Final Notice

by Jonathan Valin

I stared at the picture and thought I knew, thought that I'd gotten a glimpse into that strange mind of his. It wasn't the beautiful park he'd cared about, it was the statue—the same one that Twyla had centered on. Only for him it had an entirely different meaning—that statue of two brothers suckled by a mother-wolf. For him, it was symbol of his own blighted family life and a key to what had caused him to go so terribly wrong. He'd left the same drawing in Effie's trailer—the same message. Because he'd had an artist's eye, after all, and the childhood trauma he'd never outgrown was his single theme. I was a little surprised that Jake had left it there for that long gaze of Hack's dead eye to see.

  “Harry?” Al said suddenly. Something about his voice made me shiver and drop the flashlight beam to the floor. I turned around and saw him kneeling again beside Hack. “When did you go out to that trailer park?” he said. “When was Effie Reaves killed?”

  For a minute I couldn't think of it. So thoroughly had I tried to block that memory out of my mind. “Thursday. Thursday afternoon.”

  “We got a problem then,” Al said in that unsettling tone of voice.

  “What problem?”

  He got to his feet and pulled a cigarette from his coat. His right hand was trembling a bit and that worried me more than the tremor in his voice. Something had shaken him up and he was not a man who was easily shaken. “Now I don't want to sound like George DeVries, but there is something fishy about this.” He pointed to Hack's body. “I'm no forensic specialist, but I've seen my share of corpses. And, Harry, this one's been dead for a couple of days.”

  At first, it didn't sink in. “So, he's been dead for a couple of days, so what?”

  “Yeah, but this is just Saturday morning,” he said and glanced at his watch. “Two A.M., Saturday morning. And Effie was killed on Thursday afternoon around one.”

  I felt a thrill of terror run up my spine. “What are you saying, Al?”

  “Well, Harry,” he said almost bashfully. “I think all this time we might have been looking for the wrong man.”

  ******

  The S.W.A.T. team arrived at two-fifteen. They had a coroner in tow. The doctor—a silver-haired man with a cast in his right eye and the rumpled, ornery look of a country physician—spent about fifteen minutes examining Hack, then joined us out on the porch where we'd gathered to wait.

  “I can't be sure of the exact time of death,” he said casually. “Or of the cause. But he sure couldn't have murdered anyone on Thursday afternoon. Even if he wasn't dead, he wouldn't have had the strength to raise his arm.”

  “Jesus,” I said out loud.

  And then my mind went to work with a kind of blazing speed, running through alternatives, checking each one out; even though a part of me knew, without thinking, that there was only one real alternative that made sense of all I knew. There were those two boys on Ringold's list, Harry. The ones you never got around to checking. Only what did they have to do with Effie Reaves? And the answer was nothing. Well, there was Norris Reaves, then. Maybe he'd killed his sister over the speed, a business deal that had gone as bad as it could get. Only why would he cut her up that way—the way Twyla Belton and the library books had been cut up? He didn't know about the Belton girl or the books. So it couldn't have been Norris. And that left just the one. The one I didn't want to think about.

  “Twyla Belton was killed two years ago,” I said, putting it together once and for all.

  Foster said, “Right.”

  “And when did Hack start living with Effie?”

  He said it solemnly, as if he were fighting the same battle that I was. “Two years ago.”

  “And those damn books,” I said. “Say he started tearing them up again a couple of months ago.”

  “Just about the time when Hack was really going to hell,” Al said. “Really falling apart.”

  “Then Hack dies. Maybe in his arms. And he loses control. And instead of striking out randomly as he'd done two years before with Twyla, he kills the Reaves woman in a savage act of revenge.”

  “What the hell are you saying?” George DeVries said.

  I walked into the house and upstairs to the back room. There was something I wanted to check out. Something crucial. As I stepped through the door, I heard Foster say it for me.

  “We've been looking for the wrong brother, George. It was Jake doing the killing all along.”

  “Jake!” I heard him say. “That just isn't possible. What about that drawing? What about the tattoo? Twyla didn't implicate Jake.”

  Only she had, I thought, as I made my way up the dark stairs to the back of the house. Because he had been there, too. In the picture she'd drawn on that summery afternoon, two years before, in the Hyde Park Library. He had been there in the white background beyond his brother's tattooed arm. In the part of the page that was like an undeveloped print. Jake had been there, too. Jake was always there. Tag-along Jake. His big brother's shadow. He might even have watched her as she drew, seething inside because his brother had betrayed him by running away with a woman like his own despised mother. Then tearing up the books in the john, where Leo Sachs had seen him. Tearing them up, as if he were cutting up Hack himself—that paragon of talent and physical perfection. Tearing up, at one and the same time, the symbols of his brother and of the sexuality that he thought was destroying him. Jake, the good brother, the good son.

  I walked into the room and stared again at Hack's dead eyes. But this time I tried to see the room from Jake's peculiar angle of vision. To see what he'd left behind him to guide his pursuers. Because death itself was Jake's medium and this was a scene he had composed as carefully as he'd composed the one in Effie Reaves's trailer.

  I looked into Hack's eyes and back at the wall at which he was staring. And I knew. “He's going to kill again,” I said out loud.

  Foster, who was standing in the doorway, said, “Maybe not. Maybe this is the end of it.”

  “Look for yourself, damn it!” I pointed to Hack's body and to the picture on the wall. “This has all been arranged, Al. Just like the crap in Effie's bedroom. He's got his brother staring at that damn statue again. It was just a yearbook picture of Hack in the trailer. But it's the same message—Haskell, the Overlook statue, and death. He's going to kill again tonight. We've got to get to a phone.”

  And then he understood, too. “Kate,” he said and the cigarette fell right out of his mouth.

  She was back at the Lord house at that very moment. Maybe searching his room.

  25

  I WOULDN’T want to repeat that drive back to Hyde Park—racing through the dark and the rain to find...God only knew what when we arrived. There isn't much that you can't picture in your mind's eye. Your own death. The death of a lover. But the image of Kate Davis torn to pieces the way Effie Reaves had been torn apart...that was something I didn't dare conjure up. That was something that the saner part of me just wouldn't let me imagine. So I didn't think at all. Just listened to the tires singing through the rain and watched the rain-swept countryside whirl past us in a blur, until the trees and hillsides died away and we were coasting past storefronts and car lots and, finally, past the sedate rows of yellow brick apartment houses and graceful colonials that marked the fringes of Hyde Park.

  Al had radioed ahead, so there were cops all over Stettinius when we pulled up to the Lord house at about three-thirty. Blue lights were flashing from one end of the street to the other—like some seasonless celebration.

  I didn't wait for Al to park. Just leaped out the side door as he pulled to the curb and ran through the rain up to the open door of the Lord home. A cop tried to block my way—a husky kid in a rain cap and slicker with his night stick dangling at his side. I shoved him aside so hard that he went down in the mud, then stepped over him and through the door. The mother was sitting on the stairs with her head in her hands and a weak look of pity on her face. When she saw me, she smiled grotesquely.

  “They don't understand, Mr. Stoner,” she said as if she'd been lost for hours and fi
nally chanced upon someone who spoke her own language. “They've got it all confused. Jacob is a good boy, you know that. You tell them. Maybe, they'll believe you.” She threw her hands up as if to say she'd tried herself, but they just wouldn't listen.

  I walked up to her and wrenched her off the stairs. I must have been burning more adrenaline than I thought, because I actually picked her up off the ground, like a big straw doll. Her eyes got very large and she let out a yelp of terror.

  “You're the one who doesn't understand!” I said through my teeth and shook her a little in rage.

  I sat her back down on the stairs. Hard. She wrapped her arms around her breasts and held herself tightly. She was scared. I wanted her to be. I wanted something to get through that thick hide of hers.

  “Your son Haskell is dead.”

  She nodded. “Dead.”

  “I know you don't care about that,” I said almost hysterically. And for a second I wanted to club her so that she'd feel something outside of her own selfish circuit of emotions. But I held back. She was a lost cause anyway. And Kate still had to be found. So I played it the only way I knew would work. Her way.

  I looked her in the eye and said, “If you don't want to see Jake dead, too, you'll tell me exactly what I want to know.”

  She nodded again.

  “Because he's in great trouble.”

  She shook her head. “Not Jake.”

  “Yes, Jake!” I shouted at her.

  She flinched. “He's not here. He left the house around midnight. Then he came back and went upstairs. When he found out what that friend of yours had done, he became very upset and left again.”

  “What do you mean? What did Kate do?”

  “She took some of Jacob's pictures,” Mrs. Lord said loftily. “I told her not to tamper with my boy's things. But she wouldn't listen. I wouldn't blame Jacob a bit for being upset with her.”

  “You wouldn't, huh?” I said and had to restrain myself from slapping her. “Did Kate say where she was going?”

  Mrs. Lord blushed. “Why, to your apartment, Mr. Stoner. She was upstairs for quite a long time, looking through the boys' rooms. Then she came back down with two sketches and said she was going to your apartment. She seemed very excited. Frankly, I didn't understand her at all.”

  “When?” I said. “When did she leave?”

  “At least an hour ago,” the Lord woman said.

  “And Jacob? When did he leave?”

  “Around two-thirty, I think. Then all these people arrived...”

  I whirled around on the stairs and ran back out the door. Al Foster was talking to a plainclothesman on the walk.

  “She's at my place, Al,” I shouted to him.

  He nodded and said, “Let's go!”

  ******

  It took us ten minutes more to get to the Delores—ten more minutes through the dark, slick streets of Hyde Park and east Walnut Hills. I didn't know what Kate had taken away with her when she left the Lord home—what it was that had made her so excited. All I knew was that Jacob hadn't liked it and that was enough to scare the hell out of me. When we hit Burnet Avenue at Melish, I turned on the car seat and tried to explain to the other men, as calmly as I could, what Mrs. Lord had told me. Then I gave them the lay-out of my apartment building, in case Jacob was waiting there.

  “I live on the fourth floor of the Delores, toward the rear. Apartment E,” I said. “There are two ways into the building. Through the lobby door and up the stairs or through the rear door at the head of the parking lot. Al and I will go in the front. George, you and Cal guard the back.”

  One of them said, “Fine.”

  I turned back to the dash and stared miserably at the raindrops beading up on the windshield. “If that crazy bastard has...” But I still couldn't think about it.

  “It's going to be O.K., Harry,” George DeVries said stoutly.

  I kept repeating that—“It's going to be O.K. It's going to be O.K.”—as we raced the last mile and a half down Burnet to the Delores lot. When Al pulled over to the curb and stopped the engine, I turned back to DeVries and said, “Give me the shotgun.”

  He passed the short-barreled Winchester over the car seat, stock-end first. I opened the door, stepped out into the lot—the shotgun in my right hand—and gazed through the thin white mist of rain at the two rows of cars parked on the asphalt. The Pinto was there, all right, about halfway up the second row.

  “At least she got this far safely,” I said to Al.

  He nodded. “Do you need a key to get in the lobby door?”

  I shook my head. “But the rear one's locked.” I pulled my house keys out of my pants pocket and tossed them over to Cal Levy. “It's the blue one, Cal. And the door's right over there.” I pointed to a metal door set in the rear of the building, between two rosebushes. “Give us a minute to get around to the front, then come on up.”

  Al and I walked quickly to the top of the lot, then up the four concrete steps, past the dogwoods, to the cement walkway that led to the lobby. I glanced up at my front window, but there was no light on inside. And that worried me. I pulled back the pump on the shotgun, flipped off the safety, and started to run. Once I got through the door, I bounded up the stairs two at a time, swinging around the banisters with one hand and clutching the shotgun with my other. By the time I got to the fourth floor landing, my thighs and lungs felt as if they were on fire.

  I didn't wait for Al to catch up with me. Just marched straight down to my apartment and put my hand to the doorknob. The door opened effortlessly—it wasn't locked. I threw the shotgun to my shoulder and pointed the barrel into the room. Foster had made it upstairs by then. He was leaning against the sash, his Police Special in his hand. I edged through the doorway into the darkness and whispered, “Kate?”

  There wasn't a sound.

  “I'm going to turn on a light, Al,” I said.

  I reached for the wall switch and flipped it on. For a second I had the eerie feeling I was in the wrong apartment. The lamp that usually stood by the couch was lying on the floor in front of the coffee table. In the dim, uneven light I could see the Zenith Globemaster sitting on its side like an unpacked box. Papers were scattered on the rug. And the baize armchair had been overturned and slashed open. White cotton stuffing dripped from the ripped cushion.

  “Jesus,” I whispered.

  Then I started shouting—her name. Tearing through the apartment. Opening doors. Rifling closets. And shouting her name. But she wasn't there. At least, she wasn't there anymore.

  “My God,” I said helplessly to Foster. “He's got her!”

  Al didn't say anything. I sat down on the couch and held my head in my hands. “Kate.”

  Levy and DeVries filed through the door and when they saw me sitting there, they looked away.

  “What the hell could she have taken that would have made him come after her like this?” Foster said furiously. “What the hell was in those pictures?”

  I stared at the papers scattered on the floor, but I couldn't make my voice work. My throat was too full of grief.

  “If those pictures were what he was after,” DeVries said, “why didn't he just take the damn things and...I mean he didn't do anything to the girl. At least, not in here.”

  He was right. There wasn't any blood on the floor. Or any of the gruesome remains that the Ripper usually left behind him. In fact, once I'd made myself calm down, I realized that the room didn't look right at all—not, that is, if it had been the scene of a struggle. Nothing was broken. Not even the lamp that was lying in front of the coffee table. And Kate knew enough karate to have put up a fight that would have left half the room in shambles and awakened every tenant on the fourth floor. Jake had been in the apartment, all right. The slashed cushion told me that. But I began to think that Kate hadn't been there with him, that he must have tricked her into going back down to the lot or to the lobby, sapped her, then taken her keys and come up to the apartment on his own. But why would he have done that if, as Geor
ge had said, the two drawings were all he'd been after? Perhaps he thought she'd hidden the pictures somewhere in the apartment. Only there wasn't any sign of a search. Just the pile of papers, the overturned lamp and radio, and the slashed-up chair.

  There could only be one explanation for the look of the room, and the fact that I wanted to believe it—that I had to believe it, in order to keep from falling apart again—didn't make it any less reasonable. For some reason Jake Lord wanted me to know that he'd been in my apartment; he wanted me to know that he had taken Kate. Just as he'd wanted me to know that he was planning to kill again. Like the drawing he'd left in the farmhouse, the artful way he'd disarranged the room was meant to be another clue—something between a taunt and a cry for help, as if he were saying “this is what I'll do, if you don't stop me.” I thought again of what Benson Howell had said about the games psychopaths played and knew that Jacob Lord was coming to the end of the match. He was declaring himself openly, serving his version of a final notice, challenging me to find him before he fulfilled his own prophecy and killed a third time.

  But if it was a kind of game to him—a contest between pursuer and pursued—and if, as Howell had claimed, he actually wanted to be caught, then there had to be something else in that room that he'd left behind to guide me. If it was a game, he was waiting somewhere with Kate, waiting and watching to see if the hunter was shrewd enough for the prey. If I wasn't shrewd enough, if I didn't read his signals right...Kate would be dead. She could be dead at that moment, but I refused to believe it. I refused to believe that Jake would have gone to such trouble to abduct her, when, as DeVries had said, he could have killed her on the spot.

  I stared at the papers scattered on the floor. Outside of the lamp, the radio, and the chair, they were the only anomalies in the room, Blank sheets of typing paper, mostly. A few bills that he could have pulled out of the rolltop desk. And something else. I got up from the couch and walked over to where they were lying on top of the pile. Two oversized sheets of drawing paper, torn from a sketch pad.