Chapter Fourteen #2
A slither of ice water runs through her.
His voice. She had almost forgotten his voice, hushed and gentle but with a strange force to it.
Henry never had to speak loudly to get what he wanted.
She looks down at her green silk blouse, formfitting, with mother-of-pearl buttons.
She spent a long time picking it out, along with a claret A-line skirt.
She fiddles with the collar, working up the strength to reply.
Then she raises her head, and their eyes meet.
She cannot look away from him. She never could.
“Surprised to see me in such good shape?” He flashes that lopsided smile that once drove her crazy. “Yeah, there’s not a lot to do in here except pump weights.”
Is that a bruise? Beneath his right eye? Or just the stain of fatigue? His body looks strong, but age has found its way into his face, scoured it out at the cheekbones, added lines.
“Can’t lie. Didn’t think I’d ever see you here, Bev. You dying or something?” His laugh is hollow, unsure.
She swallows, her eyes trained on him.
“Are the kids okay? Tell them Daddy loves them.”
A sourness pricks at the back of her throat.
He hasn’t lost that arrogance. It wafts off him. Henry was never scared of anything, except his father. He was always so comfortable being the one to speak, the one to manipulate any situation for his own gain. She won’t let him do that now.
“I’m getting married,” he says before she has a chance to open her mouth. “A lovely girl. Lorraine. We’ve been writing each other for a while. We’re in love.”
Her gut sways. Love. She never understood how some people looked at killers and saw rock stars.
Sure, someone might be taken in by Henry’s looks, his charisma.
He always had a magnetism to him. But since his arrest?
Since he had admitted killing seven women?
How could someone fall in love with that?
Henry watches her intently, as if curious to see her reaction.
“Congratulations,” she says, sitting a little straighter in her chair. She won’t give him the satisfaction of surprise. Henry blinks, but his expression does not change.
“How are you, Beverley?” he asks after a while, with a tilt of the head, as if he pities her. She is not here to be pitied. She is here to find out why he did what he did.
She knows she is going to have to flatter him, to use her own weakness, her fragility, to make him think he is the one with the power. Her cheeks tremble slightly as she draws them into a smile. “I need your help.” She swallows again, watches for his reaction.
“Sure,” he says without hesitation, but she sees something strange flicker across his face. “Whatever you need.” He clasps his hands together and places them on his knee.
How can it possibly feel as if he is toying with her when he is the one behind glass?
She glances at the guard waiting in the corner of the room.
He looks half asleep, linked fingers resting on his convex belly.
The woman at the far end has ceased her sobbing and has moved on to apology, palm flat like a starfish against the glass.
Beverley leans in, lowers her voice. “There’s someone killing women around Berryview.”
Henry’s fingers suddenly unlace, and his boot thuds to the floor.
“Are the kids okay?”
She won’t be drawn in. “I want to try to learn about him.”
Henry looks confused. “You don’t know who it is, right? Or are you in here to tell me my uncle Marvin’s been misbehaving?” That empty bravado again. Always with the jokes, deflections.
“I want to know about the sort of person this killer might be.”
He raises his thumb and forefinger and wipes at each dry corner of his lips. Then he looks up at her and she is pinned, once again, by those eyes. “Bev, I’m not a headshrinker.” He smiles.
“No, but you are a killer.”
His smile becomes wider then—but there’s a chill to it, as if he’s resentful of being bested. He reassembles his features. He always was so conscious of how he appeared.
“Go on, then,” he says, waving a hand. “Try me.”
She doesn’t pause for breath or to give him the opportunity to change his mind.
She tells him about the girls, Cheryl, Emily and Diane.
She tells him of the ways in which Cheryl and Emily were killed, the ritualistic nature of their murders, the posing, the props, the arrow, the tattooed knuckles.
She tells him how she went into his study and found his road maps, how the locations of the cases all intersect at one very specific part of the interstate.
The whole time, Henry watches her intently, his eyes never leaving her face.
“So, what do you need me for? Sounds like you’ve become some sort of detective since I got locked up.” He forces another laugh, a fox-like scrape.
She leans back in her chair, tries to mirror his posture. She is sure she has read about this technique in a book somewhere. Mirror someone; it makes them trust you.
“I want to know about you. I want to know why you did what you did.”
He doesn’t tell her to stop as she had expected him to.
“How did you choose your victims?” she asks.
He smiles and does not blink, watching her for a while. His hand goes to the back of his neck, scratches. He seems reluctant, at first, to answer, and she wonders if that is because he cares about what she thinks or because he has become accustomed to lying.
“I just went for whoever was easiest,” he supplies eventually, with a shrug.
“Easiest?”
“Yep. Whichever house looked easiest to get into, wherever there wasn’t a man home.”
Beverley looks briefly to the floor, wonders if she is strong enough for this.
But then the faces of Henry’s victims appear in her mind’s eye, the women he killed.
Some of them mothers. One girl in her teens.
A housewife in her forties. All of them had tried to fight back, every single one, but given Henry’s strength, they never had a chance.
“You watched them?”
“Yeah.” He says it as easily as if he is talking about a ball game. “For a while. Just to check there was no boyfriend or anything.”
She recalls evenings he spent out of the house, returning late, telling her he’d had a job that went on too long, or that his boss had called him into the warehouse for a meeting.
Was this what he was really doing? Watching women?
Checking whether they double-locked their doors at night, whether they left windows cracked in hot weather, whether their yards were easy to access?
“In the car?” she manages to ask.
“Or on foot. I’d just walk past the house at the same time every night.”
“Always the same car?”
“Yeah. Just our car, Bev.”
She blinks away disgust. That was the steering wheel she still touched every day, the same gearshift, the same driver’s seat.
“Your guy using different types of cars?”
She nods. That was one reason Roger had given for the crimes not being linked—different vehicles had been spotted at each crime scene.
“That’s easy enough,” Henry says. “Anyone can access multiple cars. You just take ’em. Maybe your guy’s some small-time felon taking things further, pushing boundaries.”
“ ‘Pushing boundaries’?”
“In my experience, these things start small,” Henry explains, clearly relishing having authority on the matter. “Like, a killer might start off with little things—breaking and entering, stealing women’s lingerie, watching people in their houses…”
She bristles.
“Then he might wake up one day and find that’s just not cutting it, that he needs something else, something bigger, to satisfy him.”
Beverley can’t meet his eye. He is talking in the third person, but she knows he must be referring to himself, his own behaviors.
“So then he might move to grabbing a girl, touching her, sexual assault or whatever, and it spirals from there. It’s an urge for him.”
Him, not me.
“The itch becomes harder to scratch, the thrill harder to come by.”
Through dizziness, Beverley must concede that he has a point. Their killer could be someone with a few smaller crimes under his belt. He could have a record already.
“But, Beverley.” Her head snaps up. It’s the first time he hasn’t had a hint of a smile about him.
She remembers that expression: a blankness that came upon his face whenever he spoke about his father, whenever he talked about trying to make him proud as a kid but never succeeding, whenever he recalled how his father would taunt and belittle him.
“This guy, your killer—he hates women.”
“What?” Despite herself, she is stunned.
“Pretty women, successful, talented. That’s what you said, right? The type of girls that were prom queens.” Henry scratches his neck. “He probably feels…what’s the word? Emaculated.”
“Emasculated.”
“Yeah. He feels emasculated by them—rejected, or whatever.”
Did Henry hate women? Had he hated her during those few years that they’d been married? It had sometimes felt as if he had, his resentment bubbling up through the cracks, convincing her that she had done something wrong in those moments, that she’d failed as a wife, as a woman, to keep him happy.
“Did he touch ’em?”
She is jarred back to the room. “Sorry?”
“Did he have his way?” He has adopted a mock prim tone.
Her eyes dart. How can he talk about them like that?
“I don’t know.”
She doesn’t know. She didn’t ask if the women had been sexually assaulted. She doesn’t even want to know the answer.
“He’s probably some sad guy who struck out with too many women and wants to punish them for it,” he says plainly.
She pauses.
“Maybe a loner,” Henry continues. “Maybe never married.” Henry scratches at the stubble on his neck again. “I bet he uses hookers.”
Her eyes flick up to his.
“How come?”
“He’ll be finding ways to feel in control.” His hand rests at his neck and she wonders if it’s intentional. “That’ll give him a kick, making a woman do anything he wants her to do. I’d bet on it.”
She considers it. That would make sense—killing is so often about control—but how might they find the sorts of men who pay for sex? She makes a mental note to discuss this with Elsie and Margot. She just won’t tell them how she got the idea.
“What of the fact that there are different weapons involved,” she asks, “different ways of killing? Does that suggest it’s different people? Killers normally—” She pauses, feeling suddenly absurd talking to him like this. “Don’t they usually stick with the same weapon?”
Henry snorts drily. It raises the hair on the back of her neck.
“Bev, there are men in here who’ve killed people with sharpened pencils, done things I could never harm your ears with. They don’t care if they’re using the same thing. They just care about the killing.”
She thinks of the men in her scrapbook, what the newspapers had said—how they favored strangling or shooting. There definitely seemed to be some consistency to their actions.
“What about you?” she asks him. “Did it matter to you?” Her mouth feels dry. “How you did it.”
A grin splits his face.
“Bev, I’m a lazy guy.” His laugh is chilling. “I just used what was easiest—what I could find, whatever fit my mood.”
She is sure she has misheard him. “Your mood?”
“Sure,” he says flippantly. “If I felt angry that day, something like a bit of pipe or a wrench or a fire poker—something like that would do it. If I wanted something quicker, if I didn’t want too much mess, just a rope or hands.
It’s more—” He pauses, and she wonders if he is finally realizing the horror of what he’s saying.
“It’s more poetic like that,” he says eventually, glancing at the ceiling as if summoning some grand idea. “Like art, or music, or whatever.”
Despite herself, she has begun to shake. She tries her hardest to hide it, burying her hands under her legs, nails gripping the Formica chair.
“Wrap it up, lovebirds.” The guard stands, glances at his watch.
The sobbing woman, the only other visitor, screeches her chair back so violently that it topples. Then she tears across the room and waits with clenched fists for the guard to let her out.
“But how are you really, Beverley?” Henry doesn’t seem to want their meeting to end. “I worry about you, y’know?” He clearly knows he has her rattled.
Another guard has arrived at Henry’s side and is replacing the handcuffs. Henry watches Beverley as he stands, keeps his eyes fixed on hers as he is led out of the room.
She does not stop shaking until he has left and she has followed the guard down the corridor, has stepped out of those barbaric-looking gates.
Pressure is building at the backs of her eyes.
She is so frustrated at herself, frustrated at the sheer impotence of her anger.
It changes nothing. Rage becomes ridiculous when it has nowhere to go.
It will not change what Henry has done, what she needs to do now.
It cannot continue like this—men taking whatever they want and no one holding them accountable for the harm they cause.
Henry might have thought he was manipulating her from the other side of that glass—he might have thought he had control, as he had five years ago—but really he has gifted her ammunition.
If Henry’s right, she has a workable lead.
She just needs to figure out how to find the men who use prostitutes in the areas around the killings and determine how the victims they’re investigating could possibly be linked to that.
As she crosses the parking lot, she winces.
Raising her hand to her aching jaw, she realizes she has been clenching her teeth this whole time.
She forces her face to slacken, shakes out her hands, tries to remind herself of her own strength.
She has looked into the eyes of a killer; she has seen what’s inside his head.
She is in control. Still, when she’s reached the car, slammed the door and locked it from the inside, she begins, loudly, wildly, to scream.