by Robb T White
‘I don’t know, Cee. Will Nolan use DeShonte’s description? I’d like to conduct a second canvass myself, but I have to get back,’ Jade said.
‘With Nolan, who knows?’
She signaled male masturbation—a couple jerks of the fist at the midsection—‘But I’ll keep after him. He’s a good cop.’
Jade, thinking aloud, said, ‘A male Caucasian wandering around a black section of town had to be seen by more than our DeShonte. If he wasn’t in town hitch-hiking and had a car, he bought gas. If he wasn’t camping in the woods, he must have used a motel. He had to eat. Pittsburgh PD should check every pizza and pierogi shop within five square miles.’
‘Lots of pierogi and pizza shops in Pittsburgh but Pittsburgh’s homicide bullpen is good, even considering Nolan. They’ll do it,’ Cee told her.
‘What about the second grid search Nolan ordered up?’
‘Nothing. Just McDuffy’s weapon so far. Three-eighty. Stolen, figures.’
‘Why not take the gun, do you think?’ Jade asked her.
‘If he can pull an eyeball out of your head like picking a grape, I don’t think he needs one, do you?’
Jade considered it. Guns, cell phones, laptops—all easily traceable.
‘That’s the other thing I believe the profiler has wrong,’ she said to her. ‘He thinks our killer is on social media—scouting porn sites, hanging out in chat rooms, trying to entice women with crude overtures—but I think he’s a loner, the guy next door you don’t see. I don’t see the megalomania.’
Shaughnessy concurred, ‘He’s a lot more than a loner. He’s the stuff of nightmares.’
The stuff of nightmares. Jade thought of Shaughnessy’s phrase, a trite cinematic blurb on a Hollywood poster for yet another slasher film. When did America turn so dark—or was it always that way and she didn’t realize it was sneaking up on her? One day you turn around and there’s the mindless grin of a smiley face on a ball cap, a coffee mug, a tree stump near a river in Arkansas.
She’d been neglecting her yoga in the onslaught of computer searching, phone calls to other field offices, checking every bulletin and database that might bring her closer to the sandwich man. Tonight, she promised herself she’d spend more time on her yoga, shaking out the dirty dishwater of her body’s toxins.
Chapter 14
FRED LIKED TO SAY his brother came and went from home ‘like an Apache.’ Even Franny, with whom Charley had a tolerable, if not warm, sibling relationship, always said Charles creeped her out with his Tourette’s and his midnight walks.
‘Let’s see what you’ve got here, little brother,’ Fred said.
Once more, he was investigating Charles’s room while his brother was on one of his mysterious errands. He popped the lid off the plastic tote. Nothing marked on it. Fred wasn’t above pilfering if he could get away with it, and he often did by lying. Fred was aware that his charm was getting frayed at the edges; soon, he feared, he’d be gibbering out loud making those odd cries and squeals, his once handsome face flawed with nervous tics.
‘Fuck me, only books,’ Fred muttered.
But what an odd assortment of texts, he thought. All confined to two polar opposites of the human condition: philosophy or mayhem, for lack of a better term.
From the latter end, he drew out books on close combat published by various branches of the armed services, some that looked self-published or were printouts from the dark internet and filled with gory photographs. Some were highly specialized on knife fighting, the martial arts, such as Kino Mutai: The Art of Biting and Eye Gouging. Several on various judo throws. Fred examined one title: Shinmeisho No Waza, something about Kodokan Judo, whatever that was. He saw the word te-waza in the subtitles of some.
Fred recognized some of the philosophy tomes: Camus, Rebelling Against the Absurd, Sartre, Inventing Meanings in a Meaningless World, Heidegger’s Confronting Existential Guilt and Death, Søren Kierkegaard’s Willing One Thing. More texts with equally obtuse titles on alienation and identity, mass culture, politics, and social isolation, all guaranteed to draw big yawns from any undergraduate. What a gloomy hodgepodge, Fred thought, by Jews with names like Cohen, Weiss, and Bettelheim.
He tossed them back into the tote but decided to keep a Maslow: Becoming Self-Actualizing. Maybe he could glean a few tips there.
But the ones that gave him pause and took away the breath wore titles like Biting and Eye Gouging: Why You Need to Know the Philippine Art of Kino Mutai.
Fred, a narcissist and something of an amiable sociopath in his own right, had a difficult time recognizing where ethical lines were drawn on human behavior in general, but he had always suspected his brother of being profoundly disturbed. The ‘episode’ was not enough of a trigger to explain what lay beneath Charles’s skull. Yet there was never anything to make one understand why Charles one day up and left a comfortable home, abandoned prospects for a career in New York City, thanks to their father’s lifetime of doing and culling favors for Wall Street big shots—not to mention Fred’s own forlorn hope of the possibility of a wellconnected marriage to money, which—in Fred’s opinion—was the worst of all Charles’s mistakes and irrational decision-making. If Franny’s stuck-up husband could find a way to hang that around Charles’s neck in a court of law, Fred’s life would be bliss.
‘Min, would you pass the salt?’
Susan, seated beside Charley, caressed his arm. ‘I don’t know why you insist on using Franny’s middle name all the time. You know she doesn’t like it.’
‘It’s fine, Susan. I see Charles so seldom these days, it’s fine whatever he wants to call me,’ Franny said and gave her brother a smile across the wide table, a polished oak that their father had paid a small fortune to obtain from a hacienda in Brazil.
‘Charles, have you any good amuse-bouche recipes to share with the family, seeing as you are the traveling gourmand among us?’
Charles looked up from his plate where he had meticulously carved meat from the breast without nicking the bone. Fred insisted on Bavarian chicken for the entrée; it was known as Hitler’s Favorite Meal around the house.
‘I have several for chili dogs I think you might like,’ Charles said.
He despised having to fall into this silly badinage with his older brother every time he came back, but there was no avoiding it. His brother was a case of arrested development. Love of money, as the adage had it, was to blame. Fred wore it like a bad cologne. Fred’s disposition, however, was never a concern of his. He forgot his brother entirely on the road.
All through the meal, his stepmother tried to get him to commit to a longer stay. He mostly ignored her and tried to ignore his smug brother-in-law across the table who, with Fred, kept up most of the conversation. He wasn’t surprised to see how his sister had evolved more each time into a snob; it was inevitable. Geography is destiny in more ways than one. If you fed from a silver spoon long enough, ordinary people become a blur and then, one day, you couldn’t see them at all. The conversation rotated among politics, real estate, George and Amal Clooney, Broadway musicals, society marriages, and who was going up while who was going down.
Wöissell recognized some of the surnames from his past but for the most part he entertained himself with his own thoughts, perfectly able to contribute a word or sentence into the conversation as it touched him and passed on. In a way, he felt a kinship to Susan. She had aged and therefore become respectable in her society. The smear of her being a social climber would never have been uttered now as it was whispered about after her marriage to Wöissell’s father. He was never mentioned during dinner. The on-duty nurse had strict orders to keep him silent during family gatherings or dinners; well-paid and short of pillow suffocation, she obliged.
‘I do approve this wine, Susan. What is it?’
Wöissell was deep in his Arkansas reverie but suspected where the conversation was going next.
‘I have no idea,’ she said. ‘Ask your wife. She insisted on it when we were ordering from
that online catalogue.’
‘Definitely an Allegrini,’ Franny said.
That had launched his brother-in-law into a tedious explanation of the differences between wines from single-vineyard estates in Italy and California’s wine valley. The last time Wöissell was home, he had to endure a lecture on the workhorse grapes, the corvina and the rondinella. Wöissell wondered what his brother-in-law would say if he popped his eyeball out of his head like a grape and set it on the plate in front of him.
‘Charles, give us some of your expertise from the road a la Rousseau, another vagabond philosopher. For all we know, you’ve been spawning a litter of children from various scullery maids we know nothing about.’
‘Fred, do be quiet,’ his stepmother replied. Charles watched her stiffen her back. He suspected they weren’t the natural enemies they appeared.
‘Susan, can you imagine a pack of raggedy brats showing up on your doorstep whining to be taken in to see their grandmother?’
Fred was more than casually drunk at this point. Wöissell caught the look between Minerva and her husband.
‘You’re drunk,’ Susan said.
Wöissell smiled. Fred’s jibe had some truth behind it. Susan deeply disliked her own flesh and blood child, Robbie James, who cadged money from her until Fred protested ‘Robbie the Robber’ had stolen some of their lawn furniture to pawn for his drugs.
‘I was just wondering if our prodigal son here has anything to slow—to show—for squandering his inheritance. Simple quesh—ques-tion.’
Charley felt their eyes on him—Minerva’s eyes were downcast, hoping the awkward situation would disappear. Fred, drunk at table, was becoming an embarrassment around town.
‘I haven’t learned anything new,’ Charley said. ‘There’s nothing new to learn. Everything that can be said has been said. It would be a good idea for human beings to stop talking altogether.’
Charley thought the Augean stables of humanity were full of talk-manure. It was time to abort the farce of existence and bring it to an abrupt end. He was assisting in his own small way.
‘Charles,’ his brother-in-law protested. ‘It sounds to me like you’re advocating some kind of benevolent final solution we should all abet.’
‘That’s one way to put it,’ Wöissell said.
‘Lemmingsh—lemmings jumping into the fucking sea,’ Fred pronounced and topped up his wine flute as he spoke.
‘Fred, you disgust me,’ his stepmother said and scowled at him.
‘Drunk is as drunk does. Why not ashk—ask your traveling stepson over there what he thinks he’s doing—every time he leaves the house. You treat him like a trick bird on display. What’s he been up to, huh? Driving around—in that junked-up food truck?’
Wöissell looked at his brother; the booze was ageing him fast—the sallow, puffy skin, half-moon bags under his eyes; those tiny fissures at the corners of his mouth would become twin valleys left behind by the receding glacier of booze, a moraine of rubble.
Susan fidgeted with the stem of her wine glass. ‘Charles, really, do you think it’s wise to park that vehicle out front?’
Wöissell gave her one of his rare tight smiles. ‘Wittgenstein—’
‘Who?’
‘You don’t know him, Min. Wittgenstein’s father was one of the richest men of his day. He refused to take any of his family’s money and taught in a poor grammar school.’
‘Roaming around like a fucking Berber in the Lost Quarter …’ Fred mumbled from his end of the table.
‘Frederick, leave the table, now!’ his stepmother demanded.
‘I’ll pass on dessert,’ Charley said to her. ‘Thank you for another delicious meal.’
‘But, Charles, it’s green tea and lychee mousse. Your favorite …’
Her voice trailed off in a tremolo note of disappointment at his curt refusal. She was a knock-down Nancy Reagan, tending to her ‘Ronnie’ in his mental abyss, propping up ruins.
Wöissell stood behind his stepmother and placed his hands on her shoulders, feeling the delicate shoulder blades he could have snapped like toothpicks. He bent down and kissed the top of her head. ‘Not tonight.’
In the morning, he would meet with a bank officer to get his next installment of the trust and fill his prescription for more clonidine patches. Pittsburgh was long behind him, his track obscured. Let the entire Providence police department drive past the family manor and gape at the Chevy food truck in the driveway, they’d think nothing of it.
In his room, he noticed at once the disarray of books in the tote. His ape-like brother’s hirsute paws rooting among them, touching them, made his lip curl. He sorted through them until he found one and took it out. Fred would find it on his pillow tomorrow along with his morning hangover: Common Sense Self-Defense: For the Woman Who Doesn’t Have the Time to Train.
Chapter 15
‘THERE ARE WORSE THINGS,’ Gilker said, ‘than ending your career as a forensic accountant.’
‘Sir, with respect, that report in your hands is a significant step to a further investigation. That’s all I’m asking,’ Jade said.
Shaughnessy’s call that morning had changed everything, especially her darkening mood after last night’s ‘date’ with Pete. A man fitting the description of the McKees Rocks unsub was identified by a motel manager and confirmed by a motel maid. He had driven off in a white truck with a logo on the side. They didn’t know make or model and didn’t know whether it was a camper or a utility truck.
‘Nolan doesn’t think much of your theory, either,’ Shaughnessy said, ‘he put a BOLO out on another white truck and the plates because the driver matched the description. It turned up in Michigan. The driver was a 52-year-old bigamist using a fake ID.’
‘OK, what else, Cee? We’re re-interviewing the plant foreman where Burchess, Hugheart, and Crawford worked. Gilker sent one of his resident agents to have another go at the factory employees. We have to add to that description if we’re going to narrow it down from a million suspects.’
‘More like fifty,’ Shaughnessy replied. ‘The pizza guy in McKees Rocks said he served a customer like that the night of the murder. “What did he look like?” the cop asks. “Average,” he says. The sketch artist drew a composite that looks like every third Caucasian you pass in the street. Nolan says we can’t use it on TV or they’ll knock out the police hotline.’
‘What about the motel maid?’
‘No,’ Shaughnessy replied. ‘She never got a look at him. In and out before her shift. Places like that, you learn not to stare at the guests. One of the other maids, maybe an illegal, doesn’t speak English, told her he left the room spotless—the bed made as if he was military. You could bounce a quarter off it, she said. Everything cleaned to a spotless gleam. She told her she didn’t have to do a thing in there except change the sheets.’
‘Blast, damn. Too late,’ Jade lamented.
‘Right, no DNA,’ Jade said.
‘The room’s been let since. Spray Luminol in motels and the whole room lights up like the Aurora Borealis.’
‘Long shot, I know. Plates are going to be false anyway. This guy doesn’t do what he does and travel with real papers.’
‘Lots of people travel around with false IDs,’ Shaughnessy said.
No, she knew it was her man. He wasn’t just wrapped too tight—cleaning a motel room, who does that? It’s like washing a rental car. But he didn’t want prints or traces left behind. This was habit, not some transient with a cleaning phobia. Habit meant pattern. Pattern meant practice. And, then, she hoped, you come around to habit again. ‘Practice makes habit, not perfection,’ another Quantico axiom. It wasn’t much but it helped her make the next decision and for that she had to see Gilker.
Jade’s report requested interfacing with a task-force investigation that had not yet been created between two state CID agencies and, more significantly, had not been approved. A Sisyphean task without juice from an ADIC, and there were only ten of them in the entire Bureau
. If Gilker wanted to stonewall, it was dead right there. UACB, a Bureau acronym for Unless Advised to the Contrary by the Bureau. Bureaucracy at work. Her permanent reassignment was to commence in two weeks.
‘You’ve become a victim of your own campaign, Hui,’ he said. ‘You wanted off the duty you were assigned, not me, so now you’re reaching for—’
‘Sir, I think, with respect, I think you’re wrong—’
‘No serial killer, no established connection. These are separate police investigations,’ Gilker said. ‘You’ve earned vacation time. Why not go somewhere and think about what you really want from the Bureau?’
He wanted to get shot of her, that much was clear. Ever since she got back from Pittsburgh, things seemed different. She’d had only brief conversations with Pete around the office. Whenever she called his cell, it went to voicemail. Was he avoiding her, having second thoughts? He was down in Little Rock and due back tonight. She left a message asking him to meet her at the fish place, knowing he’d remember the first restaurant he took her to.
Shaughnessy called to say nothing was new. McDuffy’s murder was inching its way to the cold case file. Nothing was going anywhere but Nolan was pissing in her ear about the waste of resources. He sent over a Pittsburgh phone directory to help ‘with the white man seen on Duquesne.’
Pete showed up twenty minutes late and apologized.
‘I had some things to do at home,’ he said as he sat down.
She was thinking: your wife one of them? A petty thought she banished.
They talked nonchalantly, just two colleagues enjoying a meal. She looked about the dining area at all the white hair, the canes, an oxygen tank and two wheelchairs. Growing old before she accomplished something frightened her. Pete, a good storyteller, wrapped his anecdote of a burglar who fainted right after he robbed his first bank but went on to found a chapter of the Junior Chamber of Commerce from behind Angola.
