GRACE NOTES
Journal Entry #427
If you watch a lot of true-crime shows, you start to notice a sameness to them. The murders take place in towns where “this kind of thing never happens,” and I always shake my head at these people who are trotted out by the producers to demonstrate the innocence lost. What I can’t understand is, how is anyone innocent anymore? The first time they tracked down one of these guys and hauled him out of his hole, only to find a nebbish of a man instead of the monster they’d been expecting, maybe then you could understand the initial surprise. But now? BTK had a wife and kids in his suburban home and a shack full of murder props outside in the back. Gary Ridgway was just average-sized, and he wore thick glasses, peering at the hookers on the street like a granny ordering soup in a restaurant. John Wayne Gacy had a heart condition that excused him from gym class at school, but somehow, he found the strength to murder more than thirty people. Cripes, if you told me today that old Mrs. Saunders on the corner had a bunch of bodies buried in her backyard, I wouldn’t be that shocked. You never know about people.
Molly came over today so I could show her my progress. She didn’t like the photos of the victims on the wall. “It seems like something he would do,” she told me. “Displaying them like that.”
If he had, he would need someplace completely private to do it, like BTK with his shed. You wouldn’t want to risk any family member or hapless landlord stumbling in to see the evidence. “He didn’t take trophies,” I reminded Molly. Or, if he did, the cops kept a tight lid on it.
Molly brought up an interesting idea as she looked at the newspaper clippings I tacked up. “Maybe he didn’t need to,” she said. “Maybe that’s part of why he sent those letters to the press, to get them to make trophies for him.” That would mean he’s been subsisting on yellow, faded paper for years now. Sure, the news throws him a bone every so often, but the Lovelorn Killer doesn’t make the serial killer hit parade because he’s never been caught. You need that happy ending when the monster’s true face is revealed. If he wants to be famous, he has to be caught. What a torture that must be for him. Probably ties him up like those knots he loves so much.
“That’s how we force him out,” I said to Molly. “We get him back in the news, give him a taste of that old high.”
Molly turned around so she didn’t see the dead people. I forget sometimes how it must look to other people. “But there’s nothing new to report on,” she said.
That’s why I keep all the pictures and reports tacked up on the wall. There’s something in there. I just can’t see it yet.
I can see him, though. He’s older now, less nimble, but just as ordinary as he ever was. He has thinning hair and a jowly face, aging like the rest of us who’ve grown up alongside him. I see him driving around the old neighborhoods where he made his kills, watching for the women in particular. I wonder if it’s harder to find them now that we’re all inside, yoked to our screens. Sure, he could go to a beach or a park where lots of people gather, but that’s not his scene. He’s at home on a street just like mine, with trees and families and delivery trucks. He’s probably been among us this whole time, laughing to himself about how stupid we are not to recognize him. He must be feeling pretty damn smug right about now. If he can just keep a lid on his urges, if he can just keep his mouth shut a little longer, he will have gotten away with it. But there’s the rub. The longer he waits, the farther he fades into history. Into eternal anonymity.
Because that’s the thing with these men: they could be anyone, but they’re mostly nobodies. Nobody important, anyway, because no one knows their secrets. They live in the same houses and eat the same food and wear the same skin as other humans, passing by us on the street like whistling past a graveyard. Only in the end when they finally come out into the light do we blink at them in a horrible kind of recognition: Oh, it’s you. You were right here all along.