Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

  It was only a momentary reference in her mind, just the quickest of recollections, but even that brief thought brought that rainy night back again, that night where she’d laid on that cold wet asphalt and listened as Jasper Fines had walked over and shot Sheriff Beaumont. It had sounded like there were a few words exchanged before that fatal gunshot had rang out, echoing so loudly in the quiet of that night, but it always came back to Norma the same way, with that evil man standing over her and pretending to shoot her, then laughing, and then walking over to kill Beaumont, and then getting into the Sheriff’s car and driving off. She’d crawled over and held Beaumont’s head as he died, and she’d looked up and seen the taillights of his car off in the distance, shrinking slowly and finally disappearing over a rise, winking out of the darkness. And the birds following the lights - those dark birds that flew away into the night, following the red lights.

  They’d found the abandoned police car far south of Liberty, almost to where the King’s Dominion amusement park was now, but the investigation and dustings for fingerprints had turned up nothing out of the ordinary. Jasper Fines had killed three people in Liberty and then just vanished into the night.

  Wait, she told herself, trying to catch her train of thought before it had wandered off into yet another hour-long recollection of that night on the road. Focus on what you were thinking about - focus on the present. They were obviously keeping stuff from the public about the Lisa Stevens murder - hadn’t they kept things out of the press 18 years ago too, when Sheriff Beaumont had told all of his deputies to keep certain things under their hats?

  Of course, it had been the toes.

  In both of the murders attributed to Jasper Fines, each of the smallest toes on the left foot had been missing. A gruesome detail like that had to be kept from the public for two reasons: one, it was just too horrific, and details like that could send normal citizens into a tizzy. The town had been crazy enough back then without telling them that the Killer was butchering the victims and stealing parts of them. The other reason was that details like that were helpful in eliminating false confessors who did nothing but use up valuable investigation time and resources. But the fact that the killer had decided to take parts of his victims with him had driven the Liberty police crazy, a desecration of members of their community that drove them to solve the cases no matter what the cost, no matter how much effort it took.

  And now there was someone in Liberty, killing people and removing parts of them.

  No, it was obviously a coincidence - things like this just didn’t happen in real life. Maybe in the movies or on TV, but never in real life, where things didn’t always come out in an hour or two with happy endings for everybody involved except the bad guy. Norma had seen enough sad endings in her life to know that things like that just didn’t happen, at least not in the real world.

  The ulcer in her stomach rolled over, though whether it was a reaction to the bagel and coffee or to her recent thoughts Norma had no idea. Sometimes even remembering that night on that dark and puddled road could send her stomach into contortions of pain, and though the doctors told her it wasn’t the case, Norma felt that most of her ulcer problems were caused by her head, screwed up as it was.

  But sitting here worrying about it wouldn’t make her stomach calm down at all. Fretting about the questions she wanted to ask, the opinions she wanted to express, that would only make her stomach hurt worse.

  She tried to put the questions out of her mind, tried to pretend that deep down inside she wasn’t still a cop, didn’t still yearn to search for killers and motives and clues. She reminded herself that she was just a bus driver now, a bus driver with a crooked nose that hampered her social life and a ulcer-torn stomach that produced such pain to threaten her sanity. She wasn’t going to amount to much of anything, and there was really no use in worrying about that or anything else. So what if the Liberty police were scrambling to solve a crime - they didn’t need her, they had plenty of better investigators than her. Time had simply passed her by. She’d been a quitter before, and now, she was no different.

  “You think you’ve got something there, but it’s nothing. I mean, what are the chances that you can have anything new to say about the guy when this Task Force up there in Seattle spent years and millions of dollars investigating the case, and they couldn’t solve it?” Chris Hanson asked. He’d gotten caught up in this thing too, reading all the reports and checking out the facts and details included in his computer printouts. At first he told himself that he was simply fact checking the data, but now he had to admit that it was all pretty interesting. Maybe this FBI assignment would not be as boring as he had imagined.

  She knew he was right, but she couldn’t help getting excited. And it wasn’t about solving anything. “I’m not saying I solved any crimes. All I’m saying is that the Black Diamond Killer must’ve come from somewhere and, unless he was caught or killed, he must’ve gone somewhere after the killings stopped, right?”

  Chris nodded, reluctantly. “Yeah, I guess so. But what have you got here?” he asked, pointing at the reports and files she had strewn across an unused desk in the Computer Center for him to see. “You have the 29 cases the Task Force was sure he was responsible for, and what else?”

  “Nothing, Chris. That’s what I want to use the Cray for - to search for other cases that fit the time span and the details related to these crimes,” she explained, tapping on the short stack of reports that contained dozens of circled entries. “This is just a starting point, I think. And I could keep going through these reports, narrowing it down and throwing out the cases that don’t fit my pattern, but the Cray can do it faster, and better. And it could display them better.”

  “How?”

  She grabbed the hardbound book on the Black Diamond Killer and opened it to a photocopied map of Washington State. Each of the locations of where the bodies had been found had been noted on the map, along with the date, and it was easy to see the pattern - the Black Diamond Killer always killed and then disposed of his victims in the same general location, most of the bodies dumped within a twenty mile radius of the small town of Black Diamond and the Seattle/Tacoma International Airport.

  “I’m thinking we could try to see if there were any other murders in the surrounding states that could be attributed to him,” she said, pointing at the map. “If he stayed with the same M.O., there might be other unsolved ‘collector’ cases in the area that never made it into the original investigation. I mean, how much of this information inside the Cray is from old files that no one except the original investigators in the original jurisdiction has seen. Unless they called the Task Force and told them ‘hey, we might have a case here’, would the Task Force have heard about any other cases in the region that fit the pattern?”

  Chris thought about it for a moment, studying the map. It did make sense to try to narrow the search by location and by time, and it would get this crazy girl off of her ‘report printing’ kick. Plus, he would get a chance to play with the geographical display functions of the Cray, drawing maps and plotting events and timelines. “Okay. You figure out what parameters you want and how you want it displayed, and we’ll crank it in.”

  She smiled, a smile that he could fall for, a smile that he was sure insured that she got her way in almost everything.

  “Already did that, Chris. Do we have a big monitor we can hook up to display the Cray’s output? It’ll be easier than squinting at that little monitor,” she said, pointing at the Cray’s IO room with its rows of keyboards and monitors. “I want to do something like the ‘Dead’ section does, by plotting with colored dots over a full-color map.”

  He shook his head and headed off to find a good-sized monitor. After about twenty minutes he found a 25-inch monitor at one of the unused graphics workstations and moved it over to a table just outside the Cray IO room. He unhooked one of the smaller monitors and keyboards and pulled out the wiring, bringing the keyboard and monitor connection out of the IO room and hooki
ng it into the back of the 27 inch monitor. He also pulled up to chairs to the newest Cray workstation, and Julie brought over all of her reports.

  Chris began entering the parameters, and Julie decided not to say anything. Sure, she wanted to enter the information, but at this point it was more important that the parameters be entered quickly and correctly, and they really didn’t have time to be teaching her - there would be plenty of time for her learn.

  Chris hit ‘Enter’ after punching in all the information, and a very detailed map of the Pacific Northwest popped up almost instantly. Julie was amazed at the details she could see, even on the large monitor; to her it looked like some type of satellite image that showed the states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, and parts of California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana. She looked over at Chris but he was staring at a small numerical display in the lower right hand corner of the monitor that read a little over 12 minutes.

  It seemed awfully fast to Julie. “That quickly?”

  “Well, it’s not searching the whole database, just the one we did on ‘all extremities’. That’s faster, and it makes the search a whole lot easier on the Cray. All the data files were tagged on the earlier search.”

  It seemed reasonable to her.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing at a red dot that had just popped up on the screen near Billings, Montana. A tiny legend had also appeared, designating the red dot as ‘1980’. Three more popped up in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, and one more red dot appeared in California north of Sacramento.

  Chris was looking at the screen. “Wow, that was fast. Those are the first cases that fit all of your parameters. It’s probably searching by year, starting with 1980.”

  As they watched over the next few minutes, green colored dots began appearing on the large screen with ever-increasing speed, 1981’s cases. Most of the green ones were centered around Seattle, and they were obviously cases involving the Black Diamond Killer, but as Julie’s few hours of research last night and this morning had showed, five green dots appeared in the Portland, Oregon area and two appeared in Yakima, east of Seattle. The Cray moved on to 1982 and blue, and as with the 1981 case’s most were centered on Seattle. 1983 and 1984 followed, labeled orange and purple, with much the same result, and then 1985 began popping up. These dots were colored yellow, and they centered at first around Seattle, but soon stopped. Julie nervously watched the screen for several seconds, and then three yellow dots appeared in Portland in quick succession, followed by a couple in northern California and one in the Lake Tahoe area, on the Nevada/California border. After several more seconds, the clock at the bottom of the monitor counted down to 0:00:00 and was replaced with a curt message: “Search completed.”

  They were silent for a few minutes, and then Chris asked the question that was on both of their minds.

  “So, what does this show - did he kill in Seattle and then move down here, down the coast? How many of these hits are erroneous?” he asked, pointing at the 1985 cases well south of Seattle. They both knew the ‘collector’ parameters that had been programmed into the Cray, but to see it here, displayed with such accuracy on this large monitor, brought home the real power the Cray wielded - it had just searched through the stack of cases that would’ve taken Julie several days, doing it in mere minutes.

  Julie was still studying the screen. If you discounted some of the anomalous dots, such as the 1980 case in California and the 1986 case in Salt Lake City, there could be a pattern in the colored dots. To her mind, it looked like a killer had moved through the northern states, taken a five year ‘rest stop’ in the Seattle area, and then moved on down the coast towards San Francisco.

  “Can you get it to display the months along with the years without re-searching the whole database? Or draw a line connecting them all chronologically?”

  Chris nodded and began tapping onto the keyboard. A few seconds later and the dots were joined by little numbers 1-12, corresponding with the month that the case was initiated or when the coroner had estimated the date of death, whichever was earlier. After the months were displayed, a thin white line connected all the dots by chronological order, and the map looked like some kind of crazy connect-the-dots puzzle.

  The little dots and their corresponding numbers now formed a more organized pattern that she could follow, and the dates started to drop into place. The killings across the northern part of the United States were easy to follow - but how many more killings was this wandering murderer responsible for? And in how many cases had he changed his pattern, killing and not taking a piece, or killing and the body never being found?

  Chris was studying the screen, trying to puzzle out the pattern. “I can’t believe it’s that easy. I mean, this guy or a group of guys has been out there killing all this time, and all we had to do was type in a few lines on a computer and up pops a map of his travels? “

  “Yeah, I know.” The colored dots made it all so obvious, so very clear, it was difficult to put any validity in them. “Well, you have to remember that we are searching for very specific unsolved cases involving a particular kind of crime. And we’ve narrowed the search down to a particular location and time frame. AND, we’re using the most sophisticated computing device built to date, with access to all of the nation’s criminal files. And the Cray’s search algorithms are very good, and very fast.”

  “I dunno. I guess it just seems too easy.” Chris nodded, pinching his lips with his thumb and forefinger, staring at the screen. “So, I guess the next thing to do is eliminate the other cases, right?”

  She looked over at him and smiled. “You know, for someone so reluctant to help me on this, you’re kinda getting into it, huh?”

  He smiled. “Stop it. Let’s get to work,” he said, and leaned over the reports.

  Julie was starting to enjoy this.

  The cuts on her hands and arms refused to bleed.

  Sally climbed upward, struggling to make the summit before the last of her strength abandoned her. Her will was strong, buoyed by her strange encounter with that huge man back there, professing his insane devotion to gods that no one even remembered. Still, her fingers and arms were cut deeply in many places, and still the wounds refused to bleed. She’d fallen more than once, slipping and sliding ten or twelve feet to the rocks below and cutting herself, but she did not bleed.

  Her palm had been slashed open in one of the falls, and she’d unconsciously started wiping the blood onto the once-white front of her wedding dress before she saw that there was no blood.

  The Temple of Zeus, as Sisyphus had called it, appeared and disappeared from her view with frustrating regularity. Above the Temple she saw a huge group of circling birds, swooping and diving slowly over the squat building.

  The building was maddeningly familiar, but she could not stop to stare at it. She had to climb, to reach the top, to stay ahead of the fog.

  She’d noticed just after she’d parted company with the big man. The fog had started blanketing the lowest reaches of the mountain, swirling around its’ rocky feet and slowly climbing the slopes below her.

  Finally, the Temple came into view for good as she crested the summit and looked at the building for a long moment. The columns marching off on either side of the staircase and, above each of the columns, was inscribed the names of the United States and a series of Roman numerals she did not understand.

  Beyond the stairs there was a huge and familiar seated figure, white of marble but somehow looking flesh and blood, very much alive. The statue of President Abraham Lincoln waited for her inside his memorial.

  The questions ricocheted around her head as she slowly climbed the steps, the little chains on her rattlesnake-skin boots jingling with each step.

  The inside of the memorial was cool, the hard floor and columns cold after the strangely muted warmth of the sun outside. A glance behind her from the top of the staircase showed her that the top of the mountain was almost surrounded by the fog, tendrils of it already reaching over the edges a
long the path she’d just climbed. The top of this mountain was flat, and the fog had made it into a rocky island surrounded by a sea of mist. Nothing existed but the top of this mountain, and the temple, and an endless ocean of clouds.

  “Do not worry. The mist cannot reach you here.”

  She turned to look for the source of the deep, booming voice that had somehow answered her very thoughts, and she saw that the granite visage of Lincoln was now looking down at her, smiling. His eyes were clear and bright and full of intelligence.

  Sally gulped, her throat suddenly caught on something.

  “Wha...what did you say?” she asked, feeling small as she looked up, talking to this seated giant.

  “The mist,” he said, and one marble arm came to life, straining and breaking free of the carved stone armrest. It pulled up from the carved chair and a shower of chunks of marble and stone crashed onto his white knees and the polished marble floor around his seat.

  “The mist only exists to...urge you to me.”

  She saw that as he talked the rock of his face seemed to split and then knit back together, stone healing itself in an instant, the cracks growing backwards into nothingness. It was a fascinating and disturbing thing to see.

  “Where am I? Why am I here?” she asked, even though part of her already knew that answer.

  Lincoln smiled, his face cracking and moving.

  “Here is where you choose, child. Here is where you decide whether you want to live or die.”