Bad Signs

by R.J. Ellory

  “It feels like I should work the case.”

  There was silence between them for a little while.

  “But it’s now a federal matter. Isn’t that the truth?”

  “Sure it is, but the incidents here are still our jurisdiction. I just think that with the murders before he got here, now these attacks … well, someone like that isn’t going to stop, are they?”

  “No,” Alice replied. “Not if that’s the route they’re taking.”

  “I’m going to call them,” John said.

  “Now?”

  “In a little while.”

  “But it’s after eight already. How will you reach them?”

  “I’ll just call the federal office here in Tucson and they will know where to find them. They may still be here. They may have gone back to Phoenix, or they might be in El Paso or someplace.”

  Alice nodded. She started to clear the plates away.

  John took her hand as she returned from the sink. He looked up at her.

  She smiled, touched the side of his face. “I married you for who you are, not who I thought you might become. You do whatever you have to do. Don’t you worry about me, okay? As long as you’re safe then I’m fine.”

  John Cassidy called the Tucson federal office just before nine. He was informed that Agents Koenig and Nixon were in El Paso. If he called the El Paso office they might be able to give him the name of the hotel where they were staying. He called El Paso, he took the name and number of the hotel, and when he called he was informed that the federal people had checked in, received one phone call, and left again immediately. The hairs on the back of Cassidy’s neck stood to attention. He thanked the receptionist at the hotel, put a call through to the El Paso County Sheriff’s Department, and they informed him that the sheriff was out at a crime scene with the federal agents.

  “Somewhere on 180,” he was told. “Just a few miles out of the city.”

  Cassidy thanked them once again, hung up, and dragged out a local map. Interstate 180 ran directly out of El Paso, and then became 62 before heading on up through Pine Springs and into Carlsbad. El Paso was a good three hundred or so miles away. He felt the urgency. He felt the compelling need to go now. Right now. But he did not. He appreciated Alice’s understanding, her acceptance of his work, the intensity with which he sometimes approached it, but he needed to reciprocate that understanding. Leaving now for a four- or five-hour drive to El Paso would not be enthusiastically encouraged. It would have to wait until morning, and then he would have to gain Mike Rousseau’s permission.

  His evident distraction prompted a barrage of questions from Alice. He told her as much as he knew, none of which was certain, all of which was a jigsaw of assumptions based on what little he knew.

  “So go now,” was her response.

  He looked at her, surprise evident in his expression.

  “Go now. Get the question answered. At least you’ll know. Say you leave it ’til morning, and then you speak to Mike and Mike says no … well, what’re you going to do then?”

  Cassidy didn’t have an answer.

  “Go,” she said. “I’m going to bed anyway. Go and find out what’s happening, and then you can either drive back tonight or stay over and call me in the morning and let me know what you’re doing. I know how you’re going to be until this nightmare is over, and I’d rather have you doing something about it than pacing up and down all night and making me crazy.”

  John Cassidy didn’t say anything. He just held her for a while, and then he kissed her forehead and let her go and he went upstairs to change for a long drive through the night.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Nine thirty p.m., evening of Wednesday the twenty-fifth of November, just as John Cassidy pulled away from the sidewalk ahead of his house, Elliott Danziger checked into a motel off of the I-10 outside of El Paso. Having driven back into the city after leaving the scene of the Eckhart killings, he took a leisurely dinner at a steak and ribs joint in the suburbs. He ate well. He was surprised by his appetite, but then he hadn’t eaten since the diner where he’d first seen that family. And he’d been working, of course. Work like that was sure to fire up a good hunger.

  The Sweet Dreams Motel was relatively secluded. It sat back from the highway by a good quarter mile. Nothing more than a crescent of cabins, cabins much as the one occupied by Bailey Redman and Clay Luckman no more than half a mile farther on. They had passed the Sweet Dreams a good while earlier, and though Clay had wanted to stop right there Bailey hadn’t liked the look of the place.

  “And the name,” she said. “Sweet Dreams Motel. It’s real corny, and it sounds like the sort of place where people book a room for an hour to have sex.”

  Caught off guard, a little embarrassed, Clay neither protested nor disagreed. They kept on walking, stopped at the next one they found, the Travelers’ Rest, though the neon sign out front read Th Travel rs R st. It looked cheap enough to bother without questions, and Clay was right. The man behind the counter merely took their money and gave them a key. Had he been asked for their names Clay would have said anything but Clarence Luckman and Bailey Redman, but the man did not ask, and Clay did not offer. They took the key and made their way out of the building and around the corner to a disheveled cabin with a narrow, low-ceilinged bathroom in back, a TV that took quarters, and a double bed that seemed awful small for a double bed.

  They talked about the sleeping arrangements. Clay Luckman, gentleman that he was, offered to sleep on the floor. Bailey said no, they could sleep head-to-toe on the bed. Clay went out to get bottles of Coke from a machine in the forecourt. They spent two dollars in quarters watching The Patty Duke Show, Shindig!, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and The Beverly Hillbillies. Neither of them wanted to watch the news to see if their respective disappearances were being reported. Perhaps out of fear, perhaps trying their best to believe that the world did not care and would leave them alone. Had they done so, they would have seen Clay’s grainy monochrome face staring back at them, and a report that anyone who saw this individual was to report immediately to the authorities, that they should not approach or communicate with this person, that this person was deemed “armed and dangerous.” Truth was that Clay Luckman hadn’t seen much television at all. He asked Bailey where the pictures came from and how they arrived. Bailey said she didn’t know, that it just happened that way. During The Virginian she took a bath. Clay turned the volume down and he could hear her singing in there. He didn’t know what it was, but she had a pretty voice. She hadn’t mentioned her father for a while, nor her mother for that matter, and even though Clay had thought of them both he hadn’t said a word. Maybe she’d just closed it all up in the back of her mind. Maybe she was one of those people that bottled everything tight, and then life kept on shaking her and shaking her, and finally she would explode. Maybe she’d last until she was twenty-five and then have some kind of mental disease or something. He’d seen people like that—kids even—at Barstow and Hesperia. Couldn’t feed themselves, couldn’t talk properly, pushed full of pills that seemed to do nothing but make them a lot quieter or a great deal louder. One of them jumped off a roof and broke his legs. Another of them stabbed a younger kid with a dinner fork. Crazy people.

  “You want a bath?” she asked. She stood in the doorway, a towel around her. Her hair was wet and combed back flat against her scalp. “I left the water in there for you in case.”

  “Sure,” Clay said, and he waited for her to come on out so he could get into the narrow room.

  Once inside, the door closed behind him, he could smell her. The soap, the warm water, and something beneath that. The scent of Bailey Redman. It made him think of her in all manner of ways that were personal and private, and he felt excited. Then he felt embarrassed because he was seventeen and she was fifteen, and really she was still a kid. But she was smart and she was funny and she was good-looking, and though he’d never had sex he did think about it a great deal, and if he was going to do it the first time
then he would want to do it with someone like Bailey Redman. And then he thought that he wouldn’t want to do it with someone like Bailey Redman, but with Bailey herself.

  Clay leaned down and looked through the keyhole in the door. He couldn’t see much of anything but the corner of the bed. He cursed himself for being a pervert, and then he got in the bath.

  Later, smelling as clean as Bailey, he was aware of how rank his clothes were. Both of their clothes. They needed to get them washed, or they needed new ones. New stuff for both of them, if they were smart, could be as little as ten bucks. That would leave thirty-something.

  “I think we should get some new pants and T-shirts,” she said moments later.

  “I was thinking the same thing.”

  She looked at the TV. “You ever seen this?”

  “What?”

  “It’s called The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.”

  “Nope, never seen it.”

  “It’s good. It’s like spooky stories and whatnot. Come sit and watch it with me.”

  Clay got up on the bed and sat beside her. They watched it together, clean bodies in grubby clothes, and then they turned the TV off and lay down side-by-side, and neither one of them mentioned the fact that they were meant to be head-to-toe, and it was warm and they fell asleep.

  At some point in the early hours Clay awoke. His head hurt and his mouth felt like copper filings, and he could hear a strange fluttering sound. It was a while before he realized it was just moths beating gently at the windows and the screens. They kept on trying, as if within was always infinitely better than without. As if something different was always far greater than something the same.

  Bailey was curled against him, and their bodies were like spoons in a drawer. He was busting to pee, but he did not move. He did not want to wake her, because being this close to someone felt good, and it felt right, and it seemed like they belonged.

  He smiled faintly, and he closed his eyes, and in a handful of minutes he was asleep once more.

  Half a mile away, dreaming nothing, Elliott Danziger slept also. He wouldn’t wake until eight thirty, and he would wake with the fiercest hunger and a thirst like the Sahara. He felt other things as well, inside things, things in his mind and his emotions. Among them was a sense of accomplishment, behind that a feeling of so many things undone, and the now-compelling need to hurt someone. It didn’t matter who, and why was of even lesser concern. It was simply there, and so strong it was impossible to resist. Not that he would have resisted it. That would have been like saying No to ice cream, and who in their right mind would do that?

  Again, despite the hour, conversations were taking place in offices and on telephone lines between serious men with serious faces. Agents were being dispatched to towns and cities throughout Arizona and California. Duty rosters were being drawn up, overtime money was being appropriated and apportioned, duty was being called upon, guns were being issued. Scheduling coordinators were being informed that radio bulletins needed to be broadcast more frequently. More pictures were needed. More local newspapers were being asked to run the grainy monochrome image of Clarence Stanley Luckman—escapee, killer, sociopath, teenager. More officers were assigned to locate the murdered body of Elliott Danziger. The pressure and insistence from the upper echelons of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had become relentless. No quarter would be given. No reason for failure would be acceptable. Luckman took pride of place as the most wanted man in the entirety of the continental United States.

  And yet Clay Luckman, Bailey Redman, even Elliott Danziger remained oblivious to it all.

  DAY SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  The surprise that Garth Nixon and Ron Koenig experienced when Detective John Cassidy presented himself at their hotel at a little after eight on the morning of Thursday, November 26, was matched only by Cassidy’s seeming intensity. He was unshaven, looked somewhat disheveled, and they soon learned that he had driven from Tucson very late the night before, had found their hotel, but not wishing to wake them at two o’clock that morning had slept as best he could in his car. Inquiring after them a little before seven, Cassidy learned that they had already left. Apparently they were at a hospital somewhere. Beyond that their movements were unknown. Cassidy had then waited impatiently until their return more than an hour later. They had come back with the good news that Margot Eckhart was still alive, the not-so-good news that she was unable to answer questions and would remain that way for some considerable time. The nursing supervisor had their contact details, would inform them of any change in her condition. However, she had described the likelihood of Margot’s recovery and subsequent ability to give them any information about her attacker with the phrase as slim as it gets.

  The initial identification of the Eckharts and Rita McGovern at the crime scene had been straightforward enough. Employing all the resources they could muster from Deming, Lordsburg, and Las Cruces, ably supervised by Sheriff Hoyt Candell and Doña Ana county sheriff Michael Montgomery, Nixon and Koenig sent black-and-whites every which way. They backtracked every possible route the Eckharts could have taken, and they found the diner on 180. The agents had spent two hours there the evening before, had again spent two hours there that morning, and were now all set to cross-reference and confirm the numerous reports they had taken from the employees. Koenig was certain beyond any question that Clarence Luckman had been at the diner on Highway 180 outside of El Paso. The diner owner, Ralph Jackson, had seen the dark gray Ford Galaxie outside, had noticed the fact that the young man who drove it was obviously an ex-con. “Either that or ex-military,” he said. When asked how he knew this he said, “It’s obvious. It’s only ex-cons and ex-GIs that eat like that. Hunched down low, one hand holding the fork, the other hand around the plate like they’re guarding it.” Jackson also remembered the Eckharts. “Station wagon, I think,” he said, “though I couldn’t be sure. Nice people. Kids were very polite. Please and thank you and whatnot without having to be reminded by their folks. Seeing that less and less these days.” Jackson could not confirm whether the Eckharts or the young man had left first. He saw neither the station wagon nor the Galaxie pull away. He was in back for a while sorting out a troublesome deep-fat fryer, and when he came back both the young man and the family were gone. He did not remember what the young man was wearing, and when Ron Koenig showed him a picture of Clarence Luckman he merely said, “I don’t know, sir, I really don’t. Teenage kids, young ’uns … hell, they all look the damn same to me.”

  Ralph Jackson’s report placed the Eckharts in the diner around eleven or eleven thirty the previous morning, Wednesday the twenty-fifth. That’s where Clarence Luckman saw them. He must then have followed the Eckharts out along 180 toward El Paso. From appearances Luckman had shot at the station wagon while in motion, and the driver had been wounded or sufficiently agitated to lose control of the vehicle. The woman had been thrown clear, but the car went on to ignite and kill the three occupants, now confirmed as the father and both the teenage children.

  Rita McGovern, presumably arriving at the scene with an intent to help, had been shot in the throat by Luckman, and then Luckman had taken off in her station wagon, leaving behind the Ford Galaxie.

  What was left was nothing but forensic evidence.

  Unfortunately, the prints on the Galaxie and discarded .38 revolver were too smudged to be readable. The arrival of the print report from the weapon beneath the car gave them as much evidence as they needed to place Clarence Luckman in the locality of this latest atrocity. That gun had belonged to Harvey Warren in Marana, and these were undeniably Clarence Luckman’s prints. Clarence Luckman was close, and with the utter brutality and violence inflicted on the Eckharts and Rita McGovern he was sure to be carrying all manner of evidence on his person. It was now simply a matter of finding him. And once they found him, it was going to be just as simple to shoot him right where he stood.

  John Cassidy’s appearance at the El Paso hotel was a curveball out of left field. Th
ere was no reason for him to be there. He had the attacks on Deidre Parselle and Walter Milford to investigate back in Tucson. This was a viewpoint not shared by John Cassidy.

  “Luckman has moved on, right?” was his opening gambit. Koenig and Nixon had walked up to their room with him. Stacks of papers were piled around the carpet. The room looked more like an office than a hotel suite. “And if he’s moved on then the case has moved on with him. I don’t have any forensic skills above and beyond what your federal people have already employed in Tucson. I can’t get any more out of those crime scenes. I’ve been to both of them, twice in fact, and I can’t see anything else that is going to help you. You know who you’re looking for, you have a damned good idea where he is, or at least the direction he’s headed in, and I want to help.”

  Koenig looked at Nixon. Nixon looked at Koenig and then back at Cassidy.

  “Your sheriff know you came out here?” Koenig asked.

  Cassidy shook his head.

  “Well, I don’t know what to tell you, Detective. This is a federal matter. Your jurisdiction and authority stops right there at the Tucson city limits. We got your report about the attack on Walter Milford, and the fact that you identified his vehicle as a dark gray Ford Galaxie has been very helpful in this most recent case, but—”

  Cassidy raised his hand. “I know all this, sir, but I have a feeling about this thing, and it’s growing stronger by every minute …”

  “And what feeling would that be?”

  “That there’s a little bit more to this than we might think. There’s something about this thing that just keeps nagging and nagging at me, and I can’t let it go.”

  “And that would be?”

  “Well, that would be the fact that it doesn’t make sense. All we have are the reports from Barstow and Hesperia about this boy, but the idea that he could be capable of changing from someone who’s never had any real trouble before to someone who is capable of doing all of this—”