Every Wicked Man

by Steven James

  He was winded—even for him, it’d been a challenge.

  I tried to get the driver free, but with the way the car was crushed, it wasn’t going to happen.

  “I’ll lift it,” Mannie said. “You slide him out.”

  “You’re going to lift the car?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You could try, but I’m not sure we—”

  Before I could finish, another vehicle came screeching to a stop nearby, although it was out of sight from where we were in the ditch. I was hoping it was Greer, and I was relieved when he appeared at the roadside.

  He identified Mannie and reached for his gun.

  “Hold on,” I said. With the two of them, they just might be able to pull it off. “C’mon down. If you two can lift the front, I think I can get the driver out.”

  Greer looked momentarily confused, but when I called for him to hurry, the urgency in my voice registered, and he scurried down the embankment to join us.

  I still didn’t know where Mannie had come from or why he was here, but we could settle all that in a minute. Right now all I cared about was helping save the driver.

  Greer and Mannie positioned themselves at the front of the car, and working together, they hefted the vehicle just high enough for me to slit the man’s seat belt with my automatic knife, free his leg, and ease him out onto the ground.

  I yanked the seat belt to get enough webbing, then cut off a length of it near the buckle and used it as a tourniquet while a spark started a fire somewhere in the engine, and smoke began curling out toward us.

  Hurry, Pat.

  An ambulance siren cycled through the late morning, coming our way from the hospital down the road. I figured that if we’d been any farther out, this guy’s chances would be close to nil, but with the hospital this close, he just might make it.

  While Greer supported his neck, Mannie and I carried the driver to a flat patch of ground about ten meters from the car.

  Just after we set him down, his car erupted with a gash of fire slicing through the day, and I bent over his face and torso to protect him from the wave of heat. Then, while I did what I could to quell the bleeding in the driver’s leg, Greer handcuffed Mannie, who didn’t struggle or put up a fight.

  What is going on with this guy? Is this a trap? Is Blake here somewhere?

  I glanced around. The woman I’d been chasing was gone. No sign of Blake.

  I attended to the injured man until the EMTs showed up and took over for me, quickly and efficiently fitting him with a cervical collar and getting him on a gurney and into the back of the ambulance.

  Resuming my search for the woman, I scanned the forest, both sides of the road, and the path leading down to the brownstones, but there was no sign of her, so I returned to Greer’s SUV, where he now had Mannie in the backseat. The behemoth filled most of it by himself.

  Greer was leaning over the window, questioning him. “What are you doing here?”

  Mannie didn’t reply.

  “Where’s Blake?”

  Silence.

  “Mannie.” I noticed how much of the driver’s blood had gotten onto my hands, and I wiped them without much effect on my pants. “Thank you. For helping there.”

  He said nothing, but nodded.

  I was no psychologist, but I did know something about human nature: wanted fugitives do not usually surrender themselves so promptly and without incident to law enforcement unless they feel their life is at risk. “You could’ve gotten away a few minutes ago. Whatever you were doing up here, you chose to stay and help that man, but you must know, based on what we have on you, that you could be facing decades in prison.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “Then why? Why did you stop?”

  “Because he was dying and he didn’t deserve to and I could do something about it.”

  I thought back to one of the first times I’d encountered this man. He’d helped save the life of a police officer even though he’d been shot himself in the process.

  Was Mannie pure evil? Certainly not. This was at least the second time he’d saved someone’s life when given the chance, and both times it had cost him dearly. However, he was no saint either. From what we could tell, he helped facilitate Blake’s human trafficking and illegal arms deals. Motives are fibrous and tenuous things. And the human heart is all too often a contradiction to itself.

  I first met up with Blake Neeson last summer during a missing person’s investigation. Later, I discovered that he was a former undercover cop from L.A. who’d found his way into the criminal underground and become a kingpin in the dishearteningly lucrative world of smuggling both drugs and human beings into New York City.

  Blake was now operating under a new name—Fayed Raabi’ah Bashir—but he would always be Blake Neeson in my book, and taking on the persona of an infamous terrorist wasn’t going to intimidate me or dissuade me. Blake wasn’t interested in fueling a movement, he was simply interested in benefiting from it.

  His brother was a serial killer who’d murdered at least five people before being fatally wounded by a friend of mine and fellow FBI agent while she was attempting to apprehend him last summer.

  “We’ll work with you,” I said to Mannie. “Give us Blake.”

  “Take me in.” He eyed the blood that I’d wiped onto my pants. “Then we’ll see what happens next.”

  Greer closed the door, and we stepped out of earshot of Mannie.

  “What do you make of this?” he said.

  “I’m not sure, but wherever Mannie is, Blake is probably somewhere close by. I say we have officers go door to door down in the neighborhood and maybe even set up a roadblock.”

  He shook his head. “I doubt that’ll fly. Not with all the dignitaries at the funeral. The condos, maybe, but we can’t check all of those cars as they’re leaving.”

  “This is Blake Neeson we’re talking about.”

  “Yeah.” He considered that. “I’ll call DeYoung, see what he thinks.” Greer unpocketed his cell. “That woman you were chasing—do you think she’s working with them?”

  “Hard to say. Listen, I’ll be right back. I need to go collect some evidence.”

  “What evidence is that?”

  “Her jacket.”

  9

  Bardstown, Kentucky

  Christie Ellis knelt before the fourth Station of the Cross and brushed a strand of her blonde hair aside when it tipped across her face as she was repositioning her knees to avoid some rocks on the ground.

  For a moment, she wondered what her Baptist friends from church would think if they saw her here at this monastery, on her knees in front of a statue. But she wasn’t praying to a piece of metal or stone. She was praying to the one this statue represented. Besides, who cares what others might think. This was between her and God. The two of them had some things to sort out.

  The rural Kentucky landscape surrounded the monastery—patches of farms and quiet woodlands interspersed with panfish ponds. The moist scent of leaf cover from the ground filled the monastery’s walled-in courtyard around her.

  Christie’s parents were dead. She was an only child raising an only child.

  But you won’t be raising her for long. She’s only sixteen, and you’re almost done being a mom. You’ll never see her graduate from high school or head off to college. You won’t watch her get married. You’ll never hold a grandchild in your arms.

  And Pat. You finally found a man who treats you right, a man you could grow old loving, and you won’t get to do that either.

  The oncologist hadn’t wanted to give her a time frame. “I’ve found that it’s not helpful,” he told her. “At least not this early.”

  “But you said we weren’t catching it as early as you would’ve liked.”

  “I just mean, listing a time frame can cause unrealistic expectations.�
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  “I don’t want unrealistic ones, I want realistic ones. That’s why I’m asking. That’s what I want to know. Tell me the truth,” she pressed him. “How much time do I have left?”

  At first, he’d couched his answer in phrases like “aggressive treatment strategies” and “promising new drugs,” and she’d listened, she had, but when he was done, she repeated her question again. “How long do I have, Doctor? Be honest.”

  “With this type of cancer, at this stage . . .”

  She waited him out.

  “Three to six months,” he said at last, but his voice faltered a little. “But we can never tell for sure. Some people beat it and live a long and happy life.”

  “And some don’t make it three months.”

  A long pause. “That’s right. Some don’t.”

  She hadn’t told her husband yet, hadn’t told her daughter. And now, as she looked at the statue of Christ carrying his cross, this man of God, this Savior, this one who she believed was both risen and here by her side, she did not feel his presence at all.

  Christie believed in miracles, or at least she said that she did, she thought that she did, and so now, unless there was a miracle here, unless God healed her, she would die from this cancer that he had allowed to have free rein in her body.

  How could he be so present and yet seem so distant? How could he be both so strikingly real and so glaringly absent? My God, my God, she thought, why have you forsaken me?

  Jesus’s words from the cross—

  My God.

  Cried out into the lonely day—

  My God.

  Uttered by a brutalized and dying man.

  Why have you forsaken me?

  And the Father refused to reply. There was no miracle that day, only death. Only grief. Only the power of the grave.

  Sunday would see a resurrection, but Friday would leave a corpse in its wake.

  Three to six months.

  A corpse in its wake.

  Why give God only one side of the equation? Could he heal her? Sure. Would he? Who knows? But why didn’t he stop this from happening in the first place? Well, that was the question at the heart of all suffering, wasn’t it?

  Christie thought of Pat mourning her, of her daughter growing into adulthood without a mother. Pat was a man of passion and resolve, he had a good heart, but he often kept his emotions closed in, and she wasn’t sure how well that heart would heal after it was broken, after it was pierced by her death. His work might consume him, and both he and Tessa would suffer the consequences.

  Christie let the tears come and did not try to stop them. And there at the feet of her silent Savior, there at the feet of her slaughtered Lord, she buried her face in her hands and wept.

  10

  We came up empty in the neighborhood.

  DeYoung had been on board with us searching the residences looking for Blake and the unidentified woman, but since we had no solid evidence that Blake was in the area, the assistant director didn’t approve us setting up a roadblock or investigating vehicles leaving the funeral.

  Which, honestly, despite my desire to bring Blake in, I understood.

  I checked the woman’s jacket for any identifying pocket litter and found a ring of four keys, a still-wrapped lemon cough drop, and a crumpled-up receipt from a parking garage less than two blocks from the federal building where the Field Office was located.

  Okay. That was interesting.

  My shirt was smeared with mud and my pants were ripped from when I’d fallen chasing the woman through the forest, not to mention the fact that I was splattered with the driver’s blood. After we cleared the neighborhood, Greer, who’d taken Mannie in to be processed, called me and encouraged me rather bluntly to head out and change clothes.

  “Mannie’s not talking and there’s nothing more for you to do at the graveyard. I’ll be in touch later this afternoon when I’m done with all this paperwork.”

  I thought about just buying some clothes somewhere, but the blood was another matter—I did need to get cleaned up. And icing that tweaked wrist would keep it from swelling up too much. The driver was in stable condition in the hospital—no neck or back injuries, and the doctors were able to treat his leg without the need for amputation.

  The mystery of where the woman had gone and where Mannie had come from were still all too present, but at least it looked like that driver would recover from the crash.

  There was no crime scene unit on-site, so in order to maintain the chain of evidence, I handed off the woman’s jacket to one of the officers who’d responded and had an evidence bag large enough in his cruiser to hold it. Then I signed off on it so he could deliver it to our lab.

  * * *

  +++

  Back home again, I was hoping to slip into the shower and get changed before Tessa saw all the blood on my clothes, but she was in the living room reading when I came through the front door.

  She stared at me.

  “It’s not my blood,” I explained helpfully.

  “Okay.”

  “The guy’s doing alright. There was a car accident.”

  “Oh. Did you run him over?”

  “No.”

  “’Cause if you did I’m gonna find someone else to teach me to drive.”

  “We’re good. I’m going to get cleaned up. I’ll catch up with you in a few minutes.”

  But before I could even make it to the hallway, she asked if I’d heard from her mom.

  “She wasn’t going to turn her phone on this weekend,” I said.

  “I know, but . . .”

  “No, I haven’t heard from her. But I’m sure she’s fine.”

  * * *

  +++

  After the murders in Detroit, Julianne Springman had not bothered to change her name.

  For a while, she’d toyed with the idea of taking on a new identity, but then she realized that if Julianne Springman suddenly disappeared it might seem suspicious since, as a CSI tech, she’d been on the team that was investigating the homicides in Detroit—and the authorities still hadn’t identified who Dylan Neeson’s partner had been.

  Even though she’d been painstakingly careful to cover her tracks and mask her involvement with Dylan’s crimes, no one catches everything, and it was best to simply merge into the background rather than draw any undue attention to herself by suddenly dropping off the radar screen.

  In her exit interview and debrief with her lieutenant, he’d asked her the reason she was leaving the force. She told him truthfully that it was to pursue photography. She didn’t tell him what kind of photography that would be, but at least she could answer the question without lying.

  The other officers at her precinct had told her they’d miss her and wished her well and said they understood. She could infer, however, even in their well-wishing, that some of them were envious of her. With the amount of violence in Detroit—taking into account the high crime rate, the low clearance rate, and the average salary—being an officer there was not an ideal career choice for someone who’s trying to move up in the world and stay alive doing it.

  Anyway, that was over and done and she had moved on, camera in hand.

  Now she repositioned it to better catch the light on the face of the young woman seated in the chair beside the hospital bed.

  Mrs. Sheehan gently tucked one hand beneath her daughter’s head and drew her closer.

  The baby didn’t coo or cry.

  Of course she didn’t. Julianne specialized in photographs like this, as a way of helping the mothers cope.

  “My husband doesn’t know I’m doing this,” the woman told Julianne.

  “I understand.”

  “He . . . When I told him about it, he got pretty upset. But this is for me. It’s important.”

  “Maybe it’s just harder for men to accept.” />
  “Maybe.”

  Julianne’s website was dedicated to photographs of mothers holding their stillborn or crib-death children, to help them find community and closure during the grieving process. To help them mourn in peace.

  Some people might’ve called it macabre to photograph the living with the dead like that, but Julianne didn’t look at things that way. To her, it was a service both to the surviving family members and to herself.

  It helped the mothers remember the dead.

  And, on a more personal level, it helped her think about what it might have been like to kill those children, to smother them while their mothers slept peacefully just a few feet away. She’d had the opportunity but had always refrained. She wasn’t sure how long her self-control would hold up. It would have made for so much more of a meaningful photo if she’d played more of an active role in its genesis.

  In time.

  Time would tell.

  Julianne was still waiting to hear from Blake regarding a potential partner to work with. She didn’t know how long it would be but decided to give him another day or two before following up.

  Right now, patience was her friend, and pressing the matter could easily backfire.

  She turned her attention back to the grieving mother in front of her.

  Knowing what mourning mothers need, Julianne refrained from speaking much in instances like this, except for offering a few gentle words of comfort and solace to the women.

  She snapped several photos. From this position, there in the arms of her mother, the baby simply looked asleep. You couldn’t even tell that the child was dead.

  “I think I have what I need,” Julianne said softly. “Do you want to be alone for a little while?”

  “Actually, I’d like you to stay. If you don’t mind.”

  “I’m glad to stay as long as you like.”

  * * *

  +++

  By the time I finished showering, getting dressed, putting my bloodstained and mud-covered clothes in the wash, icing my wrist, completing my report on what had happened at the graveyard, and touching base with Greer—Mannie still wasn’t talking and hadn’t asked for a lawyer—it was time for dinner.