The Murder of Janessa Hennley (9 page)

22

The doctor
kept him an extra day for observation. When he released Mickey, he gave him plenty of pain pills and some white fluid that was supposed to coat and soothe his stomach. They brought him outside in a wheelchair, and the sheriff was there with her Tahoe.

“Need a ride?”

“Looks like it.”

“Where are you staying?”

“Bed and breakfast in town. I can’t think of the name.”

She opened the passenger side door.
“I know the one, but you’re not going there. Give me your keys. I’m gonna get one of my deputies to go get your truck. You’re staying with me.”

“I can’t impose like that, sheriff. Any hotel is fine.”

“Nonsense. I got a huge house and just me to fill it. You’ll stay in the guest bedroom as long as you like.”

“If you insist, I won’t say no.”

She helped him get into the Tahoe. Pulling himself up into the passenger seat was an ordeal in itself. He had to lean the seat all the way back to avoid the crushing pain deep within his stomach. He started to put on his seatbelt but thought he would rather go through the windshield than have that thing suddenly jerk into his stomach, so he left it off.

The house was as she’d described. It sat away from the street, separated by a massive lawn covered with apricot trees that had withered away. The
large front porch held a swing-chair and couch. Suzan helped him up the steps and into the house.

The home smelled like Mickey’s grandmother’s house
when he was a kid. Somewhere between dust and plastic with patchouli in a bowl somewhere. The decoration appeared like his grandmother’s house as well, with old rugs, mirrors, and paintings of dim landscapes.

“Not what I thought for you,” he said.

“This place has been in my family for four generations. My great-grandfather built it with his own hands. It’s just passed down from one person to the next. I thought about getting a condo in town last year, but I just couldn’t leave the place. I mean, my mom was born in this house and died  up in the bedroom. How can you sell something like that?”

Mickey followed her through the kitchen and to a guest room at the rear. The bed was a king
with several throw pillows, and the room had its own fireplace. He dropped his bag by the bed.

“This is more than generous of you. Thank you.”

She shrugged. “I feel responsible.”

“Why would you feel responsible?”

“We have only one hospital. Obviously he’d know that’s where you were. I should have had a deputy there.”

Mickey sat down on the edge of the bed. It was soft and gave way easily.
“You couldn’t have known he would do that. That move was unpredictable, which means we’re not dealing with someone who thinks rationally or linearly. You can’t guess his next moves, and you’re no more responsible for them than you are the weather.”

“Well
, I appreciate that, but I still feel responsible. Anyway, make yourself at home. I have to run back to the station, but if you need anything don’t hesitate to call me. You still got pain meds in your system, so I wouldn’t drive. Just call me, and if I can’t make it down I’ll send someone to drive you around.”

“Again, thank you.”

“Sure.”

When she had left
, Mickey looked out through the patio glass doors that led to a garden. Gray light seeped in and clouds covered the sun. He opened the doors and let the cool air inside. A crow sat on the fence in the backyard. It didn’t move for a long while, and then it lifted into the air and was gone.

23

Mickey occupied himself by going into her family’s library and reading. Most of the books were first or second editions, coated in dust with gold speckled spines and worn leather covers. He read an old edition of
Moby-Dick
for most of the afternoon before he heard a key in the door. Suzan walked in carrying a brown paper bag. She glanced at him on her way to the kitchen.

“Hey,” she said, “got some Chinese. Hope that’s okay.”

“That sounds great.”

She placed the bag down on a counter.
“I got egg drop soup and sweet and sour pork for you.”

He sat at the dining table. He could see words carved into the tabletop,
names. The chicken scratch a child might carve waiting for breakfast. “You have kids?”

“Oh, no. That table’s been here sixty years, at least. Been through a lot of kids, but not mine.”

She laid the food out on the table and washed her hands. After sitting down, she folded her arms as he put his spoon in the soup.

“Do you want to say grace?” she asked.

He put the spoon down. “No, you go ahead.”

“Dear Father in Heaven, please bless Mickey that he will heal quickly and that the pain will not bother him much. Please bless us that we will find the man we seek and have the strength to stop him. Grant comfort to those friends and family that aren’t here
, and bless this food that it will nourish and strengthen our bodies. Amen.”

“Amen,” Mickey said, forcing the word out.

“That seemed hard for you.”

He tasted the soup. It burned his throat going down.
“I’m not very religious.”

“I grew up with it. For every church sermon I attended
, my mother would give me a dollar. Huge sum of money for a kid back then. There were some weeks I’d get two or three dollars. But the trick’s on me, because the sermons stuck.”

“She sounds like a smart woman.”

She pushed food out of the cartons and onto her plate. “She was a schoolteacher. She easily could’ve gone on to get her doctorate. But she said at that time it was difficult for a woman to get into any doctorate programs. Especially in mathematics, which was her specialty.”

“
And your father was a cop?”

“
Yeah, nothing fancy. He barely graduated high school. But boy, he loved my mother. I think a lot of men are intimidated by smart women, but he loved that she was so much smarter than he was.” She took a bite of rice. “What about your parents?”

“My mother passed away when I was young. I was raised by my father.”

“How’d she pass?”

He hesitated. “Cancer. Same as my wife t
hirty-five years later.”

A silence before she said,
“I’m sorry, Mickey. What was your wife like?”

“She was one of those people that just loved life. No matter where she went
, she made the place better. She’d stay with relatives and start a garden for them. Or we’d go on vacation, and she’d see that the town didn’t have a dog park so she’d spend an afternoon petitioning the city council to designate one.” He grinned. “After a few drinks once, she got up on stage with a belly dancer because she said she wasn’t doing the moves right. In front of fifty strangers she started belly dancing, something she hadn’t done for years.”

“She sounds great.”

“She was.”

The sheriff popped open a can of Coke and slid
it over to Mickey. “You miss her a lot, don’t you?”

“Not a
day goes by I don’t think about her.” He took a long drink and it burned. “But life goes on.”

They ate in silence
for a moment.

“Can I ask you something personal?” she said.
Mickey was used to this question.

“About my health issues.”

“About your health issues.”

“I don’t see myself as dying of
AIDS, I’m living with it. And with modern medication I expect to see my grandchildren.”

“How did it happen?”

He sipped at his soup. It hurt his stomach, so he picked at some rice instead. “When Ruth died, I slipped into a very dark place. I was alone in Washington, and there was only so much time my daughter could take away from school. So I regressed into myself. I started drinking a lot, not leaving the house for weeks at a time. I took a leave of absence from the Bureau, and one day I saw my badge lying out on a counter. My first thought was, ‘Whose badge is that?’ And the loneliness was crushing. I thought it would make me stronger, but it just made me more desperate. So I didn’t want to be alone anymore.”

She put her hands on her lap and leaned back.
“What happened?”

“I would pick up women at bars and strip clubs, wherever. It wasn’t even the sex
, really. I didn’t care about that. It was just having someone there through the night. I didn’t realize that at the time.” He inhaled and exhaled loudly through his nose. “As you can guess, I wasn’t exactly practicing safe sex. I think in some ways, I wanted to die. Or at least didn’t care if I did.”

She was silent a long time, moving the food around
on the plate. “How long do the doctors… I mean…”

“
It’s all guesswork. I think I got a good ten or fifteen left in me.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, so am I.”

Another long silence as they ate.

“So, this man we’re after,” she said, changing the subject, “you’ve dealt with people like him before?”

“Cannibals?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s not terribly common among sadists like this
, but it is there. Usually there’s a sexual component. It’s extraordinarily rare to have the cannibalism without rape.”

“What do you think it means?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. Some sort of mental illness. Or maybe he’s impotent and tried to perform and couldn’t. Maybe he has some sort of injury that prevents it.”

She exhaled. “Lord have mercy. That poor girl.”

He drank down some more soda and pushed his plate away. He wished he hadn’t eaten anything. “There’s going to be more. He crossed a line and saw how easy it was.”

“No
, he won’t be doing anymore. I’m putting everything else on hold. Every cop in this county is working on this case. And when we find him, I hope he tries to fight.”

24

Mickey felt better the next day. His stomach still burned, but it wasn’t a gnawing pain that distracted him from everything else. He could manage it.

He chose not to shower because he didn’t want to get the bandages wet. Instead
, he brushed his teeth and went into the kitchen. Suzan was reading the paper on her laptop and eating breakfast cereal.

“You want some Captain Crunch?”

“No, but some oatmeal would be divine right now.”

“Second cupboard to the right.”

He mixed the oatmeal with milk and a spoonful of peanut butter and stood by the microwave as it heated. Suzan was reading an article on police corruption in the LAPD.

He sat and stirred his food before saying, “I’m guessing you don’t have a lot of that here.”

“Corruption? No. I don’t think so. I mean we have some drug pushers that are always in and out of the system, but they would never try bribing a cop. And to be honest, once you become a citizen of Alaska, the taxes are low, and every citizen gets a dividend of the oil revenue. As long as you’ve got a full-time job and health insurance, it’s not that hard to get by up here. You could even live off the land if you needed to.”

Mickey tasted the oatmeal. His stomach growled
, and he salivated like an animal. After almost two days with little food, the peanut butter tasted better than anything he’d ever eaten. “I’d like to go out today.”

“Where?”

“Jason, the mechanic. I want to bring him in for a formal.”

“You think it’s him?”

He heard her words, but knew they weren’t what she meant to say. Her tone suggested something else, that she’d known him a long time and didn’t want to accuse him of anything. “I think it’s the only way to get the truth out of him. Put him under some pressure.”

“You sure you’re up to that? Applying pressure?”

“I’ll manage.”

The gray clouds
faded away, replaced with warm sunshine and cool breeze. The summers here, Suzan informed him, never got this hot. This was the first year she actually felt comfortable wearing shorts. She remembered a couple of summers where it even snowed a handful of days in July.

Mickey enjoyed the fresh air
, and for the moment, it took his mind off the pain in his stomach, which was diminishing every hour. Though he didn’t like how powerful it was, he took a Percocet to numb himself and ensure that Jason didn’t see him weakened.

As they drove, he sat in the passenger seat
and flipped through Jason Delasorto’s criminal history. He had seven total arrests with five convictions. None of them were sex offenses, but that wasn’t necessarily an indicator of a sadist. Jason’s charges were pot and minor in possession of alcohol tickets.

“What do you know about Jason’s background?” he asked.

“Rough going at first. His dad was an extremely abusive alcoholic. I actually remember my dad talking about it, because his mom would never testify against him and the DA kept having to drop the charges.”

“Any allegations of sexual deviance? Molestations or flashings?”

“No, never.”

“Was there mental illness in their family?”

“I don’t think so. Other than the alcoholism.”

They pulled into the mechanic shop
, where Jason was working on a Mustang. He saw them and stopped what he was doing.

“Jason,”
the sheriff said, “we’d like to talk to you for a bit.”

“
’Bout what?”

“Well
, we’d like for you to come down to the station.”

“Why?”

Mickey noted the glance behind him into the shop; Jason was contemplating a run. Just in case, Mickey stepped behind him. Jason grew agitated, wiping his hands vigorously on his pants though little grease stained them.

“Calm down, Jason,” Mickey said. “We just want to talk. Sometimes people know more than they think they do
, and we just want to be somewhere comfortable for us. Somewhere we can take notes in private.”

He licked his lower lip. “I didn’t do nothin’ to her, man.”

“No one’s saying you did.”

“Then why can’t we talk here?
”

Suzan reached
for the sidearm in her holster. “Jason, you’re coming with us. That’s all there is to it.”

He
looked between them a couple of times. “All right. All right.”