Page 8 of Haven't Killed in Years
“We know,” said Porter.
“The tour is a little over five hours. We will be visiting many of the crime scenes as well as the Haggerty home outside of Worcester.”
“Worcester?” Porter lifted his sunglasses as he turned around to glare at me, apparently his enthusiasm knowing bounds and those bounds being the turnpike.
I shrugged like I’d had no idea we’d have to drive so far. How would Gwen Tanner know where Abel Haggerty had lived?
Dominic flipped open the center console and slid out two thin bound packets. He handed one to Porter and then turned to give me mine. “Here you go.”
“What’s this?” I asked.
“It’s visuals to look at during the tour.”
Porter started flipping through the pages.
“Hey,” Dominic snapped. “No skipping ahead. Turn to page one.”
He eased the van out onto the street as I turned the cover over to reveal page one as instructed. It was a staged family photo—the kind you get done at Sears. Of course, it wasmyfamily. I was a toddler with bouncy blonde pigtails, that shade of blonde that toddlers grow out of, and a chubby round face. I sat on my mother’s lap, with a huge smile revealing my Tic Tac teeth. My father stood behind mymother with his hand on her shoulder, his beard much shorter and better maintained back then. They both stared directly at the same spot, slightly off-camera, neither one of them smiling. Honestly, it would have been better to set the mood for the tour if Dominic had cropped me out.
Once we turned out of the alley and onto a congested city street, Dominic started his script. “This is the Haggerty family in 1998. Abel; his wife, Reanne; and their daughter, Marin. You can see the evil behind their eyes.”
“Not the kid,” said Porter. “She’s grinning so hard she’s gonna shit her pants.”
I laughed. They had no idea it was me. Well, Porter had no idea. My gut was telling me Dominic was just as clueless, but my brain told me not to buy it so easily.
“Fun fact,” said Dominic. “Reanne Haggerty was just released from prison.”
That was a fun fact. This is so fun. Let’s talk more about me shitting my pants.
“Did she kill anyone?” Porter asked, not taking his eyes off the picture.
“The story is no,” said Dominic.
The answer is no, I thought.
“But you think she did?” Porter inferred.
“I wonder how you stay with a man all those years, knowing what he was doing, helping him, if you weren’t into it.”
“Probably the sex,” said Porter. “Can you imagine? Most men come home from work and are like,I filed some files today, and then they climb on top of their sad, clumsy wives and are like,hump-hump-done. This guy probably came home all like,There’s a body in the trunk, let’s cut it up and get freaky.”
“They actually didn’t dismember any of the bodies,” Dominiccorrected him—a little on the nose given the recent severed arms at my doorstep.
“You’re missing my point,” said Porter.
“How many people did he kill?” I asked from the back seat, eager to get off the topic of my parents having sex.
“Eight—that he was convicted for,” said Dominic. “There’s really no way to know. He didn’t have a signature style. They were able to prove six without a doubt and then pinned a couple more unsolved murders on him.”
“What do you think?” asked Porter.
“Oh man…” Dominic stalled as he considered his words. “It’s hard to say. It’s hard to know what’s true and what a person wants you to think is true.”
“Deep,” teased Porter, and Dominic raised his eyebrows, playing into how coy he was attempting to be. I’m sure it was all theater, but that didn’t leave me feeling any more patient about the whole thing.
I wanted to lunge forward, hook my arm around Dominic’s neck, and demand he tell me everything he knew.Wait, my father’s voice echoed in my brain.Don’t do the work for your enemy. Let him reveal himself.Let him pull his own trigger.
It was another of my father’s old adages. He had many, and most of them had found a way to stick with me all these years, popping into my head for one reason or another, usually accompanying a memory. This one in particular I remembered my father saying to me as were walking the halls of my elementary school, on our way to a meeting with my third-grade teacher, a man I despised, a man I wanted my father to do something about. (Notthatsomething.)
