With a crash that pierces through the concrete hall like a pickaxe, the officer slams the cell door shut. I watch the pinstripe shadow of the bars slide across the stolid face of Marcus, my best friend of over ten years. That's it; there's that impassible barrier between us again, as it always returns at the end of each hour-long visit, for the past three weeks.
Of course he hasn't torn out the throats of those five poor girls in Franklin Park, but when ten rabid parents are howling for justice, someone has to take the fall. My friend was, unfortunately, carrying around a completed sentence for aggravated assault, and in the pristine suburbia of Sacred Springs, he might as well have been Charles Manson.
The court case was a farce; I showed up every day and watched spittle fly from the mouths of red-faced overweight fathers, who swore on the Bible and told twelve sympathetic personal friends that such atrocities could not go unpunished. They weren't bloody-minded enough to give Marcus the chair, but he ended up with ten years to life.
Now, I have two boys of my own, and I'd defend them with my life. But if Marcus ripped those kids apart, I am Napoleon. The man had worked in the produce department, twenty feet from my counter, for years. His conviction had come down when he was nineteen; he'd gotten out early for good behavior. When I say he was a changed man, I mean he ordered his steak well done so he wouldn't have to see it bleed.
Managing the meat section's generally a sixty-hour-a-week gig, but every free minute I have, I spend keeping the case open. This town despises me for it; the Upstanding Members of Society want everything to quiet back down, and if I too wish to remain an Upstanding Member, I'd better let that happen.
They didn't used to seem like such an elite club, but these days, I've come to understand that not all fraternities involve gold seals and locked doors. Some are formed, maybe unintentionally at first, when their members decide to exclude certain people, to term those people "muckraker." Then they make it a little harder for those people and their kids to get a good table at a restaurant, or to be five cents short and still buy a pack of cigarettes.
But I keep pressing. I dig up leads, just like a hero in a novel, and I pester the county office for any records in the public domain. There's no chance of help from the police, of course, but I keep my eyes and ears open. I've got good hearing, which is helpful, because gossip doesn't drift my way too much anymore.
Interesting fact about the murders: they were spaced exactly one month apart, always on the night of a full moon. Not that I'm some kind of vulture, you understand, but it seems important, an "interesting feature of the case," as one of those novel detectives might say. Do you know the origin of the word "lunacy?" It's from the Latin "luna," meaning moon. The Romans believed that craziness increased on the night of the full moon.
And it's just about that time again; tonight, in fact. I won't let my boys stay out after dark; they know to come straight home after school. I even rented them a movie, something about dinosaurs, so they're thinking of it as a slumber party. They think the killer's locked up now, that quiet Marcus from produce turned out to be a psycho; I'm sure it'll be a local legend, a story for campfires, in a few more years.
The truth is mine to carry, and I'll keep dragging it up until I find this maniac. So tonight, I'm going to eat this juicy center-cut filet (unlike Marcus, I like mine nearly raw), and I'm going to get my jacket, my hiking boots, and my .45, and I'm heading out to Franklin Park to watch for a regular customer I know will be back. Actually, after the first girl disappeared, I started heading out there a few times a month, but I always woke up the next morning with a throbbing head and dirty fingernails, and I'd pop open the paper to read another police report.
I'm not going to fall asleep tonight; I've promised myself that. I've taken a caffeine pill, and I'll have coffee with my steak. A recipe for an early heart attack, I know, but the lives of our children are worth more to me than my own old bones. Tonight, I'll be watching. Tonight, no one gets away from me.