The papers speculated that the SP Killer met the girls on the internet. All the girls had been doing internet dating, or hanging about in chat-rooms. But so far no one had traced the murderer that way. They'd tried everything to catch him. He was careful. He tortured them to death. But he was careful.
It wasn't careful, though, to keep the pictures. But then, all these people—it was hard to even think the words serial killer—almost all of them kept trophies. She'd seen a show about it on CourtTV. Roy had watched with her. He'd watched silently, closely. Annoyed when she ventured a comment.
"Tell Dad,” Brandon said, looking into the air.
Cherie and her mother looked at Brandon. Brandon was trying to say that Dad would be proud of Cherie, Judith supposed.
Cherie snorted. She knew better. Judith said, “I sure will tell him. We'll both be there on opening night."
She should go to the police right now. He was out tonight. He was supposed to be bowling. He did take a bowling bag with him. She'd never met the guys he bowled with. They'd never gotten a phone message from them on the answering machine.
He was out there right now, with that bag.
"And it's just so cool,” Cherie went on, crossing the gap in her happiness, the ‘tell Dad’ lacuna. “I've got two songs with Nathan, we have to rehearse together a lot—"
Roy had tried to talk to Judith, once, about two years ago. Maybe he had been trying to tell her about his compulsions. Do you ever feel, Judith, like you're already dead in your coffin and you're just remembering your life? You're laying in your coffin rotting and your ghost is stuck in there and whatever seems like it's happening to you now is just that dead person remembering this day. So you have to find some way to get out of the coffin, you might have to be real destructive to get out...
No, she'd said. I can't really imagine that. She hadn't encouraged him to go on. She'd been terrified by this sudden confidence, the unmitigated blackness of this disclosure.
She should have drawn him out, she saw now. This was her fault.
"And Nathan loves to do choreography—are you listening, Mom?"
"Yes! Yes I am. So you'll be dancing with Nathan as part of the show?"
He would tie them up and slowly strangle them, very slowly, the coroner had said. Making those red and brown marks on their necks, like the ones he'd painted on the miniature plastic people. Very slowly.
She had slept beside him for years.
"Mom? You are totally spacing on me. I'm gonna go call Lina anyway, she doesn't know, she's going to freak!"
She was sure there was a picture in every one of the plastic models, even the ones she hadn't opened up.
He was out right now with his bag.
She should call the police. She could call them right now.
Roy didn't say much when Judith told him she had decided she was going to sleep in her sewing room, “for awhile.” She would never be able to sleep beside him again.
He accepted her explanation about the hot flushes making her thrash around. Not wanting to disturb him. “Whatever, whatever,” he said, taking a new Revelle model, some kind of dragster, out of a paper bag. “I'm going to work on this model.” He folded the paper bag, put it carefully in the little kitchen closet he kept folded paper bags in, then carried the model out back, and set up his ladder.
She could hear him crossing the roof over the deck, and going into his attic room. He hadn't taken the bowling bag with him. He had stashed it somewhere else. He must have the digital camera in his coat. They were small devices.
She went to her sewing room, and pulled out the bed in the compact sofa. The wind was still pushing at the house, outside. The walls creaked with it.
Judith locked the door, and lay on the sofa bed, stretched out, with just the small lamp beside her sewing machine turned on. She lay on her back, looking at the ceiling, wanting a drink so badly. She didn't care about getting started drinking again, but she needed to think with clarity now. She couldn't afford to be drunk.
Had he killed someone tonight? Was he printing the murdered girl's picture now?
Judith remembered watching her father die, on the frozen lake, in Minnesota. It had been dusk, in early March. She'd been ten years old. Her father had been out on the lake, trying to fish through a hole in the ice with one of his friends. They'd had too much beer and they'd started pushing each other, laughing and floundering around, and the ice had broken. Only her daddy had fallen through.
Emergency rescue had been sent for and people tried different things to get him out. Her mother had kept her back from the lake but she'd climbed a tree to see what was happening to her daddy and from up above she could see the blurry outline of a man thrashing around under the ice, drifting too far away from the hole he'd fallen through. People were yelling at him, “Don't use up your strength trying to crack the ice, Jim! Don't do that, just tread water! Tread water and wait, you'll make it, we'll get you out in a minute, we're gonna cut through! Just hold on—don't do that, Jim!"
But Dad panicked and couldn't keep himself from trying to break through the ice. He kept trying to hammer at it but his efforts were carrying him farther and farther from the hole and he was getting more and more exhausted and then he sank down, out of sight, and they didn't get his body out for a couple of days...
Judith could hear her daughter in her bedroom, muffled through the wall so she couldn't make out what she was saying. She was on her cellphone to one of her friends, telling them about being in the show; telling them every detail. The happiness was apparent in her voice, even if the words weren't coming through to Judith.
Most of the time, Cherie was morose. Now she was going to be happy, at least for a while. She had a part in a musical at school, and the guy she wanted to get back together with was in the play, too. She might never be happier in life.
If Judith turned her husband in, that would end. Everything good in Cherie's life would end, maybe forever.
Brandon was getting better. Measurably, anyhow. He had a really good special ed teacher who spoke warmly of him.
If she'd tolerated Barry's affair, it probably would've run its course, and they'd still be together.
But this wasn't like finding out about an affair. This was finding out your husband was a monster. She had to stop him. She had to turn him in.
Of course, with her husband in the papers and on the TV news, she would probably have to move away. Living here, with everyone knowing her husband was the SP Killer—unbearable. They'd have to start someplace else. If they were allowed to, by the police. They'd want her around to testify.
They'd have to sell the house to pay for lawyers. Roy would never accept a public defender. She paid for Brandon's teachers, now. The public schools had done so little for him. Brandon would lose that.
The police might not arrest Roy instantly. He might take revenge on her. He might kill her and Cherie and Brandon. Especially Cherie. She wasn't his daughter. He'd probably thought about killing her. But if he'd killed her, the police would look at him too closely. If she looked like she was going to turn him in, he'd have nothing to lose. He might kill them all.
And the people. “She married the SP Killer. She had to have known. Some way you'd have to know. How could you not know? Come on. She knew. She knew!"
She loved being a substitute teacher. That would end. The principal would be apologetic, but he'd let her go. "The parents get freaked out, Judith. You understand."
She'd never be hired to teach again.
She ought to go to the police. Already someone more might've died because she'd delayed. If she knew and didn't tell, she was in complicity, whether the police found out about her knowing, or not. It was moral complicity. She was helping him kill those girls. There was a greater good. She had to go to the police.
A thump! from the roof. The palm tree had thrown another clublike frond at her.
If she turned Roy in, Cherie would know that her stepdad was the SP Killer and she'd always have to live with that and i
t would ruin Cherie's life. There was no telling what effect it could have on Brandon. How could it be good?
What else could she do? She imagined herself killing Roy—putting a pillow over his mouth as he slept. Putting all her weight on his face.
She wouldn't mind that, not at all. If she thought it would work. But she wouldn't be any good at killing him. He'd wake up and he'd grab her and he'd realize she knew and he'd kill her and then maybe Cherie and Brandon.
So she had to go to the police.
Cherie's voice was still coming through the wall from her bedroom. It was wordless, and happy. Like a song hummed instead of sung, by someone happy to be alive.
Judith's father had thrashed and struggled and tried to break out of the ice, and the cold water had borne him down and they'd found him face down, floating in a layer of muck near the bottom.
He should have just gone on treading water till they'd gotten him out.
She could do that. She could tread water. She could tread water until some chance came to get out of the frozen lake. Cherie could be happy until then; Brandon could go on as he was, until then. Maybe Roy would stop killing. He might. Sometimes they did. She'd read that. They stopped eventually.
She wasn't murdering those girls. Roy was doing it. He was the one doing it. And after all most of these girls were either prostitutes or slutty girls he'd picked up on the internet. They shouldn't be meeting men on the internet.
If a few more had to die, that had to be all right. She had to let it happen. She had to keep treading water. The lake was cold, and dark.
It was him. Not her. It wasn't her doing. She could sleep in the sewing room.
Copyright © 2007 John Shirley
[Back to Table of Contents]
Crimewave 9: Transgressions was printed properly by the craftsmen of Cambridge University Press. Original high quality fiction will return in Crimewave 10. Secure your copy now by subscribing. Each issue is much bigger than it ought to be, making a four-issue subscription (22 pounds UK * 26 pounds Europe * 30 pounds RoW) even greater value. You can subscribe by post with a cheque/PO payable to TTA Press, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs cb6 2lb, UK; securely online at www.ttapress.com/onlinestore1.html; or by PayPal to TTA Press. Remember: make no mistake, it's still a jaguar.
* * *
Visit www.ttapress.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.
Transgressions Page 19