The Serial Killer's Wife

by Robert Swartwood

  “Wait,” she said, looking up from the key and staring at the black 49 painted on the door.

  Todd shifted impatiently beside her. “What?”

  “It’s been five years. Who’s been paying for this place? I mean, without monthly payments they would have taken this place away. Maybe they already did. Maybe when we open this door—if the key even works—all we’ll find is a slew of cardboard boxes holding books or some college kid’s furniture.”

  Todd gestured at the key. “Guess there’s only one way to find out.”

  After another moment’s hesitation, Elizabeth crouched down and inserted the key into the lock. She was certain nothing would happen when she turned it, but it turned easily. She heard it click and then heard the melancholy groan of metal as the springs holding the door down sighed. She stood back up, bringing the door with her, the wheels along the metal rails screaming out in the dark. Then she stepped inside, reaching out to the left where she remembered the light switch was, and flicked it on.

  CHAPTER 60

  STORAGE UNIT 49 was completely empty except for a metal box on the ground in the very center of the ten-by-twelve foot space. It may once have been shiny, but over the years dust had accumulated and covered the lid of the box with a nice, even layer.

  Elizabeth began walking without even realizing it. She went straight to the box. She only stopped when she was standing directly over it. She thought about the fingers in the box, at least four if not more, and the ghosts of Eddie’s victims waiting here in this cold and dark place, just waiting until someone like her came along to find the fingers. Were they watching her now? She lifted her gaze and looked in the corners, but all she could see was more dust.

  “Elizabeth? Are you okay?”

  The question was absurd but one that needed asked. After all, she had suddenly become a statue, just standing here inches away from the thing she had been searching for these past three days.

  She did not crouch like she had when she went to unlock and open the storage unit door. Instead she got down onto her knees, feeling the cold cement through the fabric of her jeans. She placed a finger on top of the box and drew it across from one end to the other, revealing the shiny surface below in one long line and creating a dollop of dust on the tip of her finger. She held the finger to her lips and blew it away, then reached back down to the box, finding the clasps on the front. She unclasped both, paused, and then opened the lid.

  For a long moment she did not move. She did not breathe. She did not do anything but stare down at what was inside.

  Behind her, there was slow and hesitant footsteps, and Todd’s voice saying her name in a near-whisper.

  She felt her eyes beginning to brim and blinked rapidly but still one tear managed to roll down her cheek. She could not tell how far away Todd was, just how many feet, but she sensed him behind her, coming closer. She flipped the lid shut, took the box in her hands, and rose to her feet.

  Todd stood less than a yard away from her. “Is that”—he swallowed—“it?”

  She only nodded. Her mouth had suddenly gone dry and she could not speak.

  “Good,” Todd said unsteadily. “So ... now what?”

  She swallowed, found her throat wasn’t so dry anymore, and said, “Do you want to see?”

  “Huh?”

  “What’s inside.” She held up the box. “Do you want to see?”

  He shook his head. “God, no. Why would I?”

  “I want you to. You’ve come this far with me, you might as well see what’s in here.”

  He hesitated. “Elizabeth—”

  “Please. I want you to.”

  He started toward her then, staring not at her face anymore but at the box. She had been holding it with both hands but now held it just with her left, balancing it right on the palm of her hand. As he was a step away, reaching for the box, she reached behind her with her right hand, grabbed David Bradford’s Glock that she had hidden in the back of her pants, and brought it back out swinging, connecting the weapon with the side of Todd’s face.

  He went down with a startled cry, and she stepped forward and kneed him in chest. That sent him to the ground on his side. He groaned, tried to get back up, but she had the Glock trained on his face, the barrel’s sight on that spot just between his eyes.

  “I never told you she was his girlfriend,” she said. With the box now tucked under her left arm, holding the gun on Todd with her right hand, she stepped back toward the open door.

  “What”—Todd spat blood onto the cement—“what are you talking about?”

  “Special Agent Julia Hogan. I never told you she was his girlfriend.”

  Todd pushed slowly off his knee and stood up. “Elizabeth,” he said, holding his hands out to his sides, taking a step forward.

  “Stop right there or I’ll shoot you.”

  He stopped.

  She said, “Everyone that’s seen you has died. First Van and Harlan, then my brother, then Foreman.”

  “I’m not the bad guy here. I didn’t kill anyone. It was Clarence who did it. You know that. Clarence is the one.”

  She took another step back, keeping the gun aimed. “Your main mistake? You were just too perfect. No man in his right mind would have stayed with me through all of this.”

  “I didn’t have a choice. You said Cain told you to kill me. You talked him out of it, remember? The only way I was going to live was to come with you.”

  She hesitated, thinking about it, remembering being back in the parking lot of Summer Ridge, swapping out her license plate with that pickup truck’s, and then there Todd was behind her, a bouquet of tulips in hand. He’d brought them to cheer her up, he later said, but right then, right when they’d been in the parking lot, Cain had called, a nice convenient coincidence.

  Elizabeth stopped walking backward and thumbed the hammer back on the Glock. “Who is he?”

  “Who?”

  “Your partner.”

  This entire time Todd’s expression had been a mixture of confusion and fear and pain. Now something in it changed, something almost imperceptible at first, until she could see the corners of his mouth curling into a grin. He began to lower his hands, bit by bit, and shrugged.

  “Why don’t you turn around and ask him yourself?”

  Something round and cold touched the base of her neck just then, and a ghost said, “Put down the gun, sis, or else I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

  CHAPTER 61

  FOR A MAN who was supposed to be dead, Jim looked good. He wore boots and blue jeans and a black long sleeve T-shirt. His hair appeared to have a certain texture, like he had recently taken a shower.

  She took all of that in for an instant before her gaze shifted to what was really important: Matthew. Her son, dressed only in his underwear, that explosive collar around his neck, a piece of tape over his mouth. He was staring back at her, his eyes large and red from crying. He even tried screaming through the tape, pulling away from Jim, but Jim kept his grip on Matthew’s arm.

  “Idiot,” Jim said to Todd. “How could you fuck that up?”

  Todd walked forward, shrugging. He scooped the Glock up off the ground where she had placed it and grabbed the metal box from her hands and opened it. “Doesn’t matter now. We have what we need.”

  “It’s all there?”

  “Look for yourself.”

  Jim glanced in the box and nodded his appreciation and then threw Matthew at her like he was nothing more than a piece of trash. Matthew came at her fast, tripping over his feet, and he almost fell to the floor before Elizabeth grabbed him.

  “Enjoy the family reunion while it lasts,” Jim said. “Because it’s not going to last long.”

  “What are you going to do to us?”

  “Lock you in here. Drive away. Then in about five minutes”—he reached into his pocket, withdrew a cell phone—“I’m going to dial this and ... well, ka-boom.”

  She was crouched in the middle of the storage unit, her son in her arms.
After three days of being without him, she couldn’t let him go. Not now. Not after everything she had been through.

  “Don’t do this,” she whispered.

  “Sorry. This is how it has to be.”

  The men started to leave the unit but stopped when she shouted, “Wait!”

  They both looked at her.

  “At least tell me why. I deserve that much.”

  Jim seemed to consider this, then said, “What do you want to know?”

  “Just why.”

  “That’s not an easy question to answer.”

  “But I don’t get it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I thought serial killers were supposed to work alone. But ... what—it was you, Todd, and Eddie?”

  “For starters,” Todd said, “my name isn’t Todd. It’s Frank.”

  “That’s right,” Jim said. “And serial killers”—he shook his head—“is such a nasty phrase. It has poor connotations.”

  Elizabeth asked, “What connotation do you expect it to have?”

  “She does have a point,” Todd (or Frank) said.

  “Shut up.” Jim cleared his throat. “Listen, Liz, here we have one of those situations in which I’m conflicted. On the one hand, you are my sister and that boy there is my nephew. On the other hand, you both have served your purpose and we no longer need you.”

  Elizabeth held Matthew even closer, her hand over his heart. “Let me guess. Eddie hid those trophies from you as some kind of insurance in case you ever tried to backstab him.”

  Frank grinned, nodding. “Not a bad theory.”

  “Not bad at all,” Jim agreed. “But it’s wrong. For starters, Eddie never killed anyone. Not that he wasn’t culpable. He knew what was going on but he was, in many ways, powerless to stop it. You see, these quote-unquote trophies were something he had come up with. And it wasn’t for any nefarious reason like the ones speculated in the news.”

  “Then what reason was it?”

  Jim opened his mouth but Frank held up a finger and said, “Maybe you should go back to the beginning.”

  Jim thought it over for a moment. “Might as well. Won’t take long anyway. Look now, Liz, here’s the deal.”

  It happened, Jim said, on Spring Break. Back right before Jim and Eddie graduated, when Elizabeth was still a sophomore. They’d gone down to Cancun for five days. Eddie and Elizabeth had been dating for only six months then. Eddie had asked Elizabeth if it was okay for him to go. He and Jim had been planning it since the year before. Elizabeth said it was fine, she trusted him, though she really didn’t. This, she decided, was the way to see just how much he cared for her. As petty as it sounded, if he was miserable down there without her, then that was a good thing. If he had the time of his life, that was a completely different thing.

  “I met this girl down there the night before we left. She had come with some friends from school—they were from California, I forget which college—and her friends had ditched her that night. The girl was a real freak, loved to drink and party, and her friends had decided they wanted to take it easy the night before they left as they’d been partying hard all week. So I met her at this club and ended up leaving with her. We were going to go back to my hotel room but ended up taking a detour on the way. We ended up in this woodsy part off the main road, and this girl, I’m telling you, she was a nasty freak. Wanted to do all sorts of things. She didn’t even want me to use a condom but I insisted, because, you know, a freak like this who knew what kind of diseases she might have. And so we’re going at it and she tells me to squeeze her neck, squeeze it hard. Like I said, she was a freak, but I thought what the hell and went along with it. And ... it’s hard to explain, exactly, but the sex all of a sudden got better. I don’t know what it was, but squeezing her neck like that, choking her, made me feel so much stronger. I didn’t even notice when she started fighting me. I just kept going, squeezing harder, until, well, there was no more reason to squeeze.”

  He’d checked for a pulse but there was none. He considered doing CPR but didn’t know the right way to go about it, despite the fact he had taken a health course that semester. He covered the body up the best he could and left. He found Eddie in their hotel room reading a book. He told Eddie that something terrible had happened, that he needed his help.

  “I took Eddie back out there, for some reason expecting that girl to be gone. Like she’d just been faking it for me or something, and then when I left she got up and walked away. Or that I’d hallucinated the whole thing. But she was still there. Eddie told me we had to call the police. I told him he was crazy. I said I could get arrested for this. Eddie said it was an accident, but he said it like it was a question, you know, sort of testing me. I could tell he wanted to run. His eyes were all wide. He was as freaked out as me. I told him we just couldn’t do that. He wanted to know why not. I told him because of you.”

  Elizabeth frowned. “Because of me?”

  “I told him you were suicidal. That you hadn’t said anything to him about it because you didn’t want to scare him off. But that if something happened to me, happened to the both of us, you’d try to kill yourself. I told him you’d already attempted it before. I told him you had tried taking a whole bottle of Valium when you were in high school because some guy didn’t ask you to prom.”

  “I never did that,” she said, this shocking her more than anything else, remembering now how gentle Eddie had been with her when he returned from Cancun, how he had asked her repeatedly about her feelings.

  Jim grinned. “Of course I know that. But Eddie didn’t. And he fell for it, hook, line, and sinker.”

  With the threat of Elizabeth possibly doing herself harm, Eddie agreed to help Jim. Eddie retrieved a shovel, and they took the girl deeper into the woods and buried her. Eddie told him they had to get rid of their shoes and clothes and anything else associated with what happened, as the authorities might be able to track them down with any slight thing.

  “Your husband really was a bright guy,” Jim said. “I guess it helped that he had taken some of those forensic courses the year before. Eddie, he was obsessed with that kind of stuff.”

  Elizabeth said nothing. She thought about the times when Eddie was home at night and they’d watch TV. How he would dissect everything wrong with shows like CSI and Law & Order. Typical Hollywood BS, he’d call it.

  “So then we left, both of us more nervous than shit, but nothing happened. I mean, the girl’s body was eventually found. There was an investigation and all that, but no cops ever came knocking on either of our doors.”

  Nearly an entire year passed. Eddie had been living close to State College, so he could stay close to Elizabeth. Jim moved down south. He had gotten into the habit of having anonymous sex. Just meeting some girl at a club, either going back to her place or taking her to his place and fucking and then that was that. Only he kept thinking about that freak down in Cancun, how she had liked being choked. He kept thinking about how much he’d enjoyed that, how powerful it had felt.

  “So I did it to this girl, and she ... she fought me hard. But the harder she fought, the hotter it became, you know? When it was over, I wasn’t sure what to do. Now I had this dead woman in my apartment. I thought about getting rid of the body myself, but then I remembered just how good Eddie had been at it. So I called him.”

  Under the pretense that it was a work emergency, Eddie had driven nearly five hours to Jim’s place. There he was met with another dead girl.

  “Like a fucking broken record, he said we needed to call the police. I told him he was crazy. He said there was no other option. I said yes there was, we could hide her like we did that other one. He said that was a mistake. I said that if we didn’t and something happened to either one of us, you would kill yourself. Eddie said nice try, but he knew better now, and he actually pulled out his cell phone.”

  What ultimately stopped him was Jim’s reminder about what happened down in Cancun. That if Eddie called the police, Jim would confes
s to that murder and tell them of Eddie’s involvement. The whole thing had made national news, the girl’s parents being these socialites who painted a picture of a sweet academic who had so much promise. Public opinion was with them so much that if the case were reopened and Jim and Eddie were thrown on the judicial guillotine, both would lose their heads in one easy fall.

  “I could tell he hated my guts. I could see it in his eyes. But he had just started his new job, you two had just gotten engaged, so he had too much to lose. He had agreed to help me but told me this was the last time. I promised it was, reminding him that it was just an accident. He said sure, just like the time before. And you know what? That really pissed me off. Like right then, he thought he was better than me.”

  “He was better than you,” Elizabeth said, immediately thinking she should have used the present tense there instead of the past.

  “Whatever. The fact was I owned him then. He may not have realized it, but that was the truth. So then another six months passed and I did it again. I’d started driving up and down the coast, picking up these lonely housewives. We’d go to some motel by the Interstate. Their husbands always ignored them or treated them like shit, so they wanted to get back at them, even if their husbands never knew it. I must say, I fucked my fair share. And I tried to restrain myself, I really did. But then one night I couldn’t help it. I ended up choking this one woman to death. She was stronger than she looked and fought me pretty hard. Even scratched me a little. I hadn’t thought about it at the time, but Eddie apparently did.”

  Once again Eddie had refused to have anything to do with it. And once again, Jim convinced him otherwise. Jim reminded him of just everything he would lose, and besides, he said, they wouldn’t get caught, not as long as Eddie did what he was good at. Again, Eddie went to call the police and words this time would not stop him. Instead, fists did. Jim was careful not to punch Eddie in the face because that would raise too many questions with Elizabeth, but he had pummeled him in the stomach and ribs. He bullied Eddie into realizing he had no other choice but to help him hide the body, and unlike last time, Jim said he wasn’t going to stick around. He said he needed to teach Eddie a lesson, so Eddie had to hide this body on his own. And so Jim had left, Eddie groaning on the motel floor, a dead woman on the motel bed.