by Robb T White
After the meal, she toyed with the apple cobbler. ‘What is it, Pete?’
He sat back, took a breath, and said, ‘Gilker advised me in a few carefully chosen words I should avoid you if I want a meaningful career in the FBI.’
‘I figured as much,’ Jade said. ‘I’ve been a leper so long I’ve forgotten I have this effect.’
‘I know what you’re thinking—’
‘Do you?’
‘Yes, you’re thinking I’m a gutless wonder.’
‘I’m quitting,’ she said.
‘You’re quitting? Just like that?’
‘Pete, it’s been on my mind for the last six—no, eight months. I’ve run my course. I can’t take another sideways promotion. This time, it’s Great Falls.’
‘Wyoming?’
‘Montana.’
‘God’s Country,’ Pete said. ‘Take some time to think it over, Jade. Maybe Gilker’s right. A short vacation, somewhere you can unwind and put things into perspective.’
‘I’m nearly forty years old. If I haven’t got things into perspective by now, it’s too late.’
The rest of the meal was dismal. Small talk couldn’t cover what was on her mind. She knew she had been flirting with a fling and realized her own unhappiness could have done real damage to him, not to mention his wife and children at home. When she said she’d do her best to give him a wide berth around the office, he didn’t protest.
When he dropped her off at the Ramada, he asked where she might go for a vacation.
‘I’ve got a place in mind,’ she said. ‘I’ll send you a postcard.’
Her appointment with Gilker the following morning didn’t start well.
‘You want to use your vacation time to do what now?’
In exchange for the two-week extension to tie off the Smiley Face killings, he would hold her resignation letter and enforce it with a formal reprimand if she failed to complete all relevant paperwork to justify the extended time. Technically speaking, she was on vacation. She had to go off the reservation but wanted FBI resources if the need arose. If anything resulted, she said, she would make a formal request through channels and wait for everybody to sign off.
Gilker didn’t like it. He’d already called a couple of people for advice but was told the same thing: he could block her request but it could bite him later. Make sure, they said, the paperwork was done to prevent blowback; he would be acting within his purview, showing initiative as one senior colleague expressed it. Important that any hot mess fell on her, not him.
‘You’re knitting a bunch of disconnected facts into a string here, Agent Hui,’ Gilker said. ‘I don’t see a solid hypothesis.’
She wore him down with her facts: taco foreman Tiedman’s description of the sandwich man in essence matched the McKees Rocks description provided by DeShonte Baker (‘A child witness, for God’s sake, and never mind the millions of a male Caucasian between five-eight and six foot, brown and brown, weighing between 170 and 200 between here and there’). She countered with the likeliest motivation behind the river murders—namely Burchess’s selection as victim. His bullying of the sandwich man, witnessed by the night shift, the white truck in the parking lot of six McKees Rocks motels on the night before the killing of Marquel McDuffy. (‘Lord, Hui, you can’t even begin to count the number of white trucks in parking lots or on the highways’).
That last point was hard to refute. Shaughnessy said Nolan’s team ran license plates and IDs from every motel computer between the Interstate 79 junction and five miles south McKees Rocks. Nothing, nada.
‘That goes a little way toward confirming the existence of one killer,’ Jade explained. ‘He uses fake IDs and stolen plates.’
‘No, it doesn’t. You can’t confirm a negative,’ Gilker said.
‘Two weeks,’ Gilker told her, finally. ‘All communication stays interpersonal unless I approve it in advance. No receipts, nothing. The Bureau isn’t picking up the tab, Agent Hui.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Jade said.
The die was cast, however; she was done with the Bureau no matter what. She was in a countdown now. The thought bumped up her heartbeat a notch because no Plan B and no net under her. Gilker expected crystal-clear proof this eye gouger was not a phantom, like her Smiley Faces. She could be burrowing like a honey badger into a rotten log swarming with bees.
Chicago first, clean out her bank account, pay a few bills, and take a deep breath to think it all through from there. She had a scent even though it was fourteen days old.
All three murders faded as statewide sensations. The McKees Rocks killing never got near the fold of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. But she knew, if the media connected them to a fourth, trotted out the term serial killer, she’d have a nonstop circus on her hands and one unhappy ADIC in New York.
She looked at herself in her hallway mirror. She would be forty tomorrow. Most people thought she looked Mexican. Her descent being from the Hui people, not the dominant Han, had infused her with an understanding of facial subtleties. Being a woman in such a sexually aggressive society inspired her to compete with men in everything from judo to academics. She knew that a man who removed his victims’ eyes was self-made. He knew what it took to create his own identity in a hi-amped culture demolished rather than encouraged every attempt to avoid becoming like everyone else.
Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity—the Bureau’s motto. Hers, too.
PART 2
Chapter 16
Cheektowaga, NY
IT NEVER CEASED TO amaze him what Americans could find to throw a party over: wine, lilacs, dairy, corn, grassroots, art, tomatoes, watermelons, peppermint, jazz—even sauerkraut. And that was all confined to what you’d find on one slender corridor of the Dewey Thruway across New York between mid-summer and the beginning of autumn. Driving along the New York State Thruway was an acceptable risk, given the millions of vehicles passing east and west. But toll booths made Wöissell uneasy because they were accompanied by cameras as well as human witnesses. Soon, there would be only the cameras as New York moved to an entirely electronic system where motorists with EZPasses would have tolls deducted from their accounts by sensors and the rest would have their license plates snapped and a bill sent in the mail.
He never forgot he was never entirely off the grid. He couldn’t avoid CCTV cameras even in the smallest villages and townships. But he never considered himself obsessed about it like the Unabomber. It was simply an adversarial relationship, like the cameras at toll booths, that had to be avoided or dealt with by superior planning. It was easy to become paranoid when every email is captured, letter sent photographed, phone call recorded and stored in some cavernous factory stocked with servers. NSA’s ears and eyes in the skies. Soon, every police department in the country would be sending up drones to take videos. It was all one to him; bring it on, was his challenge right back. I’m here, moving through your town, and maybe I’ll stop if the mood strikes me …
Right then, it was the freedom of the road and escape from the homestead that soothed. His choice of places wasn’t a concern; nothing beckoned in particular. He was too late for the Naples Grape festival and the state fair in Syracuse, which ended yesterday; the Cohocton Fall festival was early October, but too much time between now and then meant he’d have to find some industrial zoned area wherever he could and, if he didn’t have any competition with another food truck, ask permission of the factory managers to let him sell food to their workers. After Arkansas, he had dropped the stutter—too risky, like bank robbers painting a mole on their cheek—and he let his beard grow out.
Once a site had been selected, he’d follow the simple routine of showing papers, paying fees, getting the license to peddle his products at their locales. Lying low, he called it. Serving up his greasy, tasteless, probably dangerous food and watery beverages to these ciphers, these sock puppets on two legs. No matter who or where, they were all the same: the walking dead. Wöissell didn’t hate or pity them. Unless, like that lout in Arkans
as, they brought themselves to his attention—lit that tiny spark to a roaring flame—he handed them their food and made change for a dollar. Invisible yet deadly, an exposed rod in a nuclear plant.
Wöissell’s one superstition was a 1987 Rand McNally road map of the US, well-thumbed, dog-eared, with loose pages and a large brown grease stain on the front from a fryolator accident years ago. He wouldn’t replace it. He never marked in it. Robert ‘Butcher Baker’ Hansen, Alaskan serial killer, faithfully marked his pilot’s aviation chart with Xs for his victims. Simple things, little things. Longevity depended on it.
He let randomness dictate where he should go: if a large enough bug hit the left side of the windshield and left guts, he’d choose the next town with a Roman or Greek name. New York saddled itself with them: Troy, Utica, Rome, Syracuse. If right, he’d look for, say, an Indian name. His windshield was already creamed with a patina of bug innards. He had once led his prep school debate team with an argument on the question of God’s omniscience versus Satan’s percipience as a fallen angel with the quote from Matthew: “And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered.” How about a trillion bugs a minute with their assholes driven through their brains by impacts with windshields every day?
Right side, upper left: a big one, dragonfly, the tick its death absorbed by the wind’s velocity and the impact converting a delicate life form evolved over millions of years into a gray-green blot, indistinguishable from the rest of the snot on his windshield. Death transmogrifies then it disperses matter to the same random winds, organic, sentient, non-living all into nothingness with the same efficiency but at varying speeds whether bug, diamond, star, or the nuclei of atoms.
So be it: Indian. He glanced down at the open map between the console: Cheektowaga, a mouth-filler, that one—good enough. South on Interstate 290 just ahead.
It was almost supper time. He’d locate a campgrounds and park there. Make himself a quick joyless meal. Take his bearings later. The routine was never identical but always similar. Locate the downtown, find the municipal building, ask directions for the right office. Show liability insurance, sign a commissar agreement of commercial-grade equipment in legalese, fill out food truck forms to apply for the peddler’s license, turn in the paperwork, pay somewhere between $30 and $80, detailing name of business and contact info from a list he would have memorized the preceding day. Then it was restocking his supplies, buy a new fitting for the refrigeration compressor, exchange the propane tanks, do some grocery shopping, food prep, and make the rounds of the nearest industrial park for permission to sell his food. Sometimes he felt like an Arab hawking his wares in a souk. He could do it all in his sleep.
But right then, his hunger was uppermost and the road grit needed to be washed off and the muscles in his shoulders, arms, and hands eased off the strain. When he started off, he would go out of his way to ask a cop or an importantlooking individual for directions. His goal in every town was to slip in with as few words spoken to people as possible to transact the business. Then it would become a ritual, the raison d’etre for his continued existence on this rock orbiting a bigger molten rock in blackest space. Charley thought of himself as a bug flying around in his own little orbit, too, until he found his windshield—or, as Wöissell suspected in the deepest cockles of his heart—the windshield would find him first.
The words Campgrounds Exit appeared on the highway sign as if by magic; it seemed to materialize out of his consciousness, as if he had created it merely by wishing it into being. This close to Buffalo and the Niagara Falls corridor would explain the coincidence better.
He loved that feeling of belonging, of transcending, that other mortals were denied by their weaknesses and limitations.
Transacting business here required a little more acting skill. The Rocky Hole Campgrounds signage featured full-service amenities: forty-eight full hook-up sites, tables at each site, gravel roads, full-sized showers, electric, water, and sewer. Even a laundromat. If that wasn’t enough to entice a Winnebago off the road, then being a pet-friendly facility with the KAO stamp of approval would surely seal the deal. No psychos or rapists here! Just family-approved fun! Little did they know, he thought.
Wöissell went through his road-weary traveler spiel, clipped to razor-thin efficiency by now, and paid in cash at the manager’s cabin near the entrance. Unfortunately, he had to allow the manager’s son to escort him to his space, which he submitted to with a graceful nod. The boy, a sulky-looking teen in a black tee with a fringe of chin whisker, hopped on his four-wheeler, revved the engine, and throttled off without a word. Wöissell nodded at the manager and followed the boy’s smoking exhaust disappearing around a bend.
He gave the kid a $5 tip and hoped he wouldn’t try to speak to him. He didn’t. The money and the boy disappeared at the same time back down the gravel road. Wöissell was in the middle of the U-shaped rear of the campgrounds. It was an eclectic caravansary: pop-ups, silver tubes, slide-in campers, a few of those deluxe RVs, and a mix of vehicles like his: trucks that started out as one thing in life and ended up doing another. Retirees with Q-Tip hair rubbed shoulders with hillbillies on the move. That was all right. He liked a mixed composition; nothing proclaimed anonymity in transit better than an airport terminal but a campground in the Midwest would do as a close second, barring any Ma and Pa types who liked to sit around campfires and talk about their Winnebago motor homes, their varicose veins, and pets with cute names.
Instead of doing anything on his list, he made himself a cup of black coffee, wrapped his fleece blanket around his shoulders, put up the sun visors and fell asleep. Another difference between the brothers was Wöissell’s ability to fall asleep almost anywhere at any time. Fred dared him to sleep in the red maple in their backyard and he obliged by climbing to the very top, securing a hammock to a pair of branches no thicker than his arms and falling asleep in it that night. He could nod off in front of a television and wake up fully alert an hour later. His brother was the opposite: snuffling sounds, moans, fitful sleep and an hour to shake out the cobwebs—that was Fred then and now, although Wöissell thought that, if he were ever in a room while his brother slept, the temptation to make that sleep permanent might be too great to resist.
An hour and fifteen minutes passed when he opened his eyes. He heard voices coming from the camper to his left. The sun was declining over the trees but the air was warm, thick with bugs.
The voices belonged to a young couple. He lifted a portion of the visor to see an attractive brunette with very long hair in cut-off Levi shorts and a sleeveless blouse tied off at her midriff, having an animated discussion with a bearded male her age; both in their late twenties, he guessed. It took seconds to realize the discussion was escalating into an argument. He inferred she had stayed too long at the bar the night before and the boyfriend or husband was angry about it. He heard ‘bitches’ several times and figured those were the girlfriends she’d opted to drink with rather than run home to his charms and loving embrace.
An old story. Wöissell had weathered a few of these with his father and stepmother before his decline back in Providence. With or without the accompanying foul language, it was going on in a hundred thousand homes all over the country. He took inventory and decided to shop in the morning.
While he was in the kitchen counting stock, he heard a car engine start up and then a trio of horn blasts, followed by a male’s voice threatening her if she came home late that night. A fusillade of gravel clattered against metal siding, a couple of stones ricocheted off his own truck. Then silence. Good riddance, Wöissell thought.
Ten minutes later, a soft tapping on the Chevy’s back door. He opened it to see the same young woman. She was so tanned he thought she might be Latina. Then he noticed the tan lines.
‘Yes, how can I help you?’
‘I wanted to apologize to you, mister. Me and my boyfriend, well, I’m sure you heard us. He took off like a bat on a h
ill. Some rocks hit the side of your truck. I didn’t see no damage, though.’
‘It’s an old truck. You needn’t have worried,’ he said. He cranked out a weak smile and lowered his head, assuming a harmless persona, the sun hitting him square in the face.
‘My name’s Regina. Call me Reggie or Reg.’
She extended a hand for him to shake. He hesitated. Careful, careful—don’t squeeze.
How easy it would be to swing her straight inside before she realized what was happening, send her flying headfirst into a corner of the stainless-steel table. That’ll teach you to stay out late.
She reacted to his smile. A pretty girl with perfect teeth, not a pound of flab on her body. He lowered her age by five years.
‘So, like, what’s your name?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘My name is … Wassermann. Ted Wassermann.’
‘People call you Teddy, I’ll bet.’
‘How’d you guess?’
‘Mmm, that coffee I smell? You wouldn’t happen to have an extra cup, would you, Teddy? I’ll be headin’ off to work soon. Sure could use the caffeine.’
He hesitated a beat too long. It wasn’t for lack of practice; she pumped pheromones into the air. He was attracted to her, God damn it.
‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry to bother you.’
He internalized a split-second pro-con debate. It was worse if she left upset.
‘No, as it happens, I have some fresh.’
‘My mother warned me about getting into white vans,’ she said. She ducked going past him, an odd shuffling movement. He wanted to reach out and touch her hair going past.
‘Your mother was probably right about that.’ He flashed a grin at her. God, I’ll be winking next …
‘But you don’t look like no crazy rapist, Teddy,’ she said.
She beamed a high-intensity smile at him again. He was trying to think of the last time he had held a girl in his arms and he guessed it would be a female judo teacher his father found for him. He acted as uke for her throws and holds. He recalled how he had to adjust his grip to accommodate her size difference.