Jack of Spades

by James Hankins

  “Unless our guy actually is Rivers,” Fratello said, “and somebody really did see him.”

  “Rivers is long gone,” Spader said and he knew his voice betrayed more emotion than he wanted to show. Still, he couldn’t help himself. “Rivers killed Justin Tannenbaum and Tammy Walker shortly after he was released, then he disappeared. There were sightings for a while after that, and I checked out a bunch of them myself. The last remotely credible one was nearly seven months ago. I’m telling you, he’s gone. He’s not gonna come back here and kill more people.”

  “Why not?” Cassel asked.

  Spader took a breath. “Because that’d be really stupid. And he wasn’t stupid.”

  “No,” Fratello said, “but it’d also be insane for him to come back and kill around here, and he’s as fucking insane as can be, so maybe he’s back after all.”

  “You know, Fratello—” He stopped and looked down at Dunbar’s hand, which was resting on his forearm.

  Dunbar said quietly, “We all know you don’t want Rivers to be our guy, what that would mean for you if he was, but we have to keep in mind that he could be, right?”

  Spader paused. He had no choice but to concede the possibility. “Okay, we’ve got something to think about. Rivers may have been seen in the area the night of the Golding incident. We’ll keep that in mind. Leon, let me know what the troopers say when they check back in.”

  “There’s something else to think about, John,” Dunbar said. “Whether or not it’s him, Rivers, whoever was at Golding’s house the other night is fucking with you personally now. He left a message just for you, trying to make you think a ghost from your past is back in business.”

  Spader opened his mouth to reply but Dunbar continued.

  “Look, John, everyone knows that wasn’t the best thing that ever happened to you. And it doesn’t take a genius or a mind reader to figure that the whole thing probably still eats at you a little—though I know it wasn’t your fault, man.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Well, just like we have to consider that Rivers could be our guy, we have to consider the possibility that our guy is somebody other than Rivers, somebody who has something against you personally, John.”

  Spader rolled that around in his head for a few moments while everyone watched him. He nodded. “It’s a possibility. I’d think it more likely, though, if he’d been leaving me notes from the start, or if his crimes were far more similar to Rivers’s, maybe nearly identical. But it’s certainly something else to keep in mind.”

  Spader was tired of them staring at him. He decided it was time to shine the spotlight elsewhere.

  “Where are we on the list of dropouts from the local colleges over the last twenty-five years? You were in charge of that, right, Wilkins?”

  “Yeah. I drafted a couple of staffers and the three of us have been making calls, plus I made a few visits, and, for the most part, we’re getting pretty good cooperation. This stuff is mostly computerized now, so all the college office folk have to do is punch in the right search and fax us a printout. There are a shitload of schools in Massachusetts, though, so it’s slow going. Haven’t even started on the nearest out-of-state schools yet. Got some lists from some schools, though, and saw a few names we know.”

  “Yeah, anybody interesting?”

  “Fratello over there only lasted a single fucking semester at Northeastern University.”

  “Fuck you, Wilkins,” Fratello said.

  “What happened, Leon,” Wilkins pressed, “you fail gym?”

  “Fuck you, Wilkins.”

  “Come on,” Spader said, “anyone else we know?”

  “Did you know your old buddy, Oscar Wagner, got two years of UMass under his belt before he went to the academy?”

  “I knew that,” Spader said, “but I forgot.”

  “There’s one more,” Wilkins said. “Jeffrey Golding went to Harvard for a year, but I doubt he broke into his own house and sucked his own dick, though I bet Leon would do that to himself if he could.”

  “I swear to God, Wilkins—”

  Wilkins was starting to go too far. It was time for a muzzle. “Wilkins, everyone, let’s keep it cleaner than that, okay? Unless you want a sexual harassment suit on your hands. Suspension, letter in your file, perks like that. We got guests here today and they don’t need to hear your schoolyard bullshit.”

  “Bullshit’s okay to say, though?” Wilkins asked. Spader stared at him for a moment and Wilkins shook his head and dropped his eyes back to the papers in his hand. “Moving on. No other interesting names have come up so far, but we got plenty of schools yet to pester. We’re making good progress but it will take more time. And seeing as we’re doing this in large part because our FBI profiler read some tea leaves or something and decided our guy probably went to college for no more than two years, I hope to hell we’re not wasting our time.”

  “Yeah, because we don’t have a lot of time to waste,” Cassel added. “The guy’s speeding up. What was it? Something like three weeks between the first and second victims, then twelve days before number three. Now he waits just six days before dropping in on Mr. Golding the other night.”

  “Obviously, we want to stop Galaxo as quickly as we can,” Spader said. “But like I said last time, until we’ve got something better to go on, we’ll act like Special Agent Daniels of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit knows what he’s doing. Now, anybody got anything else?”

  The detectives who had been dissecting the victims’ lives gave their reports. Spader was disappointed. Though the detectives were far from finished, their digging so far had been logical and thorough, and though it had spawned a few minor side excavations, it hadn’t yielded a single significant find, not one lead Spader considered promising. Moreover, there still didn’t seem to be a connection between any of the victims, not even the slimmest thread tying them together. The investigators even went back into the school years. No victims had attended the same high school or elementary school. In short, the task force was still nowhere. As Spader listened to all the efforts the detectives’ had made—efforts which, though mostly false starts and dead ends, had to be undertaken—he remembered something he’d read, something Thomas Edison had said about his ten thousand failed experiments with the lightbulb before he finally found the right material for the filament. According to the inventor, rather than failing ten thousand times, he had instead successfully eliminated ten thousand incorrect substances. While that way of thinking may have comforted Edison in his search for light, all Spader could think was that, after all their work, he and his team were still in the dark.

  TWELVE

  Ian Carmichael was a cop for as long as he possibly could have been. The first opportunity he had after graduating high school, he entered the academy, and he didn’t stop doing the job until mandatory retirement. He started out walking a beat in South Boston, among the Irish mobsters and the teen gangs. He made detective after just four years, which was about as fast as you could possibly make it, and in later years turned down cushy desk jobs on the sideline so he could stay in the game. He wanted to catch bad guys and, in his day, he caught a lot of them. After they made him stop sixteen years ago, because some rule in some book said he was too old to do the job anymore, he opened the Green Hills, a quaint Irish pub, full of dark wood, dark corner tables, and dark customers who mostly kept to themselves. It was a frequent hangout of off-duty cops, but it wasn’t the first place most cops went to. More men and women in blue went to Carmichael’s, another typically Irish pub closer to the nearest local precinct house. The Carmichael who’d first opened that pub thirty years ago, no relation to Ian Carmichael, had long since retired and sold the place to the highest bidder, who turned out to be an Italian guy named Albano. Because Ian couldn’t give his own place his own name, he went with the Green Hills. And that was the place Spader tended to favor, for a few reasons. First, because it attracted some cops, but not too many. Second, because you could be left alone t
here if you said you wanted to be, or if your body language said it for you. Neither he nor his body had to say anything tonight, though. The place was nearly empty. The third reason Spader liked this place, the most important one, was that big old Ian could almost always be found pouring drinks behind the bar.

  “Have one more, John?” Carmichael said.

  “One more?” Spader said, his eyes down, looking at the outline of his reflection in the surface of the rich, highly polished mahogany bar. Spader caught the subtle message—Carmichael was saying Spader had nearly had enough for the night, that one more was his limit. Spader nodded and the bartender immediately slid another Guinness in front of him, one he’d poured before he’d even asked the question. That was another thing Spader liked about the place. Ian knew when you wanted more, when you’d had enough, and when you wanted more but had had enough. Spader recalled a night just a few months after Eddie Rivers had disappeared right after killing two more innocent people, when Spader had drunk far too much in far too short a time. He didn’t remember exactly what he said to whom, but an angry crowd had grown around him, until Carmichael came around the bar, pushed through the pissed-off patrons, and pinned Spader against the bar. He shooed the crowd away, which few others could have done with no more than a word and a look, then, with a strong hand on Spader’s right wrist, he pried open the fingers of his left hand and took his car keys. Then he planted Spader on a stool at the end of the bar and watched him from the corner of his eye, watched until the buzzing in Spader’s head had stopped, until the irrational, unfocused anger had turned to weariness, until the last of the pub’s patrons had headed out into the night, one by one, casting angry glares toward Spader in the corner as they passed him. Then Carmichael locked up, drove Spader to his apartment in Spader’s car, and took a cab home. Spader realized the next day how lucky he was to have chosen the Green Hills as his watering hole that night. It had been another bad day and he’d been looking to do something bad himself, something to relieve the stress he was feeling, something to get rid of the irritating buzzing he’d felt in his head since he started drinking early that evening. If Ian Carmichael hadn’t kept watch over him, hadn’t taken his keys, Spader might have walloped some poor bastard half to death, or been beaten badly himself, or maybe driven dead drunk into a car full of innocent people. The next time he came to the Green Hills, he took a single Guinness from a wary Carmichael, drained it, and walked out, leaving behind a twenty-buck tip. He should have left far more.

  “Feel like talking?” Carmichael said, interrupting the memory. Spader hadn’t thought he’d wanted to talk, but he wasn’t surprised to find that in fact he did. The reason he wasn’t surprised was because it had been Carmichael who asked, and with the man’s uncanny sixth sense about such things, he wouldn’t have asked if Spader hadn’t, in fact, felt like talking.

  “Thinking about a case I’m on. Real nutjob.”

  “So I’ve read.” He had a brogue, so it came out, So oi’ve read. Spader hadn’t known Carmichael before he opened the bar so he was never sure if the accent was real, or affected to make the bar seem more authentic, or was affected at first but had become such a habit as to essentially make it real.

  “He’s playing with me,” Spader said.

  “With you personally? Or with the police?”

  “Me. He’s fucking with me.”

  Carmichael nodded and said quietly, “Anybody you know?”

  Spader knew exactly who he meant.

  “No.”

  Carmichael nodded again.

  Spader sipped his drink. “Pour yourself one, Ian. On me.”

  “Appreciate the gesture, John, but I did a little too much o’ that when I first opened the doors of the Green Hills here and a couple o’ years ago I gave it up.”

  “You miss it?”

  “Every fucking day o’ my life.” The word fucking came out fooking, which for some reason made Spader laugh a little harder than he might otherwise have. Either that or it was the Guinness. “Enjoy that pint, John, it’s your last tonight,” Carmichael said, confirming Spader’s earlier suspicion.

  Spader nearly protested, then realized the futility of it, so he took Carmichael’s advice and savored his next sip. He blinked, and when his eyelids came up more slowly than they should have, he realized Carmichael had gotten it right again. He’d have to drive home with extra care.

  He sighed. “My kid’s fucking up his life,” he said into his glass. He’d left two messages for David over the past two days, neither of which prompted a return call.

  “Let me guess. Blames you for it?”

  He looked up. “You gotta be psychic to be a barkeep these days, or what?”

  “Only if you want to be a good one. You don’t mind my asking, is it drugs or a girl?”

  “Maybe both. I don’t know. We’re pulling him from school. He screwed up his first year pretty badly. Goes out every night, doesn’t tell us where or with who. Shows no signs of getting his act together. The wife and I decided he needs some time off to get his priorities in order so, like I said, we’re yanking him from school.”

  “Wife? You remarried, lad?”

  “Get out of my head, will you, Ian?”

  Carmichael smiled. Spader sighed. Olivia had left him a message the other night, after their train wreck of a family breakfast. She apologized for David’s behavior. She didn’t mention the photo albums, but Spader knew she wanted them. He figured she wanted to share memories of her youth with the guy she’d been dating for a few months. Somehow, Spader found himself unable to find the time to get those pictures to her. There were more important things that needed doing. He drained another draft of Guinness and licked the creamy foam from his upper lip.

  “And how is the wife?”

  “My ex-wife,” he said, looking pointedly at Carmichael, “is doing well. Other than our problems with David, she seems to be quite happy these days. Might have something to do with her new boyfriend. Doctor of some kind. Yeah, she’s doing fine, just fine. Thanks so much for asking.”

  Carmichael grinned again. “You know what I think, John? I think you’ll be all right. I think you’ll get it all squared away. The boy, your feelings about your ex, and the fooking nut out there.”

  The word fooking made him chuckle again.

  “Old friend o’ yours coming in.”

  Spader looked into the mirror behind the bar and saw Oscar Wagner close the pub door behind him. He swiped his hand across his face, wiping away perspiration the late-summer heat and humidity had put there, even late at night, and headed for other end of the bar. He didn’t take one of the stools, but stood there, as if he intended to take whatever drink he ordered to one of the tables in the shadows. Spader took another sip of stout and began to feel a faint tingle in his head, a tiny little buzzing like he’d heard that night a while back, the night Ian Carmichael had to wrestle his keys away from him.

  “He come in here much?” Spader asked.

  “Used to. Haven’t seen him around lately. Excuse me, will you, lad?”

  Spader watched the barkeep make his way toward Wagner, wiping down the bar as he did. They exchanged words Spader couldn’t hear, then Carmichael reached under the bar and came up with a bottle of amber-colored whiskey. He poured three fingers in a glass and stowed the bottle away.

  Wagner knocked the liquor back in one gulp and slid his glass toward Carmichael, who poured another three fingers, then turned away, perhaps to avoid a repeat performance. Wagner looked as though he was about to down his second whiskey when he saw Spader at the other end of the bar. He smiled a crooked smile and sauntered over.

  “Hey, John,” Wagner said. “Buy you another?”

  Spader tried to ignore the irritating hum in his head. “Ian says this is my last. I’m inclined to listen to him.”

  Spader followed Wagner’s gaze over to the old bartender, who stood leaning back against the shelf of liquor bottles behind him, his arms crossed—arms that, although nearly seventy years old, were
still brawny.

  “Don’t blame you,” Wagner said.

  They drank in silence for a few moments.

  “You following me, Oscar?”

  “Following you?”

  “Second time I see you in a week.”

  “Eight days. And I was looking for you the first time. This time was just chance. Came in for a drink and here you are.”

  “Lucky, huh?”

  Wagner eyed him for a moment. He frowned. “Something bothering you, John?”

  Spader eyed him back, his brain humming faintly, like he was standing too close to a huge electrical generator. “Got a lot on my mind.”

  Wagner nodded sympathetically. “I bet. That’s why it doesn’t bother me that you haven’t called me back yet.” Spader looked up from his Guinness. “You know, about calling RadioShack for me. I know you pulled the case about the alien in the mask chopping people up. That must be keeping you hopping lately.” He laughed.

  The humming in Spader’s head grew worse as he looked into Wagner’s gray, gaunt face. Something in some part of his brain was saying something, something he couldn’t hear over the buzzing. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Carmichael watching him carefully, like he knew that bad things were crawling around inside of Spader’s skull, looking for a way out. Too many damned Guinnesses, he thought. Should have stayed at the apartment, but he’d felt like drinking, and if you’re drinking alone in your apartment, you’re drinking alone, but if you’re drinking alone in a bar, it doesn’t seem so much like you’re drinking alone. He looked now at Wagner, who seemed to be waiting for Spader to say something, and Spader knew this was why his head had been buzzing for an hour. Somehow it knew Wagner would come into the Green Hills, would come over to Spader, and the voice in his head, the one he couldn’t quite hear over the electric hum, was getting a little louder now. Spader blinked hard and looked away from Wagner. His eyes drifted lazily across the neon signs above the mirror behind the bar, signs advertising various beers, ales, and stouts. The one closest to them, a sign for Corona—a Mexican beer in an Irish pub, which Spader found funny for a moment—glowed yellow, and when he turned to Wagner again, he noticed that the Corona light illuminated the man’s face, staining it yellow, and the face was smiling uncertainly now, smiling at Spader, his face smiling and yellow, and that voice in Spader’s head was almost loud enough to hear.