Dead Man Running

by Steve Hamilton

  Halliday had brought a folder into the room with him. He put that on the table and then sat down in the chair across from Livermore. There was a video camera mounted high in the corner of the room. The light was blinking. Every word, every movement, it would all be recorded.

  “Congratulations,” Livermore said. “I understand you have a new grandchild.”

  Halliday had just opened the folder, was about to take out six photographs. He stopped dead when he heard those words.

  “How do you know that?” Halliday looked into Livermore’s eyes, really looked for the first time, and saw that he had green irises circled with bands so dark they were almost black. The eyes of an exotic animal.

  Eyes you’d never forget.

  Livermore shrugged at the question, gave Halliday that same half smile again.

  He overheard it in the hallway, Halliday said to himself. One of those guards outside, talking about me before I got here.

  Ten seconds in this room and he’s already trying to put me off balance.

  I will not let that happen.

  He went back to the six photographs, taking them out of the folder one by one and putting them on the table.

  Six photographs.

  Six women.

  “Every one of these women,” Halliday said, “you selected for a reason. Every step, every movement . . . it was all thought out. Where you took them to kill them. Where you took them after that. You must have watched those houses, those buildings . . .”

  Livermore shook his head, giving Halliday the little half smile.

  “You were just as careful when choosing your locations,” Halliday went on, “as you were when choosing your victims.”

  Halliday pushed one of the photographs forward. It was the last victim, Carolyn Kline. Livermore looked down at the woman’s face for just a moment. Then his eyes returned to Halliday’s. The half smile was still on his face.

  “Until this one,” Halliday said. “Why did you break the pattern?”

  Livermore shook his head again, and this time he let out a snort of laughter.

  “This funny to you?” Halliday said.

  “In its own way, yes.”

  “Last time I checked, you’re the one wearing the cuffs and leg irons, and heading to death row.”

  “Do you honestly think,” Livermore said, each word chosen with deliberate care, “that I didn’t know there were cameras in that house?”

  It was the last thing Halliday expected to hear, but this time he kept his reaction hidden.

  “They were as obvious as this one,” Livermore said, tilting his head toward the video camera over his shoulder. “Or, for that matter, your interrogation techniques.”

  Halliday stayed silent, waiting for him to continue.

  “The first camera was mounted on the bookshelf,” Livermore said, “between the legs of the wooden elephant. The second was in the bedroom, on the armoire, in the silk flowers.”

  Halliday kept staring into the other man’s strange green eyes. Kept waiting for more.

  “I wanted you to see me,” Livermore said. “Did you enjoy the performance?”

  Halliday didn’t move.

  “Tell me, Agent Halliday, is it strange for you now? Sitting here across from me? After such an . . . intimate experience as we shared? How many times did you watch it, anyway?”

  I will not react, Halliday thought. I will not give him anything.

  “I wonder if you’d even admit to yourself,” Livermore said, “that in some primal part of your brain you may have enjoyed it.”

  Nothing, Halliday said to himself. I am made of stone.

  “It’s all right, Agent Halliday. It’ll be our secret.”

  Halliday waited for another few heartbeats to pass. Then he reached down to the pile on the table and slowly pushed forward the other five photographs.

  Livermore was still smiling as he studied the photographs, one after another. He had to bend his whole body sideways to touch one of them. Halliday was about to take it away, but then he saw that Livermore was simply straightening it, so that all of the photographs were in a neat, straight line.

  He has a meticulous, ordered mind, Halliday said to himself. Compulsively neat. He removes the bodies, takes them to a place where he can have his time with them. Someplace where he knows he won’t be seen.

  Until this time.

  “Where are the other bodies?” Halliday said.

  “In a special place.”

  Halliday watched him for another moment, then took out the pad of paper from the folder and slid it across the table, with a felt-tip marker on top. Because you never give a killer a sharp object, not even a ballpoint pen. Not even when his wrists are cuffed to a chain around his waist.

  “Write it down,” Halliday said. “The exact location of this special place.”

  Livermore looked at the pad for a moment, as if actually considering it. Then he tilted his body sideways again, took the marker, and wrote down two words.

  Halliday leaned over the table and read the two words:

  Alex McKnight.

  “Is this supposed to mean something to me?”

  “There is a small town in Michigan,” Livermore said, “called Paradise. If you go there, you’ll find this man living there. He’s a retired police officer from Detroit. I would like you to bring him to me.”

  “Why do you want him here?”

  “I understand Paradise is a very small town. He shouldn’t be hard to find.”

  “If this is some kind of game, I’m not going to play it.”

  “I think you will,” Livermore said.

  “Why?”

  “Because Alex McKnight is the only person I’ll talk to.”

  Halliday sat there, watching the man. Waiting for more. When it didn’t come, he stood up and started to gather the photographs and put them back in the folder.

  Livermore wrote two more words on the pad.

  Halliday stopped dead. He read the two words. Then he stared at the man across from him. That same cold half smile stayed on Livermore’s face as he dropped the marker on the table and leaned back in his chair.

  “You should sit back down,” Livermore said. “I don’t think we’re done here.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  ALEX? IS THAT YOU?”

  It was the last voice I ever thought I’d hear that night. Or any night, ever again. I was sitting at the Glasgow Inn, with a folder full of papers spread out on the bar top. A February night in the dead middle of a long winter. Jackie Connery, owner of the Glasgow Inn, was behind the bar, watching the Red Wings game on the television he’d hung from the ceiling. Vinnie LeBlanc, my closest neighbor, a member of the Bay Mills tribe, and a blackjack dealer at the casino, was sitting in one of the big overstuffed chairs by the fireplace. On most nights like this, I’d be sitting right across from him, warming my sore body after a long day of shoveling snow and chopping wood, nursing a Molson and listening to Jackie complain about driving all the way to Canada because I won’t drink a fake American import.

  But tonight I was sitting at the bar because I had all of these papers to look at and a stakeout date with my new partner in a couple of hours. My cell phone rang in my pocket and I took it out, expecting to hear Maureen’s voice.

  It was a woman, but not Maureen. It took me a moment to place the voice. That’s how long it had been.

  “Jeannie?”

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  I drew a blank on what to say next. I was counting up the years since I’d last talked to her, this woman I’d once been married to. I was just passing twenty years in my head when she broke the silence herself.

  “I know it’s been a long time,” she said.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s . . .”

  There was a lo
ng pause. I wasn’t even sure if she was still on the line. The cell phone signal up here in the Upper Peninsula is always a crapshoot.

  “It’s good to hear your voice,” she finally said. “I hope you’ve been well.”

  “Where are you living now?”

  “I’m back in Grand Rapids. In my parents’ house. How about you?”

  “You remember those cabins my father built?”

  “Up in Paradise?”

  “That’s where I am.”

  I had come up here a year after I had left the Detroit Police Department, just after Jeannie had left me. The most remote place I could find, maybe eight hundred full-time residents in this little town on the shores of Lake Superior, a good five-hour drive from Detroit. My stated reason was to sell off the cabins my father had built along an old logging road, just north of the one blinking light in town. The real reason was that I wanted to get away from everything else in the world, and I was wondering if Paradise would be the place to do it.

  I’d been living here ever since.

  “Listen,” she said, “I know this is out of the blue, but there’s a reason I’m calling you . . . You remember my grandmother?”

  “I think so.”

  “She died, Alex. And she left some things . . . to both of us. You remember that place she had on the lake?”

  As far as I could remember, I’d only been there once, right after we got married. I had a dim memory of a little house on an inland lake, maybe an hour north of Grand Rapids. The place had seemed like it was just about ready to fall down back then. Unless somebody had renovated it, I couldn’t even imagine what it would look like now.

  “Plus that old car she had, the big white Cadillac. Everything in the house. And some money. Not a whole lot . . . But it was everything she had.”

  “I don’t understand. She left it for us?”

  “Yes, to both of us. I don’t know if she was just confused about the, um . . .”

  She didn’t have to say the word. The divorce. It was the only contact I ever had with her, after she had left. Those papers from her lawyer that had come in the mail. Please sign and return. Then it was done.

  “Or I don’t know,” Jeannie said. “She was pretty sharp, right up to the end. Maybe she just had this naïve belief that it would be enough to get us back together.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about your grandmother,” I said, trying hard to remember the old woman’s face from the wedding. “But whatever you want to do with that house, and everything else . . . Just send me the papers and I’ll sign whatever I need to. That stuff belongs to you.”

  “Gee, thanks,” she said, and then she laughed. “That Cadillac is just what I need to drive to work.”

  Even after all of these years, it felt good to hear her laughing. When she stopped, there was a long silence.

  “I have one more thing to tell you,” she said. “It’s something I should have said a long time ago . . .”

  I waited.

  “I never told you how sorry I was, Alex. All these years, I never got the chance to say it.”

  “It’s all right, Jeannie. I know I didn’t make it easy.”

  “That night you and Franklin both got shot,” she said. “I remember being in the hospital, seeing you in that bed with all those tubes in your body . . . Not knowing if you’d ever open your eyes again. And then when I found out that Franklin was already dead . . . I just didn’t know how to handle it, Alex. I walked away and I didn’t even say good-bye. And I’ve never forgiven myself for that.”

  “I don’t blame you for leaving,” I said. “I let it go a long time ago. You should, too.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll try.”

  There was another awkward silence, until she finally thanked me and said good-bye. I sat there on the barstool and looked at my phone, thinking about all the other things I should have asked her. This woman I once thought I’d spend the rest of my life with.

  “Alex,” Vinnie said from behind me, “what’s going on?”

  I turned and looked at him. Then at Jackie, who had stopped washing glasses and was watching me just as intently.

  “That,” I said, “was a phone call from another life.”

  I was still thinking about it as I left the Glasgow and got in my truck. It was twenty degrees, with two feet of snow on the ground and more on the way. I had just enough time to pick up Maureen and head over to Pickford, where we were hoping to find our man, a twice-convicted drug dealer who never showed up for his third court date in Iron Mountain. It was my latest case in my new job as a “fugitive recovery agent” for Superior Bail Bonds out of Marquette, a job that my former partner, Leon Prudell, once held—until he came home from one case with a knife wound. That was all his wife, Eleanor, needed to see. Now Leon was back working the copper kettles at the Soo Brewing Company full-time, and for some reason I had agreed to give the job a try in his place. It was a way to break up the long winter months, and I didn’t have a wife waiting at home, worrying about me.

  For liability reasons, Superior didn’t let its agents carry firearms when recovering fugitives. As much as getting shot as a cop had put me off guns for the rest of my life, I still wasn’t sure what to make of doing this job unarmed, especially when the fugitives weren’t playing by the same rules. But tonight I was working with Maureen. She was a pro, and she really knew how to work the wives and girlfriends of the men we were tracking.

  With a pair of handcuffs in my pocket, and no gun, I headed out into the cold Upper Peninsula night.

  * * *

  —

  AGENT HALLIDAY watched his breath in the air, trying to remember if he’d ever felt air so cold it actually hurt to breathe it. After seven hours on a plane, they were walking down the stairs, onto the tarmac. The pilot told them he’d de-ice the wings and keep everything ready to go.

  They walked into the one-room Chippewa County International Airport, skipped the waiting room, and went right to the parking lot. The rental agent was waiting next to the black Jeep Cherokee, which was already running. They verified the directions to a town called Pickford, and then they were on the road.

  It was fewer than twenty miles. Cook was driving, and Halliday could tell he’d never driven on ice before.

  “You get us killed before we even get there,” Halliday said, “that would not be a productive evening.”

  Cook shook his head and kept driving.

  When they arrived in Pickford, they found two roads and a traffic light. A few buildings and wide-open fields with snow blowing across the road. Halliday had already contacted the owner of the Superior Bail Bonds company, Alex McKnight’s current employer, and had made two things clear: he needed McKnight’s location, and he needed the owner not to warn McKnight they were coming.

  “What else do we know about this guy?” Cook said.

  “He was a cop in Detroit for eight years. Got shot on the job, came up here a year later. Rents out some cabins. He was a private investigator for a while . . .”

  Cook looked over at him.

  “Now he’s a bounty hunter,” Halliday said. “Excuse me, a fugitive recovery agent.”

  “Will he be armed?”

  “According to his boss, no. But that’s no guarantee.”

  Halliday checked his own weapon. He was one of the few agents still allowed to carry the old nine-millimeter Sig-Sauer P228, the same gun he swore he’d retire with.

  “And as far as we know,” Cook said, “McKnight has no connection to Livermore.”

  Halliday holstered his gun and looked out at the snow. “That, partner, we’re about to find out.”

  * * *

  —

  MAUREEN HAD ALREADY knocked on the door, told the woman who’d answered she was looking for our man, playing the “other girlfriend” angle, telling her she was about to throw all of his clothes out int
o the snow. She came back to the truck and told me this wouldn’t take long.

  Maureen was ten years younger than me. She had dirty-blond hair she kept tied behind her head, clear nail polish on rough hands, the hands of a woman who lived in the Upper Peninsula. She was a good partner, even if I didn’t know much else about her yet.

  “You’re even less talkative than usual tonight,” she said to me. We were waiting in the driveway next door to the girlfriend’s house, the heater in my truck going full blast.

  I was still thinking about the phone call, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to tell her about it. That’s when a flash of headlights hit us both in the eyes. I put the truck in gear and lowered the plow, scraping against the asphalt as I drove forward. To whoever was coming down the street, I would be just another plowman, the UP’s best winter disguise. The truck on the street was moving fast.

  I felt the familiar rush of adrenaline, no different now than on my first day as a Detroit cop. Maureen had her cuffs in one hand, the other hand ready to open her door. If this went well, we’d take him right there in the girlfriend’s driveway, before he even made it into the house. If it went badly, we could always hook his cuffs to the back of my truck bed, take him to the Chippewa County Jail, and see how frozen he was by the time we got there.

  The man’s truck skidded as it slowed in the street, then turned and finally came to a stop in the driveway next door. We both hit the ground at the same time, covered half the distance before the man even noticed us. It took another second for him to process what was about to happen to him.

  That’s when the second vehicle arrived and blew everything up.

  It was a black Jeep Cherokee, coming too fast down the icy road and going right into a sidespin. Whoever was driving had no idea what he was doing. When the vehicle corrected itself, it came down the driveway we’d parked in, its headlights blinding us. The driver hit the brakes too late, sliding across the ice and slamming into the back bumper of my truck.