Dead Men's Dust

by Matt Hilton

  “The FBI?”

  “Just watch the news. You’ll see what I mean.”

  “Okay, Walt. I appreciate your help.”

  “No problem,” he said. “Good speaking to you again, Hunter.”

  “Likewise.” I paused, considering. Then, “Walt, seeing as you’ve been so open with me, there’s something I have to tell you.”

  “Go on.”

  “I was involved in a job an hour or so ago. Guy I was up against said he’d been visited by some of your boys asking about John.”

  “Wasn’t us.”

  “I appreciate that. But I think you might want to look into who’s going round posing as government agents. Might cause a stink for you if something goes wrong.”

  “I get it now. That’s why you wanted to check in with me?”

  “Yeah. Just in case I have to defend myself.”

  “They’re not mine, Hunter. So…stay safe.”

  Stay safe. This from a sub-division director of black ops. In other words, Walter had just given official sanction to retaliate with lethal force if that situation should arise. What’s known in the trade as an executive decision.

  “Thanks, Walt.”

  Walter isn’t big on pleasantries. I was left holding a handset issuing the soft purr of a dead line.

  Something popped up on Harvey’s computer screen. I set the phone back in its cradle. All I could think of to say was “Shit.”

  With equal lack of verbosity, Rink cursed loudly. After a beat, Harvey joined in.

  On the screen of Harvey’s computer were headlines I could barely comprehend.

  FBI CLOSES IN ON MASS KILLER

  THE HARVESTMAN FINALLY NAMED

  Beneath the headlines was a photograph of my little brother.

  21

  CAIN KNOCKED AGAIN.

  Louder this time.

  Again there was no answer. Frowning beneath his impromptu hood, he stepped to the side of the door. By pressing close to the glass, he could make out any movement from within. Or in this case, lack of movement.

  No one home? How unbelievable is that?

  Letting out a sigh, he pulled the hood free and stuffed it into his trouser pocket. His palms were sweating inside the plastic bags, but he didn’t take them off yet.

  “Where the hell are you?” he wondered aloud. There was a possibility that the thief had given him the slip, but he didn’t give it much credence. He’d been parked in a position where he could watch the major exits from the hotel, and unless the thief had come down the back stairs and scaled the nine-foot perimeter fence, he was still here.

  What are the chances of that happening? Slim to zero.

  There was a chance he’d gone down to the restaurant for an evening meal, but again it was highly unlikely. From the furtive way the thief acted when he was in the parking lot, he was hiding from someone. He wouldn’t eat in plain sight in the restaurant, not when he could order food to be delivered to his room.

  That left two or three possibilities. The thief was asleep and hadn’t heard him knock. Or he was in the bathroom, and had again missed the knock. Or he’d slipped out while Cain had made his way around the back of the hotel and was even now in the parking lot looking for another vehicle to appropriate. Maybe an Oldsmobile.

  Vacillation danced a quickstep through his mind. He could run back out to check on the state of play, or he could gain admittance to the hotel suite and check out his other theories. In the end, he chose the latter.

  As quietly as possible, he tested the door handle. The door didn’t open. Not a problem. He inserted the tip of his scaling knife between door lock and frame and twisted. The lock snicked open with barely any pressure.

  The door swung open to reveal a short vestibule with two closed doors on one side. At the far end a door was open, and he could see part of a combined sitting room/bedroom apartment. Next to a recliner was a pair of running shoes, and a denim jacket was slung over the arm of a chair. Looked like the thief hadn’t packed to leave.

  Inside the vestibule, Cain listened. He could discern neither running water nor snoring. He took another step, the plastic bags making a faint sucking noise on the tiled floor. Watching the open room at the end, he pushed the front door closed, then turned to the first door to his right. Slowly he pushed down on the handle, allowing the door to swing open.

  He sneaked a look into the room. It was a tiny kitchen. A couple of buzzing flies bashed themselves against a window in an effort to escape the stifling heat. There were a few dirty dishes piled in the sink and a ring-stained coffee cup on the drain board. He reached out and touched a kettle. Through his plastic shrouding, he could feel that the kettle still bore the heat of being boiled. Proof of recent or current occupancy, Cain decided.

  Leaving the kitchen, he moved along the vestibule. He held his breath, anticipation building. If his assumption proved true, the next door would open into a bathroom, the most likely place to find the thief. Cain smiled to himself, imagining opening the door and finding the thief sitting on the toilet with his trousers around his ankles, a shocked look on his face. How ignoble!

  He pressed an ear to the door, listening for the telltale sounds of an industrious man at work. Nothing. No soft grunts, no delicate splashes, no sighs of relief or rustle of newspaper. Neither was there the sound of a shower or faucet trickling, but that didn’t mean the thief wasn’t prone in a tub and taking a moment of silent reflection.

  By habit, Cain always bolted the door to his bathroom, even when he knew he was alone. But the door swung open as easily as had the kitchen door. Cain stepped into the cooler confines of the bathroom, a delicate breath of lavender invading his senses. The lid on the toilet was up. The bath was empty. Unfortunately, the shower curtain was pulled to one side, so there was no chance of a Hitchcock moment.

  He fought down the impulse to swear. That is for the uncultured killer; he of the chainsaw or machete and lampshades made from human hide. Turning back to the vestibule, he walked with the stealth of a ninja assassin. His blade led the way, lifted like that of a matador poised for the coup de grâce.

  The open room remained constant. He attempted to tune himself to the still air, to feel the subtle drafts and eddies of the atmosphere around him. Feeling for restrained hints that human life stirred in the space out of his sight but not beyond the reach of his other senses.

  At the threshold, he once more tugged the hood from his pocket and pulled it over his head. The shock of a hooded man stepping into the room would have the desired effect and halt the thief in his tracks. All he required was a second or so of addled wits in order to take charge. He drew a deep breath and stepped into the room.

  “Damn it!”

  The room was sterile.

  Sighing now, Cain looked back over his shoulder.

  “Perhaps I should’ve checked the parking lot first.” He sighed. There was nothing he could do about that now. Might as well search the room. The thief could have left his precious Bowie knife behind in his need to move on.

  Cain checked the layout of the room. The recliner was off to his right, but all that remained there were the denim jacket and the running shoes. On a coffee table there was a yachting magazine with photos of an exclusive club over at Marina del Rey.

  Cain moved over to a bed and chest of drawers that took up the far wall. The bed was unmade. A pair of boxer shorts lay crumpled on the floor at its foot. Cain walked over and kicked the boxers until he could read the label inside. They confirmed the thief’s nationality. Definitely an Englishman. The label read St Michael, the brand name of Marks & Spencer, the source of many a conservative Englishman’s underwear.

  He next tried the drawers in the chest. T-shirts were pushed into the top drawer along with more underwear and wadded socks. The next drawer down held a pair of folded sweatpants but nothing else. The final drawer held nothing belonging to the thief, just a stack of well-fingered brochures and menus from local businesses. As well as the obligatory welcome message from the hotel
manager that no one ever reads.

  Cain made a noise in the back of his throat. Scorn given timbre. He cast his eyes around the room. A TV rested on a table next to the recliner, but there was nothing of the thief’s sitting on top of it. He turned instead to the built-in wardrobes that made up the wall next to the entrance door.

  He stared at the double doors. If the thief had fled the apartment, then he would surely have taken his clothing with him. If the cupboard contained his coat and other belongings, then it was apparent that he’d be returning sometime soon.

  Cain approached the wardrobe with a new idea in mind. It was the ideal hiding place. Concealed inside it, he could wait for the thief to return and then spring out when he was least expecting it. Smiling at his wisdom, he pulled open the doors.

  “Ah,” he said.

  The thief’s coat was still there. But something else assured Cain that the thief hadn’t fled as he’d first feared.

  The barrel of the gun pointed directly at his face.

  22

  “YOU OKAY, HUNTER?”

  No. I was numb.

  The face on the screen was unquestionably my brother’s. His hair was shorter than I remembered, and there were a couple of new lines at the corners of his eyes. But it was definitely John.

  “This can’t be right,” I said.

  Reading the accompanying story wasn’t helping. I couldn’t concentrate for glancing at the photograph to remind me that I wasn’t reading an unconnected piece of hack journalism. My heart drummed in my chest like a volley of cannon fire. Even the adrenaline rush of battle didn’t affect me in this way.

  “I don’t believe it,” I said for what must have been the umpteenth time. “There must be some kind of mistake.”

  Rink wasn’t so certain. He didn’t know John the way I did. Okay, John was a self-centered, lying, cheating thief who’d run out on his wife and kids. But there was one thing I was certain of: my brother wasn’t a depraved psychopathic killer collecting the bones of his victims as trophies. Rink was taking things at face value. He tapped the screen to prove his point. “You can’t argue with the forensics, Hunter.”

  I shook my head like there was a wasp in my ear.

  “No, I can’t accept it. Something’s wrong here.”

  “How do you explain it, then?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m sure as hell going to try.”

  Reading the news release once again didn’t calm my racing heart. The FBI had been searching for the perpetrator of a number of brutal murders that spanned the country from coast to coast. The deaths had reputedly occurred over a three-year period. The FBI was unwilling to divulge the quantity dead at this man’s hands, but would confirm that the killer’s signature was the removal of skeletal parts. The killer had finally been named as John Telfer, a British subject living in the Little Rock area.

  “It’s all a load of bull,” I told the screen. Rink threw up his hands.

  Fair enough, John had been in the country during the three-year period and had, by Louise Blake’s admission, been employed as a delivery driver some of that time. This gave him the opportunity to have visited the places listed. But according to Louise, John had gone missing less than a month ago. Surely if he’d been involved in these random killings, he’d have left town much sooner than he had.

  Experience indicates that a serial killer starts slowly, the time span between his kills narrowing with each attack as he craves more and more depraved satisfaction, until he reaches a point where he can no longer restrain the urge to kill. I suppose, with that in mind, John could have been doing the killings, and it was only now that he’d spiraled out of control and gone off on a final rampage.

  Not that I was about to admit that for a second.

  I read about a man and woman found murdered in a motel at the fringes of the Mojave Desert, how they’d both had fingers removed as trophies by the maniac the press had dubbed the Harvestman.

  A witness related how the murdered couple had been seen picking up a stranded motorist the previous morning. The police examination of a vehicle found abandoned a short distance from where the motorist had been picked up showed it was registered to one Sigmund Petoskey of Little Rock, Arkansas. Mr. Petoskey had only this evening informed police that a former employee, John Telfer, had stolen the vehicle. Tests of fingerprints inside the car confirmed that the driver had indeed been John Telfer.

  Police and FBI agents were now searching for the location of a yellow Volkswagen Beetle stolen by the killer after murdering the young couple found dead at the motel. There was no corroborating forensic evidence at the murder scene to tie Telfer to the motel, but due to the balance of probabilities, the FBI felt that naming him as the chief suspect was justifiable under the circumstances.

  “Justifiable under the circumstances?”

  “It’s a logical assumption when you think about it,” Rink argued. “John breaks down, he’s picked up by these motorists, then they go to a motel together. John then kills the couple, steals their car, and goes on his way, headed God knows where.”

  I wasn’t having any of it. “No way. They say here that the car contained John’s fingerprints. Why wouldn’t he wipe down the car the way he’s supposedly done at the motel?”

  Rink shrugged.

  “Maybe he didn’t think about wiping down the car before he was picked up,” Harvey offered.

  “According to the FBI, they’ve been searching for this Harvestman character for the past three years. Never once have they found any evidence of fingerprints before. Isn’t it a stretch to think he’d forget to wipe down a vehicle he was driving if he was on a killing spree?”

  “Maybe,” Rink offered. “You know how these crazies are. They get to a point where they don’t give a damn anymore. They believe they’re indestructible, that the police can’t catch them. They start taking chances, dropping the feds the odd clue. Makes it all the more exciting for them.”

  “So why be so meticulous at the motel? If you want to drop the feds a clue, why not leave your prints at the scene of the crime?” I sat back, crossed my arms over my chest.

  “That’d probably be too blatant,” Harvey offered.

  “And leaving a car full of evidence isn’t?” I asked.

  “Not if you never suspect that the car and the killings are going to be connected,” Harvey said.

  “Yeah,” said Rink. “It was only by chance that John was seen getting picked up by the couple. Maybe he didn’t think the abandoned car would be tied to what happened at the motel.”

  Okay, it was a fair assumption. Not one that I shared. John was no killer. I’d have staked my right hand on it, if the wager weren’t inappropriate under the circumstances. I rubbed my hands over my face, groaning with a mixture of frustration and fatigue.

  “What time is it?” I finally asked.

  “Late,” Harvey replied.

  “Does that mean it’ll be morning in England?”

  Both Rink and Harvey glanced at each other and made faces. Rink finally turned to me and said, “It’ll be early morning. Who are you thinking of calling? Jennifer?”

  “I’ll have to ring her at some point. But that’s not who I was thinking about.”

  “Who then?” Rink asked.

  “Raymond Molloy,” I said.

  “Detective Inspector Molloy?” Rink asked. “The cop you did that job for? What do you want to call him for?”

  “I need to check up on any similar murders back home. See if there’s a pattern. To show if John’s involved or not.”

  “What if he won’t speak to you? It’s not as if you’re still on the government payroll, Hunter.”

  “He’ll speak to me. He owes me a favor.”

  DI Molloy did indeed owe me a favor. I’d sorted a little problem for him concerning a pimp who’d tried to extort money from him after Molloy dallied too often with some of the pimp’s girls. It wasn’t a problem his own resources could handle without his indiscretion becoming public knowledge. It took only one
visit to the pimp for him to see sense—and to hand over the incriminating evidence of Molloy getting very creative and athletic on a waterbed.

  That didn’t mean Molloy was pleased to hear from me. I’d saved his professional reputation, but I’d also made it very clear that rough treatment of a woman—paid or not—might just make me forget about helping him next time. He answered my queries curtly. Little more than yes, no, and kiss my ass.

  “Thanks for nothing,” I said as I placed the phone back in its cradle.

  “Well?” Rink asked.

  “As ever, Mr. Molloy was his charming self.”

  “But did he give you what you wanted to know?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “There are no cold investigations into murder victims subject to postmortem mutilation. Rules out the chance that John was killing before he came here.”

  Rink hiked his shoulders. “Doesn’t mean that he’s innocent. Just that he didn’t start killing until he arrived in the U.S.”

  I shook my head as I got up and paced the length of Harvey’s office.

  “You don’t go from being totally inexperienced to hacking up bodies and taking skeletal remains as trophies. You build up to something like that. There’s nothing in John’s background that hints that he was even violent. Christ, he was a number one asshole toward the end, but that was because of the problems he was having. In all that time, though, he never lifted his hand to anyone. Not Jennifer, not his kids. He wouldn’t even stick up for himself when Shank threatened him. Does that sound like someone who’s capable of murdering people?”

  “Most murderers are nothing but low-down cowards,” Rink reminded me. “It doesn’t take a brave man to take a woman hostage at knifepoint.”

  “I agree,” I said. “But it takes some balls to take out a man and a woman at the same time.”