I'll Be Watching You. M. William Phelps
Why? Because, he scolded himself, she didn’t die. If she had, he is convinced, his name wouldn’t have even made the suspect list….
And he’s right. It wasn’t until they caught him for the second crime that he admitted to the first and copped himself the plea bargain deal of a lifetime: ten to twenty. So, in a way, he has fooled them. All of them. He gave them the first crime to avoid a longer sentence on the second.
Quid pro quo.
V
As he trolls through the streets of Hartford, however, he’s walking around with over a decade’s worth of thinking about what he did wrong—and, for that matter, what Bundy did wrong. He’s read every one of those books written about Bundy. He boasts about studying the movie starring Mark Harmon. He has notes: a student of murder—a pupil of Bundy’s predatory tactics.
And now, he believes, he is the perfect murderer. Surpassing even Bundy. He writes how in the end, Bundy was stupid after the act. He kept maps, schedules & pamphlets of the hotels, beaches & ski resorts he visited….
Not him. He vows never to do that.
Not now. Not after all he has learned.
Bundy: Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Out of prison now, given this second chance, he is determined to prove himself worthy of the title he would never admit he so desperately wants.
Better than Bundy.
Yes. It’s perfect.
It has a ring to it.
4
I
As he walks toward Capitol Avenue, he can see her out of the corner of his eye. She’s in front of the bar. Talking. Walking sexily along the sidewalk. She’s working it, too: back and forth. Her hair bounces. Heels click against the sidewalk like wooden blocks. Her breasts, the most significant part of all of this, are moving up and down gracefully—he can hardly take it—as she loiters down the runway toward the end of her life.
He needs her to leave. To walk away from them. Her nephew. That security guard. Walk away from the entrance to the bar.
Come on.
Streetlights. Other cars. The stars. The moon.
None of it matters.
His eyes are on the Target.
He needs to get her alone, out into the gloom of the city.
This must be fun for him: the hunt, the stalking part of it. It has to be like buying the dope and preparing it in a spoon. The high before the high. Heating it up. Sucking it in through a piece of cotton with the syringe.
He walks up closer to her, likely picturing the outcome. That scene running through his mind since, in his own words, “the second or third grade”: strangling a woman until life departs from her body (while staring into her eyes, of course).
He starts to sweat. His hands shake. Heart. Racing.
Turn around and walk away.
No. There she is.
Leave.
No.
Take a breath.
II
On this night in early September 2001—days before the terrorist attacks—forty-two-year-old Christina Mallon (pseudonym) stands outside Kenney’s Restaurant on Capitol Avenue while our forty-one-year-old predator acts as if he is heading for his car around the corner. Christina has no idea a killer, right at that moment, is staring at her. Neither does she have any idea that, of course, he has chosen her.
In a way, Christina knows better. Capitol Avenue at night is not a place for a woman with Tina Turner legs, and a walk that would make any man shudder, to be hanging around.
Turning, he approaches her. This close to it all, he can’t help himself. Quite casually, as if he is speaking to a child, he says, “Get in the car.” His tan Ford Escort is beside them.
She tells him to take a hike. Not tonight. And then turns.
He grabs her by the arm.
“Damn it, let go of me,” she says. Christina is startled. She recognizes him from the bar. He’s a regular at Kenney’s. Not only that, but she’s helped him get customers for his stupid frozen-food business. She’s sat and talked with him. She knows him.
What are you doing? Christina thinks.
The security guard and her nephew, now watching from afar, begin to suspect she is in trouble. As he tries to grab her more firmly by the arm and force her into his car, she jerks her shoulder and gives him a solid smack across the face.
He winces. Ouch!
“We tussled,” Christina later tells the court.
So she gets away and she runs as fast as she can as her nephew walks hurriedly toward her. She’s been through a lot in life, but she’s terrified. It was that look on his face. In his eyes. He seemed “different.”
Scared somebody has seen him, or that the security guard and her nephew will do something, he hops into his vehicle and pulls up, quickly, alongside Christina, as she registers what is going on. “Get in the car, bitch, or I’ll hurt you,” he yells from his window.
By now, she is standing directly in front of Kenney’s, almost near the entrance.
“What’s going on?” asks the nephew.
“You OK?” the security guard wonders.
There is a bottle in the gutter of the street. She picks it up and tosses it at his car, hitting the side of it.
Clank.
“Bitch!” he says before speeding off, looking in his rearview mirror.
5
I
Four months later, Christina is reading the newspaper one morning. Dead of winter. Frost on the windows. Snow on the ground. Outside, you can see your breath like cigarette smoke.
She had decided not to report the incident. What good would it do? The cops know her. She doesn’t have a good standing with them. Although she’s no hooker, she does have a few pockmarks on her record.
In any event, there’s an article about a woman, a beloved local girl, Carmen Rodriguez, staring back at her. Christina knows Carmen. She has seen her at Kenney’s. Carmen had been reported missing near the same time Christina had that run-in with the man on the street.
What’s his name?
Then it clicks. Christina is horrified. Carmen was last seen leaving Kenney’s with the same guy. No one has seen her since.
Christina picks up the telephone and calls the Hartford Police Department (HPD).
6
I
And so it appears he has made one more mistake—a vital mistake, which, unbeknownst to him at the moment, will open up a Pandora’s box of possibilities for investigators looking into the disappearance of Carmen Rodriguez. All of which will, of course, lead back to him.
II
“This guy, the one you’re writing the book about,” one criminal profiler, who has studied him for the past twenty years, tells me as we are discussing serial killers over the telephone, “could have left bodies all over New England. He is one of the most dangerous people I’ve ever tracked.”
“Everyone says that,” I respond. “I don’t know.”
“Believe them,” he offers.
Indeed, in the days of researching and writing this book, I come to learn that they are all spot on with their judgments