Chapter Twenty-eight

Brooklyn, 2011

 

Henry did exactly what Sheila told him to do. He used a butcher’s knife to cut off the man’s head so that the police wouldn’t be able to connect the man’s death with the Skull Cracker Killer. After that he found a gym bag in a closet, put the head in it, also the skull fragment, and threw in a stack of plates to weigh the bag down. He then gathered Sheila’s hammer, chisel, and hypodermic needle, and used one of the man’s undershirts to wipe off any surface he or his wife might’ve touched. With that done, he wrapped Sheila in a blanket, and he raced her, the gym bag. and Sheila’s ridiculously-sized pocketbook to the car he had rented.

On the way back to their apartment, he stopped and hurled the gym bag into Flushing Bay. He also stopped four blocks from their apartment to leave Sheila on the sidewalk. He hated doing this. He had no idea how long it would take for someone to find her, but he agreed with her that it had to be done this way. After leaving Sheila, he raced to their apartment because he had items of hers that he needed to get rid of along with the tools that she used as the Skull Cracker Killer.

She had always forbidden him from looking in her closet, but he found the scrapbook and diary where she told him they would be. A quick look in the scrapbook showed newspaper clippings about the killings she had done. The diary had, among other things, her personal thoughts about her killings. Henry read several entries, then found the one that she wrote after meeting him at the bar. The reason she had changed her mind about killing him was that there’d been several articles about the Skull Cracker Killer in which the FBI profiler insisted the killer had to be a loner and couldn’t be married, and she decided Henry would be a harmless enough guy for her to attach herself to, and that by marrying him she’d help hide herself from the police. In the following entries, she wrote about how she found him repulsively ugly, but was also developing a certain affection for him, as well as a closeness. In a recent entry she wrote that she was happy in a way that surprised her to be married to Henry, and that she no longer minded the idea of making love to him, and that she was looking forward to doing so after her next round of killings. Sheila had directed him to burn the scrapbook and diary, but Henry ripped out several pages so he could keep them.

After he got rid of all the incriminating evidence (except the pages that he had ripped out), he returned the car and took the subway home. The cops were waiting for him, which was a relief since it meant someone had found Sheila. Still, he broke down when they told him his wife had been hurt and was at the hospital.

It turned out that Sheila was unconscious when she was found, so the police at first considered Henry a suspect and took him to the station for questioning. Things did not go well when they questioned him about where he’d been that evening, and he gave them a bogus answer about how he had rented a car that day so he could drive to Long Island and visit his parents’ graves. The police didn’t believe him, and Henry sweated up a storm as he realized that if they searched him they’d find the pages from Sheila’s diary that he had taken. One of the detectives started asking him why he was sweating so much, and all Henry could think of to say was that he was worried about his wife, which only made the cops more suspicious. Henry could tell things were about to turn really ugly when a call came in that saved him. The detective who took the call must’ve been told that Sheila had regained consciousness and had claimed that her husband wasn’t involved in what happened to her, because when he got off the phone he actually gave Henry a sympathetic look.

“That was the hospital,” he said. “Your wife’s awake. You should go over there.”

“How is she?”

The detective looked away from him. “It would be better if you talk to her doctor.”

Sheila had been taken to Mount Sinai. When Henry met with her doctor, he explained to Henry about Sheila’s paralysis and the serious internal damage she suffered. The prognosis was that she’d live, but that she’d never recover full use of her body. That the paralysis was likely permanent.

Somehow Henry didn’t mind that. It meant Sheila would never leave him. Also that she’d never kill anyone else.

It turned out Henry was wrong about the latter.