Chapter Eighty-Two
It’s been a year, and Quinn has managed by, well, running.
He started by copying Hemingway. Running with the bulls in Pamplona, then drinking himself into a stupor in the Latin Quarter of Paris, then heading to Milan, where Hemingway had spent time in a hospital after a war injury and fallen in love with his nurse.
Traveling in the footsteps of the Lost Generation, he felt inspired to try writing stories again himself, but the words never came.
When the romanticism wore off, Quinn heeded the words from a novel he’d read by a contemporary writer, Lee Child: “They had changed him from a spectator into an enemy … They had pushed open the forbidden door, not knowing what would come bursting back out at them.”
That’s when he headed to Brussels.
There he found the man he was looking for.
He followed him for two days, using the skills he’d learned surveilling cheating spouses and insurance fraudsters at Midwest Investigators.
Every night the man would troll the red light district in the Rue d’Aerschot and make lewd gestures at the prostitutes working the storefront windows.
But it was only on the night Quinn followed him to the Kingdom of Love Club on Rue du Cirque that he gained some degree of closure. At three-thirty in the morning, the man emerged looking not drunk, but angry.
Quinn didn’t approach him at first. No, he waited and watched as the man hid in the shadows outside the gentleman’s club, like he too was stalking someone.
Thirty minutes later, one of the dancers came outside. A large man, a bouncer, walked her to her car, headed inside once she was locked in. She didn’t see the cherry of a cigarette in the shadows. The dancer started the car.
The man hiding in the shadows ran to the vehicle and stood in front of it defiantly. The woman opened the window, yelled something at him.
Before she could honk the horn for help, Quinn appeared in the headlights. It took the man a long beat, but recognition spread over his features.
Quinn hit him in the face. Over and over and over, even as the dancer’s car tore around them.
He leaned over the man, stopping the beating only when he heard movement outside the club. A small group watching. When they saw who Quinn was trouncing, they seemed to nod with approval and disappeared inside.
Quinn got close to Sven’s face. The man was breathing shallowly but still alive. “That’s for Giuseppe,” he said.
Getting his revenge didn’t leave Quinn feeling any better. He was reminded of Lucy—and also Jules, who’d confided that she’d taken part in one of Lucy’s sprees of vengeance. How they too found any reprieve from their pain fleeting and hollow.
The knock on his door jerks him out of the memories.
Now, he sits in a small room he rents above a bar in Recanati, Italy.
He’s been there for two months. Alessia’s cousin gave him a job tending bar, rented him the room.
She’s in Rome, in a relationship, but she didn’t hesitate to help Quinn when her parents called and said he’d appeared on their doorstep again.
He opens the door and finds Lucia, the waitress from the bar. Quinn has been something of a curiosity to the staff and locals. His Italian still isn’t good, but he’s heard them refer to him as l’uomo tranquillo, the quiet man, or l’uomo triste, the sad man.
She hands him a small package, says someone left it for him. She peeks over his shoulder, like she wants to see inside his room. He says grazie and shuts the door.
Inside the unmarked envelope is a VHS tape.
That’s weird. He walks over to the beat-up VHS machine that sits under the TV he’s never turned on.
He realizes the TV and video machine are unplugged.
He finds the cords and jams them into the outlet.
He then slides the cassette out of its sleeve and shoves it into the slot.
The footage is blurry, like someone has recorded over the same tape several times.
It starts with a beer commercial, a group of men bellowing Wazzup?
to each other. It’s stupid but also kind of funny.
But his chest flutters when he sees the opening for a news segment about the May Day Killer, something he’s made an effort to avoid for the past year.
On the screen, an ABC News logo appears on a scene showing a giant outdoor monitor that looms over a bustling New York street.
The narrator says, “From Times Square in New York, Barbara Walters.”
Wearing a white suit and gold earrings, Walters appears on the screen at an anchor’s desk.
“Good evening and welcome to 20/20, Friday. Tonight, a special hour. The mystery, the tragedy, the case of Patrick Eli Knox. The serial killer known as the May Day Killer, who terrorized the Midwest, abducting and killing young women, many who have never been found. As you know, nearly a year ago, Patrick Knox was finally identified as the May Day Killer and died in a blazing fire at the secluded location where for years he killed and abused the young women he had taken.” Music fades in.
“Tonight, for the first time, Jules Delaney, who was instrumental in ending Knox’s reign of terror, will tell us the story of her nightmare and the nightmare of so many, hoping, she says, to raise awareness of the other women who disappear every year in this country, who are never found, their perpetrators left free to commit more atrocities. ”
Quinn feels his heart rate increase. He doesn’t want to watch this. But his eyes stay on the screen as the camera moves to a shot of Jules sitting on a leather chair in front of a bookcase, Walters sitting opposite.
“Ms. Delaney, this is your first interview about the Patrick Knox case—why are you speaking out now?”
Jules wears light makeup, looks poised, beautiful.
“I spoke with my parents, with other survivors, and I decided that silence isn’t the answer anymore.
If there are other girls he took who didn’t report it, we want to show them it’s okay to come forward.
We want them to understand there is light at the end.
We want to find out if other missing women were his victims. And we want to bring attention to the many women and girls from marginalized communities who are taken but do not get the attention or resources we received. ”
“This has been a very personal journey for you,” Walters prompts.
“Yes. Patrick Knox abducted me, raped me. And we believe he did the same thing to my sister, who is still missing. And so many others. I won’t call us ‘victims’—he doesn’t deserve to make us that.”
A tear rolls down Quinn’s cheek. He listens through the first half of the segment as Jules tells what happened to her. Marvels at her bravery. The only time Jules loses her composure is when she speaks about Clare.
Walters explains, “The killings began when Patrick Knox was a teenager in 1972 in a small town in Nebraska, but then he appeared to have stopped, until starting again in the late nineteen-eighties in Nebraska. Why the break in the crimes?”
“We don’t know that he stopped. There are women who disappeared in other states, like Illinois—where he worked at the time. He transferred to his company’s Nebraska facility just before the May Day killings and the abductions began in Nebraska.”
Pat moved to Monarch after Quinn’s father died to help Quinn’s mom with Quinn and George. Or maybe it was time for new hunting grounds.
“The other odd thing about Knox is that he let some of the women go,” Walters continues, “but later came back and took them again, as he did with you. Why?”
“The FBI profilers described it to me like a cat playing with a mouse before killing it. But he was a depraved man, so I honestly don’t know. What the FBI did note, though, is that all of us who were released share similar features.”
“You look alike.”
Jules nods.
“You mention the FBI. There has been some criticism of the Bureau. That they got some things wrong in their profiles. That they should’ve been onto Knox sooner.”
“Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” Jules says. “The FBI has been nothing but supportive of me, they provided protection for me when they thought I might be in danger.”
“But the truth remains that they did get key facts incorrect. Like that they believed the perpetrator had a law-enforcement background.”
“I don’t blame them for that. There were so many women, yet so few clues. No DNA, no forensic evidence, so it made sense to think that the perpetrator had law enforcement training and would know how to cover his tracks.”
“The profile also predicted the perpetrator had a high IQ, would be someone of standing in the community hiding in plain sight, which is surprising since Knox was a poor student and, by most accounts, not a person anyone thought particularly intelligent. Not someone who could evade capture so easily.”
“He had a lot of practice,” Jules replies, and it’s chilling.
“Police now believe he murdered his own sister, Nadine Riley.” A photo of Quinn’s mom appears on the screen and Quinn feels a crushing sadness.
“Yes. Nadine Riley uncovered evidence linking him to some of the crimes. His trucking routes and timing matched where some of the missing women lived. She found something connecting him to Megan Tucker, the first victim in their hometown when they were teenagers. We think she may have discovered where he took his victims.”
“The peculiar field of military bunkers in a Nebraska farming community?”
Jules nods.
“And he framed Nadine Riley’s boyfriend for her murder,” Walters continues.
“Yes. Another tragedy. An innocent man has spent five years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.
And he would have spent the rest of his life there if the FBI hadn’t uncovered evidence in Patrick Knox’s things linking Knox to the murder of Ms. Riley.
Thankfully the new county prosecutor did the right thing and joined the petition for Randy Calhoon’s release. ”
The screen moves to footage of victims’ jewelry hidden in Pat’s truck.
Quinn’s eyes fix on the pearl earrings. The ones Pat took from Megan and then Quinn’s mom after he killed them.
Pat had said that Quinn’s father gave Mom the earrings, but it could just as easily have been Pat who gave her the gift.
A voiceover mentions undergarments taken, notes that drivers’ licenses taken from victims were never found.
Walters goes on: “The profilers also thought the date May first meant something to him. He always acted on that date.”
“Yes. It was the day he came for me.”
“And the day he took your sister.”
“Yes. We still don’t know why.”
“One of the heroes in all of this is Patrick Knox’s nephew, Quinn Riley. He was the first to put the pieces together.”
For the first time Jules looks directly into the camera, as if she’s looking right at Quinn.
“Do you keep in touch with Mr. Riley? How is he doing? This must’ve been devastating—Patrick Knox was something of a father figure to him.”
“He sends me letters from his travels. I think he just needs some time, like we all do, to figure things out.”
Quinn had started writing letters again, just as that counselor from juvenile detention told him to do a lifetime ago.
He wasn’t sure Jules had received them. In the days after Pat and the bunker and the realization that Quinn’s uncle was the man who’d taken so much from Jules, she’d pulled away from Quinn.
He’ll never forget that last day together, Jules recoiling when he reached for her hand, as if whatever was inside Pat also ran through Quinn’s veins.
In his letters, he told Jules he was sorry for the pain his family inflicted.
And he told her about his own pain. About how running, hiding, fighting haven’t worked. He asked her what will work.
As if answering his question, Jules’ lovely eyes peer back into the camera again: “If you ever see this Quinn Riley, please, come home.”
At the end of his shift later that night, Quinn sits on the stool behind the bar, reading not a novel but a collection of the Leopardi poems his old friend loved so much. He feels someone approaching the bar, and he’s about to ask their order when he hears the singsong voice.
“Whatcha reading?”
He knows that voice. His eyes move to hers.
“Jules, what are you—?”
“Wait,” she says, holding up a hand. “I’ve practiced this.” Then, in a dreadful attempt at speaking Italian, Jules Delaney says, “That night. I wanted to tell you how much you meant to me. That I want us to be together. I’m sorry after what happened, I pushed you away.”
She stares at him for a long moment.
In response, Quinn recites a line from the Leopardi poem, using his own broken Italian: “I marveled at her, she who was first to open, all innocent, the passage to my heart.”
“I don’t understand,” Jules says.
Quinn moves from behind the bar. And they kiss.
The small crowd in the bar, apparently watching it all unfold, cheers.