“So, when did you bump into Taylor again?”
“About an hour later, Nikki and Sloan walked her up to the house on Birchwood Circle. Matt and Dustin were fooling around with the girls and telling them they were having a get-together in the woods.”
I gave him a perplexed look.
“Some of the kids go there to drink and chill out. The girls followed them to the woods, and since I don’t drink, I didn’t go. I told them I’d see them later. They were so shocked that Nikki and Sloan agreed to go with them, they never looked back. Taylor stood there on her porch, and I could tell that her bag wasn’t even halfway filled. I got the impression that Nikki and Sloan had rushed her back home before she was ready to go in. So, I asked if she wanted to collect some more candy, and she said, ‘yes.’ ”
“Someone might have noticed you, Phoenix,” I blurted, feeling fearful as I imagined police dressed in SWAT gear, breaking down the door of our home and dragging Phoenix out.
“No one noticed me. That street was quiet; no one was around.”
“And what happened next?”
“I asked her if she wanted to ride my bike. She smiled and nodded. So, I sat her on the seat and let her hold on to the handlebars, but since her feet couldn’t reach the pedals, I had to guide her through the breezeway that I always used as a shortcut.”
“A shortcut to where? Where’d you take her?”
“I took her to Baxter’s old house. I told her there was lots of candy there, enough to fill her bag up.”
“Oh, God!” I groaned. In an effort to get Phoenix to confide in me, I’d been stoic up until now, but hearing him admit that he used the promise of more Halloween candy to lure a helpless little girl to her death was difficult to hear.
I glanced down at the hardened corpse that used to be Taylor Flanagan, and quickly looked away.
“As soon as she realized that the house was empty and didn’t have any electricity, she started crying. Not whimpering and whining like most little kids.…she was loud! Ear-splitting loud! And I didn’t have a choice; I had to shut her up.”
“What did you do to her?” I braced myself for the worst.
“I told her to be quiet, but she wouldn’t. I took my shirt off and used it to cover her mouth. But she kept on screaming and struggling with me. It was an accident, Pops. I didn’t realize that I had smothered her until she went limp. I tried to give her mouth-to-mouth, but it didn’t work.”
“Why did you try to resuscitate her if your plan was to kill her all along?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t want to kill her that way.”
“How did you want to kill her?”
“I wanted to hang her,” he said quietly.
I flinched and emitted an involuntary sound of horror. “Why did you have a desire to hang her?”
“I like watching public executions online. They’re uploaded and posted from different places in the Middle East and Asia. When a person gets hung, their body convulses and jerks in a way that’s fascinating, and I wanted to see it in person.”
Hearing my son admit that he sought out online videos that featured public executions was so nauseating I could feel the muscles around my mouth straining to twist into an expression of extreme displeasure. My face felt hot and my stomach lurched. In fact, every part of my being reacted negatively to Phoenix’s admission.
“Did you plan to hang Paisley? Is that why you took her to Baxter’s?” I asked, powering through the vile questions while striving to keep my vocal quality even-toned and without an inkling of judgment.
“Yeah, I planned to hang Paisley. I was going to do it after I finished reading to her. She seemed like a sweet kid and I didn’t want to kill her without making her happy, first. But…as you know, my plan didn’t succeed,” he said with a rueful smile.
“I don’t understand why you target young children? Do you have sexual fantasies that involve little kids?”
“Ew, no! I pick them because they’re easy to manipulate, and they’re such lightweights, it’s easy to physically overpower them.”
“How’d you get Taylor’s body all the way from Baxter’s house to here?”
“I wrapped her in trash bags and tied her onto my bike and then I pushed it here. It was hell pushing a bike on rugged Tijera Springs Road, but I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t leave her at Baxter’s and let some nosey real estate agent find her body.”
“No, I suppose you couldn’t,” I said resignedly. Although I’d had a gut feeling that he wasn’t mentally all there, he was much sicker and more dangerous than I could have ever imagined.
I doubted if there was anything I could do to help a psychopath that had no intention of ending his killing spree.
“Does Mr. Fawcett know that there’s a cave on his land?” I continued.
“Yeah, he knows. He’s the one who told me about it. He says he’s only been down here…maybe three or four times in the forty-plus years that he’s owned the ranch. He never told anyone about it because he didn’t want the place crawling with tourists, and he didn’t want the government butting in and making claims on the cave.”
“Hmm,” I muttered.
“As you know, he can barely see, Pops, so you don’t have to worry about him coming down here.”
“How long do you plan on leaving Taylor in this cave?” I asked with heartfelt compassion. It hurt me to my core to realize the extent of his psychosis. He was so screwed up in the head, it was clear to me that he was going to end up being confined to a mental institution for the rest of his natural life.
Of course a good lawyer could make sure that he was charged as a juvenile and set free at age eighteen.
I wondered if Elle realized that our child was a lost cause. Was his deteriorating mental state the reason that she so easily turned him over to my care after years of keeping him away from me?
And what about the therapist that Phoenix saw once a week? Did he know that Phoenix yearned to kill people and wanted to watch their bodies twitch and writhe? I imagined the therapist’s records being subpoenaed and his notes being reported in newspapers across the land. And I shuddered as I envisioned the trial being televised.
Sasha and I as well as Elle and Everett would become pariahs in our communities. The businesses that Sasha and I worked so hard to build would surely fold. And it wouldn’t stop there. Sweet little Zoe would also be ostracized. Her mermaid slumber party would be the last event that she would ever host. No parent would allow their child to socialize at our house, and who could blame them?
“We’ve got to move the body out of this cave,” I said, thinking out loud.
“Why? She’s safe here. No one will ever find her.”
“She deserves a proper burial, Phoenix. Her family should be allowed to say goodbye.”
“But she doesn’t even look like herself anymore. Why would they want to tell a corpse goodbye?”
“It doesn’t matter what she looks like. Her family still loves her and they need closure.”
My thoughts went to Tessa Jordan, my busybody neighbor, and I could only imagine the tales she would tell after word got out that my son was the perpetrator of the most heinous crime to ever take place in peaceful Springfield Hills.
I imagined her saying, Malik Copeland stood right next to me, asking questions and acting concerned when all the time, it was his own monstrous son that snatched that sweet little girl. I think Malik knew all along, and he did everything he could to cover for his son.
“What do you plan to do with her?” Phoenix asked, looking down at Taylor’s corpse with a warm look in his eyes, as if the mummified remains were a beloved pet that he couldn’t bear to part with.
“We have to put her in a location where someone will find her,” I said logically, as if having a discussion about moving a dead body was a normal conversation between a father and son.
“What about me? Are you going to tell the police?”
“Of course not.”
“I’m not stupid, Pops. You�
�re too much of a goody-goody and too moralistic to let me get away with this.”
“You’re not going to get away with it, Phoenix. Although I’m not going to turn you over to an angry mob, I’m definitely going to make sure you get intensive therapy. Perhaps another thirty-day stay in a mental hospital… But not any time soon. We need to allow some time to pass. It might draw unwelcome attention to you if you were hospitalized in the midst of the media circus that’s going to ensue when the body turns up.”
He nodded, relieved that he wouldn’t be locked up in a mental institution.
“Can I tell you something, Pops?”
Not sure if I could withstand another bombshell revelation, I nodded hesitantly.
“I was going to hang Baxter, too. But his family moved before I could get around to it.”
Fighting against a violent reaction, I swallowed hard and bit down on my bottom lip. “Baxter’s not a little kid; how’d you plan to overpower him?” I asked reasonably.
Phoenix gave me a sly grin. “I would have overpowered him with logic. I’m a skilled debater, you know.”
Uncomprehendingly, I gazed at the face of madness that belonged to my son. “What does being on the debate team have to do with overpowering Baxter with logic?”
“There wouldn’t have been a need to struggle to get a noose around his neck; I could have used the powers of persuasion to get him to willingly do it.”
“That’s ridiculous!” I was so sickened by Phoenix, I wanted to flee the cave and put miles and miles of distance between us, but I stood there and continued to endure the madness.
“Baxter was suicidal, Pops,” Phoenix explained. “Slitting his wrists wasn’t his first attempt to kill himself. He had lots of issues with his parents, kids at school…and he just didn’t want to be here anymore. But he was too scared to go through with it. If I were there with him, I would have given him the rope and instructions on how to do it right. Most importantly, I wouldn’t have allowed him to punk-out of it like he’d done many times before.
“It would have been more like a mercy killing than murder,” Phoenix rationalized. “But he moved, and that pissed me off. It really pissed me off,” he repeated in a louder tone.
He glanced down at Taylor’s corpse on the floor. “This stupid little kid died so fast, I didn’t get a chance to enjoy it.”
He stood up and began to savagely kick the corpse. The sound of his sneaker connecting with the child’s hardened dead body was so repulsive, my lips curled into a grimace as I recoiled.
“That’s enough, Phoenix!”
“It’s true, though. And it’s messed up the way nobody will cooperate with me,” he said, frowning disdainfully. “It’s not my fault that I have this urge, but if I could do it one more time—without being rushed—I wouldn’t have to kill again.”
In so many words, he was asking me to endorse and possibly participate in his final murderous escapade, and I was stunned.
“It’s getting late,” I said. “We have to get the body out of here, and go home. We’ll talk more about your situation tomorrow.”
“Do you promise that we’ll talk about it?”
“Yeah, I promise,” I mumbled.
CHAPTER 29
Phoenix was experienced in getting in and out of the cave. Getting a footing on the stones that jutted out of the wall, he scampered upward without any difficulty. Once he was outside the cave, I hoisted the body up to him.
Although Phoenix had wrapped the body in the same plastic trash bags that he’d wrapped it in when he’d brought it there, and despite that it felt more like a statue than a person, it was difficult for me to handle the child’s remains without losing my mind.
I wanted to put this nightmare behind me so badly, I amazed myself with my agility and swiftness in climbing out of the cave.
Once outside the cave, I expressed concern about getting caught by Mr. Fawcett.
“We won’t get caught. Gramps relies on his hearing and his sense of touch to know what’s going on around him.”
This time I didn’t wince when he referred to Mr. Fawcett as Gramps. His cozy relationship with the old man no longer instilled envy. It was a minor blip on the scale of problems that Phoenix had dumped on me.
“I’d like to avoid Mr. Fawcett if possible,” I insisted.
“Okay, follow me.”
Phoenix grabbed his bike, and then pedaled ahead with the corpse wedged between his torso and the handlebars. Leading the way, he rode on a barely visible path that he said would take us directly to the main road without having to bypass Mr. Fawcett’s private dwelling.
It was a longer route, but I was relieved to not have to worry about being seen. We made it to the car and Phoenix loaded the body and the bike inside the trunk.
“I know a place we can dump her,” he said.
“Where?”
“If you take Route 87 and exit at Alvarado Drive, there’s a cornfield nearby.”
“How do you know?”
“We ride our bikes in cornfields sometimes.”
“We can’t put the body in a place where you and your friends hang out.”
“None of my friends know about this particular field. I discovered it when I was scouting out new places to chill.”
He’d been in Arizona for less than a year and yet he had identified more remote locations than the average person could have imagined. Personally, I would think that being alone in a cornfield was a nightmarish experience, but Phoenix was so depraved, he viewed the massive field as an oasis.
The sky, slate gray with streaks of black, was appropriately grim and foreboding as we embarked on our journey to get rid of Taylor Flanagan’s body. White-knuckled, I gripped the steering wheel as my body lurched and bumped along the rugged terrain of Tijera Springs Road.
The treacherous road wasn’t my only concern. After tonight I would be considered an accessory to murder after the fact, and my actions could impact Sasha and Zoe for the rest of their lives. Despite the knowledge that I was jeopardizing my beloved family’s peace and well-being, I forged ahead, intent on protecting Phoenix, whom I also loved dearly.
We rode in silence for much of the drive. The rolling and tumbling of the body in the trunk was an obscene reminder of what I’d gotten myself into. For so long I’d yearned for Phoenix and me to participate in an activity that would forge a bond between us. Cycling, fishing, or camping were a few ideas that I’d proposed and that he had shot down.
Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined us bonding over murder.
I told myself that it was too late to do anything for Taylor, but I could somehow save my son. But I had no concrete plan as to how I would go about saving him. I was in the moment, motivated by unconditional love and an innate desire to protect him at all costs.
We arrived at the cornfield and I instructed Phoenix to stay inside the car. There was no point in both of us being spotted if there were prying eyes anywhere near.
Wearing the flimsy disguise that consisted of only a Western hat and glasses, I popped the trunk before exiting the rental car. As I hauled the plastic-wrapped body out of the trunk and flung it over my shoulder, I was hit with an overwhelming urge to vomit. The body was stiff and heavy like a slab of concrete. Knowing that the lifeless form had once been a lively child who had met her death because she had trustingly taken my son’s hand was difficult to deal with.
I stepped inside the labyrinth of growing corn, solidifying my role as an accomplice. Realizing that there was no turning back now, I forged ahead. To keep from panicking, I didn’t allow myself to think about the heinousness of the crime I was committing. As I moved deeper and deeper into the darkened rows of corn with their razor-sharp stalks, I focused on the idea of keeping Phoenix safe. I kept walking inside the rows and refused to place the body on the ground until I was satisfied that it was so well-hidden, it would take at least another day or two before anyone detected it.
I needed extra time to prep Phoenix and get him ready for the
upcoming whirlwind of activity that would befall our city the moment Taylor’s remains were found.
After placing the body carefully on the ground, I removed the plastic to prevent the police from finding Phoenix’s or my fingerprints.
Looking down at the mummified form, I whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
Then, I fled the scene, batting away insects that buzzed around my face.
Back in the car, I mopped sweat from my brow. The perspiration had not accumulated from physical fatigue but was the result of dread and anxiety regarding the days that lie ahead.
“You may be questioned by the police,” I said to Phoenix, trying to keep my voice light.
“Why?” he asked, sounding annoyed by the potential imposition.
“You were seen in the company of the babysitter the night the child went missing, am I right?”
“No! Matt and Dustin were with the girls. I was on the sidelines, keeping an eye on Taylor.”
He spoke as if he had been keeping an eye on Taylor to ensure her well-being, when in fact, he was appraising her as a candidate for murder. I wondered if he had sent her a warm smile to make himself appear friendly and harmless?
“If the police question you, don’t mention that you saw the little girl standing on her front porch.”
“I’m not stupid enough to implicate myself,” he said sullenly. “This isn’t my first time at the rodeo; I’ve had to cover my tracks before.”
His admission sent shockwaves through my system, and perspiration began to swiftly trickle from my forehead, pooling around the base of my neck. “But…I thought you said you never killed anyone before.”
He gave me a sly grin. “It wasn’t a person. It was Bella, my mom’s stupid little dog.”
“What did you do to the dog?”
“I hung it,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Did your mother find out?”
“Uh-huh. That’s why she shipped me off to you.”
Speechless, I made an indecipherable sound.
It was extremely immoral of Elle to send him to live with me without informing me of his declining mental status. Had I known how deeply troubled he was, I may or may not have accepted the responsibility of being his guardian. Allowing me to have a choice in the matter would have been the decent thing for Elle to do.
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