The Red Scream (4 page)

Molly flipped on the fuzz-buster attached to her visor and hit the accelerator as she turned onto Mesa and headed back toward her town house, back to the unfinished story waiting for her there on her computer screen. As usual she was facing a deadline and even after twenty-two years in the business, deadlines still made her sweat.

Eleven years ago, back when she first got swept up in the Louie Bronk arrest, she hadn’t known it would mushroom into a long and harrowing serial murder case that would absorb her attention as nothing else ever had. She’d been a police reporter for the
Austin American-Patriot
at the time, and when she dropped in at the Austin PD press room, it had looked like a slow news day, too hot even for crime, which usually thrived on heat.

Gus Drysdale, the head of the Austin homicide detail, had whispered the rumor in her ear. There was this drifter, Gus said, who was being arraigned down in Hays County for murdering an old woman he’d done some odd jobs for. “He’s got one murder on his record, back in Oklahoma. Killed his older sister and shaved the hair off her head. Then raped her—in that order. Sound familiar?” he asked, his voice rising in excitement.

Molly had turned to face him and whispered, “The Texas Scalper?”

“Could be,” Gus said. “But this guy wasn’t driving a white Mustang. No car at all—he was on foot. Rumor has it that he’s confessing to everyone who’ll listen that he’s killed more than thirty women, mostly in Texas, and mostly close to the Interstate. We’re sending someone down to question him about the McFarland case.” Gus grinned at her. “And if all that isn’t bizarre enough for you, here’s something that’s sure to appeal to a literary type like you. Many
times
he makes up
rhymes
about his
crimes.
If he isn’t our
Scalper, at least he should be good press. You get there quick, Molly, you might could scoop this.”

She’d given Gus a peck on the cheek, called to check with the city desk, and headed her truck toward San Marcos in the hope of interviewing the district attorney there and maybe catching the arraignment.

She entered the Hays County courthouse just in time to see three Texas Rangers and a U.S. marshal escorting a man who was handcuffed and chained at the waist down a long dark-paneled hallway. Because she’d come in from the bright sunlight outside into the dark hall, she couldn’t see them well at first. She followed them to where they stopped and waited in front of a closed double door marked “Courtroom Four.”

Her first impression of him, as he stood waiting, was of a small insignificant man who was slightly amused, as if none of this had anything to do with him. The chained prisoner was in his mid-thirties, she guessed, short and wiry, but with an unpleasant-looking hard paunch asserting itself above his belt. His stringy arms were covered in crude blue-green tattoos, the kind that were done in prison, and his skimpy dark hair was greased back on his scalp. Small dark eyes were set very close together. The gray T-shirt he wore was darkened with sweat stains under the arms and across the chest. She didn’t know it then, but Louie was a prolific sweater. Even in cold weather, and even fresh from the shower, he smelled like a man who’d never had a bath.

One of the Rangers turned and said to him, “Want me to escort you to the gentlemen’s before we go in, Louie?”

As he opened his mouth to speak, Molly recoiled slightly. The man’s lower jaw was crowded with jumbled, crooked teeth. It looked as if he had twice as many as was intended for the narrow jaw. It was a shock, like going fishing and thinking you’d caught a perch, but when you opened the mouth to remove the hook you found you’d caught a piranha that was still very much alive.

On an impulse, sensing that this might be an important moment, she’d pulled her little Nikon out of her bag and snapped a picture. When the flash went off in the dark hall, the man whirled toward the light with a movement as quick and instinctual as the flicker of a snake’s tongue testing the air for possible prey. He stared at her. Then he offered a twitch of the mouth which some might call the
beginning of a smile, but Molly recognized it as something else entirely. She put the camera to her eye and snapped again.

That second photograph turned out to be the best she’d ever taken. It had been run nationwide by the Associated Press and was among the pictures that made the final cut in
Sweating Blood.
What made it such a good photograph, she’d always thought, was that it captured the smirk of amused knowledge that was Louie Bronk’s characteristic way of looking at women. Looking past the camera directly at Molly, his expression that day suggested he was capable of knowing things about her that she herself could never know. Later on, when the details about Greta Huff, Rosa Morales, and the others emerged, she learned what those things were and that he was right—she could never know them about herself because when they were finally revealed she’d be dead, or dying.

During the two years it took her to write the book, she kept a copy of that photo pinned on the bulletin board over her desk, along with the autopsy photos of two of Louie’s victims—Tiny McFarland and Rosa Morales. To remind her what the book was about.

Pulling up to the mailbox in front of her house, Molly maneuvered the truck as close as she could without knocking off the side mirrors. Leaning out the open window, she reached inside for her mail and fanned it out so she could see at a glance if the check she’d been waiting for was there—the one from
Texas Law Enforcement Quarterly
for the article she and Barbara Gruber from the ME’s office had coauthored, on recent developments in blood splatter. It wasn’t, of course. Damn, but this was a slow-paying business. You could starve while waiting for payment on work you’d done months before. She sighed, dropped the mail into her lap, and drove into her garage, punching the automatic door closer on her dashboard to shut it behind her. She turned off the engine and looked through the mail: several bills, a brochure for a self-empowerment seminar for women, a letter from her Aunt Harriett, one from her agent in New York, and a flimsy white envelope addressed to her in pencil with an Austin postmark and no return address.

She tore open the envelope from her agent, praying for a lucrative film or TV offer—a secret fantasy of hers. But it was just a note saying he was negotiating with a publisher in Tokyo for the Japanese rights to the book. Apparently the Japanese were big on serial killers right now. There could be some real money in it, he said.

Dropping the letter into her lap and picking up the penciled envelope, she ripped it open and pulled out a sheaf of folded papers. They looked like printed pages that had been torn from a book. Just as the timer switched off the overhead light and threw the garage into total darkness, she recognized them as pages from
Sweating Blood.

Curious, she hurried into the house and tossed the rest of the mail on the kitchen table. The pages—twelve of them—had indeed been torn from
Sweating Blood.
They were the pages describing the murder of Tiny McFarland.

She sat down at the kitchen table and leafed through them. Attached to the last page was a yellow Post-it on which a poem was penciled in small crabbed printing. It said:

Lady writer, you ought to know it:

Louie is my favorite poet

Your depiction of his crimes

Has inspired my poor rhymes.

I give your book a rave review.

Accolades from me to you.

Now that Louie’s doomed to die

I may give his craft a try.

Oh me, oh my.

Who’s next to cry?

Sealed with a kiss.

Remember this: I am the master poet here.

Molly crossed her arms tight over her chest and raised her eyes from the page. Then she leaned back and gazed out the kitchen window where the cluster of gnarled live oaks had taken on a rosy glow from the setting sun.

What she needed was to take a deep breath and fortify herself—toughen up. Here it was: the first of the inevitable kook letters. Richard had warned her when she told him she was going to write the Bronk book that it would bring the nut cases streaming out of the woodwork like cockroaches. Not that she needed warning, really. Over the years, she’d had her share of crank letters and
threats. And, she reminded herself, not one of them had ever amounted to a goddamned thing.

She could toss this in the garbage and forget it; after all, she had work to do—a deadline in two days on an article for
Lone Star Monthly
about the Abilene Angel, a woman minister of a fundamentalist Christian sect who had just been convicted of persuading elderly parishioners to will their worldly goods to the church and then poisoning them. Molly had spent two mostly dreary weeks in Abilene researching it, interviewing sect members and families of the victims. An interesting story, she supposed, but it had never really captured her and she’d had a hard time stomaching all the holier-than-God religious extremists she had to talk to. She’d had to flog herself to get it written, but it was almost finished. All she needed now was a good ending.

She looked down at the poem again. One thing was sure: this was not from Louie Bronk. He couldn’t possibly have written it. She’d seen more than enough of his work to be able to recognize his style. When she’d been making her weekly trips to Huntsville to interview him, he had given her page after page of the verse he turned out like pancakes from a griddle, all written in his childish round script on wide-lined paper. Could she get it published for him, he wanted to know, not in a magazine but in a real book. She’d promised to show it to someone and had actually persuaded her agent to send it out to a few editors with the suggestion of an anthology of poems by death-row inmates all over the country. Though Molly liked the idea, wanted to call it
Poetry from the Edge
, it had met with universal rejection.

Instead, with Louie’s permission, she had used some of his poems in
Sweating Blood
as a device to give more insight into Louie and his background. She had paid him a flat fee of one thousand dollars, which went into his prison account for use in the commissary and kept him in cigarettes and Moon Pies for a year.

So Molly was all too familiar with Louie Bronk’s poetry. The person who had written this was far more literate.

She rested her fingertips on the first of the torn-out pages and slowly caressed the heavy white bond. The print was so sharp it looked as if the letters should feel raised. Though she had been seeing her words in print for twenty-two years, this was the first book, and the pages seemed more durable, more authoritative somehow.
But for some reason she didn’t understand, Molly hadn’t even glanced at the text of
Sweating Blood
since she’d completed the last of her editor’s revisions more than a year ago. When she’d received her fifty author copies two weeks ago, she had just held one in her hands and stared at her name on the cover for a long time. She’d always intended to write a book and there it was, finally. Then she’d opened the cover to check out the photograph on the flap. But she hadn’t yet opened it to read the text. Maybe because she was sure she’d find errors and it was too late to do anything about them.

Now she picked up the torn-out pages, beginning with 198, and read what she had written about the murder of Tiny McFarland.

It is difficult to imagine a more unlikely setting for the next murder, the one that happened on July 9, 1982.

In the rolling, cedar-covered hills of the Balcones Escarpment west of Austin, more than nine miles from the nearest exit off 1-35, the McFarland family lived in a sprawling native stone ranch house set on forty undeveloped acres. The McFarlands loved the location because it was peaceful and private with a country ambiance for the children—a fine place for dogs, bicycle riding, and target practice—but only a twenty-minute drive from Charlie McFarland’s office in downtown Austin.

It was a far cry from the drainage ditches and rest stops and squalid trailer parks along the Interstate highway that had served as Louie Bronk’s usual killing grounds. And this time the victim was very different from the dark-haired young hitchhikers and waitresses who were his customary prey.

Andrea Wendell McFarland, nicknamed “Tiny” because she stood barely five feet tall and weighed less than one hundred pounds, was a thirty-seven-year-old mother of two with short honey-blond hair that was streaked lighter on top.

The indulged only child of Stuart Wendell, the owner of a Texas department store chain, she had attended public schools in Austin, but instead of going on to the University of Texas as did most of her friends, she went East to college—to Vassar, where she majored in art history and took her junior year abroad in Florence. After graduating from Vassar, she came back to Austin and worked for her father as a buyer in the business. A year later, she met and married Charlie McFarland, a builder who was fourteen years her senior.

Tiny McFarland had a keen interest in the arts, especially painting and music. She was active in the Austin Symphony, the Laguna Gloria Art Museum, and the Junior League, and she oversaw her own investments,
which were considerable since her father had died five years earlier and left his entire estate to her.

A lifelong sportswoman and traveler, she had recently returned from a three-week hunting safari in Botswana. She was a fixture at charity balls and had been included several times on the list of the best-dressed women in Austin.

On this July day her husband, the chairman of a construction company he had founded himself, had risen at six-thirty and gone to work at his downtown office. At fifty-one, Charlie was a self-made businessman who had ridden the Texas real estate boom to modest success in the business of building homes and small office complexes. Business was brisk that year and he worked long hours, often leaving home at six and not returning until seven or eight in the evening.