Taylor’s facial features were no longer identifiable, but I recognized the Wonder Woman costume. The costume was once a vibrantly colored representation of a little girl’s desire to be a super hero, but now it was faded and shabby.
My heart clenched at the wretched sight. My stomach heaved mightily, yet I managed not to throw up. Pulling myself together, I sighed deeply, pinching the bridge of my nose as I tried to come up with a plan. There had to be a way for me to help Phoenix get out of this horrible mess.
“How many others are there?”
He looked up at me, bleary-eyed, wiping away tears. “There aren’t any others.”
“Why, son? Why did you hurt an innocent little girl?” I nodded toward the dead child that was draped over his lap.
“I don’t know. It just happened,” he said as his fingers unconsciously brushed against the tufts of hair that remained on the child’s head. What he was doing, stroking her hair with his fingertips, was a barely perceptible micro-movement. But I noticed it and it triggered a feeling of rage inside of me.
“Stop touching her like that! Put her down,” I snapped, feeling as if Phoenix had drawn me into a scene of a horror movie.
He carefully laid the body on the floor of the cave and then gave me his undivided attention.
Not wanting to look at the dead body on the ground, I kept my eyes focused on his face. “What happened on Halloween? How did it happen?”
“It was an accident.”
“From the moment you made contact with Taylor, what happened? Walk me through it and don’t leave out anything.”
“I was riding my bike on Halloween night, fooling around with my friends, and I saw these two girls from school—Nikki and Sloan. They were walking with Taylor…” He paused and nodded his head toward the corpse on the cave’s floor and I winced in revulsion.
“They were taking her door-to-door…and we followed them for a while, making smart-ass comments and joking with the girls. And then we just rode around, messing with people.”
“So, when did you bump into Taylor again?”
“About an hour later, Nikki and Sloan walked her up to the house on Birchwood Circle. Matt and Dustin were fooling around with the girls and telling them they were having a get-together in the woods.”
I gave him a perplexed look.
“Some of the kids go there to drink and chill out. The girls followed them to the woods, and since I don’t drink, I didn’t go. I told them I’d see them later. They were so shocked that Nikki and Sloan agreed to go with them, they never looked back. Taylor stood there on her porch, and I could tell that her bag wasn’t even halfway filled. I got the impression that Nikki and Sloan had rushed her back home before she was ready to go in. So, I asked if she wanted to collect some more candy, and she said, ‘yes.’ ”
“Someone might have noticed you, Phoenix,” I blurted, feeling fearful as I imagined police dressed in SWAT gear, breaking down the door of our home and dragging Phoenix out.
“No one noticed me. That street was quiet; no one was around.”
“And what happened next?”
“I asked her if she wanted to ride my bike. She smiled and nodded. So, I sat her on the seat and let her hold on to the handlebars, but since her feet couldn’t reach the pedals, I had to guide her through the breezeway that I always used as a shortcut.”
“A shortcut to where? Where’d you take her?”
“I took her to Baxter’s old house. I told her there was lots of candy there, enough to fill her bag up.”
“Oh, God!” I groaned. In an effort to get Phoenix to confide in me, I’d been stoic up until now, but hearing him admit that he used the promise of more Halloween candy to lure a helpless little girl to her death was difficult to hear.
I glanced down at the hardened corpse that used to be Taylor Flanagan, and quickly looked away.
“As soon as she realized that the house was empty and didn’t have any electricity, she started crying. Not whimpering and whining like most little kids.…she was loud! Ear-splitting loud! And I didn’t have a choice; I had to shut her up.”
“What did you do to her?” I braced myself for the worst.
“I told her to be quiet, but she wouldn’t. I took my shirt off and used it to cover her mouth. But she kept on screaming and struggling with me. It was an accident, Pops. I didn’t realize that I had smothered her until she went limp. I tried to give her mouth-to-mouth, but it didn’t work.”
“Why did you try to resuscitate her if your plan was to kill her all along?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t want to kill her that way.”
“How did you want to kill her?”
“I wanted to hang her,” he said quietly.
I flinched and emitted an involuntary sound of horror. “Why did you have a desire to hang her?”
“I like watching public executions online. They’re uploaded and posted from different places in the Middle East and Asia. When a person gets hung, their body convulses and jerks in a way that’s fascinating, and I wanted to see it in person.”
Hearing my son admit that he sought out online videos that featured public executions was so nauseating I could feel the muscles around my mouth straining to twist into an expression of extreme displeasure. My face felt hot and my stomach lurched. In fact, every part of my being reacted negatively to Phoenix’s admission.
“Did you plan to hang Paisley? Is that why you took her to Baxter’s?” I asked, powering through the vile questions while striving to keep my vocal quality even-toned and without an inkling of judgment.
“Yeah, I planned to hang Paisley. I was going to do it after I finished reading to her. She seemed like a sweet kid and I didn’t want to kill her without making her happy, first. But…as you know, my plan didn’t succeed,” he said with a rueful smile.
“I don’t understand why you target young children? Do you have sexual fantasies that involve little kids?”
“Ew, no! I pick them because they’re easy to manipulate, and they’re such lightweights, it’s easy to physically overpower them.”
“How’d you get Taylor’s body all the way from Baxter’s house to here?”
“I wrapped her in trash bags and tied her onto my bike and then I pushed it here. It was hell pushing a bike on rugged Tijera Springs Road, but I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t leave her at Baxter’s and let some nosey real estate agent find her body.”
“No, I suppose you couldn’t,” I said resignedly. Although I’d had a gut feeling that he wasn’t mentally all there, he was much sicker and more dangerous than I could have ever imagined.
I doubted if there was anything I could do to help a psychopath that had no intention of ending his killing spree.
“Does Mr. Fawcett know that there’s a cave on his land?” I continued.
“Yeah, he knows. He’s the one who told me about it. He says he’s only been down here…maybe three or four times in the forty-plus years that he’s owned the ranch. He never told anyone about it because he didn’t want the place crawling with tourists, and he didn’t want the government butting in and making claims on the cave.”
“Hmm,” I muttered.
“As you know, he can barely see, Pops, so you don’t have to worry about him coming down here.”
“How long do you plan on leaving Taylor in this cave?” I asked with heartfelt compassion. It hurt me to my core to realize the extent of his psychosis. He was so screwed up in the head, it was clear to me that he was going to end up being confined to a mental institution for the rest of his natural life.
Of course a good lawyer could make sure that he was charged as a juvenile and set free at age eighteen.
I wondered if Elle realized that our child was a lost cause. Was his deteriorating mental state the reason that she so easily turned him over to my care after years of keeping him away from me?
And what about the therapist that Phoenix saw once a week? Did he know that Phoenix yearned to kill people and wanted to watch their bodies twitch and writhe? I imagined the therapist’s records being subpoenaed and his notes being reported in newspapers across the land. And I shuddered as I envisioned the trial being televised.
Sasha and I as well as Elle and Everett would become pariahs in our communities. The businesses that Sasha and I worked so hard to build would surely fold. And it wouldn’t stop there. Sweet little Zoe would also be ostracized. Her mermaid slumber party would be the last event that she would ever host. No parent would allow their child to socialize at our house, and who could blame them?
“We’ve got to move the body out of this cave,” I said, thinking out loud.
“Why? She’s safe here. No one will ever find her.”
“She deserves a proper burial, Phoenix. Her family should be allowed to say goodbye.”
“But she doesn’t even look like herself anymore. Why would they want to tell a corpse goodbye?”
“It doesn’t matter what she looks like. Her family still loves her and they need closure.”
My thoughts went to Tessa Jordan, my busybody neighbor, and I could only imagine the tales she would tell after word got out that my son was the perpetrator of the most heinous crime to ever take place in peaceful Springfield Hills.
I imagined her saying, Malik Copeland stood right next to me, asking questions and acting concerned when all the time, it was his own monstrous son that snatched that sweet little girl. I think Malik knew all along, and he did everything he could to cover for his son.
“What do you plan to do with her?” Phoenix asked, looking down at Taylor’s corpse with a warm look in his eyes, as if the mummified remains were a beloved pet that he couldn’t bear to part with.
“We have to put her in a location where someone will find her,” I said logically, as if having a discussion about moving a dead body was a normal conversation between a father and son.
“What about me? Are you going to tell the police?”
“Of course not.”
“I’m not stupid, Pops. You’re too much of a goody-goody and too moralistic to let me get away with this.”
“You’re not going to get away with it, Phoenix. Although I’m not going to turn you over to an angry mob, I’m definitely going to make sure you get intensive therapy. Perhaps another thirty-day stay in a mental hospital… But not any time soon. We need to allow some time to pass. It might draw unwelcome attention to you if you were hospitalized in the midst of the media circus that’s going to ensue when the body turns up.”
He nodded, relieved that he wouldn’t be locked up in a mental institution.
“Can I tell you something, Pops?”
Not sure if I could withstand another bombshell revelation, I nodded hesitantly.
“I was going to hang Baxter, too. But his family moved before I could get around to it.”
Fighting against a violent reaction, I swallowed hard and bit down on my bottom lip. “Baxter’s not a little kid; how’d you plan to overpower him?” I asked reasonably.
Phoenix gave me a sly grin. “I would have overpowered him with logic. I’m a skilled debater, you know.”
Uncomprehendingly, I gazed at the face of madness that belonged to my son. “What does being on the debate team have to do with overpowering Baxter with logic?”
“There wouldn’t have been a need to struggle to get a noose around his neck; I could have used the powers of persuasion to get him to willingly do it.”
“That’s ridiculous!” I was so sickened by Phoenix, I wanted to flee the cave and put miles and miles of distance between us, but I stood there and continued to endure the madness.
“Baxter was suicidal, Pops,” Phoenix explained. “Slitting his wrists wasn’t his first attempt to kill himself. He had lots of issues with his parents, kids at school…and he just didn’t want to be here anymore. But he was too scared to go through with it. If I were there with him, I would have given him the rope and instructions on how to do it right. Most importantly, I wouldn’t have allowed him to punk-out of it like he’d done many times before.
“It would have been more like a mercy killing than murder,” Phoenix rationalized. “But he moved, and that pissed me off. It really pissed me off,” he repeated in a louder tone.
He glanced down at Taylor’s corpse on the floor. “This stupid little kid died so fast, I didn’t get a chance to enjoy it.”
He stood up and began to savagely kick the corpse. The sound of his sneaker connecting with the child’s hardened dead body was so repulsive, my lips curled into a grimace as I recoiled.
“That’s enough, Phoenix!”
“It’s true, though. And it’s messed up the way nobody will cooperate with me,” he said, frowning disdainfully. “It’s not my fault that I have this urge, but if I could do it one more time—without being rushed—I wouldn’t have to kill again.”
In so many words, he was asking me to endorse and possibly participate in his final murderous escapade, and I was stunned.
“It’s getting late,” I said. “We have to get the body out of here, and go home. We’ll talk more about your situation tomorrow.”
“Do you promise that we’ll talk about it?”
“Yeah, I promise,” I mumbled.