Season of the Assassin

by Laird, Thomas

  He’s extremely affectionate. Wants to nuzzle and kiss me all the time. Even Eleanor falls in love with this pooch. And he falls for my wife as well. Sonny is very territorial. He has pissed on every tree and bush around our bungalow, and he lets us know when anyone’s about. He’s better than any dead bolt, and he’s much better company. The only thing he can’t do is draw me an Old Style and a shot of Jim Beam.

  So I’ve fallen in love with a dog. He gives me something to look forward to when I get home. Eleanor takes him everywhere with her, everywhere they’ll allow an animal, at least. And she’s written Jimmy about Sonny, too. Jimmy never had a dog when he was a child. When I write my son, I tell him I’ll get Sonny mated with some excellent bitch and he can have a pup of his own.

  Sonny keeps watch for me now. He’s a very light sleeper. When I get up in the night, I never catch him zeeing out. He’s always alert when my eyes are open. Sonny’s a comfort. I’m becoming attached to him like he’s the son I never had.

  *

  I’m at the hospital ten minutes after I get the call. Anglin’s had a stroke, and no one knows how bad he is.

  He’s at Christ Mercy. We were on the streets when we received the radio message.

  ‘Maybe the fucker’ll die,’ Eddie says, and smiles.

  ‘Without admitting what he did?’

  ‘There you have me,’ my partner concedes.

  When we arrive at Emergency the doctor wants to know why we’re there.

  ‘We’re friends of the family,’ I say, smiling ingratiatingly.

  The doctor is not convinced.

  ‘You can’t see him.’

  So I show him my badge, and so does Eddie.

  ‘You still can’t see him,’ the physician tells us.

  ‘I really don’t want to hold his hand. But if it looks fatal in there, I’d appreciate a moment with him before it’s too late.’

  ‘You want a confession from a dying man?’ the ER doctor demands.

  ‘Yeah. He’s killed seven young women. If he’s going to go, I want to put a period to his case.’

  The physician stares at me and shakes his head.

  ‘I thought he was cleared of the charges.’

  ‘He was. I don’t care. He killed them.’

  Suddenly the ER resident looks at me and sees something in my eyes. What I see in his eyes is a fear that somehow I’ll take out my obsession on him, instead of on Anglin.

  ‘All right. If he goes bad, I’ll let you see him before he checks out. I really shouldn’t…But all right.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor,’ I tell him, holding out my hand. He shakes it very tentatively, and then he withdraws back into the room where Anglin lies.

  Two hours later, the doctor, Dr Arnold, reappears and tells us it was all a false alarm.

  ‘Food poisoning. No stroke. He ate some bad mayonnaise at a restaurant. He seized up from the pain, but it wasn’t a stroke…We’ll clean his insides out, and he’ll be fine.’

  ‘Can I see him after they purge him?’ I ask.

  ‘I guess so. All right.’

  *

  We wait another three hours and finally Anglin’s back in the land of the living, having had his stomach pumped.

  ‘Hello, Carl,’ I say.

  He looks up blearily.

  ‘Jesus Christ. Get out of here, will you? I’m in no condition to — ’

  Eddie’s outside the door. Standing guard.

  ‘You could relapse, Carl. Do you know how easily that could happen?’

  Carl Anglin is a strong, lanky, athletic man, but he is very weak from the purge. He understands my threat, and he tries to sit up.

  ‘Lie back, Carl. You got nothing to worry about…Unless one of your playmates decides to intrude onto my private property again.’

  ‘I don’t know what — ’

  ‘You might not, Carl, but I’m holding you responsible anyway. You come into my house, you or anyone you know, and I’ll kill you. One of your old Navy buddies invades my space just once more, I’ll find you and I’ll kill you. And I know how to get away with it. Yeah, I could be as good at it as you are, if I felt the need. And to protect my wife and family, I wouldn’t have any difficulty putting a hole behind your ear. I know where to find throwaway pieces, just like any other cop…Don’t fuck with me again, Anglin, or I’ll kill you myself…Now you take care, Carl. I’ll be around.’

  Anglin rests his head back on his pillow and closes his eyes as I leave the private hospital room.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  [April 1999]

  Mason of the FBI wanted to know why we were looking at Theresa Rojas after all these years. He came stomping into my office with his long-legged assistant, the choice morsel over whom Doc salivated, and he demanded to know what the story was. Why were we harassing an ex-witness to a dead case?

  ‘Dead case?’ I asked.

  ‘You know what I mean, Lieutenant.’

  The pretty assistant sat across from me. Doc was still in the head, relieving himself. With his prostate, it took a while.

  ‘Why do you care if I take a look at Ms Rojas? If the case is dead — ’

  ‘We’re watching her. If you hang around her, you might keep some interesting people away from her. You might inadvertently make her seem hot…Do you follow, Lieutenant?’

  ‘Why don’t you explain it to me?’ I asked, smiling disingenuously.

  Doc walked in with his Poetry magazine tucked under his right arm.

  ‘The crapper and the muse,’ he cracked. ‘One cannot exist without the other. The duality of things. The beautiful and the obscene.’

  My partner was eyeballing Mason’s Number Two as he said it.

  ‘I’m telling you, Jimmy. Leave her alone. You’ll be messing with an ongoing — ’

  ‘And what the hell do you suppose my deal with Anglin is? That’s been ongoing for thirty-one years!’

  ‘Look. Just stay clear. It’s a federal investigation.’

  He stood. The beauty accompanying the beast rose. Doc murmured something lascivious, just out of anyone’s earshot.

  ‘What was that all about?’ Doc asked me after Mason and his assistant had left my office.

  We could hear the clicking of the assistant’s high heels all the way down the hall.

  ‘We’re being told that Theresa Rojas is out of bounds to us.’

  ‘By those federal pukes?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Hey…Have you got anything back about that woman’s medication?’

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  ‘Let me show that list you made to Mari. I’m taking her out for lunch…Want to join us?’

  When Doc assured me he was not taking his pediatrician wife to Garvin’s saloon, I assented.

  *

  Mari, Doc’s spouse, was very dark. A Hindu. The mother of an adopted young black child. A child my partner adored more than he did his own continued respiration.

  We took Mari to an overpriced diner in Niles. It wasn’t far from her office. She was very short on time because she had an overstocked list of patients.

  I showed her what I had written down at Theresa Rojas’s room at the hospital in Elgin.

  ‘I’m not familiar with these three…But these two are very heavy sedatives. Why are you asking?’ She looked over at me.

  I took a sip from my Diet Coke. Then I looked back at her. She was so dark, her skin was almost a blue-black. She was also one of the most truly beautiful women I had ever personally met.

  ‘I think someone has been keeping her in that hospital room for over thirty years. I don’t know if it’s sedation or some kind of psychosis-inducing stuff they’re feeding her, but I think they’re holding her prisoner with a hypodermic.’

  ‘My God,’ Mari gasped. ‘How terrible…Can you prove any of this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The drugs on that list you showed me would not cause anyone to remain cut off from reality, I have to tell you that. Still they could be injecting her with any number of t
hings that could recreate in her mind that episode of the murders thirty years ago…But you’d have to catch them at it — unless you can have her examined by a team of doctors and psychiatrists different from her current physicians.’

  The overpriced lunch arrived. Doc attacked his food, but Mari was clearly upset.

  ‘How could anyone…’ Her voice trailed off. Then she peered up at me with her beautiful, darker-than-night eyes. ‘They have murdered her, too, then, Jimmy. It’s the same thing. They have stolen her life, if what you think is true…My God.’

  Our M.E., Dr Gray, told me to go for a blood sample. It was the only way toxicology could help us.

  We went to the Mental Facility with a court order. Theresa’s blonde-haired shrink got her nose all out of joint when I produced the order, but she herself took the sample for us in spite of the fact that we’d brought a tech along with us for that purpose. The fuzzy-haired psychiatrist gave us a murderous glare when we were leaving, but Theresa Rojas looked over at me just before I departed and gave me the slightest nod. As if she was saying that what we were doing had her approval. As if she understood, wherever her consciousness was buried, that we were shoveling our way toward her.

  *

  Dr Gray said there was a slight trace of something unusual, something suspicious in Theresa Rojas’s blood sample. But it was as if her blood had its own cloaking device, he said, because of the other drugs they’d prescribed — the ones I’d written down.

  ‘You take all these drugs at the same time, it’s gonna be difficult to separate out anything extra that someone’s injecting into her — if they actually are using a needle, that is. But there’s some kind of substance…Hell, Jimmy, if I were guessing,’ the sixty-five-year-old Examiner scratched his stubbly chin, ‘I’d say this woman has been given some form of synthetic drug that resembles LSD. But, as I say, the traces are slight, and the other drugs seem to be covering over most of the synthetic — like a raincoat or a cloak covers the clothes underneath.’

  ‘Could you bring this to a grand jury?’ I asked.

  ‘Hell, Jimmy, I can’t even identify the exact type of that shit. I said it looks something like LSD, but it’s not a drug I’ve ever come across before. We’ll have to bring this to the attention of the government folks.’

  ‘That’s like asking a cat if he swallowed Tweety Pie,’ Doc moaned.

  ‘I don’t know where else to take this, Detective Gibron,’ Gray said. ‘I’m just a poor Medical Examiner for Cook County.’

  Gray walked away from us and headed back to his examining room. He had plenty of other cadavers to look at.

  ‘We have to take this to the very people who’re trying to run us off the crime scene,’ DOC Concluded.

  ‘You trust the FBI?’ I asked.

  He laughed out loud.

  ‘How about the Food and Drug Administration?’ I asked.

  *

  It took a week of pestering before we got the FDA’s results. They wanted to know, in D.C., why we couldn’t pursue the testing of this specimen through the usual channels. We gave them a very artful runaround, and finally they took us on because some doctor there became intrigued at the type of drug our earlier results indicated. He wondered how such a chemical mixture could exist.

  The doctor’s name was Engstrom. When he saw our stuff, it confused him at first. Then I brought up that word: synthetic.

  Engstrom took our file to an older FDA scientist. Someone in his mid-fifties, Engstrom informed us over the phone. This guy proved conclusively that the chemistry was indeed synthetic. The drug was something the Feds had tested in the 1960s. It had been used in brainwashing experiments, which became all the rage after the Korean War. The stuff was created to induce long periods of total withdrawal from reality, Engstrom claimed, during which the victim — or the patient — would be highly susceptible to suggestion.

  ‘Could these “long periods” last as much as thirty years?’ I asked Engstrom over my office telephone.

  ‘Dr Graham, my associate, says the stuff could remain effective almost indefinitely, if it were introduced regularly into the subject.’

  End of conversation. The Army called this chemical stew MRS 127. It was indeed a

  derivative of the street drug LSD.

  *

  We finally got a court order to have Theresa Rojas released to us. We were going to have her sequestered in a private hospital, St. Marion’s, in the northwest part of town. All at the expense of the CPD. She was our number one witness against Carl Anglin. She always had been. But it seemed the Fibbies were at work trying to stop her release to us. Unfortunately for them, Special Agent Mason and the leggy blonde didn’t have any muscle with Judge Peter Ault, a crusty old Cook County jurist who had a rep for being a loner and for being on no one’s fucking pad.

  *

  Theresa got settled into her new room. With very strict orders. We kept a twenty-four-hour watch over her. She had no visitors, not even family. Not until she came out of whatever state this synthetic poison had put her into.

  After just two days, her new nurse said Theresa was having brief spells of agitation. Which might have been the result of withdrawal from all those tranquilizers. Dr Meredith Wells was her new shrink. She prescribed exercise, rest and good food for Theresa. It’d be a while before all those toxins would be out of her system.

  ‘It could be weeks, maybe months before she’s even partially lucid. And there’s a chance that all these drugs have done permanent damage. We’ll have to wait and see,’ said Dr Wells.

  I talked to Theresa when I saw her on my weekly visits. I came alone.

  ‘You’re looking very good, young lady,’ I said as I handed her a long-stemmed yellow rose on one occasion. Yellow was for faithfulness, my wife had told me.

  She took the flower into her hand, but a thorn pricked the flesh of her thumb.

  I went to her bathroom and got some Kleenex. I took her thumb and pressed at the scarlet droplet until the beading ceased. I tried to smile at her.

  ‘That’s the price of beauty. You get pierced by it sometimes,’ I said.

  No moods crossed Theresa Rojas’s fifty-year-old face. Her visage was bland. No smiles, but no frowns either. When Theresa was anxious, Dr Wells explained to me, she roamed around the room ceaselessly. She wandered from the bed to the bathroom to her door and all around that circuit again and again.

  No emotion showed on her countenance, however.

  ‘I bet you can hear me, Theresa. I bet you heard me the other time I talked to you, too…This is all about Carl Anglin.’

  She became restless. She stood and began to walk all around her room. From the bed to the washroom door to the main door. Theresa seemed like a mouse weaving its way through a maze it couldn’t fathom.

  ‘Carl’s not here, Theresa. Carl will never be here. We’ll be with you. We won’t let him come close. I promise you…And the way to get rid of Carl forever is to tell me what you saw and heard, thirty-one years ago…I know you won’t want to talk about it now. I know Dr Wells wants us — you and me — to go slow, and that’s okay with me…Did you like your rose, Theresa?’

  It might have been a hallucination, but I thought I saw a slight nod. Just a quiver of movement in the chin area.

  I remembered what Mari, Doc’s wife, had said about Theresa. They had indeed stolen her life. Except that she’d been imprisoned by all of us who’d colluded in her institutionalized existence. She picked up the rose from her nightstand. Her lips suddenly puckered, but no sound emerged from them, and she lightly dropped the flower back where she’d found it.

  ‘So the situation is still pretty much the same. We have a woman who’s been kept in a zombie state since the time of the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, and we now have a drug, MRS 127, which the government does not acknowledge — and neither will Food and Drug, the people you took it to in the first place.’

  So spoke the prosecutor, Henry Fields.

  ‘No one acknowledges MRS 127,’ he emphasized. �
��The man you went to originally — Engstrom? — will not go on record concerning what he told you over the phone about the origin of this synthetic, and Theresa Rojas is currently still a turnip, albeit now a non-medicated one…Am I getting this all accurately?’ Fields barked.

  ‘There’s a good chance now that Ms. Rojas will become a witness against Mr. Anglin,’ I reminded the prosecutor.

  ‘Yeah, Jimmy. But when? Which century? I know it’s not your fault, but — ’

  ‘She’s coming around, Henry. I’ve seen her, too,’ Doc countered.

  ‘And where’d you receive your M.D.?’ Henry returned.

  ‘She’ll help us. It’ll be sooner than — ’

  ‘What if Anglin disappears again?’ the counselor continued. ‘He’s done it before.’

  ‘He likes the spotlight,’ Doc insisted. ‘He won’t go away.’

  ‘What if he does his thing with Theresa?’ Henry shot back. ‘He seems to find out a whole lot of supposedly confidential information when it comes to his personal safety. The guy has a line to someone somewhere.’

  ‘He doesn’t know where she is and neither do his federal friends.’

  ‘I think I would rather pursue those government folks if, as you say, they have been shielding Carl Anglin for three decades.’

  ‘It would give me a real woody too, sir,’ Doc smiled.

  Henry Fields blushed. Darkly, lie was a pale, bald man. Very trim, like a cross-country runner who’d stayed in shape.

  ‘You guys deal with the conspiracies, if they exist. I never watch The X-Files.’

  ‘We want Anglin. Then we’ll go after any accomplices,’ I explained.

  ‘You are either a fool or a real brave copper, Jimmy. I vote for nuts, with you and your playmate here. I hope you don’t live to regret any success you might have from here on in.’

  For some reason it sounded as if there were a veiled threat in the prosecutor’s words, but I let it go.

  We walked out of the district attorney’s office and headed to the elevators.

  ‘You think he’s scared of what we’re getting into, Jimmy?’

  ‘He’d be a damn fool if he weren’t.’