The Scarecrow

by Michael Connelly

  She averted her eyes and started rubbing my chest.

  “I hope this wasn’t a one-time thing,” I said. “I don’t want it to be.”

  She didn’t respond for a long time.

  “Me, neither,” she finally said.

  But that was all.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked. “You always seem to go off to dwell on something.”

  She looked at me with a half smile.

  “What, you’re the profiler now?”

  “No, I just want to know what you’re thinking about.”

  “To be honest, I was thinking about something a man I was with a couple years ago said. We’d, uh, had a relationship and it wasn’t going to… work. I had my own hang-ups and I knew he was still holding out for his ex-wife, even though she was ten thousand miles away. When we talked about it, he told me about the ‘single-bullet theory.’ You know what that is?”

  “You mean like with the assassination of Kennedy?”

  She mock-punched me in the chest with a fist.

  “No, I mean like with the love of your life. Everybody’s got one person out there. One bullet. And if you’re lucky in life, you get to meet that person. And once you do, once you’re shot through the heart, then there’s nobody else. No matter what happens—death, divorce, infidelity, whatever—nobody else can ever come close. That’s the single-bullet theory.”

  She nodded. She believed it.

  “What are you saying, that he was your bullet?”

  She shook her head.

  “No, I’m saying he wasn’t. He was too late. You see, I’d already been shot by someone else. Someone before him.”

  I looked at her for a long moment, then pulled her down into a kiss. After a few moments she pulled back.

  “But I should go. We should think about this and everything else.”

  “Just stay here. Sleep with me. We’ll get up early tomorrow and both get to work on time.”

  “No, I have to go home now or my husband will worry.”

  I sat up like a bolt. She started laughing and slipped off the bed. She began getting dressed.

  “That wasn’t funny,” I said.

  “I think it was,” she insisted.

  I climbed off the bed and started getting dressed, too. She kept laughing in a punch-drunk sort of way. Eventually, I was laughing too. I pulled my pants and shirt on first and then started hunting around the bed for my shoes and socks. I found them all except for one sock. I finally got down on my knees and looked for it under the end of the bed.

  And that was when the laughter stopped.

  Angela Cook’s dead eyes stared at me from under the bed. I involuntarily propelled myself back on the carpet, smashing my back into the bureau and making the lamp on it wobble and then fall to the floor with a crash.

  “Jack?” Rachel yelled.

  I pointed.

  “Angela’s under the bed!”

  Rachel came quickly around to me. She was only wearing her black panties and white blouse. She got down to look.

  “Oh, my God!”

  “I thought you checked under the bed!” I said excitedly. “When I came in the room I thought you’d already looked.”

  “I thought you did while I was checking out the closet.”

  She got on her hands and knees and looked up and down the under-side of the bed for a long moment before turning to look back at me.

  “She looks like she’s been dead about a day. Suffocation with a plastic bag. She’s naked and completely wrapped in a clear plastic sheet. Like she’s ready to be transported. Or maybe it was to contain the smell of decay. The scene is quite diff—”

  “Rachel, please, I knew her. Can you please not analyze everything right now?”

  I leaned my head back against the bureau and looked up at the ceiling.

  “I’m sorry, Jack. For her and you.”

  “Can you tell, did he torture her or just… ?”

  “I can’t tell. But we need to call the LAPD.”

  “I know.”

  “This is what we’ll say. We’ll say I brought you home, we searched the place and we found her. The rest we leave out. Okay?”

  “Fine. Okay. Whatever you say.”

  “I have to get dressed.”

  She stood up and I realized the woman I had just made love to had completely disappeared. She was all bureau now. She finished getting dressed, then bent over to study the top of the bed at a side angle. I watched her start to pick hairs off the pillows so they couldn’t be collected by the crime scene team that would soon descend on my house. The whole time I didn’t move. I could still see Angela’s face from where I sat and I had to adjust myself to the reality of the situation.

  I barely knew Angela and probably didn’t even like her too much but she was far too young and had far too much life ahead to suddenly be dead. I had seen a lot of dead bodies in my time and I had written about a lot of murders, including the killing of my own brother. But I don’t think anything I had ever seen or written about before affected me like seeing Angela Cook’s face behind that plastic bag. Her head was tilted back, so that if she’d been standing she would’ve been looking upward at me. Her eyes were open and frightened, almost glowing at me from the darkness under the bed. It seemed as though she were disappearing into that darkness, being pulled down into it and looking up at the last light. And it was then that she had made one last desperate push for life. Her mouth was open in a final, terrible scream.

  I felt like I was somehow intruding on something sacred by even looking at her.

  “This isn’t going to work,” Rachel said. “We have to get rid of the sheets and pillows.”

  I looked up at her. She started pulling the sheets off the bed and gathering them into a ball.

  “Can’t we just tell them what happened? That we didn’t find her until after we—”

  “Think, Jack. I admit something like that and I am the butt of every joke in the squad room for the next ten years. Not only that, I lose my job. I’m sorry but I don’t want that. We do it this way and they’ll just think the killer took the sheets.”

  She balled everything up together.

  “Well, maybe there’s evidence from the guy on the sheets.”

  “That’s unlikely. He’s too careful and he’s never left anything before. If there was any evidence on these sheets he would have taken them himself. I doubt she was even killed on this bed. She was just wrapped up and hidden underneath it—for you to find.”

  She said it so matter-of-factly. There was probably nothing in this world that surprised her or horrified her any longer.

  “Come on, Jack. We have to move.”

  She left the room, carrying the bedsheets and the pillows. I slowly got up then, found my missing sock behind a chair and carried my socks and shoes out to the living room. I was putting them on when I heard the back door close. Rachel came in empty-handed and I assumed she had stashed the pillows and sheets in the trunk of her car.

  She picked her phone up off the floor. But instead of making a call she started pacing, head down and deep in thought.

  “What are you doing?” I finally said. “Are you going to call?”

  “Yes, I’m going to call. But before it turns crazy, I’m trying to figure out what he was doing. What was this guy’s plan here?”

  “It’s obvious. He was going to pin Angela’s murder on me, but it was a stupid plan because it wasn’t going to work. I went to Vegas and I can prove it. The time of death will show I couldn’t have done this to Angela and that I was set up.”

  Rachel shook her head.

  “With suffocation it is very difficult to pinpoint exact time of death. Narrowing it to even a two-hour window could still put you in the picture.”

  “So you’re saying my being on a plane or in Vegas is no alibi?”

  “Not if they can’t pinpoint time of death to exactly when you were on that plane or already in Vegas. I think our guy is smart enough to realize that. It was part of his
plan.”

  I slowly nodded and felt a terrible fear start to rise in me. I realized I could end up like Alonzo Winslow and Brian Oglevy.

  “But don’t worry, Jack. I won’t let them put you in jail.”

  She finally raised her phone and made a call. I listened to her speak briefly to someone who was probably a supervisor. She didn’t say anything about me or the case or Nevada. She just said she had been involved in the discovery of a homicide and would shortly be interacting with the LAPD.

  Next she called the LAPD, identified herself, gave my address and asked for a homicide team. She then gave her cell phone number and ended the call. She looked at me.

  “What about you? If you need to call someone you better do it now. Once the detectives arrive they’re probably not going to let you use your phone.”

  “Right.”

  I pulled out my throwaway and called the city desk at the Times. I checked my watch and saw it was well past one. The paper had long been put to bed but I needed to inform someone of what was happening.

  The night editor was an old veteran named Esteban Samuel. He was a survivor, having worked for the Times for nearly forty years and having avoided all the shake-ups and purges and changes of regime. He did it largely by keeping his head down and staying out of the way. He didn’t come to work until six P.M. each day and that was usually after the corporate cutters and editorial axmen like Kramer had gone home. Out of sight, out of mind. It worked.

  “Sam, it’s Jack McEvoy.”

  “Jack Mack! How you doing?”

  “Not so well. I’ve got some bad news. Angela Cook has been murdered. An FBI agent and I just found her. I know the morning edition is closed but you might want to call whoever needs to be called or at least leave it on the overnote.”

  The overnote was a list of notes, ideas and incomplete stories that Samuel put together at the end of his shift and then left for the morning editor.

  “Oh, my God! How terrible! That poor, poor girl.”

  “Yes, it’s awful.”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s related to the story we were working on. But I don’t know a whole lot. We’re waiting on the LAPD to show up now.”

  “Where are you? Where did this happen?”

  I knew he would get around to asking that.

  “My house, Sam. I don’t know how much you know, but I went to Las Vegas last night and Angela went missing today. I came back tonight and an FBI agent escorted me home and we searched the house. We found her body under the bed.”

  The whole thing sounded insane as I said it.

  “Are you under arrest, Jack?” Samuel asked, his confusion clear in his voice.

  “No, no. The killer is trying to set me up but the FBI knows what’s going on. Angela and I were onto this guy and somehow he found out. He killed Angela and then he tried to get me in Nevada but the FBI was there. Anyway, all of this will be in the story I write tomorrow. I’ll be in as soon as I clear this scene and I will write it for Friday’s paper. Okay? Make sure they know that.”

  “Got it, Jack. I’ll make some calls and you stay in touch.”

  If I can, I thought. I gave him the number of my throwaway and ended the call. Rachel was still pacing.

  “That didn’t sound very convincing,” she said.

  I shook my head.

  “I know. I realized I sounded like a nut job as I was saying it. I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Rachel. Nobody’s going to believe me.”

  “They will, Jack. And I think I know what he was trying to do. It’s all coming together now.”

  “Then, tell me. The cops will be here any second.”

  Rachel finally sat down, taking the chair across the coffee table from me. She leaned forward to tell her story.

  “You have to look at it from his point of view and then make some assumptions about his skills and location.”

  “Okay.”

  “First of all, he’s close. Our first two known victims were in L.A. and Las Vegas. Angela’s murder and his attempt to get to you were in L.A. and a remote part of Nevada. So my guess is that he lives in or is close to one of these places. He was able to react quickly and in a matter of hours get to both you and Angela.”

  I nodded. It sounded right to me.

  “Next, his technical skill. We know from his e-mail to the prison warden and from how he was able to attack you on multiple levels that his tech skill is quite high. So if we assume that he was able to breach your e-mail account, then we can also assume that he breached the entire L.A. Times data system. If he had free rein inside, then he would have been able to access home addresses for both you and Angela, right?”

  “Sure. That information has got to be in there.”

  “What about you being laid off? Would there be any e-mail or a data trail involving that?”

  I nodded.

  “I got a ton of e-mails about it. From friends, people at other papers, everywhere. I told a few people by e-mail, too. But what would it have to do with any of this?”

  She nodded as though she was way ahead of me and my answer fit perfectly with what she already knew.

  “Okay, so then what do we know? We know that somehow Angela or possibly you hit a trip wire and alerted him to your investigation.”

  “Trunk murder dot com.”

  “I will have it checked out as soon as I can. Maybe that was it and maybe it wasn’t. But somehow our guy was alerted. His response was to invade the Los Angeles Times and try to find out what you two were up to. We don’t know what Angela put in her e-mails but we know that you put your plan to go to Las Vegas last night into an e-mail. I am betting that our guy read it and a lot of your other e-mails and keyed his plan off of it.”

  “We keep saying ‘our guy.’ We need a name for him.”

  “In the bureau we would call him an unknown subject until we knew exactly who we were dealing with. An Unsub.”

  I got up and looked through the curtains on the front window. The street was dark out there. No cops yet. I walked over to a wall switch and turned on the outside lights.

  “Okay, Unsub, then,” I said. “What do you mean he keyed his plan off of my plan?”

  “He needed to neutralize the threat. He knew that there was a good chance you had not confirmed your suspicions or talked to the authorities yet. Being a reporter, you would keep the story to yourself. This worked in his favor. But he still had to move quickly. He knew Angela was in L.A. and you were going to Vegas. I think he started in L.A., somehow grabbed Angela, and then killed her and set you up for it.”

  I sat back down.

  “Yeah, that’s obvious.”

  “He then focused his attention on you. He went to Vegas, probably driving through the night or flying out this morning, and tracked you to Ely. It would not have been hard to do. I think he was the man who followed you in the hallway at the hotel. He was going to make his move against you in your room. He stopped when he heard my voice and that has sort of puzzled me until now.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, why did he abort the plan? Just because he heard you had company? This guy isn’t shy about killing people. What would it matter to him if he had to kill you and the woman he heard in your room?”

  “So then, why did he abort?”

  “Because the plan wasn’t to murder you and whoever you were with. The plan was for you to kill yourself.”

  “Come on.”

  “Think about it. It would be the best way for him to avoid detection. If you end up murdered in a hotel room in Ely, there is going to be an investigation that would lead to all of this unraveling. But if you were a suicide in a hotel room in Ely, then the investigation would go in a completely different direction.”

  I thought about this for a few moments and saw where she was going with it.

  “Reporter gets laid off, has the indignity of having to train his own replacement, and has few prospects for another job,” I said, reciting a litany of true facts. “He gets depressed and
suicidal. Concocts a story about a serial killer running around two states as cover, then abducts and murders his young replacement. He then gives all his money to charity, cancels his credit cards and runs off to the middle of nowhere, where he kills himself in a hotel room.”

  She was nodding the whole time I was running it down.

  “What’s missing?” I asked. “How was he going to kill me and make it look like suicide?”

  “You’d been drinking, right? You came into the room with two bottles of beer. I remember that.”

  “Yeah, I’d only had two before that.”

  “But it would help sell the scene. Empty bottles strewn around the hotel room. Cluttered room, cluttered mind, that sort of thing.”

  “But beer wouldn’t kill me. How was he going to do it?”

  “You already gave the answer earlier, Jack. You said you had a gun.”

  Bang. It all came together. I stood up and headed toward my bedroom. I’d bought a .45 caliber Colt Government Series 70 twelve years earlier, after my encounter with the Poet. He was still out there at the time and I wanted some protection in case he came calling on me. I kept the weapon in a drawer next to my bed and only took it out once a year to go to the range.

  Rachel followed me into the bedroom and watched me slide open the drawer. The gun was gone.

  I turned back to Rachel.

  “You saved my life, you know that? No doubt about that now.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “How would he know I owned a gun?”

  “Is it registered?”

  “Yes, but what, now you’re saying he can hack into the ATF computers? This is getting far-fetched, don’t you think?”

  “Actually, no. If he tapped the prison computer, I don’t see why he couldn’t get into the gun registry. And that may be only one place where he could have gotten it. Back during the period when you bought it, you were interviewed by everybody from Larry King to the National Enquirer. Did you ever put it out there that you owned a gun?”

  I shook my head.

  “Unbelievable. I did. I said it in a few interviews. I was hoping the word would get out and it would deter a surprise visit from the Poet.”

  “There you go.”

  “But for the record, I never did an interview with the Enquirer. They did a story on me and the Poet without my cooperation.”