by Ed Helenski
The toxicology was pretty extensive. I guess when drugs are suspected as the cause of death they do a thorough screening to make sure they are not missing anything. It was pretty much as Reggie had told me. Cocaine levels were off the chart. There were some traces of THC as well, but nothing more than I might have expected. I wasn’t sure what some of this stuff was, but each item listed the level found, and then a range that I assumed were the normal parameters. Most of the pages were just lined with zeros. The girl had a trace of alcohol, some ibuprofen, and that was it. Nothing more. I had wondered if maybe there would be some signs of barbiturates, or chloral hydrate, or anything that might have been used to keep her docile, but there was nothing. They had even screened for normal prescription drugs. Nothing there either. I saw insulin listed, and was reminded of a case where a person had a heart attack, and it was listed as natural, but turned out to be a massive injection of insulin that had brought it on. Not the case here though. There was no insulin present. Something tugged at me about that, but I couldn’t focus the thought.
I went through the rest of the medical report. Cause of death was listed as congestive heart failure. No signs of restraint or violence. Evidence of sexual intercourse, but not of any force. Pregnancy test was negative. One thing struck my eye. The girl was not completely healthy. She had the clap. “Evidence of discharge and infection typical of Chlamydia. Culture bears out diagnosis.” It occurred to me that this piece of information might be useful. I would have to see if Reggie had investigated this. Could he find out who had Chlamydia in town? Was that legal? If they found someone else with it, that wouldn’t be entirely conclusive, but it would be worth checking out. At the very least it would confirm that the girl was sexually active; at the most, it would point to something much more sinister.
I began to spin a scenario in my mind, one that would cover all the known facts, but differ in conclusions from the official report. Suppose someone, a person who had in the past developed a taste for, well, for whatever he did with young girls. And suppose he had also developed a taste for killing. And let’s suppose that he was able to keep his urges in check, or sublimate them somehow, for long periods of time.
Now let’s suppose that when he could no longer contain himself, he was still a very prudent person. And that when the time came he selected his victims with great care. Drifters, runaways, girls from the wrong places, in the wrong places. Girls that would be hard to pin down, hard to say for sure if they were missing because of foul play or just missing on their own accord.
Elmer’s list, it was Reggie’s list now, was probably not complete. My guess was that there were some other names that belonged on it, names that would fill in some of the gaps. I dug it out and looked at it again. September of 1991. August 1992. March 1993. May 1994. July 1996. August 1999. The pattern didn’t seem complete to me. There was an end of summer feel to what started things, then March breaks it up. Then May, a spring again. Then the big gap of two years and the bigger one of three. It had been my understanding from the reading and study I had done about serial killers that they rarely stopped on their own. That the pace of things almost always accelerated, not decelerated. And that when sexual power was the motive, control was hard for them to come by.
All of which led me to suppose that this person had not skipped those years. And had perhaps not contained himself to one killing a year. The third one on the list, the one from March, looked like the rate was increasing. So maybe Elmer didn’t find all the missing persons out. Maybe there were runaways from lots further away. Maybe our killer went on trips sometimes, and the only thing that got rarer was the frequency with which he killed at home.
All of that was possible, but how did Sioban fit into it? Let’s suppose that he learned long ago how to control his victims. Maybe ALL of them had come with him willingly. Maybe things only got bad later. Maybe they never got bad until the end. If Sioban is a victim, then it’s clear there was no torture, no bizarre ritual, nothing that left a mark. There was sexual intercourse, but that seemed to be it. So why kill the girls if they were willing participants? And how did he kill them? If I was right, Sioban was the first victim to be found. The first clue. And it was left out on purpose, so maybe our man wanted to be caught. Or maybe he just thought he was so good no one would ever figure it out. By the looks of the police reports he would be right.
And how did he kill her? Could it have been an accident? Could she have gotten there by herself? I didn’t think so. I thought maybe it went something like this. He had her wherever he kept the girls, and he kept them for a fairly long while. Maybe that was what excited him, the imprisoning. But he kept them well enough that they didn’t injure themselves trying to escape, or restrain them physically. This was assuming Sioban was of a type. So how did he keep them? Probably locked up, but mostly it was drugs. Keep them high enough and they would be no bother. Especially something like coke. Get ‘em seriously strung out on it and they would do most anything for more. So why kill them?
I thought, in the end, it was power that he craved. The power of imprisonment made him feel good. The power of domination, of sex, using the drugs, made him potent. And the power of life and death, that made him God. And if my hunch was right, it wasn’t his power to kill that made him feel that way. It was much worse. It was his power to get the girls to do it themselves. A sort of local Jim Jones. I think he either gave them drugs with something in it, something the tox report didn’t find, or maybe just gave them ALL they wanted, and they were willing to do it till their heart’s burst.
It was a sick, sad scenario. It was also a possible one. There was no strong evidence for any of it, but there was nothing in the evidence to contradict it, either. I couldn’t very well go to Reggie and say, this is what happened and you guys need to get back on this case. But I could point him to the Chlamydia and let him go from there. It might open up some new possibilities.
I did tell Mags what I thought that night. She listened without speaking, and I couldn’t tell at first if she just thought I was crazy or if she was disgusted with me for being able to think such things.
“I hate the very idea that this could be true.” She finally said, looking not so much disgusted as weary, “But I never did think Sioban just wandered around for a couple weeks and then fell over dead. You gonna tell Reggie about your ideas?”
I shook my head. “Not all of them, not yet anyway. But I will get him going on the STD thing, might lead somewhere.”
“Maybe you are right. I love you, and I see a million holes in your idea. But still, I don’t see as many holes as I do in the police explanation.” That made me feel better. And there was something nice about having someone believe in you, even if it was about something you would prefer to be wrong about.
On Thursday, Meg came in after school, very excited. She was hot on the heels of a scoop, she was certain of it. Apparently her taste for scoops hadn’t been diminished by the revelations of her last investigation. I asked her to tell me all about it.
She flopped down in the chair opposite me, and I was struck with her youth. She was chewing bubble gum, and the scent was carried on a cloud of air from her movement. I had been thinking of her as a rookie reporter, when I should have been thinking of her as a little girl. Well, not completely little, it looked like she was starting to enter the world of teendom, but still a child.
“I think maybe it’s some homeless person or something, but it could be an animal, I guess. Maybe a bear, wouldn’t that be cool?”
I chuckled. Despite the horrible thoughts I had about the missing girls, Meg still managed to make me laugh. “Slow down. Now what might be an animal?”
“The bogeyman” she said, matter of factly. “Or at least that’s what they are calling it. It was Autumn Jacobs who saw it first. That was before she moved. Then some of the other kids said they saw it too. I talked to Janice Shumway. She said she was out in the fields behind Langley when she saw it. It think some of the older girls go back there to smoke and may
be some other stuff. Anyway I heard her and her friends talking about it outside the Pizza Parlor, so I waited till she was alone and asked her about it. She told me that they saw it. Or thought they did.”
“Saw what exactly?” I asked, deciding to humor her in this quest.
“Well, they were out there on Monday. Everyone had heard about what Autumn had seen. Lots of kids were kind of going and looking out that way. Autumn saw it in the woods off Cleveland.” Meg looked down for a moment. “The woods where they found…her. Anyway she says she saw a bogeyman, all big and hairy, running around in the woods. So these girls went out there Monday night. They were probably out behind the old penny candy store.”
The old penny candy store was just around the corner on Cleveland. It had been vacant for years, and behind it was essentially behind my house.
“They heard a kind of yell. It was real creepy, that’s what Janice said. Then they heard all this thrashing around. You know, way out across the field in that line of bushes at the edge of the woods?”
I nodded. It marked the end of this particular field. Beyond the line of woods were more fields. It was out there that a lot of the old collapsed farmhouses were, the ones I had connected with the tale Eustice Hurley had told me. That was a dangerous area for kids to play in, but it seemed kids always played in dangerous areas.
“Well, out there in the bushes they saw something moving. They were all scared and screaming, but they were sure someone or something was watching them. They ran away of course, but I think there really is something out there.”
“Has anyone else seen anything?” I asked her, trying to be the reporter’s mentor and keep a strait face.
“Well, you know how it is. Everyone claims it was their friend or something who saw it. Tons of stories, nothing firsthand. The rumors are that its all hairy, that it yells and chases kids, that it smells horrible, and that it lives in a cave out there.”
I rubbed my chin as I thought. “There are no caves out that way. Not that I ever heard of anyway. There are a lot of old foundations and some cellar holes. It would be better if kids are not out there running around. You gonna write something about this?”
She nodded. “I can’t find anything else out. I think that I should write about it as a rumor, not saying anything about whether there really is something or not, just about how this is a story that is going around.”
I thought about that. “Maybe expand that idea a little, and make it about rumors in general. How they might get started, how they spread and embellish. Use this one as a case study.”
She seemed to like the phrase. “A case study. Yeah, that would be cool. Thanks Mr. Tharon.” She bounded off the chair and towards the front door. When she got there she stopped and turned around. “You know something, Mr. Tharon?”
“What’s that, Meg?”
“I like investigating this kind of bogeyman a lot better.” She smiled and I saw both the joy of a child and the sadness of an adult there. Then she was gone.
I did some visiting on Friday. I stopped in at Cora Gorley’s to see how she was. My dad’s house looked sad and forlorn, with a for sale sign sitting cockeyed in the small patch of lawn. Cora let me into her living room and then went and brewed some coffee for us. When she brought it back she sat down next to me on the divan and asked what brought me there.
“Well. Thanks for the coffee, Cora. I guess I just…just wanted to know how you were doing. Since Dad died, I haven’t really been to see you, and I know you and he were so close. And I wanted to thank you for all the help during that week, I couldn’t have done it without you.”
“You are very welcome, Tom.” She looked somehow smaller than when last we had met, smaller and older. Her hands sat twisting in her lap as if they didn’t know what to do, and the color of her skin was more the grey of age than the pink of vigor. I realized that my Dad’s passing had taken a greater toll on her than I had imagined.
“Are you doing all right these days?” I asked her, trying not to sound like I was concerned by anything specific.
“Oh, I have my aches and pains, but I am fine. Thank you for asking. I wanted to talk to you soon, anyway. I wanted to let you know I am leaving The Corners.” She looked almost furtive as she said it. I was surprised, she had been here all her life and I never expected to hear that she was leaving. Now that I did, I registered the stack of boxes by the door, and the ones lining the hall towards the kitchen. She was packing. “I am going to live with my niece in San Antonio.” She laughed. “Pretty strange huh? A Texan, after all these years as a Yankee. Oh well, it will be nice to have some family around.”
I nodded and sipped my coffee. Cora leaving. Yet another person taking flight. The flood. The trickle and the flood. “Well, I am really surprised. But I am sure you will be very happy there.”
She looked at me, and for a moment it seemed tears were going to well up in those dry, old lady eyes. “I don’t know about that. But when a person gets to be my age, well, there is less of a desire to be around in…in interesting times. You know that is an old Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times’” She leaned a little closer to me. “These are interesting times in The Corners, Tom. You might want to think about that yourself. Lot of folks have been lately.”
I sat silently, thinking about what she said. It was true. The town had undergone a sea change, and now it didn’t seem very desirable, at least not to most folks. Normally when a town like this empties out, it’s because the main employer goes under. But the quarry and the furniture plant had not had any layoffs, business was good.
Cora looked closely at me. “Is there something particular on your mind, Tom?”
I shook my head. “No. Just don’t like the idea of going just yet. There are things I still…” I trailed off. Just what did I mean? “Things I still want to find out” I concluded.
“Curiosity killed the cat. There are lots of things best left not known. What you know is impossible to unknow, just ask any old person.” She chuckled a dry, almost dusty laugh. It was the sort of laugh that inspired the invention of the word rueful. Then she turned serious. “This town was built at a place that wasn’t right. I know you won’t believe me, but it’s true. There’s a place down a little from here, if you followed Cleveland out past the Tario farm. There’s a well out there, a spring really. Lots of folks over the years wanted to use that water. But it was never any good. Tasted bad for one. Livestock you gave it to turned up sick for another. Just being near it makes a person feel creepy.” Her voice had taken on a dreamy, faraway tone. Her eyes were unfocussed. It was as if she were recalling some personal event. Then she snapped back to the present. Saw the look on my face. Shrugged and began gathering the coffee cups and saucers. Old folks have their quirks.
I left to go see Reggie and was glad to be back outside. Cora had gotten a little too old, I guessed, and it was probably for the best that she go stay with family. I was able to dismiss her vague warnings as just an elderly person’s foolishness. I had been hearing too many strange things from too many places. I was full.
Reggie wasn’t in his office, so I took a walk over to his house. He answered the door when I knocked. He was out of uniform. I was surprised to see him looking so…so casual I guess is the word. He invited me into his kitchen. I had not been in his house since the day we met. Everything was pretty much the same except there was no aroma of chili permeating the house.
“What can I do for you, Tom?” he asked me as he lit a cigarette. The ashtray on the table was overflowing with butts. I suspected Reggie was smoking even more than usual.
“Well, I brought back the reports you loaned me. And I had a question for you.”
He sighed and sat on the back edge of one of the tattered vinyl chairs. It didn’t look up to the task of holding his weight but somehow held. “Shoot”
“Did you notice that Sioban had Chlamydia?”
He took a deep drag and exhaled slowly. “Yeah, I guess I did. Didn’t think much of it, though. Kind
a figures with a girl like that.”
I wasn’t exactly thrilled with his response, but plunged ahead anyway. “Did you by any chance try and find out if anyone else was infected in town?”
He shook his head. “Not really any legal way to do that. Well, I suppose I could try and get a prosecutor to subpoena Dr. Tastler’s files. Then we could get a look. Didn’t seem worthwhile, considering the result.”
I had hoped it would be easier than that. Still, if there was no official investigation, maybe there could be an unofficial one. “Did you ever just ask Josh? Unofficially, of course?”
He ground out his cigarette in the mound already there. I wondered how it didn’t start a fire. “No. But I suppose that’s what you want me to do.”
I nodded. “It’s just a hunch I have. I don’t think the official version will wash Reggie. And you know it, too. Sioban didn’t just wander around for all that time. She was with someone, maybe not entirely of her own free will. It’s up to us to find that out. No one else will.”
“You are right about that last part, and that’s a fact.” He lit another smoke. “Lord, I’m tired. Tired of this place. Truth is I’m thinking about moving on.”
“You and the rest of the town, it seems”.
“Yup. But I guess I had better not leave any loose ends before I do. Times like this especially, a town needs someone looking out. And I guess I’m elected. No pun intended.”
He promised to let me know if he found anything interesting about Sioban. I made my way back down to the office to knock out the rest of the copy for the week. I wanted the whole weekend with Mags. We could maybe go somewhere, get out of the town for a while. Like everyone else.