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“No,” she exhaled. “No.”
35
Despite the sergeant’s murder, despite the Corner’s existence provable to anyone morbidly curious enough to glance into his hospital room, she still had to endure a home visit and interview with Family Services. To get permission to retrieve her children, she had to wait for the police to find an explanation for her blood alcohol level, for them to at last interview the neighbor to discover that the hot drinks he’d given her that night had been spiked with whiskey.
“To warm her up,” the neighbor explained, “like they used to have rescue dogs wear barrels of brandy? It helps.”
“The sergeant was concerned,” the boyish officer said sheepishly. “It was genuine concern. You hurting the kids, and he thought you were drinking. Lying about it. It wasn’t—he didn’t report you to Family Services to force you into saying anything. He wasn’t like that. He was a good cop. A good man.”
She was sure the boyish officer had convinced himself this was true.
Although at last required to return the children, her father-in-law still wouldn’t pick up his phone when she called. She’d appealed to the caseworker and the boyish officer for help, worried about what might happen when she showed up at his apartment to retrieve them.
The officer promised to drive her to get the children himself.
“I want to help. I need to do something good,” the boyish officer said with a sad smile, a distant look.
She chose to believe his stated motives, even though the police were clearly being helpful to appease her, worried not only that she might sue them for their failures, but also that she might talk to the reporters who swarmed hungrily around the hospital, the police station, and at the edges of her property line.
Deafened by the gunshots, she’d felt surrounded by a roaring tide as she watched the police help load the Corner into the ambulance, watched them photograph the scene. She saw them find and bag the black, weighted leather weapon she’d later learn was called a sap, the long, heavy object the Corner had used to murder the sergeant. After sign-off from the paramedics, the officers had left her at the station, waiting for her hearing to return to properly question her.
The boyish officer had gone on to the hospital, had recited the Corner’s rights before pulling his hair out by its roots, swabbing his body for evidence. She imagined the Corner’s hands paralyzed by his sides, powerless to stop them.
The invisible strands of his DNA linked the Corner to bits of himself left all around New England. In rural Maine, two grandparents killed by blows to the head, their ten-year-old granddaughter still missing, a shoeprint on a windowsill. In Hyannis, a dead mother, vanished girls. In northern Vermont, a living mother, a dead girl. A whole house on the Rhode Island coast clean and empty. A single matching hair. The tiniest trace of fluid.
Then there was the flood of possibly connected unsolved crimes with no physical evidence at all. People who’d told friends they’d felt watched. That small things had gone missing. Before murder. Before a child disappeared.
She recalled the pride in the Corner’s voice as he’d hissed the word “many.” Wondered if as his DNA was being collected he’d been excited at the prospect of being the center of the world’s macabre fascination. Maybe he’d enjoyed thinking about new avenues of control opening to him. How he’d toy with law enforcement. Keep his bodies hidden, hint vaguely at the horrors he’d left behind. Give interviews, deny them. Watch the pain of the survivors and relive his savagery.
But when she fired at the Corner, when she aimed at his very center, aimed to kill him, her shaking, injured hands, her inexperience, the physics of the gun itself caused the weapon to kick as she pulled the trigger three times, sending the bullets high. If he weren’t so tall, if she weren’t so short, she would likely have missed him altogether. But he was very tall. And she was very short. So a single bullet hit him at the base of the neck and instantly severed his spinal cord. He would almost certainly have bled to death had the sergeant’s interrupted phone call not galvanized an unusually fast and concerned response. The police and EMS had stanched his blood, had carefully pried the gun from her hands so soon after she fired, so soon after he fell, that she’d sat stunned on the snow, deaf and unmoored.
Online she sought out scans of spines, learned what vertebrae she must have nicked for that particular result. She lulled herself to sleep diagramming the probable path of the bullet, the recoil of the gun, the way the Corner had realized what she held in her hands, the way he’d turned slightly away from her as he’d charged, making that particular injury, making his survival, possible. Her mental illustration of the scene’s physics soothed her after nightmares. Calmed her when she heard an unusual noise in the house.
The Corner was paralyzed from the neck down.
How quickly had he accepted that? How long had it taken forhim to understand he now required money, help, close and constant care? That she’d turned him utterly vulnerable? If he was anything at all like she was, every morning he’d wake thinking he was in his old world and be plunged into remembering what he’d lost. But he was not like her, so maybe he’d adapted much faster. The boyish officer had hinted that the police had left the Corner alone, asked the doctors and nurses to safely do the same, to demonstrate his complete dependence on the system. After that, the officer implied, the Corner seemed to understand his new reality. He answered questions. Described crimes. Although he was drawing things out. Giving only little bits and pieces at a time. Which, she thought, was characteristically logical. The longer he was useful, the longer he could be used to close cases, the safer the system would keep him. And when he stopped being useful? Though the system had been cruel to her, she coldly acknowledged it was far worse, his fellow criminals would be far worse, when it came to someone newly vulnerable who had owned up to such evil.
A few reporters violated the restriction of her property line.
“Ma’am, did you know him? Why did he target you? What would you have done differently? Do you know anything about his family, job, background—”
In this she heard, “What did you do wrong? Please tell me, so that I can tell myself nothing awful will ever happen to me. How did he become who he was? Please tell me, because he’s more important than you are. I need to tell myself I’d be able to spot him, prevent him, never cross paths with him. Me, me, me. Him. Him. Him.”
She waited. Mentally she graphed what always happened with terrible men and their horrific crimes.Yaxis, public interest.Xaxis, time. One line for the victims and survivors. Another for the monster. By her estimate those lines were just about crossing, hersand the children’s and all the lost and devastated souls fading downward to vanish as the Corner’s line swept ever upward. Within a week the majority of the reporters had already decamped from her street to the charming New Hampshire town where the Corner had lived, a safe place where he had apparently committed no crimes at all.
The stories of the others he’d haunted, targeted, and destroyed showed her an alternate reality filled with annihilation and unanswerable questions, a place separated from her, from her children, by the thinnest of curtains.
She stopped asking the police about any cases but her own.
Despite his likely ulterior motives, she was grateful the boyish officer drove her to get her children. Waiting outside the senior apartment complex, her father-in-law stood over the children cross- armed and spiteful. But the old man softened at seeing the police car pull up. He gave the officer his condolences over the sergeant as she kneeled on the sidewalk, hugging the children.
The pain of the cold concrete on her knees helped her understand it was reality. Helped her accept that their smell, their hair, their breath were close again. Hers but not hers.
They don’t belong to you, either. That’s not how it works.
“I missed you, I missed you, I told you I’d come get you!”
She let the children trace their fingers along her healing face, ask questions about her eye, her yellowing bruises.
