by Robb T White
‘Just wanted to hear your voice,’ he said, ‘hope you’re recovered.’
‘I’m fine, all better, everything back in its proper place except for the new parts,’ she said.
‘New parts?’
‘My front teeth, just like that old Christmas tune. ‘All I want for Christmas—’
‘—is my two front teeth,’ Pete sang back at her.
It was not working. ‘I can’t, Pete. I’ve got to go.’
Maybe something else had come loose, some part in her mind that could not be replaced.
She had only two weeks’ more seniority in this office than the new transfer, a fresh-eyed Ivy League grad in his mid-twenties from Paducah, Kentucky. Daniel Bar-Jonah had double degrees in psychology and computers. Every field office nowadays clamored for IT specialists; golden children of the Information Age. The private sector gobbled up the cream and bid against one another for the next echelon of IT whizz kids like plantation owners at a slave market in the Old South.
She was showing him the ropes, advising him that morning when and when not to report certain items in a 302 that could come back to bite you later. He was an astute learner and asked the right questions.
Another email hit her inbox. She let them accumulate during the day as the majority were time-consuming wastes. Whoever said email was going to shorten the office worker’s working day should be remembered for famous last words that blew up in their face.
She usually went through her email at noon sitting at her desk and assigned them their proper place in her afternoon: Delete Unread (pep-talk memos from HR, including tax advice for those post-retirement years, birthday notices, promotions—anything that smacked of Goebbels-like propaganda); Do Something Later (Gilker’s intraoffice memoranda, bulletins from DC, law enforcement updates on agency cases); Do Something Right Now (mainly, her own ‘Contact Special Agent Hui’ notices sent out routinely on the sandwich man).
She was drinking green tea spiked with honey when she read the DC supervisor’s memo; it was to Gilker but she was a copyholder. In short, she was exonerated of any wrongdoing per FBI protocol in the death of a fellow agent. The full letter report was coming later. It would be full of sententious lingo, and would certainly acknowledge Gilker’s criticism of her actions that day, she was sure, as it was a Soothe Bell to a Pokémon, a topical reference Bar-Jonah missed when she had to explain it.
But she was intact. No one could use leverage against her for at least the next two weeks. She remembered something from a long-ago class on archetypal psychology. Carl Jung used to celebrate with friends over bad news and lament with them over good. He knew that that old medieval Wheel of Fortune keeps a-turning and, like night following day, good news always follows bad and vice versa.
Her good fortune continued an hour later when she re-checked the NCIC database for the crime parameters she had set out from her days in the Pittsburgh office.
A cop in Providence, Rhode Island had uploaded a recent murder of a known drug dealer whose hyoid bone was fractured along with other injuries. That made fifteen cities in the last six weeks where a mutilating or depraved kind of violence was meted out by an unknown killer.
She dismissed all cases where husbands and wives, or boyfriends, and stalkers, were involved with the female victim. In no case was a woman suspected to be the killer. Still, two of those had been worth checking out. Throat smashing was personal. Inadvertently she touched her own throat as she read the details. Her heart hammered in her chest.
Possibly, possibly … Let it be so.
She arranged them in a factor of increasing likelihood of the sandwich man as unsub: Minneapolis, Tacoma, Denver, Providence, Nashville, Los Angeles.
Geographical profiling would rule out Nashville and LA as the crime scenes were in predominantly black and Latino sections. It wasn’t just that serial killers trolled within their own race; it was that he wouldn’t have had a reason to be in those unmixed neighborhoods in the first place. Both murders were committed between midnight and six a.m. and the victims didn’t fit: one was a welfare mother of three children; the other was an elderly, sickly male that neighbors described as a recluse.
But Minneapolis looked good. The victim was the owner of a chain of familyfriendly restaurants in the Twin Cities. He had a big house in the suburbs and owned an expensive prefab cottage at Hanging Horn Lake. He was connected politically, was a delegate at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, and garnered accolades from the local chamber of commerce and high rankings from Better Business Bureau. No known enemies. He was a presiding member of the civic committee that organized festivals and agricultural events at the Warner Coliseum and the Education Building in the spring.
The Washington State victim was a 29-year-old pipefitter who worked for Tacoma Power. He had no criminal record. He and his girlfriend attended the Puyallup Fair, billed as one of the ten largest in the world. Four days later he was killed leaving a bar; his eye was taken out with the jagged edge of a beer bottle. Cause of death: crushed larynx.
Denver and Providence were both long shots because the victims were smalltime criminals and there were no significant events or festivals in town at the times of their deaths. The Denver victim had attended a Bacon & Beer festival at Mile-High Stadium two days before his. Aside from a record of scofflaw tickets, he had no serious criminal priors. His girlfriend said he had no enemies. He was, however, a profligate sperm donor as he had thrice been to court over paternity cases, and had his wages garnished twice.
Jade noted the time lag between event and kill varied by as much as two weeks from the known victims. Pittsburgh was a fluke, she insisted. The taco factory supervisor only knew of the time when the food truck sat outside his place. Sandwich Man could have been in town trolling for weeks for all he knew.
If Arkansas was any indication of a pattern, once he killed, he moved on fast. If it weren’t for his being confronted by ‘Crime Wave’ McDuffy in a random chance encounter, he’d have disappeared without a trace. She had exhausted every medical facility in the Midwest over Tourette’s cases despite the HIPPA laws, which were about as difficult to maneuver around as Miranda. Meaning not all. He had to be getting treatment somewhere, and it was possible to subpoena pharmacy records once she had a probable locale. She called and visited every pharmacy in Ashtabula as soon as her recovery permitted her to move without pain. Not an easy feat when she learned that half the population of the county itself was of retiree age. The brain drain in Ohio was ongoing despite the recovery from the big recession of 2008; still there were more pharmacies than bars and more bars than churches.
In an eerie, even frightening, way, she thought she might be more attuned to him after her beating. Her wounds were healed; the psychological damage Gilker was so concerned about didn’t affect her at any level of her rationality. The night terrors, awakening in a lathered sweat, were diminishing and had longer interludes between them. She was confident she was working them out of her system in a healthy way. She made every appearance to appear before Gilker with confidence, energy, and clarity in her voice, regardless of her feelings that day or how tired she was. She was going to give him no reason to block her from pursuing the case. If there was one advantage to the volumes of paperwork the FBI required of its agents, the sheer fact of it lent the case an inertia that even Gilker had to acknowledge in his own supervisory reports. He was queried about progress on her case from DC; most recently two days ago, Pete texted her, and she was certain that, if she made the right approach at the right time, he would accede to her next request. According to Pete, the enquiry from headquarters was a big one. Gilker, he said, was running around the office like a two-headed dog at a meat market.
It was a big one: she wanted to personally check out her best three prospects in those cities.
That night she called Shaughnessy for an update on the McDuffy case.
‘Colder and deader than Julius Caesar,’ she told Jade. ‘Nolan’s up to his eyebrows in alligators, meaning f
resh gang murders. He doesn’t return my calls.’
‘Buffalo told me the same thing,’ Jade said. ‘Everybody’s moved on.’
‘It’s probably nothing but it’ll get to you. Somebody called Fayetteville PD asking about the riverbank murders. The dispatcher thought it was a CI of yours. She gave the caller your motel down there.’
‘Any trace?’
‘No, it didn’t ping off any towers, no trace back to a landline. The number was masked. It could have been a burner with protection. GPS won’t work on them.’
‘Why would Fayetteville even want to trace it?’ Jade asked her. FBI offices get crank calls a dozen times a day, half of them from schizophrenics.
‘Agent Grandbois insisted on traces for anyone asking for or about you.’
‘That was good of Pete,’ she said. Privately she wondered why he didn’t call her directly. They hadn’t left things that badly.
‘You OK?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said.
‘I don’t think he’d come after you,’ Shaughnessy said.
Later, she thought about it. Why would he want to come out of the shadows? It made no logical sense unless you factored in the illogicality of his entire modus operandi. She wasn’t going to find the answer in the copy of Wittgenstein he’d left behind.
She finished another paragraph of the Tractatus that night in bed, but the words jumped around in her brain. Wittgenstein composed the notes for it while a soldier in the First World War and completed it as a prisoner of war at Cassino in August 1918. He suffered from severe depression, gave away his share of the family fortune to his siblings, and was generous to struggling Viennese artists. His older brother, an officer, committed suicide when his troops refused to obey his order to charge the enemy. He was the third brother in the family to do so. This scion of a rich family, one of the wealthiest in Europe, exiled himself to an Austrian mountain school where he taught mathematics and beat his simple students for failing to learn, one so severely he later died. Intellectual brilliance aligned itself with madness, nothing new there.
‘I’m right here, you bastard,’ she whispered.
Chapter 44
WÖISSELL HAD TO GET out of his house—go somewhere, walk, think. Put things back into order.
Fred met him at the door when he got in from Rissa’s where he’d spent the last two days. When he left her place, he thought he saw a car following him. Before he reached the Seekonk, he jumped on the I 95 interstate and headed toward Cranston. He circled back but nobody was following. He was always aware of his surroundings mainly because of Steve and his company. Rissa was sure Steve hadn’t called off his dogs.
‘He stopped calling you, right?’ Wöissell asked.
‘That’s what worries me,’ she said.
The look on Fred’s face wasn’t hard to read when he pointed to Minerva’s husband’s letter waiting for him on the table in the foyer.
‘Better check it out, Charles,’ Fred insisted.
‘If it was important, he’d have sent it registered,’ Wöissell said.
He wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of reading it in front of him. The dissembling on Fred’s face was transparent anyway. Fred was developing a fulltime drunkard’s face.
Wöissell was convinced the court action was going to strip him of his share. Fred and Minerva were in constant communication lately; his stepmother was blithely indifferent to their machinations. Her only concern of late was her no-good son Robbie’s latest escapade with the law. It didn’t affect her share of the family fortune in any event.
His plan wasn’t to fight it, but to sell it—just enough money to stake him to a new start somewhere else like California. He was sure he could wipe the slate clean, exit stage right with Rissa, no longer chased by family diseases and ghosts. Disappear from their lives forever. He had no more interest in this house or the people in it. Providence was suffocating him. The people who looked at him stared as if they could see his secret. He was tripping himself up with wrong looks and wrong things said to the wrong people. It was just a matter of time.
I have to get out.
Clarissa, save me …
Chapter 45
JADE HAD ACHIEVED ONE small concession from Gilker: he was still allowing her to use time away from other assignments to make her phone calls; she could liaise with the various PDs involved providing she kept a complete transcript available in the ‘war room.’ She wasn’t to consider herself part of the task force, officially speaking, but she was an adjunct of it in the same way cops assisted other cops in their investigations. She had to swallow hard when Gilker assembled all the resident agents in the conference room and informed them Dan Bar-Jonah, the rookie with people and computer skills, was going to head the task force. She scrupulously avoided looking at Gilker when he made the announcement.
‘I know this will disappoint, Special Agent Hui, and I am mindful of your contribution. But we have to think of the overall mission …’
She forced herself to resume listening to Gilker and came back into focus when he made a reference to her professionalism and asked for her cooperation in assisting Agent Bar-Jonah.
The meeting she had with him after lunch didn’t satisfy either of them. In defiance of his word fragile concerning her health, she slammed the door of his office and made the closest agent in the next carrel jump in his chair.
‘Sorry if I woke you, Bob,’ she said in passing. He’d absorbed every word of their heated conversation and knew it would be passed around during happy hour that afternoon.
Dan dropped by her carrel an hour later, looking apologetic.
‘I want you to know I had nothing to do with that appointment,’ he said.
‘I know it.’
She was sure he hadn’t resisted it, either, but she wouldn’t hold that against him.
‘I have some ideas,’ he said. ‘I’d like to get your opinion.’
She smiled up at him and said she’d be glad to assist in any way she could.
First, lose that ugly smiling troll tie, she thought.
She was outflanked by Gilker and, when her role was sufficiently reduced, the sandwich man investigation would turn into a real clusterfuck. She surprised herself with the use of Cee’s favorite expression. If things didn’t break her way soon, she’d add the last sentence to her resignation letter, make it official with a signature, and start scouting some online head-hunting sites.
Chapter 46
HE’D COME STUMBLING OUT of Clarissa’s house in a daze, unaware of his surroundings. He’d caught her in bed with her roommate, which didn’t offend him as much as it did Rissa herself, who bellowed at him to ‘knock on the fucking door next time!’
‘I did,’ Wöissell said, his voice choking.
‘The outside door, idiot, not the bedroom door,’ she said.
She flung her legs off the bed and grabbed a pair of sweat pants draped over the headboard. Her roommate propped herself up on an elbow and seemed to enjoy the unfolding spectacle.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I know I should have called you first.’
‘So, what the fuck do you want, Silver Spoon?’
She hadn’t called him that in a while.
‘Can we go somewhere and talk?’
‘Fuck it. Go into the kitchen. I’ll be there in a sec,’ Rissa said.
She bent down to kiss her roommate on the lips.
‘Sorry about that, babe,’ she crooned.
She pulled on her top, turned, saw him still standing there. He felt sick to his stomach. It wasn’t Rissa’s sexuality. He’d suspected they were more than roommates for a while.
On his way over, he had it all set in his mind. What he intended to say and what he would do to overcome her objections—after all, he was asking her to uproot her life and run away with him to parts unknown, a gypsy’s life.
When she sat down across from him at the kitchen, she struck a pose that gave off hostile vibes. He noticed her makeup was kissed away.
He struggled for the right words; they were all there but in the wrong order or came out of his mouth with the wrong emphasis. After a few minutes, he gave up.
‘I’m not saying this right,’ Wöissell said.
‘Oh, yes, you are,’ she said.
Clarissa burst out laughing. It was a harsh, coarse laugh.
‘You expect me to go running around the country in a food truck? Are you out of your motherfucking mind?’
‘I made a mistake,’ he said, getting to his feet.
Rissa said, ‘I like you but I’m not in love with you.’
‘I thought—’ he said.
‘You thought what? I was in love with you?’
He was at the doorway when he felt his wrist grabbed from behind. It took a second for him to react. Charley stepped back into her, threw his hands forward and together to loosen the grip, and with a turn and leg sweep, broke her grasp and put her on the floor.
She hit the linoleum hard and stayed down. He wanted to go to her but knew it was too late when Denise appeared in the doorway, holding a bra against her chest.
‘What did you do, fucker?’
Wöissell pushed past, heard the curses going down the porch steps.
Worse always comes to worst.
‘Hey, asshole,’ said the voice approaching from behind him.
Wöissell felt the world spinning beneath his feet.
Control, discipline—
The punch on the side of the head from the other direction came from Corey, a planned ambush.
Wöissell instinctively got to his feet, facing him, reeling from the punch. Sparring gloves explained why his attacker didn’t worry about fracturing metacarpals. Before he could take in the full danger, a blow from a tire iron to the back of his knee dropped him to the ground again. He had time to block the roundhouse kick coming from Corey, but he was too off balance to prevent the high kick Nick, still wielding the tire iron, aimed at his head. A glancing blow off an ear, but it staggered him and he went over on his back.
