Every Wicked Man

by Steven James

  She nodded cordially to them as they walked past.

  She was still sorting out how she was going to ask him what she needed to—it’s not a subject that a person would typically use to start a conversation with a stranger: “Listen, I’ve been following you. I think you might be a serial killer, and I’d like to help you with your next project. I’m good with photography. We could start an album.”

  Not a line they would teach you in a course on how to win friends and influence people.

  A taxi rolled to a stop across the street from the house she was surveilling, and the man she was waiting for emerged.

  A prototypical young artist—scruff that looked more like the result of just forgetting to shave for a week or two than an actual attempt at a beard. He was a slim man, wore glasses, dressed bohemian.

  Was he really the kind of person who could kill another human being?

  He looked remarkably harmless.

  But then again, so did she.

  From experience, she knew that killers could be unpredictable, so she’d brought a Beretta 92FS with her. Dylan had favored a blade, but since this man was likely a killer himself, she wasn’t sure she wanted to get up close and personal like that.

  Even the city that never sleeps does doze, and at this time of night in this part of town, there weren’t many people out.

  She snuffed out her cigarette and crossed the street.

  The man did not head directly to the address she’d been given but instead crossed the sidewalk to a place where it passed beneath a leafless tree. A streetlight had burned out, leaving a gap of blackness in the neighborhood.

  She eased her hand into her purse and slipped her fingers around the grip of her Beretta.

  The shadows swallowed him, and she quickened her pace to try to catch him, but she’d only made it a few paces into the darkness when he reappeared, as if from nowhere, standing in the middle of the sidewalk, facing her, blocking her path.

  He held what she at first thought was a knife but on second glance realized was a letter opener. Despite it not having a very imposing blade, it looked sharp enough to do some damage if it were used with any kind of practiced technique.

  “Why are you following me?” His voice was soft and not necessarily accusatory, laced more with curiosity than a threat.

  Why didn’t he go directly into the house?

  Did he see you waiting for him when he got out of the taxi?

  “My name is Julianne Springman. I’d like to work with you.”

  He eyed her quizzically. “Work with me? I’m a novelist. I work alone.”

  “Not in that capacity.”

  “In what capacity, then?”

  “Is there a better place—a more private place—we could talk?”

  “Why would I want to do that? I told you I don’t work with anyone else.”

  “You weren’t careful, Mr. Sabian. I found you. And if I found you, there’ll be others who’ll find you as well. You could use some help. I used to work as a CSI tech back in Detroit. I know all about crime scenes. How to leave clean ones.”

  She glanced at the letter opener in his hand. “Would you really stab me with that? Do you really want to chance that I haven’t told anyone else I was going to speak with you tonight?”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Just a chance to explain myself.”

  He used the letter opener to scratch harshly at his arm. “My place is close. We can talk there.”

  * * *

  +++

  The falafel burger from earlier hadn’t filled me up, and I slipped out of the bedroom to grab some leftover lasagna that Christie had made before she left. On the way down the hall, I noticed that Tessa’s light was still on and I figured I would just tell her good night, but when I knocked and called to her she didn’t reply.

  I knocked again. “You alright?”

  Nothing.

  I wanted to respect her privacy, and she might just have her headphones on, so she was probably fine. But also I felt a thread of parental concern.

  Privacy was a big deal to her, and even just opening her door could make her upset.

  I knocked a little harder. “I just wanted to say good night.”

  I started to ease the door open, but she yelled, “Don’t come in!”

  Immediately, I closed it. “Are you okay?”

  That’s when I heard her sniffle.

  “I’m fine. Leave me alone.”

  “Do you want to talk?”

  “No.”

  “Was it me? Did I do something to upset you?”

  “I said I don’t wanna talk!” Her voice was cut through with pain.

  I wished we weren’t having this conversation through a closed door, but maybe, in a certain respect, it was better this way.

  “Just leave me alone.” More sobbing. “It’s not you, okay?”

  I stood there staring at her door, feeling helpless.

  How do you help a girl who might very well need help but tells you that she doesn’t?

  It reminded me of a conversation I’d had with Christie one time when we were going through a rough spot in our relationship and I finally blurted out, “Listen, it seems like you don’t want me to solve your problem—all you want me to do is sit here listening to you talk about it!”

  “Exactly!” she’d exclaimed.

  Women are a mystery I will never understand.

  But in this case, Tessa didn’t even want me to sit around listening to her talk about her problem, so where did that leave me?

  I assured her that I was here if she needed anything, heard no response except the sound of more crying, and at last, unsure what else to do, I walked to my room and tried Christie’s number. Not surprisingly, no one picked up. I left a message. “Hey, Tessa’s feeling a little . . . well . . . out of sorts. If you get this, give me a call. I hope your retreat is going well.” Then I added, “I love you.”

  And, of course, silence was all that I heard in reply.

  14

  Maybe it was just the recent studying she’d done on feng shui, trying to make sure the settings were as ideal as they could be when she took her photographs, but to Julianne, although nothing about Timothy Sabian’s living room seemed unusual or out of the ordinary, nothing quite seemed in place either. It was an odd effect. The room wasn’t in disarray, but something about the placement of the furniture and the arrangement of the room was off.

  “Can I get you anything to drink?” he asked her as she followed him into the kitchen. “I don’t have much—some vodka and vermouth.”

  She didn’t anticipate being here long, but if she did accept a drink it might make it more awkward for him to ask her to leave before she was done explaining herself.

  “Vodka,” she said. “Thank you.”

  When he opened the freezer, she noticed that, apart from some ice, the vodka bottle, and two TV dinners, the freezer was empty.

  Timothy poured a glass for each of them, then gestured toward the living room. Once they were both seated, he said, “Now, tell me what you’re here about.”

  “Perhaps it would be best if I showed you.” She took out her iPad. “Let me just pull up a site.”

  “What site is that?”

  “You’ll see.”

  She clicked to a website containing a series of black-and-white photographs that had been taken at the turn of the twentieth century.

  She scrolled through half a dozen of them. “You see how in each of these, one person’s face is clear and well-defined while the faces of everyone else are slightly blurry?”

  In the first, a girl in a frilly dress who looked maybe five or six was holding a baby on her lap. The girl’s face was blurry. The baby’s was not.

  The second photo contained two parents standing beside a chair where a young, sma
rtly dressed man in his early twenties sat. His face and features were distinctly delineated while those of the couple weren’t.

  “What does that mean?” Timothy asked her. “The photos are faked? Altered in some way?”

  “On the contrary, it’s evidence that they’re most likely authentic. Back in the days when these pictures were taken, the exposure took so long that, as the people tried to sit still, they couldn’t help but move slightly while the photographs were being taken. That movement would cause the image to blur slightly.”

  “So, these people.” He pointed. “The ones you can see clearly, they’re especially good at sitting still?”

  “That’s one way to put it, but I wouldn’t want to be in their place.”

  “Why is that?”

  “They were dead when the photographs were taken.”

  “What? Really?”

  She couldn’t quite read his tone, but it sounded more shocked than intrigued.

  That worried her slightly.

  She knew from the information Blake had given her that Timothy had some mental instability, but now a few questions fluttered through her mind, ones that she hadn’t allowed herself to ask earlier: Do you have the wrong man? Did Blake set you up here?

  “These photographs were a way of remembering the family members who’d passed away,” she explained. “It was quite normal at the time to have pictures like that taken. When you see an old photo where one person isn’t blurry but the rest are, well, that’s a good indication that the person you can see with the most detail is dead.”

  * * *

  +++

  Timothy looked at the photographs.

  Life after life.

  Death.

  After.

  Death.

  After death.

  In each, the living were blurred by their breathing, while the dead sat as still as the staid, languid air in their lungs.

  Then the woman clicked to another site.

  A warning came up on the screen about the kinds of photographs this website contained, about how you needed to be eighteen in order to enter it, about how it was meant as a private page to help grieving mothers and not to go through the portal unless you agreed to the terms.

  As if it’s a true portal, as if you really enter anything. You’re not entering a site, you’re just moving a cursor and tapping a mouse button. Where did this idea ever come from that you can enter a site? You can’t enter a book—there are just images and words. It’s not something you go into, just something you look at. The Internet is the same. A website is a place you enter without going anywhere.

  But then his thoughts were interrupted when Julianne showed him the photos she’d taken.

  Babies. One after another. All dead. Most of them were in the arms of their mothers, some lay in cribs or hospital bassinets.

  Stress made the bugs worse. And he felt more of them now than he’d felt all day.

  Don’t let her know. Don’t let her see.

  Don’t let her find out about them.

  He repositioned himself, but he did not did not did not did not scratch.

  “It’s a way for me to help mothers move through difficult times, to process grief,” she said, then lingered over one of the photos. “This woman carried her baby for nine months. She loved him, she sang to him, she prayed for him, she painted a nursery, carefully chose his clothes, had a baby shower—and now he’s gone forever. They call them stillborns, and it’s a word that has two meanings. They were still when they were born, yes, but yet they were still born and they deserve to be remembered, to be grieved.”

  He couldn’t tell how honest she was being. There was something about her explanation that didn’t ring true to him.

  “So you take pictures of women holding their stillborn children. I’m not sure what this has to do with me. I write novels. I don’t write about dead babies.”

  “In our culture we hide our dead. We shield ourselves from the sting of death. In India when someone dies, the newspapers will run a photograph of the person’s face—but not a recent smiling picture of them alive, but rather a photo of the face of their corpse.”

  “I’m still not sure what you want from me, Miss Springman.”

  “We start a new site. A photo album for people with similar interests to the ones we have.”

  “And those interests would be?”

  * * *

  +++

  Alright, just get it out there, she thought. Just say it.

  “You kill people, Mr. Sabian. Here’s what I propose: you kill them, I photograph them, and I help you clean up the scene. Neither one of us wants to get caught. I’ll make sure we don’t.”

  He was quiet for a moment, then scratched fiercely at the side of his abdomen. “You worked in law enforcement?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you help me solve a murder?”

  “Whose?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I need to make sure.”

  “What do you need to make sure of?”

  “That I didn’t kill anyone. There are a couple of people that I know who’ve gone missing, and I want to make sure I wasn’t the one who killed them.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  He shook his head. “The voices tell me I have, but I don’t know.”

  Julianne wondered what to do. She could shoot him here, now, and walk away. But she doubted Blake would give her another name.

  Test the waters, and if necessary, take him out. You can always kill Blake yourself as well. It’ll be easy to pin his death on a guy who’s this unstable.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m in. How do you suggest we proceed?”

  “Miranda Walsh. See what you can find out about her death. Take until tomorrow night. I’ll meet you at nine. I know a good place by the river.”

  “Alright. Tell me everything you can about this Miranda Walsh.”

  * * *

  +++

  The person who’d paid the server to fawn over Timothy Sabian at the restaurant last night downloaded the photograph that the man had taken of the troubled novelist as he walked out the restaurant door.

  Timothy’s career had taken off several years ago, and it hadn’t been difficult to find him and to keep tabs on him. However, it’d also presented a dilemma—introduce himself or stay away?

  His job made it relatively easy to acquire a camera small enough and surreptitious enough to hide in the author’s home. In the end, he’d entered the house under the guise of upgrading the television’s cable connection and planted the camera in the living room.

  Just as he’d expected, Timothy had not recognized him.

  He’d felt strangely nostalgic being there with him like that, standing in the same room.

  Now, he watched Timothy through the video feed and listened to him speaking with this woman.

  It was quite a conversation.

  And the implications of it were intriguing. The two of them were planning to meet again tomorrow night at nine.

  Well then.

  It was time to clear his schedule.

  STAGE III

  Bargaining

  Torn hope. Shards of glass.

  A missing wallet. Emily’s hiding place.

  15

  Sunday, November 4

  I got up before dawn to look over the case files and spend some time evaluating what we knew about Jon Murray’s suicide.

  I didn’t want to discount the fact that Mannie had been present near the graveyard during the young man’s funeral. With Mannie there, it seemed like too much of a coincidence for the cases of Jon’s death and Mannie’s work to be unrelated. However, at the moment, I couldn’t put my finger on the connection between them.

  Jon’s dad had ordered an autopsy, and
it’d revealed no trace of alcohol in his system, but there was evidence of a synthetic drug called Selzucaine. Though I’d heard of it, I wasn’t too familiar with its effects. However, a little research told me that it was a party drug with the street name of Silver High. It lowered inhibition and made you more open to suggestion. Though having similar effects to cocaine, it was more of a hallucinogenic and more difficult to detect in the field and at border crossings, tougher even for drug dogs to sniff out.

  Being under the influence of the drug could’ve accounted for Jon’s inexplicable behavior but not the methodical way he went about his suicide, why he filmed it, or who the observer was.

  I had my notes spread across the kitchen table when Tessa appeared in the hallway. I quickly slid them into a single pile and flipped it over so she wouldn’t see anything related to the investigation.

  She’d been crying the last time I spoke with her. At least today she didn’t look upset.

  “Morning,” I said.

  “You know how sometimes you wake up with eye scabs?” she replied sleepily. She was wearing gray sweatpants and her favorite lounge-around-the-apartment T-shirt of House of Blood, one of her go-to screamer bands.

  “I don’t think they’re called eye scabs.”

  “Gritties? Crunchies?”

  “Crunchies?”

  “I’m just saying.” She yawned.

  “I think most people just call it getting sand in your eyes.”

  “It’s not sand, though. I mean, did you ever taste ’em?”

  “You—wait. You ate eye scabs?”

  “I thought they weren’t called that?”

  “We’ll go with it for now. You ate them?”

  “Back when I was a kid, sure. Kids eat boogers too. What’s worse—nose boogers or eye scabs?”

  Now that was a question I never would’ve thought I’d be asked.

  “Well?” she said.

  “I have a strict policy never to eat anything that comes out of my body.”

  “Probably a good idea.” She yawned again. “So are we gonna go to church?”