Page 59 of Red Snow
Detective Jarrod Granger
Me:Hey, I just got home, and I was thinking I wanted to make up for last night. Netflix and fuck?
WHILE I WAITfor Brandi to reply to my invite for sex, I toss my keys on the coffee table and make my way over to the desk behind my couch. I have a manila folder tucked under my arm as I remove my badge and gun and set them down, before tossing the folder on the desk and taking a seat.
Inside the folder is everything I could find on Beverly Chapman, Jeffrey’s mother. After learning that she used to have sex with her thirty-something son in their trailer, I figured I need to learn as much as I possibly can about this woman and her deranged kid, who I’m convinced is the Snowman Killer. So, I ran a check on her in our system, found her record, split it open, and this whole mess of crap came out. It was already getting late after the interviews in Eagle River, so I packed it all up and brought it home for some late night studying.
Before I open the folder, however, I think I’ll need a drink to help me process all the shit I expect to see. So, I hop out of my seat and go into the kitchen, grabbing a short glass and filling it with ice, before pouring in some Hennessy Privilege with no chaser. A few sips of this and I’ll be feeling free and loose, and my mind will be like an open road ready to be driven on. Plus, if and when Brandi shows up, I’ll be good and tipsy, so there won’t be any worry about thoughts of Stacey creeping into my head and ruining my plans to fuck Brandi into insanity.
After my drink is poured and I’ve had a couple of swigs, I go back to the desk and crack open the folder. I dump the papers onto the tabletop and start with the first ones, which are a string of police reports dating all the way back to the nineteen-seventies. The first one I pick up has a date of January twentieth, nineteen-seventy-two. Beverly Chapman was only ten years old at the time, and according to this report, she already knew how to call the cops on her drunk father for hitting her.
In the report, Beverly told the responding officer that her father, Stanley Chapman, had punched her in the face for spilling juice on the floor in their trailer. Stanley was arrested and Beverly spent the night at a friend’s house, because her mother was nowhere to be found. The report doesn’t give any indication as to where the mother was, it only says she lived with her father. As much as I’m disgusted by the idea of Beverly and Jeffrey having sex, I feel sorry for her and what she may have gone through at the hands of Stanley. If she was calling the cops at the age of ten, I already know she was going through a lot before that, and I’m sure it didn’t get better afterwards.
I grab the next report and it confirms my suspicions. In nineteen-seventy-seven, at the age of fifteen, Beverly called the cops again. This time it was to report that she had been raped, but this report is strange, because Beverly never says who raped her. She says she got jumped as she was coming home from school, but she didn’t know who the attackers were. She doesn’t give a description of anyone, even though she is reported to have bruises on her body and face, and she was taken to the emergency room for her injuries. Call it a hunch, but I don’t doubt for a second that Stanley was the one who raped Beverly that night. He gives a statement to the responding officer that he didn’t see or hear anything. Of course he didn’t. Fucker.
The next report is from nineteen-eighty, when Beverly was eighteen. She was arrested in downtown Anchorage for public intoxication and engaging in lude acts of public indecency. The report says she was caught sucking two guys’ dicks in an alley behind a restaurant on Fifth Avenue. The arresting officer made a note that she was a known prostitute in the area.
Damn, at only eighteen years old, Jeffrey’s mother was a prostitute on the cold streets of Anchorage who would openly give out blowies in the alley. I can see now that Beverly never had a good life when she was younger, and I’m sure it led to lots of mental issues as an adult.
The next paper isn’t a police report. It’s a birth certificate. Jeffrey’s birth certificate, and the first thing I notice is the year Jeffrey was born—nineteen-eighty-one, when Beverly was nineteen. The second thing that jumps out at me is the fact that the block on the certificate that is supposed to show the father’s name is blank. Since Beverly was a prostitute at the time of Jeffrey’s birth, she obviously didn’t know who the father was.
I sip my Hennessy and lean back in my chair so I can take all of this in. Beverly was abused as a child by an alcoholic father, both physically and sexually, and I’m sure mentally as well. He beat her, raped her, and forced her to be a prostitute at a young age. She’s caught sucking two guys off in an alley at eighteen, and has a son at nineteen, but she has no clue who the father is. Wow, what a fucking mess of a life. But the story goes on in the next police report.
This report shows Beverly at the age of twenty-one, when she was arrested for possession of heroin. Just add drug addict onto her list of craziness, and you start to clearly see a picture of why little Jeffrey may have turned out to be a serial killer. Beverly was arrested ten times for drugs between the ages of twenty-one and thirty, and who knows where little Jeffrey was when mommy went off to jail because of her addiction.
The next report shows Beverly as a thirty-three-year-old being arrested for trying to write her own prescription for Percocet. Holy mother of shit. This woman was an addict a long time, and Jeffrey lived with her during all of this, so who knows what he may have seen, and what she may have subjected him to. I don’t feel bad for him since he’s cutting off women’s heads, but I do have an understanding of why his victims look like Beverly. He fucking hates her for whatever she did to him all those years, but he just couldn’t take that hate out on her until she died of Leukemia.
I toss the stack of papers on the table and lean back in the chair with my hands behind my head. That’s a lot of crazy to digest, and it takes a minute for me to come to a conclusion and develop a theory that I think will help me move forward in this investigation. I take a big swig of my Hennessy that burns so good all the way down, then I spread all the papers out across the desk so I can see them all.
“Alright,” I say, thinking out loud. “So, Beverly Chapman is the daughter of an abusive father, which means, statistically, she is very likely to have become an abusive parent herself. Her father raped her for who knows how many years, and then forced her into prostitution at eighteen, and at that time, she was already a heroin addict.
“She gave birth to Jeffrey at nineteen years old, while still addicted to heroin, showcased in her multiple arrests for possession in her twenties. After a while, she moves on from heroin and starts fucking with prescription drugs, which is evident in the arrest at the age of thirty-three.
“We have reports showing the police were called to her trailer multiple times in the past ten years for domestic issues, but all of her neighbors say the only people who were ever in the trailer were her and Jeffrey. She’s overheard having sex with her son as recently as a couple of years ago, and she dies of Leukemia only two days before Brenda Cox’s body was found in front of the elementary school.”
I pause to sip my drink, then start up again.
“So I’m thinking the cycle of abuse that started with Stanley Chapman, continued with Beverly. She abused Jeffrey in all the ways her father abused her, but she may have even started with him at a younger age, because by the time Jeffrey is in his thirties, he’s having sex with her willingly. She had an abusive, sexual relationship with her own son, and it fucking broke him. Once she died, Jeffrey snapped. I bet he loses his shit completely, and when he sees a woman who even loosely resembles Beverly, he can’t control himself. He’s probably freaked out because his attraction is sexual, yet he hates everything his mother ever did to him, so he hates the women who look like her too. He’s conflicted through and through, so his only release is to kill them. In his head, he’s killing his mother for what she did to him. He’s killing her over and over again.
“Beverly totally fucked this guy up, and I bet he’s been acting strange ever since she died. He doesn’t have any known associates, so maybe he’s been tripping at work. We should talk to his boss.”
I sip my drink again before putting it down so I can pick up Jeffrey’s profile. It says he works at Homegrown Construction, a general contractor who specializes in flipping houses, and the foreman there is a guy named Terry Weaver. This is it. This is the next step in the investigation.
I pick up my phone to text everything I just thought to Marcus, but by the time I get it unlocked, it chimes with a text notification. Brandi.
Brandi:Netflix and FUCK?! LOL. You’re crazy. Unfortunately, I have to work on this case with my boss tonight, so I’ll have to take a rain check.
“Well shit. So much for that idea,” I tell myself as the phone chimes again.
Brandi:This is just to hold you over until we see each other again.
Just as I finish reading the message, a picture of Brandi’s bare tits pops up, sending me reeling. She’s obviously in a bathroom and holding up a fancy-looking blouse to take the picture while she gives kissy lips.
I can’t help but laugh out loud at how ridiculous it is. I’m a thirty-one-year-old man, and I’m staring at a woman flashing me in a bathroom mirror like she’s a fucking teenager. It’s just the dumbest thing ever, but part of me likes it. It isn’t something Stacey would do because it’d be beneath her, but since I’m feeling the good buzz of my drink, I find it easy to laugh.
Brandi:You like?
I smile at the text and let my fingers get to work with a response.
