Bad Men

by John Connolly

  Except—

  Except that during their years together, most of them spent in a little house in Danville, Virginia, she had grown increasingly fearful of this man: of his mood swings, of his intelligence, of his capacity for cruelty to her. He knew where to hit her so that it hurt most and bruised least. He knew places on her body where the mere pressure of his fingers was enough to make her scream. There was money, for he always had money, but he gave her only enough to feed their little family of three, for a son had been born to them during that terrible second year. She was required to produce receipts for everything, and every penny had to be accounted for, just as every moment of her day had to be described and justified.

  It had begun almost as soon as they were married. It seemed to her that the marriage license was all that he wanted. He had wooed her, made promises to her, provided them with a house to live in. She had given up the job in Biloxi two weeks before the wedding, and he had told her not to take on anything else for a time, that they would travel, try to see a little of this great country. They had a short honeymoon in Mexico, blighted by bad weather and Moloch’s moods, but the proposed road trip never materialized. She quickly learned not to mention it, for at best he would mutter and tell her that he was too busy, while at other times he would hold her face, beginning with a caress but gradually increasing his grip until his thumb and forefinger forced her mouth open, and just when the pain began to bring tears to her eyes he would kiss her and release her.

  “Another time,” he would say. “Another time.” And she did not know if he was referring to the trip, or to some promised treat for himself.

  The first time he hurt her badly was when he came home from a “business meeting” in Tennessee, less than a year into their marriage. She told him that she had found a job for herself in a bookstore. It was only two afternoons each week, and all day Saturday, but it would get her out of the house. You see—

  “I don’t want you working,” he said.

  “But I need to work,” she replied. “I’m kind of bored.”

  “With me?”

  The lines in his face deepened, so that she almost expected to glimpse his teeth working through the holes in his cheeks.

  “No, not with you. That’s not what I meant.”

  “So what did you mean? You say you’re bored, a man’s going to take that to mean something. I don’t do it for you anymore? You want somebody else? Maybe you’ve found somebody else already, is why you want a job, so you’ll have an excuse to leave the house.”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s not that at all.”

  He was talking as if he was jealous, but there was no real hurt in his words. He was playing a role, and even in her fear she could see that, but it made it harder for her to argue with him when she didn’t understand why he was so annoyed. She reached for him and said, “Come on, honey, it’s not like that. You’re being—”

  She didn’t even see him move. One moment they were talking and she was extending her hand toward him, the next her face was pressed against the wall and her arm was being wrenched behind her back. She felt his breath close to her ear.

  “I’m being what? Tell me. You think you know me? You don’t. Maybe I should teach you a little about me.”

  His left hand and the weight of his body held her in place while his right hand slipped beneath her sweater and found her skin. His fingers began moving on her, exploring.

  And then the pain began: in her stomach, in her kidneys, in her groin. Her mouth opened in a silent cry, the agony increasing, turning from yellow to red to black, and the last words she heard were: “Are you learning now?”

  She regained consciousness with him moving on top of her as she lay on the kitchen floor. One month later, she found out she was pregnant. Even now, years later, it still hurt her to think that Danny, her wonderful, beautiful Danny, could have resulted from that night. Perhaps it was the price she had to pay to be given him. If so, then she had continued to pay the price for a long time after, and sometimes, when their infant son cried just a little too much, she would see the light appear in Moloch’s eyes and she would run to the boy and quiet him, nearly suffocating him against her.

  The child had been a mistake. Moloch wanted no children, and had talked of an abortion, but in the end he had relented. She felt that he did so because he believed it would tie her more closely to him, even as he told her that they were now a family, and would always be a family.

  He did not hate her. He loved her. He would tell her that, even as he was hurting her.

  I love you.

  But if you ever try to leave me, I’ll kill you.

  His mistake was to underestimate her. Men had always underestimated her: her father, her uncle (drunk at Thanksgiving, stealing kisses from his niece in the quiet of the kitchen, his mouth open, his hands reaching and touching while she maneuvered herself away, trying to placate him without offending him so that she would not put her family’s tenuous status in his house at risk), the men for whom she worked or with whom she slept. It suited her. Where she grew up, men feared and hated women whom they suspected were smarter or stronger than they were. It was better to keep your head down, to smile dumbly. It gave you more room to move, when you needed it.

  And so she began listening to snatches of telephone conversations, and using her little car, with its small allowance of gas, to track her husband. She picked up receipts for nonexistent purchases, just a few here and there, for Moloch had become distracted and no longer checked every item in the kitchen and bathroom. She looked for three-for-two offers, for buy-one, get-one-frees, then squirreled away the freebies for use later. It took her the better part of a year but, slowly, she began to accumulate a little money.

  There were places that were out of bounds to her—the shed, the attic—but now she began to take chances even in those places. In a fit of daring that left her sleepless for days, she called in a locksmith, explaining to him that she’d lost the keys to the garden shed and the attic and that her husband would be furious when he found out.

  Then she began to explore.

  First, she marked the location of everything in the shed on a piece of paper and made sure always to return each item to its spot on the plan. The attic was more difficult, seemingly littered with trash and old clothes, but still she made a drawing there too.

  In the shed she found nothing at first but a gun wrapped in oilcloth and hidden in a box of nails and screws. It took her two more searches—including one during the course of which Moloch had returned home and she had been forced to keep her hands thrust firmly in her pockets for fear that he would see the dirt and rust upon them—to find the hole in one of the boards on the floor. It looked like a flaw in the wood, an absent knot, but when she lifted it she discovered the bag.

  She did not have time to count all of the money that it contained, but she reckoned it was close to $900,000, all in twenties and fifties. She put the board back, then returned to the shed twice more to check that she had left no sign of her presence.

  In the attic there were items of jewelry, some old, others quite new. She found a small stack of bearer bonds, worth maybe $50,000 in total. She discovered bank account details in the names of unknown men and women, and credit card records carefully noted, even down to the three-digit security number to be found on the backs of the cards.

  And she came across a woman’s driver’s license in the name of Carol-Anne Brenner, a name that caused a buried memory to resonate softly. The next day, while shopping, she stopped at the Internet café at the mall and entered the name Carol-Anne Brenner on a search engine. She came up with a doctor, an athlete, a candidate for beatification.

  And a murder victim.

  Carol-Anne Brenner, a widow, fifty-three. Killed in her home in Pensacola, Alabama, three months earlier. The motive, according to the police, was robbery. They were searching for a man in connection with the crime. There was a photofit picture with the report. It showed a young man with blond hair, very pretty ra
ther than handsome, she thought. Police believed that Carol-Anne Brenner might have been having an affair with the young man and that he had wheedled his way into her affections in order to rob her. They had no name for him. Brenner’s accounts had been emptied in the days prior to the discovery of her body, and all of her jewelry was missing.

  The next day, during her attic search, she found more items of jewelry, and purses, empty, and photographs of women, sometimes alone, sometimes with their families. She also found four drivers’ licenses and two passports, each with her husband’s photograph upon it but each in a different name. The drivers’ licenses were tied together with an elastic band, while the passports were in a separate brown envelope. There was a telephone number written on the outside flap.

  Marianne remembered the envelope being delivered. A woman had brought it, a woman with short, dark hair and a vaguely mannish stride. She had looked at Marianne with pity and, perhaps, a little interest. The envelope had been sealed then, and Moloch had been furious at the fact that Marianne had been entrusted with it, until he confirmed that the seal was intact.

  Marianne had memorized the number.

  Two days later, she called it.

  The woman’s name was Karen Meyer, and she met Marianne at the mall, Danny sleeping beside them in his stroller. Marianne didn’t know why she was trusting her, but she had felt something that day when the woman called with the envelope. And for what she needed, Marianne had nowhere else to turn.

  “Why did you call me?” asked Meyer.

  “I need your help.”

  “I can’t help you.”

  “Please.”

  Meyer looked around, checking faces. “I mean it. I can’t. Your husband will hurt me. He’ll hurt all of us. You, of all people, must know what he’s like.”

  “I know. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know what he is anymore.”

  Karen shrugged.

  “Well, I know what he is. That’s why I can’t help you.”

  Marianne felt the tears begin to roll down her cheeks. She was desperate.

  “I have money.”

  “Not enough.”

  Karen got up to leave.

  “No, please.”

  Marianne stretched out her hand to restrain her. It locked on her wrist. Karen stopped and looked down at the younger woman’s hand.

  Marianne swallowed, but kept her eyes on Karen’s face. She released her grip, then slipped her hand into the other woman’s palm. Tentatively, she touched her gently with her fingers. For a moment, she thought that she felt Karen’s hand tremble, until it was suddenly pulled away.

  “Don’t call me again,” said Karen. “You do and I swear I’ll tell him.”

  Marianne didn’t watch her leave. Instead, fearful and humiliated, she hid her face in her hands until Karen was gone.

  Karen came to the house three days later. Marianne answered the door to find her there, ten minutes after Moloch had left for the day.

  “You said you had money.”

  “Yes, I can pay you.”

  “What do you need?”

  “New identities for Danny and me, and maybe for my sister and her husband as well.”

  “It’ll cost you fifty thousand dollars, and I’m nailing you to the wall at that price.”

  Marianne smiled despite herself, and after a second’s pause, Karen smiled back.

  “Yeah, well,” she said. “I’m being up front about it. You’re being charged above the going rate, but I need to cover myself. If he finds out, I’m going to have to run. You understand that?”

  Marianne nodded.

  “I’ll want half now, half later.”

  Marianne shook her head. “I can’t do that.”

  “What do you mean? You said you had money.”

  “I do, but I can’t touch it until just before I leave.”

  Karen stared at her.

  “It’s his money, isn’t it?”

  Marianne nodded.

  “Shit.”

  “There’s more than enough to cover what you ask. I promise you, you’ll have it as soon as I’m ready to leave.”

  “I need something now.”

  “I don’t have half, or anything close to it.”

  “What can you give me?”

  “Two hundred.”

  “Two hundred?”

  Karen slumped against the wall and said nothing for at least a minute.

  “Give it to me,” she said at last.

  Marianne went upstairs and retrieved the roll of bills from the only safe place she could find in which to keep it: the very center of a carton of tampons. It was a peculiarity of Moloch’s. He would not even sleep beside her when she had her period. She handed the roll of ones and fives to Karen.

  “Do you want to count it?”

  Karen weighed the roll of bills in her hand.

  “I figure this is everything that you’ve hidden away, right?”

  Marianne nodded, then said: “Well, I kept fifty back. That’s all.”

  “Then that’ll be enough, for now.”

  She moved to go.

  “How long will it take?”

  “They’ll be ready in two weeks. You can pick them up when you’re leaving, and I’ll take the rest of my money then.”

  “Okay.”

  Marianne opened the door. As she did so, the older woman reached out and brushed her cheek. Marianne didn’t flinch.

  “You’d have done it too, wouldn’t you?” said Karen softly.

  “Yes.”

  Karen smiled.

  “You need to work on your seduction technique,” she said.

  “I’ve never had to use it before, under those circumstances.”

  “I guess your heart just wasn’t in it.”

  “I guess not.”

  Karen shook her head sadly, walked to her car, and drove away.

  Marianne never understood why Moloch had kept the licenses, the purses, the little personal items from the women. She suspected that they were souvenirs, or a means of recalling the women from whom they had come, a kind of aide-mémoire. Or perhaps it was simply vanity.

  Moloch had never told her what he did for a living, exactly. He was, when she asked in those first days, a “businessman,” an “independent consultant,” a “salesman,” a “facilitator.” Marianne believed that the women, and what had happened to them, were only part of what he was. Now, when she read of raids on stores or banks, and saw her husband’s cash reserve increase; when she heard of a businessman being killed in his car for his briefcase, the contents later revealed to be $150,000 in under-the-counter earnings, and an amount just under that was briefly added to the bag in the shed; when a young woman disappeared in Altoona, the daughter of a moderately wealthy businessman, and her body was found in a ditch after the ransom was paid, she thought of Moloch. She thought of Moloch as she fingered the money; she thought of Moloch as she smelled the burnt powder in the gun among the nails; and she thought of Moloch as she spied the hardened dirt in the treads of his boots, carefully picking it away and placing it in a Ziploc bag that she bound tightly and squeezed into a tampon inserter.

  In those last days, she became aware of an increase in the pitch of his activities. There were more calls to the home phone, the phone that she was not allowed to answer. There were more frequent, and longer, absences. The mileage on his car climbed steadily in increments of two hundred miles. He grew yet more distracted, now barely glancing at the receipts from the market and failing even to check the total spent against her allowance for the week.

  There were three things that Marianne had learned about Moloch’s final operation, through careful listening and the maps and notes that he had locked away in the attic. The first was that it would take place in Cumberland, far to the north of the state and close to the borders of both Maryland and Pennsylvania. The second was that it would involve a bank.

  The third was that it would take place on the last Thursday of the month.

  She made her plans carefu
lly. She called Karen from a pay phone and told her the exact time at which she would arrive to pick up the material. She contacted her sister, who lived only a few miles away, yet from whom she had become virtually estranged because of Moloch’s paranoia, and told her of her plan, and of the possibility that she and her sorry-ass husband might have to leave the state at some point in the future, but with money in their pockets. Surprisingly, Patricia seemed unconcerned by the prospect of uprooting herself. Bill had recently been let go from a plant job and she saw it as a chance for them both to start over again.

  Marianne prepared three changes of clothing for Danny and herself, using what little cash she had left to buy them each a new set of clothes cheaply at Marshalls: no-name jeans, plain T-shirts, cotton sweaters from beneath the yellow, black, and red REDUCED sign. These she placed at the bottom of their respective piles of clothing, although she need not have worried, Moloch becoming ever more withdrawn as the day of the operation approached. This was to be his big score, she sensed.

  What she could not have known was that Moloch’s recent actions were merely one of a number of scams and crimes that he had put into operation over the years, and that there were other men involved, committing insurance frauds, drug rip-offs, minor bank raids in small dusty towns.

  Murders.

  And these were only the enterprises that produced a profit, for Moloch had his hobbies too. He had more in common with the would-be rapist Otis Barger than might once have seemed possible, except he picked his targets more carefully, from the ranks of whores and addicts and lost souls, and there was never a risk of them talking, because when he was finished with them, he disposed of their remains in forests and mountain bogs. Moloch’s peculiarity—one, if the truth be known, of many—was his disinclination to have vaginal sex with his victims.

  After all, he did not wish to be unfaithful to his wife.