Just Cause

by John Katzenbach

  The two men became entwined in the darkness, struggling, their breath mingling. Wilcox simply fought against the shape of the man he grasped, trying to find his throat, his genitals, his eyes, some critical organ that he could attack. They rolled together, thudding against the walls, smashing through the wet puddles on the floor. Neither man spoke, other than grunts of pain and outrage which burst unbidden from their lips.

  They wrestled in the pitch black, pinned together by pain.

  Bruce Wilcox felt his fingers encircle his attacker’s neck, and he squeezed hard, trying to choke the life from the man. His useless right hand rose and joined his left, completing a ring around his opponent’s life. Wilcox grunted with exertion.

  He thought, I’ve got you, you bastard.

  Then pain spiked his heart.

  He did not know what it was that was killing him, did not know even who was killing him, only that something had ripped through his stomach and was rising toward his heart. He felt panic surge past the instant agony; his hands dropped away from the killer’s neck, tumbling down to his midsection, where they closed around the handle of the knife that had ruined his fight. He felt a single insignificant groan escape from his lips, and he crumpled back to the wet floor.

  He did not know it, knew nothing anymore, but it would be almost ninety seconds before he rattled out his last breath and died.

  24

  PANDORA’S BOX

  Her solitude was complete.

  Andrea Shaeffer peered down the empty streets, eyes penetrating the gloom and mist, searching for some sign of her companion. She retraced her route for what seemed to be the tenth time, trying to impose reason on the disappearance, only to find that each footstep drove her deeper into despair. She refused to speculate, instead allowing herself to fill up with complaining expletives and anger, as if her inability to find the man were mere inconvenience rather than disaster.

  She paused beneath a streetlight and steadied herself by leaning against it.

  She would even have welcomed the sight of a Newark patrol car, but none came into view. The streets remained empty. This is crazy, she thought. It’s not late. It’s barely night. Where is everybody? The rain continued to thicken, hammering down on her. When she finally spotted a single woman, working a street corner in desultory fashion, she was almost pleased, just to see another human being. The woman was slouched against a building, trying to shield herself from the elements, her enthusiasm for another assignation on a cold, wet night clearly limited. Andrea Shaeffer approached her carefully, producing her badge from about ten feet away.

  “Miss. Police. I want a word.”

  The woman took a single look and started to move away.

  “Hey, I just want to ask a question.”

  The woman kept moving, picking up her pace. Shaeffer followed suit.

  “Dammit, stop! Police!”

  The woman slowed and turned. She eyed Shaeffer with apprehension. “You talking to me? Watcha want? I ain’t doing nothing.”

  “Just a question. You see two men come running through here, fifteen, twenty, maybe thirty minutes ago? A white guy, a cop. A black guy in a dark raincoat. One chasing the other. You see them come by here?”

  “No. I ain’t seen nothing like that. That it?”

  The woman stepped back, trying to increase the distance between the detective and herself.

  “You’re not listening,” Shaeffer said. “Two men. One white, one black. Running hard.”

  “No, I ain’t seen nothing, like I told you.”

  Andrea felt anger creaking about inside her, pushing at the edge of its container. “Don’t bullshit me, lady. I’ll make some real goddamn trouble for you. Now, did you see anything like that? Tell me the damn truth or I’ll run you in right now.”

  “I ain’t seen no men chasing. I ain’t seen no men at all tonight.”

  “You had to see them,” Andrea insisted. “They had to come by here.”

  “Nobody’s come by here. Now leave me alone.” The woman stepped back, shaking her head.

  Shaeffer started to follow, only to be surprised by a voice behind her.

  “Whatcha bothering people for, lady?”

  She turned nervously. The question had come from a large man wearing a long black leather coat and a New York Yankees baseball cap. Rain droplets had formed at the edge of the brim. He was a dozen feet away, striding toward her steadily, his voice, his body, all uttering menace.

  “Police,” she said. “Stand back.”

  “I don’t care who you are. Come down here, bothering my lady here. Whatcha doing that for?”

  Andrea Shaeffer seized hold of her pistol and brought it out, leveling it at the approaching man.

  “Just stay there,” she said coldly.

  The man stopped. “You gonna shoot me, lady? I don’t think so.”

  He spread his hands a bit, his face grinning. “I think you ain’t where you should be, lady policeman. I think you ain’t got any backup and you’re all alone and I think you got some trouble here, maybe.”

  He stepped forward.

  She clicked back the action, chambering a round, readying the pistol. “I’m searching for my partner,” she said between clenched teeth. “He was chasing a suspect. Now, did you see a white cop chasing a black man down here, thirty minutes ago? Answer that, and I won’t shoot your balls off.”

  She dropped the angle of the gun, so that it was pointing toward the man’s crotch.

  That made him hesitate. “No,” he said, after pausing. “Nobody come down here.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “All right,” she said. She started to maneuver past the man. “Then I’m leaving. Got that? Nice and easy.”

  She slid by him, walking backward up the street. He turned slowly, watching her. “You got to get out of here, miss policewoman. Before something bad happens to you.”

  That was both a threat and a promise. As she moved away, she watched the man drop his raised hands and heard him mutter an expletive, drawing it out so that it trailed after her. She kept her weapon in her hand and turned and walked away, heading back to where she had left the car, now completely at a loss and totally frightened.

  Her hand trembled slightly when she started the ignition. With the car running and the doors locked, she felt a momentary security, which allowed her anger to renew itself. “That damn stupid sonuvabitch. Where the hell is he?”

  Her voice seemed cracked and whining, and she regretted using it. She shook her head hard and stared out the window, for a single moment allowing herself the reassuring fantasy that Bruce Wilcox would come walking out of some shadow any second, out of breath, sweating, wet, and uncomfortable.

  She let her eyes wander up and down the street, but she could not see him.

  “Damn,” she said out loud again.

  She was reluctant to put the car in gear, to move, thinking that sure enough, one minute after she pulled away from the curb he would emerge, and that she would have to apologize later for abandoning him.

  “But I haven’t, goddammit,” she argued with herself. “He left me.”

  She had little idea what to do. Night had taken a firm grip on the inner city, the rain had redoubled in intensity, steady sheets of gray sweeping down the street. If the cocoon of the car was warm and safe, it only added to her sense of isolation. Putting her hand on the shift lever and switching the car into gear took a painful, exaggerated effort. Driving a single block seemed exhausting.

  She traveled slowly, painstakingly searching the area, back to Ferguson’s apartment. She paused, staring up at the building but could see no lights. She pulled to the curb and waited for five minutes. Then another five. With no sign of anything, she drove back to where she had last seen Wilcox. Then she drove up and down the
adjacent streets. She tried to tell herself, He caught a cab. He flagged down a patrol car. He’s waiting back at the motel with Cowart and Tanny Brown. He’s down at the precinct house taking a statement from Ferguson, wondering where the hell I am. That’s probably it. He probably got him to talk and he’s locked in some little room with Ferguson and a stenographer, getting a statement, and he doesn’t want to break the momentum by sending someone out to look for me. He figures I’ll know what the hell to do, anyway.

  She steered the car onto a wide boulevard leading away from the inner city. In a moment, she found the entrance to the turnpike and a few moments later was heading back to the motel. She felt like a child, young and terribly inexperienced. She had failed to follow procedure, to follow routine; failed to adhere to her own judgment and had managed to screw up badly.

  She fully expected Bruce Wilcox to scream at her for losing sight of him and failing to back him up. She swore to herself, Christ! That’s the first thing they teach you in the academy.

  Her sense of independence wavering, she drove into the parking lot of the motel and swiftly collected her things, pushing herself across the rainswept lot toward the room where she thought the three men would be waiting impatiently for her.

  Cowart thought death was stalking him. He had fled from Ferguson’s apartment in fear and anxiety, trying to restrain his emotions with little success. Tanny Brown had first pressed him for details of the conversation the two men had had, then had let Cowart slip into silence when the reporter refused to answer. There was little doubt in the policeman’s mind that something had happened, that Cowart was genuinely frightened, and he supposed he would have taken some cynical pleasure in that discomfort had the source been any different.

  They had ended up driving to New Brunswick and Rutgers, with no real reason other than to see where Ferguson was attending classes. After walking through the rain, hunched against the damp cold, dodging students, Cowart had finally described the conversation. He had raced through Ferguson’s denials and interpretations, used dialogue and detail, filled in the policeman as fully as possible, until he had reached the point where Ferguson had threatened him and his daughter. That he had kept to himself. He could see the detective’s eyes hard on his own face, awaiting something. But he would not say it.

  “What else?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, Cowart. You were freaked. What did he say?”

  “Nothing. The whole thing freaked me.”

  Now you’re beginning to know a bit of what it’s like living on Death Row . . .

  Tanny Brown wanted to hear the tape.

  “Can’t,” Cowart replied. “He took it.”

  The detective asked to see Cowart’s notes, but the reporter realized that after the first page or so, his note-taking had evaporated into useless scrawls. The two men each felt ensnared. But they didn’t share this, either.

  It was early evening when they returned to the motel, stymied by rush-hour traffic and their mutual lack of cooperation. Brown left Cowart in his room and went off on his own to make telephone calls, after promising to return with some take-out food. The policeman knew that more had happened than he’d been told about, but also understood that information would eventually come his way. He did not think that Cowart would be able to maintain his fear and silence for too long. Few people could. After receiving a scare like that, it was only a matter of time before he’d need to share it.

  He had little idea what their next step would be, but assumed it would be in reaction to something Ferguson did. He pondered the sense in simply arresting Ferguson again and charging him with Joanie Shriver’s murder. He knew it would be legally hopeless, but it would at least get Ferguson back to Florida. The alternative was to continue doing what he had done when he had spoken to his friend in Eatonville: start working all the empty cases in the state until he found something that could get him back into court.

  He sighed. It would take weeks, months, maybe longer. Do you have the patience? he asked himself. For a moment he tried to picture the little girl in Eatonville who had disappeared. Like my own daughters, he thought. How many others will die while you’re doing the mule work of a homicide policeman?

  But he had no choice. He started making calls, following up on some of the messages to various police departments in the state of Florida that he’d managed a few days earlier. Work the pattern, he insisted to himself. Research every little town and backwater village that Ferguson has visited in the past year. Find the missing girl in each one, then find the piece of evidence that will lock him to it. There will be some case, somewhere, where the evidence hasn’t been tainted or destroyed. It was slow, painstaking work, and he realized that every hour that it took put some child, somewhere unknown, closer to death. He hated every second that slipped past him.

  Cowart sat in his small room, trying to make a decision, any decision. He looked down and examined his notes, the shaky handwriting mocking him. He could just make out the list of visits Ferguson had made to Florida since being released from Death Row and returning to Newark for school. Seven trips. Have seven little girls died? he wondered.

  Did someone die on each trip?

  Or did he wait and return some other time?

  Joanie Shriver. Dawn Perry. There had to be others. His head filled with a steady parade of little girls, all walking abroad in the world, girls in shorts and T-shirts or jeans and wearing ponytails, all alone and innocent, all prey. In his mind’s eye he could see Ferguson creeping up toward them, arms open, face smiling, full of assurance and bluff and measured death. He shook his head as if to free himself of the image, and it filled instead with Blair Sullivan’s words. He remembered the condemned man speaking on the ease with which he took life.

  Are you a killer, Cowart?

  Am I? he wondered.

  He looked down at the list of Florida visits and felt a tremor race down his arms into his fingertips, where it remained like some wayward electric current, humming and buzzing.

  There are some people dead who wouldn’t be, if not for you. Little girls.

  Sullivan had found safety in the randomness of his deaths. He’d killed people he didn’t know, who merely by accident had had the misfortune to cross his path. By minimizing the context of murder, he had hamstrung the abilities of the police investigating each case. Cowart suspected that Ferguson was doing the same. After all, he’d learned at the side of an expert. Sullivan had taught Ferguson one crucial thing: to become a student of his loathsome desires.

  He remembered his trip to the Journal’s library and pictured the headline on the small story: POLICE SAY NO LEADS IN MISSING GIRL CASE. Of course not, he thought. There are no leads. There is no real evidence. At least, none that you know of. Just one innocent man taking his time to pluck children out of this world.

  Cowart took a deep breath and let all the accumulated elements of fact, supposition, and imaginary crime cascade through his head, torrents of evil swept together into a single turbulent theme, all rushing toward an image of his own daughter, waiting at the end. It seemed to him that up until that moment he had been living in some moral twilight, all the deaths that circumscribed his relationship with Blair Sullivan and Robert Earl Ferguson out of his control. That was no longer the case.

  Cowart let his head sink into his hands and thought, Is he killing someone now? Today? Tonight? When? Next week? He raised it again and looked up into the mirror hanging above the dresser.

  “And you, you goddamn fool, you were worried about your reputation?”

  He shook his head, watching his own reflection admonish him. Not going to have a reputation now, unless you do something and do it quickly, he told himself.

  What can you do?

  He was reminded of a story his friend Edna McGee had once written for the Journal. She had learned that the police in one Miami suburb were investigating a
half dozen rape-assaults that had occurred along a single stretch of highway. When she had confronted the detectives handling the investigation, they had insisted she not write a word. They complained that a story in the paper would alert the serial rapist to the fact that they were on to him, and he would change his routine, alter his distinctive style, move to a different location, and slip through the decoys and stakeouts they had planned. Edna McGee had considered this request, then ignored it, believing it wiser to warn the other, unsuspecting women who were nightly traveling the rapist’s route.

  The stories had run, front page, Sunday edition, above the fold, along with a police composite of the suspect that stared out in malevolent black and white from the hundreds of thousands of newspapers that hit the streets. The detectives working the case were, predictably, furious, thinking that their quarry would be scared off.

  But that wasn’t what had happened. The rapist hadn’t committed any half dozen rapes. The number had actually been in excess of forty. Almost four dozen women had been assaulted, but most, in pain and humiliation, had refused to go to the police. Instead, they had gone home after being victimized, thanking their lucky stars they were still alive, trying to mend their ripped bodies and torn self-esteem. One by one, they had all called Edna, Cowart remembered. Tears and hesitancy, sobbing voices, barely able to wring through their misery the horror that had befallen them, but anxious to tell this reporter, if perhaps she could save another woman, somewhere, from falling prey to this man. Within a few days of the story running, they had all called. Anonymous and terrified, but they had called. Each one thought they had been alone, a solitary, single victim. By the end of the week, Edna had the full license plate number of the rapist’s car, a much improved description of the vehicle and the assailant, and dozens of other small details that had led the police to the man’s door one night, a fortnight after the stories ran, just as he was readying himself to head out.

  Cowart leaned back remembering. He weighed Ferguson’s threat in his hands to see if it had substance.