by Rick Mofina
“Here’s the last one on the series,” Wilson said, just as the lights flickered, the floor shook from the presses, and the board she was standing on cracked. “Look out!” Wilson caught herself but the box crashed, files spilled on the floor at Reed’s feet He bent down to collect them. He reached for a black-and-white mug shot and he froze. “Jesus Christ!”
Realization rushed at him with all the fury and the earth-shaking thunder of the presses, driving him to his knees as he studied the face that met his in the flickering light.
The face of a long-forgotten enemy.
John Mark Engler.
FIFTY-SIX
The forty-watt porch lighting of the Moonlit Dreams Motor Inn attracted clouds of frenzied moths but few guests dared to stop. Every few minutes a car or truck passed down the highway, interrupting the crickets but ignoring the vacancy sign beckoning from the darkness.
But for the paint blistering, not much happened here.
The air conditioner didn’t work in number 6 where Ann Reed’s wrists were handcuffed to the wooden arms of a chair. Duct tape covered her mouth. She blinked away the salty sting of another sweat droplet.
Delmar Tribe couldn’t stop watching her. Even when he tilted his head to swallow more beer, he kept a predatory eye locked on to her. It had been twenty minutes since they’d settled in. John Engler stepped from the bathroom after a shower, his hair damp, face reddened.
“Where the hell you going?” Tribe said.
“To phone our guy and get some food, which is your job but you’re too damned drunk.”
“Screw you.” Tribe stared at Ann, then at the fractured TV screen. The set got two channels: a fire-and-brimstone Bible-thon and professional wrestling. “How long you gonna be?”
“Half an hour. Maybe less, so don’t get any ideas, Del.”
“Why the hell do you pick these rat-hole dumps, huh?”
“To make you feel at home.” Engler began collecting the keys, knives. “These places are cheap, out of the way, take cash, ask no questions. Do I have to spell it out for you? Give me your gun.”
“What the hell for?”
“Because I don’t want any trouble while I step out.” Tribe glared at him before giving up his gun, then opening another beer.
“Slow down there,” Engler said. “How ’bout some chicken from that place we passed down the road?”
“How ’bout we get our money and split? I’m sick of this. I want my cut. Let’s keep driving and get it done with the buyer.”
“No, he’s not ready. Take it easy. I’ll be right back.”
“Get more beer.”
Engler drove off.
Tribe lit a cigarette and resumed watching Ann through his smoke cloud. Her breathing quickened. Alone with him, she was vulnerable. Maybe John did this on purpose. Time ticked by as she fought to figure out Tom’s link to these men. If she understood, maybe she could reason a way out. As crickets chirped in the night, Ann felt Tribe’s eyes on her. Watching. Waiting. She blinked at her mounting fear. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes had passed, providing some relief. Maybe he would leave her alone.
Without warning he stood and stripped off his shirt.
He was huge. He had the build of an inmate for whom bodybuilding was a religion practiced daily in the exercise yard. His powerful muscles strained the tattoos on his arms and shoulders. Being shirtless magnified his deformed ear, underscoring Ann’s worry that he was abnormal.
“This place is a sweatbox.” He touched his beer to his forehead and chest “I see you’re hot too, darlin’.”
Watching her watching him, he shook his head slowly.
“Damn! You’re a looker.” He seemed bigger as he stepped next to her, bending over, drawing his face to hers. “Well, it’s no secret anymore. I know what you want.”
She began to tremble.
Fight. They’re going to kill you. Don’t let him do this. Fight him.
He held up the handcuff key and his rotting teeth emerged as he grinned.
In a few quick powerful movements he had Ann handcuffed to the bed, using the length of chain for her legs. She managed to scratch him, drawing blood on his shoulder. She got in a few hard punches but it was like slamming her hand against rock. He laughed.
“Might as well admit the truth to yourself,” he said, “you want this. You really want this bad. They all wanted it, darlin’. All of them.”
He placed one of his knees on the bed between her legs. Her heart galloped. She thought of Tom. Of Zach, thought of the woman buried in the desert. She prayed. Prayed to die now so he couldn’t do this, couldn’t take her last bit of dignity. She prayed for the other one to return.
His eyes burned into hers, the tips of something so dark and dead it turned Ann’s blood cold. He cupped one hand around her neck. His fingers met at the front, like a vise. His big thumb caressed her chin, her lips.
“Darlin’, I seen how you’ve been looking at me and I know what you want. It’s been a long time since I had something as beautiful as you. We both have needs. I’m going to help you with yours.”
He drew his face to hers, his sweat dropping on her, his breath stinking of beer and cigarettes. He reeked of body odor. As he began tugging at her T-shirt, Ann shut her eyes, feeling his hand, the hand that loved caressing king snakes, moccasins, and diamondbacks, slide down her stomach, then inch lower.
Oh God. It’s really going to happen to me....
Loud thumping on the porch planks out front smashed the quiet.
“Hey, Dad, can I get a soda from the machine!” Startled, he stopped. It was a kid. Right out front. Staccato thudding on the porch continued.
“They got grape!”
A man’s muffled voice, then a car door shutting. The man again saying: “No, Frankie, we got juice. Ours is number two. Four doors that way.”
“But, Dad!”
“Keep it down. I said, let’s go.”
More thumping, fading. A door slamming.
“Christ.” Tribe left Ann for the window, to peek through the curtains.
Another car door slammed. Engler had returned. He entered in seconds, his eyes going to Ann chained to the bed, her shirt torn, jeans unbuttoned, then to Tribe, bare-chested, stomach and face scratched, zipper down.
“What did you do? What the Christ did you do?”
The plastic take-out bags in his hands dropped, Engler charged Tribe, slamming him to the wall. Muscles and veins bulged, teeth were bared. The two men growled as they struggled before Engler shoved Tribe to the floor. He went to Ann. He was going to tear the tape from her mouth but remembered the family a few doors away and kept his voice low.
“Did he rape you?”
Ann shook her head.
“But he was fixing to rape you?”
Ann closed her eyes, half sobbing, and nodded.
Tribe pulled on his shirt, boots, grabbed some food and beer.
“What the hell is it with you and her, John?” He pointed a plastic knife at Engler. “Why didn’t we drop her after the job? Why did we keep her, huh?”
“Sit down and cool down.”
“What kind of sick thing you got going? Look. You color her hair, but not just any color. It’s her color. What’s wrong with you?”
“Shut up.”
“I’m telling you, John, she is going to bring us down. We should drop her, just like the other one. You let me have Carrie; then we dropped her. Clean. Even played out your little switch game in Death Valley. The way you wanted, so you could get your kicks. But we stuck to our plan with Carrie. Remember our plan, John?”
“Shut your goddamned mouth.”
“Whatever happened to our plan? The one that said no witnesses. I don’t recall the part that said drag a transmitter across the country. The wife of some big-ass reporter. What in hell is up with you, you twisted—”
Engler punched Tribe, knocking him to the floor.
“So that’s it.” Tribe rubbed his jaw. “She’s your fantasy, your prize. Something’s
going on. Something happened to you in the joint, brother, something bad got you all turned around.”
“Why don’t you put some food in your yap and shut up?”
“Listen to me, I’m going to take her; then I’m going to dump her. It will happen. It always does. My needs are so powerful, I ache. But they will be satisfied. Then we’ll complete our business, go our separate ways. Got that?” The room rattled when Tribe slammed the door behind him.
Engler picked up the remaining food, arranged it on the table, uncuffed Ann.
“I’ll take the tape off to let you eat if you don’t scream.” Ann couldn’t respond. She was shaking.
“You should eat. Take your mind off things.”
A long moment passed before her trembling subsided. She was exhausted. She was hungry. She was terrified. Somewhere she found the strength and nodded.
They ate in silence watching the Bible show as Ann blinked back her tears, stopping herself from saying thank you to the man who’d kidnapped her. When they finished he cleaned up, then handcuffed her to the chair. They stared at the TV set, both of them imprisoned by their fate, watching a fiery minister from South Carolina scream about atonement.
“Will you”—Ann cleared her throat—“will you tell me how you know my husband and what he’s got to do with this? Please?”
Engler was transfixed by the preacher and didn’t answer. “What did your friend mean by saying you colored my hair her color?”
He didn’t answer.
“...if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
He didn’t answer.
“How do you know my husband?” Ann’s voice cracked. “Please, I’m begging you, answer me.”
He didn’t answer.
The screaming minister was now directing viewers to James, chapter 4.
“For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanisheth away.”
FIFTY-SEVEN
“Do you know John Mark Engler?” Wilson retrieved the scattered papers and records.
“I know him.”
Reed leaned against the wire mesh of the storage stall staring at the dirt-smeared pages in his hand, not believing what he was reading.
Wilson sat next to him, examining the file.
John Mark Engler was born in 1966, in San Francisco, to an unwed teen who gave him up through a street ministry. Engler lived in several foster homes. At age sixteen he told a teacher his foster father, an alcoholic butcher, was abusing him. No one checked into it. Nothing was done.
One night, after sealing the doors and windows with wood screws, Engler set fire to his family home. Two other foster children, Engler’s foster mother, and the butcher died in the blaze. Engler was arrested three months later, while working in an Oregon logging camp. His large stature enabled him to pass for a nineteen-year-old. Because of his claims of abuse, he was sentenced to twenty-one months in juvenile detention.
Four murder victims by age sixteen. Wilson shook her head.
After his release, Engler drifted and worked as dishwasher, cabdriver, construction worker, bartender and security guard, before becoming a drug addict, a drug dealer, an armed robber and a murder suspect.
In Florida after stealing a car, Engler picked up Tyler Randall Vine, a twenty-two-year-old drifter hitchhiking outside of Miami. The pair consumed cocaine, then decided to rob the Stop N’ Skip all-night convenience store.
The clerk, Harold Smith, a twenty-four-year-old med student who volunteered at a clinic, was visited on his job that night by his girlfriend, Anita Lee, also a med student majoring in research of terminal diseases in infants.
At 3:00 A.M., Vine entered the Stop N’ Skip, pointed a semiautomatic pistol at Smith, and demanded cash. Smith shielded Lee and complied. Vine shot Smith in the head; then Engler entered and they took Lee hostage. It took five days before Broward County searchers, acting on a tip from a local “who mighta seen somethin’ out there,” found her body in the swamp, less than fifty feet from the westbound lane of Everglades Parkway, known locally as Alligator Alley.
Six weeks later, Kansas City PD picked up Vine. He was extradited to Florida, where he confessed to shooting Smith but swore to Jesus it was Engler who murdered Lee. Vine was charged with first-degree murder while the FBI issued a warrant for Engler.
Two months to the day after grappling hooks snagged the belt loops of Lee’s shorts in the Everglades, Engler was taken down by a SWAT team in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where he was hiding in the toolshed of a retired funeral director who’d called police about a suspicious noise in his backyard.
Handcuffed in the back row of the Miami-bound jet, Engler told detectives escorting him that Vine had done the killing. What Engler didn’t know was that Smith had survived his wound and had identified Vine as his shooter. While Smith failed to identify Engler, he said a second man had entered the store after he was shot. A foot impression in Smith’s blood matched Engler’s shoes and put him at the crime scene. Broward detectives charged Engler with first-degree. Both men were convicted and sentenced to die by electrocution in Florida State Prison’s Death House in Starke.
Vine worked the appeal process, never once wavering from his account that he didn’t murder anyone. So did Engler, who researched the law with unprecedented intensity, using every avenue afforded a condemned inmate.
But Vine accepted his fate when guards took him to the ready cell for the final three days of his life. He apologized to the families of Smith and Lee for the tragedy. Yet he maintained, as the hours ticked down, that he was innocent of killing anyone. Even after his head and leg were shaved for effective electrical contact, Vine upheld his innocence. Despite the encouragement of two spiritual advisers to unburden his conscience and prepare for everlasting peace, Vine was resolute, right up until the moment he was strapped into the chair.
In the seconds before two thousand volts of electricity were discharged into his body, Vine shouted: “Engler murdered Anita! I saw him! It wasn’t me!” His cries were seared in the hearts of the witnesses, forever haunting some of them as the final words they’d hear on nights when sleep wouldn’t come.
Two days after Vine’s execution, Engler was moved to the ready cell. In Engler’s version, he was the innocent victim. Vine confessed to shooting Smith because Smith identified him, but Vine wanted Engler to die with him. Engler maintained that Vine was a stranger he’d picked up and tried to help, that he’d pulled up to the Stop N’ Skip at Vine’s request to buy a snack. Engler said he ran in to help upon hearing gunfire to see Vine forcing Lee to the car at gunpoint. Vine ordered Engler to drive across the Everglades, ignoring his plea to let Lee go. Engler was scared for his life and complied with Vine.
Engler made his case in an eleventh-hour petition for writ of habeas corpus to the district court. On the afternoon before his scheduled execution, the high court granted Engler’s motion, saying that no weapon had been found, meaning the state had only circumstantial evidence against Engler, nothing strong enough to secure guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
The court acquitted Engler. He walked from death row a free man.
“Jesus, Tom, that’s an incredible story. What happened?” Wilson flipped through the pages.
“Engler’s public defenders managed to get the other states to sign off on his lesser crimes for time served in Florida. Engler worked his way back to California, went to college, started a small garage business, got married. Years rolled by. I never knew Engler existed.”
“How did you get on to him?”
“One day out of the blue I got a call from a source who’d suggested I call the Broward County Sheriff’s office in Florida and ask about this old Vine and Engler case. Specifically for any updates.”
“What happened?”
“They’d found the gun used to shoot Harold Smith and his girlfriend, Anita Lee.”
“Who found it?”
“Some environmental group doing work in
the swamp near where they found Lee’s body.”
“Did it help? In that condition, after all those years?”
“They set their best lab and ballistics people on it. Vine had said Lee struggled with Engler while getting out of the car. He’d banged his gun hand and bled. Angered, he slapped Lee, then asked Vine for another clip, ‘to make sure he had enough bullets for her.’ The trace blood on the gun and the clip matched Engler’s type and they managed DNA and other physical evidence. It supported Vine’s account that Engler shot Lee.”
“So what did you do?”
“As I remember it now, the call came when I was starting work on the murder mystery series. Word got out on the police grapevine that this Bay Area guy had gotten away with a murder in Florida.”
“All good timing.”
“Yeah, I got all the case files I could, made a lot of calls, learned prosecutors in Florida were looking into laying new charges without getting hampered by the double jeopardy clause. They were working a new angle. The last word I’d had was that the case against Engler wasn’t strong enough given the time elapsed and that Vine, the only other witness, was dead and couldn’t be cross-examined. But I still had a good murder mystery.”
“Big time. How could you forget this case?”
“I don’t know, Molly. Maybe I wanted to. I didn’t like Engler. Got a bad read off of him.”
“What happened? How did you meet?”
“He was living in San Francisco. I visited him, interviewed him several times. At first he brushed off the gun as sour grapes by police. He claimed it was planted by vindictive cops. Then he got very hostile, warned me not to run the story. Threatened me.”
“We all get that.”
“Exactly, so it wasn’t a big deal. I just thought the guy was a prick.”
“Then what?”
“I interviewed his wife. I remember I felt sorry for her. She seemed nice. I could tell by her reaction that she knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about the man she’d married. It was like the real Engler never existed.”