When he returned he made us a cup of coffee each then after about ten minutes, he started talking. It was almost like he was talking aloud to himself.
‘Deborah – we got to find somewhere to dump Deborah,’ he started thoughtfully.
I looked about me.
‘Where is Deborah?’
‘I wrapped her up and put her in the freezer last night. Now Sandra, I had a whole lot of trouble with her. Folks knew she was with me, you see? I couldn’t just dump her body or they’d come looking for me. So I had to think of other ways.’
Jesus Christ, I thought. I had a horrible feeling what these ‘other ways’ might be, from what he had showed Deborah all those weeks ago.
He walked towards a large pot sitting on the stove and lifted the lid, then beckoned me over to show me. The smell hit me instantly. Deborah had told me what to expect, but still, the horror of it was worse than I could imagine.
Inside the scorched aluminum pot was a bare white skull sitting in a pool of brown-yellow liquid. It was so stark, so ugly. The pale shiny bone almost seemed to glow against the putrid dark water.
‘I cooked her head,’ he explained matter-of-factly. ‘And then I put her ribs in the oven and roasted them, like this, see?’
My stomach flipped over. Acidic bile rose in the back of my throat but on the outside, I was calm, placid. I had to be. He yanked open the fridge door and reached inside. He pulled out a roasting pan with the unmistakable burnt remains of a human ribcage. It had been well over a month since Deborah had told us of what she had seen, and here were the ribs she had described, charred and what little flesh there was on them rotting away.
Sandra’s ribs.
Sandra.
My head swam, my guts heaved. His voice was coming to me in waves, the sound rippling in and out, and I felt I might pass out. I grabbed onto the counter for support, but Gary didn’t notice my alarm. He just kept right on talking.
‘I had to put this in the fridge because it was smelling real bad and there were complaints from the neighbors.
‘I’ve got some other bits in the freezer here.’ He opened up the freezer part of the fridge and inside, stacked from top to bottom were neat little packages of meat, just like on a butcher’s counter.
The first package he picked up was her forearm. He showed it to me as he was talking.
‘So I had this idea that I would take the meat off and then feed the bones to the neighborhood dogs. But the dogs didn’t bury the bones or take them away. I kept looking out into the yard and seeing giant pieces of hip bones out there, which wasn’t any good. Because at some point somebody might see these things and realize they’re not normal bones.’
I was reeling. The thought of Sandra being there in that kitchen in little bits and stuffed in bags was too much. But things were about to get even worse.
‘So then it’s Deborah who sets off the whole thing with the dog food.’
‘The dog food?’ I tried to disguise my disgust, to keep my voice cool and level but it was so hard. Everything he was telling me and showing me was beyond belief.
‘Yeah, you know she said she wanted to eat dog food. So I got a few cans and then I minced up some of Sandra’s body and mixed that with the dog food and put it back in the cans so they wouldn’t know. That’s what they were eating. I figure eventually they’ll eat the whole of Sandra and I don’t have to worry anymore. I got the idea from a film, Eating Raoul. It’s a good film. I’ll show it to you sometime.’
My mind went back to all the times down in the basement when he fed Deborah and Jacqueline with dog food; their forks digging into the soft chunks of meat, Jacqueline complaining about the lack of peas.
It was too much.
I tried to focus on Gary and what he was saying.
I needed to pull myself together.
He was recounting all of this like it was normal. None of this is normal, I wanted to scream. You’ve killed two women and now you’re feeding them to other people? This is fucked up. Strike that. This is beyond fucked up. I have no words for what this is.
‘Nobody knew Deborah was here with me,’ he was saying, taking deep, long slurps of his coffee. ‘So that means we can go right out and find a place to dump her body and just so long as it’s not too obvious, there’s no reason the cops will link it back here.’
Now I noticed that he talked about ‘we’ all the time – this meant that whatever he was doing I was doing too.
I wanted to cry. I wanted to curl up in a corner and weep for the awful, unnatural things this lunatic had done. But all I could do was keep hold of the counter to steady me and nod as Gary talked.
‘I think I know a place we can go. It’s right over in the Pine Barrens. But we have to be careful. We can’t stop at any tollbooths or nothing, got to make sure we’ve got the right change. We’ll go and find a place first then we’ll come back and get the body.’
He sauntered into the living room and I realized then that I’d been holding my breath. Not wishing to spend another second in that kitchen, I followed him, letting myself exhale silently as I did so.
He threw me a stained cream sweater and I put it on. It smelled of him.
‘I don’t have to tell you about the letter again, do I?’
It was less of a question, more of a threat.
I shook my head and gave him a look, like, are you kidding me?
He disappeared upstairs for a short time and that was when I took a good look around – all the windows had bars on them, the doors were fitted with two-way locks so I couldn’t get out without a key and I couldn’t see a phone anywhere.
When he got back down again he was holding a worn and battered pair of sneakers – it looked like they’d come from a thrift store.
I put them on silently. I couldn’t imagine how I looked – an oversized jumper, jeans falling off me and my hair a state.
But my looks were the last thing that mattered to me right now. I was about to step outside for the first time in months.
Gary took the front door key out his pocket to let us out but I noticed it didn’t look right. The tip part was missing.
‘What’s wrong with your key?’ I said.
‘Nothing, I made it that way,’ he answered proudly. ‘I put the regular key halfway in and sawed it off. The front half stays permanently in the lock.’
‘Why’d you do that?’
‘So no other key except mine will work.’
Made sense.
Bizarrely, and not for the first time, I marveled at how such a clearly intelligent man could be so wholly lacking in humanity. He was smart in a terrifying way because that thing that marks us out as humans, a natural sense of right and wrong, an instinctive aversion to pain and suffering, was missing from him.
Underneath the surface, there was nothing: no emotion, no sympathy, no understanding. He was like a robot walking round in a human suit. And that was what made him so dangerous. If you looked at him you’d never imagine for a minute he was any different from you. Until you’ve met someone like Gary you can’t even imagine another human acting this way. Then, when you have, you realize that everything you thought you knew could be false. How many other Garys were out there? The thought was terrifying.
The door swung open and I felt a rush of air hit me full in the face. It was amazing.
Fresh air!
Cold, clean air! It filled my nostrils then my mouth, throat and lungs. I was drinking it down like water. For a moment I forgot about Gary and just stood there, letting the sunlight warm my skin and the wind blow through my hair. But I couldn’t hang about – already Gary was moving towards the garage and I followed him.
I looked up and down the street. The neighborhood was poor, dirty and downtrodden. I knew I could run away but what would happen then? He’d just go right back in the house and kill the other two girls.
Then he’d deny it all.
One time when me and Sandra were in the basement he boasted to us: ‘I won’t ever get sent down. I’
m crazy, you see? If they catch me and take me to court I’ll just stand right up and salute everybody.’
He’d laughed mirthlessly.
‘I can beat those stupid psychiatric tests they set me. I know them inside and out. They’ll just keep sending me round the different hospitals while I keep collecting my checks. By the time they figure out what’s wrong with me I’ll be gone again.’
No, I didn’t have a hope of getting the girls out as long as he was around. My mind was ticking over, trying to take as much in as possible.
We went into his garage now and I saw the Rolls-Royce he had next to the Cadillac. He climbed into the Cadillac and opened the door up so I could get in next to him. Then we took off and we drove through the city in broad daylight.
Josefina Rivera and Gary Heidnik.
We drove east, right across the city, over the Delaware River by the Ben Franklin Bridge and into New Jersey. It was astonishing to see other people on the sidewalk and in their cars – I couldn’t stop staring, wondering about each person, what they were doing, where they were going and who they were going to meet. I felt so separate from the world now, like I didn’t belong in it at all. I was just a visitor, let out for the day, to gawp at the ordinary folk in their ordinary lives.
The journey took about an hour and on the way we stopped at an off-road diner where Gary got himself a burger and fries.
I sat in the booth opposite him, sipping on a Coke while he demolished his food.
I was around people for the first time in months. It was bizarre.
I envied them, all just going about their normal lives, nothing to worry about except what to cook for their dinner or their plans for the weekend.
It seemed so far removed from my existence. I felt like I’d been pushed into a different plane of reality where daily horrors were the norm, where people died and got minced up into dog food.
I watched Gary as he ate – he didn’t seem to have a care in the world.
‘More coffee, honey?’ The waitress was a weathered old broad with peroxide hair and a world-weary expression.
‘Fill her up.’ Gary pushed his cup in her direction and she poured him a cup to the top.
‘You want anything?’ she asked me.
‘No, I’m okay,’ I replied, too scared to ask for anything. In fact, I didn’t even want to look at her, just in case Gary read something into my expression that angered him or made him suspect me.
It didn’t even occur to me to try and scream or run out. It would have been too risky.
After another half an hour we were driving along Route 676 in the densely forested Pine Barrens. It all looked the same, mile after mile of pine forest, nothing to distinguish one place from the next, when suddenly Gary pulled the car off the road and down a tiny track that led into the forest.
If you’d never been there before you might just drive right by, never knowing it was there at all. There was no sign, no road marking or landmark to tell you where you were. Just a very small dirt track leading into the woods. After a couple of hundred yards, Gary stopped the car and turned the engine off.
He got out, looked around a bit before getting back in the car.
‘This’ll do,’ he said.
Then we drove home.
Chapter Sixteen
The Pine Barrens
By the time we got back to the house it was mid-afternoon. Gary put the coffee on again and I turned on the TV in the living room.
I let my mind go blank as the game shows blurred into commercial breaks. Minutes slid into hours and I just sat there, too worn out and exhausted to move. Just a couple of times, I got up to go to the bathroom and get a glass of water.
Mainly, I just sat there, lost in my own thoughts. I wondered about the drugs Gary was on and whether he was taking them. I wondered about the drugs he said the army had given him all those years ago. Could the drugs have made him do the things he did or was he born that way? How do you lose all your morality? How do you go about killing people as if it’s just an everyday thing? It was bizarre to me that he had reacted so indifferently to Sandra and Deborah’s deaths given how he’d outlined his plans to us to build a harem of women and children in his home. He wanted to create life – surely, killing us wasn’t part of the plan. Did he care? It occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t the first one there. Maybe he’d got another woman or women before me and he’d ended up killing them just like Sandra and Deborah. Was I really the first or was I a replacement? I didn’t have a clue, I just had to take this guy at his word. For all I knew he’d dumped a dozen bodies in the Pine Barrens already. He sure knew his way to some out-of-the-way parts of the woods without a map! What if he ended up killing all of us? Gary’s plans were coming apart at the seams but he didn’t seem to notice, or care. He went along with every new development like abducting young women and murdering them was just a part of life. Every way I looked at it my situation was terrifying – if he’d never killed before he didn’t seem to have any feeling about doing it for the first time and if he had killed before then who knew who would be next?
I could hear him moving around the house, sifting through post and papers, clearing cups and plates from the dining room table.
Once he returned to the basement and he was down there some time so I figured he must be having sex with the other girls. He was still sticking to his plan of getting them pregnant, but now that he thought I was, he didn’t bother with me. The thought of having his baby was so repugnant to me that I just put it to one side. I knew that if it came to that, I would get rid of it. Besides, I had much more urgent things to think about – like finding a means for us all to escape.
It was night time when he returned to the living room and looked at me. ‘Come on.’
He opened the door to the basement and disappeared downstairs but this time he returned with Deborah’s frozen body bent double in a clear trash bag. I turned away.
‘Look at her!’ he commanded. I didn’t want to. First I had to see her die, then I had to see Sandra in pieces and now he wanted me to look at Deborah in a bag? It was one more horrific image I didn’t need permanently lodged in my mind. But I really didn’t have any choice.
So I turned back. There she was, her taut skin frozen solid over her bones, her body folded perfectly in half. Mercifully, her head was tucked between her legs so her face was hidden by her hair.
‘Now, get in the car,’ he ordered. There was no anger in his voice, no emotion at all.
I went outside and got in the passenger side of the car. Behind me I heard a click as he opened up the trunk, then I heard a heavy thunk as her body hit the back of the car. The trunk door slammed shut, then he got in beside me.
Now we were driving back across the city, over the Ben Franklin Bridge and out into the Pine Barrens again.
The lights flickered past, the billboards screamed out their enthusiastic slogans. I just hunched myself into the side door and settled in for the long journey.
* * *
It must have been late by the time we reached the same dirt track we found earlier in the day – there weren’t many cars on the road, most of the diners were shut.
Gary pulled slowly into the forest then he stopped the car, got out and I heard the trunk catch open. I didn’t move.
Next I felt another whump from the back of the car as her body hit the trunk again – I reckoned he must have taken her out of the bag.
There was a snapping and crunching sound as he moved through the twigs and leaves on the forest floor before I saw him walk round the side of the car with Deborah in his arms, still neatly folded in two. He strode into the woods where there was a little opening and I could hear my breath now coming in short little pants.
It was completely black out there, completely silent.
Remember this, I told myself. Remember this place.
If I ever got out of this alive I knew someone was going to want to come back here to retrieve Deborah so I was trying desperately to make an imprint of the place ont
o my mind.
But all the while, I was gripped with fear.
What if he decided to dump me out here with her? Nobody knew we were here. They’d never find me. I was paralyzed, sick with terror.
In the oppressive darkness of the forest, my paranoia took over. He could just kill me out here and no one would know. What would I do? How would I get away?
I looked about wildly around the inside of the car but I couldn’t see anything I could use as a weapon. He’d taken the car keys with him so I couldn’t just drive away. The only course open to me would be to run into the woods and pray he wouldn’t find me. Then I’d be all alone in the woods in the dark, shivering, terrified and alone.
He wasn’t gone longer than three minutes but it felt like an hour.
To my great relief he just slammed the trunk door shut and got into the car next to me. He didn’t say a word.
We reversed out of the drive and headed back towards Philadelphia.
On the way back we stopped at a gas station to pick up a copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
‘To check my stocks,’ Gary explained as he chucked it down on the back seat.
He pulled up at 52nd and Walnut – a bright, sleazy part of town that seemed to come alive in the early hours, a lot of strip malls and fast food joints.
We turned into a McDonald’s and I realized we were getting out for another food stop.
As we walked into the restaurant, he threw something into the trash can – it was the bag that he used to carry Deborah’s body.
The light and sound hit me like a train as I walked in – the place was crowded, really crowded. People were all around me, they shoved and jostled as we all stood in line, those with trays elbowed their way past to the seats.
There was shouting, laughter, chatter and a heft of people so great I could hardly catch my breath.
I looked about in wonder. Did these people realize what we’d just done?
We just dumped a dead body in the woods and here they all were, acting like nothing was wrong.
Cellar Girl Page 13