by Erik Carter
He and Nash sprinted off after Ike Gallo.
There was another thought tugging at Dale, pulling his attention from the fountain. Arancia. He’d left her behind, back near where Ike Gallo‘s Malibu sat crumpled into the lamp post, steaming. He’d had Nash lock his door, and of course he had done the same, but there would be cops soon on the scene. Would Arancia be impounded? Would someone try to steal her?
Dale couldn’t consider these thoughts. They were too dark.
And he had to catch the man who tried to burn down Chicago.
Gallo was ahead of Dale, sprinting, heading toward the lake. He ran out into Lake Shore Drive, crossing about eight lanes of traffic. Cars’ horns blared. People stuck their heads out their open windows and yelled at him.
Dale gave another quick glance back and saw that Nash was right behind him. Sprinting. They’d been in a couple of chases during this assignment, so Dale had already seen that Nash was a great runner. He was in excellent condition.
Dale and Nash dashed out onto Lake Shore. More horns, more screaming motorists. Dale spotted Gallo farther away, almost to the sidewalk. He was worming his way through traffic better than Dale and Nash. He was putting distance between them.
When Dale and Nash made it to the other side of the road, they reached a large concrete promenade that ran along the blue water of the lake. People were jogging, walking dogs, strolling hand-in-hand. On the water beyond, boats were tied up, bobbing gently. Seagulls floated through the air.
Dale didn’t know the full history, but he knew this area was called Queen’s Landing, commemorating the location where Queen Elizabeth II had visited Chicago.
Gallo stole a glance behind him and started running through the people.
This slowed him down just a bit, and Dale sprinted harder, gaining on Gallo. He could see the details clearly—the folds in the man shirt, the sunlight shining on his hair.
A hotdog vendor was in front of Gallo, and when he jumped to the side to dodge it, his shoe caught on the cement, causing him to stumble.
This gave Dale and Nash an opportunity. They closed the gap.
They were right behind him now. Within inches. Dale reached out. Couldn’t quite grab him.
A bike came in their direction, and Gallo snatched it, threw it down. The rider—a teenage girl with an Afro—tumbled away, and the bike landed directly in front of Dale and Nash.
Both of them ran right into it.
Nash hit the concrete hard and with a grunt. Dale tripped forward, limbs flailing in front of him, but he maintained his balance, recovered.
Ahead, Gallo pulled to the right to avoid a group of Chinese tourists. This put him closer to the water, right along the cement’s edge, right by the three-foot drop to the water.
Dale seized the moment.
He jumped at Gallo, his shoulder catching him in the lower back, and both men flew off the edge and hit the water with a splash.
Arms and legs thrashed as both men broke the surface, gasping for air. Dale saw Gallo right in front of him, only inches away. He pulled back a fist.
“No!” Gallo shouted. “I can’t swim! I can’t swim!”
Dale lowered his fist. And watched. He gave Gallo a moment, testing his claim.
And he quickly determined that Gallo had either been truthful … or he was a really good actor. He sputtered and gasped, arms swinging hard and chopping the water.
Dale thought it safe to take him at his word.
“All right, all right,” he said. “Grab onto my back.”
Gallo hooked his arms around Dale’s neck.
Dale began swimming back to the ledge.
“You’re under arrest, by the way.”
Dale was still dripping with lake water as he and Nash walked through the Chicago FBI Field Office. FBI agents in suits cheered them on, congratulating them, slapping them on their backs.
One wise guy said to Dale, “Heard you took a little swim, secret agent man. You a klutz or something?”
“Your mom didn’t think so last night,” Dale said with a wink.
The wise guy laughed in appreciation, thumped Dale on the shoulder.
“You know that guy?” Nash said.
“Nope.”
They entered the temporary office they’d been given for the duration of the assignment, a stark, nearly empty room with a table in the center and shelves in the back with a couple cardboard boxes and some cleaning supplies. Dale shut the door behind them and started fluffing out his hair with his fingers, drying it.
“And now they’re gonna want some paperwork from us,” Dale said, tilting his head to drain water out of his ear. “Ugh. Might as well get it over with. Let me see my notebook, would ya?”
Nash’s briefcase was on one of the shelves in the back next to a tub of bleach. He grabbed it and retrieved a spiral-bound notebook, which he handed to Dale.
“Thanks.”
Dale opened it and immediately saw from the writing that it wasn’t his notebook. He closed it, looked at the front cover, which was purple.
“This isn’t mine,” he said. “My notebook is red.”
A peculiar expression came to Nash. It was almost a panicked look, and he quickly reached out for the notebook.
“Oh, then let me have that back.”
Something about the odd expression didn’t sit well with Dale. It was a very strange and unwarranted reaction. Also, he’d spotted something strange in the moment the notebook was open, a few dark words
… I want to kill the bitch and …
Dale stepped aside, avoiding Nash’s reach. He opened the notebook again. Looked inside.
And felt sick.
“What the hell is this?”
Chapter Nineteen
Ventress was laughing at him. And this made Nash hate her even more
“So you accidentally turned yourself in?” Another burst of laughter bent her over, a hand going to her stomach. “You just handed the notebook right to Conley. Lord, if I didn’t know this was a tragedy, I’d swear it was a comedy.”
She laughed again, slapped the table.
“Are you done?” Nash said.
She straightened up and adjusted the jacket of her skirt suit. “You’ll forgive an old gal, Mr. Harbick. I’ve heard of a lot of agents doing a lot of stupid things, but none quite so magnificently stupid as that.”
She shook her head, chuckling to herself, and stepped a few feet away, took another folder out of the cardboard box.
“And in that notebook you wrote out all your secret desires related to Ike Gallo’s wife, the things you wanted to do to her. Let me guess. This was a technique some shrink told you to do, yes? To ‘journal’ your thoughts?”
“That’s right.”
“And those thoughts got really tasty after you met Tricia Gallo, didn’t they? The wife of the lunatic who was burning up cities around the Great Lakes.” She flipped through the contents of the folder. “Oh, here’s a photo of her. Wooooow. She is a cute little thing, isn’t she?”
Nash didn’t respond.
“Well, don’t you agree?”
“Very pretty, yes.”
“You were attracted to her straight away.”
“Yes.”
Ventress pulled the photo out of the folder, held it up. She was doing this for Nash’s sake, in theory, but she displayed it in a way that showed it off to the whole room. More humiliation.
Nash hadn’t seen an image of Tricia Gallo in three years. The heart-shaped face with soft cheeks and sky-high cheekbones. A little point of a chin. Dark eyes. In the photo, her mouth was parted the smallest bit, a tiny opening between her small, full lips.
Ventress craned her face to the side, peeked at the photo. “Oh, yes, I bet she looked at you with those big doe eyes, all scared of what her husband was doing, what he might do to her. And you liked it. Her fear. I bet she smelled good too. Real nice perfume, huh? Something flowery and sweet?”
Taft's deep voice came from the other end of the table. “Knock it o
ff.”
Nash turned and saw Taft glaring at Ventress.
She smirked it off, looked back to the folder.
“If you liked her so much, Harbick, I don’t understand why you’d want to hurt her so bad. Here’s a quote from your notebook. ‘I want to see the look of fear in Tricia Gallo’s eyes when she sees me approach from the darkness with a knife.’ And another. ‘To be next to Tricia, to feel her soft flesh, to feel her panicked breathing under my fingers as I squeeze into her neck and—’”
Taft cut her off. “That’s enough!”
Ventress glanced his direction then snapped the folder shut, and tossed it on the table.
“I don’t need to read anymore. Hell, I don’t want to. That’s all it takes for everyone in this room to know how deranged you are, Harbick. You disgust me. Freak. There’s a reason why the world weeds out people like you, pushes them to the side, isolates them where they can’t do any harm. You goddamn monster.”
Taft bolted out of his chair. “That’s enough! Jesus Christ, lady!”
Ventress locked eyes with Taft and gestured toward Nash.
“This is the kind of person that your ‘top man’ brought on as a consultant. Maybe Nash’s deranged bullshit is the reason why Conley took the girl. Maybe after so many grisly cases in his career, Conley listened to Harbick spurt off some psycho evil like that shit in his notebook, and it sent him over the edge. Maybe, Taft, Conley’s hurting that girl. Right this very moment. Now sit your ass down. I’m not through with my investigation.”
Taft stared at her coldly and sat down.
Ventress turned back to Nash.
“Conley found your filthy notebook. Then what happened?”
Chapter Twenty
Dale couldn’t believe what he was looking at.
“This is your handwriting, Nash...”
“Yeah, that’s just ... it’s nothing. Let me have it back.”
Nash reached. Dale turned his shoulder, not looking away from the notebook.
Endless pages of dark fantasies.
About Tricia Gallo.
He read aloud. “‘I want to see Tricia Gallo in pain. And in her underwear. In pain and in her underwear.’”
Nash laughed nervously. “I was just clowning around. Let me have that.”
Dale continued staring into the notebook. He flipped through it.
“There are pages and pages of this shit. ‘I want to hear Tricia’s pretty lips say my name as her dying words.’ ‘I wonder what she looks like when she...’”
He trailed off. It got worse. And Dale had seen enough.
He closed the notebook, brought it to his side.
“This is serious, Nash.”
Nash laughed nervously again.
“Be still, Dale. It’s just a gag.”
“Be still? Be still?? You think I’m overreacting? I just found a notebook filled with hundreds of pages of my partner’s fantasies about hurting the woman we’ve been sworn to protect.”
Nash shook his head, still smiling. “I just—”
“Stop. Stop trying to play this off. You know I’m right. Get that stupid smile off your face.”
Nash finally released the nervous smile. Fear in his eyes now.
“How long have you had these fantasies?”
“Since we first met her,” Nash said quietly. “Back when we—”
“No, I mean how long have you had any dark thoughts like this?”
Nash’s voice was even quieter when he responded. “Almost as long as I can remember. Since I was about eight years old or so.”
Dale exhaled. And he thought things over.
What was he to do now? What was the best course of action?
He didn’t have to think long.
There was only one option…
“There. Now you know,” Nash said. “Let me have my notebook.”
He reached for it. Dale sidestepped
“Come on, Dale. Stop foolin’.”
He reached again, a frustrated look on his face this time.
Dale shoved him away, hard, with his free hand.
“No, Nash. I’m going to report this.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Ventress was almost starting to enjoy this.
What had begun as an investigation that she’d found disgusting—both Conley’s actions and the revelations about Harbick’s sick mind—had turned into something so strange, so outrageous that she couldn’t wait to hear what Harbick had to say next. It was all so bizarre, so nuanced. And Harbick was such a screwup. It was fun to watch him squirm. Conley was a screwup too, and Ventress was having just as much fun with him—and the guy wasn’t even there!
“Conley gets you kicked out of the Bureau for being a sicko,” she said with a grin as she stepped nearer to Harbick, invading his space. “And then three years later he asks for your help on this case because you’re a sicko. That takes some balls.”
Harbick shrugged matter-of-factly. “If there’s anything we’ve proven so far at this little trial of yours, it’s that Dale Conley has guts and he does what he needs to get the job done.”
“We’ve also proven that there’s still a serial killer roaming around Hot Springs, chopping up young women,” she said. “We’ve also proven that Dale Conley is missing. Both of those points have been very well established.”
She stared into him for a moment, asserting her power.
“It must have been real tough working with him,” she continued after a moment, “this man who banished you to the periphery of society where you belong.”
Harbick looked down at the table in front of him. “It was a challenge, yes.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
The previous morning.
As Dale sat on the couch in the hallway outside Mira Lyndon’s hospital room, waiting for the psychiatrist’s clearance to talk to her, he was still catching the occasional whiff of the loathsome hospital smell. But he’d been there for so long—hours now—that he’d gotten somewhat used to it. He knew, though, that he would still be smelling it later. On his clothes. Lingering in his nostrils.
There was no longer any screaming coming from the room. The hallway was quiet but for the typical hospital noises—the beeps of medical equipment, hushed chatter, doors opening and closing.
Dale looked at a framed picture. In the photograph were Mira Lyndon and her boyfriend, Clyde Bowen. He was short, the same height as his girlfriend, with very dark hair halfway to his shoulders, dark eyes, and a full beard, also dark in color. The photo’s colors were a bit washed out, but it looked like Bowen’s skin tone was olive, giving him a slightly exotic look.
Mira sure did seem to like him. She was plastered against him, huge smile. He had his arm around her back and wore a confident, almost smug grin, lips closed.
Dale focused on Mira. The smile was bright, as were her eyes, which sat behind a pair of glasses. She had a very nice figure, which her simple outfit—a T-shirt and bellbottoms—showed off.
And while this was something that Dale typically noticed—a nice figure—he did so now with a two-pronged pang of guilt. First, he was looking at a photo of a woman and her boyfriend. Dale made it a point not ogle married and otherwise taken women … as much as possible.
Also, and perhaps more importantly, was the fact that this same woman, whose image he was having a hard time taking his eyes off, was lying in bed only feet away. Beaten up. Cut up. Having just been attacked by a serial killer.
Dale didn't feel so much like a pig … as he did a creep.
But he couldn't help it. There was something … different about Mira Lyndon. And it pulled him in. As he looked at her image in the photograph, he tried to figure it out. She was extremely thin, and yet she wasn’t at all gangly. She had perfect proportions, carrying her thinness exquisitely. Well-shaped legs. Toned arms. Long but not too long torso. Her breasts—poking against her T-shirt—were small, but, again, perfectly proportioned. Completely perfect. Her face was smooth and round. Hair, dark and straight. Her e
yes were dark as well.
None of these qualities screamed out. It was the sum that created the whole. And if he was being completely honest with himself—if he pushed aside the guilt—he would have to admit that this was the most attracted to a woman he’d been in a long time. A very long time. It was magnetic.
She couldn't have been much taller than five-foot-six or -seven, so while she was fairly tall, she was no Redwood. Yet everything about her was long and sinuous. Twisting. Those proportioned legs, tiny yet toned arms. He imagined her abdominals—hidden under the shirt—to be tight and smooth with the long, thin indentation running up the center. And…
And that's where he stopped his imagination.
He just couldn't let himself think like this about her, about someone who had just been attacked so viciously.
What the hell was he doing?
Nash approached and sat down next to him. Dale was thankful for the distraction.
“What’s that?” Nash said, gesturing at the frame.
“Someone brought her flowers and this photo of her and the boyfriend.”
“May I see it?”
Dale hesitated. He looked at Nash but didn't hand him the photo.
Nash smirked. “Oh, I see. You don’t want me to see it. Don’t want the weirdo to see the woman in question. You know, they’re going to let us in that room any minute now, and I’m going to see her in person, wounds and all. You recruited me for this assignment. How am I supposed to be your consultant if you won’t even let me look at a snapshot?”
Dale didn’t respond, just handed the frame to Nash.
Nash looked it over for a moment and handed it back.
“We never spoke again, you and me,” he said. “After that last visit you made in Detroit.”
“It wasn’t by lack of interest. You made that decision, Nash. The BEI could have helped you and—”
“I’m not pointing fingers. I just want you to know what a rotten situation you’ve put me in.”
Dale pointed to the hospital room.
