Relentless (25 page)

“For the girls, Margie and I tried to pass the trip off as a vacation. Took them to a kid-friendly restaurant. Back at the motel, the girls went fast asleep in one of the beds, in spite of TV-news chatter. Margie wanted a hot shower. Closed the bathroom door so she wouldn’t disturb the girls. I watched … I watched … the news.”

A Peterbilt roared past the Mountaineer, traveling too fast for road conditions, flinging up a sheet of water from the puddled pavement. Cascades overwhelmed the wipers, and for too long we were blinded. All that might lie ahead vanished from view.

“I thought I’d see something on the news about my folks, but
nothing. Then … Margie was a long time in the bathroom. I knocked, she didn’t answer. I went in to see if she was okay, but she … she wasn’t there.”

John paused. His breathing was quick and shallow. Before it quickened further, he worked to control it.

Ordinarily, in weather this foul, I might have suggested to Penny that she pull off the highway and wait for the torrents to diminish. But stopping in this lonely night seemed like an invitation to Death, and I preferred hurtling half-blind into the downpour.

John continued: “The shower was running, stall door open. Her underwear, her robe on the floor. There was a double-hung frosted window. Bottom sash was up, curtains billowing. How could he have taken her so quietly, no struggle? I went out through the window. Behind the motel was a field, an endless field, far away a line of trees, all visible under a full moon, nobody out there, nobody.”

Penny whispered my name, wanting to know something of what John was saying. I glanced at her but shook my head.

The sight of her flooded me with apprehension—that she would vanish like Margaret Clitherow, that she would turn a corner and not be there when an instant later I rounded the same corner, that she would walk from one room into another and be gone forever.

“The motel had three wings. I found my way around to the front,” John recalled, “sure I’d see her being forced into a car. But the night was quiet. No one in sight. Only the desk clerk in the motel office, watching TV. Then I saw the door of our room standing open. I thought … I
knew
… I left the girls alone, now they were gone, too.”

Another massive truck began to pass the Mountaineer, its array of running lights blurring as it cast up blinding sheets of water. Penny eased up on the accelerator to let the rig get past us more quickly, and I almost urged her to keep the pedal down.

“But in the motel room, the girls were asleep, just as I’d left them.

But on the second bed … sparkling on the bedspread … Margie’s engagement ring, wedding band. I knew then she was dead or as good as dead. He wouldn’t taunt me with the rings if she were nearby where I might find her. Explaining this to cops in a strange town—no chance. They’d think she walked out on me. The returned rings proved it. No abductor would return her rings. Waxx did it once, he could do it twice, the girls would be next. I had to think only of the girls.”

Guilt twisted his voice. He believed he failed Margaret. Even if that was not true, he would always believe it.

I said, “Take your time. If it’s too much now, you can call me later. Or not at all.”

“No. I have to tell you. You don’t understand. I
have
to tell you.” He took a deep breath. “So I threw into the suitcases what little we’d taken out of them. Emily and Sarah were so sound asleep, they hardly stirred when I carried them out to our SUV and belted them in the backseat. When I drove away, no one followed us. But no one had followed us from home to the motel, not for a hundred miles.”

“Credit card,” I said, remembering the warnings he had given me.

“Yeah. I thought—the American Express I used at the motel. You see in movies, they can track you like that. But this wasn’t the FBI. This was a half-baked book critic with no more resources for tracking someone than
I
have. So maybe he planted something on our SUV.”

I said, “Some kind of transponder or something.”

“So I found a residential neighborhood, cars parked at the curb, in driveways. I went looking for keys behind sun visors, under seats. Couldn’t believe the risk I was taking. I was crazy with terror for the girls. I stole a Chrysler PT Cruiser, put our bags in it, moved the girls from our car. Emily grumbled, but I shushed her to sleep.”

As Penny squinted through the smeary windshield, rain persisted, but suddenly the traffic washed away. Mirrors reflected the emptiness behind the Mountaineer. Ahead, no taillights were visible. Beyond the
reach of headlights, the highway became a hidden vein in the wet flesh of the night, and we raced forward like an air-bubble embolism toward an unknown but inevitable moment of destruction.

“This was back east,” John said. “We lived in New York State, but the hundred miles took us into Pennsylvania. In the PT Cruiser, I kept going south. My agent, Jerry Simons, lived in Manhattan but owned a four-acre retreat in Bucks County, spent weekends there in summer. Margie and I stayed once, for a week. Now, late September, I didn’t know if Jerry was using the place. I called his cell phone, got him in New York, made up a story about needing isolation to finish my novel. The house was available. I knew where the spare key was hidden. The girls and I were there in three hours.”

To this point, the tightly controlled emotion with which John Clitherow recounted these events suggested that I was the first to whom he had told the story in almost three years and that his need to unburden himself was acute. The urgency with which he spoke seemed to arise from a determination to share information that might spare me from losses like those he suffered.

When he arrived in memory at the house in Bucks County, however, his manner and his tone changed. His urgency abated, as did the note of guilt in his account. The distress that had been swelling toward anguish now shrank to a chilling insensibility, and his voice became flat, his cadence slow.

“I couldn’t sleep that night in Bucks County. Sat in a bedroom armchair, watching over the girls, torn by grief and guilt and fear. I loathed myself, my helplessness. Self-hatred is exhausting. After dawn, I fell asleep in the chair. Woke and saw the girls were gone. Stumbled like a drunkard through the house, hunting them. Just before I found them in the family room, I heard them screaming.”

The seeming indifference in Clitherow’s voice didn’t sound like stoicism, not like an intentional suppression of feeling. It was apathy,
the consequence of reaching a tipping point. Having felt too much for too long, he was drained of feeling, of the desire to feel.

“In the living room, Emily and Sarah, still in their pajamas, ran toward me, weeping, screaming. I opened my arms, but they pushed away, eluded me. They ran into the kitchen, up the back stairs. And I saw they’d been watching television. And I saw on the screen … my wife, naked and chained to a wall. And she was still alive. And a man, face concealed by a hood, he was … he was … cutting her.”

As I listened to John Clitherow, the cell phone grew damp and slippery in my hand. I held it tighter.

“And I didn’t hear the girls screaming anymore,” he continued. “I went upstairs to find them. And they weren’t in the bedroom where they had slept, where I’d watched over them. And they weren’t in the next room or the next. And they weren’t downstairs. And they weren’t in the backyard. They were gone. And I never found them.”

Suddenly I wanted Penny to take the next exit, turn away from the place to which we were headed. We weren’t detectives, we didn’t know how to gather evidence and build a case. Besides, if we went where Waxx had been, if we probed his past, he was more likely to find us. The shadow of the predator is no place for the prey to hide.

John Clitherow droned through a nightmare that was no less terrifying for the flat tone of his voice: “And I went back into the family room where my wife was still on the TV. And he was still doing things to her. And on the floor in front of the TV were the pajamas my daughters were wearing when they ran screaming from the room, returned to me like my wife’s rings were returned. I tried to take the DVD out of the player, there was no DVD. I changed channels. She was dying on all of them. And something happened to me then, I don’t remember clearly, and I think I smashed the TV screen with a lamp. And I knew Jerry kept a gun in the house. And I searched and found it and loaded it with one round. I was going to kill myself.”

I had not said anything to Clitherow in a while. Nothing I could say would make any difference. He didn’t need to hear me speak to know that I was listening.

His voice sounded more lifeless than ever: “Maybe I didn’t have the courage for suicide, or all the years I believed in the sanctity of life made suicide impossible. And gradually I started wanting to kill Waxx more than I wanted to die. So I put nine more cartridges in the gun. And I waited for him. And three days passed. And the phone rang. Waxx said just ‘Porch.’ And on the back porch I found a DVD.”

Evidently Penny determined from my expression and my posture that I was in the thrall of an abhorrence so absolute that it nearly paralyzed me. My left hand was fisted on my thigh, and she closed her right hand tightly over it.

“And for a day I could not look at the DVD. And then I did. And my daughters were chained to a wall. And they must have been coached, promised mercy for cooperation, because they cried and pleaded to the camera, ‘Daddy, don’t hurt us again. Daddy, please let us go.’ And then. And then they. And the horror began, and I turned it off. And the DVD was evidence, but evidence that falsely incriminated me.”

Speeding into the cold rain, fast into the black night, we would eventually come head-on to a wall not of stone but of a solidified darkness, the iron-dense and perfect evil of Shearman Waxx.

“I don’t know what he did with their remains. Since then I’ve stayed alive. Hoping to find him, kill him. Now I realize that was a delusion. He is untouchable, Cullen. He is the night itself.”

John hesitated, and then wandered into an alley of depressive philosophy: “The innocent die, the wicked prosper. With a cunning ability to invert the truth, evil men claim to be noble, and people abandon reason, bow down to them, and accept all kinds of slavery.”

Once a man with faith, with confidence in the common sense of the average man, Clitherow seemed surprised to hear himself speak
those dismal words, for he inhaled sharply and after a pause returned to Waxx: “He’s untouchable, relentless. Cullen, you think you escaped him. But he didn’t want any of you to die in the house explosion. He wanted only to take it from you. If I hadn’t phoned when I did, if I hadn’t told you to get out, he would have called to warn you.”

Implicit in that statement was the assumption that Waxx had been monitoring my phones, and not only knew that Clitherow had called but knew as well what he had told me.

“Cullen, he didn’t want any of you to die in the explosion, because he breaks us down to ruins, step by step, not all at once. And now I am in the tower
de Paris
with—”

A noise both wretched and pitiable came through the phone line, and at first I thought that emotion had returned to Clitherow in a sudden stroke, that he was choking with grief.

A moment later, I realized this was more agony than anguish. It had been precipitated by a sound not made by the writer: a ripping noise, vicious and wet. I was listening to a man being murdered.

His phone dropped from his hand, clattered on the floor, did not disconnect. Briefly, his death throes issued from a distance.

But then came the thud-and-clump of a body falling. Perhaps his head was again close to the phone, because I heard him clearly. He seemed to be trying simultaneously to gasp for breath and to vomit.

I imagined that his throat had been slashed, that he was choking on his own blood.

I prayed for an end to his misery and at the same time hoped for one last gargled word, a revelation.

In mere seconds, Clitherow was finished and silent.

Earlier, when he became emotional and I suggested he call me back later or not at all, he said something that now had new meaning:
“I have to tell you. You don’t understand. I
have
to tell you.”

He had not been surprised during the call by his murderer. They
placed the call together. At the point of a knife, John Clitherow was forced to repeat the hideous story of his family’s destruction both for my benefit and for his humiliation.

Before me, hard shatters of rain rattled off the windshield.

At some point after the calls that John made to me at our house earlier in the day, he fell into Waxx’s hands. He used a disposable phone, but he called my listed number, not knowing that Waxx was already after me, and somehow that was his undoing.

We swept past a vehicle parked on the shoulder of the highway. I got only a rain-blurred glimpse of it, but I thought it was a black SUV. Not a Cadillac Escalade, surely not. Waxx couldn’t be everywhere at once. No headlights appeared behind us in the side mirror.

Over the open phone line, from the scene of the murder, other noises arose: the killer in motion. He fumbled the phone when he picked it up. Then came his slow steady breathing.

Determined not to be the first to speak, I listened to him as he listened to me. My resolution did not hold, and although I knew who he must be, I said, “Who is this?”

His voice was low and gravelly, ripe with a false good humor that could not conceal the underlying menace: “Hello there, brother.”

This was not Shearman Waxx, unless he was a man of many voices.

“Brother,” he said, “are you with me?”

“I’m not your brother,” I said.

“All men are my brothers,” he assured me.

“Waxx? Is that you? Who are you?”

“I am my brothers’ reaper,” he said. His soft laugh was ugly.

I put down the passenger-door window, pressed END on my cell phone, and threw it into the night.