Hallowed (8 page)

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 beaten 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.

After the game, I stopped by Comeaux’s Grocery to pick up my paycheck.  The other guys were putting in a late night as the weekly stock that usually came in on Thursday morning had come in early Friday morning and they hadn’t been able to get much of the stock out during the day in between dealing with customers.  The storage area had been packed with boxes, and Mr. Comeaux was paying overtime to those who had been willing to stay after closing and get all the boxed stock out onto the shelves.  It was a quarter to midnight by the time I got there and only a few of the guys were still around putting up the last of the stock, including Don-Tom.

Donald St. Thomas had been unlucky enough to be born to parents with an odd sense of humor.  Mr. and Mrs. St. Thomas had three sons of which Donald was the youngest.  His two older brothers, legendary hell-raisers in Haven, notorious for their rambunctious high school years, for which stories were still swapped around the locker room, were named Thomas and Jonathan respectively.  With names like that, begging for creative shortening, friends had taken to calling them, of course, Tom-Tom and Jon-Tom.  After years of fighting his legacy and denying that he was anything like his party-animal brothers, Donald had ultimately come to terms with the name with which he had been destined to be burdened: Don-Tom.

He and Rob Wallace were nearly finished and his portable radio was cranked up to the classic radio station out of Austin. 
Dark Side of the Moon’s
“Brain Damage” had just begun and Roger Waters had announced that a lunatic was on the grass. 

Don-Tom was a senior at Haven High.  When I’d first met him, he seemed a little distant.  Almost clueless.  He was a hard guy to engage in conversation, but when things got quiet and the work got monotonous, Don-Tom began to open up.

Once we’d gotten into a conversation about life after high school, while we were knocking out the breakfast food aisle.  When I had asked him what he planned to do after he graduated, he replied, “Not a clue, but one thing’s for sure.  If I don’t take another class as long as I live, it’ll be too soon.”

Judging from his brothers, I figured he was just another beer-drinking, truck-driving type, living for the day when he could move out of his parents’ house so he could start living the life of abandon.  But, of course, I didn’t really know him.

“What are you interested enough in doing that you’d do it voluntarily for the rest of your life?” he asked me.

I hadn’t reached that age yet where the question of my future plans would get irritating, and I would definitely never have it phrased in quite the same unique manner.  Instead, I found the subject intriguing.  It was the first time I recall actually verbalizing my interests in terms of whether or not they were marketable dreams or just potential money pits.

“Well, my mom expects me to go to college,” I replied.  “But I think Dad’s always expected me to follow in his footsteps and become a cop.”

“Yeah, that may be what
they
want, but what do
you
want?”

No one had ever asked me that before.  “Y’know, I’m not real sure.  Lately, I’ve been interested in the concept of justice.”

Don-Tom had glanced away from his work on the cereal shelf for the first time.  His flipped his long black hair out of his eyes.  “Justice, huh?  Are you talking about moral or legal justice?”

“I guess, I don’t know.  What’s the difference?”

“The judge is the difference.  Do you answer to man or God?”

I distinctly remember feeling that question sink into my bones and make my head swim with the implications.  I’d never considered that there might be such thing as judgment beyond this material world.  The concept staggered my teenage brain.

I gave a shrug as I continued my stocking.  “Both, I guess.  Y’know, I’ve been going to my uncle’s church a lot lately.”

“Now there’s something they can’t teach you at the university.  Hell, they hardly even teach ethics anymore,” he scoffed.  “Giving tens of thousands of dollars to educators whose knowledge is subjective seems a little foolish to me.  Real knowledge can’t be purchased.”  This seemed to amuse him so much that he began to chuckle to himself and shake his head.

“So I take it you’re just going to get a full-time job after you graduate?”

Don-Tom again turned to me.  He gazed through me, past the store entrance, and somewhere into the distant future.  “I think I’d like to travel the world.”

He then turned back to his work.  “There are so many things we can’t imagine because we’ve got such a limited perspective.  Take religion for instance.”  He gave me a look, then seemed to think twice about what he had been about to say.

“What?” I asked.

“I’m not very religious, y’know.”  He shrugged.  “I’m spiritual.”

Of course, I’ve heard people say this before, but I’d never been completely sure what they had meant.  I figured Don-Tom was as good a sounding board as anyone, so I asked, “What do you mean?”

“Organized religion is…”  He gave me another look.  “I know your uncle’s a priest and all that, so I don’t mean any offense to him, but… all the rituals and rules, y’know, like tithing and fasting, it just feels to me like those tests they used to give us in first grade.  Y’know, the ones that felt like busy work and all the time you felt like you could be doing something more constructive.”

I found myself nodding more at my recognition at classes like this, though not completely sure how it applied to my uncle’s religion; then I realized that this was how I still thought of it.  “My uncle’s religion.”  Not my parents’ religion, nor my own, but my uncle’s.

“You’re a smart guy, Paul,” Don-Tom continued.  “Here’s what I think, it’s a just balm for the masses.  It’s a governor motor to keep those capable of chaos from going off the deep end and taking somebody with them.  I can follow the rules of society without any help from a book, thank you.”

“If they don’t come from a book, where do they come from?”

He never stopped stocking as he answered, “Me.  They come from inside me.”

“So you came up with these rules on your own?”

I was honestly interested, not attempting to challenge him in any way, yet the look he gave me was one of disoriented confusion; a look that said, “Come again, pal?”

St. Thomas had completely abandoned his work and was wiping his hands on his uniform as if he were about to wrestle something and didn’t want to lose his grip.  “Look, Paul, hundreds of thousands of lives were taken over the rules in the Bible.”

“But doesn’t that make the interpreter wrong and not the text?  Do all those Islamic terrorists make the Koran wrong?”

He turned to me as if about to rebut my answer then just glazed over.  “Huh!” was the only word he uttered.  “I gotta say, that’s a pretty honest question?”  He silently began breaking down the boxes we had emptied, seemingly mulling over the conversation we’d just had.  “Y’know what I like about you, Graves?  You don’t get offended like most people I talk to about this stuff.”

“Hell, I like talking about these things.  Helps me clarify my understanding better.”

Remembering this conversation now, I stopped over to say hello as he finished up stocking the last of the canned tomato section.

“Hey, Don-Tom.”

He took one glance at my navy-blue pants with the bright gold stripe up the side and said, “What did I tell you about coming here in your nightclubbing attire, Graves?”

“Just got back from the Lockhart game.  We lost.  21 to 10.”

“Yeah, Lockhart’s got some big boys, don’t they?”

“And fast.  They just about broke Randy in half out there.”

Don-Tom rose and worked the kinks out of his back.

“Don-Tom, you ever hear of Spiritualism?”

“What’s that?”

“Y’know, séances, Oujia boards, talking to the dead.”

He shrugged.  “Y’know that kind of stuff…”  He shook his head.  “There are some things I’m not curious about because common sense tells me that no one really knows the answer.  Not having an answer sometimes is worse than never having asked the question to begin with, y’dig?”

I nodded, pretending to understand, but I didn’t have a clue.  Instead I told him that I was going to the restroom.

“Hey, while you’re back there, can you make sure we got all the stock out?”

I stepped into the back, the sound of Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” fading away as I entered the darkness of the storeroom.  Mr. Comeaux must have shut the breakers off in preparation for closing because the ordinarily dim fluorescents were dead.  The frigid air from the refrigerated cases on the other side of the wall to my right was just cold enough to make my breath visible.

The light from the store leaked across the floor but barely touched the fifteen foot high ceiling above.  I peered into the darkness and tried to detect any boxes they may have overlooked.  A few crates of milk sat just beside the dairy section.  I set to work putting them away, my eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness enough, that I could see further back into the storeroom.  Sure enough, my eyes seemed to detect one lone box pushed up against the left-hand wall about five yards away.  I started forward into the almost complete darkness, feeling my way toward the box.

From the other side of the wall, I could dimly hear Neil Peart go into his blistering drum solo when I heard a whisper in the black depths of the storeroom.

That stopped me cold.

“Hello?” I barked.

No response. 

It was late and now, I found myself aggravated with Comeaux for turning the lights out before everyone was out.  He was always trying to conserve electricity and save a few bucks.  Someday someone was going to hurt themselves tripping around in the darkness and he’d lose the store in a lawsuit.

Then I heard it again.

Paul.

All the blood drained from my legs and I stood frozen in place.

“Yeah?”  The voice that emerged from my lips seemed to come from a five-year-old.

Then it struck me.  I hadn’t seen Rob Wallace around.  “Starship” Wallace was infamous for pulling pranks that only he could appreciate.  That freaking idiot was probably goofing on me right now.

The blood that had so recently abandoned my legs flooded my face.  Anger fueled the last ten steps as I charged into the darkness, seized the box in both my arms, and lifted it atop my shoulders.  I stood there a few seconds longer and peered into the impenetrable darkness of the bowels of the storeroom, daring whoever had spoken to try it again.  The box on my shoulders was light, probably toilet paper or towels, but the corner would hurt just as much coming down on the head of some wiseass.

There was no movement that I could detect.  The only sound I could hear was the drip drop of a slow leak, probably one of the compressors from the refrigerated cases slowly giving up the ghost.

“Paul?”

I swung around and came very close to pitching the box at my boss.

Comeaux gave me a look of understanding and snatched the box out of my hands.  “You here for your paycheck?” he snapped, attempting to hide the blooming smirk on his face.  “Tell Wallace and St. Thomas to get punched out.  Those guys are gonna suck me dry with this overtime.”

After I picked up my paycheck from Comeaux’s office, I met “Starship,” coming out of the staff break room, as he pulled on his jacket and hefted his canvas backpack to his shoulder.  “See you on the other side of midnight.”  Rob was kind of a techno-geek and took every opportunity to lord his knowledge over the rest of those of us.

“Nice job, man, setting that last box all the way on the other side of the storeroom,” I said to him.  “I nearly killed myself stumbling around in there.”

He gave me a blank look, shrugged, and started past me.  “Whatever, man.”

“Next time you try and scare someone, try to be a little more creative, okay?”

“Fascinating, Captain.”  He glanced back and lifted his brow at me in Spock-like fashion.  “I’ve been here in the break room for the last fifteen minutes, talking to my girlfriend on the cell phone.”

On the way out, I passed by the storeroom one more time and took a glance back into the darkness.  Between the apocalyptic dreams and now the voices, I was wondering if I had finally lost my mind.