The Last Scoop

by R. G. Belsky

  Guess things weren’t that idyllic in Eckersville then, after all.

  She was living with her own parents, and eventually, it was Parkman’s grandmother who raised him. The mother died of a drug overdose when Jeff was fourteen. A traumatic ordeal for a teenager to endure, but he managed good grades in high school, went to college, and got a degree in law enforcement and criminal justice.

  He loved to travel and he loved to fly, one of the articles about him said in a profile after his appointment to police chief. He originally thought about being a pilot. But then he applied for—and was accepted—for U.S. Air Marshal training after college. He spent a number of years as a federal air marshal, flying around the country to all sorts of locations, including during the terrible days after the 9/11 terror attack.

  A few years later, when the government closed some of the U.S. Air Marshal units, Parkman decided to return to his hometown and joined the Eckersville Police Department. He had a good record as a police officer and—with his impressive background as a federal air marshal, along with a college degree in criminal justice—quickly moved up the ranks of the handful of officers until he was named chief.

  Parkman was well liked, well respected, and well thought of in general as a good police chief by the people of the town that I had talked to.

  Along the way, he’d gotten married. His wife, Doris, was a flight attendant Parkman met while flying as an air marshal. She continued in her flight attendant job even after Parkman left the air marshal job for the Eckersville Police Department, commuting back and forth to the Indianapolis and Fort Wayne airports for flights.

  She got a lot of free air miles, so Parkman would sometimes fly to whatever city she was going to on his days off from the police department, one person told me. That’s how much in love they were, the person said.

  She’d left the job several years ago to raise their children, the children Parkman proudly displayed pictures of on his desk at the station house. But, because of her background with the airline, she got special access to tickets that allowed her to fly around the country on trips even after she was no longer working as a flight attendant. People said the couple took several trips a year, using Parkman’s vacation days to visit all sorts of spots throughout America. “They love to travel,” one Eckersville resident told me. “Me, I’ve barely even been out of Indiana. But Chief Parkman and his wife … well, you should hear some of their stories about all those trips.”

  Parkman definitely checked off a lot of the boxes in the profile that the FBI had developed for who The Wanderer might really be.

  Most importantly, obviously, was the travel. The Wanderer moved around the country to find his victims. Parkman was a U.S. Air Marshal. That meant he could well have traveled to many of the places where the women died. Investigators at the FBI would be able to do a more detailed check of his long-ago flight records as a marshal and compare them to the murder locations. I was also intrigued by the fact that his wife continued to work on flights after he joined the police force, and that he sometimes accompanied her on these trips. Also, they’d continued traveling around the country recently. That might answer a big part of the puzzle.

  Then there was the background of him coming from a broken home, without a real mother. That raised the possibility of a boy who had a resentment against women at a young age because of the one that abandoned him before he even had a chance to know her. It was a scenario that had been found in a number of other serial killers of women in the past.

  And then there was his life now. A seemingly happy family man, husband and father. Liked and respected by everyone who knew him. Good-looking, charming, the perfect image for a chief of police in a town. The last person in the world you’d suspect of being a brutal serial killer of women. Except that fit the scenario of many serial killers. It was eerily similar to the most notorious American serial killer of all time: Ted Bundy. Bundy was good-looking, charming, and didn’t look like a serial killer, either. Until he preyed on his victims. If Parkman was a Ted Bundy–like serial killer masquerading as a good guy and model citizen, that made him even scarier. Because he carried a badge.

  I tried to call Manning again, but his phone went to voicemail. Maybe he was still with Parkman and didn’t want to answer a call from me in front of him. Or maybe he was somewhere else where he couldn’t take a call. I left a message telling him what I’d found out and said I’d meet him back at the hotel to figure out what our next move should be.

  CHAPTER 57

  THE HOTEL WE were staying at was about three miles away. I was driving the Toyota Corolla that I’d rented at the airport. Not a great car, and a few times, I made a sudden stop or swerved to stay in my lane as I struggled to figure out the gears and unfamiliar dashboard items.

  That happened again now as I was about to pull into the hotel parking lot. I wound up switching lanes in a hurry without using my turn indicator light. Mostly because I couldn’t find it. Another driver behind me honked and gave me the finger as he passed. I smiled and waved politely at him, which seemed to make him even madder. Midwestern hospitality and friendliness weren’t all it was cracked up to be.

  I stepped on the accelerator and speeded up into the right lane, but as I did, I heard something behind me.

  A police siren.

  I looked in my rearview mirror and saw the police car coming up behind me with a flashing red light on top.

  I stopped and pulled over to let the police car go wherever it was going. But it pulled up right behind me. I realized the cop was stopping me.

  Damn.

  Maybe he’d seen that weird traffic incident and thought I was drunk.

  I didn’t have time for this now.

  But I had no choice except to sit in my car and wait for him to come to the driver’s window to ask for my driver’s license and rental registration and all the rest. Hopefully, that and my media ID, plus me talking about working for his boss Chief Parkman, would be enough to get me off without a ticket.

  But the cop didn’t appear by my window. Instead, I heard a voice coming over a loudspeaker that said: “Step out of the car. Keep your hands up and in plain sight. Do not make any sudden moves or gestures.”

  All this for a minor traffic infraction?

  I did what the cop said. I got out of the car, put my hands in the air, and waited. Finally, the cop got out of his squad car. He had a gun out and pointed at me. That’s when I recognized who it was.

  Parkman.

  “Chief Parkman, it’s me. Clare Carlson. What’s going on here? You know who I am …”

  “I do,” Parkman said, moving closer to me with the gun still pointed. “And now, I’m afraid you know who I am, too.”

  CHAPTER 58

  PARKMAN HANDCUFFED ME, led me to his squad car, and pushed me into the back seat. There was a plexiglass divider between the front seat and me, and the doors were locked. I was trapped there, even if I did somehow manage to get at the door handle. He got into the front seat, pulled away from the curb where he was parked—and began driving. I could see we weren’t headed in the direction of the police station. I didn’t think we would be.

  “What’s going on here?” I asked, still trying to maintain the illusion that I didn’t know the truth about him. “I was headed over to the station to work with you on tracking down more of those names. Is this about something I did wrong in my car? I’ll pay the fine if you want to give me a ticket.”

  Parkman didn’t say anything until we were far enough out of town that there were no other cars close to us on the highway. Then he pulled over to the side of the road, got out and unlocked the back door, grabbed me by my hair, and delivered a vicious blow across my face. I fell back onto the seat, stunned and feeling blood trickling down my face. He grabbed me again and hit me a second time. “Now you know what’s going on,” he sneered. Then he locked the back door again, got back in the front seat, and kept driving.

  “I was there when you called your pal Manning,” he said. “Manning doesn�
��t have a very good poker face. I could tell something was wrong. Then I found you were asking questions about me around town. Yes, I have friends who tell me things like that. It didn’t take much for me to figure out you knew about me.”

  Manning. He was my only hope now. He knew about Parkman. If I didn’t show up at the hotel, he’d go looking for me. And he’d be even more suspicious when he couldn’t find Parkman either. Maybe he would put out an FBI arrest warrant on Parkman, and they’d track him down before he did whatever he was going to do to me. But that would take time. I didn’t know how much time I had. I had to keep Parkman talking until Manning could find me.

  “Why did you lie about knowing Dale Blanchard?” I asked him. “I stumbled across your relationship with Blanchard when I interviewed someone this morning. But, if you’d told the truth about that at the beginning, maybe it wouldn’t have seemed so important. It was the lie that made me think you had something to hide.”

  Parkman shrugged. Like it didn’t matter one way or another. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I kept talking.

  “The biggest thing though was all your traveling over the years. Moving around the country as a federal air marshal. Did you stop off in some city between flights, murder someone, and get back on the plane to fly home? You kept traveling with your wife, too, even after you stopped being a marshal and joined the police force. What did she think you were doing? Did you tell her you were stepping out of the hotel to go buy cigarettes or something, then murder another innocent woman?”

  Still nothing from him. I kept going anyway.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “You have a loving wife. A beautiful family. Why couldn’t you be happy with them?”

  “That’s different.”

  “Different how?”

  “That’s all good, but it has nothing to do with why I’ve killed all those other women. It might surprise you to know that I have an extremely healthy sexual relationship with my wife. I didn’t have sex with any of my victims. You always wondered about that, you told me. Well, sex isn’t what this is about.”

  “What other reason is there?”

  “Fun,” he said.

  Parkman laughed. A scary laugh.

  “What about Becky Bluso? Did you kill her, too?”

  “Oh no, that was really Dale Blanchard. I was the one he got drunk with and confessed it all to. We met when he was home on leave from the Army before going to Iraq. I guess it had been weighing on his conscience and he needed to tell someone. He talked about how he used to play this sex game with girls, tie them up and pretend to threaten them with a big knife. He said he didn’t know why he did it, it just got him excited. But he’d never actually hurt anyone. Until that last time with Becky Bluso. The next day after our drunken conversation he called me in a panic. Tried to claim he’d never really killed her. That he made up the whole story, and I shouldn’t ever tell anyone. But I knew it was true.

  “I never did tell anyone, but not to protect him. I liked having the secret. It excited me in the same way it did him. Thinking about how he’d tied up women and then murdered one of them. I used to fantasize I was him plunging that knife into that goddamned snotty bitch Bluso who wouldn’t even give me the time of day.

  “I thought about it a long time. I fantasized all the time about murdering a woman like that. Holding her helpless, having her completely under my control—and at my mercy—until I decided it was the right moment to end it. I used to plan out every minute of how I would do it. Subdue the girl. Tie her up. Stand over her with the knife or the rope I was going to use. Or sometimes I thought about using my hands to kill her. That was so much more personal.

  “It got to the point where I couldn’t think about anything else. I’d sit in my room after school and fantasize about doing what Blanchard had done to Becky Bluso. Blanchard felt guilty about murdering her. The guilt was eating him up, he told me that night. But I knew I would never feel guilty if I did it. I would feel … well, exhilarated. And now Blanchard was dead, so it was my turn to carry on with what he’d started that day on Oak Park Drive.

  “One day I did it. I got up the nerve to do it for real. And you know what? The actual deed was even more exciting than the fantasy. God, I loved it! I started to read about all the serial killers and the things they’d said about how it felt to murder a woman. Especially remembered a quote from Ted Bundy. About how it made him feel like God when he looked into a woman’s eyes before he killed her. That’s how I felt. I felt like God. I was in complete control of when this person died.

  “Sometimes I played out the scene for hours. I’d hold the knife over her, make her think I was about to stab her and then stop. Then I’d do it again. Or I’d start to strangle her, then let her breathe again just as she was gasping for air. I loved to see the hope in their eyes when I did that. The hope that this was all a game, that I wasn’t really going to kill them. Then, when I did, it was even more satisfying for me.

  “After that first time, I did it again. And again. Never enough so that anyone could ever put together a pattern between the murders. And never in the same location. The best part was when I joined the police force, then became the police chief. I was on the inside of criminal law enforcement.

  “I even went to an FBI seminar for local police in Washington once that was all about how to identify and capture serial killers. How great was that? I was getting firsthand advice from law enforcement on how to avoid getting caught by them. Not that anyone ever came close to figuring out what I was doing. Until you. I mean, I was the police chief. Who would ever suspect me? I was incredibly successful when you think about it. I murdered all those women in a period of thirty years, and no one ever suspected a thing. I became one of the most prolific serial killers in history. Only no one knew that except me.”

  We were several miles out of town, on a lonely road with no other cars in sight. I wondered what Scott Manning was doing now. Had he figured out that I was missing?

  “And then Marty Barlow came to see you,” I said.

  “Yes, that old man wanted to talk about the Becky Bluso murder. Said he’d covered it back when he worked here at the newspaper. Now he wanted to find out some answers—closure, he called it.”

  “But how did he find out about the other murders?”

  “I told him.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, I didn’t tell him directly. He never knew it came from me. I just anonymously sent him enough information after he visited here that led him to suspect there was a silent serial killer at work responsible for all of the murders, including Becky Bluso.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Not because I wanted to get caught. But I decided it was time for people to be impressed by what I had done. I mean everyone knew about other famous serial killers. Like Ted Bundy and Son of Sam and the Zodiac Killer. Now it was time my work got recognized for my achievements. Even if no one could ever find out that I was the one responsible for it all. I still want people to know about my accomplishments. I want them to know that there’s someone out there who is the greatest serial killer ever. Better than Bundy, better than Son of Sam, better than Zodiac or any of the others.”

  “Did you murder Barlow because he found out too much about you?”

  “Of course not. He never suspected me. Hell, I showed him that plaque from Russell Danziger, like I showed it to you. And he took the bait, too. I kept feeding him anonymous stuff that pointed him in the direction of Danziger. He thought Danziger was The Wanderer, not me. Why would I kill Martin Barlow? And I don’t even know where he lived in New York. What happened to that old man had nothing to do with me. I was simply hoping he’d write about the murders. He was going to, too. Even gave me a nickname, right? The Wanderer. I kind of liked that. But he died before he could write his story.”

  “Then I came along?”

  “Same thing with you. I wanted you to write about The Wanderer. Let everyone know about my exploits. Without anyone ever finding out who The Wa
nderer really was. Except you did your job too well.”

  He pulled the car into a secluded area of the road now. No one could see us.

  “You won’t get away with this,” I said. “I’m a journalist. People know I’m working on this story. If you kill me, they’re going to figure out there’s a connection between my death and the story I’m working on here.”

  “Maybe they will. But they won’t suspect me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m the police chief. I’m going to be in charge of the investigation into your death.”

  “You’re forgetting one thing. I’m here with the FBI. Agent Manning knows the truth about you. He’s going to know you’re responsible for my death, too. Think about that before you do anything stupid. Maybe we could work out some kind of plea bargain for you …”

  He laughed.

  “A plea bargain? God, you’re desperate, aren’t you? I don’t think anyone’s going to give me a plea bargain for nineteen murders. So why not make it an even twenty, huh?”

  He smiled at that—a scary smile.

  “Manning knows,” I repeated, hoping that might somehow make him hesitate. “I called him on the phone before you grabbed me. I left a message telling him everything.”

  Parkman reached into his pocket and took out a cell phone. I recognized it right away. It was Manning’s cell phone. He played the last message on it for me.

  “Scott, I’m headed back to the hotel,” I heard my own voice saying. “Let’s meet there and figure out what to do about moving on Parkman …”

  Parkman shut off the phone.

  “If you’re waiting for help from Scott Manning, well … I don’t think Agent Manning will be helping anyone anymore.”

  CHAPTER 59

  I COULDN’T HANDLE the idea of Scott Manning being dead.