Family Murders: A Thriller (7 page)

The next day Eric went and tried to get his job back. The best time was between shifts. Factoring in the time it took to walk into town, he knew he wouldn't be there when Gabby got home, but he told her to go straight into the house, lock the door, and wait for him to come home. Eric wasn't rehired, and after leaving the welding shop at around three-thirty in the afternoon, he said he had taken a long walk to clear his head.

He arrived home just before six, and claimed his first sign something was wrong was discovering the bloody fillet knife on the kitchen counter. The blood was beginning to dry and to lose its vibrant red hue, so he had been unsure what it was, and picked the knife up to examine it further. Upstairs, he found the mutilated body, called 911 from the phone in the master bedroom, and tried to carry his sister downstairs to get her closer to the ambulance.

He later described the one detail that had lead him to be unable to speak when police showed up: his sister's body had been propped up in a desk chair and faced towards the door; her hair had been tied to the chair to keep her head level; on her face, covering her eyes, were a pair of pink plastic sunglasses.

Eric believed he would have reacted differently to the simple death of his sister, say in an accident, but in this case he knew that her death was his fault. It was payback, plain and simple. The display of the body, the sunglasses, were all meant as a message, a message written just for him. All the things Gabby had endured were intended as revenge, and the sunglasses were a signature.

"From him to me," Eric had said. And he had said it again and again, telling the story again and again, without ever changing a detail or getting caught in some small fabrication.

The story was compelling at trial. Eric's lawyers presented it as an alternate theory of the crime, and though the police tried and tried, there was no way to prove events didn't unfold exactly as Eric described. There were no witnesses, and the story seemed to explain all the physical evidence.

All the parts of Eric's story that could be verified were. He had been fired, he had come and tried to get his job back, but for the two hours he supposedly spent walking—the two hours during which, in the opinion of the coroner, Gabby's life had bled out of her—no witnesses or alibi could be found.

There were no witnesses to the supposed altercation the day before either. No one remembered a red Challenger driving by, or a big man in his twenties wearing a leather jacket. At trial, the prosecution emphasized that this story relied solely on the word of a suspected murderer. That was true. The defense could not produce one scrap of evidence that the man in the red car was anything other than the fabrication of a very sick mind.

The semen was typed to match Eric, but the defense was quick to point out the number of people who had the same blood type and would also be a match. In most people's opinion, not much weight was given to this evidence by the jury. The most compelling day of the trial, according to many of the journalists, was the day Eric took the stand. A murder trial is judged by the standard of reasonable doubt, and at the end of the day no one could say things hadn't happened just the way he said. Combined with testimony that was described in more than one article as "riveting," a not guilty verdict was returned.

Some people said it was for the best, that the town needed to heal, not take revenge on a boy who'd grown up there. When the subject of justice came up, whether he'd actually done it, those same people tended to clam up. It was a sore spot that he had managed to live among them, undetected, for all those years. In their heart of hearts, most people seemed glad enough the damage had been contained in Eric's own family, and happy enough to leave it at that.

One of the more vocal locals, one who still seemed perfectly willing to lambast the Fallows clan in print months after the trial had ended, declared with some theatricality that he had "witnessed the birth of a sociopath. That boy has been nurturing a seed of something inside him for a long time, and at the end of last year, I saw it come into bloom."

At least it seemed theatrical in retrospect. Reading between the lines, one could get a sense of a town that needed to either do some serious soul-searching or forget it ever happened. Towns are like the people who live in them—most choose the latter.

***

Angela sat back in her chair, unable to believe the town in the story was her town. It had been almost two years since Ted had decided he wanted to move back. She knew plenty of people who had lived their whole lives there, whose parents and grandparents had, and no one had ever breathed a word of it, as gossip or anything else. Angela supposed the story couldn't go on for ever. As far as headlines went, "Child Murderer Still On Loose" was pretty embarrassing.

But that was the gist of it: Eric Fallows was still out there. Maybe that's why no one wanted to talk about it. They were afraid to summon him, like saying Bloody Mary three times. It would be different if he was rotting in a cell; it would all be in the past. Instead the whole thing still lived and breathed in the present. Eric still lived and breathed in the present, out there in the world somewhere.

"No, not somewhere," Angela breathed. "He's here."

"He's home."

Friday, October 12th, 1990

9

Angela woke Friday morning to the sound of breathing coming from behind her.

She had spent nearly three hours in the library the previous day. After driving home she had called to make sure Julie was safe, then carefully locked herself in. Special attention was paid to the new deadbolt she had installed in the door to the addition. Then she collapsed into bed.

She had nightmares, but never woke up.

When she did come around, it was to the prickle of hot breath across the back of her neck. Her stomach dropped; her eyes snapped open like over-tightened window shades. For a few seconds she couldn't move, couldn't do anything other lay on her side and stare at the wall. She was an ostrich again, head buried in the sand.

It only took a few seconds for her mind to conjure a horror tour: Eric bending over the bed, feet wrapped in garbage bags, smelling her hair; Eric wearing black leather gloves and testing the edge on a fillet knife; Eric under the covers with her—behind her—naked.

The rhythm of the breathing brought her back to reality. It was measured and slow, the breathing pattern of someone who was asleep.

Or someone who was pretending to be.

Either way, Angela realized, this was as good a chance as she was going to get. She steeled herself, then leapt up and pressed her back against the wall, twisting her head wildly from side to side, scanning the room. If someone was coming for her, at least it wouldn't be from behind. There was someone there, on the far side of the bed, rustling and…snoring. Angela picked up a small statuette with a heavy base off her bedside table, raised it over head, and—

—and realized she recognized the snoring. She reversed her weapon, used the statue side to flip back a corner of the covers.

Fucking Ted! He was here, at home, sleeping next to her. Angela remembered her certainty that Ted's return home would assuage her fears. She thought of all the nightmares she'd had, all while sleeping next to him.

"I guess it only works if I know you're there," she said out loud. And she did feel better now. The light coming through the uncovered corner of the window was bright and clear and still. Pre-hurricane weather in her experience, but even so, it was a better looking day than she had seen in a long time.

With a start, she realized it had only been three days since an almost carefree family dinner. She looked down at her husband. In some ways, she had missed him so much, needed him so much. But she had also surprised herself. She had figured out the danger to their child, figured out just how sick the man stalking their family was, and she had overcome her fear and survived. Julie was safe, the house was secure. It was only a stopgap until they could figure out what to do, but as stopgaps went she was proud of it.

She was proud of herself, and surprised at how her thoughts of Ted had diminished over the past three days. Looking down at him, she thought she would feel relief. Instead she felt…comfortable. She was comfortable now with the idea of confronting Eric Fallows alone. She would do it head-on if she had to.

Let Ted sleep. There was so much to tell him, and she doubted he would believe half of it. She also doubted her ability to unify the events of the past few days into a cohesive story, one that would make sense to him as it now made sense to her. She needed him to understand the important part: there is a monster out there, one with a penchant for young girls, and he is fixated on our daughter.

Let him sleep, and she would spend some time thinking about how to explain it all, thinking about what to do. Stepping up had given her authority, but a sense of responsibility came along with it. Ted would be thunderstruck, paralyzed. She had to be ready with their next move.

She decided to go for a hard run, across the rough terrain on the path behind her house. It was hilly, and the lull of the ups and downs, the mental energy of controlling her breathing, always freed up a part of her mind she couldn't otherwise access. Perversely, these past few days had made finding it easier. She needed that clarity now more than ever.

Ted was here, Julie was safe, and the bright still air that came only before a storm beckoned to her. There would never be a better time.

And for protection, well, nothing fazed her as long as she had Rocky.

Downstairs in the kitchen she found a note:

"Bet I'm asleep right now. Came home on the red eye hoping to beat the storm. It worked! See you soon. Love, Ted."

Angela pulled open the sliding glass door, stepped out on the deck, whistled for Rocky, and carefully locked the door behind him. She bent over and tied the key into a shoe lace.

"Come on, boy." She started walking. Warm-ups usually lasted five minutes, but today she felt loose and ready. Today she couldn't wait. Before she hit the edge of the yard, she was running.

The trail started out flat. It was slick and colorful with the reds and oranges of damp and fallen leaves. After perhaps a quarter of a mile the hills started, small at first, bigger later. The entire area behind the house was owned by the city, but undeveloped. It extended for a few miles and then, at some invisible line, became state forest. The trees behind her house went on farther than she could ever hope to walk. She knew she should be scared to be out here, even with Rocky, but this was her territory. Besides, she had never met anyone who could keep up with her cross-country on terrain like this. Angela didn't know where it came from, but it had always been like that for her—when she wanted to, she could really fly.

Right then she kept it slow and steady, searching for that hypnotic pace. Rocky lumbered along next to her, tongue out, occasionally shooting out left or right in an attempt to corral unseen animals. At the most distant part of her usual run, the trail came around a corner and made a straight, level two-hundred-yard run just below the lip of a plateau. The path had been artificially cut level into a grade that was too steep to walk on. The result was a vertical dirt and clay wall on one side of the trail and a steep drop off into some tree tops on the other.

Coming around the corner, running along the straight-away with dry leaves curling up into the air in her wake, Angela felt better than she had in a long time. She laughed out loud. A few yards ahead of her, Rocky barked in return. Then the bark turned into that low rumble and Rocky came to sliding halt.

Angela stopped and looked down at her dog. "What is it, boy?"

She looked up at the trail again, ready to scan the area ahead, but any kind of search was a moot point.

There he was, standing in the center of the path. She hadn't so much as heard the leaves rustle. Even at fifty yards, Eric was easy to pick out. He was wearing a dark leather jacket and a pair of bright pink sunglasses.

It seemed impossible to just appear on this section of path, but Angela quickly figured he had come from above, sliding down the incline and then jumping down from the top of the vertical cut into the hill. She realized just as quickly that she couldn't escape the same way: it was effectively a wall over ten feet tall, one made of a compressed, crumbly kind of brown clay, the type that would give way at her first handhold.

But he couldn't get back out that way either. A quick glance over the steep side reinforced her first impression. As far as drops went, it was probably not survivable. This section of the path was effectively a funnel, one way in and one way out. There was only one way to go—she had to turn around, head back, run away. Her body turned halfway, and then Angela made a decision. She had been on the run from this man after their very first meeting, and ever since.

No more. Because there
was
one other direction she could go. Forward.

"Come on, Rocky." She started walking. Rocky didn't really need any encouragement. She could feel the change in his demeanor, from playful to something like human fury. She hadn't known dogs could feel that way, had certainly never seen it in Rocky, but could feel it radiating off him. Could see it, too. He was usually so clumsy for a dog, like a perpetual teenager who doesn't know how long his limbs are. In an instant he had become lithe and loose and powerful. Each footfall seemed measured, streamlined. He was, she realized, stalking.

"Good boy," she said.

Rocky didn't look up. He kept his eyes down-range, and Angela realized she should do the same. One foot fell in front of another. She started to approach. Eric's entire body was so still, it was easy to believe he had never moved at all.

That he had always been here.

Behind the pink plastic, his face was unreadable. When Angela was twenty yards out, she started talking.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, calmly as she could.

He said nothing.

"What are you doing here, Eric?"

Using his name at least got a small movement. He smiled.