Hush

by Anne Frasier

  "Because he's crazy," Hastings said.

  Everybody moaned at her lame joke.

  "He could have cut it off because he decided he didn't like his mother anymore," Ramirez volunteered.

  "Or he could have cut it off because someone saw it and he was afraid that person would use it to identify him."

  That observation came from Hastings.

  "We were looking for a guy with a tattoo. Guess now we're looking for a guy with a scar," Ivy said.

  "What about DNA in the tattoo?"

  "We put an urgent priority on it. It's unlikely we'll get anything, but we should have an answer for you in a few days."

  "Even if DNA can be extracted, it probably won't do us any good," Max said. "I'm guessing we won't find a match in any of the databases."

  "He's getting more daring," Ivy said. "I'm afraid this might be a sign of escalation."

  "I agree," Max said. "He's getting bold. He's gotten away with it so many times that he now thinks he's invincible. He may be escalating, but he may also get sloppy and do something stupid. We have to be vigilant."

  Regina Hastings stood up and stretched, motioning to the ringing telephone. "Be my guest. Somebody. Anybody."

  Ivy sat down and began taking calls.

  Evening rolled around, and Ivy still hadn't run her idea past Irving. She finally caught up with him at Sully's, a local bar where a lot of the cops went after their shift instead of going home. At Sully's, they could be with people who knew what it meant to be a cop in Chicago.

  She found Irving there, playing pool.

  His jacket and tie and dress shirt had been discarded, so that all he wore was a white T-shirt, silver watch, and dark dress pants. He chalked his pool cue and bent down to make a bank shot. Yellow striped nine ball in the corner pocket. Under the rectangular beer light that hung from chains above the green felt of the table, cigarette smoke collected. The darkly paneled room was enveloped in an eye-burning fog.

  He made the shot, missed by a fraction of an inch, and laughed. While his opponent moved in with his stick, Max perched back on his bar stool as if he and the stool were old friends.

  Ivy moved through the haze of smoke and took the seat beside him. "I've been looking for you," she said.

  In front of him were three empty shot glasses and three beer bottles.

  "Can I get you something?" the bartender asked. She was one of those hard, tough women who looked older than she probably was. Someone who wouldn't take anything from anybody.

  "Coke."

  Max's opponent landed the eight ball in the side pocket. He picked up the pile of wrinkled bills from the edge of the table, asking, " 'Nother game?" He was small and wiry. Probably somebody who made a living playing pool.

  Before Max could answer, Ivy did it for him. "No. Not now."

  "This your wife?" the man said with a grin. "You in a shitload of trouble?"

  "No, she isn't my wife," Max said, turning his back on the pool table and motioning for the bartender to give him another drink.

  The bartender placed Ivy's Coke on a square napkin and poured Max a shot of gin. Then she fished in the pile of bills in front of Max and pulled out what she needed.

  "Take her Coke out of that."

  He downed the gin as if it were medicine, then grabbed the beer for a chaser. "In the South," he said, "they call everything a Coke. So if you say you want a Coke, you then have to specify if you want a Pepsi Coke, or a Coke Coke."

  "What about Sprite?" Ivy asked. "Or Mountain Dew?"

  "No, I think it's just the dark soda. All the dark soda is Coke."

  "Oh." She took a sip from her glass, then carefully placed it back on the napkin. Behind her, someone dropped some money in the jukebox and the voice of Billie Holiday took over the room.

  Ivy fiddled with the corner of her napkin. "What are you doing here?" she finally asked.

  "I'm tired," he said without hesitation, his voice weighted down with the burdens he carried. "I'm tired of this shit, this ugly, terrible shit invading my life." He laughed bitterly.

  Now that he'd started talking, it seemed he couldn't stop. Alcohol did that to a person. Made them say and confess things they would normally keep locked inside.

  "What life?" he said, their conversation blanketed by the music. "I have no life. I can't have a normal life. How do you talk to someone about their favorite TV show, or a current movie, when babies are being murdered? And it's not going to end. If this fucking case is ever solved, there will be another one to replace it. Because the maniacs are everywhere."

  "It just seems that way because you're in the middle of it."

  He shook his head. "Do you know how many unsolved homicides I have on file? Over five hundred. There's no escape. I've tried becoming an alcoholic like half the people in Homicide, but it didn't work out. How do they do it? Getting wasted every night? I wanted to, but I couldn't function the next day."

  The conversation shifted. "How do you do it?" he asked. "You almost seem to be thriving on this case. Is it because you got away from him? Does that give you some kind of strength? A feeling of power instead of this . . . this stinking despair? This hopelessness?"

  She let him talk. If she said anything, she doubted he would listen anyway.

  "When I got into this, I'll admit I was idealistic. And also this machismo thing was driving me." He paused and focused on something that was farther away than the walls of a tavern in metro Chicago. "I don't suppose anything is what it really is when you're on the outside looking in. But you"—he shook a finger at her, emphasizing his point—"you have personal reasons. A purpose in being here, doing what you're doing. I understand that. It makes sense. While me—" He brought the spread fingers of both hands to his chest, suddenly a man of gestures, a man who talked with his hands, possibly the biggest hint that he was drunk off his ass. "I—I just invite this crap into my life."

  He helped himself to a swallow of her Coke, putting the glass back down while crunching on an ice cube. "I should get the hell out of here," he told her with conviction, as if this were something he'd been thinking about for longer than just the last few hours. "I should take my son and go someplace far away. Someplace where this kind of insanity doesn't happen. Oh. I forgot," he said with the same sarcasm she'd noted yesterday morning in the park. "There isn't any place like that. I'm contaminated. And when I go home, I take that contamination with me. I take it home to my son."

  He finished off his beer, drinking from the bottle instead of using the glass, then turned to Ivy. His blood alcohol had to be near the legal limit, but he didn't seem that drunk. There was clarity in his dark eyes, purpose. "I'm thinking of leaving Homicide when this is over."

  "You need to go home and get some sleep," she said. "I'll get you a cab."

  "You think I'll go home and sleep? Sleep. What the hell's that?" he asked, his thoughts veering off course, down another tangent. But he quickly remembered his original trajectory. He grabbed both of her hands, turning them palms up. With his thumbs, he caressed the ridges on her wrists. Not taking his eyes from hers, he said, "We'll catch the bastard, won't we?"

  "Yeah." She had to believe it.

  He was too sensitive for this business. She could see it in eyes that were fringed with black lashes. Funny, she'd never noticed sensitivity there before. But all his defenses were down. He would hate her tomorrow for seeing him like this.

  But if a detective was too hard . . . that could be bad too, she thought to herself. Because it took a certain amount of sensitivity to understand another human being. It even took a certain amount of sensitivity to put yourself in the mind of a serial killer.

  Max gave her hands a squeeze, then dropped them. "Is it time, Julia?" he asked, swinging around.

  The bartender checked the clock above the cash register. "Fifteen more minutes."

  "My son has a hockey game," Max explained. "And I'm not going to miss it."

  Ivy drove him there.

  They took his car, and he told her where to
turn, and when to get in this lane or that so she could exit, while he sat in the passenger seat, shaving with a battery-operated shaver.

  They ended up northwest of Chicago, in suburbs that looked brand-new.

  "Welcome to my world," Max said with a flourish of one arm.

  It wouldn't have gotten him any points with his son if he'd arrived at the hockey game drunk, so Ivy had first taken him to a diner where he'd ordered a steak burger and French fries. Ivy got the special of stuffed acorn squash and chocolate cream pie because she loved chocolate cream pie. The squash was simply a way of relieving guilt over the pie. Occasionally, Max would take a bite of something on her plate without even asking, as if it were his right.

  Ivy leaned forward and told him the idea that had come to her as she'd read Alex Martin's commentary. "We'll have the paper print a letter written to the killer from an infant he's murdered. In the letter, the baby would be talking directly to the Madonna Murderer, telling him what he'll miss out on now that he's dead, telling him how sad and lonely he is. We know that the killer loves these babies in a twisted way, so we use the letter to make him feel remorse, make him feel guilty. If he's put in a state of anxiety, then maybe he'll make a mistake."

  "The idea's good," Max said, "but it's too risky. We're dealing with a psychopath here."

  "You're the one who said we weren't moving quickly enough. It's risky, but we have to try, don't you think? So far, he's the one in control. We tried the candlelight vigil. We exposed the tattoo. We need something bigger."

  "He responded to the tattoo. At this point, a letter from the baby he killed could send him over the edge."

  "I think we need to push him now, while he's feeling pressured. Sending him over the edge might be the only way he's going to make a mistake that's big enough for us to catch him."

  "I'll run the idea past Agents Cantrell and Spence."

  She smiled. "Good. In the meantime, I'll put a letter together."

  They fought briefly over the bill, with Ivy winning. She paid, leaving a nice tip for a waitress who she'd calculated was a single mom probably working two jobs. Then they continued on their way to the hockey game, pulling into the arena parking lot with fifteen minutes to spare.

  Having arrived, Max shut off the shaver and tossed it in the glove compartment. Outside the car, he stood in front of Ivy and asked, "How do I look?"

  He'd put his jacket back on, but had left the tie in the car. She rebuttoned two buttons of his shirt, then gave his chest a pat. "There."

  "Thanks." He grasped her lightly by both arms and planted a quick kiss ... on her forehead. Probably because it was closer than her lips, Ivy reasoned, feeling a twinge of disappointment. It was the second time in a matter of days that he'd pulled her near. She decided that, as unusual as it was in a man, Max was simply demonstrative—and possibly still a little drunk.

  The game was exciting, giving her a hint of what it was that drove all those sports moms. Ivy screamed and cheered, then immediately booed loudly when Ethan was put in the penalty box for high-sticking. She didn't believe in violence in competition, but the other team was high-sticking like crazy and the referees just ignored it.

  Ethan's team won by one point, a goal scored after the game went into overtime.

  When it was done, she and Max hurried down the bleachers to congratulate Ethan.

  His face was red from exertion, and he loomed over Ivy in his skates, seeming eight feet tall and four feet wide, all padded under his green jersey. When he pulled off his helmet, his blond hair was dark with sweat. She could tell he was glad to see his father, giving him a look that was tinged with confusion. That confusion bled over to her. He must be wondering what she was doing there.

  Mothers and fathers filed out, telling him good game as they passed. Ethan had played well, making three of his team's four goals. One woman stopped and grabbed Ivy by the arm, leaned close and said, "That son of yours will be playing pro hockey."

  She was gone before Ivy could correct her. She looked at Ethan, ready to make some light comment, when he spun away, heading for the locker rooms.

  Before ducking inside, he stopped and said something to a dark-haired, middle-aged man waiting at the locker-room entrance. The man turned and waved in their direction.

  That night, Ivy couldn't sleep. She kept thinking about Ethan, about the way the woman had thought he was her son.

  Sometimes she dreamed that her son was still alive. But she knew it was just a dream, a mother's fantasy. In her imaginings, his face was always out of focus. She could never quite see what he looked like. But now she knew that if her son had lived he would have looked like Ethan.

  She lay in bed thinking about the letter from the dead baby. It would be hard to write, but she would do it, she must do it. And while she was doing it, she would think of another baby, her baby. . . .

  She rolled over, disturbing Jinx, who meowed with faint reproach. What a good cat. He'd taken to the tiny apartment better than she ever thought he would. Then again, maybe he was simply biding his time, waiting to go home.

  "Here's the letter I want you to run." Ivy pushed an eight-by-ten sheet of typed paper across the diner table. On top of it was a diskette.

  Alex Martin pulled it closer, avoiding the puddle of coffee that had spilled when he'd poured too much cream.

  They were sitting in a back booth of a greasy grill where a bored waitress with big hair brought them coffee in stained white cups that were probably as old as the building itself. Definitely not a place Alex would have chosen.

  He hadn't been surprised to get Ivy Dunlap's phone call. He hadn't even been surprised to find that she wanted to meet with him. He knew the article in the Monday Herald would have ignited some rage within the police department. That's what it was supposed to do. But what had surprised him was finding out that she wanted him to work with them to help catch the Madonna Murderer.

  "It's a good idea," he said after reading the piece she wanted him to put in the paper.

  "It's been okayed by the department and the FBI. But then I doubt that's something you'd be worried about."

  The first dig. That didn't bother him.

  She was an attractive woman, although she had a directness about her that was a little disconcerting, even for him.

  "I suppose you want to know what's in it for you,” she asked.

  He laughed, and said, "You've got me all wrong."

  "Oh, come on. I don't have time for any diversionary tactics. This isn't a game to me. It has nothing to do with making any kind of name for myself. But for you . . . that's what it's all about, isn't it?"

  "Not at the expense of the truth. That's all I'm after. The truth."

  He leaned against the back of the booth, angry now, coffee forgotten. He resented her implications and accusations. He wasn't a tabloid reporter after some grisly crime for the sake of shock value. "I think you'd better find another reporter. Maybe someone from the Sun Times." She didn't even pretend to be interested in her coffee. "It's pretty much common knowledge that behind most newspaper reporters is a frustrated fiction writer."

  Ouch. That hurt. But it wasn't really true. He was the only frustrated fiction writer he knew. Everybody else at the Herald seemed to like his or her job just fine.

  "If you run this, if you help me, I promise to give you a story. An exclusive story."

  He perked up. "About the investigation?"

  "About me."

  Intrigued once more, he leaned forward. "About you?"

  "I have a story to tell. One I think you'll be interested in."

  After meeting with Ivy Dunlap, Alex caught the Red Line back to the paper.

  "This is great stuff," Maude said after she had read Dunlap's piece. "I don't mean the writing," she quickly corrected, catching Alex's frown. "The idea that the paper is going to be involved—that's great. There's been concern over the growing conflict between the media and the CPD. We've needed some-thing like this to soften the hostility."

  "So we'll r
un it?"

  "I have to get final approval, but I don't think I'm getting ahead of myself by telling you this will get you the attention you deserve—both in-house and out."

  Alex almost hugged her, but stopped himself at the last minute. She was his superior, and he didn't think a hug or maybe even a twirl would go over that well. But he wasn't worried about approval. Maude hadn't had a submission turned down in years.

  "Wanna go for coffee?" he asked. "My treat." He'd never made such a daring offer before, and was surprised when she said yes.

  At a table in the basement cafeteria, she pulled a flask from the giant canvas bag that never left her side, and added an ample amount of brown liquid to her coffee. She offered the flask to Alex. Suddenly they were almost equals. He shook his head and she stuffed it back in her purse.

  "How far would you go for a story?" she asked.

  "I'm not sure. It would depend on the situation."

  "You gotta have guts," she said. "Did I ever tell you about the time I posed as a hooker to get a story?"

  Looking at her now, he couldn't imagine. He would have shuddered, but he was too polite to do so.

  That evening, Alex called his mother. "Did you get the copy of my article?" he asked, even though he knew she had to have gotten it since he'd sent it by overnight courier.

  "I'm so proud of you!" his mother said. Sometimes she would spout a mouthful of shit just to build his confidence, but he and his mother were close and he knew her enthusiasm for his article was genuine. He told her about the new piece they'd be running.

  "It isn't dangerous, is it?"

  She would never quit worrying about him. He smiled at her small-town naivete. "No, not dangerous at all."

  Chapter 29

  Psychiatrists had labeled him obsessive-compulsive, but he just liked things done in a certain way, a certain order. Nothing wrong with that. If a particular order wasn't followed, he couldn't concentrate on anything else because there was always a chaos shouting and shouting and shouting at him, making a clutter in his head. The only way he could make the clutter go away was to go over everything again, doing it right. And then he had to do it more than once. Like when you wrote the wrong letter, and then you had to print over it to correct it. You had to print over it again and again and again, so the right letter became dominant.