Every Wicked Man

by Steven James

  I asked Tessa, “Do you want me to whip up some soup?”

  “You mean do you want me to hand you a can opener?”

  “I can also make some sliced fruit.”

  “Slicing fruit doesn’t count as making it.” She sighed. “Alright, look, I’ll fry some falafel burgers. You want one or are you gonna eat meat right in front of me even though you know I’m morally opposed to it and it grosses me out?”

  “When you put it that way, it makes me seriously hungry for falafel.”

  “You’re lying, but I don’t care.”

  * * *

  +++

  Blake had not heard from Mannie since he’d checked in earlier that morning.

  He’d sent him to the hilltop overlooking the funeral in order to keep an eye on things through the binoculars.

  “What do you want me to look for?” Mannie had asked.

  “Anyone we might recognize. And take note of whoever the senator talks to.”

  “Especially Reese?”

  “Yes. I understand he’s coming in from Phoenix for the funeral. See if you can confirm that.”

  “Also Rockwell?”

  “Yes. It might be informative if the billionaire shows up.”

  “Alright.”

  Now Blake tried Mannie’s phone again, but no one answered.

  Though his thoughts were mainly on Mannie and the arrival of the canisters within the next couple of days, he’d made a promise to Julianne Springman and he wasn’t about to go back on his word. So he took a little time to review the material he’d gathered for her and then gave her a call.

  “I have a name for you,” he said. “All the information you need. I’ll send you an encrypted file. Do you have a secure server?”

  “I don’t trust my network. We should meet in person.” She gave him an address—a pub and pizzeria in Brooklyn.

  “Why there?”

  “I know the place. It doesn’t have any working video cameras.”

  He decided that allowing her to choose the location was acceptable. “I can be there at eight.”

  “I’ll see you then.”

  11

  As we ate dinner, Tessa asked me about the case, as she was apt to do: “I know you can’t tell me anything about your investigation, but if you could, what would you say?”

  “Pass the ketchup.”

  “Right. So’d you find out about the cows?”

  For some reason, earlier this week we’d gotten talking about what you call different groups of animals: a herd, flock, school, and so on. Neither of us knew off the top of our heads what you refer to a group of cows as. I’d had to look it up.

  “The plural of cow is kine,” I told her. “But actually, twelve or more cows is a flink, so that one’s sort of arbitrary.”

  “Huh. Have you heard about crows? It’s an appropriate one; fits in with your job.”

  That one I knew. “A murder of crows.”

  “Impressive.”

  “And a sleuth of bears,” I said. “Another good one for my job.”

  “Hmm. Nice. Oh—there are some really good reptile ones: a quiver of cobras, a lounge of lizards, a rhumba of rattlesnakes.”

  “Are all the reptile ones alliterative?”

  “A float of crocodiles isn’t.”

  “I have to say, two of my favorites are still the ones you mentioned on Monday: a bloat of hippopotami and a fluther of jellyfish.”

  She took a bite of her falafel burger and hadn’t quite finished chewing it when she went on. “You think those are good? There are some really weird ones that I found earlier today: a fesnying of ferrets, an implausibility of gnus, a deceit of lapwings, and a trip of dotterels.”

  “Are you making these up?”

  She swallowed. “Totally true. I promise.”

  I’d heard of dotterels but couldn’t place exactly what they were. “At the risk of sounding animal illiterate, what is a dotterel?”

  “Find out. That’s your assignment.”

  “Well, I guess that’s why Al Gore invented the Internet.”

  “No. The Internet is for cat videos, celebrity death rumors, conspiracy theories, and dragging down the world’s collective IQ a dozen points a year. No Googling dotterels. Too easy. You’re Dr. Analog. Find another way.”

  “Fair enough.”

  * * *

  +++

  Ralph Hawkins was leading the joint task force that was tracking down Blake, so after dinner I contacted him. Ralph was based at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime near the Academy just outside D.C. Normally, his group focused on consultations between the Bureau and state and local law enforcement, but he’d been assigned a more active role in this case. Currently, he split his time between D.C. and New York City.

  “You got word that we caught Mannie, right?” I said.

  “I’m reviewing the files now. Is he talking?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’m coming up there tomorrow. There’s a pile of paperwork staring me in the face here, but I’m about to flamethrow the whole freakin’ thing and fly up to the city.”

  “Sounds good. By the way, ‘freakin’?”

  “Trying to clean up the language for Brineesha.”

  His wife must have finally put her foot down, and when she did that there was no moving it aside.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “I should be there tomorrow afternoon. Maybe Mannie will have decided to be a bit more cooperative by then. If not, maybe I can convince him.”

  “You can be quite persuasive when you need to be.”

  “Yes, I can.”

  * * *

  +++

  Julianne had ordered an appetizer of garlic knots and was finishing her second one when Blake arrived. He slid her a manila folder and she passed him the still-warm rolls. “Try one,” she said. “They’re to die for.”

  “I’m good. Thanks.”

  “Where’s Goliath? I thought he’d be coming along. You two seemed quite close.”

  “He’s occupied with other matters. I should tell you first of all that I’m not certain that the man whose name I’m giving you has committed any actual crimes—but there is strong evidence that he has.”

  “What kind of evidence?”

  “Recordings of his meetings with his psychiatrist.”

  “How did you get those?”

  “One of the doctors at the facility where he spent some time is a client of mine.”

  “A client?”

  “A regular one, we’ll leave it at that. Let me just say that from all I’ve been able to glean, the man I’m recommending to you has the potential to be, well, a fitting partner.”

  “Potential.”

  “As I told you yesterday—no guarantees.”

  She tapped the dossier. “And the information is in here?”

  He nodded. “And I’d suggest you speak with him soon. Tonight if at all possible.”

  “Why?”

  “Prudence,” he said simply.

  He pressed the garlic rolls aside with disgust as if he were nudging a slug across the table. “Now, I believe that our business in this matter is concluded. It isn’t wise for either of us to spend any additional time together. Good-bye, Julianne.”

  “Good-bye, Blake,” she said. For now, she thought. Because she had someone special in mind for her next photograph, and the irony that he had just given her the name of the man who was going to kill him was not lost on her.

  * * *

  +++

  The ERT was able to pull some prints from the windowsill at the senator’s house, but they turned out to be his son’s. If someone else had entered the house through that window, he was being extra careful or wore gloves.

  The sole impressions outside the house were Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars,
size eleven, men’s. The shoes were popular with Tessa’s generation, so I wasn’t sure what to make of that. A classmate or intern coworker of Jon’s? Perhaps.

  Also, the team pulled some partials from the woman’s jacket that I’d recovered from the thorn patch in the woods. The prints came up as “unavailable”—a rare category that meant the person had been printed, but then the fingerprints were expunged for some reason, maybe so that a confidential informant could remain confidential, maybe because a cop was working undercover.

  Whatever it was, in this case, it added another layer of mystery to what was going on. I sent in a request for an expedited release of the name, but I didn’t know when, or even if, I would get it.

  Why did Jon take his life when he did? What clues from his travel patterns and his relationships might shed light on that? Did he intend to be home alone or not?

  I decided to review the footage of the observer in Senator Murray’s house to establish if I was perhaps wrong in postulating that the person was male. However, after studying it several times, I concluded that, based on height and build, this person was not the woman who’d fled from me in the graveyard, and Mannie, being black, was the wrong ethnicity.

  I contacted Greer and learned that Mannie, apart from declaring that he would talk tomorrow, still hadn’t spoken a word.

  “Are you going into the office tomorrow?” Greer asked me.

  “Yeah. At least in the afternoon.”

  Originally, I hadn’t been scheduled to work, but in this job no matter how many hours you put in each week, there’s always a reason to be at the office. I still hadn’t figured out where to draw the line between personal responsibilities and work assignments. Full days off for me ended up being pretty few and far between—something I needed to sort out, now that I had a family.

  “Bad guys don’t take days off,” Greer said, “so why should we?”

  I couldn’t tell if he was being reflective or sarcastic. “Right. What about you?”

  “Mannie’s not my case, and if he’s not talking, there’s nothing I can really do on that front. I’ll probably tackle a few things here from home.” Ever since moving from Chicago he’d lived in New Jersey and had an hour commute each way, so I understood. “But I’ll come in if I need to. Let’s see how things shake out.”

  He told me he would work with Public Affairs to develop a press release that stated we were still collecting more information about Jon Murray’s death and asking the public for any facts they might have.

  “Don’t mention the observer,” I said.

  “We won’t.”

  12

  Tessa plugged in her earbuds and cranked the music from DeathNail 13.

  Silence weirded her out, especially at night.

  Well, that wasn’t completely true.

  When she was reading, silence was alright. But times like this, being here by herself, made her think too much, and right now she didn’t want to do that. She didn’t want to think about how mad her mom probably was at her, or why she suddenly took off for Kentucky this weekend. Or how lonely it was around here without Az staying with them.

  She hadn’t realized how much she liked having somebody her age around, a little sister, but whatever. That was over. Az was gone, back to Kazakhstan. Even though Tessa had tried emailing her a couple of times, she hadn’t heard anything back. Which wasn’t a hundred percent surprising. Az was probably just glad to be away from her.

  A scrap of a poem came to her.

  Tessa pulled out her journal and wrote:

  i don’t want to get too close to you

  because i might get scratched by the barbed-wire necklace

  you like to wear.

  it is a deadly decoration that reminds me of the frontier.

  and the slicing up of the land.

  you’ve had it for so long that it’s getting rusty.

  it is a barbed-wire fence that surrounds your heart,

  hanging delicately around your neck.

  It wasn’t super eloquent or memorable, but it felt real, and for right now that was enough.

  Her mom wrote entirely different kinds of poems, more traditional and rhymy, but dabbling in poetry was something they actually had in common.

  For Tessa, poems were a way to express emotions that couldn’t be stated outright.

  She’d tried explaining that to one of the girls at school once when she said she didn’t “get” poetry. “Poetry isn’t something you get,” Tessa had told her. “It’s something that quivers inside of you with truth that you can’t quite articulate but that you feel.”

  “Poetry quivers?” Candice had said.

  “Yeah. I mean, sort of. Reading a poem is like flirting with some cute guy, not like sitting in biology class. Or at least it shouldn’t be.”

  “I have no idea what that means.”

  “Okay, well, did you ever have to dissect frogs in biology class?”

  “Yeah.” Candice squinched up her face in disgust. “Ew.”

  “Well, most English teachers treat poems like biology teachers treat frogs. They think that cutting them open, peeling them apart, probing into them, and identifying their different parts is the best way to understand them rather than watching them in the wild and marveling at how they move.”

  “Who marvels at a frog?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Yeah, no. I get it. I guess.”

  Tessa continued. “They’re like, ‘See that simile there? The author is telling us he’s really suicidal.’ ‘And here, we have Shakespeare writing in iambic pentameter. Let’s take the next hour and totally cut the heart out of his work of art. It’ll be so much fun.’ Just like the biology teacher is doing when he hands out the dissection knives.”

  “Okay, I think that’s enough with the whole dead-frog thing.” Candice looked pale. “Get back to the cute-guy part.”

  “So when you see him, your heart races, right? You can’t keep your eyes off him. And you don’t want to take a knife or whatever and cut him open. You want to kiss him. To feel his lips against yours. To hold him in your arms.”

  A sly smile. “That’s not all I want.”

  “My point is the only way to really write a poem is to stop thinking of it as a way of communicating an idea or getting a point across, but as a way of breathing life into words.”

  “Sorta like Frankenstein, making them alive?”

  “Sort of.”

  “So give me an example. Not a dead-frog poem. A cute-guy-with-his-lips-against-mine poem.”

  “I have a gravity-laden heart,” Tessa began. Then she let the words write themselves in her mind, and she spoke them softly as they did: “Dragging me deeper and deeper into myself. Only the orbit of a much greater sun could ever lift me high enough for me to breathe freedom air.”

  “How is that a poem? It doesn’t even rhyme.”

  “You are so lame. Poems don’t have to rhyme.”

  “Do one that rhymes.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Ha. You can’t think of one.”

  “I could if I wanted to.”

  “You’re stalling.”

  As Tessa thought about it, words came to her: Dark dreams awaken and rise in the night. What whips can tame them? What chains restrain them? What harness can rein them or quiet their bite?

  But she didn’t say that to Candice. Instead, she just said, “You’re right, I was stalling. I can’t do it.”

  Now, Tessa looked at the words she’d just written about barbed wire and an isolated heart. Yeah, it could use some work, but it was enough for the moment.

  She considered a title for it and ended up with a choice between “Loneliness” and “Love.”

  She decided to go with wishful thinking and chose “Love.”

  13

  Julianne lit another cigarette and
waited across the street from the address Blake had given her in Ozone Park, a neighborhood in Queens that she noticed contained mostly single-family households and not just condos or townhouses.

  No lights were on in the man’s home. Maybe he’d retired to bed early. Maybe he was out and would be returning later.

  Blake had told her to contact him tonight. “Prudence,” he’d said somewhat enigmatically, and she wasn’t sure exactly what he was getting at, but she didn’t want to miss her chance if tonight was the best time to connect with him.

  She was betting on the fact that he was out and about. If he was in bed there was no rush. She could make her way up there and break into his condo if necessary anytime tonight.

  Over the last year, she’d pretty much given up smoking, but there aren’t too many reasons you can stand on a street corner in New York City and look around the neighborhood and not draw attention to yourself.

  So, she revisited her old habit.

  She hadn’t been certain that she wanted to kill Blake until she’d met up with him at the restaurant. He had a dismissive air about him that she did not like. Killing those whom she knew wasn’t a moral dilemma for her. The first two people she’d murdered were both people she loved—her fiancé and her best friend, who he’d cheated on her with.

  There was simply a moment when you realized that the person you were talking with or looking at needed to die. It wasn’t helpful to question that feeling. It was simply a matter of a decision you made and then carried out.

  Yes. Blake deserved the same fate as his brother.

  There.

  Done.

  That’s all there was to it.

  Movement to her left caught her attention: two men approaching, hand in hand.

  Was the gentleman she was tracking gay? She didn’t know, but based on the physical description in the dossier that Blake had provided for her, it didn’t look like either of these two men was the one she was here to meet.