12th of Never (Women's Murder Club 12)

In another couple of hours, we were going to be talking to that sack of crap. I hoped that, having almost died, Randy Fish would feel some compassion for the parents of the missing girls. He was on death row. He had nothing to lose by telling us where he’d disposed of their bodies.

Chapter 59

THE LANDSCAPE SURROUNDING the penitentiary is remarkable for its emptiness. If you stand in one spot and turn a full 360 degrees, you’ll see the stark prison buildings, a few distant farmhouses, and dusty flatlands out to the horizon.

We met Ron Parker at the front gate. He told us that Fish would speak only with me and there was a condition. I had to apologize for the way I treated him.

“Really? He comes out of a coma after two years and that’s what he wants?”

“That’s what he said, Lindsay. He wants to make a deal, but you know, he’s a manipulative prick. I think you should apologize, see if you can get some kind of rapport going. This might be our best and only chance to find out where he put those girls.”

One hour and many checkpoints later, I entered a small room with one glass wall. On the other side of the glass was a maximum-security hospital room. Randy Fish was wearing a hospital gown, sitting up in bed, reading a book.

I felt like Clarice Starling meeting Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs.

But Randolph Fish was no Anthony Hopkins. He wasn’t a David Berkowitz or a Ted Bundy, either. At close to thirty years old, Randolph Fish looked like a teenage movie star.

I pulled out the straight-backed chair and Fish looked up, recognized me, and gave me an endearing smile.

I said, “Hello, Randy.”

“Well look at you, Lindsay,” he said. “You’ve put on, I’m going to say, twenty-two pounds since I saw you last. You look healthy.”

At five five, Randy Fish might have weighed 135 pounds when I’d kicked him around three years ago, but he weighed less now. His brown hair was clean. He had large brown eyes and bow-shaped lips. He looked unbelievably sweet and vulnerable and frail.

It was easy to see how women had fallen for him, done what he’d asked of them, without having the slightest sense that he was a sexually deviant psychopath with an insatiable desire to maim and kill.

“How’re you feeling?” I asked him.

“Rested,” he said, smiling again.

“I’m glad to see that you’re okay,” I said truthfully. “I still have some questions for you.”

“Don’t you have something to tell me?” asked the killer.

“What are you reading?” I asked.

“The Poet by Michael Connelly. I’m not going to beg you, Lindsay. You know what I want.”

I felt literally sick. I’d seen the morgue pictures of the five women we knew Fish had killed. One had had her fingers and toes cut off while she was alive. Another had hundreds of knife slits all over her body. All of them had been brutally raped, bitten, hanged. I knew too much about what this psycho had done and I didn’t want to give him anything.

But if I wanted to find Sandra Brody’s body and those of the three other missing young women, I was going to have to give in.

I quashed my gag reflex, but I still tasted bile at the back of my throat when I said, “I’m sorry I had to be so rough with you, Randy. But you know, you had threatened to kill a hostage. And Sandra Brody was still missing.”

“You call that an apology?”

“You remember Sandra,” I said. “She’s a pretty girl, brunette, size four, has a bit of an overbite. She was a biology major. I might be able to help you if you tell me where she is.”

“I don’t remember a Sandra Brody,” he said. “In fact, I can’t even remember why I was locked up. But I do remember you, Lindsay Boxer. I wish we’d met under different circumstances. You’re very dear to me.”

He showed me the book he’d been reading and said, “This is pretty good. Have you read it? Do you read?”

He was back into his book, turning the pages, seemingly absorbed. As far as Randy Fish was concerned, the interview was over.

I had apologized.

He’d given me nothing in return. And I was absolutely sure he was messing with me. If I had gotten down on my knees and given him an unconditional apology, he would still have messed with me.