A Shadow Fell Page 7

  23

  The phone call I received at precisely 2 o’clock in the morning interrupted a nightmare – and replaced it with one much worse. As I fumbled for the phone, shaking off the remnants of sleep, I glanced at the bedside clock. A sudden and gut-wrenching foreboding brought me completely awake. I brought the phone to my ear but said nothing. I could hear the sound of soft breathing.

  Then a voice I had hoped never to hear again unless emanating from a man in the final throes of death, after having suffered the most excruciating pain possible, whispered, “Well, well, Jack, it’s been a long time. And how has your life been going? How’s the family? .... Cat got your tongue? I’m disappointed. I thought for sure you’d have some special words of advice for me.”

  “I do.”

  “Oh? Do tell, Jack. Share, please.”

  “Give up playing your little mind games you sick fuck. They won’t work on me. I’m coming for you. Soon.”

  “What, no whining about how I’ve ruined your life? Taken your precious little angel from you? Destroyed your beautiful wife? Tsk tsk, Jack, you’re much too composed. Maybe I’ll have to see what I can do about that. Hmm? Well… bye for now. Do sleep well.”

  The threat was obvious. Without hanging up I clicked for a dial tone and called the hospital. When the duty nurse picked up I tried to keep the panic out of my voice. “It’s Jack Parmenter calling. I need you to go to my wife’s room and have the officer guarding her call me. It’s very very important that you do this immediately.”

  I was lucky enough to be speaking to someone who knew when to act. A few minutes later I received a call from Officer Alejandro of the Ocala police force. “Mr. Parmenter, is something wrong, sir?”

  “First I need you to check that my wife is okay. Do that now, please.”

  “Hold on,” he said. I heard him enter her room and walk across the floor, then retrace his steps back into the hallway. “Everything’s fine, sir,” he reported. “She’s breathing easy and seems quite comfortable.”

  “Okay, listen up. I’ve received a call from Reuben Henderson and he has as much as said he’s going to be making an attempt on her life. I need you to be extra vigilante. Trust no one. Is that clear?”

  He seemed unfazed. “Of course, sir. You can rely on me.”

  “Thank you, Officer. Please don’t let me down.”

  “Right, sir. Everything’s under control.”

  I waited until I knew Tom Kilborn would be at his desk and phoned him. “Jack,” he said, coming on the line. “I know what you’re calling about.”

  “You know he called me?”

  “We have a tap on your phone. I thought you knew that. Anyway, you can rest easy. The call was made from Arizona. We’ll---”

  “Arizona?! Jesus, Tom! My parents live in Sun City, a suburb of Phoenix! You have to get some people there now!”

  “Shit. Give me the address.”

  I did.

  “Okay. We’re on it.” He hung up.

  I phoned my parents number. It rang until the answering machine came on. I told them their lives might be in danger, that they should leave the house, go somewhere safe immediately, no matter what time they received the message.

  All I could do now was await the call from either my parents or Kilborn.

  It didn’t take long. Within ninety minutes my phone rang.

  The moment I heard his voice I knew the news was bad. “Jack, don’t panic. There’s been ---”

  “Oh, God, no. Please don’t tell me ---”

  “Your mother suffered a mild heart attack from all the excitement. That’s all. She’s at Phoenix General now. Henderson did show up at their home but luckily a neighbor happened to spot him before he was able to do anything.”

  “Where’s my dad?”

  “We’re trying to locate him now. Apparently he’s out of town with some golfing buddies. They’re in the Palm Springs area – planning on playing several different courses.”

  I felt like I was about ready to have a heart attack myself. “I’ll get a flight out there as soon as I can. Meanwhile, for Christ’s sake, watch over Callie.”

  “I’ve already been in touch with Ocala P.D. - they’re going to double up on the guard station. And hospital security has been fully apprised of the situation.”

  “I’ve got a cell phone now that I’ll keep with me.” I gave him the number. “Call me if anything happens. Anything.”

  “I will, Jack. And I can’t tell you how sorry I am for everything that’s happened.”

  “Yeah.”

  24

  I got a quick flight to Phoenix by catching a connector out of Jacksonville, Florida, to Dallas. By noon the next day I was at my mother’s side. She was resting comfortably and smiled weakly when she saw me. She held out her hand. “Mom, I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “Hush,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  “I spoke to the doctor. He says you’ve had a mild heart attack but you’re going to be okay.”

  “I know, dear. Stop worrying. Your father was all worked up too. I sent him down to the cafeteria to get a cup of coffee. You should go see him.”

  I patted her hand. “I will but first I want to talk to the police. There’s a police detective outside right now. I’ll be back in a little bit.”

  When I approached the Phoenix police detective, who was speaking with a uniformed officer in the hall, he introduced himself as Roger Kirkland.

  “What can you tell me, Detective?” I said.

  “We have a preliminary confirmation that it was Henderson,” he told me. “Looks like he was acting as a deliveryman. He pulled up in a white mini-van with no lettering on it, wearing a white cap, and was carrying a box wrapped in brown paper up the walkway to your parents home. Luckily – very luckily – the next door neighbor happened to see him and recognized him immediately. She screamed and got the attention of several other people in the vicinity. Henderson then immediately took off. Your mother’s heart attack actually happened after the fact when being told what had occurred. She didn’t even see Henderson herself.”

  “No luck on tracking him from here?”

  “Afraid not. By the time we got the call and responded he was long gone.”

  I found my dad in the hospital cafeteria. He was sitting at a table with a cold cup of coffee in front of him, looking utterly bewildered. Seeing me he stood and we held each other for a long moment.

  “I’m so sorry, son,” he said. “I should have been here.”

  “You have nothing to apologize for, Dad. If anything I should be apologizing for bringing this down on you guys.”

  “Have you seen your mom?”

  “Yeah, I just came from her room. She’s resting comfortably and doing well. The doctor told me it was a mild heart attack and he expects her to recover completely.”

  He nodded his understanding but still seemed dazed by all that had happened. He and my mother were simple people. Danger was not something with which they were accustomed to dealing. At this stage in their lives they certainly didn’t need the kind of excitement they were getting.

  A few days later my mother was released from the hospital and back home. I stuck around for a day after that and then got a flight back to Florida. I would have preferred to stay longer with my folks but I had a wife who needed me even though she didn’t yet know it.

  Con came to see me the day after my return.

  “We gotta get this fucker, Jack,” he said. “The Feds ain’t doing it.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said wearily. “I got that.”

  My insides churned. Things were so much simpler for Henderson now than when he’d been an undetected serial killer. Back then he had ingeniously set up countless poor suckers to take the fall for his murders and that had all required a lot of planning and work. Now he had nothing to hide. In fact he was probably glorifying in the attention he garnered from it all.

  Con scratched his whiskers while he ruminated. “Wouldn’t surprise me if that was Henderson that
camped out up there on the mountain,” he said. “Maybe the best chance of getting him is to go back. If he was there then he’s likely set up somewhere within hiking distance.”

  “Not necessarily,” I pointed out. “It could be he just decided to visit one last time.”

  “If it was just a one-time visit why would he have gone to the trouble of covering up the fact he’d been there?”

  His thinking, of course, mirrored my own. “You’re probably right,” I said. I believed Henderson had an irrepressible need to spend time at the site of that cabin. It was where he had killed his sister and that singular event brought him the greatest joy of his life. He needed to relive that joy and the best opportunity for him to do that was to be where it happened. It’s why he had brought so many of his victims back there to kill them.

  “There’s only one way we’re ever going to know for sure,” Con said. “We could go back up there. Maybe he’s been back. If he has, we might be able to pick up his trail this time.”

  25

  “Are those flowers for me, Jack?” Callie said when I walked into her room. She was standing unaided and walking awkwardly with the aid of her therapist, an angel of patience named Paula. I saw she was also gaining a little of her lost weight back.

  “For you, beautiful lady,” I said.

  She beamed. My heart skipped three or four beats.

  But then it was like a light went out in her eyes. “Why the sad look?” I asked.

  “I can’t remember anything,” she moaned. “It’s driving me crazy. I need to remember but I can’t.”

  “You will in time. You just have to be patient.”

  “They said my name is Callie Parmenter.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “What’s your name, Jack?”

  I had been cautioned by her doctor to answer her questions as candidly as possible but to avoid topics that might create stress. As she was clearly beginning to put things together for herself it seemed only right to respond honestly. “I’m your husband, Callie,”

  She didn’t appear very surprised at this. “Oh,” she said. “I thought maybe you were my brother. How old am I?” she asked.

  “You just turned forty-two, sweetheart. In case you’re wondering, I’m quite a bit older than you.”

  “Do we have any kids?”

  “No,” I said. “We got married just a few years ago.”

  “What---”

  “Okay, that’s enough for now,” Paula said, saving me from entering into an area that might prove troubling. “Time for a rest.”

  I told Callie I would come back in an hour to spend some more time with her.

  Paula walked me out. “We’re very pleased with her progress, Mr. Parmenter. Before long she’ll be running around the block. And I think her memory will come back, too.”

  “That’s good to hear,” I said.

  Paula lowered her voice and turned to face me. “I was so sorry to hear about your mother. Is she doing okay.”

  I nodded. “She’s going to be fine.”

  “You’ve been through so much. When are the police going to find that horrible man?”

  “I wish I knew, Paula.”

  Doctor Salouf had left word at the reception desk that he wished to speak with me. I knocked on his office door and he called for me to come in.

  “You wanted to see me, Doctor?”

  He slowly removed his reading glasses and leaned back in his chair. “First of all please let me say how sorry I am for this most recent scare you’ve had.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You must be having a very difficult time dealing with so much going on in your life.”

  “I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t.”

  “You know, if you’re having problems with sleep I could---”

  “Thank you anyway. About Callie?”

  He looked down at some papers on his desk. “We’ve done some preliminary aptitude and intelligence tests,” he said.

  There was a very serious look on his face. I braced myself for more bad news. “And?”

  “It looks as though Callie is functioning at a somewhat impaired level mentally.”

  “But she seems to be doing so well except for the memory loss. Isn’t it to be expected that she’d be a bit… backward.”

  “The tests I’m referring to are more basic than that, Jack. They measure ability to problem solve.”

  “What are you telling me? Will she be able to live a normal life?”

  “Normal is a relative term. Certainly she’ll be able to do most of the things the average person would do but her ability to complete difficult tasks, reason out complex problems, things like that, will most likely be impaired. Her I.Q. appears to be at roughly the level of a twelve-year-old child.”

  I sat quietly, trying to compute how this would impact our lives together. As long as she was happy with her life I would be satisfied with that. My biggest fear was that she might not want to live with me. I was after all a stranger – at best, a friend - in her eyes. Who knew how she would feel about accepting me as a husband.

  Doctor Salouf watched me as I contemplated these thoughts. “Things could be much worse, Jack,” he said. “Much much worse.”

  “I know,” I said. “I just want her back. I don’t give a damn what her I.Q. is.”

  * * *

  Con had gotten into the habit of simply walking over to my place whenever the mood struck him. Often I arrived home to find him parked contentedly on my verandah, beer in hand, tossing a stick for Winston. I wasn’t bothered by this, but the question of his dubious past weighed on me and I wanted to find a way to bring up the topic of his wife again without sounding meddlesome.

  When I told Con about Callie’s improving physical condition he reacted very enthusiastically. But when I confided that I had told her we were married his reaction was much different. “How did she feel when you told her that?” he asked.

  “Hard to say,” I answered. “It’ll take some time for her to absorb all the new information she’s getting. I didn’t expect that she’d be bowled over with joy or anything.”

  “You gonna tell her about your daughter?”

  “Not until she’s ready. And that might not be for a while.”

  He pondered this without comment.

  Although concerned about Con’s possibly murderous history I also recognized his usefulness to me in finding Henderson. If Henderson was, as I suspected, living somewhere in the mountains I knew I had little hope of finding him without Con’s help. Not that it would have stopped me but I wanted to know if I was, in fact, using one murderer to find another. The common sense side of me dictated that I should know; the emotional side told me it didn’t matter.

  Every time I saw Callie struggling with the challenges she faced, every time I woke from another sweaty nightmare with the sound of Tanya’s screams ringing in my ears, and every time I thought of my sweet-tempered mother, the only thing that mattered was that I find, and kill, the animal responsible for causing such destruction within my family. Anything that could aid me to that end was justified.

  That night I had another nightmare. Unlike my previous dreams, however, it was Reuben Henderson’s screams that echoed in my head when I jolted awake.

  And in contrast to my condition on so many other occasions, I wasn’t sweating or racked with guilt.

  I was smiling.

  26

  I was mowing the neglected patch of lawn in front of our house when I saw Con coming through the trees carrying two beers by the bottle necks with one hand and holding a folded piece of paper in the other. He took a seat on the verandah and waited for me to join him.

  I had worked up a pretty good sweat and the beer looked good. I cut the motor on the mower and took a seat beside him.

  “Figured maybe ya could use one a these,” Con said passing me a bottle dripping with icy dew.

  “You’re a master of great timing, ” I said before tipping my head back and draining half the
bottle.

  We sat in companionable silence for a few minutes which was more often than not the way it went with us.

  “You been wondering about my wife,” he finally said. “Thought ya might be interested ta know she wrote me a letter. She’s in Portugal.”

  Once again Con had surprised me. I had been under the erroneous impression that my casual enquiries had not even registered with him but this was obviously not the case. “Portugal?”

  “Yeah. That’s where her family was from originally. Says she misses me and wants ta know if she can come back for a visit. See how things are with us.”

  “Is that what you want, Con?”

  “Yeah, of course. It wasn’t her fault that we didn’t make it. Every time I came back from Nam I was a little worse. After my third tour I had changed a lot. I was sullen and sharp-mouthed with her all the time. And drinking too much. When I woke up one morning and realized she’d left I wasn’t surprised at all. I remember thinking it was a miracle she had waited as long as she did.”

  “I hope it all works out,” I said.

  “Thanks. You know the cops figured I had killed her. She was reported missing and when they didn’t find her things didn’t look so good for me.”

  “Well, now you’ll be able to clear that up. When is she coming home?”

  “Pretty soon, I hope. She gave me her number in a little town near Lisbon. I’ll call her tomorrow around noon and tell her to get here as fast as she can.”