A Good Killing (35 page)

“He deserves justice,” Wendy said. Her voice was so cold it was like ice water on my face, startling me awake from my Kumbaya daydreams. “And we’ll never get justice in Holly Grove.”

We sat there, thinking. What do you do with the pedophile you’ve drugged and kidnapped but do not have the will to murder?

“We could cut off his balls?” I suggested.

“Uh-huh. We can’t kill him, but we slice off his testicles?” Wendy grimaced. “Who’s volunteering for that one?”

“Hey, I’m just trying to be creative. How about tattooing his chest, like
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
?”

“Do you own tattooing equipment?”

“No.”

“Should we go to Meijer now and buy some?”

“Yeah, I could use some Doritos, too.”

The sound of semi-hysterical female laughter, shrill as loons, rolled out over the glassy black lake.

“Besides,” Kathy said, as the echoes of our laughter died down. “How does that help? The girls he rapes don’t see his chest anyhow. Or if they do, it’s too late.”

I nodded.

Kathy turned to the coach. “Did my daughter see your chest when you raped her?”

“Um.” His eyes flitted around, as if he could find the right answer in the sky, or on the lake, or by my shoes. “Um. I don’t think so.”

“You don’t
think
so? What does that mean? You don’t remember? Hayley was so unimportant that you can’t recall the details?”

“No, she was very important. I cared about her. A lot.”

Wendy crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows at him. He looked anxiously at her. I almost laughed at his dilemma. How do you convince the mother of your underage rape victim that you cared about her—in front of your wife? Coach’s eyes went back and forth between Wendy and Kathy. He finally settled on Wendy, apparently deciding she was his likelier ally—or more dangerous threat.

“Baby,” he said, “not more than I cared about you.”

“Did you look into her eyes?” Wendy’s voice was slow and dangerous. “The way you looked in mine, the first time we made love? Did she stare back at you in wide-eyed wonder, like I did?”

“No, honey, no. It wasn’t like that.
You were special
. I did her from behind. Doggy style.”

Kathy let out a shriek, grabbed my golden running woman off the floor, and swung the trophy at him. The base hit the side of his skull, making a sharp cracking sound. He yelped as the wheelchair tipped onto its side and landed on the floor. “She was a little girl!” Kathy wailed. “Not a dog! Not a toy for you to use and throw away!” She brought the trophy down on his head again. The sound was juicier this time. Coach grunted and twitched within his duct-tape encasing. “You killed my baby!”

“Kathy!” I shouted. “Stop!”

“No!” Wendy yelled. “Not like that!”

Kathy didn’t seem to hear. She hit his head again and again. The sound became slushier with each impact. Wendy and I ran over and grabbed her arms. Kathy fought us. “I’ll kill him!” she screamed. “I will kill him!”

“Kathy, no, no, no, Kathy!”

We stopped her with the trophy midswing. After a moment, she seemed to come back to herself. She lowered the trophy. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Oh my God, I’m sorry.”

We looked down. The coach’s head was crumpled like a Jag that’s been hit by a semi. Bits of flesh and blood covered the boat. Guess that’s where the blood on my sock came from.

“Jesus.” I crouched down and tried to find a pulse in his throat. There was none.

I looked up at my friends and shook my head. When I took my hand from his neck, I saw that my fingers were stained red.

I stared at his body. He deserved to die. I wanted him dead, even if I couldn’t kill him with my own hands. So now I waited to feel . . . joy? Terror? Vengeance-is-mine?
Something.
But all I felt was the urgent academic need to solve a difficult logic question, like the kind I blew off in school ten years ago. Because we could no longer package this as a drunk-boating accident.

57

B
lood pooled on the AstroTurf under Coach Fowler’s head, like a dark amoeba creeping outward, exploring the floor of the boat. The duct tape kept him strapped in a fetal position in the overturned wheelchair.

“Oh my God. I killed him.” Kathy dropped the trophy and looked down at her blood-flecked shirt. “What do we do now?”

I pulled the Kleenex out of my pocket and wiped my bloody fingers.

“We improvise.”

I listed all the things we’d need. Bleach, rags, mop, hose. Bicycle helmet, leather jacket, ski mask, gloves, pillows. Wendy said the lake house had all of them. She steered the pontoon boat back across the lake. Kathy was shaking in her seat. I put my arm around her shoulders and tried to say comforting things. “I hope Hayley saw that from heaven.”

Kathy half laughed and half sobbed. “No. She was innocent. Hayley, I’m sorry.” She pulled out her flask and took another drink.

We didn’t bother to right Coach Fowler in his wheelchair. He lay on his side during the whole ride back to shore. Because: fuck him.

Turns out, that attitude is not helpful when you’re conspiring to murder someone and cover it up. When the boat was tied to the dock, I finally righted the chair to push him to land—and saw that the entire left side of his body, the side that had been pressed to the floor, was now dark purple. I guess once his heart stopped beating, gravity took over and his blood pooled on that side. I should have thought of that, but, heck, it was the first time I’d ever been part of killing someone. Next time, I’ll be more careful. Kidding.

His neck was cocked at a stiff, unnatural angle. Blood soaked his hair. Between the bashed-in right side of his face, and the puffy purple streak going down his left, he finally appeared on the outside like the monster he was within.

He also looked like someone who’d lain on his side for half an hour after dying. He didn’t look like someone who’d died sitting up in a car. I could see that with my own civilian eyes. What could a coroner tell from the corpse?

“Gasoline,” I said. “We’re gonna need a lot of gasoline. And some of those big gallon-size Ziploc bags.”

Wendy nodded. “We have gasoline for the boat.”

We wheeled him to the garage, where we cut him out of the duct tape and loaded his body into the passenger seat of the Corvette. He seemed to have gotten heavier since dying. Even with the three of us, he was very difficult to move. Touching him was horrible. His body was stiff and cool and sticky with blood.

There were two main jobs remaining. Kathy was too drunk and freaked out for either of them. It made sense for Wendy to clean the boat since she knew the grounds. I did not envy her, scrubbing down her husband’s flesh and blood. But she did a good job, as you saw. That boat had never been so clean, before or after. When Wendy does a job, she does it right. And now you know why Wendy held the memorial service there. Dozens, maybe hundreds of people walked all over that property that day, especially to visit the open bar on the boat. As you might say: the crime scene was thoroughly contaminated.

I volunteered to drive the car. That made sense, too. If anyone was going to get caught, it should be me. Wendy had Isabel to raise. Plus, as his long-suffering wife, she’d be the first suspect the police looked at. Kathy had her mother to look after, in the nursing home. And she would also be a prime target, with her daughter having just made a report against the coach. This started with me, and I would end it.

My heart raced the whole drive back to Holly Grove. The coach’s corpse tipped over onto me at some point, and I yelped and shoved it
away. But I stayed precisely within the speed limit and obeyed every traffic law. If a cop had pulled me over at that point, not even your legal skills could have saved my ass.

My idea was admittedly low-tech. There were more interesting things I could have done if we’d had more time to plan and prepare. On the fly, this was the best I could come up with.

I drove toward the high school. When I got to the bend in the road before the stadium, I pulled the car to the shoulder and put it in park. I got out, opened the door to the passenger side, and pushed the coach over to the driver’s seat. It was hard; I had to use my legs.

I put on the leather jacket, ski mask, gloves, and bicycle helmet. It was hot and claustrophobic, but I hoped this would protect me from the impact. I’ve seen enough crash-test videos at GM to know what a head-on collision can do to a body. I got into the passenger side and buckled my seat belt. Obviously, I didn’t buckle up the coach. I stuffed two pillows on the dashboard in front of me. I tucked another pillow between my chest and the seat belt.

“Hang on tight, Coach.”

I put the car into drive, reached my left leg across the bench seat, and pressed the accelerator to the floor. The Corvette leaped forward. It had plenty of horses under its hood—but no power steering. I had to pull hard on the steering wheel to keep it pointed straight at the stadium.

The car went down the road, over the shoulder, and across the grass. It rushed toward the thick concrete wall. It was like flying. For a moment, I felt like I used to at the high jump, suspended above the world, apart from all the pain and complications. Then the wall was a few feet away.

I thought about the cinder block Wendy had suggested we put on the accelerator. Wouldn’t that have been a better option than my own fragile self? But a cinder block couldn’t have kept the car steering straight. And, it would have left concrete chunks all over the car, and the police would’ve known it was a staged crash. It had to be me, to make it look like a drunk-driving accident. I was trying to save my friends.

People talk about their life flashing before their eyes. That didn’t happen to me. Instead, I saw a bunch of other girls’ lives. A streaming reel of their faces. Some, I knew well: Hayley Mack, Isabel Fowler, Zoë Malone, Wendy Weiscowicz. Some of the girls looked vaguely familiar, and some, I’d never seen before. One after another, the girls looked at me, steady and serious. Blondes, redheads, brunettes, African American, Hispanic, white.

I think, in that moment, I saw all Coach Fowler’s past victims. Maybe his future ones too. Girls who wouldn’t have to go through what we had, because we killed him. They were the reason for what I was doing. They were worth it.

The car met the wall. The cry of collapsing metal and shattering glass filled the world. In my periphery, Coach’s body launched into the windshield. My own body heaved forward, and, despite the pillow, my ribs felt the full battle between the car’s momentum and the tensile strength of a fifty-year-old seat belt. The last thing I remember is putting out my hands to try to stop the dashboard, which was flying toward my face. Then everything went black.

58

W
hen I came to, the stadium’s thick concrete wall was inches from my face. The car’s hood was smashed into a triangle. Coach slumped in his seat, now
extremely
mangled, although there was no new blood on him. Guess you only bleed when you have a beating heart.

My wrist hurt like crazy, probably from hitting the dashboard. I was dizzy and nauseous from the pain but knew I didn’t have much time. I got out of the car, staggering to stay on my feet. The wreckage was smoking and creaking, but there was no fire. Yet.

I could hear sirens in the distance.

I took off the jacket, ski mask, gloves, and bike helmet and threw them into the car, where they would burn. I reached behind the passenger seat and pulled out the twelve gallon-size Ziploc bags filled with gasoline. I poured eleven bags of gasoline on the car, soaking every inch I could.

I took one last look at Coach Fowler. His body was mangled and frozen into a weird angle. His skin was gray and his face was mashed. His hair was matted stiff with dark blood.

I poured the last bag of gasoline on him. I hoped he would burn down to ashes, like a cremation. Now I know that ashes take more heat and time than I had that night.

The sirens were getting louder. I threw the empty Ziploc bags into the car, where they would melt away. I wiped my hands on my jeans, hoping I wouldn’t catch myself on fire. Then I pulled out the matches, struck a flame, and threw it onto the car.

The fire whooshed up instantly. The car looked like a marshmallow in a campfire: for a moment it was just a car surrounded by
flames, like a hologram. And then the flames started to eat the car, turning it black. The seats started to melt. Coach himself seemed to burn faster than anything else.

I could see the flashing lights coming up the road as I limped off through the woods. Behind me, the car exploded. The force knocked me to the ground and knocked the breath out of me for a minute. I got up and walked away, the flames warming my back as the sirens got closer.

I walked all the way home, trekking though woods, yards, and back roads. It was three miles away.

At home, I used my burner phone to call Wendy’s burner phone. She’d made it back to Cedar Point, establishing her alibi. Then I called Kathy’s burner phone. She’d gone to her own house, which wasn’t the plan. She was supposed to be spending the night at her mother’s nursing home—that was her alibi. She’d snuck out of there earlier that night. I guess she was too rattled, or too drunk, to remember to go back there. I told her she had to go, now. She said she didn’t want to get caught driving drunk. That seemed like the least of our potential problems. I yelled at her: “Kathy, you have to go. Get in your car! Now!” Stuff like that. Eventually, she went, and she had her alibi.

That must’ve been the screaming that Tammy heard coming from my house that night. Luckily, she didn’t see me throwing my burner phone into her bushes.

I stripped off my clothes and threw them into the washing machine with a lot of soap and Borax. I took the second-longest shower of my life. I ran the clothes through the washing machine again. I didn’t realize the one sock had fallen behind the machine. Damn that sock.

Then I climbed into my bed and fell into a dead sleep for the next twelve hours. I woke up to the sound of the police pounding on my door. Your old boyfriend Rob was standing on my porch, asking if I wouldn’t mind swinging by the police station for a quick chat. You know what happened after that.