Chapter 1

“Good morning San Antonio and thank you for tuning it to WOAI Channel 4 News. Today’s top story, the sentence in the Everett Reilly trial is expected to be announced today. Reilly, son of reclusive oil tycoon and billionaire Jake Reilly, was arrested in the rotunda of the Capitol building in Austin by the Texas Rangers, just over five years ago. And it was live on C-SPAN!”

The screen cut to a scene from five years before. Texas Rangers, with the blessing of the Governor, arrested Everett Reilly as he entered the capitol building. Everett had been a member of the Texas Legislature and the cameras were on hand to witness another attempt to get the gay marriage issue before the legislature. Everett Reilly had been a vocal opponent to the bill.

Everett, flanked by flunkies, marched into the building with his head held high, waving to people he assumed were his constituents or, at least, could be. He was a handsome man with a head full of thick hair, a square jaw and wide shoulders that tapered into a trim waist. Rich, personable, handsome and a hit with the ladies, he was the last person you would have expected to be a pedophile who tortured and murdered small children.

He was smiling and joking until his little group was forced to an abrupt stop by a pair of men in western-cut suits, Stetsons on, even in the building. Backed by a quartet of Texas State police officers, the two cowboys had the five-pointed silver star of the Texas Rangers pinned to their lapels.

In a clear, commanding voice, one of the Rangers called out, “Everett Reilly, you are under arrest. Please turn around and place your hands on your head.”

Everett Reilly turned pale white and looked around in panic but there was no escaping.

He squared his shoulders and managed a sneer. “This is ridiculous! A blatant attempt by my opponents to smear me and keep me from voting on this issue. Exactly what charges have been trumped up against me?”

It seemed like the entire rotunda went quiet long enough for the Ranger to be clearly heard.

“The kidnapping, sexual assault and torture of a minor child.” the Ranger said, spinning Everett Reilly around and cuffing his hands. Reilly’s face was a mask of disbelief and fear.

The press went wild, screaming out questions at the top of their voices and shoving cameras in Everett’s face. That was where the video clip stopped and a new clip began, obviously taken by a telephoto lens over a long distance. The voice-over continued.

“Subsequent video, now made infamous with the History Channel exposé on the case, showed the police carrying at least a dozen small packages out of the lakeside home of Everett Reilly and into waiting coroners’ vans. We know now, of course, that those packages were the bodies of his victims. There was some good news among the bad, when police announced that they had rescued Reilly’s latest victim, a nine-year old boy known only as Danny. It was fitting because little Danny’s kidnapping was the event that proved to be the key to unlocking this mystery. It led to the identification of Reilly, a search warrant for his home and the gruesome discoveries that followed.”

The clip switched to a blurred image of a SWAT officer carrying a child. The image looking like it was at extreme zoom and the child’s form was very obviously pixelated in post-production. The image was taken in front of Austin’s Heart Hospital where a crew had been filming another story and just happened to catch the SWAT officer in the background. It wasn’t until days later that the new station realized what they had caught on film.

The screen returned to the local news hosts.

“The murder victims, who had to be exhumed and then identified by DNA testing, were sexually abused, brutally tortured, dismembered, then buried in Reilly’s extensive basement. The evidence was incontrovertible since Reilly recorded the inhuman acts for later viewing. The FBI was brought in when autopsies on the remains found in Reilly’s basement were positively identified as children from here in Texas, but also in three surrounding states! The Justice Department moved the case into the Federal court system where the US Attorney General is said to have closely monitored the proceedings.”

A crime scene photograph appeared on the backdrop behind the commentators, showing a shot of a video camera on a tripod, pointed at a metal table covered stains that looked like dried blood.

“The judge in this case has a history of strict interpretation of sentencing guidelines, so our legal experts expect today’s sentencing to be one for the record books.

“In other news, the Spurs are back in the spotlight when star forward...”

<CLICK>

I hadn’t left my room in more than twenty-four hours. My caretakers were understandably concerned but, when I promised to call my therapist, they backed off a bit. Mrs. Carver brings me meals and leaves them outside my door, I hear her, but I can’t eat.

I have my own bathroom so I don’t even have to leave for that. The shower is field-stone lined and it feels like a cave. Even before this ... crisis, I would sometimes hide in there, with the lights out, and pretend I am alone in the world, deep in some primordial forest cave, hiding from predators. For some reason, the idea helped me to relax.

I turn the television back on and flip through the channels, pausing when I see Everett Reilly’s face again. I can’t help it. I watch obsessively, knowing what will be said, knowing that I can’t change a thing, but unable to not watch. Every once in a while, I get the strength to turn the TV off, but it never lasts.

<Click> and the room is pitched into darkness again.

<Click> and the light from the television hurts my eyes.

<Click>

I had nightmares every night for more than a year, even though I knew it was over. I knew in my head that he was in prison, but in my dreams, he was with me. Always the same. Always the smile, the bright white, perfectly straight teeth and those bright blue eyes. Always the grating sound of the pruning shears as he clicked the blade again and again. Always the slight crunch when the blades grated on the ends of the two bones as they cut into the joint and separated the tip of my finger. Even now, his laughter at my screams of pain echoed in my ears.

The intensity of the nightmares faded, eventually, and then they came less frequently. My therapist said they would and she was right. My caretakers at the time, the Falsey family, were understandably wary of me. I guess waking up in the middle of the night because your foster child is screaming bloody murder must have worn on them. The Falsey family only lasted a couple of months. The Sherhans came next, Then the Mortensens.

The Mortensens were awesome, but they were older folks. I spent two and a half years with them before Mister Mortensen had his stroke and I hated to leave. Mrs. Mortensen was almost as broken-hearted as I was, but she had Mister Mortensen to look after.

I went to live with Mister and Mrs. Carver. They are very nice folks and life with them has been pretty good. There are bad days, usually those when some facet of the trial made it through their careful screening process. You could almost count on me having another nightmare that night.

My therapist is a nice woman. She is something more than a therapist, but I haven’t worked out what. She is much more involved in my life than the therapists you see on TV or read about in stories.

She tries her best, but she doesn’t seem to have a clue why I can’t move on; why I can’t get past this. She has even brought in some colleagues to “meet me”. I think she is as tired as I am and I wonder if she just wants this, and me, to go away.

The trial was completed a year ago, and it has been a great year. My grades were better than ever, not that they had ever been particularly bad. I am a good student. I had joined the drama club and it was a lot of fun immersing myself in some character, trying to live in that character’s skin, to be him (or, in one case, her!). Being anyone else other than me was always a relief, even if it only lasted while I was on the school stage.

I even had a couple of acquaintances at school. Not friends, really, but almost.

A quick glance at my watch told me it was just thirty hours ago; a reporter had ambushed me on the street. She said she had been visiting Everett Reilly in prison, writing an exposé on the mind of a serial killer. When I tried to get away, she grabbed my arm and said something that made me just lose it. She said, “He told me that he loved you and wished you would visit him. How do you feel about that?”

I don’t remember how I made it the rest of the way home, only waking up to someone pounding on my door. I vaguely remembered telling them that I was okay, just tired. The next time I woke up, my television was on. I must have turned it on at some point, since my bedroom door was locked, but I don’t recall when.

The lead story on the news caught my attention though. “Convicted serial killer pedophile to be sentenced today!”

So.

Here I sat. I couldn’t have articulated why it was true, just that it was so. I couldn’t do anything, couldn’t be anything, not until this was done. I felt as thin as a sheet of paper, with gale force emotions buffeting me from all sides, threatening to tear me apart, to shred me into a billion bits of tormented confetti.

My finger hurt. When I looked down at it, in the light of the television screen, I could see that I had rubbed it raw again. Though it had not happened recently, there were times in the past where I had rubbed the scar tissue on the stump of my little finger raw. It was an unconscious movement, rub, rub rub. Before I knew it, it would bleed. It has been a while, a year at least, since that happened, but now it is raw again.

That finger was the only outward sign that I was not just like everyone else. The only visible thing that made me unique in a crowd. A tiny little difference, one that most people never notice. In my mind it is a flashing, pulsing neon sign. It is a scarlet letter, a huge arrow that floats over my head telling the whole world that I am ... what?

My therapist says it is, in part, survivor’s guilt. Reilly had me for one day and one night and just a few hours past dawn on a second day. Yes, I was traumatized by watching him take his pleasure with and then decapitate his last victim, but the boy, no, the thing on the table hadn’t even been human anymore.

Reilly had taken the time to explain how the thing had come to be. He, Reilly, had taken one knuckle at a time. A day between each knuckle, a week between each major joint. Fingers then wrist, then elbow and shoulder. Start over with the feet until all that was left was a torso and a head.

Each victim lasted, if they survived the amputations, a little over four months and in the end, it was a mewling, drooling and pissing meat sack. There was no more intelligence behind those eyes than you would see in the eyes of a goldfish.

He told me that he never took the eyes anymore. He had, at first, but he loved to see the fear and pain in the eyes, right up to the end.

I watched him clean up the mess he had left, but the act of decapitating the corpse was not the murder. He had killed that boy a long time before he snatched me.

Other than the initial rape which, let’s be honest, hurt like you would not believe, he only took the littlest bit from me. The last knuckle on my left pinkie. A fraction of an ounce of flesh from a hand I didn’t even use much, being right handed. After him forcing himself on me, the cut wasn’t even all that painful, though the blowtorch he used to cauterize the wound ... that made me pass out.

When I woke up again, he patiently explained to me that tomorrow it would hurt much, much more than today and, when it was at its most painful tomorrow night, he would use his shears to cut off the second knuckle so we could start all over again. After, of course, he had his fun. He didn’t sugar coat it or call it something it wasn’t. He told me right out that he was going to use me for his own pleasure and, the more I screamed and bled, the better he liked it.

He assured me that by the time he was done with the fingers on just one hand, I would welcome his attention. I would beg to be allowed to please him. He actually giggled when he explained that I would weep for the chance to anything, no matter how disgusting; anything to put off the next cut just a little while longer.

A miracle happened the very next morning. There was an explosion of some sort, then lots of people yelling, men dressed all in black running back and forth with guns. Two of them threw a blanket over me after using bolt cutters to free me from the chain around my waist. They rushed me outside and into an ambulance where a lady dressed in a white shirt was crying and trying to listen to my heart.

It was three days before I learned that Reilly had killed my parents and my older sister. When he had decided he had to have me, he marched into my parent’s house and murdered them in their sleep before carrying me out to his car.

I was an orphan. Somehow, that fact seemed fitting at the time, like it was inevitable. My therapist says I was just in shock.

I slept again, my bedroom door still locked tight. I knew I should eat something, but the thought of food had my stomach heaving. I sipped tepid water from the tap to sooth it a bit and watched television.

The cable news stations were a boon, or maybe a curse, running news and commentary twenty-four hours a day. Everyone was a-twitter as the news stations hyped the sentencing what-ifs. Now, on the second day, the Judge had sequestered himself in his own chambers, deliberating. Some pundits said he was trying to figure out how to sentence Everett Reilly to death, resurrect him and kill him again for each murder. Other pundits claimed that the judge was trying to find a way to avoid the death penalty. This was Texas though, so those guys were mostly laughed at.

When the news broke, interrupting some argument over immigration to announce that the judge had re-entered the courtroom, I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

There was complete silence in the packed courtroom as the judge took his seat at the bench and carefully laid a single sheet of paper in front of him. He took a deep breath, nodded to his court reporter, then began to speak.

“I am not going to give a sermon here, nor will I remonstrate with the prisoner who stands before me. I am going to read this sentence and there will be no, and I mean no, outbursts, questions, or other demonstrations by anyone. I will hold in contempt, with the full weight of my authority as a Federal Magistrate, anyone who defies me on this.” He said, glaring around the room and daring anyone, anyone at all to say something.

He dropped his eyes for a second, then looked straight into the camera. “Danny, if you are watching, I wish it were in my power to have some tangible sentence carried out right here. Right now, in front of the cameras so that you would have the closure you so richly deserve. Forgive me, forgive us, for not protecting you before, and for not doing right by you now.” he said solemnly, before turning back to the courtroom.

Inside, I quailed and I could feel tears on my cheeks. I hadn’t cried, really cried since, well, since that day in his basement, but I could feel myself cry as he talked to me through the television.

“Everett Carson Reilly. You have been found guilty by a jury of your peers in the kidnapping, rape, mutilation of twenty-three children under the age of twelve and the premeditated murder of twenty-two minor children under the age of twelve; the murders of one child over the age of twelve and the murder of seven adults. You have been given a chance to be heard and to show cause why sentencing should not be imposed or, if imposed, that the court should consider mitigating circumstances. No legal cause has been shown to preclude the imposition of the judgment and sentence. A comprehensive sentencing order will be placed on file with the clerk of courts.”

“In the case of the murder of Michael Cargyle, you are sentenced to death by lethal injection. In the case of the murder of Anthony Brown, you are sentenced to death by lethal injection. In the case of...” This went on until all twenty-two children were named; all seven adults, including Mom, Dad and one teen, my sister Angela. Thirty death sentences were handed out, one for each murder.

“To keep us from being here for a week, I will condense the reading of the lesser, though still heinous and unforgivable charges.

You were found guilty in twenty-three cases of kidnapping, so you are sentenced to twenty years for each one, without the possibility of parole, the sentences to be served consecutively. You were convicted of eight counts of the rape of a minor child and for each count, you are sentenced to ten years to be served consecutively. You were convicted in eighty-nine counts of mutilation of a victim with special circumstances, I.E. during the commission of a felony. You will serve ten years for each count, the sentences to be served consecutively.

I hereby remand you to the custody of the Federal penitentiary system and order them to hold you in the Florence SuperMax prison facility for the duration of your sentence or until your appeals expire and you are put to death by lethal injection.”

The judge, with one last look around the courtroom, slammed his gavel down on his bench top and rose from his seat. He exited the courtroom without a word and the room remained silent until the door closed behind him.

I sat there for, well, I don’t know how long. The numbers wouldn’t add up, wouldn’t make sense in my head. Thirty death sentences, that was easy to understand. But the others, consecutively means one after another, right? Concurrently would mean all at the same time, so did that mean that he would have to serve all the kidnapping years first, then the rape years and so on? Or was each one independent of the others? What if the death penalty got overturned, what happened to him on the murder charges? Was it 890 years for the mutilation or was it 1,430 years for everything?

It occurred to me that it didn’t really matter. Eight hundred or a thousand, the man wouldn’t live long enough to find out which really applied. If the pundits were right, he would spend the rest of his life in solitary or become a target for every other inmate in the prison.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. About any of it, really. I did feel like a weight had been lifted or eased a bit anyway. Was I happy that this was over? Was it really over? Would his appeals bring this up again and again and again? Would I ever be free of this?

A soft knock at my door and I glanced at the television. In the corner of the screen was the time and I realized I had been sitting here, staring at nothing, really, for a couple of hours now.

“Jack? It’s Rene. Can I come in? We should talk, Jack.”

Crap. Rene DeBlasio was my therapist. She was a warm, sweet, caring woman who knew me better than anyone alive, and she was the last person I wanted to talk to. I knew, however, that not talking to her was not an option. She had the power to have me admitted, for observation, and nothing I could say at that point would change her mind. It would be better to face her now. She had done it once before when I had gotten a hold of some pills I thought would make things more bearable.

I got up off the bed and staggered, shocked by how weak I was, how stiff my joints all were. I made it to the door and unlocked it, turning the knob so it would unlatch. Then I shuffled back to my bed, not looking and not even really caring if Rene took the hint and followed me.

“Jack, can I open a window or something? It smells like a boys’ locker room in here. Celia tells me you haven’t eaten in two days, Jack. By the smell, you haven’t showered either!”

Rene DeBlasio was in her forties, matronly without quite making that leap into grandmotherly, though she was close. I had long thought that a lot of it was purposeful, that she dressed and acted the part to make people more relaxed.

She had one of those faces that people instinctively trusted. She was warm and open and smiled a lot, with those tell-tale crinkles at the corner of her eyes that made you think she was going to laugh any second now.

Right now, she had one eyebrow cocked and one hand on her hip as she used the other hand to theatrically wave in front of her nose.

“How do you know?” I asked, the thought coming up so suddenly that I forgot I was hiding.

“How do I know what, Jack?” She asked curiously, dropping her act for a moment.

“How do you know what a boys’ locker room smells like?” I asked, trying to keep from smirking. I was surprised that I even felt like I wanted to!

She scowled and glared at me. “Just you never mind, Daniel Jackson McCoy. I am the one asking the questions here. Me therapist, you patient, remember?” she asked crossly, but I could see the twinkle in her eye.

She pulled out the chair from my desk and sat down, knees primly together and hands folded in her lap.

“You watched it.” she said softly, her eyes flicking towards the television screen. “Tell me about it.”

She didn’t mean for me to tell her about the sentencing, I would bet that she had watched every second of it for herself. She wanted to know how I felt about it all. What I thought about it.

“The judge spoke to me through the camera, did you see that?” I asked instead of answering. Rene nodded, but didn’t speak. She had that patience bit down to a science.

“It was a surprise. I think ... I think that helped, a bit. It made me, I don’t know, sit up and pay attention? I have been in such a funk ... My mind has been going a million miles a minute and I keep seeing Everett’s face when I close my eyes so ... but when he said my name, the judge, I mean, it was, I don’t know, as if he was asking me to forgive him. As if this was, somehow, his fault and he was ashamed. But it isn’t. It’s no one’s fault but Everett’s.”

I tried to gather my thoughts, but it was like trying to pick up a small puddle of mercury. The harder I squeezed, the tighter I tried to hold on to them, the faster they would squirt away.

“Consecutively means one after the other, right? Is it serving all the years for one crime, then all the years for the next crime and so on or is it all the years for one crime, one after another, but more than one crime can be served at the same time? Is it eight hundred and ninety or one thousand, four hundred and thirty?” I asked, my mind latching on to the math problem from earlier.

“I don’t know, Jack. Is that important? We could find out tomorrow if you really need to know.” Rene said, watching me.

“Not important. Not really, but I, I think, no, I feel like I need to know. I need to know what those sentences mean.” I thought, but didn’t say, that I wanted to find out how many years and tattoo them on my palm, so when I doubted; when I was scared, I could look down and see it. I shook my head, dispelling the odd thought.

“Jack, I have another patient. This patient is someone that I refused to see, at first, but came to realize that it would be a good thing to spend some time with him. Over the years, he has convinced me that there would come a time when you would want to meet him. Normally, I would never consider introducing two of my patients unless it is in the form of group therapy, but this time it is different.”

She paused, watching me closely to see how I was responding to her revelation, I guess. She had never, not in the five years she had been seeing me, even admitted she had other patients. I tried to keep my face calm and just slightly interested. I don’t think I fooled her.

The corner of her mouth has always fascinated me. It twitched with her mood. Down if something bothered her, up if something amused her, and a slight, almost unnoticeable wiggle when it she was about to change the subject.

Today, it was doing all three and I tried not to stare.

“Jack, with this other person’s permission, I am going to tell you a few things you would have no other way of knowing. First, and most important, is that Everett Reilly’s father has already told his son that there will be no appeals, no high-priced lawyer filing motion after motion to tie up the courts for decades. In fact, the only motion he would support, both financially and morally, would be a motion to implement the death penalty judgment as soon as the mandatory appeal has been denied. If Everett wants any other kind of fight, he will have to depend on bleeding heart, anti-death penalty lawyers who take cases for free. With the mood of the nation in the wake of his trial, well, I haven’t heard of any firms stepping up and offering.”

His father? Why would his father want him... “Why wouldn’t his father try to save his son’s life?” I asked, shocked even though I, as much as anyone alive, knew the character of Everett Reilly.

“He has been estranged from his son since the moment Everett got control of the first part of his trust fund. Everett spit in his face, there in the lawyer’s office, and walked out. Even before that, theirs was a rocky relationship, though Everett’s father appears to have had a very loving and supportive relationship with his other three children and his wife. Jack, he was as shocked, sickened and horrified as the rest of the country, even more because the monster was his own son.”

I tried, for just a moment, to imagine having a son, and having him be Everett. I didn’t have the mental acuity, the imagination, to even begin to comprehend the horror that would be.

“He’s your patient? The father?” I asked, knowing the answer. She hadn’t thought he had been horrified, she had plainly stated it as fact.

“You know, don’t you, that the only reason I spoke of it at all, the only reason I would even tell you I had another patient, much less who he is, was that he gave me permission?” Rene asked, watching me, waiting for my answer. This wasn’t one of those times I could just assume she understood. She was, in her own way, demanding an acknowledgment.

“I understand.” I said softly, wondering what he was like. I had seen pictures, of course, the news people had hounded him every chance they got. Old pictures, taken before the trouble, had shown him as a man who was strong and powerful, someone to be reckoned with, but with humor and even humility that showed in his eyes. In later pictures, after the arrest of his son, he had looked as though he had the weight of the world on his shoulders and had shrunk under the load. He just looked old and tired.

“We have a lot to talk about, Jack. I have a lot to tell you, but not until you take a shower and eat something. You are worrying Celia and James to distraction and they deserve better than this from you.” she said sternly, standing up and smoothing the creases from her skirt. “Go on, get cleaned up and come downstairs. I’ll see if Celia can’t get you some stale bread and maybe some cheese, if it isn’t too moldy.”

I rolled my eyes, playing the part of the aggrieved teen, but I could see the laugh lines around her eyes crinkle and knew that she wasn’t buying it. I had learned a long time ago to fake the actions and emotions people expected to see, but it rarely worked with her. It amused her and, because she was amused, I was amused. It was a game we played without ever discussing the rules.

A half an hour later, after showering and getting dressed, opening the windows in my room and stripping my sheets for the wash, I was downstairs apologizing to the Carvers.

“I got stopped on the way home the other day by some reporter lady. She tried to question me and, when I said no comment and tried to walk away, she grabbed me by the arm. She said that she had been meeting with Everett Reilly, writing a story about him. Then she gave me a message from him. She said he told her he loves me and wants me to visit him!”

I paused, knowing that calling the reporter what I wanted to call her would just focus them on me, on my language. Adults were so...

“She asked me how I felt about that. How I felt about him loving me. How I felt about him wanting to see me.” I said through clenched teeth. I was doing everything in my power to not scream in rage at that last bit, the anger rushing back like it had just happened minutes ago, not two days.

Rene was right there in front of me. She grabbed my chin and forced me to meet her eyes.

“Jack! Get a grip, boy! She’s not here. He’s not here. He’s in prison where he will rot for the rest of his miserable life.” Her words were low, but the concern for me was clear as a bell. She let her grip ease and then put her palms on my cheeks, her eyes softening but still locked with mine. “It’s okay, Jack. It was a shock, but you are safe with us.”

I closed my eyes and breathed deep. The anger I felt inside surged and ebbed with each new thought. I was angry at the reporter, at Everett, at myself for the fear I felt. I was fifteen, for fucks sake! I was not a ten-year-old boy anymore! Then the anger switched to Rene. I knew that was wrong, but it was there. She had seen me at my worst and, in some ways, she was the last link to my painful past.