* * * *
They met Chief Tanner in the evidence processing room on the second floor. He was waiting for them at the end of a long table on which sat a single cardboard box. The box appeared to have been roughly torn open; the brown wrapping paper and string that had bound it had been left hanging from its crushed sides. It was smeared with fingerprint dust as well. Several men in lab jackets were arrayed around the table in various attitudes; none appeared happy with the box.
“We had the robot open it when we saw it was addressed to you,” Chief Tanner informed Byron as he and Vanda walked into the room of waiting men. “There was no return address and after what just happened, I thought it best we didn’t take any chances.”
Byron stopped at the far end opposite his counterpart and asked, “What did just happen?”
Tanner pushed the box several inches further away just using his fingertips and said, “We went right over to Mister Timothy Wakely’s house after I got a look at that list of yours—he was the next on it; still living so far as we knew—we now know that to be incorrect.”
“Murdered?” Byron said.
“Very much so,” Tanner assured him; “Had his head removed with the family sword. My boys here,” he nodded at the gloomy technicians, “assure me that the sword is a genuine Confederate issue; probably a family heirloom. Not that that matters much for Mr. Wakely, as it appears he had no children of his own to hand it off to—a confirmed bachelor as they used to say in the old days.” He winked at Byron.
Vanda, who had been edging up to the open box, halted and said, “Please tell me that his head is not in that box.” Her face went a shade lighter.
Tanner gave her a look; then said, “Byron, I’m afraid this might be bad news for you, but what came in this box has to do with your missing friend, Llewellyn.”
Byron noticed Vanda sidling a little closer to the box. He remained still. “Bad news?” he repeated dully.
Vanda reached the box and peered quickly in. Byron heard her say, “Oh my God!”
“Pretty bad, yeah,” Tanner continued; softening his voice a little. “Some sonofabitch sent you his index fingers.”
Byron felt himself take a step back then stop; then heard himself ask, “You sure they’re his?”
“Yeah, ’fraid so; we rolled one and sent it through AFIS. It was a match from when he applied for a pistol permit in Atlanta a few years ago. We couldn’t lift any prints from the box itself. Whoever sent it was careful enough.”
“Any chance for Thomas,” Byron asked.
“It’s possible” Tanner answered; his expression unconvincing; “…he could still be alive. It would depend on whether they stanched the bleeding…or whatever else they may have done to him before, or afterward. I’m sorry, Byron; I know you were good friends.”
“That’s it then?”
Tanner shook his big head reluctantly. “No, I’m afraid not…there’s a note.” The Columbus chief slid a clear plastic evidence bag containing a handwritten note on lined paper to Byron. Byron noted the rusty-looking stains that decorated the margins, as well as remnants of clear tape that had been snipped near their middle. It read, ‘Tell Byron to hurry up—I’m almost done. Thomas wanted to point the way.’ He looked up at Chief Tanner as Vanda placed a hand on his arm. He could feel himself shaking. “His fingers had been taped to this page?”
Tanner nodded. “Each was pointing in the opposite direction of the other…a joke.”
“Who’s left now?”
“Just one according to Llewellyn’s list—a Randolph J. Carruthers, white male, aged seventy-six. He lives alone since his mother died a few years ago. We’ve got undercover with him now.”
“Anyone assigned to the night shift yet?”
“You and Tucker I expect,” Tanner sighed.
“That’d be fine…thanks.” Byron said.
Tanner called over to Vanda, “Tucker, you in?”
She turned slightly from the open window overlooking the patrol parking lot and answered, “Neck deep, Chief.”
“Byron, go get fitted for a vest and draw a weapon from the armory…you comfortable with a .45 cal?”
“That’s what we qualify with.”
“Good. Tucker, will you stop mooning around and escort Chief Patrick to the armory, please ma’am?”
As they walked down the hallway together Vanda turned and said, “He might still be alive, Byron. I know it’s not likely, but we don’t know why he was taken in the first place. He may have some value to them.”
Byron said nothing; as he was wondering what that value might be.
“Besides,” she added with a weak smile, “at least now you know that he’s not the one behind all this.”
* * * *
Randolph J. sat in the shadowed corner of his cluttered, dusty living room and eyeballed the two officers that had relieved his previous guardians. They didn’t look like much to him. When he had been the man’s age, he reflected, he could have taken him easily; as to the woman…well, that was obvious. He had spent nearly his entire life in school gyms teaching kids the rudiments of sports and the basics of developing a strong physique and knew two losers when he saw them. Smokers and drinkers…soft and slow—this was what stood between him and…something…a painful death, maybe. He shuddered and the damned woman noticed as she made her rounds of the windows checking latches. She quickly turned away. He hoped that they could at least shoot well, if it came to that.
The man reentered the room from the kitchen after spending what seemed an inordinate amount of time in the back rooms of his house. He was drying his hands with a ragged dish towel. “Find anything to interest you?” Randolph J. asked slyly.
Byron regarded him for a moment before asking in his turn, “What do you think?”
The old man reared back in his stained and tattered lounger, “I won’t tolerate disrespect—I demand respect.”
Byron turned away and went to the front door. “Uh huh,” he answered disrespectfully.
Vanda sidled up to him and whispered fiercely in his ear, “Do you mind? We’ve got to spend all night here with this old boy, so do you think you could you give your feud with the elderly just a slight hiatus?”
Byron jiggled the door knob and double-checked the deadbolt without answering.
Vanda’s forehead furrowed with a new thought. “Wait a minute,” she continued with just a glance over her shoulder at Mister Carruthers, “did you find something?”
Byron turned back toward the kitchen and Vanda followed. “I’ll make some coffee,” he said.
When they had entered the tiny, fly-blown kitchen, she seized his elbow. “Byron?” she demanded; then folded her arms waiting.
He looked over her shoulder into the darkening living room. Carruthers studied them both with open suspicion, his long, sagging face, pale and stubbled, pursed in distaste; his tiny, deep-set eyes glittering with malice. Byron turned back to Vanda. “He has a drawer full of children’s underwear in his bedroom,” he said; then resumed his preparations, rinsing out a greasy coffee pot and spooning some stale grounds into a filter basket.
“Might be grandchildren,” Vanda offered unconvincingly.
Byron glanced over his shoulder at her; then returned to his task.
She looked once more to where the man they were to protect glowed like a fungus in the deepening shadows of the on-coming evening. “Oh Lordy,” Vanda whispered; “Oh dear God; I won’t sleep a wink in this house,” she promised.
“Am I allowed to use my own bathroom?” Their unhappy host called out to them. “Would that be a goddamn problem, do you think?” He began to hoist himself up on shaky, spindly arms.
“It’s your house,” Byron answered, “do what you want. All we ask is that you not go outside and to keep all the curtains closed and the doors locked—the rest is up to you.”
“So I can go to bed if I want to?” Randolph J. persisted unpleasantly; beginning his unsteady exit of the close, malodorous room.
“It’s up
to you,” Byron repeated; “Don’t let us stop you.”
The old man made his way like a great, white spider into the dark recesses of the rear of the house and vanished from sight.
* * * *
When they came for him it was not in darkness but just as the sun began to rise over a murky horizon. Vanda had not been as good as her word, but had fallen asleep on the old man’s seedy, sprung couch sometime after three AM. Byron had succumbed in an armchair facing the front door some time before, confident that the sound of anyone attempting to gain entry would quickly rouse him.
It was the crash and grind of the approaching garbage truck that awakened them both. Byron stood and stretched before going to the window to take a peek at the world newly revealed, and heard bones cracking in his back. He smiled tiredly at Vanda who had just managed a sitting position and who smiled blearily back.
He parted the thick, dusty curtains just enough to peek outside. The garbage truck trundled noisily into view, an institutional green monster, spewing diesel smoke and dripping an unsavory stew of fluids from various leaks within its carcass. With a hiss and a squeal it halted in front of Carruthers’ house and the ‘Moan Back’ man leapt down from the maw of the vehicle. Byron dully registered the worker’s scroll of ‘tats’ and began to turn away. ‘He’s going to ruin those fancy cowboy boots,” he thought.
“Anything showing,” Vanda asked cheerfully as she made her way to the kitchen to begin a new pot of coffee.
Byron heard the crash of metal as Randolph’s garbage can was slammed into the lip of the receiving end of the truck outside. “No,” Byron began, “just the garbage pick-up. That’s one job you couldn’t pay me to…” The boots niggled at his subconscious and he turned back toward the window, but it was the sound of running footsteps that interrupted his sentence. “What the …” he began. He threw back the curtain just in time to see ‘Cowboy Boots’ returning the now-empty and very dented can back to the side of Carruthers’ house, even as a second heavily-tattooed man, presumably the driver, charged up the walk wielding a cinder block. Byron just had time to think, ‘Two white males, heavily tattooed,’ before the concrete was launched through the very window he was peering out from. He threw himself to the right in a shower of broken glass and shards of jagged wood.
From the kitchen, he heard the sound of something clattering to the floor and the faraway sound of Vanda’s voice crying, “Byron?”
He had fallen onto his right side, pinning his gun beneath his frame. He scrabbled to flip himself over and bring it into play even as Vanda rushed in with her weapon already drawn and pointing at the destroyed window. In that split second, the face of ‘Cowboy Boots’ appeared framed in the wreckage and Byron noted his long, curly hair, clean and shining in the light of the new day; swinging about his shoulders like a model’s in a shampoo commercial. In spite of the tattoos concealing so much of his features it was clear to Byron that he could not be much more than twenty-five. He tossed the grenade into the room and vanished before either he or Vanda could fire a single shot and Byron thought his expression inappropriately cheerful for the occasion.
The resultant explosion concussed Byron and retuned him to the floor clasping his ears, deaf, writhing, and blind as a mole. He could not know what might have happened to Vanda. Though his senses had been scattered by the concussive bang and brilliant flash of the stun grenade, he understood that he was still alive for the moment, yet helpless and at the mercy of his enemies.
It was the terrified screams of Randolph J. that first pierced the swirling disorder of his mind and ears and let him know that there would be an end to his disablement. Through a white haze he was startled to see that the two tattooed men were already in the house and carrying the old man between them, as neatly wrapped in a blanket as a cigar. Byron sat up feeling for his gun. The driver kicked him in the forehead as he passed with his load and Byron went back down, the gun temporarily forgotten.
As a trickle of blood began to stain his vision, Byron dragged himself toward where Vanda lay. He could see that she was still breathing, but unconscious. He felt something metal beneath his hand and seized it; then made for the appallingly destroyed doorway like a slug—unable to comprehend what had transpired in the lost time from the moment of the explosion until now.
As the sun rose like an angry red eye over the misty tree tops and damp roofs, he saw his adversaries toss Carruthers onto the drooling lip of the garbage truck’s compressor. Byron’s vision cleared enough to witness the younger of the two men throw the lever to commence the downward progress of the great blade, as the older held their victim in place, smiling all the while. Carruthers screamed and flopped about like a monstrous cocoon while watching his death come to him with the inexorable whine of hydraulics.
Byron’s first shot went wide of the larger, older man, but pinged off the metal hide of the truck in an unnoticed shower of rust and paint. The killers were unable to hear the report above the screams and machinery, so he tried again. This time the younger one went down, his hand releasing the deadly lever, but without missing a beat his partner took over his duties and resumed the downward progress while pinning Carruthers with a corded, muscular arm. He glanced back towards Byron with a patient hatred, as if he had all the time in the world. As Byron tried to steady himself for his next shot, the great, filthy blade arrived; beginning its crude vivisection—there was no chance for the victim now; the voice of his terror and pain arcing ever-higher; then abruptly halting with the sickening snap of metal at last meeting metal.
With only the briefest of pauses to insure that his partner was truly dead, the big man stalked away in the direction from which the truck had come, but so many people had come out to see what was happening, that Byron had no chance for another shot. His quarry walked away and, wisely, no one made a move to stop him. The screaming of the shocked witnesses almost masked the banshee-wail of fast-approaching sirens, while behind him Byron heard Vanda cough and groan.
“Don’t open your eyes,” he mumbled through a mouthful of blood; then laid his head down on the filthy floor and closed his own.
* * * *
It was mid-afternoon by the time Byron and Vanda were released from the emergency room at Saint Francis and Tanner was waiting for them in his office. He could have been happier.
The two of them gave their account of the debacle at the Carruthers home and their stories being in accord with the facts found on the scene, Tanner had little to say except, “Well, maybe things will settle down now since they got everyone on the goddamn list; hopefully that made the surviving sonofabitch a happy camper.” As they made their way for the door, he added, “By the way, I’m glad those bastards let you two live…they did, you know. Any thoughts on that, Byron; I’m sure it’s crossed your mind too?”
Byron turned back to Tanner who looked tired and as creased as old leather, and said, “I’ll probably never know now. They did what they set out to do, I think. It’s over.” He didn’t tell Tanner or Vanda of the note he had found tucked away in his jacket pocket. One of the assailants had slipped it into his jacket as he and Vanda had lain unconscious after the concussion grenade had done its work. It read, ‘Think simple and you’ll know what to do—come alone.’ It was written in the same crude lettering of the note contained in the bloody package.
Outside of Tanner’s office Vanda took Byron’s hand and looked up into his face. “You shouldn’t be alone tonight, Byron…I know I don’t want to be.”
Byron found that he couldn’t even smile. “God, I spent my whole youth and a good part of my adulthood fantasizing about this moment.”
Vanda sighed and took a step back, releasing his hand. “But…?”
“The memory of ‘us’…of what could have been, is all I’ve had to keep me going at times…a lot of times. My life is a shambles right now…my wife…I don’t even want to go there. The truth is I can’t afford the risk of losing you by having you; I’m afraid to take the chance, Vanda.”
The cor
ners of Vanda’s mouth turned up just a little. “My God, I can’t believe I’m being turned down in favor of a fantasy—even if it is a fantasy about me. You are a dreamer, Byron Patrick, and a little bit of a poet, and very sweet, and I’d really like a chance to kick your wife’s ass.” The little smile vanished. “You’re also something of a liar, Chief Patrick. You’re keeping something back in all this and I know it has to do with your little brother’s abduction all those years ago.”
Byron reared back as Vanda smoothly continued, “Yeah, that’s right, I know about your little brother and Virgil Curtsie—I had one of our computer geeks ‘Google’ you the day we met—I may be a hot little number, Byron, but I am also a pretty damn good cop. That list your friend Llewellyn had is connected to that event. You know the rest, I think, or have figured it out by now.”
Byron stared hard at her for several moments; then said, “Tom and I killed Virgil Curtsie, Vanda, the man who took my little brother. We were just kids, and I don’t think we set out to do it, but to be honest with you, I don’t really know anymore. But now, all these years later, it seems someone wants revenge for that killing—that’s why they took Thomas.
“As to the list, I’m just not sure. It became apparent to me during this investigation, and to you as well I suspect, that the list was a roll call of pedophiles; all of an age to have been contemporaries of Virgil Curtsie. What Tom was doing with the list—that’s where things start to get hazy. At first, I thought it might be Tom behind the murders, but after the index fingers, I knew better.”
Vanda glanced cautiously at Chief Tanner’s closed door. “You poor baby, you’ve been carrying this around all these years and then…this. It must seem like a nightmare.”
The Detective Megapack Page 11
