The Helper cd-2

by David Jackson

  What was it she said about the time she got the phone call from her daughter in the burning South Tower?

  I said to God, let it be me in that building. I’m old, I’ve had a good life, let it be me who has to walk into that wall of fire. Anything to save my baby.

  And that was it. That was enough to seal her fate. Perhaps she told that story a thousand times, to a thousand different people. But somehow it reached the ears of the killer. He latched onto it. And now he plans to grant the wish of Mrs Sachs to be reunited with her daughter.

  Doyle knows this beyond doubt.

  Because what he can smell in this hallway is gasoline.

  Some things you can’t prepare for.

  You can draw your weapon and you can kick open the door and you can hope for the best.

  It doesn’t always pan out as you’d like.

  Mrs Sachs stands in the center of her tastefully decorated parlor. She is drenched from head to toe, and there is a massive puddle around her feet. The pungent odor of gasoline is overpowering. Lying on its side on the floor is a gasoline canister.

  Mrs Sachs doesn’t move. Her head is bowed, her shoulders slumped. She seems already resigned to her fate. Her frail, bedraggled form is a pitiful sight.

  Standing next to her is a man in a gray suit. He ticks all the tall, dark and handsome boxes, like he should be on the cover of a cheap romance novel. Doyle has never seen him before. Has no idea who he is.

  What he does know is that, much though he’d like to, he can’t shoot the sonofabitch.

  Because the bastard is holding a cigarette lighter in his outstretched hand. And it’s lit.

  ‘Freeze, motherfucker!’ yells Doyle. Because it’s the kind of thing he’s been trained to do. You don’t ask nicely and you don’t ask twice. You hit ’em fast and hard, and you don’t give them time to think.

  Except that Doyle doesn’t know what his next move should be.

  He can’t shoot this guy. Can’t hit him. Can’t arrest him.

  Can’t even get anywhere near him. That flame is only a couple of feet away from Mrs Sachs. With all the fumes in here, it’s a wonder she hasn’t already gone up like a firework.

  The man clearly knows he has the upper hand. There is no fear in his eyes. No indication that he senses the game is up.

  Knowing this, the man smiles and reaches under his jacket.

  ‘I said freeze! Do it, motherfucker, or you’re a dead man.’

  But there is no stopping this man. When his hand reappears, it is clutching a gun of his own. A gun which he slowly brings to bear on Doyle.

  ‘Drop the gun! Drop it or I’ll shoot, goddamnit!’

  Doyle hears the way his voice has gone up an octave. He’s starting to panic. His finger is tightening on the trigger of his Glock, but he knows he cannot fire.

  The man’s smile broadens. ‘I tell you what,’ he says. ‘Why don’t you drop your gun instead?’

  The man’s gun is now level with Doyle’s. It’s a standoff. Or at least it would be if it didn’t seem as though everything was stacked in the killer’s favor. One of them can shoot, the other can’t. Life is unfair like that sometimes.

  The man takes a step toward Doyle. ‘Come on, be a good little boy. Put down your weapon and I might think about letting you live.’

  Doyle is itching to start blasting away. His pupils are immense, his muscles taut. His every fiber has been dedicated to the task of taking out this sick fuck. He is so close to the release point that what he sees before him now is not a human but a target. His mind has already dehumanized the figure, readying Doyle to send out the bullets.

  But all the while there is that little warning light, suspended in the air. A small spike of heat, just waiting for gravity to suck it down into that pool of liquid death.

  Doyle feels the need to blurt something out. Anything.

  ‘She doesn’t need your help.’

  The man cocks his head slightly. His lips twitch.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Mrs Sachs. She doesn’t need your help. You’ve made a mistake.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Mrs Sachs doesn’t want to die. All she said was that she wished she could have taken her daughter’s place if it meant saving her life. That’s not the same as her wanting to die now. If you kill her, you won’t be helping her.’

  Another twitch, but his smile is fading. ‘Shut up. You’re just trying to stop me. It’s too late for that. It’s decided. The call for help has gone out. I have to. . I have to do what’s necessary.’

  ‘Sure you do. But this isn’t necessary. You want to help people, don’t you? Well, this isn’t helping. Think about it. Mrs Sachs doesn’t want this, so how are you doing her a favor?’

  ‘She said she wanted to burn.’

  ‘Yes, but only if it meant saving her daughter. That doesn’t apply now. Killing Mrs Sachs will serve no purpose. Her daughter is dead.’

  As Doyle says this, he is sure he sees a sudden tremor in Mrs Sachs. As though his declaration about her daughter has cut her like a knife. It pains him that he is piling more misery onto her after all she’s been through.

  The man turns his head a touch. Looks dispassionately at the sodden bag of bones that is Mrs Sachs.

  Come on, thinks Doyle. Dig deep. Find your humanity.

  The man returns his gaze to Doyle. It is still the gaze of a madman.

  ‘Enough talking,’ he says. ‘I have a mission. Drop the gun. I’m giving you five seconds.’

  ‘Forget it, asshole. You ain’t walking out of here.’

  ‘Five,’ says the man. ‘Four. .’

  ‘Don’t make me do this,’ says Doyle, when in truth he doesn’t know what he will do. He is out of options. He either kills the guy and watches Mrs Sachs become a raging inferno, or he puts the gun down and hopes it will buy him some time to think of another approach.

  ‘Three. .’

  The man takes another fractional step toward Doyle, but still he holds the lighter directly above the pool of gasoline.

  ‘Two. .’

  Doyle wants to scream, to run, to shoot, to surrender, all at once. He feels all the different pressures straining him in a thousand directions.

  And then it happens. The unexpected. Something he didn’t figure was a part of this equation.

  Mrs Sachs moves.

  She moves faster than he would have thought possible. A sudden launching from the position she has steadfastly maintained since Doyle arrived.

  Seeing the surprise on Doyle’s face, the killer starts to twist his own head toward Mrs Sachs. But he is too late. She flings her arms wide and jumps onto his back like some rabid starving animal. Her hands cross over in front of his neck and her skeletal fingers sink into him for purchase.

  The noise is that of a gas hob igniting, but multiplied many times over. A front of hot air punches Doyle in the face. The center of the room is now filled with a huge fireball that starts to spin and dance and scream.

  Doyle keeps shifting his aim, searching for a clear shot. But the burning mass moves too fast. Through the dazzling flames he can make out the arms of the killer, clawing at the demon on his back. But still she clings on, and the man’s piercing screams send spears of ice through Doyle’s veins.

  In what is perhaps a last-ditch, unthinking attempt to survive, the killer suddenly starts pumping his legs. He runs straight at a glass-fronted cabinet, twisting to his left just before he collides. The whole front of the cabinet implodes, and as the man rebounds in a shower of glass fragments, Mrs Sachs finally becomes detached from him and thuds to the floor. As the man continues to spin and careen off walls and furniture, Doyle holsters his gun and races to the window. With a roar of effort he yanks down one of the heavy drapes.

  He knows what his training is urging him to do now. It could almost be a question from a police exam: You have two victims — one almost certainly dead, the other still with a chance of surviving. Which one do you help first?


  Doyle heads straight for the body of Mrs Sachs.

  He throws the curtain over her and pats it down until he is certain the flames are out, then runs back out into the hallway. Next to a copper umbrella stand, a fire extinguisher is attached to the wall. Doyle rips it away and heads back into the parlor. He sees that the man has dropped to the wooden floor and is just sitting there, blazing away. Doyle is reminded of some newsreel footage he saw once of a Tibetan monk who sat cross-legged and immolated himself in protest at something or other.

  Doyle tackles the flaming gasoline puddle in the center of the floor first, blasting it with the extinguisher more times than it needs. Then, slowly, he crosses the room to the remaining pyre. He takes aim with the extinguisher. Waits a few seconds. Waits a few more seconds. Then puts out the fire.

  He looks down at the charred, sizzling mass. Wrinkles his nose at the smell of roasting flesh. Wonders why people do what they do.

  Stepping back to Mrs Sachs, he chooses to leave her covered. It seems more fitting somehow. He wants to remember her as she was when he first met her. Aged, frail, but still with a spark of life. Still capable of flirting with him.

  And then he thinks about what he said just minutes ago. About the emphatic way in which he asserted that her daughter was dead. That was the trigger. That was what made her realize that her life was no longer worth living. And it was what saved his own.

  And all the other victims. Dead not because of what they did or what they desired, but because of what they said.

  Such is the power of words.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Of course, he tells them everything.

  When they arrive in droves — the cops, the medics, the fire department — he tells them all he knows.

  He tells them how he got a phone call from Mrs Sachs, saying that she wanted to talk with him about her problems with Repp, and that when he got to her house he was confronted by this madman, who had forced Mrs Sachs to make the call and who was now intending to kill both her and Doyle. He tells them how the guy was screaming that this was to teach Doyle to stop poking his nose in where it didn’t belong.

  They ask Doyle what the perp meant by that. He tells them he doesn’t know. It doesn’t make any sense.

  And when he has said all this he has to swallow down the sour taste it leaves in his mouth.

  In the hours that follow, the bodies are examined. Partly melted credit cards are found in the man’s wallet. Enough to identify him.

  His name is John Everett.

  The investigating detectives search Everett’s house in Queens, and what do you know? They find detailed notes on a number of people who have been murdered in the city recently. Notes about where they lived, their likes and dislikes, their personal habits, their daily schedules, and so on. Especially noteworthy is information on how these people indicated their desire to end their miserable existence.

  Well, well, well, the detectives say. Isn’t it funny the way things pan out sometimes? Turns out that Detective Doyle’s theory wasn’t so wacky after all. And if Doyle hadn’t kept plugging away at it, maybe the killer would never have showed himself like he did.

  So what the cops get is an instant clearance of several unexplained homicides and a perp they don’t even need to prosecute, seeing as how he’s been burnt to a cinder. Everyone in the NYPD is happy.

  Everyone, that is, except Callum Doyle.

  He’s tempted to let it go. As time passes and the evidence against Everett continues to stack up, Doyle is sorely tempted to accept that the cases are solved and that he should move on with his life.

  The investigators find a pair of shoes in Everett’s bedroom that match up with footprints left on Vasey’s wooden floor. They find a leather biker’s jacket with a tag missing from one of the sleeve zips, the tag having been found in the bathroom where Helena Colquitt was drowned. Fingerprints found on the SUV used to kill Lorna Bonnow match those found all over Everett’s house. The shotgun used to kill Hanrahan is also found at Everett’s place. And when photographs of Everett start to appear in the media, several people come forward to say that they saw him near the scenes of crime, one of those helpful citizens being the owner of Peppe’s Pizza Piazza, who says he served Everett not long before Helena Colquitt was murdered.

  There seems no doubt about it. The evidence is too overwhelming. Everett murdered all those people. Case closed.

  Well. . maybe it’s still open a crack. For Doyle, at least.

  For one thing, how did Everett get to know so much about his victims? Has anyone even tried to explain that? Some of those details were intimate, personal things. How did he find them out? Hanrahan wouldn’t have gone around telling everyone he met that he was thinking of swallowing his piece. Tabitha said that she told only Mrs Serafinowicz and Doyle that she considered suicide. Vasey was too worried about his reputation to have gone blabbing that he threatened to hang himself in a pathetic effort to win back his wife.

  How did Everett discover all this information about his victims? Did he know them? Did he work with them in some way?

  And then of course, there’s the glaring omission from Everett’s otherwise detailed notes.

  Doyle himself.

  The man on the phone knew a heck of a lot about Doyle. The names of his wife and child. Where he was born. Being abandoned by his father. His phone numbers. Even that he was working on a case involving Mrs Sachs.

  So where’s all that in the notes? Doyle doesn’t get so much as a mention.

  In a way he’s glad, because it would have meant answering a lot of awkward questions. But still, it seems curious that he’s not in there.

  All these things he could probably overlook. With a little effort he could dismiss them with a remark such as, ‘I guess I’ll never know.’ And, over time, he would come to forget the unexplained and just be happy that he, Callum Doyle, was responsible for stopping a serial killer.

  He could do all this were it not for one problem. The gnawing problem that keeps him awake at nights:

  The voice of Everett that he heard in Mrs Sachs’s home is not the same voice he heard delivering clues to him over the telephone.

  He has tried telling himself he must be imagining things, that he is looking for demons that cannot possibly be there. Voices sound different on the phone. At Mrs Sachs’s house the adrenalin was free-flowing: the way Everett spoke then was probably nothing like his usual speaking voice, and Doyle was not exactly calm enough at the time to analyze the guy’s speech patterns. So he tells himself he should forget it. He’s chasing shadows.

  But Doyle doesn’t always believe what he tells himself. The voices were different. He’d bet his life on it.

  So what does that mean?

  Everett was the killer. Doyle believes that much. But if Everett wasn’t giving Doyle all those clues, then who was? And why? The caller never claimed to be the murderer; Doyle simply made the assumption that he was. It was a natural enough inference: the man knew so much about those already deceased and those about to die. Who else but the killer could know those things?

  Someone did. He knew many things about many people.

  So how?

  Thinks Doyle, I don’t have a fucking clue.

  Three days after the death of Everett, Doyle is on a job that involves a trip to One Police Plaza. Before he leaves, he takes the elevator up to the eleventh floor. As he steps through the doors he bumps into Lonnie Adelman. The CCS detective is carrying a huge wad of documents under one arm, and his characteristically flushed face is that of a man who has just done a hundred-meter sprint to catch a bus, rather than that of someone who has merely walked along a corridor.

  ‘Cal! Hey, man, how’s it going? Nice work on the serial killer thing. Seems like I can’t read a newspaper these days without seeing your ugly mug staring out at me. You got the paparazzi following you around yet?’

  Doyle shrugs. ‘I got lucky. Right place at the right time. The press are making it into more than it was. To be honest, I’m
not sure all this coverage is good for me.’

  ‘Sure it is. And you deserve it too. Luck, my ass. From what I heard, you’re the only one who had the balls to push the serial killer angle.’ He drops his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Frankly, if it wasn’t for you, the white shirts would still be scratching their heads and crying over their COMPSTAT figures.’

  Doyle feels his face becoming as red as Adelman’s. ‘Maybe. Anyhow, that’s why I dropped by. To give my thanks to you and to Gonzo. That work you did on that laptop I brought in really-’

  Adelman stops him with a raised finger. ‘And now you’re giving me too much information. That was a favor for a buddy. A favor I’m not sure I want anyone else to know about, if that’s all right with you.’

  Doyle smiles. ‘It stays between us. Just know that I’m grateful, okay? To you and the kid. Is he around, by the way?’

  ‘The Brain? Actually no. He called in sick a few days ago. Something about a bang to the head. I guess he has to look after his most precious organ, right?’

  While Adelman laughs, puzzlement creases Doyle’s brow. He knows better than Adelman about the bang to Gonzo’s head, and didn’t think it looked serious enough to take time off work. But that’s not the only thing bothering him.

  ‘I’m sorry, what did you call him?’

  ‘What, the Brain? You don’t think it suits him?’

  Doyle feels his stomach clench. A snatch of conversation jumps back into his mind.

  Forget about what your heart tells you to do. It’s the Brain that’s important here. You don’t need anything more than that.

  And then another one:

  Brain power. That’s what’s missing here. Find it, Cal. Use it.

  And then yet another:

  Protect that Brain. It’s the only thing that’s going to get you out of this mess.

  Brain. With a capital B. Not the organ but a person. Gonzo.

  Nah, thinks Doyle. Now you’re getting ridiculous. How could he possibly have anything to do with this?