“Don’t you call me that!”
“—in this day and age, where segregation and the like are frowned upon. Your family never told you, right?” She looked almost sympathetic. Almost. “It didn’t stop them from teaching hate, but they didn’t have the balls to tell you any real truth.”
Behrman cracked under the pressure and swung wildly on George. This was a dreadful idea for him to have … on top of his other troubles, he could add assaulting a federal agent to the list.
There was a flash of movement and it was likely that only someone with extensive martial arts training could have tracked it. Behrman, unfortunately, didn’t have that in his background, and the crunch when George broke his nose was a real eye-opener. Loun, meanwhile, was frozen in place, staring at his “white brother” with horror.
“There’s something wrong with you,” I commented as George stepped off so Behrman could stagger toward a roll of paper towels. “You do know that, right?”
He looked at me. He had blood on his shirt and his eyes were better, but he still looked desperately unhappy. “There’s something wrong with all of us.”
chapter sixty-four
“That was fun,” Emma Jan said later, “but I’m not sure how it helps us find JBK.”
“I am. I just need a computer. And possibly Paul. Is he here?”
“He’s off listening to blue, or smelling yellow, or whatever the hell he does when he’s not freaking me out. Gah, that guy gives me the creepies.”
“I might need him.”
“So tell him. What am I,” George bitched, “your fetcher-of-weirdos?”
“Nice job title,” Emma Jan snickered. She had been rummaging through her absurdly large purse while we were talking, and extracted a full-size bag of ripple chips. “There you are, honey. Where you been all my life?”
“How long you been carrying around the pleather bottomless pit?” George asked, fascinated in spite of himself.
“Years and years. I don’t understand women who walk around with paperback-size purses. How can they function?”
“Are you all right, Emma Jan?”
Crunching, she replied, “Sure, Shiro, why wouldn’t I be?”
“I thought Behrman’s mirror remark was unkind.”
“’M used to it,” she crunched. “World’s fulla mirrors. I’ve spent my life trying to avoid them when I can. It’s my Achilles’ heel, that fucking Mirror Syndrome. It’s the only thing really wrong with me—”
“Besides your weird liking for gigantic purses,” George added.
“—but it’s a doozy.”
“So, you are saying you lead a relatively normal life.”
“Yep.”
“Except for that one delusion.”
She grinned. “Yes, honey, except for that one big, whopping, gigantic, enormous delusion, I’m absolutely fine.”
“A minor setback?”
“Right.”
I rolled my eyes and she laughed. “Hey, your girl Cadence was gonna give me a beat-down. She thought I was stealing you.”
If she had suddenly struck a match and set herself on fire, I could not have been more perplexed. “Stealing me from whom?”
“Her.”
“But that is…” Foolish. Idiotic. Panicked. Untrue. Cadence. That was Cadence.
“So I think we established that you and I aren’t dating.”
“All right.” This emotional chitchat was making me uneasy. So I dealt with it as I always did: “We have work to do.”
“Listen, I’m gonna go debrief Michaela.” George glanced at his watch and frowned.
“Ah.”
“What, ‘ah’?”
“It will not work, though you may try.”
“What?” Emma Jan was looking from him to me to him again. “What’s he gonna try?”
“Michaela takes a dim view of her agents committing assault.”
“Which is hilarious,” George broke in, “given how often it happens—right, Shiro?”
“Correct.” What could I say to that? He was correct. “George has decided that a full and fake contrite confession may lessen her ire, as opposed to waiting until she finds out about it.”
“At which point she’ll unleash her ire all over my delicate ass and a week’s suspension with pay could turn into six months without pay. Think how boring that would be!” He seemed horrified at the very prospect. Not the prospect of being low on funds—being kept away from the daily excitement that was working for BOFFO. “Who needs that? Let me know what you guys find out.”
“Best of luck, George, and I am sure her ire will not come anywhere near you.”
“Oh my God, you are so bad at empathy,” George said, rubbing his temples.
“Says the sociopath.”
“Yes, but I can fake it convincingly.”
“You cannot.”
“Can so!”
“You have the moral compass of a moray eel, and it’s instantly obvious to anyone who spends more than five minutes with you.”
“Ah! But!” He wagged a finger at me, being careful to stay out of arm’s reach. Yes, he could be taught. “During those first five minutes, I’m magical.”
Despite myself, I laughed and Emma Jan joined me.
The sly bastard had a point.
* * *
“I’m not getting this,” Emma Jan said, looking over my shoulder. “At all.”
“The story Loun told us. The reason he started The Good Citizens. It got me thinking. The death of those two little girls had a profound effect on the family, yes?”
“Sure. They justified starting up their stupid We Hate Blacks Club.”
“Remember when he told about the boy who killed them? ‘The buck who killed them, he fried for it not even three months after he killed them.’”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what he said.” She’d pulled up a chair and scooted close to mine so she could see the screen. “‘Fried’ meaning electric chair, so the state actually killed the guy within three months of the murders. Wow, they didn’t bother with much paperwork back then, did they?”
“Yes, the idea of an investigation, arrest, trial, and execution happening within ninety days simply boggles the mind. But I think that is our lever. That is our answer. Because if we plug in what little we do know … look what comes up.”
I hit a few keys while Emma Jan munched contentedly. “There!”
And there he was. George Stinney: the reason behind the June Boys Jobs. All there in the archives, the puzzle solved if only someone put the pieces together in exactly the right order.
Or if someone could smell blue.
And if I had pulled my head out of my behind, we might have known this earlier and the Mickelson boy would still be alive.
“Oh, Jesus,” Emma Jan said, staring at the screen. “Jesus.”
“They did it. All those years ago, those two little white girls showed up dead, and the town just went insane.
“They arrested, convicted, tried, and executed George Stinney for murdering the girls. Within three months. The state…” I blinked hard but the words did not change. They would never change. “The state executed a child who most likely did not kill anyone.” And even if he had … even if he had … he had been fourteen.
Emma Jan and I stared at each other. Her expression was mine: I could feel it, I knew it, looking at her. We were both horrified … and glad. Fiercely glad. Because behind any good cop is a puzzle solver … and finding the solution to any puzzle, no matter how senseless and awful, is meat and drink to us.
We were thrilled to solve it. It felt better than anything in our lives, solving this. Which begged the question: If I was, say, an accountant, would I ever have been happy? Or did I need the adrenaline of a murder investigation? Did I need a corpse to prompt me to enjoy being alive?
“They executed him … he was too little for the electric chair. See? He was too little. Five foot one inch, ninety pounds. They had a hard time with the electrodes. And the adult-size mask did not f
it, of course. Nothing fit him. And even that did not stop them from…”
I did not want to look at the pictures.
I looked at the pictures. “His family was so afraid, they left the night he was arrested. His father had already been fired. They had to creep out of town and leave their son to his fate. He died surrounded by killers who thought it was fine to electrocute a teenager. He died eighty days after the murder.”
I was seeing it and I had trouble believing it. Oh, you bastards. You blind fools, see what your foolishness has brought the world?
“Sure, makes sense. The murders had to have ramped up tension that had already been there. Racial, political, probably economical, too, and what-have-you. It just … fed on itself until it burned out. And it couldn’t burn out until somebody paid. George Stinney’s family has been making people pay for it ever since,” Emma Jan finished. “For generations! They’ve been … my God.”
“Pulling a teenage boy—”
“A white boy.”
“Right, a white boy. Pulling him from the herd. The beatings … how the boys died … that was how George was supposed to have killed the girls in 1944. They said he beat the girls to death with a railroad spike; their skulls had been broken in four or five places. So the killers have been killing the white teenagers the same way. We thought it was torture-murder at first. The killers have been telling the world the George Stinney story over … and over … and over. The clothes the boys have been found in…”
“Jeans and a striped shirt.”
“What George wore to the electric chair. He died in the clothes the state gave him. So the killers dressed them the same way.”
It was almost poetic. And grotesque.
“Okay, but George was executed in 1944. Paul proved the murders started in 1954.”
“That makes sense if you look at it from the correct perspective. They needed ten years to get some distance. Ten years so people could begin to forget. Ten years for research, maybe even training. An ordinary family suddenly decides they need to get good at murder … you do not jump into such a thing without preparation. So they took their time. And after ten years had gone by, they were ready.”
She nodded, the chips long forgotten. “It had to have started with one of his surviving family members. So an aunt, or uncle, or maybe even an older sibling. And each generation, one of them … what? Loses the coin toss? Wins the coin toss? And is taught the killing ritual.” She shook her head. “No wonder we didn’t see it.”
“That is charitable,” I said dryly, “because we should have, years ago. I should have.”
She snorted, an unlovely sound that was also quite funny. “Right, Shiro. You should have realized that a murder committed less than two weeks ago was tied to murders starting back in 1954. What a dumbass you are not to have figured that out. You’d better turn in your ID and try to get a job as a crossing guard.”
“I should have known earlier.” Cadence was not the only one of us capable of mulish stubbornness. “I should have realized it was never about Behrman. It was about Loun. I knew, I knew something about the dichotomy of those framed mug shots was going to be our answer. I simply could never … quite … put my finger on it.”
“Now what?”
“Now we tell George and Michaela.”
chapter sixty-five
“Are you shitting me?” George practically screamed.
“It’s not that I doubt you,” Michaela said. “I believe every word you said. It’s difficult, though, to grasp the years of … of poison.” She turned and looked at us with haunted eyes. I had never seen Michaela look her age before. “Can you imagine the horror of being born into that family? To know that you will either be the one to kill an innocent child, or that you will be the one to help cover it up? To know that you will grow to adulthood and have children. To know you must teach your son or daughter … and they will teach your grandchild. My God!”
George couldn’t stand it; he had to jump up and pace. We were in Michaela’s actual office, so there was not much room for that. “This is gonna change everything. A whole family of … Am I the only one who wants to lock them all up in some secret government lair and then do experiments on them?”
“Yes,” Michaela and Emma Jan said in unison.
No.
“Bad enough to be after just some random guy who, even if we didn’t catch him—”
“Traitor.”
“—we being all cops, not just us, if all the law enforcement agencies don’t catch a bad guy, it’s just him. Nobody worried about Bundy’s kid, if he even had one—”
“A daughter.”
“Yeah, okay, but nobody’s worried she’s gonna pick up where Dad left off, right? No one’s worried she’s gonna flee to Florida and rampage through a sorority house with a goddamned wooden club, right?
“But with this guy … We don’t catch him, and his kid or nephew or whoever takes over … and even if that guy had gotten nailed, his kid was waiting right there in the wings to take up the family business … Ugh!” He clapped a hand over his mouth and shook his head. “I just called generations of murder the ‘family business.’ It’s the coolest and most terrible thing I’ve ever imagined.”
“You make an excellent point.” Normally I tried not to compliment George. Such things went immediately to his head. “Usually an ugly crime will die with the victim … and the killer. But not this time.”
“Aw, man, all that? All those kids killed, years and years of it? Parents teaching the hate to their kids and then their grandkids … and for what? More death. Like George Stinney even cares, wherever he is, heaven or hell or nada, like he cares that his nutso family’s been whacking teenagers since he died.” He kicked over the garbage can, which couldn’t have been very satisfying, as it was for paper, and only had three pieces to spill. “What a waste. Of their lives and our time.”
“Do not forget the murdered boys.”
“Yep, the victims, too.”
“And the murdered girls,” Emma Jan added. She looked at Michaela. “Do you think George did that? Killed those girls?”
“I think that their murder was a terrible, heinous crime, and it paved the way for more devastation and death.”
“You didn’t answer my question, boss.”
Michaela shrugged. Click. Closed. She had shown us as much as she would.
“I am not certain George was guilty,” I admitted. “Eighty-one days is rather speedy. Sometimes it takes almost that long for jury selection.”
“You know what, though? You know what?” Pace, pace. “Even if he did it. Even if he was the killer, killed those two little girls, he still got jammed. I don’t care if he was slobbering into his chocolate milkshakes and howling at the moon, or if he was just getting an early start in his career as a repressed racially downtrodden serial killer. He was wronged. The system fucked him. It fucked him.”
I tried to hide my astonishment. To hear this from George Pinkman, of all people. He normally cared nothing for motivation, for the did-he-or-didn’t-he game. But he was outraged about this.
“And if he didn’t do it … God!” He raked his fingers through his hair and rubbed his eyes so savagely mine watered in sympathy. “I don’t even want to think about all the layers of awful if he was innocent. I can’t. Literally can’t wrap my mind around it, like Michaela said.”
“Well, jeez, buddy, don’t hurt yourself.” Emma Jan shot me a look, but I could only shrug. I had never seen him like this, either.
“I guess I just don’t have the force of imagination to pull it off. Even thinking about trying to face the implications is giving me a migraine. That poor kid.” Silence, while he finished pacing and flung himself back into his chair. “So now what?”
“Now we expose JBK to the light of day,” Michaela said.
We all stared at her, but it was Emma Jan who broke the silence. “What do you mean, Michaela?”
“We have managed to keep the media out of this, for which I am always gratef
ul. Trust a reporter to ruin a perfectly organized murder investigation, every time. But now we are going to tell the media everything. And then we are going to let the killer come to us.”
“Okay, that sounded mysterious and weird, but what, exactly, is the plan?”
She told us. I was not so much surprised as amazed.
chapter sixty-six
Here are various headlines from local papers and news affiliates that prove, once and for all, that Michaela Taro was not the one with whom to fuck. I had no idea how she had put all this together so quickly, and no desire to find out. Some things mortal man was not meant to know. Michaela’s Machiavellian practices were quite high on that list.
RACIAL MOTIVATION BEHIND SERIAL KILLINGS: THE TRUTH ABOUT GEORGE STINNEY
GEORGE STINNEY: EXECUTION SPARKS DECADES OF MURDERS. THE KILLING NEVER STOPPED!
THE STINNEY CASE: DEATH OF INNOCENCE?
PROFESSOR DECKLIN COMING TO TWIN CITIES TO LECTURE: STINNEY WAS INNOCENT! WHO REALLY KILLED THE GIRLS?
That one was my favorite. I think it was Michaela’s, as well. For one thing, there was no Professor Decklin. For another, there was no proof of Stinney’s innocence, as there was no real proof of his guilt.
But the killer wouldn’t know that. Even if he did, we didn’t think he could stay away.
As it turned out, much to my shock and sorrow later, we were right.
chapter sixty-seven
But that was before my nervous breakdown. My mini-breakdown. Don’t judge … I was overdue! And I have no idea why it happened just then. It seemed very random to me. As it did (I heard later) from others.
“That’s it!” I announced. The buzz of FBI-related activity went on despite my outburst. Of course, I wasn’t the first person to suddenly freak out in her cube. Suddenly I wanted out. Out out out!
“That’s it,” I said again. “I have to … have to…” What? What could I do? How could I get out of here with a good enough excuse? Where could I go? Oooh! Dr. Gallo! “I have to go donate platelets.” Though it might be too early … it certainly hadn’t been seven days …
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