Dead On

by Robert W. Walker

  “The notes aren’t dated.” He tried to arrange them without luck. “Show me the sequence. Which came first, second, and so on.”

  “Then we’re a partnership?” she asked.

  “ Show me the order.”

  “Are we agreed then?”

  He bit his lower lip over clenched teeth. “I’m in. Now show me.”

  “Until you got hold of them, they were in order.”

  “Please.”

  She began organizing them. “This one’s the most recent, this the first, second.” Between them lay the bundle of six letters and torn envelopes.

  “How were they delivered?”

  “Left where he knew I’d be.”

  “And the first drop, where?”

  “Terry’s gravesite.”

  “Jesus, on the grave?” He imagined the shock she must have endured opening that letter standing over Terry’s grave.

  “Left it on his headstone.”

  “Just lying on his headstone?” He didn’t know what to say, and he feared any kind words would be hurled back at him.

  “Taped…it was taped to the stone with blanketing tape to combat the wind.”

  “Blanketing tape?”

  “Sort used in any hospital. Wants me to know he knows where I work, too, I suspect.”

  “And the last letter? Where’d you find it?”

  “In my mailbox, again no postage.”

  “Mailbox? Not in our apartment building?”

  “Yes, afraid so.”

  “Then he knows where you live and work—and by extension where I live and work.”

  “Yes, it’s why we’re talking; the only reason we’re talking.”

  “How long? For how long has he been watching me?”

  “First letter showed up just over a week ago, but he’d already found you.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s in the letters. He’s proud of it. His letters led me to your building.”

  “How long?” he persisted.

  “Maybe a couple of weeks. Not sure to the day.”

  “He’s been shadowing you, and you’ve been shadowing me, and he’s been shadowing you—but you don’t know how long?”

  “Afraid I don’t know the answer to that.”

  “Nice of you to let me know, Doctor.” Marcus zeroed in on the first and last letter, carefully reading while Mrs. Mallory said something about having wanted to approach him sooner. But Rydell put up a massive hand, gesturing for silence as he studied each threatening communiqué in order now, skimming each.

  After several more swallows of beer and ten minutes, he said, “These letters are the work of a ranting animal, filled with foul language and an even fouler imagination.”

  Giving it straight back to him, she muttered, “So tell me something I don’t already know.”

  In the letters, Cantu detailed and outlined how he meant to torture Katrina to death after raping her. He went into a paroxysm of detail in fact about how he meant to break every bone in her body and make a Thanksgiving turkey of her body, hang her alive yet over an open fire in the Georgia brush and literally cook her and eat portions of her flesh to “become one with mine enemies” as he put it. The cold tone and matter-of-factness of it all stood at serious odds with the four-letter words spewing forth. The reading left Marcus internally shaken.

  “This guy’s a full-blown lunatic, Doc, and you really ought to’ve handed these over to the detectives investigating the case.”

  “Do my civic duty and get myself killed, heh?”

  “Whatever’s happened in the past with your husband’s case, you should really have turned these over to—”

  “Bullshit and you know it. They’ve decided it’s unsolvable; let it go so cold it hurts to touch it.”

  “They’re still very much working the case, Doctor. Hell, three cops were killed.”

  She grimaced and then sipped at her wine. “I’ve repeatedly and exhaustively pushed them on where they’re at with the case. I’ve gotten nothing from them.”

  “That’s hard to believe; I mean these are fallen comrades, fellow cops.”

  “Look at how they’ve treated you. Moreover, look at yourself,” she countered. “Time has a way of brush stroking out memories.”

  He dropped his gaze. “I’m not an Atlanta cop anymore, or haven’t you noticed.”

  “A real cop and a creep partner of his compared the case to drilling a well in Dubrovnik, Russia; said when you hit solid rock, it’s a dead end. Said it was time to hire a private dick, and then he offered his services.”

  “Said it just like that, did he?”

  “Did everything but expose himself.”

  “While volunteering for the job. I get it.” Marcus shook his head in a show of disgust. “Did you pull a gun on him?”

  “No, reserved that for you.”

  “You don’t want just any private eye.”

  “Exactly. I want someone who—”

  “—has as much to lose or gain as you?”

  “—has a vested interest.”

  He held up his beer in a toast. Look, I’m sorry for the way the cops’ve treated you.”

  “I don’t want your sympathy, Rydell. Besides, you can’t apologize for the whole lot of ’em, and I’ve danced around with those clowns long enough. They’re like the rest of Atlanta. They’ve put it all behind them.”

  He nodded. “The old balm. Out of sight, out of mind.”

  “They’ve all moved on, and they don’t wanna be reminded.”

  “Blight on the city and the department. All that crapola you know, image, PR, politics.”

  “So you haven’t been totally out to lunch after all?”

  He gave her a grim smile. After a moment’s silence between them, lightening streaking overhead, and the smell of rain imminent, his clenched fists opened to become palms. “I know those guys downtown, ‘specially the politicians and the brass. They want to believe Cantu’s fallen off the face of the earth.”

  “Or drowned in the sea,” she countered.

  “Maybe burned to death in a fiery crash?”

  “Froze to death in the freakin’ Arctic.”

  “In the arms of Santa Clause ’imself.”

  This made her laugh but all too bitterly and briefly. “The authorities are useless!”

  “But the letters could open up leads you can’t know of, if you chose to share them with the guys still on the case. Guys like Thomas Keevers.”

  “The letters led me to you.”

  “Cantu left me alive for his own perverse reasons. Sure would like to know what those reasons were.”

  “He led me to you.”

  “Precisely what he wanted, no doubt.”

  “What, that I lead him to you or to us?”

  “I doubt it matters either way to him whether he kills us separately or together, but he’s come back, obviously, because he is drawn to the hunt and the kill.”

  S E V E N

  Some time had passed when Kat Holley ordered an appetizer. “Haven’t eaten all day…feeling a bit light-headed.”

  “Win on an empty stomach.” He nursed his near black beer. Silence thickened like hardening concrete between them until he added, “Look, Doctor, playing marionette in his game could get us both killed.”

  “I realize he’s calling the shots right now but—”

  “Calling the shots. Sweetheart, this murdering creep is weaseling his way around the corners of your life.”

  “Get smart, Detective. He’s playing games with us both.”

  “You’ll forgive me, Doc, but all this is a lot to digest in an hour and—” he looked at his watch—“and a half. You’ve had a couple of weeks.” Rydell’s forehead creased with consternation.

  “You think it a coincidence this morning?”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “That-that little girl you saved, Kim, that she wasn’t helped along?”

  “Helped along?”

  “That it
’s curious Quinn should leave a weapon of any sort within reach of her?”

  “Whoa up there. You saying…you think Cantu had something…orchestrated all that?”

  “Down to your taking the stairs two at a time, yes.”

  “Nahhh—he’d have had to convince the girl, Kim, to play me.”

  “She said a cop sold her to Quinn, remember?”

  “He’s impersonating a cop?”

  “Not rocket science to pose as an undercover cop these days. You can get all the necessary equipment on eBay.”

  “It’s not a far stretch,” he agreed now with a shake of the head.

  “Not if he wants to get into your place, bug it while you’re out playing Dick Tracey, whatever.”

  “Jeeze, wonder how much he knows about my…my habits.”

  “Hence the reason I now carry Terry’s .38 Smith & Wesson.” She flashed the gun. “Get a clue, Detective.”

  His hands went up, waving in response to her displaying the gun. “Jeeze, lady, put that away!”

  She made the gun disappear again.

  “Look here,” he continued, “how could Cantu know that I’d give a damn and come—”

  “—come running up those stairs? He knows you, has studied you.”

  “To what end? Why?”

  “To watch you jump. You said it yourself, Mr. Marionette.”

  “Put me through my paces.”

  “Pretty elaborate too. Having you save a child in the bargain. Make you feel good about yourself long enough to go after him.”

  “That’s insane. To come out of hiding for…to…to torment me, you.”

  “Come on. You know the type.”

  He nodded. “Likes playing God.”

  “In psychiatric terms, he’s a sociopath and a pathological liar. He’s gotta be loving it, pushing our most emotion-packed buttons, Detective.”

  “Just so hard to swallow all at once.”

  “He’s a manipulative bastard. You, me…the ones he’s already killed. That little girl—using her like fish bait. Selling her to a pervert.”

  “All so he could get into my place, plant a camera or a bug. In his time with the Marines, he’d been a freakin’—”

  “—Electronics wizard, I know. Makes him even more dangerous.”

  Marcus drained more beer. “Too much coming at me too furiously to deal with.” He fended off a panic attack, but he still felt like a drunk in a windstorm. “I guess, like it or not, we’re partners.”

  “Now you’re making sense.”

  “Appears, for whatever satanic reason, that’s the way he wants it.”

  “Never underestimate the depth of his evil, Detective.”

  He nodded, adding, “You’re preaching to the choir.”

  “And there’s no second guessing what’s pumping through his brain.”

  “It’ll be a helluva tightrope walk, getting this guy.”

  “Alone we’re both vulnerable, but together, we might stand a chance.”

  He nodded. “And once we get the upper-hand…”

  “Then he’s all mine.”

  “I lead the lamb to your slaughterhouse, heh?”

  “Lamb, no. Snake, yes. Lead the snake to my scalpel.”

  He finished off the last of his third beer. She did likewise with her Chardonnay. “I suggest we find a new base of operations,” she suggested.

  “Where do you propose we set up? Where do we go that this creep can’t follow?” Marcus scanned the entire street, turning in his seat to see if anyone anywhere was paying too much attention. If Cantu were watching, he did so from a dark slice of shadow at some distance. Perhaps an alleyway or window. Perhaps using binoculars.

  “You feel it, too?” she asked, munching now on cheese sticks and ranch dressing.

  “What? What’re you talking about?”

  “I see it in your eyes.”

  “What?”

  “Like he’s watching our every move from some rat warren.”

  “Let’s don’t get paranoid, Doc.”

  “Hey, in certain circumstances, paranoia is a gift.”

  “And fear keeps you alive, I know.”

  “Face it, Detective,” Katrina continued, waving wide eyelashes at him. “You’re a little rusty.”

  “Thanks for qualifying with a little rusty.”

  “Like riding a bike, isn’t it?”

  He shrugged and grumbled. “Just too many sleepless nights.”

  “One too many divorces, I suspect.”

  “God, you’re like listening to my mother.”

  “She never let you get away with any shit, did she?”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “Is she, you know, still with us?”

  “She passed away going on seven years now, right after Pop. She never got over his dying. They had that rare kind of love between them, unshakable… unbreakable.”

  “Did your father go out badly?”

  “Multiple sclerosis, long-suffering, but it finally finished him off. Damn disease is absolutely draconian.”

  “Sorry, and your mother?”

  “Why all these questions?”

  “We’ve got to find out what’s causing your black outs.”

  “Oh, really? Then you believe me?”

  She ignored this. “Determine if it’s genetic in nature. A blood disorder, what? Determine if there’s a way to treat you.”

  “No one’s got an answer to that one, Doc.”

  “I don’t want you blacking out on me at a crucial moment.”

  Their eyes met over this, both thinking about that moment when he’d checked out while Terry and the others were murdered. Finally, he said, “And I thought you cared.”

  “I do. I care about my own safety and aims.”

  “Very altruistic of you, Doctor.”

  “Now that we understand one another, we need to make a plan of operation, determine a base of operations. Any ideas?”

  “Not one damn clue. How ‘bout you?”

  “Your mother’s place.”

  This froze him. “The mountain cabin at Blue Lake?”

  “Is there another?”

  She watched his face scrunch into a questioning glare. The questioning look turned to understanding as he said, “You knew my parents were dead when you asked.”

  She gritted her teeth. “I do good research.”

  “And interrogations.”

  “I try.”

  “Yeah, I can see that.”

  “Look, few people know of your parents, and fewer still know of the getaway. I just stumbled on it in an obscure trade magazine your dad wrote a piece for, buried in his bio.”

  “So you think Cantu knows nothing about it?”

  “It may be the only piece of information that Cantu hasn’t got.”

  “How do you know that?” he asked, his eyes still darting about.

  “I don’t. Not for sure. But the place has an alarm system.”

  “Had an alarm system, but how in hell could you know that?”

  “An elderly woman, alone in the woods on a lake with boat traffic, a lake that spills into a river?”

  “All right, all right, First Alert but that was when they used the place.”

  “We ought to pick up a dog then, plant him outside the place,” she suggested as if she had an animal in mind.

  “No way! No freakin’ pets. I’d rather tie tin cans around the perimeter.”

  “Look, a dog can act as a safeguard in a place like that while we get our ducks in a row.”

  “No ducks, no dogs.”

  “Be reasonable. If not a dog, then we’ll have to install an alarm system, or reactivate the old one. Get with the program.”

  “Get with the program?” He wallowed in silence for a moment, grimacing. “A few minutes ago the program was blow a hole through my stomach.”

  “Don’t be difficult!”

  “Me?” He actually laughed out loud, feeling the effects of the last pint.

  “Some trouble, I’d
say, yes.”

  She’s damn cute still. Too cute to be planning to murder a murderer, he thought but said, “I’d say we could toast to it, but nahhh…on the chance he might be watching. Don’t want him to think we are getting on.”

  “Together, I am confident, we can corner Cantu. Keep your eye on the goal here.”

  He still felt uneasy, finding himself in this conspiracy. “I don’t like screwing with a long-standing code, Doctor, and this…if I agreed to any of this…”

  “What code?”

  “Never conspire to commit murder, especially murder for hire.”

  “Get over yourself. Damn it, you’ve been conspiring to murder yourself for how long?”

  “That’s different,” he challenged.”

  “How?”

  “It’s a conspiracy of one. Harm’s no one but me.”

  “Only if you don’t talk to yourself,” she countered. “Your other self.”

  He started to reply in anger but stopped himself, saying instead, “Look, I’m going to make out like we’re still on opposite sides of the fence here, create a real scene.”

  “Because he’s watching?”

  “Because he may be watching, and if so then—”

  “—Then he knows we’re conspiring his death.” She smiled at this turn of phrase, pleased, it appeared, with its melodic charm. “Call it justifiable homicide.”

  “Pick that up from Court TV? Nancy Grace?”

  They sat looking across the table and into one another’s eyes, still sizing one another up. “All right,” she said in a whiskey voice, whispering, “do we have a go here or not, partner?”

  “Get back to your apartment and be safe about it.” He dropped a few bills on the table. “Gather up any necessities you might need in the woods, and meet me at my garage space below the building, clear?”

  “Clear but what’s the space number?”

  “Come on! You know every detail of my life. What’s another number?”