by Brett Adams
Meters.
At my feet.
I stepped onto the grit gathered at the curb of the parking lot and breathed in. Did the air taste different at that threshold?
After almost three weeks at sea, I had made landfall. US soil. Somewhere out there, treading the same soil, was Hiero. He had another woman in his sights, no doubt.
I’d left the lifeless body of a neglected friend in the UK. I wasn’t going to let that happen here.
66
A Californian redwood shifts four tons of water to its canopy every day. It can pull with the force of a John Deere tractor, through vessels a millimeter wide.
Kim told me this once as we sat beneath an oak on the grounds of the University of Western Australia. Not bad for something lacking a nervous system.
It was spitfire season, when you could find hairy caterpillars clinging to the sides of trees in great, writhing lumps. When she told me the redwoods achieved their water feat with capillary action, I joked that it was more efficient than caterpillar-y action.
She didn’t think it was funny, but she laughed anyway, because I’d had a story rejected that day.
That’s Kim.
67
Marten sat, to all appearances patiently, while Grover spoke her bio.
Top cadet of her intake at Hendon Police College, London. Awarded the Queen’s Police Medal in her second year of service. One of the youngest to make the rank of inspector, a feat that earned her a place in the five-man shortlist—the entire ‘special dispensation’ quota for the UK in the FBI’s own training apparatus—sponsored by the International Criminal Investigative Analysis Fellowship.
“Where the world comes to learn to profile the criminal mind. Marten liked our country so much she stayed to take a degree in forensic psychology from Harvard.”
She’d never seen Grover in salesman mode. He was uncannily convincing. He had put her on a pedestal, and was jacking it to the roof.
She waited for the cue he was about to push her off it, and all the while, the second hand of the clock at the back of the hall wound around its face.
“It’s fair to say Detective Chief Inspector Marten Lacroix has taken the ladder of success three rungs at a time. Her caliber was obvious from the first day she arrived at Quantico, her record during her time here almost spotless.” He paused. “Almost . . .”
Here we go, thought Marten, and braced for impact.
Standing at the lectern, he pivoted his shoulders toward her, as if including her in a shared understanding. “There was that one case, her first in New Jersey, just a few hours drive from here.”
From the number of smiles that appeared in the audience, Marten knew they were primed. This was a full-tilt setup. She was going to eat grass, and they were ready to enjoy every word of it.
“But far be it from me to steal her thunder. Much better heard from the horse’s mouth. Marten?” Grover inclined his head, inviting her to the lectern. He was smiling, but the crease in his brow said, ‘Remember: an apology, for everything. That’s the deal.’
She stood, and walked to the lectern with a calmness she did not feel. She had to tug the mike down; Grover was a big guy. She tapped it once. “This thing take estrogen?”
The laughter quickly petered out and she was left with a yawning silence.
Her gaze wandered across the ranks of agents. She noticed a few had notebooks open in their laps, pens poised. On a hunch, she said, “I’m fresh off the plane. Assistant Director Jackson didn’t even give a girl a chance to powder her nose, so I need a little help. Somebody jog my memory; which lesson are we talking about? Which rung, to labor the analogy, did I slip on?”
A hand shot up, predictably belonging to one of the note-takers.
“I think Director Jackson is referring to the Wayne case.”
Marten’s brow creased in mock confusion. “You’re all too young to have heard of it, surely?”
In answer, the agent who had spoken raised his book.
“Are you telling me it’s required reading?” She pivoted to look at Grover, put a hand to her breast. “I’m flattered,” she said, and noted that his smile had been replaced by a look of faint suspicion.
“Well, let me turn this around then. Nothing worse than listening to a lecture. Allow me to test the mettle of the agency’s up and coming. The future. The brains trust.”
She tilted her head at Grover, seeking permission. A curt nod indicated she had it. He couldn’t politely do otherwise.
Another breath. Her gaze raked the audience, all faces upturned and expectant.
“We had a motto, mantra even, when I was a cadet. I wonder if any of you know it?”
A handful of arms shot into the air. Marten nodded at a young woman in a severe black suit.
“Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity?”
“Straight from the crest. But no, I’m referring to a less-than-official motto. Perhaps it has fallen out of favor in these times.”
Marten observed the young agents trade glances.
“So polite.” She glanced at Grover. “A regular tame flock you’ve husbanded here, Director.”
A voice was raised tentatively. “The truth stinks?”
Marten laughed. “Close enough, if Grover Marshall’s house rules won’t abide no cussin’. The truth is indeed a pile of crap. The point being, of course, that it will out in the end—declare its presence to all who have noses and aren’t too delicate to hunt for it.”
“The truth.” She pinned them with her eyes. “Truth. Not convenience. Not simplicity. Not pragmatism. Not expediency. Certainly not beauty.”
She paused to allow her words to sink in.
“So. The truth. Grover invited me up here an hour ago. I asked him to assist me in the capture of Jack Griffen, the Intercontinental Killer, who even now has likely made landfall on US soil. He agreed, on one condition. That I apologize for my part in the collapse of the case against Cory Wayne.”
Grover’s expression shifted. In no time he’d assumed the look of one in on it. So smooth.
“So,” Marten said, “The truth is construed from facts. Let’s try lining a few up.
“First, the prime and only suspect in the State’s case was a Mr Cory M. Wayne. I don’t remember what the ‘M’ stands for; let’s assume ‘Molester’”—A few laughs—“Now, who can tell me on what evidence the case was built?”
Hands began to shoot up.
“No need to be polite. Just call it out.”
A voice called out. “Wayne was seen near the scene of the crime.”
Another said, “Coworkers reported he’d been agitated in the days prior.”
More voices chimed in, speaking over each other.
“Internet records indicated his porn consumption spiked in the weeks preceding the murder.”
“Dirt from the embankment where the victim was found matched traces taken from his boot treads.”
On and on it went. Everyone, it seemed, was eager to show they knew the material. Marten waited patiently.
When the flow finally began to ebb, she raised a hand for quiet.
“You really are good students. So, honoring my deal: Grover. Everyone. I’m sorry.”
Silence.
“I’m sorry for pointing out the case against Corey Wayne was built entirely on circumstantial evidence, targeting a man with no demonstrable motive nor relevant history. For that, I apologize.”
Marten continued over the murmurs.
“I apologize for finding fault with every cliché of criminal profiling trotted out to explain what motivated Wayne to get off the couch one summer day and go hunting for a real, live little girl—a need to reassure himself of his fading manhood, to seize control of his life, to find some outlet to vent his anger.
“Never mind that he had plenty of opportunity to do all three routinely in the bars of his home town, as revealed by numerous witnesses. Not to mention the money he was making from his cut of black market OxyContin.
“Folks, Corey Wayne’
s manhood was alive and well; he felt in control of his life.”
She watched the anger glint in eyes as it travelled the room like unseen lightning. But then, too, she thought she saw mental cogs turn behind those eyes as minds rehearsed the list of evidence she had recounted. The hostility faded from some faces.
“Second,” she said. “When these concerns were discreetly pointed out by a certain young agent to her senior colleague, what action did he or she take?”
No one leapt to answer. They were gun-shy now. Apparently, Marten Lacroix was not the cardboard cut-out they’d assumed her to be.
At last, the woman who had first given Marten the FBI’s motto spoke up.
“The senior officer provided the media with the key evidence, and asked the local sheriff to organize a public forum where community members might come forward with further information.”
“Brave girl. Yes, it was indeed that agent’s response to call the equivalent of a townhall meeting to pump more hot air into the case, rather than admit what was obvious to everyone involved—that it was bullshit—and begin the painful task of raking over other leads that were now that much colder.”
From the corner of her eye, Marten saw Grover refold his arms like he was snapping wood. How much further could she push it, before it backfired? Not enough, and he’d pay her request for help lip service and get away with it. Too far and he’d simply freeze her out, reneg on his promise.
“So, I apologize for taking a fresh look beneath the mountain of grief and anger, rightly felt, but unhelpfully piled upon the first-hand facts of the case.
“And while I’m at it”—an olive branch, a real concession—“I am sorry for grossly underestimating the depth of grief and anger generated by the death of a young girl in a small town—which can’t have made this investigation easy. If I’d been a mother then, as I am today, I would have trodden more carefully.”
For some reason, the memory of Jack Griffen bent over the prone form of a dying woman in a waiting room flashed across Marten’s mind. It was a moment before she gathered up the threads of her thought.
“But who then?” This from a hard face with a crew-cut. “Who murdered Jennifer Nicolls?”
“We don’t know. I don’t know. And, it’s okay to say I don’t know. Takes a man to say it,” she joked. And, she thought, there’s one more truth that smells like shit.
“But time is wasting, and there is a killer loose on US soil right now. The textbook for this case hasn’t been written yet. I—we, with your help—could be writing it now, instead of taking points from an old grudge.” She spread her hands. “What do you say?”
Finally, she turned to look Grover full in the face. His expression was unreadable.
“Before these witnesses, Grover. Have I apologized for ‘all of it’? Fulfilled my part of the deal? Will you let me help you catch Jack Griffen before he murders again?”
Motionless a moment, Grover stood and strode to the lectern.
“Please join me in thanking Detective Lacroix.”
The applause was louder than she had expected. When she turned to speak with Grover, he had already left the stage.
68
Any fool can hold a gun.
For proof, I offer myself. Crouching there in the shadowed stoop opposite the café, I held the Glock raised before me, gripped double-hand. Easy.
Fully loaded, a Glock 17’s steel, brass, plastic and propellant totals thirty-two ounces. Weighs less than a can of beans. And any fool can hold a can of beans.
What’s more, if the Glock is typical—built, as it was, by a man with no firearms experience to win a contest by the Austrian Ministry of Defense—any fool can design one too.
But to fire one at a human being?
That, it turns out, takes a devil.
It’s like they say: pressure can make a diamond, or a stain. It all depends on what’s being squashed.
Squatting there in the shadow, one shoulder braced against a dirt-encrusted brick wall, trying to keep the Glock’s sight trained on the kid’s chest as he sauntered to the café entrance, I was beginning to fear I was from Stainsville.
The problem wasn’t the occasional yellow flash of a taxicab, or the stink of rotting trash wafting out of the gutter. I had clear sight across the street. There was no wind to speak of. I knew the chambered hollow point round would expand when it punctured his flesh with a good chance of smearing an artery or organ.
Everything was ready.
Except me.
My hands were jittering like a junkie in withdrawal.
Maybe it was nerves? I know it wasn’t guilt.
No, I wanted a tight bead on his chest. I wanted my bullet to tear him a new hole. Was giddy to see him ragdoll to the ground, and watch his blood sluice onto the street.
Those are the perks of an Angel of Death on an avenging mission.
My real fear was that my body was falling apart. That the stresses of the past weeks had caught up with me, and the flesh-machine named Jack Griffen had finally thrown a cog. That deep down, part of my constitution had ruptured. Now, when I needed it one last time.
Maybe murder took more than a professor of literature had—particularly a forty-five-year-old professor of literature with a diabolical heart condition and a fear of needles.
Why not? Everything else had broken.
I strained again to still the tremble in my arms. Just one more shot.
Because—oh, boy—I meant to murder. Just once. First and last on my scorecard.
My one hope was that before he died, he had the presence of mind to look for me. I wanted him to know I made it. Me, Jack Griffen. I played his game. And he lost.
I’m tempted to ask, “How did it come to this?”
Fact is, I know precisely how it came to this. Our journey is documented in ridiculous detail on his blog.
But cold-blooded murder?
I know I said earlier I was ready to kill Hieronymus Beck. But with murder, how wide is the chasm between saying and doing?
Murder. The oldest crime. Stuff of books and movies, and news headlines of not-quite near places and unfamiliar faces. Not something encountered during school drop-off, or grocery shopping, in the office, on the beach. Murder is a beast from a different dimension. Scary, sure, but ultimately unreal, because it belongs to another world.
But have you ever wondered what it would take for you to cross that chasm? What circumstances? What passions? What failure of logic? What temporary insanity?
In Ross MacDonald’s novel, Instant Enemy, his hardboiled detective Lew Archer says of the murderer, “The second self that most of us have inside us had stepped into the open and acted out its violence. Now he had to live with it, like an insane Siamese twin, for the rest of his life.”
Think about it. Who do you love most in all the world? What would you do to the person that brought violence into your loved one’s experience? I’m not talking about an accident. I mean an act deliberated over. Relished. Lacking even the mercy of death, because the perpetrator plans to violate your loved one again. And again. And again.
How are you feeling? Get anything? A little flutter deep, deep down of a kind of rage that would throw down every ingrained inhibition and put primal bloody murder into your hands?
That little flutter is a long way from murder, but it’s there isn’t it. You felt it. And the thing is, it’s alive. All it needs is a little sustenance and it will grow. It feeds on scraps that fall from the table of your emotions.
For me it took a simple discovery to crystallize the desire to murder—really make it become.
And that discovery was learning Hiero’s next target.
Hiero had sat down, by a window. Perhaps I wouldn’t have to wait for him to exit the café after all. I imagined a bullet striking the window glass. Saw it turn white and fall like shattered ice. How much force would the glass sap from the bullet? Enough to render its killing power iffy?
Not if I plugged him in the head.
As I watc
hed him fuss with his hair, I rued the fact that the human body is decidedly more mobile than the tree trunks I’d abused learning to aim the gun.
How had the long, twisting—at times, twice-walked—path of my life led here, to this moment, in a foreign city, on the other side of the world, with a gun in my hand, and murder in my heart?
Memories of the previous week were a mixture of blurred boredom and shattering revelation. Gold flecks amid the pan’s dross; tacks in the mud.
The first thing I did after I left Longman and Scrub was purchase a burner phone in Jacksonville, using some of the cash I found in the packet Longman had given me. The next was hit Hiero’s blog.
The most recent entry was short:
3PM, with the best Cheesecake in New York.
Straightaway I knew it was a cipher. Put that way to keep the police off, but enough for me to decode.
I had only ever travelled to the US once before. Hiero knew it because he had asked. The trip was for a conference in New York. A member of the conference’s review committee gave me a tour, which included a little café in Chelsea for, he claimed, the best cheesecake in New York.
I should say, the part of the blog post that was legible was short. Because beginning immediately after ‘New York’ the text turned into garbage. Trash. Random letters and symbols, like the blog had passed its expiry date and begun to rot.
But I paused over that oddity only briefly. I had my target. A café in New York, at 3PM on the 13th of November.
Driving north, I covered a thousand miles in three days in a second-hand peanut-brown Dodge Avenger 98 that wallowed along the lanes like a walrus on ice, but which had come with no questions asked and no formal registration switch. Finally I could say I felt okay on the right side of the road, if not comfortable. A fear still lurked in me that in a vehicular crisis, my reflexes would fire the wrong way in a split second, and send me into onrushing traffic. But I wouldn’t need to worry about driving soon. Wouldn’t need to worry about anything.
I started with five boxes of ammunition—5000 rounds of hollow point 9mm Parabellum—bought from a gun shop on my way through Savannah. Many times I drove an hour off the interstate looking for a barren place to fire the gun, took out a box of ammunition from the trunk, and paused to marvel that in one of those boxes lay the bullet that would end Hiero’s life. And a darker thought: in there, too, lay one for me.
