65

I’m a “hero.” A man who grew up with the devil and slew a serial killer to save his family. Every customer and prospect I meet wants an appointment—even the women. It’s been over two years since I killed Lawrence Massy and my business keeps building. For the first time, my loan production numbers have steamed past those of Bullshit Bob. I’ve personally raised our bank’s share price, which makes our new CEO talk about stock options and a bigger office with a bigger window. Executive recruiters are calling. After thirty-one years of trying to escape my father’s stigma, he’s made me almost as famous as he is. There’s something sickening about that.

There was also something sick about the envelope I received at my office a few months ago. It was addressed to Preying Hands II. My fan had sent me exquisitely drawn pen and ink sketches of dismembered women. That’s why our family’s phone is unlisted. Even our email addresses are confidential.

Jill and I started over in a new house with no name on the door or mailbox. We live in Leucadia, close to Jill’s parents. Mama complains about how much farther away we are. We pretend to sympathize. As for our old house, plenty of crazies were interested in purchasing it. They wanted to live where the “real” son of the Preying Hands was martyred. I never want to meet the man who bought it.

Polly was the first to go public about growing up with Harvey Dean Kogan. It was the only way to control the story. The Union-Tribune did a Sunday article with photos of her restaurant and even Homer the cat. Newspapers from as far away as Sydney, Australia, picked it up. Polly hates the publicity as much as I do. Every week a few tourists show up at the Haven to meet the Preying Hands’ daughter. Polly suggests that they find another restaurant. Sometimes she manages not to shout.

Homer’s skin is wrinkling like an old man’s and the small bit of fuzz on his face has started to turn gray. At some point he confirmed our friendship by dropping a kill at my feet. He even lets me rub his scarred stomach. I stare into those green eyes and see something cold and yet familiar. We’ve grown to a kind of understanding.

Jill has returned to an almost normal teaching life. Her colleagues and the older kids know the whole story of how she fought off a serial killer. The sixth graders are in awe. But her third graders don’t understand what she had to do with Ms. Morton’s death. Jill intends to keep it that way. We hope that in a few years she’ll once again be what she was before: a remarkable teacher.

We both worry about Garth and Frieda. No one knows with any certainty how Massy affected them. We’re committed to extended counseling, but children don’t want to talk about how they witnessed a man try to cut up their father. And then watched their father beat him to death. The experts say it will take time for our kids to “process” the “incidents.” My optimistic wife thinks our children are resilient enough to fully recover. But I know that what happened will taint their childhoods, just as my father’s crimes irrevocably shattered mine. As sad as it makes me, I’ve learned that some wounds can’t be cured; they have to be lived with.

The police never returned my vape pen and the marijuana extract. They gave back everything else though—even the copies of Harvey Dean Kogan’s victim pictures and the pocketknife he gave me. Jill helped me burn the pictures. We rented a boat so Garth and I could throw our pocketknives into Mission Bay.

I now understand why Mama forbade Polly and me to see ourselves in our father’s image. She refused to let the thought of his murders exist in our family. That absolute belief in our goodness was an act of love. I intend to pass that gift on to my children.

Which brings me to my final secret, the one that took me until last night to admit to Jill. Even now, the truth of it hides in recesses of myself I don’t want to uncover. But I have to. If for nothing else, to free myself from what happened.

Jill and I were sitting on our new couch in our new house. I’d sucked down two glasses of pinot noir to fortify me. “Remember Béni-Messous and the Time magazine photo?” I said.

The truth is, I saw fifteen men’s corpses on the road through that Algerian village. Their killers had placed their heads on top of their chests. I aimed my Nikon but knew that no newspaper would publish such a grisly photograph. I needed something more indirect, more stylized to make my name as a photojournalist. Colonel Laribi helped me compose the shot. His soldiers placed the men’s heads in a neat line on a white wall that paralleled the road. Laribi’s men used blood to write in Arabic on the wall: “God is great.” I photographed the backs of those heads. The dead men seemed to stare into the houses where their wives and children lay slaughtered. That staged scene became the photo I’m famous for.

As she listened, Jill squinted. Then her eyes softened. Can anyone sympathize like my wife?

She put her arms around me. “It’s time you forgave yourself,” she said. “For what you did. And for what he did.”

My father. Harvey Dean Kogan. The Preying Hands. I never did journey back to visit him. Never spoke by phone. Even now I sometimes see Pop with the eyes of the child who adored him. But I’m a dad, a man who must protect his children. That means walling off the love I once felt for my father.

I imagine that he died alone on one of those gurneys the prisons use for lethal injections. But cancer is a slower form of execution. Perhaps, as it claimed him, he was alone and terrified—like his victims. Or maybe kindly doctors or inmates caressed his hair and said that he had God inside him. Maybe a kind of grace—even goodness—floated down like a hand to touch his yellow forehead.

Maybe.