Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

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    By Monday night, Anderson grew chilly as rain began to fall. He’d noticed that one of the boys who lived there had left the Carellis’ back door ajar. When it was completely dark, he slipped in and crept downstairs to the basement.
    The Carellis’ home was quite large, with three bedrooms on the main floor and two unused bedrooms on the basement level. Anderson chose one of those, and he listened to the family’s footsteps overhead. He wondered if anyone had heard him. Apparently not, because nobody came downstairs.
    The basement bedroom was much more comfortable than the garage. Late that night, when he was sure the Carellis and their two sons were asleep, Anderson went upstairs to the kitchen and helped himself to some cake. He also made himself a strong drink with some rum he found in their bar. His hunger satisfied and his nerves eased by the alcohol, he returned to his hiding place in the basement.
    With two sons in the house, Martha Carelli thought nothing about the missing cake. She had no reason to check the liquor cabinet.
    While Martha Carelli was bowling the next day, Anderson leisurely prowled the house. He even used the phone to make some calls to facilitate his leaving town. When Martha returned around five, Anderson was almost caught upstairs, but he quickly fled back to the basement.
    Martha didn’t see him, and she didn’t notice that more food was missing from the refrigerator and pantry. He’d been careful not to gobble down obvious things, and he’d thrown away empty cans that might raise her suspicions.
    Still unaware that there was a stranger in her house, Martha hurried down the stairs. She wanted to get a load of laundry in before she started to fix dinner. As she emptied a hamper of soiled clothes into the washer, she heard a noise she couldn’t identify. She thought it odd because she knew her sons were outside playing ball.
    More curious than frightened, she noticed that the laundry room window was open, and decided the boys were probably planning to sneak in—or out—that way for one of their pranks. They were known for that.
    Half smiling, she began a search of the basement rooms.
    She had almost forgotten about the jailbreak.
    As Martha walked into one of the unused bedrooms, she suddenly felt prickles of alarm, goose bumps dotting the flesh of her arms. The big man appeared in front of her, and he was holding a gun in his hand. For a moment, she froze with shock and disbelief, and then she screamed. She whirled and tried to run to the stairs, but Anderson snaked out a muscular arm and held her fast.
    “Shut up!” he barked as he threw her to the floor. “You know I just got out of jail. You read the papers.”
    Martha Carelli continued to scream, hoping her sons might hear her and run for help, or that her husband might be coming home from work. But her cries only served to anger the stranger.
    Mike Anderson kicked her viciously and repeatedly in the head until she saw waves of blackness, and then passed out. When she came to—she didn’t know how long later—one of her eyes had begun to swell, and blood coursed down her face.
    Fighting to stay conscious, she tried to think. Of course she had read about the escape. She knew that two of the escapees had just been captured and that two were still at large. She was most afraid for her family, and wondered frantically how she could warn them.
    It was too late. Her eleven-year-old son and a neighbor boy came running down the stairs. They had heard her screams, and now they stopped short at the sight of her bleeding face and the man who stood over her. He held his gun on the boys and forced them into the bedroom, ordering them to lie on the bed next to Martha. Then he opened the cylinder of the pistol and showed them that it was fully loaded with six bullets.
    They were sixth-graders, and they knew they couldn’t fight him, or run for help before he caught them. Anderson tore sheets from the bed into strips, and he used them to gag and hogtie the youngsters.
    “Don’t look at me,” he said to Martha. She wondered why he bothered to say that; he knew she had already seen him, and that she knew who he was. She wished mightily that she hadn’t screamed. If she had just kept quiet, the boys wouldn’t have come downstairs.
    But now, things just kept getting worse. Her fourteen-year-old son walked into the bedroom, calling out her name. Anderson quickly overpowered him, too, tied him up as he had the others, and told