Cut and Run

by Ridley Pearson

  He fell to his knees as Manderly’s thick fist caught his coat collar from behind. Larson looked over his shoulder and straight up the man’s arm and said, “Give me one minute. Sixty seconds. Then we’ll do this.”

  Behind a face flushed from running and indignation, Manderly met eyes with him, released him, and stepped back.

  Plastic surgery was a relocated witness’s best friend, never mind Hope’s pledge never to resort to it. Chin, cheek, breast, and buttocks implants, Botox, pigmented contact lenses, teeth veneers, dental work, laser hair removal, and a cutter’s creative blade could so radically alter a person’s look that only the lab boys could make the final confirmation. He disconnected from the victim’s hair color, forced her chin flatter, her nose wider, her cheekbones lower, wondering if it possibly could be her.

  He used his pen to move the woman’s hair off her neck. Ears were as individual as fingerprints. This woman’s right ear, smooth and perfect and clearly untouched by surgery, did not belong to Hope Stevens. Larson had once spent hours staring at Hope while she slept. This was not her ear. He exhaled.

  Wondering now how he might explain himself, he hesitated briefly while concocting a ruse. “Gloves?” he asked the tech.

  He did not look back at Manderly as the detective asked, “What the fuck are you doing in my crime scene, Deputy Marshal?”

  “Gloves,” Larson restated, motioning with his hand, awaiting delivery.

  “If you’re thinking of moving her head, forget it,” Manderly said. But he must have okayed the gloves, because the technician deposited a pair into Larson’s waiting palm.

  Larson donned the gloves, slipped open the eyelids and touched the surface of the eye, looking for contact lenses that weren’t there.

  “Victim’s name?” Larson asked.

  “I’m not in a real giving mood,” Manderly said. “Maybe we take this up back at the office when your boss talks to mine.”

  Larson snapped off the gloves and let them fall. He passed Manderly his full credentials wallet as he stood. He explained, “We thought… briefly… judging by what we’d heard of this scene… the address… that we might know the victim. But clearly we’re mistaken.”

  “Lemme get this straight. You came here in a real cooperative mood, but changed your mind after seeing her face?”

  “Why the old lady?” Larson asked. “Any theories on that?”

  “Why the cross, tits to crotch?” Manderly nibbled toward the truth. “That fit the profile of whoever it is you’re after?”

  Larson considered how to play this. Rotem had assigned him to track down Markowitz and therefore knew none of what he was up to; if it went boss to boss-which wasn’t going to happen until Monday morning-this would all come apart on him.

  “Did she lease it or sublet it?” Larson asked.

  “We barely just got here. Give us a minute to get her bagged first, would you?”

  “I’m betting sublet.”

  “Are you telling me this was mistaken identity?”

  “They look a lot alike.”

  “This one and who else?”

  Larson shook his head, conveying his unwillingness to share that information.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Manderly said. “I suppose you have a theory on the neighbor?”

  “An older woman like that… she was probably a longtime resident of the building. When this one became a problem, he turned to the older one for what he wanted.”

  “And what did he want?”

  “There’s a contract hit out,” Larson explained, stretching the truth. “I’m supposed to stop it. This razor…” Larson indicated the cuts. “We’ve seen him before.”

  “So have we,” Manderly said.

  Larson rose to his feet, heady from the fatigue and moving too quickly. But more than all his physical challenges, it was this information that made him stumble a step. “What’s that?”

  “We had a similar killing, a razor like this, earlier today. We figure we got ourselves a serial killer.” He added, “And I’m thinking you federal boys have lost one. Am I right?”

  “The other victim look anything like this one?” Larson indicated the dead woman on the floor.

  “Not really. Older, maybe four or five inches shorter. Smaller overall.”

  Larson felt himself relax a little. Hope might look older, but she couldn’t have shrunk. Sunderland had provided a possible place of Hope’s employment. “This wouldn’t have been an employee of St. Luke’s Hospital, by any chance. Would it have?”

  Manderly’s face registered his astonishment. “Where the fuck did you get that?”

  “I’ll need to speak to the investigating detective,” Larson said.

  Manderly stood and brought his face close to Larson’s. “You’re looking at him,” he said. “It’s been a long fucking day, pal, and it just got longer for both of us. You’re coming to the office. And if I have to cuff you to get you there,” he said, a couple of his uniforms perking up and stepping toward them, “I will.”

  “This dumb-ass picked the wrong closet,” Manderly explained. Nearly two hours had passed amid the familiar smell of burned coffee and male sweat. Cop shops weren’t so different, one to the next. It had been a while since Larson had been inside an actual police department, his time typically occupied in federal facilities. But the lighting, the low hum of printers and copiers, of keyboards and muted conversation were nearly the same.

  Manderly and Larson occupied chairs in a good-sized conference room with gray carpeting and an oval table that sat eight. The room’s single window might have had a good view if the blinds hadn’t been drawn. A computer and keyboard, a blank whiteboard, a pair of phones, and a video projector accounted for most of the room’s electronics. On a separate dolly, a TV and VCR held the attention of both men.

  “Thing is,” Manderly said, further explaining himself, “evidently hospital scrubs make pretty good pajamas, and this closet in ER was getting hit the hardest. That, and antibacterial soap, and shit like that. So Admin gets a heads-up from IT that they can mount a wireless webcam in there for peanuts and monitor it for theft. This jerk-off drags her in there to do his thing, having no idea he’s on Candid Camera.”

  On the screen, in the silent, jerky motion of low-frame-count surveillance video, to which Larson was becoming accustomed, the abduction and murder played out again.

  “Either he got seriously lucky here, or he’d scouted it and took his chances, but his back is always to the camera. We never get a look at his face.”

  “Other security video?”

  “They got cameras all over the entrance to the ER, ’cause that’s where the trouble always comes from. But this turd entered ER from the main wing. We got a profile of him while he sat in a chair scoping the vic, but that’s about it. And in terms of quality, it sucks. Grainy and burned out. It’s true video. This webcam stuff is much better quality.”

  As it was, the webcam image didn’t impress Larson. It blurred with any quick motion, so that when the killer moved to cut her neck it looked as if someone had wiped Vaseline on the camera lens.

  “Back it up,” Larson instructed, all civility gone from his voice. It felt like a ghoulish act to repeatedly watch her die.

  On the fourth viewing, Larson accepted the VCR’s remote from Detective Manderly, to both men a symbolic exchange of power. Larson watched a particular twenty-second section well over a dozen times. He finally said, “I can’t make out any of that, can you?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Have you got any kind of society or center for the deaf here in town?”

  “ Metro Deaf School,” Manderly answered. “One of our captains…” he said, responding to Larson’s look of surprise, “has a kid enrolled. They do this music thing every Christmas. Pretty fucking amazing, actually.”

  “Can we get someone over here?”

  It had taken Manderly that long to understand the request. “Fucking A…” he said, his tanned face breaking into a
smile. “Now that is fucking genius!”

  Two long hours later, Larson had a ticket in hand for the city mouthed on the video by the woman who was about to be murdered in the hospital linen closet.

  “ St. Louis.”

  Back to where he’d started.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Wearing only a shirt, Paolo leaned back on the airport motel’s crisp white sheets and muted the television’s sound. On the screen, the videotape of the yoga instructor in her pink leotard played, just as it had been playing when he’d sneaked into apartment 3D. The woman on TV turned sideways, bent over, and practically touched her nose to the floor. But it was the way her compact little ass flared toward the ceiling that sent Paolo’s heart aflutter.

  He removed the small cardboard sheath that protected the new utility razor blade, examining its miraculous edge in the yellowish light of the motel room’s bedside lamp. In flashes, his face reflected partially in the steel of the tiny sharpened mirror-an eye, his teeth, another eye. He’d grown thinner in recent months, his face stretched unnaturally over sharp cheekbones, more like the face of a mummy, the dark eyes sunken deeply inside pronounced sockets. The rich brown color of his eyes only revealed itself when he tilted his head up into light. Despite the look of his gaunt frame, he’d never been this fit, this strong, this fast on his feet, in his life.

  He accepted that with crimes came punishment. Guilt gave way to confession. Release. He felt no pain, internally or otherwise, when he did these things to others, only when he did them to himself. Without pain there was no payment. It confirmed his existence.

  He examined the perfection of the blade. He loved it, and hated it.

  Propping his head up with two pillows, he saw past his erection to the screen where the pink leotard continued its contortions. He could picture the woman he’d killed mimicking those movements. He could smell her.

  He unbuttoned his shirt. It fell open revealing dozens of raised scars. Some pink and fresh. Others dark and older. A few lucky ones had been cut repeatedly and now protruded a quarter inch or more, a geometric lump of scar tissue.

  Under the glow of the lamp’s dim light he placed the blade to a vacant space on his abdomen and applied pressure, gentle at first, then pressing more firmly as the skin separated and curled away from the blade. He gritted his teeth, watched the television and stroked himself.

  He dragged the razor deeper, creating a red, feverish wound three inches long. As he climaxed he dropped the razor, awash in relief, a flood of departing tension, like a drain being opened beneath him. He closed his eyes, sighed deeply.

  Later, when he bothered to look, he realized he’d gone a little deep with the razor. The pink leotard had been lying on her back at the time, stretching her legs up and apart. He’d overreacted. The wound would require butterfly bandages, but he carried them with him wherever he went.

  For a moment he was not alone. For a moment he’d done nothing wrong. For a moment he felt at balance with the world and his own place within it. These feelings would change, would forsake him over the next several hours-he’d been here enough times to know. The kill might return in his dreams, might linger for days or even weeks. That he’d fucked her while she died beneath him only made matters worse: his moment of creation, hers of destruction. But he took opportunities when they arose and paid for them later in his own way, as he did now.

  He might rest later, but now the adrenaline from this painful act would carry him. He sometimes stayed awake days without sleep, never bothered by it, never fully understanding it. He couldn’t remember if or when he’d last eaten and reminded himself to eat something before continuing.

  Under the glare of a fluorescent tube, he wetted a towel and cleaned himself.

  His black hair wet and combed back, he left the room for a twenty-four-hour diner, envisioning pancakes and a hot cup of coffee, an aging redhead in a tight shirt who would call him “Hon.”

  A bead of blood seeped through and stained his shirt despite the butterfly bandages. He failed to notice it, his body numbed and distant. His mind whirring. He felt right again. And that was all that mattered.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Alice Dunbar’s Jefferson Square loft apartment lacked a view of the St. Louis arch or the Mississippi. Instead, it looked out onto what only a few years earlier had been a needle park. Gentrification had relocated the drugs and dealers a few blocks south and east. Now the park offered Penny a place to play on the jungle gym or to swing on the swings during the steamy, sultry afternoons.

  But Penny wasn’t in the mood for playing. She stared at her mother, tears pooled in oversized blue eyes, poisoned by betrayal. “But we just got here…”

  Alice packed furiously, a maternal storm leaving debris in its wake. She’d been through this before, she reminded herself, wanting to stay calm. Only months ago, in fact.

  She felt bad for uprooting Penny for the third time in her five short years. This time Penny had found a set of kids at day care to call her friends, and her mother hated to lose that.

  Until this most recent move Penny had pretty much kept to herself. She liked American Girl dolls and to be read the accompanying stories. McDonald’s Happy Meals, her hamburgers with onions, mustard, and ketchup. She’d outgrown a macaroni-and-cheese phase. Now it was frozen Gogurts, pancakes, and flank steak when Mommy could afford it.

  She liked for her mom to read to her before bed, her baths hot, and her pillowcase cold.

  She’d learned to watch her mother for signals when on the bus or the street. With little in the way of discussion, instruction, or explanation, she’d intuited that they lived a secret life, a different life from others.

  “It’s not forever,” Alice lied. In fact, Alice had no idea when they might stop running. “We’re not moving, we’re just leaving for a while. Like vacation.”

  “Not me! I’m not going anywhere! I’ll run away! I will.”

  “That’s the point: We’re running away together, sweetheart,” Alice said in as loving a voice as she could muster. “We’ll be back.”

  Despite this outburst, Penny was significantly more mature, more worldly and sophisticated than her peers. It no doubt stemmed from their nomadic, secluded life. Whether those qualities would benefit her remained to be seen. She acted like a five-year-old, but she read at a sixth-grade level and spoke with an adult vocabulary. Though adults were impressed, Alice wasn’t thrilled with what she saw developing: a precocious, challenging, willful child who acted as if she were entitled.

  Garage-sale furniture had failed to adequately fill the loft space that had once housed a printing press and been home to a citywide giveaway newspaper. Alice had left the yellowed front pages of past editions stapled to the rough wood walls as artwork.

  She checked the TV, tuned to CNN, wondering how often they would run the ad for the ID bracelets. She’d seen it only once, about an hour earlier, but that had been enough to make her leave St. Louis today. Possibly forever. The WITSEC deputies had drummed into her the need for her to keep up her daily watch of USA TODAY and CNN. And even though she’d fled WITSEC years before, she’d never stopped looking for the warning signal. If she ever saw an ad for a silver-plated ID bracelet, with the name “Johnny Anyone” on the bracelet, and the address on the mail-in form “ PO Box 911, Washington, DC,” she was to take immediate action. Sight of the ad today had knocked her sideways: one moment struggling through life on its typically difficult track, the next, pure panic.

  Something drastic, something radical had happened within WITSEC that must have jeopardized all protected witnesses. Sadly for Alice it was just more of the same-the endless dance of reinventing herself.

  She packed while containing an anxiety she hadn’t experienced since fleeing St. Luke’s. The unsettling existence of living with the knowledge that someone was after her, wanted to kill her, preoccupied her every thought, every movement. WITSEC tried to explain such feelings in its orientation literature, but had no idea what they were talking about.

&
nbsp; She knew that given this unexpected move, she would not sleep for days, worried sick about Penny being a part of this, and what might become of her daughter if her enemies were ever successful. She glimpsed her immediate future. Their survival depended upon her own random, unpredictable behavior. They would live on what she’d saved until she found new work. She did not maintain a bank account; instead, she converted paychecks to cash for a fee and bought U.S. Postal Service money orders. She would keep moving, would contact no one. They would return to an isolated, unpredictable life for the next few days or weeks, however long it took for WITSEC to run a nearly identical ad to read: “Mr. Johnny Citizen, PO Box 411, Washington, DC.” That combination would alert her that whatever the problem, it had been resolved. It would be safe for protected witnesses to call the memorized phone number and check on their individual status. For Alice, long since out of the program, it would likely mean choosing someplace else to resettle with Penny. St. Louis had not worked out as planned anyway.

  Self-pity crept in and she pushed it away. She would not cry in front of her daughter, would not resent their situation. She was alive. She had a beautiful daughter. She would not fantasize some life other than that she’d been handed. She would not give them that. She would not succumb.

  She and Penny were a team like no other. Best friends. Mother and daughter. Rivals. Survivors.

  She looked up from the clutter of clothes, sorted first by necessity, given that she’d elected to try for a warmer climate this time. Fewer clothes, less baggage.

  She turned.

  Penny was not in the room.

  She called out, the first tendrils of fear wrapping around her heart.

  “Pen?”

  No answer.

  Her daughter had been standing there only seconds-minutes?-earlier.

  Her feet moved independently of her. First at a walk, then a run, she hurried around the few rooms offered by the loft’s layout. She checked under both beds, in all three closets, behind the couch… all of those places Penny sought during hide-and-seek.