Shadowman. Weiss had been one of the first detectives on the scene after the so-called South Bay Massacre. He had watched while police divers pulled the children’s bodies to shore. He remembered one little girl, her face shot half-away, her body half-devoured, but one profile still whole, still sweet, just sleeping.
He had told me that the media invented a criminal to fit that scene. Jeff Bloom of the Chronicle—“he had, like, one unnamed source”—had been the apparent author. The character Bloom created—a fantastical monster, really, melodramatic name and all—was an unstoppable killer, feared even by his criminal employers, a man who could find anyone, get in anywhere, in order to carry out a job. Weiss had told me all of this.
But he had never told me—I had only heard it rumored—who Bloom’s unnamed source was, the true creator of this diabolical creature: a police detective at odds with his willfully blind department, a detective who was unsure himself whether he had invented the Shadowman or simply traced his living outline in the fabric of events.
And now, Harry Ridder was dead, a suicide. And Peter Crouch was dead, murdered in his wine cellar. And Julie Wyant was gone, was missing.
The Shadowman was real whether he was real or not.
“Here we go. Into the woods,” Ketchum went on, scowling.
This now was the northern wilderness. The road had curved away from the coast. Hills of forest were closing in on either side of it.
“Look at this shit,” Ketchum said.
Weiss did look. After a few miles, he saw the screen of trees growing thinner by the roadside. The coils of razor wire growing visible through the trees. Towers rose against the sky, the shadows of riflemen inside them. Concrete cages jigsawed together on the ground below. Nothing seemed to move anywhere, not one thing. No sign of a living soul.
“It’s the asshole of the world,” Ketchum growled miserably. “You’ve dragged me straight into the asshole of the world.”
Thirty-Seven
There were identity checks at the gate and again in the entry chamber. Grimly efficient guards searched them. They went through metal detectors so sensitive the iron in your blood could set them off. Then more pat-downs. Then a wood-faced officer the size of a mighty pine thumped along a hallway with them, led them to the first barred gate.
The officer stood rigid while a scanner read the patterns in the iris of his right eye. There was an ear-piercing buzzer. The gate slid open. The officer hung back. Weiss and Ketchum went into the cinder block corridor alone.
The gate slid shut behind them like a sprung trap. They walked down the colorless corridor side by side. Experience had hardened Weiss to the desolation of these places but it pressed on him all the same, more so with every step. It felt to him as if they were descending away from the light and air into a cave of suffocating blackness.
Ketchum felt it too. He shook his head. “Man oh man,” he muttered, “This is about as far from your mother’s tit as you can get.”
Video monitors watched their every step. They did not see another living officer until they reached the steel door of the visiting room. There was a Lexan-enclosed control booth here to their right. The control booth officer nodded at them, unsmiling, through the booth’s thick windows. Another deafening buzz. Weiss pulled the steel door open.
They came into a small concrete room. One wall—the wall in front of them—was transparent, Lexan like the control booth. There were plastic chairs against the walls to their sides. Weiss and Ketchum each drew one up and sat down.
They sat without speaking, looked through the Lexan wall. There was a single metal chair on the other side of it. It was bolted to the floor. Now, a steel panel behind the chair slid open. Two guards came in holding a shackled man between them. Each guard held one of the man’s arms. They led him to the chair. They sat him down in it. They knelt and chained his shackles to bolts in the floor. Then the guards withdrew. The steel panel slid shut. Weiss and Ketchum sat facing the man chained to the chair: Lenny “Whip” Pomeroy.
He was not the usual prison thing. Very slender, almost delicate. Delicate hands with long, thin, fidgeting fingers. A long, delicate face, damp, sorry eyes and thin, delicate lips that were constantly moving, moving. It seemed as if his inner monologue was steadily leaking out of him in an inaudible whisper.
For the past two months or so, he had been trading with state and federal lawmen: the false identities of escaping felons in return for high-level protective custody. He had barely seen the sun in all that time and he was paper white.
“All right, Pomeroy,” said Ketchum. “I’m Inspector Ketchum of the San Francisco Police Department. This is Weiss of Weiss Investigations, a private agency. He’s got some questions for you.”
The convict’s eyes ping-ponged between them. They seemed to choose Weiss finally—not to rest on him but to hover around him like a hummingbird around a flower. He gave a quick shake of his head. “No. No. Three months we said.” His voice was a nervous breath. The voice-activated mike made it sound metallic and staccato in the speakers above the Lexan. His shackles rattled, pulling taut as the fingers of his two hands twined together and untwined. “No more, no more for three months.”
“This isn’t about that,” Weiss said quietly.
“Three months, that’s what we agreed to.” Fingers twining, fidgeting.
“We’re not asking you for any more AKAs.”
“We had an arrangement, a deal. You said. You told me…”
Weiss cut in on him. “We’re looking for Julie Wyant.”
The effect of the name on Pomeroy was instantaneous and dramatic. Weiss wouldn’t’ve thought the guy could get any paler but what color there was in his cheeks drained out. He seemed practically transparent sitting there, except for those eyes, big and bright now in the see-through outline of the man.
Weiss couldn’t tell if Pomeroy was shaking his head—no, no, no—or just spasming in his agitation. The detective spoke in the same quiet voice. “I don’t work for the Shadowman,” he said. “I’m trying to stop him.”
The bright hummingbird eyes hung around him. “Yes…Well…Well…You’d say that, wouldn’t you? I mean…But how do I know? You see what I’m saying? How do…?” It trailed off. His lips went on moving, moved even faster, but nothing more came out.
Weiss ignored the question. “I figure it this way,” he continued in a firm, calm voice. “Something happened when Cameron Moncrieff was on his deathbed—he said something or did something that affected the Shadowman. Exposed him maybe in some way. Julie Wyant was there. And Moncrieff’s lawyer, Peter Crouch. And the gardener, the kid, Harry Ridder, what was he, outside the window? Eavesdropping? Or just passing by?”
“Tending the roses.” It seemed as if the phrase were part of his ceaseless monologue made suddenly audible, like a word suddenly highlighted, suddenly visible in a jumble of letters. “Early Heart of Gold roses under the bedroom window. He just overheard, just overheard, that’s all.”
Weiss nodded his encouragement into the bright, frantic gaze. Leaned forward, his hands clasped between his knees, his big body hulking in the little plastic chair. “So what was it, Pomeroy? What happened the day Moncrieff died? Tell me. I need to know. For Julie’s sake.”
Weiss and Pomeroy regarded each other through the transparent wall. Ketchum said later it was like some kind of exorcism was taking place, as if Julie Wyant’s name had put a spell on the prisoner and was forcing the information to come out of him against his will.
The lips in the white face went swiftly on and again, after a while, some of the words he was whispering grew loud enough to hear. “You can’t understand. You can’t…You don’t know her.”
“Well, you explain it to me. How about that?” Weiss said. “Moncrieff told her something, didn’t he? He told her something the Shadowman doesn’t want her to know. Or gave her something he doesn’t want her to have or…”
“No!” Pomeroy hissed. “No, no, no, no. You see? You can’t understand. You can’t. You th
ink it’s about…about things, about…about things. But you don’t know. You don’t know Julie.” He drew out the syllables of the name tenderly, with a tone of exaltation.
Weiss didn’t like the sound it made. A queasy sort of sound. It sent a heavy, queasy feeling over him. He had thought he was pretty close to figuring out this whole scenario. Now he wasn’t sure. Now he wasn’t even sure he wanted to figure it out.
“She changed things,” Whip Pomeroy went on in that same overly sweet, overly elevated tone. “She changed…everything. Everyone. She was like…oh—oh, an unreal creature. Like paintings you see. Or daydreams you have. She was the way people never are. You know? You can’t know.”
Weiss grew queasier, heavier. Staring through the window at the pale, nervous man shackled to his chair on the other side. Judging by the high expression that had now come over Pomeroy’s delicate features, he seemed in danger of going into some kind of rapture over the missing woman.
Weiss gave a gruff shake of his head. As if he didn’t get it, didn’t understand. But in truth, he feared he was beginning to.
“She talked to you as if you were the only person in the world,” Pomeroy whispered ecstatically. “And when she put her hands on you…You see? She changed things…. She changed…everyone.”
“Moncrieff, we’re talking about,” Weiss said finally. “You mean she changed Moncrieff.”
“Oh, Cam—Cam worshiped her. We both did. Everyone…And after Cam took her in, the way she cared for him when he was sick, the way she was with him, it…It changed him, that’s all. He wanted to…to do something. You know?”
Trying to shake off the queasy feeling, Weiss fought to focus instead on the emotional logic of the scene Pomeroy was describing. Moncrieff, the old pimp and smuggler, on his deathbed. The weight of his sins on his chest like so much bullion. The impatient fingers of hellfire scrabbling up the sheets to get at him. “He wanted to do something good, you mean?”
Pomeroy’s head went up and down. His shackles pulled tight and rattled loose as he fidgeted. “Something for her,” said Pomeroy. “Something…to save…her.”
“To save her.” From her prostitute’s life, he thought. “He wanted to save her. So he gave her—what? Some money?”
“Money, yes. Cam didn’t really have very much money in the end. He gave her what he could but really…it was me. It was, you know, the AKA.”
“The identity. Moncrieff told you to give her a new identity.”
Pomeroy’s eyes wandered around the room as if following the flight of a mosquito. He whispered, whispered, whispered inaudibly, then whispered, “It was what I could do for her. Cam knew that. No one…No one’s ever traced an identity I made. No one ever has unless I told it to them.”
“Okay. Okay,” said Weiss. “I’ve got all this. Moncrieff gave Julie Wyant money and a new ID so she could start a new life. What I’m asking you is: What about the Shadowman? What does he want? Why does he have to find her? What does she know, Pomeroy? What did Moncrieff tell her or give her that he…?”
“Aaah…” The air came out of Pomeroy like that. He descended from whatever lofty heights. And now he had a new look on him, a look, Weiss thought, as if someone had run an electric wire down his shorts. His teeth were bared, his eyes were all scrunched up, his whole face was all tensed and scrunched up. As if it pained him, just pained him to listen to Weiss’s speculations. “You see, you see?” he said. “Because you don’t know her. So you don’t think it’s all things. Just money she might have or something she heard or witnessed…. You don’t believe there’s anything….”
Then his lips continued moving, but his voice was gone, was silent. And Weiss still couldn’t get it. He was still sitting there with this half-formed, inarticulate suspicion and he couldn’t give it shape, make it clear.
“All right. All right, let me do this again,” he said slowly. “Moncrieff is on his deathbed. And he’s sorry for his sins and so on. And he wants to do something nice for someone. So he gives Julie Wyant some money and a new identity….”
“Yes. Yes. Exactly.”
“And the lawyer’s there, Peter Crouch.”
“Yes.”
“And Harry Ridder, the gardener, is outside the window tending the roses or whatever and he overhears this.”
“Yes.”
“And you were…where? You had to be there too, didn’t you?”
“I was there. But I left right after Cam died so no one would know.”
Weiss gave a big, slow nod. “Right. Right. Because you were the only one who knew the new identity, who knew what it was.”
“Yes.”
“And that’s it then. That’s everything. The whole story.”
Ketchum pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, shook his head. “Unbelievable,” he muttered.
But Weiss pressed on, playing the scene through in his mind. “Okay. So—let me just make sure I’ve got this. Moncrieff realizes the kid, the gardener, Harry Ridder, is eavesdropping.”
Pomeroy’s nervous eyes flickered back and forth. “Crouch. It was Crouch who realized it.”
“Okay. So then what? After Moncrieff dies, Crouchy says to the kid—what?—‘You’re in big trouble, kid. If anyone finds out you overheard this, you’re a dead man. You better run for your life before the Shadowman gets you.’ Right? Something like that?”
“Yes.”
“And he throws in some horror stories about the Shadowman for good measure. To scare the kid or whatever. Only he scares the kid so much, the kid blows his brains out in sheer terror.”
Pomeroy nodded, his lips moving, his eyes wandering.
“And now the Shadowman does show up. And it’s Crouch he comes after. He tortures Crouch to death in order to get the whole story about what happened around the deathbed. And you—that’s panic time for you. You could be living in a suburb of Cleveland or something on Witness Protection but instead you get yourself arrested and have yourself locked up in the deepest, darkest hole you can find….”
Pomeroy hardly seemed to be listening anymore. He was studying the ceiling, whispering something inaudible. But he nodded.
Weiss sighed. “And it’s all because…” He hadn’t known how he was going to finish that sentence, what he was going to say, but as the words came out of him, his inner resistance broke. Suddenly he knew what it was he knew, knew why the heavy queasiness had come upon him. He swallowed once. And then he said, “It’s all because of her. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what the Shadowman is after. He’s after her.”
It seemed to take a second or two for this to register on Whip Pomeroy’s brain. But then, as if startled, he glanced at Weiss, at Ketchum, at Weiss again. And he whispered, “Yes. Of course. Of course. Yes.”
“That’s it. Just her. Not…money. Not some secret that she knows or he wants to know. Just…”
Ketchum let out a short bark of a laugh and the delicate Pomeroy jumped at the sound as if it were a gunshot. Weiss was also thinking—telling himself—that it was nonsense. Craziness, nonsense.
“The Shadowman’s in love with her,” he said slowly.
Now a weird and dreamy stillness seemed to drift down over Whip Pomeroy. His shackled hands sank motionless to the chair arms and his pale face went slack. His lips stopped moving, hung parted. The damp, enormous eyes stared. Weiss waited for what seemed to him a long time before the prisoner’s mouth began its quivering again. He waited what seemed a long time more before Pomeroy said, almost wistfully, “He’s the worst man in the world, you know. Maybe the worst man ever. I told Cam. I always told him. But Cam said he had to use him sometimes. In business sometimes. He had to.” Now, as if providing accompaniment to his lips, his hands began to twine and fidget again too. “And one day, he saw her. The man…You know, I never knew his name. Not his real name. He had so many. Different ones each time. The Shadowman—that’s what the newspapers called him. That’s the way I came to think of him after a while. We both did, me and Cam. The Shad
owman. And one day, he…he saw her. He set eyes on her. And that was that. He would never stay away then. We couldn’t make him stay away. He kept coming back and back. He kept coming back to see her. And she told him…she told him she didn’t…want him there…but he wouldn’t stay away. Nothing could keep him away. And one day, he…”
Pomeroy was silent and Weiss was silent. He was silent, thinking about her. The beckoning woman in the video. Her red-blond hair, her face like an angel. I’m still me.
“He hurt her,” whispered Whip Pomeroy. “He hurt her. I heard it all. I was in the next room. I heard it all. He wanted her to be with him and she wouldn’t. So he hurt her. And then…then when he was finished, he started to say things…things…things a person can’t say, things no one can say and still be human. He told her all the things he would do to her unless…unless she was his now. He wanted her to be his now. And I heard him. In my room next door. He needed her, he said. He said she was the only thing he had ever needed in all the world, the only thing he had ever wanted his whole life. And he would do anything—anything he had to to have her in the end. He would have her in the end no matter what, he said. He said these terrible things and then…then he began to cry. I heard. I…He began to cry and he begged her. He begged her.”
My God, thought Weiss. “You heard…”
“I was in my room, the room next door. I heard it all.”
Well, why didn’t you stop him, you wimpy piece of shit, he thought, he almost said aloud. But of course, he knew better. He fought the words down, the anger down. “And now you’re the only one who knows where she is,” was what he said. “The only one who knows who she is.”
“I’m the only one,” whispered Whip Pomeroy.
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