by Brett Adams
So Hiero’s “poison” had been heroin? Heroin in a massive, killing dose.
I hunted through the drawers. The top two were filled with underwear, socks, and handkerchiefs. The bottom drawer held only one item, a pink journal with a lock. On the floor at the base of the drawers lay a condom wrapper, torn nearly through.
A sharp rapping sound startled me, but not from fear. Anger was fast burning that off. Someone was knocking on the outer door. The light coming from the living room swelled.
Without thinking, I stooped to wrench the bottom drawer open, retrieved the journal, and thrust it down the front of my shirt. With a final glance at Li Min’s still body, I strode from the bedroom.
The outer door was half open, and two faces poked comically through the gap, silhouetted by the corridor light.
I hefted the toolbox, pulled the door open, and brushed past them.
“Blocked toilet,” I said without stopping.
They were a little couple with wizened faces. The man chattered at my back, but I didn’t stop. At apartment three I exchanged the toolbox for my driver’s license, and if the owner thought anything strange, he wasn’t saying.
I had to walk a long way before I could hail a taxi, but was glad for the exercise. The last thing I wanted to do then was sit alone.
I gave the driver the name of the only hotel I knew in Hong Kong. The one Kim and I had stayed in years before on our honeymoon.
The hotel was expensive, and the taxi had taken the last of my cash. My second mistake in Hong Kong was to use my credit card to secure the room. The first had been to secure a toolbox with my driver’s license.
11
True Crime is a genre of non-fiction. It’s an odd name. Libraries don’t have shelves for True Architecture or True History. I guess it must be because there is a market for it, and people devour True Crime in the same way they devour Thrillers and Period Romance.
Hiero confessed to me one time that he read true crime from the age of eleven. Disco Bloodbath, Ellroy’s My Dark Places, The Stranger Beside Me, everything on Time’s top twenty, and anything else he could get his hands on. Even the autobiography of Viennese serial killer Jack Unterweger, which was written in prison.
I say ‘confessed’ but Hiero didn’t think of it as a confession.
I was aghast.
He said that of them all, Truman Capote’s genre-defining In Cold Blood was his favorite—an account of the murder of a farming family in lonely Kansas committed by two ex-convicts. More than any other novel, he said, its message went beyond murder. It was about free will and destiny; the choice of one murderer, and the DNA of the other. That’s why it was a classic.
The novel’s success didn’t do Truman Capote much good. His obsession with the case plunged him into depression. He fell into a bottle and never emerged. Never wrote another full length novel, and died of liver disease compounded by a cocktail of drugs, alone, nineteen years after the murderers swung from a Kansas State Penitentiary gibbet.
And this was what Hiero was reading at age eleven. What sort of father would allow an eleven-year-old to read about mutilation, rape and murder?
12
Barely an hour.
That’s how long it took the police to track me down to my Hong Kong hotel room.
My guess is the nosey couple had found Li Min’s body and called it in. The police had canvassed the corridor and obtained my details from the man with the toolbox. It isn’t hard to copy down a driver’s license. A search for my name in the hotel registry database would have quickly yielded my hotel.
On reaching my room, I had tossed my briefcase on the bed, and taken a shower. I’m not normally a long showerer, but when I toweled off, the clock by the bed told me I’d been in there for almost half-an-hour.
I put my trousers back on, found a bottle of bourbon from the minibar, and took it out onto the balcony. From the fifth floor I was close enough to see the police car arrive, and its officers stride purposefully into the lobby. A minute later the phone rang. I answered. It was the concierge, checking that everything was to my satisfaction.
Checking that I was in.
The phone call confirmed it. The cops were coming for me.
For a moment I contemplated waiting for them to arrive. My anger seemed to have burned itself out, and now I simply felt sick. The urge to wait for the police was strong. They were the good guys. I was a good guy.
But then I remembered Detectives Thomas and Palmer of Murdoch Police Station. I remembered the death smile. You didn’t give the good guy the death smile.
I threw a shirt on—no time for the tie, which smelt of vomit in any case. I picked up my shoes, socks, and briefcase, and slipped out the door and along the corridor toward the fire stairs.
Bounding down the stairs on bare feet, I had reached the third floor landing when I heard the clap of hard-soled shoes rising up the stairwell, and the measured breathing of a fit man. I ducked into the corridor, shut the door, and pressed my ear to it.
My wrist buzzed once, and I realized my Medline was bleeping at me. The adrenaline of my flight had pushed my heart rate into the red zone. I wrapped my hand over the watch to mute its noise, and tried to think calming thoughts.
The clap-clop of standard issue Gore-Tex leather combat boots rose, until they sounded from the other side of the door, then began to die away.
I lifted my hand from the watch. My heart rate was dropping back into the orange zone. I eased the fire door open, and with a glance up the stairwell, padded downward on my bare feet. I didn’t want to die. I also didn’t want to burst from the stairwell into the lobby looking like a fugitive.
At the ground floor, I paused to put my shoes on, took a breath and squared my shoulders, then entered the lobby.
Through the glass revolving door that gave onto the street, I could see a tour bus parked with its freight hatches thrown open. It had evidently disgorged its passengers into the lobby. The buzz of voices and clatter of luggage on tiles filled the air.
I set my face toward the revolving door and headed for it, my back prickling with imagined glances. I hoped there wasn’t a cop stationed on the street.
There wasn’t. I had escaped.
I walked till my feet began to ache, stopping only at an automatic teller to drain my savings accounts dry. (It held more cash than I remembered—my maths was off or perhaps a forgotten annuity had dropped?) I now had almost nine thousand Hong Kong dollars in my wallet, and after that it was the credit card, and a big fat blip on the radar every time I charged it.
From a street vendor I got a greasy skewer of fish curry balls, and broke a hundred dollar note. When I finally found a public phone with an enclosed booth, I entered and hunched over the machine to take the weight off my feet.
I picked up the receiver, fed coins into its slot, and dialed Australia.
“Murdoch Police Station. How may I help?”
“I want to speak to Detective Thomas,” I said. Then added, “Tell him it’s Jack Griffen,” thinking that ought to shift him off his donut.
Tinny holding music, then a gruff voice. “Thomas here, Mr Griffen.”
“How’s the investigation going, Detective Thomas?” There was a tremor in my voice.
“So, so,” he said, as if I’d disturbed him about as much as rain would a rock. “We have one person of interest who doesn’t follow instructions too well.”
“I guess you’re talking about me,” I said.
“Uh-huh. Want to tell me about it?”
“I’m in Hong Kong.”
That put a ripple through his calm.
“Then if you want to avoid a world of trouble, you’d better get your arse back to Perth.”
“He’s done the next one.”
“Who’s done what?” he said irritably.
“Detective Thomas of the Murdoch police station, I’ve called you to inform you that Hieronymus Beck has assaulted another girl. The next one on his list. And this time he succeeded. She is no longer alive.
”
Thomas was silent.
“You do remember the list I showed you four days ago?” I pressed. “Now do you believe me?”
There was a longer pause, then he said, “Okay, but the best place in the world for you right now is here, so—”
“Okay?” I shouted. “Li Min. Her name was Li Min. And now she’s dead.”
I hung up.
The digital readout on the phone said I had $5.60 credit left. I dialed the US, California.
A sweet voice spoke from the receiver, and echoed in my head: “Hello?”
“Tracey, Honey, it’s Dad, I just—”
A giggle interrupted me, then, “Just Kidding. You got the machine. Leave a message at the . . .” Beep.
Where was she? It was early morning in San Francisco, and Tracey had never been an early riser.
Then I remembered. She was in New York, attending a seminar by some screen guru. Damn.
I hung the receiver up, and waited without much hope for it to return my remaining credit. It didn’t.
From the safety of the booth I scanned the street for uniformed cops. Nothing. Across the street a damaged neon sign advertised an Inter-et afé. Exiting the booth, I crossed the street, and descended steps that hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. I bought a watery coffee and an hour’s credit, and wedged myself into a corner seat in front of a terminal. The air was pungent with sweat and takeaway food.
I must’ve been the oldest patron by twenty years. Placing my briefcase on the desk by the terminal, I hunkered down behind it.
Behind closed eyes, my thoughts eddied and wouldn’t settle. Li Min’s face kept bobbing to the surface, and then came the painting of the devil creature and its yellow eyes. I felt again the cold shower water that had made me shiver, and remembered how my eyes had stung when I’d cried again. I don’t know if the tears were for the girl or me. Probably me. I didn’t know her from a bar of soap.
But hardly anyone has seen her the way you have . . .
The part of my brain that I would have until then called cautious kept jabbing me with the assertion that the police hadn’t been looking for me.
But beneath it a harder voice told it to shut up. Start working on a way out of this hell.
I knuckled my eyes, and opened them. A quick scan of the room confirmed no one was looking at me. Okay.
My first task was to gauge Hiero’s next move. But I had failed at that once already, so I decided to take my own advice. I would research.
From my briefcase I retrieved Li Min’s journal. The cover was extremely pink. I shot an embarrassed glance about the room, but no one seemed to be paying me any attention.
The journal’s lock was thicker than the usual bon-bon treat securing a girl’s journal (A guess based on a sample of one, my daughter’s). But the clasp it held was weaker than a tin can. It tore away easily, and I folded the journal’s cover back.
The first page was covered in a neat, small script. The date at the top left of the page indicated the first of January. Li Min was a journal keeper. I flipped forward till the writing abruptly disappeared and I hit blank pages, then backtracked to her last entries, looking for what exactly, I wasn’t sure.
As I read, the dead girl’s voice spoke in my mind. And her favorite word was Hieronymus. Never Hiero. Always Hieronymus. It was an infatuation, complete and utter. I skipped back through the year to find where the infection had begun, and found her first glowing tribute to the ebullient American with the brown hair and deep gray—almost alien—eyes and the chivalrous manner. As I flicked forward, the voice told me of group dates to the movies and karaoke, coffee with friends, and, ultimately, dinner alone. They read heavy books together on blankets by the river, and she learned of the novel he dreamed to write. She believed the dream.
And having believed the dream, her journal entries grew terse. The end of semester closed in, and she feared their parting would be the end of the relationship.
She wrote nothing in the final week of semester, and her journal ended with one last abrupt entry. It had been written only yesterday. It said: tonight we celebrate our love. ‘Love’ was followed not by a full stop, but an absurd winking emoticon.
Following that was the last phrase Li Min wrote in her journal, perhaps the last she ever wrote:
Cometh the hour, cometh MC Griffen.
I shook my head, frustrated, and glanced about the café. From the back of the room someone cursed in frustration. But there was no one there to help. No one that understood.
It took a moment for the bomb to drop.
Griffen?
I scanned the last journal entry again. Obviously I had misread.
But no. There on the page, in stubborn ink: Cometh the hour, cometh MC Griffen.
Griffen?
I’d dropped acid and this was my trip, only I’d forgotten I’d taken it.
Griffen.
The girl I didn’t know knew me. The dead girl, the hard-liner in my head added.
And why MC Griffen? Of what Ceremony was I supposedly Master, pray tell, dead girl? Your celebration of love?
What the hell was I doing in Li Min’s journal entry for the day she died?
Hoping to silence the dead girl’s voice, I clapped the journal shut and threw it back into my briefcase, and withdrew, instead, Hiero’s folder.
I wet the end of a finger and flicked through his notes, past the injured girl, past the dead, to Number Three. The action was comforting; the autopilot of marking a term paper. Perhaps I was still in shock. I withdrew it and extracted the key parameters.
How: Blunt force trauma
Where: Underway
When: TBD
Who: Chälky
He had dropped the poetry, which was helpful, but the information was scant. It read like a placeholder. Blunt force trauma was clear enough, but for Where, Underway? What did that mean? Would the murder take place in a subway?
And for When, he hadn’t even bothered with a cryptic clue this time. TBD?
The name, Chalky, wasn’t familiar. It sounded like a nickname. Assuming Hiero was targeting exchange students, would it be enough to determine which one was next in his sights?
I pushed the folder aside, pulled the computer keyboard over, and with its sticky keys entered the code for my hour’s credit. Soon I was looking at the familiar login screen for the university student database. I entered my credentials and fidgeted while thousands of miles away a computer tucked into a closet on the university decided whether to trust me.
The seconds mounted till at last it replied, Forbidden. Not friendly, but unambiguous. My access had been terminated.
Which was either an error—possible—or meant the police had contacted the university. And the only reason I could think of for them to do that was that they suspected I was on the loose and intent on fiddling with students.
Ignoring the part of me that said, ‘Bugger them—forget about it and let them find out the hard way who is fiddling with the students,’ I rubbed my face with both palms and tried to think of Plan . . . which plan was I up to now? Let’s call it Plan F.
The professor was fumbling over Plan F, and Hiero, the alpha male, was still cruising on the alpha plan.
Think, man.
A roar filled the dank room. A young gamer threw up his hands and belched triumphantly. A minute hand on a clock on the wall crept towards the hour.
My screen was still telling me politely but forcefully that I was Verboten, when I noticed the fine print beneath the message, the essence of which was that in the event I thought the response mistaken, I should contact the administrator.
A glimmer of hope. Plan F grew legs. I would contact the administrator. One particular administrator, to be precise.
I closed the database screen and logged into Skype. Within the program, in a pane on the left, lay a list of my contacts. Beside each contact a colored dot indicated if they were logged into Skype. Scanning the names through a smear on the screen I found the one I wanted, Matthew Price
. His dot was a happy green. He was online, like always. Matt would be first in line for surgically implanted net connections when they arrived.
He was a click away. He was also an administrator of the university computer systems. Matt Price was my ticket back into the database.
He also happened to be my daughter’s ex-boyfriend. And in this case, that was good. Theirs had been an amicable parting, and I had always had time for him. I hoped it would be enough now.
I initiated a chat session: “Matt. Can you talk?”
A full three seconds later his reply bobbed onto my screen: “Sort of. In the thick of a rollout . . . what’s up?”
“I need you to run a query on the student database.”
“Can’t you?”
“No. I can’t login.” Please don’t ask me why.
“OK. Send me the details. I’ll run it tonight.”
“It’s urgent. I need it yesterday.”
A pause.
“Send it through.”
“I want a student with . . .” What? I wracked my brain for where to start. “A name like ‘chalk’.”
Another pause.
“Okaaay. What sort of like? Looks like chalk, sounds like chalk, hobbies include collecting chalk?”
Smartarse.
“Whatever you’ve got,” I said.
A full minute passed, while I watched the cursor pulsing on the screen. Then his reply came.
“Not much there. Best I got is Ryan Faulk.”
“Is he an exchange student? Sorry, meant to say limit the search to exchange students.”
“Nope.”
Damn.
I snatched up Hiero’s third sheet and ran my eye over it again.
That’s when I noticed the ‘a’ in chalky had an umlaut. Faint, but there.
I typed: “Okay. Forget chalk. Just give me students from Germanic countries.”
While I waited I opened a web browser, and searched maps for ‘Underway’. It gave me the visual equivalent of a shrug, so I tried splitting the search term into ‘Under way’. That retrieved three results, one in the US, and two in the UK.
