Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

  He glanced at the case summary and nodded. “Yeah. I didn’t know that the Black Diamond Killer was supposed to be one of your ‘collector’ guys, did you? That’s kinda creepy, considering they never caught the guy. What if he’s still carrying that shit around with him, or keeping it in storage or something?”

  She nodded, listening to his words but thinking past them to deeper implications and deeper motivations. She looked back up at him and smiled, and he started shaking his head, showing her his watch.

  “No, no, no. I’m off in a half hour, and whatever it is you want can wait.”

  “You can start the search and leave, and it’ll be ready in the morning. Can you get me a list of all the BDK cases, or cases where he’s mentioned?” She was being her most charming, and it really wasn’t fair, and she knew it.

  He nodded, resigning himself to not getting out of work on time. As he got up to leave, he turned back to her. “You know, if you’re as good at figuring things out as your are tenacious, I wouldn’t want you looking for me.”

  The red binder hadn’t been what David had expected.

  Well, to be completely honest, David hadn’t known really what to expect. He’d figured on a long letter of a dozen pages or so, with maybe some pictures or other things thrown in by Bethany to remind him of their time together, to make him feel guilty about leaving.

  But this, this book was more like an entire history of their relationship, a chronicle of their time together. Sure, there was a letter, but he wasn’t sure if you could call something that was almost 100 pages long a ‘letter’. It seemed something that big deserved a better word, as if there should be a way to describe something somewhere in the middle, between a really long letter and a really short book. Maybe ‘tome’ didn’t apply, but certainly ‘letter’ didn’t.

  But Bethany had written almost 100 pages, and the pages of the letter were plastered with dozens of pictures and drawings, phone numbers and phone messages, ticket stubs and restaurant menus and cards from birthdays and holidays, all things that obviously had meant a lot to her and also showed how much they had cared for each other.

  He couldn’t really read the letter as he drove; her backhanded, scrawled handwriting style had always been hard for him to decipher even when he was sitting completely still and concentrating on it. But he was able to pick out a few lines here and there between glances at the flat Indiana road in front of him, the binder propped against the steering wheel, but it looked like Bethany had described these important memos and their significance to her. Instead of a pleading discourse on ‘Why did you leave?’ as David had expected, this letter looked more like a description of the good times that they had had together.

  Here was a card he had gotten her on Valentine’s Day, only a couple of weeks after they had started dating. It wasn’t a lovey-dovey kind of card - they hadn’t gotten to that point in their relationship yet, so this card was a funny one that had made him laugh, something that was sorely lacking in his life before he’d met Bethany. It was amazing how quickly another person can become an integral part of your life. Before he’d met Bethany, he had had several girlfriends, and each time those relationships had ended (mostly from his own actions or his own stupidity - or a combination of both), there was always those couple of weeks where he felt like a lone and helpless loser, incapable of loving or being loved. There were always the questions that seemed to revolve around inside his head like a hurricane, seeking answers: Why hadn’t things worked out? What had he done wrong? HAD he done something wrong? He supposed everybody asked themselves the same old questions, or similar ones, whenever their relationships turned sour. But why did he have so much trouble with relationships in general? His family, his friends, his girlfriends - none of them were healthy, steady relationships. Maybe it was because he had no template to gauge by, no examples to follow. His father and his mother were both long gone. And the woman who had raised him never taught him how to deal with others - her only serious relationship was the one with the half-empty bottle of Stoli in her hand.

  One of the girls he had dated briefly in high school had been interested in Psychology, and she had told him once that he had such bad luck with women, and with other people in general, because he always kept all of his emotions inside. Supposedly, he never told anyone how he felt, and because he kept it all inside, he grew more and more angry because he had no one to share his feelings with, up to the point where the anger grew and swelled inside him and he lashed out - usually at those around him.

  He didn’t know if he bought it or not, but sometimes when he was in a particularly sour mood, Linda and her opinions of him would resurface. Was he keeping everything in, keeping all of emotions locked away inside so that no one could get at them, so no one could hurt him? Sure, he’d been hurt before, especially by a mother that had never been there for him when he needed her, and by a father that had never even been there at all, but was that why he kept everything in? Did he keep everything in? And did the fact that he’d been hurt in the past so much, did that mean he would do anything to keep from being hurt again?

  Bethany had told him in one of the few arguments after they had broken up (she had learned fast not to try and talk to him about what had happened between them because he would just walk away from her - that was usually the way he dealt with things) that she had been taken completely by surprise by his demand to end their relationship. She’d said that everything had been going along fine, as far as she could tell, and she’d been shocked when he’d told her he was unhappy. She’d had no idea.

  Well, didn’t that prove the point? Linda had obviously been on to something with her psychobabble theories, but what could he do about it? Was he supposed to go around whining and crying and complaining all the time like some kind of wimp? Wear his heart out on his sleeve for the whole world to see? He didn’t think so.

  But the way he was doing things now obviously wasn’t working. Maybe it was time for a change.

  Change, that was it. He needed a change of life, a change of pace. And here he was, in his car, headed west to California, to make as big a change in his life as he could think of. Yeah, this was the right thing to do. And when he got to California, things would be different.

  He closed the red binder and set it on the passenger seat. But even as he was looking straight out the window, trying to keep his eyes on the road, he could still see the bright red cover of the binder out of the corner of his eye, and it felt like it was calling to him, teasing him, daring him to open and read, really READ this time. And not just glance at the pictures.

  Tuesday came and went and no one seemed concerned for Abe Foreman and Gloria Thatcher’s absence - the only persons who really questioned Gloria’s absence were the folks at the new townhouse complex, where she was supposed to come in and sign her lease on Tuesday morning. Neither one of them had any pressing appointments or engagements to keep or meetings to attend on that day, and so it was that Tuesday night arrived before anyone grew concerned.

  On Tuesday nights, usually, Abe Foreman and some of the other businessmen involved in the development and construction of the Liberty Place Mall would get together and informally discuss how the mall was doing. It was really just an excuse for this particular group of friends to get together at the mall’s Ruby Tuesdays and congratulate each other on their insight and forward thinking in investing in the mall when it was still just a series of dreams and sketches on the architect’s wall. Each of the original partners in the venture had made back many times their original investments, and the weekly celebratory dinner and drinks were always casual, hassle-free occurrences.

  But on this Tuesday night, the entire meal passed without Abe Foreman‘s smiling face appearing, apologizing for being late. He never missed one of their weekly get-togethers - it was a much-deserved break from his otherwise hectic schedule. One of the men at the table mentioned that he and Abe and some others had planned to go into DC the night before and hit a few strip clubs, but they had gone without him -
Abe had never showed. By the time coffee and sticky buns came, his absence was the topic of conversation. Quick calls on cellular phones to Abe’s home and work numbers gave no satisfaction, and phones slipped back into pockets while their owners faces’ wore expressions of concern and curiosity. One man made a comment that the only thing that could keep Abe away from the dinner table was a woman, and that launched a lengthy discussion on the importance of female ‘companionship’ in every man’s life.

  After the ‘meeting’ broke up, each man headed for home or office, depending on their level of commitment to family or work or their own personal list of priorities, but each still kept one eye peeled for Abe’s new car - it was all he could talk about for weeks, and his new purchase had been another topic of conversation at the table.

  One of the men on his route back to his office happened to go through Gloria Thatcher’s neighborhood, or things might’ve turned out far differently. As it was, the man was driving down her street and listening to classical music on his car’s CD player when he glanced over and saw Abe’s new car in the woman’s driveway.

  He slowed and pulled in beside it, laughing to himself.

  “That sneaky devil,” he thought. Why else was his car parked out in front of the single woman’s house this late at night? Everyone knew that Abe Foreman worked closely with Gloria Thatcher, and lately he’d been trying to settle up her affairs and get her moved into a new townhouse. She was slightly famous in this little town through her family connections, but everyone knew about her penchant for alcohol. Some of her money had gone into the Mall too, so most of the men in Abe’s group knew about her and her activities - and her marital status. Obviously, Abe was giving the woman a little more personal service than he gave most of his clients.

  Smiling, the man saw that there were lights on in the house and decided spontaneously to sneak up to the big window on the front of the house and maybe catch Abe in a compromising position, something embarrassing that could be used to fuel their conversations over coffee for years to come.

  The man worked his way through some bushes, scratching himself on a branch, and sidled carefully up to the large picture window on the front of the house. He peeked in, hoping to see something interesting.

  Abe was there, all right, but he wasn’t in the mood to be joked with. He was lying on the living room floor with broken pieces of a glass coffee table underneath and all around him. His head looked strangely flattened on one side and was surrounded by a large black stain like the spilled brackish ink of some giant pen, a huge dry puddle around him. One large, jagged piece of glass from the coffee table stuck rudely up through the meat of Abe’s shoulder, the point of the piece of glass dulled with dried blood.

  The man looked in the front window for several more seconds and then absently fumbled out his cellular phone, punching 911 without even really dialing it. He couldn’t take his eyes off the grisly scene inside, the sight of his dead friend. The blood, the broken glass, the way Abe’s eyes looked, open and wide and white and...

  The 911 operator had to yell at him to drag his attention away from the scene.

  The cops took only a few minutes to arrive, but by then, things were already starting to move very quickly. The Liberty Police Department, already overtaxed with the investigation of Lisa Steven’s murder, was now called upon to investigate two more deaths. Three deaths in 48 hours, more than had occurred in the past six years. One was a murder, and the other two were very questionable.

  No one was able to contact Gloria Thatcher’s next of kin, David Beaumont. A call to his last recorded place of residence reached a sleepy voice who told them that he’d moved out and had left town for good, driving to California. The voice also informed them that David had last talked to his girlfriend, a Miss Bethany King, and she might be able to help the police track David down. The name was familiar to those investigating the Lisa Stevens case – Bethany King was her best friend and the last person to speak with the Stevens girl.

  Abe Foreman had no relatives in the area and the Liberty police were forced to get a positive photo identification from several of his friends, including the individual who had originally discovered the body. In cases where a next-of-kin cannot be contacted, the police are sometimes forced to track down friends or acquaintances of the deceased.

  It was for that reason that a police car pulled up in front of the darkened house a little before midnight on Wednesday night. The policeman knocked for several minutes before Bethany answered the door, her robe pulled tightly around her against the cold, her eyes streaked with hours of tears.

  Chapter 12 - Wednesday, September 21

  The Washington Post, Richmond Times, and the Liberty Gazette all printed stories about Lisa Stevens grisly murder in their Wednesday morning editions, and AP wire also picked up the story and spread it nationwide.

  A small-town girl found murdered in her home town would always be interesting news, and the Gannet people at USA Today, headquartered in Reston, Virginia, about 100 miles north of Liberty, took one look at the AP “flash-story” and forwarded it down to the Local page, a one page summation that ran daily in the paper and included short pieces of local news for each state around the nation.

  The Local page staff sorted through hundreds of local stories from each state and narrowed it all down to four or five lines, and a sensational murder almost always made it into the final copy that was completed and forwarded to the composition rooms via electronic computer link. And the fact that the victim’s tongue had been removed made the story even more likely to run - grisly, but very newsworthy.

  One of the staff members of the Local Page mentioned to another staffer that it was two times in three days that they had run a short blurb about a killing on the east coast involving a missing body part, remembering that they had run a short line in the Monday edition about a one-legged boy who’s body had been found in a river in South Carolina.

  The second staffer thought it was probably just a coincidence, but suggested that the man who’d noticed the connection mention it to their supervisor. The first staffer, blushing slightly, dismissed the notion, having only been a staff member for a few months and not ready to blow it all on some crazy supposition.

  The short two lines ran under the Virginia - Liberty banner, and Lisa Stevens’ murder was suddenly nationwide news. Most people who read the USA Today don’t even read the Local Page, and if they did they mostly just read about their own state, so few people saw the two line blurb, and most who did didn’t even know where Liberty was located, assuming it was somewhere near D.C. and therefore a place where a violent, senseless murder was a commonplace occurrence.

  Only a few people who read the short summation paid it any attention.

  Julie was in her office early on Wednesday, poring over the reports that Chris had sent up from the Cray Room. She had him pumping out volumes of reports, taxing the computability of the massive computer, pushing it to its limits. She had full reports of all missing extremities cases over the past 30 years, reports on all the cases where the Black Diamond Killer was suspected to be involved, and reports and case summaries on the unsolved murders involving ‘extremities collection’ from 1966 to 1996, and those were just the reports she had had Chris run overnight. She’d also lugged her ‘digits’ stacks home on the Metro and pored over them, looking for any types of connections between the cases.

  She had a sneaking suspicion that this was all going to come to nothing, but even if it did, it would show the higher-ups who were undoubtedly watching her that she was a competent investigator and although she was a computer person, she used the computer as a tool to further her own goals, not just using the computer to be using it. She wanted something to come of all of her searching, but that was beside the point. She needed to show Mike Wallace and Peter Turner, her still-unseen supervisor and head of the Team, that she could work well and produce results. They had asked her to test the capabilities of the Cray and its database search functions, and that was exactly wha
t she was doing. Anything more that came of it would just be a feather in her cap.

  The first report was on all extremities cases and had taken most of the night to run, the yellow sticky from Chris stated. The search parameters were printed on the first page, and the six inch stack of computer paper would include all cases, solved or unsolved, that involved any removal of any extremities, pre- or post-mortem. She knew that the report would be hugely thick and contain hundreds of cases that had nothing to do with her search, but she felt it would be a good idea to have a sort of ‘Master Printout’ to refer back to, just in case her search became too bogged down in the details. She picked up the huge report, carried it out into the hallway and plopped it down on a skinny wooden table she’d pilfered from another office. The table looked old sitting up against the wall outside her office and creaked when she set the heavy stack of paper on it. She hoped it would hold.

  The second report was much smaller and the one she was most interested in. The Black Diamond Killer was the most famous unsolved string of serial murders in the nation. Hundreds of books had been written on the subject since the murders had abruptly ended in the mid 1980’s, and the opinions of those various writers varied from ‘the killer had been caught for another crime’ to the supposition that ‘the killer was still out there, prowling around,’ having moved on from the Seattle area when the investigation began closing in on him.

  Julie had heard of the Black Diamond Killer before, but she couldn’t imagine what it must be like to live in a town paralyzed with fear, scared to even go out of your house because a real monster was out there, wandering the streets. Monsters were supposed to be something for kids, hiding under beds and lurking in dark closets or relegated to the safe pages of some Steven King gore-fest.