Page 144
Story: Holly
“Pathologist’s report.”
Her hands loosen. “I need a drink.”
“I’m sure you do, but don’t take one. Honor your son.”
Vera gives a shaky laugh. “Honor my son? Do you hear yourself?”
“Yes. I hear myself.”
“I need to call my sponsor. Will you stay with me until she comes?”
“Yes,” Jerome says. And he does.
August 4, 2021
Holly is at home watching a Netflix comedy without really seeing it, just marking time until she can take another pain pill (or she may double-dip), when her buzzer goes. It’s Isabelle Jaynes, and she has company: Herbert Beale and another FBI man named Curtis Rogan. Rogan, a profiler who specializes in serial killers, flew in with the FBI team.
Izzy asks Holly if she’s seen that day’s paper. Holly read the headline on her iPad—WERE THEY CANNIBALS?—and that’s enough for her. “I guess the DA will have to have that press conference now.”
“He and Chief Murphy are set for noon. The coverage won’t just be local, either. I have to believe Randall Murphy is thanking his lucky stars that he was still in Minneapolis when all of them except Bonnie Dahl were taken. The reason we’re here is because of what our forensics guys and the FBI team found in the Harris bedroom closet.”
“What?” Thinking, what now?
“Diaries,” Herbert Beale says. “Hers. She started keeping them in October of 2012, shortly before the murder of Jorge Luis Castro. Agent Rogan here has been studying them.”
“I’ve got a long way to go,” Rogan says. “There’s over a thousand pages.” He’s a soft-spoken man with short, thinning hair and rimless spectacles. “Fascinating stuff.”
“Terrifying stuff,” Izzy says. “I’ve read enough to say that while they were both crazy, she was the crazier of the two. By far.”
“I think further study will bear that out,” Rogan says. “I don’t believe Rodney Harris would have done much more than… what’s the word? Fume, perhaps? He wouldn’t have done much more than fume at how hidebound his colleagues were and how irrational the taboo was against eating human flesh.”
“She talked him into the first one, didn’t she?” Holly says. “She pitched him on using Castro as a way for her husband to go from the theoretical to the practical. Conception to execution. Because she disliked Castro.”
“Disliked?” Izzy says, and laughs. “Oh, Holly, you have no idea. She hated him. And not just him—she had plenty of hate to go around. Beneath that well-groomed and pleasantly authoritative surface, Emily Harris was a balls-to-the-wall psychotic. Let me show you an example of the Ms. Hyde that was underneath Professor Jekyll.”
She turns her iPad to Holly. On the screen is a photo of a diary page. Written over and over again, like a bad child who has to write I will not throw spitballs in class, is this: I HATE THAT SPIC I HATE THAT FUCKING SPIC I HATE THAT FAGGOT SPIC I HATE THAT BUTT-PUNCHING FAGGOT SPIC… and so on.
“Four more pages of just that,” Izzy says.
Rogan says, “In these diaries is an Emily Harris who never attended the English Department meetings. And I’m just getting started.”
“Here’s another one,” Izzy says. She swipes to a new photo. On this page of her diary, Emily has written the n-word over and over, in big, screaming capitals. There are other pejoratives, as well.
“We’re thinking she kept her hate-diaries even from her husband,” Herbert Beale says, “but we’ll never know for sure unless she says so in here.”
“This stuff is gold,” Rogan says.
“I’d use another word for it,” Holly says.
“I mean from a psychological standpoint. One thing seems clear. She participated in the… the ingestion of Mr. Castro to please her husband. He insisted on it. But she speaks of it as a miracle cure for her back and for her husband’s arthritis. There were other imagined benefits, as well, including increased brainpower. Some of this stuff is like high-cable infomercials in hell. Eventually, though, the effects began to wear off.”
“So they did it again,” Holly says flatly. “And again.”
“They should have been caught after Castro,” Izzy says. “And if not after him, after Dressler. The wheelchair ploy was clever enough, and they did some background work, but their attempts to clean up afterward were strictly slipshod.”
“They were old,” Holly says quietly. “No one expects old people to be serial killers. Let alone cannibals.”
Izzy says, “If not for you, Holly, they’d probably still be living in that house and eating their hellish meals. ‘Oh,’ people would say, ‘he’s a little dotty and she’s a little crotchety, but they’re basically all right.’?”
Table of Contents
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24
- Page 25
- Page 26
- Page 27
- Page 28
- Page 29
- Page 30
- Page 31
- Page 32
- Page 33
- Page 34
- Page 35
- Page 36
- Page 37
- Page 38
- Page 39
- Page 40
- Page 41
- Page 42
- Page 43
- Page 44
- Page 45
- Page 46
- Page 47
- Page 48
- Page 49
- Page 50
- Page 51
- Page 52
- Page 53
- Page 54
- Page 55
- Page 56
- Page 57
- Page 58
- Page 59
- Page 60
- Page 61
- Page 62
- Page 63
- Page 64
- Page 65
- Page 66
- Page 67
- Page 68
- Page 69
- Page 70
- Page 71
- Page 72
- Page 73
- Page 74
- Page 75
- Page 76
- Page 77
- Page 78
- Page 79
- Page 80
- Page 81
- Page 82
- Page 83
- Page 84
- Page 85
- Page 86
- Page 87
- Page 88
- Page 89
- Page 90
- Page 91
- Page 92
- Page 93
- Page 94
- Page 95
- Page 96
- Page 97
- Page 98
- Page 99
- Page 100
- Page 101
- Page 102
- Page 103
- Page 104
- Page 105
- Page 106
- Page 107
- Page 108
- Page 109
- Page 110
- Page 111
- Page 112
- Page 113
- Page 114
- Page 115
- Page 116
- Page 117
- Page 118
- Page 119
- Page 120
- Page 121
- Page 122
- Page 123
- Page 124
- Page 125
- Page 126
- Page 127
- Page 128
- Page 129
- Page 130
- Page 131
- Page 132
- Page 133
- Page 134
- Page 135
- Page 136
- Page 137
- Page 138
- Page 139
- Page 140
- Page 141
- Page 142
- Page 143
- Page 144 (Reading here)
- Page 145
- Page 146