by Robb T White
Chapter 24
JADE WAS BACK TO composing her resignation letter, but the words wouldn’t come easily. She still loved the action and the chase. How could she give that up for tort law?
It has been a distinct pleasure to serve under your leadership as my senior supervisor …
Rats. Phooey. Nonsense. Even lemmings committing suicide in the ocean wouldn’t follow any of her last two supervisors if they did reverse twists off a cliff in the Arctic at the same time.
Gilker put his size eleven boots all over her report, requesting further investigation of the Arkansas and Pittsburgh crimes. He stamped No Further Action At This Time. Before Great Falls claimed her, he had some work in mind, terrorism duty: background investigations, surveillance of an Arab-American enclaves, liaising with cybercrimes, and attending conferences with Homeland Security’s own version of gypsy workshop artists and their dubious PowerPoints.
Cee’s call blew that dismal prospect out of her head like fresh air pumped into a tunnel.
‘You ready for this?’
‘Hit me,’ Jade said and held her breath.
‘Buffalo field office just came through for you, and I mean big time. They faxed us a copy of an assault charge. Perp’s name is Theodore Wassermann, two Ns. He was picked up four days ago at a campground and booked for assault and battery.’
‘Height, weight?’
‘Getting to that, getting to it, let me see—yes. Here it is. Caucasian, thirtyfour, brown and brown, 190, five-eleven.’
‘He fits. Now give me the good part,’ Jade said.
‘Hell’s bells, I was going to string that out,’ Shaughnessy said.
‘Shaughnessy—’
‘OK, keep your blouse on. Driving a food truck, white, Chevrolet, older model. Registered to Wassermann, Theodore, plates come back—stolen from a Montana used car lot!’
‘You can’t see me,’ Jade said, ‘but I am jumping for joy. Let there be a God. No priors, right? The name’s a fake.’ She said the last with the intonation of a hopeful question.
‘Yes to the first, no to the second—so far.’
Wassermann’s name stood a check with a last known address to a house in Kansas City. Shaughnessy called KC cops and asked them to do a phony welfare check; an hour later, they called back to say no one with that name ever lived at that address as far as the current owner knew.
Shaughnessy said, ‘Before you ask, the homeowner is legit, been at that residence for the last twelve years.’
‘Tax records for this Wassermann?’
‘Jackpot,’ Shaughnessy said. ‘Zilch. No such person registered to any Wassermann Food Service—that’s the name on the papers. But the name on the truck said Leo’s or Lou’s. Some kid in a campground outside Buffalo where Wassermann was staying told the detectives the guy was a “weirdo freak” and nearly knocked some guy’s head off there.’
‘That surprises me,’ Jade said. ‘The sandwich man reeks of control.’
‘Here’s the bad news. State police put a hold on him, but they were too late by hours. Out on bail and skipped yesterday, truck and all.’
‘We need his lawyer,’ Jade said.
‘His lawyer is consulting a lawyer before making a statement to police,’ Shaughnessy said.
‘What does he know?’
‘He’s just covering his ass,’ Shaughnessy said. ‘All this sudden hoopla and official activity over his client must have spooked him.’
‘Nuts,’ Jade said.
‘Heavy cursing, there. We got him. You got him, Jade. He’s in the system, BOLOs up the yin-yang, every New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan trooper on every turnpike and freeway between here and Kalamazoo or Timbuctoo is out looking for him. I predict he’ll be staring at you across an interrogation room table in forty-eight hours.’
‘I thank you from the deepest cockles of my heart,’ Jade said.
‘Just buy me a brew when you’re back in town. What’s next?’
‘Fax me everything ASAP. I’ll take it to Gilker. If he turns me down, I’ll go over his head so fast his ears will spin.’
When she knocked on his office, Gilker was on the phone to his wife and tried to wave her out. Instead, she took a chair right opposite his desk and sat down. Gilker stared a laser beam through her, which she ignored while he discussed the night’s dinner plans without taking his eyes from her once.
‘Sounds yummy. A gourmet meal waiting for you, sir.’
‘You’re this close to insubordination, Agent Hui.’
He held up thumb and forefinger as if he were showing her how to pick a flea off a dog.
She gave the gesture back to him. ‘I’m this close to catching a homicidal maniac who can remove an eyeball from a human head as easily as you picked an olive out of your last dirty martini,’ she said calmly. ‘Here’s the proof.’
She placed the faxed documents on his desk.
Gilker made a show of reading each one. She stayed silent, unmoving, contemplated a still pool of water bubbling up from the ground.
‘All right,’ Gilker said.
‘Thank you, sir,’ Jade said.
‘Agent Hui, one more thing,’ Gilker said.
‘Sir?’
‘Bring me back a scalp, not a dumpster fire.’
He didn’t need to say ‘or else.’ Now she had FBI resources and Gilker had just given her authority to resume the investigation; for the record, he’d remain SAC and clear all requests.
That night she was on the last flight out to Memphis for a connecting flight to Buffalo International. She called ahead to alert their office she was coming and asked them to have the agent on hand who had spoken to Agent Shaughnessy in Pittsburgh that morning.
Her stomach fluttered with nervous tension as the big engines outside her window roared to life and the G-force pressed her back into the seat. She held Wassermann’s mug shot in her hand and studied his face, every line and shadow. It was a pleasant, intelligent face with eyes that stared straight ahead. Light brown hair that made her think of a gerbil, a broad forehead, deep-set eyes. Long, straight nose. No expression. His left cheek was contused.
‘Your boyfriend?’ the man seated next to her asked.
‘Somebody I’m going to meet soon,’ she said.
The remainder of the flight was half-dream, half-sleep; she was back in some distant classroom taking a test and completely unable to comprehend the questions or guess at the answers. The reverse thrust of the engines woke her while she was cobbling an answer from a pastiche of metaphysical questions on the paper. Dreams, cobwebs of the brain, synaptic misfirings, meaningless gibbering from the paleocortex sending imagery and habit to its smarter cousin, the neocortex, for unscrambling.
The man next to her must have heard her mumbling in her sleep.
‘Beg pardon. What did you say, miss?’
‘I said, “I know who I am.”’
‘Good for you,’ he said.
Chapter 25
‘IT’S VERY LATE, AGENT HOI,’ Lyle Frisbee said.
‘I’m sorry about that, sir,’ Jade said.
She stood in his foyer waiting for an invitation to enter the living room of his attractive Craftsman home, but his body language and abrupt mannerism told her he wasn’t going to let her any farther into his home.
‘I don’t think I should be talking to you. I’m seeking counsel for—’
‘I am aware of that. You should be aware of the fact that your client is the prime suspect in four recent, very gruesome murders.’
‘Look, as I told you, I had no idea of any of this! I only handled his A and B charge, nothing else has come to my attention. Nothing like what you’re talking about, Agent Hoi.’
‘Hui.’
‘Look, I’m on a legal tightrope here.’
‘No, you’re not, counselor. You’re out of your depth is what you are. You have a moral and legal obligation as an officer of the court to tell me what you know about Ted Wassermann’s whereabouts.’
‘Hon, a
nything wrong?’
Jade saw a pretty petite blonde wife standing behind him.
She smiled at her and said, ‘Good evening, Mrs. Frisbee. I’m Special Agent Hui of the FBI. I’m here on a criminal matter relating to a former client of your husband.’
‘He might not be former, legally speaking, that’s what the bar association will determine, not you … Sweetheart, let me talk to this woman—agent, for a few minutes in private. Everything’s fine, honest.’
“This woman,” huh? Careful, little man, Jade thought. I had my law degree while you were still making out in junior high with your cheerleader wife.
‘Look, Agent Hui, I’ve said all I’m going to say until I speak to my lawyer.’
‘You look, Frisbee, because I’m tired of waiting for you to understand the seriousness of what I am telling you. You won’t have to worry about your law license because I’ll go straight to the AG in Albany, have him hauled out of bed if it comes to that, and I’ll get a writ from the toughest judge in Buffalo, and I’ll have him or her yanked out of bed if I don’t get a satisfactory answer to my question.’
Frisbee’s face wasn’t exactly a grid of complex Hiragana symbols; he was begging to talk. What she had said in her best command voice had just turned his pallor a distinct gray. She cracked him with ease and got the details of Wassermann’s trashed food truck.
‘Lord Jesus, I hope none of this comes back to me,’ Frisbee whined.
He was openly relieved she seemed more interested in his client’s personality and his Tourette’s symptoms than anything he had done on his behalf.
‘Did he pay you?’
‘That’s none of your business,’ Frisbee huffed.
‘Let me ask it again. Did he pay you in cash, credit card, check or returnable soda bottles?’
‘Money,’ Frisbee said. ‘Cash, if you must know.’
Frisbee decided that the Western Union business was confidential, lawyerclient privilege.
Jade said, ‘Mr. Frisbee, he forfeited confidentiality with his false information and he broke the law when he skipped town.’
‘I wish I could tell you where he was going, Agent Hui, but he was … strange, close-mouthed. I never had a client like him. He didn’t seem fazed by anything. Except for one thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘He said he had to get his meds. The guy looked pretty healthy to me. I thought it strange considering he was entitled to free medication from the county, but he grabbed me by the arm when I said I’d get him what he needed. I’m telling you, he squeezed my forearm so hard it left a deep bruise. Check it out.’
Lyle rolled up his shirt sleeve to show her the grab mark, as big as a grapefruit and the color of an eggplant.
Jade was sure he earned more than his standard lawyer’s fee from the state, and as for his ‘doing a favor’ by going to the truck on his behalf, she’d bet her last dollar he was promised money. The sandwich man might have appeared calm to his lawyer, but she knew he had to be dying inside. He operated in shadow and secret, not under scrutiny like this, with cops, jailers, and lawyers surrounding his every move. Jade wondered how long he was out there “working” before they caught a break like this. VI-CAP estimated as many as fifty serial killers trolling in the United States in any year.
She drove to the Rocky Hole Campground in a pouring down thunderstorm. The water belted the interstate traffic and made visibility a problem for everyone but the amphetamine-laced drivers of eighteen-wheelers.
The teenager who answered her knock on the manager’s trailer told her his father was in town. He didn’t know what he was doing in town and he didn’t know when he was expected back.
‘Maybe you can help me,’ she said. ‘I’m Special Agent Jade Hui. What’s your name?’
He mumbled something that sounded like colon.
‘Colm? That’s a beautiful Irish name. Do you know what it means in Gaelic?’
‘Collin, I said, what the fuck, lady. You real FBI?’
‘Yes, I am,’ she said.
‘You ever shoot anybody with that gun? That’s a Glock on your hip, ain’t it?’
‘I wonder, Collin, if I could ask you some questions about the man the police arrested here—’
‘That fucking asshole.’
‘I need to know whatever you can tell me about him while he stayed here,’ Jade said.
The boy was so monosyllabic she had to pry everything out of him with follow-up questions just to get him to elaborate. Social media, text-English, the 124 characters of a tweet—yet what is it that made young people so backward with their mother tongue?
‘Did you see what he threw into the garbage?’
‘Garbage bags.’
‘Did you see how many?’
‘No.’
‘What color were the bags, do you recall?’
‘Black, green, no, black, maybe.’
‘Black, not dark green? Are you sure?’
‘I just fuckin’ said so, didn’t I?’
‘Anything else you can tell me?’
‘He drinks,’ Collin said.
‘How do you know that?’
‘I seen him one time, rather I heard him. He’s got, like, these fuckin’ hiccups.’
She doubted that. More likely he was peeping into windows and he heard him.
‘That’s a nasty bruise on your forehead,’ Jade said on a hunch. ‘Did you take a spill on that Yamaha out there?’
That irked, hurt his pride. Before he clammed up, she got him to tell her about the confrontation with Wassermann.
‘I taught him a good lesson, though,’ the boy said. He whipped a stiletto out of his pocket. ‘I slashed that fucker’s front tire. He won’t be going too far.’
‘That blade is longer than four inches,’ she said. ‘You could get into trouble for it.’
‘Suck my big fat pork sword, bee-yatch!’
She watched him peel off on his four-wheeler, silently renewing her oath never to have children.
She contrasted him with the polite DeShonte Baker and wondered why you could always expect to receive more courtesy from children in a yurt in Outer Mongolia than anywhere in America. The other thing that piqued her interest was Wassermann’s urgent question about which day the dumpster was emptied. Her instincts told her this unpleasant millennial and the sandwich man’s brief conversation over that would have meant something to him if he was doing more than tossing out trash.
She called city sanitation and discovered where the landfill was and what time the pickup at the campground had been made last week. Tomorrow was the next pickup. She told the supervisor to come down and keep that part of the grid secure until she got there. It was possible to get to the place in the landfill where the driver went. People found lost diamond rings in garbage dumps. This would require some help so she used Gilker’s clout to request volunteer searchers from the Buffalo police academy and the Erie County sheriff’s auxiliary association.
By three that afternoon, she had four FBI agents, twelve academy trainees, and eight volunteers, all garbed in white crime scene body suits isolating black bags from the section where the driver said he took his load. Wassermann was too low on the US Marshal’s radar as yet, but they agreed to send someone out to help.
By 7.30 that evening, they had 128 50-gallon sized black garbage bags isolated in five rows on a pavement near the landfill manager’s shed. She thanked and dismissed the sheriff’s volunteers and set up two teams: one for the trainees to do the initial sifting; the other for the FBI agents to sort through, looking for items of interest. She gave them all a background briefing on what they should be looking for as evidence; she apologized for the vagueness and said that, unpleasant as it might be, they should not disregard rotting food in the bags as a reason to dismiss any possible connection between Wassermann and other crimes. She left it vague and they went to work. The Buffalo PD officer who had contacted Agent Shaughnessy to assist was detailed to provide the crime scene lighting they would need to work t
hrough the night.
By eleven p.m., Jade was certain seven of the remaining ‘bags of interest,’ as they were jokingly referred to, had come from Wassermann’s food truck. Five of them were searched item by item under her supervision. Nothing caught her eye. One contained an outdated road atlas and a broken handgrip. The other had different kinds and lengths of fibers that looked like carpet fibers from different vehicles. Half-smoked cigarette butts, pop and beer cans that were unsullied by the filthy mess of the other bags’ contents, which seemed unusual. Maybe these were personal. Long strands of human hair, possibly women’s, some with follicles attached. She had them separately bagged and marked for DNA testing. Finally, a dozen small white strips of paper she recognized as money wrappers. Most of the rest inside was fouled with the residue of food and grease, but several were legible. The words Bank of Fayetteville were written in small type. She had them photographed and bagged.
The US Marshal was turning over a piece of rubber tubing in his hand. She isolated a dozen items for a further look.
‘Your guy a junkie, Agent Hui?’
‘That’s thick tubing. It might be part of a slingshot,’ she said.
Beside it, she placed pieces of broken plastic, polished wood, a strip of canvass in camo design. She recalled Dr. Peaspanen’s autopsy of Hugheart and his lecture on slingshot accessories. So far, no steel shot.
By two in the morning, she finished her 302 report for Gilker. She checked a map and saw Cleveland and Youngstown were equidistant from Ashtabula, the nearest town where a festival was scheduled to begin the day after tomorrow. She called Pittsburgh and left a message with the on-duty agent to have Agent Shaughnessy call her in the morning. Cee would run interference for her as far as Pennsylvania’s burgh and small-town festival, county fair, and Amish knitting bee along Interstates 79 and 90. Buffalo was working the phones in the other direction of where he went east.
Cleveland would handle the eastern portion of Ohio, which meant, in order, Ashtabula (Wine & Walleye), Painesville (Celtic Fest), Cleveland itself, which had to be split up ethnically or demographically: the Flats, the Warehouse District, Slavic Village, and Little Italy for, respectively, barbecued ribs, microbrews, Polish kielbasa and spaghetti. Sandusky and Toledo were long shots for a damaged tire. She called the Youngstown field office fifty miles to the south on Route 1 and asked the duty officer to have the SAC call her in the morning. These were courtesy calls, mainly, but she would need help if anything developed.