by Ed Gaffney
“That never stopped you before,” Ayers chimed in.
“—But anyone can see that there was a dramatic change in the killer’s behavior pattern after Diary of a Serial Killer was released,” Crane continued.
“Do you not realize that the journal entries found on Alan Lombardo’s computer speak to that issue specifically? This was widely publicized at the trial. Are you mentally impaired, or do the facts of the matter have no bearing on the offal that spews forth from your hollow skull like some putrid geyser? Thanks to your despicable opus and the rampant, irresponsible speculation about me that followed,” Ayers continued, “after the fifth murder, the killer decided to center his killings in Indian Oaks, to further implicate me. And in so doing, he destroyed my reputation, and very nearly destroyed my career. Are you now saying that you don’t believe this to be the truth?”
Crane just shook his head and kept smiling. “And even if I am wrong about that,” he replied, “I fully believe that the same characteristics I identified in Diary of a Serial Killer will apply to the killer of these two new victims.”
“If I’m not mistaken,” Terry said, staring at the screen, “Surfer Dude just accused Malcolm Ayers of being a serial killer. Again.”
And then Ayers responded quietly. “The poisoned ravings of your foul mind, no matter how absurd, can do considerable damage, if broadcast widely,” he told Russell Crane. “I implore you to keep your odious and defective opinions to yourself, sir. Let the police do their job. Let them catch this monster who has seen fit to attack us. Stay in Marblehead, or California, or wherever it is that you skulk, and keep to your own tawdry pursuits.”
“And that was not exactly a ringing denial,” Terry concluded.
THIRTEEN
Dear Vera,
Well. It’s been about two weeks, and I’m sure you’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to.
The answer is that I’ve been working on something that I very much hope you like.
But I’ll get to that and some other exciting things in a minute.
First, an apology.
The other day, I reread that letter I sent to you about Iris Dubinski, and I have to admit that was not very nice of me. First of all, I spent the entire letter gloating, which is not only undignified—it’s downright rude.
And second, I sent the letter to you after I killed the woman. What kind of friend would do something like that? You’re a police detective, not a medical examiner. You want to save people, not recover dead bodies. If I had been paying attention to your feelings, I would have sent a letter in advance of the killing, to give you a chance to stop it.
So I apologize. No more gloating. No more letters after the fact.
Here’s a diary entry from a couple of days ago that I hope will make up for my insensitivity:
September 7. I finally found my next participant.
He’s a little older than my other participants, which is very good news. I like variety. It keeps the blood flowing. So to speak.
I suppose what I like best about someone new is imagining what it’s going to be like. For example, what will it sound like when I take the old man’s finger? Will the sound be so unusual that I will want to take two? Will his bones be so brittle that the falanges will crackle, like dry sticks, when I use my pruning shears?
He must be an independent person, since he’s still living alone at his age. But will he fight back? Or will he just succumb to his inevitible demise?
And what if, just as we get started, he has a heart attack, and dies before we get anywhere? What am I going to do with a body that I did not kill? I’m not exactly a mortitian.
The possibilities are infinite. But one thing is certain.
For my participant, it will be a very important and dramatic evening.
Hello Vera. I’m back.
I know, I know, mispellings. What a crude way to tell you who the next victim will be. I might as well have used onomatopeia. But I thought I would start off with some relatively easy clues, since I feel that I owe you something for being so uncaring in my letter to you about Ms. Dubinski.
Good luck saving the old man’s life, but act quickly. It will be all over tonight.
Eternally Yours
September 10
Five minutes ago, when Detective Vera Demopolous first walked through the door of the law office with the latest letter from the serial killer in her hand, she started breaking rules.
Well that was too bad. Because she was running out of time. And like Grandma used to say, in an emergency, rules start to seem more like suggestions.
It was about seven o’clock. Depending on what the killer meant by “It will be all over tonight,” Vera might be too late.
The state police lab was frantically running tests on the original of the letter, and Ellis was working with their database, trying to crack whatever code the killer had used, doing anything he could to generate a name or a set of names of people to warn, or possibly to protect.
But Vera couldn’t shake the feeling that there was a connection between this serial killer case and the one solved twenty years ago which might reveal the letter’s hidden message. She’d called everyone she could think of, even Willy Grasso down in Florida, but so far, she’d come up empty.
As a last-ditch effort, she called attorneys Terry Tallach and Zack Wilson, the two people who now probably knew the most about the original Springfield Shooter case. They agreed to let Vera look through some of the old Alan Lombardo files, in hopes that it might trigger something.
Terry had actually said that he’d been intending to call her for the same reason. Interesting.
Anyway, she and Zack were now standing next to each other at a table, reading the photocopy of the letter that Vera had brought with her.
Terry was pacing the office like he hadn’t been fed in about two weeks. Then he stopped. “Are you telling me that this psycho is sending you letters to your home address?” His voice was pretty loud.
“I’m having my mail forwarded to the station house,” Vera replied, turning back to the killer’s message. “Which is why we got this letter as early as we did. If I’d opened it after I got home from work today, we might not have even seen it before the murder.”
Zack had pulled a pad in front of him, and was jotting down some letters. “Let’s see. The f in phalanges is wrong. So is the i in inevitable, and the t in mortician.” He looked at the pad. “F-i-t.”
“Yeah,” Terry said. “That sounds like what I’m just about to have.” He went back to pacing.
Vera turned away from the letter and now began to sift through the documents in the file box that Zack and Terry had made available to her. “We’ve already run those letters back at the house,” she said. “We tried all of the combinations, but if those three letters spell the last name of the victim, we’re in trouble. There’s no old man living alone in Springfield whose last name is spelled with only the three letters f-i-t, in any order. And if they’re initials, we don’t have a chance to get through all of the possibilities in time.” She pulled out the computer journal entries from the Springfield Shooter trial. “Are you sure there wasn’t anything like this in the Lombardo case?”
Zack shook his head. “There were lots of diary entries, and six notes at the crime scenes left to Detective Grasso. But the killer never gave hints about who he was going to kill. At least not as far as I’ve seen.” He turned to Terry. “Hey, Elvis. You see anything in the Lombardo file like this letter?”
By now, Terry had joined them at the table, looked at the pad for a second, and then moved off again, for another lap of the office. “No. And can we get back to the part where the serial killer knows where Vera lives? Is it just me, or is that kind of, oh, I don’t know, un-fucking-settling?”
The file Vera was looking through contained all of the diary entries she had seen in the police reports, with a bunch of notes written in the margins, as well as all of the trial transcripts, court filings, other evidence, legal research, and folder after folder of o
ther paperwork that she couldn’t even begin to pay any real attention to. “I’ve got to get back to the station,” she said, pushing the file box away. “I can’t go through all of this in the time we’ve got.”
But suddenly Zack said, “Hold on just a minute.” He went to a bookshelf, grabbed a dictionary, and began flipping through it.
Terry continued, from the other side of the room. “I guess what I’m saying is that if a serial killer started sending letters to me at home, I’d never stop vomiting.”
The big man’s words did not match up with Vera’s experience. A year ago, she had barely survived a kidnapping, and Terry happened to be on hand when she was rescued. He was much braver than he pretended to be.
“The killer misspelled ‘misspelling,’” Zack interrupted. “He left out an s.”
Terry was next to them at the table immediately. “So that means you should add an s to the list, right? F-i-t-s. Maybe there’s somebody with that for a last name.”
Something about that didn’t add up for Vera. “Weren’t we making a list of the letters that the killer used incorrectly?” She took the pad and reread the list. “If he left a letter out of a word, technically, he didn’t use any letter in that word incorrectly. Maybe the list should be of letters that were left out of the words.”
Zack grabbed the pad. “Like ph, instead of f, for phalanges.”
Vera consulted the list. “C for mortician, and s for misspelling.”
“And a, for inevitable,” Terry added. “And by the way, what the hell is ‘onomatopeia’?”
Zack started turning the pages of the dictionary. “It’s when the word sounds like—” He paused, reading the dictionary, and then the letter again. “Holy shit.”
“All right. I know it doesn’t mean that.”
“No, onomatopoeia is misspelled, too. He left out an o.”
“So what does that leave us with?” Vera asked.
Zack read the list of letters off the pad. “P-h-o-a-c-s. Does that mean anything to you? What about combinations?”
At that, Zack began to write the letters in different order. Saphoc. Pachos. Coshap. Achops.
He kept going, but Vera kept looking at Achops.
Ac Hops.
A. C. Hops.
“Stop right there!” Vera exclaimed, pulling out her cell phone. “The victim’s name could be Hops. A. C. Hops. Or C. A. Hops, I guess. Whatever. I’ve got to call Ellis and get someone started on calling—”
“But there’s lots of other possibilities,” Terry said. “How do we know—”
Vera interrupted him, waiting for Ellis to pick up. “We don’t. But at least we can be doing something…” Ellis finally answered the phone.
“Vera, is that you?” he asked. Something was wrong.
“What’s up, Ellis? I was just calling because we might have something on the note.”
“Never mind,” Ellis said. “We just found our victim. Seventy-seven-year-old Laurence Seta. Evening grocery delivery service found the old man taped up, shot repeatedly. There’s a note. ‘Welcome to my world.’ No question. It’s our guy.”
Paul had picked up a few messages from the office, and was bringing them home to Mr. Heinrich. He had left the twins, Oren and Ira, to watch the old man. But the truth was, there wasn’t much to watch. The boss was heading downhill fast. He had nurses and doctors coming and going all day and night, but there really wasn’t much more to do.
It was surprising that Mr. Heinrich even cared about phone messages anymore, but he insisted that Paul check in at work every day. It was probably so that Neil got used to having Paul around.
When he reached the big house on Maplewood, he turned down the side driveway and entered from the back of the house. He headed straight up to the old man’s bedroom. Ira, or Oren, he could never keep them straight, was sitting on a chair outside the room, listening to his iPod. He waved as Paul knocked on the door and entered the room.
Mr. Heinrich was lying back in his bed. He was hooked up to an IV, and a nurse was getting ready to leave the room. She smiled sadly at Paul as he went past her, and sat next to the bed.
“Paul, how’s business?” the old guy said, in a soft voice. “The nurse just gave me some morphine, so this is a good time.”
“Well, things are pretty quiet in the office. Some money came in from Nate and Skelly, and a big check from the Ziggerman job. Neil was spending a lot of time splitting that up.” Paul looked down at the messages. “You got a couple of calls from Dr. Choi, one from Bill MacNeal saying he hopes you feel better—”
The old man wheezed a little laugh. Miraculously, it didn’t turn into a coughing fit. “Oh yeah. Tell Bill I’m feeling great.”
“—And the last one is from a woman named, let’s see. Vera Demopolous.”
The old man’s eyes did not register anything. “Vera who?” he asked.
Paul checked the note again. “Demopolous. She says she’s a detective with the Springfield Police. She wants to talk to you about Alan Lombardo.”
Laurence L. Seta
IT WAS 5:45 P.M. ON SEPTEMBER 10, WHEN Laurence Seta answered the door for the last time in his life.
He had just finished putting the dinner plates into the dishwasher, and was getting ready to sit down and watch the news. He liked to stay current, not only because it seemed that the world was going to hell in a handbasket, but because it didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that the only way to stay young was to keep involved in life, exercise your mind and your body, and spend time with children.
He wasn’t expecting anyone, but it was always good to have visitors, so when the doorbell rang, he opened the door cheerfully to the nice-looking man.
The next thing Laurence knew, he had fallen back onto his bad hip. He had no idea how he had collapsed onto the floor, but pain was coursing through his entire body like an electrical current of agony.
And then, through the buzzing in his ears, he heard the door close, and a man’s voice say, “Welcome to my world, Mr. Seta.”
Twenty-Eight Seconds
GETTING SHOT IN THE LEG WASN’T NEARLY AS bad as Zack would have imagined.
Sure, it had knocked him on his ass, and it burned—a lot—but Zack had pulled himself up to his feet using the clerk’s wheeled desk chair, and the shooter was no longer paying attention to him.
Justin’s life was at stake. The pain in Zack’s leg was going to have to wait. He began to run toward the shooter.
But the moment he put his left foot down, he immediately fell on his face.
Who could ever have imagined that walking could be so hard?
And then a flash of memory raced through his mind like a miniature bolt of lightning. It was six years earlier, and Zack was back in his apartment, speaking to his father on the phone, watching Justin not walking again.
“Zachary, these kinds of opportunities do not present themselves often, and I strongly urge you to take advantage of this one that is practically begging to make you a rich and successful man.”
Justin was resting his tiny hand on the coffee table for balance, standing there, smiling a drooly smile at Zack from across the living room. The child had been cruising around the furniture in their tiny apartment for months. The little boy obviously wanted to learn how to walk, but he was afraid to let go of that coffee table. He’d been working on that trick for about two weeks now.
“I really do appreciate that, Dad, but I just don’t think it’s the right place for me.”
Zack’s father’s idea of a golden opportunity and Zack’s were on opposite sides of the solar system. For the past ten days, his father had been trying to recruit Zack to join his buddies at his old firm in Boston. The only criminal law they did was defending their corporate clients against charges of white-collar crime. It was likely that they’d try to turn Zack into a civil trial attorney, defending insurance claims against multinational corporations.
“If you’re worried about money, you shouldn’t be. Even after hiring a full-time nanny
for that child, you’ll still be making three to four times what you’re making now.”
And just then, Justin lifted his right hand off the coffee table and stood there, grinning, completely detached from the furniture. He was going for it.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” Zack said. “I’m going to have to pass—”
“For Christ’s sakes, Zachary, think of what you’re doing. This will be the last time you have a chance to do something important with your life.”
At that moment, Justin looked directly at Zack, reached out both hands toward him, and took his first four steps, all alone, wide-eyed and giggling with pride and joy.
“You know what, Dad?” Zack asked, more confident of himself than ever before. “I’m already doing something important with my life.”
And then there was the crack of a new bullet ripping through the air. And the sound of a new shriek of pain from the gallery.
There had to be another way for Zack to get to this guy.
While the world continued to move around him like a very slow dream full of screaming people, the words of that Navy SEAL from the bookstore came back to Zack again.
“There’s always another way. SEAL training is all about learning how to find the other way. You know why SEALs never fail? They just try something else.”
Zack may not have been a SEAL, but goddammit, he wasn’t about to fail. He had no idea how to stop that shooter, but standing up seemed like as good a place as any to start. He grabbed hold of the seat of the clerk’s chair again, and used it to drag himself up onto his right leg. The well-oiled castors on the vinyl floor made the chair dance around, but at least Zack was upright.
Standing on his good leg but leaning on the wheeled chair, Zack turned to face the gunman, who was now about twenty feet away, and pointing his gun out at another victim. Suddenly, as if self-propelled, the chair lurched violently toward the shooter, threatening to roll so far away from Zack that even though he was holding on to it, he’d fall on his face again. So Zack hopped ahead on his right leg to keep up with the chair.
