The Serial Killer's Wife (34 page)

“Don’t do this,” she whispered.
 

“Sorry. This is how it has to be.”
 

The men started to leave the unit but stopped when she shouted, “Wait!”
 

They both looked at her.
 

“At least tell me why. I deserve that much.”
 

Jim seemed to consider this, then said, “What do you want to know?”
 

“Just why.”
 

“That’s not an easy question to answer.”
 

“But I don’t get it.”
 

“What’s that?”
 

“I thought serial killers were supposed to work alone. But ... what—it was you, Todd, and Eddie?”
 

“For starters,” Todd said, “my name isn’t Todd. It’s Frank.”
 

“That’s right,” Jim said. “And
serial killers
”—he shook his head—“is such a nasty phrase. It has poor connotations.”
 

Elizabeth asked, “What connotation do you expect it to have?”
 

“She does have a point,” Todd (or Frank) said.
 

“Shut up.” Jim cleared his throat. “Listen, Liz, here we have one of those situations in which I’m conflicted. On the one hand, you are my sister and that boy there is my nephew. On the other hand, you both have served your purpose and we no longer need you.”
 

Elizabeth held Matthew even closer, her hand over his heart. “Let me guess. Eddie hid those trophies from you as some kind of insurance in case you ever tried to backstab him.”
 

Frank grinned, nodding. “Not a bad theory.”
 

“Not bad at all,” Jim agreed. “But it’s wrong. For starters, Eddie never killed anyone. Not that he wasn’t culpable. He knew what was going on but he was, in many ways, powerless to stop it. You see, these quote-unquote trophies were something he had come up with. And it wasn’t for any nefarious reason like the ones speculated in the news.”
 

“Then what reason was it?”
 

Jim opened his mouth but Frank held up a finger and said, “Maybe you should go back to the beginning.”
 

Jim thought it over for a moment. “Might as well. Won’t take long anyway. Look now, Liz, here’s the deal.”
 

It happened, Jim said, on Spring Break. Back right before Jim and Eddie graduated, when Elizabeth was still a sophomore. They’d gone down to Cancun for five days. Eddie and Elizabeth had been dating for only six months then. Eddie had asked Elizabeth if it was okay for him to go. He and Jim had been planning it since the year before. Elizabeth said it was fine, she trusted him, though she really didn’t. This, she decided, was the way to see just how much he cared for her. As petty as it sounded, if he was miserable down there without her, then that was a good thing. If he had the time of his life, that was a completely different thing.
 

“I met this girl down there the night before we left. She had come with some friends from school—they were from California, I forget which college—and her friends had ditched her that night. The girl was a real freak, loved to drink and party, and her friends had decided they wanted to take it easy the night before they left as they’d been partying hard all week. So I met her at this club and ended up leaving with her. We were going to go back to my hotel room but ended up taking a detour on the way. We ended up in this woodsy part off the main road, and this girl, I’m telling you, she was a nasty freak. Wanted to do all sorts of things. She didn’t even want me to use a condom but I insisted, because, you know, a freak like this who knew what kind of diseases she might have. And so we’re going at it and she tells me to squeeze her neck, squeeze it hard. Like I said, she was a freak, but I thought what the hell and went along with it. And ... it’s hard to explain, exactly, but the sex all of a sudden got better. I don’t know what it was, but squeezing her neck like that, choking her, made me feel so much stronger. I didn’t even notice when she started fighting me. I just kept going, squeezing harder, until, well, there was no more reason to squeeze.”
 

He’d checked for a pulse but there was none. He considered doing CPR but didn’t know the right way to go about it, despite the fact he had taken a health course that semester. He covered the body up the best he could and left. He found Eddie in their hotel room reading a book. He told Eddie that something terrible had happened, that he needed his help.
 

“I took Eddie back out there, for some reason expecting that girl to be gone. Like she’d just been faking it for me or something, and then when I left she got up and walked away. Or that I’d hallucinated the whole thing. But she was still there. Eddie told me we had to call the police. I told him he was crazy. I said I could get arrested for this. Eddie said it was an accident, but he said it like it was a question, you know, sort of testing me. I could tell he wanted to run. His eyes were all wide. He was as freaked out as me. I told him we just couldn’t do that. He wanted to know why not. I told him because of you.”
 

Elizabeth frowned. “Because of me?”
 

“I told him you were suicidal. That you hadn’t said anything to him about it because you didn’t want to scare him off. But that if something happened to me, happened to the both of us, you’d try to kill yourself. I told him you’d already attempted it before. I told him you had tried taking a whole bottle of Valium when you were in high school because some guy didn’t ask you to prom.”
 

“I never did that,” she said, this shocking her more than anything else, remembering now how gentle Eddie had been with her when he returned from Cancun, how he had asked her repeatedly about her feelings.
 

Jim grinned. “Of course I know that. But Eddie didn’t. And he fell for it, hook, line, and sinker.”
 

With the threat of Elizabeth possibly doing herself harm, Eddie agreed to help Jim. Eddie retrieved a shovel, and they took the girl deeper into the woods and buried her. Eddie told him they had to get rid of their shoes and clothes and anything else associated with what happened, as the authorities might be able to track them down with any slight thing.
 

“Your husband really was a bright guy,” Jim said. “I guess it helped that he had taken some of those forensic courses the year before. Eddie, he was obsessed with that kind of stuff.”
 

Elizabeth said nothing. She thought about the times when Eddie was home at night and they’d watch TV. How he would dissect everything wrong with shows like
CSI
and
Law & Order
. Typical Hollywood BS, he’d call it.
 

“So then we left, both of us more nervous than shit, but nothing happened. I mean, the girl’s body was eventually found. There was an investigation and all that, but no cops ever came knocking on either of our doors.”
 

Nearly an entire year passed. Eddie had been living close to State College, so he could stay close to Elizabeth. Jim moved down south. He had gotten into the habit of having anonymous sex. Just meeting some girl at a club, either going back to her place or taking her to his place and fucking and then that was that. Only he kept thinking about that freak down in Cancun, how she had liked being choked. He kept thinking about how much he’d enjoyed that, how powerful it had felt.
 

“So I did it to this girl, and she ... she fought me hard. But the harder she fought, the hotter it became, you know? When it was over, I wasn’t sure what to do. Now I had this dead woman in my apartment. I thought about getting rid of the body myself, but then I remembered just how good Eddie had been at it. So I called him.”
 

Under the pretense that it was a work emergency, Eddie had driven nearly five hours to Jim’s place. There he was met with another dead girl.
 

“Like a fucking broken record, he said we needed to call the police. I told him he was crazy. He said there was no other option. I said yes there was, we could hide her like we did that other one. He said that was a mistake. I said that if we didn’t and something happened to either one of us, you would kill yourself. Eddie said nice try, but he knew better now, and he actually pulled out his cell phone.”
 

What ultimately stopped him was Jim’s reminder about what happened down in Cancun. That if Eddie called the police, Jim would confess to that murder and tell them of Eddie’s involvement. The whole thing had made national news, the girl’s parents being these socialites who painted a picture of a sweet academic who had so much promise. Public opinion was with them so much that if the case were reopened and Jim and Eddie were thrown on the judicial guillotine, both would lose their heads in one easy fall.
 

“I could tell he hated my guts. I could see it in his eyes. But he had just started his new job, you two had just gotten engaged, so he had too much to lose. He had agreed to help me but told me this was the last time. I promised it was, reminding him that it was just an accident. He said sure, just like the time before. And you know what? That really pissed me off. Like right then, he thought he was better than me.”
 

“He was better than you,” Elizabeth said, immediately thinking she should have used the present tense there instead of the past.
 

“Whatever. The fact was I owned him then. He may not have realized it, but that was the truth. So then another six months passed and I did it again. I’d started driving up and down the coast, picking up these lonely housewives. We’d go to some motel by the Interstate. Their husbands always ignored them or treated them like shit, so they wanted to get back at them, even if their husbands never knew it. I must say, I fucked my fair share. And I tried to restrain myself, I really did. But then one night I couldn’t help it. I ended up choking this one woman to death. She was stronger than she looked and fought me pretty hard. Even scratched me a little. I hadn’t thought about it at the time, but Eddie apparently did.”
 

Once again Eddie had refused to have anything to do with it. And once again, Jim convinced him otherwise. Jim reminded him of just everything he would lose, and besides, he said, they wouldn’t get caught, not as long as Eddie did what he was good at. Again, Eddie went to call the police and words this time would not stop him. Instead, fists did. Jim was careful not to punch Eddie in the face because that would raise too many questions with Elizabeth, but he had pummeled him in the stomach and ribs. He bullied Eddie into realizing he had no other choice but to help him hide the body, and unlike last time, Jim said he wasn’t going to stick around. He said he needed to teach Eddie a lesson, so Eddie had to hide this body on his own. And so Jim had left, Eddie groaning on the motel floor, a dead woman on the motel bed.
 

“That was the first one they found with her ring finger missing. Apparently when Eddie was cleaning the place up, he noticed some flesh under her fingernail. He knew the DNA would match mine. So he cut it off for two reasons. One to keep it as insurance, like you said. And two so it would help start marking the bodies so the authorities would begin to see a pattern.”
 

Elizabeth and Eddie were married two months later. Jim was Eddie’s best man. There was nothing between them that suggested any kind of hatred. They both had become perfect actors, playing their roles without fail.
 

“The next time it happened, Eddie said he was through. He said he wasn’t going to help me anymore. I told him that was fine, then if he wanted to turn me in I would make sure you were killed.”
 

“And how were you going to kill me if you were in jail?” Elizabeth asked.
 

Frank raised his hand. “That would be me.”
 

“You see,” Jim said, “I had already hooked up with Frank here. Frank was a state trooper.”
 

“I was also in the service,” Frank said. “That’s where I learned about explosives. I learned just how effective the right amount of C-4 could be. So that collar right there around your son’s neck, the one that killed Reginald Moore, even the one right now around the neck of that FBI agent’s kid—those are all thanks to me.”
 

Elizabeth said, “Your mother must be so proud.”
 

“
Any
way,” Jim said. “He’d caught me for speeding one night when I was taking a girl to a motel. We were both wasted and he should have arrested me for drunk driving, but he didn’t. Tell us again, Frank, why didn’t you?”
 

Frank smiled. “I could tell some serious shit was about to go down.”
 

“So he let me off with a warning. I should have realized then something was messed up about that. He hadn’t even made me go through any of the motions, despite the fact I was no doubt way over the legal limit.”
 

Frank said, “I followed them back to the motel and watched them go inside. That woman, she was one fine piece of ass. I’d actually tried hitting on her once at the bar. Got nowhere. And seeing Jim with her, both of them drunk, ready to fuck ... it had pissed me off. So I waited for them for a while and then went to the door. I tried the door and, would you believe it, the drunk asshole had forgotten to lock it. I walked right in and found him almost done choking the girl to death. And you know what, Elizabeth? It was the hottest fucking thing I ever saw.”
 

Jim thought everything was over then. He’d finished and stepped away and there the cop stood, watching him. He’d even raised his hands, which made Frank laugh out loud. Frank asked if Jim had any K-Y Jelly. He asked if he had another condom. Then he went to work.
 

“So we came up with this arrangement,” Jim said. “I’d find the talent and fuck them first, choke them to death, while Frank watched. Then he’d do his thing. Once every couple months we’d drive separately up and down the coast, checking out a few bars and clubs. It was always easy spotting the lonely housewives. And when I did, well, that urge, that hunger inside of me, it just went crazy.”