The Axeman's Jazz (Skip Langdon Mystery Series #2) (The Skip Langdon Series)

by Julie Smith

  Di rushed to let her in, apparently having decided her presence wasn’t the worst idea in the world—perhaps she was still afraid of him. Or perhaps she just wasn’t thinking clearly.

  Steve didn’t give her a chance to gather her wits. “Skip, whereyat?” he said as if he hadn’t seen her in a week or two. He didn’t give Di a chance to wedge a word in. “Skip, Di says she lost her scarf and her lipstick.”

  “Lipstick,” said Skip. “Fiesta, right? He wrote the A in Fiesta.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” She had scrunched her hands into semi-fists and wedged them up against her mouth, maybe trying to get it to stay shut. “Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. What’s going on? What’s going on here?”

  Skip said, calm as a Valium addict: “Someone’s setting you up, Di. He strangled Jerilyn with your scarf, and then he wrote the A with your lipstick. Or did you do it yourself?”

  “No!”

  “Then he planted the typewriter.”

  “And the book,” said Steve.

  “And the book. You think he’s a friend of yours, but he’s trying to get me to arrest you. You probably gave him the keys yourself.”

  “No!” She had crossed her arms under her breasts, her hands holding her elbows so tightly they looked like claws. “I left my extra set on the table.” She indicated a dark, carved one. “I keep it there and when someone comes, I throw it to them from the balcony. It’s gone, though. I wondered if he forgot to give it back.”

  “Who, Di? Who? Alex?”

  “Alex?” She wrinkled her brow as if trying to remember who on earth Alex was. “Not Alex. Sonny. I was at his house. I forgot some things—I put on fresh lipstick—” She interrupted herself. “That’s why he didn’t come Thursday! I went by his house twice, once after I left PJ’s and then when Steve left here. He was going to follow me home, but he didn’t. He just left me at PJ’s. Oh! Steve, I didn’t mean—”

  Steve said, “Missy didn’t lose her keys. Sonny came back to PJ’s make sure Abe was still there.”

  “I’ve got to go,” said Skip.

  What she needed were Di’s keys. But she needed a search warrant to get them. Okay, okay. She’d get one. But first Sonny. He wasn’t under surveillance. Somehow, she felt desperate to find him, just to pin him down, to know where he was before she called Cappello.

  She went back to the bar and called the hospital. He’d been there, but he’d gone home sick. She said she was Missy and asked how long ago he’d left. An hour.

  Then he ought to be home. But he wasn’t. At least he didn’t answer his doorbell. She tried phoning and got no answer.

  Missy’s?

  As she was standing on the porch, about to ring the bell, the door burst open and Skip found herself face to face with Alex.

  “I wouldn’t go up if I were you. I came to return a book I borrowed. Sonny just got there and he’s in an awful mood.”

  A book. Sure. You hoped to find Missy alone. She smiled. “Probably because of me. I asked him to meet me here, and he sounded like he had better things to do.”

  Alex held the door for her. Skip went up the stairs and stood for a moment outside Missy’s aunt’s apartment, not wanting to knock, hoping to hear what was going on, to make sure it wasn’t violence. She felt her hand going to her purse, snapping it open just in case.

  Missy was talking. “Oh, Sonny, I feel so awful. I’ve never done anything like that in my entire life. I don’t know if I’m losing my mind or what. I’m out of control. I called my therapist, but he wasn’t in, and then I went to see Di—”

  “No, Missy, I’m the one who should be apologizing.” It was Sonny’s voice. “I was like that, like the way I was, because somebody else died this morning and I felt really horrible about it.”

  “At the hospital? You mean you lost a patient?”

  “I didn’t exactly lose him, I made him die. I make a lot of people die, there’s something about me.”

  “Sonny!”

  “But I can make it right. I can stop it. I have to get the atonement right, that’s all. I’m still fine-tuning the atonement. See, it happens when I try to help them. If I try to help them, they die.”

  “Sonny, don’t be ridiculous. Every doctor loses patients. You make it sound as if you never save anybody, as if that’s not what being a doctor’s all about. I don’t see why you’re so down on yourself.”

  “It’s that way for other people. It’s different for me. It’s getting so all I have to do is touch them, like that old man this morning. I thought it was a fluke the first time it happened. I thought all I had to do was atone with a blood sacrifice, like I had to do that other time. And I tried to be kind. I know I was kind. I deliberately chose someone unimportant. Anyway, it was meant to work like that. She asked me to go for coffee at the right time—just after the first one died. You had your car, so I could take her. The only thing I didn’t have was gloves; I had to drop by the hospital and get some, but she didn’t mind. She thought she had a new boyfriend.

  “No harm was done that time. Nobody knew her, she didn’t know anybody. And it was a life for a life. You know it had to be that way. It’s the only way to stop the killing.”

  “Sonny. Sonny, we have to get you some help.”

  “But it wasn’t to be, it didn’t work. I mean, it didn’t work permanently. Before, it worked for twenty-two years. I don’t know what went wrong, but I knew when it happened again, it had to be done again. But this time it wasn’t happenstance. I planned it. I called Tom from the phone list—just called and asked him to meet me for coffee. I knew nobody knew him and he didn’t know anybody. But he was more important than she was. He didn’t have friends, but at least he had a daughter. I thought he was the one.”

  “Sonny, stop!”

  “And then I had a really good idea. I thought I could make the sacrifice first, and then my patients would be safe. I thought if I killed a lot of chickens, it would be the same as one person. But you can’t do it that way. The sacrifice has to be second. You can’t atone if you haven’t done a crime yet. I should have known that.” He was talking very fast, getting something off his chest that had been sitting there squeezing his lungs.

  “And then I realized it couldn’t be someone unimportant; it had to be someone very important. Someone who’d really be missed. Someone young, someone very, very innocent who’d never done anything wrong in her life, someone a lot of people loved. So when Abe said he had a baby-sitter, I knew she was the one. See, there wasn’t anybody in the group who was young enough, who matched up right; it had to be somebody outside the group. Yet the group was the sacrifice pool. I already knew that. Because it was anonymous. It was there. All past events had shown that was correct.

  “And so the baby-sitter was the one. I thought for a minute it might be one of his children, but that couldn’t be. Because you’d have to kill the baby-sitter to get to the kid. Do you see that? Only one sacrifice was required. You understand that, don’t you?”

  Missy was making wheezing noises, as if she had asthma.

  “It’s not numbers you need. You need the right sacrifice. But it happened again today, so I know it can’t just be a young person, it has to be someone even more precious than that. It has to be someone you love.”

  “Sonny, this is just too silly for words. You’re so overtired, you’re so freaked out by that crazy father of yours—”

  “Don’t say anything against my father!”

  “Sonny, all doctors lose patients.”

  “Oh, no. They save people. And I will too after this, Missy. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about this, but it’s got to be done.”

  “You can’t mean…”

  “Oh, Missy, I’m so sorry.”

  “…what I think…”

  “I love you, Missy.”

  “…you mean.”

  Skip was paralyzed. Should she try to get help? Yes, by all the rules. But she didn’t dare leave, even for a second. She was Missy’s only lifeline and she knew it.

  Wa
s the door locked? Bound to be. If she tried to kick it in and it didn’t give right away, Sonny would be warned. He’d have a little time before she got in. Too much time.

  “Sonny, no! No!”

  He must have attacked her. Skip kicked, the door gave.

  Sonny was standing close to Missy, but not holding her, apparently having let her go.

  “Freeze or I’ll blow your fuckin’ head off!”

  He stared at Skip, but only for a second. He ran into the bedroom and his leg was just going over the sill, out the already-open window, by the time she’d followed. He had a lead of only a second or two but it was enough. She watched him land on a bush, jump off, and start running. “Stop, goddammit! Freeze or I’ll shoot!”

  But she was bluffing. He was unarmed. Which meant there was only one thing to do—follow him out the window.

  “Missy!” she yelled. “Call for back-up. Ask for Sylvia Cappello!”

  She was still debating what to yell next—Geronimo or bombs away—when she realized she’d already landed; she was sliding off the shrubbery, and nothing seemed to be broken. She was in a narrow space between houses. She turned toward the street as Sonny had done.

  She had help! Sonny was running down the street, was already halfway down the block, but someone was giving chase. Alex. Oh, great. Just what she needed.

  “Alex, get out of the way!” she yelled as she pounded after them.

  But Alex was gaining on him, was almost upon him. He wasn’t about to stop.

  Skip yelled, “Sonny, freeze!” but she was pissing in the wind and she knew it.

  And then to her amazement he did freeze. He simply stopped and turned around, seemingly calm as a cat. The problem was, Alex was still in the way.

  Suddenly, things looked different. Alex had been about to jump Sonny, but he stopped and sidestepped, like there was a wire stretched across the road at neck level. Sonny struck at him. Alex backed away. Sonny ran at him with his fist at chest level. Alex turned his back on him, obviously rethinking the whole thing, intending to run the other way, but Sonny grabbed him around the neck, jumped on his back.

  “Let me go!”

  What the hell was happening? Skip couldn’t tell.

  Sonny said, “Come one step closer and I kill him.”

  She stopped so fast she practically skidded, painfully aware of the comic aspect of it, but trying desperately to keep her balance; if she went down, she was out of control. If she wasn’t already.

  And she saw, as she focused on Alex, that she was. Sonny’s hand, tight around his neck, was holding a small blade at his jugular.

  “It’s a scalpel,” Sonny said. “Do you know how sharp these things are?”

  THIRTY-ONE

  THE SIRENS OF the first District cars sounded in the distance, and when they had arrived, and the officers had come to take her place for a moment, she literally limped back to the car, feeling the weight of her now-drenched hair and clothes.

  She had stood for only a few minutes with her gun pointed at Sonny, while neighbors came out and went back in, but she could truthfully say they were the worst few minutes of her life. It was bad enough trying to focus on Sonny, putting everything into keeping him from making a move, trying to be damn sure she didn’t let him hurt Alex. But in addition there had been the neighbors, of whom she could get only glances out of the corners of her eyes. She’d had to hope none of them had a gun and none of them took it into their heads to shoot her. She’d had to keep shouting that she was a police officer, to “go back inside now!” knowing that her outfit—baggy khaki pants, sandals, and tank top—didn’t help her image.

  Her butt fell to the seat of the black-and-white, with no help from the rest of her body. She had to fight to keep from leaning over, resting her head on the dashboard. But she couldn’t; it would give away how close to collapse she was. She was reaching for the radio as Cappello pulled up.

  “Joe’s on the way,” she said. “I’ve already ordered the block closed off.”

  Skip rubbed her forehead. “Hostage negotiators?”

  “I didn’t know we needed them.”

  Skip gestured. “He’s got Alex; how’s that for irony?”

  Quickly, she ran down what had happened, then went to see about Missy and call Cindy Lou. Missy was staring out the window, pale, unmoving. Skip thought she was a good candidate for Cindy Lou’s ministrations, but she wasn’t ready yet to start picking up the pieces. There was still hard work to do.

  “He didn’t mean it,” Missy said. “He’s just overtired. He didn’t really mean it.”

  “Missy, listen to me. You’ve had a bad shock, but you can’t let yourself pretend it didn’t happen. You have to be strong for a little while longer.”

  Missy seemed to draw strength from the notion that someone wanted something from her. “Is there something I can do?” she said, and there was hope in her voice.

  “Maybe. But first I want you to drink something.”

  Skip went and got her some juice. When Missy had drunk it and some of her color had returned, Skip said, “I heard a lot of what he said.”

  “About killing his patients?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know, his family blames him for his grandfather’s death. He was…” Her face started to go, her voice caught in a sob, but she stopped till she could untwist her muscles, speak normally. “He was four years old at the time.”

  “Jesus.” Skip was all too familiar with the principle of blame. She’d seen families where the father was so wasted on crack he was barely recognizable as a human being and he’d say it was all his wife and kids’ fault for nagging and crying. She knew a girl at McGehee’s who hadn’t been out a single afternoon or evening since the ninth grade, when she’d “disgraced the family” by cutting school one day and getting caught. As it happened, her father had been simultaneously involved in a public bribery scandal, but the girl was the one who got blamed for “disgrace.” Skip had grown up herself with a father who never made a mistake that wasn’t followed by “Look what you made me do!”

  Finding someone else to blame was part of being a Southerner, as Cindy Lou had so rudely remarked.

  And so was cruelty. The crack dad had beaten his wife and kids. The McGehee’s girl had been deprived of an adolescence. Skip’s own nice doctor dad usually took a swing at whoever had made him make a mistake. (More interesting, multi-layered punishments were reserved for more serious crimes.)

  So she knew that if Sonny had been blamed for something as large as a death, there was probably cruelty attached to it, cruelty on a scale that would make a war criminal wince. Di’s story had said plenty about his father, about his arrogance, his lack of feeling—in fact, how he’d tried to make it her fault he’d screwed up her surgery. Maybe the whole family was like that.

  After all, they’re all doctors.

  But she banished the unworthy thought.

  The horror of the whole thing, the thing she couldn’t get past, was that whatever had happened, it had happened when he was four years old. She knew Sonny’d killed three people, including a teenager, and had heard him threaten to kill his own girlfriend, but thinking about what he’d been through, her heart went out to him. Not to the real Sonny, the monster he’d become, but to the former Sonny, the toddler who’d been accused of killing—and now was trying to wipe the slate clean by killing a few more people.

  Crazy.

  She saw Cindy Lou pull up. “Come on,” she said to Missy. “Let’s go down. Are you afraid?”

  Missy shook her head.

  She needed Missy to tell Cindy Lou what she knew, but she had a feeling Missy might be able to help—might be one of the few Sonny would talk to. He’d thought he had to kill her, had meant to and tried to, but the irony (and possibly the saving grace) was that he thought he had to kill her because he loved her.

  You always hurt the one you love.

  Yeah, but the point is he does love her.

  By now, the entire block was sealed off, neig
hbors having been escorted out of their homes in case there was gunfire. Joe had arrived and wore a worried look. He was wiping perspiration from his face. A hostage negotiator with a megaphone was trying to talk to Sonny. Alex looked as if he’d dipped his face in white powder. As for Sonny, his own face was distorted, ugly—fearful, Skip thought, and that wasn’t good. His hand still held the scalpel, steady as any surgeon’s.

  A man at the end of the block was creating a disturbance, trying to get across police lines. As she and Missy talked to Cindy Lou, she tried to ignore him, but his voice was getting louder and louder. When she heard him say, “That’s my son, dammit!” her stomach did one of its flips. How had Lamar found out?

  But it wasn’t Lamar. Missy heard it too, and without another word ran to him. “Damn you!” she shouted. “Damn you, Robson Gerard! Damn you and your stupid fundamentalist meanness. Damn you for what you did to him!”

  She had her hands raised as if to fight, to scratch at his eyes, perhaps, but she couldn’t get past the policeman he was talking to and ended up flailing at air.

  Skip, walking toward them, heard Robson say, “Young lady, I am not a fundamentalist,” and would have laughed if she’d had any sense of humor left.

  She said, “Missy, this isn’t helping things.” As if word had come down from Mount Sinai, Missy lowered her hands and shut up.

  To the cop Skip said, “Let him in.” And to Robson, “We need to talk.”

  Skip sent word to the hostage negotiator, who asked if there was anyone Sonny wanted to talk to—Missy was there; his dad was there.

  Sonny said no. And that was all he said. He didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to leave, it looked like, just seemed to want an excuse to cut Alex’s throat.

  Cindy Lou, who after all had a couple of graduate degrees in psychology, pulled out all the stops to put Robson at his ease—or relative ease, under the circumstances—and said a powwow was called for, up at Missy’s. Would that work for Missy?

  Missy nodded as if hypnotized. Robson also nodded. Skip was ready to try anything.

  But as they turned and started to leave, Sonny spoke for the first time except to say no. “Missy! Missy, I want to talk to you!”