The Killer's Wife (19 page)
Authors: Bill Floyd
“Don’t say that,” I pleaded. “Don’t even think it. That’s exactly what Randy would want, and we can’t give him one iota more satisfaction than he’s already taken from what he’s done to us.” I couldn’t find the words to express what I really wanted to share with him, that I knew what it was like to repress something great and horrible; it was like a solid block in your chest, a state of shock that seemed neverending. But the level of my presumptuousness in pulling him aside was weighing on me, the sheer indefensible audacity of it.
“You’ll feel better eventually,” I managed, hearing the dull weak sound of this serviceable platitude. How patronizing
I must have seemed, trying to impart some insight to this young man whose entire family had been erased by my husband while I was blithely pretending there was nothing wrong. I was trying to convey to him the feeling of something unlocking, a great unburdening to which I so desperately aspired but of which, in reality, I had no understanding as yet. In my head I was crying out that I’d been cheated, too, but of course what he’d been cheated of was so much greater. Finally, I finished lamely, “You can’t let anyone else tell you how to grieve. It’ll happen at its own pace, whenever you decide you’re ready.”
I must have seemed, trying to impart some insight to this young man whose entire family had been erased by my husband while I was blithely pretending there was nothing wrong. I was trying to convey to him the feeling of something unlocking, a great unburdening to which I so desperately aspired but of which, in reality, I had no understanding as yet. In my head I was crying out that I’d been cheated, too, but of course what he’d been cheated of was so much greater. Finally, I finished lamely, “You can’t let anyone else tell you how to grieve. It’ll happen at its own pace, whenever you decide you’re ready.”
“But I don’t even
want
it to happen,” he said, and now there was that twinge of terror and uncertainty that had surfaced momentarily on the witness stand. It was like he was begging me for something, some reassurance that he would eventually feel what he was supposed to feel, that he would make contact with something in himself that was essential and elusive.
want
it to happen,” he said, and now there was that twinge of terror and uncertainty that had surfaced momentarily on the witness stand. It was like he was begging me for something, some reassurance that he would eventually feel what he was supposed to feel, that he would make contact with something in himself that was essential and elusive.
I realized now, too late, that I had absolutely nothing to offer him by way of apology or reassurance. His uncle was coming across the garage toward us, and I felt a surge of gratitude at any excuse to be released from this proximity to Carson’s desperation. I reached out and squeezed his cold, unresponsive hands one more time before walking briskly to my car. I couldn’t bear to look back.
M
atthews pulled into the driveway a few hours after we’d last talked to Duane. He didn’t have the siren on, but as Carolyn and I watched him hurry up the sidewalk to the front door, the urgency in his step was obvious to us both. I held the door and he nodded at us in turn as he came in.
atthews pulled into the driveway a few hours after we’d last talked to Duane. He didn’t have the siren on, but as Carolyn and I watched him hurry up the sidewalk to the front door, the urgency in his step was obvious to us both. I held the door and he nodded at us in turn as he came in.
“We need to talk,” he said, dumping a briefcase on the couch. He immediately set to rummaging through it, pulling out reams of papers, scanned photographs, and official reports, then separating them into stacks as Carolyn
and I traded anxious glances. Finally, he opened his laptop and placed it beside Carolyn’s.
and I traded anxious glances. Finally, he opened his laptop and placed it beside Carolyn’s.
“Did you get to speak to your ex-husband yet?” he asked.
“The people at the prison said they’d get back to me by this afternoon. We’re still waiting. Carolyn thinks they wanted to take a crack at him themselves. Is there any word on my son?” I said.
Matthews shook his head. “Sorry. But I’ve been on the phone with Duane and a variety of Detroit-area police departments for most of the last couple of hours. Duane apologizes for being out of touch with you guys, but he thought it would move things along more quickly if we were getting this information firsthand. He’s been sending us stuff via e-mail pretty much the whole time. I’ll get to everything, but first I want Nina to see …” He trailed off and flipped through some papers until he found what he was looking for. He held up a grainy reproduction of a photograph, obviously scanned through a computer or fax machine. I recognized Carson Beckman’s thin mouth and his dark eyes, but this was a very different portrait from the boy I’d last seen in court. His features were more drawn and the cheeks were missing their former fullness, as though his skin had lost its surface tension and lapsed into a loose mask. It made him appear stupefied, an animal facing the sluiceway. He wore three earrings in the right ear, two in the left. An untidy soul patch on his chin added to the general air of unchecked self-disregard. “Have you seen him recently?” Matthews asked.
I shook my head, uncertain. “I don’t think so. It’s hard to be sure.”
Matthews spoke excitedly, as if he was trying to compress everything into a concise summary but knew it was hopeless. “That’s Carson’s ID card from his last known employer, a delivery service he worked for up until about six months ago. The picture is over a year old, so he’s probably changed his appearance to some degree since then. However, we did send a copy of it to the Murphy Police Department in Tennessee, and they said it matches their witness descriptions of the suspect in Julie Craven’s murder.” He brought out another photo, this one of a college-aged girl. He handed it to me and watched my mouth come unhinged.
“My God,” I said.
“Looks a lot like her, doesn’t it?” Matthews agreed.
“Who?” Carolyn said.
I set the photo down with trembling hands. “My son’s teacher. Rachel Dutton.”
“Doesn’t necessarily mean anything yet,” Matthews warned us. He finally seemed to have his things in the order he wanted them, and he leaned back on the couch and took a deep breath before continuing. “But compulsive killers, especially early on, are often driven to seek out victims that share certain physical characteristics. So, along with everything else we’ve discovered over the last few hours, it adds up to the most solid lead we’ve got. Okay. So, after the Beckman family murders, Carson is remanded to the custody of his paternal uncle, a man named Joe Beckman, and his wife Laurie.”
“Duane went to see them,” Carolyn said.
“That’s where he was calling me from. Apparently, Lane Dockery’s sister had been trying to contact them for a while now, ever since her brother went missing, but they wouldn’t allow it. Either their original interview with Dockery didn’t go so well, or Carson told them not to communicate with anyone else about it, we’re not sure. But when Duane told them about Hayden, they relented. Carson lived with the aunt and uncle from the time of the murders up until two years back, when he moved into an apartment across town. They thought he was still there until about six weeks ago, when the Realtor called them and said that the apartment was being repossessed because of nonpayment. There were a few boxes there and the aunt and uncle had cosigned the lease, so they picked up the boxes and stowed them in their garage at home. They claim to have had no contact with their nephew since then.
“Duane got part of the story from them and I followed up with the local police, but the rest of this stuff is straight out of Carson’s own possessions.” He held up pages of handwritten notes. I swallowed thickly, recognizing the handwriting. “Jeanine Dockery says she found her brother’s watch among the items in Carson’s boxes. It’s engraved with Lane Dockery’s initials. The aunt and uncle had been fairly reticent about the whole thing up until that point, but Duane said the sister kind of lost it on them and the aunt started spilling while the uncle called his lawyer. Duane convinced Joe Beckman that later on he might want us to consider him to have been a help, rather than a hindrance. The
poor people sound like they’ve been at their wit’s end with the whole thing.”
poor people sound like they’ve been at their wit’s end with the whole thing.”
I put a hand on Matthews’s arm. I could feel his hot skin, the racing pulse. “Start at the beginning, please.”
He took another deep breath and said, “Okay, okay. Carson basically had problems from the time he moved into his uncle’s house on through the time he left.”
“Which is to be expected, after what had happened to him,” Carolyn said.
“Agreed. But when you’ve been in the business as long as I have, you can’t help but notice how often the victim becomes the aggressor. I’m sorry, but it’s a fact of life. Take Charles Pritchett, for a relevant example. Duane says the aunt kept repeating how Carson was in one kind of therapy or another the whole time he was living with them, and how they couldn’t have been expected to do any more than they had. Their own children were grown and moved out of the house, with families of their own, and all of a sudden they have a troubled teen living under their roof. Their kids tried to make Carson feel welcome when they were home on holidays or whatever, but Joe Beckman claims that the more they tried to include him, the more he withdrew. Finally it was basically an arrangement of them providing food, shelter, and an allowance to someone they felt to be a stranger. They intimated some trouble with the authorities but Duane said they wouldn’t elaborate. That’s why I called up the local guys. Carson is old enough now that any juvenile records should’ve been expunged, but that doesn’t always happen in our own office, so I figured it was worth a
shot. I got to one of their records’ guys and explained the situation and that a child might be at risk, and he found what I needed.”
shot. I got to one of their records’ guys and explained the situation and that a child might be at risk, and he found what I needed.”
Matthews slid a few papers out and let us look. They were official police reports, one showing a charge of minor battery against a female. Carson was listed as the suspect. “This is from when he was sixteen,” Matthews said. “Only a few months after his testimony at Randy’s trial, he attacked a girl at school. She wasn’t seriously hurt, but she was scared enough that she and her parents pressed charges and the school kicked him out. The judge in the case felt some sensitivity to Carson’s past and suspended the sentence, and he was allowed to finish high school at a private academy.” He showed us another incident report. “No conviction on this one, but Carson was brought in and interviewed as a suspect in a series of Peeping Tom complaints in his uncle’s neighborhood. I think what we’re seeing here is ample evidence of a young man going off track in a real way.”
I shifted the papers and found one that had caught my eye before. I held the letter out to Matthews and said, “What about these?”
He nodded. “From Randy. There are quite a few, and it looks like Carson held on to most of them, which suggests to me that he wanted them to found at some point. They’ve been in contact for years. That’s why I asked if you’d talked to Randy yet.”
Carolyn was shaking her head. “Why would Carson Beckman want to correspond with the man who’d killed his own family?”
“He wasn’t stable,” Matthews said, shrugging. “I mean, I can’t pretend to know for certain, and we’ve only got Randy’s end of the correspondence. I imagine you were correct in surmising that the prison authorities in California were taking their own shot at getting information from Randy. I’ve already been in touch with them and they’ve searched Randy’s cell but haven’t found anything. He knows they were reading his mail, all prisoners know it, so I imagine he tossed all of Carson’s letters as they came in, or at least before all this blew up.” He met my eyes. “We need to call San Quentin back and have them put you in touch with him, right now.”
“Not yet,” I said. “I need to know the rest about Carson. He’s at large and Randy’s not.”
“Well, like I say, he’d graduated high school and worked a series of jobs in and around the area. No real record of any extracurricular activities, but that’s not unusual for a kid his age. We haven’t been able to track down any friends or acquaintances, so the Detroit cops are starting with coworkers at his most recent employer. He was in infrequent contact with the aunt and uncle until the Dockery interview, after which he disappeared. They didn’t hear any word on him again until the apartment supervisor asked them to pick up his things.”
He laid out a series of papers, copied versions of Randy’s letters to Carson. “These are in roughly chronological order, as best we can tell. The first one appears to be from just over two years ago, right after New Year’s. Randy makes reference to Carson’s ‘resolution,’ which Duane and I agree must’ve
been some internal prompt that compelled Carson to make contact. He would’ve been twenty-one years old then, and most severe mental illnesses often manifest their onset between the late teens and early twenties. Then there’s this: Randy writes, ‘You say you’ve tried to put it all behind you but the dreams keep coming. You tell me they won’t stop, and that Dr. Vale and her pills don’t help either. I suggest you ask yourself why you would contact
me
’—and that’s Randy’s emphasis—‘out of all the people in the world. The answers you seek are already there inside, if you have the courage to face them. I cannot give you the answers, but I can offer whatever help I can—I owe you that much, at least. Some ground rules, though: I’m sure you know that all incoming and outgoing mail here is read before being forwarded. The best I can do is set you out a map of sorts, a way to navigate to your own answers. My advice for you right now is to quit taking those pills. Drugs will only dull your soul and obscure the truth.’”
been some internal prompt that compelled Carson to make contact. He would’ve been twenty-one years old then, and most severe mental illnesses often manifest their onset between the late teens and early twenties. Then there’s this: Randy writes, ‘You say you’ve tried to put it all behind you but the dreams keep coming. You tell me they won’t stop, and that Dr. Vale and her pills don’t help either. I suggest you ask yourself why you would contact
me
’—and that’s Randy’s emphasis—‘out of all the people in the world. The answers you seek are already there inside, if you have the courage to face them. I cannot give you the answers, but I can offer whatever help I can—I owe you that much, at least. Some ground rules, though: I’m sure you know that all incoming and outgoing mail here is read before being forwarded. The best I can do is set you out a map of sorts, a way to navigate to your own answers. My advice for you right now is to quit taking those pills. Drugs will only dull your soul and obscure the truth.’”
“Jesus,” Carolyn breathed.
Matthews showed us other letters. “Notice how Randy starts addressing Carson by the time they’ve been communicating for a few months.” We saw the dedication line:
Son
. I remembered how Randy had tried to contact us after he’d first been sent to prison, how he’d addressed his letters to Hayden. I swallowed and felt sick. Matthews continued. “Their code wasn’t very sophisticated, but it didn’t have to be. Unless they’re otherwise instructed, prison censors can only scan for overt mentions of criminal activity. The reason the warden initially became suspicious was when Randy
mentioned ‘the caterer’s house’ in the aftermath of Pritchett’s attempted hit on him. For two guys with very little chance of owning their own homes anytime soon, we see a lot of reference in their correspondence to real estate. From Randy: ‘My suggestion is that you start with something much older. A fixer-upper no one else would want. The risk is much lower, since such structures often stand alone and isolated from more crowded neighborhoods. I know they don’t hold the same attraction or romance as what you referred to as your “dream home” or your “ideal place” but I strongly advise you to begin with something more rudimentary. Otherwise, the idealized home could prove more than you’re yet able to handle.’ Randy talks about checking the area beforehand. He tells Carson to ‘be sure to familiarize yourself with the other possible buyers who’d have an interest in your acquisition.’ He says to check for ‘lines-of-sight.’ We think he’s referring to family members and neighbors.”
Son
. I remembered how Randy had tried to contact us after he’d first been sent to prison, how he’d addressed his letters to Hayden. I swallowed and felt sick. Matthews continued. “Their code wasn’t very sophisticated, but it didn’t have to be. Unless they’re otherwise instructed, prison censors can only scan for overt mentions of criminal activity. The reason the warden initially became suspicious was when Randy
mentioned ‘the caterer’s house’ in the aftermath of Pritchett’s attempted hit on him. For two guys with very little chance of owning their own homes anytime soon, we see a lot of reference in their correspondence to real estate. From Randy: ‘My suggestion is that you start with something much older. A fixer-upper no one else would want. The risk is much lower, since such structures often stand alone and isolated from more crowded neighborhoods. I know they don’t hold the same attraction or romance as what you referred to as your “dream home” or your “ideal place” but I strongly advise you to begin with something more rudimentary. Otherwise, the idealized home could prove more than you’re yet able to handle.’ Randy talks about checking the area beforehand. He tells Carson to ‘be sure to familiarize yourself with the other possible buyers who’d have an interest in your acquisition.’ He says to check for ‘lines-of-sight.’ We think he’s referring to family members and neighbors.”
“Guidelines for how to stalk someone,” I said.
“Sounds like it. And it’s not long after these letters that we start seeing reference to ‘the caterer’s house.’ The chronology coincides with the failed attempt on Randy’s life.”
“He sent him after Pritchett?”
Matthews looked at us. “We can’t say for certain, can we? But Carson apparently wasn’t up for the job, and some of Randy’s most recent letters are pretty testy. This one says, ‘For all your pages and pages of unseemly smugness about how well it went with the place in Tennessee, and
how maybe since that was your first house it could be the best house and you might not want to move again, we both know that isn’t how it works. If you ever want to have serious assets, you know you have to build an entire portfolio.’”
how maybe since that was your first house it could be the best house and you might not want to move again, we both know that isn’t how it works. If you ever want to have serious assets, you know you have to build an entire portfolio.’”
“It’s him,” Carolyn agreed. “Randy must have sent him here after Pritchett exposed you.”
“Actually the last letter we have is from right after Lane Dockery came to see Carson, just before Carson dropped off the map. Randy says, ‘So you see that I can send you the right prospects. The
writer’s house
’—my emphasis—‘opens up whole new avenues of revenue to you. We are connected now by more than our shared past, we are connected by a living present and the foreseeable future. You are my hands.’”
writer’s house
’—my emphasis—‘opens up whole new avenues of revenue to you. We are connected now by more than our shared past, we are connected by a living present and the foreseeable future. You are my hands.’”
They were both looking at me when Matthews let the final page fall to the table. I set my teeth. I told Matthews to call the prison and get things moving.
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