by Jacob Stone
“I see.” Bogle hummed softly as he mulled this over. “He’s getting sloppy. Any surveillance cameras in the area?”
“None in the garage. The Santa Monica police are trying to pull whatever surveillance video they can.”
“So you might have him already?”
“We might.”
“It certainly sounds like things are breaking. Or at least they’re about to.”
“It does.”
“Should we be getting on the first plane back to LA?”
“No. I still want you three to dig into this from the New York end. I got a name for you. Glen Blakeman. I’m not sure how serious he is, but find out what you can. Supposedly he was a stockbroker in 2008. Something happened five years ago to SCK. Maybe he got arrested, maybe he got into an accident, maybe he got sick. See if you can figure out which. Look for anything unusual happening before SCK’s New York disappearance.”
“Piece of cake,” Bogle said. “New York has what, eight and a half million people? With two top investigators plus Polk looking into this, we should have this wrapped up by noon tomorrow. Or in five years.”
“Try for noon.”
“Will do.”
Morris got off the call as Stonehedge returned carrying a large take-out bag. The actor brought back not only fish tacos, but sides of grilled squid in an olive and garlic sauce, roasted cauliflower, creamed brussels sprouts with pancetta, and a square pasta dish that Stonehedge said was a sunchoke and chestnut agnolotti in a brown butter and sage sauce. Morris skipped the squid but tried the other sides, and had to admit the fish tacos and the rest of the food was very tasty.
“Not a bad perk for having me tag along,” Stonehedge said with a thin smile.
“Almost makes it worthwhile,” Morris said, his expression inscrutable. He showed the actor the two timelines he’d been working on. “I’m trying to see where they intersect so I can figure out where Hawes ran into Susan Twilitter recently,” he said in between bites of fish taco.
“You don’t have much on Twilitter’s timeline,” Stonehedge observed.
“Unfortunately, she wasn’t nearly as active on social media as her friend was. But she had a seven-hour gap yesterday where she didn’t make any phone calls, and I’m guessing that’s when she was with SCK. Hawes was in Santa Monica yesterday having lunch at Stephanie’s Café.”
“Twilitter lived and worked in Santa Monica.”
“Yeah. I’m betting she met up with SCK somewhere near Stephanie’s Café, and that’s where Gail Hawes had the misfortune of seeing them.”
The thought of this excited the actor. He asked, “What do we do now? Head down to this café and show a picture of Twilitter?”
“We’ll wait until tomorrow afternoon when there’s a better chance the same waitstaff is on duty. For now, we’ll see if any surveillance video is found or whether the hotline brings in any plausible leads.”
After the day’s press conference, the hotline was busy for two hours generating forty-seven calls. Forty-three of them could be eliminated after a few minutes of talking, which left Morris with four calls he needed to follow-up on. These, however, seemed a low probability, at best, of leading anywhere, and Morris had decided to wait until tomorrow morning to handle them. The last hour a small trickle of calls came in, but these were from shut-ins looking for someone to talk to, or flat-out nuts.
A call came in from Walsh. Glen Blakeman was picked up in San Diego. “The detective I talked to told me he was acting squirrelly,” Walsh said. “I know it’s late, but if he’s SCK I want to know it tonight.”
It was late. Morris squinted at his watch, and saw it was already past ten. San Diego was more than a two-hour drive, which meant the earliest he’d be home would be three in the morning.
“I’m heading there now also,” he told Walsh.
Stonehedge raised an eyebrow at Morris. “Where are we heading?”
“San Diego.”
Stonehedge showed an amused smile. “Another perk of having me along,” he said. “I’ll chauffeur you in my BMW i8. At this time of night, I’ll have us there in an hour and a half. Guaranteed.”
* * *
Stonehedge kept his word. While the roadster never felt like it was going over sixty, Morris at times glanced over at the speedometer and saw that it was registering over two hundred kilometers per hour, which a quick conversion showed the car was speeding along at over a hundred and twenty miles per hour. He didn’t complain, and they pulled into the San Diego precinct where Blakeman was being held an hour and twenty-eight minutes after they’d left.
Morris called Walsh and told her that he and Stonehedge had just arrived. Walsh seemed surprised to hear that. “Did that actor fly you down in a private jet or something?”
“Or something,” Morris acknowledged.
“I’m still a half hour outside of San Diego. No reason for you to wait. You can fill me in when I get there.”
“Okay.”
The San Diego detective who had picked Blakeman up sat in with them as they joined Blakeman in the interrogation room where he was being held. Blakeman was a large, blubbery man whose eyes had a nervous twitch that left him blinking far too much as he sat staring at Morris and Stonehedge. He was also sweating badly enough that his shirt was drenched.
“I want a lawyer,” he told Morris.
“You haven’t been arrested yet,” Morris said. “You’re being held for twenty-four hours for questioning. If we can clear this up, you’ll be released.”
“I don’t care. I want a lawyer.”
“If you insist on that, you’ll be booked and arraigned on charges for three first-degree murders, all strong candidates for the death penalty given the heinousness and exceptional depravity of the crimes. Bail will be denied, and the news will be reporting that you’ve been arrested as SCK.”
Blakeman looked at Morris dumbly.
“The Skull Cracker Killer.”
It took several seconds for Blakeman to react to that, and when he did it was as if he’d been punched in the face, and his blinking became so rapid that it looked like he was blinking out a Morse code message.
“That’s who killed Freeman?” he asked.
“Him and two women today.”
“What?” This news surprised him enough to momentarily slow his blinking. “The same guy also killed two women? That’s not me. I swear it.”
“Why’d you come to San Diego?”
Blakeman grimaced as if he were suffering from an awful toothache, and then his large round face melted into a look of utter hopelessness, and his blinking came to a stop.
“I panicked,” he said, shrugging helplessly. “When I saw the news about Freeman being killed in one of my listed properties, I knew the police would be sure I’d done it, especially after I’d been shooting my mouth off to everyone in the office that I was going to bash Freeman’s head in. I had no alibi yesterday, and so I came down here.”
“When was that?”
“Last night.”
“What were you doing yesterday?”
Another weak shrug. “I didn’t have any showings scheduled. I spent the day smoking weed and watching videos.”
“Porn,” Stonehedge suggested.
Blakeman’s expression was both embarrassed and sickly. “Why’d you come to San Diego?” Morris asked.
“Maybe the weed got me paranoid, but when I saw the news about Freeman, all I could think about was escaping to Mexico.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Yet another half-hearted shrug. “Partly because I couldn’t work up the nerve, and partly that I was hoping that the real killer would be arrested for Freeman’s murder.”
“What time did you get to San Diego yesterday?”
“I checked into my hotel around eleven.”
“And you’ve been in San Diego the whole time?”
“Yep.”
“Can you prove that you didn’t drive back to LA today?”
Blakeman shook his head glumly.<
br />
“Where were you at twelve thirty today?”
That perked Blakeman up. “That was when one of those women was killed?” Tears of relief flooded his eyes as a smile broke over his face. “I had room service bring up lunch around one o’clock. Jesus. That should prove I’m innocent, right?”
At that moment, Walsh walked into the room. From the groan she let out, she must’ve sensed from everybody’s expressions that she’d just spent two hours on the highway for nothing.
“If we can verify it, yeah,” Morris said.
It took twenty minutes to verify it. On the drive back to Los Angeles, Stonehedge offered, “You win some, you lose some.”
“All part of the job,” Morris said. “You keep crossing off leads until you get one that sticks. My gut is telling me we’ll be getting one soon that sticks.”
Chapter Thirty
Portland, Oregon, 2012–2015
“What a first year we’ve had together, huh?”
Henry waited for his wife to respond, but as usual, since she got injured, she sat mutely in her wheelchair staring blankly at nothing in particular, her mouth twisted into a pinched, angry circle. Henry sighed. Eventually she’d accept what had happened to her and be grateful for this opportunity to start fresh. And they were starting fresh. A year ago they had met in a dive bar in Bushwick (even though the place had great wings) and now they were one month short of their first year anniversary and sitting together in the backyard of their custom-built house in Portland, Oregon. Henry had even planted a garden. If things went well they’d be eating their own freshly grown tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, and strawberries later this summer.
It really had been a crazy, wild year, especially the last eight months. With the time that had passed, that bizarro night when Sheila got hurt seemed more like a bad dream than anything that really happened, especially now that they’d moved to the other side of the country. The months that followed that night, though, were difficult ones, as Henry was wracked with worry over his wife’s health and whether the police would discover that Sheila had been the Skull Cracker Killer. Oddly, he never worried that he’d been seen entering that man’s house or that the police would arrest him for killing that man and cutting off his head. He had somehow deleted that part of it from his own mind and had convinced himself that all he’d done that night was protect his wife from a man who had grievously injured her. The fact the man had hurt Sheila only during a desperate attempt to save his own life never occurred to Henry.
No question that Sheila had been grievously injured that night. The doctors told them the paralysis was permanent. The internal damage, especially to her heart, was worse than what the doctors had first feared. But they had also told them Sheila could still have a reasonably good quality of life. With dedicated physical therapy, she could strengthen her left side, and if she could control her stress and eat well there was no reason she couldn’t live into her seventies.
So all of that was a relief for Henry. But there was still the fear that the police would somehow connect Sheila to the dead man in Queens. After all, Sheila had picked him up in that bar. But it turned out she’d been careful not to be seen with him, just as she had been with Henry at the bar in Bushwick. If the police were ever suspicious that there was a connection between the man’s death and Sheila’s injuries, they never talked to her about it. Instead, they seemed to fully believe that she had been assaulted on a sidewalk blocks from Central Park West where Henry had left her.
The media had a field day with Sheila’s supposed assault, plastering her picture on TV and in the newspapers every day for a week, which scared the bejesus out of Henry. He was sure someone from the Queens bar would recognize her and come forward, but it didn’t happen. Instead, there was an outpouring of public outrage over the city not having fixed the broken streetlight that Henry had left Sheila under since there had been another assault at the same location a month earlier. When a lawyer approached them about suing the city, Henry wanted no part of it. First, the idea of it seemed ridiculous, second, he just wanted Sheila to get healthy enough so they could pack up and leave New York before the police wised up, and third, he had discovered after that night that Sheila was far wealthier than he could’ve imagined. They didn’t need the money, and they didn’t need the risk of staying in New York a day longer than they had to, but Sheila wanted to sue and he was afraid it might look funny to the lawyer if he tried arguing against it. He could barely believe it when the lawyer was able to arrange a three-point-four-million-dollar settlement with the city (after his fees) less than two months later.
* * *
Henry let out a grunt and, with some effort, maneuvered his bulk off the lounge chair, stretched, and worked a kink from his back. He gave Sheila a quick look and noted her angry, sullen expression, and how twisted and thin her body looked. She must’ve dropped twenty-five pounds since the accident, and probably weighed at most a hundred and twenty. That was too light for her. Now that they were in Portland, things would change. They were only half a mile from downtown. He’d roll her to different healthy restaurants each day. They were going to become part of the community and make friends and enjoy their life here. New York would become nothing more than a faint memory. Only a whisper that they would ignore. Given enough time, they’d both believe those murders never happened—both the man Henry had killed and the ones Sheila did. This was going to be the start of a new day.
Henry squinted and shielded his eyes as he glanced up at the sun.
Yes, sir, the start of a new day.
* * *
Henry had been gone no more than an hour, and he blinked several times not quite believing his eyes when he saw that Sheila was smiling at him. Well, half smiling since the right part of her mouth stayed weighted down and only the left side was curled upward. This was only the second time since her injuries that he had seen her smile; the first time being after their lawyer told them what the city was offering for a settlement. Henry was about to comment about how he knew that the kitten he had bought his wife two weeks earlier would cheer her up when he saw the animal’s small, fluffy body lying on the floor next to Sheila’s wheelchair. Given how the animal’s body was positioned and the way his little tongue lolled out of his mouth there was no question that the kitten was dead.
Henry grimly noted to himself how he’d been right about the kitten cheering up his wife, just that he’d been completely wrong about how the poor thing would do so.
“I see your left hand must be getting stronger,” he said.
The left side of Sheila’s lips twisted upward a tiny sliver more. She was obviously pleased with herself, but otherwise didn’t bother to respond.
Henry picked up the dead kitten and brought it outside to their backyard. He left the kitten’s body in the dead patch of weeds where he had tried planting tomatoes the first year they were there and retrieved a shovel from the shed. For two years he had tried growing vegetables with miserable results before finally accepting that instead of a green thumb, he was the kiss of death for plants. Worse than cyanide. He dug a hole for the kitten and buried the poor little thing.
Things hadn’t worked out in Portland as he had hoped. He enjoyed the downtown area when he was able to go there, and he had little trouble shooting the breeze with strangers and making casual friendships, but his wife had been resistant from day one. After six months of seeing her mood only deteriorate, he tried to get her to see a psychiatrist, but she flatly refused. He tried talking sense into her, explaining that her depression was worsening but that it didn’t have to be that way.
“If you send me to see someone, I’ll tell him,” she finally said in that painfully drawn-out manner that she had, as if it exhausted her to push out each individual word.
Henry felt the short hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “What would you say?” he half-heard himself ask her, knowing full well what she would say.
“About all of them I killed. About being the Skull Cracker Killer.”
&n
bsp; “He wouldn’t believe you. Or she wouldn’t believe you since the psychiatrist I made you an appointment with is a woman.”
“She’ll believe me. I’ll tell her things to make her believe me.”
“It wouldn’t matter,” Henry said. “Doctor-client privilege. She wouldn’t be able to tell anyone since you’re no longer a threat.”
“I’ll tell her about you. How you cut off Black’s head after catching the two of us alone. That you injured me and left me on that sidewalk. She’ll believe me, and there will be no doctor-client privilege to stop her from calling the police on you.”
Tim Black was the man Sheila had picked up in Queens that night and tried to make one of her Skull Cracker victims, except that she didn’t inject enough succinylcholine into him to fully paralyze him right away and he was able to fight back when she started to break apart his skull. Henry tried to decide whether she was bluffing or if she’d really tell a psychiatrist that lie. Or really half-lie. He wasn’t sure, but he ended up cancelling the appointment, and he didn’t bring up therapy or psychiatrists again, and over the next year and a half Sheila’s mood darkened further. It was almost as if her mood had grown as twisted as her body had become.
It was three months after the kitten incident that Henry caught his wife looking at him in a way that caught him off guard. There was no dark anger or bitter resentment pinching her mouth. Instead she looked more the way she did before her injuries. There was almost a serenity to her features. Almost as if she were looking at him with the same kind of fondness he used to catch glimpses of during their early days together.
“Why?” she asked.
This confused Henry as he didn’t know what she was asking. “Why what?”
“Why haven’t you killed me yet?”
That shocked him. “Why in the world would I do that?” he asked incredulously. “You’re my wife!”
