All the Dead Fathers

by David J. Walker

  At her office she carried her mail to her desk and sat down to sort through it. There wasn’t much. The usual catalogs, a few bills … and one postcard. Her name and address taped on the front this time were in embossed printing on what appeared to be thin white card stock. Again the postmark was Chicago, and again the message on the back was hand-printed in block letters: READY OR NOT.

  37.

  Kirsten wasn’t sure how long she sat there and stared at the address taped to the postcard before she finally reached down and pulled open the bottom right drawer of her desk. Her box of business cards was there, and beside it in the drawer was what was left of one of the cards after her name and address had been cut out.

  She hadn’t opened that drawer in months, so the address could have been cut out, and the remnant left behind, at the same time as the Smithsonian was taken. Or it could have been done two days ago, when the magazine was returned.

  While she was processing that, her cell phone rang. This time it was Dugan. He’d seen TV reports about Truczik’s murder. From what he said it was apparent that there’d been no information given about who found the body, no mention of her at all.

  “You must have heard about it, right?” Dugan said.

  “Um … yeah. How could I miss it? It’s all over the news.”

  “Wasn’t Cuffs supposed to be out there providing security?”

  “He didn’t start until sundown,” she said, “and he was at the retreat house. The murder was earlier, at a golf course a mile away. Was there anything on the news about Cuffs showing up?”

  “No, they’re not saying much of anything. Was he there?”

  “What he told me was that he heard a siren and went to see what was going on. Anyway, he’s off the case now. The cardinal doesn’t want him hanging around out there, I guess.”

  “Really? And what about you? Are you—”

  “They’re promising increased security at the retreat house, and the FBI’s involved. And that sheriff’s investigator from Rockford … Wardell … I guess he’s got some new information. So it looks like law enforcement’s working this thing pretty hard. What can I do that they can’t?”

  “Right,” he said. “And what about that postcard stuff? Anything more on that?”

  She’d been hoping he wouldn’t ask that because she wanted to stick to the truth, more or less. “I’m watching my back. Haven’t seen anyone.”

  “Good, but be careful, okay? Anyway, I should get going. We’ll be tied up all day out here. The weather’s great, of course, but I won’t see any of the outdoors till long after sundown. This program is intense, and my team— But you don’t wanna hear me blab on and on about that. Talk to you later. Love you.”

  “You, too,” she said. “’Bye.”

  She did want to hear him blab on and on, though. About anything. She’d have spent the whole day listening to him blab.

  * * *

  She left the Impala downtown and took a cab home. All of the entrances to their building were quite secure and she felt safe there. So safe and snug inside, in fact, that she made herself go outside and run five miles along the lakefront in the afternoon. It was still warm and sunny, and the jogging paths were crowded. Later she walked a mile to a Thai restaurant for supper. And walked back.

  She didn’t spot anyone following her. What she felt, though, was another matter. Frequently, and regardless of where she was, she would feel someone’s eyes on her. She knew the feeling was a reaction to being stalked, certainly not based on observation and fact. And even if it were true that someone was out there somewhere, watching her, they wouldn’t attack her from a distance. That would be too remote, too cold, for such a person. Anyway, she wasn’t about to lock herself up in the apartment.

  Inside or out, though, she did a lot of thinking, much of it fruitless, and made a few phone calls.

  None of the priests turned up dead all day Saturday.

  * * *

  In the morning she went out for the papers and was home eating breakfast when, at five after nine, two FBI agents came. On Sunday, for God’s sake. She made them wait until nine-thirty before she let them in. She didn’t know if they were the same agents Wardell had spoken so disparagingly of. If not, they easily could have been, except that the whole time they were there only one of them spoke, the tall thin one. The one with the bodybuilder’s physique wrote things down in a little black notebook.

  “You’re interfering with a police investigation,” the tall one said.

  “I don’t believe I am,” she said. “Plus, you’re not police, you’re—”

  “We’re special agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We’re assisting with, and coordinating, an interstate investigation being conducted by a number of police jurisdictions. Nonpolice participation is interference … and it’s not welcome.”

  “What, specifically, are you asking that I stop doing?”

  “It’s not a request,” he said. “It’s a directive.”

  “About what, specifically? Not to talk to my own uncle? Not to bring what I believe to be helpful information to an investigating officer? Not to walk around a golf course in the rain and trip over a body? What?”

  “The coincidence you pointed out to Sergeant Wardell is—”

  “Jesus! The killer might change course, sure. But so far she’s done K, I, R, S, and T. You think that’s a coincidence?”

  “She?”

  “It was a woman who left the phone message for Truczik. You know that. Even you guys can’t believe that if he called back and a man answered, he’d have gone out to meet him. And if you think the order these murders are following is a coincidence, tell that to Anthony Ernest. Or John Ettinger … wherever he is. Or to Michael Nolan, the only N on the list.”

  “What have you told them about this … theory of yours?”

  “Nothing. I’ve told Sergeant Wardell.” These guys were either amazingly stupid or deliberately avoiding the truth. “I certainly wouldn’t want to interfere with anything an elite group of geniuses on the federal payroll dreams up.”

  “No ma’am, I’m sure you wouldn’t.” His eyes narrowed, and she knew she had crossed the line. “Keep this in mind,” he said. “A five-minute phone call from one of us ‘geniuses,’ and you’ll be getting notice from the State of Illinois that your private detective’s license has been placed on probationary status. For that reason alone, I’m sure you wouldn’t want to take any action that could be construed as interfering in a multiple murder investigation.” He shrugged. “Am I beginning to make myself clear?”

  She backed off a little, but the problem was they had their own prejudged answer to everything. When she told them about the postcards, the agent advised her that if she thought the words HERE I COME or READY OR NOT constituted a threat upon her person she should file a report at her local police station. Later he suggested that the woman who called Truczik could easily have been a man. Gay men in particular, he said, were good at imitating women’s voices.

  Through it all she tried to stay cool, but it wasn’t easy. By the time the two men left they’d renewed their threat about her license, and she hadn’t made any new promises or any new friends.

  * * *

  She spent the rest of Sunday much as she’d spent Saturday, including another run along the lakefront. She called Dugan and he sounded tired, but enthusiastic and caught up in his mock-trial workshop.

  She resumed where she’d left off Saturday, churning the facts through her mind, trying to identify this killer who knew her name … and used it. It wasn’t someone who’d learned who she was just last week, either, because whoever it was had been spelling out her name from the start. And whoever it was had to know she would eventually pick up on it. And didn’t care. Maybe wanted her to.

  She considered the phone message for Truczik a crucial factor, a turning point in helping her analyze what was going on. That phone call was so significant, in fact, that making it must have signaled a new phase in the killer’s thinking, too
.

  In the public’s mind, sexual misconduct by priests seemed to be linked almost exclusively with homosexuality, and much of what Kirsten had read and seen in the media seemed to assume the killer was a male victim of abuse. But Truczik’s caller must have been a woman, whatever the FBI guys wanted to think. And the person who had shown up at Stieboldt’s hospital room was a woman, too. A woman who smiled a lot, just like the woman who’d been at Bunko’s when Kanowski was there. So, statistics and profiles and public perceptions notwithstanding, it appeared that this particular serial killer was probably a woman.

  She concluded with even more certainty that the priest killer and her own “Here I come, ready or not” stalker were one and the same. The alternative—that two unrelated crazies knew her name, and both just happened to pick the same time to move into her world—was too big a coincidence to be credited. So it was one person with a bizarre two-item agenda: to kill abusive priests and to terrorize her. And the person was not a stranger.

  Both in her years as a cop and since then, she’d made plenty of people unhappy. Ruined their lives, in fact, at least as far as they saw how their lives should go. Most of those people, though, were run-of-the-mill criminals pursuing their careers, and they were aware that she’d merely been pursuing hers. Many of them she couldn’t even remember, and didn’t need to. What she needed was a list of seriously disturbed persons with grudges against her personally. That list wouldn’t be very long. And it wouldn’t require a review of any records. All she needed was a sheet of paper, and her memory. She came up with a list of eleven people and then, using no tool other than her own judgment, whittled it down to six.

  Four of the six were men. One of those was a cop gone bad named Walter Keegan, who might have been crazy and vengeful enough but was most assuredly dead. She didn’t think she was looking for a man, and checking out the other three men would be slow going on the weekend, but using the Internet, the telephone, and some creative misrepresentations, she did the work. She was able to verify that Theodore Kopp was in a facility for the criminally insane outside Louisville, and that Carlo Morelli was a guest of the state of Illinois, in Pontiac Correctional Center. The final man, a strangely fastidious killer named Victor Utz, was unaccounted for. Utz hated Kirsten, but he was a tiny man, physically weak, and—more important—would never kill in a way that might splatter blood all over his person.

  Eliminating Utz got her to where she thought she should be, because she believed the crazy in question had to be a woman. Of the two women on the list, Adele Wacker had to be well over seventy and, like Utz, was a physically small person. Again, though, Kirsten did the work, and she located Adele in a nursing home on the northwest side. That left Debra Morelli, Carlo’s sister. She was a large, strong woman, psychosexually disturbed, and with ample reason to be very unhappy with Kirsten.

  A mark against Debra’s candidacy, of course, was that she was almost certainly dead. Still, of all those on the list—male or female—she was the one Kirsten could most easily imagine slicing off a man’s skin or body parts, or impaling him with an umbrella. And unlike Walter Keegan, who was certainly dead—Kirsten had seen the bullets tear into him—Debra Morelli was only almost certainly dead.

  No one claimed to have seen Debra die, but there was no evidence of her being alive, either; and there should have been, given the bloody circumstances surrounding her last sighting. So the cops were assuming she was dead. Not to mention that lots of people had been fervently hoping she was … including Kirsten.

  * * *

  So Kirsten knew what she had to do on Monday. But meanwhile Sunday came and went, and no priests turned up dead that day, either.

  38.

  At four A.M. on Monday, Debra was on the road.

  Time was racing by, but she had used her weekend well. Lots of rest, two workouts. She had never been stronger. She burned all the bloody drop cloths from the van along with the clothing, hers and that of the dead Stieboldt, and gathered up what was left of the pervert from the feeding room in the hog shed. She was fond of her two hogs and treated them kindly, but she’d learned how to withhold their food and make them very efficient. What bones they’d left she sawed up and scattered over several dumps. She was glad Stieboldt was the only one, so far, she’d had to bring home with her.

  She forced herself to watch some of the media coverage, too, not because she needed validation of her efforts, but to learn what she could about public response. There was no mention of anyone mourning the dead priests, of course. Everyone knew they were animals who preyed on children. People knew, also, that they were lucky someone had the courage to treat those men as they deserved, as God willed.

  There was no talk, either, of the order she was following. What the media stressed was that the victims were narrowly targeted, so there wasn’t the general panic there’d been with the D.C. snipers, nor the outcry that would have put hundreds of police out looking for her. This time it wasn’t fear that held the public spellbound, but blood and body parts, and morbid curiosity about the sexual misconduct of those priests. People were so weak, so easily drawn to sordid, sick details.

  For her part, confident of God’s help and with just two to go to reach the fullness of seven, she would play her cards carefully, but she would not be afraid to play. Locating Stieboldt in the hospital and catching Truczik out in the open were both the result of careful surveillance, then swift and courageous action. God helps those who help themselves.

  Each purging brought its own rush of excitement and satisfaction, and she would have liked more opportunity to savor them. But she couldn’t take the time. Carlo was coming out in nine days, a week from Wednesday.

  It seemed so long ago, that night she’d had to run and leave him behind. That had torn her apart, and though she hadn’t seen him since, everything had been for his sake. The struggle to get to Sicily, submission to the clumsy pawings of la capra in his compound there, the painful plastic surgeries. Then coming home, and the loneliness of hiding out. Everything was for Carlo.

  No one would see her, but when Carlo came out she would be watching, and she hoped to be able to gather him up at once. But she dared not contact him with advice, and he had never been smart the way she was. If he let himself be taken she had a plan. She would risk everything to save him, and with the help of God the two of them would be together again. He had never been able to function without her. She would have to protect him—and now even walk for him and talk for him. She would love him as though he were whole.

  * * *

  Debra drove on through the darkness, north of Chicago on I-94, the Tri-State Tollway, past the exit she always used for the seminary. Then, past the final toll booth, she exited and headed west. There were still farms up here that hadn’t fallen under the developers’ bulldozers.

  Debra knew something about hiding out in the country and about using an alias. You couldn’t create a new identity simply by moving to a new place, a rural place owned by a cousin with a different name than yours, and then calling yourself by the cousin’s name.

  “No,” she said, “that’s not enough.” She was alone in the van, driving past a mailbox with the name CHRISTOPHERSON on its side, but she spoke out loud. “There’s much more to it than that, my dear Father Ettinger, as you will learn.”

  Beyond the mailbox a driveway led up to a well-kept farmhouse. A light shone behind drawn curtains in one ground-floor window. And then, as she drove past on the road, she saw something else. Drawn up beside the house and visible in the glow of a tall, backyard pole light, sat a late-model, light-colored, four-door sedan. Not your ordinary farmer’s vehicle, she thought. More like a car signed out from the pool of some governmental agency.

  She cursed out loud and pounded the steering wheel with the heel of her hand … and drove on. But before very long she calmed herself. This setback, too, God would somehow turn into a blessing.

  39.

  On Monday morning Kirsten left town in the rented Impala and drove east into Indi
ana, then on into Michigan, headed for Detroit. It was at least a six-hour drive, and she’d struggled with whether to go that far away or not, with the killer still at large and Michael in danger. But she couldn’t think of how her staying around Chicago was going to make him or the others any safer.

  Besides, for them and for herself, safety lay in eliminating the source of danger, and she couldn’t just sit around and hope the cops would do that. Or wait for more postcards or painted targets. Nor would she settle for calling someone three hundred miles away on the phone and hope he’d take the time to answer her questions, hope he’d open up to someone he’d probably think had gone off the deep end herself.

  But she hadn’t. She had spent Saturday and Sunday working out the possibilities, and had rejected the idea that the crazy who was killing priests and terrorizing her was someone completely unknown to her. First, that seemed so unlikely as to be barely possible; and second, if that were the case, and given the scarcity of evidence, there’d be nothing to do but lie back and wait … which was unacceptable.

  So she had thought and rethought, made her list and scratched out names, logged onto Web sites, exchanged phone calls and e-mails, and became convinced it was Debra Morelli she was looking for. Born in Detroit, Debra had lived there until she moved to Chicago with her brother, Carlo. So Detroit was the place to start looking, even though it was in Chicago that Debra had dropped off the face of the earth.

  * * *

  It had happened four years ago. Kirsten was hired by, of all people, Larry Candle, for what seemed a simple task—find the witness who could exonerate Larry and keep the Supreme Court from pulling his law license. But Larry hadn’t told Kirsten quite everything, and she and Dugan found themselves one night in a life-and-death battle with Debra and Carlo. When Debra fled, leaving Carlo behind, they didn’t chase after her. She was armed, after all, and they weren’t. Besides, her neck and face had been slashed and she was bleeding so badly everyone assumed she’d surface in an E.R. soon enough. She didn’t, though. She never turned up anywhere. So people made another assumption: that she was dead.