Consumed

by E. H. Reinhard

  “We probably should, even if it’s just for a bit. What time did they say they would be there?”

  “I’m not sure, but they have the excavation crew, another forensics crew, and who knows who else heading out there. I’d guess there will be people there all day.”

  I nodded.

  “Make a left on Jo Johnston Ave,” Beth said. “Should be the next street.”

  The drive took us another couple minutes. We pulled up to the ten-plus-story white building that read Metro General Hospital at the top and made a left into the matching white parking structure across the street. I found us a spot, and we headed toward the complex. As Beth and I crossed the street, I took in the medical complex, consisting of the white high-rise on our left and a conical brown-brick building, labeled The Meharry Clinic, before us. More matching brown-brick buildings stood in the distance.

  “Do we have any idea where we’re supposed to be going, here?” I asked.

  “Nope,” Beth said. “Main entrance looks like it’s this way, though. I’m sure someone will be able to tell us where we need to go.”

  Beth headed past the roundabout for dropping patients off and pulled open the door at the ground level of the white high-rise. I followed her in.

  We stopped briefly at the reception desk and asked for Doctor Mitchell. The woman in scrubs at the front desk told us he would be with us shortly, so we took a seat in the waiting area. A few magazine articles later, a man appearing in his late fifties approached the front desk. He was short, balding, and wearing a set of blue scrubs with a white lab coat—he looked the part of a doctor. The receptionist pointed over at Beth and me, and the man walked up.

  “I’m Doctor Mitchell,” he said. “Are you the agents from the FBI that called?”

  Beth and I stood. “Agents Hank Rawlings and Beth Harper,” I said.

  “And you said that you wanted to speak with the patient that is under guard here, correct?” he asked.

  “Correct,” Beth said.

  “Sure. We have him in our secure wing on the fourth floor. You need to be with someone to get through, which is the reason I had you guys ask for me. Why don’t you guys follow me, and I’ll lead you up.”

  We followed the doctor toward the elevators.

  “What’s Kirkwood’s condition?” I asked.

  “He’s stable but, um, I can’t say he’s going to win any awards for being a model patient,” Doctor Mitchell said.

  “What did he do?” I asked.

  The doctor thumbed the button for the elevator. “He came out of surgery last night. Well, the first thing he did when he came to was try to get out of his restraints, which is to be expected, I guess. We use a canvas wrap that goes around his chest and thighs. His arm that remained was also restrained, so we weren’t too worried about him getting out. However, when one of our night nurses went in to try to calm him down, he bit at her, catching a handful of her hair in his mouth. Her hair actually had to be cut with scissors to free her. We’ve since sedated him and fitted him with a bite shield.”

  “Bite shield? Like…” I held my hand over my mouth and chin.

  “Exactly.”

  The elevator doors opened, and we stepped in.

  “There hasn’t been anyone by to try to see what he has going on mentally, but just judging by his continued conversations with no one, there has to be something going on there,” Doctor Mitchell said.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Beth said.

  “Rumor has it he pulled off and tried eating his own arm,” the doctor said. He looked at me with raised eyebrows.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  The doctor said nothing.

  The elevator doors opened, and we followed Doctor Mitchell to the left down the glossy-white-floored hallway. He stopped at an office outside a pair of gray doors with small security-glass windows.

  The doctor rapped his knuckle on the sliding glass window of the office. A security guard slid open the window. He was slim and a few inches under six foot. I spotted another security guard seated behind him that looked a bit bigger. Both men looked in their early thirties and were armed.

  “Doc,” the first guard said.

  “We have two more agents to see our guest,” Doctor Mitchell said.

  “Sure, can I see your IDs quick?” the guy asked.

  Beth and I handed our credentials to the man. He looked at them both and slid us a sheet to sign in. We did.

  The man took back the clipboard the sign-in sheet was attached to. “Inside the room—one next to the bed and one near the door—are large red buttons. Those are for alarms. Use them if necessary. They alert our office here and the entire floor.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  The security guard reached under the table next to him and must have pressed a button to unlock the doors—they buzzed to our right. The doctor pushed one of the doors open and held it ajar with his foot. Past the doctor, two men in suits were sitting in chairs at the end of the short hall. Both had newspapers in their laps. “He’s in that room there with the guards,” Doctor Mitchell said. He jerked his chin toward the two seated men. “I actually have to go do my rounds. If you need anything else from me, just have them page me.”

  “Thank you,” Beth said.

  We walked past the doctor toward the agents standing guard. I heard the door latch closed at our backs.

  The two agents stood as we approached. The nearer of the two stood my height and build—a few inches over six foot and a few pounds under two hundred. He had short, dark hair and a black suit. The agent farther from us had blond spiked hair and a gray suit—he stood a few inches shorter than his partner and looked in his early thirties.

  “Beth Harper,” Beth said. “And this is Hank Rawlings.” She pointed at me.

  We exchanged a round of handshakes with the other agents—each man had a firm grip.

  “We got a call that we should be expecting you,” the taller of the two said. “Agent Alex Boone, and this is Agent Tim Ebron. We got sent over from the Nashville office to supervise this guy until they get him transferred somewhere.”

  “Anything unexpected?” Beth asked.

  “I don’t know about unexpected, but listen,” Agent Ebron said.

  The two went silent, and I could hear Kirkwood talking inside the room.

  “That’s been going on since we got here,” Agent Boone said. “Full-out conversations with nobody. I listened to the topic for a bit. It was something about whatever he was watching on television, like he was discussing the show with someone.”

  “Great,” I said. “Thanks, guys. We should just be a bit in here.”

  “Let us know if you need something,” Agent Boone said.

  I motioned for Beth to enter the room. She flipped the lock on the outside of the door and pushed it open. Kirkwood’s conversation came to an abrupt end, and the room went silent. I followed her inside and closed the door at my back. I noticed the sterile smell of hospital immediately as I looked over the room. The floor was a glossy white, matching the hall—the walls were also white and bare aside from outlets and sockets that I assumed some kind of medical equipment plugged into. A bathroom was directly to my left, the foot of Kirkwood’s bed just beyond it, also to the left. The right wall had a television hanging from the ceiling but was bare aside from that. A blue faux-leather chair stood in the right corner against the back wall. The room had no windows.

  Beth walked to the foot of the bed. I followed and looked at Kirkwood. His eyes were open, staring past us and up at the television on the wall as if we weren’t even there. I looked over my right shoulder to see what he was watching—it looked like some kind of morning talk show. I looked back at Kirkwood. His eyes were the only visible part of his face. His hair covered his forehead, and the frosted-white bite shield he wore covered his nose and extended down past his chin before vanishing into his thick black-and-gray beard—the shield was some kind of plastic. The straps from the bite shield circled his head and pulled his hair and
beard close. He lay on top of the blankets in a white hospital gown. Tan canvas straps secured his body to the bed. Another canvas strap secured his right wrist—his right hand clutched the remote control for the TV. What remained of his left arm was wrapped in a bandage. I looked down to his ankles—also bound by the straps.

  His eyes darted to Beth and me the second I heard the television behind us go to commercial. “What do you want?” he asked, his voice muffled by the shield.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Beth pulled her voice recorder from her pocket and clicked the button to start it. “Agents Beth Harper and Hank Rawlings with Richard Kirkwood. Mr. Kirkwood, we’d like to ask you some questions.”

  “Between commercials,” he said. “You two open your yaps during my show, and you can see yourselves the hell out.”

  I pulled the notepad from my pocket and flipped to the page where I’d written my questions.

  “Are there bodies on your property that weren’t in the houses?” Beth asked.

  “Probably,” he said.

  “Where would they be?” Beth asked.

  “I think my dad buried some. I might have buried one or two. Probably by the old barn. Now that I think about it, I know there is at least a couple back there. I used to play with them when I was a kid.”

  I shook my head and went to the first question I had written down. “Why have you been doing this? What made you do it?”

  “Nothing made me do anything. I did what I did because I could and I wanted to.” He paused for a moment. “Plus, I like the taste of people.”

  Kirkwood’s answer was direct, quick, and had conviction. It seemed he’d thought about it before.

  “Can you describe for us your relationship with Chief Deputy Whissell?” I asked.

  “Relationship? At the end there, I guess you could have called it a man and his dinner.” Kirkwood chuckled. “He was my brother, Mark. Mark Matheson. I’m not sure where he ever picked up the August Whissell name. He was an asshole. Always called me names.”

  “You’re saying that the chief deputy was Mark Matheson?” Beth asked.

  “That’s what I just said. Changed his name and left town a year or two before my father got caught. I guess he thought he could get away from everything and be a different person. My mother tried the same shit, gave me her maiden last name.”

  “The chief deputy knew what you were doing?” I asked.

  “He helped get rid of the girls. Dumped them somewhere where they wouldn’t be near me,” Kirkwood said.

  “You mean the side of the road?” Beth asked.

  “No. I did those when Mark wouldn’t come and pick them up. He took what was left of some of them and got rid of them somewhere. Couldn’t tell you where, though. It’s not good for me to keep them around.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Let’s just say they aren’t happy after I kill and eat them,” Kirkwood said.

  “They talk to you?” Beth asked.

  “Some do. Some don’t,” he said. “The talkers have to go. I have a hard enough time dealing with my mother.”

  My eyes went to the next question on my list. “How long have—”

  “Commercial is over,” Kirkwood said, interrupting me. “Shut it.”

  I looked at the remote control in his hand and debated taking it from him to get on with the interview, but he was telling us everything that we wanted to know, at least during the commercials, so I decided to let it continue that way. The more I thought about it, I realized I’d never really had someone who’d committed such terrible acts sit and explain himself. Beth and I waited while the talk show played. The talk show was testing the paternity of a woman’s child. Three different men sat alongside her on stage, waiting for the results. Kirkwood yelled through his mask at the television when the results came in that none of the three men was the father. The show went to commercial again.

  Kirkwood’s eyes came back to Beth and me.

  I crossed my arms over my chest and went back to the question on my list. “How long have you been doing this?” I asked.

  “What? Eating people? Or killing people?” Kirkwood asked.

  “Both,” I said.

  “As long as I can remember, on the eating. Dad would bring home the meat, Mom would fix it up, and the four of us would sit around as a family and eat. Mom would flick the fingers and toes to Bandit, our collie. Our mother had a couple recipes that were out of this world.” Kirkwood smacked his lips and then continued, “She used to make this shepherd’s pie where she would cut the meat from the girls in little—”

  “Enough.” I didn’t need to hear the family recipe for human shepherd’s pie. “When did you start killing people?”

  “I don’t know. It’s been a while.”

  “Do you remember when you started picking up prostitutes?” Beth asked.

  “Probably when I got a car.”

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “Fifty-nine.”

  “So you’ve been doing this since you were what, sixteen?” Beth asked.

  “Around there.”

  “How often?” I asked.

  “Whenever I felt like it.”

  “How many?” Beth asked.

  I heard Kirkwood scoff under his plastic mask. “That’s like asking someone how many hamburgers they’ve ate in their life or how many times they’ve had eggs. Who the hell knows,” he said. “Shut up. Show is back on.”

  Beth and I stood quietly while the talk show came back on and the host discussed what was going to be on the next show, along with the preview. Kirkwood laughed at two women pulling wigs off of each other as they fought. The credits for the program rolled.

  “What happened to your father?” Beth asked.

  “Don’t know. I think my brother might have killed him,” Kirkwood said.

  “And your mother?” I asked.

  “That I did. It was an accident.”

  “How did it happen?” Beth asked.

  “Well, I sometimes get a little confused, and it happened when I was having one of those times. I put an ax through her chest.”

  “You said it was an accident. How do you accidentally put an ax through someone’s chest?” I asked.

  “I was outside chopping wood and kind of daydreaming. Next thing I know, I’m in the living room, and she’s on the living-room floor with an ax through her chest. All I remember about it, really. Like I said, I must have been a little confused as to where I was, and well, that’s that.”

  Kirkwood’s voice didn’t have an ounce of anything that sounded like remorse in it.

  “When did this happen?” Beth asked.

  “October sixteenth, nineteen ninety.”

  I found it odd that he knew the exact date but didn’t question it.

  “You said the corpse in the chief deputy’s house was your mother. You’ve been taking her around with you since then?” Beth asked.

  “When Mark helped me buy the old family land back from the bank, we brought her from where I was staying and buried her in the house I built. She didn’t stay in the ground long, though. She doesn’t like it in there.”

  “Doesn’t like it in there?” I asked.

  “She gets lonely. So I take her out every now and then so we can spend some time together. She forgave me for killing her years ago. The old woman can sure annoy the heck out of you, though.” Kirkwood chuckled again. “It’s always something with her. Don’t know what they did with her, do you? I was thinking that maybe they’d let her sit in here with me.”

  “Um, no,” I said. I looked at Beth, who opened her eyes wide.

  Beth and I stayed in Kirkwood’s room for another half hour before leaving for the Kirkwood property. He continued in the same fashion for the remaining time we were there, talking between commercials and answering every question we threw out to him.

  We’d been driving for the better part of an hour and were just minutes from Kirkwood’s house—the trip had been mostly silent aside from the phone c
all to Agent Clifford to meet us there. I imagined Beth was going over the interview in her head as I had been.

  “Ever take any psychology courses?” Beth asked.

  I looked over at her sitting in the passenger seat and leaning against the door. “Sure, in high school and a bit in college. Why?”

  “Kirkwood would make a hell of a study for someone in the profession. I’m betting they could learn a lot,” she said. “The guy is unusually open.”

  I shrugged, slowed the car, and flipped on my turn signal for the road Kirkwood’s property was on. Beth’s mention of him being open to talk stirred another thought in my head. “This shithead is going to be famous,” I said as I made the turn.

  “What do you mean?” Beth asked.

  “Think about it. You put that guy in a courtroom with a camera crew, and he starts talking about everything. You won’t be able to get away from the coverage. His little in-and-out of crazy every couple of seconds. A halfway normal answer followed by him talking about the corpse of his mother annoying him. The media will eat it up.” I was quiet for a second. “Sorry, poor choice of words.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Beth said. “I don’t think there’s really anything we can do to avoid that, though. Whatever. We’ll see what happens when the time comes, I guess. I’ve been thinking about something else.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “He said the chief deputy was getting rid of the bodies for him. What do you think he did with them?”

  “It looked like Whissell had a good amount of land. He could have been burying them on his property,” I said.

  “Maybe we should have that excavation crew take a look around over there as well.”

  “Probably wouldn’t be the worst idea,” I said.

  I saw a pair of sheriff’s cruisers blocking the center of the road up ahead—to both sides of the roadway, along the gravel shoulders, were news vans parked bumper to bumper. Each van had its mast raised—television crews walked about filming.

  “Looks like the word is out,” I said.

  “You think?”

  We passed a couple of the vans and slowed when we approached the sheriff’s cruisers. I glanced to my left—a couple of the vans were from Nashville, and I spotted one that appeared to be a Memphis affiliate.