Strong Darkness

by Jon Land

  “You better hope what you pulled in Providence was worth the shit storm you’ve unleashed.”

  “Sometimes your American idioms are lost on me,” Zhen said, breathing a sigh of relief.

  “Then try this, Li. Of all the people in the world you don’t want to piss off, you picked the absolute worst two.”

  21

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

  Cort Wesley was sitting by Dylan’s bedside when the sun rose high in the morning sky over the city of Providence. Caitlin had already left to return to Texas, their final conversation in the wake of her failed attempt to chase down the Chinese girl somehow responsible for Dylan being here starting out terse but finishing the way they always did.

  * * *

  “I overheard your call with Tepper,” he told her.

  “How much did you hear?”

  “Enough to know something’s going on at home that needs your attention.”

  He could see Caitlin hedging. His dad had been something of a gambler, a magician working the cards as well as a dice mechanic who thrived on ripping off mopes too distracted to follow his hands. Boone Masters had spoken to him a few times about “tells,” how he selected his marks from the varied candidates who submitted their applications just by showing up. Boone could read a man by his actions and mannerisms, most having more than their share.

  Well, Cort Wesley knew Caitlin Strong had only one such tell: the way she twirled a finger through her hair, sometimes nibbling at the strands with her teeth. She’d get fidgety and her eyes would start looking past him, seeing other things.

  “I can handle everything on this end,” he continued. “It’s long past midnight, Ranger.”

  “I just can’t get the way that girl looked at me out of my mind.”

  “Describe it.”

  “Pleading. And she recognized me, Cort Wesley. I’m sure of it, just like I’m sure she was almost ready to talk before she ran off.”

  * * *

  Once Caitlin had left, Cort Wesley’s thoughts veered the way they always did when he got scared or angry: to taking a two-by-four with rusty nails hammered through it to whoever had done this to his son. It was the only way he knew to deal with the tide of violence that always seemed to find him no matter his resolve to avoid it. It was, Cort Wesley supposed, his tell. For so many years in his life, first in Army Special Forces and then as a much-feared enforcer for the Branca crime family out of New Orleans, violence had been a first resort, not a last. It came naturally to him and he saw no reason to resist the temptation, couldn’t have even if he wanted to.

  And that made Cort Wesley wonder if the last five, six years had been a lie. That he’d fooled himself into believing it was possible to reconcile the worlds he moved in and the dueling instincts that battled to control him. Suddenly he smelled talcum powder and fresh root beer and turned toward the window to find old Leroy Epps standing there, winking his way.

  “How you be, Bubba?”

  22

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

  “Been a while, champ,” Cort Wesley said to the ghost of the man who was the best friend he’d ever had.

  Epps grinned, showcasing the full rows of teeth that alternated between shiny white and the decaying brown Cort Wesley remembered better. “Too long. How is it you only see me when times are tough, the world turned all upside down on you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Believe I do, ’cause them’s the times you start looking outside yourself for answers and your gaze turns naturally to me. Just like it used to when we was inside the Walls together.”

  Epps held a bottle of root beer in a thin, liver-spotted hand. His lips were pale pink and crinkled with dryness. The early morning light filtering through the window cast his brown skin in a yellowish tint. He’d been a lifer in the brutal Huntsville prison known as the Walls, busted for killing a white man in self-defense; his friendship and guidance had gotten Cort Wesley through his years in captivity. The diabetes that would ultimately kill him had turned Leroy’s eyes bloodshot and numbed his limbs years before the sores and infections set in. As a boxer, he’d fought for the middleweight crown on three different occasions, knocked out once and had the belt stolen from him on paid-off judges’ scorecards two other times. He’d died three years into Cort Wesley’s four-year incarceration, but ever since he always seemed to show up when needed the most. Whether a ghostly specter or a figment of his imagination, Cort Wesley had given up trying to figure out. He just accepted the fact of his presence, grateful that Leroy kept coming around to help him out of one scrape after another.

  His old friend extended the bottle of root beer out toward Cort Wesley. “Say, you want a swig?”

  From this angle, a measure of the sun’s rays seemed to pass straight through him. “No thanks, champ. You enjoy it.”

  “Don’t seem like you be enjoying much right now. You know the amazing thing about where I be these days?”

  “What?”

  “You can’t see better really, just farther and deeper. By deeper, I means on the inside and out. And right now, old Leroy can see you making bad thoughts in your head.”

  “Can’t hide anything from you, can I, champ?”

  “If it’s in your head, you might as well write it down on a chalkboard from where I stand.”

  “What is it you see?”

  “You fixing to scramble a whole lot of people’s brains. I remember how you used to deal with the shit of the world on the inside. Nothing seems to have changed on the out.”

  Dylan snorted, something like the noise he made during nightmares hatched in the first few months after watching his mother murdered five or so years ago now. Cort Wesley glanced over, watched his son’s eyelids seem to dance. A good sign, he hoped.

  “One thing has,” he told Leroy, leaving his gaze where it was.

  “You think the reason for the thoughts you got matters?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do. I think it matters a whole lot.”

  “A man ain’t allowed to determine the circumstances of his own changing. In for a penny, in for a pound—you reading me here, bubba?”

  “Not really.

  “Goes like this. You think the cause changes things, but it really don’t since the only change that matters is the kind that happens real deep inside a man at his core. You remember me telling you about that?”

  “Ilk you called it.”

  “Damn straight I did, ’cause that’s what it be. You’re a much different man today than you were when I had feet that made marks in the sand. Except when you dig down real deep where it takes someone like me to see what’s going on. Down there you’re the same and that’s the way you’re thinking right now. I ain’t blaming you none—it’s the way you deal with things, how you keep control by knowing what you can do when push comes to shove. I just want you to know the cost.”

  “What’s that?”

  Leroy drained the rest of root beer, his thin neck expanding like a snake swallowing a rodent, and then laid the empty bottle down on the windowsill. “Only way a man can change who he be is down at that core with his very ilk. Everything else is for show, and the problem is it seems you gotta step into the kind of shoes I’m wearing now to finish the job. So I guess my point is don’t look for it, bubba, but be ready when it comes.”

  “Whatever you say, champ.”

  “Doesn’t sound like you mean that much.”

  Cort Wesley’s gaze veered back to Dylan. “Somebody put my boy in a hospital and damn near killed him. Caitlin and I think it may have something to do with the porn industry and prostitution.”

  “How is the Ranger?” Leroy asked, the whites of his eyes brightening.

  “Same as ever. Just like me.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “Isn’t that what you just told me?”

  “Which I take to mean you weren’t really listening. No matter. What I say’ll make sense to you soon enough, but I imagine some heads will have to
get cracked first.”

  “Nothing new there, champ.”

  “Every day is new, bubba, every hour and minute too. That’s what you learn where I’m at, where time don’t have no matter at all. Like I told you, I can’t see better, just farther but, man, what a sight!”

  A doctor he hadn’t met yet, wearing a white lab coat, pushed the door to Dylan’s room all the way open and entered, startled when he saw Cort Wesley seated in the chair.

  “You must be the boy’s father.”

  Cort Wesley rose, his knees cracking, noticing that Leroy Epps was gone. “I am. How’s my son?”

  “As his neurologist, that’s what I came to check,” the doctor said, moving to the bed. “We should begin to see some improvement today.”

  “He made a sound. His eyelids were fluttering. I think he was dreaming.”

  “That’s good,” the doctor noted, and held Dylan’s one eyelid open and then the other while shining the light into them. Then he looked toward the window, face tilting in surprise. “Where’d that come from? Haven’t seen one of those since I was a boy growing up in the South.”

  Cort Wesley followed his gaze and saw the bottle Leroy Epps had drained still sitting on the sill.

  “Authentic Hines Root Beer with old-fashioned sassafras as the primary ingredient,” the doctor continued, shaking his head nostalgically. “Brings back memories, I’ll tell you. Almost like seeing a ghost.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Cort Wesley.

  23

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  The serial killer’s latest victim had been found in a room at the Menger Hotel that overlooked the Alamo. According to Bexar County medical examiner Frank Dean Whatley, the unidentified young woman was presumed to be a prostitute for reasons he didn’t elaborate on right away. Her body had been removed hours prior to Caitlin arriving on the scene but the wall behind the headboard was splattered with blood and the bed sheets were covered in it.

  Caitlin stood in the doorway for a moment, picturing the scene in its original form; the victim with her head cut off and sewn back on backward, raped postmortem.

  Just like the victim William Ray Strong and Judge Roy Bean had examined in a camp occupied by Chinese workers building the Trans-Pecos rail line in 1883, without benefit of crime scene technicians, DNA testing, blood splatter experts. Or lights and sprays that could reveal hidden blood and semen. Hard to believe a case ever got solved in those days, but the Texas Rangers had solved plenty of them anyway.

  “We pulled a sample of the stitching he used off the carpet,” Whatley reported, having inched up closer to her. “Step into the room and I’ll run the numbers for you.”

  Frank Dean Whatley had been the Bexar County medical examiner since Caitlin was in diapers. He’d grown a belly in recent years that hung out over his thin belt, seeming to force his spine to angle inward at the torso. Whatley’s teenage son had been killed by Latino gangbangers when Caitlin was a mere kid herself. Ever since then, he’d harbored a virulent hatred for that particular race from the bag boys at the local H.E.B. to the politicians who professed to be peacemakers. With his wife lost, in life and then death, to alcoholism, he’d probably stayed on the job too long. But he had nothing to go home to, no real life outside the office, and remained exceptionally good at performing the rigors of his job.

  Whatley had seemed to resent Caitlin in her first years as a Ranger, warming up to her only after they’d worked closely on a few cases together. Caitlin always let him know how much she appreciated his persistence and professionalism, inevitably treating the victims of violence with a dignity that belied the coldness of his office. He’d purchased floral bed linens with his own money to better dress the steel slabs on which he performed his autopsies, because he believed those with the misfortune of ending up there deserved at least that much comfort and respect.

  Caitlin entered the hotel room, feeling immediately chilled, and wondered if it was the product of illusion or a literal change in temperature from the hall. The room looked lifted straight out of the mid-nineteenth century when the hotel had been built, outfitted with furnishings that included a four-poster bed, velvet-covered Victorian couch, and marble table. A framed colorful tapestry map of Texas from around that time hung over a dark-wood desk.

  The Menger was proclaimed “the finest hotel west of the Mississippi” almost since its first day in business and, according to the information Caitlin had pulled up on the Internet, had played host to the likes of Sam Houston, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and numerous presidents. It was even said that none other than Teddy Roosevelt recruited several of his Rough Riders in the hotel bar. The hotel’s majestic facade and beige-tone design, together with its original wrought-iron balconies pitched beneath striped awnings that looked like wagon canvas, made it an apt complement to the historic Alamo located directly across the plaza.

  Caitlin could hear Whatley’s labored breathing just to her right. “You know, my great-grandfather came up against an almost identical killer in 1883.”

  “You mean the case he supposedly worked with Roy Bean? I thought that was just a legend.”

  “Maybe so, like everything else. But there’s plenty of facts to support it really did happen.”

  Whatley took out his handkerchief and mopped his brow of sweat, even though the room was chilly. “Well, I got some facts for you too. The victim wasn’t carrying any ID and AFIS came up with nothing when we ran her prints. But if she was a prostitute, I’d say we’re looking at very high-end, even exclusive.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “We found her clothes hung neatly in the closet, name-brand designer the whole way. Her grooming was perfect and she carried a small bottle of perfume in her purse that cost more than I make in a week.”

  “So she had a purse, but no identification.”

  “Killer must’ve removed it. A souvenir probably.”

  “Well, I hope it helps us catch him, Doc.”

  Whatley frowned and dabbed some more sweat off his brow. “The preliminary autopsy I conducted revealed fracturing of the hyoid bone and broken blood vessels in her eyes consistent with being strangled to death before she was beheaded. The cut was jagged and, I’m only guessing here, done with some kind of sharp, serrated knife like you might see a butcher use to trim filets. But, judging by the irregular slices, a butcher would have been much finer in his work.”

  “You said you found some of the thread he used when he stitched it back on.”

  “It was more like a twine, maybe a tightly woven yarn. I haven’t identified the material yet, but I can tell you it was found at the crime scene in Houston too.”

  “Houston,” Caitlin echoed. “Where else?”

  “Laredo,” came the voice of D. W. Tepper from the doorway, “to go with Lubbock and Amarillo. Is five still your favorite number, Ranger?”

  “I don’t recall it ever being my favorite number,” Caitlin told him.

  “I’m talking when you were a girl. Everything had to be in fives. Know why? Because that’s how many shells fit into a Colt Patterson revolver, the first pistol Earl Strong taught you how to shoot.”

  Whatley looked toward Tepper. “Am I done here? I got a ton of work waiting for me back at the lab.”

  “You got any more questions for the good doctor, Ranger?”

  “Just one,” Caitlin said, turning back toward Whatley. “Your autopsy reveal any semen inside the victim, Doc?”

  “No, and I wouldn’t expect there’d be.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because the man who raped her didn’t do it with his johnson. Near as we can tell, he did it with a soldering iron. Guess the only good thing about us not being able to identify her is that we don’t have to explain all that to her next of kin. Long way to ship the body in any event.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “The girl was Chinese.”

  24

  SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

  “All five victims were Chinese
,” Tepper told Caitlin, after Whatley had taken his leave.

  “Just like William Ray Strong’s case in 1883…”

  “Another reason why you’re the only one for the job, Ranger.”

  “I assume you dusted the outlets nearest the bed for prints, Captain,” Caitlin said.

  “We did and there weren’t any.” Tepper felt about his pockets, not realizing he was already holding his pack of Marlboros in hand. “But heat marks indicate the soldering iron was probably plugged in when it was inserted into her. You can see why I was adamant about asking you to come home.”

  “Because I know something about electric tools?”

  Tepper’s expression crinkled in displeasure. “Because Austin figured we needed to put the right face on this.”

  “Me?”

  “People of Texas are sure to feel safer knowing that you’re on the job.”

  “The ones I haven’t shot anyway.”

  “How many of those are left? Ten or twelve maybe?”

  Caitlin looked back at the blood staining the sheets, back wall, and floor. “How do the other four killings compare to this one?”

  “I got Lieutenants Berry and Rollins sorting through that now. Looks like the pattern’s pretty much identical, although the other investigations all seemed to miss out on one thing Doc Whatley figured out in the time it takes me to finish a Marlboro.”

  “This is a nonsmoking room, Captain,” she said, watching him tap the pack.

  “You see me striking a match, Ranger? Let it go, will ya?”

  “Soon as you give up that nasty habit, I’ll be glad to.”

  “Tell me how our serial killer could be repeating history, how he came by such specific knowledge that’s not written down anyplace I’ve ever seen.”

  “Maybe he had a grandfather like mine who told him the tale.”

  “Either way, he’s got intimate knowledge of events from 1883.”

  “A connection to the railroad would be the most obvious conclusion.”