The Serial Killer's Wife

by Robert Swartwood

  Elizabeth was conscious of Todd watching her from the passenger seat, his body tense. “Doing what back there?”

  “Don’t be coy. If you didn’t know what I was talking about, you wouldn’t be back on the road like you are now.”

  “You didn’t have to kill them.”

  “You’re right, I didn’t have to. But you forced my hand.”

  “How?”

  “You went there and got them involved. I suppose when I told you no police, I thought you would be smart enough to know that meant no anybody.”

  “They were no threat to you.”

  “But they were. At first I didn’t understand why you had gone there, but after some quick research, it all made sense. Donovan Riley wasn’t the most upright citizen, as you no doubt already know.”

  “That was still no reason to kill him.”

  “What about those hackers? What purpose were they going to serve?” When she didn’t answer, Cain said, “Exactly. If you don’t want to play our little game fairly, then there is going to be consequences.”

  “I want to talk to my son.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. You want those trophies, I want to hear my son’s voice.”

  “You want to hear his voice? Okay, then. Listen.”

  There was a pause, and then she heard movement, the sound of tape ripping away from skin. She heard Matthew but just barely, his voice faint, only it quickly grew stronger as he began to scream.

  “No!” she shouted. “Don’t!”

  Todd was visibly shaking beside her, his eyes wide.

  Matthew’s screaming went on for only a few more seconds but to Elizabeth it felt like days. Then the screaming suddenly ceased, and Cain spoke again.

  “There, you wanted to hear your son, you heard him.”

  “You bastard.”

  “I don’t know what kind of game you think you’re playing here, Elizabeth, but it’s not going to work. I will teach you not to fuck with me.”

  She hesitated, then said, “Clarence, please don’t do this.”

  “Shut up! You say one more word and I will make your son scream again.”

  Elizabeth bit her lip hard enough to draw blood. Tears had begun to well in her eyes, blurring the highway in front of her.

  “I’m beginning to think I’m giving you too much leeway. I thought one hundred hours was more than kind, but it seems you have decided to take advantage of my generosity.”

  There was another pause, this one much longer, Elizabeth at first thinking that either Cain had disconnected or else she had lost the signal. She heard a beep in her ear, pulled the phone away, and saw there was a new text message.

  “There,” Cain said. “That should motivate you a little more, don’t you think?”

  Then he did disconnect and Elizabeth immediately clicked on the icon to show her the picture.

  Her foot instantly lifted from the gas pedal. Her hand fell away from the steering wheel. Her body was weightless and she was just sitting there, staring at the image on the screen.

  “Elizabeth!” Todd shouted, grabbing the wheel and trying to keep the car in their lane.

  Elizabeth barely paid any attention. Her entire focus was now on the image on the BlackBerry’s screen: her son still tied to that bed, still with the tape over his mouth and the explosive collar around his neck, the bright red digits above his head now reading 70:00:00.

  CHAPTER 29

  BY THE TIME they passed over the Pennsylvania state line it was almost noon. Todd was driving now, Elizabeth in the passenger seat paging through the two books. The sky was clear and the sun was bright and Todd wore his sunglasses. He didn’t have an extra pair for Elizabeth but she didn’t care, keeping her head down and her gaze focused on the pages.

  For the past seven hours they had barely spoken. Three times Elizabeth had cried, both for her son and for what had happened to Van and Harlan. There was a time when those men had been the only family she had, and now because of her they were dead.

  Every hour the BlackBerry dinged, and Elizabeth would glance at the picture and then quickly set the phone back down on the middle console. She felt like one of Pavlov’s dogs—every time she heard that familiar and innocuous ding, she started to tremble.

  At one point she was paging through Never Coming Home: The Edward Piccioni Murders and sighed heavily, shaking her head.

  “What’s wrong?” Todd asked.

  She didn’t answer for the longest time, just staring down at the book. Finally she said, “There’s a chapter in here about how me and Eddie met. Only it’s half right. I’d completely forgotten it was in here.”

  “What part did they get right?”

  “Basically that we were in college. This author, he interviewed some people we went to school with but who weren’t even close friends.”

  “So the author was being a lazy reporter?”

  “Either that or he just didn’t give a shit. To be honest, I can’t blame him. Besides Eddie, who was to say he didn’t have it right? As far as anybody knew, I was gone and never coming back.”

  There was a silence, and then Todd said, “Can I ask you something?”

  “What?”

  “Why did you bring them with you?” Meaning the books.

  She glanced down at the paperback in her lap. The other was on the floor by her feet. The gun—Harlan’s gun—was locked tight in the glove box.

  “Like Van had said, I need to freshen up on my history. I never thought I’d go back home. Not even once did the idea cross my mind. And now we’ll be there in”—she glanced at the dashboard clock—“probably four hours or so, and I don’t remember what happened.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I remember bits and pieces, but for the most part I forced myself to forget. It was just ... a different life. It wasn’t my life anymore. I kept telling myself I had nothing to do with it, that I would never have to think about it again.”

  “So then reading those books—at least, that book—it helps?”

  “It brings some of it back. Most of it’s bullshit, though.”

  “Like what?”

  “Just the stuff they say about Eddie. Like one time in high school he had gotten suspended for pulling some prank. The author says his teachers should have seen the signs then. I mean, he wasn’t the only one. The prank—and the author doesn’t go into detail about what kind of prank it was—it involved two other kids. The author doesn’t even mention them. So apparently Eddie’s teachers shouldn’t have considered the possibility there would someday be trouble with them, just Eddie.”

  Todd had begun his ritual of chewing coffee beans again. He started to place another one in his mouth but paused, his mouth hanging open.

  “What?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “It’s clearly not nothing. What is it?”

  “You mentioned the author talking about warning signs. You never noticed any yourself?”

  She slumped in her own seat, staring now out her window. “No, I didn’t. For the longest time I asked myself how that was possible. I mean, I was with him the most. We shared a bed together. We shared a bank account together. I should have seen the signs, right? I should have noticed something was going on. In a way”—and here she wiped at her eyes, her voice breaking—“in a way, I’m responsible for those women’s deaths. In a way, I killed them, too.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Don’t do what?”

  “Blame yourself. It’s not your fault.”

  “But what if I’d been more observant? What if I noticed the signs right away? I could have done something.”

  “Like what?”

  “I could have called the FBI myself. Had him taken away.”

  Todd started to say something but shook his head instead.

  Elizabeth said, “When these books first came out, I wanted nothing to do with them. But my curiosity got the better of me. Every time I went into a bookstore, I managed to find at least on
e of them. I’d flip through a dozen other books on the shelf before picking up that one. And then I’d read a page and get angry and want to tear the book in half.”

  “Did you read the one by Clarence Applegate?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  Todd hesitated again in speaking.

  “What is it?”

  “Before, after we left the bar and Cain had called, you called him Clarence. What did he say to that?”

  “He didn’t say anything.”

  “So he didn’t deny it?”

  She looked at him. “Go ahead and say it.”

  “You think Cain is really Clarence Applegate.”

  “At this point, I’m not ruling anybody out.”

  “But ... he was a husband of one of the victims, right? I mean, I know he wrote that book and everything, but why would he do this?”

  Elizabeth stared back out her window. She hadn’t been back to this part of the country in five years. She’d forgotten just how beautiful this region was, especially during the fall. The fields and the mountains and the trees with their yellow and orange and red leaves.

  “Do you really want to know about Clarence Applegate?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Then the first thing you need to know—the only thing, really—is the guy is a complete psychopath.”

  CHAPTER 30

  CLARENCE APPLEGATE HADN’T always been a psychopath. Not in his formative years, those in middle school and high school and even college. He was bright, confident, and, despite his unfortunate name, surprisingly good-looking. He married his high school sweetheart, though they had broken up after school and had gone their separate ways during college, both attending different universities. It was by chance that they ran into each other two years after graduation, both having just dealt with recent breakups, that they decided to get together for dinner and reminisce about old times. A year later they married. Three years after that Elizabeth’s husband raped and murdered Clarence’s wife.

  “How do you know all that stuff?” Todd asked. “You know, about high school and college and when they got married.”

  “It was in his book.”

  “He wrote every single detail like that?”

  “Well, yeah. What do you expect? The man’s not only an opportunist, he’s a narcissist.”

  That’s not all Clarence Applegate was. He worked as a loan officer at a prestigious banking firm in Atlanta. That was his day job, but what he really wanted to do—his ultimate goal in life—was to become a published author.

  Ever since middle school he had been writing stories. He kept sending them to magazines—places ranging from The New Yorker to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine to small literary journals that paid only in copies—but nobody would take his work. Mostly all he received were form rejections, though sometimes a generous editor would scratch out a short note with words of encouragement. He knew the road to publication was not an easy one. Some people got lucky. Mostly everyone else had to work their asses off and even then they weren’t guaranteed a spot in what he regarded as Publication Heaven.

  But that didn’t keep Clarence Applegate from dreaming.

  Every morning he would wake up early and write for an hour, and every evening, before bed, he would sit at the computer and write for another hour. He was relentless, and kept more consistent hours than most professional writers (a claim he had no basis to make but one he liked to use to break the ice at social gatherings), but despite all that, he still was never able to sell any of his work.

  And then his wife was murdered, and all media attention was focused on him—Clarence Applegate, Grieving Husband Extraordinaire—and something in the back of his mind (this part Elizabeth admitted was her own speculation) whispered a helpful reminder: All publicity is good publicity.

  Within a week he had come up with a book proposal about life seen through the eyes of a husband whose wife was murdered by a serial killer. A week later he had managed to secure an agent for the project. At first there wasn’t much interest from publishers, but then months later a team of FBI agents arrived one Saturday morning to the home of Edward and Elizabeth Piccioni, and suddenly the idea of Clarence Applegate’s book wasn’t so uninteresting. Within days a small bidding war took place between a handful of publishers for a book not even written yet.

  Todd said, “So how much of his book has to do with your husband?”

  “Very little. Clarence mostly talks about himself, giving anecdotes from high school and college, and how his dream was to become a writer. About halfway through he actually starts talking about the murder. How his wife was away on a business trip. How she didn’t call him one night and when he called her she didn’t answer and he got worried. After a day when he didn’t hear anything he became extremely worried and started making calls. Eventually he got the police involved.”

  “So what,” Todd said, “he also thought of himself as a detective?”

  “The book makes you think that. He goes into a lot of detail about the initial investigation. But I remember reading online from some of the real detectives involved how he played a very minor role. Actually, if I remember this right, one of the detectives said Clarence acted more like an annoying gnat than anything else.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “How you become involved. I mean, to the point where he would do ... this.”

  Elizabeth produced a mirthless grin. “This is the part of the story where the psychopathic nature of Clarence Applegate really begins to shine.”

  As expected, once the FBI had come for Edward Piccioni, the media began its circus. This was when Clarence’s agent began shopping around the proposal again. Clarence by that point began studying serial killers. He knew not all of them had to have nicknames—in fact, the only ones who seemed to have nicknames were those never captured—but he thought the public loved a good villain, one with a good moniker, and so he came up with The Widower Maker.

  It wasn’t a good nickname. Many thought it was stupid. But Clarence fought to have it brought into the mainstream. He argued that Edward Piccioni had raped and killed only young married women. And by doing that, he left only widowers behind—children, too, but as he wasn’t a father he didn’t seem to harp on that aspect.

  This was just days after Eddie’s arrest. Clarence had already started his own website, had created a sort of following. Some of his short stories—the ones he considered his best—he posted on the site for people to read. Again, any publicity was good publicity.

  And then Elizabeth Piccioni and her son disappeared, and all eyes, for some reason, turned toward Clarence Applegate. It did not take him long to come up with the theory, no matter how outrageous it was. Clarence may not have been a very good writer, but he certainly knew the market, understood what sold, and commercial success—the very thing he craved—mostly hinged on the idea of sensationalism. That’s what got people going, what made them start frothing at the mouth, and so he was the very first to put it out there on his website:

  Elizabeth Piccioni was obviously her husband’s partner in murder.

  Todd shifted in his seat. “And people went with it, just like that?”

  They were on the Pennsylvania Turnpike now, about two hours away from Harrisburg.

  Elizabeth said, “What do you expect? Most people are sheep.”

  Whether or not Clarence Applegate actually believed his claim to be true, nobody could say for sure, but he suddenly made it a priority. He created another website, one called Where In The World Is Elizabeth Piccioni, and he offered a reward for any information leading to her capture. The police and FBI did not quite agree with the idea, though they did note they were very interested in getting in contact with Elizabeth. Was she a person of interest? They never said one way or another, but they did acknowledge that she was a witness.

  Very quickly Clarence Applegate began to understand the media. He learned that the more outrageous he became, the more publicit
y was pushed his way. He began making more claims about Elizabeth. How she was really the brains behind the whole killing operation (that’s what he called it, too: the killing operation). How if anything, Edward Piccioni was a helpless puppet in Elizabeth’s diabolical game of murder (again, that’s how he put it: diabolical game of murder). What’s more, he claimed their newly born son was a demon seed, that Edward and Elizabeth’s plan was to groom him into the family business to become the ultimate serial killer.

  It was at that point the media began distancing themselves from Clarence Applegate. His fifteen minutes of fame was finished, as far as anyone was concerned. But he still had the book contract and he still had his websites and he still had his stories. And as the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, people began to forget all about Elizabeth Piccioni.

  But not Clarence.

  He posted on his website how he was making it his mission to see that the evil bitch (again, his phrase) be brought to justice. He speculated on the different ways Elizabeth was raising her son to become another serial killer. He even played with the idea that Elizabeth fed her son human blood.

  Elizabeth—at this point already living on the third floor of Riley’s Pub—began seeing the awful things Clarence Applegate was posting about her and her son. Having just run away from a life where her husband had raped and murdered six women (if not more) to find that now she was being accused of not just participating but also being the brains behind the entire thing ... it was just way too much for her to handle.

  Todd said, “So he shifted the entire focus off your husband and placed it on you.”

  “He didn’t have much of a choice. The other book—one written by an actual true crime writer—was already given a release date. Clarence had barely written one hundred pages of his. He knew he had to stay with the idea he had proposed, about life through the eyes of a husband whose wife was murdered by a serial killer, but he was a lazy researcher, even lazier than the other guy. He didn’t want to look into my husband’s history. Besides, he figured the other book would show that stuff, so he wanted to do something different.”