Chapter 9

Van

I take the last sip of gas station coffee I’d picked up about twenty minutes ago and place the empty Styrofoam cup in the cup holder. I look across the parking to the visitor entrance. I’ve been here once before but I didn’t take in the details. I’ve been sitting in this parking lot for over four hours now, waiting for visiting hours to start.

I’ve had plenty of time the last several hours to look at the facility. The visitors’ complex is a large square building with a guard tower rising up from the southeast corner. Behind that building is the prison itself. Everything is done in white stucco that’s aged and molded over the years. A twenty-foot fence with barbed wire coils at the top separates the visitors’ center from the rest of the facility, but even if a prisoner were to make it past that, there’s another twenty-foot fence with barbed wire enclosing the visitor building from the outside world.

When I see a few people start to arrive, I don’t get out of my truck right away. Instead I lean over to my glove compartment and pull out a worn envelope I’d received almost three months ago. Ironically, it had come just one week before I got the trade offer to come east to the Cold Fury.

It’s addressed to Grant VanBuskirk in care of Etta Turner at Etta’s home in Redding, California. I was still playing for the LA Demons when she received it. My standing orders were to toss out any letters from the Virginia Department of Corrections, and she always did that. But this one wasn’t from him, but rather from the warden’s office. She felt it important enough to forward to me.

I reach inside the envelope and pull the letter out.

Dear Mr. VanBuskirk,

I am writing this inquiry to you per the request of Inmate #94920555, Arco VanBuskirk. As you are his next of kin, he has asked me to inform you that he has been diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer and his prognosis is grim, since he is choosing not to undergo treatment. Mr. VanBuskirk has attempted to contact you, but he suspects you are not reading his letters. He wanted to make one last effort to reach you, in the hopes that you might consider a phone call or a visit with him before he passes.

If you could please contact me to discuss this, I can forward your decision to Mr. VanBuskirk.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Arnold Glyner

Warden, Virginia Department of Corrections

Richmond Maximum Security Prison

I stare at the greeting again.

Dear Mr. VanBuskirk.

That hasn’t been my name since I was nine years old, when Etta helped me legally change my name when she adopted me. The only nod I gave to my heritage was to keep Van and add Etta’s last name, Turner, to create my new identity. Grant VanBuskirk died a long time ago.

With a sigh, I toss the letter and envelope onto my passenger seat. I don’t need it to get in the prison. This I was assured when I was here a few months ago. I didn’t come to see Arco, but rather I made an appointment to talk to the warden. He confirmed what I already figured.

Arco was still a sociopath, and there were no medications available that would change that.

He was indeed dying and he had maybe six months if he was lucky.

He had requested medical clemency and was denied summarily. His sentence of life in prison without parole, not to mention the horrific things he did, all were going to ensure he died in prison.

The warden did not know for sure why Arco wanted to see me, but he could only guess it was to make some type of amends.

That had cracked me up. I’d actually laughed at Mr. Glyner for his foolish assumption. Arco made amends with no one. He had not one moment of remorse for the things he did, including ruining his son’s childhood.

The last thing I got from the warden was help in paving the way for a future visit to Arco if I decided to go. I really didn’t want to, but the fucker was dying, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t have any regrets. Getting entrance was a little tricky, because as Arco’s next of kin, I was still listed under my old name. My new identification proclaimed me to be Van Turner. The warden put a note on my file to explain the name difference, and that was the best he could do. I didn’t like this, because at age twenty-eight, after playing ten years in the NHL, no one knows my true identity. That’s the way I wanted to keep it, but I think the risk at this point is needed. What happened between Simone and me last night has me freaking the fuck out.

It was a chance I was taking coming here…being recognized. The most I could do was put my glasses on, and hoped that no Cold Fury fans worked in this prison, or even a die-hard fan who knew many of the league’s players.

The process to meet a prisoner isn’t overly complicated, but it takes time. I check in, go through two metal detectors and a pat down. I’m led to a waiting room, where about ten other people sit, waiting for their visit with a loved one. I’d learned that some prisoners could meet in an open room with limited contact. Other prisoners—the more dangerous ones—were kept behind a glass partition and we had to communicate via phones.

Arco was in this category.

“First time?” a man says beside me where we perch on flimsy plastic chairs.

I turn to look at him warily, but he’s wearing nothing but the pleasantly bland smile of someone making conversation.

“Yeah,” I admit.

“This place is the pits,” he says. “My son is in here for armed robbery. I try to get to see him at least once a month and it kills me. This place is sucking the life right out of him.”

“I can imagine,” I mutter, not really wanting to talk about it.

“Who are you visiting?” the guy asks genially.

“A friend,” I tell him, but Arco is no friend of mine.

“What’s he in for—” the man starts to ask, but a door opens.

A security guard calls out my name. “Grant VanBuskirk.”

I’m thankful they didn’t use my current identity, and I probably owe thanks to the warden for that, however he annotated Arco’s file.

Standing up, I wipe my sweaty palms on my jeans. The man calls out, “Good luck,” but I don’t acknowledge him. My stomach is churning as I walk toward the guard, trying to prepare myself to face my father for the first time in two decades.

Arco VanBuskirk was born and raised in the D.C. area. He was a handsome man. Smart, outgoing, and the life of any party. He sold insurance and was quite good at it. He married Miriam when he was almost thirty and she was twenty. She used to tell me it was true love at first sight, but I’m pretty sure Arco manipulated her into falling in love with him. They had me within nine months.

I have no idea if Arco was raping and murdering women when he married my mom, but he was arrested for five murders when I was just seven years old. I was eight when he was convicted and I was in court for his sentencing. Because my father was tried in the summer, my mom made me attend every day of the trial, as she resolutely refused to believe her husband could do something so heinous. She felt we needed to present a united front. She did not care that her third-grade son had to hear the horrific details of what his father was accused of doing. I had nightmares for years, but I still loved my mother.

When Arco was convicted and received his sentence, he bragged to the court there were many others they’d never find. I remember how proud of himself he seemed.

My mom killed herself three days later, unable to accept she had been so wrong about him.

Arco’s sister, Etta Turner, was four years older than him and recently divorced. She knew her brother was a sociopath, just like the court shrinks did. Luckily, his insanity defense fell on deaf ears with the jury, but Etta would always tell me, “Your father is just batshit crazy.”

Temporary custody was granted to Etta, who also was still in the D.C. area but had little to no contact with her brother. She once admitted to me when I got older that he killed her cat right in front of her when they were kids, and that’s when she knew his mental health was corroded beyond repair.

But Etta swooped in and became my savior. It didn’t take her long to realize we couldn’t stay in the area. School had become intolerable to me, as I’d become an easy target for bullies. If I wasn’t getting my ass kicked because my father was a serial killer, I was being patently ignored by everyone else, including my teachers. My grades plummeted, and that was when I started the long but permanent withdrawal inward.

Etta had seen enough of this after only three months. Her divorce left her well off, so she spent a shit pot full of money petitioning the court to terminate Arco’s parental rights. The only good thing he ever did for me was to not fight the petition, and after I was awarded full and sole custody to Etta, she fled with me across the country.

We settled in Redding, California, and before I reached my ninth birthday my name was Van Turner and Etta was my mother for all intents and purposes.

The guard leads me to a large room with several partitioned desks separating visitors from inmates. I sit in a metal folding chair with a small wooden ledge in front of me. There’s a phone receiver attached to the partition that blocks me off from the chairs to my left and right. A Plexiglas shield separates me from the room where the inmates are led through.

I’m drumming my fingers on the worn wood of the desk, trying to appear calm for that moment when Arco walks in.

And when he does, my gut contracts so hard I’m afraid I’m going to shit myself.

He’s led in by a guard who holds on to his elbow, wearing a beige jumpsuit with his hands and legs shackled. He’s hunched over as he shuffles inside and his gaze goes along the row of people on my side of the glass. When his eyes lock on to mine, his lips curve into what could be deemed a relieved smile.

I don’t trust it for a moment.

Fuck he looks bad. If my math is right, he’s got to be going on fifty-nine years old, but he looks like he’s eighty. He was once a tall and powerful man; now he’s frail. His body is emaciated, his face gaunt. His hair is almost completely gray, including the grizzled beard he’s sporting.

I’ve refused to look at any news articles or pictures of him since I moved to California. When I got older, Etta would keep me updated to some extent. She’d let me know how his appeals went, or tell me when I’d receive a letter from him. Every single one of them went into the garbage can. Arco was nothing to me.

With the guard guiding him, Arco ambles with short steps to the chair opposite me and waits for his handcuffs to be removed, after which he takes a seat with his legs still shackled. He just stares at me a moment, almost as if he’s drinking me in. His eyes roam over my face, coming back repeatedly to my eyes, which are also his eyes. I keep my expression neutral and just wait to see what he does.

Finally he picks up the receiver on his end, and I reluctantly do the same. When I press it to my ear, I hear his monstrous voice say, “I knew you’d come.”

“Only to see for myself you were dying,” I say callously.

This causes Arco to chuckle as he shakes his head.

“Still a little pissant,” he says with clear affection. It makes me queasy that he thinks he even has the right to feel anything for me.

But then his eyes turn hard and calculating. Leaning toward the glass and placing a forearm on his desk, he says in a low voice, “But we know that’s not the only reason you came.”

Fuck, I hate he knows that about me. I also hate the look on his face that says he has the upper hand, and it pisses me off.

“Now I’ve seen you,” I tell him with bored disinterest, “so I’m going to be on my way.”

I start to stand from my chair, but before I can pull the receiver away from my ear, I hear him say, “Think you’re going to get that Cup this year.”

It feels like my heart stops beating as my butt hits the chair. I press the receiver hard into my ear and listen as he continues, “Didn’t think I’d know who you became, did you?”

Fuck no, I didn’t think that. He was never given my new identity. All his letters to me had been addressed to the name I’d been given at birth and sent to Etta.

“Saw you on TV,” he says proudly. “Couldn’t believe that was my boy…a damn professional hockey player.”

Fury and hopelessness well up within me. This is a secret I never wanted out, and frankly, never thought it could get out. Any evidence of Grant VanBuskirk was wiped clean when Etta adopted me and changed my name. The court records were sealed.

“You better keep your fucking mouth shut,” I growl into the phone.

“Or what?” he taunts back.

I’m frozen in place without any rejoinder. I can’t do a fucking thing to him, and he knows it.

I’m surprised when gives a dismissive wave with one hand. “Relax. I’m not going to tell anyone. Wouldn’t get me anything anyway, and besides…you’re my son. I protect what’s mine.”

“I’m not your son,” I grit out. “Your rights were terminated—”

“My jizz is what knocked up your bitch of a mother,” Arco says into the phone, and his voice causes me to freeze with fear. It’s dark, seeping with madness and coated in malice. He sounds unhinged as he continues. “You got my fucking DNA, boy. You’re my son no matter what some paper says. A regular chip off the old block.”

My head spins as I feel like the little boy who used to visit his father in jail while he was awaiting trial. Wanting to love someone so desperately, but knowing in your heart of hearts that you couldn’t because he was pure evil.

My mom made me visit him with her, and he’d put me on his lap and say those exact words to me. You’re a chip off the old block.

He didn’t know it then, and I didn’t know it then, but those words have fucking haunted me most of my life.

Am I?

A chip off the old block?

Clearly there’s something wrong with him. I’ve read so much fucking stuff on sociopathy, all of it depressing as hell, as it can’t be fixed. Bluntly explained: the brain circuitry is fucking broken. It’s why I wanted to go to college and get a degree in psychology, so I could possibly analyze why my father did the things he did. And most important, I wanted to try to figure out if there was a chance I would turn out like him in any way, because half of my makeup was from his jizz as he says.

“You got questions for me, boy,” Arco says as he impedes my thoughts.

Not a question.

A statement of fact.

I refuse to give that to him. I might have a million and one fucking questions, but I can’t seem to bring myself to ask them. To do so would give reveal to this foul creature that I’m worried about myself.

I mean…it’s true.

I’m so fucking worried.

I’m withdrawn and can’t make personal connections. I like to fuck women, but that’s all I want from them. I don’t desire intimacy or love.

How much of those things are because I share the DNA of a serial rapist and killer?

“You want to know if you’ll grow up to be like me, don’t you?” he whispers into the phone, and my hair stands up on the back of my neck.

My throat is so dry I can’t answer. Besides, if I opened my mouth, I’m afraid I’ll hurl vomit against the glass.

Arco leans in closer, and I actually lean back. We don’t have to be close to hear one another. He grins at me, and I note his teeth are yellowed with nicotine.

“I’ll tell you a little secret that no one else knows,” he says in a low, promising voice.

I want to hang up the phone. I know I should and get the fuck away from this man. But I can’t move. I want to hear the secret as much as I want to run far away.

“I didn’t kill my first person until after I married your mom,” he murmurs into the phone. “I know I alluded to there being many throughout the years, but truthfully…I didn’t start getting those wild urges until then.”

I can’t fucking help myself as I croak, “Why then?”

Arco shrugs. “Who knows? I know I always wanted to control women. Wanted to do vile things to them. And of course I did. I’m thinking maybe it was just me reaching a certain age. Maybe I had to just grow into the person I was supposed to be.”

Jesus fuck…I’m two years younger than when this sick fuck started raping and killing women. A sludgy, thick swell of self-disgust rises within me and I have to swallow hard against the bile in my throat.

My hand shakes, threatening to drop the receiver. I clamp on tighter and ask him one more question. “Did you ever love her?”

Arco blinks in surprise. “Who? Your mom?”

I just nod at him.

He leers at me through the glass. “Fuck, no. She was a means to an end. A front, so to speak. And she gave me a kid, which made her semiuseful. But let me tell you, my boy…you don’t know how many times when I was fucking that cow I wanted to put my hands around her throat and just squeeze—”

I slam the phone onto the receiver and push up out of my chair. Giving my back to Arco, I head toward the exit. I can hear him banging on the glass and his muffled yells that I can’t quite make out what he’s saying. I’m afraid if I look back at him—eyes all crazy and vile admissions falling out of his twisted mouth—that I just might recognize something of myself in him.

I spend the day driving around, ruminating over what I learned. I do this until the late evening hours, wanting to assure myself that Simone has gone to work when I get home. It’s close to midnight when I prowl through our dark house, and I have a small measure of relief when I see light under Lucas’s bedroom door. At least he’s not out fucking some stranger tonight.

Once in my room, I pull the shoebox out from under my bed and take off the top. I put the letter from Warden Glyner on top of the contents and replace the cover. Sliding it back under my bed, I resolve that I’m going to keep Simone far, far away from me.

For her own safety.