Hush

by Anne Frasier

  At 8:05 every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, he caught the 427 bus at the corner of Winslow and Hughes to head to his part-time job at the computer- software company Astral Plain. Just before boarding, at precisely eight o'clock, he bought a copy of the Chicago Herald and Chicago Sun Times. He didn't read them until he got on the bus. He couldn't even peek at the front page when he picked it up. Instead, he'd make the print and the photo all blurry, so he couldn't cheat, so he couldn't see it before it was time.

  As the bus pulled laboriously away from the curb, he would sit down and open the Chicago Herald.

  He was making the paper all the time now.

  Several days ago, he'd read about the deaths of April and Joshua Rodrigez. He loved to read about himself while he was sitting right in the middle of the world. In plain sight. He was smart. And they were stupid. So stupid.

  Today there was no picture of attendants lifting a gurney with a black body bag into the back of an ambulance. Instead, there was a huge photo—it took up the entire top half of the page—of a stuffed bear. A baseball glove. A graduation cap. A telescope. A Beatles album. Sgt. Pepper. Which was the album that marked a turning point in their career. It had songs like "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," and "Lovely Rita."

  His eyes tracked down.

  Dear Madonna Murderer,

  A letter. A letter to him.

  Excited, intrigued, he lowered the paper and looked around.

  There was the smelly old bitch who rode the bus all the time. Some college students with their backpacks and weird hair, their pierced faces. They didn't smell, but they bothered him almost as much as the stinking ones. Then there was a girl in an orange fast- food uniform with white cuffs and a yellow smiley button on her collar below her ugly, frowning face that said, Have I told you about today's special? Nobody was looking at him. Nobody noticed him. He was invisible. The invisible man, able to move freely among the masses without danger of being seen. His gaze dropped back to the paper.

  Dear Madonna Murderer,

  I'm writing to you from the cemetery. Why the cemetery? Because I'm the baby you killed three days ago. It's lonely out here. And dark. It's always dark. When they were throwing the dirt on top of me, I was so scared. I cried and cried, but nobody heard me. Why did you kill me? Wait. Don't tell me. I think I understand. I think you may have done it because you love me. Is that it? Do you love me? And you didn't want me to have to suffer through life the way you have suffered. Am I right?

  I know how hard you've had it. I know that your mother hasn't always been good to you. But I'm lonely. And sad. I'll never have a chance to do any of the things children do. You've taken that from me. I wish you hadn't done that, I wish you hadn't killed me. I wish I could have made up my own mind about life, you know?

  It was signed Joshua.

  He stared and stared at the name. How stupid did they think he was? He sat there and pick, picked at himself, pulling and picking, pulling and picking until all of his eyelashes were gone.

  The bus lurched to a halt. People got off. People got on. And suddenly he realized this was his stop.

  He folded the paper and jumped to his feet, hurrying down the rubber walkway, diving through the back doors just before they closed, the rubber seals brushing his shoulders.

  Standing on the sidewalk in a furious rage, he attacked the paper, tearing it and tearing it into smaller and smaller pieces, finally shoving it deep inside a trash container. When he looked up through a red haze of anger, people were staring at him.

  "Fuck you!" he screamed, spit flying. "Fuck you!"

  Responses to the dead-baby letter began arriving the following day. Most showed up as letters to the editor, a few were sent directly to Alex. Suddenly he was a pseudo star. Upon receiving the day's mail, he would put the letters in a sealed plastic bag and take them directly to Homicide. At the front desk, he was issued a temporary pass and allowed to venture where no Alex Martin had gone before.

  The majority of the letters they'd received so far were from outraged readers, full of accusations of exploitation and sensationalized journalism. But others were clearly written by someone who was disturbed. It would be the job of the police department's certified document examiner and forensic linguist to come up with a description of the disturbed writer.

  Alex had done his homework, and he knew that document examinations could be one of the most effective ways to link a suspect to a crime. One of the earliest cases in which a document examiner played a key role was the Lindbergh kidnapping. But it would take the skill of a forensic linguist to come up with an even more telling profile. By examining the order of the words, the usage, the patterns of speech, the linguist could determine gender, education, and ethnic background. A good examiner could often pinpoint the area of the city in which the suspect had been raised.

  In the second floor Madonna case room, the letters were carefully sorted and examined, three of them raising hopes of legitimacy. Then they were sent to the crime lab, where the letters and envelopes would be photographed and examined for any microscopic fibers. From there, they would go downstairs to the document examiner.

  Other proactive measures were also being taken. The cemetery where the latest victims had been buried was being staked out, and expectations among the task force were high. They needed this break.

  Harold Doyle had been a certified document examiner with the Chicago Police Department for nine years. He'd worked on kidnapping cases, and poisoning cases, bank robberies, counterfeiting, and embezzlement. He was good, but not cocky. As soon as he received the letters from the crime lab, he faxed copies to the FBI office in Quantico, and to Patty Hund, the Chicago-based linguist. Then he began his own careful examination.

  He would study the letters with a high-powered microscope, then begin the tedious search to see if a match could be found in the questioned documents. The paper would be run through an ESDA, Electro Static Detection Apparatus, which filled in indentations with graphite, and copies would be sent to every government office where signatures were on file.

  It wasn't his job to dissect the contents of the letters, but he read them all the same. The first was handwritten using black ink. The characters were small, the indention left on the paper deep.

  It's bad enough that you allow scenes of violence to dominate front-page news, but you’ve now descended to a level that could only be called trash journalism. Do you think these kinds of tactics will gain more readers? Do you think it will make the killer feel so bad that he'll come forward and confess? Don't insult his intelligence.

  The next letter was written in a more feminine hand, small and cramped, with a slant to the right. A cursory glance told Doyle that in all likelihood it had been written by a woman in her sixties. But he would examine it anyway, and file a report.

  Letter to the editor.

  Shame on you. How do you think the families of the victims feel, seeing a letter "written" from their dead grandson, or nephew? How do you think that made them feel, to open the paper and see that? I am canceling my subscription. Shame on you.

  The last letter had been printed on an ink-jet printer and was similar to the first except that it was addressed to the Police Department.

  CPD.

  The letter in yesterday's paper is an open admission of your lack of expertise. Anyone reading it will see it as the desperate plea it is, an admission of your total bafflement. Why not simply run headlines that read, WE HAVEN'T GOT A CLUE?

  Have you no pride? Have you no shame? Resorting to such juvenile tactics. Why don't you get out your junior-detective kit?

  Doyle suspected that the first and last letter had been written by the same person, but it would be up to Patty Hund to make that determination.

  The sound of the ringing phone woke her.

  Heart pounding, Ivy lifted the receiver to her ear, fully expecting to hear that there had been another murder.

  "In your profile you said he may have intended to major in math. Well, everything is numbers."


  "Max?"

  Ivy pressed the button that illuminated the green light on her travel clock. 2:50 A.M.

  "All of it. The thirteen stab wounds. Then the twenty-two stab wounds. Even the number of your old apartment, although that was probably a very strange coincidence. But someone who deals in numerology might argue that there are no coincidences."

  The brain fog began to lift, and she remembered that Max had left Headquarters a few hours early to take Ethan to a hockey game miles away in Michigan. "Where are you calling from?"

  "My car."

  "I thought you weren't heading back until tomorrow."

  "I decided to drive straight through after the game. I didn't want to be away any longer than I had to. Ethan's asleep in the passenger seat, and I've been listening to one of those weird programs you sometimes pick up in the middle of the night. It's about numerology."

  She scooted higher in bed. "My old apartment was 283. That doesn't go along with your theory."

  "Yeah, but in numerology you add all the numbers together."

  "And that makes thirteen. . . ."

  "Exactly. Everything he was doing sixteen years ago was based on the number thirteen, even down to the thirteenth victim, Claudia Reynolds."

  "Is that why he stopped? I was number thirteen?"

  "Possibly."

  "But the babies . . ."

  "For some reason, he doesn't count them. Probably because he doesn't think of their passing as punishment. He's always rationalizing his role in their death. He's playing God, sending them someplace where he thinks they'll be better off. Thirteen symbolizes death and birth, the end and the beginning. Change and transition. For some reason, his number has now changed from thirteen to twenty-two."

  "But two and two is four."

  "Twenty-two is a master number," he explained. "It doesn't break down. And get this—twenty-two means 'mastery on all planes.' 'Supreme power.' 'Special abilities.'"

  She turned on the bedside lamp and reached for the tablet and pen she kept within arm's reach in order to jot down any ideas that might come to her in the middle of the night. "I think you might be onto something." Her heart was beginning to beat a little faster. "If you're right about this, then that would mean he plans to kill a total of twenty-two mothers. Where is this knowledge going to take us? How can it help?"

  "Considering the killer's fascination with numbers, I think it's only reasonable to surmise that he might also work with numbers. Like a math teacher, or an accountant maybe. Numbers would be his life. We need to go back and check with the area mental hospitals to find out if any patients were math teachers or accountants."

  "I agree."

  "Sorry to wake you up, but I had to run this by somebody. Sometimes things that seem so rational in the middle of the night make no sense the next day. I had to know."

  "I'm glad you called."

  "Go back to sleep," he said, the signal breaking up. "I'll see you in the morning."

  "We got a few results back while you were gone. Nothing breaking." "I'll pick you up on the way so you can fill me in.

  Chapter 30

  "Could you—" Max motioned to his coffee as he turned the car onto Grand, heading in the direction of Area Five. On the way to Ivy's, he'd stopped and picked up a half-dozen bagels and two cups of coffee from Bagels, Bagels, and now he ate as he drove.

  In the passenger seat, Ivy pulled the plastic drink tab from the lid, and passed the coffee to him.

  "Anything come of the DNA testing?" he asked.

  "It was too degraded for the lab to get anything from it."

  "He's too smart to give us something that easy. How about the drugs? Any leads on the drugs used in the babies?"

  "Brought in a couple of kids who were caught selling it on the street. I guess it's a new kind of high, but they hadn't sold any to anybody who fit our profile."

  "What about the last crime scene?"

  "Nothing."

  "Your apartment? Anything happening there?"

  "I think he must know the building is under surveillance. Maybe we should make a big show of moving the cops out."

  Max shook his head, checked the rearview mirror, then over his right shoulder before executing a lane change. "If he figures out who you are, you'll be the next target."

  "Which would make me the perfect bait."

  "Not a good idea. What about responses to the letter from the infant? Documents or Forensics come up with anything yet?"

  "No, but Linguistics came up with a character analysis that closely matches our profiles."

  "Good for us. Any leads from the envelopes, paper, or ink?"

  "Not yet. Every public-document office in Chicago is trying to come up with a possible match, but that could take weeks. We're going to run another letter soon."

  "That's not a good idea."

  "Why not? We're hoping to keep up an ongoing conversation. The responses have stopped, and the longer we can keep him talking, the better chance we have of catching him."

  "You don't even know if any of the responses are actually from him. You might be putting energy into a strategy that will simply be a waste of our time, time that could be better spent elsewhere."

  "Is that your only concern?" she asked, trying to imply that it was a damn lame one.

  "I'm afraid it might backfire. I'm afraid the killer might overreact. That it could actually accelerate the murders."

  "What are you basing that on? We already know he feels guilty about killing the babies. Why not use that to our advantage?" She was dismayed to find them arguing again, but she wasn't going to back down in order to avoid a confrontation.

  "I don't know what I'm basing it on. There is nothing to base it on. There's been no other case like this in the history of serial killings. That's what I'm basing it on. This guy doesn't fit the pattern, and he might not react the way we want him to."

  "So we don't run the new letter?"

  "This isn't a dictatorship. I'm not going to tell you not to run it, I'm just saying it's against my better judgement."

  "Really? There wasn't one other person who thought it was a bad idea, that's including three experts on serial killers."

  Unable to finish her bagel, Ivy wrapped the remaining half and tossed it back in the brown bag, rolling the top down with a loud, angry rustle of paper. They continued in silence through two lights. "Why did you okay the first letter then?"

  "I thought it was worth a try. We've done it, but we don't want to push it."

  "I think you're being too cautious."

  "You don't know what you're doing."

  "Oh, so we're back to that."

  "I don't want to fight."

  "Neither do I."

  They pulled into the parking lot. Max found a spot in the shade under the overhead ramp. They got out and walked toward Headquarters in silent hostility.

  Chapter 31

  He was having trouble staying focused. Random thoughts would jump into his brain, then jump out before he could fully explore them.

  Something eating away at him. Eating, eating, knocking on his head, trying to get in, trying to get out.

  Go away.

  Babies, babies, babies. Little baby boys smelling like powder and cream. Take their breath away, take their breath away. . . . Hush, hush, sweet little boy, Momma's here. Momma's right here.

  "Last call," someone said.

  He looked up, his hand gripping an empty drink glass, the short kind that was used for whiskey on the rocks. His brain crash-landed, putting him back in the here and now, a crappy neighborhood bar a half-mile from his home. His mother had sent him out—he looked up at the clock—hours ago to get her a six-pack of beer. Instead, he'd bought drinks for himself. And when her money ran out, he started using his own.

  The bartender, a thin, world-weary man with deep creases in his cheeks, was still waiting. "Somebody should put you out of your misery," he told the bartender.

  "What?"

  It was always fun to throw things like that at
people. They never knew how to react. How easy it was to disturb someone with just a few words, words that didn't fit the protocol. Humans came with a manual, a set of rules, a code that saturated every waking moment of their pitiful lives. But if you stepped outside that code, it threw people off because there was nothing in the manual about seriously fucking with somebody's head.

  "I said, Somebody should put you out of your misery. Wouldn't you like that? Think about it."

  He usually didn't drink. His mother drank, and he didn't want to do anything she did. And drinking made things he could normally suppress rise to the surface. But there was such a feeling of release to it, such a sense of freedom.

  "No more bartending," he said. "No more moving between crummy sets. Your home. The bar. Home. Bar. See what I mean?"

  "Get the hell out of here."

  "I want another drink."

  "You ain't gettin' another drink, now get the hell out before I call the cops."

  He wagged a finger at him. "You don't know who you're talking to." He leaned closer. "I have power."

  The bartender laughed in his face. "Get out of here, psycho. You don't scare me. You're just another loser." He picked up a cordless phone and began dialing.

  The murderer of infants, the murderer of mothers, got to his feet knowing he possessed the power of God in his hands. "I'm leaving."

  He lurched from the building, then dropped into his car, which was parked a block away. He sat there in the dark, watching the last of the customers leave the bar. Engine idling, he watched as the lights went out, one by one. Finally, the bartender emerged from the building, locked the door, then began walking down the sidewalk in his direction.

  He tromped down on the accelerator. The engine roared, the car flying forward. With a heavy thud, the left front fender struck the bartender, tossing him over the hood where he landed in a crumpled heap in the street near the curb.