Turning Point

by Jeffery Deaver

  Simms’s face twisted up in an alarming way. His cheeks now matched the ruddy nose, and the chameleon change was not from the cold. “My wife, she . . . last year . . .”

  Apparently he couldn’t finish the sentence. Died, Michael guessed.

  C’est la vie . . .

  “And so you spend your days prying comments from parents about dead children, or children about dead parents. Is that really news? And you wonder why nobody gives a shit about journalism anymore.”

  Grim faced, Simms waved a hand in the air as if fending off a wasp, then spun around and walked away. Was he crying? Hard to tell. Runny eyes and noses were the order of the day.

  Michael, feeling good, noted the reporter had apparently had enough of asking senseless questions and was walking to his little all-I-can-afford car. He jogged back along the path that would take him to the far side of the preserve and his own vehicle.

  As he ran, the reporter vanished from his mind. His thoughts spiraled to Sonja Parker last night. Her beautiful face was oval and her skin translucent as pearl. Her voice low. Her laser-beam blue eyes were severe. Her athletic figure was a bit boyish but her ass was great. The slim physique wouldn’t appeal to a lot of men. Michael, though, just plain loved that build. He didn’t want to get into sister issues at this moment but there you had it. He wondered where Marge and the kid were now. She hadn’t spoken to him for seven years.

  Some people took things way too seriously.

  He pictured Sonja once again, last night, standing at the door, fiddling with the key, her blonde hair lit like a halo from the starlight.

  God’s shotgun . . .

  Ah, Sonja.

  Ah, Marge.

  Both of whom gave him an idea.

  Michael decided to go on a date.

  4

  Detective Ernest Neville was looking over the charts that hung in the Detective Division of the Handleman County Sheriff’s Office.

  OPERATION: RUSSIAN DOLL KILLER (RDK)

  This was a large room with cubicles for the detectives. Though Neville was senior, there was no separate office, which was fine by him. He liked being with his peeps, as his daughter, Sheri, would say. The walls were scuffed and stained, the gray furniture dented, the linoleum streaked.

  The decor was municipal law enforcement everywhere.

  A large room, yes, but of late the space had grown somewhat more crowded, as it was home to the RDK task force, which swelled the Division population to eleven, from its usual six. Neville was presently gazing at the details of evidence found at the sites of the murders—each in a different part of the county, miles apart (Neville had stuck pins in a map, thinking the sites might cluefully spell a word or designate a number, but no).

  Homicides were not frequent in Handleman County. But Neville read the law-enforcement literature voraciously (and, with Betsy, watched the crime shows on TV); he’d never heard of anyone quite like RDK. There were virtually no forensic or circumstantial evidentiary leads that pointed to a suspect, no witnesses who could offer anything more specific than the vague description he’d recited to the reporters earlier. There were probably others who’d seen more but it took a special kind of person to go on record and give details about a man quick with a butcher knife.

  No footprints. No useful toolmarks. The lab had isolated some DNA, but the killer wasn’t in the CODIS database. Neville had read an article about a rape and murder in England a few years ago. The police had asked every man in the county to take a DNA test for comparison with the perp’s. It wasn’t required but if you refused you obviously became suspect number one. That was how they caught their man (he’d tried to pay a friend to give a sample for him).

  Neville sure liked the idea and came up with a plan to surreptitiously get samples of DNA from as many male residents in the county as he possibly could. That got shot down by the sheriff.

  Wearing his thick camo jacket and jeans and boots, Deputy Benji Camp, Neville’s main assistant, walked up to his boss. Built like a wrestler, crew-cut Benji was the jock of the department, an athlete, outdoorsman and the best marksman for miles around. His cheeks were red and his nose damp. He dabbed and explained about his fieldwork after the Juniper Lane crime scene. He shrugged. “Might be a lead, but just can’t tell at this point.”

  Which was the story of the investigation to date.

  “Just keep at it.”

  With a nod, the solid man hit the trail once more.

  Neville sipped a Dr Pepper. It was his favorite drink. Betsy liked some wine at dinner, and though not fond of alcohol, he was sporting enough to sip a little, provided he “doctored” it, the pun referring to the soft drink he mixed in. The county didn’t stock the soda in the lunchroom, so Neville brought a stash from home. Which was just as well. Here, it was a ridiculous $1.50 each in the vending machine, and exact change only. Insult to injury.

  “Hey.” The county sheriff walked into the Detective Division. He went by Jimbo Rawlins—the man hated his given “James,” as well as the nick “Jim,” so had for inexplicable reasons settled on that odd farm-boy mutation. He was a cowboy, with a weathered face and beer gut and broad shoulders. His hands were massive and the right palm was permanently tattooed with gunpowder particles from the time he held on to the barrel of a revolver for dear life, wrestling with a sinewy meth-head.

  “Got that report,” Rawlins said. “The shrink.”

  Last week the county had sprung to fly in a consultant based in Washington, DC, a psychiatrist who specialized in profiling.

  Neville had a vague recollection of what Sigmund Freud looked like, skinny, bearded and bald, and Dr. Trenton Stoller fit the first and the last of that triad. He also smoked, it was easily deduced (either he indulged in the filthy habit frequently or laundered his clothing rarely).

  The man had looked at the files and spent some time talking with the investigators. He’d taken notes, probably like a real shrink did in sessions with patients—Neville wouldn’t know—and had then flown back home.

  Now, Neville was skimming the report.

  The dolls are the key to his crimes, and will be the key to locating him. The problem centers on his parents. He was forced to play many different roles in order to survive a neglected, and possibly abusive, childhood. He would present one personality to his family and when that didn’t protect him he withdrew (i.e., became the next inner doll).

  To find his identity, I would examine local school and family services records to locate reports of neglect (and/or abuse) from ten to fifteen years ago. You’re looking for reports of an adolescent—probably over- or underweight—acting out (“a cry for help”) who then would become passive and contrite when confronted with authority. The infractions he committed would have been vandalism, arson, bullying younger children. In recent years, his anger at his parents has pushed him past the tipping point and he is now murdering, in an attempt to reclaim his role as the outermost Russian doll.

  Neville sighed. “School and county records? That long ago? I’ll get somebody on it, but talk about long shots.”

  Rawlins grumbled, “Sounds like what they’re saying on TV. And CNN didn’t send us a bill for three hundred an hour.” He then turned to a slim, bespectacled, balding man in his forties, the Crime Scene Unit analyst on the task force. The sharp-eyed man usually could be found in white Tyvek coveralls but presently was in typical Sheriff’s Office couture—a starchy gray uniform. “Any luck with that print?”

  The CSU man shook his head.

  Sighing, Rawlins stared at the same chart that Neville was perusing. After a moment he said, “Mayor’s getting impatient.”

  Whole town’s impatient.

  Whole county’s impatient.

  I’m impatient.

  But Neville understood what he was really saying. If they didn’t catch RDK soon, there would be political consequences. The mayor had just been reelected by a slim margin. It was a one-year term and she might be facing unemployment come next November.

  “I told he
r we’d have answers soon. Will we have answers soon?”

  How do you reply to a question like that?

  There going to be another earthquake like in ’08?

  “We will, Jimbo.”

  The sheriff acknowledged the pointlessness of the question, and the answer, with an ambiguous nod of the head.

  Rawlins’s eyes strayed from the evidence chart to a large plastic jar with a slot cut into the lid beside the coffee maker. Inside were a number of crumpled bills, singles through tens mostly. A couple of twenties. A sign behind it read:

  MARSHALL HOSPITAL CHILDREN’S WING FUNDRAISER.

  GIVE LIKE A SON OF A BITCH!

  The sheriff asked, “How much we raised?”

  Eyeing the jar, the CSU man said, “I don’t know. Couple hundred.”

  “Fire’s going to beat us. They always do.”

  A young deputy pointed out, “They stand on intersections at red lights and guilt you into coughing up bucks. We can’t do that. They’ve got free time. We don’t.”

  “Catch him.” Rawlins stepped into the corridor.

  5

  The app was like Tinder.

  Or was the word ap? One p or two?

  Michael didn’t have the inclination to check.

  He had joined and submitted his profile, which was about forty percent accurate. The protocol for meeting was the same for blind dates everywhere: You never picked her up, or she you (girls could be psycho too). You met in a crowded, neutral place. A drink first, and if no one blundered or shocked, then it was off to dinner.

  How the evening went after you sat down and tucked napkins was always a roll of the dice.

  Tonight, Michael really hoped he’d get lucky.

  He needed that. All the stress, the anxiety. The Russian Doll thing wasn’t helping the way he’d thought it would. The memory of the opalescent face of Sonja Parker wasn’t either.

  Pausing, looking around casually, he tried to sense any threats. Hard to say. Maybe. Some of his ill ease was paranoia. But he couldn’t forget that he was a target. There were crosshairs on his back. He turned his collar up and continued on his way.

  He was walking to the Riverfront District and the bar where he would meet Randi. The place was on the same street as his apartment, though the one-mile distance between the two might as well have been a light-year. The Riverfront scene was glitter and glass and chrome, populated after work, like now, with hordes of suited men and frocked women clustering and buzzing like worker bees in a hive. He had been to the place Randi’d picked—Chasin’s, what a name—and it set him on edge. Still, he was willing to endure it.

  Lucky . . .

  “Spare some money?”

  Michael stopped, midstride, and looked down.

  The man, in a worn, black sweatshirt and stained parka, sat cross-legged on a blanket. He was holding a cup. On his head was a stocking cap very much like the one in Michael’s backpack at home. A sign reported:

  I’M A WOUNDED WAR VET. HOMELESS. PLEASE HELP.

  He looked up with anticipation in his gray face. His hand, in fingerless gloves, rose. The cup he gripped contained bills and coins.

  “Where did you serve?” Michael asked.

  “Afghanistan.”

  “What outfit?”

  Brief hesitation. “The One-oh-one.”

  “One-oh-one what?”

  The man asked him, “Did you serve?”

  “Fuck no. Why would I do that? What was your outfit?”

  “Um, the One-oh-one . . .” Voice fading, maybe in confusion.

  “You said that. Can’t you be more specific?”

  When the man didn’t reply Michael tugged his gloves off and tapped a request into Google.

  “What’re you doing?”

  Reading, Michael asked, “The 101st Airborne?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “So, where in Afghanistan?”

  “Why’re you asking me?”

  “Where?”

  “In Kabul.”

  More reading. He was impressed. Quite the heroic outfit. He looked down at the man: “No, the One-oh-one wasn’t in Kabul.”

  “I meant we landed there, and went, you know, someplace else.”

  With irritation: “Okay. Where?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “How can you not remember where you were stationed?”

  “Man, come on. I had a head injury.” He pointed to the sign.

  “Let me see.”

  “See what?”

  “Show me the scars. Take the hat off.”

  “You’re crazy. I got hurt. My memory, it comes and goes.”

  Michael said, matter-of-factly, “You’re asking me for money. I’ve got a right to know if you’re telling the truth. So far, seems you’re lying.”

  “All right. Don’t give me any money.”

  Crossing his arms, Michael said, “Let me tell you a story. This guy, young guy, he got arrested. Something small, shoplifting maybe. I heard this on the news. He was in court, claimed he was a veteran, to get sympathy from the judge. Only he’d made it up. The judge would’ve given him next to nothing as a sentence but he found out the army claim was fake and sentenced him to a year in jail and five hundred hours working in the VA, and then he had to write letters to a thousand wounded soldiers, apologizing. By hand.”

  The man sputtered, “I’m not . . . faking. I forget things.”

  “Why aren’t you working?”

  “I can’t get a job.”

  Michael pointed across the street. A grocery store had a help-wanted sign in the window. “You mean you don’t want to get a job.”

  “The memory thing.”

  “Got a solution. Find some help and then get a job.” Michael ignored the astonished look and pointed to the man’s handwritten sign. “All right. We’re not sure about the ‘vet’ part. What about ‘homeless.’ Is that real?”

  “Jesus Christ, I live in a shelter!”

  “And I live in an apartment. Neither of us own a home. So I guess that makes me homeless too. But I’m stupid because I pay and you don’t. Where’s the shelter?”

  “On Seventeenth.”

  “Hm. You remembered that.” Michael peered into the cup. “How much money you have in there?”

  “What? Why?”

  “How much?”

  “You’re taking my money?”

  “Only the bills. Have you touched them?”

  The man stared.

  Michael said, “You tried to rob me. There’re consequences. Tell me, have you touched the money? Your hands’re filthy.”

  “I—”

  “Don’t they have showers in shelters?”

  The man raged, “I’ll call the cops.”

  “That won’t end well. Most of them’re vets.”

  “Fuck you. Take it. Just leave me alone!”

  Michael pulled a tissue out of his pocket and scooped out the bills, seventeen dollars, wadded them up and slipped them into his pocket. It’d buy him lunch. He’d had a craving for pizza lately. He could leave the bills, still in the tissue, under the plate without actually touching them. He’d make sure the tab came to about sixteen dollars.

  When he was ten feet up the sidewalk he heard a shout. “Barawala Kalay Valley.”

  Michael paused, looked back.

  “I remember! We were in Barawala Kalay Valley. My unit . . . it was the 327th Infantry. Second Battalion. We were after a warlord. Qari Ziaur Rahman.”

  “Hm.” Michael turned and continued on his way. Thinking of the pizza had made him hungry. He’d be on good behavior during drinks so he and Randi could migrate to a restaurant ASAP after the booze.

  Ten minutes later he was walking through the door of Chasin’s and looking around for the advertising account executive, thirty-four, lover of cats and sushi hand rolls and spinning classes and Stephen King and The Good Place and the Steelers. She didn’t write in the profile that she liked cuddling and fireplaces and walks on the beach and Lady Gaga concerts, but he�
��d bet if he told her that he did, her first thought would be: let’s check out caterers, Mom.

  He spotted her standing at the far end of the bar. She’d picked a spot with dim, wrinkle-friendly light. She was in a brown leather jacket, quasi-low-cut black sweater (how long had she debated that choice?) and designer jeans. Kinky blue shoes with stubby heels.

  A pretty face, girl next door. A substantial figure but not fat. Nice ass. And the wrinkles were no big deal.

  She spotted him and her eyes brightened a few lumens. Since his photo had been uploaded to the dating site Michael hadn’t lost his hair, hadn’t porked up, hadn’t developed any scars. As he approached he didn’t try to hug or kiss, but simply nodded, leaving it to her to extend a hand, which he gripped in both of his.

  Good behavior.

  Lucky . . .

  6

  A grasshopper walks into a bar.”

  Randi was telling a joke.

  “The bartender says, ‘Hey, you know there’s a drink named after you.’ The grasshopper says, ‘Who names a drink Fred?’”

  Michael gave an appropriate laugh/groan.

  The fuel was bourbon and vodka, and the engine they powered churned out sentence after sentence about jobs, hobbies, residences present and residences past, schools, friends, vacations, NPR podcasts, food, sports, on and on and on.

  All of it harmless, some of it interesting, none of it weaponized.

  After forty minutes Michael reflected that the foundation of the evening seemed well laid—a clever verb for a date, he admitted to himself. He suggested dinner. Randi’s eyes brightened further and she left the choice of restaurant in Michael’s hands. Protocol dictated that it be walkable, of course. Not wise to get into a taxi with a strange man, even one who was more or less charming and attentive and apparently harmless. Besides, Michael could just imagine what might happen if he got the same cabbie who’d dropped him off last night before his little get-together with Sonja.

  Whose fault is that? Get a better job . . .

  With Italian food on his mind, thanks to the homeless vet, he suggested Lombardi’s Family-Style Trattoria, which dished up the solid, satisfying and overportioned fare you’d expect from the name.