The Killer's Wife (18 page)

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Authors: Bill Floyd

BOOK: The Killer's Wife
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A
s soon as Carson Beckman took his seat on the witness chair during Randy’s trial, I knew I’d been mistaken about the sketch tacked to the cabinet doors in the shed out behind our house. It hadn’t been a portrait of a future Hayden after all, or even Randy himself as a younger man. No, it had been this boy: there was that same thin unsmiling mouth, the rounded cheeks, and those vacant eyes. Even that bowl of fine, limp hair was the same, except that now I could discern its dirty blond color. Randy had chosen this boy as a subject for his sketch, just as he had drawn my own
portrait many years before. I felt an instant and uncomfortable kinship with him.
Knowing what had happened to him, everyone in the courtroom expected him to be painfully childlike. In truth, he’d recently turned sixteen and came across more like a stooped, awkward man than an adolescent. Carson, dressed in a suit and tie that were obviously a size or two too small for his frame (every time he swallowed, the motion of his Adam’s apple lifted the entire collar), sat in the witness chair and answered the defense attorney’s questions in a monotone. It was surreal, the lack of inflection and emotion on display as the young man recited in short, bland bursts the story of how Randy had murdered everyone in his immediate family.
“That night, when did you first become aware that something was wrong?” Allan Beyer asked. The public defender remained seated at the defense table, so every time Carson had to look in his direction, he also saw Randy. Observing from the gallery, I wondered if that was the way I’d looked when I was up there, loath to shift my eyes toward him. Carson mainly stared off into the distance, at some fixed point above the exit signs over the courtroom doors.
Beyer was the younger of Randy’s defense attorneys, and the one better tolerated by the jury. The older man, Gavin Plummer, was a bald, scowling fellow prone to lengthy ruminations and rhetorical leaps that sent eyes rolling in the gallery and more than once provoked outright scoffing from the judge. Beyer had taken over the majority of the questioning early in the day. Now he waited nearly a
full minute, idly twisting the curls of his graying hair before he repeated his question.
Carson almost seemed to be smiling, lolling in place, and I guessed that he was drifting on a cushion of prescription drugs. I’d been gulping at least a Xanax a day since Randy’s arrest. “When Dana woke me up,” Carson said mildly.
“And what did your sister say to you?”
“She said someone was in the house.”
The kid wasn’t offering anything extra, but this time Beyer didn’t allow the silence to take hold. “How did she know?”
“She heard Mom scream, just that one time. The only time before, I guess, he put the tape over her mouth.”
“‘He’?”
“Mr. Mosley.”
I had remained in the courtroom after suffering through what the attorneys had labeled a “recross.” In a reversal that I found extremely offensive, but which Turnbull and the rest of the prosecution team had concluded that I could not avoid, the defense had called me back to testify again, and again it was in relation to the contention that Randy had been mentally unstable at the time he committed his crimes. Turnbull’s suspicion was that the defense would assert that since Randy had left me the key to his shed, knowing what I would find within and how I would react—by taking the actions that would end his spree—that he’d actually
wanted
to be caught, tried, and executed. This, so Turnbull’s theory went, would prove beyond dispute that
Randy’s mind was not operating in a rational manner. “A last-ditch grasp to save him from lethal injection,” had been Turnbull’s summary. “Novel, but something of a reach.”
Worse than what they had done to me, though, was their summoning to the stand this lone survivor of Randy’s attentions for much the same reason. Although the Beckman murders had taken place out of state, the defense had argued that Carson’s testimony was relevant to Randy’s state of mind when he committed his crimes. It had been stipulated, and noted, that the witness was testifying under protest, but Beyer and his sallow old grump of a partner had cited some archaic precedent, and Judge Oliver had reluctantly agreed to allow Carson’s testimony.
So now Carson fidgeted in the witness chair, his eyes locked on empty space. An archipelago of acne traced across his chin, and his hair was flat and uncombed. His skin had a sallow cast that suggested months sequestered in the same bedroom, leaving to attend school but not much else. The aunt and uncle on his late father’s side, who’d taken legal guardianship of the boy, were seated not far away from me in the gallery, but I found that I couldn’t meet their eyes.
Beyer tented his fingers and leaned forward at the defense table. “What did Dana tell you to do?”
“She said we should go across the hall and hide in the guest room,” Carson said. As though a switch had been tripped, he suddenly became more animated, and began to speak in a rush. “She was talking about climbing out the window. But we were on the third story, and I don’t think
she was thinking clearly. I was scared so I followed her, and while we were in the hallway we could hear that something was happening in our parents’ bedroom, but the door was closed so we couldn’t see anything. When we got into the guest room, though, we could hear our parents’ door opening and then a voice called her name. It wasn’t Mom or Dad. I couldn’t look back, because she was pushing me ahead of her, and when I got into the room she slammed the door and that was the last time I saw her until it was over.”
The room was dead silent except for the sound of Carson’s quickened breathing. Judge Oliver asked him if he was all right to continue. She told him he could have a break if he wanted to. Carson shook his head curtly and gave her what was, under the circumstances, an oddly charming smile. “I’d prefer to get it over with,” he said.
Beyer continued his examination and Carson told the story: how he’d been too frightened to move or to turn on the light, so he’d huddled in the guest room in the dark and listened. His sister had screamed once after closing the door behind him and that was all. Carson described the sounds of a struggle. He said, “There were … damp sounds, like when you walk through a puddle. Someone beating on a wall or maybe the floor, I don’t know.” Few in the courtroom could look at him while he was saying these things, but I did. I couldn’t look away. A shadow of some prurient intensity, a pale sort of transport I associated with deep and abiding trauma crossed his face before the dead flatness returned.
“How long were you in there?” Beyer asked.
“The police told me later that it was over an hour, but I don’t know. I wasn’t wearing a watch.”
“When did you come out of the guest room?”
“After he told me it was okay.”
Beyer didn’t have to look up from the desk to note the stark shift in everyone’s attention; it was palpable. “Who told you? Mr. Mosley?”
Carson nodded, then leaned toward the microphone mounted on the witness stand. “Yes.”
“So he knew you were hiding in there?”
Carson had gone ghastly, and for a moment I thought he might faint and slide sideways out of his chair. But he stayed in place, face frozen, his lips barely moving. “I was sitting on the floor with my back against the door in case he tried to come in. I had decided that I was probably going to die. I heard someone coming out of my parents’ room and down the hallway, and I had my hands over my mouth, I remember that, I was trying not to let him hear me breathing or anything. There weren’t any more sounds and I started thinking maybe he was already gone and I should get out of the house or try to go and help Dana and my mom and dad, but I was too scared. Too much of a coward.”
Beyer said, “Son, no one is suggesting that you could’ve done anything to prevent what happened to your family. It wasn’t your fault. You should be thankful to be alive.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Carson snapped suddenly. We were all watching him intently now, leaning forward in our seats as he glared first at the patronizing defense
attorney, then finally over at Randy. “He knew where I was hiding the whole time. He knew. He was standing outside the door, right on the other side of me, and he just started talking, like it was a normal conversation. He said, ‘I know there was a boy in this family, I just can’t seem to find him anywhere in the house. I’m going to have a son myself, soon. My wife doesn’t know it yet, but I think it will be a boy, I can sense it.’ And then I must have made some kind of sound because he went, ‘Shhhh,’ and then he told me to wait another few minutes before I came out. He said not to look for my parents or my sister, but to go straight downstairs and call the police. Then he left and I waited and I did what he said.”
Beyer shifted his focus to the jury. “In all his years of committing the most appalling of crimes, Mr. Mosley had never before been in the habit of leaving survivors. He even spoke to Carson prior to leaving the Beckman home, fully aware that Carson would be able to identify his voice to the police, which he in fact did, over a year and a half later. We would ask you to consider whether these are the actions of a sane person acting in his own best self-interest, or rather those of one who was deranged and functioning with an impaired reasoning capacity, as evidenced by a clear wish to be apprehended.” Randy saw that his lawyer was ready to let it go at that, and he whispered harshly in Beyer’s ear. The public defender was obviously reticent, but did his client’s bidding. He turned again to the witness stand. “One more question, young man. Can you offer any explanation other
than insanity for
why
Mr. Mosley would have spared you, after what he’d done to your family? Can you think of any sane reason for him to have left you alive?”
The judge looked at Turnbull, expecting his objection. The prosecutor had even risen to his feet when Randy spoke up from the defense table, aiming his words directly at Carson Beckman, who sat motionless and pale on the stand. “He knows,” Randy said.
Carson stared at him as though he could make him disappear. His voice was adamant. “No, I don’t know.”
Judge Oliver told Randy to hold his tongue unless he wished to be sworn in. Beyer and his partner frowned and Beyer put a hand on Randy’s arm. But Randy was still watching Carson, and he mouthed the words silently this time, the same as when he’d mouthed that he loved me while I was on the stand: “Yes. You do know.”
T
urnbull’s prosecution team led me out a rear exit from the courthouse, so I could avoid the cameras and questions from the gauntlet of reporters staked out on the front steps. The exit led into a private parking garage reserved for court employees and witnesses who’d been summoned to testify; it was a cold and shadowy concrete structure that I imagined could bring out the paranoid or claustrophobic tendencies in even the most stable folks. Turnbull promised me that this would be the last time I’d have to come to court, unless I wanted to be present when the verdict was read, which he expected to be sometime the following week.
“Is there any chance they’ll find him not guilty?” I asked.
“There’s always a chance,” Turnbull said, fidgeting with his bow tie. “But I think the jury will see through the insanity defense. What they did with that boy today bordered on crass, and juries typically don’t respond well to such tactics.”
“Then I don’t need to be here,” I said.
I’d turned to my Accord when I heard one of the entrance doors to the deck opening behind us. I looked around and saw Carson Beckman coming down the aisle of parked vehicles, flanked on either side by his aunt and uncle. I had fully intended to get in my car and drive home as quickly as I could, but seeing him there, a diminished-looking figure between his older guardians, I don’t know what possessed me. I couldn’t help myself.
They stopped by a big silver SUV, and Carson had one of the rear doors open when I approached to within a few feet and cleared my throat. He turned, as did his uncle, a distinguished- and harried-looking man with snow white hair and a three-piece suit. They both stared at me. “I’m so sorry to disturb you,” I said, hearing the tremor in my voice, but determined to overcome it and say what I needed to say. “I’m Nina Sarbaines, I used to be Nina Mosley. Would you mind if I had a quick word with you, Carson? It won’t take a moment.”
His uncle seemed about to intervene and politely ask me to go and leave them in peace; in fact, I could almost see the words forming in his head, but Carson nodded and quickly walked a little distance away from them. I followed him and
when he turned around I couldn’t help reaching out and placing a hand on his arm. He flinched and I drew my hand back.
“I just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry,” I said in a rush, almost stammering. And of course that wasn’t all I wanted to say, but my throat closed up on me and I couldn’t continue. I’d meant to tell him that I understood that what my husband had taken from him was irreplaceable. I’d wanted to tell him that although I knew my situation was different, Randy had taken a lot away from me, too.
He stared at me curiously a moment, not obviously offended, but not comforted either. After a pause that lasted long enough to make me question my impulse to confront him, he said in a voice quiet and hollow: “I don’t feel right. I don’t feel like I’m supposed to feel.” Like the lack of emotional response on his part had frightened him. “There’s something wrong with me.”

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