Jack Daniels Six Pack

by J. A. Konrath

  “It’s easy. A guy I know is getting married, and he needs some people to stand up.”

  “You want me to stand up at a wedding for some guy I don’t know?”

  “Yeah. But this isn’t the wedding. It’s the rehearsal dinner.”

  Phin shrugged. “Sure.”

  “Thanks. I don’t know the time yet. Can I call you?”

  “No phone. I’ll call you, day of.”

  We played one more game, he won, and then we said our good-byes and I headed home. It turned out asking guys on dates wasn’t so hard after all.

  I entered my building and passed my new neighbor walking down my hall. She wore the same dirty uniform she had on that morning, and carried a large leather satchel.

  Though she didn’t look at me, I heard her whisper “Bitch” as she passed. I let it go. I’d already gone Rambo on her once today. Besides, the woman was entitled to her opinion.

  Back at my apartment, Mr. Friskers surprised me by leaving no surprises. No mess. No destruction. Everything was exactly as I’d left it.

  This bothered me. Perhaps he was sick. Or perhaps he’d spent the day deep in thought, plotting the annihilation of the human race.

  “Mr. Friskers? Where are you?”

  I made a kissing sound.

  There was an unbearable screech that shook my core foundations, and the cat launched himself at me from atop the refrigerator. He landed on my chest, claws digging in, and I had to clench to avoid soiling myself.

  My sweatshirt protected me from any scarring, but my heart was beating so hard I could feel it thump against the inside of my rib cage.

  I unhooked the cat from the fabric and placed him on the floor. He sat and stared up at me, apparently pleased.

  “You’re under arrest,” I told him.

  He yawned, then walked over to the litter box and began kicking litter onto the floor.

  I checked my answering machine. Nothing. Then I searched for edibles and found a can of potato soup that I made easy work of. I also had some vanilla wafers, but only after promising myself I’d exercise in the morning.

  My evening’s entertainment consisted of the new Robert B. Parker book, which Herb had bought me for Christmas. Why couldn’t I meet a guy like Spenser? To make it work I’d have to get rid of his shrink girlfriend, but I figured that was no big loss.

  When I was getting too tired to read I turned off the light and tried to sleep.

  Sleep didn’t come. I had a zillion things running through my head, and my mind refused to shut off. I thought about my mom. About Latham. About the case. About Herb. My hand hurt, and I couldn’t get comfortable, and I finally just gave up and flipped on the TV.

  Big mistake. The Home Shopping Club was selling designer shoes. I bought some black Prada sling-backs, some brown Miu Miu sandals, and thankfully they were out of my size in Dolce & Gabbana, because my credit card wouldn’t have been able to handle the shock.

  Two a.m. crept by. Then three. Then four. Then five. I tossed and turned, and finally dozed off trying to picture a woman stupid enough to marry Harry McGlade.

  Chapter 19

  THE PHONE WOKE me up, which was a blessing. I’d been in the middle of a dream where I had to warn some children that danger was coming, but no matter how hard I screamed, no sound came out.

  After shaking away the disorientation, I picked up the receiver.

  “Daniels.”

  “Morning, Jack.”

  I sat up. “Hi, Herb. How are you doing?”

  “Okay. Didn’t mean to be a jerk the other day.”

  “You’ve got a lot on your mind. Any results yet?”

  “We should find out today. I heard about the fire. You coming in to work? I’ve got something.”

  I looked at the clock. Nine twenty. I’d gotten about four hours of sleep. Not too bad.

  “What is it?”

  “I got in early, went through the old Gingerbread Man files. Something was missing. I remember searching Kork’s house and finding an address book. Wasn’t there.”

  “Misfiled?”

  “Signed out. Bill checked the sheet, and the last person to go through the Kork stuff was our old friend Barry Fuller, right after the case ended. So I had Bill pull Barry’s things, and found the address book.”

  “You wouldn’t be telling me this unless you found something.”

  “Book was mostly empty, except for some scribbles. They look like the letter L, except some of them were upside down and backwards.”

  That got me fully awake. “Is it a code?” “I’ll tell you when you get here.”

  I showered, and dressed in a gray Shin Choi A-line skirt, a white Barbara Graffeo blouse, and some Dior flats, no hose. The shoes were acquired at an outlet store and had been mispriced. I got them for eight bucks. I remember holding my breath when the cashier rang them up, figuring she’d notice. She didn’t. That’s been the high point of my year so far.

  The day was dark, cool. Looked like rain. I stopped at the churros cart before going to my office, and bought Herb two with extra cinnamon.

  “Churros?” Benedict lit up like a hundred-watt bulb. “Jack, my stomach thanks you. Both for me?”

  “Both for you.”

  He bit a sizeable portion out of the first. “Mmmm. I’m taking you to dinner on your birthday.”

  Benedict had been saying that for years. By my count, he owed me 108 dinners.

  “What have you got, Herb?”

  He handed me the address book, open to the page with the scribbles on it.

  “I thought it was a doodle at first. But then I realized it had ten characters.”

  “A phone number with an area code.”

  Herb nodded, his mouth full of fried Mexican dough. While he chewed, I stared at the symbols.

  “Pigpen code.”

  My partner frowned. “That took me an hour to figure out.”

  “We learned it in Girl Scouts.” I drew a quick tic-tac-toe board and filled it in with numbers. “Each symbol represents the number inside it. So the first number is a two.”

  Herb stared at me as if I’d grown a tail. “You were a Girl Scout?”

  “My mother thought it would build character.”

  “Can you get cookies at a discount?”

  I quickly deciphered the first nine numbers. The dot on the end had to stand for a zero.

  I clucked my tongue. “Two-one-nine area code. Indiana.”

  “I already looked up the number. It’s in Gary. Unlisted. And you won’t believe who it belongs to.”

  Herb waited for me to ask, so I did.

  “Tell me if this name sounds familiar, Jack. The owner of that phone number is Bud Kork.”

  “The Gingerbread Man’s father?”

  We’d tried to locate him after the murders, but he never turned up.

  “The one and only.”

  I thought about the jar of severed toes, all of them at least thirty years old. Too old for Charles Kork to have done it, but not too old for his father.

  “Insanity runs in families.” Herb shoved the remainder of the churros in his mouth.

  I rolled it around in my head. Could our perp be the father, taking over where his son left off?

  Only one way to find out for sure.

  “Want to go for a ride?”

  Chapter 20

  GARY, INDIANA, LIES forty minutes east of Chicago. I filled Herb in while he drove, covering everything I’d done over the last few days. Rather than praise my heroics, Benedict latched on to the mundane.

  “I can’t believe that asshole McGlade is getting married. She a hooker?”

  “Haven’t met her yet. That sounds about right.”

  “Currency must be changing hands. There’s no other way. Unless the woman has some serious mental problems.”

  “I told you about the fire, right?”

  “Twice. Hey, if Bud Kork’s our man, how does the rental car fit in?”

  I shrugged. The other five Eclipses on my list had been found,
their side mirrors intact.

  “He could be working with an accomplice. Or Bud Kork might not be our man. Or maybe the fireman ID’ed the wrong car. Or maybe the car that lost the mirrors wasn’t driven by the killer—maybe it was just a citizen who panicked.”

  He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Lots of maybes.”

  “Someone killed Diane Kork and burned down her house. Someone familiar with the Gingerbread Man case.”

  “Could be a copycat.”

  I made a face. “In the thirty years you’ve been a cop, have you ever encountered a copycat killer?”

  “Not once. But it happens all the time on CSI.”

  Herb took a box of orange Tic Tacs out of his ashtray and offered them to me. I declined, and he emptied the whole box into his mouth.

  “Maybe,” he said, the candy clicking against his molars, “Diane Kork is the killer. She put a fake tattoo on the woman in the video, making us think she’s dead.”

  “I don’t think so. The tattoo was hard to see in the video.”

  “Still, we can’t rule it out. We haven’t found her body, and after what she lived through, maybe it pushed her over the edge.”

  “Diane Kork was a schoolteacher. Whoever shot me missed my head by less than an inch.”

  “Could have had lessons. Or could have gotten lucky.”

  Herb called Dispatch on his cell, and had them check if Diane Kork had a FOID card. Illinois required all gun owners to have one. The info came back quickly.

  “No firearm owner ID for Diane. But she could still have a gun.”

  “Doesn’t feel right to me. It’s someone else. I told you about the suitcase.”

  He frowned. “The guy’s keeping trophies.”

  Thrill killers liked to keep little reminders of their deeds. The burned human hair probably came from a scalp. And I knew the curved piece of metal was the underwire from a bra, having been poked by enough of them in my time.

  “If Diane Kork were the killer, I don’t think she’d keep a victim’s bra.”

  “Could have been Diane’s bra.”

  “Was it her hair too? We can call the Feebies, get a lecture about how rare female serial killers are, and how none have ever been found that take trophies from their victims. No, Herb, it’s someone else. Someone picking up where Charles Kork left off. Someone who knows the case.”

  “That could be twenty million people, Jack. Maybe more. Is the movie out on video yet?”

  “I hope not.”

  Before Fatal Autonomy became a crummy series, it was a crummy made-for-TV movie about the Kork case. I’d been forced to watch some of it; Harry had conned me into being a technical advisor.

  “For verisrealityitude,” he’d said.

  My input had been ignored, and the movie turned out to be a travesty. But it still had a lot of real facts in it. And after the case ended, there were the inevitable quickie true crime paperbacks, and that TV documentary.

  Much of the world knew about the Gingerbread Man. It made me reconsider the copycat angle.

  Herb slowed for the toll. We were about to get on the Skyway, Chicago’s largest bridge. It ran about eight miles long, and high enough to see deep into Indiana. Our view proffered a smattering of factories, their gigantic chimneys spitting copious amounts of smoke and filth, staining the overcast sky. Industry wasn’t pretty.

  We drove in silence for a few minutes before Herb finally spoke.

  “I’m scared.”

  I reached over and touched his arm.

  “You’ll be fine, Herb. Even if it is cancer, you’ll get through it.”

  “That’s what Bernice says.”

  “Smart lady.”

  “I’m the homicide cop, and she’s stronger than I am.”

  “People deal with death in different ways, Herb.”

  Drizzle accumulated on the windshield. Herb hit the wipers, causing a dirty rainbow smear.

  “Do you ever think about death, Jack?”

  “Sometimes. I almost died yesterday, in the fire.”

  “Were you afraid?”

  “At first. Then I accepted it, and I was just sad.”

  Herb’s voice, normally rock solid, had a quaver in it. “My father died of cancer. Strongest man I ever knew. By the end he weighed ninety pounds, had to be spoon-fed.”

  I thought of my mother, steadily losing weight despite the feeding tube. I pushed away the image and tried to be jovial.

  “Don’t get your hopes up, Herb. You’ll never weigh ninety pounds.”

  My joke fell flat. Herb looked out of his side window. We passed a particularly ugly factory, its smokestack belching flames like the great Oz’s palace.

  “What scares me the most is no longer existing. Everything I am, everything I think, everything I feel, all of my memories and thoughts and dreams— erased. Like I’ve never been here at all.”

  “You’ve got family, Herb. And friends. They’ll remember you.”

  Herb’s face was a mask of sadness. “But when I’m dead, I won’t remember them.”

  We continued down I-90 east for another twenty minutes. The expressway was newer, and the asphalt better, on the Indiana side. It ran parallel to a train track for a while, and then we turned north on Cline and west on Gary Avenue, and we were soon on the plains, no buildings for miles.

  I checked the MapQuest directions.

  “We’re looking for Summit. Should be coming up.”

  “Nothing’s coming up. Except some cows. Hey!”

  Herb pointed to the right. I followed his finger to a large bale of hay.

  I didn’t laugh, but at least he’d snapped out of his funk.

  Summit turned out to be a dirt road, and it ended at a 1950s prefab ranch, the front yard overgrown with weeds. Ancient appliances and rusty old farm equipment peppered the property, and an old barn that looked like Godzilla had stepped on it sat behind the house.

  “Is this it?” Herb asked.

  “Has to be. There’s no place else.”

  “It looks like the shack from The Beverly Hillbillies.”

  “Or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

  Herb parked next to a Ford pickup truck that looked old enough to run on regular gas.

  “Ready to meet the monster’s father?”

  Herb nodded and we got out of the car. The closer we walked, the worse it looked. The roof was missing half its shingles. Several boards on the front porch had rotted away. So much white paint was flaking off the sides, the house looked like a paper birch tree.

  I took out my badge, and noticed Benedict already had his in hand.

  Wouldn’t be smart to surprise the occupant. It was too easy to picture him crouched behind the front door with a shotgun, waiting for strangers to trespass.

  Herb hesitated before getting onto the porch, eyeing it dubiously. I went first. The warped wood groaned, but it took my weight. Benedict followed, stepping gingerly.

  I knocked, a thin, hollow sound.

  “Bud Kork? This is the police.”

  We waited.

  No answer.

  I knocked again.

  “Mr. Kork? We see your truck outside. We know you’re home.”

  A voice filtered through the closed door. “Come on in. I’m getting dressed.”

  I looked at Herb, and we both put our hands on our holsters. He pushed the door open, and I went in fast and stepped quickly to the left.

  The house was dark and smelled like something had died under the floor-boards. A single fly buzzed around in the stuffy, fetid air. I located a switch on the wall and flipped it on, bathing the room in a sickly yellow glow from a bare forty-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling.

  The room took the word mess to new heights.

  There were several stacks of old newspapers, piled high as my shoulder. A dozen broken television sets, some older than me, lined up along the walls. A large box of rusty gears sat atop a cracked aquarium filled with dry grass. The walls were bare, except for a dusty framed portrait of a
severe-looking Jesus, staring down from heaven. The caption beneath read: God is always watching.

  Herb followed me in, pausing to look around. He was humming something softly, which I recognized as the violin riff from the shower scene in Psycho.

  I stepped over a bushel basket of balled-up Wonder Bread bags, and walked toward the doorway at the end of the room.

  “Mr. Kork?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  He had a cracked, broken voice, like he might burst into tears. I navigated more garbage and peeked through the doorway.

  A painfully thin old man stood in the tiny kitchen, his entire body twitching and shaking from Parkinson’s disease. He wore a stained white undershirt that hung on him like drapes, and a pair of beige slacks, equally stained, with holes in both knees. His face was a skull with a thin layer of age-spotted skin stretched over it. Thin, colorless lips. A hook nose. Bulbous, rheumy eyes. His head was bald, but he had bushy white eyebrows long enough to comb, and enough ear hair to stuff a pillow.

  I showed him my star.

  “I’m Lieutenant Daniels. This is Sergeant Benedict. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  He nodded, his oversized Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “About the devil. Questions about the devil.”

  I stepped closer, the stench of his body odor preventing me from getting within touching distance.

  “What about the devil, Mr. Kork?”

  “Well, you know all about the devil, don’t you? You’ve met him.”

  “I’ve met the devil?”

  Parroting tends to draw people out, make them more compliant. Even if they weren’t making sense.

  “The devil. Charles. My son. Terrible boy. Knew it from the day he shot out his mother’s cloaca.”

  “Cloaca?” Herb raised an eyebrow.

  “Her dirty bits. Female parts. His mother was a harlot. The whore of Babylon. Bore me the devil for a son, praise Jesus Christ Almighty in heaven above.”

  Bud made the sign of the cross, then fished a black rosary from his pocket and kissed it with trembling lips.

  I frowned. This wasn’t our guy. He couldn’t have made the video of Diane’s death, or shot at me in her house. He was too disconnected, too frail, the Parkinson’s too advanced.