’s outrage would continue only until fresh headlines appeared. She would move from the status of human being to that of a statistic.

Gail looked toward the end of the row at her father, his skin dark and leathery, his hair thinning and gray, his blue eyes, in the past rarely without a twinkle, now pale and watery. Her glance backtracked to her mother, her face drawn and pale despite its tan, her short strawberry-blond hair hidden beneath one of her many chiffon scarves, her fingers intertwined and trembling. She saw Carol, sitting to her mother’s right, reach over and cover her hands with her own. Carol’s hand was steadier, calmer, though her face was no less distraught. Always thin and fragile-looking despite her toughness, she appeared to have lost weight during the last week, and had resumed her two-packs-of-cigarettes-a-day habit, a habit she had supposedly kicked the year before. Carol hadn’t known Cindy that well. She was glamorous Aunt Carol from New York who visited several times a year with presents and a nice smile, and whom Cindy had seen last year in the chorus of
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat;
but for the most part, niece and aunt had remained attractive mysteries to one another. Still, her eyes were puffy and her face drawn. Her other hand held tightly onto Jack’s. He stared straight ahead, as Gail had caught him doing often in the past week. He looked the same as he always did, and yet he looked completely different. Something had been stolen from him, she realized, knowing in that instant that the same thing had been taken from her. When she looked at Jack, it was like looking in the mirror. Did he feel as dead inside as she did?

Jack’s other hand moved restlessly from his knee to Gail’s lap. Occasionally, they had clasped hands tightly. Now both her arms were around Jennifer who sat staring at the floor, her white skirt dotted with the tears that kept falling into her lap. Her shoulder-length straight brown hair fell against her cheeks, virtually blocking out her face. Her hands twisted in her lap, tearing at a tissue and banging at her legs. To Jennifer’s right sat Sheila Walton, Jack’s mother, who had only just flown in the night before from wherever it was that Jack had been able to reach her in the Caribbean. She had that otherworldly look of a person suffering from jet lag, Gail thought, then decided that the look was one they all shared.

Behind her sat Mark and Julie, Laura and Mike, and several other of their friends. Gail looked around for Lieutenant Cole but couldn’t find him.

Beyond the first few rows, the faces grew indistinct, and though Gail tried to find a face that didn’t belong, it was impossible. They all belonged. None of them belonged.

“That man over there,” she said to Lieutenant Cole as he appeared out of nowhere to take her arm and escort her up the aisle when the service was completed. Gail indicated a dark-haired man with a forward thrust of her chin. Lieutenant Cole whispered something to the man
beside him. “And I don’t recognize that man in the blue and white suit.” Gail watched the fair-haired young man with slightly slumped shoulders disappear through the church doors. She remembered that the suspect had been described as having dirty-blond hair. “And that man,” she said, pointing quickly with her hand before realizing what she was doing and dropping it to her side.

Lieutenant Cole’s lips creased into a narrow smile. “That’s one of our men,” he told her.

Gail’s face registered surprise. “He’s a policeman?”

“Undercover.”

Undercover. Gail repeated the word silently as they continued their walk to the front of the church.

As they filed out the door, Gail noticed Eddie Fraser flanked by his parents. Gail tried to smile in his direction but her lips only twitched grotesquely and she abandoned the attempt. Jack walked with his arms tightly around Jennifer. In the past week Jack and Jennifer had pulled closer together than ever, while Gail had felt herself pulling farther away. Had anybody noticed?

Gail watched the burial service, the small coffin being lowered into the ground, hearing the sobs of those around her, without any movement of her own. Her eyes were dry; her body was still. To a casual observer, to the man behind the camera and to those who would watch the events later on television, she appeared, as one newscaster would comment, a pillar of strength, a remarkably controlled woman. One commentator went so far as to wonder publicly what she had been thinking, and would have been undoubtedly disappointed to learn that she was thinking nothing at all. Her mind was a complete blank. A stranger lurking in the bushes had wiped it clean.

They knew as soon as they pulled the car into the driveway that something was wrong, that the house was not
the way they had left it. They saw glass strewn across the front entrance as they approached.

“My God,” Gail whispered.

“What’s happened?” Jennifer cried.

“Call the police,” Jack said, his voice calm.

The police were right behind them, and within minutes had surrounded the house and searched inside it thoroughly dusting the house for fingerprints.

“I doubt we’ll find anything,” Lieutenant Cole told them later as the extended family sat in stunned silence in the middle of their ransacked living room. The stereo was missing, and the color TV, as well as any money that had been left lying around, and some jewelry. “Whoever did this probably knew from all the publicity that no one would be home because of the funeral and selected his time accordingly. Break-in artists are no respecters of grief.”

“Do you think whoever killed Cindy might have …” Gail began.

“Unlikely,” Lieutenant Cole answered, cutting her off gently. “Very unlikely.”

“But not impossible,” Gail stated.

“No,” he agreed. “Not impossible.”

“Animals,” Dave Harrington kept repeating to whoever was nearby. Gail stared blankly at her father and felt nothing. This further indignity was too far removed to touch her.

After the police had left, and Jack was driving Jennifer over to Mark and Julie’s where it had been decided she would spend the night, Gail set about picking up the objects that had been carelessly thrown around the house. Drawers had been emptied onto the floor, coffee tables had been overturned, several little knickknacks lay broken or crushed into the carpet. The cutlery had been emptied onto the dining-room floor and discarded, silver
plate not being a good enough substitute for the real thing. Gail leaned over and picked up one of the long knives, running it along the side of her finger, and was surprised a second later to see a small river of blood.

“Gail, my God, what did you do?” Carol said urgently from somewhere beside her.