In The Falling Light (38 page)

Carla wanted to kill someone when she
received the first correspondence. The second one made her want to
die.

“Tell me about Anita Rodriguez,” Trent
said.

Carla stiffened, but kept her face a stone
mask.
No, please don’t.

“She was your seventh victim,” the producer
went on, “and you kept her the longest. Why?”

Kelvin Finch’s eyes looked past the camera
and into memory, and the faintest ghost of a smile crossed his
lips. “I was drawn to her,” he said, his voice wistful, as if he
was a man talking about a love affair from his younger days. “I
thought she was beautiful, and she had the most amazing, big dark
eyes.”

Finch proceeded to talk about Anita
Rodriguez, and what he had done to her. Trent Whitsome had advised
him before they started that anything too graphic would simply be
edited out and never see any screen time, and so far during the
interview Finch had kept it vague. Now, however, it was as if he
could no longer contain himself, and he explained in heartbreaking
detail his “romance” with and ultimate disposal of the
seven-year-old.

Against the wall, Carla’s eyes bored into
her daughter’s killer. His words washed over her in great, crashing
waves of pain, and she was unable to stop him, unable to not hear
about the things he had done, of which she had mercifully never
known until now. Somehow, she managed not to cry.

She saw Finch was getting an erection as he
reminisced.

Concealed in her right boot was a
box-cutter, a heavy silver device with a razorblade which could be
pushed out by thumbing a lever forward. When she learned she would
be standing here during the interview, mere feet away from Finch,
she retrieved it from a locked box of contraband weapons
confiscated from the inmates over the years, now used during
officer training. She had placed it so she could reach it easily,
and now its weight and shape was an irresistible presence.

Carla’s life was one of despair. One of
those many despairs was that the combination of events she needed
in order to exact her detailed revenge would never come. It was a
feeling which had become a constant, and the items hidden in a
small black nylon zipper bag, locked in a bottom drawer of her
desk, untouched and unused for so many years, were a constant
reminder of this. How many chances would she have to get him in
this position, defenseless and unsuspecting, within easy reach? In
the years he had seen her at Deacon Valley, he never once
recognized her, even though she was sitting in that courtroom when
the DA told the judge a plea of guilty had been obtained in
exchange for life without parole. She had even been on the TV news,
standing next to Emilio at the end of their driveway, surrounded by
supportive neighbors and clutching a school picture of Anita – the
same one she shared the annual birthday celebration with – crying
and begging anyone who had seen her daughter to please come
forward. No one recognized her now. Then again, that had been many
years ago, and in a different part of the state. Finch wouldn’t
recall her because he cared only about himself.

The King was talking about circular saws and
Hefty bags.

Carla was going to do it, the hell with her
grand scheme. Finch could have a heart attack tonight and die in
his cell, or run across one of the general population lifers with
nothing to lose and a hatred of pedophiles, and having him taken
away before she could avenge her daughter would be more than she
could endure. It was going to be now. She would slit his throat
from ear to ear right in front of the camera, and scream Anita’s
name at him as he bled out.

Yet she didn’t move from her place,
remaining motionless as a grave marker.

When the King was done with his story, Trent
signaled to his crew to cut and wrap it up. He’d come in here
thinking he was thick-skinned and hardened enough to hear whatever
this man had to say without reaction, a cool professional who could
separate his emotions from the job. He was wrong, and now he just
wanted to go back to his hotel and try to shower off Kelvin
Finch.

He nodded to the lady sergeant, a woman with
a lean face and hard eyes who might have once been attractive.
Since being introduced to her this morning he had the recurring
feeling that they’d met before. Her name tag simply read MENDEZ,
and that was no help. Once during the day he’d expressed this idea,
but she had said no, they’d never met. During the interview she’d
had no reaction at all to Finch’s horrific stories and casual
commentary on the destruction of young life, and the producer
figured she was probably numb to all this, exposed to it on a daily
basis. That was the kind of professional demeanor he’d come in here
incorrectly thinking he had.

Carla instructed the other CO in the room to
return Finch to his cell. Once he was gone, she waited while the
crew members packed their gear, used her radio to inform Central
Control that they were coming out, and led Trent Whitsome and his
people into a hallway. They made it twenty feet before Carla
brusquely excused herself and pushed into a ladies room, barely
making it into a stall before she threw up.

Carla’s kitchen was in shambles. The table
was overturned, one of the chairs lay broken under a ragged hole in
the sheetrock, shards of glass and ceramic littered the linoleum
floor from where she had hurled plates and glasses against the
refrigerator and walls. She stood in the center of it all, fists
clenched, screaming as tears streaked her face.

Why didn’t she kill him when she had the
chance?

How could he have done those things to her
precious, tender-hearted little girl?

Memories of pregnancy, of changing diapers
and cooing nursery rhymes, night lights and cuddling after bedtime
terrors spun through her head. Anita learning to walk, the first
time she said “mommy,” crayon drawings and laughter and wrestling
in the grass. Singing ABC’s, endless questions and favorite toys.
The first day of school, Christmas mornings, a play in kindergarten
where she was dressed as a sunflower. The random “I love
you’s.”

“
Oh, God!”
she wailed, failing to her
knees and cutting them on the fragments, hugging her chest and
rocking, a long moan of animal pain escaping her.
“You did that
to my baby! You took away my baby!”
She fell on her side,
curling into a fetal position as the tears exploded. Yet another
birthday would come and go while Kelvin Finch moved day to day
through life, another sad little cake, another bottle of vodka, the
years stretching out before Carla like an accusation.

“Mommy’s sorry, baby,” she choked. “Mommy’s
so, so sorry.”

It had been her third day of second grade,
and Anita had begged to walk to school on her own because she was a
big girl. The school was only three blocks away, the street didn’t
see much traffic, the neighborhood was safe and friendly, and Anita
was a smart girl. Emilio had left for work already, and Anita had
taken her time getting dressed and ready. Carla knew she’d be late
for work if she spent the extra twenty minutes to drop her off, and
gave in.

Yes. A single spoken word, a product of her
own selfishness, her misplaced sense of importance in wanting to
avoid a scolding at the store where she worked instead of
protecting her only child as a mother should. For eleven years,
that knowledge reminded her daily that it was her fault. She
thought about it more than she did Kelvin Finch.

No one saw him take her. Carla never knew
how it happened until this evening, a nagging question answered by
the killer himself. He had been driving slowly through the
neighborhood and saw her on the sidewalk, ponytail and bright
yellow backpack bouncing along behind her as she marched to school.
He pulled to the curb half a block ahead of her, got out, and
started looking under his car.

“Here kitty, kitty,” he called. “Here
kitty.”

Anita stopped, crouched and looked under the
car too. “Here kitty,” she said, always a helpful little girl. His
hand clamped her mouth and she was inside the back seat of his car
so fast that no one heard or saw a thing. He bound her, sealed her
mouth, and drove away. The entire abduction took less than sixty
seconds.

Carla stared across the kitchen floor at the
fragments of glass, some tipped with fresh blood, and gasped for
breath, the tears still flowing freely. “So sorry,” she whispered.
“Mommy’s so sorry, baby.”

Trent Whitsome followed his GPS and drove
his rental car down the main avenue of Levi, Oklahoma, a burg
sitting on the prairie twenty miles from Deacon Valley Correctional
Facility. It was a small, nondescript town which probably wouldn’t
even have existed except for a large stockyard and rail center, and
the fact that it was home to most of the people who worked at or
provided services for the prison.

It was ten days since the Finch interview,
and he was the new favorite with the HBO brass. They loved what he
had put together, and even after plenty of cutting the interview
was chilling. It would be the centerpiece of the special. Whitsome
would oversee the final editing process, dishing up pieces of the
Kelvin Finch interview and intermingling it with the details of the
case, archive footage of cops emerging from wooded areas with small
body bags, interviews with investigators and neighbors, as well as
a psychologist’s views on Finch’s letters and the events which led
to his capture and incarceration. There was talk that they had
landed Gary Sinise to provide the dramatic narrator’s voice, and
the audio department had given him a preview of the documentary’s
haunting soundtrack.

Also key to the special, to provide the
heartache and connect with the audience, was the interviews with
the parents. The two single moms had committed suicide, another
couple had divorced and died during the intervening years of a car
accident and cancer respectively. A fourth couple, also divorced,
refused to participate. But Trent had already conducted and filmed
interviews with three of the remaining families, only one of which
was not divorced. One more to go.

Carla Rodriguez’s husband couldn’t be
located. The woman herself had vanished as well, simply dropped out
of existence. Trent spoke with anyone he could find who knew her,
hitting repeated dead ends. She had broken off all contact, and
hadn’t been heard from since the whole, terrible thing came to a
close.

He got lucky with Shay Downing, however, the
realtor who handled the sale of Carla Rodriguez’s house. After some
polite conversation and Trent’s assurance that he would keep her
name out of it, Ms. Downing offered that Carla had left Tulsa right
after the sale was completed, but before the check for the equity –
and there wasn’t too much of that, she said – could be cut. Carla
left her realtor a forwarding address, an apartment in Levi,
Oklahoma.

Trent believed it was the one and only loose
end of a woman who clearly did not want to be found. And he thought
it was beyond intriguing that she had relocated to the town
adjacent the prison where her daughter’s killer was spending his
life. That by itself was a story, and Trent had busied himself
during the long drive from Tulsa to Levi with questions. Why did
you vanish? Why move here of all places? Have you ever visited him,
tried to contact him? What have you been doing for eleven
years?

He turned into a residential neighborhood of
small frame houses and little stucco-walled apartment complexes,
stopping when directed by his GPS. Grabbing a legal pad off the
front seat, he headed across a dry lawn towards one of the
buildings.

He would ask her all those questions in
person.

It was her day off. Carla was coming out her
apartment door with a bag of trash for the complex dumpsters, and
saw the man trotting up the concrete steps, his head down. They
passed each other on the stairs with a brief “excuse me,” and then
the man stopped on the steps above her.

“Mrs. Rodriguez?”

She froze, and he skipped back down the
steps until he was in front of her.

“Mrs. Rodriguez, I’m…” He stared at her, his
mouth open in mid-sentence. “Oh my God,” he whispered.

Carla looked at the HBO producer, her jaw
clenched, the hand not holding the garbage bag trembling. She
wanted to tell him he was mistaken, wanted to tell him to go away,
forget he had ever seen her. She knew he wouldn’t.

Trent shook his head slowly. “You look
different. From when you…back then. You’re thinner.”

“I run.”

He paused. “Yes you do.” He raised an
eyebrow.

She took a deep breath. “When did you
recognize me?”

He let out a short laugh. “I didn’t, but now
I know why I thought I knew you. I have the footage from when you
and your husband were on TV. You’ve changed a lot, not just because
of the years.”

She unconsciously put a hand to her face,
and he saw the tremble. “It’s the prison. It changes a person.” She
set down the trash bag. “What are you going to do?”

Trent hefted the notepad. “I have a lot of
questions for you. Will you…?”

“No. I have nothing to say.”

“C’mon, Carla. All this…” he waved his
notepad in a circle, “…is very unusual. What you’ve done is
unusual. Talk to me, tell me your side. Give
me
a chance to
tell your side.”

She shook her head. “You couldn’t understand
it.”

“You were in that room,” he said, “you had
to stand there and hear the things he did. I won’t pretend to
understand how painful that was, but you can help me to
understand.”

“No.”

He shrugged. “The story gets told either
way, I just…”

Carla moved up the steps and into his face,
her voice tight between clamped teeth. “Listening to that sick fuck
talk about torturing and killing my girl wasn’t enough? You need
more pain, Mr. Whitmore? Is that what turns you on, like those
things
that live in the Monster House?”