Life Penalty

by Joy Fielding

  What was she doing in here? Gail wondered, suddenly panicking, bolting for the front of the store, desperate for some fresh air. An outstretched arm appeared out of nowhere and blocked her way.

  Gail looked up to see the young man whom she had been following. He was taller than she had been prepared for, possibly over six feet, and very muscular despite being slim.

  “Looking for me?” he asked with a taunting grin. Gail gasped with surprise, focusing her attention on the sign behind him which directed patrons to the back room to see the impressive display of films.

  “Can I take you to the movies?” he sneered.

  Gail forced herself to look at him. His eyes were small and piercing, his skin bad, his nose and mouth thin, his hair uneven and uncombed, neither blond nor brown. He was possibly twenty years old, she estimated.

  He moved closer to her. “Why are you following me?” he asked, his lips moving closer to her face. “Think I can do something for you? Want me to do it for you right behind one of those curtains back there? You name it, lady, I’ll do it.”

  Gail struggled to find her voice, but no words came.

  He pushed his face closer to her, his hand reaching for her and catching the back of her hair.

  “Nice hair,” he said, moving still closer.

  “Please …” she said softly.

  “Please? Oh yeah, please. I like my women nice and polite.”

  Gail’s hands shot wildly into the air, catching both herself and the boy by surprise. He dropped his arm and stepped back, not sure what had happened. In the several seconds it took him to reassess the situation, Gail raced past him, knocking over a row of magazines and watching in horror as pages of bound and gagged women fell lifeless before her eyes. In another instant she was out on the street, straining to catch her breath and praying that the youth would not follow her.

  What could she possibly have been thinking about when she’d followed him inside? Even discarding the odds on finding the killer here, this boy couldn’t be the one she was looking for. He was too tall, too bold, too forward. And he obviously had no trouble dealing with older women. He was not the sort to attack a child, she decided, unless the child was old enough to give him a good fight back. His interests would run to bigger prey. Gail slowly straightened her shoulders and headed shakily toward the Russian Tea Room.

  Carol was on her second glass of wine when she arrived. “Sorry I left you like that,” she apologized before Gail had a chance to speak.

  “I’m sorry too,” Gail said sincerely.

  “Enough said,” Carol decreed, signaling for the waiter. “I’m starving.”

  Carol was as good as her word, saying nothing about the incident to either Jack or Jennifer when they met later at the theater.

  It was a pleasant evening, and everyone agreed when the day was over that they would have to do it again soon.

  FIFTEEN

  After a particularly vicious series of late-night murders along Highway 280 into the New Jersey Turnpike, Gail began to drive there daily. At first, she was curious to pinpoint the exact location of the killings. However, even after her initial foray told her that there would be nothing to mark the spot, no police blockade of the area, no blood left splattered along the roadway to interrupt the tedium of the drive, she continued to cruise there every day.

  The newspapers were frustratingly vague. Highway 280, they reported, west of the New Jersey Turnpike. About the details of the crimes themselves, they had been appallingly explicit.

  The first of the four killings had occurred sometime after midnight on the sixteenth day of September. A young woman, age thirty-two, had been returning from an evening spent visiting friends who lived in New York. She was alone in her car when she was waylaid and forced off the road by another car, which police surmised from the tire tracks found near the scene, had been waiting for just such an opportunity. The woman had been led into the grass at the side of the highway, stripped of her clothing, sexually attacked with a sawed-off shotgun and then murdered.

  Two nights later another car was forced off the road in a similar fashion at just past ten. According to a near-hysterical motorist who was driving by but didn’t come forward until several days later, the middle-aged couple inside were forced out of their car at gunpoint and led into the tall grass by the side of the road. No one but the killer was around to appreciate the depth of their fear, the degree of their horror. The police could comment only on the savagery of their wounds. Both had been sodomized and shot repeatedly; both had been mutilated after death and left by the side of the road for early morning motorists to discover on their way to work. The driver who had witnessed the couple being led to their doom claimed he saw only one gunman, that the man was white and appeared to be young and blond, but it was dark and he had been terrified and couldn’t be sure.

  Police insisted that they were keeping a sharp eye on that stretch of highway, but the following week, there was yet another killing: a young man returning from a late date had been edged off the road and slaughtered in the identical manner of his predecessors. The police, though they voiced strong doubts in print that the killer was likely to strike again in the same spot, were nonetheless advising motorists who had to travel between the two states at night to take 24 or a suitable alternative. The traffic between New Jersey and New York after dark along Highway 280 came to a virtual stop.

  During the day it was as busy as ever. No one thought that the killer, or killers, would strike before dark. Gail was usually on the highway before twelve noon and home by four, giving her enough time to travel back and forth between the two states twice. Occasionally, she pulled over to the side of the road and stopped for several minutes, trying to internalize the terror of being pulled from her car and being forced to walk into the high grass at gunpoint. A walk toward death.

  After a few days she began leaving the car, walking along the side of the busy highway. Passing motorists regarded her strangely, then averted their eyes, not stopping to ask if she might need help. She began concentrating her attention on the tall grass, kicking at it with her feet and wondering if there were snakes.

  She imagined being led into the thick of it, being told to remove her clothes and lie down, disappearing into it as if into an open grave. She felt the coldness of a gun’s metal as it inched up her thigh and forced its way rudely inside her. She heard the squeeze of the trigger, saw her body exploding around her, felt … nothing.

  “Hey, what the hell are you doing out here?”

  Gail turned around sharply at the sound of the man’s voice and saw a late-model silver car with its driver, a balding, middle-aged man, leaning out of the window on the passenger side. “What’s the matter with you?” he continued angrily. “Are you crazy? Don’t you know what happened on this road? It’s goddamn dangerous to leave your car! You gotta take a leak?! Wait till you hit a service station!”

  Gail thanked the man for his concern and retreated timidly to her car. He waited until she was safely inside before resuming his own journey, shaking his head in dismay as he passed her.

  She was getting nowhere, she thought restlessly, her mind not on the traffic at all. Her excursions into Newark and East Orange were proving fruitless. Everyone was guilty, she decided cynically. There were no innocents left.

  She’d certainly never find anybody driving along the highway in the middle of the afternoon. It was an exercise in futility.

  A few days later Gail ceased driving along Highway 280 in the afternoons, and went there at night.

  She waited until the evening that Jack was scheduled to attend one of Lloyd Michener’s group meetings, declining once again to accompany him. Soon after he was gone, she informed Jennifer that she was restless and felt like going to a movie. When Jennifer offered to go with her, Gail reminded her she had homework, and left the house before Jennifer could protest further.

  The highway at night was a different world. The darkness took away its cloak of civility, making the serpentlike twists and
turns a tangible menace. Even before the murders she had felt this, driving home with Jack and Jennifer after their recent foray into New York. Gail had never been a creature of the night. As a child, she had slept with the bathroom door wide open, its light spilling over into her room. With the daylight, she felt in the middle of things, included, protected, secure. But with the darkness came the isolation. She felt like an observer on an alien planet, and the feeling had always frightened her. Now, along this dark stretch of highway, aware that hers was the only car in sight, that feeling of isolation intensified and overwhelmed her. She fought the urge to turn back, to return to the safety of her well-lit kitchen and wait until morning. And then she remembered (as if she had ever for a moment forgotten) that Cindy had been killed in the bright, friendly light of day, that monsters did not always require the glow from the moon to guide them. Her eyes searched out the darkness at the side of the highway. (“Are there such things as monsters, Mommy?” “Of course not, sweetie.”) She tightened her grip on the wheel and continued full speed ahead.

  And then she saw the other car.

  She was almost at the New York border when she saw it hidden behind some trees and camouflaged by its own dark color. Within seconds it was behind her, edging closer and closer to her rear fender. Gail stepped on the accelerator. The other car stayed right behind. Gail checked her rearview mirror but the darkness and the glare from the other car’s headlights made it impossible for her to get a good look at the men inside. All she could make out was that there were two of them. She saw the other car veer suddenly to the left, out of her sight line. In another instant it pulled up beside her, trying to force her off the road. Gail pressed the gas pedal to the floor but the other car matched her speed, the man in the passenger side waving her frantically over. Then she heard the siren and looked toward the other car with measurable relief. But the man on the passenger side was flashing something in her direction, something that looked like a badge, and she realized that he was responsible for the siren, though the car was unmarked. She took her foot off the gas pedal and slowly reduced her speed, gradually pulling over to the side of the road. The car was right behind her. She heard the sound of car doors slamming and saw two men racing in her direction, guns drawn. It suddenly occurred to her that no one knew precisely how the other victims had been waylaid. What better way, she thought, as the men approached her door, their guns clearly visible, than to pretend to be the police. Everyone stops for a cop. No one questions the authority of a uniform and a badge.

  She felt the gun at her head and stepped wordlessly from the car. No one spoke as the men led her away from the automobile, into the high grass. No other cars drove by to witness her forced striptease, to see her laid bare against the cold earth, one gun at her temple, the other snaking its way up her leg. Perhaps they would just shoot her and spare her the pain of their tortures. She’d been tortured enough, she thought, looking past her window into the worried—even frightened—eyes of the young man at her car door. She pressed the button which automatically lowered her window.

  “Police, ma’am,” he announced, pushing forward his badge. Gail gave it only a cursory glance. There was no way she could differentiate between the real thing and a fake. “Would you mind getting out of the car, ma’am.” It was a command, not a question.

  Gail took a deep breath and released it slowly. Her knees were shaking as her feet touched the ground outside. The grass licked at her ankles. The air was cool, much colder than when she had begun her drive. Fall had definitely settled in, she realized, wondering how it had escaped her notice, amazed by the inexorable progression of time.

  The second man went around to the passenger side of her car, peering into the back seat with a flashlight. “We’d like to take a look inside,” the first man said. Gail nodded. Was this part of the game? Get the victim to relax, make her feel secure before leading her to the slaughter? “Can I see your driver’s license ma’am?” the officer—she decided to think of them as such for the time being—asked politely, if warily. He watched closely as she opened her handbag and took out her wallet, handing it over to him. He declined, pulling his body noticeably back. “Take it out of the wallet,” he told her. Gail smiled. It had been a test. She knew that policemen were required to ask you to remove your license from your wallet before handing it over. If this man had done otherwise, she would have known he was not who he claimed to be. But he obviously knew his part well. She watched him as he studied her license.

  “Everything’s fine in here,” the other officer said. “Would you mind opening your trunk, please?” he asked, and Gail reached inside the car and pulled the keys out of the ignition, then handed them to the young man beside her. He, in turn, threw them over the hood of the car to the other policeman, who walked to the trunk and opened it up. It was empty except for the spare tire.

  The first man now returned to his own car and phoned in her driver’s license number for verification. He came back a few minutes later, seemingly satisfied, his gun now safely in its holster. “Mind telling us just what the hell you’re doing out on this highway alone at this hour?” he demanded with an equal mixture of curiosity and anger.

  “I had a fight with my husband,” Gail lied, saying the first thing that came into her mind. She was still not sure these men were who they claimed to be. She pictured Jack’s face, wondered if he was home yet from the meeting. Would they call him? Tell him where she’d been? “I needed to get out for a while and calm down.”

  “On this highway?” the second man demanded incredulously. She saw that he was the older of the two and swarthy where the younger man was fair.

  “It seemed as good as any,” Gail said, not sure what else she should say.

  “Don’t you read the papers?” the younger officer asked. “Don’t you know what’s been happening along this highway?”

  “We’ve been away,” Gail said. “Florida. We just got back.”

  “You don’t have much of a tan,” the second policeman observed, shining the flashlight in her face.

  “I don’t like to sit out in the sun,” she told him. “It’s not good for you.”

  “Neither is driving alone this late at night down a highway where four people have been murdered in the last two weeks.”

  “I didn’t know,” Gail stammered. “We’ve been away.”

  “Yeah, well, make sure that you don’t do anything stupid like this again,” the older man said. “If you want to cool off, drive around the block, not out on the highway. Better still, don’t fight with your husband. Poor guy’s probably got enough on his mind.”

  Gail thought that was probably true. “Do you have any idea who’s been doing the killing?” she asked.

  “We’re working on it,” came the standard response.

  Gail nodded, feigning assurance. “Can I go now?” she asked timidly. She wondered if Lieutenant Cole would ever find out about tonight, what he would say to her if he did.

  The younger officer handed her back her driver’s license after first rechecking her name. “Look, Mrs. Walton,” he said softly, and for a minute Gail thought he might have recognized her, “we didn’t mean to scare you, but this isn’t a television program where the good guys show up just in time to save the damsel in distress. People are getting killed out here. Innocent people are being butchered. It’s not kiddies’ day at the exhibition. You’re damn lucky it was us and not some lunatic who stopped you.” Gail nodded contritely. “We’ll follow you back till you get off the highway,” he said.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Gail protested.

  “Oh yes we do,” she was told.

  “Thank you,” Gail acknowledged.

  “After you,” the policeman said, and Gail climbed back into her car and started the engine. The police car stayed behind her until she was safely off the highway. She honked her horn in appreciation, which was acknowledged with a wave of a hand.

  Jack was in the living room waiting for her when she walked in the front door.r />
  “How was the movie?” he asked, his voice flat.

  “Not very good,” she told him, avoiding his eyes, heading directly for the stairs.

  “What did you see?”

  Gail stopped on the second step, her mind a blank. “I can’t remember the title,” she said. “One of those dumb car chase films, you know the type. Cars racing down the highway. Cops and robbers.” She stopped. “How was the meeting?” She asked the question to avoid more questions from Jack.

  “Good,” he answered slowly. “I’d like to talk to you about it.”

  “Could it wait till morning?” she asked quickly. “It’s just that I’m so tired now …”

  “Sure,” Jack said immediately, not trying to hide his disappointment.

  “I’m really so exhausted,” she continued, realizing it was true.

  “Good night, Gail,” he said softly.

  Gail managed a weak smile. “Good night,” she told him, and went upstairs to bed.

  SIXTEEN

  On October 1, the body of a twenty-nine-year-old mother of three was discovered buried in a shallow grave just past the outskirts of Livingston. She had been raped, and shot twice through the heart. The woman was the wife of a local real estate tycoon. The newspapers were suddenly filled with photographs of the attractive young woman and her now grieving family.

  “Do you think there’s any connection?” Gail asked Lieutenant Cole when she was finally able to reach him two days later.

  “No,” he said firmly.