by Robb T White
As they pulled into the PD station, Shaughnessy said, ‘Some advice, you don’t mind. Nolan’s old-school. He thinks psychological profiles are all bullshit. I wouldn’t mention it.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ Jade said. ‘Most street cops think our profiles are bunkum.’
‘Is that a word, Agent Hui?’
Jade laughed. ‘Bullshit’s a better word.’
‘Look, I haven’t asked. My supervisor said to liaise, so I’m liaising. But I’m curious. Is this eye gouger a serial?’
‘We’re not ready to make that deduction,’ Jade said.
‘I was watching Tillotson mentally estimate your weight while he talked about that little female drunk.’
‘There’s nothing to say revenge here or back in Arkansas. We’re considering it, it’s possible for both given the respective victimologies. I’m thinking your McDuffy might have caught up with our guy. It’s too big a coincidence to say it’s coincidence. The proximity to our killer alone is enough to convince me something connects.’
Chasing phantoms across the Midwest with her PowerPoint was demoralizing and a colossal waste of time and resources for any ‘brick agent.’ It felt like being put out to pasture before her time and it riled her in the deepest cockles of her heart. In Racine, which was ground zero for the entire conspiracy theory, the word got out she was coming and everyone in the conference room was ready for her behind their smiley face mugs and ball caps, good-natured ribbing—of a sort but it rubbed her nose in it. If a real and very dangerous killer had accidentally crossed his line with hers, she was going to be skeptical he wasn’t just another phantom.
She’d spent a long day on the phone talking to detectives all over the country about weird, uncleared cases. A triple murder in Oklahoma City, husband, wife, daughter. Killer spares the daughter’s child sleeping in a crib but wipes out the family one at a time as they enter the trailer. Bodies piled up behind the couch. He was in that trailer an hour, cops say.
There were other cases with ‘weird’ being the link. Two deadbeat dads: one from El Paso. Another uncovered in a melting snow drift last March near a freeway junction outside Philadelphia. Both completely dissimilar backgrounds, one Hispanic, one Caucasian. Never met. But besides gender, both had impregnated several women and told stories about being secret agents or undercover narcotics officers. Just enough to waste her time.
‘The odds of them being killed by the same man are slim and none,’ Shaughnessy opined. ‘And Slim just saddled up his horse. You do remember what they taught us about jumping to conclusions, right?’
‘I do,’ Jade replied.
Still, it rankled. She had compared inventories of both victims’ possessions when discovered on scene. Nothing in common, nothing to say they were alike that way. The Texas man had a ball of wax paper in his pocket; the cops tested it for drugs but obtained nothing from the residue besides the normal triglycerides found in common cooking oil.
‘What else did forensics turn up?’ Shaughnessy asked.
‘The Texas victim was found in the desert. He’d been ravaged by coyotes and insects. Nothing at all could be established beyond the fact he was seen in town at a street festival in company with his current, very pregnant girlfriend and then spotted in the desert by a medical chopper pilot who noticed buzzards circling.’
‘What about the Philly guy?’
‘A dead-end there, too,’ Jade said. ‘He had no priors. Just a slew of paternity cases in his wake. He was a male stripper for some male revue franchise called Hunk-O-Mania.’
Jade wanted to call Pete, get his advice and ask him to check out some cold cases in a geographical block she had sketched out as a paradigm, but in the confines of the car, and with another agent—a woman who might pick up unintended vibes in the subtext of her communication—she felt it would make conversation difficult. Something was sticking in her craw over the eye gouging because it was not in either case the fatal wound. Why do it? It delayed escape. It left a signature like a bomber using a certain type of wire or knot. It chilled her even more than the car’s air conditioning blasting through the vents.
What fantasy need could that fulfill?
She’d researched it as a phenomenon of fundamentalist countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia, but those countries enacted an elaborate and ghastly procedure for blinding by dripping sulfuric acid into the eyeballs of the person to be formally punished by the eye for an eye decree demanded in Sharia law. Jade’s capacity for empathy was such that she could feel the hopeless terror of the one to endure this: diapered and strapped into a chair with a helmet paced over the head, which is forced backward, so the acid drip of ten or twenty drops—so many over the course of an hour—will give the prisoner screaming into his gag every painful degree of horror to be experienced as sight fades until no light is left and you are taken to shower off the inevitable voiding of your bowels.
Jump backward to Mark Twain’s time in frontier America and fights between rough men in which eye gouging was encouraged; some brawlers wore specially designed thumb caps for taking out an opponent’s eyes in an organized barn fight. SEAL training taught a few techniques for clawing an enemy’s eyes in close-quarter combat. The Eagle Claw was commonly taught in women’s self-defense classes.
But eye gouging struck a deeper chord as a manifestation of this killer’s derangement. How did you define it when even the psychological community actively disputed schizophrenia’s very existence in the refereed journals, some in favor of treatable psychoses? But for an investigator to get inside such a mind? The Greeks and Rosicrucians believed in metempsychosis—soul migration, so why was a mind-to-mind interaction so difficult to understand? She recalled Yokoyama Taikan’s Metempsychosis at the art gallery in Tokyo: a droplet of water vapor falls from the sky, joins a flowing mountain stream into the sea from which the dragon arises—and so on ad infinitum. Physicists don’t know what happens to subatomic particles when they ‘disappear’ and re-appear in attoseconds of time. Do they go to another universe, another dimension of reality? The zig-zag track of her own reflections was like a disappearing wave on the seashore, gone as soon as recognized.
‘Cee, how far is the crime scene from here?’
‘Just a couple blocks east. Want me to make a pass?’
‘If we have the time.’
‘Not really, but Nolan’s kept me waiting many times. This is payback.’
It had a typical rust-belt look and feel: derelict warehouses and broken windows, cracked, sloping sidewalks littered with debris and broken glass. If it weren’t for the jerry-built houses built onto the sides of hills, she’d have said it was Youngstown up north in Ohio, where she’d done one of her PowerPoints. Two very different environments, times of day, races of victims. Yet the same technique in both cases.
Shaughnessy slowed and pulled to the curb. She saw some medical debris left behind by paramedics.
‘Seen enough? Let’s go,’ Cee said and put the vehicle in gear. ‘Here we are,’ she said, as she was pulling into the precinct lot.
Jade got out of the vehicle. She fixed the wrinkled blazer as best she could and realized how much she missed being groomed and kempt.
‘What’s wrong?’ Shaughnessy asked.
‘Someone just walked over my grave,’ she said, repeating a family line.
‘Better step it up,’ Cee advised. ‘We don’t want to keep our big Irishman waiting.’
Detective Sergeant Duncan Nolan was six-five and broad-shouldered. He had no paunch for a man in his mid forties, which was unusual. Shaughnessy said he went to sleep every night at nine p.m. and woke at three in the morning. He was a cop who despised other cops for driving to restaurants at lunch time. He preferred to stop wherever he was and eat the sandwiches he made the night before out of a paper sack while leaning on the roof of his Crown Victoria. Subtlety wasn’t his forte. Shaughnessy laughed at his interrogation techniques. If he had two or three suspects, he’d isolate them in different rooms and run from one room to the oth
er, screaming through the veins in his neck at each suspect until one of them cracked. His personal bust rate was ninety-one per cent.
‘Same as Rocky Marciano’s KO rate,’ Cee added, which Nolan loved to brag about.
Nolan borrowed one of the interrogation rooms and Shaughnessy made the introductions.
‘What are you looking for with that piece-of-shit, Miss Huey?’
‘Special Agent Hui, Detective. I’m hoping you can tell me something about Marquel’s criminal habits. What kinds of victims did he choose? When and where, if you have those details.’
‘Sure, Nolan said, ‘no problem. Marquel is the kind of asshole who will jump out from behind a hedge and clobber an old lady if he saw her standing on a dime—and I don’t mean a dime bag.’
‘Come on, Dunc,’ Shaughnessy said. ‘Quit fucking around.’
‘Did he usually go out of his way to attack the weak?’ Jade asked.
‘They all do, miss. That’s why we call them thugs.’
‘Duncan,’ Shaughnessy said, this time a growl.
‘OK, Cece, keep your panties on. Christ. Here’s his jacket,’ Nolan said.
He shoved a thick file folder across the table.
‘Agent Shaughnessy showed me a summary. What I’m curious about is whether McDuffy could have been taken by surprise. Does this look like a gang murder—something to do with turf?’
‘It’s possible—but not likely,’ Nolan said. ‘That part of town is no-man’s land. Most of the tenants are either too old and poor to move out or they’re welfare moms pushing one kid in a stroller, holding another one by the hand, and baking one more in the oven—none by the same sperm donor, but that’s just my own politically incorrect opinion here.’
Shaughnessy told Jade, ‘Don’t let the dumb cop act fool you. This guy’s writing a master’s thesis at Carnegie U. Isn’t that right, Dunc?
Nolan smiled wide, ‘You outed me, Cece. Sociological Darwinism and Urban-Bound Single-Mother Strategies for Coping.’
‘Impressive, Sergeant,’ Jade said. ‘Do you think McDuffy was a physical coward—I mean, without a gun? Could he handle himself in a brawl?’
‘You’re asking could somebody get the jump on McDuffy.’ Nolan thought for a long moment before responding. ‘All those guys think they’re the next Mike Tyson. If he was high, sure.’
‘How soon can we see the tox report?’ Shaughnessy asked.
‘Six weeks, Cece. There’s no rush on this guy. I’ll forward it to you and you can get it to you. Look, this guy, he’s a fuckin’ career criminal. Did a couple bids in junior college when he should have been sent to Greene—’
Shaughnessy interpreted, ‘He means Pennsylvania’s supermax in Greene County. The junior college is the medium security they call West Pen here.’
‘Detective, this career criminal,’ Jade said, ‘had his eyeball taken out of his head with surgical skill after he went to the ground with a debilitating head injury. It was dark, but there are streetlights, people in those houses able to look out windows, cars that could have passed at any moment.’
‘It’s ghetto, Agent Hooey,’ Nolan said.
Nolan scratched his stomach and bowed his head, thinking. She met Shaughnessy’s gaze and the message Shaughnessy communicated through a barely noticeable tilt of her head: Wait for it, it’s coming …
‘I had the uniforms canvass both sides of the street, three different times of day. Nobody saw anything, which is ghetto-speak for One or all of us saw it, but fuck you, cops, we ain’t talkin’ to you motherfuckers. But …’
Shaughnessy jumped in, accustomed to Nolan’s theatrics. ‘But somebody on that street saw something or knows something. Which one of your blues picked up on it?’
‘Philomena.’
‘He a new guy? I thought I knew all your patrolmen,’ Shaughnessy said.
‘Philomena’s a first name. It’s a she. Fresh out of the academy—la-de-da,’ Nolan said.
On the way to see the desk sergeant to get her name and address, Shaughnessy said, ‘That guy loves to bust my balls. He usually greets me with something like, “Hey, Cece, munched any good rugs lately?” The fucking Irish prick.’
It was the first overt reference to Shaughnessy’s sexuality, not an awkward moment, however, because women in law enforcement bonded over their mutual warfare against the male bastion of the establishment. The Bedouin credo came to Jade’s mind: “Me against my brothers, I and my brothers against my cousins, I and my brother and my cousins against the world.” It applied as well to women in the traditionally masculine professions.
Patrolwoman Philomena Walker, or Philly Walker, as she was known in the muster room, was a twenty-something millennial, married, the mother of two little ones. She was cordial at the door, didn’t mind the interruption of her sleep, although her husband was clearly reluctant to disturb his wife’s rest. ‘She’s on nights now and you know how hard that is to adjust to, especially when you have kids,’ he apologized.
Mrs. Walker led them to a breakfast nook in the kitchen of their small but tidy home.
‘Philomena,’ Shaughnessy asked, as soon as they were settled and the introductions made, ‘can you tell us which person or house on the street you canvassed gave you the feeling they knew more than they were saying?’
‘Yeah, I remember. I told Nolan but he kind of blew me off. I’m still getting the dumbass rookie treatment, you know? It was a Mrs. Baker’s house. DeShonte Baker, her grandson, he caught my eye for a split-second while I was talking to her about the body on the sidewalk. He’s only thirteen, but, in that neighborhood, it’s the age when many of them get jumped into a gang.’
Shaughnessy wrote down directions to the house, and they thanked her and left.
‘Ever been married, Jade?’
‘Once,’ Jade said. ‘I came close another time.’
‘I’d like to get married someday,’ Celeste said. ‘I just haven’t met the right woman yet.’
DeShonte Baker lived in one of those houses built into the side of the hill. The mother was out of the picture; the father unknown. The buckled cement steps went up two and a half flights before ending at a slanted porch.
DeShonte turned out to be a bright kid with an easy-going smile. Jade liked him at once. She’d seen children in dangerous places all over the world and wondered how they could smile so much when their lives were so bleak. Like those Syrian children on TV.
Shaughnessy lowered herself to his level to meet him eye to eye; she asked him about the night ‘of the body.’
‘What did you see, DeShonte? This lady is a special agent of the FBI. You know what that is, right? She came all the way to your house to find out what you saw. You won’t be in trouble and no one will hear that we spoke to you. Now, what did you see?’
‘He—he was a white man,’ DeShonte said.
Shaughnessy looked at Jade and Jade immediately hunkered down to his level so close her knees touched his.
‘Can you tell me what he looked like?’
Jade cut her eyes to see her partner take the notes. She kept up her questions, gently, simply, and let the boy reflect a bit on his answers. Then she backtracked some of her questions to see if the details changed.
Back in the SUV, Shaughnessy looked at her. ‘Well, did the kid come through or what?’
‘He was consistent,’ Jade said. ‘That’s encouraging. He didn’t seem to be exaggerating for self-importance, and he said “I don’t know” several times when he couldn’t remember. I think he just gave us a pretty good description of the man I’m looking for.’
‘McDuffy didn’t even make the back page of the Post-Gazette,’ Cee told her.
‘I’m talking about the murders of Coy Burchess, Donald Hugheart, Duane ‘Buddy’ Crawford, and Marquel McDuffy,’ Jade said.
‘What did you make of that squeaking noise he mentioned—the reason he stared out the window?’ Shaughnessy asked her.
‘No idea,’ Jade replied. ‘It’s the one thing that stands out, though.�
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Shaughnessy nodded, pleased with their results. ‘The murder occurred right outside his bedroom window. He had a bird’s-eye view of the whole thing going down. He said he could hear Marquel’s voice plainly through the open window and everybody knew McDuffy. They knew to keep clear of him because he was known to carry weapons and threaten people.’
‘I wonder what Detective Nolan will think now,’ Jade said.
‘Who cares what that lug thinks?’ Shaughnessy said.
‘You don’t look so tough to me,’ Jade said.
That cracked Shaughnessy up and she laughed all the way down the street.
Shaughnessy found Jade an unused carrel and set her up with a laptop and printer so that she could get as much of her report down as possible before her flight out of Pittsburgh. She redacted the profiler’s three-page report and attached it as an appendix.
Shaughnessy came by an hour later. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Everything’s fine,’ Jade said.
‘When my face gets scrunched up like that, it means I’m pissed off,’ Shaughnessy said.
‘No, but thanks for asking. For everything, by the way. I’ve done my share of gofering for other agents. It’s no fun.’
‘So what is the problem?’
‘The profiler’s report,’ she said. ‘Look, the author says this. The killer is likely a white male, mid-twenties to early forties, of low or neglected education, is lacking in family structure, and does not socialize well with others. He will have trouble in his employment record. Probably a string of low-paying, low-performing, menial tasks which will add to his hostility toward society. He has a hair-trigger temper and will have a record of assaults. His job could involve long-haul trucking or furniture moving as he will abandon one unsatisfactory environment for another, repeat the process, and move on …’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Except for the itinerant part, everything! He’s not an underemployed transient. I don’t think the guy DeShonte saw out his window matches this assessment, not even close.’
‘How can you be sure? Look at that part of town. If your guy isn’t a transient, what would he be doing in McKees Rocks at that time of night?’
