I left off while I was still upstairs trying to decide what to do. I had considered just waiting for my grandfather to come up and get me for breakfast, but the idea of him in the doorway of the only exit from the room made me very nervous. I wound up just getting dressed, putting my keys and wallet in one pocket and a small folding knife in the other, and heading downstairs.
He was still at the stove when I entered the kitchen, and despite my fear I could feel my stomach grumble at the smell of eggs, bacon and coffee that permeated the air. Not that I could trust eating any of it, but my stomach wasn’t concerned with trivial matters like rat poison and antifreeze. He turned and gave me a nod as I made my way to the table.
“Good morning. I was going to come get you up in a few minutes. Hope you’re hungry.”
“Nah, not too much,” I lied. “My stomach has been weird this morning, so I think I’m going to have to wait. Smells great though.” I sat down in a chair where I could face him and reach the door outside or the living room quickly if things went south. He nodded his head and kept on poking at the eggs.
“Well, that’s a shame, but it’ll be here for you if you feel up to it a bit later.” He set the pan of eggs on an unlit burner and turned to face me, his expression slightly concerned. “Don’t think you’re getting sick, do you?”
I shook my head, weighing different lies and excuses, but finally I decided this was as good of an opportunity as I was going to get to broach the topic of what I had seen the night before.
“I…well, I’ve just been a bit worried since last night. I saw you when you came back last night.” My grandfather was nodding already, but I pushed on. “I saw all of it, not just when you came back from the woods. I saw the woman you had.”
His expression didn’t change at first, but after turning off the stove and taking a seat across the table from me, I saw a mixture of worry and sadness on his face. “I thought you most likely had. And I know how something like that must look. I didn’t want to frighten you by approaching you about it, and if I’m honest, I was hoping you had missed the first part. Not the way I wanted you to find out about all this.” He rubbed his mouth and gave a nervous smile. “Still, I was half-afraid you’d be gone when I got up this morning or that there’d be police out here. I know you can’t trust me right now, but giving me the chance to explain means a lot to me.”
I nodded. His words were said in an even and reasonable tone, but I couldn’t help but feel a dull dread growing in my stomach. A part of me had hoped he would deny everything and convince me it was a dream or mistake. Instead he was confirming that it happened. And I’d be lying if I said he wasn’t intimidating even in his kindest moments. He was very intelligent and half a foot taller than me, and the last couple of days had been proof enough that age had slowed him very little. Last night he had carried that woman without any signs of real effort, carried her lifeless body out into the dark to…
“Come back to me. I know this is frightening. I can tell you that you have no reason to be afraid of me, but how much is that worth right now? Very little, I suspect. So let me explain as best I can. All I ask is that you listen to the entire thing, and if at the end of it all, if you want to call the police or leave or whatever you think is best…I will be fully cooperative. But I need you to hear the entire thing, because some of it is going to sound very strange at first. Okay?”
I leaned back in my chair, my head pounding. This was the point where I had to make a decision to give him a chance or not. Whether to risk myself even more or not. On the one hand, I could run and call the cops. On the other, I could hear him out, and in theory, still do that if I didn’t like or believe what he told me. Still…
“Where did we put the tape?” When he raised an eyebrow, I shrugged.
“I’ll hear you out, but I want you taped to that chair before we
start. I can’t risk this being a trick or you deciding its not going
your way and you want to attack me.” I could see the hurt in his eyes,
but I pushed past it. “I want to believe you, to trust you, but you
know it’s the smart thing to do on my end.”
He nodded. “It is. I’m proud of you for thinking of it, I just hate it comes to that. But that’s my fault, not yours. It’s in the living room, I think on the table by the sofa.”
Standing up slowly, I backed into the living room and grabbed the tape, fearful for the five seconds he was out of sight. But he was waiting in the same spot when I came back in, and he sat still while I put layers of tape around his chest and arms, securing him firmly to the back of the wooden chair he sat in. Pausing for a moment to consider, I then wrapped the remaining tape around his ankles and the front chair legs just to be safe.
The job done, I asked him if he was comfortable enough. When he said he was, I sat back down across from him, my hands sweaty and slightly shaking as I tried to give him a comforting smile. “Sorry again. But I’m ready to hear everything you want to tell me.”
My grandfather looked off in the distance for a moment before focusing his dark blue eyes on me. “Your mama told you that my wife, your grandmother Rebecca, died in a car wreck. A drunk driver, right?”
I nodded. “Yeah, she said she was killed going to visit you at the hospital. You had been working on a patient for hours and she was bringing you some dinner.”
Dark anger flickered across his face, disappearing as he shook his
head. “Well the last part was right. I had been working on a girl who
had been shot in a hunting accident since early afternoon. The girl
wound up living. But my sweet girl, your grandmother, she didn’t get
killed by a drunk driver. She was taken as she was getting out of her
car at the hospital. Brutalized and torn part, with what was left of
her being found in a field ten miles away.”
His voice grew rough and cracked with emotion as he spoke. “I didn’t even know anything was wrong at first. But someone found the covered dish she was bringing me in the parking lot, dropped and broken. They figured out it was her car and then they came to me. I had just finished the surgery an hour earlier, but still had another five hours on my shift. So I went to take a nap, thinking she would wake me up when she got there. Instead, it was one of the admins, asking if I had seen my wife that evening.” He spread his hands out on the table, long-fingered and steady even at his age. Staring at them, he continued.
Your grandmother was a smart woman, a good woman. Sure, things were
safer back then than they are now, but it wasn’t like no one ever got
hurt or killed. Even in a smaller town like we lived in, it happened.
But she had no real enemies, and she was always careful when she
traveled anywhere. My point is that no one would have easily gotten a
jump on her.
The police said at first that it could just be a misunderstanding or she could have just decided to leave, as stupid as that sounded. I spent all night looking for her, terrified and half out of my mind. By the next morning the police were there with me. It was just before noon when they found her body in that field.
I made the mistake of going to the scene. I had told myself that I was used to blood, to everything a body could show, and that I owed it to her to see how she died. It was beyond anything I imagined. One arm and the opposite leg had been torn completely off, and her torso had been shredded to such a degree that…well, it didn’t look like a person at all. And that was actually better, because it made it seem unreal. But then I saw her long, light brown hair.
I had always loved her hair so much, and even attached to the shattered ruin of her face, I knew it anywhere. It was remarkably clean compared to the rest, as though someone or something had taken great care not to mess up or soil that pretty hair. That thought is what broke me I think. I don’t remember much for the few days that followed. I know I was at her funeral, but I couldn’t tell you anything about it.
When I finally resurfaced from whatever stupor I was in, I was sitting at home with my brother and his wife. They were trying to keep me company. We were watching t.v. I think. I wanted to scream at them, to yell and make them understand that this was all pointless now, that my life was over, that everything was over, so why were they trying to prolong things? Instead, I just told them that I appreciated their help and attention, but that I knew they needed to be getting back home and I needed time to myself. They wasted little time in packing up and heading out.
I spent the next day or so weighing various methods of suicide. I really had no interest in living in a world without her. I believe in God and I think suicide is a shame and likely a sin when done for such selfish reasons, but I was to the point that I didn’t care. I didn’t care if I went to Hell for it. I felt like I deserved it for letting this happen to her. But this led me down the path of dwelling on what had happened to her and what had caused it. Who had caused it.
I set aside my ideas of pills and ropes and self-inflicted gunshot wounds, got a shower and a shave, and I went down to the police station. Over the next few weeks I continued to harass and harangue them, pushing them to do more while understanding there was likely little more they could do. They had looked for witnesses, there were none. They had looked for evidence of how the attack was committed, and had only come up with injuries “caused by indeterminant blunt and serrated objects”. There were no cameras at the hospital until three years later, and this was before the age of cell phones to track.
After bullying them with a threatened lawsuit, I obtained copies of
all their photos and reports. I poured through them but found little
more of note. The parking lot was paved, so there were no tire tracks
to follow, and no tire or shoe tracks had been found near the field
where she was killed. Something about the parking lot stuck out to me,
but I wasn’t sure what it was at first. After two days of looking at
everything, it hit me.
The hospital had a separate parking lot for doctors and surgical staff that was blocked by a mechanical arm and a key pad. Rebecca had the passcode, so she had parked there when she was taken. That parking lot was on the far rear of the hospital, not visible from the road and without any hospital roads or paths that would make it a thoroughfare for a casual passerby. What were the odds that someone had just happened upon her as they went by or decided to wait in a relatively small and quiet parking lot for hours until they had a chance to snatch someone? I decided it seemed unlikely. In retrospect, I know it was certainly possible I could have been wrong, but at the time I needed answers, and I’d decided focusing on someone who worked in the hospital and/or had access to the parking lot like my wife was the best course of action.
Among all the complaints I might have had about the investigation of
Rebecca’s murder, I would never have made it further without them. One
of the detectives had pulled a tissue sample from under her fingernails
and had sent it in to be tested if they ever got something to compare
it to. Understand this was in 1986, and DNA testing was brand new. It
wasn’t even an option at the state crime labs at the time, and the
likelihood of that sample ever being of use was small to none.
But I still had to actually file a lawsuit to get the sample back so I could send it to Daniel Church, a friend of mine from med school that had gone on to work at one of the foremost labs for DNA in the country. He couldn’t do tests for me officially, but he knew what I was going through and agreed to help as much as he could in an unofficial capacity. The main thing that he needed was viable samples from a suspect for comparison.
Fortunately, that was the easy part. Hospital policy required all
operating room doctors and staff to have semi-annual blood work both as a
check for any substance abuse issues as well as a screening mechanism
for any potential infectious disease. After testing, the remainder of
those samples were stored until the next round of tests six months
later. The tests weren’t all done at once of course, but at any given
time there were twenty-three samples cooling in a fridge in the serology
lab.
So I pulled some from each of them and sent them to Church. He called me two days later, his tone grave. He asked where I had gotten so many samples so quickly, what was I getting him into. I told him I wasn’t getting him into anything. At most he was running some DNA tests, with no indication of who was being tested or why. And if anyone ever asked me, I hadn’t seen or heard of him since we graduated fifteen years earlier. I could tell he was still troubled, but after a long silence he agreed to run the tests.
The next five weeks were excruciating. DNA testing was much slower back then, and I understood he was having to go slower than normal to do it in a clandestine manner. Still, every day I was constantly waiting for the phone to ring, and when it finally did, I could hardly hear Church over the frantic thudding of my own heart. I asked him to repeat what he had said.
“The tissue you first sent is a match to Sample 17. It’s from that person or their identical twin.”
I thanked him and hung up the phone. I had sent him numbers instead of names on the samples, but I knew whose was whose by heart at this point. Sample 17 belonged to an orthopedic surgeon at the hospital, Marcus Salk. He was a chubby middle-aged man that was always telling jokes and had a reputation as a good doctor. I didn’t know him well, but I had always gotten along with him fine. Why would he do this?
My first urge was to find him and torture him until he told me why. I could feel my rage building as the information soaked in, my mind racing to dissect any interaction we had ever had, any scrap of knowledge I had about him. I thought that he had come to the hospital about five years earlier, was unmarried, had a cat maybe? I realized how little I knew, and how I needed to learn more before I committed to an act and either hurt the wrong person or gave them an unintentional means of escape.
That’s when I began studying Marcus Salk.
---
Credits
Comments