by Edward Lee
“Are you nuts!” I shouted at him.
The two vagrants scampered off, terrified.
“Yeah, you better get out of here, you pieces of shit!” Jameson yelled. “Christ, you people smell worse than the bottom of a fuckin’ dumpster!”
“What the hell is wrong with you, man?” I said. “You can’t be pulling your gun on people for shit like that.”
Jameson reholstered his pistol, chuckling. “Cool off. I just wanted to put a scare in ’em. Bet they shit their pants, huh? See, I just saved the city a cleanup fee. Usually they shit in the street.”
.”They’re homeless, for God’s sake. They got nothing.”
“Fuck that pinko shit,” he said, then bulled through the red light.
It occurred to me then that Jameson had a harder load on than I thought. “Hey, look, Captain. You’re pretty lit. Why don’t you let me drive? You’re gonna get pulled over at this rate.”
Jameson laughed. “Any cop in this city pulls me over, he’s transferred to the impound lot in the morning. What’s up your ass?”
“Nothing,” I said. I knew I had to grin and bear it. But I still had a few more questions to ask. Just be careful, I told myself.
“Fuckin’ junkies, fuckin’ bums.” Jameson’s eyes remained dead on the street. “Everybody asking for a handout. I never asked for no handouts.”
“Some people are more fortunate than others,” I said.
“Oh, don’t give me that liberal pantywaist bullshit,” he spat, spittle flecking the inside of the windshield. “I never had nothing. My father died when I was seven, died in a fuckin’ steel mill when an ingot fell on him off of lift-clip. After that I got hocked into the fuckin’ foster care system. So I don’t want to hear no shit about poor people from poor environments. I got out of that hellhole, graduated high school, got my degree, and now I’m running the fuckin’ homicide squad in one of the biggest cities on the west coast.”
But I was still remembering what his wife had said. “What, uh, what about your mother?” I asked.
Jameson lead-footed it through another red light. “My mother? Fuck her.” Beer fumes filled the car. “My mother beat feet the same day she dropped me. That dirty bitch wasn’t nothing but a junkie whore. She was street-shit. She was walking garbage just like that whore just tried to smudge up my windshield. Far as I’m concerned—I never had a mother…”
««—»»
It got to the point where almost anything Jameson did or said would support some facet of Dr. Desmond’s profile. A prostitute for a mother, who abandoned him at birth. No nurturing touches as an infant, no mother figure in the formative years. An ability to control his symbolic delusion to the extent that he can function in society and maintain steady employment. A man who is probably married but probably doesn’t have children. A man with a mounting inability to perform sexually.
I also found it interesting that Jameson’s favorite places to drink were bars in the derelict districts, bars in which any of the sixteen previous victims might easily have hung out. I wondered what Dr. Desmond would think about that?
Oh yeah, I knew he was the one. But what was I going to do about it?
The next couple of hours were pretty paralyzing. Jameson dragged me around to three more dive bars, getting drunker in each one, his hatred boiling. Loud, obnoxious, belligerent. At one point I thought one of the barkeeps was going to throw him out, but I prayed that wouldn’t happen. Knowing Jameson—and as drunk as he was—he’d probably yank out his gun, might shoot someone. But before that could happen, I got him out of there.
Then the end came pretty fast after that.
««—»»
“I’m a crime reporter for the Times.” I flashed my press ID to the two doctors in the ER. “Earlier tonight, I was with Captain Jay Jameson of the city police homicide unit—”
One of the doctors, a balding guy with long hair, squinted over at me from a scrub sink. “You know that guy?” The doctor’s nametag read Parker.
“That’s right. I was drinking with him in some area bars,” I admitted. “When his name was logged in as an in-patient, the night-editor at my paper contacted me.”
“Fuck, the guy was drinking,” another doctor said. This one was big, with a trimmed beard; his nametag read MOLER. He was taking instruments out of an autoclave. “No wonder his blood was so thin. He damn near bled to death right in front of us. He took three pints before we could stabilize him. What happened?”
“I was dragging him out of a bar about two hours ago,” I told them. “He was pretty drunk. I was about to put him in the car when he bolted. The guy just ran off across Jackson and disappeared under the overpass. I couldn’t find him. The biggest reason for my concern is Captain Jameson said some things to me tonight that lead me to believe he may be—”
“This psycho who’s been killing girls and cutting off their hands,” Parker finished.
I stared at them, slack-jawed. “How—how did you know?”
Dr. Moler snickered. “When the EMTs brought him in, he had a severed hand in his pants.”
“Jesus,” I muttered. “What happened to him?”
“Looks like after he ran off from you,” Parker explained, “he must’ve picked up a hooker, then he made his move, but she shot him. He was lying in the middle of Jackson when the EMTs found him. But it must’ve been his second girl of the night ’cos he already had one hand on him.”
“Shit,” I said. “I called the cops the minute he bolted, told them my suspicions, but they didn’t take me serious.”
“We’ll show ’em the hand we found in his pants,” Moler said. “Then they’ll take you serious.”
“So you said his condition is stable?” I asked.
“We stabilized the blood loss and ligged an artery. But the x-rays showed a cranial fracture—hematoma. He’s prepped for more surgery but I wouldn’t give him more than one chance in ten of making it.”
“Where is he now?” I asked. “I really need to talk to him.”
Parker pointed across the ER. “He’s in the ICU prep cove. Second floor’ll be down to take him up in a few minutes. You want to go see him, go ahead. But don’t hold your breath on him regaining consciousness.”
“Thanks,” I said, and at the same moment several paramedics burst through the ER doors with what looked like a burn victim on a gurney. “Great!” Parker yelled. “My relief’s two hours late, and now I got a spatula special!”
I rushed to the prep cove and there he was: Jameson. Tubes down his throat, tubes up his nose, strapped to a railed bed. An IV line ran from a bag of saline to his arm. He looked dead.
“Hey, hey,” I said. I patted his face. “I guess you’re in a coma, huh, Captain? Well you know what? They got you for the whole thing now. I knew you were the one.”
His slack, lined face just lay there like a bad wax mask. “Once Dr. Desmond finds out the details, he’ll realize that his profile fits you to a tee. He’s a smart man. He’ll back up my allegation one-hundred percent.”
I patted his face a few more times. No response.
Then I took the needle-cover off the hypodermic I’d brought along. “Yeah, I knew you were the one. I knew you were the perfect dupe to take the fall.” The hypo was full of potassium dichlorate. It’d kill him in minutes and wouldn’t show up on a tox screen. I injected the whole thing into his IV connector.
Then Jameson’s eyes slitted open.
“You’re a pretty damn good cop, Captain,” I gave him. “You got any idea how hard I worked burying those bodies over the last three years? And there are twenty-one, by the way, not sixteen. You did a great job of keeping ’em out of the papers…until those last three. Just dumb luck for me, huh?”
He began to quiver on the bed, veins throbbing at his temples.
I leaned down close to his ear, whispered. “But that really screwed up my game when the victims started making the press. I thought I was gonna have to lay low now, get the junkie bitches from out of town. But you solved al
l that for me.”
I grinned down at him. His eyes opened a little more, to stare at me.
“Yeah, I knew you were the one, all right. The minute Desmond explained those profiles to me, and when I saw that picture of you with your father. No mother, just a father who died the same year. And, Christ, man! You were Desmond’s patient! The press’ll eat that up! Homicide cop seeing a shrink—homicide cop turns out to be the killer. It’s great, isn’t it? It’s perfect!”
See, after I dragged him out of that last bum bar, I shoved him in the passenger seat of his car. The drunk bastard had already passed out. I drove down Jackson when there was no traffic, cracked him hard in the head with the butt of my own piece, then shot him in the groin. I was aiming for the femoral artery, and I guess I did a damn good job of hitting it. He bled all over the place; I knew the fucker was going to kick.
Then I stuck the hand in his pants and shoved him out of the car.
The whole thing worked pretty well, I’d say.
“Don’t die on me yet, asshole,” I whispered, pinching his cheeks. “See, Desmond had it right with his profiles. Only it turns out the real killer was the least likely of the bunch—just a sociopath with a hand fetish.”
It was hard not to laugh right in his face.
Jameson’s hand raised an inch, then dropped. He was tipping out but I gotta give the old fucker credit. He managed to croak out a few words.
“They’ll never believe it,” he said.
“Oh, they’ll believe it,” I assured him. “What? You’re gonna tell them what really happened? Not likely. In two minutes you’ll be dead from cardiac arrest.”
“Lib motherfucker,” he croaked. “Pinko piece’a shit…”
“That’s the spirit!” I whispered. “Go out kicking! But—”
His eyelids started drooping again. This was it.
“Not yet! Don’t die yet,” I said, squeezing his face. “There’s still one more thing I haven’t told you, and it’s something you gotta know.”
Spittle bubbled from his lips. I could see him struggling to keep his eyes open, fighting to keep conscious just a few more seconds.
“Remember when I went back up to your condo to get my glasses?” I said. “What do you think I did to your wife, dickbrain? That hand they found in your pants? It was your wife’s right hand!”
Jameson tremored against his restraints. He shook and shook, like someone had just stuck a hot wire in him. Down the hall, I could hear the elevator opening, the crash team coming to take him up to surgery. Don’t bother, guys, I thought.
But just before Jameson died, I managed to tell him the final detail. “That’s right, I stuck her right hand in your pants, Captain. And her left hand? I got it safe, right here with me.”
Then I patted my crotch and grinned.
They took him up, and his obit ran the next day…along with everything else. Homicide captain investigating the Handyman Case, found with his own murdered wife’s hand in his pants? The same shrink he was seeing for alcoholism and sexual dysfunction corroborating that Jameson fit the profile?
Case closed.
And don’t forget what Desmond said about sociopaths. They’re skilled liars. They’ve had their whole lives to practice. They know what’s right and what’s wrong, but they choose wrong because it suits them.
That sounds good to me.
I’ll just have to bury the next bodies deeper.
— | — | —
THE SALT-DIVINER
PROLOGUE
The Onomancers had failed, and so had the Sibyllists. The Haruspicators came next, keen-eyed yet solemn in their blood-red raiments. One of them nodded within his flaplike hood, and then the young girl was stripped naked and lain on the onyx slab.
It was one of the geldings, who’d previously had his eyes sewn shut, that clumsily shoved the ivory rod into the girl’s sex. The slim naked thing’s hips bucked, and the shriek of pain launched out above the ziggurat as though she were shouting to the gods themselves. Blindly, then, the gelding held up the bloody rod for the Synod to see.
No doubt, a true virgin.
The gelding was summarily beheaded, his body dragged off by silent legionnaires. Next, the highest of the Haruspist’s slipped the long sharpened hook deep up into the girl’s sex. She flinched and died at once, a tiny river of red pouring forth. But the Haruspic priest was already at work, his holy hand a blur as the hook expertly extracted the girl’s warm innards through the opening of her sex. Barehanded, then, he hoisted up the guts and flung them down to the ziggurat’s stone floor.
The wind howled, or perhaps it was the breath of Ea himself.
But when the Haruspist gazed intently at the wet splay of innards….
He saw nothing.
The King’s jaw set; he seemed petrified on his throne. Only one recourse remained, and if it too failed, only doom awaited the King and his domain. He turned his gaze toward the last flank of robed and hooded priests—the alomancers. The King gave a single nod.
One figure stepped forward, face hidden within the hood’s roll. From one hand, a thurible swayed, a thurible full of salt.
He depended the thurible over the fire…until the salt began to burn.
Smoke poured from the object’s finely crafted apertures, and the figure leaned forth—and inhaled the holy fumes, one deep breath after another, until he collapsed.
The King stiffened in his throne; legionnaires burst forward to render aid. Eventually—thank Ea—the alomancer revived after a distended silence. Even the wind stopped, even the clouds seemed to freeze in the sky.
The alomancer shuddered. Then he gazed at the King with eyes the color of amethyst, and he began to speak….
I
It started when the salt spilled.
The man looked ludicrous. Black hair hung in a perfect bowlcut, like Moe. He stood at the rail, tubby and tall, with a great, toothy, lunatic grin. “Ald, please,” he requested. “It’s been eons.”
Rudy and Beth nursed cans of Milwaukee’s Best down the bar, Rudy pretending to watch the fight on the television. They’d made the rounds downtown, hoping to cop a loan, but to no avail. Then they’d retreated to this dump tavern, The Crossroads, way out off the Route. Rudy didn’t want to run into Vito—as in Vito “The Eye”—a minute before he had to. He felt like a man on a stay of execution.
“Are you the vassal of this taberna, sir?” the ludicrous man asked the barkeep. “I would like some ald, please.” “Never heard of it,” swiped the keep, who sported muttonchops and a beer-belly akin to a medicine ball. “No imports here, pal.” This is The Crossroads, not the Four Seasons.”
“I am becruxed. Have you any mead?”
Rudy could’ve laughed. Even the man’s voice sounded ludicrous: a high nasal warble. And what the hell is ald?
“We got Rolling Rock, pal. That fancy enough for ya?”
“I am grateful, sir, for your kind recommendation.”
When the keep came down to the Rock tap, Rudy leaned forward. “Hey, man, who is this guy?”
The keep shrugged, tufts of hair like steel wool poking out from his collar. “Some weirdo. We get ’em all the time.”
Beth, frowning afresh, looked down from the no-name fight on TV. “Rudy, don’t you have more to worry about than some eightball who walks into a bar? What if Vito shows up?”
“Vito The Eye? Here?” Rudy replied. “No way.” The assurance lapsed. “Hey, maybe Mona could loan us some dough.”
“She barely has money for tuition and rent, Rudy. Be real.”
Women, Rudy thought. Always negative. He glanced back up at the fight—Tuttle versus Luce, middleweights—but thoughts of Vito kept haunting him. What will they do to me? he wondered.
The keep set down a mug of beer before the ludicrous man, but as he did so, his brawny elbow nicked a saltshaker, which tipped over. A few trace white grains spilled across the bartop.
The odd patron grinned down. Focused. Nodded. He pinched some grains and cast them ov
er his left shoulder. “Blast thee, Nergal and all devils. Keep thee behind, and slithereth back into your evil earthworks.”
“We ain’t superstitious here, pal,” the keep said.
“To blind the sentinels of the nether regions,” the man went on, “who stand to our left, behind us. Dear salt, a gift from the holiest Ea, and all gods of good things. To spill the sacred salt is to bid ill fortune from heaven. It was once more valuable than myrrh.”
“Who’da hell’s Merv?” asked the keep.
“Beware the woman infidel,” intoned the patron. “Your paramour—”
“What’da hell’s a paramour?”
“A lover,” Beth translated, for all the good her education had done. “A girlfriend.”
“She is so named,” the ludicrous man said, “…Stacy?”
The keep’s pug-face tensed up like a pack of corded Suet. “How’da hell you know my girlfriend’s name?”
“I am an alomancer,” the odd patron replied. “And your lovely paramour, hair like sackcloth and teeth becrook’d, shalt be in a moment’s time abed with a man unthus known.”
The keep scratched a muttonchop. “What’d’ya mean?”
“He means,” Beth said over her beer, “that your girlfriend is cheating on you with a guy she just met.”
“A man,” the patron continued, “too, of a formidable endowment of the groin.”
“‘At’s a load of shit,” the keep said. “You’re a nut.”
This guy’s something, Rudy thought. He was about to comment when someone tapped on his shoulder. Oh…no. Very slowly, then, he turned to the ruddy and none-too-happy face behind him. “Vito! My man! I was just downtown looking for you.”
“Yeah.” Vito wore a tan leather jacket and white slacks—Italian slacks. They called him The Eye, since only hi5 right eye could be seen. A black patch covered the left. “Your marker’s due Friday, paisan. You wouldn’t be forgetting that, huh?”
“Oh, hey, Vito,” Rudy stammered. “I remember.”
