They Thought He was Safe

by P. D. Workman

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  Philippe didn’t say anything for a minute. “Are you okay?” he asked finally. “You’re talking, so you must be okay. Did they do any permanent damage?”

  “I don’t think so. Waiting for x-rays.”

  “So you probably don’t want to talk to my guy tonight. You’re not going to be able to see him.”

  “I still want to. Can he come here? I’m probably just going to be laying around here for hours until they decide I’m okay to go home or I sign myself out.”

  “Really? You want to see him at the hospital?”

  “At least we will be safe. There won’t be anyone hanging around like at the bar.”

  “Huh. Unless one of those skinheads broke his knuckles on your face and decides to go in to get them treated.”

  Zachary remembered the skinhead shaking out his hand after hitting Zachary in the cheek and didn’t think it was so funny. He took a quick look around, nervous, but he couldn’t see the emergency room waiting area from where he was. He couldn’t see very much of anything from where he was. Just the cop standing over him, waiting for him to finish the call so he could ask more questions.

  When he hung up, the cop raised an eyebrow. “Not much slows you down, does it?”

  Zachary thought about how much he sometimes had to fight against himself just to get from one day to the next. Working through physical injury was nothing compared with fighting his own brain and emotional state.

  “I guess. I mean, it’s not that bad with the Demerol. I don’t think anything is broken. I’m a little loopy, that’s all.”

  “Who is this guy that you want to come talk to you tonight? What’s that all about?”

  Zachary didn’t see what that had to do with his assault case, or what business it was of the cop’s, but he answered anyway. Maybe there was a way to persuade the police that there was something to Jose’s disappearance.

  “A witness that says that more men have disappeared than just the one I’m looking for. That there have been a long series of similar disappearances.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Zachary figured the cop already knew exactly what it meant. “That we might have a serial killer on our hands.”

  “We?”

  “If there’s a serial killer operating in Vermont, then the police are going to have to be involved sooner or later.”

  “What makes you think there’s a serial killer? That’s quite a reach.”

  “I don’t know yet, not until I talk to this guy and look into it further. He says there have been others. That’s all the information I have so far. That and my missing person… doesn’t feel right. I don’t think he just took off without telling anyone.”

  “Has a report been filed on him?”

  “Yes. The officer in charge is…” Zachary tried to bring the name up, but the Demerol was having a bigger effect on him than he had thought. “McDougall? No—Dougan. I already talked to him. He doesn’t think there’s anything to it.”

  The cop grunted. “So, these neo-Nazis that attacked you,” he said, going back to the investigation at hand. “Do you think they had something to do with your missing guy? Were they trying to warn you off from the investigation?”

  “No, I doubt it. They wouldn’t know about the questions I was asking inside, they just thought I was gay. Unless they have someone planted inside, and I don’t think these guys are that subtle. They’re just out to do some damage. Pick off easy targets.”

  “You might want to reconsider going to night spots like that. Especially alone. Take a friend with you. A few friends. Don’t walk to your car by yourself.”

  Zachary sighed. He didn’t exactly have anyone he could take with him.

  The cop shook his head. “Well then, you might want to get a permit and start carrying. At least you would have a way to defend yourself.”

  Zachary had promised himself that he would never own a gun. It would be far more hazardous to his safety than it would be a benefit.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll think about it.”

  “That doesn’t mean I want you going around shooting up every skinhead you see… but you do have the right to protect yourself.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  S

  ometime between when the cop left and when Philippe’s friend made it to the hospital, Zachary fell asleep. He wasn’t normally quick to fall asleep in strange places; it was hard enough at home. But the Demerol and the aftermath of the adrenaline rush apparently combined to make him sleepy, and he fell asleep right in the hallway as people walked by talking and shouting instructions to each other. He woke up a few times, but then closed his eyes again and just drifted off, feeling warm and comfy and drowsy.

  He was eventually taken in for his x-rays, and then moved to another curtained area while he was waiting for the results. He’d been there for some time, sliding in and out of sleep, when a man showed up at his bedside.

  At first, Zachary took him for a janitor or an orderly. A tall man with black skin and sharp, angular features. He looked down at Zachary and said his name a few times before Zachary realized that this was someone he actually wanted to talk to. Zachary tried to sit up and the man helped to readjust the pillows and raise the head of the bed. Then he sat down in a chair he dragged into the curtained area from somewhere outside.

  “You are Zachary Goldman,” he said firmly.

  “Yes,” Zachary nodded. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to fall asleep there. You’re Philippe’s friend?”

  The man looked at him suspiciously. “His friend, yes. I am.”

  “Good. He said that you had told him about other men disappearing, and I wanted to hear about that. It’s important.”

  “I have tried to tell people that it is important, but everybody just blows it off.” The man made a sweeping gesture with his hands.

  Zachary nodded. He was starting to see how that was the case. No one yet had shown any concern over what had happened to Jose, other than Pat and Philippe. “Yes. But I want to hear. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do anything to make anyone else pay attention, but if these disappearances are related, I want to know about it. There’s no point in chasing down dead ends if there are a bunch of related disappearances that could lead us to the killer. Or whatever he is.”

  Philippe’s friend nodded.

  “What’s your name?” Zachary asked him.

  “Jama Mwangi, but you can call me John.”

  “Okay, John. What can you tell me about these missing men?”

  John had a soft-sided briefcase with him. He opened it up and pulled out a writing tablet which had a long list of carefully hand printed names in a column from the top to the bottom. Zachary took it from him, looking over the list. There were so many names. He had expected two or three more, not a full page. He scanned through the names. They were not names that he recognized. Nothing that had been in the news. A lot of them were Hispanic names, maybe some African or Middle Eastern. Zachary worked his way through them, trying to break them down by ethnic groups, to start seeing patterns even before he had any more information than the names.

  He rested the list on his lap. “Are they all illegals?”

  “No, not all. Some have documents. Some were even citizens, born here. But none of them were white.”

  Zachary thought about that, letting his mind drift. If they were all immigrants, or looked like immigrants, then the perpetrator had picked them because of that. He wanted men who would disappear more easily. Men that the police would discount, just as they had Jose, as someone who was other than they were. Someone who could be written off as unimportant and insignificant. People like that just came and went. They could just disappear one day, but there was no reason to be concerned. They just did that kind of thing.

  “Can you tell me anything else about them? Did you know all of them? Did any of them get reported to the police as missing or end up in the news?”

  John looked at Zachary, his eyes piercing. Zachary
tried to keep his eyes steady and not to blush under the close examination.

  “You believe about this?” John demanded.

  “Yes, I believe it. I want to know if they’re related to each other and Jose. I need more details in order to investigate them.” He let his eyes run down the list again. “This is a lot of people.”

  “It is not all this year,” John explained. “Only a few every year. Between two and six. But it has been going on for years.”

  “How did you find out? How many of them did you know?”

  “There had been talk in the community. Rumors, stories that men disappeared and no one ever knew what happened to them. I didn’t know what to think. I thought it was just urban legend. You need to be careful, or the man with the hook will get you.” He gave a laugh and looked at Zachary to see if he understood.

  Zachary nodded. “A cautionary tale. Trying to help people to stay safe.”

  “Then there was Amelio…” John pointed to one of the names on the page, two thirds of the way down the list. “He and I were seeing each other… not exclusively, but regularly, every week or two… and then he stopped showing up. No one had seen him. I asked everyone. But he was just gone. They said that he had just stopped coming around. Maybe ICE got him…”

  Zachary nodded. Same old story. “But you were sure that he hadn’t been caught, or gone off somewhere on his own?”

  “I couldn’t be sure one hundred percent, but…” John gave a little shrug. “I knew him. I didn’t think he would just leave without telling me. Or somebody. And there wasn’t any word that it was Immigration. Usually, there are at least rumors. Someone saw it go down. Someone knew that they came to the apartment or to his work. But no one had seen or heard anything.”

  “Did he have a family? Here or wherever he came from? Back home?”

  “No, he was single. There have been others… some of the men on that list had wives, children. Usually not here. Usually, they were still sending them money, or trying to arrange to bring them here.”

  “How many did you know personally? Just Amelio?”

  John shook his head. “No. A few others…” He went down the list, pointing to each of the names after Amelio’s, indicating how he knew them or knew about their disappearances. Zachary looked at him, feeling the deepening frown lines across his own forehead.

  “How do you know so many of these men?”

  Sometimes serial killers liked people to know what they had done. They liked to rub it in the face of the officials. Could John be one of those men, proudly showing Zachary all of the men that he had killed in the past years to see his reaction?

  “I didn’t know all of them,” John said quickly. “I did know a few of them. I am… attracted to that type. Dark, slim, kind men… I was drawn to them. But they kept… disappearing.”

  As if someone else were drawn to them too. Zachary nodded. He had talked to Kenzie about the traits that the missing men might share. The type that the killer might obsess on.

  “Do you have more details than this?” he asked, thinking of John’s briefcase, which looked like it had held a lot more than just a few sheets of paper. John didn’t look like a lawyer or accountant. “If I’m going to investigate it, I need to know everything. Trying to track down everything you already have would take time, and it would take that much longer to find Jose and whoever took him.”

  John let out his breath. “It’s too late for Jose. Isn’t it? Don’t you think?”

  “It may be,” Zachary admitted, “but if you’ve already gathered data, I don’t want to waste time trying to find out the same information.”

  John searched his face once more, then nodded. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a thick pile of papers, all sorted into files and rubber-banded together. There were sticky notes protruding out the sides and tops of the folders. Zachary reached for it eagerly. It wasn’t very often he had so much to go on. If John knew what he was talking about and wasn’t just a paranoid conspiracy freak, the files were a treasure trove.

  John laid the stack of files in Zachary’s lap. Zachary pulled the rubber bands off and opened the top folder. Background notes on one of the more recently missing men. Surveillance records. Notes about his acquaintances and finances. Zachary couldn’t believe his luck.

  “You have all of this information and the police still wouldn’t listen to you?”

  John shrugged. “I haven’t… exactly… gone to the police.”

  “How could you not give them this information?”

  “If I went to the police, they would deport me.”

  “If you were helping them to solve a crime, especially one of this proportion, they wouldn’t turn you in. They could help you get a visa to let you stay here, for helping them.”

  “They don’t do that.”

  “They can,” Zachary insisted.

  “But they don’t.”

  Zachary couldn’t argue with that. He knew very little about what it was like to live as an illegal immigrant. John would know far better than he did how the police or government would respond to an illegal offering information and asking for asylum. Zachary had no idea how they would be treated. From what John and Paul the bartender had said, they wouldn’t be welcomed with open arms.

  “Can I borrow these files? Make a copy?”

  John shook his head. “I don’t want them out of my sight. You can look at them, but I don’t know what will happen to them if you take them away. This is the only copy.”

  “We could go somewhere to copy them. A library. Office store.”

  “Nobody will be open this late. And you don’t look like you are going to be going anywhere soon.”

  Zachary looked down at himself, still bruised and muddy and tired after his long night. He could get himself released, but he should at least find out whether he had any broken bones. And he probably shouldn’t drive while he was still foggy from Demerol. His heart was thumping quickly, excited by the prospect of looking through all of the information that John had compiled about the missing men. But there was no way he would retain everything he read, even if he could read through everything in one night. What he thought he would remember might disappear as soon as the Demerol wore off. Drugs could do funny things with memory.

  “I don’t know… we need to find a way to copy them. Do you think that one of the nurses would let us use a photocopier?”

  John raised an eyebrow, looking at Zachary and shaking his head slightly as if Zachary were crazy. And he supposed it had been a stupid question. The hospital wasn’t going to let them borrow a photocopier. If he could just capture what was on each of the pages… but even trying to write down the important points on each page would take hours, and there was no guarantee that he would get everything relevant. At some point, he’d find he needed to go back to the originals, and that would mean arranging to meet John somewhere and then paging through all of those papers again for what he had missed.

  “A snapshot,” he said suddenly.

  “What?”

  Zachary started patting his pockets. He looked around. At some point, they had changed him out of his street clothes into a hospital johnny. They must have done that before taking x-rays, though he couldn’t remember it. During that period that he’d been in and out of sleep.

  “Where are my clothes? Do you see them?”

  John opened a skinny cupboard. “In here.”

  “In my coat, check the pockets. I have a digital camera.”

  “A camera?” John repeated doubtfully, patting the coat.

  “It’s small. Smaller than a cell phone.”

  John looked through the pockets more carefully, and eventually found Zachary’s tiny digital camera, which he always thought of as his spy camera. It was like the novelties listed in the backs of comic books when he’d been young, only it was far more sophisticated than anything that had been invented back then. Higher resolution than a cell phone camera. Removable storage cards so that he could take as many pictures as he needed
to without filling the camera memory up.

  Zachary checked it over. It was a little banged up after his encounter with the skinheads, but the lens and the viewfinder were unmarked, so it should work. Hopefully. He held it over the page of names and clicked the shutter button. A moment later, the document appeared on the LCD screen, edges smoothed and square, nice high resolution.

  “Perfect. I’ll take the pictures; you turn the pages. It will take a few minutes, but it’s easier than finding a copy shop in the middle of the night.”

  John hesitated, taking the list of names from him.

  “It will be okay,” Zachary told him, trying to soothe any worries that John had. “You’ve done a lot of work and you probably don’t feel like letting it go… but you want to do something for these men, don’t you? You want us to be able to put them to rest, and to know what happened to them. And to catch whoever is doing this. We can’t just keep watching from the sidelines as more men disappear.”

  John nodded his agreement. “Yeah, you’re right… But you’re sure you can use them? You can get the police to do something about it this time?”

  “I will. I know cops and I’ll find someone who will take another look at it. I’m not going to give up until they’ve taken another look at these cases. It’s one thing when there’s one missing man. But this many… we need to catch who is doing this.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  T

  he doctor returned to find Zachary covered with John’s papers while he photographed them to make sure that he had every last piece of information on the missing men as he could get. The doctor shook his head slowly.

  “What’s all this? Shouldn’t you be resting?”

  “I have work to do,” Zachary told him. “Can I go home now?”

  “The x-rays are clear. You don’t have any bones that need to be set. But I wouldn’t recommend resuming your normal activities for a few days. You’re going to be pretty stiff and sore. You need to give your body the chance to recover before you go off… doing whatever it is that you do.”