by Erik Carter
Ern was still angled against the fence, his face lodged between the bars. Dale grabbed his shoulder, pulled him off the fence and onto his back. His eyes were wide open, staring into the black sky.
Dale feebly, stupidly put a pair of fingers to Ern’s neck.
Dead.
Dale took two steps backwards. His back struck a tree. His eyes locked on Ern’s body. He put his hands in his hair, and he slid down the tree till he hit the earth.
Movement on the other side of the fence. He looked. Red-and-blue lights from the street outside the house. The family inside, clustered by the glass rear doors, silhouetted by warm light. Cops running across the lawn toward him
And standing on the sidewalk, under a pool of light from a streetlight, was Nash.
Dale’s hands were still in his hair, his elbows on his knees. He looked at Ern again and reached out to close the man’s eyelids.
In a movie, this would be a special moment. In a movie, the eyes would close when Dale brushed his hand over them.
But when Dale retracted his hand, the eyes were still open, still looking into the black sky.
Dale reached out, tried again. And finally the damn things closed.
He shuddered. And put his hands back in his hair as the shouting of the cops drew nearer.
Chapter Fifteen
As Ventress watched Harbick describe how Conley had led Plunkett to his death, she saw the man grow quieter again.
Harbick had been acting tougher, being more assertive. But it was all false bravado. Bring a little death into the equation, and little boys like Harbick turn in on themselves.
Harbick had just described how he crossed the yard with the local police and found Conley sitting on the other side of the fence, a foot away from Plunkett’s dead body. Elbows on his knees, hands in his hair, head hung.
“I’d never seen him like that,” Harbick said.
“Distraught?”
“No. Still in control of himself but ... distant. Almost shell-shocked.”
“And yet he’d just met Plunkett, only hours earlier,” Ventress said. “I’m sure Conley has seen lots of people die in front of him in his line of work. What makes Ernie Plunkett’s murder different? Gee, it’s almost as though Conley felt guilt for dragging a guy into an investigation he was never supposed to be a part of, only to get the guy killed a few hours later.”
Harbick still had a somber look in his eye, and his voice was quiet as he described Conley’s reaction. “Dale couldn’t get over that Ern had just invited us to meet his wife and kids. For some reason Dale was fixated on that.”
Jesus. What a sap.
Ventress felt like she was reading some sort of cheesy women’s romance, full of high emotion and lofty language and cliches. She’d let Harbick wallow in his pathetic feelings. She had work to do.
She turned away from him, stealing a quick glance at the clock before looking over the table at the others.
It was 3:34.
Excellent. Only another hour and a half of this crap.
“Had the killer claimed another victim?” she said to no one in particular.
Detective Sadler leaned forward in his seat, placed his arms on the table.
“Lenora Page. Twenty-four-year-old black female. Owner of one of the art galleries downtown. Her throat was slashed—but not as deep as the Mancini girl’s. Our guy didn’t mutilate her like he did Mancini either. She was found in the space between her detached studio and her home.”
“Another message?”
Sadler nodded and grabbed a ratty old briefcase off the ground, plopped it on the table.
“He’d scrawled it out on the studio’s wall,” Sadler said, digging through a stack of loose, bent-up papers in the briefcase. “He used artist’s paint he’d gotten from inside the studio. Here.”
He pulled out an eight-by-ten photo, held it up for the room to see. It was another crude message, like those in the other two photos Ventress had seen.
She read it aloud.
“She was a real peach.” Ventress let the words roll through her brain for a moment, then she turned her attention back to Harbick. “And Conley, in all his historical genius, was able to make a connection to an unsolved serial killer?”
“He was,” Harbick replied, once more using that edgier tone she’d picked up on. “The Atlanta Ripper. A black serial killer. 1911 to 1912. Never brought to justice. Sliced black women’s throats. It fit the pattern Dale had found. Each new murder emulated an unidentified serial killer from history, and the victims were modeled after the original victims.”
“So Conley was able to decipher a pattern,” Ventress said. “Yet he wasn’t able to make a connection between the different serial killers our guy is imitating, was he? He wasn’t able to figure out when or where or who our guy is going to strike next, was he?”
“Obviously not,” Harbick said coldly.
The petulant little shit.
“Yes, ‘obviously not,’ is right,” Ventress said. “Because after you two weren’t able to stop Lenora Page’s murder two nights ago, you got a call in the wee hours of the morning yesterday … about a fourth attack.”
Chapter Sixteen
The ringing telephone woke Dale with a jolt.
He propped himself on an elbow, and it only took him half a moment to remember where he was.
The Sawmill Inn. A cheap motor lodge.
With all the historic hotels in Hot Springs, Dale had found himself in a place like this. What a shame. But cheap motels were company policy. Or, rather, the policy of his boss, SAC Walter Taft, who required his agents to get the second cheapest lodging available during their assignments. It saved Taft money—Taft being a notorious penny-pincher—but it also covered Taft’s ass. If anyone asked, he could honestly say that he didn’t force his agents to stay at the cheapest available lodging.
Dale tugged the chain on the small lamp at his bedside. Squinted at the light. The blanket covering him was thin, scratchy. The walls were scuffed. The TV was small and black-and-white.
He grabbed his watch from the nightstand. It was 3:45 in the morning. He picked up the receiver.
“Hello?”
He listened.
And then he said, “We’ll be right there.”
The smell of hospitals always got to Dale. It had since he was a kid. Something about the combination of cleaners and disinfectants and medicines and body odor. And as he stood at the nurses’ station, he tried to push the nauseated feeling aside, focusing instead on the highly attractive nurse he was talking to. Even if she’d not responded at all to his attempt at charm.
Oblivious. She was just oblivious. Yes, that had to be it.
“Around the corner. At the end of the hall,” the nurse said, pointing, but not looking up from her clipboard.
“Thank you,” Dale said, giving a big smile to the top of her head as he turned to leave. Nash followed.
As they headed toward the corner the nurse had indicated, Dale heard something. In the distance.
Screams.
He and Nash exchanged a look.
They turned the corner and saw at the end of the hall a young, black, uniformed cop standing beside an open doorway. Through the doorway, Dale could see a curtain drawn around a hospital bed. There was a gap in the curtain, and through this gap he could see flurries of activity—thrashing limbs of someone in the bed and multiple medical personnel. A very short man in dingy dress clothes stood outside the curtain, watching, his back to the doorway.
The man turned around. It was Sadler. He saw them approaching and stepped out of the room, walked up to them just beyond the doorway.
“Conley, good to see you again, bud. How you doing after last night?”
Dale shook Sadler’s hand. “I’m good. Thanks, Sadler.”
Sadler glanced at Nash. “Mr. Harbick.”
“Detective.”
Dale nodded toward the hospital room and the commotion. “What do we got?”
“An attempted victim. Atta
cked in her home. She managed to trip the guy and slip away. She got in her car and sped off. Made it a mile before she drove off the road into a telephone pole.”
“What’s her condition?”
“Physically, she’s going to be fine. Multiple cuts and stab wounds, but nothing deeper than an inch. Abrasions. Contusions to the neck. Wounds to her right ear. Mentally, though ... that’s a different story. She’s been in hysterics since they found her in her car.”
“Name?”
“Mira Lyndon.”
“What do we know about her?”
“A local, like the other victims. Lifelong Hot Springs resident. She works at one of the hotels. A maid. She’s the girlfriend of Clyde Bowen.”
“You say that name like it means something,” Dale said. “Is he a big shot in town?”
Sadler laughed out loud.
“No. Not quite. Just an average Joe. Works at the Alistaire bathhouse. A masseuse. But he’s pretty well known around town. One of those kind of guys.”
“You know him?”
“I know of him. Met him a few times.”
Dale nodded toward the room and all the screaming. “Is he in there?”
Sadler shook his head. “Couldn’t reach him by phone. I’m about to swing by his house.”
“Did Mira say how the attack happened?”
Sadler shook his head again.
“Did she give a description of the killer?”
“Just that he had crazy eyes. She kept repeating that. Crazy eyes, crazy eyes.”
“We can’t very well start pulling in everyone in town who has crazy eyes,” Dale said.
He ran a hand over his face. Another victim. A survivor, thank god, but Dale was no closer to answers than he’d been when he arrived. He hoped his frustration didn’t show to Sadler and Nash. He wasn’t being callous to Mira Lyndon. He just didn’t want anyone else to end up like her, chopped up, screaming in hysterics.
Sadler pointed back into the hospital room, where Mira Lyndon’s thrashing and screaming continued. “That’s the shrink in there now, Dr. Wells. He and those nurses are trying to get a sedative in her. He said that once it sets in, we might be able to talk to her.”
Dale looked behind them. There was a small couch.
“What do you say, Nash? Want to wait?”
Nash checked his watch. “I don’t have anywhere else to be at 4:30 in the morning.”
“I’m afraid I do, however,” Sadler said. “I gotta go find Clyde Bowen. And tell him somebody cut up his girlfriend.”
Chapter Seventeen
Ventress looked at Nash with an anxious, hungry, dark smile—as if the words she had resting on her tongue were so deliciously twisted she could hardly wait to get them out.
“You liked that, didn’t you?” she said. “Sitting in the hallway, listening to Mira Lyndon’s screams.”
“Honest answer?”
Ventress nodded.
“Yes,” he said.
Nash hated her. Hated her. Oh god, he despised her. She was trying to humiliate him.
But he could hurt her…
“Sick. Just sick,” Ventress said. “That’s the sort of thing that got you kicked out of the FBI, isn’t it?”
“You know that it is.”
“If only fate hadn’t paired you with Dale Conley, you might have continued to live your little double-life. God, what star-crossed morons you two are. Absolutely amazing that you crossed paths. What was it? What sent Conley to you in Detroit?”
“Like all his assignments, there was a historical connection to our case. And it was a fascinating one.”
They were in Nash’s office in downtown Detroit. It was the first time they’d had a chance to go there during the assignment, and Nash was proud to show it off. It had a chic, modern design—polished metal, black accents along the shelves, orange carpeting.
But Nash could tell that Dale was too distracted to be impressed. He was too engrossed in historical intrigue. They could have held their discussion in a gas station bathroom; it wouldn’t have mattered to Dale. At that moment, the only thing of interest to Dale was the bit of unsolved historical mystery he’d unearthed, which was going to help them catch Ike Gallo.
“Do you see what I’m getting at?” Dale said. He had a huge, excited smile with a complementing set of wide and twinkling eyes. A pure, childlike enthusiasm.
“I’m afraid I don’t,” Nash said.
“Where was the biggest fire our arsonist has set so far?”
“Peshtigo, Wisconsin.”
“Exactly. Imitating the worst fire in American history, one that destroyed Peshtigo and a dozen other villages, killing a minimum of 1,200 people but perhaps twice as many. Absolutely devastating. But it’s been mostly forgotten. The worst fire in American history has … been lost to history. Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”
“Of course it does. But it’s not my job to—”
Dale held up a finger.
“I’d noticed Peshtigo’s date during my research, didn’t give it much thought until it lined up with another date.”
Dale rolled out the regional map of the Great Lakes area that they’d been using for the case. His hand writing was on the map, black ink Xs scattered over the region.
“In addition to the fire in Peshtigo, Ike Gallo has set the four fires in Michigan: Alpena, Port Huron, Holland, and Manistee. And all four of these towns have devastating fires in their histories.”
Nash waved his hand impatiently. “Which is exactly why you were brought on—to analyze that history. What’s your point?“
“The date! All of the Michigan fires happened on the same day. They are collectively known as the Great Michigan Fire. October 8, 1871. And these places aren’t close to each other. Not by any means. They’re all over the state, hundreds of miles apart. A pretty amazing and devastating coincidence, don’t you think?”
“How could it not be amazing?” Nash said. “But it’s not like it’s not been noticed. You said yourself—the event got a collective name, the Great Michigan Fire.”
“I also mentioned that the Peshtigo Fire was the worst fire in American history, but it’s been lost to time in only a hundred years. Guess the date on the Peshtigo Fire.”
Nash paused for a moment before he answered. “October 8, 1871?”
“Bingo,” Dale said.
Nash had to hand it to Dale. Even in the midst of their hunt for Ike Gallo, this historical revelation he’d uncovered made Nash’s mouth open in surprise. “That’s … that’s pretty wild, Dale. But what I need to know is how Ike Gallo—”
Dale held up a finger again.
“But wait. There’s more,” Dale said in the cheesy voice of a television commercial narrator. “We’ve established that Peshtigo is the worst fire in American history. But what’s the most famous fire in American history?”
“The Great Chicago Fire, of course,” Nash said. “Mrs. O’Leary’s clumsy cow and all that.”
“And from where does Ike Gallo, the firefighter-turned-arsonist we’re chasing, hail?”
“Chicago.”
Dale grinned. “Want to take a guess as to the date of the Great Chicago Fire?”
Nash paused. “No way…”
“Say it, Nash.”
“October 8, 1871.”
“That actually … is pretty fascinating,” Ventress said. Her mouth was wide open. “All those massive fires … on the same day …”
Dale’s historical find was so beguiling, it had even impressed Alberta Ventress…
“That’s right,” Nash said. “And all scattered around the Great Lakes. Dale found a few different theories for the coincidence. One of the ideas is that a meteor shower hit the region.”
Ventress shook her head with amazement. Smiled. Then caught herself. She regrouped, put the scowl back on her face, and crossed her arms.
“That was Dale in his element,” Nash said. “Stitching together pieces of historical intrigue. That’s how I know him—a smile on his face and a
smartass comment coming out of his mouth. Not like when I last saw him. In the rain.”
“What was different?” Ventress said.
Nash’s mind flashed back to the hospital. Rain washing over Dale’s cheeks. The steely expression, the dark eyes. The gun.
“There was … so much darkness in his face. But I supposed that’ll happen when nothing’s going your way. Dale’s used to winning. He’s used to catching the bad guy.”
“What about Ike Gallo? Your bad guy in Chicago.”
“He was a Chicago firefighter, and his wife, Tricia, was the fire commissioner’s daughter. He’d always felt inferior, being a lowly firefighter, and when he got sacked, he was convinced it was his father-in-law’s doing. So he starts fires all around the Great Lakes, replicating the fires of October 8, 1871. Trying to make it look like Tricia’s dad had done it. The last piece was going to be Chicago, the city Tricia’s dad was sworn to protect. He was going to burn it like the Great Fire. We’d already found him out by then, so no one was ever going to think that Tricia’s father did it. But Ike thought he could still humiliate the man.”
“And, of course, you stopped him.”
“Indeed.”
“And that’s how Conley found you out in Chicago, as I understand it. Right after you two caught the bad guy.”
Chapter Eighteen
The misty air surrounding Chicago’s Buckingham Fountain felt cool, refreshing against Dale’s skin. The water show was in full swing, and in addition to the spray it was creating, there was also the thunderous, booming sounds of the jets of water. Dale caught a glimpse of the center jet shooting way up above him, 150 feet in the air. It was a stunning display and one that Dale would love to witness had he not been chasing an arsonist.