by David Levien
Behr released him and stood, sucking in air. He kicked away the carpet knife and picked up the hammer, then found blood soaking down his pant leg, but on the opposite side from the arm that had been cut. He rolled Prilo over and saw the source: Prilo’s tongue had been caught out and stuck between his teeth. The tremendous pressure the choke put on his jaw had taken a chunk out of it. Blood poured from his mouth. Behr slapped him, and Prilo came back to consciousness sputtering and gagging.
Behr got him by the front of his shirt and jacket with his left hand, holding the hammer in his right.
“What the fuck?” Behr said.
“You broke my arm,” Prilo said, drooling and spitting blood. Even with the lacerated tongue Behr could pick up a bit of southern Indiana or even Missouri twang in Prilo’s speech.
“Dislocated the elbow. May not be broke,” Behr said, trying to gather his faculties and ask a reasonable question.
“What you want?” Prilo asked,
“What are you doing in here?”
“Who are you? You not a cop,” Prilo said, more blood falling out of his mouth.
“No, I’m not,” Behr said.
“You a relative?”
“Of who?”
“Of hers,” Prilo said, and suddenly Behr knew whom he was talking about: Mary Beth Watney, Prilo’s victim.
“No.”
“You been following me.”
“You set me up for an ambush,” Behr said. “What do you use this place for?”
“Nothing. I just ’membered it from delivering here before it closed. You been following me,” Prilo said again.
“I want to know about you and Kendra Gibbons,” Behr demanded.
“Who?” Prilo asked.
“Kendra Gibbons. Young blond girl. Prostitute. Disappeared eighteen months ago. Don’t give me the dumb act.”
“I don’t know nothing about her,” Prilo said. “What do you think I am?”
“I know what you are,” Behr said into Prilo’s face. “You’re a goddamned murderer of women. And I think you murdered Kendra Gibbons.”
“It wasn’t me,” Prilo said.
A moment passed with only the sound of their breathing. Behr felt blood running down his arm as he stared into the eyes of a killer. But he’d killed too, and he wondered for an instant what Prilo saw staring back.
“Telling you: it wasn’t me.”
Prilo’s denial sounded truthful. But there was something else behind his words that resembled knowledge. Ordinarily Behr could take his time. He could strap the guy to a chair and interrogate him. He could hold him or call the cops. Or throw him in the trunk and drive him into the woods and make him think he was going to be executed. But Behr had no time for that. His body and soul were split in half—one side needing to go to Trevor, in the car alone, but the other desperate to know what Prilo knew. He wanted to go check on his son, but he wasn’t about to leave Prilo, and he wasn’t going to bring him along and show him he had the boy there either. He had to hurry, and he considered crushing the bones of Prilo’s face in order to get him talking, and raised the hammer.
“Don’t give me that bullshit. Tell me what you know about the dead women turning up in this town or you’ll never leave this fucking warehouse.” Behr smacked him across the head with the side of the hammer. There was a dull thud as unyielding steel met skull. Prilo lurched over to the side, gulping air through his bloody mouth. Behr straightened him up. “What do you know?” he demanded.
“Okay …” Prilo said, panting. “Someone’s working the Near Northside of town. Other parts too.”
“Someone’s working?” Behr said. “You mean a signature killer?”
Prilo nodded.
“How do you know? You know who he is?” Behr asked. He considered whether there was some kind of club made up of these sick bastards.
“No,” Prilo said. “I just know it. I seen the news. Other reports over time. It’s obvious: he’s hardcore. A binder and a chopper who been in mid-cycle for quite a while and now he going ‘nova.’ ”
“That’s all obvious?”
“To me it is,” Prilo said
Gene Sasso used to say: “A good cop sees what’s happening. A great cop understands what it means.” Behr supposed it was no different when it came to one sociopath recognizing another’s handiwork.
“Keep going,” Behr said.
“Why? You think you want to find him? You don’t want to find this boy, believe me,” Prilo said, almost smiling, showing bloody teeth.
Behr raised the hammer. “You want to be eating through a fucking straw?”
“Okay. Okay,” Prilo said. “What you want to know?”
“Who am I looking for? Black, white, Asian? Old or young? Criminal past? Employed? Manual laborer?”
“Oh, I don’ know. Could be a brother who hate white women. But probably a white man.”
“Why’s that?”
“Just more righteous white men out there. Gotta play the odds,” Prilo said, his twisted mind working now. “I wouldn’t say he’s young. Young boys maybe want to kill their mama. But this boy been at it for a while and working with control. Maybe he want to kill himself but as a young woman. Or kill his mama young, like when he was a boy. Maybe he just likes blondes. Either way, he gotta be thirty-five, forty, forty-five.”
“What else?” Behr demanded.
“I don’t know, man.” Prilo shrugged.
“Sexual element?”
“Shit, you thinking like a grade schooler. Course there is,” Prilo said.
“There hasn’t been any DNA found,” Behr said.
“None?” Prilo said, seeming surprised for the first time, then impressed.
“Not a trace.”
“Well, there’s ways …” Prilo said. It chilled Behr, and made him certain that Prilo had killed multiple times and had gotten away with it.
“Give me more,” Behr said. The side of him that needed to go to his son was gaining strength and he had to leave.
“Well …” Prilo considered. “He got something about being public.”
“Public?”
“Yeah. He putting ’em out there now. Some he has, some he hasn’t over time, I’m sure. But now he showing himself. He making a relationship with the world. He needing the attention.”
“You’re saying he’s looking to get caught?” Behr asked.
Prilo shook his head. “No, no, no, no, no. You said that. I’m not saying that. When you fools catch a man it ain’t ever for all he done. You don’t ever know what a man’s really done …”
Behr didn’t have any more questions that made sense. He felt his arm throbbing now.
“What you gonna do, call the cops, get me sent down?” Prilo asked.
What could Behr call the cops with? No proof of attempted murder. It’d be called a simple assault that would be knocked down to self-defense after Prilo’s lawyers made a case that Behr had followed and surprised him. Breslau wouldn’t like that, and Behr didn’t need it. But he knew in his bones that the man at his feet had done unspeakable things to numerous women. He considered beating him to death with the claw hammer and leaving him there, a rotting pile of pulp to be discovered or not. He tried to close the valve inside him. The same one he did when deer hunting and a downed animal required finishing, or when he was wing shooting and a wounded bird needed its neck wrung to end its misery.
Finally, after a long moment, Behr released Prilo’s jacket and flung the hammer into the darkness of the warehouse, where it landed with a faint chiming sound.
“I won’t call the cops. On one condition: you talk to me again if I need to.”
After a long moment Prilo nodded.
“How do I reach you?” he asked.
“Nah. I’ll reach you.” Behr turned to go when he heard Prilo’s voice behind him.
“I know what you was thinking about just now. I know …” Behr still heard Prilo thumping his chest as he walked quickly from the warehouse. “Look in there. You may not find your
man, but you’ll find what you looking for in there. You’ll find what you need …”
Behr ducked under the loading bay door and into sunlight and broke into a run. He leapt off the bay platform and hit the ground in a sprint for his car, where he found Trevor screaming in terror at being left alone, but otherwise unharmed. As soon as he saw him, and his real life came flooding back over him, Behr understood what he’d almost allowed to happen. He’d been caught in that undertow and it had slowly and inexorably dragged him away from shore.
A current of panic unlike that he’d felt even when facing a murderer’s knife and hammer began rising in his chest and he tried to force it down.
“It’s okay, baby boy,” Behr said, stroking his son’s head. He kept trying to hush and reassure the boy as he got in the front seat. Behr wanted to take his son out of his car seat and cradle him. But he needed to be gone before Prilo emerged. He chunked the car into gear and pulled out in a spray of gravel. He sped along 30th until he saw a strip mall and pulled into the parking lot. He held Trevor there, trying not to bleed on him, until the boy quieted. Behr’s heart pounded at what he’d done.
36
You should be in the office, you dumb son of a buck, get back there.
But he isn’t in the office, and he isn’t going back. Not yet. He knows that much about himself. The reason is: it just doesn’t last anymore. Not at all. It used to keep him for months. After a work, he was good for a season. Then it had reduced to months, then weeks. And it was down to days now and he didn’t know where it would go from here. He was getting like one of those science experiment chickens in a cage, heedlessly pecking the button for cocaine instead of corn and starving itself to death.
He is trolling for a new project now, as he has been for the last few days. Thus far he’s seen nothing. But sometimes you went out with your rod and your bait and came back with just your rod and your bait. And sometimes you came back with no bait at all and nothing to show for it.
He keeps driving the streets of Fall Creek Place. He just has a feeling. The red light changes to green and he makes a left onto 24th, and that is when his luck changes. He sees her running along the side of the road, a jogger in her early thirties, tall and strong, in a purple long-sleeve top, black tights, and white sneakers, her blond ponytail bouncing like a sunbeam, and he knows he has to have her. He will have her.
He follows along at a respectful distance, watching her run for a long time, a good three-quarters of a mile, cataloging her route and mentally predicting her weight, her scent, the coarseness of her pubic hair, the density of her flesh. She could go to a café, to a store, or her car or office, or to meet a friend, but that’s when he knows powerful forces are smiling upon him, because instead, he is right there when she slows to a cool-down walk for a last block and enters a small house on North Talbot.
He sits there in his car a few doors down and lets some relief settle on him. He can go back to work, for the time being, because Sunbeam is in his life now, he has her address, and he has a new center to his universe.
37
Behr needed stitches, but there was no way he was bringing Trevor with him to the emergency room. He’d texted Susan to come pick up their son so he could go on his own, and he’d ignored a half dozen calls from her while she was on her way. Nothing credible beyond outright lies had come to his mind about why he needed her to come get the boy, so he was hoping to avoid the conversation altogether. When he heard her keys in the door, he realized that was unlikely.
“Where have you been? I was worried,” Susan said as soon as she entered.
“Out … doing a few errands,” Behr answered lamely.
“Errands.”
“Yeah.” Fuck. He felt her eyes find the peroxide and bloody dish towels on the kitchen counter behind him.
“Did you go to the bank?”
“No.”
“The car wash?”
“No.”
“Did you buy formula and diapers?”
“No.”
“Where were you, Frank? What errands?”
He didn’t answer.
“Damnit, Frank! Where is he?”
“Taking a nap.” She moved past Behr, grabbing Trevor’s snowsuit, and saw the blood on it.
“Whose blood is this? Did something happen to him?” She raced into the living room and pulled the sleeping baby from the Pack ’N Play. Her hands began picking at his clothes, trying to uncover him.
“No. He’s fine. It’s mine.”
As she turned she glanced through the open door to the second bedroom and saw the photos of body mutilations all over the walls in there.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said, turning Trevor away and covering his eyes, even though they were closed and he was still asleep. “You think this is a suitable environment for our son?” she asked.
“He doesn’t go in there, and they’re covered up when I know he’s gonna be over here, Suze,” Behr said, knowing how foolish it sounded. “It’s not like he’s reading the reports.”
“Still, Frank … What happened today? What happened to you?” she asked. “Did you take our son on your case?”
“Susan, don’t get yourself all hyped up. Do you think I’d put him in—”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’d do,” she said with force. She didn’t go in for that kind of language ordinarily. It was a big deal to her. She was that mad, and he knew she had a right to be. She stared him down. “All I know is that this little being is my whole life. And I thought you were a part of it. But now I just don’t know …”
“Don’t you think he’s that to me too?”
“Well, apparently chasing missing hookers and God knows what else is part of your life too,” she said.
Behr said nothing.
“Tell me what happened right now.” He’d tried to cover the rag wrapped around his arm with a long-sleeved shirt, but it had soaked through with seeping blood. The shirt was dark colored, so he didn’t know if she could actually see it, but the time for obfuscation was over. He gave her a brief recounting of the day’s events. Her mouth hung partially open, her eyes blinking rapidly as she assimilated the facts.
When she finally spoke her voice was so flat and free of emotion it chilled him to his core. “Something’s really wrong with you,” she said. “I thought you were struggling to get out from under, but now I know what’s really going on: you’re not even trying, you’re just bored and hungry for action.”
The accusation hit him like an artillery round. He almost felt his mouth gaping, like a fish out of water, as he tried to answer, but she spoke first.
“Do me a favor: don’t come by for a while.”
“Suze, no way—”
“Just a little while. Get your thinking straight.”
“Come on—”
“Jesus H., Frank. I’m thinking about getting a lawyer involved here.”
“Don’t do that,” he said, more volume and anger to his voice than he intended. “Please don’t,” he modulated.
“You exposed our son to a killer. A goddamned murderer.”
He had nothing he could say in response.
An interminable silence followed, and they stared at each other before he finally nodded. With Trevor in her arms, his snowsuit wrapped around him, she left. When the door had slammed, the quiet and emptiness that remained were absolute.
38
Behr left the ER with twenty-two stitches in his arm, instructions not to work out for five days, a prescription for Vicodin, and a blister pack of samples. Besides that, he felt like he had nothing else in his life but his case. The medical resident who had sewn him up had been curious about the nature of the injury, and he’d kept asking even after Behr had told him, truthfully, that a carpet knife had caused it. Behr had expected this, so while he was waiting he’d placed his wallet, open to reveal his retired police tin and P.I. license, on the bedside table next to his phone and keys. The doctor’s eyes finally found the small badge, and he stop
ped asking and finished with the sutures.
Behr wasn’t prone to carrying his gun regularly. The places he generally went weren’t that dangerous, and he was big and trained and willing and able to defend himself physically. But there was a moment he reached on certain cases when the time came to start carrying a weapon. That’s where he found himself now. In some ways he wished he’d made the decision before the moment with Prilo in the warehouse. He wouldn’t have any stitches in his arm. But then Prilo would be dead, and Trevor would have been with him and in the middle of all that, so perhaps it had worked out as well as it could have.
With the Vicodin sample in his bloodstream, and the exchange with Prilo rattling around in his head, Behr found himself in his car texting Lisa Mistretta, and then he found himself in front of her door with a bottle of Patrón Silver under his good arm.
“You must be starting to get the impression that I don’t have anything to do with my nights,” she said. “And you might not be wrong.”
“The way I keep showing up, you must be pretty sure I’m in the same boat.”
She was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt with her hair pulled back. She let him in and didn’t say anything when he took off his coat, revealing his bandaged arm. They were in the kitchen with drinks before either spoke again.
“You were right, I was wrong,” Behr said.
“You’re gonna find that’s a trend.” She smiled. “About what?”
“About Prilo,” Behr said. “He’s no good for this.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
Behr shrugged.
“Get the fuck out!” she said. “You talked to him?”
“Oh, it was some kind of talk,” Behr said, as he saw her eyes go to his injury.
“He did that to you?” she asked. Behr nodded.
