Every Dead Thing Read Free

daughter lay splayed across Susan, one arm hanging between her mother’s legs.
    The room was red around them, like the stage of some terrible revenger’s tragedy where blood was echoed with blood. It stained the ceiling and the walls as if the house itself had been mortally wounded. It lay thick and heavy on the floor and seemed to swallow my reflection in a scarlet darkness.
    Susan Parker’s nose had been broken. Injury was consistent with impact against wall or floor. Bloodstain on wall near kitchen door contained fragments of bone, nasal hair, and mucus…
    Susan had tried to run, to get help for our daughter and herself, but she had made it no farther than the door. Then he had caught her, had grabbed her by the hair and smashed her against the wall before dragging her, bleeding and in pain, back to the chair and to her death.
    Jennifer Parker was stretched, facing upward, across her mother’s thighs, and a second pine kitchen chair was positioned beside that of her mother. Cord wrapped around the back of the chair matched marks on Jennifer Parker’s wrists and ankles.
    There was not so much blood around Jenny, but her nightdress was stained by the flow from the deep cut in her throat. She faced the door, her hair hanging forward, obscuring her face, some strands sticking to the blood on her chest, the toes of her naked feet dangling above the tiled floor. I could only look at her for a moment because Susan drew my eyes toward her in death as she had in life, even amid the wreckage of our time together.
    And as I looked upon her I felt myself slide down the wall and a wail, half-animal, half-child, erupted from deep inside me. I gazed at the beautiful woman who had been my wife, and her bloody, empty sockets seemed to draw me in and envelop me in darkness.
    The eyes of both victims had been mutilated, probably with a sharp, scalpel-like blade. There was partial flensing of the chest of Susan Parker. The skin from the clavicle to the navel had been partially removed, pulled back over the right breast and stretched over the right arm.
    The moonlight shone through the window behind them, casting a cold glow over the gleaming countertops, the tiled walls, the steel faucets on the sink. It caught Susan’s hair, coated her bare shoulders in silver, and shone through parts of the thin membrane of her skin pulled back over her arm like a cloak, a cloak too frail to ward off the cold.
    There was considerable mutilation…
    And then he had cut off their faces.

    It is darkening rapidly now and the headlights catch the bare branches of trees, the ends of trimmed lawns, clean white mailboxes, a child’s bicycle lying in front of a garage. The wind is stronger now, and when I leave the shelter of the trees I can feel it buffeting the car. Now I am heading toward Becket, Washington, the Berkshire Hills. Almost there.
    There was no sign of forcible entry. Complete measurements and a sketch of the entire room were noted. Bodies were then released.
    Dusting for fingerprints gave the following results:
    Kitchen / hall / living room—usable prints later identified as those of Susan Parker (96-12-1806-7), Jennifer Parker (96-12-1806-8), and Charles Parker (96-12-1806-9).
    Rear door of house from kitchen—no usable prints; water marks on surface indicate that door was wiped down. No indication of robbery.
    No prints were developed from tests on victims’ skin.
    Charles Parker was taken to Homicide and gave statement (attached).
    I knew what they were doing as I sat in the interrogation room: I had done it so many times myself. They questioned me as I had questioned others before, using the strange formal locutions of the police interrogation. “What is your recollection as to your next move?” “Do you recall in relation to the bar the disposition of the other drinkers?” “Did you notice the condition as to the lock on the rear door?” It is an obscure, convoluted jargon, an anticipation of the legalese that clouds any