The Murder of Janessa Hennley Page 13

  The pain didn’t fade. She felt her lungs bursting, and through the stars and blackness, she thought she was dying. She’d seen what a blow to the head could do to people. She could have internal bleeding in the brain that she wouldn’t even notice for a few days. But that would suddenly, and painfully, kill her. She needed to get to a hospital.

  The sack wasn’t on her head anymore. She opened her eyes, scanning her surroundings. She was strapped to a mattress, her legs and hands bound. She was in a basement with multiple windows. It was airy and sunny, and she’d seen it before somewhere, but in her hazy state couldn’t guess where.

  “I see you,” a voice hissed.

  She gasped. The man stood five feet away from her, staring at her face unblinkingly. He looked like a nightmare. Sores that exposed the tissue beneath polluted parts of his skin. The skin itself was sagging and yellow, matching his eyes. Some of his thick, greasy hair had fallen out in clumps. The skin on his neck was bright red and flaking, as though it were about to peel off.

  “I see you,” he said again, his voice metallic and grainy. A voice that, she thought, wasn’t used to speaking. He lurched toward her, and she startled again, trying to get away. He pulled up a plastic chair and sat down in front of her. “You can see me?”

  She nodded as tears rolled down her cheeks.

  “Yes, I see you,” she said quietly.

  He seemed almost happy by that and leaned back, grinning. Typically a grin gave others a pleasant response, but in him it only revealed rotting black and yellow teeth. Jagged, like a carnivorous animal’s, his gums black and bleeding.

  “You can see me,” he rasped.

  “Yes, yes, I can see you.”

  He slapped his hands down on his thighs. “I can see you. You can see me.”

  “Yes, I can see you, and you can see me.” She swallowed. “My name is Suzan. What’s yours?”

  The man pulled out a knife and slit her face from her eye down to her chin. It bled so profusely she felt the droplets against her neck. She howled in pain, which seemed to excite the man more. He placed his tongue on the wound and licked from her chin to her eye. His breath was like rotting meat, the spit sticky and rank.

  He tucked the knife away and sat down, locking eyes with her, the horrible grin still twisting his lips as a dribble of blood leaked down his tongue and over his teeth.

  42

  Mickey stood at the patio doors watching the plant in the living room again, wondering how it had died. How Suzan had neglected it enough for it to be unable to survive.

  A forensics unit on loan from Anchorage PD was there, as were three deputies from the Kodiak Basin Sheriff’s Department and two detectives. Mickey had called the FBI field office as well, but no one was available to come down.

  They’d torn the house apart from top to bottom and found almost nothing. The smear on the cupboard and the full bath were the only evidence that something was wrong. But Deputy Woody said the sheriff always answered her phone.

  Woody looked out over the backyard. “I’m sure she’s fine. Gotta be.”

  Mickey glanced to him. “That smear on the cupboard. The forensics boys told me it was skin. It’s the same thing I saw at the Hennleys’ house.”

  Woody swallowed and wouldn’t look him in the eyes. “We’ll find the son of a bitch. If I have to close down this damn town, we’ll find him.”

  Mickey nodded, but knew they were helpless. They couldn’t find him when they had time and the sheriff. They weren’t going to find him now. At least not in time.

  “Lemme know if anything turns up, will ya?” Mickey said, and walked out of the house.

  Mickey sat in his truck and watched the forensics team leave. They’d been there all of two hours and hadn’t turned up any more than he had on his walkthrough. He nodded to them as they piled into their van with the words ANCHORAGE POLICE DEPARTMENT MAJOR CRIME SCENE UNIT emblazoned on the side. The three deputies on Suzan’s porch spoke before they got into their cruisers and left as well.

  Mickey started the truck and went down Kodiak Basin’s Main Street, where all the tourist-fueled shops and restaurants resided, little oases cut out of the surrounding forests. He stopped at the first bar. A pinball machine dinged in a dark corner. Two men in flannel shirts sat at the bar and sipped beers. One of them was pale with stringy white hair streaming out of a red baseball cap. His eyes appeared light blue, but as Mickey sat down next to him, he saw that they were milky from glaucoma.

  “Beer, please,” Mickey said.

  The bartender, a middle-aged woman with tattoos on her forearms, poured him a tall mug of beer.

  “Ain’t seen ya here before,” the man in the cap said.

  “No, I haven’t been in town long.”

  “Up here for the camping?”

  “Something like that.”

  He drank down a black beer and wiped his lips with his sleeve. “Well, I’ll tell ya, stay away from the Tetons.”

  “Aren’t those in Wyoming?”

  “Nah, that’s the Grand Tetons. We just call ’em the Tetons up here. It’s them two mountains to the west that look like tits.”

  “What’s wrong with ’em?”

  “People keep dyin’ up there. They get lost and starve. Cell phones don’t work up there, ya see. But people think cell phones work everywhere, so they don’t plan right and they go up there and get in trouble, and then guess what? No phones.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks.”

  Mickey’s watch began to beep. He shut it off and pulled the medications out of his jacket pocket.

  “Antibiotics?”

  “You see a lot for someone that’s goin’ blind, old man.”

  The man laughed. “Ain’t that the truth. Name’s Lyle.”

  “Mickey.”

  “Well, Mickey, you ain’t got to be embarrassed in front’a me ’cause a that. I got nineteen pills I take in the morning. And every year it seems like I add some to that. So you ain’t got to be embarrassed.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  They spoke for over an hour. Lyle told him about his children and then his grandchildren. Within that hour, Mickey had four beers. He didn’t realize it until the bartender told him he should probably slow down if he was going to drive again.

  “Helluva town, though,” Lyle said. “I came here after the War.”

  “’Nam?”

  “That’s damn right. Couldn’t find no peace. I was just a young kid, and I came back and I was all screwed up in the head. But we didn’t have no words for it then. Shell shock, I guess. None’a the doctors knew what it was, so we couldn’t get no medication for it. You in the service?”

  “I was.”

  “You see any time?”

  “Same, Vietnam.”

  He didn’t say anything, but nodded as if that conveyed everything that could be said.

  Mickey asked for a Sprite and a coffee. He drank half the Sprite and then sipped the coffee. “I was the same way when I got back. Restless. Agitated. I swear I must’ve gotten fired from a hundred jobs in those few years after I got back.”

  “Not easy, is it? You come back a different person, but everyone else is the same. You’ve changed, and they just don’t understand it. It’s not their fault, but they just don’t understand it.”

  Mickey sipped his coffee. “We were in a village once near the border, the border with Laos. My unit had a good mix of black boys and white boys, rich and poor. The diversity made us stronger, I think. We were close. We were in this little village, and two of the boys took this girl… I don’t know how old she was. Twelve, maybe thirteen. They took her behind some trees and they started…”

  He drank down the rest of his coffee.

  “Right in front of her parents, who we had down on the ground ’cause they’d found some weapons there. I pulled those boys off her. We were screaming at each other. They were calling me a fag, and I don’t remember what I was saying. My sergeant saw us fighting. He came over and pulled out his pistol.
I thought he was gonna shoot those boys. I stepped in front of him and said not to do it. But that wasn’t where he was aiming. He blew the girl’s head off, the top of her head. Her mother got up to run to her, and one of the boys panicked and shot her down. Everything was in slow motion. I couldn’t make it go faster. But I turned around and saw that peasant man’s eyes. He’d just lost his daughter and his wife… I’ve never seen eyes like that.”

  “And you see ’em every night,” the man said solemnly.

  “Yeah.” Mickey blinked like it would clear away an image. “I haven’t told anyone that in almost forty years. I don’t know why I just told you.”

  “Ain’t good to keep that sorta thing inside ya. It eats you up like a tapeworm.”

  Mickey laid a fifty on the bar. “Have a good night, Lyle.”

  “You too, Mickey.”

  43

  After an afternoon of restless sleep, Mickey had found a dirt road by the hotel that went up one of the mountains. The evening fell quickly and night after that. The darkness comforted him. It had for a long time.

  He drove a good while before it dawned on him that he was too drunk to drive. He pulled over at a viewing area and got out of the truck. He had stopped at a convenience store and bought a bottle of Miller, which he popped open and drank as he sat on the hood. The city lights sparkled below him, and he could even see the bright specks of Anchorage far off on the horizon.

  He took out his pain pills and counted ten. He laid them on the hood of the truck and stared at them. He gulped a long swig of the beer then picked up the first pill and turned it in his fingers as he watched the lights beneath him. He brought it close to his lips and held it above his mouth.

  His cell phone buzzed.

  Mickey let it ring twice before he placed the pill down on the hood and checked the ID. It said JON STANTON CELL.

  “How are you, Jon?”

  “I’m good. Sorry for not getting back to you sooner. I’ve been a little swamped with the boys.”

  Mickey drank a few gulps of beer and then capped it and set it down on the hood. “It’s okay. I don’t think it mattered.”

  “You all right?”

  “Not really. No.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  He leaned back on his windshield. “The person I’ve been looking for up here. He took someone I cared about.”

  A pause. “I’m so sorry, Mickey. What happened? Who’d he take?”

  “You don’t know her. She’s the sheriff in this small town in Alaska. I couldn’t find him in time, and he took her right out from under me.”

  “Do you have any suspects?”

  “We did. But he’s not the one that did this.” Silence a moment. “How do you?… I mean…I’ve never seen anyone like you, Jon. How do you…”

  “How do I catch them?”

  “How do you do it?”

  Stanton hesitated. “I can put myself in their shoes.”

  “The victim?”

  “No, not the victim. I know they teach you in criminology classes to think like the perpetrator but unless you have certain… traits, you can’t do it. Not really. It’s usually just an imitation of someone looking at the killing from the outside in. You have to look at it from the inside out.”

  “And how do you do that?”

  A long silence. “I become evil.”

  Mickey wished he hadn’t asked. “He’s going to kill her. I know it. I don’t think he has yet, because with the other vics he just killed them in their house. He took her somewhere. She’s the sheriff. She might be special to him. He’d want to savor it.”

  “What were the last vics like?”

  “The girl was who he came for. Teenager, sixteen, troubled. Promiscuous and into drugs. He ate her, or parts of her. Left smears on the windows in their home and some on the sheriff’s cupboards in the basement. Forensics said they were skin.”

  “Skin? Like skin falling off of him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you thought he might have a disease of some sort?”

  “I considered it. The autopsy report for Janessa said she had the same smears over her body. But the ME couldn’t really guess at a disease that would cause it.”

  “If it’s skin, it’d have to be something serious.”

  Mickey uncapped the beer and took a sip. “Serious enough that he would be in-patient? Or a support group or something?”

  “Yeah, that might not be a bad place to start.”

  Mickey threw the bottle into the brush as a fire began to build in him. “He had to have met Janessa somewhere. She was in and out of rehab and psychiatric facilities.”

  “And I’m guessing there’s not a lot of them in Alaska.”

  Mickey paused. He wanted to discuss Janessa more. He was on to the path he needed to go. He could feel it in his bones. But he had something else to talk about first. A mutual friend that had passed away.

  “Jon, I never got to talk to you about David’s death. I know he was your friend for a long time. He talked about you.”

  “I know. But that’s the past, and I’ve found it’s better to leave that alone. Go get your guy, Mickey.”

  “Thanks. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  He hung up and stared at the moon. It was nearly nine. He picked up the pain pills and threw them into the forest before getting into the truck and driving to the sheriff’s station.

  The little room they’d set up for him was still there, and no one said a word as he shut the door. He pulled out the Hennley file and looked up the grandparents’ phone number.

  44

  Mickey set up an in-person visit with Janessa’s grandparents for nine the next morning. He slept only a few hours, then showered and dressed. He grabbed two cups of coffee and a muffin at the grill in the hotel before driving to their home in Anchorage.

  The home appeared old, and a ‘60s Ford truck stood in the driveway. It was a few minutes before nine, but Mickey couldn’t wait any longer. He got out and knocked on the front door. An elderly woman answered as she put on her glasses.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Agent Parsons, with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We spoke yesterday.”

  “Oh, right. Yes, please come in.”

  As Mickey expected, childhood black and white photos decorated the side tables and mantle, and plastic coated the furniture. He sat on a couch. The grandmother disappeared into the bedroom and came out with her husband. He shook Mickey’s hand and said, “Donald Hennley.”

  “Mickey Parsons, nice to meet you.”

  “We already spoke till we were blue in the face with the sheriff,” Donald said, his knees creaking as he sat down next to his wife.

  “I have some different questions, if that’s all right.”

  “Sure. We got nothing but time.”

  “I think the person that killed your son and his family was there for Janessa. She was the draw. I need to know more about her.”

  “Well hell, you don’t have to be an FBI to know that. She was spending time with the worst sonsabitches I ever seen. Bikers, thugs with tattoos on their necks… They were her dope dealers. And she didn’t have any money. What she did have was her beauty, and she traded that.”

  “The parents knew about this?”

  “Yeah, we all knew. But what the hell were we gonna do? We put her in rehab so many times, they stopped taking her.”

  “It was like watching a car accident about to happen,” the grandmother said. “You knew what was coming, but the driver just wouldn’t listen to you.” She glanced at Donald. “I just never thought she would bring her whole family… I mean, those two young boys. What’d they ever do, Agent Parsons? What’d they ever do to anyone?”

  Mickey was quiet a moment as she composed herself. “Which rehabs did you take her to?”

  “Every one we could.”

  “Was there one in a psychiatric unit? Somewhere where people with severe disorders might be able to see or interact with Janessa?”

  �
�You think one of them did this?”

  “We don’t know. I’m just exploring a hunch.”

  “Well,” Donald said, “we took her to Alaska Regional Hospital, and she was in this group session thing. It was supposed to be for people that nothing else helped. They weren’t all drug addicts. A lot of ’em were mentally ill.”

  “Alaska Regional. You’re sure about that?”

  “Yeah, it’s the biggest hospital in Anchorage. It’s only fifteen minutes from here.”

  “Did Janessa ever say anyone from that group was following her around, or maybe called her at odd hours?”

  “There was one boy,” he said. “Her parents didn’t know about it. Janessa was closer to us than her parents. I guess that’s natural for a kid like that. Anyway, she had… relations with him. The boy was only fifteen, but I remember he would call her sometimes.”

  “Did you tell the sheriff about this?”

  “Well, of course. But frankly, Agent Parsons, she had relations with so many men, I don’t think it mattered.”

  “Do you remember the boy’s name?”

  “His first name was Tyler. I don’t know his last name.”

  Mickey handed his card to Donald. “If you think of anything else, please give me a call. This man… I think he may have kidnapped someone else. I need to find him fast.”

  “We’ll do whatever we can.”

  “Thank you for your time.”

  Mickey drove immediately to Alaska Regional. Its size impressed him. The architecture resembled LEGO blocks randomly joined together, and the brown exterior gave it a look thirty years too old.

  He parked in police parking. Inside, he marched past the emergency room and cardiology to guest services. A woman with white hair and glasses behind the desk was swearing under her breath at a computer.

  “Hi,” he said, flashing his badge. “I need some information, please.”

  45

  Suzan had no idea what time it was, but she was grateful that the windows allowed her to see daylight. Her arms and legs burned, and her hands, though she couldn’t see them behind her back, felt swollen like melons. The skin was tight, and any movement sent pain through her wrists and fingers. The binds were so firm she couldn’t move any of her fingers.