True Crime
Cora is way into serial killers, is the thing.
Which for a while made it easy to find gifts, when those occasions came around. Get her an autographed book. Get her the documentary. We toured Whitechapel and she photographed all the Ripper sites that still exist, and then we spent the rest of the weekend naked in a hotel room. She compared the crime scene photos to her modern ones and she said things like, “This building is where Mary Kelly would have been, here on the left,” and the original was so awful I had to get out of bed and make coffee.
“I am in love with a very strange person,” I said.
“A strange person who puts up with your weirdnesses with a winning smile and endless patience,” she said.
But eventually, those things weren’t enough. One day she comes bouncing into the bedroom, smelling of mint and lotion, her hair up and her smile looking, you could say, indecent.
She hands me a laptop. “Look at this!” she says. “It’s a website that sells—”
I take the laptop and my stomach does a turn. I see BUYKILLERSTUFF.COM. I see “Ted Bundy’s Ray-Bans, $12,670.” Here is a baseball mitt purported to have belonged to John Wayne Gacy, $4,215. Here’s Jeffrey Dahmer’s—
“Jesus,” I say.
“I’m not saying I want that stuff,” Cora says. “But can you imagine? Like how did this website get their hands on this stuff? Do you just contact the family of killers and victims and try to buy shit?”
I know that’s exactly where she’s headed, and I’m loathe to give her laptop back. But she’s already making gimme gimme hands, because Cora is an engine of focus and purpose where it concerns people who have been mangled by an engine of focus and purpose.
Four months later and the junk room we used to call the Murder Room as a joke is now, in fact, full of paraphernalia. Cora built a display case that houses the letters, baby clothes, and homework assignments of people who were gutted and found by dogs and hapless hikers, decades ago.
On the far wall is another display case, harder to fill and mostly empty.
She works. She researches and emails and makes phone calls to other time zones.
And then she comes to me one day and says, “I have an opportunity. I sent some letters and made some calls.”
Some line is about to be crossed, I can tell, and the bumps stand up on my arms.
So, Cora goes. She goes to the prison in Nevada where Randal Everett lives, and where he will die, presumably during the first of his seven life sentences.
She comes back four days later with what she calls instructions.
“We’re going to Barstow,” she says. “We’re going to rent a car and buy some shovels.”
“What’s in Barstow?” I say.
She gives me a look.
“Okay then. Barstow.” Because Cora is brightest star in my sky, and the only person for whom I’d take shovels and flashlights into the desert, that is exactly what we do.
