Collecting the Dead: A Novel

by Spencer Kope

Back at the hotel, I convince Jimmy to eat something while he works, and we order room service. It gives me an excuse to camp out in his room, a constant reminder that he has a theory to explain.

  “Seriously, Steps,” he argues, “why don’t you go to your room and get a shower or a bath or watch some TV? I’ll call you when the food arrives.”

  “I’ll just watch TV here,” I reply. “Yours has more channels.”

  “They both have the same channels,” he says with a sigh.

  “My room’s boring.”

  “This room is identical to yours, how is it less boring?”

  I shrug.

  “Really? You’re going to just sit here and watch TV while I work?”

  “Unless you want me to help?”

  Jimmy holds up both hands and shakes his head. “No!”

  After that he just ignores me.

  Retrieving the Bureau-issued Dell laptop from his briefcase, along with two pens, one black and one red, and the offending notebook he’s been scribbling in for the last couple days, he settles at the small round table in the corner of the room and gets to work.

  Clearly I’m just the eye candy in this brain trust, so I settle back on the queen-sized bed and start flipping through channels. The volume’s a little loud, I admit, so when Jimmy casts an annoyed look my way, I turn it down a notch. Apparently one notch isn’t enough, because his eyes narrow and he continues staring until I turn it down another five notches.

  Touchy!

  Room service arrives twenty minutes later, and I dig into a pepperoni calzone with extra sauce on the side while Jimmy pauses long enough to eat his eight-ounce steak smothered in A.1. sauce and a loaded baked potato the size of a large river rock. He’s not normally an overly picky eater, but the first thing he does is scrape the chives off the potato.

  “Those are good for blood pressure,” I say between bites. “You just turned thirty-three a couple weeks ago; you should pay more attention to stuff like that.”

  “Thirty-three is not old,” he shoots back, “and my blood pressure is nearly perfect.” Pointing his fork at the little pile of green ringlets, he adds, “You’re welcome to them, please. The sooner they’re off my plate, the better.”

  “I’m just trying to look out for you,” I say, trying not to grin.

  He goes back to his potato.

  “They’ve also got antioxidants that help fight cancer.”

  He looks at me now, fork in his left hand, knife in his right; I notice they’re both pointing in my general direction. “When did you become an expert on chives?”

  “We grew chives on the back porch when I was a kid. Mom loves them. Dad’s not particularly fond of them but doesn’t complain much.”

  “He doesn’t complain because your mother would beat him with a dirty frying pan.”

  I’m about to object, but then realize there might be some truth to that.

  In ten minutes I finish off the monarch’s share of my calzone—the thing was huge—and dump the remains in the garbage can. I thoroughly rinse the plate and silverware in the sink and set them back on the serving tray. When Jimmy finishes, I do the same for him so he can finish collecting and sorting his thoughts on the case. As I go to scrape his plate, the only thing left is a lonely pile of chives nesting in A.1. sauce and butter drippings.

  Sad. Just sad.

  Meanwhile, Jimmy apparently has a lot of thoughts to collect and organize. So much so that I finish watching one episode of NCIS and I’m halfway through another before he speaks again.

  Finally, the theory!

  There’s a great shuffling as he turns the laptop around to face me and returns the notebook, pens, and miscellaneous scraps of paper to his briefcase.

  I hit the off button on the remote and the TV goes black; the room goes quiet.

  Jimmy motions to the chair next to him at the table and I grudgingly extract myself from a stack of pillows and blankets.

  “You remember your description of Ashley’s car?” Jimmy begins. “About how Sad Face’s shine was all over the inside, the steering wheel, even the gas cap, like he’d fueled up as some point?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “And it was pretty clear from Ashley’s shine in the trunk, and her hands on the inside of the trunk lid looking for a latch or a release, that she was held there for a while, probably just long enough to transport her to wherever he keeps them, right?”

  I nod.

  “Which other cars looked the same?”

  “How do you mean?” I’m puzzled.

  “How many did Sad Face drive? How many did he fuel up? How many had the victim’s shine in the trunk?”

  I think for a moment.

  “Other than Ashley there was … well, Valerie Heagle for sure … and the one from Susanville—”

  “Tawnee Rich.”

  “That’s right … and Leah Daniels. I think that’s it.”

  “You’re missing one.”

  I think for a moment, running the names, the cars, the shine around in my head.

  “Jennifer Green,” he says without waiting.

  “Jennifer Green, right, I remember: Crescent City.”

  Jimmy pushes a piece of paper across the table. At the top of the page the victims are listed in chronological order of their disappearance, starting with Valerie Heagle. Jimmy watches me as I study the list; he doesn’t say a thing, just lets me digest it.

  “Do you see it?” He knows that I don’t and loves every minute of it.

  I hold my finger up, begging for more time.

  “It’s right in front of you, clear as day.”

  “If it was clear as day you wouldn’t have spent two days working on it.”

  “I had to do some research first.”

  “Research?”

  “Yeah, I had to let you check for shine.”

  “So your research is actually my research?”

  He grins. “Well, if you put it that way, I suppose so.”

  “Wonderful.” I push the paper away. “And what did my research reveal?”

  “Our research revealed a strange phenomenon hidden within the first five lines of the list.” He pushes the paper back to me.

  “Line number one?” he says. When I don’t answer, he gets annoying. “Line number one, come on, Steps, what is it?”

  I glance down at the paper. “Valerie Heagle,” I growl.

  “Number two?”

  “I’m not playing this—”

  “Line number two?” he persists.

  “Jennifer Green,” I snap. “And then Tawnee Rich, and then—”

  Dammit! I see it. He’s right.

  “—and then Leah Daniels and Ashley Sprague, the first five victims.”

  “And,” Jimmy says, “the only victims whose vehicles were occupied by and driven by Sad Face.”

  “But we’re up to eleven victims; why only the first five?”

  “That’s the big question. Something happened, something significant enough to cause him to change an established routine. We figure out what it was and we’ll be closer to catching him.”

  “Maybe he didn’t have a car during the first abductions.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But you don’t think so? You think it’s something else?”

  Jimmy shrugs. “I think he liked using the victims’ cars. I think it gave him a sense of power and added to the fantasy. It’s not something he would give up easily. Besides, if it was working so well for him, as it appeared to be, at least for the first five victims, why switch to your own car? That just increases the risk. Now it’s your license plate number someone might see as you’re stuffing the victim in the trunk, or your license plate number attached to the parking ticket written outside the victim’s apartment. That’s how they caught David Berkowitz, you know.”

  “Berkowitz?” I know the name.

  “Yeah, the Son of Sam killer.”

  “He got caught because of a parking ticket?”

  “He did,” Jimmy says.r />
  I mull this over a minute. “So, what if Sad Face used the victims’ cars because, like Berkowitz, he almost got caught for some other crime, maybe a burglary or a robbery, something like that, and learned his lesson about using your own car during the commission of a crime? If that’s the case, what’s he doing for transportation now? He wouldn’t use his own car, or a rental—that can still be traced back to him.”

  “Maybe he uses his own car, but swaps out the plates for some that are stolen?”

  “That’s good,” I say. Then I remember something from a conversation three months earlier. “Dex was telling me that a lot of their dopers buy cheap cars and never put them in their name. They just drive them awhile and then sell them to someone else.”

  “Don’t they have to register the car in their name to renew the tabs?”

  “Yeah, but you can drive up to a year before the tabs expire. And if the seller doesn’t fill out a report of sale and turn it in to the Department of Licensing there’s no way to find out who actually owns the vehicle.”

  “I like that one better than the switched plates,” Jimmy says, “but that’s not going to help us track Sad Face, if his real name’s not attached to anything. And we don’t have time to wait for him to screw up.”

  No, we don’t, I think. I reach into my pocket and pull out the locket, Lauren Brouwer’s locket. It still pulses, like a small heart beating in my hand. Jimmy watches me from the other side of the table. After a moment, I slide the locket back into my pocket.

  “We need to work faster,” I say.

  Jimmy just nods.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I was ten years old when I lost my mind.

  It was temporary … mostly.

  When I emerged from the woods two years earlier—and recently dead—the shine was no more than a dusty hue brushed over the world with gentle strokes. A lot changed in two years. By age ten the shine had fully blossomed: an apocalypse of color that shoved its way through my eyes and bounced around inside my skull.

  I hadn’t yet learned to control it, to turn down the volume. That wouldn’t come for a few more years, and then slowly; in the meantime I lost my mind. I remember my father cradling me in his arms when I sobbed, his eyes wet with a father’s grief, not knowing what to do.

  We kept it from Mom as best we could, though I heard snatches of conversation on occasion, usually late in the evening when they thought I was asleep, and often after those days that were particularly tough. She knew something was wrong, but never got the why or the what of it out of Dad. He would deftly answer her questions without answering and then redirect her concerns in a harmless direction.

  It was best that way.

  Meanwhile, Dad was determined to find a solution to the shine, so we started spending weekends on a variety of father-son outings. We consulted experts in various religions, in mysticism, in spiritualism. We visited several parapsychologists and one regular psychologist. We experimented with colored glasses and infrared lights.

  Often we’d find ourselves on the waterfront looking out at the Puget Sound. There’s no shine on the water, just beautiful waves of normalcy. It’s here that we first started to learn how to control the shine, to mute it and hide layers.

  Dad would place a ball in the surf with just two or three distinct shines on it. That ball, set against a backdrop of beautiful shine-free water, allowed me to focus on one shine at a time and, eventually, to turn the others low, like you would with a dimmer switch. I’ve never been able to completely shut it out, not on my own, but the relief that came from learning to turn the neon glow down is indescribable.

  It came at a price.

  The effort of it gave me headaches, real skull-pounders that throbbed at the front of my head. The first few times it happened I remember holding my eyes closed with my hands. The pounding was so bad I thought my eyes might pop right out of my head; I was determined to hold them in.

  It was on a trip to a glass studio a month before my eleventh birthday that things changed, and for the better this time. Mom was with us; it was actually her idea. She had been talking about taking up pottery or some other hobby and wanted to see what glassblowing was like. This particular studio was having an open house, and though we had to drive an hour to get there, Mom determined that it would be quality family time.

  Of course she loved it: the studio, in addition to the quality time.

  The studio was in a surprisingly small work space with an odd assortment of metal tools and stands and three metal doors built into the wall, each opening into a separate furnace with a separate purpose. We soon learned that one was the main furnace, where molten glass waited to be collected and shaped. The second was the glory hole, a furnace used to reheat a piece as it was being worked on. Finally, there was the lehr, or annealer, used to slowly cool the glass over hours or even days.

  When we first entered the shop, a glassblower, or gaffer, was taking a raging-hot glob of shapeless glass from the furnace using the end of a long metal rod—which, I soon discovered, was hollow. The blob began to take shape as the glassblower blew air through the rod and then rotated it around and around and around like a piece of wood on a lathe. In no time at all it began to resemble a vase with bands of color, called caning, running from top to bottom.

  That’s about the time I lost interest and wandered into the gift store attached to the shop. Here was every manner of bowl and plate and vase and glass, a thousand colors shining and reflecting from ten thousand facets.

  Near the front of the store was a magnificent platter propped upright on a wooden stand. The glass was clear, with a flourish of burgundy and blue on each end. I remember giving it a casual glance as I passed, the glance of a disinterested ten-year-old on an art outing with his parents.

  But something in the glass caught my eye.

  The glass was so crystal clear—ironically because it was crystal—that I noticed a fingerprint on the backside. A single fingerprint on the upper edge, most likely left when it was placed on the stand.

  Big deal, it was a fingerprint.

  Only this fingerprint didn’t have any shine. Big deal! Huge!

  Walking around to the other side of the table, I stared at the backside of the platter. There before me was a fingerprint in dark walnut dappled with rose petals. It stared back at me; hell, it slapped me in the face. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Every fiber of the feltlike texture was on display … as clear as crystal. I moved back to the front of the platter.

  Nothing: a fingerprint.

  It was maddening, overwhelming, amazing.

  I wanted to scream, DAD, DAD, DAD, and run into the other room, but I realized that would be unwise and hard to explain. Instead, I walked with excited steps back into the shop and tugged at dad’s right hand, trying to pull him into the store while at the same time trying not to garner too much attention.

  Dad resisted, caught up in the magic of glowing glass and dark metal tongs.

  “Da-aaad,” I whined … though I kept the volume to a whisper.

  He ignored me.

  I tugged again … and again … and again.

  “What is it, Mag—” The look on my face when he whirled around, or maybe it was the tears stretching down my checks, startled him, and he whisked me from the room, shepherding me in the crook of his left arm.

  In the store, he knelt before me and held me at arm’s length, looking me up and down. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Did you hurt yourself?”

  I remember shaking my head and taking him by the hand. I led him to the platter and just pointed as the tears started to fall again.

  “What, Magnus?” he practically pleaded. “What?” He glanced through the opening into the workshop and saw that Mom was still engrossed by the glassblower.

  “Do you see the fingerprint?” I asked. I used my own small finger to guide his eyes, until the tip was just inches from the glass.

  “I see it,” he answered.

  “So do I.”

  I bur
st into tears and threw myself into his arms. Over the next ten minutes he had me look through maybe a hundred different pieces of glass and crystal, always with the same result. Soon it all made sense. Glass had no effect; it was something we’d experimented with before with no luck, despite what colors might be added to it. But put a crystal in front of my eyes and every bit of shine was magically erased, as if it never existed. Move the crystal away, and the shine returned in all its hideous glory.

  The glassblower found it a rather odd request, but within a week I had my glasses with their lead-crystal lenses: my special glasses.

  And with them I reclaimed my sanity and my life … until some dozen years later when the FBI took both away. At least this time I have some say in the matter. I can quit anytime I like. Jimmy says so.

  I can quit anytime I like.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  June 28, 7:47 P.M.

  “Diane, it’s almost eight, what are you still doing in the office?”

  “My boys are in the field,” Diane replies. “Where else would I be?”

  “At home reading a book,” I suggest. “At the movies; bowling; Zumba classes … anyplace but the office. Someone on this team has to have a real life.”

  “This is my real life. Besides, I don’t bowl … or Zumba.”

  “I’m worried about you, Diane,” I say, but she just laughs. “So what’s this interesting tidbit?”

  Her tone changes instantly. “I know how he picks his victims,” she replies.

  My pulse quickens and I feel the sudden rush of adrenaline. “Hang on, Diane.” I wave Jimmy and Walt over and search for the speakerphone button on the keypad. “Go ahead, Diane. You’re on speaker.”

  “As I was saying, it occurred to me early this afternoon that the kidnap sites are sporadic: Susanville, Red Bluff, Oroville, Crescent City, even Medford, Oregon. His range is maybe a hundred and fifty miles in every direction, with Redding as the hub.”

  “So he’s a delivery driver of some sort,” Jimmy offers.

  “Or a forest ranger,” Sheriff Gant says. “Maybe a logger or a hunter. Most of the area you’re describing is covered in national parks and national forests. You’ve got Shasta National Forest, Trinity National Forest, Lassen Volcanic National Park, Six Rivers National Forest, Klamath National Forest, and the list goes on. You can’t go anywhere in this part of the country without tripping into a national forest or park.”