A Killer's Wife (Desert Plains)

by Victor Methos

  She sat down on the bed and rested her hand on the pillow. It was cool to the touch and soft. Silk covers.

  She pulled the pillows out of the cases and searched inside. Then under the bed, under the mattress, in all the clothing, in the drawers in the bathroom and kitchen. She searched the fridge, the freezer, and the cabinets. Wesley didn’t have a toolbox anywhere, so she got a butter knife from the kitchen and unscrewed the vents and checked inside. Nothing.

  Standing in front of the bookcase, she ran her fingertips over the spines. She skipped all the books except for the biography of Eddie Cal. The author had written letters to her, phoned her, texted her, emailed her, and shown up twice at her house. She’d finally had to file a stalking injunction against him to get him to stop. He was a blogger that had secured a six-figure deal for writing the book. Yardley had found out later he had been arrested for stalking and assaulting a neighbor and was currently serving a fifteen-year sentence.

  The biography was long, probably about six hundred pages. Far more than Cal deserved, she thought. She pulled the book out and held it in her hands. It felt too . . . rigid. Opening it, she saw the first disc about a third of the way in. The second disc halfway in. Golden DVDs with no writing on them to indicate what they contained. She felt queasy.

  It took a long while for her to build up the courage to put one in the DVD player and turn on the television. She inhaled deeply and closed her eyes. Please . . . let me be wrong . . . let me be wrong.

  She hit play.

  41

  The video began with darkness, but Yardley could hear shuffling. Some metallic clanks, and then the lens cap came off.

  She recognized the room immediately: the Olsens’ bedroom. The image green but bright, and Ryan and Aubrey Olsen sleeping next to one another. The image stayed with them a long while, and nothing happened. Ryan Olsen snored.

  More sounds coming from behind the camera. Yardley couldn’t place them. Clothes maybe, or sheets. Something soft rubbing against something else. Ryan Olsen sniffled, and the snoring stopped for a brief period. Filling the silence was the unmistakable sound of breathing, but it wasn’t coming from the Olsens.

  Naked skin appeared to the right of the image. A man’s buttocks and legs. A knife dangled in his fingertips. He stood at the foot of the bed with another handheld camera. Not a phone but a newer, sleek digital camera. He took several photos and then put the camera down onto what looked like a small plastic sheet he had laid on the carpet. The man’s face was not visible, as he didn’t turn toward the recorder.

  The man tapped the blade of the knife against his thigh as he watched the Olsens sleep. The way Wesley would tap his fingers against his thigh when lost in thought.

  The nausea Yardley felt sent a burning fluid up her esophagus, and she had to swallow to keep from vomiting. She put her hand to her mouth, as though physically pushing it down. The man slowly made his way around the bed.

  The man glanced at the recorder, ensuring it was focused on him correctly. It was Wesley.

  As quickly as the bite of a snake, he bent down and put the knife to Ryan Olsen’s throat.

  Yardley turned away. She couldn’t hold it any longer. She ran to the bathroom and vomited.

  When the retching stopped, Yardley flushed the toilet and pulled herself up to her feet using the sink. She stared at herself in the mirror. Though she knew men found her attractive and that she appeared younger than her thirty-eight years, she just thought she looked old now. Old and tired.

  She splashed water on her face and rinsed her mouth. She let the water run over her hands for a long time afterward, long enough that her face almost dried. Her purse sat on the floor, and she lifted it and set it on the sink. She took out a disposable sanitary napkin and dried the spots on her face that were still wet. She didn’t want to use one of Wesley’s towels.

  She avoided looking in the mirror. As she stepped out into the hall, she heard a voice.

  “Hello, darling.”

  42

  Time slowed. Yardley thought of a paper napkin falling to the ground from a table at a restaurant. She watched it shift and float and land silently on the floor. As though her limbs wouldn’t respond to her brain’s direction to move and stop the napkin.

  Wesley had turned the DVD player off.

  “You never asked to come here,” he said, glancing around, his voice calm and even. “How do you like it?”

  She didn’t respond.

  His hands thrust into his pockets, and he sat on the arm of the couch and exhaled loudly. “Imagine my surprise when the management office called me. I really thought this day wouldn’t come. I thought, naively, I suppose, that I could keep this from you. I simply had no idea you would get involved in this case. I just wish you would’ve listened to me and left it alone. Ultimately, my dear, this really is your fault.”

  She almost said, You need help, Wesley. I can get you help. But from his eyes, she knew that would be useless. His eyes had, somehow, changed. Turned lifeless, like the eyes of a doll. Or perhaps it was just how she perceived them now.

  “I’m leaving, Wesley. Get out of my way.”

  He held his arm out toward the door. “By all means, go.”

  The distance to the door came to about twenty feet if she went through the living room, maybe thirty if she went through the kitchen and around Wesley. Though slightly overweight, Wesley was strong and fast. If he wanted to grab her, she wasn’t quick enough to get away.

  “Back out of the condo and go down the stairs. And then I’ll follow.”

  He smirked. “Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “I think you love me,” she lied. “And that you don’t want to hurt me.”

  “Don’t I? How do you know? You don’t know the first thing about me. You don’t even know my name.”

  The nausea was back as she pictured him in her bed, making love to her, his eyes locked to hers as he told her he loved her and she believed him. She had to strain to keep from retching again.

  “You look absolutely pale, darling. Why don’t you go lie down and have a nap in the bedroom? You’ll find the bed quite agreeable. We can have a talk afterward.”

  She realized the reason he hadn’t already attacked her was because of the neighbors. The units were compact: someone would hear.

  “I’ll scream.”

  “You could. And maybe someone will hear, and maybe someone won’t. And even if they do hear, maybe they’ll do something about it, and maybe they won’t. Is that a risk you’re really willing to take?”

  “Are you? Do you want to join your idol on death row?”

  He chuckled. “My idol. Interesting way to put it.”

  “What would you call him?”

  He shrugged. “A dear friend and an influence. A mentor. But our work, see, our work was only similar, not identical. He helped me see the differences between us.” A grimace came over him. “Dark Casanova Junior. I can’t tell you how disgusted that made me. I had wanted to wait a little longer for this last one, the adorable Miles family, but I thought I should teach you all a little something about respect. I was going to use their blood to leave a note for you. I realized the media would have to call me something, so I might as well have chosen it. I was thinking the Poisoned Braid. Do you know where that comes from? Medieval Japan. Assassins would come in the night and cut a small hole in the thatched roofs of their targets. They would run a thin braided rope down the hole to the lips of their target and then drip poison down the braid. It would sometimes take hours to dribble down and touch the lips. That’s the discipline these men, and sometimes women, had. The discipline and patience of death.”

  “You’re no assassin, Wesley. You’re a butcher that targets children.”

  He grinned. “The door hinge, I’m guessing?” He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Such a shame. I meant to go back and replace that hinge later, but I was nervous Cason might have someone watching the house.”

  “I can’t believe you took the
time to fix a door. It’s sloppy work.”

  He nodded. “Yes. I agree. It’s not often I’m wrong, but I like to think I can openly admit it when I am. That was a poor decision. But thinking about the look on the child’s face when he opened that door . . .” He chuckled. “Chance worth taking.”

  He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply through the nose as he lifted his head toward the ceiling. “You have no clue what it’s like, Jessica. The muffled screams that bounce off the walls and seem to linger there, the eyes that pour the last of life out of them, and the smell.” He inhaled again. “I can smell it at night sometimes. The smell of blood and empty bowels and sweat. It’s disgusting and intoxicating at the same time. There’s no other smell like the smell of a human being at the moment of death. Nothing even close. You lose yourself in it. You can’t think clearly . . . it was . . . sublime.” He opened his eyes. “How’d you know it was me?”

  “When I realized the children were the actual targets, it wasn’t hard to deduce that one of the only offices that would have a record of sealed adoptions was the guardian ad litem.”

  He nodded. “And then something just happened to click? Nothing just happens, Jessica. Your subconscious made the connections. Maybe you always knew and just didn’t care?”

  “No,” she gasped softly.

  He chuckled, sensing the cut. “Maybe you’re just meant to be with someone like me or Eddie?”

  She closed her eyes and imagined Tara. She had to survive this for her. Tara had no one else in the world.

  As long as Wesley was talking, he wasn’t hurting her.

  Yardley glanced toward her purse on the sink. “How long did you follow me for?”

  He beamed a little. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “I think I’d believe anything about you right now.”

  He folded his arms. “I’ve been watching you for so long—I knew you before we even met. You actually saw me once. I was following you on a hot day in July and stopped for a drink at an ice cream store. You and Tara came in a few minutes later. We smiled at each other.”

  She thought back and couldn’t recall any such moment.

  “But you know what the most difficult part of all this was? It wasn’t getting you to fall in love with me. That was actually easy. The most difficult part was getting a position at the law school. When I found out you had applied, I quickly applied there as well. I was teaching at a more, let’s say, prestigious school, and UNLV only had adjunct positions open. They didn’t understand why a tenured professor at such a high-ranking school would only want an adjunct position. So I earned pennies as an adjunct there while I waited. Luckily, a tenured position opened during your second year, and everything lined up.” He paused. “Do miss where I lived, though. I hate Las Vegas. It’s so . . . tasteless, isn’t it?”

  “Why now, Wesley? Why did you start the killings now?”

  “That, I’m afraid, is better left a mystery.”

  He pushed off the couch toward her.

  43

  The clouds had rolled back, revealing a perfectly blue sky. Baldwin watched as Ortiz ate a double cheeseburger with chili and onions with the zeal of a man that had just been rescued from a desert island. The chili dripped down his chin, and he had to keep wiping at it with napkins between every bite.

  “So my daughter,” Ortiz said with a mouthful of burger, “her first word is mommy, right? And so I’m spending all my day off with her, like, all day. I make it seem like I’m doin’ my wife a favor and taking the baby out so she can run errands, right? And I just work her all day. ‘Daddy, daddy, daddy.’ Just over and over again. By the end of the day, she’s sayin’ daddy. I didn’t say nothin’ to Rebecca, and she texts me and says she’s sayin’ daddy now and not mommy.” He chuckled. “If Rebecca ever found out, she’d have my cojones.”

  “Huh,” Baldwin said, staring off into space.

  “That’s all you gonna eat?” Ortiz said before taking another massive bite. “Justa buna bandwich?”

  “Not hungry.”

  “Bhat’s brong?”

  “It’s that warrant for Wesley Paul’s place. If Jessica actually finds something . . . I mean . . . I don’t know.”

  “You worried she’s gonna toss anything she finds?”

  “Well, I don’t want to be that blunt, but yeah. She’s in love, or thinks she is.”

  “Man, if it’s him, if she had this happen to her again, you know how pissed she’s gonna be? This psycho found her just because she was married to another psycho and then tricked her into falling in love with him? Get outa here. I’d be more worried about her killing him. She don’t got a piece, do she?”

  “I don’t know.” He tapped his finger against the table. “I can’t just sit here. Let’s go check on her.”

  “I’m not done.”

  He rose. “I’ll get you another one after. Come on.”

  44

  Yardley jumped into the bathroom and slammed the door shut. The lock spun just as the door bounced with Wesley’s weight behind it. He kicked it, and Yardley leaned her back against it, pushing with her feet against the floor as hard as she could.

  “Jessica, open the door. I just want to talk.”

  “I have my phone. I’m calling the police.”

  “Jessica!”

  More kicks to the door. The edge nearest the doorknob cracked. It couldn’t take many more kicks. She remembered she hadn’t removed the gun from her purse after last night. She grabbed the purse and fumbled for the gun. It felt heavy in her hand as she gripped it. She pushed away from the door and moved into the tub, as far back as she could get. Two more kicks, and the door splintered and flew open.

  Right then, she should’ve pulled the trigger. A hole should have appeared in Wesley’s chest, and blood should have soaked his shirt. She could see it so clearly, like a vivid dream. For a moment she wondered if she had done it. Only when Wesley smiled did she realize she hadn’t. An unsaid understanding bloomed between them now: they both knew she couldn’t kill him.

  He shook his head, the smirk never leaving his face. “I really thought you had it in you. You’re the toughest woman I ever met. I thought if you ever found out, you really would kill me. But your parents were both chickenshits. Guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, eh?”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “No you won’t,” he said, stepping forward.

  “Wesley,” she said, panic in her voice, the gun shaking in her trembling fingers, “don’t do this. Don’t make me kill you.”

  “Hey, I just want to talk. You’re not going to kill me for just wanting to talk, are you? I want to go out and make some coffee, sit on the couch, and talk about this.”

  “Don’t come any closer. I’ll do it. I swear to you I’ll do it.”

  He took one large step, and the muzzle pressed against his heart. “Go ahead. Do it.”

  “Please don’t,” she begged, her voice cracking. “Please.”

  “Begging? Jessica, I have never seen you beg for anything. I have to say, it’s quite pathetic. I really thought you were stronger than this. Or was that strength just a fun house–mirror version of you for everybody else to see?”

  He reached up and grabbed the gun. As he did so, the click of a safety flicking off echoed in the bathroom. Wesley’s head jolted forward with the amount of force Baldwin used to press the muzzle against the back of his skull.

  “She won’t, but I will. And I really don’t want to ruin Jessica’s clothes with your brains. How about we let go of the gun nice and slow and put our hands on the back of our head.”

  Wesley chuckled. His fingers slowly slipped off the gun and went to the back of his head, where Ortiz grabbed them and used them to twist him down to the floor, slapping on cuffs before banging Wesley’s face into the tile.

  “That’s for ruining my lunch, pendejo.”

  45

  The local LVPD detectives came quickly. Baldwin had decided to give them a courtesy call. Two of
them arrived with several uniformed officers, who mostly hung around the door and chatted about a college game going on that night. One of the detectives, an obese man with a tacky blazer, wanted Yardley to give a statement right then, but Baldwin told him he would give her a ride home and take it there.

  Yardley couldn’t stay in the condo anymore. She waited outside for him.

  “I don’t even know what to say,” Baldwin said as he walked up to her.

  “You don’t have to say anything.”

  “I’ll give you a ride home.”

  “No, I have my car.”

  “You shouldn’t drive right now. I’ll drive your car and have Oscar follow us.”

  She nodded as she stared up at the condo. “I’m such a fool.”

  Baldwin stepped in front of her so she couldn’t see the condo. “You are a human being who was the victim of a monster. You didn’t find him—he found you. What he did, ultimately, had nothing to do with you.”

  She blinked slowly and looked at him. “If it was the first time, I might believe you.” She looked back to the condo and said, “Let’s go. I can’t stomach this place anymore.”

  The drive wouldn’t take long, but Baldwin thought he should ask her about how she’d found Tara, something positive that had happened, but then thought better of it. He was amazed she wasn’t crying. He wondered if she would do that later when no one could see.

  “Have you eaten?” he asked as they got off the freeway.

  “I’m not hungry,” she nearly whispered. Her eyes never leaving the passenger-side window.

  “If you need someone to talk to, I’m here. I’m a good listener, and I’m your friend, Jess.”

  She didn’t respond, her eyes glued to the passing city. For a moment he thought she was going to speak, but instead she leaned her head against the glass.