That Darkness

by Lisa Black

  Still, she didn’t have to act that relieved that this wasn’t a kind of date.

  The perky hostess asked if they had reservations, then assured them that she could get them in anyway. The table was fairly ideal, away from the bar and off to the right, with two pillars in the way. Jack did not want Dillon to get a good look at him, still unsure what story he would use for the man’s abduction.

  Jack threw his jacket over one of the empty chairs, then grabbed the rear seat of the table before Maggie could make a choice so that he could face the front of the restaurant. If he leaned slightly to his right he could see Dillon clearly; otherwise a pillar blocked their lines of sight.

  “This is fine,” he assured the hostess, and hoped that the slightly quizzical look that now both Maggie and the hostess were giving him occurred only because he hadn’t pulled her chair out for her. Did men still pull ladies’ chairs out? Probably not, he thought, glancing at the couple at the next table, where the woman wore a figure-hugging pair of swishy slacks and a black top with a row of sequins around the neckline while her date sported oversize cargo shorts and a worn flannel shirt over a stained T-shirt. Men didn’t pull out chairs anymore. They didn’t even dress like men.

  “Are you from Chicago?” Maggie asked after they had opened the menus and a stylishly tailored waitress had gone over the specials.

  As if Jack didn’t already feel completely out of his comfort zone. “What?”

  The vehemence of his response seemed to startle her. “I—you said, ‘I’ve never been.’ I’ve only heard people from the Chicago area put it that way. Everyone else in the country says, “I’ve never been there.”

  “Oh. Well—no. I’m not,” he lied. “Have you eaten here before?”

  “No. I walk past it all the time. But I just—walk.” For some reason this seemed to embarrass her and she buried her nose in the list of appetizers as Jack thought yeah, I noticed that tendency to stroll.

  “Any leads on Brian Johnson?” Maggie asked after they had ordered. Around them, the place smelled fantastic. Waiters talked up the specials. Diners chatted; they seemed happy. Hardworking. Normal. When had Jack last felt normal?

  What did that word even mean?

  “We talked to some of his exes today.” Jack summarized the visit to the crime scene and Latasha Greene’s apartment. He left out any mention of Dannie Johnson.

  “Did you know Barry Nickel was also killed with three twenty-twos to the back of the head?”

  “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”

  “Yeah, I get that, but isn’t it kind of strange that we suddenly have all these guys killed with twenty-twos?”

  For a moment Jack forgot all about Dillon Shaw. He softened his tone and leaned forward. If he were going to complete his current mission, he needed to neutralize Maggie Gardiner. The woman apparently had way too much time on her hands. “No, I wouldn’t say so. It’s always been a popular caliber, easier to stuff one in the back of your waistband than, say, a forty-five. It’s small and light, not much kick so it’s not hard to shoot even without a lot of practice, and ammo is cheap.”

  “So it would be a good choice for an assassin?”

  He snorted, then covered it by pretending to sneeze into his napkin. Don’t scoff. Scoffing at her will only make her more determined to prove her theories. “These guys don’t assassinate each other. They murder. If killing someone occurs to them a whole half hour before they actually do it, that’s careful forethought and planning. They’re not criminal masterminds—they’re a few steps above brain-dead. That’s what makes them so dangerous, because they don’t think. They just do.”

  “Drug dealers?”

  “Criminals. The ones that make their living at it, I mean.” He reined himself in; just a cynical, seen-it-all cop who knew better than to take it personally. “And a twenty-two is small, which means there’s no guarantee you’ll kill your target. You might just tick him off. I’ve seen guys hit in the skull with twenty-twos or twenty-fives and it just skims along the bone, under the skin. Barely even hurts them.”

  Maggie reached across the corner of the small table to pluck something from the sleeve of his jacket, stretched over the back of the extra chair. Squinting at it, she asked, “Got a cat?”

  “A poodle,” he said, thinking of the fluffiest dog he could, then mentally kicked himself. Great way to sound manly, Jack.

  She gave it another look, as if finding that story suspect, but then held it away from the table and let it drift off into the atmosphere. Much to his relief. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d folded the tiny fiber into a napkin to take back to the lab. But she hadn’t finished with his jacket sleeve. “You got some yellow paint on this.”

  She held the sleeve near the elbow, showing him a small smear near the back; he had not even noticed it.

  He racked his brain for an explanation for yellow paint, couldn’t come up with anything that made the detail worrisome. Yet that did not reassure him and his mumbled explanation about helping a friend paint his kitchen did not seem to reassure her. Either the woman was OCD, or she had some reason to take a special interest in yellow paint.

  He did not at all like the way she stared at him.

  He needed to deal with Maggie Gardiner. And he could guess at only two options. He either needed to become her new best friend . . . or he would have to introduce her to his project.

  But then she seemed to shrug and spoke in a more natural tone: “So a twenty-two is not the weapon you’d choose to kill somebody.”

  “If I wanted to kill someone,” Jack said, “I’d use a rifle and shoot from a rooftop about a block away.”

  She seemed to picture this. “Maybe he did. There are a lot of twenty-two rifles, aren’t there?”

  He shook his head. “If it had been a rifle, the slugs would have exited. Rifle bullets are thinner and rifle barrels are longer so the bullet exits with more velocity than in a handgun.”

  “Oh, yes. Sorry. I know I’ve been in this work for a long time but I still don’t pay much attention to guns. I figure out what caliber they are by reading the engraving off the side of the barrel. Same thing with cars. They all look alike to me.”

  “But you can tell dog fur from cat fur?”

  She smiled so widely that her cheekbones popped. “Yes! Dog hairs end in this perfect, smooth spade shape. Cat hairs end in what looks like a stump with a bunch of tendrils sticking out of it. It’s easy, at least it is with a stereomicroscope and the heavier guard hairs. When you get into the soft fur, the thinner strands that keep them warm, it can get a lot trickier. Cat, dog, rabbit, the really tiny hairs can all look the same.”

  “What about people?”

  “Much more consistent. Human hair is kind of boring. That’s why I can’t make a positive identification with just microscopic appearance, because it doesn’t vary enough. Nowadays all we do with hair is to screen it to see if it’s even remotely similar, then send it over to DNA.”

  “I thought you couldn’t get DNA out of hair.”

  “Not the actual hair shaft, that’s just dead cells. But if there’s skin cells at the root area, those can be tested. If we’ve just got the hair shaft we’d have to go mitochondrial, and the city’s not going to pay for that unless the president has been assassinated in Public Square.”

  Or they’ve got a cop who’s a serial killer, he thought. But he would not wear a hair net when he met with a target. That would be even worse than a fake mustache. A man’s dignity had its limits.

  “And mitochondrial can’t distinguish between relatives, anyway, so in many cases it might not help.”

  “Relatives?”

  “Maternal relatives. It passes unchanged through the female line, so you, your brother, your maternal uncle, a cousin by your mother’s sister, your mother’s mother, would all have the same mitochondrial DNA. Unless there’s some kind of mutation.”

  “But not a son.”

  “No, he would have his mother’s.”

&nbs
p; “Huh.” Not that it mattered. Jack had no children.

  In quick glimpses he checked on Dillon Shaw, who, true to form, sat at the bar and nursed his beer, speaking to no one or, apparently, making eye contact with them. One of the girls had gotten up to meet some people coming in and went to a table with them, leaving the other two. The third woman still stared into the clear glass depths of the wine cellar. The second stared out into the street, or maybe at Dillon. Jack couldn’t tell. The bar itself, lit from within, glowed through its swirling amber surface and illuminated the man’s face like a beacon. Jack wondered if Dillon appeared as creepy to everyone else as he did to Jack, who knew his history, who knew the complaints, the charges unfiled because the victims had been traumatized or intimidated into withdrawing them. Or did he appear like any other young man, on the prowl certainly but in a normal and healthy way, when in truth there was nothing normal and healthy about him?

  Maggie was saying something about carpet fibers and asbestos, repeating her findings that connected Viktor to Brian Johnson and also to—

  “Who?” he asked.

  “Marcus Day,” she said. “He was a frequent flier killed last month. Same thing, twenty-twos to the back of the head.”

  Jack nodded, and hoped it seemed to be in wisdom rather than shock. The clear line of his work, the progression of his acts, neat, contained, invisible to the world around him . . . suddenly seemed wide and fuzzy and opaque. And vulnerable.

  She chatted on about the fibers and the trace material. And the cat hair.

  “What about Barry Nickel?” Jack asked, neatly participating in the conversation while knowing what her answer would be.

  “I got nothing.” Maggie swirled her diet cola, gazing at the ice cubes as if they might double as tea leaves. “On his clothing, I found beige carpet fibers—from the apartment we found him in—a golden retriever, yellow cotton, green linen. No cat, no blue polyester. No asbestos. No granite.”

  “So there’s nothing to connect him to the other men?” Jack said with relief.

  “Not a thing. Except the three slugs to the back of the head. Couldn’t that be considered a signature?”

  Damn, she was smart. And entirely too good with details herself. He looked at her hair, at the hollow area at the base of her throat, and thought, new best friend indeed. “Maybe on TV. In real life it’s called killing a dude at close range. Scumbags love popping in the back of the head. It serves as a message to others on the street: ‘You’re not going to have a chance to fight back. Cross me and I will put you down like a dog.’”

  A small smile curved her mouth. “Along the same lines as snipers’ T-shirts that say ‘there’s no use running, you’ll only die tired’?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That would explain why none of them show any signs of a struggle. No bruises, no defensive wounds, not even their clothing is disarrayed. Not one of them saw it coming. But I can’t see what connection there could be between three guys involved in street crimes and a child pornographer in a high-rise office wearing loafers.”

  Jack refrained from saying exactly again. Not a good idea to oversell. “True. I’m sure all these guys crossed somebody—they all do, sooner or later—but it wasn’t the same somebody. Whatever else Brian Johnson might have been, he wasn’t a pedophile.”

  “Or Marcus Day, from what I see in his record. And Viktor’s girls weren’t that young.”

  She looked sad at the thought of Viktor’s girls. Finally, something they had in common. Deliberately he reached over the table and placed his hand on hers. “As my grandfather used to say, it’s a kick in the teeth.”

  As before, this seemed to startle her, but she didn’t pull away. Or look away.

  Her skin felt soft and warm and without thinking he curled his fingers into her palm and gently squeezed. Such a simple gesture, but it had been a long time since he’d touched a woman in any way, shape, or form. Somehow it hadn’t seemed like a good idea, after he’d begun his work.

  Probably wasn’t now, either.

  He let go and straightened up. But he had achieved his purpose—the look on Maggie’s face had definitely softened, the cat hair and paint smear forgotten. He had convinced her that they were on the same side. Always, the same side.

  At the bar, wine-staring girl spoke to the bartender. Jack hoped she was buying another round. The level in Dillon’s glass had fallen into the last quarter.

  “But that doesn’t mean they weren’t killed by the same person,” the damnably persistent woman went on, tossing her words off as if they heralded no more importance than the latest Hollywood divorce. “We could have a Paul Kersey on our hands, someone who thinks he’s helping the police out.”

  Jack had taken a sip of water and now choked on it. Then he tried to pull his lips into what felt like a death’s-head rictus of a smile. “A vigilante? Seriously?”

  “I know, it sounds ridiculous. It would explain a lot, but—truthfully, vigilante killers don’t exist. Revenge killings, yes, but that’s not the same thing. There are vigilante-type protectors, like the Guardian Angels and the border Minutemen, and people who dress up like superheroes, but they’re more defensive than aggressive and have never killed anyone that I’ve heard of. And they’re certainly not anonymous—anyone who runs around in a uniform or a satin cape wants to be noticed. True vigilante killers, organized and impartial, only appear in the books and movies. They’re the fantasy of a frustrated public.”

  “You sound like you’ve given this a lot of thought.”

  She laughed. “I wrote a term paper titled ‘Death Wish’ in college. I got a little obsessed with that movie.”

  “Really?” He had heard of it, but never seen it.

  “It was a surprisingly difficult topic to research—not because there’s so much written on it, but so little. Finally I used that lack of retrospective in the paper and said that a vigilante asks a very simple question, and like all simple questions, it can never really be answered.”

  “Simple?” He had always thought so, but felt surprised that anyone else did.

  “Is it better to do the right thing or the legal thing? And how do you know it’s the right thing if it’s not legal?”

  He laughed, because his answer was equally simple: He knew it was right because he knew.

  She went on: “Are they protectors of the innocent or psychos who have found a socially acceptable justification to gleefully lay waste to other human beings? What’s more important to them, social justice or the indescribable fun of getting away with breaking the rules? You can go round and round until you get dizzy.”

  “What did your paper conclude?”

  “That I couldn’t reach a conclusion—that each event came with a myriad of circumstances and motive, motives that the vigilantes themselves may not understand. For example, the Minutemen who patrol the borders—most of them are older males, ex-military, single. It starts out as wanting to help their country, wanting to do the right thing, but in the end it seems to be largely a way to fill their days and still feel potent.”

  Potent? Jack thought. As opposed to—“Does it matter why?”

  “Legally, no. Morally, yes. If someone’s killing criminals because he wants to protect society, or if he’s killing criminals because he likes killing and has figured out that no one looks too hard into such deaths, yes, it matters. If we’re trying to draw a moral conclusion, that is.”

  “You just said you can’t draw a conclusion.”

  She shook her head with a rueful expression. “I couldn’t. Because if future violent crime is prevented, then who cares how or why? Maybe ends do justify means—but if on the other hand you then have someone who feels free to disregard the rule of law, is that a good result regardless of other factors? See what I mean? Round and round. But one thing I’m sure of, though I didn’t put it in my paper.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “That in times of crisis, morality is the first thing to go out the window. It becomes a luxury people
just can’t afford.”

  I couldn’t agree more, Jack thought.

  “And because of that, society will never be able to make up its mind how we feel about vigilantes. We pride ourselves on being people of action, but someone taking violent action on their own scares us because so much can go wrong. It’s like a war—a war was a great idea, or at least a necessary one, when we win. But if we lose then it’s a tragic waste of lives and resources.”

  “What grade did you get on the paper?”

  “B.”

  “Really?”

  “B minus,” she admitted. “The teacher wanted a more definite conclusion. I couldn’t give him one.”

  Their meals arrived. He had ordered the sturgeon and Maggie had also gotten seafood. Dillon appeared to be dining on beer, but that wouldn’t be anything new for him.

  In yet another example of his shining dinner conversation, his head still reeling with Maggie’s social analysis and that “potent” crack, Jack said, “You like scallops, huh?”

  She sliced one with her fork. “Not so crazy about them, really, unless they’re breaded and deep fried. I just wanted to see the dish.”

  “Why?”

  She looked up at him, fork still poised. The candle on the table caught her eyes, turning them the same color as a bright summer sky. “Because I think Brian Johnson might have eaten his last meal here.”

  Had he? Well, not here, but—Jack managed not to spit out his fish.

  Damn.

  “The pathologist said”—Maggie gave the waitress an apologetic glance as the girl fussed with the assorted sides and sauces—“that he had scallops in his stomach contents.”

  “Lots of places serve scallops.”

  “Not with almonds and raisins.”

  “Yes they do.”

  “No, they don’t,” Maggie and the waitress answered in unison.

  “Yes, they—they must.”

  “No,” the waitress said, getting a slightly pissy tone in her voice. Lola’s dishes were created by an internationally famous chef. “They don’t.”