Dead Man Running

by Steve Hamilton

  I’d met plenty of killers before. I could remember running down at least two of them myself, literally chasing them and tackling them to the ground, putting on the handcuffs—hooking them, as we used to say in Detroit—and then dragging them back to my car.

  But this man . . . Thirty seconds in the room with him and I was already starting to wonder if maybe Halliday was right. Maybe this was another kind of man entirely, something I’d never seen before.

  There were two guards with him, two men who obviously spent every free hour in the gym, the sleeves of their uniforms pulled tight over their biceps. They looked just as amped as everyone else in the building. Probably making double overtime and drinking in every second so they could tell the story at the bar.

  “You can leave him here with us,” Halliday said to the guards.

  “That’s not happening,” one of them said. “We stay with him.”

  “There’s no danger,” Halliday said. “He’s chained up. There are two other men outside watching us, including your warden.”

  “We stay with him,” the guard said, sneaking a look at the one-way glass. He’d obviously been given an order, and he wasn’t even going to think about breaking it. “That’s nonnegotiable.”

  Livermore had been watching the exchange with a slight smile on his face. He sat down on the other side of the table while the guards took their positions directly behind him. He didn’t look comfortable—that would have been physically impossible—but he did his best to lean back in his chair as he kept looking at me. I’d sat across from five thousand men in interview rooms just like this one, and four thousand nine hundred ninety-nine of them had let their eyes wander to the ceiling, or had stared down at their own hands.

  This was the first man who looked me square in the eye. Like he would somehow be the one leading this interview.

  “Alex McKnight,” Livermore said. “You’ll excuse me for not shaking hands.”

  “Why am I here?” I said.

  “Do you feel it? The gravity of this moment? The two of us finally sitting in the same room together?” He seemed to pick each word carefully, as if lifting it from a case lined in black felt.

  I didn’t answer him.

  “Your whole life,” he said, “has been leading to this moment.”

  His eyes remained locked on mine. The other men in the room didn’t exist.

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “You and I are connected, Alex. Like two atomic particles hurtling in independent orbits. Until the inevitable day when they collide and everything changes.”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “Everything I’m saying is quite lucid,” Livermore said, and in that moment I saw a flash of something in his eyes. Something between impatience and outright anger. “Lucid and accurate. Our connection is real, Alex. It has shape, it has substance. A past and a future. You just haven’t seen it yet.”

  “The only thing I see,” I said, remembering what Halliday had told me on the plane, “is a lunatic who kills women and has sex with their dead bodies.”

  “I knew you’d say something like that. Eventually.”

  “You don’t know a goddamned thing about me, Livermore.”

  I felt Halliday’s hand on my back. I ignored it.

  Livermore leaned forward and smiled at me.

  “Four years in the minor leagues,” he said. “Never made it to the show. Your strikeouts-to-walks ratio was never good enough. A classic case of overprotecting the plate, which I suppose says something about your personality. Your best batting average was .249.”

  That’s when the room started to tilt. I could feel the other three men watching me. Agent Halliday, the two detention officers, measuring those words, watching for my reaction. A batting average is a hard number. It’s right or it’s wrong.

  Livermore had it right.

  “Eight years as a police officer in Detroit,” he went on. “You and your partner answered a call one night. An emotionally disturbed individual, who ended up shooting both of you. Your partner died. You survived. They took out two slugs, left one in your chest.”

  He kept watching me, studying me like I was an open book to him, like he could see everything I’d ever done.

  “You’ve been living with that night ever since,” he said. “A cop’s greatest failure, letting his partner get killed. Unfortunately for young Officer Franklin and his family, you couldn’t protect your partner as well as you protected the plate.”

  I tightened my grip on the edge of the table. My partner’s name on this man’s lips . . . It was an obscenity.

  “All right,” Halliday said, “that’s enough.”

  “You were married for nine years,” Livermore said, ignoring him. “Your wife left you after you were shot. You ran away from what was left of your life, and you’ve been hiding in a little cabin on the edge of the world.”

  I came two thousand miles, I thought, to have my whole life laid out on this table.

  By this psychopath I’ve never met before.

  “You hunt bail jumpers now. You pretend that this matters, even though you’re no better than a janitor, collecting human refuse. Tracking down petty drug dealers who’ll be replaced the next day. It’s such a pale imitation of what you once were, Alex. Being a police officer may not be much, but at least you were something then. You were a man who could actually change things in the world.”

  I didn’t move. I kept staring into his eyes.

  “Look at your hands, Alex. You chop wood, and you shovel snow. You have no other purpose now. And a man with no purpose is hardly a man at all.”

  He waited for me to look down at my hands. I didn’t move my eyes.

  “You should be thanking me,” he said. “I am giving you a great gift today.”

  He’s trying to get under my skin, I thought. I’m not going to let that happen.

  “As much as you might deny it,” he said, “there is some essential part of you that is excited to be here with me.”

  “We brought him here like you asked,” Halliday said. “Now tell us where Stephanie Hyatt is.”

  Livermore’s eyes flashed again, like he was annoyed by the interruption to his little soliloquy about my worthless life. But then a half second later, his composure had returned.

  “I was clear on this point,” he said. “I will take Alex to her.”

  “You’re not taking him anywhere,” Halliday said. “You’re dealing with me now.”

  “As of this moment, she has been tied up for seventy-two hours. I was careful not to constrict her circulation, but after so many hours in one position, it becomes unavoidable. The pain at this point must be unimaginable.”

  The words hung in the air. I could sense the tension building in Agent Halliday’s body. Even the two guards were looking down on the back of Livermore’s head like they wouldn’t mind choking him right here in the interview room.

  “She’s out of water by now,” Livermore went on. “I left her one container, with a straw. That means she’s already gone through several stages of extreme thirst. Her muscles are cramping, which adds to the pain. Her tongue is swelling. If she tries to cry out for help, she’ll barely make a sound.”

  He paused for a moment, gauging my reaction. I stared back at him without giving him anything at all.

  “She’ll soon have a severe headache,” Livermore said, “as her brain literally begins to shrink inside her head. She’ll have hallucinations. Then seizures. Her vital organs will shut down, one by one.”

  He regarded everyone in the room, even the guards behind him, with an imperious look on his face, like a military officer reviewing his troops and finding them lacking. Finally, he settled on Halliday.

  “She is alone, Agent Halliday. Alone and scared. She knows she’s been abandoned, and that she will soon die. And the saddest part of
all . . .”

  His eyes left Halliday and came back to me.

  “She can’t even cry about it,” he said. “Because there is no water left in her body to make tears.”

  In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to go over the table. I would have done anything to him, would have water-boarded him, would have driven nails into his hands, whatever it took to make him tell us where this woman was.

  “There is still hope for her,” Livermore said to me. “These men all want to find her, but they have no idea how. You are the key.”

  “What do you think’s going to happen here?” Halliday said. “We’re going to open up the front door and let you out?”

  “I understand you’ll need to have a number of men involved,” Livermore said. “As long as Alex is one of them.”

  “How many more men would you need?” I asked Halliday.

  “Alex, we have to talk about this.”

  “How many?”

  “My partner and I,” he said. “The jail will want two men, three if you include a driver. The state police . . .”

  “You already have a plan,” I said. “In case you decided this was real.”

  He hesitated. “Yes.”

  But something still didn’t feel right to me. I would have gotten my gold shield if I had stayed on the force, and if I had, my instincts would have guided me for the rest of my career. Serial killer, psychopath, it wouldn’t have mattered. It all would have come down to one question.

  Is he telling the truth?

  I leaned forward across the table, so close it startled the guards behind him. He kept looking me in the eye, without moving a muscle.

  “I don’t think this woman is alive,” I said.

  He smiled. “Are you willing to take that chance?”

  Halliday stood up and tried to grab me by the shoulder. I pushed him away. It was becoming a bad habit, physically resisting a federal agent, but at that point I didn’t care anymore.

  “Livermore,” I said, “what the hell do I have to do with any of this?”

  “I know I’m not answering your questions,” Livermore said to me. “But that’s not why I brought you here. You just have to play your part, Alex. You don’t have to know how it ends.”

  “It ends with you strapped to a table,” I said. “You know that, right?”

  “I think we’re done,” he said with another smile. “For now.”

  He startled the guards again when he stood up. Each man grabbed one of his arms. A pained look crossed Livermore’s face, like this was just one more annoyance. He looked nothing like a man who’d have to start accepting treatment like this for the rest of his life. As the guards pushed him toward the door, he stopped just long enough to meet my eyes one more time.

  He nodded to me, gave me one last half smile. Then he walked out the door.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WE NEED TO BE ready for anything,” Agent Halliday said. “I don’t want any surprises.”

  “What the hell’s he going to do?” Agent Cook said. “His arms and legs will be chained. With seven armed men watching him.”

  He had left me out of the equation, the eighth man along for the ride, but I wasn’t going to say anything about it. One hour had passed since the jailhouse interview. One hour of me replaying everything Livermore had said to me, trying to make it all add up into some kind of sense. But it still wasn’t coming together.

  I shouldn’t be here, I said to myself. I should be back home in Paradise, plowing snow.

  But if there really is a woman out there somewhere . . .

  We were all in the FBI sedan, with me in the backseat again. Cook was driving, Halliday was riding shotgun. We’d been up for almost thirty hours straight by now. I could see it weighing heavy on Halliday as he turned to look at me.

  “Alex,” he said, “I want you to be ready for an audible.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re the X factor here,” he said. “These other men don’t know you.”

  You don’t know me, either, I thought. But I let it go. If I were in their shoes, I’d be just as mystified by this stranger from Michigan, who didn’t seem to know anything about Livermore, even though he could sit there and recite my batting average.

  But still, what would the plan be? Cook was right—with Livermore’s hands cuffed and chained to his belt . . . In their wildest imagination, how did they think one stranger could change that equation?

  “Everything’s covered,” Cook said to his partner. “He’ll be tied up like a Christmas turkey.”

  Halliday shook his head and looked out the passenger’s-side window as the city of Phoenix passed by. I could feel the nervous energy coming off of him in waves, even if his partner didn’t share it. I knew the feeling, despite every reason not to, because I had it myself. Something about this whole setup didn’t feel right to me, and the feeling got stronger with each passing mile.

  “Where are we going?” I finally said. “Unless that’s classified information . . .”

  “Little mining town called Bagdad,” Halliday said. “Up in Yavapai County, about two and a half hours away. DPS is going to run the first vehicle, then Livermore will be in a prison van behind that, with two guards. We’ll follow behind.”

  “Who’s DPS?”

  “Department of Public Safety. That’s the state police here.”

  I nodded and sat back in my seat. We seemed to be alone on the road, but I knew the other vehicles were probably up ahead somewhere.

  “There’s only one road up here,” Halliday said a few minutes later. “US 93. That’s got everybody a little nervous.”

  “Livermore’s a loner,” Cook said. “Can you really see him with a crew of men up here waiting to ambush us?”

  “No,” Halliday said. “I can’t see that.”

  It looked like he wanted to say more, but he kept it to himself.

  “There they are,” Cook said as the prison van came into view. Ahead of that, I saw the state police car with its lights flashing. We settled in at the tail end of the parade just as we were leaving Phoenix, heading through Glendale, Surprise, and Sun City West. Heading northwest, out into the great nothingness of central Arizona. The road itself was a straight line drawn on a flat plain, with railroad tracks to the right and telephone wires to the left. Beyond those, as far as I could see in any direction, it was nothing but brown earth covered by a thin layer of green and gray vegetation. Low mountains in the far distance and a bright blue sky above us. The view didn’t change for an hour.

  By the end of the second hour, the vegetation was growing thicker, the mountains coming closer with each passing mile. We were in a valley between the Poachie Range to the west and the Santa Marias to the east. There were great piles of red rocks on either side of the road. A voice broke through on the radio.

  “Lead to Halliday and Cook. Are we sure this road is secure?”

  Halliday looked over at his partner for a moment, then picked up the mic and keyed it.

  “We had an advance team sweep through here a few minutes ago,” he said, looking out the window. “Nothing up there but rocks.”

  But as he put the mic back, I could see him staring out the window, like we’d suddenly been transported to Afghanistan. Even Agent Cook, the man who’d been playing it cool all the way up here, hunched forward at the wheel to look out at the road.

  All because of one man riding in that van ahead of us, I thought, sitting between two guards and tied up, as Agent Cook had said, like a Christmas turkey.

  A few minutes later, just as we got to the turnoff for Bagdad, the same voice broke over the radio.

  “Stopping ahead. Pull in behind us.”

  We made the turn and saw the other two vehicles pulled over to the side of the road. Cook stopped behind them and got out. The two state troopers from the lead car w
ere standing behind the prison van, next to the van driver, and now Cook joined the conference and they stood around talking about something for a few minutes, before Cook finally gave me a wave to get out.

  Halliday got out with me. It was coming up on noon now, the morning sun warming up the day, well into the eighties. I held up a hand against the glare. As I came closer to the party, I could feel the two troopers watching me carefully, measuring everything about me.

  Halliday told me to wait a few yards away while he went to confer with the others. Every single man kept looking back at me until Halliday shook his head and came back to give me the news:

  “They want you in the van.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “As of now, it’s not our show anymore. The state guys, the jail guys, they all want you to be safe as we get close.”

  “Safe,” I said, “as in locked up like a criminal.”

  This is the “audible” he was talking about, I thought. But before he could say anything else, I left him there and approached the rest of the party.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Put me in the van if that’s what you need to do.”

  “Those are the orders,” the van driver said.

  When he opened the back door, I could see Livermore through the wire mesh. He was sitting on one of the side benches, with the same two guards who had stood behind him in the interview room early this morning. His own personal attachment.

  “Got some company,” the van driver said as he unlocked the inner door.

  The two troopers stepped up to me then. First they asked for my cell phone, promising to give it back when this whole thing was over. I took it out and handed it to them. Then they asked me to put my hands on the side of the van before going inside.

  “This gets better and better,” I said, but it was clear we’d all just stand out there in the sun until I let them frisk me.

  It’s not enough they drag me all the way out here and treat me like a goddamned suspect every step of the way . . .

  “For all we know,” one of the officers said, “you could be working with this guy.”