by John Marco
He paced the room much of the day, switching between the various news channels by hand (instead of using the remote) and keeping the volume low because he was convinced the paparazzi next door were trying to monitor his viewing habits. He stopped shaving and barely ate, especially after first his favorite pizza place and then even the local catsup-on-cardboard thirty-minute-or-less franchise cut him off because they didn’t want their delivery guys filmed bringing him food.
His anger at Jen dissipated as his anger at Duane grew. Jen had been weak, yes. She had betrayed him. But Duane was the seducer, the home wrecker, the kidnapper, the villain. This was all, all Duane’s fault and Duane would be made to pay.
Michael learned that Jen was dead at the same time and in the same way as the rest of the nation, on Susan Vick’s show, “Crime and Punishment,” on CNN, almost three weeks after Jen’s disappearance. He could have lived without knowing that her “badly decomposed, naked body” had been dumped, half in the water, below a small waterfall in a downstate nature preserve—their nature preserve. But, apparently the rest of America could not live without such information or without knowing that the body had been discovered by two birding enthusiasts who were horrified by what they had seen.
The “reporters” covering the story now seemed to spend almost as much of their time with his and Jen’s friends and family as they did camped out on his door-step, so it wasn’t long before the location of Jen’s body was linked to him, to them, and sensationalized as just one more sick, depraved aspect of the horrific crime.
An hour later, Michael was put on “unpaid, indefinite leave” from his job.
Two hours later, “unauthorized” photos of the “crime scene” and Jen’s grisly body were on the news. The television shows used black bars to cover the intimate parts, but did nothing to censor the bruising or blood or bloating—the horrific parts—of her body. He was sure the postings on the internet weren’t censoring anything at all.
Three hours later, Michael was arrested for Jen’s murder. The light from the television setups outside his motel room was as bright as his future with Jen had once seemed, when the police entered the room with the maid’s key and carted him off to a waiting squad car in his boxers and a white T-shirt, his eyes angry and red from crying and his chin sporting a ragged and splotchy, stubbled beard. Before the cops even got him into the vehicle, pushing his head to make sure it did not hit the door jamb as they firmly assisted him inside, he heard one energetic live-on-location journalist breathlessly telling his audience that Michael had apparently been growing the beard in an attempt to disguise himself before a planned run for freedom.
Reporters and photographers rushed the car as the police attempted to begin his transport. Michael couldn’t make out their individual inquiries in the tumult and din of the assault, so he just shouted over and over as the car began to pick up speed. “I didn’t do it. It was Duane.” And then they were free of the mob, and the cop riding shotgun told him to shut up unless he wanted to make a confession. After that, he just sobbed hysterically until an hour after they put him in an interrogation room at the station house.
It was in the wee hours of the morning that the interrogation began. He knew from watching the cop shows on television that he should call a lawyer, and, of course, the detectives said so each of the three separate times they read him his rights. But he also knew that he was innocent, that Duane had done this horrible thing to his Jen, his dear, sweet Jen, and that asking for an attorney would make him look guilty, would distract them from their efforts to find Duane, to find the real killer. God, he thought, now I’m quoting O.J., but that’s how he phrased it every time they asked him.
So he didn’t ask for a lawyer. And no one, not his friends, not his fellow workers, not his family, and certainly not Jen’s family, sent one on his behalf. He was on his own. But he knew he would be all right, just as soon as the authorities captured Duane. There would be dirt in his vehicle or blood—Jen’s blood, oh, God—on his clothing, and footprints and fibers and all that forensics crap, and his nightmare would not be over, but it would be less. They simply had to find Duane.
The cops, however, did not seem to be too interested in Duane. They had no evidence that Duane existed, so they said. Although they had not yet recovered Jen’s cell phone (they were searching the nature preserve downstate thoroughly, though), there were no calls to or from it during its active history except from home or from identified friends or businesses that were not suspicious. No one had seen this mysterious Duane. Jen had not confided to her best friend, Barb, that she had taken a lover.
“But, the computer!” shouted Michael, bone weary from grief and from lack of sleep. “She was having online sex with him, I know it.” And the police, they promised that their technical guys were checking out the computer, but then the conversation would turn to other things for hour after hour. Let’s talk a bit more about your love life, your temper, what crime shows you watch on TV, why you left work early that Friday, why no one saw you that weekend, and why there were bleached-out blood stains on the door and wall near the garage. Let’s go over just one more time your trips to the nature preserve—it was highlighted on a map in your car—and the fight the two of you had that Friday afternoon and the scratch on your cheek, the one you are trying to cover up with that pathetic beard.
During the rest of the day, things got progressively worse for Michael, if that could be imagined. The police were testing DNA found under Jen’s fingernails to see if it matched his, on the presumption that she had attempted to fend off her attacker. After all, the mess in the house clearly suggested that there had been some kind of struggle. And the stench of bleach suggested he had tried to cover up his crime.
He had just a few moments of elation when the police finally admitted to him that they had recovered sexually explicit instant messages on his home computer between sexybride186 and badboy4452. But then the detectives said the forensic techs had traced the source of badboy’s raunchy chat to Jen’s (although they kept calling it his) laptop computer and demanded that Michael tell them where he had disposed of it.
It made no sense. Jen wasn’t talking dirty to him. It was Duane. He knew it was Duane. But he merely mumbled his insistence that the laptop was Jen’s and he didn’t know where it was.
It was late the next evening, with no respite for sleep for Michael, aside from fitful dozing in the straight-backed chair he was handcuffed to in the chilly interrogation room, when Michael first learned that Jen was seven weeks pregnant when she was killed. Susan Vick had told the rest of the world four hours earlier, just ten seconds before the first time she referred to Michael as a “depraved baby killer” instead of her usual reference to him as “the violent-tempered estranged husband” of the angelic Jen. But, of course, Michael didn’t know that until later. Instead of receiving what would, at one time just weeks ago, have been the happiest news of his entire life from his loving wife, or a doctor, or even a social worker at the police station, Michael found out that Jen was pregnant when the detective that had been hounding him in shifts for almost thirty hours announced that a second count of murder was being added to his indictment.
And by that time, Michael was so weary, so beaten down, so anguished and afraid that he prayed, he prayed to the God of the church where he had been married, that the baby carried in his wife’s womb wasn’t his, that it was Duane’s. He prayed that his dead wife was having her lover’s baby, because he needed the police—the friendly, neighborhood, suburban cops that had been so helpful to him in getting a stop sign installed at the end of their block in their homey little suburban subdivision—to test the DNA and find that the child wasn’t his.
It was Duane’s. It had to be Duane’s.
Michael tried to think back on the timing, on the last times he and Jen had made love, but he was too tired and it was too painful to remember.
He finally stopped answering questions and asked for a lawyer, not because he had wised up about his legal predic
ament, but because he just wanted the endless interrogation to stop and it seemed the only way he could make that happen. He got a nebbishy public defender who treated him with distaste and told him to say nothing and wait for the evidence to come in, then they would talk about strategy. So Michael sat in his cell, where no visitors came to call, and watched his wife’s funeral on television and listened to all of their friends say wonderful things about her and say nothing about him in their eulogies.
And, then, a week later, the DNA analyses came in, and it was Michael’s skin under Jen’s fingernails and Michael’s son in her womb, and Michael cried for his unborn son and for his family and for the life they could have had. And while the questions still raged through his mind about how and why Duane had ruined his life, he no longer raged out loud. Instead, he merely sat mute as the questions, the images, whirled through his mind. It didn’t really matter anymore. Nothing mattered anymore. If he couldn’t find Duane, couldn’t kill Duane, there was no point to his existence.
The police and the prosecutor, of course, kept pressing for a confession. “We’ll take the needle off the table,” they said, as if confessing to Duane’s crime in order to secure the living hell of a life in a cell without friends or family, his every thought preoccupied with the man who killed his wife and child being at large in the world, hurting others, was a desirable thing. So, he never confessed and there was a trial.
At first, the press was excited about the prospect of a trial, but when it became apparent that the public defender was just going through the motions, that Michael was just going to sit there, stony faced and silent, as the forensic evidence was presented, they raced on to the next circus, a missing Hispanic girl in Pensacola.
The public defender wasn’t a hack—or at least he didn’t want to look like a hack—so he brought up the issue of the mysterious Duane and the fact that there were no witnesses to the actual crime. But the prosecutor just smiled and kept referring to Duane as the “phantom lover” and “imaginary killer” and insinuating that it was all in Michael’s mind, that Michael was Duane and that he had killed his beautiful Jen.
At times the prosecutor was so convincing that Michael had doubts, himself. Why was Michael so weary when he had woken up on the couch during the news, after sleeping for hours? Could he have possibly killed Jen and forgotten, blocking out the violent rage of a hideous, jealous alter ego? Had some twisted part of him done such a thing to his dear, sweet Jen? Was it really all his fault?
But, no, he was the victim.
The guilty verdict on both counts was no surprise. Neither was the sentence: death by lethal injection. After all, Michael had not even presented a single character witness at sentencing. None of his friends— Jen’s friends—would agree to testify. Even Uncle Fred begged off, because of his heart, he said. Michael didn’t know the details, but apparently it was broken somehow.
Michael waived his appeals, but even without that tedious nonsense, the process of the criminal justice system was such that more than three years passed between the crime and the scheduled execution date. And now Michael became frantic. It wasn’t that he was afraid of dying—that would be a pleasant release when it came. It was that he wanted to know. He wanted to know who killed Jen. He wanted someone to believe him. He wanted someone to keep looking for Duane, and he knew that once the plunger had been pushed on the needle, Duane would be lost forever. No one would ever open the case again.
And so the questions whirled through his mind, giving him no rest until the final rest.
Michael Gaylon Caufield was pronounced dead by lethal injection at 5:13 p.m. on March 1. There were ten witnesses, as prescribed by law. No one attended the execution on the convicted’s behalf.
Susan Vick did a retrospective of the crime and the trial on her show that evening.
Darren Kraykowski watched Susan Vick’s retrospective on the television in his motel room in Lubbock, Texas, while he played solitaire on a beat-up old laptop. The stupid cow of a reporter thought she knew all about killers and criminals, but Darren knew from real life and death personal experience that the key, the real key to being a serial killer wasn’t just moving from place to place and avoiding falling into discernible patterns and, of course, working hard— working damn hard—to avoid leaving evidence behind. Simple things like being discreet, using a fake name, avoiding her friends, and wearing a rubber. And more clever things, like getting the lonely wife to lend you her cell phone and her laptop for your clandestine sex talk. No, the real key was setting up some poor sap to take the fall. Then no one would ever really come looking for you.
Of course, you couldn’t really blame the cops— especially the safety patrol suburban types. Eight or nine times out of ten when you found a sweet young dead bitch naked in the woods, it was the husband or the live-in boyfriend that did it. The safety patrol played the odds.
Still, it was risky business for Darren. Of course, that was part of the thrill—not just the seduction, not just the sex, not just the glorious pleasure of the killing itself, and not just getting a twofer because the tramp was preggers or a threefer because her numb-nuts hubby took the fall, it was the chance of getting caught.
Even this loser schmuck, Michael, he might have stood a chance if he had called the cops sooner, or gotten a decent lawyer right away, or if his friends had stuck up for him in the interviews with the cops or even at the trial, itself.
This guy, this stupid, clueless, shit of a guy, he was alone even before his wife ran off to get slaughtered by a ruggedly handsome and surprisingly charming psycho serial killer drifter.
Michael never knew it until it was late, too late, but he only had imaginary friends.
BEST FRIENDS FOREVER
Tim Waggoner
“ADDY, is that a stuffed dog on the side of the road?”
Upon hearing his daughter’s words, a cold pit opened up in the middle of Ron Garber’s stomach. He gripped the steering wheel tightly and concentrated on keeping his gaze fixed straight ahead. If he could keep from looking, just for a few more moments, they’d drive past, and he wouldn’t have to see whatever Lily was pointing at. If he didn’t see it, it couldn’t be real, and if wasn’t real, he could forget about it.
“Daddy! Over there! Look!”
Lily was only seven, still young enough to be relegated to the back and be forced to endure the humiliation of a booster seat. But despite her age, she had a mind sharp as a scalpel. She’d know something weird was going on if he refused to look, and she could be tenacious as a pack of pitbulls when she wanted to. She wouldn’t stop asking him why he didn’t look until she got a satisfactory answer. He had no choice. He had to look.
It’s probably nothing, he told himself. Just a toy some kid had been playing with and left outside, temporarily forgotten.
He turned to look in the direction Lily had pointed. On the opposite side of the road, sitting on the gravel shoulder, was a three-foot high stuffed St. Bernard. Brown and white fur, floppy ears, red-felt tongue hanging out, black plastic eyes. Eyes that did more than not reflect light but which seemed to absorb it, feed on it, drink it in and swallow it down.
Ron hadn’t seen the toy dog in . . . in . . . a while, he decided. But he recognized it instantly. His nostrils filled with its musty odor—the result of the animal having been left out in the rain overnight once when Ron was only slightly younger than Lily. Though he continued to hold tightly to the steering wheel, his fingers felt the dog’s artificial fur, and he whispered a single word.
“Biff . . .”
“Let’s stop and get the doggy!” Lily said. “He looks lonely!”
Ron’s foot pressed down on the accelerator, and their Toyota Sierra minivan flashed past the toy.
“Daddy, we can’t just leave him there! Someone might steal him! Or he might get hit by a car!” Lily had always been a sensitive, highly empathetic child, and she sounded honestly worried.
Ron reached up and tilted the rearview mirror so he couldn’t look back and see
Biff.
“No need to worry, honey. Whoever the dog belongs to will come back and get it soon.” He tried to keep his voice as normal sounding as he could, but his words came out edged with tension. He glanced over his shoulder at Lily to gauge her reaction, but his daughter wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at the repositioned rearview mirror and frowning.
“Besides, there’s a lot of traffic, Lily. I’m not sure I’d be able to turn around.” Only partially a lie. Ash Creek was hardly the largest town in Ohio, but it was almost the lunch hour, and a lot of people had left work to pick up something to eat. There were a number of fast-food joints in this part of town, so there were a lot of cars on the road. Not so many that he couldn’t turn their minivan around if he really wanted to, but even as smart as Lily was, he hoped she wouldn’t realize that. She was only seven, after all. Still, before she could say anything, he added, “I have to get to my appointment on time. It’s an important opportunity, and I can’t afford to miss it.”
This wasn’t a lie. True, he’d made sure they’d left early enough to give him a comfortable cushion of extra time to get to Coleman Publishing, but he didn’t want to squander that time by making any unnecessary stops. He glanced at the black portfolio case propped against the passenger seat next to him. Important opportunity was an understatement. It was the break he’d worked so long and hard for.
He’d been at his home office earlier that morning, sitting at his drawing board laying out ads for a newspaper insert for a local grocery, when he’d gotten the call. Kevin Armstrong, art director for Coleman Publishing, had finally gotten around to reviewing the samples Ron had sent several weeks ago. Armstrong had liked what he saw and told Ron that Coleman had been approached by a local church to print a line of Christian-themed children’s books to use in Sunday school. Armstrong thought Ron might be the perfect choice to illustrate them. The gig wouldn’t pay much, and Ron wasn’t religious by any means, but if he landed the job, he’d get his first professional credit illustrating kids’ books. A credit he could use as a calling card when approaching national publishers.