by Bill Floyd
“Let him go,” I demanded.
Carson aimed the gun at me. He said, “He’s going to be so proud of what I’ve done.”
That was when I knew he was going to kill me. Instinct took over. I flinched sideways as I moved toward him, trying to reach Hayden. Not a good idea, since the Kevlar protected my front and back but didn’t extend to the sides, where there were only the canvas straps and buckles. The blast from the shotgun was huge and somehow flat, like a stone wall collapsing onto a marble floor. I took the full force in my right rib cage, and slammed off the wall in the entrance hallway. My legs went out and I sprawled facedown. I couldn’t breathe. I heard his footsteps approaching, and rolled over onto my back. My right side was completely numb; I couldn’t move that arm. The pistol was in that pocket. My chest heaved, trying to inhale against what felt like a metric ton of pressure squeezing the air from my lungs.
The ringing in my ears nearly blocked what Carson was saying as he came and stood over me, smoke still trailing out of the barrel he’d fired. The other one was less than a foot away from my face, and I could feel the gun’s heat.
“I was going to kill you both, last week,” he said, smiling in a remote kind of way now. “But then I followed you to school when you went to pick Hayden up, and that’s when I saw the teacher. That lady was exactly my type. She got highlighted and I shifted my plans. I bet your husband was sort of pissed about that. Still, it was only a postponement.”
I tried to say, “my ex-husband,” but it was impossible with no breath.
I didn’t hear whatever it was that he heard right then. But his head snapped up and he turned quickly, with surprising agility for a man with another person strapped to his chest, and fired his second barrel through the front window. The curtains blew apart and glass shattered and I saw Carolyn’s hand flailing as she went down. She’d been approaching the front door, crouched over, but he’d heard her coming. I tried to scream and breathed fire. Hayden was still shrieking against his gag and Carson slapped him on the side of the head before turning back to me.
“No fair,” he chastised me. “You were supposed to come by yourself. Not that I expected you to. But that one’s down, and I’m ready for however many more you’ve got coming. God, isn’t it great to feel?” He knelt and smoothed a hand over my hair. It came away bloody and he showed it to me. The world spun and Hayden’s kicking foot brushed my arm. I tried to grab hold but Carson pushed my hand away as he stood and broke the breech on the sawed-off. He chucked the empty cartridges and pulled two more shells from the pocket of his jeans.
“One thing I can tell you that might help,” Carson said. “I couldn’t kill your boy. Randall told me that harvesting a child was special, they see special things, and it was like a delicacy. He thinks I’m just like him, but really I’m not. I couldn’t do it to a child. I didn’t even touch his eyes. That was just to get you out here. I tried but I couldn’t do it. He’s too much like I was, back before all this started. I want him to have a chance, away from you and his father both. I’ll take him with me. He’s my brother.”
I was gasping like a landed fish. I thought of the bass mounted above the fireplace, how it must have died straining in the filthy shallow bilge water of some flatboat.
“Your husband is the only one who ever recognized me for what I was,” Carson said quietly, rolling the shells between his thumb and fingers. “If anyone else had known, they’d have tried to lock me up, but Randall understands. He knows what it’s like to live completely alone, with no one there who could possibly know you, the reality of what goes on inside. All those years, ever since I really started to grow up, I knew something was wrong with me. I dreamed of doing things, awful, ugly things to people, and I knew it wasn’t right. I knew I couldn’t tell anyone. So I hurt other things instead. But then Randall Roberts Mosley came into my home and even after he left me alive he never really left. I kept dreaming of all those things I wanted to do, but now I dreamed about him, too. I thought about contacting him for years and years before I actually did it. That was the bravest thing I ever did in my life, just putting that first letter in the mail. When he wrote me back, when I realized he understood, even though we were writing in code … That was when I knew I could really do the things I’d always dreamed. He gave me the strength to quit fighting it, to accept who I was and seek out the face from my dreams.”
“He’s … a piece of shit,” I managed.
Carson looked at me sadly. “I know,” he said. “But so am I.” He loaded the shells into the breech and tried to snap the shotgun shut, but Hayden kicked out again and this time his small, tender foot wedged between the stock and the barrels. He screamed. Carson laughed and moved his foot away. The front door opened. Carson turned as Carolyn shoved herself into the hallway, laid out on the floor, both hands on her gun and aiming steadily as she fired twice. The shots were tiny plosives in my ringing ears. Carson’s head snapped one way and then another, blood and tissue exploding as his face disintegrated. I screamed for Carolyn to stop, certain that Hayden would be hit. Carson twisted and fell over on his side, facing me. Hayden flailed in his grip and blood cascaded down across both of them.
Carolyn set her gun carefully on the thin carpet and looked at me. I saw that her back had been torn open by the buckshot, a large swatch of bare and bloody sinew above her waist. Blue smoke choked the air and she said, “Called … I called the cops before I got out of the car.”
I couldn’t answer her. I pulled myself across the floor on my fingernails. I made it to Hayden and Carson, tearing at harness straps and the strips of tape binding my son. He screamed when I pulled the tape off his mouth: “Mommy! Mommy!” I asked him if he was hurt but he just kept crying. I worked the straps until they came loose and he tumbled into my arms. He got the tape off his own eyes and blinked at me. I saw the full blue of his irises and that’s when I really lost it, screaming and crying along with him.
Finally he stopped sobbing and managed to say, “M-mom, you’re bleeding. Are you okay?”
I didn’t tell him that it was getting more and more difficult to breathe. I looked over at Carolyn and said, “Hayden? You need to go get that blanket off the couch and put it on her back, okay? Hold it there as tight as you can.”
He didn’t want to leave me but he did it. Carolyn made a painful sound when the blanket touched her skin, and I wasn’t sure it was the most sanitary course of action, but she was bleeding a lot more profusely than I was. She hadn’t been wearing a vest, and there’d been nothing to absorb the blast but skin and bone. She stared at me now, looking more exhausted than anything. I supposed she was in shock, and her next comment removed all doubt.
“I give you the vest and you manage to get shot in the one place it doesn’t cover you,” she said, sounding somewhat puzzled and amazed. “I’m probably going to be in some trouble for not calling the police sooner. You’d damn well better live long enough to explain all this to Duane.”
EPILOGUE
1.
Randall Roberts Mosley’s execution was scheduled for March 10 at six o’clock in the morning. It was still twilight when I arrived at the penitentiary, passing by a small cluster of death penalty opponents who hefted placards and candles as they marched outside the gates. I knew from the news coverage that some of Randy’s victims’ families were among the protesters; I admired their sense of forgiveness and idealism, but I could never stand with them. Not for Randy.
I sat in the observation room with eleven other people, mostly relatives of the victims, and a couple of witnesses from the press. None of Randy’s lawyers showed up. The warden came in and introduced himself and briefly summarized what we were about to see, and the rules of behavior. Warden Jenkins was a small man in his sixties, informally dressed in a collarless shirt and khaki jacket. He advised us to try to contain any overt displays of emotion, although he understood how difficult that might be. He said that, under normal circumstances, the prisoner would be given a chance to say some last words, but that
Mr. Mosley wasn’t handling the situation very well and wouldn’t be making any statements.
Randy had tried to get in touch with me several times during the past year, since the ordeal with Carson Beckman. I’d ignored his requests. I was glad he wouldn’t have the chance to speak today. I felt like I’d given him ample chance to say anything he had to say. Two years of dating, four years of marriage, and then another seven when I’d suffered alone; I don’t think I’d have ever again listened to so much as a single word that came from his mouth.
We watched as he was brought into the room at five minutes before six, fully restrained, with two guards holding his legs and another couple holding his arms. I was momentarily taken aback by how fat he’d become, an extra hundred pounds at least since the day he left the key for me. He was bald, too, and it made him look even more pathetic. It didn’t help his fearsome image that he was twisting and fighting every inch of the way. Several of the people in the observation room shifted uncomfortably, and I understood; movies had trained us for a solemn occasion, informed by quiet gravitas from the condemned and honorable satisfaction from the maligned. But Randy, as ever, seemed determined to spoil it for everyone. He screamed through his rubber mouthpiece and pushed at the guards as they strapped him onto the table. Canvas straps secured his arms and legs, and I couldn’t help but think of Hayden and Carson Beckman.
I’d left Hayden back east with the McPhersons, who’d started speaking to me again once I became a celebrity of the acceptable sort. And imagine, all it took was my getting shot.
Seated on my right side was Dennis Hughes, the younger brother of Keith. Keith and Leslie Hughes had been murdered less than a year before I found out I was pregnant with Hayden. On my left were Paul and Katherine Zimmerman—their daughter Jane was killed shortly after Randy and I were first married, while he was on a business trip to Minneapolis.
Dennis held my right hand, tightly. Katherine Zimmerman held my left.
The majority of the impacted families had declined their invitations. Despite the many who’d gone on the news to express their opposition to the sentence, most were satisfied with it, but felt no compulsion to see it carried out in person. Charles Pritchett was in the observation room, seated behind me and to the right. I saw no reason to speak to him, and he finally afforded me the same respect.
The surgeons had dug over forty pellets out of my side. The force of the impact broke two ribs, and I wouldn’t ever be sleeping on that side again. I lost part of my liver, and was later told that I’d been within minutes of bleeding to death when the paramedics had arrived at Abraham Locke’s house. The liver is a regenerative organ, I was pleased to discover, and grew back. I spent two weeks in the hospital and countless hours being interviewed by Detective Matthews and other policemen, all of whom were uniformly displeased with me. None, however, was as angry as Duane Rowe, who hadn’t spoken more than a few words to me in the entire time since, despite the fact that his wife and I had kept in touch. He was initially so furious with Carolyn that he might’ve divorced her, if he hadn’t been so happy to have her alive. Her wounds weren’t as serious as mine, but she’d undergone multiple skin grafts, and spent several months recuperating.
I had rejected the book and movie offers, but given the Rowes my blessing to accept the same. From what I read in the papers, they’d sold the rights for a healthy six figures. Lane Dockery’s sister was writing a book of her own.
When Randy was finally strapped down, all the fight seemed to go out of him at once. The medics tipped the table where he was splayed, and it canted upward slightly so that he was able to look at us. The glass separating the observers’ gallery from the injection room wasn’t mirrored, and the warden had told us he would be able to see us clearly. He granted his final regard to each of the witnesses in turn, his face pinched and twisted. I heard Pritchett cursing him one last time. Then Randy’s eyes settled on me. He tried for a menacing grin, but with the rubber guard jammed between his teeth he just looked ill.
I smiled for him, though. As the medic hooked up the IV and pushed the plunger on the first syringe, the one with the drugs that would sedate him, I kept looking right into his eyes. I wanted my face to be the last thing he ever saw.
The terror and sorrow he experienced at the end were clear in his expression, until the drugs hit his nervous system and his features went slack. Then the medic fed the other drugs into the IV line, the ones that would paralyze him and finally stop his heart. A few minutes crept by before his chest quit rising and falling. A minute or so after that, a doctor pronounced him dead.
2.
Two months later, I sat in Pullen Park with Jeanine Dockery, watching the children play in the mild midmorning sunshine. Jeanine had flown in that morning and was leaving the next day to meet with her publishers in New York. The hard glare reminded me of how I’d first met Duane and Carolyn Rowe in this very same park last winter. Too much had happened since that meeting, and I didn’t see Duane anymore, and Carolyn only rarely. The press surrounding the Carson Beckman affair had made it difficult for them to continue with any anonymity in their chosen profession, so they’d shifted their duties from fieldwork to managing a small workforce of other private investigators, consisting mostly of former police officers that knew Duane personally. Carolyn had told me Detective Matthews had retired from the Cary police force to take a job with their firm.
“They do good work,” Jeanine said when I updated her. “And they were helpful in writing the book.” Jeanine looked better than I’d imagined when I only knew her as a voice on the phone. A slender, soft-featured woman of fifty-eight with hazel eyes and auburn hair, she was slightly stooped from an early onset of osteoporosis. The wrinkles that bunched her face when she smiled were an attractive feature rather than a distracting one. But her voice was still that gravely, throaty rumble, and I enjoyed listening to her as she told me about the publication schedule for her nonfiction book. She kept referring to it as “Lane’s book,” but I knew from Carolyn that Jeanine had done almost every bit of the work.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t more helpful with that,” I admitted. “I needed to forget about as much as I could.”
She waved a hand dismissively and took a bite of her ice cream cone, careful not to drip it on her pink pantsuit. She looked over toward the swing set. “Thank you for letting me come and visit with Hayden,” she said. “I needed to see the life that was spared. I needed to know Lane’s death helped save someone in some way.”
In one of Carson Beckman’s final letters from Randy, there’d been mention of “the final disposition of the writer’s property.” Randy said the view sounded spectacular, but that Carson probably should have “made it farther from your own property line.” After Carson’s death, Jeanine and a swarm of Illinois state police had combed over the city blocks surrounding the apartment Carson had rented before being evicted. They found nothing. They tackled the suburban grid where his aunt and uncle lived. Three miles from their home was a proposed development that had been abandoned when a group of environmentalists successfully sued to keep the builders from fouling a lakeshore bird sanctuary. Some of the land had already been bulldozed and foundations dug. In one of the empty cellars, among the pipe shafts and fallen tree limbs, the body of Lane Dockery was found underneath a pile of construction debris. Dockery’s throat had been cut, his eyes removed, rolled up scrolls consisting of pages from one of his true-crime books placed into the sockets. I’d read the news with sorrow and regret. I remembered the vindictive part of myself wishing ill to Dockery, when all along he’d only wanted to tell what he saw as a fascinating story.
Apparently, the reading public agreed. Jeanine’s version of the Randy Mosley/Carson Beckman case wouldn’t even be released for another two weeks, but it was already a bestseller on Amazon and some other prerelease retailers. She informed me of this without great pride, but as a sort of warning that the publicity might be rough on me for a bit longer. Despite what I’d said to her about needing to forget, I w
as long past the point where forgetting was an option. I couldn’t outrun it, and both of us knew it.
“He does seem to be doing quite well, given what he went through,” Jeanine said, still looking over at Hayden.
“It wasn’t this way at first,” I assured her. “He wasn’t really hurt, but they had to keep him in the hospital for a few days until the shock wore off. He’s had nightmares, and we’ve both been in counseling.” I didn’t know if the sessions with the shrink the hospital had recommended were doing me any good, but they seemed to help Hayden. He was back in school, making up the classes he’d missed while I kept him home during the rest of the winter after his abduction. Right now, he and Caleb McPherson and some other boys were taking turns pushing each other far too high on the swings. I called over for them to be careful, and Hayden shouted back, “Sure, Mom!” and promptly ignored my admonition, swinging higher than before. It looked dangerous to me and I rubbed my hands together nervously.
Jeanine Dockery reached over and laid her cool hands across mine. They were steady, calm, reassuring. “It’s a good sign he’s not scared,” she said.
I wanted to believe that. I wanted to embrace the power of simple bravery in the face of a world where there was so much to be scared of. But I’d ignored the core truth that sometimes fear was telling you something you needed to know, and it had cost me, had been costing me for years and years. I told Jeanine, “I’m trying to find the line between a healthy wariness and paranoia. It’s kind of tough going.”