by R. J. Jagger
“Which is what?”
“Which is something serious.”
Waverly must have had a tone in her voice because Su-Moon backed off a half step and studied her.
“You’re going to kill him?”
“Let’s put it this way,” she said. “If he stays on the streets, someone else is just going to end up dead.”
Su-Moon shook her head.
“Let the police handle it.”
“With what evidence?”
“What do you mean, with what evidence? With all of it.”
“All of it is basically nothing,” Waverly said. “There isn’t enough at any one place.”
120
Day Four
July 24, 1952
Thursday Morning
River exercised outside with his shirt off, occasionally pulling in the industrial area with his peripheral vision to verify that the woman with the binoculars was still in place. January ought to be getting close. In hindsight River should never have let her go. She was armed but the other woman might be too.
He worked through the pain of one final set of seventy-five pushups, then wiped his brow with the back of his hand and headed inside.
Thunder rolled through his veins.
He pulled the roof in with the binoculars.
The woman wasn’t visible.
She was in her down position.
He kept the scene in sight, ready to dart to the side at the first sign of a head popping up.
“Whoever you are, you’re going down.”
Suddenly there was movement. Two figures were fighting, standing chest to chest and pounding each other in the face.
They dropped.
Seconds passed.
River ran outside and took the ladder to the top of the boxcar, hoping to get a line of sight over the parapet. It didn’t work. Whatever was happening was out of view.
Come on.
Come on.
Come on.
Then a partial silhouette of a figure appeared, not frantic, not fighting, but visibly shaking. Then the figure stood upright and turned around.
It was January.
She looked directly at the boxcars and waved her arms.
That was it.
That was the signal.
River dropped the binoculars and ran that way, cutting across abandoned tracks and knee-high weeds, trying to not step on anything that would jack-up his foot.
When he got to the building, January was waiting for him at street level. Her face was a mess, her hair was disheveled, her shirt was ripped, her arm was scraped.
“Where’s the woman?”
“She’s up on the roof,” January said. “She’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“Yeah, dead. We ended up in a fight. It was her fault. She’s the one who started it.” A beat then, “So what do we do now, just leave her there or dump her somewhere?”
River weighed it both ways.
“We’ll dump her. Go get the car, I’ll bring her down.”
Up on the roof, River recognized the body. It was that woman who worked with Bryson Wilde. He picked her up, flung her over his shoulder and carried her down to street level. January was already there, waiting for him with the car.
River looked around.
No one was in sight.
He dumped the body in the trunk and slammed the lid.
Then they got the hell out of there.
121
Day Four
July 24, 1952
Thursday Morning
Wilde couldn’t think. The sound of Secret hanging up was a noise in his head he couldn’t quiet. Whatever relationship they had was either over or dangerously close to it. He didn’t want it to be, but if it was, he wanted to at least know for sure one way or the other.
“I have to make a run,” he told London.
“To where?”
“To see a woman.”
“With everything that’s going on?”
“Yes.” He grabbed his hat and tilted it over his left eye. “Come with me. You can wait in the car. You’ll be safer there than here.”
“Okay.”
Ten minutes later he rapped on Secret’s hotel door, expecting the usual, namely no answer. This time was different. This time the door opened.
“I thought we had something,” Wilde said.
She turned.
“Come in.”
He followed, shutting the door.
“I know you’re a model,” he said. “I know you’re big time.”
“Look, Bryson—”
“Tell me what’s going on,” he said. “Tell me if I fell in love with the wrong woman.”
“You didn’t fall in love with anyone, Bryson.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
He waited.
She studied his eyes.
Her face softened.
“I’m not who you think I am,” she said.
“I already know that.”
“No, I’m not talking about my name, I’m talking about inside, in my heart.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? I don’t get it—”
“What I mean is that I did something,” she said. “Something that was wrong.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “I do something wrong every day.”
“I don’t mean like that,” she said. “I mean something serious.”
He frowned.
“Tell me.”
She walked to the window and looked out, keeping her face away.
“It was in August of 1950, about two years ago,” she said. “It happened in Chicago. I was there on a photo shoot. My manager was with me. His name is Sam Lenay. He was in trouble. I did something to help him. At the time I did it, I didn’t realize exactly what I was doing.”
“Did what?”
“I played a role,” she said.
Wilde lit a cigarette, took a deep drag and blew smoke.
“You’re confusing the hell out of me,” he said. “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
“I seduced someone,” she said. “I did it for Sam, to get him out of trouble.”
“I don’t care who you slept with.”
“It’s not about sleeping with someone, Wilde. It’s about doing something that makes them end up dead.”
Wilde stopped a puff halfway through.
He pulled the cigarette from his lips.
“What are you saying? Are you saying that you killed someone?”
She exhaled.
“Yes,” she said. “More than one.”
The pieces didn’t fit.
He didn’t care.
He wasn’t interested in the pieces any more.
He turned her around, took her in his arms and pulled her tight.
“I don’t know who you are and I don’t care what you did,” he said. “I do know one thing though. I know that I don’t want to lose you before I even really have you.”
122
Day Four
July 24, 1952
Thursday Afternoon
Su-Moon stepped back, almost as if pushed in the chest by Waverly’s words, and said, “I can’t believe you’re even talking about killing someone. If that’s your goal, count me out. I’m all for doing whatever it takes to get this guy off the streets—I think I’ve already proved that—but I’m not going to turn myself into one of his kind to do it. You shouldn’t either. I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation.”
Waverly lowered her eyes to the ground.
Then she looked up.
“I had a sister,” she said. “Her name was Carmen Key. In August of 1950, she was murdered. Someone dressed her up in a red dress and dropped her off a roof. It happened in Chicago.”
“I had no idea.”
“No way you would,” Waverly said. “The police got nowhere. I hired a private investigator, a man named Drew Blackwater, who didn’t get much further than the police, but did get something. He found out that a woma
n named Emmanuelle LeFavre was in the vicinity at the time it happened. Emmanuelle in turn remembered seeing Carmen with a man that evening. They were entering the alley that ran alongside the building. She got a glimpse of the man. It wasn’t a good one but it was at least something.”
“Okay.”
“I flew to Chicago and met with her,” Waverly said. “She felt my pain. She agreed to help me in any way she could. The police didn’t know about her. She didn’t want to get involved with them. She thought they weren’t confidential enough. She thought that if the guy found out there was a witness, he’d be able to get that person’s name.”
“Through a bribe?”
Waverly nodded.
“A bribe, a leak, whatever,” she said. “I agreed to keep her identity secret and not tell the police about her. She spent two weeks combing the city on foot, hoping to run into the guy by blind luck. Their paths never crossed.”
“Too bad.”
“Right, too bad,” Waverly said. “She was a model from New York. She returned home. Meanwhile, my investigator, Drew Blackwater, kept pressing forward. He came up with a second piece of information. He found out that another woman—a lady by the name of Brittany Pratt—had been killed in an identical manner exactly one year before Carmen, meaning August 1949.”
“In Chicago?”
“No, in New York,” Waverly said.
“Where Emmanuelle lived.”
“Right,” she said. “I flew there, hired a local private investigator, and stayed with Emmanuelle for three weeks, trying to get a lead on that prior murder.”
“Because the same guy did both.”
“Exactly,” Waverly said. “That turned out to be a waste of time. In the end, we got nothing, no witnesses, no leads, no motives, no nothing.”
“Damn.”
“The hardest part about it was that I knew that there was something there somewhere to be found. We just never found it.”
“So what’d you do?”
“Well, I figured if there were two, maybe there were three,” she said. “My Chicago investigator—Blackwater—actually came up with another victim, a woman named Geneva Robertson who was murdered in Las Angeles in March of 1950. Again, the woman was dropped off a roof wearing a red dress.”
“So August wasn’t set in stone.”
“No, now we had two in August and one in March,” Waverly said. “I did the same as before, flew to Los Angeles, hired a local investigator, the whole bit. Emmanuelle met me there.”
“That’s quite a friend.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” Waverly said. “She paid all the bills, too. She had the money, from her modeling. I had hardly anything. She paid for the plane tickets, the hotels, the investigator fees, everything. In the end though it was a giant waste of time. We didn’t get anything useful.”
“Damn.”
Waverly grabbed Su-Moon’s hand. “Come on, let’s walk,” she said. They headed for 16th Street, where the buzz was. “Last weekend, we had a similar murder in Denver. My boss, Shelby Tilt, saw it as a big story, not because it was a murder, but because he was personally aware of a similar murder that had happened out in San Francisco when he worked there,” she said.
“Meaning Kava Every.”
“That was the first I’d heard about a fourth victim, fifth actually, if you count the one in Denver,” Waverly said.
“Did you tell Tilt about everything you already knew?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I knew from the start of all this that I might have to personally kill the guy if there wasn’t enough information to take to the police,” Waverly said.
“So you’ve had revenge in mind from the start.”
“Yes, if by revenge you mean justice,” Waverly said. “My goal is to ruin this guy’s life and get him off the streets. If that can be done through the cops, then great. That’s my route of choice. If it has to be done through alternative means, though, then I’m prepared to do that as well.”
Su-Moon let the corner of her mouth turn up.
“Don’t let me get on your bad side.”
Waverly frowned.
“You know, from the beginning I’ve really had no second thoughts about killing the guy if it came to that,” she said. “Now that I’m getting close, I’m not so sure I’m up for it.”
“What we need to do is figure out a way to trap him,” Su-Moon said.
“How?”
“I don’t know. There must be a way, though, if we think hard enough.”
They walked in silence.
“Why didn’t Emmanuelle meet you in San Francisco? Is she dropping out?”
“No, she’s playing a role.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we had two murders to cover at the same time,” Waverly said. “I went to San Francisco, Emmanuelle came to Denver.”
“She’s here?”
“Yes.”
“What’s she doing?”
“She hired a dick named Bryson Wilde to investigate the murder here,” Waverly said.
“Why would he take the case?” Su-Moon said.
“Money.”
“I know, money, what I’m say is, why wouldn’t he scratch his head and say, What’s your interest in all of this? What do you care about who killed someone?”
“Okay, I see what you mean,” Waverly said. “She made up a cover.”
The words hung.
“Which is what?”
“Which is she pretended like she saw it from a distance, pretty much like what actually happened to her in Chicago. She’s hoping that the investigator will crack it. If that happens, her plan is to view the guy from a distance, without him knowing it, and see if he’s the same guy she saw in Chicago.”
Silence.
“If she saw him back in Chicago, maybe he saw her too.”
Waverly nodded.
“That’s possible. So?”
“So, what if he sees her by some random happening while he’s out walking around?” Su-Moon said. “What if that happens and she doesn’t know it happened?”
The city was full of life.
Cars moved.
People moved.
Everything made its own special little noise.
Su-Moon stopped, then looked into Waverly’s eyes. “Have you ever considered that maybe Emmanuelle is the killer?”
Waverly laughed.
“Good one,” she said. “How do we trap Bristol? That’s what I want to know.”
Su-Moon grabbed Waverly’s elbow.
“I’m serious,” she said. “She was in the vicinity when Carmen got killed. After you found out about her, she got you to promise not to tell the police about her.”
Waverly started to open her mouth.
Su-Moon cut her off.
“Hear me out,” she said. “Another murder happened in New York, where she was—again. She paid all the bills for all the investigations, including the investigators themselves. Maybe that was her way of being sure they didn’t find anything, or if they did, they only told her about it and not you.”
Waverly wasn’t impressed.
“We need to trap Bristol,” she said. “That’s what we need to focus on.”
Su-Moon frowned.
“Maybe she’s been tagging along not to help you but to be sure you don’t get anywhere,” Su-Moon said.
“Stop it.”
“I’m just saying—”
“And I’m saying I heard you,” Waverly said. “So stop saying. Enough’s enough. Emmanuelle didn’t kill anyone. She couldn’t hurt a fly.”
123
Day Four
July 24, 1952
Thursday Afternoon
Fifteen miles west of Denver, where the flatlands collide with the Rockies, a frothing whitewater river snakes out of the mountains into Clear Creek Canyon. Next to the river is a twisty, dangerous road. With a dead body in the trunk, River took that road west between vertical rock walls, deep
er and deeper into the mountains.
Ten miles into it he turned right on 119.
Eight miles later, an abandoned road appeared on the left. The mouth was barely recognizable as something other than overgrown vegetation. The guts of the road disappeared over a jagged ridge into thick lodgepole pines.
River headed down it.
He hadn’t been this way in years.
Five miles down that road was a long-abandoned gold mine, filled with thirty or more dangerous vertical shafts that disappeared straight down into the belly of the world.
River used to come here as a kid.
He and Butch Bannister would dare each other to jump over the shafts. Some were narrow and easy. Others were a whole different world.
River pulled next to one of the wider shafts and stepped out of the car.
The thin mountain air was ten degrees cooler than Denver, maybe fifteen.
With the clouds and the wind, it was almost cold.
He opened the trunk and pulled the body out, tipping it over the lip and letting it drop to the ground with a thud. He grabbed the feet and dragged it towards the hole, stopping two yards short.
He looked at January.
“I’ll bet she’s not the first to be dropped down here,” he said. “I’ll bet she lands on ten more just like her.”
“Be careful. Don’t get too close.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I used to play here as a kid.”
He got behind the body and pushed it with his foot, closer and closer to the opening, then in.
The body banged against the sides on the way down.
It was a familiar sound.
River had dropped five hundred rocks down the shafts.
The sound was always the same.
In spite of the chill, his brow was moist. He wiped it with the back of his hand and looked around.
The world was silent.
Not a sound came from anywhere.
“She’s in China,” he said. “There’s one thing we don’t have to worry about, and that’s anyone ever finding her.”
January wrapped her arms around him.
