Superstition

by Karen Robards

  By now Joe was almost willing to swear that its expression was accusing.

  “Get lost, pig,” Joe said to it, as he had at least half a dozen times in varying forms in the last five minutes. The pig didn’t budge. It either couldn’t hear, didn’t understand, or was plotting its next move.

  Joe felt like an idiot for talking to it. To compensate, he ostentatiously picked up a crispy brown slice of bacon and opened his mouth.

  The pig grunted. He could hear it through the door.

  He eyed the pig. He eyed the bacon.

  The pig grunted again.

  “Goddammit,” he said bitterly, and put the bacon down.

  The pig stayed put. He could feel its eyes on him as he pushed his still half-full plate away and, taking a sip of coffee and lighting a cigarette instead, returned his attention to the file that was spread out on the table. The e-mail that Nicky had sent him was on top.

  He’d already read it so many times that he could recite the lines from memory.

  The question was, what the hell, if anything, did they actually mean?

  It was eight-forty-seven a.m., he’d gotten more than six hours of sleep, and he should have been wide awake, clearheaded, and filled with fresh enthusiasm for the job he had in front of him. Instead, he felt about as fresh as last week’s garbage. His mouth was as dry as if it had been stuffed full of cotton, his eyes burned, and he had a killer headache, which half a breakfast, two cigarettes, and his coffee so far hadn’t touched.

  The damned e-mail tortured him with its possibilities. He turned them over in his mind, trying out various interpretations without being convinced by any of them, and finally ended up sitting with his head in his hands, staring at the pig in frustration.

  Outside, the sun was shining. The sky was a beautiful baby blue dotted with fluffy, white clouds that looked like sleeping lambs. Beyond the less-than-lovely visage of the pig, he could see that the stage was set for one more glorious day in paradise. The purply foliage of the black gum fluttered like blackbirds’ wings, ruffled by what he knew from experience would be the warm, salt-tinged breeze that regularly blew in from the ocean in the mornings and evenings. The golden-yellow sunflowers had already shaken off the morning dew and were turning their dinner-plate-sized faces toward the sun. The gulls would be calling, the tide would be going out, and fishing boats and small yachts would be making their way down Salt Marsh Creek toward the ocean. The clam-diggers and early-morning joggers would be coming in from the beach, while the day-trippers and sun baskers would be heading out for a day in the sun.

  Inside, the kitchen looked like crap, smelled like coffee and cigarette smoke and grease, and felt airless. Joe probably looked like crap, smelled like coffee and cigarette smoke and grease, and felt airless, too. In the jacket and tie that Vince insisted he wear since the two of them were scheduled to talk to the local media at nine-thirty, he was already too hot. The cooling effects of the bedroom air conditioner didn’t do a thing for the kitchen, which was at the other end of the house, and the kitchen’s windowless state precluded installing a second air conditioner in there.

  Ordinarily, he opened the back door while he cooked to air the place out.

  Ordinarily, there was not a pig with its snout pressed to his door.

  A loud banging on his front door—the bell had been broken when he had moved in, and he hadn’t yet gotten around to fixing it—distracted him, and he got up to answer it. It was Dave, as expected, and about time, too.

  Joe opened the door.

  “You got that in-depth background stuff back on the TV people yet?” was how he greeted Dave. In Joe’s experience, investigation was best done in concentric circles. Start with the people nearest the victim, physically and emotionally. Nicky had discovered the body. Other TV people who worked with the victim had been present at the time of the crime as well. As far as he’d been able to determine, the members of that small group were the only ones on the scene who had known Karen Wise before she had come to Pawleys Island. Ergo, they were the place to start digging.

  “Some. Employment records are still coming in.”

  Joe led the way back into the kitchen.“I want to see the files this afternoon, whether they’re complete or not.”

  “You got it.”

  They reached the kitchen, and Joe rounded the table. As he did so, he glanced up and found two beady, black eyes watching him through the door.

  “You’re taking the damned pig, right?”

  “We-ell . . .” Dave drew the word out.

  In the act of reaching toward the e-mail so he could show it to his Number Two, Joe froze. He turned his head and fixed Dave with hard eyes.

  “What do you mean, ‘well’? There is no ‘well.’ ”

  “I’m taking her, I’m taking her,” Dave said hastily.

  “Good.”

  As Joe turned back to the table, Dave walked past him, making disgusting kissy noises at the pig, which, Joe saw at a glance, was practically dancing with excitement at seeing him.

  For the first time ever, Joe found himself in agreement with Amy about something.

  “We got a new development in the case,” Joe began, turning back to the e-mail. “Last night . . .”

  The pig began to scratch frantically at the glass with a hoof. Joe broke off, frowning at it.

  “You finished with that?” Dave asked, nodding at Joe’s unfinished plate of bacon and eggs.

  “Yeah,” Joe said.

  “Do you mind?” Without waiting for Joe’s reply, he picked up the plate, walked to the door, opened it, and, with the pig nudging his trouser leg with its snout and wagging its wormy little tail like an ecstatic dog, dumped the contents on the deck.

  Joe watched, dumbfounded, as the pig lowered its snout to the food and started gobbling it up, bacon and all.

  “She loves breakfast,” Dave said by way of an explanation, and came back into the kitchen.

  Cannibal, Joe said silently to the pig just before Dave shut the door on it.

  “So, what were you saying?” Dave carried the plate to the sink, turned on the water, and started rinsing it.

  Recalled to himself, Joe returned his attention to the matter at hand. “Nicky Sullivan called me last night. She got an e-mail she thought I ought to see.” He tapped the e-mail. “This is it right here.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Dave opened the dishwasher, stuck the plate in, closed it again, then came toward the table, drying his hands on a paper towel. He took the e-mail from Joe, scanned it, and whistled.

  “Sounds like our guy.”

  “Does, doesn’t it?”

  Dave frowned at him. “You don’t think so? Seems to me like that handle is pretty convincing. Lazarus is the guy in the Bible who died and was brought back to life. And 508—that’s the date the Wise girl was killed, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Joe’s voice was dry. “The thing is, at the time this e-mail was sent, just about everybody else on the island knew that Karen Wise had been murdered on May eighth, too. To say nothing of the people at the TV station where the girl worked. And her family. And God knows who else.”

  A beat passed.

  “I didn’t think about that.” Dave sounded slightly chagrined. “So, you think somebody else maybe sent it?”

  “Somebody else could have. I don’t know that they did. I’m just saying that it doesn’t necessarily have to have been sent by the perp.”

  “Good point.”

  “We got anybody on the force that maybe has some computer expertise? What we want to do now is trace this back to its source, if we can.”

  “I don’t know.” Dave looked doubtful. “Not me, for sure. And not Bill Milton; he can’t even send an e-mail. And not Jeff Roe, or George Locke, or Andy Cohen, or—”

  “I get the picture,” Joe said, interrupting. What he didn’t need was a recitation of all the people on the force who couldn’t do it. “Don’t feel bad; I can’t do it, either. I already tried all I know how to do, which is basically contact
the service provider. It was forwarded through one of those free Hotmail accounts, but that’s all they could tell me. They’re trying to trace it back, but it’s not looking good.”

  “Did she send a reply?”

  Joe shook his head.

  “How about if we get her to, then? Maybe he’ll write back to her, and we can use it to trap him somehow.” Dave sounded eager.

  Joe kept his opinion on the possibilities of that succeeding to himself. Anyway, even if it worked, it involved widening Nicky’s exposure to the possible perp, which he was loath to do. “I tried sending a reply myself. What I got, basically, was something like ‘e-mail address not found on server.’ ”

  “Crap,” Dave said.

  “Yeah.” Joe reached for the e-mail. “I know it goes without saying, but keep the fact that Nicky got this to yourself. If it gets out all over the place, she’ll probably start getting copycat e-mails by the dozens. If the perp writes to her again, we might miss his message in the avalanche. In fact, pass the word around the department: Nobody tells anybody anything concerning this investigation without running it by me first.”

  “I know better than to talk about an ongoing investigation.” Dave sounded injured. “We all do.”

  “Just making sure.” Joe gave him an apologetic grimace, and glanced up at the clock over the refrigerator. “I gotta be at the mayor’s office at nine-thirty. What I want you to do is start checking out that list we had put together of known violent offenders in the area. The key question is, where were they Sunday night? Also, we need to know about anyone just released from prison, or out of the military, or back from anywhere that might have kept them out of circulation in this area for a number of years.”

  “Got it.”

  “We probably also need to start pulling in files on any murders involving women and knives in the last fifteen years within, say, a two-hundred-mile radius.”

  Dave groaned. “You realize that we’re sixty miles from Charleston, right? And then there’s Columbia and the whole Myrtle Beach-Grand Strand area and—”

  He broke off, waving his hands to indicate the magnitude of the search.

  “I know,” Joe said. “But if we’re dealing with a serial killer, something related should turn up. They don’t kill and just stop for fifteen years, then start up again. Unless he’s been out of circulation for some reason.”

  “Yeah.” Dave made a face. “Well, I’ll get on it.”

  He turned and started walking out of the kitchen, obviously heading toward the front door.

  “Whoa, there.” Joe saw where he was going and straightened away from the file he was putting back together. Dave turned to look at him, his face suspiciously innocent. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Dave snapped his fingers like he just then remembered. “Cleo.” He started walking back toward Joe. “Well, I’ll just take her home, then.”

  “Good idea.” Joe’s voice was dry.

  Dave had a hand on the back doorknob when he looked back. “Unless she could just stay one more night?”

  “No,” Joe said. “N-O. I mean it.”

  Dave sighed. “Okay.”

  Then he went out the back door.

  Joe waited until he saw Dave leading the pig—it had a harness-type collar and leash just like a dog—out through the gate before he left the house. It was a little after nine as he walked across his lawn toward the curb, where his cruiser was parked. Sure enough, there was a nice tropical-scented breeze, enough to make the temperature, which was probably in the mid-seventies, feel five degrees cooler. The sunshine was blinding, reflecting off the worn, gray asphalt and the sidewalks and the cars parked along the street. A couple of women were out walking their dogs, and one old guy was cutting his grass with a push mower that had a roar like a chainsaw—the yards in this part of the island were way too small for anything as fancy as a riding lawnmower—but other than that, the neighborhood was quiet. On this block of small, neat, well-kept homes—his, he noticed with a sweeping glance up and down the street, was the only one that obviously needed its grass to be cut—adults worked and kids went to school. There were few residents around during the day.

  One of the women waved—plump, middle-aged, a bubble-haired blonde in tight black capris; who the hell was she?—and he, having had five months of conditioning in the ways of the South, waved back. Then the other woman waved, and the old guy, and he waved back to them, too, then opened the door to his cruiser and got in and shut the door again with a feeling of relief.

  Like everything else here in paradise, the waving-to-the-neighbors thing was different from what he was used to.

  Where he’d lived before, in Trenton, he’d never even so much as grunted at his neighbors. If he had started waving at them, they would have thought he was a nut and stayed the hell away from him. His neighborhood had been a little run-down, but he’d had a decent enough apartment. Gunshots could frequently be heard in the middle of the night, pigeons had roosted in the eaves of his building and pooped on his windowsills, and trash was nearly as ubiquitous in the streets as kudzu was in any untended open spot here, but, hey, he had damned sure had air-conditioning.

  The mob, the druggies and the dealers who sold to them, the hos and pimps, the petty thieves and thugs—they’d all been part of the landscape of his life. He’d dealt with them on an as-needed basis, and the rest of the time he’d alternately ignored or arrested them, depending on the circumstances.

  He’d never thought he’d actually miss them.

  But he did.

  The almost perpetual sunshine, the slow pace, the laid-back, whacked-out locals, such as Nicky’s supposedly psychic mom and his pig-owning, lovesick assistant chief, were as foreign to his experience as penguins to a Texan. This wasn’t his town, and these weren’t his people. He didn’t have an instinct for how the place worked, which meant that he was operating at a disadvantage before he even got started.

  If he’d been back in Jersey and this murder had happened on his watch, he would have known where to start. He would have leaned on the neighborhood homies until somebody gave some information up, and then he would have had an idea about where to begin looking for the perp. That was the thing about crime: It never happened in a vacuum. Criminals didn’t just spring up out of the ether. They were people, with jobs and families and neighbors just like everybody else. Same thing with victims.

  In other words, somebody always knew something. The key was finding who and what.

  He’d already talked by telephone to Karen Wise’s parents, her two brothers, her friends, and her coworkers. None of them professed to have a clue as to any reason why anyone might want to kill her. She’d been only twenty-two years old, in her first job, with a boyfriend who had an airtight alibi in Chicago at the time of the crime.

  At this point, it wasn’t looking as though the crime was personal.

  On the other hand, a whole slew of factors, from the similarity of Karen Wise’s murder to the earlier murder of Tara Mitchell (and keeping in mind here that no one knew the actual fate of the other two teenagers), to the site of the killing, to the tie-in of the television show, pointed to a link between the slayings.

  Which led to another question: If the murders were related, were they dealing with the same perp, or a copycat?

  And if this was the same perp, where the hell had he been for fifteen years?

  At this point, with the coroner’s report on Karen Wise still unavailable for comparison with the autopsy findings on Tara Mitchell, and any possible DNA or forensic evidence still being processed by the respective labs to which it had been sent, all Joe could do was speculate.

  But he did have at least one semisolid lead: Nicky’s e-mail, which, if legit, promised two more killings. Two more “close together” killings. Two more close together killings that it was his job to prevent.

  The first order of business for the day was to find out where that damned e-mail had originated.

  Joe started the engine
, cranked the air-conditioning, and pulled away from the curb. As he drove down the street, he started punching numbers into his cell phone.

  He might not personally have the expertise to trace the e-mail back to its source, and his department might be equally lacking in technical know-how, but fortunately, he knew someone who could get the job done.

  He’d been away for a while, but they wouldn’t have forgotten. It was time to start calling in some chips.

  THE OLD SAW about being careful what you wished for kept running through Nicky’s mind as she nosed her rented silver Maxima over the South Causeway Bridge to Pawleys Island. It was Saturday, about six-thirty p.m. After leaving Sid’s office, she’d spent the remainder of the day Friday filming her segment of Sunday’s show—all except for the lead-in, which would be done on-site at the Old Taylor Place in just a few minutes—making travel arrangements, and packing. Today had been spent in transit, first flying from Chicago to Atlanta, then taking another, smaller plane from Atlanta to Charleston, and finally driving from Charleston to Pawleys Island. She was tired, hungry, crabby, and increasingly scared to death.

  She’d wanted to come back here. She’d fought to come back here.

  And now here she was.

  Right within Lazarus508’s orbit.

  It was possibly not the smartest thing she’d ever done.

  But she couldn’t have not done this story. It was hers, dammit—not Carl’s or anyone else’s. Hers.