by Knight, Dirk
His negativity and lack of confidence. He was a cancer to be around. Staley could never understand why she forgave him, when he couldn’t forgive himself.
The rain was incessant. They drove down winding highways surrounded by sycamores and shrouded by a lush green canopy. Kentucky is a forest. The click-whoosh, click-whoosh of the Crown Vic’s wiper blades provided a metronome to their conversation, what little of that remained. When there were no words there was the whine-splash-hum of the balding tires on the rain-slicked highway to fill in the gaps.
Click-whoosh.
They were done talking.
The case had gotten to the both of them.
Four months. A long sleepless four months had passed since the children went missing. Three months, two weeks and four days since he and Abigail had watched the abduction as captured in grainy footage from rooftop security cameras. Carron hated the television show misconception, the propagated bile and uninformed writing, the Hollywood drivel that told you that if you blew up a grainy image it became clearer. He came into the FBI like a child in the womb, protected from the truth and nurturing the misconception that police and FBI had an Easy Button. In the real world, real pictures taken with real cameras that were evidence in real cases became larger and grainer and not a bit of fucking help in finding Leopold Lutz.
Click-whoosh.
Two months since the first body showed up along a muddy riverbank in Mississippi, dead from the bloodletting, infection, and starvation. He’d not made it to his eighth birthday but had known terror and pain in excess of what most combat veterans would know. Certainly more than Carron had.
Why the teeth?
When looking at his scarring Carron determined the boy’s death to be an act of mercy. It was a blessing that he’d not survived into his eighth year on this side of eternity. The twenty-inch gashes and patches of missing flesh, the rectal bleeding and hemorrhoids. Death couldn’t have come fast enough for the boy. Nothing that Carron had seen and dealt with to this point had prepared him for the Lutz case. Abigail was no less disgusted. What else was there to talk about?
Click-whoosh-splash.
Leopold Lutz. He even had a molesty name for Christ sakes. Carron was doubly sure that aside from having a molester’s name he was the only Leopold born this side of the seventeenth century, but that hadn’t made the son of a bitch any easier to track down, now had it?
Leopold had been an elementary school teacher, well-groomed, sheepskins on his wall, a lifetime in the classrooms, a scholar. Lutz came from a family with money and had never known strife. Like many Silver Spooners, he thought he understood the plight of the poor and often told people what not to say, for it was offensive. He was not what you would call unattractive, in a conventional sense, but he also wasn’t drawing any second glances.
He simply was.
There was absolutely nothing remarkable about Leopold, in fact the only thing strange at all was that he had the makings of a college professor and chose to stick with the tiny-toons for a quarter the pay. Even that decision could be explained away as a love for helping children; that is, until you uncover his footlocker full of kiddie porn and Polaroids from his trip to Thailand. Suddenly his career choices, the lies he undoubtedly told at interview after interview came into focus.
Click-whoosh.
They came into focus on a career that ended just a few days too late when a student with mild retardation made an accusation of inappropriate touching in the restroom. Lutz denied everything, said he was trying to help the boy, who’d made a mess of his trousers, but retired anyway to save public humiliation (supposedly), and the story got very little attention from the local gossip columnist and less still from the women’s circles. Not even a headline.
Small towns are usually a treasure trove of dirty laundry and, “did you hear about Harry Dunn’s daughter’s illegitimate half-negro baby,” or, “Poor Sara Valentine got herpes from her husband of twenty years. I guess after two decades of marriage, he finally decided to use a public toilet.” Each family was a fully functional rumor mill, but in the case of Leopold Lutz and the retard, no one gave it much of a second thought.
“Poor man, wrong place at the wrong time,” and, “that poor young boy must be so confused he doesn’t know what he’s saying,” they’d said. They were like the media toeing the line and blurring the margins for their favorite candidate in a local race.
Leopold, and the entire Lutz family, was well liked; even the slow child’s father had said he was sure it was just a misunderstanding. Maybe the poor schmuck couldn’t come to grips with reality. Maybe he was too embarrassed to admit it to himself, maybe he just couldn’t even fathom his little boy’s willie in the teacher’s mouth, so he minimized it. Sided with the adult.
The rational adult.
The whole issue was minimized, swept aside, and forgotten, until the day Leo crammed four of his former students into the back of his car in broad daylight and skipped town. Then suddenly people started to look at the facts and the possibility that their college grad, daddy’s boy, favorite, fortunate son had come home to invade their children.
Carron can’t help but to blame them. There should have been an immediate investigation. The fucking hick cops, good ole’ boys, just let it all slide.
Aww shucks, twern’t nothing to worry about.
Eddie Mercer. That was the name of the first boy they found dead. They found him by the river. He’d gotten off easy.
Click-whoosh.
“This is the turn, up ahead,” Abigail said, motioning with her finger and breaking the oppressive silence.
Carron pulled off onto the graveled lane, stopping a few feet in. He stopped at a corroded and rusted “No Trespassing” sign, which hung from a somehow rustier chain. The entire ensemble looked as though it were waiting for a strong breeze to carry it away in a cloud of red dust.
“I’ll get it,” he said to Abigail when she unlatched her safety belt, motioning her to stay in the car.
The rain crackled and popped in his ears, like static on an old television set, as the heavy droplets came down on his beige duster.
The white ants were winning.
The chain was padlocked to the post, which he might have expected. The padlock was shiny, polished chrome, and stuck out like a Harlem Globetrotter at a midget convention. It was clearly no more than a few months out of the wrapper, most likely purchased to keep Carron, and those like him, out.
“This is it,” he said, settling back into the driver’s seat with a sigh.
This little stretch of Kentucky wilderness was bank owned. They had taken over the deed from Leopold’s grandparents some decades back when no one else in the family had taken up the responsibility or taken any interest in 200 acres of untamable thickets and gnats and coons.
No one wanted to jump on that grenade.
The bank hadn’t shown much more interest in the property or managed to get anyone out to keep up the land. Carron’s guess was that they had made a trip out some twenty years ago and never came back. They put up a shiny chain and lock to keep up appearances and keep out riff-raff, and other than that, the land sat and festered, along with the metal.
Carron thought that some would say the land had gone back the way it should have been. He was sure that hunters would have crossed the dilapidated fence line from time to time, and eventually someone might have called the police, depending on what they’d seen, but nine times out of ten, the hunter would be more concerned with his own trespassing and poaching than the atrocities that were carried out on the property. And so, here it stood unmanaged, unchanged, and unwatched. The only sign of anything was a new lock on a twenty-year-old chain.
Three-dollar-bill.
“What are you doing?” Abigail yelled as Carron backed the car up and slammed it into drive.
Click-whoosh-crash, and the Crown Vic’s bumper guard cut through the rusted chain like the snapping of a pencil lead.
Chink-a-link.
“That’s what I�
��m doing.”
Nevertheless, Abigail only looked ahead, into the forest, through the trees.
The metronome of the wiper blades was joined by the hollow popping and reverberating of the gravel under the overinflated tires. There was also the occasional splash of the tires into the puddles that had gathered in the well-rutted road.
Branches clawed and scratched at the Chevy’s doors and windows, ruining the paint job, and further threatening the silence he and Abigail had cultivated. The once traveled path was now an overgrown canopy of flora. Tarantula legs, hairy and dark, draped down, limiting their visibility to what was right in front of them.
There would be no element of surprise if they continued on much farther. Besides he and Abigail, and the man who’d replaced the lock, it appeared that no one knew this place existed, not even God. There was no trash or rubble or other residuum from kids hiding out smoking pot and drinking. There were no leavings from hunters or even a bit of paper gradually blown into the alley by the wind. It was like one of those little marshy areas below the highway super-stack in the middle of nowhere.
Although the bank owned it, the responsibility to maintain it had reached end of life. No one wanted the job, so no one asked for fear that it may fall into his or her circle of responsibility. It was the elephant in the room.
Click-pop-whoosh-splash-screech.
The second boy, William Westin, had turned up just a few miles up the riverbank from the first.
Local cops again failing at their job, the bastard had been confident enough to come to the near-same-spot and carelessly dumped the boy in the cold of the night.
By this point, Leopold could afford to be careless.
The local authorities had proven as useless as tits on a boar hog, and his identity wasn’t guarded or even cloudy. Everyone knew who had the children. He was now the center of a nationwide manhunt. The FBI was involved when he crossed state lines and was spotted entering Mississippi. Everyone knew his name; they just didn’t know where to find him.
They didn’t even know where to start.
Westin wouldn’t get Carron and the FBI any closer, either.
There wasn’t enough physical evidence to pinpoint his location. The long symmetrical gashes in the boy’s back had been pack-filled with ashes and rock salt. That bit was different from the last. Lutz had taken more time, greater care and attention to detail, he had kept Westin alive longer and done more to him because the greater the stakes, the greater the payoff at the end.
The ashes were from a common sycamore tree. Everyday firewood. The salt was Morton; driveway pellets.
They could have been anywhere.
The pain had to have been unbearable, and then the infection finished what the blades had started.
The autopsy for Westin had shed light on something they all had missed. Eddie Mercer was only missing three. They had assumed wrongly that they were knocked out in a tussle.
Click-whoosh-pop-scrape.
In addition to the festered wounds, William’s teeth had been removed—all— but not all of them had been remanded while he was still alive. The level of infection and necrosis varied from socket to socket, suggesting that they were taken a few at a time, here and there over the course of months.
The last five were removed posthumously.
What a sick fuck.
Click-whoosh-pop-scrape-splash.
Abigail had done her magic, her meticulous, half-psychic records search had turned up this hidden preserve’s history and led them to what Carron hoped would be the end of the road. He was road weary from this case. From just knowing that there were some things that he hadn’t the power to stop or set right. That out of all the men and women he had encountered in his life as a career criminal, or in his next life as an active duty combat veteran, that this man Leopold Lutz was the one that Karl had warned him about. The man believed in what he was doing, and wouldn’t be swayed by any different notion.
He was closed to reason. What’s more, he didn’t feel conflicted in the least about the horrors he was perpetrating. Decency be damned.
Some men destroy the world because they want to, some because they have to, and some because they can.
The scraping of the sycamore branches became more pronounced and the Chevy’s progress more labored and audible, the paint peeling away in swatches and the fingernails of the tree screaming though the dense moist air.
They had reached a chokepoint; they had to preserve their silence.
He stopped the car and collected his flashlight, before hoofing it the rest of the way up the congested thoroughfare. Abigail silently motioned again, with her perfectly formed hand, through the tree line.
The house was little more than a shack. A generator hummed and chugged off to one side, muffled slightly by the plywood lean-to that shielded it from the rain. There was a smaller, uncovered machine near it. A well pump.
This place had been, at one point, the epitome of the pioneer spirit, but now it oozed with the stench of molestation and secluded horror. It had taken on the aroma of its guests.
Carron felt hopelessness seep into his clothing as he drew nearer the door. The loose boards of the patio creaked and groaned beneath his weight; everything swollen from the rain.
The entrance loomed ahead, a harbinger of bad juju, like the wavy lines on a desert highway.
His breath and heart stopped for what seemed like an eternity as he finally moved forward into the threshold and cranked the doorknob open.
Carefully, they cleared room after room in the ramshackle shanty of a house. Lutz wasn’t there.
In the kitchen, the morning sun, what little had eked its way through the dense blanket of clouds and fog, shone through an oversized mason jar. There were tiny, bloody teeth collected at the bottom, with a few drying on a paper napkin just beside it.
Carron wanted to cry for the children. He wanted to surrender to his hopelessness and throw down his weapon. Just walk away because he knew that even if they got Lutz, there would be ten more Lutzs born next week and his children’s children would be at risk of the same passionate and emotionless deaths.
But as much as he wanted to toss in the towel, say “fuck it” and back out of the tumbledown driveway, he had to find Lutz. He had to reserve his tears. He had come this far and Karl and Jenny were counting on him. So were the other children. He would cry for them later; not then, but after it was done.
Abigail pointed to the jar he’d already seen, her eyes telling the same story his had. He nodded and turned away.
The rink—tink-tink patter of the rain on the roof was the only sound filling the tiny shack until it was suddenly interrupted by the whining screech and bang of a loose screen door.
His heart jumped from his chest and he spun to meet eyes with an equally shocked Leopold, who tossed up the handfuls of dishes he’d been toting and ran back the way he’d come. A thick porcelain plate clobbered Abigail, knocking her to a knee, while a still-warm bowl laden with the sweet brown sugar maple stench of oatmeal caught Carron mid-jaw. He shrugged it off, but it had been enough to distract him for a second; just a heartbeat to halt his pursuit and give Lutz a slight head start.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Get that son-of-a-bitch,” she shouted and Carron turned into a track star, spinning through the shitty screen door and hurdling over the warped banister, which was nothing more than a hastily nailed up two-by-four, and chugging through the soggy, overgrown bluegrass.
Hurtling after the incredibly plain-looking art instructor.
His target was still pulling away and increasing his margins.
He’s fast for a teacher, Carron thought, digging deeper not to be left totally behind. He lost him once he hit the timberline. His head start had proven enough to cripple Carron’s one advantage.
Though he lacked the element of surprise, he just kept tumbling through the arbor, confident that Lutz would not be doubling back. And if he was stupid enough to try, Abigail was not far behind. He was
heading to the boys; Carron knew it.
In the next clearing, there was an erection resembling stables, or what stables would be if they had been boarded up and abandoned for a quarter-century, and he heard the slap-slam-bang of a door flinging open too hard and rattling back home.
He followed the sound to the far side of the stables, the door still flapping in the wind and rain. The padlock in a puddle of mud between two paver stones leading up to the threshold.
He thumbed the safety on his sidearm subconsciously, his training taking over. He slid his back along the wall, one step closer to the door, buying a few precious seconds to collect his faculties, and stabilized his self against his labored breathing.
After Phoenix, and then Iraq, he was nearly drowning in the Kentucky deluge.
So perfect it seemed choreographed, he flicked the door open with the toe of his shoe and did a spin-clear-turn into the doorway with his pistol leveled. It was surprisingly dry in the building. There was hay and straw strewn about the floor and harsh lighting trickled down from a single flood bulb, which was holstered in a shiny metal bowl and nailed to a rafter beam.
He could hear the shuffling of feet in the hay. The sounds were amplified by Carron’s adrenaline-soaked senses.
He kicked open the second stable door, gun trained on the source of the noises.
A bowl crashed to the ground, shattering into slivers of porcelain and puddles of gooey oatmeal, which oozed into a stew with the chaff on the floor. It was Kevin Harting, the oldest of the boys taken.
“It’s okay. You’re okay. You’re safe now,” Carron said.
The boy looked up with haunted doe eyes, scarcely making contact, then he continued pushing wads of oatmeal and straw—undoubtedly some splinters from the bowl as well—into his mouth and past his toothless bloody gums. Kevin’s starvation had outweighed all other elements of who he was.