She laughed. 'A girl needs a hobby.'
'How's Spike?'
'Being a very good boy.'
'Relatively or absolutely?'
'Absolutely! One of the roofers had a pit bull bitch chained up in his truck, and she and Spike got along just fine.'
'That's not good behavior. That's self-preservation.'
'Actually she's a sweet dog, Alex. Spike charmed her- she ended up grooming him.'
'Another conquest for the Frog Prince,' I said. 'Want me to fix dinner?'
'How about we go out?'
'Name the place and time.'
'Um- how about Beauvilla around eight?'
'You got it.'
'Love you, Alex.'
'Love you, too.'
The beach house had cable hookup, which meant foolishness on sixty channels instead of seven. I found an alleged hard news broadcast on one of the local stations and endured five minutes of happy talk between the anchors. Then the male half of the team said, 'And now for an update on that demonstration downtown.'
The screen filled with the limestone facade of the main court building, then switched to a ring of chanting marchers waving placards.
Anti-capital punishment protestors bearing preprinted posters. Behind them, another crowd.
Twenty or so young women, dressed in black, waving crudely lettered signs.
The Bogettes.
At the trial, they'd favored ghost-white face makeup and satanic jewelry.
They were chanting too, and the admixture of voices created a cloud of noise.
The camera pulled in close on the preprinted placards:
LOCK THE GAS CHAMBER, GOVERNOR! ALL KILLING IS WRONG!
NO DEATH PENALTY!
THE BIBLE SAYS: THOU SHALL NOT KILL!
Then, one of the hand-scrawled squares: pentagrams and skulls, gothic writing, hard to make out:
FREE JOBE! JOBE IS GOD!
The marchers came up to the court building. Helmeted police officers in riot gear blocked their entry.
Shouts of protest. Jeers.
Another group, across the street. Construction workers, pointing and laughing derisively.
One of the Bogettes screamed at them. Snarls on both sides of the street and stiffened middle fingers. Suddenly, one of the hard hats charged forward, waving his fists. His companions followed and, before the police could intervene, the workers knifed into the crowd with the force and efficiency of a football offense.
A jumble of arms, legs, heads, flying signs.
The police got in the middle of it, swinging batons.
Back to the newsroom.
'That was- uh, live from downtown,' said the woman anchor to her deskmate, 'where there's apparently been some sort of disturbance in connection with a demonstration on behalf of Jobe Shwandt, the Bogeyman killer, responsible for at least… and- uh, we seem to have regained our… no, we haven't, folks. As soon as our linkup is restored, we'll go right back to that scene.'
Her partner said, 'I think we can see that passions are still running pretty high, Trish.'
'Yes, they are, Chuck. No surprise, given the fact that it's serial murder we're dealing with, and- uh, controversial issues like the death penalty.'
Grave nod. Shuffle of papers. Chuck fidgeted, checked the teleprompter. 'Yes… and we'll have something a little later on the situation regarding capital punishment from our legal correspondent, Barry Bernstein, and some face-to-face interviews with prisoners on Death Row and their families. In the meantime, here's Biff with the weather.'
I turned off the set.
The death penalty opponents were easy enough to understand: an issue of values. But the young women in black had no credo other than a glassy-eyed fascination with Shwandt.
They'd started as strangers, standing in line outside the courtroom door, sitting through the first few days of trial, sullenly, silently.
The gore level rose, and soon there were six. Then twelve.
Some press wit dubbed them the Bogettes and the morning paper ran an interview with one of them, a former teen hooker who'd found salvation through devil worship. Personality-cult magazines and tabloid TV picked them as freaks-of-the-week, and that attracted a dozen more. Soon the group was huddling together before and after each court session, a uniformed cadre in black jeans and T-shirts, ghostly makeup, iron jewelry.
When Shwandt entered the courtroom, they swooned and grinned. When victims' families, cops, or prosecutors stepped up to the stand, they put forth a battery of silent scowls, prompting protest from the DA and warnings from the judge.
Eventually, some of them earned jail time for contempt: exposing breasts to Shwandt; shouting 'Bullshit!' at a coroner's sworn statement; flipping off Carrie Fielding's mother as she got off the stand, sobbing uncontrollably.
While locked up, they granted interviews full of sad autobiography- all claimed abuse; most had lived on the streets and worked as child prostitutes.
Low self-esteem, said the talk-show therapists. But that was like trying to explain Hitler in terms of artistic frustration.
Restricted from the courtroom during the last weeks of the trial, they assembled on the steps and howled for justice. The day of the verdict, they promised to liberate Shwandt at all costs and to seek their own 'personal justice.'
Milo had seen them up close, and I asked him if he thought they might act on the threat.
'I doubt it. They're publicity whores. When the talk-show morons stop calling, they'll crawl back into their holes. But you're the shrink, what do you think?'
'You're probably right.'
The person who'd stalked me had warned me first. Other victims had died without warning.
Sometimes I thought about the others and thanked God that Robin and I had been lucky.
Once in a while I thought about the night the house had gone up in flames and found my hands clenching so hard they hurt.
Maybe I wasn't the right therapist for Lucy.
On the other hand, perhaps I was eminently qualified.
3
Robin and Spike came home at 4:15. Robin's green sweatshirt was smudged with dirt. The green played off the auburn in her hair.
She kissed me and and I put my hands under the shirt.
'I'm filthy,' she said.
