She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be

by J. D. Barker

  “So he was in Florida when those people died?”

  “I suppose he could have flown, but yeah, probably.”

  Stack hobbled back to the map. “There’s more. This one here.” He indicated another red tack. This one in Iowa. “We’ve got two hundred acres of corn that went bad overnight, on August 8, 1995.”

  “Corn?”

  Stack nodded. “According to the local sheriff, the entire field looked like someone covered it in gasoline and struck a match. Every stalk was black.”

  “But not really burned.”

  “But not really burned,” he agreed.

  Fogel’s eyes narrowed as she stared at the map. “It’s always been people.”

  “Unless we missed something, yeah.”

  “And where was Thatch?”

  “Texas, on August 6. He got to the cornfield on August 10.”

  “Too fast for a bus, too slow for a plane. He’s driving,” Fogel pointed out.

  Stack pointed at yet another red tack. “August 8, 1996, Chicago. A suspected mugger is found in Grant Park.”

  “Burned, but not really burned.”

  “Yep.”

  “And Thatch?”

  “Last withdrawal was nearly a week earlier in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Then another withdrawal on the 9th in Chicago,” Stack told her.

  Stack went to the last red tack. “Last year. Rye, New Hampshire. A homeless man in Odiorne Point State Park. Body found, same as the others. He had three different wallets on him, so probably some kind of thief. He’s still a John Doe, though. Thatch got there two days later. Prior to that, he was in Philly.”

  “He’s chasing these events.”

  “He’s chasing her,” Stack said.

  Fogel turned to him. “You really think it’s the girl? All of this?”

  Stack turned to the wall with all the past victims. “Every one of these killings happened here in Pittsburgh. Then we got that massacre and house fire in ’93. From there on, they’re scattered around the country. All these random places.” He pointed at the picture of the house in Dormont. “It started here in ’78, our first three victims.”

  “You said yourself, she would have been a baby. One or two, at most. How is that possible?”

  Stack ignored her and went on. “Someone snatches her when she’s a baby, killed her parents and took her, kept her in that house, here in Pittsburgh. Until that fire. Now she’s on the run.”

  “But she can’t stop killing?”

  Stack rubbed his chin. “Something about that date. Always August 8.”

  “How do you explain the cornfield? Nobody died that year. That we know of, anyway.”

  A flicker entered his eyes. “A lot of corn died, though, didn’t it? What if this isn’t really about killing but is somehow about ‘taking,’ taking life?”

  “What’s the difference? I don’t follow.”

  “What if, on August 8 of every year, she has to somehow ‘take life,’ steal it, feed off the energy, maybe to sustain herself?”

  Fogel laughed. “What? Like a vampire or something?”

  “Like something, yeah.”

  “Now I know you’re drinking again.”

  He shrugged and crossed to the stack of file boxes on the far wall with an awkward limp. “All I’m doing is following the evidence. I’ve been through every one of these coroner reports a dozen times. Aside from the gunshot victims at the house, they all died of the same thing. They were drained. Every ounce of liquid gone from the body, every cell dried out, every bit of life gone, until we’re left with nothing but a dried out husk.”

  Fogel was staring at the wall again. “Okay, let’s suppose you’re actually right and not just some crazy old man—”

  “Thanks for that.”

  Fogel went on. “Aside from the first year, we’ve got single victims from ’79 through ’92, then in ’93 we get the shit show at the house on Milburn, twenty-one bodies in total but only seven burned but not burned, fitting her pattern. What was that?”

  “I think somebody went in to put her down, and she used the opportunity to get out.”

  “Our man in the black GTO.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And Brier got caught in the crossfire.”

  Stack nodded. “Seems so.”

  The two of them went quiet for a long while as all of this sank in. Then Fogel returned to the map. “The blue tacks are cash withdrawals, right? Look at this. He’s been all over the country.”

  “From what I can tell, he never spends more than a few weeks in the same place,” Stack replied.

  “Has he been back to Pittsburgh?”

  “He hasn’t withdrawn any money in or around Pittsburgh, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been here. That attorney of his would probably know, but he’s not going to tell us,” Stack said.

  “Where was the most recent withdrawal?”

  “A small town in Nevada called Fallon—last night at 10:38.”

  “And we’ve got two days until August 8.”

  “Yep.”

  Fogel stared at the map. Thatch is chasing the girl. Fogel’s chasing Thatch; had been for years. The definition of insanity is repeating the same thing and expecting a different result. If she wanted to solve this, she needed to get ahead of it. “I’ve got some airline miles saved up, and I haven’t called in sick for three years.”

  Stack took the bottle of Aleve from his pocket and swallowed two pills with a sip of Diet Coke. “That’s my girl.”

  2

  In July of 1998, one week before Fogel would meet with Stack, I woke to a kick in the shin and a not-so-friendly gruff voice coming from an even unfriendlier face staring down at me. “Hey, kid. You can’t sleep there.”

  That statement wasn’t altogether true, because I had slept right there. I picked up at least three hours of uninterrupted z-time in that very spot before he came along. I considered telling him that, but the fact he wore a uniform zipped my lip. Only a Bryant Park police officer, but a police officer all the same, and in New York the only place worse than spending the night on a bench in the park was spending a night in a cell surrounded by crackheads, drunks, and assorted homeless.

  I almost grinned at that particular thought, but grinning would hurt too much. I had no business thumbing my nose at those people. After all, they were my people and had been for some time now.

  I swung my legs off the side of the bench and pinched my eyes shut against the sharp sun poking through the trees, and the little movement hurt, too. A tiny hammer inside my head gave my temple an exploratory thump, then followed through with a hard-handed pound, another after that. My stomach rolled, followed by a guttural noise that left my mouth tasting like rancid pork and whiskey.

  As hangovers went, this was bad, but I’ve had worse.

  I very much needed to take a piss.

  When I left Penn State in the spring of 1994, I fell off the wagon.

  Let’s face it, I never really climbed all the way in. At best, I held onto the back.

  It was the damn white coats.

  Got to be I saw them everywhere.

  Every other car in my rearview was white.

  In Richard Nettleton’s letter, he mentioned Florida was the worst, and it truly was. Damn near every other car was painted white in the Sunshine State, and while nobody wore a single coat, white shirts and shorts were all the rage. I quickly realized when someone watched you from across the street in a white shirt and shorts, it was no different than a long, white trench coat. I had no idea where they hid their guns, but there was no hiding the look in their eyes—that look was universal. They knew me, and I quickly learned to spot them.

  I got good at spotting them.

  I went to Fort Lauderdale, because according to the file I stole from the Penn State Registrar, the last known address for Perla Beyham was off 17th Street in the heart of the tourist district. An apartment above a tee-shirt shop with a nice view of the beach. She wasn’t home when I arrived, on account of being dead. Her neighb
or remembered her—not many people drown in a bathtub, so the story took on a life in the building, and most of the other six residents knew about it.

  Perla Beyham dropped out of Penn State in the spring of 1979. Nobody knew why. She got a waitressing job at a tiki bar (also on 17th Street) and died about two weeks later. The coroner ruled it an accident—fell asleep in the tub, the report said—there were rumors of suicide. The happy girl who left for college was not the girl who returned. Most blamed her paranoia, her fear of being watched, on drugs, even though nobody had ever seen her take anything. She left work on May 22, 1979, went home, and took a bath, and that was that. They found her body two days later.

  The neighbor I talked to, a nice old man named Dave, said some of her belongings might still be down in the building’s basement. When I broke in that night, I didn’t find anything, and I tossed the place pretty good.

  I still owned the Jeep back then and happily left the Sunshine State. I went in search of Garret Dotts next. Garret wasn’t too hard to find. His grave sat in the far back corner of the cemetery in Cantonville, Georgia, not too far from Atlanta. The tree where he hung himself in March of 1980 was only a short five-minute drive from where he was buried. A large willow.

  I returned to Pittsburgh on August 7 of 1994.

  When I spotted Detective Fogel and some of her friends in the cemetery the following night, watching my bench, I remained in the woods, where I could keep an eye on them and the bench. I doubted Stella would show—at that point, I wasn’t sure she was even alive—but I wanted to be there just in case. At a little after midnight, I was back on the road, and I didn’t stop driving until dawn.

  More than a week passed before I learned about the four people who died at a hospice in Montana. I ate breakfast at a diner outside Cleveland, and whoever occupied the booth before me left their newspaper folded on the seat. I found the story on page four—not very long, but enough. I knew it was Stella. I knew.

  The people in white coats knew, too.

  They were crawling all over the city by the time I arrived, particularly around the hospice ward at St. Francis. More near the homes where the four people had lived out their lives before entering the hospice. I watched two woman in long, white coats leave the coroner’s building and climb into a white Chevy Suburban SUV. One of them made a phone call while the other watched me. When her eyes locked with mine, I knew it was time to leave that city.

  It took me nearly six months to track down Penelope Maudlin, and during that time, I lost myself in the Pacific Northwest. Matteo regularly deposited my monthly allowance of two thousand dollars, but I quickly realized the money didn’t go very far. I imagined he still paid my rents at both Auntie Jo’s apartment and the one I shared with Willy Trudeau at Penn State, but I had to find my own housing on the road, and that proved to be difficult on my shoestring budget.

  Two thousand dollars per month broke down to about sixty-five dollars per day. Subtract three cheap meals, and I had about fifty left. The Jeep loved its gas, and that was good for about twenty a day if I stayed on the move, leaving me with around thirty bucks. I found no shortage of cheap, fleabag motels along the backroads, which could be had for thirty dollars. Rooms at hostels, too, but I also needed money for alcohol, and in those early days when I still wasn’t of drinking age, obtaining a bottle came at a premium since I had to pay someone to buy it for me. I couldn’t sleep without it, though, and without sleep, I couldn’t drive, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t do much of anything. The fog brought on by a nice bottle of whiskey (or the thick haze brought on by Thunderbird, when I was really strapped) got my mind to rest, silenced the screams.

  I bought a tent and assorted camping gear in Medford, Oregon, and drove as deep into the mountains and forest of the Umpqua National Park as the Jeep would take me. I sometimes went days without seeing another person, and that was good. People who hiked the trails didn’t tend to wear white, either, and that was good, too. I’d venture into Medford or Roseburg or one of the other small towns at the base of the mountains only when it became too cold to camp, when I needed money or supplies, or to visit one of the six public libraries I found nearby. I was at the library in Canyonville on the day I found Penelope Maudlin.

  The microfiche machines were located in the far back corner of the library, next to the storage room containing shelves upon shelves of boxes containing film. Aside from the librarian, a nice woman named Melda Dorrell who retired to Canyonville with her husband in 1989, I was alone. Most people were either working or at school in the early afternoon, and I was always careful to get back to my camp before those crowds started to arrive.

  Penelope Maudlin was a unique name, and I credit her unique name as the sole reason I found her at all. Her Penn State file listed her home address as Crystal Springs, Illinois, but when I found the house about two months earlier, the windows and doors were boarded up, the roof was gone, and the siding was black and charred from a long-ago fire. From the next-door neighbor, I learned the fire had been electrical, ruled an accident and started in the basement. Penelope’s parents had been sleeping, and both perished, unable to get out in time. The fire had been in 1982, the year Penelope graduated from Penn State with a degree in geology. Her Penn State file contained her campus medical records. She first visited the infirmary in September 1978, and her visits increased in frequency up until her graduation. She suffered from acute migraines.

  From the microfiche, I learned she took a management job with Brennen Oil in Waco, Texas. The Waco Tribune wrote up a short piece on account of her being the first woman to hold the position—notable, particularly at such a young age. She was to start in August 1982.

  On her first day, August 8, 1982, she pulled into her assigned parking space at Brennen, got out of her Toyota Camry, retrieved a can of gasoline from the truck, and poured it over the car. As two of her potential coworkers watched in frozen horror, she climbed back inside and lit a match and tossed it onto the hood. The flames engulfed the car. They said she didn’t make a sound.

  Shortly after learning about Penelope Maudlin’s fate, I found myself standing at the center of a blackened cornfield in the middle of Iowa, and I knew Stella had stood in the very same spot two days earlier. I drove straight there from Pittsburgh—I watched our bench from the woods again that year. Detective Fogel had been there too, but she didn’t see me.

  A year would pass before I would track down Lester Woolford in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He had been cremated, so only ashes remained. His urn held a prime location in Whispering Meadows Cemetery in the top right corner of a building I later learned was called a columbarium. There was a fountain out front. I spent two nights sleeping behind that building—no need for my tent; August nights in Wisconsin were warm. The bottle of Wild Turkey I had on hand made them warmer.

  Woolford dropped out of Penn State in the spring of 1979, then disappeared for nearly seven years. At one point, his parents issued a reward and filed a missing person’s report, but from what I could find in the local papers, that didn’t turn up much of anything. Since he was an adult, the police weren’t looking too hard, and the only people chasing the reward were in Green Bay, far from where his body was found in Knoxville on August 8, 1986—about the same time the body of Eura Kapp was discovered in Pittsburgh, burned but not burned.

  On the night of August 7, 1986, Lester Woolford checked into room 226 of the Knoxville Motor Lodge off Interstate 275. According to the police report, he was alone and paid for two nights in cash. They think he started cutting himself around two in the afternoon but couldn’t really be sure. He continued cutting himself late into the night, possibly until first light. Housekeeping didn’t find him until the morning of August 9 on account of the Do Not Disturb sign he placed on his door. The scalpel was still in his right hand. He piled the items he removed from his body neatly to his left. His face was unrecognizable by the time his body finally gave up to shock and loss of blood in those wee hours. The ID in Woolford’s wallet was fake. He had mat
ching credit cards, too. The police matched his dental records, though, and in early September, his body was released to his parents, who felt it would be best to have him cremated.

  On August 8, 1996, national news picked up the story of a man burned to death in Chicago. I fueled up the Jeep and arrived there a day later. Surely Stella again. White coats everywhere, too. I didn’t stay long.

  Last year, I held up in a South Philadelphia hostel for the better part of a month before making the drive to Pittsburgh on August 8. Detective Fogel wasn’t in the cemetery. Neither was Stella, for that matter. I sat upon our bench until a little after midnight, then I drove back to Philly. I had been attempting to find Cammie Brotherton—she stayed at this same hostel for the summer of 1978, twenty years before me, after dropping out of Penn State. Remarkably, the manager remembered her but had no idea where she went next.

  1997 was also the year I turned twenty-one, and the bartender at the Irish Rooster two doors down from the hostel was quick with refills of Guinness and kind enough to throw in a few extra shots with those I bought. I nearly stayed when the television above the bar ran the story about a man’s body found burned in New Hampshire. I even ordered another beer. When I went to pay for it, Stella’s letter fell from my pocket, and I changed my mind. I said I’d be back, but on the way out the door, I saw a white trench coat hanging on the coatrack.

  I had not gone back.

  In those years, I often dreamt of Stella. A longing to hold the one thing I never could.

  “Move, kid. Don’t make me arrest you.”

  The Bryant Park police was still staring down at me, and I scrambled to my feet before he could kick me again. An empty bottle of Jameson dropped from my coat and thudded down into the grass. Before he could say something, I bent, picked it up, and shuffled over to the nearest trash can. My legs were wobbly, and I was a little light-headed. I hadn’t eaten anything since since breakfast yesterday, and that had only been a greasy egg McMuffin.

  “I want you out of my park.”

  “Your park?” Phlegm caught in my throat, and I damn near choked on it before spitting it out and on the sidewalk about an inch from his shoe. I didn’t mean for it to land there. I was still groggy, and my aim was off.