Blessed are the Dead (15 page)

 

Chapter 29

A
FTER HIS RITUALISTIC
wiping down of the phone, Johnson asks me if I got his message.

“No. When?”

“Yesterday. Someone else answered your phone. She kept asking me why I killed Jasmine—­she asked me about ten times.” He laughs.

I bite the inside of my lip. “Let me guess. Was her name May?”

“Yeah, that's it. I remembered it because it was a month of the year.”

I try to remain calm. “What did you say to her?”

“I didn't. I just told her to leave a message for you that I called.”

“Well, I never received a message. What were you calling about anyway?”

“I was bored. Got me out of my cell.”

“The editors want me to write a story about your life—­a profile—­so I have a bunch of questions to ask you. What was your childhood like?” I ask. “Did anything happen to you that might have caused you to be who you are?”

He smiles his gap-­toothed, sort of bashful smile.

“Nah. That's what the FBI keeps asking. I had a normal childhood. It has nothing to do my choices as an adult. The feds told me if I agree to a bunch of interviews about my life, and they use me as a case study, they might be able to cut me a deal.”

“Are you serious?” I hadn't realized the FBI was talking to him so much. It's been three days since they found Jasmine's skull. Nobody has charged him with her murder. He was right. There doesn't appear to be any evidence pointing to him.

“Yeah, so why should I give all of this to you for free?”

“Because you want my story about you to be fair?”

That is apparently good enough because he continues. His eye wanders as he gives me details of his life, and I look down, scribbling what he says as quickly as I can.

He was born April 20, 1958, to Dean and Sharon Johnson. His father was in the U.S. Marines and his mother a homemaker. He gives an odd smile when I ask about his mother and balls his hand into a fist in his lap.

“She was Suzie Homemaker. Just like any other mother during that time. Cooked and cleaned and all that shit.”

I try not to look at the fist he has made and press him to talk more about his mother, but he changes the subject. That's okay. I'll come back to mother.

“We were a working-­class family. I played baseball. I hunted, camped, rode motocross. My dad would wake me up at three in the morning to take me fishing sometimes. He coached Little League. Playing ball always made me happy. I used to play baseball and football in the streets with the other kids in the neighborhood.”

His life sounds mundane. Normal. I ask more questions. I'm digging. There must be something else. I want to go back to his mother. There was something there. But I'll wait.

“Was anything in your childhood rough?”

“No tougher than anyone else's. If I did something wrong, I got whupped with a wooden spoon or a belt. The kindergarten teacher once called up my dad to complain since it hurt for me to sit down, but he just hung up on her.”

I don't say that nowadays, his teacher would have reported it to child protective ser­vices.

“Would you say it was physical abuse?”

“I'm not sure what would constitute physical abuse. I think it was better in the old days when there was discipline and kids were spanked when they misbehaved.”

“Do you remember the times you were spanked?”

“Hell yeah. I was whooped all the time. It was part of growing up during that time. Shit, my earliest memory is getting smacked when I was three.”

“What for?”

“How am I supposed to remember? I was three, for Christ's sakes.”

“What about sexual abuse?”

“No.” His answers are so matter-­of-­fact. No matter what I ask, he appears unruffled and almost as if he's enjoying talking about his life.

I ask him when he first had a girlfriend.

“We were both fifteen. Mostly we just hung out together at the empty lot with the other kids in the neighborhood, smoking cigarettes and trying to find older kids to buy us beer.”

“Did you have sex with her?”

Suddenly, a look in his eyes freezes me. I barely breathe. It only lasts a few seconds, but it seems longer. For a minute, he seems to stare right through me. “Yeah.”

He will not elaborate. It's almost as if I imagined it—­that hard glint in his eyes—­but I know I didn't. I've never had this strong a reaction from him before, so I push on.

“What did she look like?”

“She was just a little thing,” he says, and his eye starts to wander as he remembers. The moment is gone. The blank look is back on his face. “Everyone used to think she was someone's little sister, but she was in our grade.”

“What color hair did she have?”

“Brown, like yours,” he says, then meets my eyes. “Like Caterina's.”

I freeze. I don't even breathe. His eyes are probing, and he tilts his head a bit. “But maybe Caterina's was a little bit different, a little darker than yours.”

He's just guessing, I think. He saw my reaction, and he's adjusting for it.

“I think you're bluffing,” I say. “I don't think you know anything about Caterina. I don't think you took her.”

His eyes are empty, a chasm of nothingness that sends chills down my spine. He suddenly seems dangerous to me, even though a thick pane of glass separates us. But I wait, not dropping my gaze.

“Well, it was a long time ago,” he finally says. “Maybe I didn't take her after all. Sometimes they all get mixed up in my head, you know.”

“Tell me something that proves you took Caterina. One thing, and I'll believe you.”

I don't know if I mean the words, but I need him to give up something that will help me know one way or the other. I'm nearly sick with frustration.

“She cried for her mama for two days straight.”

I close my eyes for a second and swallow. “Any little girl would have done that. Tell me something specific to her, to my sister.”

“You're just going to have to trust me.”

“Not good enough.”

“Well, there was something about a jump rope, if I remember correctly.”

I drop the phone involuntarily. His eyes widen. I try to cover my reaction by faking a coughing fit. I bring my fist to my mouth and hold up a finger to tell him to wait a second. I walk over to a dark corner, trying to get out of his sight line, continuing my fake coughing fit. How could he know that?

I look back over. He's craning his neck to see me. I see his bulging eyes, one wandering madly, watching me, and I feel bile rise into my mouth. I give a few more strangled-­sounding coughs. Pull it together. Keep him talking.

I pick up the phone again. “Sorry. Cough drop almost went down the wrong pipe. What else? What else can you tell me about Caterina?”

“That's enough for now,” he says. “Don't you want to know about my life for your story?”

Fine. We can play that way. I look down at the list of questions I compiled to ask him.

“Do you do drugs?”

“I used to smoke weed and do coke. In the last ten years, I've been in a pretty happy peaceful place ever since I quit.”

“Are you happy right now? Locked up?”

“Yeah, I'm still happy.”

“How can you be happy? Don't you have a guilty conscience for all the things you've done?” I try to keep the outrage out of my voice.

“Why do you need a clear conscience to be happy?” he says. “I believe in basic, simple world peace through individual happiness. That's what I learned from Buddhism.”

It's so absurd, I move on to another question.

“When did you start studying Buddhism?”

“When I joined the military.”

“Military? What branch?” I make a note to look up his ser­vice records.

“Enlisted the day I turned eighteen. Army. Yep, the old U S of A government was the one trained me to kill. What do you think of that? Good use of taxpayer money?”

I look at his emaciated frame, and he must see the doubt in my eyes.

“I didn't always look like this. My motorcycle wreck fucked me up. I used to be in good shape,” he says. “Can't do shit now.”

“Were you honorably discharged?” He looks away. I'm going to assume that's a no.

I glance at my watch. The guard is going to come in any minute. Now's the time to ask about his mother.

“I always ask ­people I profile to share one memory of their mothers,” I lie.

His left eye wanders, and his other eye looks off into space. His hand goes back down to his crotch, and he flexes it into a fist. Squeeze. Unsqueeze.

“Right after my grandma's funeral. Found my ma lying in bed. Had her hat and shoes on still. She was crying.”

As Johnson tells the story, his eyes seem to lose focus the more he gets absorbed in the memory. I don't want to jar him out of it, so I barely move my hands as I take notes, without looking at my notebook and keeping my eyes on him.

“So I come beside her and pat her arm, you know, to comfort her?”

I nod.

“I tell her ‘It's okay, Mama. Don't be sad.' And she just pulled me up on the bed with her and sort of hugged me and was laying on my arm some. She laid there so long my arm fell asleep. But I didn't care.”

He stops and gives me a wan smile.

Was that it? “What happened then?”

“Dad came home. She jumped up and started fixing herself up.” Johnson stopped, and his dead black pit eyes refocused on me.

“And?” I prod.

“She asked me what I was doing in her bed. I told her she pulled me up there. She called me a liar and whupped me.”

When he finishes, his eyes look down at the desk in front of him. Just then, the guard unlocks the door.

On my drive home, I realize that during several parts of my interview, I almost forgot Johnson was a self-­proclaimed killer. This realization—­that I could be talking to a stone-­cold serial killer like I'd talk to my own brother—­disturbs me more than nearly anything else he told me today. Except the jump rope. How did he know about that? Was it in the newspaper at the time? I remember the thick folder in my desk. The one that contains the newspaper clips from Caterina's kidnapping. Maybe it's time I take a look at them.

Not today, though. Maybe tomorrow.

 

Chapter 30

C
HUCK
H
ARRIS HAS
a raspy, longtime smoker's voice.

He's a former neighbor of Johnson's in San Jose I'm talking to for my profile piece. The news research department found him for me by searching under Johnson's old addresses. He's a fifty-­five-­year-­old auto mechanic who helped Johnson work on his car while the two smoked and drank beer, Harris tells me.

“I'm sorry I don't know what else to tell you,” he says. “I really don't know the guy.”

“That's okay. Just tell me what you can.”

“He was cool until he had his motorcycle accident. He was laid up in the hospital for a ­couple months. When he got out, he limped, said his hip hurt like hell. But it was more than that. You could see it in his eyes. They were wild and crazy. He was different. I knew he was going downhill, but I didn't know how badly. That accident had something to do with it—­it's not just head problems.”

After a few seconds of silence, Harris adds, “But if he likes little girls, he can kiss my ass.”

M
Y BIG PLAN
for today is to go see what the mother of a serial killer looks like. I don't know if I believe Jack Dean Johnson took Caterina. I don't even know if he really took Jasmine. But I do know that he took another little girl and wasn't going to bring her back alive. Even if he didn't take Caterina or Jasmine, I know deep down inside he is truly a killer. Even if he didn't kill the dozen or so ­people he claims, he has killed before.

But what exactly has made him this way? Maybe his mother will help shed some light on this.

T
IME TO MEET
Mommie Dearest.

The address in my notebook matches the numbers on the gray condominium in front of my parked car. The condominiums are in a quiet residential neighborhood in San Jose that is shaded with old trees. I peer through my windshield at the windows of the house where Sharon Johnson lives. I take a deep breath and walk to the door. It opens almost immediately after I knock.

The woman standing before me is whippet thin and only comes up to my shoulder. Her eyes are crystal blue. They are the first things you notice. A slash of peach lipstick is smeared on her thin lips. She wears beige slacks with sharp creases down the legs and an ivory blouse buttoned up to her neck. Her hair is so blond it is almost white and is pulled back into a neat bun. She looks both scared and mean. Like a little yappy dog trying to act tough around a German shepherd. She might be little, but she's not afraid to bite.

“Mrs. Johnson? I'm with the
Bay Herald,
” I say, handing her my card. “I'm doing a story about your son, Jack. I talked to him but wanted to also talk to you.”

She looks me up and down, then wearily opens the door and gestures for me to come in. Inside, it smells like furniture polish in the tidy living room. She perches on a love seat underneath a picture of Jesus. A Bible sits on the end table between her chair and the couch where I sit. Gold curtains are neatly tied back from the windows, and vacuum marks crisscross the beige carpet. A clock on the mantel is ticking loudly. There are no photos anywhere.

“Go on ahead,” she says before I even take out my notebook. “I'm sure I'm not going to be able to help you any. You say you talked to Jack? Of course he would talk to you.”

The way she says it makes me feel dirty, as if I've done something wrong. I pull my blazer closed as she gives me the once-­over, her gaze lingering on the three-­inch heels of my pumps.

“Ma'am, when I spoke to your son, he described a pretty typical childhood filled with Little League practice and fishing trips. I wondered if something might have happened to him later on that . . . changed him.”

She begins fiddling with a doily on the arm of her chair. “I honestly don't know why Jack is the way he is. We gave him everything a boy could need. He never wanted for anything.”

She dabs her eyes as if to wipe away tears, but when she glances at me, her eyes are dry.

“Ma'am, I have to ask these questions. It's my job.”

I try the question again. “Did anything traumatic ever happen to Jack when he was a child? Did he hit his head? Did he have problems at school?”

She pinches her lips together and shakes her head. “No. He was always a good boy when he was young. But he did give us a bit of trouble in high school, but that's just because he couldn't keep his privates in his pants. He thought he was in love with some little floozy. But I put a stop to that.”

I hope my face doesn't convey my surprise at her sudden vehemence at this memory. I try to sound sympathetic.

“It must have been hard for you to see him with a girl you didn't approve of.”

“Well, it was. I grounded him for a month. He had to read the Bible aloud every night on his knees in the kitchen. And then I had a little talk with the girl's mother. By the time he was off restriction, the little whore was going to another school.”

Whoa. Again, I work hard to keep a blank face, free of reaction to her words—­especially her choice of words.

“Do you think having him read the Bible helped?”

She looks at me like I'm stupid.

“Why, of course it did. That's the only way to fight off what Satan wants us to do. What else could we have done?”

“Well, I'm not a mother, but it seems to me that most teenage boys go through that stage,” I say, but can't believe I'm actually in a position where I am defending Jack Dean Johnson in a way.

“It's a sin.” She starts speaking faster. “The Bible says that having sex before marriage is wrong. Those urges are sinful, and it was our job as parents to correct that.”

“Did anything like that ever happen again?”

“No, he was able to control his sinful nature after that . . . until now, I guess,” she says.

Sharon Johnson's eyes are darting around, and she shakes her head and adjusts herself on the couch, smoothing the legs of her pants with her palms. Johnson told me in jail that his father was dead. This might be my last question, but I need to ask it.

“Ma'am, I know this is painful, but I have to ask you this—­Did Jack's father abuse him in any way? Maybe yell too much or hit him too hard?”

She stands. I push on.

“Did his father drink a lot?”

She raises her arm to point to the door. Her hand is shaking, and her lips are pursed.

“It's time you leave, young lady.”