by Robb T White
‘What would you call it then?’
‘I don’t know, but these three men together form the answer,’ she said.
‘Better get started then. Gilker does like to see his agents busy,’ Pete said.
They mapped out a longest-to-shortest distance itinerary. They made calls to interviewees too far for a drive without a good pretext for a face-to-face. She handled Buddy Crawford’s family—two brothers and a sister still residing in Smackover at the end of the state. Pete took Donnie Hugheart’s kin, cousins, extended family, given the three marriages of his father and two of his mother, ex- and three current girlfriends—none of whom knew of the others—were all cooperative and forthcoming. None could add a new detail to what they had told the agents sent locally to do extensive interviews.
Over lunch at a highway diner on the way back from one of Buddy’s ex-girlfriends, Pete said, ‘I thought having to explain what a Bossier Parish was every time I left Louisiana was tough. Imagine coming from a town called Smackover, Arkansas.’
Jade smiled, flexed a linguistic muscle. ‘It’s French originally, I think. The first people here were trappers and woodsmen. I guess they saw all this sumac covering everything in sight and decided to call it Sumac Couvert. Add a half century or so of settling and phonetic assimilation—Voilà, you get Smackover.’
‘Why, you little show-off,’ Pete said. ‘I’m impressed.’
He grew serious. ‘OK, we’ve spent half the day learning nothing except that our two deceased were gentlemen and princes, generous, well-loved, and kind to babies and strangers. The worst thing I heard about Donald from his friends and family was that he was “a little rough around the edges.” I talked to his high school principal for twenty minutes, and I finally got him to crack. He said Donnie Hugheart was a thick-headed bully who terrified some of his teachers, and he strongly implied there were girls who’d cut their right arms off before they’d agree to a second date with him.’
Jade said her experience regarding Buddy Crawford was about the same—right down to the girls he used to date. ‘One of them told me each of these guys was bad enough, but when you put all three together, it got a whole lot worse.’
‘OK,’ Pete said, ‘let’s take the gloves off. We know their shift supervisor out there at the taco plant was hardly enamored by any of them, but he practically had to turn himself inside out not to talk against Burchess. Who knows? Let’s see if a little time passing has given him a change of heart about his former employee.’
‘Here’s his address,’ she said, holding up her notebook for him to see. ‘We can catch him asleep. He’s been on nights for the last ten years. How fast can you drive this buggy?’
‘Really fast, Special Agent Hui. Hold on to me if you get frightened.’
She thought of holding on to him anyway, but that wedding ring was a drogue to her emotions. She had been involved with a married agent once, and she vowed never to make that mistake again.
Clay Tiedman opened the door in his bathrobe. His thinning mouse-gray hair was tousled and stuck up like tiny wheat sheaves all over his head. He had a beaten, scared look to him.
‘I’m sorry to say it because I’m a Christian, but he got what he deserved.’
It came unsolicited out of Tiedman’s mouth. They had barely crossed the foyer of his small brick house. It sat obscured from the road by massive lilac bushes reaching halfway up the front picture window and a tulip tree that shed its petals in big pink and white clusters beside his driveway.
‘How so, Mr. Tiedman?’ Jade asked at once, blocking Pete before he could respond to Tiedman’s offer for some warmed-over coffee.
‘I hate the stuff,’ Tiedman said, ‘but it keeps me awake. Your body never gets used to working nights at any age.’
Jade brought him back before another digression weakened his opening statement—or blunder, whichever it was.
‘Mr. Tiedman? About Coy Burchess?’
‘I’m sorry to say this in front of you, miss, but he was a pig. Sexually speaking, he was after every good-looking girl we hired on the taco line. It wasn’t just comments—bad as they were—hell, everybody could hear him—but he wasn’t above putting his hands on women, too.’
‘Did you talk to him about that?’ Pete asked.
‘I did. He just gives me this look, like, you know, like, “I’m Coy Burchess and I can do what I damn well please.”’
‘Do you know of any incidents where, say, a husband or a boyfriend might have objected to the way he treated a particular woman?’
Tiedman thought a bit before he shook his head and said, ‘No—no …’
‘What is it, Mr. Tiedman?’ Jade pressed.
He told them about the new hire—‘Skinny Jeans’—the dayshift foreman called her. It was whispered all over the breakroom that Coy and she were having an affair. Sneaking off during their shifts, meeting in the parking lot before and after work. Leaving together.
‘Mr. Indiscretion,’ Tiedman said. He seemed to expect a compliment for the cheap wit.
‘So,’ Pete asked again, ‘did Skinny Jeans’s boyfriend or husband get wind of her affair with Burchess?’
Smart of Pete, she thought. He avoided the obvious question of whether she had a boyfriend or husband—safe assumption, there—and cut to the chase, allowing Tiedman to avoid the self-recrimination of being a malicious gossip.
‘Word I got was she broke up with her man. She used to drive this Honda and one day—no car. Guess it must have belonged to him or whatever. So he, Burchess, I mean, is driving her to work every night. Sometimes they come into the breakroom together, you know, smelling of—smelling like—’
‘Like what, Mr. Tiedman?’ Jade prodded, expecting the answer.
‘Like sex,’ Tiedman forced the word out, blushing under his jawline.
He smoothed a hand over his scalp but the bristles remained intact. Pete was trying to give her a look, which she studiously avoided receiving.
Tiedman warmed up as the interview went on, but in proportion to his waxing enthusiasm for their granting him a license to dispense salacious gossip about two of his workers, it wasn’t panning out into a lead. Burchess was a whoredog, to borrow Tiedman’s word, but he most likely wasn’t killed by a jealous boyfriend. Still, they’d have to find the man and any other man that Burchess had put cuckold’s horns on in the last five or six months. Chances are, if you planned to kill him for seducing your girlfriend, the offended party would act within a short time span.
They were at the door, Jade about to thank Tiedman for allowing them to interrupt his sleep for the night shift.
‘You know something, there’s this thing he and his pals got into with the sandwich man,’ Tiedman said as an afterthought.
‘The sandwich man?’
‘Yeah, you know, the canteen truck that comes at shift break every night. Been showing up for a few weeks. I guess the owner gave him permission since we didn’t have none on account of the guy before him was dismissed for missing too many nights. One night, he shows up, serves the crew coffee and sandwiches, tacos, soda pop, hamburgers, whatever. I mean, we got vending machines. Personally, I won’t eat out of one of them things—’
Pete asked, ‘Is he—this sandwich man—still around? Will he be there tonight?’
‘No. He ain’t been around in a while, come to think on it,’ Tiedman replied.
Tiedman told them what Burchess, Donnie Hugheart, and Buddy Crawford did that one night he happened to observe.
‘I’m sorry for the other two, their families. They wasn’t so bad, but Burchess, he got what he deserved like I said. He tormented that poor man one night I felt I had to apologize.’
Pete thanked him for ‘assisting in this important investigation’ and asked him to keep the interview confidential ‘until such time as the FBI released its official report.’
‘When do you think that might be?’ Tiedman asked.
When hell freezes over, Jade thought, but she said, ‘It’ll happen through routine chan
nels, Mr. Tiedman. Again, we are grateful for your time.’
Outside, Pete turned to her. ‘What do you think?’
She said, ‘It’s not much. But—’
‘—but we have to follow up,’ he finished for her.
‘Should we start drawing up a list of potential pissed-off boyfriends and husbands?’
‘I know right where to start,’ she said.
It would mean a trip back to the trailer home of Mrs. Coy Burchess. Maybe the woman would be in a better mood.
Jade removed her blazer and Pete his suitcoat. She was wet under the arms and in the hollow notch of her throat. The man looked as if he had just stepped out of a GQ cover.
‘Where we’re going to put your handsome looks to good use,’ she said. ‘There’s a widow I want you to meet.’
‘Is that a compliment, Special Agent Hui?’
‘It is what it is, Special Agent Grandbois.’
Chapter 10
PITTSBURGH LAY HEAVY ON Wöissell’s mind. He wondered if he was losing his grip. The Tourette’s had taken him by surprise, but where was his discipline, his control?
It was a constant worry nowadays because of his deteriorating condition. He had other, more pragmatic problems ahead: money was getting low, thanks to his trailer-trash charity and he was down to a single set of identity papers. One other rule of the road was never run without a backup set of papers. He resigned himself to going home to Providence.
The very name stuck in his craw. Charley thought of Harpies, those mythological ‘snatchers’ who carry evildoers off to the Erinyes, those beautiful women and men with feathers and glowing red eyes. It was simple enough to Wöissell once he understood and came to grips with all of society’s phoniness and lies: be the perfect killer.
He was motoring steadily north on Interstate 79 now, just forty miles from Interstate 90, the mighty east-west artery spanning Seattle and the East Coast. He’d put hundreds of thousands of miles on this interstate alone.
Without much more thinking on the subject, he let the truck ease into the right lane for the NYC junction. Wöissell had a governor in his head that passed down his arms to his hands and kept his truck steady at that speed. He rarely used the passing lane unless he fell behind some distracted motorist. One speeding ticket in twelve years on the road was remarkable considering he had a million miles under his belt and more sets of tire replacement than he could remember. The Chevy was his third truck and there weren’t many parts of an internal combustion engine that he had not had to replace or fix by now. Fortunately, money was never a big problem. He figured he had lost money overall, even though he tried to break even on the road. It meant fewer trips home to Providence and his detestable family.
Wöissell made a quick decision; he’d stop in New York west of Syracuse. Coming up on Canastota Village, he found a La Quinta Inn and pulled in, driving to the back so that his truck would be less noticeable to travelers by taking up two parking spaces. Details, details—a habit of diligence.
It was still daylight, the air redolent of a late summer afternoon, barring the occasional whiff of diesel exhaust from the nearby highway. He felt better. The shadow cast by the McKees Rocks would soon fade. Wöissell’s intelligence had a drawback: his mind was a rolodex of patterns, facts, allegories, and information; everything he learned was stored there. Things were harbingers of other things, preludes to bigger events. Like a roulette ball that skips and jumps over slots before settling, he had the ancient Greek’s fear of doom overarching every event in life.
Paranoia, Charley thought, was a simpler, better word for it.
Chapter 11
ON THE WAY TO the trailer park, they talked about their killer.
‘It would help to put a face to him,’ Pete said.
‘I’m not so sure,’ she said. ‘Charlie Albright’s profile was off in one respect only. He was much older than the presumptive thirty the profilers thought. Eyeball removal, for him, was sexual. He was a sado-masochistic. He once tied up two prostitutes and beat them with a belt.’
‘It’s never surprising these guys hate women,’ Pete said.
‘Very true, Pete, but he liked to be hurt, too. I don’t think our guy has the same psychosexual aberrancy. I think it’s much—colder, more intellectual somehow.’
‘I thought you said these guys were basically nut-jobs, not too bright, and overrated.’
‘Profiles with complex, multiple-category typologies are always laden with inclusion requirements and therefore are too cumbersome to be useful. We’ll know when we interview him, though.’
‘I understood nothing what you just said.’
He had a good laugh, full-throated, unashamed.
‘Let’s catch him and find out, shall we?’
‘I like a girl with confidence,’ he said.
Darn it. They were flirting now.
She had to admit to herself that the long hours, so many spent bleary-eyed in front of a computer screen, in field office carrels all over the Midwest made her yearn for companionship. She fended off office romances easily but meeting a man was tough in her case and dating sites just didn’t appeal—too cold-bloodedly mathematical. You have to leave something to nature, she thought. In an odd way, it made her realize how normal her own programming was from the killer she sought. She doubted if he wasted five minutes of reflection on his own loneliness and estrangement from humanity. There was a whole other kind of burr under his saddle, and if she could find it, she could get closer to him.
Pete opted for the surprise attack, show up at her door unannounced, he said, whereas she preferred to call first. Rock-paper-scissors decided in his favor.
Luck was with them. The widow Burchess wasn’t exactly pleasant, judging from the downward turn of her mouth when they appeared at her door. She was wearing a new-looking maternity outfit and her hair was done. The sweat beads that were dotting her upper lip on the previous visit were gone; her face was made up with rouge and eye shadow.
More telling than the expensive perfume wafting about the small confines was the fact that the trailer was cleaned and newly decorated. Jade’s eye for detail caught three pieces of furniture that weren’t there a few days ago, including a leather couch that took up most of the living room space. The huge-screen, flatpaneled Vizio affixed to the mantle had definitely not been there the last time and would have set the purchaser back $1,500. Mrs. Burchess could not have collected on insurance this fast, assuming her husband had any.
It could be coincidence, Jade thought, but—like any cop—coincidence in proximity to crime was as welcome as a rain-wrapped tornado. She’d have to be careful, but her secret weapon was already making progress. Evie Burchess almost tripped over herself to accommodate Pete, asking him to sit there, patting the new sofa, asking if he’d like a drink—beer or coffee? A blind person would have noticed the high-voltage smile, another item missing from her first visit. When Pete asked for tap water, she cooed, and fetched a bottled water from the fridge, which—come to think of it—was also new.
The woman hit the lottery or else something had happened.
‘I’d like a water, too, Mrs. Burchess,’ Jade said and smiled at her host. The smile on Evie Burchess’s face dropped a few watts as she realized she, too, was part of the deal.
They sat at the small kitchen table, Evie’s knees almost pressed up against Pete’s legs. The maternity blouse was a size too small and her swollen breasts were on full display. Like her husband, she was inked up: bluebirds and butterflies, a star on her inside wrist; the top of her left breast and on a bare shoulder a Masonic eye of Providence surrounded by flames.
Evie’s flirtatiousness worked in their favor, if Pete could keep from falling headfirst into the cleavage, and they just might leave her trailer with something more useful than a little humor at the expense of the Merry Widow. Pete never looked at her, but his body language and reciprocal tone matched Evie’s. She was grateful for the cue he signaled: take over the questioning.
It paid off
. Evie went into a litany of her deceased husband’s betrayals and named names. Jade wrote, Pete listened, and nodded his head, dismayed his gender could be so faithless to such a woman as she. At one point, he reached out to pat Evie’s hand. She had to choke back a laugh.
‘What could I do?’ Evie sniffed. ‘I got a baby on the way—’
It wasn’t Oscar-worthy yet Jade managed a sympathetic smile. She probed, gently at first, for information about disgruntled boyfriends and husbands.
Her husband was ‘sexually voracious,’ Evie said, casting her eyes down, embarrassed. Coy once drove past a certain husband’s house while she was inside with him and her children and howled out the window like a wolf. That was the signal for her to meet him at a designated tryst motel the next day. The husband told Evie he ‘would do something about it’ if she didn’t put a stop to it.
‘Evie, I see you’ve redecorated the place. It looks very nice,’ Jade said to cut off this unproductive line.
‘I came into some money,’ Evie said. ‘Somebody owed Coy some money and paid me.’
Her face darkened for a brief second, and she looked at Pete. ‘Ya’ll aren’t going to turn me in to the IRS, are you?’
‘No, Evie,’ Jade took over, ‘but it could be important if we knew who this man was who paid the debt to your husband.’
Evie looked at her for a long moment then she got up and went down the hallway.
Jade took advantage of Evie’s absence to stage whisper, ‘I can come back later if you’d like.’
Pete remained stone-faced but tapped his shoe against her shin. Jealous of a trailer park slattern now, she thought. I’m a snob.
Evie came back, redolent of more perfume wafting from her cleavage, and placed the note on the table between them. She reached for one of her Vape cigarettes.
