The Silent Hour

short-lived. Some editors and TV anchors around the state no doubt grumbled when they saw he was going to disappear quietly behind bars, taking a good bloody story with him. On the day of his arrest, he’d offered something special. Something none of them had seen before.

The victim was a man named John Maxwell, who was the new boyfriend of Harrison’s former lover, Molly Nelson. The killing occurred in Nelson’s rental house in the hills south of Xenia, Ohio, a town made infamous for a devastating tornado that occurred the same year Harrison went to high school, destroying homes, schools, and churches while killing thirty-four people and leaving nearly ten thousand—including the Harrison family—homeless. It wasn’t the first storm of breathtaking malevolence to pass through the little town: The Shawnee had named the area “place of the devil winds” more than a century earlier. The winds certainly touched Harrison’s life, and a few decades later the locals would claim the devil clearly had, too. A Xenia native who was half Shawnee, Harrison had been separated from Nelson for more than a year before he returned to town and they reunited for one night together. It was passionate and borderline violent, beginning in a shouting match and culminating in intercourse on the floor. Evidence technicians later agreed that the abrasions found on Harrison’s knees were rug burns from that night and had no relevance to the killing that took place two days later.

After the night of sex and shouting, Nelson told Harrison she was done with him, that it was time to move on. Time to move away. Get out of town, she said; find something else to occupy your attention.

Apparently she didn’t convince him. Harrison returned to her house two nights later, hoping, he would say, for more conversation. The police would insist he returned with murder on his mind and a recently sharpened knife in his truck. Harrison’s story, of an argument that the new boyfriend turned into a physical contest, was never proved or disproved because there was no trial. What went undisputed was the result of the night: Harrison punched Nelson once in the jaw as she went for the phone, interrupting her as she hit the last of those three digits needed to summon help, and then turned on Maxwell and killed him with the knife. Harrison disconnected the phone, but a police car had already been dispatched, and a single sheriff’s deputy entered the house through an open side door to find Nelson unconscious and Harrison sitting on the kitchen floor beside Maxwell’s body, his cupped hands cradling a pool of blood. He was attempting, he said, to put the blood back into the corpse. To return it to Maxwell, to restore him to life. He was, he said, probably in shock.

That detail, of the attempt to return the blood, added a new twist on a classic small-town horror story, and the crime received significant media coverage. Front-page articles in the papers, precious minutes on the TV news. The murder was well documented, but I don’t remember it. I was an infant when Harrison was arrested, and his name meant nothing to me until almost three decades later, when the letters started.

2

__________

He wrote me for the first time in the winter, about two weeks after my partner, Joe Pritchard, left for Florida. I remember that because my first instinct was to laugh out loud, and I was disappointed that there was nobody around to share my amusement. It was a crazy letter from a crazy killer who was already back on the streets. That life sentence only held him for fifteen years. He’d been out for thirteen when he made contact with me, sent a letter explaining that he had a matter of “grave importance” to discuss, but wanted to tell me his personal history before we met. It was an issue of honesty, he wrote. He had recently learned the importance of total honesty, of accountability, and therefore he would not hide from his history. He proceeded to describe, in a formal, matter-of- fact fashion, the crime he’d committed and the time he’d served, then left a phone number and asked that I call him when I was ready to meet.

The letter went into the trash without ceremony, and no call was made. More than a month passed before the second one arrived. This time, Harrison was more insistent and even stranger. He wrote that he’d followed my career in the newspapers and believed that I had been chosen for his task. He knew this must sound strange, but I needed to believe him, needed to meet with him just one time. There was talk of me being not a detective but a storyteller. Harrison had a story, and he needed to know the ending. No one could tell the ending but me. Was I intrigued?

I was not.

This time I considered burning the letter, or tearing it to shreds, but then decided that was too much of a gesture. Instead, I tucked it back into its envelope and tossed it into the garbage. Four companions soon found their way to a similar demise in the months that followed. Harrison was growing more persistent, writing so often that I at least took the time to look into his background to see what sort of psychopath I was dealing with. I considered contacting his parole officer but never did. His correspondence, while annoying, also seemed harmless.

He gave up on the letter campaign and decided to arrive in person on an unusually warm afternoon in the first week of May. I was in the office and engaged in critical business—browsing the ESPN Web site and pondering what lunch should be—when there was a single soft knock on the door. Walk-in business isn’t just infrequent at our agency; it’s nonexistent. There’s no sign on the building, and that’s by design. Joe had a theory about walk-in clients being the sort you wanted to avoid in this business, so we kept a low profile.

I pushed back from the desk, crossed the room, and opened the door to face a man who couldn’t have stood an inch above five-six. He had a thick build, the natural sort rather than a weight-room product, and his hair was cut very close to his skull. There was one scar on his face, a dark imprint high on his cheekbone, offsetting a pair of coal-colored eyes that were fastened on my own.

“Mr. Perry.” It wasn’t a question; he knew who I was.

“Yes?”

“I’m Parker Harrison.”

He saw the look that passed over my face in response.

“I’m sorry if the letters bothered you,” he said. “I didn’t want to be a bother. But I also thought . . . you were a police officer, and I thought maybe the name would mean something to you. So I said, well, better to be up-front about things, right? Then, when you never called, I decided maybe that was a mistake. I was hoping you’d welcome me.”

“Welcome you.”

“Yes.”

We stood there in silence for a moment, and then he made a nod at the interior of the room and said, “Are you going to let me in, or do we have to talk on our feet?”

“On our feet,” I said. “It’s not going to take long to finish the conversation, Harrison. I don’t investigate thirty-year-old murders committed in front of a witness and then confessed to. Besides, you’re already out. You did some time and now you’re done. So what’s the goal? I don’t understand it, and I don’t want any part of it.”

For a moment he just stared at me, looking perplexed. Then his face split into a smile, one with some warmth to it.

“Of course you think that’s what I want. Why wouldn’t you? I’m sorry about that, Lincoln. May I call you Lincoln? I apologize for your confusion, but the last thing on my mind is my own case. I mean, there isn’t a case. As you said, I confessed. That wasn’t a joke, something I did for kicks because I wanted to spend my life in prison. I killed that man, Lincoln, killed him and never denied it.”

He must have seen some reaction in my eyes, some hint of the chill that had gone through my stomach, because he stopped talking and frowned.

“I say that like it’s nothing,” he said, “but that’s not how I feel about it. Not at all. I regret it terribly, would give anything to see him have his life back. So if you hear me talk of it like it’s nothing, please understand that’s just a product of familiarity. When you spend every day living with the price of destruction—of someone else’s life and your own—it becomes awfully familiar.”

He spoke very well, gracefully even. I said, “All right, it seems I misunderstood, but why tell me about your case in that first letter if it’s not your current concern?”

“I told you,” he said. “I wanted to be honest.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You know, Harrison, there are some things we all keep to ourselves. If I’d killed