The Red Scream (22 page)

“You know,” she said, “David might have been killed just a few hours after talking to me in Katz’s—that really bothers me. Do you think his talking to me could have had anything to do with his death? Maybe someone was worried about him telling me something.”

Grady turned right on Koenig and headed toward Northwest Austin where Molly lived. He was driving the speed limit for a change.

Molly said, “Look at the timing here. A month ago Louie Bronk gets his execution date. Three weeks ago my book is released. On Tuesday Charlie McFarland tries to get me to stop writing about Louie Bronk and his first wife’s murder. The same day I get an anonymous letter saying the writer is going to emulate Louie. That night David Serrano, the old baby-sitter who was the original suspect in the first murder, wants to talk, and later that night—probably—we aren’t sure when—he’s murdered. Wednesday morning Charlie’s second wife is murdered, also shot to death. Oh, I don’t know. This just makes my head hurt more.”

“Well, one thing’s sure,” Grady said, “this one’s not going to be a slam-dunk.”

“Mmmmm,” Molly said. “And all of it five days before the convicted killer of the first wife is scheduled to be executed.”

Grady said, “Things look worse and worse for McFarland, don’t they?”

Molly didn’t answer.

In silence, he turned onto Steck, then left into Molly’s complex, pulling up in front of her town house. Jo Beth’s white Volvo was parked in the driveway.

Grady shut off the engine and headlights and turned to face her. “Head still hurt?” he asked in a low voice.

Molly had a sudden flash of remembrance from years past: Grady Traynor used to have the best technique in the world for banishing headaches. She wondered if he still had the touch. “Yes,” she said, “it still hurts.”

“May I try my hand?” he asked, sliding out from under the wheel. With surprising agility, he managed to get over the protruding shotgun and the apparatus that locked it in place so he was on her side of the seat.

She knew it was madness to go any farther with this. But her head was now thrumming with pain.

He reached out his long-fingered hands, put one on each side of her head, and pressed gently against her temples with the heels of his palms.

It felt so good she was instantly lost in the sensation. He rotated her head so she had to turn her back to him, and then he moved closer so he was right behind her. “Lean against me,” he whispered in her ear. “Relax, so it has a chance to work.”

Knowing it was a mistake, that she was passing the point of no return, she let herself sink against him, feeling the heat from his body and the solidity of his chest against her back. With the tips of his middle three fingers, he pressed against her temples, making tiny circles. Gradually he increased the pressure until it felt as if his steady pressure was pushing the pain back.

At the same time he pressed little circles with his thumbs behind her ears. It was heaven. The tingling sensations radiated from her head down her neck into her body, producing little flutters low in her abdomen, and a feeling of bonelessness, a liquefaction right down to her toes.

Slowly he moved his hands down to her neck and shoulders, and began to massage. “Is that a good place?” he asked, pressing his fingers into the tight place between her shoulder blades.

“Mmmm,” she said. He certainly hadn’t lost his touch. She remembered it all, now that she was allowing herself to. This was a man who loved foreplay—endlessly creative, tireless foreplay—not her first lover, or her last, but her best.

“Better?” he whispered, his breath warm in her ear. Then she felt his breath lower, on the back of her neck, then the brush of his lips
there. He moved his hands slowly along her shoulders, down her arms toward her breasts.

A car squealed up to the house next door, catching them in its headlights. Startled, Molly sat up and pulled away.

Grady tried to draw her back, but she shook her head.

Molly’s young neighbors got out of their car and stood laughing and talking in the street, glancing over at the parked police car.

Grady looked at the Volvo in Molly’s driveway and sighed deeply. “I guess Jo Beth is here,” he said.

“I guess so,” Molly said, running a hand through her hair.

He reached out for her hand and squeezed it. “Maybe we could talk some more tomorrow. Take up where we left off.”

She started to open her door, but he held on to her hand. “Thanks for the help tonight, Molly. Be careful; we’ve got a killer out there. And it looks like the dam has broken.”

She nodded at him, disengaged her hand, and got out of the car, feeling dazed.

Inside the house with the door locked behind her, she switched off the outside light and peered through the narrow window at the side of the door. He was still sitting there in the dark, hadn’t started the engine yet.

When she heard a footstep behind her, Molly jumped and spun around.

“Well,” Jo Beth said, “was it him?”

“Huh?”

“David Serrano—was it him?”

“Oh. Yes, it was.”

“Is that
Dad
out there in the patrol car?”

Molly looked out again as if she wasn’t sure who it was. “Oh, yes,” she said, “it is.”

chapter
12

Lying makes your nose grow long—

Lying is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Lying keeps them guessing.

Lying is a blessing.

Everybody lies,

Cries,

Dies.

LOUIE BRONK
Death Row, Ellis I Unit,
Huntsville, Texas

M
olly Cates woke with a gasp, her head jangling. It was the goddamned telephone ringing—surely the worst sound in the world to wake up to. She reached up and fumbled it down from the shelf in the headboard. “Hello.”

“Mom, have you seen the morning paper yet?” Jo Beth’s voice sounded breathless.

“Jo Beth. No, I just woke up. Why? What’s it—”

“Just go get it and read the article on the front page of the City-State section in the
Patriot.
Listen, I’m late for a meeting. I’ll call you when I get out.”

Molly put the phone down, exhaled a long breath, and sank back to the pillow for a minute to regulate her breathing. The David Serrano murder probably wouldn’t have made it into this edition of the paper. Whatever this was, she knew she wasn’t going to like it.

She got up and threw on her old terry-cloth robe. Then she put some coffee on to perk, so she could fortify herself while she read whatever it was.

She hurried out and scooped up both papers—the
New York Times
in its blue plastic bag and the
Austin American-Patriot
in the clear one—and stripped the bags off on her way inside.

Back in the kitchen, she poured a mug of coffee and pulled out
the City-State section. The headline stopped her dead. With the cup poised at her lip, she read it one word at a time to see if she’d gotten it right at first glance. “BRONK RECANTS CONFESSION IN 1982 MURDER.” She felt a slow churning in the pit of her stomach. She sat down and proceeded to read the article:

Huntsville, Sept. 24 (AP) Convicted serial killer Louie Bronk claimed today from his death-row cell that he lied eleven years ago when he confessed to the 1982 slaying in Austin of Andrea “Tiny” McFarland. Bronk is scheduled to die here Tuesday by lethal injection for the robbery-slaying of the thirty-seven-year-old woman, who was shot to death outside her Northwest Austin home.

Bronk, 48, was convicted by a Travis County jury of capital murder in 1983 and sentenced to death. He is believed to be the notorious Texas Scalper who during a five-year period from 1977 to 1982 murdered as many as fifteen women along the Interstate 35 corridor. Beside his conviction in the McFarland murder, he has been convicted of four other murders in Texas—Greta Huff in San Marcos, Rosa Morales in Corpus Christi, Candice Hargrave in Waco, and Lizette Pachullo in Denton. In each case he received a sentence of life imprisonment.

Bronk has also confessed to at least fifty other murders in twelve states, but many of those confessions have been shown to be invalid.

Bronk made his statement Thursday through Texas Prison Ministries founder Adeline Dodgin, whom Bronk calls his spiritual adviser and best friend.

Bronk’s attorney, Tanya Klein of the Texas Assistance Center, who has been handling Bronk’s appeals, was out of town and unavailable for comment.

In his handwritten statement, Bronk said he was confused and under severe pressure when he made the confession. He claimed that officials who questioned him supplied him with enough information about the crime that he was able to confess to it convincingly.

Bronk said that the reason he has waited until now to recant the confession is that he has recently become a Christian and wants to set the record straight before he dies. “I know now that the only way to make up for the bad things I done is to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. God as my witness, I didn’t never even set eyes on Mrs. McFarland. I been reborn in Christ and I want to live whatever is left of life to me as a real Christian. That’s why I got to tell the truth about it now.

“The book that was wrote about the murder is totally false,” Bronk also said in his statement, referring to the recently published Catton Press book about the crime,
Sweating Blood
, by
Lone Star Monthly
writer Molly Cates. “At that time I wasn’t a Christian and I did like to spin a story, so I gave that lady who wrote the book a long tall tale. She just believed everything I told her and put it in that book but none of it is true. She encouraged me to tell that pack of lies. I can’t believe in this country you can get lies printed like that.”

Molly clenched her teeth and read on:

Travis County District Attorney Stan Heffernan, an assistant DA at the time, prosecuted the case. Asked about Bronk’s recanting of his confession, Heffernan said, “This is just the sort of thing I would expect from Mr. Bronk, who enjoys manipulating the media. Here at the eleventh hour, with his appeals running out, Mr. Bronk is merely making a desperate gesture.”

When questioned about the murder Wednesday of Georgia McFarland, 48, the second wife of Charles Clegg McFarland, whose first wife Bronk was convicted of murdering, Heffernan said Austin Police were actively following up several leads.

Molly let the paper fall to the table. That perverse, lying son of a bitch! After all his talk about going down with dignity and not giving in to the red scream. The macho code on death row dictated that when your time came, you went stoically. The worst thing was to give in to the red scream—to give voice to the terror of the execution chamber. Now here he was whimpering and getting ready to scream the red scream.

But why on earth should she be surprised? Like her daddy used to say, “Lie down with dogs, darlin’, and you get up with fleas.”

When she had decided to do the follow-up interviews with Louie and include some of the material in her book, everyone had advised against it. Her editor, her agent, Richard, Jo Beth—they had all warned that he was too crazy, too unreliable a source. And she hadn’t really needed it; there was plenty of information available in the trial transcripts, case reports, and interviews.

But she had been determined to hear about it in his own words and write part of the story from his point of view.

She picked up her coffee cup and brought it to her lips. Her
stomach gave a little heave of protest before she could drink. She dumped the coffee out into the sink and watched it run down the stainless-steel drain.

Why was she feeling so queasy over this? Louie was a liar making a last-ditch effort as the reality of his approaching death hit him. No one was likely to take anything he said seriously. If she was going to get upset over a little heat like this she ought to write about charity balls or the golden-cheeked warbler.

She glanced at the clock on the oven. It was seven-thirty and she had an appointment at eight-thirty with Alison McFarland. This development was all the more reason to get going on the story: a killer making a last-minute repudiation of the confession that got him convicted—this was good stuff. It would make a much better story. She needed to keep that in mind.

Molly took a long hot shower and put on what amounted to her working uniform: tan slacks, a white T-shirt, and an orange linen blazer she liked because it was supposed to look wrinkled and did. After she was dressed, she felt slightly better, but her stomach was still roiling.

She looked in her Day-Timer for the instructions to Alison McFarland’s house in South Austin. Then she picked up her notebook and little Panasonic tape recorder, checking to be sure there was a tape in it.

Molly drove through the seedy old South Austin neighborhood to the tiny frame bungalow at 1202 Monroe where Alison McFarland lived with Mark Redinger. The roof was patched in places. Tarpaper sheets hung raggedly over the edges, and the sidewalk in front of the house had undergone an upheaval where the roots of an old oak had cracked and lifted it. This sure was a long way from her daddy’s modern mansion on the hill.