The
first one went better than she could have expected. The right rifle,
a .260 Remington with a Zeiss Conquest scope, which she had demanded
when they divvied up her father's estate years before because she
knew it had the least recoil. A comfortable place to sprawl on the
floor of her van. The sun down, the parking lot of the Walmart nicely
lit by halogen spotlights, her van parked in the dark beyond. A
six-pack of hard lemonade in the cooler at her elbow.
Katie
waited an hour for a deserving target, watching through the hole
she'd bored for the scope in the back door of the van. He turned out
to be a young, heavy-set man with thick black hair, most of his face
obscured by the bushy beard extending well up onto his cheeks and a
Red Sox baseball cap pulled down to rest on the top of his glasses.
He caught her attention by scanning the parking area before reaching
down between his seats, coming up with a handicapped parking pass,
and clipping it onto his rear-view mirror as he pulled into a
handicap spot.
She
removed the plug from the lower of the two holes, the one for the
barrel. Through the top opening, she located the driver's door of the
car in her scope. The young man opened the door, jumped to his feet
effortlessly, and shoved it shut with his hip as he took his first
long strides towards the store.
She
squeezed the trigger. When the rifle fired, the clap left her ears
ringing. "Wear your ear protection, moron," she reminded
herself, irritated.
She
put the caps back in the holes in the hatch door and raised up to
look through the rear window. The man lay face-down on the asphalt,
blood splattered beneath him in a long arc reaching an abandoned
electric cart near the curb. An elderly couple who had just exited
the store had dropped to the ground with their arms over their heads.
An SUV swerved around the body to grab a parking spot near the door.
Katie
wrapped the rifle up in the quilt, crawled awkwardly between the
seats to the front of her van and pulled away from the scene, slowly,
cautiously. Her heart was beating a drum roll, and the air inside the
van tasted of gunpowder.
***
She
finished the six-pack before she could fall asleep that evening. Her
bladder woke her long before she'd rested enough though, and after
the trip to the bathroom she accepted that further sleep was not
possible.
She
made a pot of coffee, took her blood pressure, cholesterol and pain
meds, choked down a large tablespoon of peanut butter for protein,
and turned on the television for some company. Deborah had always
watched the news in the morning, and Katie found it a habit she
didn't want to break.
A
young black reporter in a sports coat too heavy for the humid summer
weather stood at the edge of the Walmart parking lot, breathlessly
laying out the timing and sequence of events. The actual crime scene
seemed overwhelmed by the comings and goings of police, fire,
Homeland Security, news cameramen, city officials, and finally, the
FBI. It looked to her like a couple of acres of parking had been
cordoned off with yellow tape which sagged between light poles and
billowed in the breeze. Nothing he said suggested she had been seen.
Katie
examined her emotions as the reporter conjectured about the origin of
the fatal bullet. Guilt? Very little. The man had been able-bodied,
taking up a handicap space, the kind of selfish prick that had forced
her mom to walk from remote parking even when her emphysema was at
its worst. Excitement? That seemed to have dissipated quickly the
previous evening. Satisfaction? More like an itch that had been
thoroughly scratched but would most likely return as she continued on
with the plan. Pain? Still there, mostly in her ribs. She took
another Percocet, wondering when her oncologist would permit her to
move up to harder drugs. He seemed to be holding that out as a reward
for applying for hospice.
***
She
didn't try to pull herself together until after lunch, in preparation
for her appointment with her shrink, Eric. The mirror disappointed
again. She had hair once more, but it had grown back coarse, like
corn shocks after a month in the Thanksgiving display she used to
hang on the front door of the urban two-story she and Deborah had
shared. Her skin, once creamy, was growing increasingly transparent,
so that late in the day she could track the network of veins and
arteries underneath. Even the blue in her eyes seemed muddied. The
only part she found pleasing was her cheekbones, much sharper after
the weight loss, high enough that she looked faintly Native American.
She
picked the cheeriest blouse in her closet, a polyester thant felt
like silk in her hands, a fuchsia and sky-blue pattern. It
momentarily improved her mood, but the adult diaper she donned
brought her back down.
***
"Tell
me about your week," Eric said, seated beside her on his long
leather couch.
Katie
fixed her gaze on the fat white candle he always lit at the start of
their sessions, leaned back in the couch and threw one arm on top to
take pressure off her ribs. "I'm trying to do what you said–work
on acceptance. Still not sleeping worth a damn. I haven't seen
Deborah or Glory Beth for a month."
"How
do you feel about your daughter now? Last time, you were furious
about the things she said to the judge."
"I
keep reminding myself she's only 15. That helps."
"You
were also angry at your partner. Have you come to terms with her
behavior too?"
Katie
thought the word 'terms' gave her a great deal of latitude. "I'm
working on that."
"Hmm,"
he said. "Are you still working?" He wrote something, but
kept the folder tilted away from her so she couldn't see it. She
figured it was something like "Agitated, fatigued."
"I
had three days of temp work at a call center downtown. They didn't
want me back. Evidently, I don't have a warm voice."
"How
do you feel about working menial jobs? With your background in
management?"
She
rubbed both eyes with a pinch of her right hand. "Acceptance,
right? Nobody hires cancer patients. I understand that. So I work on
appreciating whatever comes along. It beats sitting at home waiting
to die."
Eric
wrote some more. "You've had a great deal to accept recently,"
he said. "Anger is normal. It might show up in ways you don't
expect. Try to identify those impulses that derive from that anger
and stop yourself from acting on them. In times of personal crisis,
misplaced anger can drive a wedge between you and your loved ones."
Katie
held back from saying the first thing that came to mind; it was
already too late.
***
Deborah
had made her a cup of chai the afternoon of the emancipation hearing
a month earlier, after their daughter Glory Beth had been finally
pried away from them by Deborah's born-again bitch sister Elaine and
her brother-in-law Stuart.
"You're
going to stroke out if you don't watch it," Deb said, stroking
Katie's neck lightly. The fingers felt like steel wool.
Katie
had expected to come away from the hearing in tears, not with the
seed of anger that now burned within her. But their daughter had
adopted a pernicious attitude over the past two years thanks to the
harping of Elaine about the ungodly relationship between Katie and
Deborah. It had surfaced again that morning when Glory Beth's
testimony dwelt on Deborah's licentious lifestyle. And the judge had
forbidden them from even approaching their daughter for the time
being, so she couldn't challenge Glory Beth's behavior.
"I
told you Elaine was going to bring up that article," Katie said
bitterly. She was unsure what angered her more; Deborah's repeated
infidelity or the fact she had blogged it, claiming that her sexual
freedom was an important example to set for their daughter,
encouraging her to transcend the repressive mores of her parents'
generation.
"The
judge was a troglodyte," Deb replied. "Sometimes you just
have to make a stand, even if it causes you pain in the short run."
When she tried to put her arm around Katie she slapped it away.
"I
can't stand to have this argument ever again. I'm moving out."
"We've
been together almost twenty years. You can't just throw that away."
"As
far as I can tell, you throw it away every time you walk out of here
to meet your lovers."
***
Katie
still read the newspaper, curious about the future despite her
prognosis. Daily delivery was one of the first things she'd arranged
when she moved into the tiny efficiency apartment in a neighborhood
quickly on its way to becoming a barrio for immigrants from Central
America. She circled an article in the Metro section about a Tom
Abalo, a forty-year-old brick mason who had just been arrested for
driving drunk for the tenth time. This time he'd clipped a boy on a
bicycle who ended up losing a leg. Appallingly, Abalo was free on
bail, even though he'd been forbidden from driving since his fourth
conviction.
He
still had a land line, so she was able to bring up his address from
the White Pages. Googling his name provided a photo of him with a
couple of proud homeowners posed in front of their new brick patio.
Luckily,
her beat up van, which she and Deb had kept only because it was handy
for hauling Deb's pottery to weekend shows, did not look out of place
in Abalo's neighborhood, where virtually every driveway sported a
panel van advertising a construction or repair service. She parked
down the street where she had a clear view of his house from the
floor of the van. The sun had set, and despite the heat, she was cold
at her core, so she snuggled into the sleeping bag they had bought
for the women's retreat where Deb's infidelity had found its first
legs.
She
put a stick of gum in her mouth and waited; although she had zero
appetite, the chewing gave her the illusion of eating, and she was
content with illusion at the moment. With all the opiates, food lost
velocity in her colon and could be coaxed into passing through with
only the greatest difficulty.
While
there were no streetlights in this development, many of the houses
had gas lights shining on their sidewalks, and the soft glow gave
just enough illumination to frame anyone coming out of a house. She
waited, and waited, until at just after 10:00 p.m. when Abalo walked
out of his house, jumped in the truck in the driveway, and backed
out. Katie started the van. When the truck passed her, she followed
from a distance. As she expected, he drove less than a mile to a bar
in a strip mall on Westerville Road, Jack's Lounge.
She
figured he was there for quite a spell, so she took the opportunity
to hit the McDonald's down the road to change diapers and was back on
post, parked in the lot of a closed window repair shop across the
road, when he came out of the bar at 1:00 a.m. He was in the company
of two other drunks, but fortunately they peeled off, got in another
pickup and left before Abalo, walking unsteadily, reached his. The
shot was a piece of cake, although the sound echoed for a couple of
seconds from the glass storefronts of the strip mall.
She
wove her way home via back roads to avoid any traffic cams and
arrived by 1:30 a.m. Her ribs were aching brutally thanks to the
hours spent on the hard floor of the van, but the sense of
retribution made the pain endurable.
***
She
had fallen into a restless sleep on her futon late that morning when
the doorbell rang. She'd told no one except her ex-boss Bev Crosley
where she was living, so she was expecting her when she opened the
door. Only at the last moment did she think to wonder if it could be
a cop, a bit of obliviousness that surprised her.
However,
it was neither. Instead, there stood Deborah holding a fruit bouquet
of chocolate-dipped prunes. There was no contrition on the woman's
face, but Katie couldn't remember ever seeing her ex-wife contrite.
Or embarrassed, for that matter. She wore the faint smile she always
did, like she saw something everyone else didn't.
She
stepped aside so Deb could enter. She'd forgotten already how much
taller her ex was than her, willowy, all the way to hair which moved
like sea grass in the lightest of breezes. She had always loved
running her fingers through Deb's hair.
Deb
placed the bouquet on the counter that divided the living room from
the kitchen. "These still work on your constipation?"
"There's
such a thing as knowing one another too well," Katie said,
taking a seat on one of her bar stools. "What are you doing
here? And how did you find me?"
Deb
took a seat on the other bar stool, so that their knees almost
touched. Katie scooted back.
"I
called Bev. She's worried about you, and so am I. I'm hoping to
convince you to move back home. It's like a house full of ghosts back
there, and I miss you like crazy."
"Too
late," Katie said. "I've moved on. You should too."
"Moved
on to what? An apartment the size of a closet? More painkillers? Kid,
we've been through too much together to watch you die alone. To hell
with Glory Beth; give her another month with the God Squad and she'll
come begging us to let her return."
"It's
not that, and you know it," Katie said, shoving the bouquet
further away; the smell was nauseating her. "I only stayed with
you for the last two years for Glory Beth's sake. Since you starting
cheating."
"I
told you right up front what I was doing, as you'll remember. I
thought maybe now, when you're close to, you know, you'd see how
silly it is to let other people stand in the way of living life on
your terms. But I'll tell you what; you come back, I'll remain
faithful. If that's what it takes."
"Which
will make me just what you despise, right? The person who takes away
your freedom? No thanks."
"So
what are you going to do?" Deb's cheeks were flushed, a sign
Katie had long recognized as a precursor to an angry outburst. "Hole
up here until you die? For Christ's sake, there's not even anyone to
find the body. You could lay here until you rot before someone knows
you've passed."
"I'm
working on a project," Katie said. "Believe me, there will
be plenty of people know when I die."
"I
don't like the sound of that."
"Meditate
on this. I don't want you. I don't need you. Go and sleep with
anybody you want. Be free." She waved her hand toward the door.
Deb
stood, frowned, shook her head. "You poor girl. Don't be afraid
to call me when you need me. And you will." She left without a
backward glance.
***
On
the news that evening the murder was the lead story; given the
history of the victim, there was a hint of schadenfreude in the
reporter's voice. Fortunately, there was still no mention of a
witness, although the reporter conjectured that the shots might have
come from a van or SUV. They did suggest a possible link with the
Walmart shooting.
She
had expected a race between her mortality and discovery, so she
wasn't all that worried that they might have pieced together a bit of
the plan. The day of her death was still in her control.
The
next morning, though, she woke exhausted, only then realizing she had
forgotten to eat the day before. With disgust, she ate a few of the
prunes from the bouquet and rinsed them down with a bottle of Ensure.
It was mid-afternoon before she had the energy to browse for her next
victim.
It
didn't take long. Scott Van Driesen, once a wide receiver for the
local university, had been caught eleven years earlier raping a coed
at knife point. Since his release from prison two months before, two
women had been raped by a man matching his description and method.
However, the Columbus Dispatch
reported that the woman Van Driesen was living with, Polly Bender,
who had been one of his guards in prison, insisted he'd been home
with her both nights. Caught by the photographer, Van Driesen had
given the most appallingly smug smile when asked if he did it.
***
Bender
had a house in the country twenty miles west of Columbus, which
magnified the difficulty. Katie assumed the sheriff's department was
going to keep an eye on him, although she doubted they had the
manpower to watch him around the clock. The night was once again
going to be her friend.
She studied the layout on Google Earth.
The house was surrounded by cornfields, the nearest neighbor a
quarter-mile away. There was a lane a hundred yards to the west of
the house to allow tractor access to the corn fields. Since the
August heat had baked the ground dry, she presumed she could park
there.
She
had never made a Molotov cocktail before, but she remembered the
olive oil vases that had been Deb's obsession for a while, until she
discovered they were too brittle. Waiting until Deb was at work, she
returned to the two-story long enough to snatch one that would hold a
quart of gasoline. It was shaped like an acorn squash, easy for her
to throw.
The
lane through the corn was indeed bone dry; she was able to back well
away from the road at 3:00 a.m. the next morning. She made her way on
foot down a row of corn toward the house, the rifle over her
shoulder, the gas bomb in her left hand. She nicked her earlobe on a
corn leaf and it began to drip blood, but the pain disappeared into
that of her ribs.
She
stopped at the border between corn and lawn, laid the rifle down, and
pulled out the lighter she'd brought from home, the one she used to
fire up the medical marijuana that had proven so useless. She played
out the steps in her mind, took a deep breath and walked quickly to
the house. There she lit the fuse and, with all her remaining
strength, threw it through the picture window of the living room.
As
flames lit the interior of the house, she dashed back to the corn,
dropped to the ground, picked up the rifle and sighted on the front
door.
She
was almost too slow when the two of them exited instead through the
kitchen door on her side of the building. She quickly sighted on Van
Driesen as he turned on the outside faucet and fumbled with the hose
curled at his foot. She aimed for his back, but hit him in the head
instead.
To
her surprise, Bender, an older, obese woman, didn't run; instead,
unthinkably, she ran in Katie's direction, shrieking. She waited as
long as she could for the woman to come to her senses before dropping
her with a shot to the chest only ten yards from her sniper's nest.
The
fire department responded so rapidly she had to wait for them to pass
by before pulling her car out of the corn and speeding away.
***
Every
time she started to drift into sleep, Van Driesen's face, at the
moment of impact, came back to her. She had thought her heart
adamantine, but apparently she had a bit of work yet to do to purge
herself of sentiment. And she felt repentant about Bender. The woman
had been a liar and a fool but didn't deserve to die for such scum.
To
her surprise, the sheriff of Sheridan County was quite open on TV
that morning about what the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation had
found on the scene. They had recovered a shoe print from where she
had approached the house, a tire print from where she parked, and a
blood sample from the corn leaf on which she had cut her ear.
Luckily, she was sure her DNA was not in any police database. They
had matched the bullets in all three killings, though, and the
television people were barely able to disguise their delight at
having a serial killer to draw viewership. Even more so as the BCI
had concluded from the footprint that the perp was a woman.
Katie
walked into the bedroom and grabbed her father's Glock, tucked it
into her waistband.
***
"Tell
me about Glory Beth," Eric had asked during her first visit six
months earlier.
"She's
precocious," Katie said. "She should be, given the amount
we spent on sperm."
"And
your partner? Is she smart too?"
"Very
much so. It's gotten so sometimes I have trouble following their
conversations."
"That
must be annoying, since you were the birth mother."
"I
guess so. Sometimes I get the sense that Glory Beth sees Deborah as
her mother, or maybe her father, or both, while I'm something else. I
can't put my finger on what. A wicked aunt, maybe?"
"From
what you've told me about your partner, she sounds like a person who
makes people earn her respect."
"Oh,
that's true. She can be downright rude to people. But not to Glory
Beth. She can do no wrong in Deb's eyes."
"But
not in yours."
"I
can tell the girl is going to break my heart. I just don't know how."
"Did
you ever consider that your ambivalent feelings about your daughter
might be in part transference of your feelings about Deb?"
Katie
had sat quietly mulling this over for several minutes, until the
silence grew too oppressive. "How much am I paying you for this
bullshit?"
***
She
had intended to complete the plot in the morning, before the lawyers
trickled off to court, but her ribs kept her up late, until she took
an extra couple of Percocet. They left her drowsy until 11 a.m., and
by the time she showered, dressed, and wrote out her confession, it
was early afternoon.
The
traffic was one thing she was not going to miss, she thought as she
fought her way downtown. Luckily, the parking garage across from the
firm where Deb worked had several open handicapped slots on the
ground floor. Ironically, it had been Deb who convinced her to get a
script for a handicapped mirror hanger.
She
laid the rifle on the passenger seat, where the police were sure to
find it, and used her phone to email her confession to them. She
adjusted the Glock in the small of her back.
As
she rode the elevator to the fourth floor of the building across the
street, she realized that the outfit she was wearing, the mint-green
taffeta blouse, the tailored slacks, the melon blazer, the Blahnik
flats, had been bought for her by Deb. That was a mistake, but she
was too far into it to return home and change.
She
had never cared for the firm's receptionist, Astana Poole, a woman
who had a way of looking at her that she found demeaning, unsure it
if was personal or simply a strategy to put clients in their proper
place, subordinate to their attorneys. Therefore, she wasn't afraid
to pull the pistol as she walked up to her. The waiting area was
otherwise unoccupied.
"What
in the world?" Poole said, finger poised above her phone.
"Before
you call 9-1-1, call Deb. Tell her I'm waiting for her. Don't tell
her any more than that."
Poole,
hands shaking, pressed Deborah's extension. Katie couldn't hear her
answer, since Poole was wearing a headset, but was content that the
woman did just as she instructed.
"Now
call the cops."
Poole,
puzzlement on her face, punched the number. When the police answered,
she identified herself, gave the address, and said, "We have a
woman in the lobby named Katie Frank holding me at gunpoint. I think
she means to kill Deborah Kline, one of our attorneys."
When
Poole began nodding, and Katie said, "That's enough. Hang up."
She
did so. "Please don't kill me."
"You
do what I tell you, you'll walk away from this. Understand?"
Poole
nodded. Katie could smell the odor of urine wafting across the room,
and was pretty sure her diaper was dry.
Just
then, Deb came around the corner, saw the setup, and stopped. "What
the hell are you doing?"
"You
and I have some unfinished business." She swung the gun around
to point at her ex.
"What?
You're going to kill me now? Are you really that angry?"
"You
cost me my daughter. Shouldn't I be?"
Deb
wrapped her arms across her chest. "Elaine took Glory Beth from
us. You know that."
Katie's
arm was trembling. "But you provided the ammunition. It's you
that deserves the punishment."
"So
that's why you're going to kill me. To punish me for losing Glory
Beth."
"Who
said I was going to kill you? I've done far worse. I hope you enjoy
going through the rest of your life known as the wife of a serial
killer."
Deb
was silent for a long moment. "It was you? That shot those
people? That was your project?"
Katie
heard Poole gasp. In the distance, she could also hear a siren. "The
guidance counselor in my high school asked me once what I was going
to do to leave the world a better place. I figure I've done my bit."
"I
never knew you had such cruelty in you," Deb said. Katie could
see the tears coursing down her cheeks.
"Cruel?
You haven't seen anything yet. When you think of me, I don't want you
dredging up sweet memories, so here's my last gift. I want you to
remember me just like this."
And
with that, she raised the gun to her temple and fired.
