Devil in the Wires

by Tim Lees

  The Attack

  “You were there, Chris!”

  “I was not!”

  “I saw you. I saw you there.”

  She slumped in the chair, her long body molded to the cushions. But her fingers clutched the chair arms, and her knuckles were white.

  “That wasn’t me. That—­I think that’s Shailer’s expert. His consultant. I thought it was him behind the killings, but they’re not his style. He’s—­”

  “God damn it, Chris! It was you! It looked like you! It fucking was you—­”

  “But younger.”

  “I don’t—­Jesus. It was dark, I mean, for God’s sake, why are you, what—­”

  She shook. She twisted her fingers together. I knelt beside her.

  “Angel,” I said. “It wasn’t me. All right? I have a . . . a double. Someone who looks like me. He’s not human. He’s one of them. A god. Sort of.”

  She shook her head. Riff fussed around her, whimpering. She put her hand over her face.

  “Was it that guy again? Gotowski?”

  “Uh-­huh.”

  “I’ll talk to someone. This cop I know. Jesus, Angel. You’re sure you’re all right? Really?”

  “No. No, I’m not sure. I’m not even sure why I let you in here—­”

  “Tell me, Angie. Talk to me. Tell me what happened.”

  It had been late, she said, already dark. She’d been busy all day, and Riff needed some exercise. So she took him to the field beside the lake. A lot of it was still boggy with meltwater, but there was a children’s play area, fenced in. No one about. She took him inside, unclipped his leash, and let him go. He charged about, full with energy. It was all great fun. She clapped her hands, she urged him on. Then someone said her name, “Angel.” Just quietly, like that, and everything had seemed to freeze. The traffic sounds had died. She couldn’t hear Riff. He’d been there just a second back, and then . . . “It was like a dream—­or a nightmare. I was scared, only I didn’t know what of. Then I saw Paul. He was very close, and I remember thinking, he couldn’t have gotten that close or I’d have seen him. He was the one who’d spoken. And there were these three other guys, behind him, a bit further back, and . . .”

  “One of them looked like me?”

  “No, no, you weren’t there yet. But they came into the playground. That jerk Gotowski, he was all, Now you’re scared of me, aren’t you? There was no one else around, Chris! A summer night, and there was no one there! I called for Riff, only he didn’t come. The place still looked the same, only it wasn’t, you know? It was like an image of the place, or . . . I don’t know. I can’t explain.

  “It was obvious what was going to happen. But even then, he wouldn’t come at me directly. He had his pals move in from the side. One of them got my elbow in his face. That still hurts, actually. I kicked at them—­I kicked at Paul, but I was only wearing sneakers. The thing that bothered me was Riff. I couldn’t hear him, and I was so scared something had happened to him. I was more scared of that than anything else. I yelled at Paul, ‘What have you done with my dog?’ And still there was nobody around, no one . . .

  “And that’s when I saw you.

  “I couldn’t believe it. You were just standing there, over near the road, and there was a streetlamp lit up one side of your face, and you did nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just stood there, and you watched . . .”

  “Angel. That wasn’t me.”

  “It looked like you, and—­I don’t know. Maybe your hair was longer, or—­I don’t, I just don’t know. I yelled for you. And then suddenly I could hear again. There were traffic sounds, and, it was like a pressure lifted. And then this wonderful boy—­” she scratched the dog’s head, “he came racing up, barking his head off, and the guy still had hold of me, and he was just so mad—­Riff, I mean, biting and snapping—­” Riff, as if denying this, rubbed his head along her leg and drooled politely. “Then somebody was running over, but it wasn’t you, Chris. It was just some passerby, trying to help. And Paul and the others, they were gone, and . . .”

  “I wasn’t there. What you saw—­” and I wondered how to explain it to her. “You’re sure of it? You’re sure it looked like me?”

  I have ducked a lot of things in life. A lot of work, a lot of responsibility, a lot of relationships, when they got too much trouble to maintain. But some things follow you. It’s like they’ve got their hooks deep in your skin, and you can’t shake yourself free, no matter what you do.

  Chapter 52

  Monsters Don’t Look Like Monsters

  Woollard said, “Got an address, this fucker?”

  “I don’t know it.”

  “Don’t matter. I will find it and will personally ensure he has a very . . . memorable encounter with Chicago’s finest. She pressing charges?”

  “I think she might, yeah.”

  “Even better.” He rubbed his hands. He sipped his coffee. “I am having one good day here, Mr. English, and I extend the hospitality of the C.P.D. to you, if you would care to join me.”

  I noticed how he chose his café table facing the door, close by the window; noticed, too, the way he watched the traffic in the street outside.

  I sat opposite, and waited. He seemed to take a while to get comfortable. Then he said:

  “So, lo and behold. We got a partial off this last vic, off the thumbnail, OK? And guess what? Motherfucker’s in the system. Ain’t that a surprise.”

  He pulled out his phone.

  I said, “So that’s it, then? Problem solved? Nothing to do with us, or the Beach House, anything like that?”

  “Here.” He handed me the phone. “Take a look.”

  It was a mug shot, with the blank look of mug shots. The man was maybe thirty, thirty-­five, one eye half screwed up as if someone had surprised him with a bright light. A lick of hair fell across his brow, and the parting was low, over the left ear, as if he were going bald and trying to hide it. Once you edited out the lighting and his expression, it was a very ordinary face, perhaps a little weak-­looking—­there was something about the chin, the cheekbones, the set of the jaw . . . a kind of uncertainty, perhaps.

  I said, “You could pass him on the street, you’d never know.”

  “Monsters don’t look like monsters. Don’t act like it, neither, not all the time. Makes ’em hard to spot.”

  “I disagree.”

  “You do.”

  “I’ve seen some nasty-­looking monsters in my day.”

  “Yeah, well. Different line of work, huh? This guy is a Mr. Louis William Buckfill. He’s smart. Some computer skills, wants to be a game designer—­don’t they all? He’s known to us, all right, but nothing in the present bracket. First offense, eighteen years old. Girlfriend brought charges—­they’d had a fight, he set fire to her hair. But I guess they made up, ’cause she dropped the charges. After that, lists of assaults, possession, so on and so forth. Same old sorry story. On the assaults, his pattern is women. There’s another girl. One night he held her down, took slices off her with a surgical knife. She disrespected him, or some such. I guess he’s the sensitive type, you know? Well, he got time for that. Record says he was a model prisoner.”

  “And now he’s out.”

  “Been out a year or so. And only now he starts on this.”

  “I see where you’re going with that. But the connection’s in his head, not the Beach House. He’s obviously schizophrenic or something.”

  “His psych report says otherwise. And that’s bullshit, by the way—­he’d-­have-­to-­be-­crazy-­to-­do-­that. Maybe some are. I’ve met some nasty fuckers, and a lot of ’em were saner than you an’ me. Sane is kinda relative.”

  “I don’t know much about these things.”

  “No?” He leaned back and smiled. “Now, there you go again, Mr. English. That’s why I like you. ’Cause everybody else I talk to is
a fucking expert on the subject.”

  I sipped my coffee. “You think that these are sex killings?” I said.

  “Not in the usual way, for sure. Though I’m guessing that’s a part of it.”

  “Supposing there was something else?”

  “Something that connects with what you ­people do? Then I return to my original point. Give me one good reason we don’t close you down right now, hey?”

  “I’m working on it. Definitely working on it.”

  His phone rang, and he stepped outside a minute. I could see him, hunched up, nodding slowly.

  He came back in, pulled some bills from his wallet.

  “Looks like we have a hit,” he said. “Our Mr. Buckfill’s got no home address, but we found something else.” He nodded me to follow. “See, Mr. English, we’re not Sherlock and we’re not C.S.I. When we get a name, we run it against this and that—­vehicle registration, renters lists, so on. This time we got a match. Not an accommodation address, but we shall see what we shall see. Wanna come along?”

  Chapter 53

  The Buckfill Garage

  We drove. I couldn’t read the US landscape. By repute, we had come into a bad place, but the houses could have graced one of the better-­off London suburbs, and the streets were lined with trees. We passed a public park, the snow still clinging in the shade, great puddles spread across the lawns. The trees dripped. There were a lot of guys just hanging out, on stoops and street corners. Apart from that, I’d have felt fine taking a stroll here.

  I told Woollard this. He humphed. “We are crossing frontiers,” he said. “You can’t see ’em, but they’re there. One territory to the next. And I guarantee you, right this second, the word is going out: po-­po in the hood. Sure, it’s an unmarked car, but that don’t make no never mind. These kids can smell it. That’s their lives. That’s what they do.”

  It was noon. We came to a modern, modest-­looking district. Already, I could make out something happening ahead. There were cop cars parked. A bunch of ­people at the roadside—­locals, shifty and agitated. Cops on foot, all standing by.

  Behind them stood a row of parking garages. You could tell the lucky one, just from the police presence. But as yet, no one had moved. The doors were still firmly shut. Nothing had happened.

  Woollard strolled towards it. “Could be we got him here. Could be. Our very own Jeffrey Dahmer.”

  “H. H. Holmes,” I said.

  “Oh yeah. We’ve got a history here, all right, and it ain’t always pretty. Hey, come on, guys! Make room, make room!”

  Another car had arrived, but the crowds were blocking it. Woollard strode across. He was in there personally, remonstrating with them, firm but also diplomatic. I had to respect him for that; even for a cop, these things get dangerous. “Let us do our job, and we’re outta here. We can be slow or we can be fast. Your choice.” Reluctantly, step by step, the crowd moved out the way. The new car came through.

  And after that, we did a lot of just standing around.

  It got edgy. I had controlled the god of Assur, but I could not control this mob of resentful neighbors, angry at our intrusion in their midst. A ­couple of clods of earth were thrown. They shattered harmlessly against the tarmac.

  “Any more of that,” said Woollard, “and we gonna have to do something.”

  “This isn’t good,” I said.

  “This,” he said, “is your big lesson for the day. This is the result of years and years of trouble. Forced ghettoization, years of bad policing, and a gang problem that won’t quit. And now we’ve got a need to be here, it rears its ugly head. Now, I don’t believe our man is a popular fellow round these parts, but no matter. He is one of them, of a sudden. Welcome to Chicago, bud. This is the real thing.”

  There was shouting. A big man in the front of the crowd began hurling questions. The atmosphere was thick, tense. Water ran across the tarmac. And then, suddenly, everything around us was movement. The warrant had been granted. We were a go. Someone moved in with bolt cutters, wrestling with the lock on the garage door.

  “Come on,” said Woollard. “You’ll wanna see this.”

  “You keep telling me that.”

  The lock broke. A ­couple of big cops raised the door. The crowd behind was silent now. This wasn’t intrusion anymore: this was spectacle, this was the evening cop opera, shown early.

  The garage was a storage space. There were piles of boxes in the entranceway; a stack of newspapers that went up almost to the ceiling. Behind that, in the gloom, I could make out lumber, what might have been a cabinet, some stacked-­up wooden chairs, and a washing machine perched on a bench. There was something else, too. A darker shape, hanging in the shadows. The light switch wasn’t working. Only when one of the cops got a flashlight on it did I see what it was.

  Our perp was hanging from a beam by what looked like an electric cord. His face was swollen. His head was round and dark as a blueberry. He wore jeans and a hoodie. Both were stained with what I assumed was blood. His toes pointed downwards.

  As the cops moved into the small, cluttered space, the body began to move, like a pendulum, swinging gently back and forth, the elegantly pointed toes inscribing figure eights upon the air.

  “Suicide,” I said.

  “You think?”

  “Happens a lot, surely, with this type of killer?”

  “What type would that be, then?” Woollard sniffed the air. “Been dead a day or two, I’d say. Plus our freak weather will have kept him fresher than might otherwise. Do the math, Mr. English. This guy may have killed, may have tortured. Did he dump our body? I’d say no.”

  Woollard stepped forward, shining his own flashlight up into the swollen face.

  “Well, hello, Louis William Buckfill. What you wanna talk to me about today, huh?”

  Chapter 54

  The Double

  I finally saw the photographs of Shailer I’d asked for. Angel logged me in and there they were, thumbnail after thumbnail, on and on, page after page.

  “Who’s thinks he’s this photogenic, for God’s sake?”

  But here was Shailer at a stack of formal gatherings. He wasn’t the main man; he was usually off to the side, or talking to somebody else, or grinning brightly from the margins. But he was there. Here was Shailer at a lunch, at a dinner, and dancing with a blond woman some years his senior. Here was Shailer at the beach, his jacket slung over his shoulder. Here was Shailer in proximity to this celebrity or that, this industrialist, that politician. These were the official archives of the Registry, the kind of stuff that went into department newsletters and PR guff. The sort of stuff that Angel drew on for her day-­to-­day job.

  It was the other stuff that interested me. The waste, the bad photos, the pictures where the crowd was wrong or where the main guy shut his eyes just as the pic was being shot. The outtakes. And, in time, I came to those.

  I kept on going through them, till my eyes began to fog and my finger ached from clicking on the “next” button.

  Then Angel said, “Isn’t that you?”

  I sat up. “Where? What . . . ?”

  It was a scene at lunch—­one of those boardroom lunches where the windows are all full of sky, with one or two small building tops just peeping up over the windowsill. There were five ­people at table. Two were women. One was Shailer. One was a man I didn’t know. The fifth . . .

  I zoomed. I zoomed until the picture fell apart in squares of color, then I pulled it back, trying for the biggest, sharpest image I could get.

  “It’s you,” she said again. “Seattle. What were you doing in Seattle, Chris? You said—­”

  “I wasn’t in Seattle.”

  She frowned. She said, “If you’re lying to me—­”

  “I’m not lying.”

  Her gaze was hard.

  I said, “I’m not. This is Field Ops. This is
what I’ve been trying to tell you about. You can lose everything here, your name, your identity . . . your friends,” I said.

  “Friends.”

  “And more than friends.”

  She tipped her head on one side. Her eyes went to the screen. “He looks like you. They reckon everybody’s got a double, but . . .”

  “I do have a double. Shit . . .” I felt my belly tighten up.

  “Chris . . . ?”

  “I thought it was weird. I mean, I thought there was something up that first day at the Beach House. I got a reading, but there was nothing there. No Assur, no nothing. I got a reading and I shouldn’t have.” I turned from the screen. Then I looked back. It was me, all right—­someone who looked like me.

  “What is it? What’s wrong? Talk to me.”

  “Everything’s wrong,” I said. “Everything. It couldn’t be more wrong.”

  A heavy summer rain was falling. Beyond the domes of the museum, in the air above the park, it turned into a pale, opalescent mist, a cloud of rainbows. The light was always strange here. Now, though, it had a glow like neon. I called Shailer. I kept calling. He wouldn’t answer. I left a message: “I need to talk to you.” Two minutes later, and I left another: “Now.” And it went on like that. “Pick up your fucking phone,” I said, and, “Shailer!”

  I paced. Riff lay in his dog bed, watching me. He whimpered quietly from time to time. He was upset. He was upset because I was upset.

  I said, “I’m going to the Beach House.”

  “I’ll drive you.”

  “No.”

  “You’ll be soaked!”

  “I want to walk. I think I need to walk.”

  “I’ve got an umbrella you can borrow.”

  “I need my reader.” I started looking, trying to work out what I’d need. She came up and put her arms around me from behind, then turned me about.

  “Chris. Don’t get hurt, all right?”

  “I won’t get hurt.”

  “I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. You understand?”