Jack of Spades

by James Hankins

  “Says here we’ve got an ‘organized’ offender, one who plans his crimes, displays control at the scene, and leaves few or no clues.”

  “He say anything in there we don’t already know?”

  “Give the guy a chance, Gavin. That was just the first sentence. It also says we’re looking for a male, twenty-five to forty years old, though the suspect could be a few years outside that range on either end.”

  “Dwight likes to cover his ass,” Dunbar said.

  “He says we’re looking for a white guy, because most serial killers are white, and because most murderers kill those of the same race, and all our vics so far have been white.” Spader scanned more, then said, “Our guy probably has slightly above-average intelligence. Certainly has a high school diploma and our profiler strongly believes he attended college but did not finish. It says here he would have attended for no more than a year or two. And the fact that he has struck only in Massachusetts makes our profiler here think that if Galaxo did attend college, he did so in state, or no farther than an hour away by car.”

  “How the hell does Daniels know he went to college? And didn’t finish?”

  “Let me see…he says our suspect is intelligent and driven, so he’s likely to have attended a secondary school, one offering four-year degrees, but the fact that he takes only a body part or two, no more, and the fact that he doesn’t seem to do more—no further mutilation, doesn’t kill them right there, doesn’t even seem to stick around long enough to likely experience full sexual gratification from his acts, if that’s what he’s looking for—these facts indicate that he’s not a finisher. That he doesn’t have it in him to finish a four-year education.”

  Dunbar cracked another walnut and chewed, while mulling that over for a moment. “What else does he say?”

  “Let’s see…says here Galaxo is a loner.”

  “No shit. Who wants to hang out with someone who chops people up for fun?”

  “He probably can function well enough in society to go unnoticed.”

  “That’s the part that always gives me the willies, you know? The guy sitting behind you at the movies, the barber cutting your hair, the guy fixing your broken toilet, he could be spending his days doing the same shit we all do, then at night, while the rest of us are watching the idiot box, he’s out there cutting people to pieces.”

  “They should wear special T-shirts or something,” Spader said, “identifying them as serial killers.”

  “I’m just saying, it’s scary.”

  Spader couldn’t disagree. “Says here Galaxo is probably an only child and his parents are probably both alive. The father is domineering, hard to please. May have physically abused the son, either sexually or otherwise, but the profiler is less certain on this point. Both parents work or worked, though because of societal mores, the mother may not have worked until the suspect was older, either of high school age or older. Given that all victims were male, the suspect may or may not be homosexual. Accordingly, he’s probably not married or living with a woman with whom he’s romantically involved.”

  “It says that? ‘May or may not?’ ”

  “It does.”

  “Nice to see the FBI go out on a limb with his sexuality like that. That report doesn’t happen to give us Galaxo’s address, does it?”

  “Yeah, here it is. One-Two-Three Main Street.”

  “Great. Let’s go pick him up.”

  Spader continued, “It does say here, though, that Galaxo lives in a suburban neighborhood in Massachusetts, which, to him, is a ‘comfort zone.’ That’s why he commits his crimes here.”

  “What’s our profiler say about Galaxo pretty much leaving Pendleton’s mother alone?”

  “Hold on, let me look. Okay, here it is. Suspect may harbor a secret fear of women, so he stayed away from her for the most part. That dovetails with the fact that he may or may not be gay.”

  “Right. May or may not.”

  “Exactly.”

  Spader skimmed over the document. “Jesus, Gavin, you have to eat those things right now? It’s distracting.”

  “I got a bag of chips in my desk. You want me to eat those instead?”

  “Stick with the walnuts. Let’s see, what else is in here? The suspect gets in close with a stun gun or chloroform rather than threaten with a handgun, and he doesn’t make his life easier by using power tools, preferring to use a handsaw and the like, leading the profiler to believe he’s probably employed in a field in which he uses his hands rather than sits behind a desk.”

  “Like a butcher?”

  “Well, he’s certainly a butcher in his night job.” Spader read on. “Here’s an exact quote. ‘The suspect is a seriously disturbed individual.’ ”

  “Thank God for the FBI. Why does he wear the mask?”

  “Says here he doesn’t want his face to be seen.”

  “You’re a real card, John. Why a kid’s mask?”

  “Give me a second, let’s see…okay, here it is. Wears the mask for the obvious reason of disguising himself—”

  “Score one for you.”

  “—and to disguise his voice.”

  “Which makes sense.”

  “Sure does. He can say whatever he wants, play his sick games of choice with them, and they couldn’t ID him by face or voice.”

  “So the fact that it’s a kid’s mask doesn’t mean anything?” Dunbar asked. “I mean, psychologically?”

  “Special Agent Dwight W. Daniels doesn’t attach any special significance to it. I suppose if they made masks specifically for adults with voice-changing technology and our guy still went for the Galaxo mask, it might tell us something. But he probably just went with the best option for him, the mask with the most advanced technology inside.”

  Dunbar nodded to himself as Spader read the report for another moment and tried to keep from reaching over, yanking the nutcracker from Dunbar’s grasp, and hurling it across the room.

  Finally, he said, “It says here that the way Galaxo cuts off parts of people’s bodies without apparent passion demonstrates extraordinary emotional detachment, as well as ambivalence about the feelings or pain of others. He knows he’s hurting them but he doesn’t care at all. And he loves control. From the tying up to the forcing victims to make choices. He’s in charge every second of his time in the victims’ homes, and he likes the victim to know it.”

  “Right up until they’re dead,” Dunbar said. “But wait, back up a second. If he’s all about control, what’s with the choices he offers? What’s that about? If he really wants to show how in charge he is, why doesn’t he just take whatever body part he feels like taking? Why let the victim choose?”

  Spader read a little more, then said. “The profile here goes into considerable detail about that. It all has to do with what triggered all this. Something set all this in motion, some precipitating event. It pushed a fragile psyche over the edge.”

  “What kind of event?”

  “Apparently, Galaxo feels as though arbitrariness has negatively impacted his life.”

  “And that means?”

  “Some decision or decisions somebody made pissed him off and he thinks they could have done things differently.”

  “Usually with a guy like this, his fuse is lit by getting fired or his wife or girlfriend dumps him.”

  “You’re right,” Spader said. “And if Special Agent Dwight W. Daniels is right, his boss or his wife or girlfriend did what he or she did for what Galaxo considers arbitrary reasons. Or maybe it’s nothing like that. Maybe they’re tearing down his house to put in a new train station when they could have just as easily—in his mind—chosen a different site. Or maybe his insurance company denied him coverage for something major, without good enough reason in his opinion, and he’s ticked off. So he’s getting revenge, making a statement about arbitrariness.”

  “It fits,” Dunbar said with a cheek full of walnuts that Spader wished he’d just swallow already. How the hell had he and Dunbar stayed friends for so
long? Dunbar continued, “Let’s say there’s no connection between the victims, which we sure as hell haven’t been able to find yet. So he’s choosing them pretty much at random, his only requirements being that he can get into their house when they’re alone.”

  “So that’s the first arbitrary decision.”

  “Exactly. Who to choose for a victim. The next statement of—what’d you call it? Arbitrariness—is with the punishment he inflicts. With Pendleton and Lisbon, he threw out a couple of choices, then changed them, right? And remember, he took out the first vic’s tongue—Yasovich’s—and put it in a few places before finally settling on the meat drawer in the fridge, next to the bologna. Like he’s telling us it’s all random.”

  Spader scanned the report for a few seconds. “It’s like you read this thing before I did, Gavin. The profiler says pretty much what you just said. You should consider joining the FBI.” Of course, they both knew he was a decade too old to apply.

  “Fuck you, too. So what do you think?”

  “About the randomness? It fits with the crime scenes and the witnesses’ accounts. And Special Agent Dwight W. Daniels sure thinks it makes sense.”

  “But what do you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think yet. Your theory’s better than any I’ve come up with.”

  “Anything else in that report?”

  “That’s about it. Except the very end, where Special Agent Dwight W. Daniels covers his ass again by saying that he could be wrong, of course, about certain opinions in the profile, including the race and age of the suspect.”

  “Is he even sure about the species? Maybe Galaxo really is an alien.”

  Spader laughed.

  “So what do you think, John? How accurate is it?”

  “We’ll know when we catch the son of a bitch. Let’s get a copy of this to everyone on the task force with a note saying I’ll be calling some of them tomorrow. This report suggests a few leads to run down, and because we haven’t come up with anything on our own so far, we’ll run them down.”

  Spader saw the look on Dunbar’s face.

  “Okay, Gavin, you and I both know the FBI doesn’t have a crystal ball, and Daniels’s report was easy to poke a little fun at, but there have been cases where profiles have been helpful in catching seriously bad guys, so until we get something solid to work with, we’ll continue our investigation using the report as a guide. Just a guide, nothing more. We’ll work any other angle we can think of, too. When we think of them, that is. Until then, relying on the profile, we’ll look into colleges and universities in the state, and those within a couple hours’ drive, and get the names of all white male students who completed two years or less of school over the past, say, twenty-five years.”

  “What about the blue-collar thing? Anything we can do with that?”

  “You want to walk into every car repair shop, warehouse, and factory in the state and ask if anyone likes to wear kids’ masks and cut people up?”

  “I was thinking you could assign that smart-ass Wilkins.”

  Spader knew he was joking, but he said, “We might be able to use that, though, for what it’s worth. We’ll take the list of names we get from the various colleges and check into the people, find out who’s blue collar and who’s not.”

  “That could be a lot of them. I mean, they don’t get their degree, they aren’t sitting behind the CEO desk of a big company.”

  “We’ll see. Anyway, the guys working with their hands now will be our first priority, though we certainly won’t give a pass to the white-collar guys just on Special Agent Dwight W. Daniels’s hunch. But again, because we’ve got nothing better to go on, we’ll give this profile serious consideration. Once we get our list of blue-collar college dropouts, we’ll give highest priority to those who still live in Massachusetts, still have both parents alive, and have no siblings. And they have to fit the physical type. Someone five feet tall or seven feet tall wouldn’t. Neither would someone a hundred twenty pounds or someone four hundred pounds. There may not be many people who fit all our requirements—according to the evidence so far and our profile here—and any that do will be the first we look more closely at. And once we start looking, we should find out if any have recently been fired or dumped. Those will be serious red flags. And if the names on that drilled-down list don’t pan out, and no other evidence comes to light before then, we’ll get looser on our criteria and look at more people on the broader list.”

  Dunbar nodded. In a quiet voice he said, “Does that sound like Eddie Rivers to you?”

  “Who?”

  “The guy Daniels describes. Sound like Rivers?”

  Spader expelled a breath through pursed lips. “A little, I guess. If I remember right, he did go to college for a few semesters. Bunker Hill Community College, I think. I can’t remember if one or both of his folks were still alive back then. Not sure if he was an only child.”

  “He worked with his hands,” Dunbar offered. He was right. Rivers used to do body work on cars.

  Spader shook his head in mild annoyance.

  “I know you don’t think Rivers is our guy here,” Dunbar said, “but you have to admit that we certainly can’t rule him out based on the profile.”

  Spader had to concede that. “But I think we have a better chance of finding our guy through the college angle, with all the cross-references we talked about. That may be a long shot, too, but who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  Dunbar nodded. A moment later, he cracked another walnut and said, “Speaking of getting lucky…”

  “I’m not giving you Hannah’s number.”

  “Damn.”

  EIGHT

  Jeff Golding kept a gentle hand on his four-year-old son’s shoulder to keep him from wandering near the garage door, which was still descending automatically, while his wife stood just inside the kitchen entering the five-digit code to disarm the security system. When the light on the alarm panel switched from red to green, he and Danny followed Emily into the kitchen. Golding closed the door and entered the code again, rearming the system. Emily went right to the answering machine to check for messages, Golding went to the refrigerator for a bottle of water, and Danny shot out of the room, the red lights in the heels of his sneakers flashing across the kitchen tile.

  “No TV,” Emily called after him.

  “Just one show, Mom,” Danny said from the other room.

  “It’s late, Danny,” Golding said. “Almost bedtime. No TV.”

  Golding downed a third of the water in one gulp and offered the bottle to his wife. She took a smaller sip and handed it back.

  “I’m not all that tired tonight for some reason,” he said. “Are you?”

  “It’s getting late. And Danny’s not even ready for bed yet.”

  “But it’s not that late, is it?”

  She smiled. “What? After Danny goes to sleep?”

  Golding smiled, too. “It’s been over a week. I don’t have to get up particularly early for work tomorrow. You said you don’t have a meeting until noon. What do you say?”

  “I say—”

  She stopped. Golding was about to ask what was wrong when he heard it, too.

  “Is that the television?” he asked.

  “Sounds like it.”

  “He’s gotta start listening a little better, Em.” He raised his voice. “Danny, your mother said no TV.”

  Danny’s small voice drifted in from the other room. “It’s not the TV.”

  Golding and Emily exchanged puzzled looks. All they heard for a moment was the faint hum of the refrigerator. Then they heard it again. A strange voice, squeaky and utterly unnatural.

  “That’s Galaxo,” Emily said. “The alien.”

  “Now he’s lying to us? Damn it.” He raised his voice again, louder this time. “Danny, you’re watching TV in there and you just lied to us about it. We’re not happy. Now turn it off and get ready for bed.”

  “I’m not lying, Daddy. It’s not TV.”

&nb
sp; Golding handed the bottle of water to Emily and strode into the den. He looked first at the television set, but was puzzled to see a black screen. He looked around the room. The lights were off and Danny was nowhere—

  He stopped cold, his eyes registering an image his brain refused to process, an image that, in other circumstances—maybe at a theme park or birthday party—would have had Golding smiling and fumbling for his camera. But not here, not at night, not like this. It was too weird. Danny was sitting in the lap of Galaxo, the alien Danny liked to watch on Saturday mornings, the one who adorned his PJs and bedsheets. They were sitting in a dark corner of the room, in Golding’s recliner, illuminated only by the moonlight spilling in through the French patio doors. Then Golding remembered hearing about Galaxo in the news lately, though he’d been busy this month at work and hadn’t really paid much attention to the story. But now this creep in a Galaxo mask had broken into his house and had his son. Cold fear clawed at Golding’s insides.

  “Galaxo is here, Daddy!” Danny squealed with delight. “He came to see me. Right here in our house!”

  Golding shook off his confusion, clenched his fists, and started forward.

  “Please don’t come any closer,” the man in the mask said in Galaxo’s goddamn creepy cartoon voice. “I have a gun.”

  Golding stopped. What else could he do? What should he do? Jesus, he had no idea what to do. He couldn’t imagine how the bastard had gotten into the house. The alarm was on. He couldn’t have known that the man had waited for them to leave home hours earlier, then walked around the house and picked the lock on the back door. It took a few minutes, but it hadn’t been all that hard. And then he waited. He didn’t open the door, because he saw by the red light on the alarm panel just on the other side of the patio door that the security system was activated. He just waited in the shadows by the patio door, listening for the sound of the garage door opening at the front of the house, and when the door went up hours later, he reached out of the shadows, grabbed the doorknob, and when the light on the alarm panel went from red to green, he opened the door and stepped into the den as quietly as he could. He closed the door behind him, listening to the beeps from the panel by the door from the garage to the kitchen, as Golding punched in the code, alarming the system once again. Golding knew none of these things. All he knew was that his son was in danger.