by Bill Floyd
“Is he dead?” was my first question.
Carolyn shook her head. “No, but Duane’s on the phone and he wants you to listen while he gives me the update. Jeanine Dockery picked him up at the airport and they’ve been at it for a few hours now.”
Still wearing yesterday’s clothes, I took a capful of Listerine and swished as I followed her downstairs. She’d moved her camp from the den into the kitchen to be closer to the coffeepot. I winced at the sun coming through the blinds as she pushed the speaker button on the phone. “Baby? She’s here now.”
“Nina. How are you holding up?” Duane was trying to sound fresh and engaged, but I could hear the lag in his voice as I leaned over the sink and spat. He must’ve gotten even less sleep than I’d had.
“What did you find out?”
“Well, Jeanine already had her brother’s notes sorted into what she believes, and I tend to agree, is roughly chronological order. He has a system all his own, so it’s difficult to tell. What we do know is that Mr. Dockery was indeed working on a book about Randy’s case. Apparently it’s stuck with him all these years, and he kept a file of clippings on Randy’s appeals and denials. He seems to feel that time has just about run out, and that once Randy is executed it’ll open up some legal hurdles that have impeded his writing the story. His first impulse was to search you out, because, and I’m quoting from some of his earliest notes here: ‘Without the ex-wife’s side of the story, it’s just another sordid PP, and the market for that is sat.’”
“‘PP’ is ‘police procedural’ and ‘sat’ is short for saturated,” came another voice over the line, this one gruff and terse, like a lifelong smoker who’d endured one too many lectures on her habits.
“That’s Jeanine,” Duane said.
“Thank you for your help,” I said.
“Find my brother.”
Duane promised her we’d do our best. “So Dockery was convinced that having Nina’s angle was the only way to tell the story. But he didn’t have much luck finding you.”
“That’s because he didn’t have us,” Carolyn said smartly, and immediately slapped a hand over her mouth. I knew what she was thinking: if they hadn’t been good enough to track me down, my son might not have been abducted. She put her other hand on my arm and I said, “Forget it.”
“So instead he went to see Randy. Apparently they had at least one face-to-face meeting, which we found on Dockery’s schedule and which I’ve confirmed with the authorities in California. Randy declined my request for an interview, by the way. Nina, he says he’ll talk to you.”
“Do you think he knows who took Hayden?”
“He still denies any involvement. I don’t know. He could be behind the whole thing, and he’s holding out to play it for kicks, wanting to torture you. He could really not know, but he’s going to try and leverage our interest into talking to you so he can indulge in whatever satisfaction he’ll get from hearing the emotion in your voice. Given his general profile, I’d say it’s a safe bet he’d get something out of that. The one thing I’m fairly certain of is that he won’t help us find Hayden.” Duane didn’t sound thoroughly convinced by any of his own theories, more like he was obliged to keep all options on the table even though he knew better.
“If there’s any chance it will help, I’ll talk to him.” Carolyn didn’t look comfortable with the prospect but I didn’t care. If Randy wanted some personal time to fuck with my head, it was a small price to pay for any clue that might help me to get my son back. And I might have some choice words for him.
“Carolyn, you’ve got the contact number for the prison. Call them when we’re done, if you still want to. But first hear me out, because I think we might have another lead worth following up. In the notes from his interview with Randy, Dockery says Randy advised him to search out a person named Carson Beckman. You guys remember him?”
Carolyn tapped on her computer, searching, knowing she’d heard the name before. But I didn’t need any reminding. “The only survivor of Randy’s attacks,” I said.
“Actually there were two. After Randy’s arrest, when his face was all over the TV, a woman named Patricia Lineberger positively identified Randy as a man who’d assaulted her fifteen years earlier. This was before he was known to have killed anyone, and the Fed profiler who later interviewed Randy thought it was his fledgling attempt. He tried to force her into his car when she was walking home from a bar near where he was living with his foster parents. She escaped, and it scared her badly enough that she filed a report. But Carson was a different matter. Randy killed the other three members of his family, in his next-to-last assault, a little less than a year before Nina turned him in. Carson was fourteen at the time, and he survived by hiding in a guest room.”
“I remember his testimony. It was one of the most frightening things I’ve ever seen,” I said, feeling the sweat pop out on my arms. “The defense team had him on the stand one of the only days I was in court. Poor kid.”
“My impression is that things didn’t improve very much for him later on,” Duane said. “Randy had suggested Dockery find Carson because, and let me quote from the notes here: ‘RRM felt they shared a common bond of ruined childhood. Spoke like CB was important to him.’ Dockery suggests that the two of them, victim and perpetrator, may even have been in contact after Randy was sentenced.”
Everything inside of me went still. “‘CB’? Wasn’t that the signature on the letters to Randy that the warden at San Quentin was concerned about?”
Carolyn was staring at me, her mouth open. “‘CB Taylor.’”
“Where’s Carson Beckman now?” I asked.
“We’re not sure. After the murders, his uncle on his father’s side became his legal guardian. Dockery has an appointment to see them listed on his calendar, and according to Jeanine the date was only a few weeks before his disappearance.”
“Two weeks to the day,” Jeanine confirmed from the background.
“I’ve been calling the uncle’s number off and on for the last half hour but I haven’t got an answer yet. I left a message. But I’m way ahead of you, and I called Matthews right before I called you guys.”
I was shaking my head. “Why would someone who’d been hurt by Randy … ? Why would they even want to talk to him in the first place?”
“We don’t know,” Duane said. “Look, there’s no use in my going to California if Randy isn’t willing to speak with me. But Beckman’s uncle lives not too far outside Chicago, and Ms. Dockery has offered to drive me there this afternoon.”
The cigarette voice came on again. “I tried to get in touch with them weeks ago, but they wouldn’t talk to me. I have the feeling that once they hear what’s happened with your boy, they might be more inclined.”
Carolyn told them to quit wasting time talking to us and get on the road.
2.
The afternoon was excruciating. The police didn’t want me leaving the house, in case Hayden’s abductor attempted to contact me. Matthews called after we both had spoken to Duane and he cautioned us against premature conclusions. “Even if this Carson Beckman kid is involved somehow, apparently no one knows where he is. We were able to track him to an apartment where he was living up until this past November, but the property manager says he got evicted and we’ve got no current address. The most recent photo I’ve been able to find is from nearly eight years ago. He’s gone from an adolescent to an adult in that time, so he won’t look the same. Duane says he’s going to try and fax me a more recent photo if he can get one from the uncle.”
Other than that, it was quiet. No phone calls, and no incoming e-mails to my computer or Carolyn’s. I paced and tried to eat. I only managed to get down half a sandwich. I kept seeing Hayden’s eyes as he passed beneath the camera in the classroom hallway; so big and terrified, so helpless, pleading. And now he’d been missing for nearly twenty-four hours. In the company of a man who’d slashed Rachel Dutton’s throat. A man who’d adopted my husband’s habit of ocular perversion.
Carolyn tried to distract me. At first she talked trivialities, but heard the delusory tone of my responses, and moved on to possible scenarios. Carson could be the guy; Carson could be a sorry kid still wrecked from what had happened to his family; Carson could be dead himself. I stared out the window while she talked. A cop car was parked across the street, and every so often they’d come knock on the front door and ask how we were doing. I was torn between wanting to invite them in out of the cold and hating them for not finding Hayden. It was their job, and instead of being out there beating the bushes they were just sitting, waiting; it was driving me crazy.
I kept hoping that maybe this time they would actually do some good, getting Hayden’s picture out there, informing people, talking to possible witnesses. Or maybe someone would recognize the vehicle, spot Hayden’s abductor driving along, and call it in. Maybe by some miracle my child would be rescued by a lucky traffic cop and we would be getting the call any minute now.
Someone did see the vehicle. The police found it abandoned less than four blocks from Hayden’s school, in a parking garage near an office park. A review of surveillance cameras in the vicinity caught it passing by less than twenty minutes after yesterday’s assault. The driver’s face wasn’t visible in any frame they’d so far been able to isolate. Matthews called us with the news only a moment before it came across as a bulletin running beneath the soap operas on Channel 41.
“We assume he had another vehicle waiting. We’re interviewing people in the area but so far there’s nothing positive to report.” Matthews sounded tired and dejected. “Have you talked to your ex-husband yet?”
“I’m calling San Quentin the minute I get off the phone with you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
As soon as Carson Beckman took his seat on the witness chair during Randy’s trial, I knew I’d been mistaken about the sketch tacked to the cabinet doors in the shed out behind our house. It hadn’t been a portrait of a future Hayden after all, or even Randy himself as a younger man. No, it had been this boy: there was that same thin unsmiling mouth, the rounded cheeks, and those vacant eyes. Even that bowl of fine, limp hair was the same, except that now I could discern its dirty blond color. Randy had chosen this boy as a subject for his sketch, just as he had drawn my own portrait many years before. I felt an instant and uncomfortable kinship with him.
Knowing what had happened to him, everyone in the courtroom expected him to be painfully childlike. In truth, he’d recently turned sixteen and came across more like a stooped, awkward man than an adolescent. Carson, dressed in a suit and tie that were obviously a size or two too small for his frame (every time he swallowed, the motion of his Adam’s apple lifted the entire collar), sat in the witness chair and answered the defense attorney’s questions in a monotone. It was surreal, the lack of inflection and emotion on display as the young man recited in short, bland bursts the story of how Randy had murdered everyone in his immediate family.
“That night, when did you first become aware that something was wrong?” Allan Beyer asked. The public defender remained seated at the defense table, so every time Carson had to look in his direction, he also saw Randy. Observing from the gallery, I wondered if that was the way I’d looked when I was up there, loath to shift my eyes toward him. Carson mainly stared off into the distance, at some fixed point above the exit signs over the courtroom doors.
Beyer was the younger of Randy’s defense attorneys, and the one better tolerated by the jury. The older man, Gavin Plummer, was a bald, scowling fellow prone to lengthy ruminations and rhetorical leaps that sent eyes rolling in the gallery and more than once provoked outright scoffing from the judge. Beyer had taken over the majority of the questioning early in the day. Now he waited nearly a full minute, idly twisting the curls of his graying hair before he repeated his question.
Carson almost seemed to be smiling, lolling in place, and I guessed that he was drifting on a cushion of prescription drugs. I’d been gulping at least a Xanax a day since Randy’s arrest. “When Dana woke me up,” Carson said mildly.
“And what did your sister say to you?”
“She said someone was in the house.”
The kid wasn’t offering anything extra, but this time Beyer didn’t allow the silence to take hold. “How did she know?”
“She heard Mom scream, just that one time. The only time before, I guess, he put the tape over her mouth.”
“‘He’?”
“Mr. Mosley.”
I had remained in the courtroom after suffering through what the attorneys had labeled a “recross.” In a reversal that I found extremely offensive, but which Turnbull and the rest of the prosecution team had concluded that I could not avoid, the defense had called me back to testify again, and again it was in relation to the contention that Randy had been mentally unstable at the time he committed his crimes. Turnbull’s suspicion was that the defense would assert that since Randy had left me the key to his shed, knowing what I would find within and how I would react—by taking the actions that would end his spree—that he’d actually wanted to be caught, tried, and executed. This, so Turnbull’s theory went, would prove beyond dispute that Randy’s mind was not operating in a rational manner. “A last-ditch grasp to save him from lethal injection,” had been Turnbull’s summary. “Novel, but something of a reach.”
Worse than what they had done to me, though, was their summoning to the stand this lone survivor of Randy’s attentions for much the same reason. Although the Beckman murders had taken place out of state, the defense had argued that Carson’s testimony was relevant to Randy’s state of mind when he committed his crimes. It had been stipulated, and noted, that the witness was testifying under protest, but Beyer and his sallow old grump of a partner had cited some archaic precedent, and Judge Oliver had reluctantly agreed to allow Carson’s testimony.
So now Carson fidgeted in the witness chair, his eyes locked on empty space. An archipelago of acne traced across his chin, and his hair was flat and uncombed. His skin had a sallow cast that suggested months sequestered in the same bedroom, leaving to attend school but not much else. The aunt and uncle on his late father’s side, who’d taken legal guardianship of the boy, were seated not far away from me in the gallery, but I found that I couldn’t meet their eyes.
Beyer tented his fingers and leaned forward at the defense table. “What did Dana tell you to do?”
“She said we should go across the hall and hide in the guest room,” Carson said. As though a switch had been tripped, he suddenly became more animated, and began to speak in a rush. “She was talking about climbing out the window. But we were on the third story, and I don’t think she was thinking clearly. I was scared so I followed her, and while we were in the hallway we could hear that something was happening in our parents’ bedroom, but the door was closed so we couldn’t see anything. When we got into the guest room, though, we could hear our parents’ door opening and then a voice called her name. It wasn’t Mom or Dad. I couldn’t look back, because she was pushing me ahead of her, and when I got into the room she slammed the door and that was the last time I saw her until it was over.”
The room was dead silent except for the sound of Carson’s quickened breathing. Judge Oliver asked him if he was all right to continue. She told him he could have a break if he wanted to. Carson shook his head curtly and gave her what was, under the circumstances, an oddly charming smile. “I’d prefer to get it over with,” he said.
Beyer continued his examination and Carson told the story: how he’d been too frightened to move or to turn on the light, so he’d huddled in the guest room in the dark and listened. His sister had screamed once after closing the door behind him and that was all. Carson described the sounds of a struggle. He said, “There were … damp sounds, like when you walk through a puddle. Someone beating on a wall or maybe the floor, I don’t know.” Few in the courtroom could look at him while he was saying these things, but I did. I couldn’t look away. A shadow of some prurient i
ntensity, a pale sort of transport I associated with deep and abiding trauma crossed his face before the dead flatness returned.
“How long were you in there?” Beyer asked.
“The police told me later that it was over an hour, but I don’t know. I wasn’t wearing a watch.”
“When did you come out of the guest room?”
“After he told me it was okay.”
Beyer didn’t have to look up from the desk to note the stark shift in everyone’s attention; it was palpable. “Who told you? Mr. Mosley?”
Carson nodded, then leaned toward the microphone mounted on the witness stand. “Yes.”
“So he knew you were hiding in there?”
Carson had gone ghastly, and for a moment I thought he might faint and slide sideways out of his chair. But he stayed in place, face frozen, his lips barely moving. “I was sitting on the floor with my back against the door in case he tried to come in. I had decided that I was probably going to die. I heard someone coming out of my parents’ room and down the hallway, and I had my hands over my mouth, I remember that, I was trying not to let him hear me breathing or anything. There weren’t any more sounds and I started thinking maybe he was already gone and I should get out of the house or try to go and help Dana and my mom and dad, but I was too scared. Too much of a coward.”
Beyer said, “Son, no one is suggesting that you could’ve done anything to prevent what happened to your family. It wasn’t your fault. You should be thankful to be alive.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Carson snapped suddenly. We were all watching him intently now, leaning forward in our seats as he glared first at the patronizing defense attorney, then finally over at Randy. “He knew where I was hiding the whole time. He knew. He was standing outside the door, right on the other side of me, and he just started talking, like it was a normal conversation. He said, ‘I know there was a boy in this family, I just can’t seem to find him anywhere in the house. I’m going to have a son myself, soon. My wife doesn’t know it yet, but I think it will be a boy, I can sense it.’ And then I must have made some kind of sound because he went, ‘Shhhh,’ and then he told me to wait another few minutes before I came out. He said not to look for my parents or my sister, but to go straight downstairs and call the police. Then he left and I waited and I did what he said.”