Deviant by Harold Schechter Page B

story come through there that second time.”
    Eddie blinked once, then said, “Somebody framed me.”
    “Framed you for what?” asked Chase.
    “Well, Mrs. Worden.”
    Chase leaned closer to his suspect. “What about Mrs. Worden?”
    “Well, she’s dead, ain’t she?”
    “Dead!” Chase exclaimed. “How do you know she’s dead?”
    Eddie’s lopsided grin seemed frozen in place. “Well, I heard it.”
    “Where’d you hear it?”
    “I heard them talking about it,” Eddie said, straining to sound nonchalant.
    By then, whatever doubts Chase had been entertaining about Gein’s involvement had completely evaporated. He knew he had his man.
    Informing Eddie that he was a suspect in the robbery of Bernice Worden’s store, Chase radioed his superior, Sheriff Schley, that the suspect was in custody. Then he started the squad car and pulled out of the yard, leaving the Hills shaking their heads in bewilderment.
    They had no way of knowing, of course, that the next time they set eyes on their quiet little neighbor, his name would be known throughout the nation—indeed around the world. Or that they themselves were about to gain widespread and highly unwelcome celebrity as the last people to break bread with America’s most notorious maniac.

13

    From the English fairy tale “Mr. Fox”
    “ ‘ And then—and then I opened the door, and the room was filled with bodies and skeletons of poor dead women, all stained with their blood .’
    “ ‘It is not so, nor was it so. And God forbid it should be so,’ said Mr. Fox .”
    A t thirty-two years old, Arthur Schley was a big, imposing man, not overly tall but broad-chested and husky—the kind of small-town sheriff whose very bulk invests him with authority. On the night of November 17, however, Schley was feeling a little unsure of himself. A former employee of the Waushara County Highway Department, he was new on the job and nervous about heading up a murder investigation. Still, things were going well. He was surrounded by a large force of experienced officers, and, though it was not quite eight o’clock, only a couple of hours since he’d received Frank Worden’s call, the suspect had already been apprehended. The important thing now was to locate Frank’s mother.
    Gein’s house seemed like the logical place to start looking, and so, accompanied by Captain Schoephoerster, Schley got into his car and headed out of town, arriving a short while later at the lonely, decaying farmstead.
    Gein’s house looked grim even in broad daylight. On a frozen winter’s night, with icicles hanging from the porch roof and dead clumps of weeds poking up through the snow, its desolation was so extreme that even a brave man could be spooked by the sight of it. It was hard to believe that anything human could make its home in such a place.
    The two officers moved across the yard, boots crunching in the snow, breaths rising before them like wraiths. They made their way around the house, trying each door in turn, but all of them were tightly locked, except for one—the door leading into the summer kitchen, which was secured with a flimsy latch. Schoephoerster put his boot to the door, and it gave way with a crack. Aiming their flashlights at the junk-littered floor, the men moved carefully around the rotting cartons and rusted farm tools to the opposite side of the shed, where Schoephoerster tried the door that led into the main part of the house. Meanwhile, Schley stepped back and swept his beam around the room. He felt something touch his jacket from behind and turned to see what he had brushed up against.
    There, in the beam of his flashlight, dangled a large, dead-white carcass. It was hanging upside down by its feet. Its front had been split completely open, so that its trunk was little more than a dark, gaping hole. The carcass had been decapitated as though someone had sliced the head off for a trophy.
    The body had been butchered like a heifer or a dressed-out deer. Only