Hush

by Anne Frasier

  "My God. Can you imagine how many people in the country have a tattoo like that?"

  "It will take an enormous amount of manpower to check up on all the false leads."

  "We were right about his mother fixation," she said, getting up from the bed. "I'm hoping good old mom is still around and recognizes her son's tattoo."

  "I'm not sure she'd turn him in if she did. She might prefer to deal with him herself."

  "Which could escalate the killings."

  Downstairs, they returned the key while getting the name of the previous manager.

  "Couldn't find the name of the guy who wanted to rent that room," the manager said. "But I've got some boxes in storage I can go through."

  "Give me a call if you come up with anything," Max said.

  They stepped outside.

  In the short time they'd been in the apartment building, the weather had taken a turn, an east wind carrying in one of those violent summer storms that made the windows rattle and turned the sky dark as night.

  Angry wind pushed at the basement window, shoving it open with a loud thud as the metal hinge caught, keeping it from opening more than a few inches. Raindrops sharp as knives stabbed against his arm as he struggled to reclose the window, the latch finally catching.

  He used to be terrified of storms. When he was little, he used to hide under his bed. His mother would find him there, and she would laugh at him.

  But now storms gave him power. They made him strong, made him more than he used to be. With each crash of lightning, his power grew. He could feel the hot blood pumping through his veins with every thunderous heartbeat, feel the oxygen saturating his brain. Man was such a complex machine, a malformed, sickening joke. If aliens landed on Earth, they would have to think humans hideously ugly with all of their guts and fluids and teeth.

  He was horny.

  He needed a woman.

  Not a whore, but a real woman.

  He stood in the basement with his hand deep in his pants, wrapped around his power. Any woman in the world would want him. Any woman in the world would gladly die to have him. Even his mother.

  "Do you have a hard-on?" she'd asked him one morning when he was sixteen. She'd laughed and stuck her hand down his underpants and he'd shriveled up like a button. "Think you'll get a girl when you can't even keep it up? But don't worry. Your mamma will always love you."

  That's how she was. One time she would berate him for masturbating or having girlie magazines, the next she would be putting her hands down his pants as if she owned everything about him.

  His first date had been with a girl who was popular with the guys because she'd put out anytime, anywhere. But that night, when it had come time to stick it in her, he'd shriveled up just like the day his mother had put her hands down his pants. And the girl had laughed at him. Just like his mother.

  Whores. They were all whores. That was the reason. Men paid his mother for sex. Not much anymore, but occasionally an old customer came around. And he would wonder, Are you my father? You ugly son of a bitch.

  He would remind himself, reassure himself, that he couldn't have come from her.

  What he needed was someone who wasn't a whore. Someone who was clean and pure and virginal.

  Ivy Dunlap.

  The name sprang into his mind.

  He was halfway there, because she was already interested in him.

  It had been easy to find out her name.

  All he had to do was follow her home from police headquarters. Inside the lobby of her apartment building, he'd watched her get her mail, taking note of the box number that matched her apartment number. All he had to do was find her name on the security panel near the locked double doors.

  Ivy Dunlap.

  After that, he'd gone home and done a search on his computer, not expecting to find anything, thinking he'd have to use other avenues, other connections, other resources. Instead, he immediately found out that Ivy Dunlap had written a book. Symbolic Death: Inside the Mind of a Serial Killer.

  He'd ordered the book off the Internet, wondering why he hadn't heard of it. He thought he'd read every serial-killer book that had been published. With a little more digging, he discovered that the book hadn't had a national release, and that it had been printed by an obscure press in Canada. So. Ivy Dunlap was from Canada. They had brought her in to catch him.

  He found that extremely funny. Extremely satisfying.

  The phone rang. He picked it up before the first ring stopped. It was Dr. Mathias.

  "I've had something come up," Dr. Mathias said. "I'm going to have to reschedule this week's appointment."

  "Since I'm doing so well, maybe we could just skip it."

  "Are you taking your medication? You know how important that is."

  "I'm taking it."

  A lie. He hadn't taken it for two months. Funny that Dr. Mathias hadn't noticed anything different about him on their last visit. But then Mathias was always preoccupied, thinking about golf and his expensive girlfriend.

  "Then we'll just skip this month," Dr. Mathias said as if his mind had been probed and his thoughts manipulated. The Manipulator. Maybe that's what he would call himself from now on. Gosh, but he'd always hated being called the Madonna Murderer. The Manipulator. With a capital M. He liked that. Manipulator of the Mind. M.M.

  "Would you mind if we started meeting on the twenty-second of the month instead of the thirteenth?" the Manipulator asked.

  "The twenty-second?" Dr. Mathias questioned in that vague way of his. "I don't see why not. I'll have Irene pencil you in."

  The Manipulator picked up a snow globe and shook it. "Super," he said, watching the flakes of snow fall gently on the mother and her infant son.

  Yesterday he'd driven to Max Irving's house. He'd parked his car a block away and sat there, drinking pop and waiting. Ethan Irving had finally come out and he'd followed him to a record shop in a strip mall. He'd followed him inside and taken note of the CDs he examined and the purchases he made. Now he knew what the kid liked; with the help of the Internet, he could study up on it.

  An interesting kid. A nice-looking kid.

  He hoped the rain stopped soon. He had a hockey game to go to.

  Chapter 22

  Ethan's day had started out bad and kept getting worse. First of all, someone outbid him on the Plantations of Pale Pink Guided by Voices seven-inch auctioned on eBay. That kind of find didn't come along that often. Shit, there were only a few thousand made. Then his dad had called to tell him he wouldn't be able to take him to his hockey game. So even though Ethan was old enough to drive, he had to bum a ride, which made him feel about twelve years old. He and his dad had been getting along pretty well lately, so why wouldn't he let him use the car? Why was he still hiding the keys?

  Ethan and his team members were warming up on the ice, slapping pucks back and forth. Ethan caught a flying puck in his gloved hand, then dropped it near his feet. Using his stick, he played with it a little, moving it back and forth in front of him, then he shot it back to his teammate Ryan.

  The other crappy thing that had happened was that he'd found out he'd been adopted not once, like he'd always thought, but twice. A place on the Internet said they could find a person's natural parents, so Ethan had paid them two hundred bucks to discover that his mother—or the woman he'd always thought was his mother—had also adopted him. Now, if he wanted to go back any further, he had to pay another two hundred bucks.

  Maybe it was a scam. Maybe the whole thing was a he. Maybe they told everybody the same story so they could get more money out of them. His friend Jake had tried to get a fake driver's license off the Internet. He got a passport photo taken and gave the guy all the info he wanted on his card, along with a hundred bucks. Jake hadn't wanted the ID to drink. He'd wanted it to get into an over-21 concert. Why did bands do that? Play someplace where half their fans couldn't go? Maybe they didn't want teenyboppers hanging around, acting stupid. Yeah, that was probably it. But anyway, Jake got ripped of
f. Jake had told the guy he needed it in time to go to the concert, and the guy had told him that was cool, not to worry. Jake bought his ticket, then waited and waited, but the ID never showed up.

  People could be such assholes.

  Ethan figured the guy doing the scamming was some fat hillbilly with a battered pickup, thinking it served the kid right for trying to get a fake ID. He was probably sitting around scratching his belly, laughing about it with a mouthful of rotten teeth.

  Ethan signaled to Ryan that he wanted to quit with the puck and just skate. He was getting a weird edge on his right blade, but Casey, the only guy who really knew how to sharpen hockey skates, wasn't at the rink that night.

  The whistle blew and everybody gathered up the scattered pucks and skated in. Ethan scanned the bleachers.

  No Max.

  Suddenly Ethan didn't feel like skating. He didn't feel like playing.

  He knew Max was working on some headache of a case, but Max was always working on a headache of a case. His not showing up was just one more sign that he really didn't care, that Ethan was really no more than a pain in the ass. Max was just too nice to say so to his face.

  No matter how you looked at it, life sucked.

  Ethan's present frame of mind didn't do the game any good. He missed some easy plays, broke his best stick, and ended up in the penalty box two times for hooking and high-sticking before the coach took him out completely. That night's game was part of a summer-league tournament, not as important as school-year games, but still important. And the coach used the summer games to determine his school- season lineup.

  "What's wrong with you?" Ryan asked as Ethan dropped down on the bench and pulled off his helmet. He wiped at the sweat pouring off his head. "Are you sick or something?"

  "My skates are dull," Ethan said. "The blades kept slipping out from under me."

  "Better get them sharpened before the next game."

  "Yeah, I know."

  He was just going to come out and ask Max about the adoption thing. Max would be pissed to know he'd gone behind his back, but Ethan had to know.

  He got to his feet. "I'm going to change."

  "Coach won't want you to leave."

  Yeah, the coach liked you to stay on the bleachers whether you were playing or not. But Ethan wanted to get into dry clothes. "I gotta piss."

  "Okay, bud."

  Ethan neatly sidestepped Ryan's hand. "Don't hit me on the ass. You know I hate that." He was heading to the lockers when an unfamiliar voice said, "Tough game."

  He looked over to see a dark-haired man of about forty standing near the locker-room entrance, his arms crossed at his chest. Was he somebody Ethan was supposed to know? Somebody's dad? Or somebody who knew or worked with Max?

  "I don't know what was wrong with me," Ethan said.

  "That's the way it goes. There'll be other games."

  "Oh, yeah," Ethan said absentmindedly, wishing the guy would shut up. He didn't feel like making small talk with somebody he was probably supposed to know but couldn't place.

  "Even Gretzky had bad nights. Says it's part of the game."

  "Are you a personal friend of Wayne Gretzky?" Ethan asked sarcastically.

  Wayne Gretzky was Ethan's hero. Max had promised to take Ethan to the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, the city where Gretzky began his career. Ethan still wanted to go, but not with Max.

  "I don't know him, but I've seen him play a few times," the guy said. "Ran into him after a game and he talked to me like we were buddies."

  "Yeah, I'll bet he did." The guy was full of shit.

  "Too bad your dad couldn't make it to the game tonight."

  So he was some buddy of his dad's.

  "But your dad's job is important. Really important."

  "It doesn't matter if he's at the game or not."

  "Need a ride home?"

  "No. No thanks. I'm riding with a friend."

  "Just thought I'd make the offer. Want me to throw that away for you?" he asked, indicating the broken stick Ethan held in his hand.

  "Sure." Ethan handed him the hockey stick and headed into the locker room, not giving the guy another thought.

  Chapter 23

  Max pushed the mouse across the mousepad, clicking on a site called Tattoos, Tattoo, Tattoos. While waiting for the page to download, he took a bite of his ham and cheese on rye.

  He and Ivy were sitting in his office, the wet black umbrella they'd shared propped against the wall, dripping water on the floor. Ivy had pulled up a chair near the corner of the desk. He could hear the crinkle of her sandwich wrapper and smell her almond cappuccino.

  "How's your sandwich?" he asked absently while checking on an icon labeled "traditional tattoos."

  "Great," she said around a mouthful of food. "I was starving."

  She'd gotten the house vegetarian with sprouts, tomatoes, black olives, mushrooms, and cranberries, hold the onions. Apparently his post-hypnotic relaxation suggestion had worked. In fact, he was more traumatized by the hypnosis than she was.

  He typed the word mother in the search box. "Okay, here we go," he said as pictures began to appear.

  He kept his eyes directed at the screen. "Didn't know there were so many MOTHER tattoos."

  Ivy got up and moved closer, bending so she could see the screen. "There," she said, pointing a finger with the hand that held the cappuccino. "That's it."

  He clicked on the small photo; an enlargement quickly filled the screen. "You sure?"

  "That's it, exactly." Not a shred of doubt.

  Couldn't sound more certain than that. He saved the photo to disk, then printed out a handful of copies. "We'll have the photo lab put together what we need for the media while I work on getting approval to run it in the papers and on TV. We'll also get a copy to David Scott so he can rim it through the FBI's tattoo database."

  "How are we going to explain the source of the information?"

  She still didn't seem overly concerned. Maybe he should try hypnosis on himself.

  He'd never had much faith in the power of hypnosis, but when he was in college he'd taken a course out of curiosity, then became involved in some experiments that led him to believe it could be a useful tool under the right conditions. But he'd never used it to keep his own head from exploding.

  "We'll just say an eyewitness came forward, and for that eyewitness's safety we can't divulge the name," Max said.

  "I think we should tell the rest of the team who I am. The secrecy is hindering the investigation."

  Abraham had taken the news of Ivy's confession well. Rather than getting angry, as Max had expected, he'd seemed relieved that the secret was out.

  "There are too many people involved. And people talk. It's human nature." He pulled up his address book on the screen, then put in a call to FBI Agent Spence. When he didn't answer, Max punched in Mary Cantrell's number and quickly explained their strategy.

  "You have to be aware that running the photo could trigger another killing," Agent Cantrell said. "On the other hand, I don't think you have any choice. The vigil didn't flush him out. The leads on stolen drugs were dead ends. I see the tattoo as the next step. Realizing that we have such knowledge about him could trick the killer into making a mistake. That's what we're after. A mistake. And so far he hasn't made any. But you need to protect your source. Don't let the witness's name get out, or his or her life will be in danger."

  Conversation over. Max hung up and glanced at Ivy, who was sipping her coffee, staring at the tattoo printout in her hand.

  Two days later, the photo of the tattoo ran in the Chicago papers and made national television news. A couple of matches were found in the FBI tattoo database, but one of the guys ended up being dead, the other in prison.

  Task-force members hit the streets, checking out every tattoo parlor in a six-county area.

  "Seen anybody with a tattoo like this?" Ronny Ramirez stuck a five-by-seven photo under the tattoo artist's nose.

  The guy was a biker, with long
blond hair pulled back in a ponytail and arms covered with tattoos, some good, some bad. He shook his head. "Nobody gets those kind of tattoos anymore, man. I've never even done a tattoo like that."

  Regina Hastings pulled her gaze away from a glass display case of body-piercing jewelry. "We don't want to know if you've done one, we want to know if anybody's come in wanting you to change one into something else. You do that, don't you? Change tattoos so they look like something completely different?"

  "Yeah. Sure. We even do it free sometimes for kids who want to get out of gangs. But I ain't seen one of these in years." He tried to hand the photo back.

  "Keep it," Ronny said. "And if somebody does show up with that kind of tattoo, don't say anything to him. Just call this number." He handed him a card with the number of the direct line to the task-force office.

  "Homicide, huh? What'd this guy do? Kill somebody?"

  It was obvious the tattoo artist didn't want to rat on one of his own.

  "He's killed a lot of people," Ramirez said. "He's killed babies."

  "Oh, fuck me." The guy stuck the card in the pocket of his black leather vest, then patted it. "If he comes around here I'll give him a tattoo with an HIV- infected needle."

  "Just give us a call instead," Hastings said dryly.

  "Ten down, fifteen to go," Hastings said four hours later, crossing A Good Poke off their list. "That's just metro Chicago. I didn't know there were so many tattoo parlors around."

  "You got any tattoos?" Ronny asked, shooting a glance in her direction as he pulled out of the parking lot.

  "You'll never know the answer to that one. Turn right, next block."

  "Tell me." He stopped at a red light. "Why'd we only go out one time? I forget."

  "Because I found out you were an asshole."

  "Oh. Oh, yeah."

  "Are you admitting it?" she asked, amazed.

  He made the right turn and they rode in silence for a couple more blocks. "I don't like to be laughed at," he finally said.

  "Who does? But when something's funny, I laugh. That's the way I am."