Marcus took a few more notes in his notepad, which was by now mostly full of hectic transcriptions. He wrote in the margins: Transitory. “I read the medical examiner’s report,” Marcus said. He heard in his voice a rising inflection, an invitation for her to ask him for details, for his opinion, for hope.
“What happened to your wife, Marcus?” she asked, her eyes still closed, her words slow and long.
He looked up from his notepad. “What?”
“How did she die?”
“How did you know?”
“You’re wearing a wedding ring still.”
“But how did you know she died?”
“I always know these things. How did she die?”
“It was a brain aneurism,” Marcus was surprised to hear himself say. He never talked about it with anyone, not even his children. It was something he left to those dark and total nights when there was nothing surrounding you but things left unspoken.
“Tell me about it,” she said. “Please.”
“About when she died? Why?”
“It seems fair that you tell me, considering what I’ve told you, doesn’t it?”
“OK,” he said, entering into the memory slowly, carefully, like a child entering a dark and unlit room. “She died in her sleep, I think. I woke up in the middle of the night, and she was lying next to me. I knew something was wrong right away, because it was so quiet. I realized then that she wasn’t breathing. So I turned to her, saw her outline, but I didn’t think it was actually her. I didn’t know who it was, but it wasn’t her. It couldn’t be her. I lay there a whole ten minutes thinking here was some un-breathing stranger lying in our bed. And then I touched her skin and it was cold. It was really cold. Like glass. And all that time it had been her, but I only realized it in that moment.” He heard his voice breaking, so he stifled it with a sharp breath. “She died in her sleep, though, so that’s good, I guess.”
“That would be a good way to die.” May smiled, her eyes closed. “From one dream to the next.”
Marcus heard the minute-hand clicks of a clock. He saw it on the wall behind him. Quarter after eight.
Peter had stopped his pacing and stood stationary across the room, hands on his hips, head cocked to his shoulders, eyes closed and lips moving silently. His thinning hair was a mess atop his head.
“I still talk to her sometimes,” Marcus said to May. “My wife. Before I fall asleep. I talk to her. I say something small and inconsequential. It never feels how it used to feel, but it’s something. I tell her I miss her. Something like that. It makes me feel like she’s there in some small way, and maybe she is.”
“Maybe she is,” she murmured.
She breathed softly, quietly, her lips parted in a sleeping grin. “I’m glad we did this. It felt good to talk about him with someone like you. Someone who understands him, even if you don’t know it.”
“Be safe, May. Promise me you’ll be safe.”
“No one is coming for me. I’m a nobody. I keep a low profile, more as a professional caution than anything else. But I’m glad I got to meet you after all these years. You’re a good person, Marcus. Now get out of my apartment and leave me alone.”
* * *
On their way down the stairwell, Marcus found a business card, folded four times. He stopped and picked it up: MISS MAY PIECEWORK. It had a phone number on the bottom. He regarded it briefly with a smile before stuffing it into his pocket.
Peter walked in labored strides as they exited the building and stepped out into the wordless night. Marcus’s throat hummed like a motor with the full weight of a thousand questions he knew they should have thought to ask, details that they should have followed up on. But it had also been enough. Although there were no more leads to follow, he felt like whatever latent and lingering questions he’d had about the Kingfisher had somehow been answered in the spaces between what was left unsaid. And more importantly, he knew Miss May would be safe.
There was ball-game traffic congesting the street. Headlights overlapping into a dull and setting sun. The casual car horn punctuating his and Peter’s footsteps on the sidewalk as they neared his parked car. In the distance, the sounds of a protest—bleary and atonal chants rising through police sirens.
Marcus opened his door and began to lower himself inside when he saw Peter standing on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets.
“Come on,” Marcus said. “I’ll give you a lift home.”
Peter shook his head, looked out over the congested street. “I might just walk. Looks like it might be quicker. You get home.”
“You shouldn’t be walking around that far. Not on your bad leg. Just get in.”
“I appreciate it, but I’d like the walk.” Peter smiled, pained and far away. “A lot to think about tonight.”
“She’s going to be OK,” Marcus said, standing against his open door. “She seems like she can take of herself. I wouldn’t worry about her.”
Peter nodded. And then he said, face shining in the creeping headlights, “She knew him, Marcus. She’d known him since he was fifteen. She’s seen him. Like, really seen him. It’s fucking crazy, isn’t it? It doesn’t feel real.” Peter was energized, smiling widely. As enthusiastic as Marcus had ever seen him.
“I’m not sure any of the past couple days have felt real,” he answered.
Peter shifted his step, easing off his bad leg. “But she knew him, Marcus. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? You heard what she said about him.”
Marcus wasn’t sure what May’s account signified. This woman had once known a man who might be dead, who might be alive. “She knew him,” Marcus said finally. “And I’m glad we found her. We did what we came to do. We warned her. That’s all we can do.”
Peter looked as though he were just seconds away from jumping out of his skin. Marcus couldn’t remember ever seeing Peter so eager, so unbridled, so ready to spill. “You know as well as I do what this means. Don’t pretend like you don’t.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s alive, Marcus.” Peter raised his arms, as though trying to take flight. He was speaking rapidly, difficult to keep up with. “I know she doesn’t think so, but that’s because she doesn’t want to believe it. He’s still out there somewhere. You heard all those things she said about him. You think it’s some coincidence that he ‘died’ just days after he followed her and beat the hell out of her pimp? After she yelled at him, told him she never wanted to see him again? He left because of her, Marcus. Out of guilt, anger, or whatever. He left.”
“I know,” Marcus said. Because he did know. Even if he did not want to know this, he knew. The Kingfisher had not died that day back in 1984. He was confident of this. The rest, though, was speculation.
“But how would anyone else know? The gunman? Do you think it’s possible…” Peter began to ask, but stopped.
“What?”
“Nothing. I have a thousand thoughts swirling around right now. This is crazy, Marcus. It’s fucking crazy. He’s alive. He’s out there somewhere.”
“He may be.” Marcus nodded.
The light changed at the intersection, and a few dozen car horns entered into a dissonant chorus as the mass of steel bodies pulled forward in a slow but certain progression.
“Why don’t you care?” Peter asked, with a cautioning smile. “Don’t you care? He’s out there somewhere. We could find him. He can stop all of this.”
“Get in the car, Peter. Let’s go home.”
“We can find him, Marcus.” Peter laughed, mouth hung open in disbelief. “Why aren’t you listening to me? We can end all of this if we find him. Why don’t you care?”
“Because it doesn’t matter,” Marcus said firmly. “It doesn’t matter that the Kingfisher is still out there, because he’s sure not doing anything about whatever is happening right now. He’s not here, Peter. It doesn’t matter that he’s out there, because he’s not here.”
“Maybe we could convince him,” Peter said.
A car pulled up and parked behind Marcus’s car. A rusted Volkswagen. A man wearing a Cubs shirt and ball cap got out, cell phone in hand. He walked toward Lindley Apartments, but stopped, his focus drifting to his phone. He walked back to his car and leaned against the hood.
“Let’s get home.” Marcus lowered himself into the driver’s seat. He turned the key in the ignition and saw that Peter remained exactly where he had been, fixed to the sidewalk, hands in his pockets. Marcus rolled down his window. “Come on, Peter.”
Peter stood, a rueful smile melting from his face. “What’s wrong with you?”
“There’s no point in finding him, Peter,” Marcus said. “We couldn’t find him if we tried. And even if we did find him, there’s nothing to say to him that he doesn’t already know.” He glanced in his rearview. The man with the cell phone was standing on the sidewalk. Marcus saw the man glance over at them, expressionless. “We shouldn’t be talking about this right now,” Marcus said. “Just get in the car.”
“Can I be perfectly honest with you?” Peter approached Marcus’s car, seemingly oblivious to the stranger behind them, and leaned his elbows on the open window. “I think you’re afraid to find the Kingfisher, because if he is really still alive, that will mean that everything else you thought you knew doesn’t mean anything anymore. I think you’re scared to rewrite history, because you don’t know what it will mean. You don’t know what it will mean for you and your entire life’s work. You were wrong, but so was everyone else. This is an opportunity to do something that needs to be done. You have a chance to write the rest of the story.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Peter. This doesn’t have anything to do with my career. I’ve already explained it to you. You’re just not listening.” He lowered his voice into a barely audible breath. “The Kingfisher, if he’s out there, isn’t doing anything about all this, and we can’t change that.”
“But he’d know that we were on his side,” Peter insisted. “Sure, maybe he wouldn’t listen to me, but he’d listen to you. I’m sure he’d listen to you. He’d listen to Marcus Waters.”
“Get in the car, Peter,” Marcus said, raising his voice. He wasn’t sure if it was because he was speaking over the hum of engines behind him or if he was simply angry, tired, confused, and ready to return home.
The man with the cell phone took a step toward them, but stopped. His phone rang in his hands and he brought it to his ear. He didn’t say a word.
The sky was a premature stone-blue, the color of a television playing to an empty room.
“You used to want to get to the truth,” Peter said. “All these years, I remembered you as someone who followed a story to its end. And I respected you for that. I always respected you for that, Marcus.”
“Goodbye, Peter.”
Marcus sat in the car, slammed the door shut, and pulled into the street and into the moving tide of cars. He watched Peter in his side-view mirror, the man with the cell phone next to him, two shadows fixed to the sidewalk, both of them soon consumed by a crowd of late-arrival protestors holding chartreuse posters that proclaimed easy answers to impossible questions.
Marcus sat perfectly straight in his seat as he turned the corner. The street ahead. Nothing behind.
34 A CRIMINAL AT MY KITCHEN TABLE
BY THE TIME SHE REACHED the sixth floor of her apartment building, Tillman was breathless. She wasn’t sure how far she had run. The city blocks had blurred together, passersby scrutinizing this evening runner in day clothes, this woman pushing through tourists congested on corners, waiting impatiently for the stoplight. And now, a sweating mess, she ambled down the empty hallway and unlocked the front door with shaking hands.
“Where were you?” asked her father from his recliner in the corner of the room. His eyes were closed and his voice seemed to be coming from the far reaches of a half-dreamt dream. “Who are the people here? Talking too loud.”
“People?”
“Tilly,” came Jeremiah’s voice from the kitchen. “We’re in here.”
She passed her father. Al Green crooned him back into whatever sleep he had briefly emerged from.
In the kitchen, Jeremiah leaned against a counter drinking one of her father’s last two beers from the fridge. Tillman’s eyes fell upon a girl seated at the kitchen table, her head collapsed atop her arms. She wore a gray hoodie, the folds of fabric actively consuming her skinny body. The last of Tillman’s father’s beers sat in front of her. Untouched, sweating on the table. She raised her head and glanced over her shoulder. A castaway stare. Her hair was short, cut jaggedly around her ears. She looked young. Too young for the beer and too young for the somber gravity weighing down the room. Her eyes were swollen with either tears or fatigue or both. She briefly regarded Tillman with a scrunched expression, her eyebrows meeting each other halfway.
Tillman looked back at Jeremiah. He smiled weakly.
“Who is she?” Tillman asked Jeremiah and then turned to the girl. “Who are you?”
“Just take a seat, Tilly.”
“Jeremiah,” Tillman intoned, remembering her last phone call with him. It came back to her in words she hadn’t been given time to consider in their entirety. The Liber-teens. Arrests. Did she trust him? Tillman took a step closer to the girl, who leaned farther back in her chair, maintaining her distance. The girl’s fear was palpable, emanating from her body like an electric current. “Please tell me this isn’t who I think this is.”
“Take a seat,” Jeremiah said. “Please.” He stepped forward, pulled out a chair, and gestured for her to sit across from the girl. He sat himself between the two, a litigator’s posture, as he tried to bridge, or perhaps enforce, the space between them.
“Why would you bring her here?” Tillman asked, unable to politely ignore the fact that Jeremiah had brought a wanted criminal into her place of residence while her father slept just ten feet away.
“I’m going to explain—”
“How the hell did you get her out of the precinct? Did you stuff her in a suitcase and walk out?” She waited for Jeremiah to answer, but he was making vague hand motions, trying to calm her down as though she were an animal incapable of human speech. “What have you done, Jeremiah?”
The girl stared at her hands. She looked sick. Face paled to the color of bone. She made a low sound in her throat as though she might vomit.
“This is Officer Lucinda Tillman,” Jeremiah said to the girl. “She’s a friend of mine from the police department. We’re both here because we want to help you, and we want you to help us.”
“Actually,” Tillman said to the girl, “I don’t even know who you are. I’m guessing I know exactly what you are, but how about you tell me your name.”
The girl uttered something so softly it didn’t pass her lips.
“Excuse me?” Tillman asked.
She cleared her throat and repeated it again. “Wren.”
“Wren? That’s your name?”
The girl nodded.
“Of course it is.” Tillman sighed.
“Did they follow us?” the girl asked quietly to Jeremiah. “The FBI?”
Jeremiah fidgeted in his seat, casting a nervous look at Tillman.
“The FBI followed you here?” Tillman asked, her voice rising with each word.
“Yes, but I think I lost them.”
“You think?” Tillman scoffed, rising from her chair. “Did they follow you here or not?”
“No.” Jeremiah shook his head after allowing a pause, a meditation on the silence. “They didn’t follow us. I was careful.”
“You were careful.” Tillman laughed, gripping the edge of the table. “Of course you were careful.”
“I promise you,” Jeremiah said to Tillman. “It’s fine. It’s going to work out.” The sincerity in his voice was enough that Tillman wanted to test it by dangling him off the fire escape—would it still be fine then?
“What am I doing here?” Wren asked. A Midwestern drawl blended her words
into a single pitch.
“That’s a great question,” Tillman said. “What is she doing here, Jeremiah?”
“OK, let me explain.” He addressed the girl. Wren, or whatever the hell her name actually was. “Officer Tillman and I both think the police and FBI are making a crucial mistake in their investigation. They believe that you all, the Liber-teens, are responsible for the video.” He paused, collecting his thoughts. “I happen to think that whoever is behind that video wanted to frame the Liber-teens so that you all would hack into the police servers and release the report to exonerate yourselves, which I don’t need to tell you didn’t quite work out the way you had probably hoped. He was baiting you the whole time to give him what he wanted, and now that he has it, he still hasn’t stopped. He won’t stop killing hostages anytime soon unless we can do something.”
Tillman reluctantly admitted to herself that Jeremiah’s hypothesis made sense. If what Abe Dawkins had told her was at all true—the gunman chose hostages that Stetson wouldn’t try to save by releasing the report—then the gunman had still found a way to make the report public. The gunman was running a bloody smear campaign against the police. And it was working.
“We want the same thing, all of us,” Jeremiah continued. “We want to put an end to whatever the hell is happening out there.” He pointed out the nearest window in the general direction of a city fraying like a thread of yarn.
“Is that what she wants?” Tillman asked. “You think she cares about all that? She didn’t follow you here because she gives a shit about all that. She’s here because you probably said you could help her. When you called me and told me to meet you back here, I thought you had an actual lead. Not this, whatever this is. You think you have an idea that the police and feds haven’t already thought of? One that involves harboring a criminal and lying to the FBI? Forget losing your job, you’re going to stand in front of a grand jury for this. And me? I’m straight to prison. Do you think she cares about that?” She pointed at Wren. “Do you think we—all of us here—do you really think we want the same thing right now?”
The Reign of the Kingfisher Page 31
