Perfect Killer

by Robb T White

  She stayed up until dawn listening to Chopin études and thinking of the sandwich man. The Tristesse was a favorite for the way it melded her brain waves. She thought of her talk with the Carnegie Mellon professor doing research on sounds and how they played to the brain’s picture-making abilities. Buddhists called their flashes of sudden spiritual insight satori.

  The sandwich man had no face for her yet, just a name borrowed like a hermit crab using a shell as a mobile home for a while. Like the crab with its vulnerable underbelly, the sandwich man used his food truck’s mobility to hide in plain sight. He brought people to him. People he looked at through his serving window stood on a selection ramp but didn’t know it. He was an Angel of Death, a second-hand without the pressed uniform and flashy swagger stick or rakishly tilted SS cap greeting customers like the cattle cars that rolled into Auschwitz, where he calmly observed them. The sandwich man killed on a minute scale compared to Josef Mengele, but Mengele, she remembered, was educated, a cultivated man with two doctorates who whistled Puccini arias while he worked in his hideous labs. Her killer was more like one of those massive crocodiles on the Zambia River, submerged, watching hundreds of zebra and water buffalo ford until making his choice. It wasn’t like cattle in the kill chute of a slaughterhouse, however, because her man was selective about his victims.

  Only Pittsburgh, which, she knew, had to be a random act. What reason did you have for choosing, sandwich man? Mengele demanded his ‘twins out’ for his ghastly experiments; survivors say his cry Zwillinge auf! was heard up and down the train depot as they marched left to Birkenau to die in the gas chambers and the ovens, or right to the camps where their death was a prolonged agony of sadistic torture.

  What makes you pick that one but not this one or that one? Darn it, you chose Coy Burchess for a reason. You acted the victim to bring out the bully, was that it?

  The sandwich man was a weasel who leaped onto a parrot’s back, enjoying the ride through the jungle canopy until the bird wore down, and then the eating commenced.

  She pondered the darker abysses of the human mind while a chorus of songbirds erupted in the first lemon rays of light beginning to warm the air of summer, starting to decline toward autumn in the North.

  PART 3

  Chapter 26

  Ashtabula, OH

  WÖISSELL HAD JUST PUT the entire state of Pennsylvania between him and the Rock Hole Campground. He still wasn’t going to breathe easily until he’d added a couple more states to the equation. He had a theory that jurisdictional snafus among police departments increased proportionally to the number of states between him and his latest exploit.

  The FBI, however, was different. They were national police and could go anywhere at any time and override locals and their fiefdoms without demur. His antennae told him he was still safe; they were not alerted to his existence. He didn’t even have to worry about a skip-trace search because he’d forked over the entire bail amount. Sayonara, five grand. He’d use the $1,000 left over from his mother’s wire transfer to keep himself going on the road as long as he could. He’d have to watch the money carefully and try to make a small profit. The thought of going back home too soon was anathema. Fred, for one, wouldn’t be safe. He needed time to build up a little resistance to his family and especially toward his brother. He would never altogether be immune from the loathing he felt for Fred, but if he could manage it, there would be peace in the family home. Besides, he smiled to himself, he was saving Freddie for a grand finale, a Götterdämmerung, to be recorded to the nth generation of the Wöissell line.

  He was heading toward the Ohio line on Interstate 90 when he felt his right front tire going soft. He couldn’t risk a state trooper pulling him over so he took the first exit off 90 to a town marked Conneaut on the map.

  At the top of the exit, he noticed a sign advertising something called a Wine & Walleye Festival in Ashtabula starting in two days. It struck him as an oxymoron to put those two things together, but he decided to let randomness have its way yet once more. The car behind him gave him a blast of the horn. Wöissell gave him a friendly wave and made the turn left for Ashtabula.

  Another Indian name. He was told in the jail cell back in Cheektowaga that it was a Senecan Indian word, Ji-ik-do-wa-ga, and meant place of the crab apple tree.

  Here we go again, Wöissell thought, maybe it will bode well this time.

  He drove the fifteen miles west and saw another sign off a Route 11 freeway junction pointing north to Ashtabula Harbor. It was a different festival sign; this one was a lifeboat with a giant plaster fish in a Jazz Age tuxedo with fold-down collars holding up a sign for Wine & Walleye. The look on the fish’s rubbery lips indicated he was excited to be the herald of his own demise.

  Wöissell knew an omen when he saw one. A tic was developing in the corner of his left eye and the stress of the last week had resulted in increased Tourette’s symptoms. If he made a spectacle of himself, his opportunities for selecting his next candidate would be limited as well as the increased attention he would bring to himself.

  Force the moment to its crisis, as the poet said, he told himself, and by pressing his luck, he was giving himself up to the forces of randomness. Control, discipline—his watchwords were reinstated after that fiasco at the campground.

  First thing first, he told himself. Fix the tire, get gas, get the licenses, do some shopping, get situated in the harbor, prepare a face to meet the faces he would meet. As everywhere else he had been, his window gave him a brief snapshot of people as they came up to be served his wares. If they said something, did something that caught his eye, he would know. Timing was all.

  He followed a winding brick road into town. The Norfolk and Southern Pacific Railroad operated a massive coal terminal across from the coast guard station. Lake Erie was just visible from his vantage coming into the harbor over a bascule bridge. The snot-green river stank of diesel fumes; two lines of recreational boats on Marina Street dockside idled on either side of the lift bridge, awaiting the siren that would stop traffic and allow them to head for the open lake beyond the breakwall’s granite slabs or return to their berths in the marinas. The air was muggy with heat and fumes. He hoped for this town’s sake no walleye were pulled from this river.

  Wöissell saw food trucks and lunch wagons being set up: Cunningham sausage, waffle cakes, lemonade and the usual provender of fairs. Red umbrellas testified to Budweiser’s lock on the outdoor beer concession. He drove up a quaint street of old refurbished buildings crossed with red brick streets and lined with restaurants, coffee and specialty shops selling tee-shirts, chocolate, beach glass, ice cream, antiques, and homemade crafts. He’d been to a dozen places like this one around the Great Lakes, all of them festooned with bright banners and forced jollity while peddling to appetites of gluttony and lust. Three days of harmless fun, mostly, with money spent on food and drinks for the stomach, gewgaws for the simple. A smattering of fights in bars, some babies produced in the fornications resulting from the inebriation.

  Wöissell thought Pope Gregory did the modern world a big favor by shortening up the list of sinful thoughts and deeds. Aristotle and the monk Evagrius Ponticus had a more comprehensive list by far and every town festival was a testament to wickedness and a nation’s insatiable addiction to vice: gluttony, lust, fornication, prostitution, avarice, greed, boasting, hubris, wrath all contained in one box with a pretty bow of consumerism making the crass and boorish respectable. Toss in the Bible’s admonitions against ‘lying tongues,’ ‘sowing discord,’ and ‘feet that be swift in running to mischief’ and you had a microcosm of the human condition in every burgh, borough, and hamlet across the land compacted into a few short days. A trough with a capitalist stick rattling to call the hogs.

  Wöissell remembered most, not all, and savored memories of those from which he had culled a two-legged hog.

  Business called him from his reveries. The tire was slashed, probably with one of his own kitchen knives, so his first task was to find a r
epair shop, then get directions to City Hall, obtain his licenses under a new name, shop for supplies. It was busy work but he enjoyed doing each step of the process. Those church fathers knew a thing or two about more esoteric kinds of sinning, too, he reflected; acedia was, for lack of a better word, a dejection of the spirit he was most prone to between his selected kills. It had no connection to guilt, which he did not feel, not even a particle of, and in fact never felt better than when he was preparing to make a fellow sinner face his own end.

  What he could not ask his boy lawyer back in Buffalo to search his truck for was very carefully secured. False identity papers were wrapped in gallon cellophane baggies and kept in a metal box secured behind the fender with a blowtorch when he equipped the truck. His compost can of false leads was gone; like everything else, it was tossed onto the floor by that white-trash couple and mixed with the rest of what he threw out.

  A pang of sudden anguish caused him to slap the steering wheel and swerve into another lane.

  A detail neglected—

  Ted Wassermann was certain to be exposed; it was just a matter of time, and he hoped it wouldn’t be until his court date weeks ahead. He knew it was safer to anticipate the worst. If they got onto me, what would they find out? He knew the police would talk to the campground manager, and he was confident they could learn nothing from him—or that moron teenager son.

  What else?

  His compost can. What else was in it? Think!

  Wöissell replays the film in his head. He sees himself with the stacks of bills sorted on his prep table. He’s figuring out costs for this and that but he knows he’s heading back to Providence, so he has to figure how much generosity he can afford to leave the woman in the trailer with her swollen belly. He watches the film play out in slow-motion: he’s counting, arranging the money by denomination, squaring the edges like a croupier with his chips.

  Then, he remembers—

  The white paper wrappers from the Bank of Fayetteville from his cashed traveler’s checks. Fearing the electronic trail of a credit card, he was forced to use this old-fashioned means of keeping a reserve of money on hand for emergencies. He had placed them inside his compost can for future use in another state and then the film fades, dissolves.

  He breathed out. Nothing to fear even if they searched—and why would they do that?

  Underestimating law enforcement could get him caught. Still, they begged for him to be sloppy with their repeated failures to put one and one together. Trophy-taking was stupid. He knew the number of his victims; that was in another secret compartment hidden away in the locked room of his head.

  He passed a brick building with cars out front. The sign said Giddings & Crowell. A small neon sign in the window said Open. Simple things, little things. First things first.

  He breathed out, felt a calmness descend. The terrible anxiety of the last few days was gone from his mind like releasing a balloon and the cramping in his shoulders and back eased. He would never again allow himself to be taken in by a woman. Thinking of Reggie was still painful; her image came unbidden on the endless road or in the dark threshold of sleep—she was either a shape pressing down on him full of soft moans and warm scents, rocking him with clenched thighs, or she was a fox-faced slattern mocking him from the doorway of her camper.

  Charley had never considered choosing a woman. Maybe it was time for some equal-opportunity mayhem.

  Chapter 27

  AN HOUR LATER, SHOWERED, a couple of energy bars and three cans of Red Bull in her valise, Jade left the house for the job; she no sooner booted up her computer then the supervisor came out of his office holding a fax.

  ‘Good news. They might have found the truck, Agent Hui,’ he said.

  ‘That’s great, sir. Where is it?’

  ‘Lockport.’

  ‘He didn’t get far on that tire then,’ she said. ‘How sure are they?’

  ‘Truck fits the description. Plate is a match to the campground ledger the manager faxed us. White, older model, looks to have been painted in a hurry. Subs, Sandwiches and More on both sides. Right front tire looks brand new. Truck is registered to a Clifford Davis.’

  ‘The boy said the truck had Leo’s or Lou’s painted on the sides, sir. He wasn’t sure about much, but he seemed certain about that,’ she said.

  ‘Well, the rest fits. Davis is thirty-two, five-eleven, two hundred. Did five years at Dannemora upstate eight years ago for aggravated menacing, assault and battery, assault with a deadly weapon, witness intimidation. Lives alone, divorced. Wife’s in California with the kids. Lockport PD says he’s a constant problem. Two neighbors have accused him of poisoning pets last summer, and he’s threatened a few of them when he’s drunk, but nobody wanted to press charges.’

  ‘That doesn’t fit our profile except for the physicals,’ she said.

  ‘Profiles can be hit or miss, you know that. We’ve got three teams, twenty-hour surveillance on the house. He’s at home right now. They want to know if you want them to brace him at the house or follow him when he leaves.’

  ‘Follow. We can pull him over if anything doesn’t look right. I can be in Lockport in an hour.’

  ‘OK, I’ll relay that you’re coming. I had Knight start the work-up until you came in. See him for details. He’ll guide you to the staging area for the surveillance teams. Good luck.’

  It wasn’t as promising as she’d hoped. Their guy wasn’t prone to reckless violence. Furthermore, she didn’t see him as having a permanent residence. Something about the distances he traveled, the care he took to cull his victims, and his deliberateness, for lack of a better word, told her she was wasting time and gas. Still, if she learned anything in her career it was to expect the unexpected. Criminal investigation wasn’t all science but often depended on luck—namely, the bad guy being stupid, and somehow that didn’t fit her estimation of the sandwich man.

  Instead of a net surrounding the house, she discovered a typical miscommunication between the FBI and local police.

  The surveillance leader met her as soon as she pulled up.

  ‘One of Lockport’s patrol cars made a second pass by the house when they were told to stay back,’ he said. ‘He must have spotted it. He rabbited out the back through a cellar door, and our team lost him in the marshes back there. Damned cattails are ten-feet high. We’ve set up a three-mile grid search.’

  ‘Call for a copter search,’ she said. ‘If Buffalo PD has a thermal heat detector, see if you can get it.’

  ‘He’s a scofflaw, so the Marshals want us to get a bench warrant which will give them jurisdiction. Your call, Agent Hoy. Us or them.’

  ‘Take them off the leash,’ Jade replied. ‘Those guys love a good fugitive chase.’

  Chapter 28

  THE CHILD AT HIS window was still gazing at the menu. Charley had been reading the library’s only copy of the Tractatus, amazed that a small town library carried it. It was misfiled in the recipe section next to Tessa Dimare’s Pasta e Fagioli: The Bean Cuisine of Italy. Some Oxford pinhead provided a useless, pompous introduction. He wondered what the author would think of his only work providing fodder to academics to batten on to further their careers. Wöissell’s paths, as multitudinous as they were crisscrossing the country, didn’t bring many of that type to his plexiglass window. Too bad, Charley thought. I could make a fetish of them.

  The little boy’s rapt face finally left off staring at the menu.

  ‘What’s the difference between a chili dog with everything and a regular hot dog with ketchup, relish, mustard, and chili toppings?

  Wöissell asked him, ‘What’s the difference between the a priori and the transcendental?’

  ‘Gimme a hot dog with everything on it.’

  He was beginning to feel that familiar tightening in his gut: getting close to time.

  No one called out to him as distinct in any way. By now, he was familiar with some of the people on the street. The shop owners were tethered to their places but from time to time,
he would see a familiar face among the crowd, stopping to chat among the flow of cretins.

  He had seen too much humanity not to recognize patterns: people watchers at the outdoor café tables and benches, families, young people looking for a good time with friends or like-minded people like themselves, males in duos or trios there for the alcohol and the girls, pre-teen sets who were boy- or girl-watching, lone males seeking a fast hookup or a quick drunk, male-female couples in twenties, thirties, forties up to senior citizens who could be there for anything ranging from a pleasant stroll among the crowds through a place to end or rekindle a failing relationship to sexual liaisons with an available male or female, depending, usually, on the wife’s preference. People talked casually about the most intimate things in front of a vendor’s window as if the individual inside were deaf, dumb, and blind.

  He was biding time but it was now the final day of the festival. He wondered what his snobby relatives back in Providence would think of the wine samplers. Min’s dull critiques of Napa Valley wines versus French or Italian at the dinner table. Thoughts of home brought his father to mind. The old man’s days were numbered. Before his father’s mind caved in, he had been soliciting help from the ‘final exit’ group that assisted people in the final stages of a terminal disease with a painless suicide brought about by two bottles of helium, some plastic tubing, and a plastic bag to fit over the head. Suicide by Lowe’s. A guide would be sent to assist on the chosen day to assure the process succeeded as intended and, if needed, to keep the dying individual from twitching by holding down the hands. No do-over’s, in other words. Next to the papers, he found a hand-drawn list of household yearly expenses. His stepmother’s extravagance showed she was burning through his money even then. Little wonder his brother was outraged. That would explain Freddie’s drunken behavior at the table; when Susan went to greet Min and her husband in the foyer, Fred leaned over to hiss in his ear, ‘Don’t you care that bitch tried again to get her claws into Granddad’s trust?’