by Roger Hayden
“A shadow. Someone peeking in,” she said. Rachel sat on the couch and pulled Penny close to her in a protective embrace. Dobson looked on all sides of the house outside but didn’t see anyone. “Pack your things!” he said. “We’re getting you somewhere safe.”
Rachel turned her head, concerned. “I don’t think that’s necessary.”
“Please. Just listen to me,” he said.
He removed the door chain and unlocked the deadbolt. Eye pressed against the peephole, he looked out and saw no one there. He flung the door open and stepped outside. A couple drove by in a station wagon, staring as he walked toward the driveway with his pistol held up.
He moved alongside the house, nearing the driveway, and he called out to Landon. No one responded, though he could see a shadow move across the concrete ahead. Dobson stopped at the corner of the garage and listened. An air of quiet passed. He turned the corner with his pistol aimed, ready to fire. But there was no Landon. Three neighborhood boys, no older than ten, scattered down the driveway in panic. Dobson gasped, mere seconds from pulling the trigger. His heart seized as he stumbled back and shouted, “Son of a bitch!”
The three boys raced down the road, laughing along the way. Dobson called out to them, clutching his chest. “I’m going to call your parents!”
Harris suddenly rushed around the corner. “You okay? What happened?”
Dobson fell back against the garage door and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Nothing. Neighborhood kids messing around.”
Harris examined Dobson with concern. “Damn. You look white as a ghost.”
Dobson looked up with a nervous smile, still holding his chest “Gave me quite a scare.”
“You want me to call an ambulance?” Harris asked.
Dobson waved him off immediately, shaking his head. He holstered his pistol and stood up straight with his nerves returning.
Harris glanced at his cell phone and then back at Dobson, speaking carefully. “So, Mike. Listen. We have a change of plans.”
“What are you talking about?” Dobson said with an exhausted sigh.
“The reunion. It’s been canceled.”
Dobson turned to face Harris directly, still visibly rattled. “What-what do you mean?”
“I mean that it’s not happening. “Got a text from the station.”
Dobson smacked his hands together. “Just like that? The day before?”
Harris stared at his phone for an update. “It’s been canceled. That’s all I know.” He moved the phone closer upon receiving another message. “Hold on.” He paused, taking a moment to read. “So, according to this message, they’re doing a candlelight vigil instead.”
Dobson stepped back and patted his pockets for his cell phone. He then looked to the house upon remembering that he left it inside. “Who’s telling you this?”
“Gabby. She said that security has been moved away from the hotel and relocated to the vigil.”
Rachel stepped around the corner with caution and fear in her eyes. “What’s going on? Did you see him?”
Dobson lowered his head, shaking it. “It was nothing.” He looked at Harris as Rachel stood by in confusion. “Where is this vigil going to be?”
“Hyde Park. Tomorrow night,” Harris said.
Dobson turned around, hands on his hips, and rocked his head back, looking into the sky. “The main question is when Landon will find out about this, if he hasn’t already.”
Harris nodded and glanced at Rachel as she bit her nails. “Either way, we should get back to the station and work this out.”
Pressure weighed on Dobson like nothing no case before. Sterling was missing and her status unknown. He and his family were a target now. The reunion had been canceled and with it a change of plans in capturing Landon. Could they keep news of the vigil from the local news media? Could they create a mock reunion as well? Was there enough time for any of it?
“You can’t stay here,” he said to Rachel, turning to face her. Moving Penny and Rachel for an unknown period was not something he wanted to do.
She stared back at him with anger in her tired eyes. “I know that, but you can’t expect Penny to just go on the lam—”
“No one is saying that. We can have you both safely escorted somewhere with all her medications, her vest, and whatever else she needs.”
Rachel turned from him. “That’s easy for you to say. Wherever we go, you won’t be there.”
Hand on his forehead, Dobson resisted the urge to argue as Harris backed toward the car, wanting nothing to do with it. “This letter is no joke,” Dobson said, pulling it from his pocket. “Everyone who has received it has been murdered. Do you understand that?”
“We’ll go,” Rachel said with a vacant stare. “What choice do we have?”
Dobson approached and put his arms around her. “I’m so sorry about this.” She buried her face into his chest, sniffling as he rubbed her back. “I’ll get some guys out here. They’ll take you to a hotel close to the hospital. Take only the essentials.”
He hated even making such plans. To accept that they weren’t safe in their own home was to admit defeat. Dobson knew that, and he believed Rachel did as well. She reached into her pocket and pulled out his cell phone, relinquishing it. “You left this in the kitchen. Do what you have to do.”
He released Rachel and took the phone as she wiped tears from her eyes. With so much going on, he knew that requesting a security detail for his wife and daughter was a tall order. But the department owed him. Twenty-five years on the force, and he had never asked for much.
“Can I speak to Captain Nelson, please?” he said into the phone. A woman had answered the captain’s phone instead. He waited and could hear a busy, crowded office. Nelson came on the line and spoke with urgency.
“This is Nelson.”
“It’s Dobson. I’m with Harris outside of my home.”
A stunned pause followed. “What? Why’d you leave the station? We have a killer out there—”
“I know that, sir,” Dobson said with force in his tone. “My wife received a letter. The chain letter in the mail. I’m not going anywhere until we can evacuate her and my daughter to somewhere safe.”
A longer pause followed as he assumed Nelson to be gathering his thoughts. Too much was going on, but it was one issue Dobson was prepared not to budge on.
“Look. Just…” Nelson began. “Give me a minute. We’ve got half the police force searching for Sterling. The FBI is here. The media is setting up camp outside. It’s a cluster fu—”
“I understand. But this is my priority,” Dobson said, glancing at Rachel as she fidgeted with her hands. He was ashamed to see it come to this—hiding his family from a maniac. Of course, it could always have been another diversion. For Dobson, the key was in understanding what Landon wanted beyond revenge. Was it fame and infamy? They were going to catch him soon. That much he was sure of. But how many more victims were going to die before then? Dobson waited as the captain put him on hold for another call. He assured Harris that they’d go back to the station soon enough. Rachel, however, was lost in her own world. Her unblinking eyes stared away as she passed him and walked down the driveway. She stopped at the road and just stood there.
“Honey, stay close. Okay?” Dobson said, phone to his ear.
Harris leaned against the hood of Dobson’s car, typing onto his phone. Dobson paced the driveway with a growing impatience. He yearned for an answer to it all. Everything seemed unreal with no clear answers to a situation that was spiraling out of control.
Sterling set the notebook down. There was more, but she wasn’t ready just yet to proceed. She had lost track of time, which wasn’t hard given how the cabin had been so meticulously boarded up. She didn’t know what of Landon’s story to believe. It was true that a fire had destroyed the factory and killed everyone but him in it. Did he really believe that Cooper Erickson was responsible for it?
It would explain the connection between the murders. Lando
n blamed them all. But was it the only reason? There were a few pages left to read, and she was nowhere closer to discovering the laptop password than before. She pressed the space bar, and the log-in screen appeared. She had tried his parents’ and friends’ names. She’d tried his birthday and town names to no avail. Sterling understood percentages and knew very well that the odds were stacked against her. Then she surmised the odds of surviving captivity in a serial killer’s hideout and realized that they had been in her favor.
A noise from outside the room startled her. She rose from the stool at the workbench and grabbed a blunt hammer lying on the table amid other tools. She held it up and watched the door but no one came. The realization that Landon could still be there chilled her bones. She wouldn’t put such trickery past him. The noise returned in the form of a rattling against the windows.
Sterling looked around the room, realizing that her fears were nothing more than the outside wind. She placed the hammer on the table and returned to the notebook. A few more pages and she’d either have the answers or be left with nothing. Landon’s journal, in fact, read more like a murder manifesto of justification. Perhaps he was telling the truth. The only thing that mattered, however, was stopping him.
From the Journal of Landon Kearney:
February 1991
I could remember brief moments after the explosion. The sound of the ambulances and fire trucks are still vivid in my mind. I recall being strapped down and airlifted to the hospital without a feeling in my body. You see, most of my skin had been burnt off. At least the nerves that could feel. The beauty of third degree burns is that you don’t feel the aftermath of being burnt alive, arguably the most painful physical experience imaginable. I lost most of my face and hair along with the burns all over my body, including my genitalia.
Only seventeen, and I would never have sex or any semblance of a normal life again. My life had unexpectedly changed in an instant. I was told by the doctors that I was lucky to have survived. I supposed they were right. Ralph, the electrician, Andre, and Bruce had all perished. I was the sole survivor of a freak accident that destroyed my parents’ factory along with all their prospects and dreams.
It took years of rehabilitation and physical therapy to even walk again, plus the reconstructive surgery involved in all areas of my body. My left arm had even been replaced with a prosthetic arm. Fortunately, I was right handed, but even that didn’t matter. All movement and all speech patterns had to be relearned through my years of recovery. This recovery, mind you, was very expensive.
My time at the Cedar Creek Burn Recovery Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania had cost my parent everything they had. A second mortgage against their home barely kept up with the expenses. I was in a coma for many years, before the sheer notion of recovery could even be discussed. Feeding tubes and oxygen pumps sustained me over the time as the world gradually passed me by. During my long recovery, I often have moments where I left my coma a gradually gained consciousness. This was normally a terrifying experience as I had no idea where I was and why I couldn’t move. It felt like a nightmare.
Sometimes, I’d see a blurry image of my parents, holding one another and talking to me. Their muffled voices provided adequate comfort, but I could never filly engage with them. My body was a wrapped in bandages from head to toe. Every so often, a nursing staff would remove the bandages and casts to clean me and apply soothing solution to my ravaged flesh. My arms and legs were always propped up with a pulley or two. My head was always propped on a pillow. During brief spurts of consciousness in the beginning of my five-year coma, I began to understand things more.
Number one: I wasn’t dead. Number two: machines seemed to be keeping me alive. Number three: I had no control of movement. Number four: The line between dream and reality was blurred. And number five: I was gaining awareness. I couldn’t wake up no matter how hard I tried. It felt like being continually sucked back into a dream as I screamed for help. I’ve heard about bouts of sleep paralysis, but my experience was absolutely terrifying.
It had to be only a few months after the fire when I received a special visitor. Her familiar voice rose me from my deep slumber, but I couldn’t open my eyes or respond in anyway, even has her hand took the fingers sticking out from my arm cast. Her scented cherry blossom body lotion flowed inside what was left of my nostrils.
My hearing was badly damaged, but I could hear crying. I tried to wake up but couldn’t move. I screamed out as loud as I could without making a sound. When that failed, I simply relented to the darkness of my current state and listened as she spoke. And it was during that moment when she told me everything.
“I’m so sorry, Landon,” she said. “You didn’t deserve this. I really had no idea. I-I don’t know what to say.”
She repeatedly apologized as her tears dripped onto my bed sheets. I didn’t know what she was talking about. Anytime I was awake still felt like a dream. But I listened anyway.
“You’re a really sweet guy. I hope you come out of this soon. Then someday, I can tell you the truth. I did want to be your friend. That wasn’t a joke. It’s just… Cooper he had this idea and he forced us all to go along. I never thought this would happen. None of us knew what he was planning, and now we’re all at fault. I can’t tell anyone else about it.”
She paused and sat next to the bed, still clutching my fingers. Machines hummed and beeped in the distance. I tried to ask her what happened, but again no words came out. The rhythmic beep of the heart monitor increased with my breathing. She hadn’t told me everything yet, but I could already feel anger building inside.
“I do blame myself, though. You must understand. I should have never listened to him.” She paused to wipe her face with a Kleenex and then continued. “He has this way. You just can’t say no to him. But I don’t talk to him anymore. Not since graduation. Someday I’ll tell you the truth when you get better. You and your family deserve to know. It’s just, I’m not strong enough to go against them. I can’t do it alone.”
She released my fingers and adjusted her seat. She was stalling. For what it was worth, her guilt did sound sincere. She probably would have been better off leaving, but she finally admitted to a betrayal I should have sensed from the beginning.
“At the beginning of the school year, I really did like hanging out with you. But Cooper, he had other ideas. He made me stop seeing you. He was jealous and didn’t like having you around. I was a fool to listen to him, but you see, I thought that we were in love. So, when you started hanging out with us again, he wanted to get into your parents’ factory. He had this plan that he said was going to make us rich. He’d rigged the electrical fire to burn the place down, and he’d make it look like an accident. I didn’t think he’d actually pull it off. But no one was supposed to be there. That’s why he disable the machines. He cut the gas lines when you gave me a tour, and—I don’t know the rest, but I know it was his doing.”
She paused and lowered her head into her hands, crying. “It was our fault—Gordon, Liz, Victoria, and me. We didn’t stop him, and now it’s too late. We helped kill three people and turned you into this. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since the accident. The guilt is eating me alive.” She suddenly gripped my hand. The desperation in her voice hit this unrecognizable tone. “Cooper cut the gas hoses near one of the transformers. That’s what he told me. The gas made it explode. You must forgive me, Landon. Please, wake up! I’ll tell you everything if you just wake up.”
There was nothing I could but lie there, unable to speak or move. She cried into my bed and then slowly released my hand. I heard her stand up and wipe her face, sniffling. I couldn’t be sure if her visit was even real or if I was dreaming. It all made sense down to the T.
“Goodbye, Landon. I’ll see you when you wake up.” She kissed her fingers and then touched me upon my chest. I couldn’t believe that she had visited. She soon left the room as I drifted back into the throes of unconsciousness.
There would be no high school gra
duation for me. No college either. I’d have to pick up where I left off sixteen years later. I was thirty-three years old and nearing the end of my recovery at the burn center. The year was 2007. I’d made an astounding leap in time. Life, as I was soon to learn, would be full of many changes. I had missed presidential elections, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, technological advancements, and so many other things.
So many years stolen, I didn’t know where to begin. My deformed face took some getting used to. After so much reconstructive surgery, my face still looked like molded plastic, which I found amusing in a twisted way, considering where I had worked. I had a hazy recollection of the years before the factory fire, and the doctors had explained that such memory loss was normal.
My body had undergone a complete reset during its coma. Memories would come back, they assured me, along with my speech and motor skills. It would take therapy though.
My father came to visit me one day. His pale-unshaven face, disheveled hair, and thin, gawky frame made him appear ghost-like in appearance.
“Your mother is sick,” he told me. “Ovarian cancer.”
He explained that between my treatment and my mother’s medical bills, we had little left. But they also had sizable life insurance policies they had taken out when I was only a child. I could tell that it took him a while to get used to my appearance.
I was a stranger to him, and the opposite of the son he once had such high hopes for. I could see it in his eyes. I was a burden. My mother passed away before I could get well enough to leave the treatment center. I never saw her, but I did attend the funeral with my father. He committed suicide soon after.
Part of me believes that he did it so that I’d receive both the four hundred thousand from him and my mother’s deaths. He drove his pick-up truck off a cliff and into a ravine. The insurance company, however, cast suspicion on the circumstances of his death and awarded me half.