Man Down

by John Douglas

  That got our attention.

  Trevor stopped, an unopened beer in one hand, the opener in the other.

  Dom said, “Most of us hang lower on the left, due to the spleen. However, on occasion, you’ll run into someone who hangs opposite. In those cases, the body’s internal organs are quite often flopped, with the liver on the left, the heart on the right, et cetera.”

  “How do you know this?” Dominic’s knowledge of the human body always amazed me, but this bit of anatomical trivia was a new high, even for Dom.

  “I’m a highly trained pathologist. Which is why you hired me.”

  “No,” I said, “not how do you know this thing about hanging testicles. I understand that might take up an entire class in med school. I meant, how do you know this about Urich?”

  “Urich was shot once.”

  “Just once?” Trevor arced the beer cap into the waste-basket on the far side of the room.

  “He was a cub reporter covering crime in Detroit.”

  “I remember that,” I said. “A drug dealer shot him in the chest. Everyone was surprised he lived. The Detroit PD had a pool going.” I remembered a lot about Urich in those days. We were both young. We were both hungry. I was a street agent with a family, trying to carve out my place in the Bureau. Urich worked for theFree Press and his contacts were so good and so deep, he would often beat the cops to a crime scene. He even went undercover as a mental patient to get the scoop on a local heroin ring fronting as a VD clinic. Even with our differences, I respected Urich and always knew he had balls. Now, thanks to Dom, I knew that his right one hung lower than his left.

  “Urich took a nine-millimeter right here”—Dom touched his chest, just left of the sternum—“point-blank. The gunpowder tattooed him and he’s got a scar shaped like a star. The expanding gases from the pistol’s muzzle exploded under the skin. Painful, I’d imagine. He calls it his sheriff’s badge.”

  “And it didn’t kill him?” Even Trevor was impressed.

  “The reason he survived is because his heart is on the right side of his chest; not the left. The dope dealer assumed Urich was put together like the rest of us. He was wrong.”

  “Does this have a larger point, Dom?”

  “You know it does, Jake.”

  “You think I’m making assumptions about how the Black Diamond Killer works, is that it?”

  “It’s a possibility,” Dom said. “It’s also a possibility that this isn’t the Black Diamond Killer at all.”

  Trevor sat on the bed, elbows on his knees, his big hands folded together. “I’ve been thinking the same thing. Because I don’t think this is the same guy at all. In fact, I think the Black Diamond Killer is dead, Jake. He’s nothing more than a spook.”

  I sat down on one of the chairs and put my feet up on the bed. My shoulder was throbbing but I didn’t want a painkiller to make me stupid and slow. “I wish I had the files.”

  “The files are gone, Jake. But I bet you could recall most of the pages from memory.”

  I took a long, slow breath and tried to see the file in my head. The case file was really a box with dozens of folders, all several inches thick. I could see the last one, the Jernigan boy.

  I closed my eyes and slowed my breathing. Mentally, I pulled up individual pages. First were the photographs, the easiest to remember. I drifted past the Jernigan boy’s school picture, a picture of him with a Christmas bike, and finally, the photographs of his body, curled up as though he were sleeping. I tried to concentrate on the photos of the bedroom, but there was nothing to see. The nightstand, the autographed baseballs on the bookcase, the bed with the covers pulled back as if he had just gotten up. And tucked under the corner of the pillow was the card, the black diamond. “Spook the gooks,” I said aloud without thinking.

  “What?”

  I opened my eyes to see Trevor and Dom watching me. “It’s something one of the assassin squad said in an interview. They left the black diamond card so it would spook the enemy.”

  “Charlie Cong was one superstitious little fucker,” Trevor said.

  I laughed. “I don’t care who you are, Trev, if you know a killer’s come into your house, done his dirty business, and then left without a sound, that’d rattle anyone.”

  “The card rattled you,” Trevor said. “But that’s the man’s point, isn’t it?”

  Dom nodded. “Rattled you before, and he’s doing it again. You’re acting more from your heart than your head.”

  He was right, of course. I had been running since Bower showed up, with that ice cream cone in his hand and that smirk on his face. I hadn’t really stopped to think about who was doing what and why. I’d just run from fight to fight, thinking with my gut. The bomb, Urich, the storming of the software salesman’s hideaway, and now sleeping with my ex-wife, all were emotional responses motivated by fear. Whoever was trying to scare me stupid was succeeding.

  I paced from the windows to the door and back again. I turned the Jernigan case around in my head, looking for something I’d missed, something small, because the Black Diamond Killer left so few clues, and took so little. Except for the victim, he took so little when he left. Suddenly, a new light fell on Eric’s kidnapping.

  Ali and Toni were both in the next room, lying in the dark. Ali had fallen asleep, but Toni was awake, her eyes open. I must have looked like a lunatic, standing backlit in the doorway, because Toni sat up and whispered, “Jake, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Toni, when you came here, what did Eric bring with him? Anything?”

  “What do you mean, like his toothbrush?”

  “No. I mean a toy, or a book, something of his own.”

  “We moved so fast that we didn’t have time to bring much of anything.” Toni thought a moment. “He brought his book. The Harry Potter book.”

  “I saw that.”

  “And his Game Boy.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I think so.”

  I would ask Vince Andrews for a list of the items recovered from the scene tomorrow. “Try to remember the room this morning,” I said.

  Toni sat up on the side of the bed. “Okay.” Her eyes focused on a point in the air, searching the panicked snapshots in her mind.

  “Was the Game Boy still there?”

  “I think it was.” Then, with more certainty: “Yes, it was.” She came back to the present. “I remember it on the nightstand. I remember thinking he’d played with it after I’d told him to go to sleep. I remember.”

  I nodded. “That’s good, Toni. That’s really good.”

  “Why, Jake? Why is that important?”

  “That makes this different from the other cases,” Trevor said. “That means this isn’t the Black Diamond Killer.”

  Toni looked confused, trying to see what Trevor and I saw.

  I said, “The Black Diamond Killer always took a souvenir. Always. But whoever took Eric didn’t know that.”

  “Whoever took Eric was targeting Jake, not your boy,” Dom said.

  “That means he could still be alive?”

  “Yes, of course. We just have to find him.”

  Toni hugged my neck. “Oh, Jake, this is good news, isn’t it?”

  “I think so, Toni. Yes.”

  Dom said, his voice a rumble, “All along, all they’ve done is distract Jake. That was their intention.”

  Trevor added, “Look at Bower. The clown came out of nowhere just to mess with Jake’s head.”

  “And it worked. I was distracted.”

  “But from what?” Toni asked.

  “We’re only working one case,” Trevor said.

  “So, the same people who are doing this are involved, somehow, in the Callahan case?”

  “Looks like that to me,” I said.

  “That means, if we work our way up from North Carolina,” Dom said, “we’ll find who took Eric.”

  “Or, if we work our way from here,” I said, “we’ll find our North Carolina killer.”

  “This i
s no longer a series of separate crimes,” Dom said. “From Durham to Beaufort, Alexandria to here, it’s all one big crime scene.”

  “We just have to pull the right thread and the whole thing will come apart,” I said.

  My cell phone went off and I answered it.

  “Jake, it’s Rob.”

  “Where have you been? You disappear. You don’t answer your phone. Jesus, McManus, what the hell’s going on?”

  “I’ve been working the phones all afternoon, Jake. Neil Burke assigned me to the Jason case this morning. I’m not one of your special team, remember? I can’t just leave work.”

  “You should call Katie. She’s been worried about you.”

  “I will. I heard about Ravan pulling you from the case…”

  “That was Armstrong.”

  “Jake, you know that nothing happens around here without Ravan’s blessing.”

  “Are you saying Ravan wanted me off this investigation?”

  “You have no idea how Ravan talks about you when you’re not around, do you, Jake?” Rob said it with condescending sympathy, as if I’d suffered a head injury and couldn’t tie my shoes.

  “You find something funny in this situation, Rob, you let me know what it is. I could use a good laugh.”

  “No, no, honest. I’m just amazed at how blind people can be. Me, too. I mean, if I didn’t know better, I’d say there was still some lingering hostility between us. But then, why would I be busting my ass to find your son if that was true?”

  The possibility that Rob had a lead trumped all of the other emotions. “You have something, Rob?”

  “I think so. One of the other agents caught the follow-up on one of the fruitcake calls.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He got some fucking yokel up in Trailerville somewhere, you know, so he didn’t think much about it until the guy mentions the Holy Knights of New Jerusalem. So he asks me if maybe it has something to do with your case. And since it’s up in your neck of the woods…”

  “Did you mention this to Vince?”

  “Vince isn’t heading up the investigation. Harry Gillette is.”

  “I know. But Harry’s an ass.”

  “I called Vince,” Rob said. “I called Harry and Ravan, too. None of them thought it was worth a look.”

  “What makes you think different, Rob?”

  “Well, I pulled up Bower’s file.”

  “I had Vince do that before.”

  “But did Vince think to track down Bower’s old butt buddy from Leavenworth? Did he pull the file on old Tom Smooth? Did your golden boy really do the digging he should have, Jake?”

  I was suddenly so tired of Rob’s frat-boy attitude that I wanted to strangle him. “Godammit, do you have something, Rob?”

  “Yeah. I think I know where Bower is. Tom Smooth was the guy who recruited Bower into the Holy Knights. I had a hunch they might still be in contact. You know how old lovers are, Jake; persistent, even when they’re time is gone.”

  I let it pass. “Where are they, Rob?”

  “Tom Smooth has a training camp about an hour from where you are now, toward South Mountain. You got a map?”

  35

  “There it is.” Trevor pointed to the small, single-story house built back in the trees. It was the kind of place that would have started as a fishing camp, then grown, room by room, into a year-round house with proper siding and paint. The front-porch light was off, but we could see the orange spark of a cigarette in the dark.

  I parked at the side of the road and Trevor and I walked across the lawn toward the porch.

  “Officer Waters?”

  The smoker on the porch was quiet for a long time. The cigarette arced into the grass and Waters said, “Come on up before you wake the wife and get us all in trouble.”

  “Why the dark?” Trevor asked. He was so alert I could practically feel the tension vibrating the air. Waters could, too.

  “Mr. Donovan here seems to trail reporters around.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” I said. Officer Waters had been the target of a full-blown media attack, or as full-blown as it gets in rural Maryland. The shouts, the shoving, and the cameras trip up even the stars, and no one (or no one sane) ever gets used to it. You learn how to look natural, but that’s the best you can hope for. And for those who are pushed into the glare by accident or mischief, it can make smart people stupid and stupid people forget how to walk and talk.

  “My phone’s been ringing so much I may have to move,” Waters said.

  I couldn’t tell if he was serious or joking. “I’m glad you decided to help us,” I said.

  “I haven’t decided anything. I might go back to sleep. That’d be the smart thing.” He paused and lit another cigarette with a match that blasted away our night vision. “You know I’m suspended.”

  “I know.”

  “Without pay.”

  “We’ll make it right,” Trevor said, but didn’t tell either of us how.

  Waters seemed to think about that. “I almost didn’t answer when you called.”

  “I’m glad you did.” I sat in a rocking chair and let my eyes readjust to the dark. Trevor leaned against the porch railing.

  “I still haven’t decided.”

  “But you thought about it,” I said.

  “Yeah. I thought about it.”

  “What do you think?” Trevor asked.

  “I think I’d be nuts to do this. You have no warrant. And it’s out of my jurisdiction. And, after Russell Frey’s lawyer gets through with me, I might be sleeping in a box under the railroad trestle.”

  “If you help us get my boy back, I’ll get you a better job, and I’ll make sure you get enough good press that no lawyer in the world will take you to court.”

  Waters laughed. “Like you’ve been so good at getting good press for yourself.”

  I was grateful that it was too dark for Waters to see my face redden. “It’s been a bad week for a lot of things,” I admitted.

  “First question is, why not call the tactical boys from Quantico, or even the Baltimore office?”

  Trevor and I looked at each other, aware of the glance even in the dark.

  “You deserve the truth,” I said. “The director’s at a charity function at the White House. The assistant director’s at Lincoln Center seeingLa Traviata.”

  “What about the agent in charge? Vince?”

  “He’s been removed from the case.”

  “His replacement?”

  “He won’t take my call.”

  Waters laughed, but it wasn’t because he’d heard anything particularly funny. “So we’re on our own again, ready to bust into another software salesman’s boudoir?”

  “Maybe,” Trevor said.

  Waters stood up and walked past us, off the porch and into the yard. He looked up at the stars, the sky full of them out here in the darkness, away from the city lights. “I think I’m going to pass this time, boys. I got plenty of trouble already.”

  Trevor said, “Jake and I could do it in daylight, maybe. But at night we need someone who’s been there.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “A militia camp near South Mountain.”

  “Tom Smooth’s place? Yeah, I’ve been there. I was part of a reconnaissance team investigating weapons violations.”

  “Why’d the ATF choose you over one of their own?”

  “Same as you. They picked me because I’ve hunted in and around those mountains since I was a boy. I know that camp. And I know Tom Smooth. If your son is with Tom, you need to get him out quick. Tom has a fondness for the boys.”

  “I heard that,” I said.

  “You have any tools?”

  Trevor said, “They confiscated my black bag.”

  Waters scratched his head. “Let’s see what I’ve got inside.”

  “So, are you in?”

  Waters took a deep drag off his cigarette and flicked it into the darkness. “Yeah, what the hell, my career’s pretty much shot
in the ass anyway.”

  Waters took us into the mountains, the three of us jammed together in the front seat of his Chevy truck. He played cassettes of Hank Williams and Buck Owens and Dwight Yoakam until Trevor said, “You know, sometimes quiet is good,” and Waters took the hint.

  We wound up into the mountains, then turned off and followed an old logging road that wasn’t much more than a rutted trail through the forest. The truck rocked on its springs. Leaves and small branches closed in on all sides, making it impossible to see more than ten feet in front of us.

  “We used to bring girls up here,” Waters said. “That was when there was still some logging work, but I figured nobody worked on Saturday. Me and Marilyn Singer, cute little thing, were naked in the back of my four-by when a flatbed full of loggers drove up behind us. Course, I had to scramble to the front and pull into the ditch so they could get by. Those old boys hooted and waved and had a hell of a time. I never did get Marilyn to come up here after that. You suppose that’s why?”

  “You know,” Trevor said, “those stories lose a lot of their charm when you have a daughter.”

  “I suppose so.” Waters stopped the truck and turned off the lights. “We hump it from here.”

  With the truck lights off we were blind. No moon, and starlight was blocked by the forest canopy. Waters turned on a red-filtered flashlight and we gathered around the bed of the truck. I couldn’t hump a regular pack because of the .22-caliber hole Bower had inconsiderately put through my trapezius muscle, so I carried a pistol, ammunition, and three canteens on a utility belt. I also carried Waters’s Ruger mini-14.

  When he gave it to me, Waters said, “It’s semiauto, but she’ll squirt out rounds as fast as you need. The Holy Knights are probably full auto.” He smiled. “It’s a macho thing.”

  Trevor carried a 30.06 deer rifle with a scope. Waters had a Remington 870 pump with an extended magazine. We also had Motorola handheld radios, designed for camping families and vacationers traveling in more than one car.

  Armed and ready, we set out in darkness so complete that I kept my fingertips on Waters’s back and Trevor kept his on mine. Together, three blind men walked slowly up the mountain, one foot in front of the other. It’s the infantryman’s lullaby, so restful in its predictable rhythm that exhausted men often fall asleep without missing a step.