A Gift for Dying

by M. J. Arlidge

  ‘Wojcek is the key. And she’s going to make a mistake. We are so close.’

  ‘I wish I could believe you, Gabrielle,’ Hoskins replied heavily. ‘But this investigation has been compromised from the start.’

  He looked out into the incident room, his gaze settling on Miller’s vacant chair. Hoskins had nearly removed Gabrielle from the investigation then – she could remember every word of his expletive-laden reaction to Miller’s confession and suspension – and had only been dissuaded from doing so because of the negative headlines Gabrielle’s dismissal would inevitably generate. Still, her position was hanging by a thread, and Gabrielle knew it.

  ‘Sir, you gave me this job because you had faith in me, because you trusted me to lead this department,’ she continued, forcing down her anxiety. ‘Keep that faith for one more day. If, after that, I’ve failed to deliver, then bring the Feds in, do whatever you have to do. But don’t rob us of the chance to end this thing on our terms, to show that the CPD is up to the task it’s been entrusted with.’

  It was a naked appeal to his pride, to his sense of legacy and reputation. Hoskins deliberated for an age, sizing up the possible risks and rewards, before nodding his head curtly and taking his leave. Gabrielle watched him go, relieved to have survived their latest skirmish, but aware that her reprieve was temporary.

  Her head was on the block now.

  114

  ‘What the hell are you looking at?’

  Kassie jumped, startled by the angry voice. Coming to, she realized that she had been caught staring. Already heads were turning towards her, the man’s aggressive complaint echoing round the silent library.

  ‘I asked you a question.’

  He was rising now, irritated and unsettled by Kassie’s scrutiny of him. Backing away, Kassie racked her brains for a suitable response, something to diffuse the situation, but all she could think of, all she could see, was this poor man choking to death on his vomit, even as he continued to grip the dirty syringe.

  ‘I’m sorry … I didn’t mean to disturb you.’

  ‘Too late,’ he countered, heading directly towards her.

  Kassie’s eyes were drawn to his arms – his sleeves riding up to reveal track marks. Why had she been so stupid? He wasn’t relevant to her main purpose, so why had she stared at him? Alarmed, Kassie speeded up her retreat from the tatty community library. The guy looked unhinged and clearly meant business.

  Immediately, Kassie hit something hard, knocking the breath from her. Disoriented, she froze, bracing herself for the young addict to launch himself at her. But to her surprise, he now backed away, returning swiftly to his seat. Confused, Kassie turned, to discover that she had collided with the sizeable frame of the library’s security guard. He was looking down at her unkindly, distaste writ large on his face.

  ‘I think it’s time you got your bony ass outta here, don’t you?’

  Stumbling out into the light, Kassie sank down on to the library’s cold, stone steps. The burly guard had marched her to the exit, outlining what punishment awaited her should she attempt to return. He clearly didn’t like the look of her – Kassie could tell from his expression that he thought she was suffering from mental health problems, something that scared and disgusted him in equal measure. Adding a few pointed insults, he had launched her from the premises.

  Chastened, Kassie had wanted to run, to put as much distance as possible between herself and the scene of her latest embarrassment, but instead she crumpled to the ground, careless of the reactions of passers-by or the undercover cops who no doubt loitered nearby. Resting her throbbing head on her knees, she closed her eyes and let the darkness engulf her.

  Each morning she rose with renewed hope, somehow shrugging off the disappointment of the previous day. But almost a week had passed now, and she was finding it harder to maintain her optimism. She knew she stood on the edge of destruction, that there was not a second to waste, but her body was revolting against her, paralysed by fear and despair. And, as ever, there was no one to raise her up.

  Her mother was hundreds of miles away. She had no friends to turn to. And she had been expelled from school for persistently cutting class – the formal, typed letter had been waiting for her on her return from the Detention Center. With nowhere else to go, she now spent her waking hours on the streets, conducting her fruitless search, retreating home only when she was too exhausted to continue. The few hours she spent in the family home were filled with fear and regret, a forlorn figure rattling around in an empty box. A week ago, she would have called Adam, sought out his company, but, of course, there was no question of doing that now.

  Kassie rubbed her forehead roughly against her knee, willing herself not to cry. But her loneliness was total, her misery complete. She’d liked Adam, Faith too, yet she had destroyed them both. One had left this world, the other remained, suffering in ways that Kassie couldn’t bring herself to imagine. This was the wreckage of the lives she touched. In truth, it had always been this way. Wherever she went, disaster followed. The fact that her time was drawing to a close provided no solace – she had done more damage in fifteen years than most managed in an entire lifetime. This would be her legacy.

  How strange life was. Two weeks ago, after she’d collided with Jacob Jones on North Michigan Avenue, she’d been full of purpose, determined to challenge her gift, to stare Fate down, to save the lives of those whose death she had foreseen. But now? She would raise her bones and continue her quest no doubt – what else could she do? – but it was more in hope than expectation. She’d clung to the idea that her involvement in these murders meant something, that she had a role to play. But perhaps, after all, she was just a chance witness to a killer’s pitiless cruelty? Maybe all this frenzied activity was the pointless thrashing around before the inevitable end?

  Reluctantly, Kassie picked herself up off the cold steps. There was nothing she could do but carry on. She knew now, however, that she was doomed to fail.

  Her time was up and she was staring down the barrel.

  115

  She had haunted the house ever since Faith’s death.

  Adam was used to having Christine around – she had her own key and let herself in fairly often during Faith’s pregnancy – but this had been during happier times, when they were expectant, excited, full of hope. Now things were very different. Adam was still in shock, stumbling from day to day, but he at least had things to do. Many of these duties were unpleasant – informing stunned friends, family and colleagues of her death, arranging a joint funeral for Faith and Annabelle, preparing for the obligatory inquest – but they gave Adam purpose and point, in the short term at least.

  Christine appeared to have no such comfort, vacillating between vocal, anguished despair and stunned apathy. Christine had invested all her hopes in her daughter, and the prospect of a grandchild, but had been left with ashes. She lived alone, her husband was long gone, so Adam understood why she felt the need to be in the house, to be with someone else who shared her pain. But it didn’t make it any easier to stomach. Christine ghosted around the house, crying, making endless cups of undrunk tea, only pausing to sit in front of the TV, staring hopelessly into space as the presenters talked to themselves. Adam found the latter particularly troubling, his mother-in-law acting like a zombie, providing no comfort by her presence, instead underlining the needless, pointless cruelty of Faith’s death.

  She was there now – staring morosely at the Weather Channel. Christine seemed unaware of his presence, so Adam slipped past the living room door into the hallway. He was heading for the front door, but paused now to look at himself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. He was wearing the Ermenegildo Zegna suit Faith had bought him for his fortieth birthday, the one she had taken such pains to select, ensuring the colour, the fabric, the cut, were perfect. It moved him to tears now to think of the love she had poured into this gift and he fervently hoped that some of her goodwill, her affection, would rub off on him today. He needed it.

&n
bsp; His appearance before the Illinois Board of Professional Regulation was due to start in under an hour. Part of him was still angry that he had been summoned, but another part of him knew that it was inevitable, given his recent behaviour. He had initially concealed the summons from Christine, convincing himself that it wasn’t relevant, that his involvement with Kassie hadn’t contributed to Faith’s death. But this wasn’t true and eventually he’d overcome his embarrassment and told her. She had reacted calmly, but Adam could sense her silent judgement, her belief that this ‘reckoning’ was fit and proper. She, of course, was not interested in the main thrust of the Board’s grievances – the numerous lines Adam had crossed during his treatment of Kassie. Her accusations were more pointed and more personal. Why, as her husband, as a trained psychologist, had Adam not spotted the signs? Why had he not foreseen what was coming? Why had he abandoned Faith on that fateful day?

  He had posed himself these questions many times since Faith’s death, torturing himself during the long nights, when the minutes seemed to crawl by. Still he had no answers. Yes, Faith had been suffering. Yes, her moods had been variable – cogent and defiant one moment, inconsolable and despairing the next. But he had never, never in his worst nightmares, thought that she would take her own life. Despite her early mental health problems, she had been stable and level-headed of late. It was true that her desire to be a mother had on occasion overwhelmed her, during their many failed attempts at IVF, and that at times she had been depressed, but she had never relinquished her desire to live. She loved her mother, she loved him – that had never been in doubt. And yet … she had chosen to leave them.

  She had left a scrawled note on the floor, but it simply read: ‘there is no hope’, which defied reason. Was it possible that her depression had morphed into a form of psychosis, a mental state in which she was unable to fully consider the consequences of her actions? Perhaps her desire, her need, to be a mother had simply crushed her? Her choice of the nursery as the site of her suicide strongly suggested that this was the case, but still, if this was the case, how had he not seen it coming? Faith had been hostile, upset, that last morning, pushing Adam away, but still it was so unexpected … The only mercy was that she had not suffered – her neck had broken cleanly – but this did nothing to lessen Adam’s profound shock and grief at her passing.

  Sometimes he was angered by Christine’s unspoken desire to blame him, other times he welcomed her censure, feeling he deserved it. Sometimes, his thoughts turned to Kassie. He had barely had time to process Gabrielle Grey’s insinuations before he discovered Faith, and since then those concerns had gone clean out of his mind. Over the last couple of days, however, they had started to return. Grey had poured scorn on Kassie’s alleged abilities as a psychic and Adam’s indulgence of that idea, and though he had resisted her attack at the time, now he felt instinctively that she was right. Yes, Kassie’s ability to predict the identity of the victims was uncanny, but she did know them all personally. Yes, she seemed to have been trying to help, but who had she saved? No one. They had all died in the most awful of circumstances. What, then, had Kassie got out of it? The attention of numerous people – her mother, the authorities, but most crucially him and Faith. She had won them over, come to live in their house, inserted herself into their lives.

  One telling fact kept gnawing away at Adam. Despite stepping inside their bereavement, despite living at close quarters with both of them, literally looking them in the eye day after day, Kassie had not foreseen Faith’s death. The two had spent a good deal of time together, Faith seeming to find Kassie’s presence comforting – she had even started drawing her. And yet Kassie hadn’t foreseen her fate, hadn’t realized that her death was imminent.

  What, then, did that mean? That her gift was intermittent, sometimes on, sometimes off? Or that there was no gift at all.

  Adam was floundering, tortured by unanswered questions. But on one point there was little doubt. The one thing – the most important thing – that Kassie should have seen coming, she had not. Which made Adam wonder if he should ever have believed a word she said.

  116

  He cradled his coffee, stroking his chin. The smooth skin felt strange to his touch – he had shaved his goatee off a week ago, but was still getting used to it. Its sudden disappearance had caused a few comments at work, but he’d rehearsed the reasons for the change and no one seemed suspicious – the consensus was that it took years off him. Some even speculated that he might have a new lady friend, which had made him chuckle. The bruising on his face had aroused more interest, but this too had been explained away, his colleagues having no trouble believing him foolish enough to collide with a branch while jogging after dark. Their low opinion of him was finally paying dividends.

  After the disaster at Lake Calumet, he had initially panicked, terrified his carelessness would result in his capture. But an e-fit had not appeared in the press the following morning – indeed, a whole day passed before an image of a middle-aged man with a goatee started appearing in media outlets. It was a passable likeness, but no more – the eyes, the shape of face both wrong – and, besides, the police appeal was caged in muted terms. This man was a ‘person of interest’ that the police needed to talk to. He was not officially the prime suspect, or even a suspect, they just wanted to speak with him. This had cheered him – but also puzzled him. What kind of game were they playing?

  Confused, unnerved, he had pored over the newspapers and online news sites, hoovering up the coverage of the investigation. And on Blacklisted.com he had got a break – the notorious news website publishing an inmate’s snatched cell phone photo of a fifteen-year-old being led to a police van. The girl was in handcuffs, on her way to the Juvenile Detention Center – the website alleging that she was the CPD’s prime suspect, the same girl that had been arrested after Jacob Jones’s murder.

  He had recognized his youthful nemesis immediately – the sullen-looking teenager who seemed able to predict his every move. Claiming family illness, he had immediately taken a couple of days off work, bending his steps towards the Juvenile Detention Center on South Hamilton Avenue. A few bored journalists haunted the main entrance, but he had taken up a position across the street from the rear exit. He knew from his own experience that inmates were usually released via this discreet route, either first thing in the morning or last thing at night. And before long he had been rewarded for his foresight – the awkward teenager shuffling out to freedom through the back doors, into the gloom of a cold Chicago night, a couple of days after her initial arrest.

  He had been tempted to approach her – to abduct her, demand answers from her – but the sight of undercover officers tailing her stopped him in his tracks. Instead he had followed them at a discreet distance, all the way to Back of the Yards, where the girl entered a small, neatly kept bungalow. The tailing officers immediately took up positions on the other side of road, their eyes glued to the house. He had driven away fast, his thoughts in tumult. It seemed impossible, ridiculous even, but the website was right. Clearly the slight girl was the prime suspect for the murders. There could be no other explanation for it. Obviously, the police had no idea what they were dealing with.

  It was a trait they shared with his co-workers, who had shown no interest in his brief absence from work and even now seemed more interested in tech mags than the monster in their midst. Shaking his head at their boneheaded ignorance, he tugged his phone from his pocket and pulled up Jan’s profile, heading straight for his calendar. This confirmed that the young Slovakian was working the early shift and would be clocking off at 3 p.m. Had he expected any different? Of course not, he had checked Jan’s schedule three times already today. He was being overcautious, but he also knew this ritual was part of the build-up, the constant monitoring of his victim’s schedule an enjoyable prelude to what lay ahead. Poor Jan had such big plans, for himself, his girlfriend, his sister, little realizing that he had only hours to live.

  Sliding the phone back into his p
ocket, he went through the plan once more. It was risky to strike again, so soon after Calumet, but there was no way he could stop. The terror of his victims – their begging, their distress, their agony – was one thing, but it was the wider reaction of the city that excited him now. His murders had engendered a gnawing anxiety that rippled through the well-to-do suburbs of Chicago. The city’s movers and shakers were used to reading about violence in the Tribune – pictures of the latest drive-bys – but the thought that death could stalk them, could walk right into their house and tap them on the shoulder, had them running scared. If they weren’t safe, then no one was.

  You saw it in the television interviews, heard it on the radio phone-ins, read it on the online community bulletin boards – fear. Danger had never felt so close before and they wanted it to stop. They were holding community vigils, organizing protests, demanding extra police on the streets, desperately wanting this reign of terror to end.

  All because of him.

  117

  Gabrielle Grey sat in her office, the blinds down, the door locked. This was not her usual style – she liked to encourage an informal, sharing dynamic within the department. But, right now, she needed to be alone.

  Her meeting with Hoskins was still fresh in her memory. Following his departure, she had immediately checked in with Suarez in the incident room, then with Detective Richards, who was her point man on their surveillance team. The news was not encouraging – Kassie Wojcek continued to stalk West Town, but seemingly to no purpose. Her behaviour was becoming ever more unpredictable – she had just been thrown out of the local library for disturbing the readers – and Gabrielle could tell that her team were beginning to doubt that their surveillance would prove fruitful.

  Feeling beleaguered, frustrated, Gabrielle had retreated to her office. The expected breakthrough with Kassie Wojcek continued to elude them. The teenager maintained her lonely hunt, but hadn’t actually done anything interesting or incriminating. Nor had she contacted anyone. This latter detail was particularly unnerving, their working theory being that Kassie had an accomplice, selecting and stalking her prey before handing them over to a more experienced killer. Yet over five days of surveillance, her officers had not seen her contact anyone. She hadn’t used her phone, nor had she attempted to meet with anyone, so how exactly was this partnership working?