Vincent Zandri - The remains

Placing my face directly below the nozzle I let the water spray directly into my eyes until the sting started to go away. I made sure to keep my eyes closed tight while I rinsed my hair. When the cell phone chimed I automatically whispered, “Crap.” Of course someone had to be calling me while I took a shower; while I was blinded by soap in my eyes. Reaching outside the shower curtain I picked the cell phone up off the sink, opened it to see that a new text had been delivered. Immediately I thought of Robyn as the water dripped onto the electronic readout.

Thumbing the Send button I opened the message

Cry, cry, cry, little kitten.

The shower curtain flew open. The cell fell into the tub. A hand wrapped itself around my mouth. The hand squeezed my mouth and nostrils tight. I couldn’t breathe. An arm wrapped itself around my waist. The shower curtain began to tear away from the rod, one ring at a time. The pop-popping noise of the breaking plastic filled the bathroom along with shower spray; along with my muted gasps, along with Whalen’s high-pitched strains.

He released his right hand, producing a knife. He pressed the blade of the knife up against the underside of my neck, then quickly pulled the knife back just an inch or two, cutting into the skin. The pain was searing. It shot up and down my spine. I wanted to scream, but the hand was covering my mouth.

My vision escaped me. I saw blackness lit up with stars, neurons exploding in my brain.

He pressed the knife up against the underside of my ribcage. He pressed the sharp blade up against the skin, flicked the knife back quick.

More burning pain.

Legs went wobbly. Blood poured down my ribs and belly.

Then an explosion. A gunshot.

The hand that covered my mouth released and fell away. The knife dropped into the tub. I looked down, saw the blood circling the drain, circling the thin knife and my shattered cell phone. I heard Whalen’s body hit the tile floor. I heard footsteps. Out the corner of my eyes I saw the blurry image of Detective Harris. In his right hand he held an automatic. He grabbed the towel from the rack, put it into my hands.

I was too shocked, too frightened to speak, to cry, to do anything.

“How bad are you hurt?” he demanded.

I managed to shake my head.

He reached down with his right hand, pressed two fingers against Whalen’s jugular.

“He’s gone.”

My back pressed up against the water-slick ceramic wall, I sank down into the tub, the water spray shooting down onto my head, onto my now exposed cast.

Whalen was gone.

I shivered and was suddenly overcome with the urge to cry.

Cry, cry, cry…

It’s exactly what I did.

More police came. So did the state troopers who blocked off the entrance to the apartment complex with their blue and yellow cruisers.

The EMTs came. The press showed up. TV and print.

Caroline and Franny rushed to the scene when they got wind of it on the radio.

I sat in the back seat of Harris’s Jeep. He’d sent one of the uniformed officers out for tea and I now held a steaming cup in my trembling hands. The EMTs had already looked me over, examined the wounds to my neck and chest. The surface cuts required no stitches. Only butterfly bandages. Still, they insisted I be transported immediately to the hospital for further tests and observations. Given the condition of my healing heart along with the early stage pregnancy, there was no telling what I might suffer in the short term.

I flat out refused.

I’d just been released from the hospital two weeks before. Tests proved there had been no permanent damage to my heart after having suffered the mild heart attack up on Mount Desolation. The EMTs looked at me with skeptical frowns. They asked me to signature a waiver of release absolving them of any and all responsibility should I drop dead on the spot. I did it.

Then they left me alone.

As soon as Whalen’s body was bagged and lifted into the back of a big, black SUV with tinted windows, Harris joined me in the Jeep. He sat behind the wheel, an identical Styrofoam cup in his hand, the only difference being his held black coffee.

He asked me if I was all right. I sipped my tea, running the exposed fingers on my damp, cast-covered right hand through still wet hair and breathed.

“Just a little shaken up is all.”

He sipped his coffee.

“You know now that without question, that Whalen is out of your life forever,” he consoled. “Without… question.”

“The future is bright,” I smiled, then stared down into my tea. “How did you know he’d be here?”

“I didn’t really. Late last night I got a call from forensics in Albany telling me the bones found on Mount Desolation didn’t belong to a male meeting Whalen’s criteria for a man of approximately sixty years of age. In fact, the bones probably belonged to a female who passed away decades ago. More than likely, one of Whalen’s early abduction victims.

“Our theory now is that he buried the women outside his home in the woods and periodically interred them, laying them to rest in different areas in and around Mount Desolation. That is, until finally laying them to rest down inside that basement after he was released from prison. That would explain why we never uncovered remains inside his house all those years ago. It’s not that he was always one step ahead of us. It’s just that we just didn’t have the technology we have at our disposal nowadays.

“All morning long I thought about it. If the bones didn’t belong to Whalen, there was a good chance he’d survived the damage inflicted to his head by Francis. Which meant he might still be out there, waiting to strike again.”

“What about the black and white photo you returned to me along with a note?”

He shook his head, vehemently.

“That’s just it. I jumped the gun when I sent that out yesterday afternoon. It dawned on me that Whalen’s prints didn’t have to be on that photograph for it to have been in his recent possession. The man spent thirty years in prison. It’s not difficult to scrape away the prints on your fingers given the time. Anyone can do it with a common household disposable razor blade. Or even if he had left prints, it’s not impossible for him to dissolve them from the picture’s face before planting it on your folk’s porch floor.”

“And the jimmied window? That was Whalen’s handiwork?”

“I can only imagine that he wanted to get a personal feel for your childhood home. You know, step into the footsteps of his beloved Molly and Rebecca; his two little kittens. I now believe he broke into the home many times over the past six months. He scoured the place and came up with the photo. On the day you went out to Brunswick to have a face to face with Caroline Scaramuzzi, Whalen followed you, planted the pic in a spot you were likely to find it. Call it his way of playing with your head on top of those cryptic text messages.”

“But how did Franny paint that exact image of us back in the seventies if he never had access to the photo?”

“That’s just it,” Harris said. “He did have access to it. In fact, dozens of people did.”

I didn’t quite understand what he was getting at, until he reached into the Jeep’s glove box, pulled something out. “Caroline gave this to me yesterday after I’d already FedEx’d the original to you.”

He handed it to me.

It was a Christmas card. A postcard-sized Christmas card with a reproduction of that same black and white photo of Molly and me printed beside the words “Happy Holidays.” Written in my mother’s unmistakable ballpoint, “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the Underhills.” It was dated December 3, 1976.