by Thomas Laird
I stopped briefly and removed the Nine from my shoulder holster. I was wearing the weapon under a very light nylon jacket. Light as it was it was still too warm, so I was sweating heavily in this steamy air. I palmed the gun in my right hand and held it against my right thigh. It was dark enough that no one on the street saw the pistol. They were too busy scoping out the tourist traps.
I was within a half-block of the Major — I assumed it was him. I was still edging closer to him. He had slowed down noticeably. He was approaching a crowd of people who were waiting outside a movie theater. They were standing in line for some film — I couldn’t see what was on the billboard outside the place.
He turned back toward me. He waited for me, his hands inside his jacket.
I kept on coming until only 100 feet separated us. The Major placed himself directly in front of a crowd of two hundred movie patrons. He had them as a shield, except that his cover was behind instead of in front of him. It was effective, nonetheless.
At fifty feet, I halted. Stalemate. He knew I wasn’t going to cut loose with all those civilians standing behind him.
Under the glare of the bright theatrical lights of the marquee, I could see his face. He was blond, like his FBI victim. He had what was called an aquiline nose — like an eagle’s beak. But it wasn’t overly large. There was a distinct dimple in his chin. He looked like a Hollywood leading man. A handsome specimen. Tall, athletic, rugged. Like the advertisement for the Marlboro Man. A man’s man.
He was smiling at me. Perfectly white teeth, naturally. I might have been shooting at Gregory Peck when he was younger, the thought occurred to me.
Then I remembered his threats to my family. I watched him smile. The line outside the theater refused to move. The movie might not have been scheduled for another half-hour. I had no way of knowing.
He was still showing me those teeth. And my backups were either lost or late.
His grin vanished when I raised the nine-millimeter pistol. Deliberately, I fired three rounds into the air.
The sound of the shots brought screams from the people in line, and then the crowd scattered and headed for any sort of shelter they could find. The throng in front of the show disappeared in less than five seconds. It was like a magic trick.
And just as the last of the bystanders got out of our way, I saw the Major pull the gun with its silencer attached out of his right jacket pocket. I watched him raise the weapon in my direction, and then I pulled the Nine’s trigger.
My first round spun him around and knocked him to the ground. I rushed toward him, and as I closed in he tried to raise his gun again. My second bullet hit him in the belly and doubled him over, but he still tried to stand up and get off a shot at me. My third and final round found his throat, and the shock of this impact knocked him flat on his back.
I stood over his supine body. Blood was jetting from his neck wound, but the other hits showed simply as black holes in his clothing.
I removed the handgun and silencer from his grasp. His grip had very little strength left in it, so there was no struggle. There were new shrieks coming from the sidewalk behind me. Female onlookers who’d just realized they’d witnessed a killing.
Except that the Major, if this was really the boss of Tactical Five, was not quite history yet.
I tried to press my fingers over the little gouts of blood coming out of the wound in his throat, but I couldn’t get them properly plugged in. If the paramedics didn’t arrive soon, he’d bleed to death. I tried my handheld radio, but the spurts of blood frightened me into reapplying the pressure on his throat.
Finally a patrol car arrived. I told the uniforms who I was and ordered them to call for the paramedics. There was a first aid kit in their car, so I was able to get a bandage over the Major’s neck wound.
But he’d lost too much blood already. I’d blown an artery in half with the Nine, I thought.
I bent down close to his face.
‘Tell me. Tell me before you die. Tell me how to get to Anglin. How to get his juice turned off at the roots.’
The handsome spook tried to smile, but his own juice had nearly run out.
He tried to mouth some words, but his wound stopped him speaking.
I got close to his face, close enough so no one else could hear, what with all the street noise around us.
‘Anglin killed the President, didn’t he? Tell me…just tell me.’
But all the Major could do was blink his eyes once. And then his stare became focused far, far beyond me — and beyond all of us.
*
‘Why the hell did he shoot the girl?’ Doc lamented.
‘Maybe he thought she was with us. Maybe he scoped us out and thought she was the Judas goat. I don’t imagine the Major handled betrayal very well.’
‘Why’d Mason send her?’
‘Fear. The Major was a scary guy, Doc. I don’t know. Maybe Mason had no clue the spook would take out that pretty little woman just because the Major sniffed something in the air. The Major isn’t talking anymore, and Mason’ll find a little hole to hide in as soon as possible. Bet on it.’
‘Now there’s no way to link Anglin with the President.’
Doc peered out into the darkness from my office’s window. He looked off into the east, where the Lake lay.
‘I can’t think of anybody who’s likely to come forward on the matter. No. It seems our conspiracy theory has sunk with the fortunes of the leader of Tactical Five. I’m sure all his partners will slide into their drains when the papers find out this guy was attached to the secret G.’
‘But they won’t go any further than the Feds will allow.’
‘Of course not.’
He turned and sat down in the leather chair opposite my desk.
‘We have only one card left to play.’
‘Theresa. Yes,’ I agreed.
‘We need to take extraordinary steps to keep her in the pink.’
‘Yes. We do.’
‘There can be no press. No media. Until we’re headed to court.’
‘Our friend Henry Field will not prosecute until he’s sure, damn dead sure, that we have a real live witness in her, Doc. If Theresa regresses, if she goes south on us again, we lose Anglin forever. His deal with the Feds is still active, now that the Major’s croaked. He has his armor in good repair now that his boss isn’t around to remove his insurance policy. We don’t get him with Theresa Rojas, he doesn’t get got.’
‘She has to remain in our world.’
‘There it is. There it truly is.’
*
Theresa made great strides, the Indiana shrinks told us. She had become very vocal, very articulate. Her solitary confinement in the prison of her mind was over and she talked all the time. She was lucid and clear, and there was very little to remind her doctors and therapists of the mental recluse that Theresa Rojas had been.
Doc and I had to take very careful precautions about visiting her and communicating with her over the phone. I didn’t know if the FBI was worried about finding the witness we’d hidden from them, now that they had the Major’s death — and life — to cover up. Except that they knew Anglin would spill everything once we took him in. He’d want all the rats to drown with him. He was that kind of rodent. It’d make great press, and he enjoyed the spotlight.
The thing that disturbed me then was that Anglin would hear about Theresa’s recovery. It would be in the interest of the members of
Tactical Five, if any remained, to let Anglin know about her. Then his self-defense mechanism would pop into place, and that clique of spooks would get Theresa done for free.
We had to keep Carl under full-time surveillance until we were sure about Theresa’s recovery. Once we’d cuffed him, I’d feel better. I’d have liked to be able to cuff the Major’s surviving ‘relatives’, too, but I didn’t know their names. But I could locate Anglin, at least. He was her most direct threat.
The Chicago Police Department was not exactly an example of optimum secu
rity. We couldn’t trust anyone with information about Ms. Rojas. Not the captain. No one. We were going to make a lot of enemies once people around here found out we’d been sitting on a witness like our girl. There would be men who would want to take credit for nailing Anglin, but I didn’t give a shit about ruffling those assholes’ feathers.
I was going to keep Theresa alive. I was going to be sitting there when she placed the noose over his head. I was going to watch something like justice happen in a Chicago court of law. All these miracles would come to pass if I could keep Theresa in one piece for the next few weeks while her doctors finished her therapy.
Theresa was coming out into the open. Back into the world. She smiled and talked to people. She’d finally been able to free herself, and she’d crawled out from underneath that bloody, thirty-one-year-old dormitory mattress.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
[July 1999]
The Major’s fingerprints belonged to a man who’d died years ago. We went to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for an explanation. We received nothing for a response. They simply didn’t know. It was a mystery.
And Special Agent Mason was nowhere to be found. He had been reassigned — and his new whereabouts were classified, John Rush, the FBI guy who talked to us, explained. Rush was an old-timer. He had no use for clandestine splinter groups and spooks, he said, and I believed him. There was disgust on his middle-aged face as he had to deliver this perfunctory rap. He was just doing his job, he apologized.
We told him this was a murder investigation. He replied that killing the Major — whoever he was — had been simple self-defense on my part. No murder there, he stated. I explained that the Major was linked to Anglin and that it was Anglin who was the murder case. Special Agent Rush shrugged his shoulders. He had nothing else to give us. The Major was gone. I imagined the Feds had secured the remains, and his carcass would now belong to the apparatus of ‘National Security’. The mills of government were already grinding up his bones. The story of the gunfight in the street was relegated to a few sentences in both of the major Chicago newspapers. Just another shooting in a big city, according to the media. And their source of information was not the Chicago Police Department. The government itself had given them the story on this incident.
So, as quickly as he’d popped up in front of me, the Major had disappeared on the night he’d blown a hole in Doc’s Fibbie girlfriend. I thought my partner was still in mourning over her loss.
‘The world has too few truly beautiful women, Jimmy. I know what we think of her profession, but that’s no reason to be prejudiced toward such a miracle of genetics,’ Doc lamented after the ambulance had taken Joyce Carlson’s dead body away. We’d finally found out who she was after the Major had slotted her.
There would be no more talk of conspiracies, of Presidential assassinations. Doc and I had come to the end of the line. Everywhere there was an opening, there was a dead end to match it. No wonder the Warren Commission people came up with a report as quickly as they did.
No one wanted to know who did it. I was convinced that we were through with what had happened almost forty years ago in Dallas. A few movies and books, a few half-cracked theorists on the talk shows. We just wanted it to be finished.
As far as Doc and I were concerned, it was done. We were focusing on Anglin. If he wanted to share something with the world after we locked his ass up for no less than ten murders, that was his business.
Carl Anglin might have wanted to let his pent-up dogs of vengeance loose when he went down, but that was not going to stop his prosecution this time. The race was on to get him to trial before the remnants of Tactical Five, if there were any, got to him to shut him up.
We had surveillance people on the ex-Navy killer round the clock. Our captain was very interested to know why we had the heat on high, but we kept him at arm’s length about where we were. It was between Doc and me. That was the only way to keep Theresa Rojas’s status secret.
She was getting stronger all the time. All we told our superior was that Anglin’s arrest was imminent. He was the only law enforcement person we shared that information with, but we needed to move quickly before other people became involved, as inevitably they would.
We were about to take Theresa’s deposition. On the next Tuesday. This was Friday. We were waiting to see if she had any ‘episodes’. To this point she hadn’t had the flashbacks that might have occurred, her therapist warned us. That was the LSD factor in MRS 127. But the doctor in Indiana had never dealt with a victim of this synthetic, so everything was new to him too.
Renny Charles was another person we’d have liked to bring in as a witness against Anglin. Not that Charles could put Anglin on scene, whether back in 1968 or in the other three cases. But he could help a jury understand what kind of creature it was who was on trial.
I tried to put the Kennedy killing out of my mind — and off my conscience. I was too young to have voted for the man. I didn’t much like any of his relatives or their offspring, and I was never much taken with his aristocratic wife. His sex life didn’t concern me, although I couldn’t fully respect a man who couldn’t keep his word or his vows. But that was his private life.
It was like being privy to a secret. The more you had to keep it to yourself, the more you wanted to shout it to the crowd. Human nature at its worst, I supposed.
With the death of the Marlboro Man, alias the Major, we’d have to leave the conspiracy behind John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s demise to other people. We had a job to do. We had to bring the murderer of ten young women to justice. It was about time, for them and for their families.
*
We had a stenographer and we would be running a tape. Theresa was a natural beauty. The passing years hadn’t stripped her of what God had originally endowed her with. There was a natural grace, a femininity about her. When she stood, you wanted to touch her shoulders. They were fragile and elegant. She stood straight, no stoop in her posture. There was no sense that nature was aging her. She looked almost like the file photographs that showed her as a nursing student at the end of the 1960s.
‘Theresa, we’d like to begin. If you’re all set,’ Doc told her.
I sat next to her. I reached out and touched the back of her hand. She looked over at me and smiled gently. She resembled the Madonna, I thought. At least, all the pictures and other renderings I’d seen of the Virgin Mary. Her smile made the room warmer, more comfortable. It was almost scary, supernatural. She was the other side of the Anglin coin.
‘Go ahead and tell us what happened on that night in 1968,’ Doc prompted.
‘It was a Saturday night.’
Theresa took hold of my hand and held on firmly.
‘I didn’t know what was happening to the other girls. I only found out what he did to the last two, because they were in the same room as I was…I was in the bathroom when he came into our suite. The door was shut. I heard them struggling with him, and then he must have tied the two of them up because I didn’t hear any more struggling. I was going to try and hide in the bathroom, but I thought he’d surely check there when he came back. I came out of the toilet and I was going to try and look for a knife or a scissors or something to cut them loose. Then I heard him turning the handle of the door, and I fell to the floor and I crawled under the bed.
‘He had his back to me at first. But when he turned I saw his face. My head was at the edge of the box spring, and I could see him as he watched my two roommates. One of them was on the bed I was underneath, and one was on the bottom bunk of the bunk beds across the room. After I got a good look at him, I inched my way further beneath the bed.’
‘Why did you chance it by taking a look at him, Theresa?’ I asked.
She gripped my hand even tighter.
‘Because I knew he was going to kill them. I knew he would kill me too if he found me. I had to see him…Maybe he wouldn’t find me, I thought, and then he wouldn’t get away with what I knew he was going to do.’
‘Wha
t kind of weapon did he use?’ Doc asked.
‘I saw a straight razor in his hand. I don’t know what else he used…He went to the bunk bed and hit her. She was tied up like a pig. She couldn’t move. I saw him beating her when I crawled back to the edge of the box spring. I wanted to scream, I wanted to cry out. But I knew he would do the same things to me if I made a sound.
‘He beat her and beat her…and then he raped her. Twice, I think. Once when she was lying on her back and the other time…’
She squeezed my hand again.
‘He sodomized her. Her name was Carolina. He attacked her as if she were not even human. It was like watching an animal in the barnyard…Then he turned her back over and cut her throat with the straight razor. Carolina couldn’t make a sound because of the gag he used on both of them. She bled badly. Spurts of blood. I almost got sick, and I inched my way back under the center of the bed.
‘I didn’t see him kill Marita. She was on top of the mattress above me. I saw the bedding come down at me as his weight went on top of her. He must have raped her twice or three times. I can’t be sure. But I heard her groan when he killed her. I knew he had killed because the blood ran down the wall next to me and began to pool beside me. Then there was less weight on the bed. I saw him walk across the room. I moved myself closer to the edge where I could see.
‘He took the razor and cut Carolina from her breasts to her privates. He opened her up like a cow. I could see her insides…’
Theresa halted. I asked her if she needed a break or if she wanted some water.
‘No. Let me finish this…He slaughtered her like a steer or a pig, and then he came back to the other bed and cut Marita. Again I knew what he did because more blood came dripping down the wall next to me, and the smell was…was unbelievable.’
She stopped there.
‘What did he do then?’ Doc asked.
‘He left. He wiped his straight razor on Carolinas sheets, and he left.’
‘And what did you do then?’ I asked her.
