Fury

by G. M. Ford

  Bennett Hawes was beyond wistful irony. He paced the room at breakneck speed. “Even if I do find him, he’s just going to tell me to kiss his ass,” he blurted out. “Excuse my French, but you know he and I aren’t exactly…,” he said.

  Bennett Hawes had been managing editor for twenty-one years prior to Corso’s arrival. He’d lobbied long and hard for Corso not to be hired. First time they met, he’d asked Corso for an explanation of New York. Corso told him he didn’t have one. “Then I’ll never be sure I can trust you,” Hawes had said. Corso said he didn’t blame him. Said he wouldn’t hire himself either. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your outlook, Mrs. V. had insisted.

  “I know,” Mrs. V. said.

  She opened the top drawer of her desk, pulled out a piece of pale blue notepaper and a matching envelope. He couldn’t see what she wrote, but whatever it was fit on a single line. She then reached down into her bottom drawer and fingered her way to what she was looking for. Found it. A scrap of white paper folded in thirds. She signed her name to the note, folded the page in half, slipped the white scrap inside, and sealed the envelope. “If he can find him, have Leo give this to Mr. Corso.”

  Chapter 2

  Monday, September 17

  2:16 P.M. Day 1 of 6

  The hunted develop an eye for detail. An inner lens for imprinting the lay of familiar land or the fall of shadows at a certain time of day. He spotted the silhouette as soon as he turned the corner. A guy waiting by the women’s showers. He stopped the car. Shifted into reverse and then backed to the far end of the lot.

  As he got out and walked to the back of the car, he flicked his eyes in the guy’s direction. Big son of a bitch…whoever he was. He opened the hatchback and bent down as if to remove something from the car. Then quickly duck-walked between parked cars until he reached the opposite side of the shower building.

  He slipped off his boat shoes and pulled a steel ballpoint pen from the pocket of his raincoat. With his shoes stuffed into his coat pockets, he peeked around the short side of the building. Empty. He covered the distance and then peeked again. The guy still stood in the eaves, peering out at the Datsun through the beaded curtain of rain that ran headlong from the gutterless roof.

  He took two silent steps forward, grabbed the guy by the back of his hair, and jammed the point of the pen into the hollow behind the big guy’s ear. The guy made a surprisingly fast move to duck and turn, but Corso moved with him, increasing the pressure on the pen until it threatened to burst his eardrum, lifting him up onto his tiptoes, as if he were climbing a ladder.

  “Easy now…easy now,” the big guy chanted in a strained tenor.

  Corso recognized the voice. Pulled the pen back and spun the guy around. The guy rubbed behind his ear. Scowled. “What the hell’s with the Apache routine, Frank?” he asked. “You could seriously piss a guy off with that kind of shit.”

  “Apache, my ass. I should be asking you what’s with the lurking routine?”

  The big guy patted the hair at the back of his head. His face was red. “I’m a professional lurker, Frank. Remember? I’m a detective. Lurkers Are Us.”

  Corso slipped his shoes onto his feet, shouldered his way past the guy, and headed back to the car. The guy followed Corso into the rain.

  “You don’t generate much paperwork, Frank,” he said to Corso’s back. “You don’t exactly leave a guy a lot of choices when it comes to finding you.”

  “Might lead some guys to figure I don’t want to be found,” Corso said. He stuck his head inside the car.

  “Took me damn near two hours yammering on the phone,” the guy complained as he ambled through the downpour.

  “Come over here and make your big ass useful,” Corso said.

  The big man crossed the parking lot to Corso’s side. Both men stood six-four, but that was where the similarities ended. Corso had a loose-jointed, raw-boned quality about him. Leo Waterman was big all over. Fingers twice the size of Corso’s. One of those guys you could hit with a shovel, only to have him rise from the ground, smiling at you, with blood on his teeth. That was Leo’s edge, what made him a good private investigator. By the time you figured out he was about three times as smart as you’d imagined, it was too late. You were screwed. Worse yet, if you had a problem with it, Leo doubled as his own complaint department.

  Corso straightened up. Heaved a sigh. Looked the big man in the eye.

  “How you been, Leo?” Corso asked.

  “Hangin’ in there, Frank.”

  Corso clapped him on the shoulder. “Good to see you again. How’s Rebecca?”

  “Dating a gynecologist.”

  “Sorry to hear that, Leo. You guys were together a long time.”

  Leo looked off into the distance. “Yeah,” he said. “Almost twenty years. She says I’m not ‘emotionally available.’”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Damned if I know,” Leo said. “I’ve been trying to work up a picture of it for the past four months so’s I could fake it.”

  “Sorry to hear it,” Corso said again.

  Leo made a face. “Not only am I back to eating my own cooking, but I’m so horny the crack of dawn better be careful around me,” he said.

  “A gynecologist, huh?”

  “He’s thirty,” Leo said. “Named Brendan.”

  “I remember when thirty sounded so old,” Corso mused.

  “Yeah, me too,” Leo said miserably.

  They stood for a moment, sharing a silent grimace with the rain.

  “Grab ahold here,” Corso said.

  Leo stepped around the corner of the car. A Rolls marine battery. Two hundred or so pounds of lead and acid with a plastic handle at each end.

  Together the two men carried the battery down the ramp to the dock. Set it down while Corso unlocked the chain-link gate to C dock and then lugged it all the way out to the end. By the time they set the load down, Corso was heeled so far over on one side his knuckles threatened to drag on the dock and his hand felt as if it was being cut in two. Leo didn’t seem to notice either Corso’s discomfort or the weight of the load. Corso reckoned how if he were Brendan the gynecologist, he’d make it a point to stay a long way from Leo.

  Leo looked the boat over. Whistled. “Yours, huh?” he asked.

  Corso allowed how it surely was.

  “This true-crime writing shit must really pay,” Leo said. “Maybe I oughta pen my memoirs.” He walked along the slip, taking the boat in. “How big?”

  “Fifty-one feet,” Corso said. “A Monk design.”

  “A beauty.”

  “Think of it as my house and it won’t seem so extravagant,” Corso said. “I live aboard.” Corso stepped up onto his combination dock box and boarding stairs. “Come on,” he said, stepping over the rail onto the deck.

  Leo reached down, grabbed both of the handles, and, without so much as a grunt, set the battery on the rail. Corso thought he might have detected the hint of a smile forming on Leo’s lips. Corso spread his feet wide, grabbed the handles, and pulled upward. Nothing. Corso looked down at Leo, who was openly grinning now.

  “Awkward angle,” Corso said.

  Leo just kept smiling. Annoyed now, Corso yanked the battery for all he was worth, getting just enough clearance to allow the load to bang down onto the deck between his feet. The big boat rocked from the impact, but he still had his toes. Thank God for inch-and-a-half-thick teak decks.

  Corso slid the door open and stepped into the boat. Leo climbed aboard. Still smiling. “Ya didn’t hurt yourself, did ya, Frank?”

  “Stop grinning at me, goddamn it,” Corso snapped.

  Leo used a massive hand to wipe the smile from his face, then nodded at the battery. “Where’s this baby go?” he asked.

  Corso pointed to the floor beneath his feet. “Down in the engine room,” he said.

  “Why don’t we put it down there? Wouldn’t want you to sink the damn boat. It’s way too pretty for that.”

  Corso had s
pent just enough time around Leo to know this was the only chance he was going to get. With Leo, it wasn’t a good idea to go all demure at a time like this. You made any noise about how you could handle it on your own and Leo was just the guy to give you a wink and allow how he knew all along you could.

  Corso grabbed a D-ring in the teak-planked floor and pulled up a four-by-four-foot section of floor. Before he could set the hatch aside and lend a hand, Leo swung the battery over to the edge of the opening. He dropped to his knees, then down onto his belly, grabbed the handles, and managed to set the battery down gently in the engine compartment. As he worked the hatch back into place, Corso thought, once again, that if he were Dr. Stirrups he’d make it a point to give Leo a wide berth.

  “So,” Leo said. “You want to know who’s looking for you?”

  “Nope,” Corso said. “Couldn’t give less of a shit. As soon as I get that battery installed, I’m firing up and heading to the islands for a couple of weeks. A little cruising. A little fishing. Maybe some writing.”

  “Not even curious?”

  “Just tell ’em that you told me whatever you were supposed to tell me.”

  “Actually, I wasn’t supposed to tell you anything.”

  Leo reached into the pocket of his coat and produced a pale blue envelope. “I was just asked to give you this. You don’t want to read it, don’t.”

  Corso knew the stationery right away. “Shit,” he said and snatched the envelope.

  “Mind if I look around?” Leo asked.

  Distracted, Corso told him to go for it. He held the envelope but didn’t open it.

  He vividly recalled the day her first note had arrived in the mail. He’d been sitting on a trunk in the East Village apartment, eating cornflakes out of an empty margarine tub. Waiting for the lease to expire at the end of the month and wondering what in hell he was going to do with the rest of his life. It was two weeks after the front-page saga of his disgrace and firing, and about ten days after Cynthia had packed in their lives and fled, leaving only the trunk, a brass end table, and a pile of partially addressed wedding invitations adrift on the mantel.

  Bent in half and stuffed into the top of his mailbox. A plain manila envelope with a baby blue note that read:

  Dear Mr. Corso,

  If you would be interested in discussing a position with the Seattle Sun, please use the attached ticket to fly to Seattle on July 9, 1998. A room has been booked for you at the Sorrento Hotel. Confirmation #032011134. I look forward to seeing you at 9 A.M. on July 10, 1998, at the Seattle Sun Building, 2376 Western Avenue, Seattle, WA.

  Natalie Van Der Hoven Owner-Publisher

  Seattle Sun

  A bit odd, to be sure, but…I mean, why not? Wasn’t like he’d had other offers. The way Corso saw it, for the next thirty years or so, he’d be lucky to land a job writing copy for a union newsletter. Why not, indeed?

  She never asked him for an explanation of the New York fiasco. Just said she was a longtime fan. She also had a rather audacious plan. The kind of leap of faith only attempted by the desperate. She was willing to bet that Corso’s syndication readers would follow him, regardless of what had happened in the past. She offered to give him back his press credentials. Said she’d make him the Seattle Sun’s roving reporter. He could call his own shots. Thousand bucks a column. Expenses agreed upon in advance. No bennies.

  What she wanted in return was all of his syndication revenues. After New York? Hell, it was a no-brainer. Like that old Billy Preston song: “Nothin’ from nothin’ leaves nothin’.” So Corso had agreed. The deal had worked out for both of them. Over the past three years, she’d built Corso’s syndication numbers nearly back to where they had been before his firing. The extra revenue was a major factor in keeping the Seattle Sun afloat. As for Corso, he’d rebuilt some measure of confidence in his own sanity and had finally finished the book he’d started ten years earlier. When Those Who Favor Fire had gone to the top of the bestseller lists last year, they’d negotiated the weekly column back to twice a month. Two grand a pop.

  He used his thumb to rip open the flap of the envelope. Written in her crisp schoolteacher hand it read: Same story. This time the marker is mine. Signed Natalie Van Der Hoven. A scrap of white paper waffled to the floor. Corso heaved a heavy sigh and dropped the note on the chart table. Left the paper on the floor. He knew what it said. Read the note again. Same story? Walter Leroy Himes?

  Leo was out on the stern checking out the view of Lake Union and foggy Queen Anne Hill beyond. A floatplane roared north, bouncing across the choppy green water until it lurched into the sky and disappeared over Gasworks Park.

  “Hey,” Corso yelled. Leo stepped over and poked his head into the cabin.

  “Himes is scheduled for execution on Saturday, right?” Corso asked.

  Leo made a move like he was giving himself an injection. “Yeah,” he said. “Midnight. Walter Leroy boots up the cosmic Kool-Aid over in Walla Walla.”

  For over eleven weeks in 1998, a serial killer had shaken Seattle like a maraca. Eight bodies in eighty days. Eight girls strangled, raped, and thrown into Dumpsters like urban litter. Taken from crowded places, where the volume of traffic alone should have made abductions impossible. As the weeks passed and the bodies became more frequent, the killer began to take on almost mythic properties. The media started calling him the Trashman. By the end, the streets were deserted after dark, and the pressure on the Seattle Police Department to find the killer was unrelenting.

  SPD had now called in the county, the state, and the FBI. They hunted and harangued and profiled and pontificated, until, like clockwork, the sixth girl was found dead in an alley below the Pike Street Market. And then the seventh girl turned up. Hysteria reigned. A chorus called for the ouster of the chief of police. Others wanted the National Guard to safeguard the streets. Then, just when they feared another body was due to be found, they finally got lucky.

  Two uniformed officers in a patrol car came upon an eighteen-year-old girl, Leanne Samples, staggering down a snow-covered service road in Volunteer Park, her panties missing in action, her face scratched and bleeding, her blouse torn to shreds and hanging at her wrists. When finally calm enough to talk, she told the officers that she’d been dragged into the bushes and had been in the process of being raped when the sound of the squad car caused her attacker to flee. The officers called for an aide car and all the backup in the world.

  About the time Leanne Samples arrived at Harborview Medical Center, nearly a hundred cops and FBI agents swept through the park like fire ants. They found her white cotton panties beneath a dormant azalea; they also found the owner of a local auto-body shop getting a blow job from a fifteen-year-old runaway boy from Saginaw, Michigan. Most significant, however, they found a homeless transient by the name of Walter Leroy Himes playing with himself in the men’s room behind the bandshell.

  By the time detectives arrived at Harborview Medical Center, Leanne’s parents, who were members of a Christian fundamentalist congregation, had put a stop to her medical treatment. Seems they and their brethren didn’t hold with any of that scientific hocus-pocus. No fluid workups, no DNA testing. No nothing. The Devil’s handiwork and all that, you know.

  Faced with the total loss of forensic evidence, the desperate detectives showed Leanne a five-year-old mug shot of Walter Leroy Himes. After some prodding, she said yes, that was the man who’d tried to rape her. Two days later, Leanne picked Walter Leroy Himes out of a six-man lineup. The rest, as they say, was history. Hell, Himes made it easy for them.

  Walter Leroy Himes was, after all, everything a murdering scumbag was supposed to be. For starters, he was every bit as ugly as he was big. A mouth-breather with big red lips and truly lamentable personal hygiene. Not only was he uneducated, but he was stupid besides. Refusing a lawyer until the last moment, when Judge Spearbeck stuck him with a wet-behind-the-ears public defender who had no idea how to deal with a client who wouldn’t shut up in court, who wound up duct-taped t
o his chair, wearing a bright orange ball gag the judge ordered from the sex shop up the street from the courthouse. The capper was that Himes turned out to have an extensive record of sex offenses. Three county convictions for public nudity back in his native North Carolina. Seems he liked to wave his winkie at schoolkids. Worse yet, he’d recently done nineteen months at the Twin Rivers Correctional Facility for fondling an eleven-year-old girl in a downtown mini-mart. He had been released from prison a scant three weeks before the killings began. If ever a man was a natural to catch a rap, it was Walter Leroy Himes. And catch it he did. Big time. Eight counts of aggravated murder. Eight death sentences.

  Leo stepped into the salon, sliding the teak door closed behind him. “What do you think?” he asked. “Now that Judgment Day is close at hand, you figure old Walter Leroy wishes he hadn’t kept referring to the governor as ‘the chink’?”

  Corso thought it over. “If Himes was wired for regret, he wouldn’t be on death row at all,” he said finally. Leo nodded in silent agreement.

  The state of Washington has never been particularly anxious to enforce its death penalty. Had Himes had sense enough to keep his mouth shut, they would have locked him up and let him appeal until he rotted. Not Himes though. No…Himes immediately tried to waive his right to appeal and demanded his death sentence be carried out posthaste. Claimed his maker knew he hadn’t killed those girls. Figured when he got to wherever he was going, first thing he’d do was he’d rape those eight, what he called “stuck-up bitches,” good and proper. Give ’em an eternity of what he figured they’d been asking for anyway. Way Himes saw it, since he was an innocent man, they owed it to him. Needless to say, such pronouncements did little to enhance Walter Leroy’s popularity.

  Such quantum stupidity quite naturally attracted the attention of the ACLU, which then had spent the last three years and the better part of four million dollars exhausting every legal avenue in an ill-fated effort to save Walter Leroy Himes from both the state of Washington and himself.