by Craig Larsen
Nick remembered how much genuine concern the detective had shown him. “That would make sense.” He squinted, shaking his head. “You don’t have to look it up.”
“Lieutenant Dombrowski, on the other hand, that’s a man to watch out for. I’ve crossed swords with him a number of times.” Daly scowled. “He’s a political beast, that man—and heading straight for the top. He’ll be our police chief when Gutterson steps down, mark my words. If he’s the one who’s got you in his sights, I’d—” Daly stopped herself. “You sure you’re up to this?”
Nick forced a thin smile. “I’m fine,” he said. “Really. It’s good to know what I’m up against. If this is actually going to happen, I’m not going to be able to avoid it anyway.”
“You might as well be prepared,” Daly agreed.
Nick looked away. One of the men on the other side of the newsroom was laughing, and Nick followed the sound to its source. The man leaned forward and looped an arm over another man’s shoulders. You’re killing me, Tom, Nick heard him say. You’re absolutely killing me.
“Listen,” Daly said, shifting forward in the chair, “something occurred to me when I was thinking about the crime. Something that might be of interest to you. A story came across my desk about a month or two ago, out of Milwaukee. You hail from Wisconsin, don’t you?”
“From Madison,” Nick confirmed.
“I doubt you’ll remember the story, because it didn’t get much play. A suburban couple, well-to-do, were murdered a couple of months ago—pretty brutally, in their sleep. Their teenage kids were at home at the time. Apparently they didn’t hear a thing. The police thought it was odd the boys could sleep through the noise, and they were considered suspects for a couple of days—that’s what made the story interesting. Long story short, the murder turns out to have been committed by a homeless man with no connection to the family at all. He just wanders in off the street one night and kills these people in their bed. Stabs them each twenty or thirty times.”
Nick felt himself shiver. An image from his nightmare flooded his mind. His father’s eyes were hollow sockets. Opening his mouth to speak, blood spilled down his chin. Sam appeared in the study with them, and Nick cried out to him: He’s dead, Sam. Dad’s dead. Sam’s face twisted into a smile, and Nick realized that his brother was holding a bloody knife in his hand.
Nick fought off the vision, focusing on Daly instead. “How did they end up catching him?” he heard himself ask the editor.
“The police found the homeless man dressed in a pair of the victim’s trousers, selling some of the wife’s jewelry.”
“In Milwaukee, you said.”
Daly nodded, then pushed herself up from the chair, once again wincing as she straightened her knees. “I’ll send you a link from my office. I thought maybe it was something you’d want to check out. Another homeless killer.” She stretched and looked around the newsroom. “Yeah, it helps to keep yourself busy. Especially if there’s no baseball to watch.” She rapped her knuckles a few times absently on Nick’s desk, then wandered off toward her office.
When the rain cleared later that morning, Nick ducked out of the newsroom to visit the mortuary. The director had called to let Nick know as a matter of procedure that the cremation would be carried out in the afternoon. There was nothing for Nick to see. Sam’s remains weren’t resting in a casket. No funeral would be held. Sam wasn’t religious, and the body itself was too mutilated to view. Nevertheless, Nick understood that this would be his last chance to say good-bye to his brother.
Nick sat in the small chamber where the mortuary held its memorial services. Sam’s body was lying somewhere else inside the building, Nick didn’t know where. In a refrigerated drawer in the basement, perhaps. Nick was holding a large yellow envelope in his hands—Sam’s personal effects, which the director had turned over to him a few minutes before. Nick hadn’t been expecting the rush of emotions.
An image of his brother’s face hovered in front of his eyes. Not a memory of Sam himself, but of a photograph taken when they were kids. In the snapshot, Sam was standing next to him in front of their house in Madison, holding his lunch box, on their way to Nick’s first day of school. Nick was remembering how brave Sam had always looked to him in that picture. Nick had been smiling, too, but he understood that his ease belonged to his brother. Sam had always made everything so effortless for him. He had blazed the trail, Nick only had to follow.
Something kept tugging at Nick. An impulse that wouldn’t go away. He wanted to see Sam. Until he saw him again, he couldn’t accept that Sam was dead. This thought brought him back to Laura Daly and to the loss of her son. Harold Daly had simply disappeared. Laura never had the chance to close the door. The days she had spent expecting her son to reappear in her life had melted into a tragedy too slippery to grasp. Nick glanced at the raised platform at the front of the room, where an empty coffin was staged, surrounded by a profusion of flowers. What would Sam have done? Would he have demanded to see Nick’s body? Nick knew that Sam wouldn’t have accepted no for an answer.
At last, Nick split the yellow envelope open, then tilted it upside down to empty its contents. There was only one thing inside. The police had confiscated the rest of Sam’s personal effects—his cell phone and whatever else he had in his pockets. The heavy steel wristwatch their parents had given to Sam as a graduation gift slid into his hands.
Nick sat staring at it. It had never occurred to him before how out of character it was for Sam to wear it. Everything else Sam wore reflected his success. This clumsy watch provided the only hint that Sam, too, missed their parents. That their childhood back in Wisconsin meant something to him.
Nick dropped the heavy timepiece into the envelope, then stood up and found his way back outside.
chapter 21
Back at the Telegraph, Nick was staring at the screen of his computer. His eyes appeared to be focused, but he wasn’t seeing anything on the plasma display. Instead, he was lost inside a vivid recollection from a decade before, sparked by images from the nightmare that had woken him early that morning.
Sam was standing beside their father’s desk in their parents’ study, alone in the room, looking at Nick over his shoulder, startled. Next to him, the drawer to a black metal filing cabinet was pulled open. The second that Nick had pushed open the door and wandered into the room, he understood that his brother was doing something wrong. The cabinet was kept locked, and as far as Nick knew his father held the only key. Nick saw that Sam had taken a file from the drawer and had spread it out on their father’s desk.
“They’ve got twenty-three thousand dollars in their checking account,” Sam said with a strange smile.
Despite his unease, Nick was surprised by the information. “Is that all?” he asked.
“That’s just their checking account,” Sam said. “I haven’t been able to figure out their savings yet. But they’ve got at least twice that. Some of it’s in stocks, and it’s in a couple different banks.”
“What are you looking at?”
“Come here. Take a look.” Sam waited for his younger brother to approach the desk. “These are their statements. See? Here’s the check they wrote for me last week to the admissions office at the University of Washington. Seventy-five dollars. And here’s one they wrote to your school. For soccer fees, I guess.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Why?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Aren’t you curious?”
Nick realized that he wasn’t. “I don’t care.”
“It’s only right that we know,” Sam said. “It’s important. Maybe not for you yet. But me, I’m going to college next year. Maybe I’ll want a car. Who knows? I want to know what they’ve got.”
Nick shrugged. “Nothing’s going to change if you know,” he said. “Not for me, and not for you, either.”
Sam frowned at his little brother. “That’s what you think.”
“Aren’t you afraid Dad’s going to find out?
”
Sam was examining the papers on the desk again. “No,” he said, dismissing Nick’s concern. “They won’t be home for another hour. I know where everything goes.”
When the phone on their father’s desk rang, both boys jumped. It was a mechanical ring. The loud, jarring sound of a small steel bell being struck by a tiny hammer. “Jesus,” Sam said, recovering himself.
“See?” Nick exclaimed, as though the phone’s ring had snuck up on them and proved his point. “You’re going to get caught.” He reached for the phone.
“Don’t answer it!”
“What?” Nick put his hand down onto the beaten-up, heavy receiver anyway.
“Don’t pick it up, Nick!”
“Why not?”
“Wait a second. Let it ring a few times first. What if it’s Dad? You don’t want him to know you’re in the study.”
Nick waited through the course of another rattling ring, then picked up the phone. The man from the power plant didn’t want to speak to him, though. Michael Simmons was their father’s boss and, after fifteen years at the plant, a family friend. “Put Sam on the phone,” he said to Nick, and Nick understood that something had happened.
Sam’s face went blank when Nick handed him the phone, and his expression didn’t change during the short conversation. He hardly spoke. He listened to whatever Simmons had called to report, then told the man that he would talk to his brother about it. Then he handed the receiver back to Nick.
After Nick hung up the phone, the two brothers looked at one another. Sam didn’t have to speak the words. Nick understood that his parents were dead.
“Dad was driving,” Sam said. “You know how much ice there is on the road.”
Nick felt his legs begin to shake. He collapsed into the chair in front of his father’s desk. The room was going black all around him.
Their father had lost control of the car and driven head-on into a speeding truck. He had died on impact. Their mother had survived until the ambulance arrived fifteen minutes later, slowly bleeding to death, trapped inside the twisted metal wreckage of the totaled car. Her weakening cries were audible to the small group of people who gathered around the crash, gawking at the scattered mess the truck had left in its wake.
“I want Mom,” Nick said. “I want Dad. Let’s go. Let’s get them.”
“They’re dead, Nick,” Sam said. “It’s too late. They’re already gone.”
“Yo, Nick. Nicholas Wilder.”
Lost in his reverie, Nick didn’t hear the voice at all. A man appeared at his desk, waving a sheet of paper in his field of vision. Nick took his eyes from the computer screen.
The man’s name was Johnnie. One of the newspaper’s best researchers, he was three or four years older than Nick, prematurely gray. He tossed the sheet of copy on Nick’s desk. The headline screamed out at him: Homeless Man Robs Store, Two Dead. “This came in from New York a few hours ago. I was just setting it. Laura thought you might want to see it.”
Nick regarded the news story. “Sure, thanks.”
“You look like you could use some sleep, buddy.”
Nick glanced up at him, then shrugged. “Couldn’t everybody around this place?” He twisted the sheet of paper around and began to read.
Fifteen minutes later, he walked into Daly’s office, a manila folder tucked under one of his arms. Daly didn’t lift her eyes from the proof she was redlining by hand. “A pretty interesting series of coincidences,” the editor said, carefully X-ing out a few sentences from the body of the story. “Wouldn’t you say? A string of unprovoked, brutal murders in three different cities. Seattle. Milwaukee. New York. All of them stabbings, all of them committed by homeless men.” She raised her pen from the galley, at last looking up at Nick. “Sounds like a story, doesn’t it?” Self-consciously, she took the half-glasses from her nose and pinched them closed, then tossed them into an open drawer.
“Will you pick up my costs, Laura? I’d like to see if I can get a couple of interviews.”
Daly didn’t seem surprised by the request. “You give me a story, Nick, and I’ll pick up your flight and a rental car. If you’re flying out there just to satisfy your own personal curiosity, though, you’re on your own time.”
“I understand.”
Daly gave him an assessing look. “You’ve already booked your flights, haven’t you?”
Nick didn’t have to respond.
“So what are you waiting for?” The senior editor looked back down at the proof, finding her grip again on the red pencil she had been using to scribble her corrections.
Nick remained standing where he was. “I know I’ve been messing up pretty badly,” he said.
The gray-haired woman glanced back up.
“I wanted you to know, though. I took your advice. At the gala, I took some pictures.”
Daly set her pencil all the way down, a small smile turning up the edges of her mouth. “Is that right? You get anything good?”
Nick shook his head. “Not exactly what you had in mind.”
“No?” Daly pursed her lips, waiting for Nick to explain.
“I didn’t get the spread you imagined for the Sunday magazine. I did get these, though.” Nick set the manila folder down on the senior editor’s desk.
The first photograph was a digitally enhanced picture of Hamlin talking to the stout, mustached man as Nick had first seen them. The resolution was so good that Daly could see the beads of sweat on the heavier man’s forehead. Daly examined the picture, then slid the photograph over to one side in order to look at the one underneath: a picture of the two men seated in the middle of the empty auditorium, the heavy man’s face glowing red with the reflection of the velvet, his distress etched across his brow.
“Who is he?”
“You don’t recognize him?”
Daly shook her head. “He looks familiar. But no, I don’t.”
“I asked around here this morning. Something about the way Hamlin was talking to him bothered me.”
“The way he was pressing him,” Daly suggested.
Nick shrugged. “I guess. He was really going at him.”
“So who is he?” Daly asked again.
“Ralph Van Gundy.”
“That’s Ralph Van Gundy?” Daly leaned back in her chair, surprised. “The head of the Washington state EPA?”
Nick nodded. “I guess there’s nothing wrong with Hamlin inviting a commissioner from the Environmental Protection Agency to the gala—”
Daly harrumphed. “He’s not just a commissioner. He’s the man responsible for awarding the Elliott Bay contract to Hamlin’s waste-management company last month. That contract netted Hamlin twenty-five million dollars, what, just two, three days ago?”
“All the more reason Hamlin might want to invite him to the celebration. There’s nothing wrong in saying thank you.”
Daly gave Nick a measuring look. “You know there’s something wrong here yourself. That’s why you took these, huh? You knew there was something wrong even before you knew who this man was.”
Again, Nick shrugged. “Well, the pictures are yours anyway.”
Daly slid them back into the manila folder, then held it up toward Nick. “No,” she said.
“You don’t think it’s worth checking out?”
“I didn’t say that. You know there’s nothing I’d like more than to get my hands around Jason Hamlin’s neck.” The words had come out more bitterly than the editor intended.
Nick took the folder from Daly. “Why don’t you keep these, then?”
Daly shook her head. “I can’t.”
“Because he owns the paper.”
“It’s more complicated than that.” Daly leaned her elbows onto her desk, then rested her face in her hands, grinding her palms into her eyes. “Like I told you, Hamlin and I go back a number of years now.”
“You’re afraid of him.”
“He knows where a number of bodies are buried,” Daly said. “Let’s put it that way. You do a
man like Hamlin a few favors, you end up in his debt. You understand what I’m saying?”
Nick nodded. “Sure.”
“It can wait until you get back. And like you say, there’s probably nothing there anyway. No smoking gun. But keep those pictures. Even if I can’t, there’s no reason why a freelance photographer who doesn’t officially work for the paper can’t take a run at him.” Daly looked down at her watch. “What time did you say your flight was?”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “I know. I better get going.”
chapter 22
Henry Dean had entered a boutique on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, armed with a broken bottle. Without warning he had attacked the first person who crossed his path. Witnesses reported that he literally cut the woman to death. He attacked her so violently that his arm had become a blur. When he was finished with her, he left her on the floor in shreds, blood pumping from her throat, her intestines oozing from a gash in her torso. After that, he turned on the store’s clerk and swung the broken bottle at him so savagely that he nearly severed the man’s head from his neck. Three other people in the store had no escape. The attack happened so fast, they fell to their knees and cowered against the wall, expecting to be killed, too. The carnage stopped, though, as abruptly as it began. Dean dropped the broken bottle and walked to the counter and grabbed a pair of Ray-Bans. He ignored the cash in the register and left the store with the sunglasses. Fifteen minutes later, the police subdued him only a block away, standing on a corner panhandling, covered from head to toe in the drying filth of his victims’ blood.
Nick had expected a monster. Instead, he found a small, wiry man with a thin face and well-groomed short brown hair. His street clothes were visible beneath the oversize orange coverall issued by the jail. His wrists and ankles had been shackled to a steel chair, and he didn’t move when Nick entered the holding cell at Rikers Island, New York. He didn’t even raise his eyes. Nick had the impression that the man was catatonic. “Henry. Henry Dean,” Nick said. The man didn’t respond, and after a few minutes, the officer who had ushered Nick in terminated the interview.