bramble shirts and shoes with razor-blade in-cushions. Or maybe this
wasn’t Hell at all, maybe it was just the belly of the whale.
I think I went a little nuts and then recovered before we reached our
destination.
For sure, I lost all track of time, and I was convinced that we were
ruled by the clock of Purgatory, on which the minute and hour hands turn
without ever advancing. Days later, Sasha would claim we had spent less
than fifteen minutes in those tunnels. She never lies.
Yet, when eventually we prepared to return the way we had come, if she
had tried to convince me that retracing our route would require only a
quarter of an hour, I would have assumed we were in whatever circle of
Hell was reserved for pathological liars.
The final passage which would lead us to the kidnappers and their
hostages was one of the larger tunnels, and when we entered it, we
discovered that the abbs we were seeking or at least one of them,
anyway had posted a neatly arranged gallery of perverse achievement.
Newspaper articles and a few other items were taped to the curved metal
wall, the text was not easily readable by the infrared flashlights, but
the headlines, subheads, and some of the pictures were clear enough.
We played our lights over the various items, quickly absorbing the
exhibition, trying to understand why it was here.
The first clipping was from the Moonlight Bay Gazette, dated July 18,
forty-four years earlier. Bobby’s grandfather had been the publisher in
those days, before the paper had passed to Bobby’s mother and father.
The headline screamed, BOY ADMITS TO KILLING PARENTS, and the subhead
read, 12-YEAR-OLD CAN T BE TRIED FOR MURDER.
The headlines on several additional clippings from the Gazette, dating
to that same summer and the following autumn, described the aftermath of
these murders, which apparently had been committed by a disturbed boy
named John Joseph Randolph. Ultimately, he had been remanded to a
juvenile detention center in the northern part of the state, until he
achieved the age of eighteen, by which time he would have been
psychologically evaluated, if declared criminally insane, he would
subsequently be hospitalized for long-term psychiatric care.
The three pictures of young John showed a towheaded boy, tall for his
age, with pale eyes, slim but athletic-looking. In all the shots, which
appeared to be family photographs taken prior to the homicides, he had a
winning smile.
That July night, he’d shot his father in the head. Five times.
Then he hacked his mother to death with an ax.
The name John Joseph Randolph was unnervingly familiar, though I
couldn’t think why.
On one of the clippings, I spotted a subhead that referred to the
arresting police officer, Deputy Louis Wing. Lilly’s father-in-law.
Jimmy’s grandfather. Lying now in a coma in a nursing home, after
suffering three strokes.
Louis Wing will be my servant in Hell.
Evidently, Jimmy had not been abducted because his blood sample, given
at preschool, had revealed an immune factor protecting him from the
retrovirus. Instead, old-fashioned vengeance was the motivation.
“Here, ” Sasha said. She pointed to another clipping, where the subhead
revealed the name of the presiding judge, George Dulcinea.
Great grandfather to Wendy. Fifteen years in the grave.
George Dulcinea will be my servant in Hell No doubt, Del Stuart or
someone in his family had crossed John Joseph Randolph somewhere,
sometime. If we knew the connection, it would expose a motive for
vengeance.
John Joseph Randolph. The strangely familiar name continued to worry me.
As I followed Sasha and the others along the gallery, I seined my memory
but came up with an empty net.
The next clipping dated back thirty-seven years and dealt with the
murder-dismemberment of a sixteen-year-old girl in a San Francisco
suburb. Police, according to the subhead, had no leads.
The newspaper had published the dead girl’s high-school photo.
Across her face, someone had used a felt-tip marker to print four
slashing letters, MINE.
It occurred to me that if he hadn’t been diagnosed criminally insane
prior to turning eighteen, John Joseph Randolph might have been released
from juvenile detention that year with a handshake, an expunged record,