Every Dead Thing

“I’m trying to find someone. It’s a different case, but I think this person may be in trouble. If I stay here, there’s no one to help her.”

“It may be a good idea to get away from this for a time, but from what you’re saying, well…”

“Go on.”

“It sounds like you’re trying to save this person but you’re not even sure if she needs saving.”

“Maybe I need to save her.”

“Maybe you do.”

I told Walter Cole later that morning that I would continue looking for Catherine Demeter and that I would be leaving the city to do so. We were sitting in the quietness of Chumley’s, the Village’s old speakeasy on Bedford. When Walter called, I had surprised myself by nominating it for our meeting, but as I sat sipping a coffee I realized why I had chosen it.

I enjoyed its sense of history, its place in the city’s past, which could be traced back like an old scar or the wrinkle at the corner of an eye. Chumley’s had survived the Prohibition era, when customers had escaped raids by leaving hastily through the back door, which led onto Barrow Street. It had survived world wars, stock market crashes, civil disobedience, and the gradual erosion of time, which was so much more insidious than all the rest. Right now, I needed its stability.

“You have to stay,” said Walter. He still had the leather coat, now hanging loosely over the back of his chair. Someone had whistled at him when he entered wearing it.

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?” he said angrily. “He’s opened an avenue of communication. You stay, we wire up the phone, and we try to trace him when he calls again.”

“I don’t think he will call again, at least not for a while, and I don’t believe we could trace him anyway. He doesn’t want to be stopped, Walter.”

“All the more reason to stop him, then. My God, look at what he’s done, what he’s going to do again. Look at what you’ve done for his-”

I leaned forward and broke in on him, my voice low. “What have I done? Say it, Walter. Say it!”

He stayed silent and I saw him swallow the words back. We had come close to the edge, but he had pulled back.

The Traveling Man wanted me to remain. He wanted me to wait in my apartment for a call that might never come. I could not let him do that to me. Yet both Walter and I knew that the contact he had established could well be the first link in a chain that would eventually lead us to him.

A friend of mine, Ross Oakes, had worked in the police department of Columbia, South Carolina, during the Bell killings. Larry Gene Bell abducted and smothered two girls, one aged seventeen and abducted close to a mailbox, the other aged nine and taken from her play area. When investigators eventually found the bodies of the children they were too decomposed to determine if they had been sexually assaulted, although Bell later admitted to assaulting both.

Bell had been tracked through a series of phone calls he made to the family of the seventeen-year-old, conversing primarily with the victim’s older sister. He also mailed them her last will and testament. In the phone calls he led the family to believe that the victim was still alive, until her body was eventually found one week later. After the abduction of the younger girl he contacted the first victim’s sister and described the abduction and killing of the girl. He told the first victim’s sister that she would be next.

Bell was found through indented writing on the victim’s letter, a semiobliterated telephone number that was eventually tracked to an address through a process of elimination. Larry Gene Bell was a thirty-six-year-old white male, formerly married and now living with his mother and father. He told Investigative Support Unit agents from the FBI that “the bad Larry Gene Bell did it.”

I knew of dozens of similar cases where contact with the killer by the victim’s family sometimes led to his capture, but I had also seen what this form of psychological torture had done to those who were left behind. The family of Bell ’s first victim were lucky because they had to suffer Bell ’s sick wanderings for only two weeks.

Amid the anger and pain and grief that I had felt the night before, there was another feeling that caused me to fear any further contact with the Traveling Man, at least for the present.

I felt relief.

For over seven months there had been nothing. The police investigation had ground to a halt, my own efforts had brought me no nearer to identifying the killer of my wife and child, and I feared that he might have disappeared.

Now he had come back. He had reached out to me and, by doing so, opened the possibility that he might be found. He would kill again, and in the killing, a pattern would emerge that would bring us closer to him. All these thoughts had raced through my head in the darkness of the night, but in the first light of dawn, I had realized the implications of what I felt.