The Red Scream (30 page)

He shrugged. “Just Tanya and you. And Sister Addie. I tell her everything.”

Molly stood and nodded to the guard.

As the guard took a step in his direction, Louie turned his head and watched his approach with the intensity of a batter watching a pitch cross the plate. The cords in his neck stood out like snakes and his eyes from the side looked as still as marbles. It occurred to Molly for the first time that she’d never once seen Louie blink.

chapter
16

The kid was always black and blue

Scared to death and hungry too.

That’s too bad, the teacher said.

Just be glad that you ain’t dead.

So he learnt at home and school

The hunter’s special Golden Rule:

In this world some blood will spill.

Make damn sure you’re not the kill.

LOUIE BRONK
Death Row, Ellis I Unit,
Huntsville, Texas

I
t was after nine o’clock and almost dark. The last fifty miles of the drive home Molly had felt like a horse galloping back to the stable; all she wanted was to get home, soak in the bathtub, and climb into bed with the stack of mail-order catalogues she’d been saving. The absolute last thing she wanted to do was what she’d promised herself she
would
do: sit down and work at her computer. Maybe it was age creeping up on her; she used to make this trip all the time and then work half the night.

She pulled up to her mailbox. Inside was a neat stack of mail bound with a rubber band. On top was a note written on a piece of lined paper torn from a spiral notebook. She drove into the garage and read the note by the overhead light.

“I’ve got some news. Call me if you feel like dinner or if you don’t feel like dinner. Grady.”

Molly paged through the mail and since nothing looked like a check or good news, she carried it into the house and dumped it on the table. She didn’t feel like dinner or calling Grady. It could wait. She opened the refrigerator door and the icy blast felt so good she just stood there for a while, leaning over with her forehead resting
against the freezer door, surveying the meager contents—sliced turkey, bread, some beer, and a few shriveled tomatoes.

Finally she grabbed a Coors Light, popped it open, and took it with her to her office.

She stopped in the doorway and looked into the dark room in which she spent so much of her life sitting alone at the keyboard. She sipped the beer and watched the red light on her answering machine flickering in the darkness and the eerie bluish toasters flying across her computer screen. Since she always left the computer switched on, she used a program that darkened the screen after five minutes of no use. Tonight it was displaying her favorite screen-saver—winged toasters flapping across the blackened background, with an occasional piece of toast whizzing by. Talk about rabbit holes, she thought. This, right here, might be the strangest rabbit hole of all—a place where toasters flew and voices resided inside a box, a place where she spent her days alone writing what was called “true crime,” but some of it was not true.

Maybe none of it was true.

Without turning on the light, she sat down at the keyboard. For the first time, sitting at her desk, watching the toasters wing their way across the screen, she admitted it to herself: it was possible, it was just possible, that Louie didn’t murder Tiny McFarland. Liar though he was, he’d been pretty damned convincing. And Addie Dodgin, who was nobody’s fool, believed him.

It was possible.

And if Louie didn’t do it, then
Sweating Blood
was largely fiction. If Louie didn’t do it, then David Serrano and Alison McFarland must have been wrong or lying about seeing that car. If Louie didn’t do it, he was about to die for the one crime he did not commit. If Louie didn’t do it, then who the hell did?

The trip to Fort Worth tomorrow was unlikely to produce anything. But now the doubt was planted in her mind. She knew from experience that, once planted, it was lodged there forever. Maybe it would turn out just like the first crime she ever researched—Vernon Cates’s murder. She’d worked night and day, followed every lead, however tenuous, and she’d gotten nowhere. That was the worst outcome of all—not to know.

She straightened up in the chair and tapped the space bar to wake up the computer. Time to get to work. If she wrote the Bronk story
well enough, Richard would not be able to resist it. But how was she going to write it? This morning it was all perfectly clear. Now she just didn’t know what the story was.

She called up a new document with two key strokes. There on her full-page monitor was the computer version of the writer’s dreaded blank page—all backlit and ready to go. She typed two question marks so the screen wouldn’t look so empty, then stared at them and the blinking cursor.

She could go ahead doggedly and write the story she’d intended all along: after ten years on death row a notorious serial killer finally receives society’s ultimate punishment. She’d describe his last words, the death chamber, the injection, the witnesses, the different reactions of everyone involved. Poignant interviews with the victim’s family, with law enforcement officials, and with a woman who befriended him in prison. Everybody with a different slant on capital punishment. A good story, one she’d been thinking about for years—the appropriate end to the Louie Bronk saga. That story she could write half-asleep.

Or she could write the story of a writer who spent eleven years covering a serial killer and writing a book about him. Then, only days before the killer is to be executed, the writer discovers that the crime for which he has received a death sentence—the crime that was the focus of her book—was not committed by him. A story of delusion and failure. Yes, that could make a story, but she hoped to hell it wasn’t true.

Or she could write the story of a family—a rich and powerful dysfunctional family—that was shattered by a random act of violence. The twist comes when years later it turns out that the family may have lied and is sheltering a killer. A real murder mystery, that story.

Or she could write the inspirational story of a woman who befriended a doomed killer, who accepted him as no one else had ever done, and converted him to humanity as well as to Christianity. Just in time for his date with death. The story of Addie Dodgin might make interesting reading.

Or—Lord, she was too tired to deal with all this uncertainty.

She needed a bath and some serious sleep. She sat back in her chair and stretched her arms out in front of her, curving her back, which ached from the drive. It was too hard. She couldn’t do it right
now. Richard Dutton was going to have to wait another day for the proposal, though this would be the first time in the eight years she’d worked for him that she hadn’t delivered what she promised right on time.

As she stood, the phone rang. She looked down at it and thought about letting the answering machine take it. But she lost patience and picked up before the end of the third ring.

The voice over the line said: “Yup. She was one of mine, sure was. See, I can have any woman I want. Any woman. She was there at this big, fancy house, all dressed in white, not a spot on her anywhere, carrying a bunch of flowers she’d picked. Yup. Just as easy to do the rich ones as them you pick up by the side of the road. Ain’t no difference when you get down to the basics.”

Molly let out a long breath. “Grady. Don’t do that. You’re reading right from his confession, dammit.”

“His very words, as quoted in your book. Just in case you find yourself softening toward him here in the final hours.”

“I’m not softening. Far from it. But—”

“But what?” he asked.

“Tell me your news first. Then I’ll tell you mine.”

“Okay. This is news of the bad variety. If I had any good news to go along with it, I’d ask which you wanted to hear first, but since I don’t, here it is: you got another note from your pen pal, and it’s pretty ugly.”

Molly braced herself by leaning her hip hard against the desk. “Read it to me.”

“Okay. By the way, it was stuck to some more pages from your book, thirteen pages this time. Candice Hargrave.” Molly pictured the autopsy photos of the willowy dark-haired teenager with her slender throat slit so deep her head was nearly severed.

Grady read in a monotone:

“Lady writer, here’s my rhyme:

I can find you anytime.

You may think that you can stay

All detached, above the fray.

If you think life’s like a book

Better take a second look.

You’re a cinch—an easy mark
,

your eyes wide open in the dark.

So as you witness Louie’s death
,

Think about your own last breath.

Tell me this, since you know it all—

when will the master poet call?

Molly’s breath stuck in her throat. It was fear, the hot, raw, abject kind that made her want to cower in a corner. She hated it. She leaned over the desk to switch on the lamp, but stopped herself and straightened up. She was not going to give in. “Well, the verse may be improving a little,” she said. “Eyes wide open in the dark—that’s pretty good. I wonder how he knows.”

“Molly, I’ve got a patrol car passing your house every half hour. If I weren’t on tonight, I’d come stay with you.”

“You’re assuming I’d let you.”

“Just for protective purposes, of course.”

“Protective! You—the worst shot in the history of the Austin Police Department.”

“I qualified once again this year,” he said. “Now tell me what you started to say before, about Louie Bronk.”

“Grady, it may just be that I’m tired, but—” She looked down at the computer screen, blank except for the two question marks. “I’m worried. There may have been a big mistake.”

There was a silence over the line. Then he said in his take-charge, official voice, “I want to hear everything, absolutely everything.”

“Hold on a minute.” Molly carried the cordless phone with her to the small sofa. She leaned over and repositioned the pillows so one would be under her knees and another under her neck. Then she lay down and wedged the phone between the pillow and her ear. Sometimes it was better to talk about difficult subjects lying down; the change in posture sort of tilted the world so you could get a different angle on things.

“Okay,” she said. “I just wanted to get comfortable.”

Then she told him everything—beginning with Louie’s claim of innocence and ending with her reluctant promise to him to apply her pit bull nature to the fullest in Fort Worth. As she talked, she pictured the man at the other end of the line—listening intensely the way he did, nodding his head and encouraging her to go on. Talking
with Grady Traynor, she remembered, had always been easy: he really listened and was willing to play with the possibilities.

“So,” she said, “here I am in my dark office trying to write my boss a proposal for the final Louie Bronk story. But I can’t do it because I don’t know what the story is.”

“Molly,” Grady said, “if you really think there’s a chance this story of Bronk’s could be true, it has repercussions for our two murders. It would take some doing, but I could justify calling Fort Worth right now and asking them to send some uniforms out to look for the car in the morning.”

Molly thought about it. Then she could sleep late and stay at home all morning drinking coffee and writing the proposal. But no. She could do this better than some bored cop. And she’d promised Louie. Experience had shown her time and time again that it was better to do things herself.

“Thanks, Grady, but I better do it myself.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Well, I need to. I promised.”

“Molly, I don’t think it’s safe. Let me take care of it.”

“No. And I wouldn’t have told you if I thought you’d bully me.”

“Well, how about this? I could send someone up there with you, or get you an escort in Fort Worth, a cop who knows that area, just to drive you around.”

“No. Thanks.”

“Still the loner,” he said.

“I’ve never been worth a damn at delegating.”

“Or at teamwork.”

She sighed. “Or at teamwork.”

“Will you call me from Fort Worth?”

“Okay.”

“No matter what?”

“Yes.”

“Molly, the more I get into it, the more I wonder about Charlie and that earlier murder. Did you know that Tiny McFarland was the one who had the money in the family and Charlie inherited millions from her? Up till then he’d been small potatoes. It was the bucks he inherited from her that allowed him to build a big business.”

“Of course I knew that. It was all in my book.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “That’s where I got it actually.”

She thought for a minute and said, “Since I owe you some info, here’s a gift that fits right into your theory. I bet you didn’t know that Tiny slept around. Alison says her mother was chronically unfaithful. That was not in the book because I didn’t know it until yesterday.”