Mania

by Craig Larsen

  Beneath his skates, Nick felt the ice bend. For a split second, he thought he would be pulled into the lake. He heard the ice crack and groan and start to give. Unthinkingly, saving himself, he let go of the hockey stick. He jerked backward as the stick landed with a splash in the icy water.

  The man fought to remain afloat. Regaining his balance, Nick watched helplessly as he slowly lost his buoyancy. When the man once again dipped beneath the surface of the water, this time Nick lost sight of him completely. As before, the abrupt silence stunned him, bookending the intervening rush of sounds. The water became eerily still. Nick squinted, listening to the raspy hiss of his own breathing, leaning forward over the broken edge of the ice, trying to peer into the murky lake. He must have stared at its glassy surface for ten full seconds before he realized that the man wasn’t moving anymore. At last, comprehending, he dropped to his knees.

  Nick wasn’t aware that Sam was standing next to him. He twisted in surprise at the sound of Sam’s voice. “Stop it, Nick,” Sam was ordering his younger brother. His voice was raised nearly into a shout. “Stop it! You’ll fall in.” Nick hadn’t realized that he had been straining to reach into the icy lake. Not until he became aware of Sam’s fingers digging into his shoulders, restraining him.

  “Please, Sam,” he said. “We’ve got to get him out of there.”

  Sam dragged his smaller brother roughly back from the edge of the hole, forcing him down onto the ice a few feet back. Then he took his own hockey stick and used it to lift Nick’s from the water. After that, stepping as close to the edge as he dared, he reached his stick into the water and searched for the man with the end of its blade.

  “What are you doing?” Nick asked his brother. He wasn’t trying to fish him out.

  Sam continued to prod the hole with his hockey stick. He didn’t bother trying to explain. Nick was too young to understand that the longer the man went undiscovered, the less likely anyone would be able to piece together the series of events that had led to his untimely death. Too young to understand that they couldn’t leave behind any evidence that they had been there. “He’s dead,” Sam said matter of factly. He didn’t try to say more.

  Once he found the corpse, Sam balanced himself on his skates and took the blade of his hockey stick and gave the dead man a firm shove backward, wedging him under the thick, frozen shelf. Nick turned away from the blurry image of the man beneath the frosty layer of ice. He lay backward. He was still breathing hard, but his tears had gone dry. He looked up at the sky. The clouds had thickened again, and it was beginning to snow. The lake would freeze over tonight, the hole would close. It would be months, he knew, before the man was found.

  Sitting on the stairs in front of his family’s house in Madison, Nick shuddered. The recollection felt unreal. Like a dream.

  As far as Nick knew, if the body was ever discovered, the police hadn’t conducted an investigation. The boys had never seen or heard anything about the man. Over time, Nick had suppressed the memory.

  Fifteen minutes passed, and then, rousing himself, Nick walked down the lawn to the Taurus. He was cutting it short if he wanted to catch his scheduled flight back to Seattle. Shaken by his flashback, he was pulling the rental car’s heavy door open when he heard an engine approaching. He turned and waited for the car to pass, his eyes connecting with Elizabeth Munroe’s as she slowed to a stop in front of her parents’ house.

  Elizabeth’s daughter looked just like her mother. She had long, dirty blond hair and light blue eyes, paper-white skin and freckles on her nose. She stood between her mother’s legs, considering the strange man. She felt safe with the comforting weight of her mother’s hands on her shoulders, her mother’s fingers tangled in her wispy hair. She had yanked her mother’s sweater hard enough to pull her off balance when she leaned forward to give Nick a quick kiss on the cheek.

  “I’m sorry you can’t stay longer,” Elizabeth said.

  Nick shrugged. “That’s okay,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting to see you anyway.”

  “So what brought you back?”

  Elizabeth’s daughter was listening to every word. “I was passing through,” he said innocuously. “I just wanted to see the neighborhood again.”

  Elizabeth smiled. “I can’t believe how much older you are.”

  “Have I changed that much?”

  She smiled, nodding her head. “Yeah. I’d like to tell you no. But yes, you have.”

  “You, too,” he said. He looked down at her daughter. “How old is she?”

  “How old are you, Emily?” Elizabeth gave her daughter’s shoulders a soft squeeze. When Emily didn’t answer, she tousled her hair a little. “She’s four,” she said to Nick.

  “She’s beautiful,” Nick said.

  “She’s shy.”

  “That’s how I remember you. Not like this.”

  Elizabeth’s smile turned into an awkward laugh.

  “I never would have imagined you with a daughter. So you’re married now?”

  “I’m Catholic. What do you think? Yes, I’m married.”

  “So it all turned out okay, then. In the end, I mean.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes darkened. A gust of wind tossed a few strands of hair across her face. “How is Sam?” she asked.

  Once again, Nick glanced at Emily. He didn’t want to answer. When Elizabeth covered her daughter’s ears with her hands, the girl struggled indignantly, craning her head to look up at her mother.

  “Did something happen to him?”

  Nick didn’t respond.

  “Did something happen to Sam?” Elizabeth asked again.

  Nick shook his head, unable to find words to tell her that his brother had been murdered. In the end, he didn’t have to. Elizabeth was able to read it in his face.

  “I can’t say I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said.

  “What?” Nick was surprised by the callous remark.

  “I guess I don’t mean it,” Elizabeth said. “But he deserved whatever he got.”

  Nick examined her, puzzled by the depth of her emotion.

  “He beat you up. Don’t you remember?”

  “We were kids,” Nick said. “That’s what kids do.”

  “Not like that. He was so cruel to you. I could never understand why you didn’t fight back. I always wished that you’d stand up to him.”

  Nick understood that she meant for her sake as well. “I couldn’t,” he said.

  “I was your girlfriend. How could you let him take me from you?”

  “I didn’t want to. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “You were like a powder keg, Nick. I never understood what kept you from exploding.”

  Nick dropped his eyes, rocked by the image of Sam’s fingers wrapped around the rectangular, taped handle of his hockey stick as he went up onto his toes and wedged the man’s corpse as far as he could beneath the ice. Emily was twisting back and forth in front of him, freeing herself dramatically from her mother’s protective embrace. “Do you ever wonder,” he asked, pulling himself back into the moment, “how things would have turned out differently? If you hadn’t gone to that dance that night, I mean. If you and I had—well—” He didn’t finish the sentence.

  “No.” Elizabeth shook her head.

  “I wanna go see Grandma,” Emily said.

  Elizabeth acknowledged her daughter by combing her fingers through the tangles of her hair. “I don’t like to look backward anymore. Like you said, I’m just glad everything turned out okay in the end.”

  Nick smiled. He squatted down in front of Emily, eyeing her thoughtfully, then reached forward and tugged a few strands of her hair. “She really is beautiful,” he said to Elizabeth. “I look at her, and I can only see you.”

  PART 5

  chapter 24

  “Where the hell have you been, Nick?”

  Nick had switched his phone back on and called Stolie the moment the plane touched the ground. He had only been gone from Seattle for a day and a half, but he anticipated the de
tective’s outburst. “I’m back in Seattle now,” he said. “I’m sorry if I put you in a bind, but I wasn’t running away.”

  “You didn’t come back home to your apartment last night. I was worried about you.”

  “You don’t have to worry. I can come to the station now, if you want.”

  The pilot’s voice blared over the loudspeaker, announcing that the plane’s gate was temporarily occupied.

  “You’re on a plane,” the detective observed.

  “I’m arriving at SeaTac.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “It’s a long story. I want to tell you, but later.”

  “Listen, Nick. I have some good news for you.”

  Nick knew what this must mean. “You caught him?” He held his breath.

  “His name is Jackson Ferry.”

  Nick closed his eyes in relief. He had been expecting the police to take him into custody.

  “We need you to come down here now,” the detective was saying. “We’ve been looking for you since yesterday. I could arrange an escort for you, but it will probably be just as quick if you catch a cab. We need you to make an ID.”

  Nick was standing next to Stolie in front of an inch-thick piece of one-way glass. The police had gathered five other men from the street for the lineup. All of them were dressed in grimy, street-worn clothes. None was wearing shoes. Several of them had long, greasy hair. Nick, though, was only considering one of them. From the moment he had stepped up to the glass, his attention had been drawn to Jackson Ferry’s ravaged face. His eyes were fastened on Ferry’s. The detective had told him that the glass was mirrored on the other side, but Nick couldn’t shake the feeling that the man was staring back at him, too.

  An image from the night of Sam’s murder filled Nick’s head. Ferry was charging at the two brothers out of the blackness of the shadows. The rustling of Ferry’s clothes echoed in Nick’s ears. Closing his eyes, for a split second Nick was able to recapture a photographic image of Ferry’s pocked and sallow face, his watery light blue eyes open wide with terror, as though he were being hunted.

  “That’s him,” he said.

  “Which one?”

  “The third man from the left. The man with the blue eyes and long hair, wearing the black coat.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s Ferry,” Stolie confirmed.

  Nick continued to look at him. He was large, significantly taller and more muscular-looking than the other men the police had lined up. The skin on his face was reddish and leathery, deeply creased, his hair thick and scraggly and greasy. His lips were dark red, one corner of his mouth festered with sores. His hands were scabbed and filthy, badly scraped, powerful. This was the Street Butcher, just inches away behind a plate of glass, the dangerous beast who had killed Sam.

  Stolie leaned forward and pressed a button on an intercom. “You can take the men back out,” he said, his voice rumbling over a loudspeaker on the other side of the glass. Nick watched the two officers inside the room usher the men through a doorway. Ferry lowered his eyes, and Nick followed his gaze down to the dark brown, cross-hatched butt of one of the officer’s guns as Ferry shuffled forward. When Ferry was just behind him, the cop seemed to feel his eyes on his weapon. He turned and, resting his hand on his holster, directed Ferry through the doorway.

  Nick hadn’t heard the other man approach, and he jumped at the touch of a couple of fingers on his shoulder. He turned to face the short and wiry gray-haired lieutenant he had met a few days before. Lieutenant Dombrowski nodded at him, his lips tightly compressed.

  “Detective Stolie’s filled you in already, Mr. Wilder?”

  Nick took note of the lieutenant’s nearly imperceptible Eastern European accent. “No,” Nick responded, shaking his head. “I just got here.”

  “I brought him here to the window as soon as he arrived,” the detective explained to his commanding officer. “We haven’t had the chance to speak yet.”

  “You’re a fortunate man, Mr. Wilder,” the lieutenant said.

  “I’m not so sure I would consider myself fortunate right now,” Nick replied.

  “No? Maybe not.” He allowed himself a thin, slightly apologetic smile before explaining the remark. “Detective Stolie managed to track your man down. He had been sleeping the last few weeks at the Hudson Hotel, downtown. Detective Stolie tells me you know the place?”

  Nick nodded.

  “He was moving on apparently, going south for the winter, on his way to Frisco. Detective Stolie found a friend of his at the shelter, though—told him to look for Ferry down at the rail yard. We nabbed him at midnight, about to hop onto a train. Another five minutes, and he’d have been gone. You don’t consider that fortunate?”

  “My brother’s still dead,” Nick said.

  Again, the lieutenant showed Nick his thin smile.

  “We found him wearing your shoes,” Stolie offered. “The black and orange Nikes. Just like you said.”

  “And a few things that belonged to your brother,” Dombrowski added.

  “His wallet,” Stolie said. “His driver’s license—a couple of credit cards.”

  “Ferry’s clothes were covered in dried blood,” the lieutenant continued. “We’re having DNA tests run now. Initial testing confirms that it’s your brother’s. We’ll probably find some of yours, too.”

  “The evidence supports everything you’ve told us,” Stolie said.

  “I wouldn’t want you to leave Seattle again, though,” Dombrowski said.

  Nick looked warily at the lieutenant. “What about the other crimes? Dickenson. Claire and Daniel Scott. Have you questioned him? Has Ferry confessed?”

  Stolie shook his head. “We’ve questioned him, but he hasn’t told us much.”

  “He hasn’t said much,” Dombrowski corrected him. “About the only coherent response we’ve gotten from him is that he has absolutely no recollection of any of the murders. We’ve got the blood evidence, though. And Detective Stolie says you can place him near Pioneer Square the night of the kid’s murder.”

  Nick remembered his conversation with Daniel Scott. “What about a ring?” he asked. “A gold ring with a diamond set into it—a man’s ring.”

  Nick was aware of Stolie and Dombrowski exchanging a quick glance. “What about it?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Did you find it on him?”

  “In one of his pockets,” Stolie confirmed. “Did it belong to your brother?”

  Nick shook his head. “To Dickenson.”

  “I’ll look into it,” Stolie said. “Maybe someone who knew Dickenson can identify it.”

  Dombrowski was looking at Stolie through narrowed eyes. “You got anything else for us?” he asked, turning to face Nick.

  Nick returned his stare, then looked away. “Is he legally sane?” he asked.

  “He’s sane enough to know what he did,” Dombrowski responded. “Just like you or I would know it if we killed someone.”

  Stolie disagreed. He shot a glance at the lieutenant. “He could barely speak his own name when we first found him,” he retorted. “He seems a little more focused now. But he’s mentally ill. There’s no question. The memory loss is real. This guy is blacking out. He’s not acting.”

  “So what will happen now?”

  “We take the case to the DA,” Dombrowski said, “and we nail him.”

  “Don’t let the lieutenant upset you, Nick,” Stolie said to him after Dombrowski had excused himself. They were walking together from the back of the precinct house, down a long, wide corridor that led past the holding cells to the street.

  Nick considered his response. “I’m not upset,” he said at last. “I’m just not certain this thing is over yet.”

  “No?” Stolie looked surprised. “What do you mean?”

  “I came across two recent cases. Not here—one in New York, the other in Milwaukee. Random murders where the killer was a homeless man. The Telegraph arranged it so I co
uld go interview them. That’s where I was yesterday.”

  The detective was not impressed. “Someone murders someone else every half hour in this country—you know that.”

  “Usually there’s a motive. These homicides were practically spontaneous. Both crimes were extremely violent, perpetrated by apparently mentally ill homeless men who have no subsequent recollection of the crime. Just like this one.”

  “When did these other murders occur?”

  “One was just a few days ago, in Manhattan. The one in Wisconsin happened a few months ago.”

  “So what did you find out—anything interesting?”

  “Yeah, maybe. I haven’t been able to prove anything yet, but I think both the killers have a past history in Seattle.”

  Stolie considered the idea, then shook his head. “It’s true these hobos can really move around the country. Look at Ferry. He was on his way down to San Francisco. If I hadn’t caught him, he would probably have been there by now.” He pursed his lips. “By the same token, that only makes it that less unusual that these other men could have a connection here.”

  “I suppose,” Nick admitted.

  “Listen, Nick.” Stolie stopped walking. He turned upon Nick to make his point. “You’ve got my e-mail address. You can forward me the names of these two guys and I can dig around a little for you if you want. If I were you, though, I’d give it a rest.” He pointed a finger at Nick’s ravaged face. “As far as I can see, you’re running on empty. I’m not a psychologist, but if I were in your shoes, I’d be in shock. You still haven’t been able to remember everything that happened the night your brother was killed, have you?”