Quentin Garrison watched his face. He was very good at describing people, a skill he used all the time in his true crime podcasts. Later, recording the narration segments with his coproducer, Summer Hawkins, Quentin would paint the picture for his listeners—the leathery skin, the white eyebrows wispy as cobwebs, the eyes, cerulean in 1976 but now the color of worn denim, and with so much pain bottled up behind them, as though he were constantly hovering on the brink of tears.
The man was named Reg Sharkey, and on June 20, 1976, he’d watched his four-year-old daughter Kimmy die instantly of a gunshot wound to the chest—the youngest victim of April Cooper and Gabriel Allen LeRoy, aka the Inland Empire Killers. Two weeks later, his wife, Clara, had decided her own grief was too much to bear and committed suicide, after which Reg Sharkey had apparently given up on caring about anything or anyone.
Quentin said, “Wasn’t it LeRoy who pulled the trigger?”
“Yes.”
“But you blame April.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Reg stayed quiet for several seconds. Quentin resisted the urge to fill in the dead air. This was a trick that often worked in interviews, the subject finally relenting and spilling his guts—anything to put an end to that awful, uncomfortable silence.
Quentin listened to the hum of the air conditioner and the whoosh of a passing truck. Just outside the shaded window, a bird shrieked—a blue jay, Quentin thought, or some other similar species put on this earth to destroy radio broadcasts. He was glad Summer had talked him into the cardioid mic—it was so much better at cutting out background noise than the omnidirectional he’d planned on taking.You’d be surprised at how many distracting sounds there are in a typical living room, Summer had said. And she’d been right. Of course, if Summer had seen this place, she’d never have called it typical.
Reg’s living room was a time capsule, from the faded plaid earth-toned couch, to the Formica coffee table, to the avocado-green ashtray and matching coasters that looked as though they hadn’t been unstacked since the premiere of the very firstStar Warsmovie. There was a coffee-table book of photography—The Best of Life Magazine—and a few dustyTV Guides, one of which had Fonzie on the cover. It was as though Reg Sharkey had attempted to stop the clock on June 19, 1976, before his family had crumbled into a billion pieces.
Quentin took in the line of photographs on the mantelpiece—almost all of them of Clara and Kimmy, holiday photos and vacation shots, birthday party pictures, mother and daughter, smiling and young, forever hopeful, just we two... Quentin’s jaw tensed, a tiny, bitter seed taking root at the pit of his stomach.
He took a deep breath, willing the tension out of his body as he’d learned in the holistic yoga class his husband, Dean, had forced himto take.In with the positive energy, out with the negative...God, Dean could be so Californian sometimes, but it was better than nothing. Worse than downing a globe-size martini, or putting one’s fist through drywall. But better than nothing.
“They’re all I have,” said Reg. “Those pictures you’re looking at. They’re the only family I have left.”
“Well...” said Quentin.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes.” Quentin struggled to keep his tone neutral. “I know what you mean.” But the truth was still right here with them, hanging in the stale air and coursing through Quentin’s tensed muscles, showing itself in his narrow face and his slight overbite and the thick black lashes that used to get him teased when he was a kid. No matter what Reg Sharkey thought he meant, the truth was with them. It had nowhere else to go.
Reg and Clara had another daughter, a girl ten years older than Kimmy. At the edge of the mantel stood the evidence, a faded professional photo of the Sharkey family: Kimmy as a baby in Clara’s arms, posed between Reg and that older daughter, Kate.
Quentin stared at the ten-year-old standing next to her mother, a skinny kid with a pained, buck-toothed smile, a puffy-sleeved pink party dress that seemed to swallow her whole. Thick lashes behind plastic-framed glasses, dark eyes identical to his own.
He gritted his teeth. One picture. Out of this entire gallery, just one picture of Kate in a bent, cardboard frame. Anger bubbled within him, the kind a healing breath couldn’t fix, and Quentin had an urge to point that out—just one fucking picture of her—but he kept his mouth shut, remembering Reg’s rough voice over the phone. How he’d relented, finally, to thirty minutes and not a second more. Quentin needed those thirty minutes if this podcast was going to work. He needed to keep calm.
Quentin cleared his throat. “Back to my original question,” he said. “What did April Cooper do to make you think she was the real killer?”
“She didn’t do anything.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
Reg sighed heavily. “Gabriel LeRoy was all over the place. He was firing at everybody in that Arco station. He was consumed by rage. Out of control.”
“Okay...”
“She wasn’t.”
Quentin nodded slowly. “She could have stopped him, but she didn’t.”
“Yep.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “but I’m really trying to understand this. Can you explain to me why that makes a fifteen-year-old girl guiltier of murder than the legal adult who actually killed everyone?”
He drew a long, weary breath. “Think about a house on fire. It’s your house. Burning to the ground, taking with it everything you own. Everything you love. April Cooper—a fifteen-year-old girl as you point out—is standing next to the firehose, but she doesn’t make a move toward it. She just watches the flames and smiles.” Reg ran a hand through his hair and leaned forward, eyes blazing. “Who are you going to blame for all that destruction—the fire? It’s a thing of nature. It can’t exist without burning.”
Quentin took too big a gulp of the iced tea Reg had brought him—lukewarm and bitter. Hard to swallow.Everything you love.
