by Thomas Laird
I never used to care about who ran the show, as long as they let me operate my own way. But that was always a fantasy. You’re never in charge of the horse you ride. There are too many variables. The weather, the track, the speed of the horses in your heat. All of the above comes into play, and no matter how fast your animal is, he’s prone to all those circumstances around him. And then he might slip and fall, even on a dry track. Maybe there’s a gopher hole on that track, and his hoof catches it, and he falls and breaks his leg and you fall with him and get yourself paralyzed and he gets put down.
I’m not a player at the track. But I like to go to Arlington. I think it’s less of a fix than the trotters at Hawthorne. I don’t bet on the thoroughbreds. I just like to watch them run. When they’re not being held back by their jockeys, it’s a beautiful sight to behold.
I hate to wax up all metaphoric, but it’s the way I see these series murders. It can’t have to do with the victims, so it has to have something to do with the Twin Killer, as everyone in the press likes to call this hooded asshole. He has to have some juice if they’re calling off the dogs. The only time they talk about manpower hours is when our wages are being negotiated or when they don’t like the smell of heat in the air being aimed at the bad guy. This bad guy must have friends.
It’s only my personal theory, but there it is.
We’re going to go with Lila’s scenario, however. We’ll chase this prick the way we’ve always pursued him, and we’ll hope Clarke doesn’t become a dick about us counting the hours we spend doing it. It’s pretty hard for him to have an exact accounting of our whereabouts except for the information we give him. Otherwise, he’ll have to send a tail after us, and that gets even more expensive.
The story about no one caring about six hookers being slaughtered sounds true enough, but to an honest Homicide, it doesn’t matter much who got popped. It matters far more that his killer pays. That may sound cold and inhuman, but the effect is the same no matter what your motivation is: The idea is to catch the perpetrator and get them off the streets forever. The rest is academic.
So do you go after a murderer of a street lowlife any more slowly or less intensely than you do after a high profile perp? I know I don’t. Maybe there are detectives who play for the crowd, who lust for the headlines. But I don’t think they’re all that many like that. It may sound self-serving, but I’m really not in that crew.
It might harken back to my Ranger training. Most of the stuff we did in Vietnam never made it to newsprint. That was the way we planned it. The guys we killed when we were on recon were Viet Cong honchos—they were killers, too. If we splattered their melons with a scope from long distance, anonymously, then that was the way we played it. We didn’t leave calling cards, like some of our military brethren. We didn’t want them to know who bid them a final farewell. The job was a task, and all you wanted was accomplishment, and we were very efficient at closure.
I’ve carried that attitude over into my police work. I don’t give a shit about medals and commendations. (Mine are stashed in a drawer underneath my underwear, at home. The ones from the War, I mean.) I don’t want face time in the papers or on the local news. Let the cowboys on the force have my share of adulation and their own. I just want to eliminate the names in red on our white board in my office. They’re the list of the dead who haven’t had their murderers brought to justice. Their erasure is the only pleasure I get out of this work. When we blot those names out on that board, it beats my paycheck. It’s the only satisfaction that does override the cash I get for doing this work.
Lila and I haven’t slept together since the first time we made the earth move. I don’t think the earth moved, actually, but I know the mattress and box springs were engaged enthusiastically. I’ve been looking for a cue from her that she’d enjoy another close encounter, but I haven’t been reading any of that from her lately. She comes to work, we ride the streets looking for our hooded fellow and for several other bad guys, and then she drops me off or I take her home, depending on whose turn it is to drive.
It’s mid-January, and already I’m starting to think Clarke needn’t have worried about the hours we’re putting on our top case. It’s becoming chillier and chillier—the weather outside and the temperature of our investigation into the Twin Killer.
It’s moving toward not moving at all. There have been no similar double slayings, and I’m wondering if our guy hasn’t backed off. Or maybe got himself aced. It happens. These people play in dangerous backyards, and maybe some pimp caught up with him and put a few rounds into the top of his head. We get white stiffs collected by the meat wagon all the time. They go into black or mixed hoods and they say the wrong thing or do the inappropriate thing, and they get chilled and slabbed. It does happen.
There is a flurry happening outside our car as we drive back to headquarters. We don’t have anything new on our “primary” case, but we did catch two braindeads who killed three people—two on one case and a single on the other. We caught them both because they’re stupid and they’re stupid because they just had to tell someone else about their own stupidity. Talking delivers more killers than evidence, sometimes. Most killers aren’t high IQ motherfuckers. They’re just dumb motherfuckers. Lucky for us. Lucky for us that more of them aren’t clever, that more of them aren’t meticulous planners and connivers.
I look over at Lila, behind the wheel. Her hair is now shoulder length and still descending. I’ve wanted to run my fingers through those cascading tresses for a couple weeks, now. But I haven’t laid a finger on her at all since the night in question.
“You pissed at me?” I finally blurt.
“No? Why would you ask that?”
Her eyes are trained on the street. We’re only a few blocks from Headquarters.
“Why would I ask that.”
“Sounds like you’re pissed at me,” she retorts. But there is a slight grin on her face.
“You haven’t said much of a word to me since the night we were…together.”
“You don’t have to tiptoe around it, Danny.”
She knows I have no talent for subtlety.
“Well?” I ask.
“I thought you wanted to cool it for a while so we could both figure out where we’re headed.”
“When did I say that?”
“Maybe you didn’t say that, but I thought that’s what you had in mind.”
“I’m for full ahead.”
“What if I’m not?” she asks.
I look at her, but her eyes remained focused on the road.
“Okay, then,” I tell her.
“Now you are pissed.”
“No. Now I know, that’s all.”
“Danny….”
She turns her face toward me, but I’m the one glaring at the street before us. We’re pulling into the parking lot.
“Forget it. I’m all right with it,” I tell her when we pull into a space on the lower deck.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m certain,” I lie to her.
We seem to be back where we were before things got physical. We joke around the way we always did, and we never bring up what happened in the bedroom or in the squad car when we got things “straight.”
But I feel tension every time I see her, now. And she seems just a little too pleasant, every time we’re not talking police business.
At home, I’m still watching a slow transformation. Kelly’s report card showed four A’s and two B’s. It’s been her best showing in her three and a half years.
I know she’s gained weight. She even asked me to take her out to buy new clothes. She wears a uniform that was always too baggy at Sacred Heart, but now she’s filling it out nicely. She’s showing the same kind of curves that her mother sported, when we were together. Kelly’s not getting fat, however. She’s made use of the membership I’ve got at a health club about a mile from the house. She even rides a bike back and forth to add to the physical regimen at the club.
I spent t
hree hundred on her for the clothes, although she tried to argue me into putting some of the stuff back on the racks. I don’t think I’ve bought her new duds since she was a freshman. She never got any taller than she was when she was fourteen, and she unfortunately never gained any weight until the last few weeks. I’m tickled to spend the cash on her. Most of my paycheck lies in the account, after our bills. I’ve got a pretty decent stash in the bank because I rarely spend anything on either of us. My balance is pretty healthy, then.
She’s asked me to go with her to her outpatient treatment, as soon as my schedule allows. I told her I’d make it even if I have to ask for personal time, and her face lit up when she discovered after all this time that I’d do anything for her.
All she had to do was ask.
At least one front of my life has shown some glimmerings of hope. The front with Lila has become extremely dim. She’s killing me with kindness. She wants to drive me to work and drop me off all the time, and when we go out for dinner break, she always snatches the tab before I can grab hold of it.
As February arrives, the weather deteriorates. It becomes snowier and colder, and action on the street gets curtailed quite a bit. Homicides are down to a three-year low. We’re stuck with the original redliners, as the unsolved cases are called, and nothing new comes onto our white board. It’s eerie. It’s as if death has blown town and headed for Miami, or toward other warmer climates.
Most of our homicides take place in the heat of summer and early fall. People are out in the hoods, then, and they’re pissed because it’s hot and sticky. The cold kind of freezes the activity up, quite literally, as it has recently. I’m sure things’ll pick up when the spring thaw arrives in March.
You can count on death. Life is iffy, but death is certain. Cheesy but true.
Clarke doesn’t pull us in on the carpet, but I know he’s been keeping tabs on us via other detectives. There’s nothing to call us on because our case against the Twin Killer has gone Arctic. He’s not killing, and he hasn’t left anything for us to dig up about him.
My thought that he might have been killed doesn’t pan out, either. I’ve checked all the recent killings, and no one even remotely matching his description has popped up onto the screens. It’s as if he’s submerged, vanished from the surface.
Gone underground.
I remember in college we read The Odyssey. I also recall the part where Odysseus (Ulysses) is called to go into the nether world, into hell, to find out about the world of the dead. He has to find out about the underground before he’s allowed to surface and return to the land of the living.
So where does the Twin Killer go to hide? Where’s he go to wait until the heat is turned down or turned off? He must have a source of income, but he doesn’t feel like a shift worker to me. He likes late night activity, and that tells me he can’t have a gig that requires getting up at dawn and going off to some factory. It’s all supposition, I know, but I have to track him somehow, even if he isn’t leaving tracks behind him.
If he’s wealthy, that would explain his night life framework. Maybe he doesn’t work at all. Which makes him the offspring of somebody powerful, which makes Clarke’s little speech about backing off make sense.
But I know it’s just my mind exercising itself in lieu of facts, and facts make a case, not imagining.
Lila is closed mouthed about the kind of guy she figures did the six prosties. She doesn’t say much. She has always been the non-theoretical detective, between the two of us. She follows the evidence and rarely runs after her intuition. You’d think a woman would be inclined to be bound to intuition, but Lila breaks most everyone’s expectations about her to shards.
“We’re never going to catch him,” I tell her over burgers and fries at an overpriced sports bar on the northside.
“You’re just depressed. Stop whining,” she smiles.
“I’ll stop being depressed when you tell me why you stopped us cold, Lila.”
She puts down her half pound burger and shoots a glare right at me.
11
April in Paris it ain’t. April in Chicago is more like a climatic tug of war. The winter gives in grudgingly to the spring. The false spring starts in early March, sometimes, and the ice and snow and unbearable hawk cold out of the northeast give way to some southern breezes that merely titillate but do not deliver the relief of April’s warming winds.
Our redliners are up to seven, including the killer of the six girls.
It’s almost 65 degrees today, on April Fool’s Day. It’s balmy enough to take a walk to the Lake with Lila on our lunch hour, about 1:15 P.M. We walk to the Lake in under fifteen minutes because our headquarters are that close. As we walk east toward the water, she stops and turns to me.
“You think he’s dead?”
“You mean our favorite serial killer?” I try to grin.
“Do you?”
“No. I don’t think he’s gone anywhere except underground, and only temporarily.”
“Why’d he stop?” Lila says, as we begin the trek to the beach. We can see the sand and the Lake, now. It’s only a few more blocks. The sun is up in the sky and it’s unobstructed by any of the fleecy white clouds that roll slowly overhead.
“Maybe he was bored.”
She doesn’t respond to my inanity.
“He’s not bored,” she finally counters.
“No. I don’t think so, either. Something came up, maybe. His conscience?”
“He doesn’t have one,” Lila frowns at me.
“Yeah, I know. It’s just that I don’t have an explanation for why he’s taken a powder. Maybe he fell in love with another series killer and they’re off to Canada to make little creeps in their own images.”
“Women don’t tend to do shit like this,” she says.
We’re at the entrance to Elm Street Beach. We walk toward the lake water. It’s cooler, here, as it always is except in the gooiest days in July and August when there’s no place to escape the swelter of the humidity.
We plant ourselves on a bench. Lila bought us two torpedo sandwiches at Luigi’s, across the street from HQ, and I bought two cans of Diet Coke from the machine on our floor. I carted the pop and Lila took care of the sandwiches. Not very gentlemanly of me, I know, but Lila carries her own loads and doesn’t ask for dispensations, whether it’s torpedo sandwiches or our workload.
We eat without talking, but we devour the food quickly because we only have an hour and the trip back to work takes fifteen minutes, just like it did on the way here.
“The Captain has gone quiet, also,” Lila says, breaking the silence between us. The beach is sparsely attended. It’s way early for the swimmers and the sunbathers, but back on the sidewalk there are the walkers and the joggers and the bicycle riders and the skateboarders. You wouldn’t think all this tranquility could be home to the monsters we pursue.
“Yeah, I haven’t even seen him, let alone heard from him. But it’s understandable. He knows this case has gone static, and maybe he’s trying to keep the lull going until everybody loses track of our man.”
“Ain’t going to happen,” she smiles lamely.
“No. It ain’t.”
“And how’s the kid?” she says, aiming her blues at my own eyes.
“The kid is going to graduate with her class. Not with honors, but she had too much ground to make up for all those other years. But she’s got everything made up, and I have to say that Sacred Heart bent way back over backwards to help Kelly out. I gotta hand it to them. They went overtime on my kid, and I’m grateful to them. I might have to start going back to church, now.”
“Don’t get crazy on me, Danny,” she laughs.
I look over at her until she stops giggling.
“What do you believe in, Lila?”
“Huh?”
“I mean it. What do you believe in? Anything?”
“Should we take this little interview to the interrogation room?” she laughs again.
“No. I’m s
erious. What do you believe in? Anything at all? Or are you an atheist?”
“All that sounds more like an accusation.”
“Quit answering me like a cop. I’m asking you a serious question. No shit.”
“No shit? You really want to know?”
I wait for her to reply.
“There is no God, if that’s what you’re asking. If there were, how does He stand back and let creatures like the Twin Killer come out of a human womb? Think of all the things that can go wrong in a pregnancy. Think of all the easy resolutions a loving God would be able to create, other than allowing this piece of dirt to breathe. He could’ve taken care of the problem back in the first trimester, Danny.”
“Then we’d be out of a job.”
“True. But we could find something else to do besides hunt butchers.”
“I couldn’t.”
“You couldn’t do anything besides this?”
“No. I thought about it a lot.”
“And you see yourself doing this until retirement.”
I watch her eyes. They’re dead serious and engaged with mine.
“I love you, Lila. I want to take it to another, higher place.”
“You’re changing the subject, Danny.”
“With me, that subject’s never changed.”
“You know how I feel about you.”
“No, actually I have no idea.”
“Come on!”
“I don’t, Lila. I can’t read you at all.”
“You can read anybody on the street, so why can’t you see that—“
She breaks off and shifts her gaze to Lake Michigan. The water is a metallic gray-blue. A cloud finally does cover the sun, but just briefly, and then the brilliant light sparkles over the water in front of us. Way out on the horizon, I can see one of those processing plants that cleans the lake water. Its brick front barely darkens the surface of the gray-blue body before us.
