The Long Way Home Read online

  “Thank you, Jesus, for that,” Joanne says, and now her eyes are a little shiny.

  “The worst part was watching…and listening…to him hurt her. I wanted to close my eyes and disappear, but I couldn’t leave her alone with him. Instead, I would yell to her that it was going to be okay, that it would be over soon. He would tell me to shut up, to be quiet, but I wouldn’t listen. I kept on yelling. She would do the same thing when it was my turn. We held on tight to each other’s voices. We took care of each other the best we could. It wasn’t much, but it was all we had.”

  “The things he did to her…the bad stuff…did you leave anything out in your letters? Did you tell me everything or did you leave some things out to spare me?”

  Jennifer shakes her head. “No. I couldn’t do that. I told you everything I could remember.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure. My counselor had me keep a journal and anytime I remembered something new I would write it down—for myself and the police. The press never got a hold of most of the things I remembered later on. But I always told the detectives and I always told you in my letters.”

  “Cassidy…she talked about us?”

  “Oh, yes,” Jennifer says, surprising herself with the slightest of smiles. “She adored you both. She told me all about the movie nights you and her had from the time she was a little girl right up until college. Double features with popcorn and pizza and blankets on the sofa. She told me that you were the one who taught her her love of books. And I heard all about how her father was the worrier in the family. How he was too nervous to teach her to ride a bike, so you had to do it. How he didn’t want her to play soccer or ride a skateboard because he was afraid she’d break a bone. She told me how it was you who taught her to climb trees and that, the first time she fell, you bandaged her knee and took her to get a milkshake and made her promise not to tell her father how it happened.”

  Joanne laughs and it’s a wonderful sound to hear in the quiet living room. “That man could worry the bark off a tree, I swear to you.” She stares out the big bay window overlooking the front yard, remembering, dust motes dancing in the rays of sunshine slanting into the room. “He was a good man, a good father.” She looks back at Jennifer. “And she was the best daughter in the whole world.”

  ****

  On June 20, 2001, Jennifer Shea became the first—and only—person to escape from the serial killer known as The Boogeyman.

  This is how it happened:

  One day The Boogeyman simply made a mistake and failed to properly lock Jennifer’s shackles. She claimed that this occurred after a rather violent episode and that The Boogeyman seemed to be unusually angry and out of control that day. No matter the cause, once she was certain he was gone from the house, Jennifer was able to thread the heavy chains through the rungs in her shackles and get her arms and legs free.

  She slowly crossed the cellar on legs that could barely walk and tried to free Cassidy. She tried everything she could think of, but was unsuccessful. Next, she decided to sneak upstairs and search the house for a key or a tool to help free her friend, or for a telephone to summon help. Unable to locate any of these items, she had begun to return to the basement when headlights from outside swept over the dark kitchen she was standing in. The Boogeyman was back.

  She hurried best she could down the stairs, easing closed the cellar door behind her, and pretended to lock herself up again. She prayed he wouldn’t notice anything out of place inside the house or anything different with her chains. She prayed he was spent from the earlier episode and wouldn’t come for her.

  Instead, he came for Cassidy.

  Practically growling at her, The Boogeyman battered her with his fists, again and again, striking her in the stomach and face until, exhausted, he dropped to a knee in front of her, gasping for breath.

  That was the moment a bleeding Cassidy had been waiting for. She lifted her arms overhead with all the strength remaining inside her petite body and brought the heavy metal shackle around her wrists directly down on top of The Boogeyman’s bowed head. There was a loud thunk as steel met flesh and he collapsed hard to the ground, dazed and mumbling and on the cusp of unconsciousness.

  Cassidy looked up at Jennifer and screamed, “Run!”

  Jennifer hurriedly unthreaded the chains again and started across the room toward her friend.

  “Just run,” Cassidy yelled at her. “He’s gonna wake up. You can’t help me. Just GO!”

  Jennifer ran. Stumbling upstairs. Across the kitchen. Out the door and into an uncut grassy field where a red pick-up truck was parked. She didn’t stop to check for keys. She kept running across the field and into the woods beyond. She kept going once she broke free of the tree-line and came upon a seldom-traveled dirt back road. She didn’t stop until nearly an hour later when she was found by a pair of teenaged brothers out hunting for squirrels on the northern edge of their family property.

  The police were called and Jennifer was helicoptered to the hospital where she was combed over for evidence and given an IV with fluids to combat dehydration and something to help her anxiety. Her family rushed to the hospital and members of the police detective squad bustled in and out of the room with question after question. There was even a sketch artist, but all Jennifer could describe was The Boogeyman’s mask.

  Three-and-a-half hours later, with Jennifer’s help, the police located the farm where The Boogeyman had been taking his victims. There, they found the dirt cellar with the shackles, just as Jennifer had described.

  They also found the lifeless body of Cassidy Cavanaugh still chained to the wall. Her heart had been removed from her chest.

  The next day, during excavation of a suspicious-looking section of the yard, the police discovered the remains of four more missing women. The bodies were quickly identified and the next of kin notified.

  Of course, the Boogeyman was long gone by the time the police and SWAT teams reached the secluded farm. Forensic experts pored over the house, lifting prints and fabric and hair samples, but they found little of any use. The Boogeyman was a genuine mystery. He went by the name of Jackson Greene—not his real name, the police would soon discover—and had rented the house over the telephone some two years earlier. He paid his rent on time each month, mailing a money order to the landlord, and there had never been any problems with his occupancy. Mr. Greene owned no credit cards, didn’t work anywhere within three hundred miles of the town, and had never been in trouble with local law enforcement.

  The landlord, a real estate agent by the name of Bryan Kennedy, claimed to have met Mr. Greene once, when he’d handed over the keys to the house at his real estate office two years earlier. His description of the man as “white and tall and kinda chunky” did little to aid the police in their pursuit of The Boogeyman.

  Mr. Kennedy did, however, remember one important character trait about the man: he was able to recall from that one meeting and several subsequent phone calls that Mr. Greene’s voice was particularly memorable. He described it as “kinda rough and raspy, like maybe he was a longtime smoker.” This observation—based on Jennifer’s testimony—reinforced for detectives that Mr. Greene and The Boogeyman were indeed one and the same man.

  The sensationalistic Boogeyman article appeared in People magazine one week later and additional feature stories soon popped up in several other high-circulation periodicals, including Time magazine and the New York Times. Book and movie agents called the house. Reporters camped out in the front yard hoping for a thirty-second clip for the evening news. Police even arrested a local photographer who had hidden in the bushes in the back yard to try and take pictures through a window.

  Jennifer Shea, Cassidy Cavanaugh, and The Boogeyman were national news for much of the remainder of the summer—until a bigger, gaudier story came along. Then they slowly slipped to the back pages and were eventually all but forgotten…

&nb
sp; Until nearly a year later, when to the police and public’s horror, the killings started again a few hundred miles south in central Virginia. That it was the same Jackson Greene, the same Boogeyman, committing these atrocities was never in question to the detectives investigating the disappearances. Everything was exactly the same: the type of victims, the method with which they were taken, even the timing of the disappearances.

  The Boogeyman had simply relocated to another state and, once he had settled in, started killing again.

  Until, one day, four years later, he finally stopped for good.

  The last known victim of The Boogeyman was a nurse by the name of Ashley Francenti. Miss Francenti was taken from a hospital parking lot on the night of October 3, 2006 and remained missing for almost two weeks, until her mutilated body was discovered by a road crew in a drainage ditch running alongside I-95 not a half-mile away from her apartment. Miss Francenti was missing two fingers from her right hand and her heart had been carved from her chest. It remains to this day the only time The Boogeyman returned one of his victims.

  Jennifer Shea lived those years in a perpetual state of fear and anxiety and guilt. Fear and apprehension that The Boogeyman would hunt her down and find her again. Guilt that she had abandoned Cassidy in that filthy cellar and was ultimately responsible for her death.

  When the disappearances eventually stopped, it did little to ease her troubled mind. As one of the detectives who originally investigated Jennifer’s case told her one afternoon on the telephone: “We have to hope that the son-of-a-bitch died or was picked up for another crime and is rotting away inside a prison cell somewhere. Otherwise, people like him don’t just stop. Sometimes, they move on to other places. Sometimes, they take a break. But they don’t just stop. Ever.”

  ****

  “I tried so hard to free her…”

  Jennifer stops to catch her breath. The sun from the bay window has crept across the living room and is shining on her back now. She wishes she had a glass of cold water.

  “…but it was hopeless. When she yelled for me to run, I took off on instinct. We were so used to listening to each other. Later, I wondered why I had run at all and thought…hoped…she had found the key in one of his pockets and was able to free herself.”

  She struggles to get the next part out of her mouth.

  “Not a day has gone by that I haven’t felt regret. Not a day that I haven’t felt guilt. I loved your daughter, Mrs. Cavanaugh. We only knew each other for six days, but I loved Cassidy like a sister.”

  Jennifer is crying again, her words rendered almost unintelligible, and she is startled to see fresh tears coursing down the older woman’s cheeks. She realizes Joanne is choking back sobs of her own and Jennifer sees something else in her expression that causes a sensation of almost joyous relief to wash over her: the woman is looking at Jennifer with forgiveness in her eyes.

  Jennifer wipes at the tears on her cheeks and opens her mouth to continue, but she stops when a shadow falls over her from behind the sofa and Joanne’s eyes flash wide.

  Jennifer realizes in that moment, too late, that it’s not forgiveness she sees in the old woman’s eyes. It’s regret.

  “I’m sorry,” Joanne sobs, shrinking back into the reading chair. “I’m so sorry. He…tricked me.”

  Jennifer feels a brush of air as the shadow behind her moves closer and a hand touches her shoulder.

  “It’s so very lovely to see you again after all these years,” a familiar raspy voice whispers just inches from her ear.

  Jennifer Shea wants to get up from the sofa and run. She wants to run far away and never stop running, but she can’t. Not this time. Instead, she slowly turns around and, for the first and final time, looks at the man behind the mask.

  THE BAD

  GUYS

  “I’m scared,” the dying cop said.

  “You’re gonna be okay. Help’ll be here soon.”

  “I’m dying.”

  I shook my head. “No, you’re not. You’re gonna be okay.”

  My partner of fifteen years coughed and blood bubbled from between his lips. I lifted his head higher, my fingers slick with sweat. My other hand remained pressed against the bullet wound in his chest, a warm scarlet glove.

  “You get him, Ken? You get the bad guy?”

  I nodded, glancing at the crumpled figure lying on the other side of the dark parking lot. “I got him.”

  He coughed again. A mist of blood sprayed my face.

  I didn’t know what else to do. Head up so he doesn’t choke. Pressure on the wound to control the bleeding. I keyed the radio unit hanging on my vest. “Dispatch, where the hell’s my ambulance?”

  “Accident on 22. ETA six minutes.”

  I didn’t know if he had six minutes.

  As if he were reading my mind, he closed his eyes and his head went heavy in my hand. “Hang on, buddy. Ambulance on the way.”

  I looked up at the deserted road leading into the warehouse parking lot. I knew my 10-00 would be answered by every officer in the area, but we were way out in the middle of nowhere. In another ten minutes, this place would be a circus. I just prayed it wouldn’t be too late.

  “I took…it.”

  His voice caught me by surprise, and I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. I looked down and his eyes were open—wide open and fierce. “What? What’d you—”

  “I…took the money.”

  My entire body went numb. My stomach clenched.

  “The money and…” He started to cough again, and then he was moaning in pain. An awful sound.

  “Don’t talk, buddy. It’s okay. Don’t—”

  “Have…to.”

  I didn’t want to hear it. Not another damn word.

  “The money…the guns,” he whispered, his eyes closing again. “I took. Parker’s…innocent.”

  Rookie Donald Parker. Home on administrative leave these past three weeks pending investigation.

  Sirens now in the distance.

  He heard them, too. He opened his eyes, and my heart broke. My partner. My best friend.

  I couldn’t help it. I thought of his wife asleep at home. Jillian. Now that the kids were old enough, she’d just gone back to work at the elementary school. She was excited to teach again. Aaron, his ten-year-old son. His old man had been showing him how to throw a curve ball. Kayla, his eight-year-old daughter. He’d just built her a two-story playhouse in the back yard. He’d painted it pink, and she called it her castle. I never once wondered where the money had come from.

  The sirens were louder now. Closer.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, knowing even then it was a lie. “Don’t say a word to anyone.”

  He surprised me by lifting his head. His lips moved, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I bent closer.

  He reached up with a blood-streaked hand and grabbed my arm. “I…I’m sorry.”

  He held my gaze, tears spilling from his eyes and running down his cheeks. I started crying then, too. Silently, the way men like us are supposed to cry.

  I heard the wail of sirens and the screech of tires on gravel behind me. I looked over my shoulder and saw a trio of patrol cars. More on the way in the distance. Still no ambulance.

  I looked back at my partner and knew it would be too late. His eyes were open and sightless. His body limp. I watched as his lifeless hand slipped from my arm to the gravel below.

  I heard the slam of car doors and rising voices.

  I took his hand in mine and squeezed it.

  I thought of his wife and kids at home and the knock on their door that was coming later that night.

  I thought of the funeral service. The dress blues and white gloves. The news helicopters and procession to the cemetery.

  And then I thought of the body camera I was wearing—and how I would have to find a
way to disable it. Damaged in the exchange of gunfire. When I dove behind the car.

  I glanced at the bad guy lying dead across the parking lot. It would be ruled a good shooting. I would be okay.

  I would be okay.

  THE MEEK

  SHALL

  INHERIT…

  “Would you eat a dog turd for a hundred bucks?”

  Brian stopped mid-shot, the basketball poised above his head. He looked over at his friend standing in the driveway. “Dry turd or fresh and wet?”

  Jimmy considered the question and answered with a crooked smile, “Moist. Couple hours old.”

  Brian dribbled to the baseline and shot. Swish. He gathered the loose ball and drilled a pass into Jimmy’s scrawny chest. “Make it or you’re the horse. Again.”

  Jimmy dribbled awkwardly to the baseline. Started to shoot.

  “Back up, you little cheater.”

  Jimmy flipped his best friend the finger and backed up a few steps. Took the shot. Airball.

  Brian threw his arms in the air and ran around the court, hooting, “Brian Anderson! Champion of the worldddd!”

  Jimmy shook his head and kicked the ball into the front yard. “Dick sucking champion of the world.”

  Out on the street, a muscular, bare-chested teenager cruised by on a skateboard. He glanced at the two boys standing in the driveway and smirked. “You girls having fun playing kickball?”

  Jimmy took a step toward the road. “Your mom had fun playing with my—”

  Brian came up behind him, clamped a hand over his friend’s mouth, silencing him in mid-insult.

  But it was too late.

  The muscle-head on the skateboard grinded to a stop. “What was that?”

  “He was talking to me,” Brian said. “Not you, Billy.”

  Brian squeezed Jimmy’s shoulder, and Jimmy got the hint. “Oww. Yeah, I wasn’t talking to you.”