pocket money, and a prayer.
The following thirty-five years were chronicled by thirty-five clippings
concerning thirty-five apparently unsolved, savage murders.
Two-thirds had been committed in California, from San Diego and La Jolla
to Sacramento and Yucaipa, the rest were spread over Arizona, Nevada,
and Colorado.
The victims each photo defaced with the word MINE PRESENTED no easily
discernible pattern. Men and women. Young and old. Black, white, Asian,
Hispanic. Straight and gay. If all these were the work of the same man,
and if that man was John Joseph Randolph, then our Johnny was an
equal-opportunity killer.
From a cursory examination of the clippings, I could see only two
details linking these numerous murders. First, the horrendous degree of
violence with which they had been committed, whether with blunt or sharp
instruments. The headlines used words like BRUTAL, VICIOUS, SAVAGE, and
SHOCKING. Second, None of the victims was sexually molested, Johnny’s
only passions were bashing and slashing.
But only one event per calendar year. When Johnny indulged in his annual
murder, he really let himself go, burnt off all his excess energy,
poured out every drop of pent-up bile. Nonetheless, for a lifelong
serial killer with such a prodigious career, his three hundred and
sixty-four days of self-restraint for every single day of maniacal
butchery were surely without precedent in the annals of sociopathic
homicide. What had he been doing during those days of restraint?
Into what had all that violent energy been directed?
In less than two minutes, as I quickly scanned this montage of mementos
from Johnny’s scrapbook, my claustrophobia had been pressed out of me by
a more fundamental, more visceral terror. The faint but constant
electronic hum, the trainlike rumble, and the less frequent but fearsome
keening combined to mask any sounds that we made as- we approached the
killer’s lair, but the same cacophony might screen the sounds that
Johnny made as he crept up on us.
I was the last in our procession, and each time I glanced back the way
we had come which was about every ten seconds i was certain old Johnny
Randolph would be there, about to strike at me, slithering snakelike on
his belly or crawling spider like across the ceiling.
Evidently, he had been a brutal killer all his life. Was he now
becoming? Was that why he snatched these kids and squirreled them away
in this weird place in addition to the desire for revenge on those who
had proved he’d killed his parents and had locked him away? If a good
man like Father Tom could spiral so far down into madness and savagery,
how much farther into the heart of darkness could John Randolph descend?
What unthinkable beast might he become, considering where he’d started?
In retrospect, I realize that I was encouraging my imagination to spin
even further out of control than usual, because as long as it was
feverishly conjuring crawly fears of bizarro Johnny, it wasn’t able to
taunt me with images of Bobby Halloway alone and helpless, bleeding to
death in the elevator alcove.
Following Sasha, Doogie, and Roosevelt, I swiftly played the infrared
beam over the final cluster of clippings.
Two years ago, the frequency of these killings increased.
Judging by the presentation on this wall, they were occurring every
three months.
The headlines roared of sensational mass murders, not of solitary
victims anymore, three to six souls per pop.
Perhaps this was when Johnny had decided to bring in a partner, the
stocky charmer who had so earnestly endeavored to give me some skull
exercise in the hallway under the warehouse. Where do tandem killers
meet? Probably not at church. How do they decide to divide the labor, or
do they just take turns sweeping up after?
With a fun partner, perhaps, Johnny had expanded his territory, and the
clippings showed him venturing as far as Connecticut and then south to
sunny Georgia. On to Florida. A jaunt over to Louisiana. A long ride up
to the Dakotas. Travelin’ man.
Johnny’s weapons of choice had changed, no more hammers, no lengths of
iron pipe, no knives, no meat cleavers, no ice picks, no hatchets, not
even any labor-saving chain saws or power drills. These days the lad