The Sculptor

by Gregory Funaro

  The reporter was unfazed.

  “Can you tell us whether or not there is any truth to the claim that the bodies of Tommy Campbell and another person were posed like this Bacchus? Are you aware of what this statue looks like? That the other body could be that of a child?”

  “I am not at liberty to comment on the case at present. A press conference has been scheduled—might have even started. If you hurry, you might be able to catch it.”

  Special Agent Sam Markham headed back toward Cathy’s house, leaving the reporter on the sidewalk to call after him with a barrage of unanswered questions.

  “Sorry about that,” Markham said once he was inside. “Someone, a local cop probably, must have leaked your involvement with the case. I didn’t expect them to find out so soon—didn’t expect them to come after you.”

  Cathy was shaken; she just stood there in the front hall—arms folded, heart racing.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she said, looking at the floor. “I really am involved in this, aren’t I?”

  “I’m sorry, but yes.” Markham reached into his jacket pocket. “Here’s my card. Call me on my cell anytime if you need anything—if you get spooked, if you think of something down the road that might help us with our investigation, or even if you just need to talk. We’ve had some agents watching your place since this morning. That’s who called me a few minutes ago—said the news van had arrived only seconds before we did. Bad timing for you and me, but that’s just the way things are. Now listen, Cathy, these agents are going to keep an eye on you for a while—for your safety, and in case Tommy Campbell’s killer tries to approach you. You most likely will never see them, so please try to forget they’re around, okay?”

  “Forget? You mean, you’re saying you think Tommy Campbell’s killer will come after me now? And you want me to forget?”

  “No. Actually, Cathy, I don’t think he’ll come after you at all. In fact, judging from my experience, I would say that the circumstances suggest just the opposite. Campbell’s killer went out of his way to draw attention to you. The last thing he’d want now is to see something happen to you. No, he’ll most likely stay away from you for a while now that he’s finished his work and now that other people are aware of his connection with you. All this is just a precaution, Cathy, in case he tries to make contact with you, to leave you another note—that is, if the notes you received five years ago are related to Campbell’s murder to begin with.”

  “They are, Sam. You know they are.”

  “I can’t be sure—might be just a strange coincidence. However, since it’s all we have to go on right now, we’ll see how far that road leads us. Now listen carefully, Cathy. Even though the press somehow got wind of what happened to Campbell and that boy, and even though they know you’ve been brought into the investigation, I’m not sure if they know yet about the inscription at the base of the statue. Hopefully we’ll be able to keep that detail quiet for a while. That said, even after the press conference this afternoon, I suggest you don’t say anything to anyone about the case—more for your own sake than for the integrity of the investigation. Say you’ve been advised not to discuss the case with the press. That’ll usually send them packing after a while. Trust me, Cathy, the last thing you want right now is for the press to know the extent to which you’re involved in this. In fact, if my gut is right, I think that’s just what the killer wants to happen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s obvious that whoever murdered Tommy Campbell and that boy had been planning this crime for a long time—perhaps even years. Although I’m sure there must be a deeper reason as to exactly why the killer chose Campbell for his Bacchus, one cannot deny the superficial resemblance between the football player and Michelangelo’s original. That means, in addition to my earlier theory about the connection with Tommaso Cavalieri, the killer could possibly have selected Campbell simply for the reason that he looked like Bacchus. He wanted to use him, like Dodd’s topiary garden, specifically for aesthetic purposes, and was willing to go to great lengths to do so—would not settle for a more, I hate to say it, convenient victim. So, you see? Even though we’re not sure yet of his motives, we can nonetheless conclude that we’re dealing with a very patient and methodical individual—obsessively so on both accounts. These types of killers are the hardest to catch because they plan so well—pay so much attention to detail and don’t leave many clues behind. And until the autopsy results come back, until we get an idea of exactly how this person murdered and preserved his victims—how he actually created that sick sculpture of his—the only window into his motives right now is you. You and your book.”

  “So you’re saying you think this maniac is using me?”

  “Perhaps. I’ll have a better idea once I read your book. But judging from the great lengths to which the killer went to put his sculpture on display in Dodd’s garden—a display that the killer obviously intended as some kind of historical allusion publicly dedicated to you—well, it’s clear to me, Cathy, that whoever did this horrible crime thought you of all people would understand his motives. And therefore it would also fall to you to help us—the FBI, the press, the public—understand his motives as well. So you see, Cathy, it appears the killer wants you to be his mouthpiece.”

  Cathy was silent, dumbfounded—her mind swept up in a tornado of questions that numbed her into disbelief.

  “I’ll be in touch very soon, Cathy. And remember to call me if you need anything, okay?”

  Cathy nodded absently; heard herself say “thank you” in a voice far away.

  A blink forward in time to her cell phone ringing in the kitchen, upon which she realized she’d been zoning in the hall.

  However, only when Cathy heard Janet Polk say “Hildy?” on the other end did she realize Sam Markham had left.

  Chapter 11

  Laurie Wenick stood before the open refrigerator and began to tremble. It had been seven months since her son’s disappearance, seven months since he failed to come home for dinner one afternoon—a cool, otherwise lovely September afternoon when his friends said they left him playing in the woods around Blackamore Pond. And so it happened that, when Laurie stared down at the cold jar of Smucker’s in her hand, when she realized that for the first time in seven months she had unconsciously gone to the refrigerator to prepare her son’s lunch for the next day—peanut butter and jelly on homemade bread that her son said made all the other fourth graders at Eden Park Elementary School jealous—more than grief, more than the profound loneliness to which she had grown accustomed, the single mother of one was overwhelmed with a sweeping sense of panic—a premonition that something very, very bad had happened.

  She had gone to bed at 8:00 A.M. like she usually did on Sundays; had worked the night shift at Rhode Island Hospital as she had done now for months—for it was the nighttime, the darkness of her Cranston duplex that had become too much for Laurie Wenick to bear. And on those rare occasions when she took the night off, the pretty young nurse would spend her evenings next door at her father’s—alone, watching TV until the sun came up, at which point she would return to her apartment and sleep through the day. She was like “a vampire” her father said—a rare and ineffectual stab at humor in what for both of them had become a dark and humorless world.

  Indeed, despite her anguish, Laurie had understood from the beginning that her son’s disappearance had devastated her father almost as much as it had her; and over the last seven months the two of them had often traded shoulders for each other in their moments of greatest weakness. At first their sorrow had been colored with the hope that Michael Wenick would be found, for this was Rhode Island, and children simply did not go missing in Rhode Island, did not disappear into thin air without a trace. Oh yes, Laurie had read the statistics, had spoken with the state police countless times about her son; and as far as she could tell there was only one missing child case still unsolved in the Ocean State—and that one went all the way back to the m
id-1980s.

  However, as the days then weeks plodded on, as divers scoured Blackamore Pond a second and then a third time, as the volunteer searches ended and the pictures appeared on the news less frequently, the statistics that claimed young Michael Wenick would return to Laurie and her father safe and sound were soon overshadowed by the grim reality of the contrary. And when the months began to pile up, when Christmas came and went without a single clue to her son’s whereabouts, Laurie and her father fell deeper and deeper into a state of numb detachment. It was as if the two of them existed in a zone somewhere between life and death—a pair of zombies, Laurie thought, who had the unique ability to watch themselves as they mechanically went through the motions of living.

  Ever since Michael Wenick was born it had been just the three of them in that duplex on Lexington Avenue—the cute, two-story one at the bottom of the hill not even fifty yards from the shores of Blackamore Pond. Laurie’s parents divorced when she was in kindergarten, but she had only lived with her father since her senior year of high school—moved in with him when her mother threw her out of the house for getting herself pregnant. Laurie’s boyfriend, Michael’s father, took off to live with relatives in Florida never to be heard from again—a bit of pretty luck for which John Wenick was always secretly thankful. The burly ex-club boxer never liked his daughter’s boyfriend—that rap-loving, baggy-panted punk with the license plate GNGSTA1. In fact, John Wenick had actually gone after the son of a bitch with a baseball bat when Laurie showed up in tears on his doorstep—her boyfriend, she had said, had denied the baby was his. Yes, John Wenick would have buried his Louisville Slugger deep in the scrawny Eminem-wannabe’s head had he found him; most certainly would have ended up in jail for murder. And only after he calmed down, only after the little fucker ran away to Florida two days later did John Wenick wonder if it also hadn’t been a stroke of luck that “Gangsta Number One” had been off getting stoned with his friends when he had gone looking for him.

  John Wenick worked for the state; had been a supervisor at the landfill for over twenty years. And after his grandson was born, he scraped enough of his savings together to place a down payment on the duplex at the bottom of the hill—the same duplex in which he had lived ever since his divorce from Laurie’s mother. Between himself and his ex-wife, John Wenick knew that he had always been Laurie’s favorite, for he had a special bond with his daughter that his alcoholic ex could never understand. And even though Laurie’s mother retained custody of her after the divorce, their relationship at best had always been strained. And so it was only natural that Laurie should have spent the majority of her time at her father’s—that is, until she started hanging out with Gangsta Number One. And so it was also only natural that John Wenick should have felt somewhat responsible for his daughter’s predicament—that if only he had kept an eye on her, if only he had kicked Gangsta Number One’s ass at the beginning, all this would never have happened. Hence, John Wenick decided to let Laurie live with him for good—was more than happy to set up his daughter and little Michael next door; actually considered it his duty to look after the boy when Laurie enrolled in nursing school.

  But more than a sense of responsibility, more than a sense of obligation, John Wenick looked after his grandson because he loved him as if he were his own. And ever since little Michael was five years old, almost every Saturday morning during the summers the two of them could be found fishing at the end of the short driveway that branched off from Lexington Avenue to the woody banks of Blackamore Pond. Without a doubt, Michael Wenick loved to fish more than anything else in the world—even more than the Nintendo Wii his grandfather had bought for him the previous Christmas. And how thrilled Michael had been when, the summer before he disappeared, his grandfather took him fishing on a boat off the coast of Block Island! For young Michael Wenick it had been the experience of his short lifetime; for his grandfather, it had been only one of the many happy chapters fate had written since his daughter moved in with him for good nine years earlier.

  And so it came as an unfathomable shock to the Wenicks—to the entire community, to the entire state—when on a cool September afternoon sometime between 4:30 and 6:00 little Michael Wenick vanished without a trace from the woods around Blackamore Pond. The Wenicks and the people of Lexington Avenue could never have dreamed of such a thing happening in their neighborhood—in the very woods where their children played; in the very woods where they themselves had played when they were children, too. No, the Wenicks, the police, the people of Cranston had no idea that a stranger had entered their midst; had no idea that The Sculptor had been watching little Michael Wenick for weeks—ever since he randomly spotted him walking home from the Cranston Pool one day with two of his companions. Yes, The Sculptor knew immediately that the boy’s slight, somewhat small-for-his-age torso would be perfect for the upper half of his satyr. And whereas Laurie and John Wenick would never have been able to comprehend the possibility that fate would soon snatch their little Michael from their lives, The Sculptor had understood upon the sight of him that he and his satyr had been destined to come together that day.

  And so The Sculptor studied his satyr’s movements—followed him home, always at a distance, at first from the pool during the summer, and then from Eden Park Elementary School in the fall; watched him from across the water as he fished with an older man with forearms like Popeye; spied on him with binoculars while he played with his two friends by the big drainpipe in the woods at the northern edge of Blackamore Pond. The satyr was the smallest of the three boys, but he more than made up for his size in daring. Someone, perhaps an older kid, had attached a rope to one of the larger branches, and on many occasions The Sculptor watched the two bigger boys look on in awe as his satyr swung like Tarzan farther and farther out over Blackamore Pond. One afternoon, the tallest of the three boys brought some firecrackers, and The Sculptor could not help but laugh out loud when he saw his satyr drop one into an empty beer bottle and then dive behind a tree.

  Yes, The Sculptor had thought. My satyr certainly is a mischievous one.

  And perhaps it was ultimately Michael Wenick’s mischievousness that brought him and The Sculptor together on that cool September afternoon. The Sculptor had discovered that often his satyr would remain behind in the woods after his companions had gone home for dinner, whereupon he would throw various objects out into the water—usually just large stones, but sometimes bottles and cans, and once even a rubber tire. But always his satyr stayed close to the big drainpipe, or to the tiny, open shoreline beneath the high cement retaining wall of one of the backyards that directly overlooked the pond. And so The Sculptor decided that the safer of the two areas would be by the big drainpipe, for in order to capture his satyr he could not allow himself to be seen; yes, in order to acquire the first figure for his Bacchus he would have to be very, very careful.

  The Sculptor had studied the satellite imagery of Blackamore Pond many times on Yahoo! Maps, but the first time he actually set foot in the surrounding woods was at night—after the older kids who smoked cigarettes and drank beer by the retaining wall had all gone home. He parked his blue Toyota Camry—one of two cars he owned in addition to his big white van—on a street nearby and used his night vision goggles to negotiate his way through the dense terrain.

  The mouth of the drainpipe was large enough even for him to crouch into, and with his night vision The Sculptor had no trouble seeing down almost half the length of the shaft. He slipped a plastic bag over each of his sneakers, a plastic glove over each of his hands, and entered the pipe. The smell was not too bad—musty and swampy—but the air felt uncomfortably thick and damp in The Sculptor’s lungs. Fortunately, The Sculptor had to go only about forty yards before he found what he was looking for: the manhole cover and the runoff opening to the adjoining street. Here, in the storm drain at the end of the pipe, The Sculptor could stand up straight; could see his tires through the narrow slit in the curb—right where he parked his car not even fifteen minutes ear
lier. And with a heavy push, The Sculptor lifted the manhole cover and peeked out.

  The location was perfect.

  As he had learned from Yahoo! Maps, the storm drain was located at the end of a street named Shirley Boulevard—a quiet, middle-class lane just two blocks over from Lexington Avenue, the street on which his satyr lived with the Popeye-armed fisherman and the pretty blond nurse who drove a Hyundai. The Sculptor had cased this part of Shirley Boulevard during the daytime; knew that most of the people did not return home until around 5:15 P.M.; knew that even in broad daylight the surrounding foliage would conceal him from the nearby houses when he emerged from the manhole—a manhole that was just big enough for the massively muscled Sculptor to squeeze through. There was no sidewalk here, only a concrete slab that capped the sewer opening. And thus The Sculptor also knew that he would be vulnerable only from across the street; knew that it would be safer to get in and out of his car from the passenger’s side, upon which he could drop directly into the manhole.

  It was almost too good to be true.

  And so it was that The Sculptor waited in the drainpipe on four different occasions before he finally abducted Michael Wenick. Yes, there was always the chance that the satyr and his companions might venture into the drainpipe and discover him. And even though in the weeks that The Sculptor had been watching the boys he never once saw them step into the mouth of the dank, dark tube—probably already conquered that fear years ago, The Sculptor thought—nonetheless he was prepared with his night vision goggles and the silencer on his Sig Sauer .45 just in case. He did not want to kill the satyr’s companions—did not want to waste good material that others might want to use someday. However, The Sculptor had resigned himself from the beginning that he would do whatever was necessary to capture his satyr. Most of all, if he did as a last resort have to kill the satyr himself before he could get him back to the carriage house, he would try to aim for the back of his head. Yes, more important than his satyr’s awakening was The Sculptor’s desire not to damage his material.