by J. A. Kerley
“This is the office of the Chief of Police …”
The Lieutenant turned white.
“Hello? Is anyone there?”
She snatched the phone from Waltz’s outstretched palm, snapped it closed, thrust it back at him: A surrender. She turned her anger from Waltz to me, her voice angry and demanding, pushing her frustration my way.
“What was left of her clothes looked like a runner’s garb. Like she went running, got grabbed off the street, brought here. Did she like to run?”
I said, “She ran marathons, even at sixty-three. She was a fitness junkie.”
“She ever run late at night?”
“She ran whenever she found the time, or was stressed. Were there any defensive wounds?”
“How about you shut up and let the Lieutenant ask the questions?” snapped a detective a few years past my age of thirty-four, a hulking monster with a Greco-Roman wrestler’s neck and shoulders. His face was pale and acne-scarred, making his small eyes look like green buttons floating in a bowl of cream of wheat. His hair was neither brown nor blond, but some shade in between, brond, perhaps. I’d heard someone call him Bullard.
Waltz said, “Her forearms are bruised, probably defensive. No tissue is visible beneath her nails. They’re cut close, unfortunately. The Forensics crew will vacuum the floor when we leave, maybe find something important.”
Another interruption from Alpha Lady. “Why did the victim give the big-ass sales job on your behalf? She was sorry about what?”
“I just got here. How would I fucking know?”
“Hey,” snapped Bullard. “Watch your goddamn mouth.” He stood to show me he was taller than me. Wider, too.
Alpha said, “Stay calm, Bubba. I’m trying to get a handle on things. Waltz told me about the box of crazies where she worked, this Institute. Is it possible a former patient might have held a grudge?”
I shook my head. “Couldn’t happen.”
“You psychic as part of your talents?”
“The only way out of the Institute is to stop breathing. They don’t rehabilitate, they analyze.”
Waltz nodded. “He’s right. I know of the Institute.”
I said, “Have you checked Dr Prowse’s whereabouts since she arrived, Lieutenant? Maybe she was targeted by the perp earlier. Maybe as early as at the airport. You might want to –”
She held up her hand. Shot me a fake and indulgent smile. “I’m sure you do fine on your home turf, Detective. But the NYPD actually looks into such things. We’ve done it a few times before.” She turned the fake smile to Waltz. “Take him to lunch, Detective. Show him the Statue of Liberty. Let him buy some postcards. But then it’s time for Mississippi to get its missing policeman back.”
Before I could correct her, she showed me her back and strode away with the sycophants in tow. The little turf war now over, Waltz seemed unperturbed.
“Somewhere in the good Lieutenant’s soliloquy I heard the word lunch. There’s a decent deli a couple blocks away. Give it a shot, Detective Ryder?”
The deli was little more than a long, narrow counter, and a few tables against a wall decorated with faded posters of Sardinia. I was without hunger and fiddled with a salad. Waltz seemed light on appetite as well and nibbled at a chicken sandwich.
I couldn’t quite figure out Waltz’s position in the hierarchy. His rank was detective, the Alpha Lady – named Alice Folger, I’d discovered – was a lieutenant. She was brusque to Waltz, but was obviously afraid to push him too far. Another big question: What gave Waltz the power to slow an investigation for several hours so I could be flown here? That would have taken sledgehammer clout.
I was about to ask when Waltz slid a mostly uneaten sandwich to the side of the table. “Let’s say Dr Prowse felt she was in danger. Why didn’t she ask the NYPD for protection?” He paused. “Unless, of course, she wasn’t in danger. That fits with her taking a midnight run through the neighborhood.”
“What about the recording?”
“We have no idea when it was made. Or why. Are you sure you have no idea why she’d record a testament to your abilities vis-à-vis psychopaths?”
Waltz was conversational, but I knew I was being interrogated. I looked down, realized it was a tell for a person about to lie. I scratched my ankle to give my down-glance a purpose.
“I’m as much in the dark as you, Shelly.”
“You have no idea what she was sorry for? Or anything about the serious whatever she was seeking?”
This time I could look him in the eyes. “I’m utterly dumbfounded.”
“What’s your background, Detective Ryder – if I may ask?”
“Eight years on the force, five in Homicide. I studied at the FBI Behavioral Division for all of a month. I also work in a special unit called the PSIT: the Psychopathological and Sociopathological Investigative Team.”
“Impressive.”
“In name only. The whole unit, which everyone calls Piss-it, is me and my partner Harry Nautilus. We’re activated maybe five times a year, usually a false alarm. Though we do have a decent solve rate when the action is bona fide.”
“Which is?”
“A hundred per cent. Still, like the unhappy lady lieutenant said, this is New York. Y’all deal with more crazies in a day than Mobile does in a year.”
Waltz spun his glass of iced tea. “Dr Prowse said you had a special gift for investigating psychos. She called it a dark gift. What’s that mean, if I may ask?”
I repeatedly punctured a piece of romaine. I didn’t want to lie, but couldn’t tell the truth. Not fully.
“I was a Psych major in college, Shelly. I did prison interviews with psychos and socios. Dr Prowse thought I had a rapport with them, made them drop their guard. That’s probably the gift she was talking about.”
I sensed Waltz didn’t believe I was telling the full story. But he shifted the conversation. “I’m not ready to close this box yet. I’ve convinced those in command to give you a few days here in case we need your input.”
I raised an eyebrow at Waltz’s ability to sidestep immediate authority. “Sounds like you went above Lieutenant Folger.”
“A step or two. That’s not a comment on her, either personally or professionally. She seems unhappy with some aspect of her life, and it makes her brittle, but the Lieutenant is blessed with a highly analytical mind. She’s destined ever upward, as the sages say.”
“She seems young for all the authority.”
“She’s thirty-two, but has been climbing the ladder three steps at a time. After a degree in criminal justice – top of her class, highest honors – she started in uniform in Brooklyn, grabbed attention by using her head, analyzing crime patterns, offering realistic solutions. She worked undercover for a while, setting up sting operations, pitting dope dealers against one another, busting a fencing operation that reached from Florida to Canada …”
“Not your ordinary street cop.” I felt a sudden kinship with Alice Folger. My departmental rise began by solving a major crime while still in uniform.
Waltz nodded. “She seemed almost driven to prove herself as a cop. It got her noticed by a few people with clout. They touted Ms Folger to the big brass at One Police Plaza – HQ. Her supporters suggested the brass jump her in rank and send her here to be tested. We’re a big precinct and our homicide teams handle everything from street craze-os to murderous stockbrokers. It’s a plum placement for a detective displaying more tricks than usual.”
Perhaps like you, Shelly, I thought.
“I’m a fellow officer. Why does Folger think I’m useless?”
“Johnny Folger, her late father, was NYPD. All three of Johnny’s brothers were on the force, one died on 9/11. An aunt works in the impound. That’s just this generation. Before that …”
I held up my hand. “I get your point, Shelly. Folger has cop in her DNA.”
“Or overcompensating to create the genes.”
“What?”
He waved it away. “Nothing.
I always found families more custom and tradition than blood, but that’s my take. What it boils down to is that Folger’s a partisan. She sees you as a –, as um …” Waltz fumbled for the word.
“As a rube,” I finished. “Someone to stumble over while the pros handle the heavy lifting.”
Waltz sighed an affirmation. I slid my unfinished salad over to join his sandwich and leaned forward, arms crossed on the table.
“How did I get here, Shelly? You know what I mean. How does a detective push the pause button on a homicide investigation, and get the NYPD to pull me from Mobile to New York in a heartbeat?”
Waltz looked uncomfortable. His fingers traced the rim of his glass. “Five years ago a councilman’s daughter ran off with a cult leader, a psychopath. I tracked him down in Alaska and personally brought her back. She had a successful deprogramming and the whole nasty incident stayed under wraps.”
I pursed my lips, blew silently. “There’s a grateful councilman on your shoulder? No wonder you could call the Chief direct.”
He shrugged. “That and a few other successes have given me a reputation for dealing with cases like your PSIT handles, the psychological stuff. I’m allowed latitude others don’t have. An input role.”
A thought about Shelly’s clout hit me. “Were you one of the supporters responsible for Alice Folger’s jump to the major leagues?”
He waved it away like it was no big deal. “I saw talent, I passed her name upstairs.”
I figured Waltz had seen a bright spark in Alice Folger and decided to drop it into an oxygen-laden environment to see if it would blaze or burn out. Judging by the veiled admiration in his voice, Folger had blazed bright.
I said, “Where do I go from here?”
“I’ve arranged you a hotel room nearby. Check in, get whatever you need and you’ll be reimbursed. You can come in to the department, or I’ll send reports to your hotel. I simply want you to see if you can add anything.”
“That’s all?”
“It’s what the lady wanted, it’s what the lady gets.”
Lady wanted, I thought, not victim wanted. Good for Waltz.
Waltz offered to drive me to the hotel, but needing to clear my head I started walking. I ducked into the continuing mist, my mind swirling into the events that had slammed my life into Dr Evangeline Prowse, with repercussions that would forever echo in my soul. Events I had not, could not, tell Sheldon Waltz.
The Alabama Institute of Aberrational Behavior housed an average of fifty criminally insane men and women. It had become one of the more enlightened such institutions under the stewardship of Dr Prowse, who had made a career-long study of psychopathy and sociopathy. It was claimed no doctoral candidate in abnormal psychology could write more than five pages without citing Vangie.
In one of her cases, a sixteen-year-old boy had murdered an abusive father, disemboweling him with a knife, a slow and hideous death by vivisection. The homicide was so savage that the local police did not suspect the boy, an intelligent and gentle soul, barely questioning him.
Starting two years later, five women were murdered in a grim, violent and symbolic manner. After the third mutilated victim appeared, the FBI gave the case material to Vangie. She studied the bizarre and ceremonial crime scenes, detecting signs of a tormented child. The police finally turned their eyes toward a twenty-six-year-old man whose father had died in the woods years before. He confessed, was ultimately pronounced insane, and Dr Prowse petitioned for him to be brought to the Alabama Institute of Aberrational Behavior.
I was in college at the time of the killer’s capture. Dr Prowse and I had met through that case, and had been bound by it for years.
The father was my father. The killer was my brother, Jeremy.
“Get back here, Jeremy, you little coward …stop that squealing …I’ll give you something to squeal about …”
“Don’t, Daddy, please don’t, Daddy …”
Though my father, Earl Eugene Ridgecliff, functioned as a respected civil engineer, he was diseased with anger. As children, my brother and I lived with the fear that anything – a word, a glance, a misperceived gesture – could explode into horror. My brother, older than me by six years, became the focus of our father’s physical rage, and I still awoke in cold sweats with my brother’s screams razoring through my home.
“Help me, Mama, help me, Mama … Daddy’s trying to kill me …”
I had never used the word murder for my brother’s actions against our father, preferring “attempted salvation”. Had Jeremy been caught and tried he might be free today, a jury figuring anyone suffering such agony had little recourse but to kill his tormentor.
But years of abuse had planted a seed of madness inside my gentle brother. Even as we built our neighboring forts in the oaks, signaling to one another with torn sheets like ship’s flags, fished for catfish in the slow Southern creeks, or lay in the summer grass and stared at clouds, the seed grew into vines that wrapped and strangled his soul.
My mother was a beautiful and emotionally fragile woman twenty years of age when my father, eighteen years her senior, passed through her small country town on an engineering project. Married within two months, my mother expected a storybook life. Instead, she found herself embroiled in a hellish drama so far beyond comprehension her only recourse was retreating to her room to practice her sole skill: the sewing of wedding dresses, white and flowing waves of satin and tulle.
The mutant seed within my brother caused him to believe our mother could have intervened in the nights of terror at the hands of our father. She could have more easily stopped the tides with her fingertips.
“The Alabama State Police today announced a suspect in the bizarre and brutal killings of at least five women …”
So deep was my brother’s belief in our mother’s complicity in his suffering that a few years after killing our father, Jeremy began killing our mother. I speak metaphorically: To actually kill her would have consigned me to a foster home – and he would not have done that – so surrogates fed his unfathomable need. Shamed by my brother’s actions, I changed my name, hid my private history behind veils of obfuscation, and refused to visit him.
It was Vangie – with input from Jeremy – who tracked me down and convinced me to reestablish a relationship with my brother. Jeremy and I had even collaborated – if that’s the word – on several cases where his unique insights helped me understand the crimes. He was so finely calibrated for madness he once boasted he could walk through a mall and point out a half-dozen people “either convinced Martians are reading their minds, or thinking things so dark they’d make Torquemada retch”.
My brother was not only insane himself, he was a Geiger counter for insanity in others.
THREE
The desk staff at the mid-town hotel were expecting my arrival and treated me with deference though I was in sodden clothes and my shoes squeaked footprints across the marble floor. They directed me to a nearby shop where I secured denim jeans, three cotton dress shirts, a white linen sport coat, a pair of upscale walking shoes plus underwear and socks.
Finally in my hotel room, a third-floor double dressed in somber monochrome – black, gray, gray-white – I showered, then snapped on a muted CNN to add color and distraction to my world. I unwrapped my new dress shirts and rinsed them in the sink to remove the creases and factory starch, squeezing them as dry as possible. In the cool and arid air conditioning they’d be set to iron in the morning. I did the same to the tees.
The phone rang, the desk advising me a package had just been delivered. A small Hispanic gentleman brought an envelope to my room, NYPD stamped on top left corner, the information Waltz had promised. As he had noted, it was spare, the investigation barely off the launching pad.
The prelims from the forensic teams in Vangie’s room featured all the No’s: No signs of struggle, No blood or body fluids visible, No seeming thefts, No signs of a search. I noted the mention of a closet with casual-type wear that seemed good for a wee
k’s stay. It appeared she had packed for a normal visit to NYC.
Yet before this particular visit, Vangie Prowse turned on a video camera, noted my experience with serial killers, then proclaimed she’d made a strange decision, and was “doing things that make little sense. But I needed a serious –”
She’d had to hang up before finishing the sentence. Needed a serious what? Doing what things that made little sense? As if that wasn’t cryptic enough, she’d looked into the camera and apologized.
“Carson, I’m so sorry.”
What the hell had Vangie done?
I lay on the bed and studied the ceiling and ran that question in front of my eyes a hundred times until I drifted into a sweaty, twitchy sleep.
A ringing phone at the bedside awakened me. I dropped it, picked it up by the cord and bobbled it to my ear.
“Hmmp?”
Waltz. “We’ve got a dead woman, Detective Ryder. It’s a bad one.”
“Do I know her?” I mumbled from between two worlds.
“Jesus, wake up, Detective. You don’t know her. God, I hope not. I’m on scene and sending you a car. Be out front.”
“Waltz, um, wait. Let me get myself toget—”
The phone clicked dead. The clock said it was 8.10 p.m. I’d slept for two hours. My washed shirts were soggy. All I had was the one I’d worn through the day, reeking of sweat and despair. Holding my breath, I pulled it on and headed outside.
Day was failing fast, oblique light soaking the sky with an amber hue. City noise echoed down the man-made canyons, giving the sounds a reverberant depth. A police cruiser waited on the sidewalk, almost to the hotel steps. I was barely inside before the cruiser roared into traffic. I looked at the driver: Koslowski. He wrinkled his nose at my used clothes, shot me a glance, and rolled his window down.
“Where’s the scene?” I yelled over the siren. The traffic was mainly taxis. Koslowski kept his foot deep in the pedal, expecting cabs to open a path by the time he got there, and somehow they did.
