Jack in the Box

by Blake Banner

  Dehan thrust out her bottom lip and gave a single nod. “That must have sucked.”

  He gave a small laugh. “You know about the styles of attachment? Bowlby? I am the anxious-ambivalent type. One of the characteristics of the anxious-ambivalent type is a highly acute sense of behavioral analysis. You can read people’s behavior like it’s a telegraphic message. I knew when she was lying, I knew when she was growing bored, I knew when she was preparing to leave me even before she did.”

  “Did you live together?”

  “Not at first. I was married back then. But by the end of it, I was with her all the time. It cost me my marriage. For a while we were totally wrapped up in each other. It was very intense. We couldn’t get enough of each other. It went on for months.”

  They hadn’t noticed, but the big red, white and blue ball had rolled out to sea and was slowly being carried away by the backwash from the waves. Mom was sitting on the sand, looking at her phone and the kid was now chasing the dog instead of the ball.

  I said, “And then her first book was accepted for publication.”

  “Yeah, and slowly everything began to change. I could sense it in the way she looked at me, they way she touched me… Small changes in frequency and intensity…” He frowned at me with anxiety in his eyes. “Do you know what I mean? You can just tell that the smiles are less frequent, she spends less time with you because other things are becoming more important, she discusses her work with other people more often and more in depth than she does with you.” He shrugged and looked down at the sand again. “You can see, you can read the signs, you know it is inevitable…”

  Dehan said, “So, what? It was a year, eighteen months?”

  “About eighteen months, and she told me she had made arrangements to spend more time in New York. Lots of excuses: her publisher was there, like that made any difference, she had switched to a New York agent her husband had found for her, she wanted to help underprivileged victims in the Bronx… A million and one apparently legitimate reasons, but at the root of it all was that her feelings for me were changing. Being with me was no longer important.”

  Dehan seemed to speak to his long, black sneakers. “This may be a painful question to answer, Alornerk, but it could be very important. Would you say that Helena and Jack were moving toward some kind of reconciliation? Were they growing closer again?”

  He nodded for a while. “I don’t know if it was a reconciliation exactly. They had a weird, fucked up kind of co-dependent relationship. She was fucking me, he was fucking some other woman, but they needed each other. Is that love? I don’t know.”

  We were silent for a moment, and as I drew breath to ask a question, he started speaking again. “She moved back to New York to be closer to him, to start living together again as husband and wife. The publication of her books was instrumental in that happening, and yet, on the day of the publication of her second novel, she was fucking me…”

  I felt Dehan go very still. I looked out to sea. The ball was a tiny dot out on the ocean. I turned to look at him.

  “Really?”

  He nodded.

  I said, “That isn’t what you testified at the time.”

  “I realized that as I said it.”

  Dehan asked. “So where were your European friends while you were making the beast with two backs?”

  He puffed out his cheeks. “There never were any European friends.”

  I gave a small laugh. “I’m sure you are aware we never really believed there were.” He gave a small shrug and Dehan gave a small frown to go with it. I ignored them both. “What you seem to be telling us, Alornerk, is that from about twelve midday to three or four o’clock, rather than having lunch at some unspecified restaurant with friends, you and Helena were having sexual intercourse.”

  I glanced at Dehan, who ignored me. Alornerk nodded. “She will be mad at me for telling you, but what have I got to lose now?”

  “We’ll come to that in a moment. First of all, I need you to tell me where this happened.”

  Dehan had her notebook out and was taking notes. Alornerk said, “In her house, in the guest room, because she didn’t want to desecrate the sanctity of the matrimonial room. I should have…”

  He stopped. I said, “What? What should you have done?”

  “I should have walked out on her and gone back to Boston. Instead I believed that I could persuade her to leave that shallow, materialistic egomaniac.”

  I sighed. “Alornerk, what you are telling us is that the only alibi you have for the time of Jack’s abduction and murder is Helena, with whom you were very much in love, and having an affair at the time of his death.”

  “I guess that is what I am telling you, yeah.”

  “Did you kill Jack Connors, Alornerk?”

  “No. I was with Helena. We hadn’t seen each other for some time. When we were alone together, she tried to resist, but the attraction was always too strong. He went to work in the morning. We finished breakfast, then went for a walk and talked things over. Next thing, we fell into bed and stayed there all morning. Eventually, after lunch, around three or four I suppose, she went off to her damned classes, and a couple of hours later, all hell broke loose.”

  Dehan studied his face for a moment.

  “We will have to confront Helena with this, Alornerk, you realize that.”

  He shrugged. “I really don’t give a damn anymore. Do your worst. She didn’t kill him, and neither did I.”

  TEN

  I spent a moment thinking through the complexities of arresting him in Massachusetts as a New York cop and came to the conclusion it wasn’t worth it, at least not yet. Instead I told him:

  “I’m going to need you to come to New York to amend your statement. Are you willing to do that?”

  “Are you going to arrest me for obstruction of justice or something?”

  “I think we’d rather have you cooperate.”

  “You going to take me in now?”

  “No. I need you to come of your own free will. But if you don’t, we’ll have to go down the whole extradition route and probably call in the U.S. Marshals, and you really don’t want to go down that path, Alornerk. Right now you’re probably going to get a smack on the wrist. But mess this up any further and then you’ll find yourself in a real mess. I’ll expect you at the 43rd no later than tomorrow afternoon.”

  He nodded. “OK.”

  Dehan had been listening carefully, with a small frown. Now she said, “Before we wrap this up, I need to know if Helena was with you the whole time that Thursday morning, from the time Jack went to work until she left for her class in the Bronx?”

  He thought about the answer for a long time, gazing out at the sea. I began to think he wasn’t going to answer, but as I drew breath to prompt him, he suddenly sighed and said, “She was with me the whole time, yes.”

  “Why did you lie about going out to lunch with your European friends?”

  He shrugged. “Because of this, what’s happening now. It was her idea. I told her she should just tell the truth. Lying always leads to complications. But she said that if the cops did forensic tests on the bed and on us, and proved that we had had sexual intercourse, we would automatically become their prime suspects. Obviously Helena stood to inherit a huge amount of money from Jack, and as lovers we had a powerful motive…” He shrugged again. “So she said we needed to deflect their suspicion by concocting this story where there were other witnesses that we would try to track down. In the meantime, the investigation would follow its own course and they would forget about us. It was like one of her lurid novels. As it turned out, she was only half right. But she was very afraid of what would happen if the cops realized that we were lovers.”

  Dehan gave her head a small sideways twitch. “I got to tell you, it’s not a good look, Alornerk.”

  He turned to gaze at her. “We were alone, but we were together, the whole morning up until she went to class.”

  I sighed and made to stand, but p
aused. “There are two things you can do to really mess this up, Alornerk: go on the run, and call Helena to tell her what’s happened. You understand me?”

  “Yeah, I understand.”

  “So we’ll see you tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Yeah, I’ll be there early, about two or three.”

  I climbed to my feet and jumped down from the wall. Dehan swung her right leg over so she was straddling the wall, looking at him. She stopped there and said, “Whose idea was it that you should go to the book launch?”

  “Hers.”

  “And hers that you should stay in the same house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did that strike you as odd?”

  “No. She had gone back to him hoping that he would receive her with open arms. But she had forgotten what an asshole he was. He treated her like a worthless piece of shit, the same way he always had, and that depressed her. So I guess she had a whole mix of feelings and urges: to punish him in his own house, perhaps to make him jealous, to assuage her own feelings of inadequacy, to restore her self-esteem, all sorts of motivations for that decision to invite me there. None of them, I later realized, had anything at all to do with me, with making me happy, with making me feel good. It was all to protect and reinforce her bruised little ego.”

  “Yeah, I get that. Is there anything else you want to tell us before we go?”

  “I didn’t kill him, Detective Dehan, and neither did she.”

  “OK, Alornerk, we’ll see you tomorrow.”

  We left him sitting there, on the sea wall, looking out at the breezy ocean as the sun began to slide down the dome of the sky toward the western horizon.

  We crossed the road and made our way back to the car. On the way Dehan tossed me the keys.

  “Three and a half hours. Your turn.”

  We climbed in and I reversed out of the driveway onto Quincy Shore Drive and headed north in search of the I-90. As we crossed over the Neponset, she suddenly raised both hands and dropped them into her lap.

  “We need some forensic evidence, Stone. We are just going round and round in circles. I…” She bit back the words, then sighed again and expostulated, “I don’t honestly see how we can close this one, Stone! I mean, everyone might have done it but nobody certainly did it…”

  I made a skeptical face and said, “Not everyone might have done it.”

  She didn’t hear me and went on. “I mean, our most likely person, like you said, is Lenny. Because, you know, he kills people, he cut off a woman’s head, and he loved her and had no alibi!”

  “I didn’t actually say that…”

  “But both Penelope and Shaw had motive and opportunity, and Alornerk and Helena lied about their alibi! Hell, Stone! We are no closer now than when we first picked up the case!”

  “Possibly a slight exaggeration…”

  “Do you believe Alornerk? Do you think he and Helena were in it together to get rid of Jack? She used Alornerk and then dumped him?”

  “That’s a novel theory.”

  “I mean, what the hell do you think, Stone?”

  “I think you are right, we need some forensic evidence. I also think, as I did earlier today, that our very narrow window is crucial to what happened. Make a movie, Dehan.”

  “What?”

  “Make a movie in your head.”

  “A movie?”

  “It starts with Jack picking up the phone and arranging to meet Penelope. Maybe she calls him or maybe he calls her, we need to find out if the records were ever requested and if not, whether they are still available.”

  “But wait a minute…”

  “I know, Dehan, she said she didn’t talk to him that day. But if she didn’t, as I said before, who the hell was he going to see that lunchtime? So either he gets the call or he calls her, and he sets off to meet her. Either that or there is another person involved in this that we don’t know about yet. Which I seriously doubt at this stage. So he sets off. What does he do? Does he get his car? Or does he walk? Whatever he does, in a very brief period of time he has been abducted. Now, Penelope’s apartment is about…” I made a rapid calculation in my head. “Three miles from Jack’s workplace. That’s a ten to twenty minute drive. But he never makes it. He never gets there. So somewhere along that route, within ten minutes or so of his leaving his office, he has been abducted. That means that whoever took him was right there, waiting for him to go.”

  “That’s true.”

  “But this is a very public place we are talking about, and nobody saw a struggle or a fight or anything of the sort. No witnesses were found who saw Jack being abducted, and we are talking about a strong man with a very aggressive personality. This is not a guy who is going to go quietly.”

  “So he knew who took him.”

  “Seems reasonable, doesn’t it? Now, the rest of his task has to be performed rapidly and quietly and in time for the special delivery to be made punctually, in the Bronx.”

  She put her fingertips to her forehead. “So, so, so…wait! Penelope might have picked him up! Jesus, Stone! You’re a genius! That’s it! Of course! You said he would never go quietly, but he did because it was Penelope who picked him up. She took him to her apartment. The most natural thing in the world. Once there, she used ketamine to knock him out. Probably lured him into the bath where the mess could be easily cleaned up, dosed him with ketamine, killed him, cut off his head and washed away all the blood, then parceled it up and sent the package. The message was, ‘You want him? You can have him!’ But how the hell do we prove it? How do we get forensics for that?”

  I smiled at her. “We need the body. I doubt we’ll find it, and after so long it’s doubtful it would tell us much, but we should try and find it just in case. You never know. We also need that white van. That van is vital. Again, it’s a long shot but we may be able to piece together something from it. And finally the phone records from Penelope’s phone, and Jack and his company’s phones. We need that call that made Jack leave his office. That is key.”

  She was silent for a bit, then said, “I get the call. The call is crucial, and the van. But I don’t really see why the body is that important. I really don’t see what the body could tell us after all this time.”

  I held up two fingers. “Two possible sources of information, Dehan. The first would be things like, was the body dumped whole—minus the head—or dismembered? That would help us to decide whether it was a man or a woman. A strong man might bundle the body in his trunk and dump it whole somewhere. A woman lacks the physical strength for that, so she might dismember it first and take it away in parcels. Also, if it was dismembered, can we identify what kind of tool was used? If it was whole, are there ligature marks? Were the hands tied? Or had he been, as you suggested, in a bath?”

  “OK, OK, yeah, I get it. What’s the other thing?”

  “Well, there is the outside chance that we are barking up the wrong tree and this was a motiveless murder.”

  “A motiveless murder…?”

  I nodded. “Is there more than one decapitated body out there?”

  “A serial killer? What on Earth would make you think that?”

  “You said it reminded you of the lock up. I get the same impression. What if the head was sent to Helena, not as a message to her in particular, but a message to the whole world? What if his obsession was not Helena herself, but married women and married men of a particular type? Are we finding this so hard because we are looking for a murder with a motive, where the only motive was to kill?”

  “You really think that?”

  “No, not really, but I think it is an avenue we need to explore.”

  “Because we haven’t got enough to be looking into.”

  “We’ll ask the inspector to give us some help looking for similar murders in the New York area during a year either side of Jack’s murder. There can’t be that many deaths by decapitation.”

  “You have something on your mind you are not sharing with me. You know it makes me mad whe
n you do that.”

  “Not at all. I am sharing with you everything that is on my mind. I am a reformed man, Dehan, you should know that: more caring, more sharing, more sensitive to my feminine side.”

  “You’re a jerk.”

  “See, that’s what I get for revealing my inner woman.”

  “Take a hike. Asshole.” She smiled sidelong at me.

  I said, “Dehan, please promise me something.”

  “What?”

  “Never get in touch with your inner man.”

  “You done?”

  “No. Especially if he has a big kind of Mexican mustache.”

  “Now are you done?”

  “No. And hairy armpits. I think that could be damaging to the inner harmony of our inner relationship.”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is there anything you are not sharing with me besides your inner asshole?”

  “No, seriously, Dehan. I don’t think this is a serial killer, but I do think that we should cover that base and explore the possibility of other decapitated bodies.”

  “Why?”

  I chuckled. “You mean what do I hope to find?”

  “Yes, OK, the more closed question. What do you hope to find in such a search?”

  I grinned at her. “Decapitated bodies.”

  “You are such a pain…”

  “Do you mean, what would prompt me to search for further decapitated bodies?”

  She didn’t answer. She just stared out the window at the passing landscape. Neither of us spoke for about half an hour. Then she suddenly said, “Yes! Fine! That’s what I meant! What would prompt you to search for further decapitated bodies?”

  I offered her my most innocent face and shook my head. “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. Call it a hunch.” Then I sighed and shrugged. “There are a couple of things I don’t get, Dehan. None of the suspects is quite satisfactory. There is always something that is not quite right. If Alornerk was so driven and so passionate about Helena that he was prepared to set up this elaborate murder, and not leave a trace, why the hell did he then give up on her without a fight? And the same goes for Lenny. It takes huge motivation do commit a murder like this. Yet, immediately after the killing, our murderer vanishes into thin air.”