Hush

by Anne Frasier

  He went back to the bedroom, where her computer was set up against the wall opposite the bed. Neatly stacked near the monitor were the inquiries she'd faxed him.

  "She's not here," said the manager, a young black woman who seemed nervous now that she'd allowed him access to the room.

  She'd been there, that much was obvious.

  He suddenly felt like an idiot. It wasn't like him to overreact, and he didn't quite know how to deal with it.

  Yesterday she'd been really pissed about, being given the street assignment while he got to sit in air- conditioning all day. So, knowing Regina, she'd gone out, gotten more pissed with each growing minute, and finally decided to play hooky—since she'd also been complaining about needing a day or two off.

  She'd come home, faxed the questionnaires, then gone to visit a friend. Probably a guy, Ronny figured, a jealous knot forming in his stomach. She was most likely at the guy's place right now, laughing about how she'd duped everybody.

  Well, he wouldn't squeal on her. He might need her to cover for him sometime.

  "Thanks for letting me in," he told the manager, as they both headed for the door.

  Chapter 33

  "I have some information for you," the voice whispered in Alex Martin's ear. Alex gripped the receiver tighter and glanced up from his desk to see if anyone was within hearing distance. Heads were bowed, workers pecking away at their computer terminals.

  "What kind of information?" Alex whispered back into the telephone.

  "About the Madonna Murderer."

  "Who is this?"

  "I can't say."

  Thrilled, his heart racing, Alex said, "I'd never divulge a source."

  "I can't risk it. If I tell you, if he finds out I called you, I'll be killed. Can you meet with me someplace where we won't be seen?" The man's voice was of medium timbre, static, and trembly. He was scared shitless.

  "Where?"

  "A cemetery. I'll give you directions."

  "Why a cemetery? Why not a coffee shop?"

  "Because people know who you are. I can't be seen with you." He gave Alex directions, then said, "I have to go. I hear him coming. You'll be there, won't you? Please be there." The caller hung up.

  A lead. A real honest-to-God lead.

  Alex quickly found Maude, who was sitting in front of her computer, huge green bifocals on her face.

  "I'm heading to the Daley Center to do a little research," he told her.

  "On the Madonna Murder case?" she asked.

  "Yeah."

  He hated lying to her, but he was afraid if he told her the truth she might insist on his calling the cops, and he wanted this to be his story. He could almost smell a Pulitzer. The cops were already taking credit for the dead-baby letter, when he knew damn well it was something he could have come up with if given a chance.

  "What about the police logs?" she asked, leaning back in her seat so she could stare at him.

  "I'll pick them up on the way back."

  "That'll be cutting it close."

  "I'll call them in if I have to."

  "Police logs? Nobody wants to take police logs over the phone."

  "I'll be back in time. Don't worry."

  Two weeks ago, she would have told him to get his ass over to Area Five. Today she just smiled and told him to have fun, then settled back in front of her computer.

  In his car, Alex thought about how his life had changed—all because of a murdering psycho. He hated to think of it like that, but there it was. The senior editor of the Chicago Herald actually knew his name now, and he was being given real assignments—real, actual, satisfying assignments. And Maude was almost treating him as an equal rather than a pain in the ass.

  He slowed his little red Protege for the tollbooth, tossed in the coins, and floored it, not waiting for the light to turn green. The only people who waited for a green light were geezers traveling through on their way to Michigan.

  Everybody else might be running red lights, but not me. I'm no lawbreaker. No, sirree.

  The Protege was a nice car, but it was the cheapest model offered; the windows had to be hand-cranked, and he could hardly hear the stereo because of road noise. Before long, he'd be able to trade up, get a car with power windows, a good sound system, and a lot more insulation.

  They said the Madonna Murderer was driven by an intense hatred for his mother. Mother and son. He and his mother got along really well, but some of his friends weren't so lucky. They had weird relationships that could only be described as volatile. Oedipus. Now, there was a kinky concept, but maybe not so far-fetched. Maybe he would do a piece on that. Yeah. He'd run that by Maude. See what she thought.

  Faint music drifted to him from beneath the noise of the engine and the roaring of the semis that surrounded him. His roommates made fun of him because they said he liked to listen to bad music. He turned up the radio all the way. Van Halen. Guy music. Cock rock. Sure it was stupid. Sure it was loud, but it was primal, empowering.

  He sang along, pounding a hand against the steering wheel.

  Yeah, his life had turned around.

  The cemetery ended up being one of those hidden, deserted places you sometimes came upon in the heart of the city. Following the directions he'd been given over the phone, Alex turned off the street and took a dirt road overgrown with grass. He drove beneath dense foliage, past toppled tombstones, until he reached the far south edge of the cemetery. He sat there a moment, wondering if he should turn around and get the hell out of there, when a man stepped out from behind a large stone. He waved and smiled.

  The guy was pale and thin, a little geeky, Alex supposed. Totally harmless. Alex shut off the car engine and got out.

  "Alex Martin?" the man asked, smiling, then casting a nervous glance over his shoulder.

  "The same."

  Alex pulled a pen and reporter's tablet from the breast pocket of his shirt while approaching the man, who still stood nervously near the tombstone. "Thanks for calling me," he said. "I want you to know I won't divulge anything about you. Not what you look like, or where we met. Nothing."

  "I know," the man said, nodding and smiling.

  "You can tell me as much as you feel comfortable with."

  "I wanted to ask you something."

  "Shoot."

  "About the dead-baby letter."

  A flicker of irritation passed through Alex. Always the dead-baby letter. Was he never going to get the credit he deserved?

  "It was a lie, wasn't it?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "The baby didn't write the letter, did he?"

  "I don't follow you."

  "The baby didn't write the letter," the man repeated, more insistently this time. "Somebody else wrote the letter, didn't they?"

  "Yeah . . ." Alex said, nodding slowly, wondering what the hell was going on. He'd gotten himself a real head case here.

  "You wrote the letter, didn't you?"

  "I had some help."

  "From the police?"

  "I can't tell you that."

  "From Detective Irving? Did he help you write the letter?"

  "I said, I can't tell you that."

  This was a total bust, like so many of the letters they'd received in reply to the dead-baby piece. There were a lot of nuts out there, and Chicago seemed to have a surfeit of them. Looked like he'd be back in time to get the police logs posted after all. Goodbye, Pulitzer. "Did you have something you wanted to tell me?"

  "I don't want you to print any more letters."

  "That's not up to me. I'm just a small cog in a big wheel."

  "You're a traitor, Alex Martin. That's what you are."

  "To who?"

  "To the babies."

  "The babies?" Alex had had enough. He turned and began walking toward his car.

  "I'm talking to you!"

  "Go fuck yourself." The words were tossed angrily over his shoulder.

  From behind him came a rustling sound, a scurrying.

  Alex turned in tim
e to see something sparkle in a small shaft of sunlight that cut through the trees above his head. An axe. The guy must have had it hidden behind the tombstone, Alex thought in detached disbelief. A fucking axe.

  Chapter 34

  Ivy gave Jinx a full fifteen minutes of lavish attention to make up for leaving him in what amounted to day after day of solitary confinement. She petted him and brushed him and talked to him in the high voice that made him smile at her with his eyes.

  It was a good thing cats didn't have the ability to anticipate tomorrow, or next week, or next month. Otherwise he might revolt, especially since he hadn't grown up in such confined quarters. At one time he'd been wild and free, walking leisurely through tall grass, sniffing at dandelions. He'd climbed trees and rolled in the dirt. He'd dozed in the shade of a lilac bush while blue jays screamed at him from above.

  Ivy and Max had spent the previous day going door- to-door, following up on former patients of the Elgin Mental Hospital who had backgrounds in math. The statements were much more in-depth than the original questionnaire. Two men had seemed promising, but they'd both come up with solid alibis for the nights of the murders. And none of them had triggered anything in Ivy.

  But would he? If she came face-to-face with the man who'd savagely and grotesquely attacked her in the middle of the night, would she know he was the one? Or would she smile and nod and go her own way? It was highly probable she'd seen him already, maybe even made eye contact, maybe even spoken to him.

  Because that's the way it was with many serial killers. They blended. They moved among the masses, changing color to match their background.

  Ivy locked her apartment, all the while aware of the camera directed at her door as she inserted the key. He wasn't coming back, not to her building anyway. He'd made the statement he'd wanted to make and was too smart to allow himself to be videotaped. That assumption didn't keep her from watching hour upon hour of tapes of people coming and going from the building.

  They'd caught a couple of drug deals going down, and a prostitute working out of her apartment, another guy stealing welfare checks from tenants' mailboxes. The few suspicious men who'd slipped in without keys had checked out as being friends and relatives of tenants.

  He wasn't coming back.

  "Hear about your buddy?" the officer at the front desk asked when Ivy arrived at Area Five.

  "Who's that?"

  "Alex Martin. A body with his driver's license and press ID was found somewhere on the north side of Area Five in a Catholic cemetery."

  Her breath caught. "Has he been positively identified?"

  "No, but his car was there too."

  The room took on a haze of unreality. If the officer continued to elaborate, Ivy didn't hear it because there was too much noise in her head. Alex Martin? Dead?

  Carrying the fog with her, she moved blindly through the checkpoint to take the stairs to the second floor. She burst into the task-force office, almost crashing into Max. "What's this about Alex Martin?"

  He grabbed her arm and turned her back around. "I tried to call, but you must have had your phone off. Come on. Let's go check it out."

  Once they were in his car racing toward the crime scene, Max filled her in on what he knew. "Last month we had a body turn up that appeared to be the victim of some kind of ritualistic sacrifice. That body was found in a cemetery."

  "Any leads?"

  "A few of circumstantial evidence, but nothing solid. The circumstantial points to a gang of teenagers or young adults who may have taken up Satan worshipping."

  "And you think this is another sacrificial murder? Why Alex Martin? And why did you want me to come along?"

  "When the cops got there this morning, they found a broken snow globe a few feet from the body."

  When he'd told her about the possible sacrificial murder, Ivy had actually felt relief rim through her. It had nothing to do with the Madonna Murder case. She was in no way to blame. Now she felt overwhelmed by horror, guilt, remorse.

  "It's because of the letter," she said in a low voice.

  "We don't know that. It may have nothing to do with the Madonna Murders. It could be someone using it as a sick trick, or using it to throw us off. That's what we're going to have to find out."

  Of course, she reasoned. Of course the presence of a globe didn't mean it had been left by the Madonna Murderer. Everybody knew he left a snow globe at every scene. Any maniac could copy him.

  The cemetery was deep and narrow, no wider than the domestic lots that flanked either side of it. A place forgotten, with many of the tombstones knocked to the ground years ago by kids committing their first crimes. After cutting their criminal teeth there, the delinquents had moved on to bigger offenses. If they didn't respect the dead, who did they respect?

  The grass hadn't been mowed all summer, and not last summer either from the feel and look of the fallen branches hiding under tangles of dead grass, ready to trip an unsuspecting visitor.

  "It doesn't look as if anybody's been buried here for years," Ivy said.

  "A lot of these little cemeteries have been forgotten," Max told her, picking his way between fallen stones. "This is probably owned by a church that died out years ago."

  The crime scene was at the back of the cemetery where trees towered over the ambulance and crime technician van, washing everything in a dense darkness. At the border of the grounds, undergrowth grew as thick and secretive as a jungle.

  There was an altar a few feet from where the tangled jungle began, a place where Easter mass must have been said at one time.

  Side by side, Ivy and Max approached the scene, walking in the paths created by tires of the vehicles on location. A little red car was being loaded onto the back of a wrecker so it could be hauled to the crime lab. The local FBI was there, along with a couple of homicide detectives Ivy had met briefly at Headquarters.

  Shutters were clicking while another technician ran a video camera.

  One of the detectives spotted them and broke away from the group. "As soon as we found the broken snow globe I gave you a call," he said as he approached.

  "Does it match the others?" Max asked.

  "Hard to say. The thing's shattered. Even the figurines inside. The victim's body has been here awhile— it looks like crows have been making a meal out of him. My guess is, the globe was placed next to the body, on the altar, but something—probably a bird— knocked it down."

  "Any idea what the victim was doing here?"

  "Not yet. After we get a positive ID, Homicide will be procuring statements from fellow employees, friends, and relatives."

  "Get copies to me as soon as you can."

  "The grass around the altar has already been vacuumed, so you can walk on it. We aren't done with the body and the altar itself." He glanced at Ivy, then back to Max. "It's pretty bad. Hacked up with an ax is my guess. A couple of our guys got sick. I haven't seen that happen in a long time."

  Max suddenly wished he hadn't waited for Ivy to show up. Now he realized it might have been a little insensitive on his part. She'd become so much a part of everything that he hadn't stopped to think. For a moment, he'd forgotten that she wasn't used to seeing dead bodies on a weekly basis.

  As the detective walked away, Max turned to Ivy. "You can hang back if you want."

  That, of course, was taken as a challenge. Her chin went up, the line of her lips straightened.

  She came along.

  It was bad. Really bad.

  The body was lying faceup on the altar, its severed arms not far away in the grass. The eyes were gone, most likely ravaged by birds, leaving two black holes staring up at the sky. The face was bloated. Blowflies and maggots churned in every opening, giving the body a strange sense of life.

  "It's Alex Martin," Ivy said numbly, able to make out enough of his features to confirm his identity.

  "This can't be the work of the Madonna Murderer," Max said in a low voice, so only Ivy could hear. "Killing an adult male?"

  "I don't t
hink you should eliminate the possibility so readily. There are exceptions to every rule of human behavior."

  "We can't afford to spend time going in the wrong direction."

  The Madonna Murderer hadn't struck in more than two weeks. Everyone was expecting a new murder any day now, and they couldn't afford to waste time on false leads or clues.

  "What about Jonas Sandberg, of Sweden?" Ivy asked. "When he was finally captured for the murder of twelve teenage girls, he was put in a mental institute. Sweden is lax when it comes to incarceration. At night he would sneak out and murder young men, then be back in bed by morning. Nobody thought it could be him because he'd never killed men before, and the method he used was completely different from the murders of the young women. It wasn't until emphysema kept him tethered to an oxygen tank that the murders finally stopped. He sadly voiced his inability to continue killing to another patient, who turned him in."

  "For chrissake, Ivy," Max said with a touch of humor. "I was just stating my opinion and my concerns. I'll keep my eye on this case, but I'm also not going to let it distract me—and I don't want it to distract you either."

  She was crouched on the ground near the shattered snow globe, already distracted. "It's the same kind." She pointed. "There's part of the baby's blue blanket. There's part of the mother's head."

  "The lab will be able to determine whether or not it's an exact match."

  She let out a deep breath and stood up. He could tell she'd already decided this was her fault, and that Alex Martin had been killed by the hand of the Madonna Murderer.

  They got in the car and headed toward Headquarters.

  "Your instincts were right about the letter," Ivy said. "I should have listened to you. That's why he killed him. Because of the letter. Because he knew Alex was behind the dead-baby letter. He probably thought Alex wrote it. He killed him to make sure there would be no more letters."

  It was possible, Max thought, yet he was unwilling to commit vocally. "It's so outside his MO."

  "This was a crime of anger. Maybe he's taken on another persona to deal with people like Alex, a persona who is even more hate- and revenge-driven."