GRACE NOTES
Journal Entry #441
Do you remember the moment you realized you were going to die? I was five years old, lying in my princess bed with its canopy and pink dust ruffles. My mother had sent me there after I put her expensive brassiere on Louie, our beagle. I might’ve gotten away with it, but I also used the Polaroid camera to take a picture of him and showed it to our mailman. “You think I’m the butt of all your jokes,” Mama hollered at me. “You’ll be sorry one day when I’m gone.”
I already knew about dead people since Mama’s mother died of a heart attack when I was three. I understood she’d been on earth walking around like the rest of us, and then poof, she died and wasn’t coming back. I hadn’t considered it would happen to Mama and Daddy—or that if it happened to them, it would happen one day to me, too. I remember holding out my fleshy little hand and staring at it until my vision blurred. I was going to die. Worms would eat me. I imagined my skin melting away until I thought I could see my skeleton poking out underneath. I screamed so loud that Mama came running, and after that, I slept in her and Daddy’s bed for a week.
The truth is, I still look at my hand when I lie in bed at night and contemplate my death. I think the rest of us Grave Diggers have similarly morbid fascinations, whether they’d admit to it or not. We take on dead cases, gone cold so long that most others have forgotten about them or given up. We tell ourselves that we’re chasing other people’s deaths. We solve a case, and we feel like we got a win over the ultimate Man in Black. Maybe, though, we wonder who will be there to remember us when our time comes.
I’m writing this in front of a wall full of dead women. They were different in life—unique hairstyles, varying skin colors, different kinds of jobs—but they all look the same now. They are dead on the floor of their own homes, tied up like Christmas chickens. The intricate interlacing of the rope and knots reminds me of shibari or kinbaku, the Japanese ritual binding that can be a form of torture or erotic pleasure, depending on how you employ it. The man who bound these seven women surely meant to torture them. The police reports on their deaths emphasize that he suffocated them slowly, loosening the ties periodically to revive them before choking the life out of them completely.
Their eyes are all closed in the crime scene photographs. I presume that’s how they were found. I believe they shut their lids against the horror of what was happening to them, and also to deny him the pleasure of watching the light go out from their eyes. I’ve read up enough on his kind by now to know that they seek out that moment of transition. A beating heart and racing pulse, the shuddering breath that dies in the chest—these guys get off on that moment. So, I understand why the women closed their eyes while he stood over them, tightening the ropes. But when I look at their pictures, I wish I could see what they saw. They are the only ones who know his true face.
He’s older now, like the rest of us. He went underground twenty-one years ago after Victim Number Seven, which likely makes him anywhere between forty and sixty-five years of age. Many experts say he must be dead, but not me. I’ve been walking the streets he walked, looking in the same windows. Sometimes I think I catch a glimpse of his reflection in the glass, at least what I imagine he must look like. I bet he’s got the same wall of photographs that I have, but his are kept private where no one else can see. His newspaper clippings must be yellowed and fragile, so old that they look like ancient history. He surely believes he got away with it. But I’ve checked the weather reports for all seven murders, and now I know where to find him.
I’ve been working on this case for months, writing up all my notes, recording conversations, visiting the crime scenes. Last week, I went on TV and practically dared him to come after me. I lay awake all night afterward, thinking every creak on the stairs could be him. Those other women never saw him coming. When the storm rolled in off the lake and cut our power for five hours, I took a kitchen knife and hid in my bathtub with it. But it was then I realized how to get him, and so I can’t chicken out now.
People are going to think I’m doing this for the glory or the credit, and I’ll admit a nice, fat book deal would be sweet, but mostly, I’m thinking about that moment when he gets the cuffs slapped on him and dragged out in front of everyone. I want him to see it was me who found him. Me, an ordinary woman living in Belmont Cragin, working at a grocery store. Just the kind of woman he killed and presumed he’d get away with it forever. Because right now, he’s a faceless spook, a ghost story, and the women he killed get known only by the way he murdered them. You can google them to see it’s true. No one remembers that Shauna Atkins played Maria her senior year in West Side Story, or that Lauren Gardner wanted to be a foster mom. They are permanent victims now, the way he made them. So, I’m chasing him because they can’t. Because maybe when he gets his life taken away, they can get a little bit of theirs back.
I get shivers when I think about it. Literal goose bumps on my arms. He’s going to feel so small, so helpless and powerless. I imagine his perp walk in front of the cameras and I can almost see his fa—