Season of the Assassin

by Laird, Thomas

  Then Marchand’s witness from the restaurant across the street gets himself shot dead in a drive-by episode just outside work. The dishwasher owed for illegal pharmaceuticals, and the people he owed didn’t care about his star status as one of our witnesses.

  Carl Anglin walks. We’ve got nobody to put him on scene. One drugged-up zombie and one for-real stiff. Marchand can’t prosecute. It’s out of his hands. The stringy-haired monster gets a free pass out of jail, and now Eddie and I are the ones holding our dicks.

  We’re right there when they open the jail door for him.

  ‘You two war heroes take it easy,’ he says and grins, his bag of personal items underneath his arm.

  I grab hold of Lezniak before he can deliver a blow. There are too many witnesses here. Too many photographers and news people.

  ‘Your nightmare just started,’ I tell Anglin.

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ He grins.

  I keep my voice low. ‘You don’t know me. But trust me on this. I’m never going to stop. I don’t care how many years it takes. I’ll be there waiting for you. That girl isn’t going to stay all balled-up in a hospital bed forever. I’ll find someone else, something else, Carl. Believe me.’

  I hadn’t realized that my hand had encircled his left wrist. When Anglin finally winces, I know it actually is my own grip that’s causing that greasy brow to crease in pain.

  ‘I know the law. I know what harassment is, Lieutenant. You can’t do this. I mean, you can’t — ’

  I grab hold of that wrist even harder, until I’m sure it’s just this side of snapping.

  ‘Ahhh…’ he cries out.

  Now Eddie is holding me back.

  ‘You’re a fish, Anglin. You’re not even a lizard. I’m going to be there when the smoke rises right out of your fucking gills.’

  Anglin shoves away from us, here at the accepting desk. But he won’t look back at me as he heads toward the exit doors.

  CHAPTER TWO

  [December 1998]

  I looked down at the dead body at my feet. She’d been twenty years old, her driver’s license revealed as I held it up to the dim-wattage bulb above us.

  ‘Jimmy, she’s had her throat cut,’ Doc told me. ‘Twice. In the area of the jugular. This guy took his time and did some nice, precise cutting. Something like our previous buddy.’

  He was referring to Marco Karrios, the so-called ‘Farmer’. He’d cut women for their internal organs — until my wife met up with him at our house. She shot him in the chest, and I was lucky enough to arrive on the scene and pop him with a head shot that ruined our brand-new mauve sofa. My wife Natalie worked Burglary/Auto Theft as a detective. She was on the fast track to becoming a Homicide cop, like Doc Gibron and me already were.

  ‘Lieutenant Parisi, the photographers are here,’ one of the uniforms told me.

  We got out of their way for the moment.

  ‘There’s something familiar about those cuts,’ Doc said.

  ‘The Farmer’s dead. I was there.’

  Doc looked over at me. ‘I don’t mean him. I mean there’s something familiar about this guy’s whole situation here. She was a student nurse,’ he said, indicating the corpse.

  ‘My God, Harold, that guy must be either dead or pushing sixty by now. He left town. I ought to know. My old man was on that case, what, thirty years ago. Anglin. Carl Anglin.’

  ‘I’m simply saying it looks like the case file for him. I was just getting off the street when your dad took him down.’

  ‘And they had to let him go.’

  ‘It wasn’t your old man’s fault, Jimmy.’

  My old man, the boozing Homicide cop. I’d been embarrassed to bring friends to the house because he’d be there in one of his ‘states’. But I also joined the police because of him. Jake Parisi. When he was straight he was good. I tried to break away from him, but everything that happened to me pulled me closer to the old man’s world. The streets. The stiffs. Christ knows he could be brutal and unpitying, but he always had a look he threw my way that brought me to him like there was some secret he wanted to whisper to me.

  ‘I know. Circumstances. A Homicide cop’s nightmare. Main witness goes looey-looey. Goes into a coma-like state, and then the other witness who puts Anglin near the dorm gets himself popped in a drive-by before the trial. They have to let Anglin walk…But there’s another problem here.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘There’s only the one victim, Doc. Anglin slaughtered several girls at one go. He was one of the first “spree” killers.’

  Doc was laid back when it got to my father. He knew the pain involved with the old man and me. He understood what the shrinks call lack of ‘closure’. There certainly was that — lack of finality, I mean. The way he left us…

  My mother, Eleanor, survived. The old man went some years back. But as I said, there was no closure.

  We were at St. Emily’s School for Nursing. It was on the northwestern fringe of the city. Anglin did his thing on the West Side, all those years ago. This couldn’t have been him. He disappeared. He was smart enough to know that he had to if he was going to dodge the big slug. My father was on him. On him enough that Anglin knew that even this huge city wouldn’t hide him. Jake wouldn’t give up on him. Hell, he didn’t give up on him.

  But Anglin would be an old man now. Too old and too cautious to carve up a young woman like the girl we saw on the floor.

  Someone must have been thinking on the same wavelength as my partner because the Feds showed up. The FBI. They asked permission to cross our yellow tape, and naturally we were generous enough to grant them access.

  ‘The vultures have landed.’

  Doc had no use for the Fibbies. He thought they were generally incompetent. He much preferred to work with US Marshals if he had to work with Federal law enforcement agents at all, and I tended to agree with him.

  Jim Mason was the special agent who appeared on scene with an assistant I didn’t recognize.

  ‘What’s the big interest here in one dead girl?’ I asked Mason.

  ‘Oh, just what you might call a passing interest,’ Mason said.

  He was about six feet five, an ex-Duke University basketball player. Had a cup of coffee with the Seattle NBA club. Fucked up his knees, I heard.

  He was also one of the few black Feds we knew in this town.

  ‘In other words, you ain’t telling us,’ Doc said as he smiled over at him.

  Mason pointed a finger, like a gun barrel, at my partner and grinned himself.

  So we ignored Mason and his girlfriend — his partner was a white female — and we finished up our end before the body-bag people toted the student nurse’s remains away.

  Her name was Martha Eisner. She was from LaSalle, Illinois. We had the task of telling her mother and father that their daughter had been raped and murdered and that we didn’t have any idea, at the moment, who had killed their girl.

  This was the worst aspect of Homicide. Doc

  and I had a long ride to north central Illinois, and there was no use stalling.

  They lived in a ranch-style place. Simple, not very expensive. Working class. LaSalle seemed to be a blue-collar area. At least, where the Eisners lived it was. It was 10.00 a.m. by the time we arrived at their door. Doc rang the bell, but I’d do the talking.

  We identified ourselves as soon as a woman in her mid-forties opened the door. When she saw the shields, her mouth dropped open.

  She let us in. Her husband was at work. She would have been at work, she told us, but she’d taken a sick day. A migraine, she explained.

  ‘I’m afraid we have to inform you that your daughter’s been killed.’

  I didn’t know any way to soften the blow except by being direct and getting it over with.

  Her knees buckled and I caught her before she hit the well-worn carpet.

  Doc helped me get her to the couch. Then my partner went into the kitchen to get her a glass of water. What good water did, I’d never understood, but
Mrs. Jane Eisner took a sip before her emotions bubbled out of her. She sobbed for a good long time. Then the sound subsided and I asked her if she was able to answer any questions.

  No, there was no steady boyfriend. No, there’d been no messy breakup with any male friend she knew of. She couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to harm her child — I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to take her girl’s life either. Not yet, at least.

  But we would. We almost always found out why.

  The interview lasted another twenty minutes. We waited until the husband, Eric, arrived home. His reaction was more hostile.

  ‘I knew that goddamn city would kill her. You don’t see that kind of thing going on around here…How can you stand to handle the…the filth you have to deal with? Doesn’t it tire you…Doesn’t it — ?’

  Then he began to sob. Jane rose off the couch and went over to console him, but he forced her away. And none too gently, I saw. I wondered if this was a happy marriage. Her migraines. His attitude. But that was a dead end. If I asked I’d find out that he was home all night, got up for work around six…No, he hadn’t killed his girl. We were the ones who’d have to find out who had. It had been a long, hard drive up here, and now we’d have to head back to Chicago to find out who’d really killed Martha Eisner.

  ‘How can you stand to deal with all the animals up there?’ the grieving father wanted to know.

  We told him we were sorry for his loss, and then we got back into the Taurus and headed toward the Interstate and home.

  Home. Indeed. The city, where I’d lived my whole life.

  I was staring out my office window, looking at Lake Michigan. This view was the only perk of my job. Other than catching the pricks that committed murder. This kid had been a junior. One more year to go to get her bachelor’s degree in nursing. She’d wanted to help people and a morgue was where she’d wound up.

  I began to wonder if her father hadn’t been right. Maybe life in some small town would be safer. I had two grown children and one infant — via Natalie, my second wife. Maybe it would be more secure for all of them if we moved.

  But I loved this place in spite of its ability to depress the hell out of me. The killings did pile up, on occasion.

  My father, Jake, had been in Homicide in the 1950s and 1960s. He’d been good at it, too. Put lots of bad people off the streets. But he’d liked to drink. Excessively. To the point that he and my mother did not share a bedroom the last few years of their marriage.

  My father had left me with the ultimate mystery. I’d been trying to solve the puzzle of his death since the day he’d left us, but the answer did not come. I’d been through therapy. I’d endured counseling. Nothing straightened it out.

  And I’d taken the case to the source itself.

  My mother.

  *

  The murder of the second young nurse was called in the next day. The people on her floor thought she’d gone home for the weekend, so no one thought to knock on her door until late Monday afternoon when she was supposed to have returned from morning classes.

  This one’s name was Renee Jackson, a black female from the West Side.

  She had been cut in the same way as the Eisner girl. Deep penetration at the jugular. Twice.

  ‘I think that son of a bitch Anglin is back,’ Doc told me as the flashes from the cameras of the scene-of-crime photographers popped around us.

  ‘He was supposed to be in Utah after he wrote that book about being the accused killer of the original seven girls. He was a cause célèbre or whatever for all those sixties liberals. You remember?’

  ‘Remember? Hell, I’m still one of them…,’ Doc reminded me. ‘Yeah. He went out west with the book money. Then there was the movie. The cops were picking on an indigent sailor. Anglin the victim. All that shit. He made some good dough. Enough to hide out in the mountains, with occasional side trips to Las Vegas and Nevada to visit the chicken

  farms. He had a penchant for whores, I think I read.’

  ‘So the Feds are thinking the same way you are.’

  ‘Why else would they show up on scene like that, unannounced?’

  ‘Because they’re Fibbie geeks with minimal caseloads, Doc. Too much money. All dressed up and nowhere to go.’

  ‘You sound highly prejudicial,’ my partner said, smiling wryly.

  ‘You think the captain’ll pop for two round trips to the Rockies?’

  *

  We flew economy to Salt Lake City. We had to rent a four-wheel, all-terrain vehicle to make the trip up into the mountains from there. The Captain would not be happy about the extra expense, but we’d been warned by the local police that other transportation would get us stuck and maybe even frozen to death.

  The Utah locals had Anglin living just three miles east of Wheeler. Wheeler itself was not even on the map, so they had to give us directions.

  And the worst part was that Anglin hadn’t been heard from or spotted in ten months. The mailman was the first to notice when all the mail began to pile up uncollected.

  The higher we went on this highway, the colder it became. When we reached the snow line, we were close to the small town. There was a Seven Eleven at the far edge of Wheeler. We stopped there to pee and to get directions to Anglin’s shack or whatever it was he lived in.

  The geezer behind the counter knew Anglin. He said he was one of the few in town who would be able to remember this recluse who had once been accused of murder. The kids in town were glued to their video screens, he explained. They didn’t read newspapers or even watch the TV news.

  Doc tapped his kidney and so did I. I was glad I was wearing my flight jacket. The cold was brutal up there, even allowing for the fact that it was winter. They must have missed summer altogether.

  ‘Nah, it warms up into the forties in August,’ the geezer behind the counter said, grinning.

  I was so preoccupied with getting to Anglin that I hadn’t noticed the beauties of the Utah scenery. It was awesome. Big sky, big mountains. Clear air to breathe. No stench of chemicals here. God’s country.

  But it was being shared by a man my father had pursued all through the final years of his life.

  When we got to the turnoff where the old man at the Seven Eleven had told us to turn right, we saw the house set back about a quarter-mile from the highway. It was no shack, but it wasn’t paradise either. It was a modest one-level ranch-style place with a large front picture window.

  We approached the house more slowly now in our dark green Jimmy.

  When we arrived in front of the structure, we saw that there were no cars or vehicles in front of Anglin’s place. Doc was driving. He stopped the Jimmy right in front of the doorway.

  I knocked on the door. Repeatedly. No one answered. I remembered the mailman. I went out to the mailbox by the road and I found it crammed with junk mail. Then I walked back to the door and Doc.

  ‘Got your little bag of tricks?’ I asked him.

  I was referring to his burglar’s tools.

  ‘Yeah. I’m always prepared.’

  He took a pouch out of his winter-coat pocket. He reached in for a slim piece of metal that reminded me of a scalpel. He inserted the blade into the front door’s lock and then he turned it back and forth. He popped the dead bolt in less than forty-five seconds. Professional speed.

  ‘I used to be faster,’ he apologized, smiling rather embarrassedly.

  We took out our weapons. We entered the living room slowly and quietly.

  Doc tried to turn on the overhead light in the room, but nothing happened when the switch clicked. I took out the flashlight from my flight jacket, and turned its beam toward the floor.

  We worked our way toward the kitchen. In the kitchen we found a large refrigerator. It seemed Anglin had done fairly well from his novel about the oppression he’d experienced from the Chicago Police Department.

  When Doc opened the refrigerator’s door, he hopped back in fright.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Sh
it. The son of a bitch has left an opened can of tomato juice. It’s turning fucking black. Christ, has the man no sense of hygiene?’

  ‘You scared the shit out of me. I thought you’d found somebody’s goddamn body parts.’

  ‘Nah. That was that other homicidal fuck from Milwaukee.’

  I heard a soft sound coming from farther back in the house.

  Doc touched my sleeve. He put a finger to his lips, and then he removed his nine-millimeter from his shoulder holster.

  I had the Bulldog still tucked into in my ankle holster, but I had my own nine in my right hand now.

  We made our way quickly and quietly into the interior of Anglin’s house. It was cold in there. His heating must have been turned off after he’d been gone a few months.

  Doc directed me toward the single bedroom on the left, at the back of the house.

  He checked his weapon and I checked mine. Then we kicked open the door and found Special Agent Mason and his attractive female assistant aiming their own guns directly at our noggins.

  CHAPTER THREE

  [June 1968]

  The girl is still traumatized by whatever horrors she endured at the hands of Carl Anglin. Now the Federal Bureau of Investigation has joined the fight to put the nails into Anglin. We are required to assist them, but we do not like to share the playing field with the FBI investigators. It’s a matter of pride and territory. They’re pissing on our trees. The fucking government has to intrude into the job. They can’t just fuck up their own patch. Eddie thinks I’m paranoid about the Feds because they’re staring over our shoulders. I’m not sure what ‘paranoid’ means, but I know when someone’s breathing down my neck. This is the 1960s. Racial harmony, understanding, integration, Martin Luther King…I’m all for equal rights. I’ve seen the work some of our black men in blue have done on the streets — when I start talking race, everyone assumes I hate blacks or anybody darker than a wop. Truth is, I hate any guy who blames his load on his background. Sink or swim, motherfucker, on your own.

  Things come up with the aid of all that government money, though. We find out unusual information about our subject. Anglin’s not the ignorant hillbilly we thought he was. He graduated high school in the upper third of his class and he has two years of college behind him. He studied languages at a junior college, and his grades were high. Then he entered the US Navy and saw duty just after the Korean War. It appears he was a member of an elite force in the Navy, but his active-duty records are ‘classified’. Which disturbs the shit out of me. I was in the Rangers, but everything we did was on record. Practically everything, anyway. When they start showing you ‘classified’, it means that this guy was part of something that would probably embarrass the US Government. Which means he was probably in the murder-for-hire business, but it’s not called that because he was wearing a uniform when it took place. I’m talking about a well-trained assassin. I understand that I’m doing a lot of guesswork here, but there’s got to be a reason Anglin’s under the veil.