LEROY ASHLEY DOES THE SAME THING EVERY DAY. He smokes on the porch as soon as he wakes up—a joint not a cigarette. Cigarettes come after breakfast, once he’s dressed in his khakis and polo shirt. From what I find in his trash, he’s fond of frozen blueberry waffles and canned orange juice—the kind you mix in a jug with water. He goes through a box of waffles every two days, folding the empty boxes instead of ripping them up. Once he hauls his trash to the oversized bins he keeps on the side of the house, he climbs in his car and drives to work. He is methodical to the point of obsession. Work for Leroy is the giant fishing and hunting store off the highway. He works in the camping department, suggesting tents and gear to fathers trying to bond with their children, hauling their purchases up to the register, and shaking their hands before they leave. At lunch he eats at the cafe in the store, ordering soup and a sandwich with a piece of fudge for dessert. He’s not overweight, but he’s a big guy, and he’s hung up on carbs. After work, he drives to the park where I first saw him. He spends about two hours there, standing against the same tree and chain-smoking his Camels. He watches the mothers across the way. Sometimes I go to the park and lean against his tree when he’s not there. There is a scattering of cigarette butts around its roots. I try to understand him, see what he sees.
When he leaves the park, he stops first at a gas station to buy more cigarettes, then a little bar a few miles from his house, called The Joe. He drinks a couple pints while scratching his belly and talking with the other patrons. He’s neither overly animated, nor is he overly talkative. Just someone you could forget. I wonder how others see him. Nice guy. Friendly enough.
Every two days he stops at the large, chain grocery store. He never gets too much, just enough to get him through another couple of days. He needs the routine, I think. He relies on the grocery store, just like he relies on his morning high. It gives him purpose. After that, he settles in at home. I’ve never seen the inside of his two-story, but his meticulous disposing of his cigarette butts, and the folding of cardboard boxes makes me think he takes pleasure in the order of his home. Outside of his personal sanctuary, he is willing to discard his cigarette butts on the floor. If it’s not his, he’s willing to destroy it. You can see the flickering of the television through his drapes. What he watches, I do not know. I have never felt inclined to peek through his curtains to take a look. I’m afraid he’ll see my reflection in the television, or have a sense that someone is watching him and come charging out of the house. That would ruin everything. He eats microwavable meals for dinner: pot roast, turkey and stuffing with a side of macaroni and cheese. I find the boxes in the trash—all folded into little squares two inches long. I buy the same meals at my own chain grocery store and try to fold them like he does. I can’t get them smaller than a notecard. I eat what he eats, I smoke what he smokes, I am him. It’s a far cry from the days I spent spying on Lyndee Anthony.
It’s not until the weather turns wet, the air gathering the chill of winter, that Leroy changes his routine. He stops going to the park. At first I think something has happened—he’s ill, or he’s having car problems. I wait for him at the park around the normal time, until I notice that the monkey bars and swings are empty. This was his summer routine, I realize. The mothers have started their winter playtime hibernation. Where does this leave Leroy? The following day I wait for him near his house, behind a copse of trees where I hide my car. He emerges from his driveway at just before two, and drives to a house in the Queen Anne neighborhood—a restored two-story, painted blue. I am curious to know who lives in the house.
I follow him in my nondescript, black Honda I paid cash for the week before. Having an extra car, one that blends in, is important to my cause. I park at a distance, and we watch the house together.
At around four o’ clock, the time we usually spend at the park, the brown, wavy-haired woman comes walking out the door. She’s toting her two children with her, per usual, all three of them wearing matching North Face raincoats. I am not particularly surprised that he knows where she lives; after all, I’ve been digging through his trash for months now. She loads them into her car, and Leroy and I dutifully follow. It’s like a mother and her psychotic ducklings, I think.
She parks in the mall’s above-ground garage, and leads her children inside as they struggle and pull to get away from her and run ahead. Leroy and I follow her in. He sits outside of JCPenney, watching the indoor playground area, minus his Camels. Instead, he holds a styrofoam cup of coffee, and a newspaper he pilfered from the trash. I take the escalator to the second floor and look down on both of them. How is it that she has never noticed this lingering man, appearing at the spots she frequents with her children?
I have, on numerous occasions, entertained the idea that Leroy is an estranged relative, or ex-husband of the woman. Perhaps these are his children. Perhaps Leroy is a private detective hired by her paranoid husband, paid to keep track of what she does on a day-to-day basis. Can you really be so lost in your own world that you fail to notice how it’s coinciding with that of a sick man? Either way, I’ll be her eyes. I won’t let him hurt her or her children. I’ll hurt him first. There will be no more Nevaeh Anthonys on my watch.
But, she does get hurt, the wavy-haired woman who the news calls Jane Doe. They don’t show her face, instead the camera zooms in on her hands, and I recognize the diamond-studded ring she wears on her thumb. The man who sexually assaulted her is still at large. When I turn on the news and see the story, my whole body begins to shake. This is my fault. I had to work. I should have taken off to watch him more carefully. I sit down and press my hands between my knees to keep them still. The reporter is standing in front of a parking garage at a local mall. I recognize it as the one where Leroy was watching her. The rapist, a man she describes as being in his late thirties, abducted her here in this busy mall parking garage, forcing her into the trunk of her own car, and then driving away. He drove her to a park two hours away, where he brutally assaulted her for hours, and then simply walked away without her ever seeing his face.
I turn off the television. This is my fault. I knew what he was planning to do, and I could have stopped him. How? I ask myself. By telling the police that I was stalking a man who was stalking a woman? Maybe they would have listened to me, sent a cruiser to investigate, but without proof, without the crime, nothing could be done.
I think about a movie I watched with Judah, one in which Tom Cruise is part of a specialized crime unit which prevents crime based on foreknowledge. The discussions that resulted between us were heated. I thought that preventing a crime before it happened was ingenious. Judah insisted that tyranny always came wrapped in someone’s good intention.
“Any of us could do something wrong. Should we be arrested—and possibly executed—based on what we might potentially do? Imagine what that would look like in real life. Would you want to live in that society?”
He’d had a point. And I thought about his speech as I followed Leroy around town, waiting for him to do something bad so I’d have a reason to punish him.
I pick up the phone and call the number the reporter gives at the end of the news story. It’s a crime hotline; the person handling the call is a man. His voice is high and nervous. It throws me off, and, for the first few minutes of the call, I find myself stumbling over my words, sounding as unsure as he does.
“I have information about the news. I mean, the rape story that was just on the news,” I say. Before we can go any further, he asks if I want to give an anonymous tip, or if he can take my information.
“I don’t know,” I tell him.
I don’t want anything tying back to me in the end.
“I suppose they can contact me if they need to.”
Once he has everything he needs, I tell him about Leroy. How I saw him following a woman to the mall. And even as I am speaking, I can hear how ludicrous my story sounds. When he asks me why I was following Leroy, I tell him it was because he looked like a rapist. There is a long pause on his end.
“Hello…?” I say.
“Yes, I’m here. I was just getting this all down.”
I imagine him rolling his eyes, sharing the story later with his coworkers. Some girl called in, convinced she’s been stalking a rapist. Another nut calling in and wanting to feel important. Sending the police on a wild goose chase, wasting the taxpayers’ money. I hang up before I can finish. This is my fault, and I need to fix it before he starts his ritual again.
I’ll take care of Leroy Ashley myself.
I go see the wavy-haired woman. Not see her in the way that normal people do, where you knock on the door and get invited in for coffee. I watch her house for days, parked underneath the wisteria across the street, fresh, black coffee in the cupholder at my side. Cars come and go—family, friends, pizza delivery. I read the book I brought, a bestseller that everyone is talking about. But every few minutes my eyes dart away from the words to check for her.
I don’t see her until a week later, when she walks to her mailbox. I remember her from before, carefree and happy, easy smiles for her bouncing children. She liked to wear dresses in bright geometrical patterns, lime green pants, and peasant tops. But when I see her now, she resembles nothing of the before. In a sweatshirt and faded denim, she has her hair piled on top of her head. Her face is pale and fearful. Before she takes the mail out of the box, she looks left and right as if checking for a predator, then she scurries back into the house. Anger floods me. What did I come here to confirm? That Leroy had broken her soundly enough for me to justify punishing him?
I am breathing hard, tears spilling from my eyes. The textbooks say that the sociopath is detached from emotion. I have spent hours comparing myself to the information the DSM and the psychology websites provide. I have grilled my professors until they urge me to further my studies and do my own research.
I have read and reread biographies written about Robert Yates Jr., Ted Bundy, Gary L. Ridgway, and John Allen Muhammad—all one-time residents of Washington. Serial killers born and bred miles away from where I was born and raised. I have examined my own soul, over and over, seeking to understand the ease with which I take life. Wondering if there is murder in the water we drink. And, through it all, I have found in myself these truths: I kill because I can. I kill because no one stops me. I kill because no one is stopping them. I kill to protect the innocent.