Free The Killer's Wife by Bill Floyd

showed the outside of the apartment building where Carrie Pritchett’s body had been found. I looked for similarities to the Memphis crime scene but didn’t see any overt ones. Pritchett reiterated that he’d never been satisfied with the California police’s conclusion that I hadn’t been involved in Randy’s crimes. Jennifer McLean seemed skeptical of his assertions, and she’d obviously done some homework. She told him she’d spoken with the local authorities and that they’d received no complaints about me. It was very strange to watch them this way, using my name so freely, the name I hadn’t used in
years; the sense of disconnect was so utter that I wanted to pinch myself. The interviewer asked Pritchett why he would spend all this time and money to come after someone who hadn’t been a problem to anyone in the area.
    “She changed her name, and she tried to hide,” Pritchett intoned, with all the smug self-satisfaction of a religious fundamentalist. “I can’t hide from what happened. I don’t think she should be allowed to.”
    My blood slowly came to a boil. The interview ended with McLean talking about how Pritchett made millions designing and catering celebrity shindigs in LA, then sold his business after his daughter’s death. When she referred to what she called his “crusade,” you could practically see the quotation marks, and I found myself liking this girl quite a bit. Most of the other coverage hadn’t dared to question his motives, because he was, after all, a Victim.
    For the first time in a few years, I found myself wanting, more than just about anything else I could think of, a freaking cigarette. I could actually feel one between my fingers. I could taste the smoke. The store was only a few minutes away, I could be there and back before Hayden knew I was gone.
    But I’d quit smoking for my son. Not for the usual reasons, but because of the books of matches I found in the pockets of his pants sometimes when I was collecting laundry. The lighters I had found hidden in his desk drawer. The fact that he’d gotten them somewhere, and the fact that he’d hidden them. He knew not to play with fire; I’d told him it was dangerous. I had caught him playing with
matches once when he was only four years old, burning a whole book of them in our driveway, and it was one of the only times I’d actually spanked his rear. Except for during my pregnancy, I’d been smoking since I was fifteen. I started back before he was a month old. I only quit for good after I caught him burning that book of matches, seeing how his eyes narrowed and focused on the flames.
    I tried to forget: he was Randy’s child, too. That same blood moved through him. The same genetic derivations ran the synapses in his young mind.
    All the books I read when I was pregnant, all of Randy’s lurid true crime paperbacks, the ones I found in a box in his office and couldn’t quit reading once I’d started in on them, they all suggested in one way or another that psychotics were genetically predisposed. Many of them came from abusive homes, which was always one of the mitigating circumstances that the savvier defense lawyers tried to have introduced at trial. Awful backgrounds of sexual perversity or martial punishments meted out by overbearing mothers or drunken fathers. But the true crime authors took pains to remind their readers that this only reinforced the idea that there was something fouled up in the physiology, hardwired into the perpetrators: lack of impulse control, the damned deranging voices, the fantasies that couldn’t be denied the way the rest of us block out the worst visions with which our minds surprise us during our idle moments.
    The early signs: setting fires, bed-wetting, and the killing or torturing of small animals. I still discovered dampness in Hayden’s sheets from time to time, long after it should’ve
quit being an issue. As far as I knew, no pets had mysteriously disappeared from our