I waited, felt the terror rattling up through her chest and squirming out the pores of her skin.
“Promise me,” she said, “that you’ll stay alive long enough to kill him. Slowly. For days, if you can manage it.”
“What if he gets to me first?” I said.
“He can’t kill us both. No one’s that good. If he gets to you before me”—she leaned back a bit so her eyes could meet mine—“I’ll paint this house with his blood. Every last inch of it.”
She went to bed a few minutes later and I turned on a small light in the kitchen and read through the files Bolton had given me on Alec Hardiman, Charles Rugglestone, Cal Morrison, and the murders of 1974.
Both Hardiman and Rugglestone looked numbingly normal. Alec Hardiman’s only distinguishing characteristic was that, like Evandro, he was extremely handsome, almost to a degree you’d consider feminine. But there are plenty of handsome men in the world, several of whom hold no sway over anyone.
Rugglestone, with his widow’s peak and long face, looked more like a West Virginia coal miner than anything else. He didn’t look particularly friendly, but he didn’t look like a man who crucified children and disemboweled winos.
The faces told me nothing.
People, my mother once claimed, cannot be fully understood, only reacted to.
My mother was married to my father for twenty-five years so she probably did a lot of reacting in her time.
Right now, I had to agree with her. I’d spent time with Hardiman, read how he’d turned from an angelic boy into a demon overnight, and nothing could tell me why.
Less was known about Rugglestone. He’d served in Vietnam, been honorably discharged, came from a small farm in East Texas and hadn’t had any contact with his family in over six years by the time he was killed. His mother was quoted as calling him “a good boy.”
I turned a page of the Rugglestone file, saw diagrams of the empty warehouse where Hardiman had inexplicably turned on him. The warehouse was gone now, a supermarket and dry cleaner’s in its place.
The diagram showed me where Rugglestone’s body had been found, tied to a chair, stabbed, beaten, and burned. It showed where Hardiman had been found by Detective Gerry Glynn, who was responding to an anonymous call, curled naked into a fetal position in the old dispatch office, his body saturated with Rugglestone’s blood, the ice pick four feet away from him.
How had Gerry felt, responding to an anonymous tip, walking in and finding Rugglestone’s body and then finding his partner’s son curled up with the murder weapon?
And who had called in the anonymous tip?
I flipped another page, saw a yellowed photo of a white van registered to Rugglestone. It looked old and uncared for and it was missing the windshield. The interior of the van, according to the report, had been hosed down within the last twenty-four hours prior to Rugglestone’s death, the panels wiped clean, yet the windshield had been demolished only recently. Glass filled the driver and passenger seats, glistened in rocks on the floor. Two cinderblocks rested in the center of the van floor.
Somebody, probably kids, had tossed the cinderblocks through the windshield while the van was parked outside the warehouse. Committing vandalism while Hardiman committed murder only a few feet away.
Maybe the vandals had heard noise from inside, recognized it as something insidious and called in the anonymous tip.
I looked at the van for another minute, and I felt something akin to dread.
I’ve never liked vans. For some reason which I’m sure Dodge and Ford would love to eradicate, I associate them with sickness—with drivers who molest children, with rapists idling in supermarket parking lots, with childhood rumors of killer clowns, with evil.
I turned the page, came upon Rugglestone’s toxicology report. He’d had large quantities of both PCP and methylamphetamine in his system, enough to keep him awake for a week. He’d counterbalanced these with a blood alcohol level of .12, but even that much booze, I was sure, couldn’t override the effects of so much artificial adrenaline. His blood would have been electrified.
How did Hardiman, twenty-five pounds lighter, manage to tie him down?
I flipped another page, found the postmortem report of Rugglestone’s injuries. Even though I’d heard both Gerry Glynn and Bolton’s accounts, the magnitude of damage done to Rugglestone’s body was almost impossible to comprehend.
Sixty-seven blows from a hammer found under a chair in the dispatch office with Alec Hardiman. Blows came from a height of seven feet and from as close as six inches. They came from the front, the back, the left, and the right.
I opened the Hardiman file, placed the two side by side. At his trial, Hardiman’s defense lawyer had argued that his client had suffered nerve damage to his left hand as a child, that he wasn’t ambidextrous, that he couldn’t have swung a hammer with such force using his left hand.
The prosecution pointed out the evidence of PCP in Hardiman’s system, and judge and jury agreed that the drug could give an already deranged man the strength of ten.
No one believed the defense attorney’s argument that the PCP in Hardiman’s system was negligible compared to the amount found in Rugglestone’s and that Hardiman hadn’t added to it with speed, but cut into it with a combination of morphine and seconal. Add the alcohol to the mix, and Hardiman was lucky he could stand that afternoon, never mind perform physical feats of such staggering magnitude.
He’d burned Rugglestone in sections over the course of four hours. He started with the feet, and just before the fire had worked its way up to the lower calves, he doused it, went back to work with the hammer or the ice pick or a straight razor, which was used to lacerate Rugglestone’s flesh over one hundred and ten times, also from right and left angles. Then he burned the lower calves and knees, doused the flames again, and so on.
Examination of Rugglestone’s wounds had revealed the presence of lemon juice, hydrogen peroxide, and table salt. Facial and head lacerations had shown evidence of two facial compounds—Ponds cold cream and white Pan-Cake makeup.
He’d been wearing makeup?
I checked the Hardiman file. At the time of his arrest, Hardiman, too, had been found with traces of white Pan-Cake compound in the roots of the hair closest to his face, as if he’d wiped it off but hadn’t had time to wash his hair.
I rifled through Cal Morrison’s file. Morrison had left his house at three on an overcast afternoon to head for a sandlot football game at Columbia Park. His house was less than a mile away, and while police had checked every possible route he could’ve taken, they’d found no witnesses who’d seen Cal past the point when he waved to a neighbor on Sumner Street.