Hallowed Read online

  I lowered my head. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

  “I’ll tell her you stopped by. Okay?”

  Figuring that was my cue, I took my leave.

  Chapter 8 (Monday, October 5th)

  Monday at band practice, Martin entered the hall accompanied by four or five people. He politely excused himself and retrieved his case from the slot next to mine.

  “Looks like you’ve become popular,” I observed.

  “Yeah,” he grunted. “A lot of morbid dudes at this school.”

  I went about the rituals of putting my horn together, then asked, “You’re okay, right?”

  “Me? Yeah. I’m fine.”

  Figured I should change the subject. “You gonna take another run at Brent Jacobs after school?” Brent was first chair cornet. Good grades. Student council president. You know the type. Born to overachieve.

  “That’s today, huh?” He closed his locker and waited for me to walk out onto the field with him. “Nah, I better get straight home. The funeral’s tomorrow and then we have to go to my aunt’s and sit shiva.”

  “Do what?”

  “Sorry, it’s a Jewish thing. Sit shiva. It’s the seven days of mourning after the funeral. Friends and relatives just sorta hang out at the house, y’know, just to keep everyone company.”

  “I didn’t know you were Jewish, Martin?”

  “We are and my aunt is, but Grace didn’t practice. Not since she left home six months ago. She was into all kinds of things, just not Judaism.”

  Funny, how I’d kinda assumed everyone was Christian, like my family. It occurred to me how little I really knew about the world outside my little bubble.

  During marching practice, I kept checking the bleachers for Claudia. She never showed. I looked for her during the day, but didn’t see her in the hall once. I was starting to wonder if she’d even gone to school that day.

  During the course of the day, I began to feel bad about the things I had said to Claudia and regretted letting her walk away Saturday evening. When the final bell rang, I passed by the counselor’s office to see Mrs. Wicke on the way out to my car. I was planning on going in and asking if Claudia had stayed home sick, when I saw Claudia herself leaning against the counter in the inner office, staring out into the hallway. I raised a hand as I passed. Not only did she ignore me, but she turned her back on me.

  That evening instead of going straight home I went to the library. If I got home too early, I got sucked into whatever recipe Dad was experimenting with that Monday. Since he’d been retired, Dad had volunteered to cook every night. After a couple of weeks of chili and grilled steak, Mom let him off the hook, though she still gave him Monday as his day to go nuts.

  So far, if his success ratio of good to bad was a major league batting average, he would been sent back to the minors.

  When I was done with my geometry and American History homework, I looked up “serial killers” in their system, just for kicks. I figured I should educate myself just in case Grace Fischer’s death was indeed murder and not just Claudia’s paranoia. In response to my query, I got “See Abnormal Psychology.” The ones I found were essentially textbooks, as dry and clinical as rubbing alcohol. So, I resigned myself to trying the Internet.

  When I got over to the pair of ancient computers with internet access, I found Claudia’s dark shape slumped over the first keyboard, her head propped up atop the heels of both hands and eyes cemented to the glowing screen not five inches in front of her. Since there were only two computers, I pulled out the chair next to her.

  “Let me guess. You’re avoiding your mother again?”

  She stiffened but refused to look up.

  “This library has absolutely nothing on serial killers.”

  She cocked her head at me and scoffed. “Of course not. That’s why I’ve had to build my own collection.” She sat up and stretched her back out. “But you didn’t come here to do research, because that would be a waste of time... and gas, right?”

  “I came here to do homework,” I said, ignoring her snipe. To make my point, I sat my backpack down on the floor with a thump. “Just curious about this whole serial killer thing, s’all.”

  Continuing to face the monitor, Claudia asked with indifference, “What do you want to know?”

  “I just want to know the basics, like what constitutes a serial killer to begin with.”

  “That’s easy. Three or more victims with a cooling off period between the murders.”

  “Then we’ve got no serial killer.” I dropped into the seat next to her. “There’s been only one body. Grace Fischer.”

  Claudia slowly turned her head and shot me a glare so intense I had to look away. I smoothly covered up by turning to the screen and logging into the system.

  “Yes, granted they’ve only found the one body so far. That doesn’t mean there won’t be any more. We’ve had disappearances. A record number historically for this area.” She turned back to the screen. “I’m trying to stay ahead of the curve, y’see, and for your information, Sadie Nayar was one of the five I already knew about, so that article in the paper was not news to me.”

  “So, give me the basics on serial killers. Boil it down for me.”

  “Okay, here’s some something general you should know. Serial killers come in two flavors: psychopaths and psychotics. A good contrast would be Ted Bundy and David Berkowitz.” Claudia stepped around behind me and typed a subject into the search engine over my shoulder.

  “Berkowitz?” I murmured, turning my head so that our noses were only centimeters apart. I could smell something vanilla-ey. I imagined it must be her hair.

  “Yes, the Son of Sam. Try and focus, please.”

  I turned briskly back to the monitor.

  “Bundy was considered to be a psychopath.” A page popped up on the screen in front of us and Claudia read: “Psychopaths are often characterized as lacking empathy for others and manipulative.”

  “So we’re talking about you essentially,” I quipped.

  Ignoring me, she continued: “Other traits include impulsiveness, irresponsibleness, overinflated self-worth, selfishness, and promiscuity. There’s this psychologist named Robert Hare who has a checklist of twenty traits.” She stopped reading and glanced at me to see if she still had my attention. “Psychopaths can be pretty charming and cold blooded, essentially doing whatever it takes to get what they want without caring who they hurt in the process. But keep in mind that they’re not always violent.”

  As I glanced back at her again, I could see that familiar spark in her eye beginning to turn to a flame. “Ted Bundy was very educated, very charming. He used the art of pity to lure women away from crowds by using an arm cast to give the illusion that he was injured and needed their help. When he got them alone. Whack! He used the cast as a weapon. He’d drag them away and rape and kill them later, by either bludgeoning them or strangling them. Sometimes he’d take the corpses and...”

  “Okay, okay, okay. I got the picture.”

  My mind had flashed to those crime-scene photos in Claudia’s books. I felt a little sick. It was one thing to see this kind of stuff in movies knowing it was all make-up and Hollywood special effects, but faced with the reality of a living, breathing human being offering to help an injured stranger then repaid with death for their kindness. The basic immorality of the concept seemed almost more monstrous than the graphic reality of the pictures.

  Oblivious to my discomfort, Claudia continued her dissertation, resting her chin on my shoulder. “Psychosis on the other hand is essentially a ‘break with reality’ and is different from psychopathy, because psychotics have difficulty with day to day activities, especially social contact, unlike psychopaths like Bundy, who seem quite normal and hold down regular jobs. He actually worked for a suicide crisis center with Ann Rule.”

  “Should I know who Ann Rule is?”

  “Crime author, but that’s not important. Okay, let’s take Berkowitz for instance,” she continued, pulling a
way and taking the chair opposite me again, leaning forward with obvious excitement. “They believe he was psychotic. Unlike Bundy, he was socially out-of-place and couldn’t hold down a steady job. As a child, he was a bully and liked to start fires, which by the way is one of the three MacDonald triad. Starting fires, that is. Not bullying.”

  “Right, the McDonald triad: Big Mac, fries and apple pie,” I mumbled under my breath, but since Claudia was on a roll now, she wouldn’t have heard even if I’d have shouted it.

  “Also, Berkowitz believed that his neighbor’s dog was possessed and had commanded him to murder. ‘See Spot? See Spot Kill?’”

  The only thing that I could “see” was that Claudia really knew her stuff--not just the sensational things that drew morbid fascination from people who enjoyed watching the kinds of movies where the villain succeeds in killing the good guy at the end. Claudia knew the psychology at the core of these caricatures. She’d done her research.

  Claudia gave me a frown. “Why are you doing that?”

  I shook my head. “What?”

  “Humming.”

  Until Claudia said it, I hadn’t realized. Oddly enough, I’d been humming unconsciously for the last few minutes of our conversation.

  About an hour later, I dropped Claudia off at home, saving Mrs. Wicke a trip. Claudia told me to come upstairs and if I were still interested, she would lend me a couple of books from her “collection.”

  “Here’s the thing,” I told her. “When I came by with the newspaper article about the disappearance of the girl, your mom told me to back off.”

  Claudia threw a minor conniption fit. “She did what?”

  “I mean, I understand where she’s coming from. She’s just trying to protect…”

  She made an exasperated growling sound and started up the steps. “Fine, I’ll bring a couple of books for you to lunch tomorrow then. Meet me in the bleachers.”

  And just like that, my education in amateur serial killer profiling was about to begin.

  Chapter 9 (Tuesday-Friday, October 6-9)

  We met up in the bleachers on Tuesday, in the shade of the announcer’s box, with our brown bags, the first day of what would become a ritual of sorts. Lunch and a crash course in abnormal psychology.

  One of the first things I learned during that first lunch was that the stereotype of the American serial killer was that he was white, male, and between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. It turns out that this was a stereotype that happened to play out as a statistical truth. African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians were outnumbered by nearly eighty-five percent.

  On Wednesday, I learned that the FBI tends to categorize serial killers into two types: organized and disorganized. The organized tended to be of high intelligence and methodical, usually covering their tracks with a certain amount of knowledge of police procedure or forensic science. These are the ones that keep the semblance of a normal life. They have relationships and jobs and generally “fit in.”

  A fellow named Ted Bundy was an organized type.

  The disorganized are of low intelligence and are more impulsive than methodical. They are creatures of opportunity and usually leave the bodies of their victims where they were murdered instead of disposing of the corpse, as the organized would do. They are the outcasts of society. These are the ones that neighbors often describe as “a loner” or “quiet and creepy.”

  Interestingly enough, as the killings progress, some organized types will become disorganized. Emotion plays a part. Often the killer will go from killing at a distance, in an effort to remain somewhat detached, to using closer range weapons, increasing the intimacy of the act. The Zodiac killer, for instance, went from using a gun to using a knife. As the intimacy and passion of the kills increase, so will the disorganization of the act, according to one of the books Claudia had given me.

  On Wednesday, as Claudia removed the entirety of her lunch from her brown bag, a can of Mountain Dew and a plastic baggy of Lucky Charms cereal, she asked me, “So what kind of UNSUB do you think we have here? Organized or disorganized?”

  “UNSUB?”

  “Unknown subject,” she answered with a disinterested murmur.

  “Y’know, this is starting to feel like an actual class.”

  “The difference is this is information that you can actually use in the real world. So, which is it? Organized or disorganized?” she repeated. “Fact number one. The corpse was found in a ravine.”

  Claudia always used terms like “body” and “corpse.” I hadn’t managed to remain quite as detached as her.

  “If Grace was specifically placed there, it sounds organized,” I offered. “Though, maybe it happened along the bike trail and the ditch was the most convenient place, which would suggest disorganized.”

  “It’s possible that the killer had weighed the body down and dumped the body in the main river that the ravine drains into. Y’know, there was a pretty hard rain a week or two before the body was found. The river might have swelled and the body might have backed up out of the river where it was originally dumped.”

  “In that case, organized.”

  “Okay. Fact two. The victim was strangled.”

  “Sounds like disorganized to me.”

  “Actually, it could be either. What we know for sure is that our UNSUB likes to get intimate with his victim,” Claudia suggested, carefully separating and eating the Lucky Charms cereal nuggets from the marshmallow bits, which she saved for last. “Either that, or this is not his first, and the other victims have yet to turn up.”

  By the end of lunch on Thursday, our sessions had become such a routine that I was starting to get used to having her around and had assumed that we would be getting together on the weekend as well.

  “So, I was thinking that maybe we should drive out to Abner and take a look at the crime scene this weekend.”

  Claudia got this expression of forced calm, like a first-time player’s awkward attempt at a “poker face.” She scooped a handful of Cookie Crisp cereal--her choice of nourishment for the day--out of a plastic baggy and dumped it into her mouth. “I have plans,” she managed between crunches.

  This sparse explanation left me with the chore of asking the obvious follow-up question. “So, what’s going on?”

  “I’m going to a movie with some old friends on Saturday.” She snatched a glance up at me. “From DFW.” Then she looked back down at the book she had been reading on the Green River Killer.

  I shrugged. “If I didn’t have the football game, we could’ve gotten together on Friday. How about Sunday then?”

  “I might be getting home late on Saturday, so I’ll probably be sleeping in late on Sunday.”

  Minutes later, we split up and went our separate ways to our next class. All the way to American History, I kept thinking: This movie with friends must be pretty important that this life-or-death investigation can be put on hold another week.

  By the time Friday rolled around, I had worked up a pretty good bellyful of resentment. So much so, that I skipped lunch with her and went to the practice room in the band hall to study my music for the game that night. When the end of the day finally arrived, I didn’t even stop by Claudia’s locker to see if she needed a ride home, like I had for the last few days. Instead, I went straight home, showered, got into my uniform, and got ready to be on the band bus by six.

  The away game in Lockhart passed uneventfully. Sonny complained about the fact that his older sister Adrian got to go up to Six Flags in San Antonio that weekend with three of her college friends and his parents never let him do anything. Greg again proclaimed his undying lust for Sonny’s sister and wondered aloud what she looked like riding a roller coaster with her long blond hair waving out behind her.

  Greg fancies that he’s got the heart of a poet.

  Also, he enjoys watching Sonny squirm.

  The uncomfortable and bumpy ride on the bus was thankfully a short twenty minute ride. We had a decent team this year but were still beat
en handily with a score of 21 to 10. No excuses, although in their defense, the guys on the other team looked old enough to be supporting kids in college.

  On the way home, Greta Ventnor started a conversation about Grace Fischer in the back of the band bus. “Well, I figure that it was a jealous boyfriend or something.”

  “Nah, it was a mad strangler,” Sonny quipped.

  Bridgette Sullivan, who was sitting with Greta, glanced back and shot Sonny a glare. “You’re so full of it, Bertrand.”

  “They’re saying that there were things done to the body,” Sonny murmured.

  “What do you mean things?” Bridgette slid her legs out into the aisle and leaned over. She was a twirler and one of the few girls whose entire body wasn’t completely covered by the obnoxious blue and gold sequined atrocities that passed for uniforms that the rest of us were forced to wear. I was just noticing for something like the thirty-fifth time that night what nice legs she had when she glanced up at me… and caught me staring. I looked away a little too quickly.

  “Yeah, I heard that too,” Brent Jacobs said from his seat across the aisle where Nathan Graham sat sound asleep next to him.

  “What did you hear?”

  “That there were all kinds of deviant sexual things done to her.”

  Greg made a face. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Everybody’s making such a big deal about all this,” I grumbled.

  Bridgette turned to me, lifting her pert little chin ever so slightly. “So, what do you think, Mr. Graves?”

  Sonny and Greg looked over. Brent and Greta’s eyes found me as well.

  I swallowed awkwardly.

  “One tree doesn’t make a forest.”

  Sonny and Greg gave each other looks of amusement.

  “Okay, Buddha,” Brent chuckled and shut his eyes, marking the end of his interest in the affairs of a lowly non-senior.

  Without the hint of a smirk, Bridgette gave me a strong parting glance that seemed to hold me responsible for further conversation with her in the future.