“You can never have enough garlic,” I tell Marino. “And the same with wine.” I show him, adding more. “An inexpensive table wine works best, something not too terribly complicated.”
Inside the kitchen, he has an apron on, and we’re cooking Lucy’s birthday dinner. Belatedly, after all that’s gone on. It’s been hectic since she killed Boone Cotton, the fifty-two-year-old construction worker who started helping with my garden back in the fall.
More recently, he was buttoning up Gwen’s townhome when she insisted on taking the place as is, never really moving in. Cotton’s Honda minivan has a quiet engine, explaining why the sound of it was almost undetectable when he drove in and out of the townhome complex while playing creepy music, the volume turned up loud.
This was after stealing Gwen’s FedEx package earlier in the day, and it’s no wonder she was eager to know what had happened to it. She didn’t want someone else getting hold of malware disguised as mobile chargers. She called Cliff Sallow at the management office, demanding to know where her FedEx package was.
Since Cotton had done work at Colonial Landing, he easily could have shown up after dark and covered the entrance gate cameras with plastic bags or something similar. He might have been clever enough to appear at her patio door with the missing FedEx package in hand, perhaps claiming it had been delivered to the wrong townhome.
He may have been familiar to her, and she turned off the alarm, opening her door. Cotton did a lot of work in the Alexandria area, and was intimately familiar with Old Town. He knew how to get in and out of places, and somehow must have figured out Gwen’s passcode for the gate.
We don’t know the answer to that and many questions, and possibly never will, as is true in so many atrocities. The only two people who could tell us are dead, and I doubt Cotton would admit anything if he weren’t. Most psychopaths don’t. They deny and lie until breathing their final breath, still convinced they can outsmart everyone.
“What I can’t get over is Dorothy was in the townhome with Gwen when the guy was upstairs in the bonus room, wrapping things in tarps.” Marino slices open loaves of focaccia bread on a big cutting board.
“We don’t know for sure that he was in the house when she was.” I tear up fresh basil, stirring it into my special Bolognese. “We just know that she heard male voices in the bonus room.”
“It was probably him. His DNA and fingerprints were up there.”
Boone’s DNA was on the ten-pound kettlebell. It was under Gwen’s fingernails after she scratched him, and that’s likely the reason he amputated her hands. He didn’t mean to lose control of her. Just as he didn’t mean to lose control of Cammie. Just as his uncle Ace didn’t mean to lose control when he would take young Boone to the railroad tracks cutting through the park on Daingerfield Island.
This was back in the late 1970s, and Uncle Ace would give him a penny to put on a rail. Waiting in excited anticipation, they’d listen to the Shock Theater theme on the cassette player inside the truck, waiting for the train while Uncle Ace molested him. According to family members Benton has interviewed, this went on until the boy was twelve, and Uncle Ace went to jail for beating someone nearly to death in a bar.
Boone Cotton’s story isn’t so different from those of other criminals who do unto others what was done to them. He was abused and humiliated, and each time he raped and later on murdered, he was reliving his own victimization. That’s what my husband has to say, and he believes Cotton didn’t start killing until his encounter with Cammie.
It’s possible the stress of the pandemic may have escalated his violent fantasies and behavior. He stepped up his predatory game, committing his first murder, Benton feels sure. Before that, Cotton committed a string of fetish burglaries that escalated to rape in the 1990s. He was never a suspect, just a nice guy who always had a friendly word or a joke.
Women found him attractive, even charming, and he fancied himself a lady’s man. That was part of his autoerotic delusion, Benton summarized. Cotton believed the women he stalked wanted him just as much as he wanted them. It didn’t matter if they were perfect strangers, and when they resisted, it set him off like a bomb.
Infuriated, he chased Gwen through her townhome with a ten-pound kettlebell. He slammed Cammie’s head into the ground and drowned her. It would seem the only thing he stole from them were their phones, which were recovered from his home not far from Reagan National Airport.
“Well, we don’t have to worry about him coming back for more,” I say to Marino as the doorbell rings. “I just wish it hadn’t been up to Lucy.”