“I’m just being paranoid, Marty. Yes, I’m excited. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Night, hon.”
Joan pulled down the sun visor and checked her eye shadow. It hadn’t smudged. She finger-combed her short blond hair and debated changing into eveningwear for her date, but the idea of going home alone made her nervous.
I’m being ridiculous, she thought. Some nut in the City of Mixed Nuts calls with a vague threat, and she was acting like a scream queen. Her security system at the house was top notch, her dog Schnapps would die to protect her, she carried pepper spray, and most important of all Joan was a second dan black belt in karate.
Any freak who tried to mess with her would have his hands full.
She wove back into traffic and was at her home twenty minutes later.
Joan’s house was of moderate size—tiny by Beverly Hills standards, but more than enough space for her. It was nestled away in a small enclave of trees, the last lot on a tiny wooded hill. Private, quiet, a complete about-face from her high powered job. The occasional visitor was surprised to find the interior warm and rustic. Rather than harsh lighting, leather couches, Picasso lithos, and a bowl of cocaine on the bar, Joan had decorated like Banana Republic. The only thing chic about the place was her Jacuzzi, and even that was trimmed in cedar.
She hit the access code on her remote and the garage door opened. In her mind she went through her gowns. Max had already seen the Versace. Maybe the Christian Dior? The same dress had been worn by Jodie Foster to some awards ceremony. She and Jodie were the same size, though Joan would have bought the dress no matter how big or small it was. It was black, classic, and simply stunning.
Joan parked and closed the garage door behind her. She entered the house using the keypad entrance, and then quickly reset the alarm. Preoccupied with what she was going to wear, it took Joan a moment to realize something was wrong.
Schnapps.
A month ago, she’d bought the German Shepherd from the best handler in California. A trained guard dog, but a lovable one as well. He normally greeted her at the door. Joan’s mind raced. Is he sleeping? Eating? Sick? Hurt?
Dead?
The phone call. Tattoo removal.
Joan reached into her purse and palmed the pepper spray in her right hand. In her left she gripped her car keys, making sure their jagged edges poked out through her fingers.
Then, without hesitation, she opened the door without punching in the code. This would set off the alarm and alert the police.
But nothing happened. No piercing siren. No lights going on. No immediate call back from the security company to see if this was a false alarm.
Joan bounded out the door and into the garage, almost bumping into the man leaning against her Jaguar.
He was average height, medium build, dressed in a black turtleneck and pants. On his hands were leather driving gloves, skin tight. He had deep green eyes, and a meticulous black goatee came to a point on his chin.
Joan forced back the shock and assumed a defensive position. The man didn’t appear to be armed. He smiled at her.
“Hello, Joan.”
She attacked. In two steps she was on him, lashing out at the invader’s face with her keys. He ducked away and sidestepped her, using her momentum to throw her against the car.
Joan absorbed the impact with her shoulder and spun, spraying mace in an arc as she turned.
He got inside of her arc and grabbed her around the waist.
“Aren’t we feisty?”
His breath was garlic and peppers. She jerked back her head and smashed it against his face, and then threw a roundhouse left that buried her ignition key in his biceps.
He stumbled backwards, bleeding from two places, and Joan twisted out of his grip and ran into the house, locking the door behind her.
The phone was dead. Her cell was in the car.
“Eight thousand dollars worth of goddamn security!”
Quick choice—fight or run? He was stronger. Outweighed her. Smart enough to disable her dog and her security system.
Run.
Joan kicked off her heels and headed for the kitchen. She grabbed a paring knife from the butcher block on her counter. Resting on a mat by the patio door were her jogging shoes. Ears cocked, she slipped them on without bothering to tie the laces. Then she eased open the patio door and moved cautiously into her backyard.
The moon was out and it was a clear night. Joan side-stepped her garden and headed to the back of the house. She decided to cut through the woods and head for the neighbor’s.
She found her dog when she rounded the corner.
In the shadows, she first thought Schnapps had been hung. Moving closer, Joan realized he’d been speared on a big stick which had been driven into the ground. Her mouth opened, but she couldn’t draw a breath to scream.
To her left was an even bigger stick, with a ladder set up next to it.
“That one is for you.” A voice, from behind her. “Let’s see if it fits.”
Joan ducked a shoulder and rolled towards the intruder, coming up in a kick to his chest. He caught her foot and twisted. To avoid a broken ankle, Joan flipped with the twist and wound up on her back, her head swimming.
“Don’t you want to know who I am? The last one had so many questions. I answered all of them, in the sixteen hours it took for him to die.”
He removed a cloth and a small bottle from his pocket. In the moonlight, the blood trickling from his nose looked like motor oil.
“I’ll give you a choice. Where do you want the stake, the ass or the crotch?”
Joan rolled onto her stomach and got up in a crouch. When she felt his touch she shot out both of her feet, mule-kicking him in the chest. Then she ran.
She had several advantages. She was in shape. She knew the area. And most of all, she was running for her life. It took her a few seconds to find the trail in the dark, but once she did she ran like hell. Branches whipped at her face, and twice she almost tripped on some unseen obstacle, but she continued full tilt until she’d reached the backyard of her closest neighbor.
Not bothering with the doorbell, Joan picked up a terra-cotta flower pot and smashed it through a window.
The siren wailed. The security lights came on.
Joan stood with her back to the house—the paring knife clutched in her hands and her eyes scanning the woods—and waited for the police to arrive.
Tom returned to his office at the 26th District, in the heart of downtown. He dragged along a large suitcase—Jessup’s—that he and Roy had filled with papers and personal effects from the deceased’s apartment. Roy had gone to the Harold Washington Library, where Jessup worked, to search his office and talk to his co-workers, leaving Tom to sort through the suitcase solo. Tom was fine with that—he was almost feverish with questions, and the suitcase might contain answers.
There was half a pot of old coffee set up on a table near the lockers, which Tom took back to his desk.
They’d worked the crime scene all morning, the discovery of Jessup’s number tattoo fueling Tom’s urgency. Tom hadn’t found any obvious clues pertaining to it, or the man’s murder. But the resemblance to his own tattoo was undeniable.
He’d asked his parents about the mark at an early age. They had no answers—when they’d adopted him at a few weeks old, he’d already had the tattoo. Some years ago, after becoming a cop, Tom had searched for his birth parents, but could find no evidence that he was even adopted. According to the county, he was naturally born to Joe and Laura Mankowski.
That was impossible, of course. His parents were both of Polish descent; short, dark, stocky. Tom was at least a foot taller, and several shades lighter.
He dug into the suitcase, pulling out some documents. Tom discovered he and Jessup were born at the same hospital. A labeled picture of Jessup with his parents showed that he also had little resemblance to them. Adopted as well? A long-lost brother?
“Not unless it was a really long labor,” Tom mu
sed. He and Jessup were born six days apart. He located a death certificate for Jessup’s father, along with several US patents in his father’s name. One of his patents was for a waterproof hairdryer, which in Tom’s mind sort of defeated the purpose.
A recent birthday card from Jessup’s mother wished him thirty more years of happiness, with love and kisses. Postmark from Des Moines. A piece of notebook paper with several book titles on it was found in Jessup’s desk. Handwriting appeared to be his. Among the titles were several biographies of Thomas Edison, a bio of Lincoln, a book about the Declaration of Independence, a book about the Theory of Relativity, and an old Ira Levin thriller. Tom checked the inventory sheet. None of these books were found in the apartment.
Tom plugged a pen drive into his USB port—he’d copied Jessup’s My Documents folder—and waded through spreadsheets, games, tax figures, and letters concerning library business. It took almost an hour and the remainder of the coffee before he found something interesting. A word processing file, BERT.DOC. It had no address heading, and was dated nine days ago.
Bert—
Looking forward to meeting you, to see if you live up to your many pictures. I realize it must be a shock, and even with the proof in the articles and in our birth certificates, you must still harbor some doubt. Besides the question of how, there are also many whys. Perhaps we can figure these out together, as well as find the others.
I’m enclosing a copy of a photo of you I recently found. Call me when you’ve made travel arrangements.
All best,
T. Jessup
Tom read it again, trying to find the hidden meaning. Was Bert a pen pal? Someone famous? Or had Jessup managed to find another person with a tattoo on their heel?
He printed the letter and logged onto the Internet. First stop, the Yellow Pages. It only took a few minutes to locate a Mrs. Emilia Jessup in Des Moines. He jotted down her number and called. Busy. Tom then accessed the CPD database and found out Jessup had no criminal record or outstanding warrants. Nor was there mention of him in the Chicago Tribune archives. He searched USENET, but Jessup’s name and signature weren’t on any of the big message boards. Google yielded nada. He tried to access Jessup’s email account, but didn’t have the password to get in from this terminal.
Switching tactics, Tom went to ViCAP—the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program run by the Feebies. Because the crime scene report wasn’t finished yet, he couldn’t fill out the long questionnaire to add Jessup’s murder to the database. But he did go surfing.
Under a search for DECAPITATION, he found no less than seven hundred entries spanning the last fifty years. That was a lot of people losing their heads. TATTOOS OF NUMBERS gave him more than eight thousand hits. He combined the two for his next search, and added CAUCASIAN MALE UNDER 35.
Fifteen hits. They detailed some pretty horrible crimes, but none of them seemed related to Jessup. He refined his tattoo search to SINGLE DIGIT NUMBER TATTOO LEFT FOOT, and got a hit.
The crime took place last year in Tennessee. A twenty-nine-year-old Caucasian male by the name of Robert Mitchell had been found in the woods outside of Nashville. He’d been stripped naked and impaled upon a ten foot wooden pole. It had pierced his rectum and eventually exited through his mouth. The coroner theorized it took Mitchell a while to die.
He’d slid down the length of the stake an inch at a time. By the time it ruptured something vital, Mitchell may have been hanging there for over ten hours.
The pictures made Tom wince.
There were no witnesses, no suspects, and very little evidence. The investigation had been extensive and taken hundreds of man hours, but not a single lead panned out. Tom read on, and felt the coffee roil in his gut. Besides being well liked in the community, Mitchell had been a cop. He also had a one inch blue number on his left heel. There was a jpg attachment of the ink, and Tom clicked on it to enlarge.
A number 2. Done in the same style as his and Jessup’s. Tom checked Mitchell’s birth date and discovered Robert was only eight days younger than he was. Tom’s mouth became very dry. He reached to pour more coffee, but the pot was empty.
Tom tried Emilia Jessup in Des Moines again. Still busy. He went back into the suitcase. Jessup’s credit card statements showed no unusual purchases. The last few months of cancelled checks were all for food or utilities. There was an address book, but no one inside named Bert.
Jessup’s phone company was local, one Tom had dealt with many times, but they still required a warrant to release phone records. Tom filled out the paperwork to set the wheels in motion, but it would take a few hours to get a list of all of Jessup’s calls.
Unfortunately, Jessup didn’t have a caller ID at his apartment. Strangely, he didn’t have an answering machine either. Tom didn’t know one single person who didn’t own an answering machine, unless…
“Unless they have voice mail.”
He searched the suitcase for previous phone bills and found one from last month. There was a charge for voice mail, but it didn’t give Jessup’s PIN. That was probably listed on Jessup’s very first phone bill, when he was assigned the line. Tom had only brought along the bills from the last few months—he hadn’t thought there would be a need to bring every single statement.
So it was back to Jessup’s apartment. He wanted to check the vic’s email anyway, and if he hurried he could make it back before noon and grab a bite. He called Roy.
“Anything?” he asked his partner.
“Office in order. No known enemies. You?”
“I gotta run back to the scene, check his voice mail. We can compare notes over lunch.”
“Meet you back at the district. I’m almost done here.”
The day hadn’t gotten any warmer, and the freezing drizzle had formed slush on his windshield. Tom climbed into his Mustang and stepped on a CD case that had fallen next to the gas pedal. Sting’s latest album, unopened. His ex-girlfriend had given it to him, months ago, at around the same time his car stereo stopped working. He tossed it in the back seat.
Tom took Addison to Lake Shore Drive, south towards downtown. To his left, Tom could make out large ice patches on Lake Michigan. Ahead in the distance, the twin antennas of the giant John Hancock Building blinked in unison. Rush hour was in full force. Tom hit the siren, forging a winding path through traffic. One of the perks of being a cop. He exited on North Avenue and parked in front of a fire hydrant—another perk. The neighborhood consisted of upper middle class apartments, most of them recent college grads, all within crawling distance to the city’s major hub of bars and clubs on Rush and Division. Tom walked to Jessup’s residence and let himself into the lobby door with the key supplied by the superintendent.
The building was newly remodeled, brightly lit, secure. Jessup’s door was taped off with yellow crime scene ribbon. Tom ducked under it and entered, turning on the lights.
The lounger that the body was taped to had been removed, taken to the lab to search for trace evidence. No one had been in yet to clean up, and the large brown blood stains on the carpet had grown funky. Tom went to the stereo, which was speckled white with fingerprint dust, and turned it on. A CD loaded automatically. Even someone as classically inept as Tom recognized Beethoven’s Fifth. He lowered the volume and let it play.
Jessup’s collection of old phone bills was in a file cabinet, and Tom searched until he found one with the voice mail personal identification number on it. Then he picked up the phone and pressed the keys to access the messages. There was only one.
“Hi, Thomas, it’s Bert. The convention is running all week, and I have to man the table every day until eight. But I’m free all day Saturday, then I have to go back to Milwaukee. Can we get together then? You’ve got my number at the hotel. Call me later.”
A robotic voice indicated the call had taken place yesterday afternoon at two-fifteen. Tom played it again, listening closely. It was a man, Midwest accent, a somewhat nasally voice. He didn’t sound threatening or imposing. His manner was f
riendly, albeit harried. There was noise in the background. Tom repeated the message once more, trying to make out the sounds behind Bert’s voice. It was the murmur of a large group of people. No street sounds, so they had to be inside. Bert had probably called from the convention he mentioned.
Tom closed his eyes, trying to pick up any key word in the background that would indicate what kind of convention it was. No luck. He pressed the star button on the phone to save the message, then sat back down on the kitchen chair. At any given time, there were more than two dozen conventions in the Chicagoland area. And hundreds of hotels. Bert mentioned that Jessup had his number. Would he have written it down somewhere?
There was no scratch pad by the phone. Tom hit the redial button on the receiver and got a local pizza shop. He went back to the second phone in the bedroom, but it didn’t have a redial button. Punching *69 didn’t work either. He would have to wait for the phone records to find out where Bert was staying.
The List - A Thriller Page 2
