In The Falling Light

by John L. Campbell

  The two men nodded.

  “Finch’s interview will be at 2030 hours, after everyone is down for the night. I’ll let you know where and give you the specifics later.” She finished up with the briefing, passed out the rest of the assignments, and then dismissed her officers. Dean Frye was just getting off the phone over by the table.

  “That was Epps,” he said.

  “And?”

  Dean looked embarrassed. “He says you’re on mandatory overtime. He wants this HBO thing to go smoothly, and says you’re on the escort detail and in the room during the interview.”

  She just stared at him.

  “I’ll take the SRT watch today so you can focus on our guests.” Dean was her assistant commander on the team.

  Carla only nodded, her face revealing nothing, but inside she was caught in a whirlwind.

  Kelvin Finch sat in a hard wooden chair, wearing a clean orange jumpsuit and a white tee shirt. Although his hands were free, his ankles were shackled down below the camera view, and the chain ran through a steel ring bolted to the floor. The room, located in the administration building and normally a storage place for boxes of files, had been completely emptied, and now only a blank wall painted in institutional gray served as a backdrop. Finch sat in a relaxed pose, hands resting on his knees with a small microphone clipped to his collar.

  Trent Whitsome was not so relaxed. It was 9:30pm, and he had been inside Deacon Valley for over twelve hours, long enough to know he never wanted to come back. It wasn’t the prison itself – he’d done work in several, and they were all about the same – it was the men locked up within it, muscled and lean and covered in tattoos and scars. They watched like wolves sizing up a weak calf. Trent was careful to stay close to his escort.

  He had the prison footage he needed, and a couple of interviews with inmates willing to talk to him about how they felt about the residents of the PC, and Kelvin Finch in particular. Now he was an hour into his chat with the King, referring to prepared notes on a legal pad.

  “Let’s talk about the letters and photos. You sent them to the families of seven of your victims. Before we talk about why, tell us how you even got that information.”

  Finch smiled. “Everything I needed was on the news after the girl was taken.”

  Trent noticed Finch spoke in the passive voice; the girl was taken, as if he’d had nothing to do with it.

  “The family’s name, the address of their house, the news put it all out there. I got more details off the internet.”

  “Why send the letters, why inflict more pain?”

  He shifted in his chair. “I was different then, full of hate, not thinking clearly. I just wanted to hurt people.” His smile returned. “I know now that it was wrong. I’ve been saved, and I put my faith in Jesus Christ. I’ve received his forgiveness, and hope the families can do the same.”

  Unlikely, Trent thought, ignoring the remark. He’d heard it from every killer he’d ever interviewed. “Those letters did some damage, didn’t they? Two suicides, the mothers of Kelsey Wallingford and Fran Petra, numbers four and six, I believe.”

  “Well, like I said, I was a different man.”

  Against a wall out of view of the camera, Carla Mendez stood at parade rest with her hands folded behind her, staring at Kelvin Finch. She’d gotten two of those letters, the first six months after the abduction, the second a year later. The first contained a graphic explanation of what he was doing to “Number Seven,” accompanied by a shadowy photo taken of the girl when she was still alive. There was duct tape and plastic zip strips and terror in her baby’s eyes. The second letter apologized that his plaything was all worn out and no longer of any use to him. The photo with this one showed a black lawn and leaf bag at the bottom of a hole in the woods.

  Carla wanted to kill someone when she received the first correspondence. The second one made her want to die.

  “Tell me about Anita Rodriguez,” Trent said.

  Carla stiffened, but kept her face a stone mask. No, please don’t.

  “She was your seventh victim,” the producer went on, “and you kept her the longest. Why?”

  Kelvin Finch’s eyes looked past the camera and into memory, and the faintest ghost of a smile crossed his lips. “I was drawn to her,” he said, his voice wistful, as if he was a man talking about a love affair from his younger days. “I thought she was beautiful, and she had the most amazing, big dark eyes.”

  Finch proceeded to talk about Anita Rodriguez, and what he had done to her. Trent Whitsome had advised him before they started that anything too graphic would simply be edited out and never see any screen time, and so far during the interview Finch had kept it vague. Now, however, it was as if he could no longer contain himself, and he explained in heartbreaking detail his “romance” with and ultimate disposal of the seven-year-old.

  Against the wall, Carla’s eyes bored into her daughter’s killer. His words washed over her in great, crashing waves of pain, and she was unable to stop him, unable to not hear about the things he had done, of which she had mercifully never known until now. Somehow, she managed not to cry.

  She saw Finch was getting an erection as he reminisced.

  Concealed in her right boot was a box-cutter, a heavy silver device with a razorblade which could be pushed out by thumbing a lever forward. When she learned she would be standing here during the interview, mere feet away from Finch, she retrieved it from a locked box of contraband weapons confiscated from the inmates over the years, now used during officer training. She had placed it so she could reach it easily, and now its weight and shape was an irresistible presence.

  Carla’s life was one of despair. One of those many despairs was that the combination of events she needed in order to exact her detailed revenge would never come. It was a feeling which had become a constant, and the items hidden in a small black nylon zipper bag, locked in a bottom drawer of her desk, untouched and unused for so many years, were a constant reminder of this. How many chances would she have to get him in this position, defenseless and unsuspecting, within easy reach? In the years he had seen her at Deacon Valley, he never once recognized her, even though she was sitting in that courtroom when the DA told the judge a plea of guilty had been obtained in exchange for life without parole. She had even been on the TV news, standing next to Emilio at the end of their driveway, surrounded by supportive neighbors and clutching a school picture of Anita – the same one she shared the annual birthday celebration with – crying and begging anyone who had seen her daughter to please come forward. No one recognized her now. Then again, that had been many years ago, and in a different part of the state. Finch wouldn’t recall her because he cared only about himself.

  The King was talking about circular saws and Hefty bags.

  Carla was going to do it, the hell with her grand scheme. Finch could have a heart attack tonight and die in his cell, or run across one of the general population lifers with nothing to lose and a hatred of pedophiles, and having him taken away before she could avenge her daughter would be more than she could endure. It was going to be now. She would slit his throat from ear to ear right in front of the camera, and scream Anita’s name at him as he bled out.

  Yet she didn’t move from her place, remaining motionless as a grave marker.

  When the King was done with his story, Trent signaled to his crew to cut and wrap it up. He’d come in here thinking he was thick-skinned and hardened enough to hear whatever this man had to say without reaction, a cool professional who could separate his emotions from the job. He was wrong, and now he just wanted to go back to his hotel and try to shower off Kelvin Finch.

  He nodded to the lady sergeant, a woman with a lean face and hard eyes who might have once been attractive. Since being introduced to her this morning he had the recurring feeling that they’d met before. Her name tag simply read MENDEZ, and that was no help. Once during the day he’d expressed this idea, but she had said no, they’d never met. During the interview she’d had no r
eaction at all to Finch’s horrific stories and casual commentary on the destruction of young life, and the producer figured she was probably numb to all this, exposed to it on a daily basis. That was the kind of professional demeanor he’d come in here incorrectly thinking he had.

  Carla instructed the other CO in the room to return Finch to his cell. Once he was gone, she waited while the crew members packed their gear, used her radio to inform Central Control that they were coming out, and led Trent Whitsome and his people into a hallway. They made it twenty feet before Carla brusquely excused herself and pushed into a ladies room, barely making it into a stall before she threw up.

  Carla’s kitchen was in shambles. The table was overturned, one of the chairs lay broken under a ragged hole in the sheetrock, shards of glass and ceramic littered the linoleum floor from where she had hurled plates and glasses against the refrigerator and walls. She stood in the center of it all, fists clenched, screaming as tears streaked her face.

  Why didn’t she kill him when she had the chance?

  How could he have done those things to her precious, tender-hearted little girl?

  Memories of pregnancy, of changing diapers and cooing nursery rhymes, night lights and cuddling after bedtime terrors spun through her head. Anita learning to walk, the first time she said “mommy,” crayon drawings and laughter and wrestling in the grass. Singing ABC’s, endless questions and favorite toys. The first day of school, Christmas mornings, a play in kindergarten where she was dressed as a sunflower. The random “I love you’s.”

  “Oh, God!” she wailed, failing to her knees and cutting them on the fragments, hugging her chest and rocking, a long moan of animal pain escaping her. “You did that to my baby! You took away my baby!” She fell on her side, curling into a fetal position as the tears exploded. Yet another birthday would come and go while Kelvin Finch moved day to day through life, another sad little cake, another bottle of vodka, the years stretching out before Carla like an accusation.

  “Mommy’s sorry, baby,” she choked. “Mommy’s so, so sorry.”

  It had been her third day of second grade, and Anita had begged to walk to school on her own because she was a big girl. The school was only three blocks away, the street didn’t see much traffic, the neighborhood was safe and friendly, and Anita was a smart girl. Emilio had left for work already, and Anita had taken her time getting dressed and ready. Carla knew she’d be late for work if she spent the extra twenty minutes to drop her off, and gave in.

  Yes. A single spoken word, a product of her own selfishness, her misplaced sense of importance in wanting to avoid a scolding at the store where she worked instead of protecting her only child as a mother should. For eleven years, that knowledge reminded her daily that it was her fault. She thought about it more than she did Kelvin Finch.

  No one saw him take her. Carla never knew how it happened until this evening, a nagging question answered by the killer himself. He had been driving slowly through the neighborhood and saw her on the sidewalk, ponytail and bright yellow backpack bouncing along behind her as she marched to school. He pulled to the curb half a block ahead of her, got out, and started looking under his car.

  “Here kitty, kitty,” he called. “Here kitty.”

  Anita stopped, crouched and looked under the car too. “Here kitty,” she said, always a helpful little girl. His hand clamped her mouth and she was inside the back seat of his car so fast that no one heard or saw a thing. He bound her, sealed her mouth, and drove away. The entire abduction took less than sixty seconds.

  Carla stared across the kitchen floor at the fragments of glass, some tipped with fresh blood, and gasped for breath, the tears still flowing freely. “So sorry,” she whispered. “Mommy’s so sorry, baby.”

  Trent Whitsome followed his GPS and drove his rental car down the main avenue of Levi, Oklahoma, a burg sitting on the prairie twenty miles from Deacon Valley Correctional Facility. It was a small, nondescript town which probably wouldn’t even have existed except for a large stockyard and rail center, and the fact that it was home to most of the people who worked at or provided services for the prison.

  It was ten days since the Finch interview, and he was the new favorite with the HBO brass. They loved what he had put together, and even after plenty of cutting the interview was chilling. It would be the centerpiece of the special. Whitsome would oversee the final editing process, dishing up pieces of the Kelvin Finch interview and intermingling it with the details of the case, archive footage of cops emerging from wooded areas with small body bags, interviews with investigators and neighbors, as well as a psychologist’s views on Finch’s letters and the events which led to his capture and incarceration. There was talk that they had landed Gary Sinise to provide the dramatic narrator’s voice, and the audio department had given him a preview of the documentary’s haunting soundtrack.

  Also key to the special, to provide the heartache and connect with the audience, was the interviews with the parents. The two single moms had committed suicide, another couple had divorced and died during the intervening years of a car accident and cancer respectively. A fourth couple, also divorced, refused to participate. But Trent had already conducted and filmed interviews with three of the remaining families, only one of which was not divorced. One more to go.

  Carla Rodriguez’s husband couldn’t be located. The woman herself had vanished as well, simply dropped out of existence. Trent spoke with anyone he could find who knew her, hitting repeated dead ends. She had broken off all contact, and hadn’t been heard from since the whole, terrible thing came to a close.

  He got lucky with Shay Downing, however, the realtor who handled the sale of Carla Rodriguez’s house. After some polite conversation and Trent’s assurance that he would keep her name out of it, Ms. Downing offered that Carla had left Tulsa right after the sale was completed, but before the check for the equity – and there wasn’t too much of that, she said – could be cut. Carla left her realtor a forwarding address, an apartment in Levi, Oklahoma.

  Trent believed it was the one and only loose end of a woman who clearly did not want to be found. And he thought it was beyond intriguing that she had relocated to the town adjacent the prison where her daughter’s killer was spending his life. That by itself was a story, and Trent had busied himself during the long drive from Tulsa to Levi with questions. Why did you vanish? Why move here of all places? Have you ever visited him, tried to contact him? What have you been doing for eleven years?

  He turned into a residential neighborhood of small frame houses and little stucco-walled apartment complexes, stopping when directed by his GPS. Grabbing a legal pad off the front seat, he headed across a dry lawn towards one of the buildings.

  He would ask her all those questions in person.

  It was her day off. Carla was coming out her apartment door with a bag of trash for the complex dumpsters, and saw the man trotting up the concrete steps, his head down. They passed each other on the stairs with a brief “excuse me,” and then the man stopped on the steps above her.

  “Mrs. Rodriguez?”

  She froze, and he skipped back down the steps until he was in front of her.

  “Mrs. Rodriguez, I’m…” He stared at her, his mouth open in mid-sentence. “Oh my God,” he whispered.

  Carla looked at the HBO producer, her jaw clenched, the hand not holding the garbage bag trembling. She wanted to tell him he was mistaken, wanted to tell him to go away, forget he had ever seen her. She knew he wouldn’t.

  Trent shook his head slowly. “You look different. From when you…back then. You’re thinner.”

  “I run.”

  He paused. “Yes you do.” He raised an eyebrow.

  She took a deep breath. “When did you recognize me?”

  He let out a short laugh. “I didn’t, but now I know why I thought I knew you. I have the footage from when you and your husband were on TV. You’ve changed a lot, not just because of the years.”

  She unconsciously put a hand to he
r face, and he saw the tremble. “It’s the prison. It changes a person.” She set down the trash bag. “What are you going to do?”

  Trent hefted the notepad. “I have a lot of questions for you. Will you…?”

  “No. I have nothing to say.”

  “C’mon, Carla. All this…” he waved his notepad in a circle, “…is very unusual. What you’ve done is unusual. Talk to me, tell me your side. Give me a chance to tell your side.”

  She shook her head. “You couldn’t understand it.”

  “You were in that room,” he said, “you had to stand there and hear the things he did. I won’t pretend to understand how painful that was, but you can help me to understand.”

  “No.”

  He shrugged. “The story gets told either way, I just…”

  Carla moved up the steps and into his face, her voice tight between clamped teeth. “Listening to that sick fuck talk about torturing and killing my girl wasn’t enough? You need more pain, Mr. Whitmore? Is that what turns you on, like those things that live in the Monster House?”

  Trent retreated from her sudden fury until his lower back was hard against the iron railing, leaning away from her. “Wait, I…”

  “Fuck you, Whitmore. Fuck your questions and your story.” She said the last word like she was spitting out something nasty. “The story’s over. It ended when he put my child in the ground.” She snatched up the trash bag. “Now get away from my house.”

  Trent watched her go down the stairs and around the corner of the building, suddenly realizing that for just a moment, he knew she was going to kill him right there on the stairs. He went back to his car faster than he would have liked, quickly pulling out of the neighborhood.

  What was he going to do about all this? Carla Rodriguez…Mendez, whatever she called herself, wasn’t just near her daughter’s killer, she was on top of him. Why? Then he thought about her burst of rage and realized the real question was, why hadn’t she done it yet? Surely that was at the heart of it all. Where to go with this? It was a game-changer, an explosive turn of events in an already spectacular story. What to do? It was a question he wouldn’t try to answer alone, and so once he pulled out onto the highway he called the brass at HBO. Let them make the decision. He already had a good idea what they would say.