All the Flowers Are Dying Read online

  He could argue the question either way, but more often than not he leans toward the latter version. Random chance rolls the dice. Things happen because they happen. You get what you get.

  Consider this, then: Anyone could have paused to watch that basketball game, but it is not just anyone, it is he himself, the future Arne Bodinson, with his particular history and personality. And, although the weather renders it superfluous, he is nevertheless wearing a sport jacket, and in its breast pocket, atypically for him, there is a neatly folded white handkerchief. He’s put it there that morning, so he realizes he has it, and without conscious thought he rushes across the court to the fallen man, drawing the hanky from his pocket, using it to stanch the flow of blood from the injured (but not, it will turn out, broken) nose.

  Others, teammates and opponents, are also quick to assist Applewhite, and in no time at all they have him on his feet and are leading him away to get medical attention. And he’s left there with a bloody handkerchief in his hand, and he looks at it, and, wondrous to say, he is able to foresee everything that is to follow. Another man would have disposed of the handkerchief in the nearest trashcan, but he sees it at once as an unparalleled opportunity.

  He bears it carefully away. As soon as he conveniently can, he tucks it away in a plastic Ziploc bag

  A man in a brown suit, evidently a subordinate of the warden’s, enters the room and clears his throat, explaining in some detail just what is going to take place shortly on the other side of the window. He’s heard it all before, and suspects that’s as true of the others, the bereaved, the members of the press, and whoever else has contrived to get one of these precious front-row seats.

  But the fellow is not just there to refresh everybody’s memory. He’s the approximate equivalent of the chap whose task it is to warm up a television show’s studio audience, telling jokes to heighten their spirits, exhorting them to respond enthusiastically to the promptings of the APPLAUSE sign. The man in the brown suit doesn’t tell jokes, of course, and his goal is to mute and muffle emotions, not amplify them. “Remember the solemnity of the occasion,” he urges them. “You may feel the impulse to say something. Whatever it is, keep it to yourself until after we’ve finished here. The sight of this man who’s brought you so much pain may move you to cry out. If you feel you won’t be able to control yourself, I’m going to ask you to tell me now, and I’ll have you escorted to another part of the facility.”

  No one is moved to do so.

  “We’re going to witness the end of a man’s life. The process will be as painless as we know how to make it, but even so you’re going to watch a man make the transition from life to death. If that’s more than you care to see, let me know now. All right. If you discover when the time comes that you don’t want to watch, close your eyes. That sounds obvious, but sometimes people forget that they have the option.”

  There’s more, but he tunes it out. The clock, after all, is ticking, and he has more to remember…

  With the bloody handkerchief zipped in a plastic bag, all of what will follow is clear in his mind, as if the script is already written, as if he need merely follow the directions.

  When he first began to kill, he did so as a means to the twin ends of money and power. Those were the two things he thought he wanted, and killing was an occasionally useful technique for acquiring them. He was not surprised to discover that it did not bother him to kill, he’d somehow expected as much, but what he had not anticipated was the pleasure and satisfaction that accompanied the act. It brought excitement and a sense of accomplishment beyond anything attainable by other means.

  It is hard to say with certainty just when he turned the corner, coming to the realization that money and power were secondary, that killing itself was its own reward. But he suspects it’s around the time that he bought the knife.

  He holds the knife, grips it in his hand. It looks like any other bowie-type hunting knife, but he paid over two hundred dollars for it, and he can feel the value in its balance and the way it fits his hand. It was hand-crafted by a man named Randall, something of a legend among the makers and collectors of bench-made knives.

  He’s used it several times since he bought it. It’s always served its purpose admirably. And on each occasion he’s cleaned it afterward, scrubbing every trace of blood from its surface. It’s stainless steel, of course, and impregnable, but blood could find its way into the seam of blade and hilt, so he’s taken the additional precaution of soaking his knife overnight in a dilute Clorox solution. No blood, no DNA, nothing to implicate the knife or its owner in any of the several killings it has occasioned.

  Now, knowing he’s soon to use it again, and knowing the how and why of it, he feels the stirrings of excitement.

  That night and the following day he drives around Richmond, getting his bearings. He learns where the prostitutes gather. There’s no easier quarry, and he’s taken prostitutes before—off the street, in a massage parlor—when the hunger for killing has demanded quick satisfaction, and there’s been no time to make the act something special. One of them scarcely seemed surprised by her imminent fate, and he wondered if she and her sisters didn’t expect to end that way, wondered if serial murder might rank as an occupational illness, like black lung disease for coal miners.

  He comes close to selecting a prostitute the first night, a slender thing dressed for success in red hot pants and a skimpy halter top. All he has to do is stop the car. She’ll get in, and the moment he pulls away from the curb her fate will be sealed. She’ll be the first unfortunate victim of the man with the bloody nose.

  But he needs to know more. The course is clear, but the particulars need to be determined. One has to plan.

  He learns much that he needs to know. He learns the name and address of the man with the bloody nose, and he discovers more about him through some diligent Internet research. A husband and father, Preston Applewhite has been leading an essentially blameless life. How ironic, then that he should abduct, sodomize, and murder a string of equally blameless boys.

  Because he has come to see that a prostitute is not a good choice. So many of them are infected with one thing or another that it’s unappealing to contemplate close contact with them and their bodily fluids. And what if the whore he picks is a surrogate police officer?

  More to the point, there’s insufficient outrage attendant upon a whore’s death. That fellow in Oregon had needed to kill a couple of dozen of them before anybody noticed, and even then the police didn’t lose sleep hunting for him.

  Then, driving slowly past the scene of yesterday’s inspiration, he sees another basketball game in progress. But the players are boys. Kids, really, wearing gym shorts. Half the boys sport singlets, while the others have bare chests. No hair on those chests, no five o’clock shadow on those cheeks. Youth, innocence.

  Kill a prostitute and nobody will notice. But kill a child?

  Once he’d written this:

  I have killed both men and women. Killing men, I would say, provides me with more of a sense of accomplishment. On the other hand, for sheer pleasure, there’s nothing like killing an attractive woman.

  And a boy? He looks at the basketball players and is unable to perceive them as sexually desirable. Still, there’s undeniable excitement at the thought of harvesting one of them. He can fake the sexual aspect, can press a suitably shaped object into service as a surrogate penis. He needn’t experience lust himself in order to stage a convincing lust murder.

  In the end, he surprises himself.

  It’s several days later that he finds his victim, by which time he’s purchased several items. Most of them—tape, a blanket, a garden spade, a rubber mallet—are from the local Wal-Mart, but there are two more expensive articles, an automobile and a computer. The car’s a Japanese import the same size and shape as the one Preston Applewhite drives, while the computer’s a laptop, a bargain-priced IBM clone. He buys the car anonymously for cash from a private owner—it’s been hit, it needs body work an
d has probably suffered damage to the frame. But it’s fine for his purposes, and it’s cheap.

  He’s found a place near the high school where some boys wait to hitch rides, and he manages to spot a boy standing all by himself, his thumb extended. He looks to be thirteen or fourteen. Too young to drive, at any rate.

  He stops the car, lets the boy in. He’s a good-looking young man, his hair blond, his face and forearms lightly tanned. There’s downy hair on his arms, and his face is as smooth as a girl’s.

  Is the boy a hustler? That’s possible, hitchhiking is a time-honored way for boys to arrange liaisons with older men. This one seems innocent, however.

  He chats with the boy, asks him about sports, about school. “How about girls?” he says. “You like girls?”

  I like men better, the boy might say, but he doesn’t, he says girls are okay. He is, by all indications, entirely oblivious to what’s going on.

  At a stop sign, he brings the car to a halt and points to the floor on the passenger side. “There’s a glove there,” he says. “Can you reach it?”

  The boy bends forward, looking for the glove that isn’t there, and he swings the rubber mallet in an easy arc and hits the boy solidly on the back of the skull. Hard enough to kill him? No, but hard enough to knock him out. In no time at all the boy’s hands are taped behind his back, and another piece of duct tape covers his mouth.

  Five minutes later they’re at the preselected killing ground.

  And, he discovers, there’s no need to employ a surrogate penis. His own is more than equal to the task. The boy’s skin is as soft and smooth as a woman’s, and his helplessness, his utter vulnerability, is exciting. He hasn’t thought to bring a condom, an absurd oversight resulting from his assumption that the boy wouldn’t arouse him. Never assume, he reminds himself. Never take anything for granted. Prepare for all contingencies. So he takes his pleasure with the boy, but stops short of orgasm. And takes up the knife, the beautiful knife that Randall made.

  After the knife, a scissors, to snip a lock of hair. After the scissors, the garden spade. Not to dig the grave, he did that ahead of time, anticipating a need for it, but to fill it in. The killing ground’s an abandoned farm, west of the city and just beyond the Southside Speedway. Its own private family cemetery is off to the side of the ruined old farmhouse. The gravestones are so badly weathered you can’t make out the inscriptions, and now there’s one new grave among the other dozen or so, and he fills it in and presses the sod in place over it. Right now it’s a fresh grave, but soon it will be indistinguishable from the others.

  By nightfall he’s placed the battered old Camry in the storage shed he rented the previous day. If anyone finds it there, they’ll find a vehicle with no fingerprints on it. There’ll be no prints on the tools in the trunk, either—the spade, the mallet, the splendid knife. The roll of duct tape.

  He retrieves his own car, a beige square-back Ford Tempo with his luggage in its trunk. He drives west on I-64 and north on I-81, the cruise control set at four miles over the speed limit. He doesn’t stop except for gas until he’s across the Pennsylvania state line. There, in a mom-and-pop motel with a front office that smells of curry, he takes a long hot shower and makes a bundle of all the clothes he wore, to be donated to Goodwill in the morning. He slips into bed naked and lets himself relive each moment of the afternoon’s entertainment, starting with the boy’s getting into the car and ending with the last stroke of the knife.

  This time there’s no need to deny himself. His climax is fierce in its intensity, and he cries out like a girl in pain.

  9

  It’s noon, and no one has yet made an appearance on the other side of the long window. It is as if the curtain has risen upon an insistently empty stage.

  Where is everybody?

  Has there been a call from the governor? No, surely not, because the governor wants to go on being governor, and may even hope for higher office someday. He won’t be making any calls. Nor is there a lawyer out there with a last-ditch appeal to a high court. The appeal process has long since ended for Preston Applewhite.

  Is Applewhite all right? He’s a young man, a man just over the threshold of middle age, but old enough for a stroke, old enough for a heart attack. He pictures the man struck down in his cell at the eleventh hour, imagines the ambulance ride, the race to save his life. And then of course the stay of execution, until he’s deemed in good enough condition to be put to death.

  But surely it’s just his own imagination, having a field day. The other spectators aren’t fidgeting in their chairs or checking their watches. Perhaps executions are like rock concerts, perhaps everyone knows they never start precisely on time.

  It’s not as though anyone has a train to catch. But there would seem to be time for a further stroll down Memory Lane…

  Two days after the Willis boy’s death, he rents a furnished house in York, Pennsylvania. It’s a few days short of a month before he returns to Richmond.

  But it’s not an idle month. He has a DSL line installed for his computer, and he’s often online, researching subjects on the Internet, checking his e-mail, keeping up with his news groups.

  At least once a day he disconnects his own laptop and boots up the one he’s bought, which he thinks of as Preston Applewhite’s computer. In MS-Word, he writes out a breathless account of the boy’s abduction and murder, departing from reality only in that he tells of the weeks he spends leading up to the event, how he wrestles with the impulse, how he determines he has no choice but to go through with it.

  And he’s deliberately vague about the killing ground:

  I took him to a fine and private place. I knew no one would disturb us there. He’ll simply disappear. No one will think to look for him there.

  Online, he opens an e-mail account for Applewhite, ScoutMaster-Bates at Hotmail.com. On the registration form, he calls himself John Smith, unimaginatively enough, but the street address he provides is 476 Elm Street. Applewhite’s actual street number, while not on Elm Street, is indeed 476. For city and state he enters Los Angeles, California, but includes Applewhite’s Richmond zip code.

  As ScoutMasterBates, he surfs the net looking for porn sites, and they don’t prove terribly elusive. It’s only a matter of days before his mailbox begins to fill up with porn spam, and by visiting the sites that promise young male models, that talk of man-boy love, he increasingly becomes the target of purveyors of kiddy porn. “All models over eighteen (wink! wink!)” one site declares.

  He downloads porn, pays for it with a credit card that can’t be traced back to him. Weeks ago he was in a restaurant, where he saw a patron at another table pay her check with a credit card and walk off without her receipt. He got to it before the waitress, passing the table on an unnecessary trip to the men’s room, palming and pocketing the yellow scrap of paper. It shows her account number and expiration date, and that’s all he needs for small online purchases. In a month or two she’ll go over her statement and, if she notices, call her credit card company to complain. But he’ll be done with her account by then.

  Back in Richmond, he sets about getting access to Applewhite’s house and car and office.

  That turns out to be easy. Applewhite’s a monthly client at the parking garage around the corner from his office. He goes there himself, inquires about rates and hours and access, and finds questions to ask until the attendant’s attention is diverted, at which time he snatches Applewhite’s keys off the numbered hook. He needs a full set for his girlfriend, he tells a locksmith, and the man grins and says he’s a trusting man, that he’s been married eighteen years himself and his wife still doesn’t have a key to his car.

  A single key opens the door and the trunk. There are other keys on the ring as well, and he has them all duplicated, knowing one will be a house key and another a key to the office. Inside of an hour he makes another visit to the parking garage, where it’s a simple matter to put Applewhite’s keys on a table, where they might have fallen if dislodged
from the hook.

  Late at night, long after the lights have been turned off in the Applewhite home, he lets himself into the unlocked garage and opens the trunk of the car. He has an old army blanket with him, purchased at the Salvation Army store in York, and he spreads it out in Applewhite’s trunk, rubs it here and there in the trunk’s interior, takes it out and returns it to its plastic bag.

  Two days later he exchanges cars, picking up the dark Camry, leaving the beige Tempo in the storage shed. He starts cruising when school lets out and soon picks up an older, more knowledgeable boy than Jeffrey Willis. Scott Sawyer is fifteen, with knowing eyes and a crooked smile. His T-shirt is too small, the worn blue jeans provocatively tight on his thighs and buttocks. When he gets in the Camry, he drapes an arm over the seatback and tries to look seductive.

  The effect is comical, but he doesn’t laugh.

  I think you’ll find something interesting in the glove compartment, he tells the boy. And, at the right moment, he swings the rubber mallet.

  There’s a failed country club north and west of the city, off Creighton Road on the way to Old Cold Harbor. The property’s for sale, and the sign to that effect has been there long enough to have served for drive-by target practice. The nine-hole golf course is all weeds, the greens neglected, the fairways overgrown. Earlier he scouted the place, picked a spot. Halfway there the youth comes to, tries to scream through the duct tape, tries to free his hands, thrashes around within the confines of his seat belt.

  He tells him to stop it, and when the thrashing continues he takes up the rubber mallet and hits the boy hard on the knee. The thrashing stops.

  Out on the golf course, he drives into the rough bordering the fifth hole, hauls the boy out of the car and drags him deep into the woods. He immobilizes the boy by smashing his kneecaps with the spade, strips him, and positions him appropriately, then dons a condom and rapes him.