by Jacob Stone
“Come on, man, buck up, it can’t be that bad.”
Henry could’ve easily disagreed with him, but instead he took a long drink of his pilsner.
“Look, there are always going to be bumps in any marriage,” Joe offered philosophically. “These are things you got to work through. Everyone goes through it.”
Henry knew not everybody went through what he was experiencing. He hadn’t planned to talk to anyone about what had been happening between Sheila and himself—it seemed too much of a betrayal of his wife to do so, but Joe had insisted they go out for beers after work and he wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Something’s eating at you, Henry,” Joe had said. “The way you’ve been moping around the office the last couple of days, you’re not fooling anyone. So we’re going to hoist a few, and you’re going to spill your guts.”
Henry had gone with his buddy to humor him. He couldn’t imagine saying out loud the thoughts he’d been having, but as they sat drinking their beer, he mentioned how he didn’t even know what Sheila did.
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve been married for three months, and I have no clue what she does for work. Or even if she works. When I try asking her, she tells me a little of this and a little of that, and then she gets mad if I push it.”
Joe’s expression turned serious. “That’s odd,” he said.
“She’s got money,” Henry said. “I have no idea how much, but her place on Central Park West costs a fortune. I’d need to be making ten times what I am now to afford it.”
They were on their second beers, and Joe was already beginning to look a little bleary-eyed. He gave the matter some thought as he drank some more, then speculated, “Maybe she won the lottery?”
Henry shrugged, looking miserable. “Maybe that’s it. All I know is I have no idea what she does when I’m at work.”
What Henry said was true, but he had his suspicions. That first night they’d met, the thought had popped into his head that Sheila could be a call girl. That she had sat at his booth only to drum up business. After they had sex that first night, he was half expecting her to charge him for the night and was somewhat surprised when she didn’t. He had felt guilty about having those thoughts, but when she later took him to her apartment on Central Park West (where they now lived) and she refused to tell him what she did for work, the thought that she might be a call girl, albeit a high-priced one, had once again popped into his head. She was certainly beautiful enough for that to be the case, and it would explain a lot of things; her lack of interest in sex and why someone as beautiful as Sheila would settle for Henry. After all, if she were being paid by guys all day for sex, why would she want any more from him, and why would she want anything other than a nice guy? If that was what it was—that Sheila was a high-priced call girl, and she simply wanted Henry for companionship when she wasn’t working—he could live with that. But things had turned more ominous over the past week.
Joe pondered over what Henry had told him, and finally made up his mind. “A little mystery in a marriage isn’t the worst thing,” he proclaimed, before finishing off his IPA.
“I think I might be losing her,” Henry said as he choked back a sob. Up until that moment he hadn’t let himself admit that his wife might be about to leave him. He didn’t think he could live if that happened.
“Sounds like you’re jumping to conclusions,” Joe said. He rubbed his bony jaw, giving the matter more thought. “I admit it’s odd she won’t tell you what she does, but you’re making a pretty big leap there.”
“Sheila has become so distant recently. The last three days she’s gotten home past two in the morning, and she won’t tell me where she’s been.”
“No kidding?”
Henry shook his head, afraid he might start bawling if he tried speaking.
“Call in sick tomorrow,” Joe said. “Follow her. Find out what she’s doing.”
The next day Henry did as Joe suggested, paying the doorman fifty dollars to call him when he saw Sheila in the lobby. He got the doorman’s call a few minutes after five, and he hurried from the bench in Central Park where he’d been camped out for the day, and spotted his wife as she left the apartment building, but then quickly lost her as she jumped into a cab.
He tried again the next day, this time renting a car. Sheila again left the apartment building a little after five, jumping into a cab, and this time Henry was able to follow her to a seedy bar in Queens. She was in there no more than forty minutes when a man exited the bar and stood outside of it as if he were waiting for someone. This man was about Henry’s height and age, balding, and looking about thirty pounds overweight. Certainly not good-looking, but a sick feeling crept into Henry’s stomach as he thought that this might be playing out the same as that night he had first met Sheila. He was proven right when a few minutes later Sheila left the bar and headed straight to this man the moment she spotted him. They walked together until they reached a car that they both then got in. Henry followed them to the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens and watched as the car pulled into the driveway of a small two-level house, and then as Sheila and this man entered the house together.
For the next half hour Henry felt like he was dying inside as he tried to figure out what to do. His first thought was to burst in there and catch Sheila in the act of cheating on him and play the martyr and tell her with shocked outrage that it was over, except the idea of losing her made him sick to his stomach. He accepted quickly that he’d rather she sleep around (whether she was being paid or not) than lose her. Even with the trauma Sheila had put him through the last few days, he couldn’t go back to living alone, and he became terrified that if he broke into the house and confronted them Sheila would end things with him. He couldn’t risk losing her, but he couldn’t just drive away either. So he sat paralyzed in his fear and dread and despair as different plans of action raced through his mind. Finally, he decided he had to go in the house. He would physically pick Sheila up and carry her out of there on his shoulder if he had to, but he was taking her out of that house. Once he got her home, he would talk sense into her, and get to the bottom of what was going on. Somehow he would make Sheila see how much he loved her, and he would find a way to save their marriage. And maybe he’d also beat the heck out of her lover before he took his wife out of there.
The front door was locked and it appeared solid. Henry tried to break it open with his shoulder like he’d seen done on cop shows, but all he did was hurt himself. He rang the bell and got no answer. In his mind he imagined that his wife and this man were too busy making love in this man’s bed to answer the door, and that thought left Henry seething. He raced around the house searching for a window or another door that he could enter through, and in the back of the house he found a flimsier-looking door that he was able to kick open on his third try. This door led straight into the kitchen, and that was where he found them, but not the way he expected them to be. Sheila lay crumpled on the floor not moving. The man was lying on his back near her, his eyes bulging open. He looked paralyzed, but his lips were trembling slightly as if he were struggling to say something.
Henry stumbled toward Sheila as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. A hammer and chisel lay near the man, and a pool of blood seemed to be leaking out of the back of his head. Unless he was mistaken, a piece of the man’s skull also lay on the floor.
Henry moved as if he were in a trance as he kneeled by Sheila, the room blurring around him and his blood ran ice-cold as he expected to find his wife dead. But she wasn’t dead. She wasn’t even unconscious. When he gently turned her onto her back, her left eye was blinking and the left part of her mouth was moving. As incredible as it was, she was trying to tell him something. He bent his ear to her lips and listened to what she had to say. Her voice was a faint whisper at best, and it took time for her to push out each word, but she told him what he needed to know. That if he called for the police or for an ambulance they would arrest her as the Skull Cracker Killer, and that
he would never see her again.
He backed away from her, and that was when he spotted the hypodermic needle on the floor. Something made him lift up the man’s head enough so he could see the back of his scalp, and sure enough a piece of his skull had been broken off exposing his brain. The room started spinning on Henry, and he sat heavily onto the floor.
He understood then that Sheila really was the Skull Cracker Killer, and knew why she had approached him that night in the bar. He also knew why she had slipped away from the booth when he had waved the waitress over. So that she wouldn’t be seen with him. For whatever reason she’d changed her mind after they’d gone down that alley, but her plan had been to do to him what she started to do to this man. Whatever was in that hypodermic needle must’ve left him paralyzed, and she had tried using the hammer and chisel to break apart his skull just like the way Henry had drawn in his skull-cracker comic books when he was sixteen.
Joe’s words came back to him. There’s someone for everybody.
There was a reason why he drew those comic books and Sheila was now killing people the same way, just like there was a reason why she chose not to kill him in that alley. Because they were soulmates. Sheila must’ve sensed that, even if she didn’t understand it at the time.
There’s someone for everybody.
With a certain finality, Henry accepted the truth of this. His wife was a monster, but that wasn’t going to change the way he felt about her, nor was he going to call the police. After all, he was more than somewhat monstrous on the outside, and even if he hadn’t realized it until now, he had to be also on the inside for Sheila to have recognized that they were soulmates.
His dizziness had passed, and he moved over to Sheila and put his ear near her mouth. It took a while, but she instructed him on what he had to do.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Brooklyn, 2011
Henry did exactly what Sheila told him to do. He used a butcher’s knife to cut off the man’s head so that the police wouldn’t be able to connect the man’s death with the Skull Cracker Killer. After that he found a gym bag in a closet, put the head in it, also the skull fragment, and threw in a stack of plates to weigh the bag down. He then gathered Sheila’s hammer, chisel, and hypodermic needle, and used one of the man’s undershirts to wipe off any surface he or his wife might’ve touched. With that done, he wrapped Sheila in a blanket, and he raced her, the gym bag. and Sheila’s ridiculously-sized pocketbook to the car he had rented.
On the way back to their apartment, he stopped and hurled the gym bag into Flushing Bay. He also stopped four blocks from their apartment to leave Sheila on the sidewalk. He hated doing this. He had no idea how long it would take for someone to find her, but he agreed with her that it had to be done this way. After leaving Sheila, he raced to their apartment because he had items of hers that he needed to get rid of along with the tools that she used as the Skull Cracker Killer.
She had always forbidden him from looking in her closet, but he found the scrapbook and diary where she told him they would be. A quick look in the scrapbook showed newspaper clippings about the killings she had done. The diary had, among other things, her personal thoughts about her killings. Henry read several entries, then found the one that she wrote after meeting him at the bar. The reason she had changed her mind about killing him was that there’d been several articles about the Skull Cracker Killer in which the FBI profiler insisted the killer had to be a loner and couldn’t be married, and she decided Henry would be a harmless enough guy for her to attach herself to, and that by marrying him she’d help hide herself from the police. In the following entries, she wrote about how she found him repulsively ugly, but was also developing a certain affection for him, as well as a closeness. In a recent entry she wrote that she was happy in a way that surprised her to be married to Henry, and that she no longer minded the idea of making love to him, and that she was looking forward to doing so after her next round of killings. Sheila had directed him to burn the scrapbook and diary, but Henry ripped out several pages so he could keep them.
After he got rid of all the incriminating evidence (except the pages that he had ripped out), he returned the car and took the subway home. The cops were waiting for him, which was a relief since it meant someone had found Sheila. Still, he broke down when they told him his wife had been hurt and was at the hospital.
It turned out that Sheila was unconscious when she was found, so the police at first considered Henry a suspect and took him to the station for questioning. Things did not go well when they questioned him about where he’d been that evening, and he gave them a bogus answer about how he had rented a car that day so he could drive to Long Island and visit his parents’ graves. The police didn’t believe him, and Henry sweated up a storm as he realized that if they searched him they’d find the pages from Sheila’s diary that he had taken. One of the detectives started asking him why he was sweating so much, and all Henry could think of to say was that he was worried about his wife, which only made the cops more suspicious. Henry could tell things were about to turn really ugly when a call came in that saved him. The detective who took the call must’ve been told that Sheila had regained consciousness and had claimed that her husband wasn’t involved in what happened to her, because when he got off the phone he actually gave Henry a sympathetic look.
“That was the hospital,” he said. “Your wife’s awake. You should go over there.”
“How is she?”
The detective looked away from him. “It would be better if you talk to her doctor.”
Sheila had been taken to Mount Sinai. When Henry met with her doctor, he explained to Henry about Sheila’s paralysis and the serious internal damage she suffered. The prognosis was that she’d live, but that she’d never recover full use of her body. That the paralysis was likely permanent.
Somehow Henry didn’t mind that. It meant Sheila would never leave him. Also that she’d never kill anyone else.
It turned out Henry was wrong about the latter.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Los Angeles, the present
Morris had used Gail Hawes’s Facebook entries, credit-card receipts, and cellphone call-log to create a timeline showing where she’d been over the last week, and was in the process of doing the same for Susan Twilitter when Natalie called.
“I’ve got a very unhappy dog here,” she said. “He’s been moping around all evening waiting for you to come home.”
“I can imagine,” Morris said. “I’ll make it up to Parker tomorrow.”
“I’m not entirely thrilled myself.”
“I’ll be making it up to you too. If not before then, on your birthday Saturday, definitely. I bet you thought I’d forgotten with all this craziness going on.”
“The thought had crossed my mind.”
“What’s it going to be, your thirty-fifth?”
“You’re a sweet talker, Morris.”
“I can’t imagine you being any older than thirty-five. Except we got a twenty-three-year-old daughter, so I’m not exactly sure how that works. But when I look at you, it doesn’t seem possible for you to be any older than that.”
“That’s because you need glasses. Or maybe it’s that old saying about memory making the heart grow fonder.”
Morris checked his watch. “It’s only been sixteen hours since I bid you adieu this morning.”
“You sure? It feels like it’s been days.”
“I know.” Morris rubbed his eyes as a tired sigh eased out of him. “We almost had him today, Nat. We know from her iPhone that when Gail Hawes left her apartment today, she turned left and walked about two hundred feet before running into SCK. If she had turned right instead, we would’ve had him on a surveillance camera. A damn flip of the coin. Right instead of left, and we’d have him.”
“You think you’re getting close,” she said softly, not as a question but as a statement.
“We are. He’s doing things he didn’t want to have to do. The woman found
in her car trunk, Susan Twilitter, was a rushed killing. We might get him from that. We’re still pulling surveillance video from the area. And if Hawes saw Twilitter with SCK, someone else might’ve also.”
“You’re sounding like you might be getting obsessed again.”
“Not obsessed. Highly motivated. I think we’ve got a chance to stop him before he kills his next victim.”
“A young blonde girl.”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I understand,” Natalie said, her voice soft, and as if she were trying hard to sound like she did understand. “Will you be making an appearance tonight?”
“I’ll be trying to. Definitely by daybreak so I can pick Parker up.”
“Did you remember to eat something for dinner?”
“I did forget,” he admitted sheepishly. “The actor who’s been tagging along with me started complaining about my stomach rumbling, and took off to pick up some fish tacos that he claims are to die for.” Morris stared bleary-eyed at his watch for a moment as he tried to remember what time Stonehedge had left. “The restaurant is in Beverly Hills, and he should be back soon.”
“To die for, huh? Sounds very Hollywood. But at least he’s reminding you to eat.”
“Yeah, at least he’s good for something.”
Charlie Bogle was calling. Morris begged off the call with his wife, promising her that he wouldn’t be overworking himself into a stroke. When he answered Bogle’s call, his investigator told him that he, Lemmon, and Polk, were checked in at their hotel in New York. “Your press conference tonight made the New York news,” Bogle said. “The woman he killed, Gail Hawes, didn’t look like she matched the other women SCK likes to kill. The one found in the car trunk did, though.”
“That’s because Twilitter was the SCK’s original target. To make a long story short, Hawes saw the two of them together, so SCK moved on to her. Because of a Facebook post Hawes made, SCK had to eliminate Susan Twilitter also. He called Twilitter at work, most likely arranging to meet up with her, and then attacked her in the parking garage when she went to her car.”