That Darkness

by Lisa Black

  “Don’t I know it. But next time I see you I want to hear all about your killer. Even if it’s really sick.” She pulled the paper from the printer before it could drop into the tray. “Especially if it’s really sick.”

  Chapter 21

  Friday, 7:30 a.m.

  “Your damn fur is going to get me hung,” Jack complained to the other occupant of his breakfast table.

  Greta stared at him without sympathy, gave a less-than-concerned meow, and washed her face.

  He sipped his coffee, trying to shrug off the morning’s chill. The furnace in his rented home did not work all that efficiently. “I didn’t think anyone even looked at fibers anymore, and I had brushed my clothes anyway. But that stuff sticks to everything . . . probably got on my coat, which I throw into the backseat now and then, where, of course, they were.”

  It occurred to him that he was talking to a cat, and he stopped.

  Greta had shown up in his backyard one day, looking less than her current regal self after a fight with some other animal had left streaks of blood-spattered mud on her white-and-gray coat. He had set out two bowls on his back stoop, one with water and one with cut-up pieces of salami, the only food he had in the house, and let her decide to approach in her own time. The salami had either won her over or confirmed her suspicion that she had found a soft touch, because within a week the cat had moved inside and Jack now made steady purchases of Purina One Salmon.

  The animal represented the only honest connection he had made to another living being in the last seven years.

  Greta’s fur clung invisibly to every surface in the house, easily transferred to Viktor. Or rather, to Severin Steckiv, Viktor’s real name. Maggie had easily found his prints on file with Interpol, since he had amassed quite a record across the Atlantic for burglary, robbery, sexual assault, and murder.

  Perhaps he should get rid of the car.

  The cat glanced up and caught his eye, as if to say: Overreaction.

  That was easy enough for her to believe, Jack thought. But...

  The idea that a cop might have killed both Viktor and Johnson should never so much as cross anyone’s mind, not even a mind like Maggie Gardiner’s. Jack counted on that. Why would it, when there were so many more reasonable candidates for killer in the city? He should sit back and let the Johnson-as-a-client-of-Viktor’s theory take hold, and that would keep everyone running in circles. Provided Maggie Gardiner kept her concerns about the pornographer’s death to herself.

  Not that Jack necessarily wanted to keep them running in circles. They were his coworkers. He respected them. It had never been his intention to make their lives more difficult, and if the city kept accumulating unsolved homicides the chief would see to it that their lives get more difficult.

  But Jack still wanted to do his job. Perhaps he should start making his clients disappear entirely. Of course that would make the job of his colleagues over in Missing Persons more difficult, but at least he didn’t have to share their coffee cups every day.

  Or Jack could provide them a solution each time he provided them a case. Frame somebody. He wanted his clients off the street. One dies, one goes to jail for it. Two birds with one stone.

  He considered that idea for exactly ten seconds before rejecting it, saying aloud: “The problem with that is, my method is meant to be humane. There’s nothing humane about jail.”

  Greta threw him another glance, no more impressed with this comment than his earlier musings.

  And it would be difficult—he would have to find two who could have a reasonable, if false, connection plus a logical motive. It would be logistically and physically complicated. But it would solve his problem, while still accomplishing his main objective.

  Not for the first time he had to shake his head over his own thought processes. In the neighborhood around him people sat over their morning coffees and teas and espressos thinking about how to shave a few minutes off the morning commute or Junior’s English grade or their unreasonable boss, while Jack calmly and reasonably weighed options regarding who might live and who might die—and now, who might suffer. How did he have any right to make those judgments?

  He didn’t. He knew that. Jack was not delusional, did not think of himself as some sort of god, did not believe that he was the only person on the planet smart enough to see a solution that wasn’t even a solution but only a small war of sporadic attrition. No, just as Jack had no illusions of a guarantee that he made things better and not worse, he had no illusions about himself. And it had nothing to do with feeling manly—or potent.

  He knew only that it needed to be done, and only he—apparently—had the strength of mind that it required. And nothing, nothing, could stop him before he neutralized Maria Stein, not this time. Not even Maggie Gardiner.

  “That is not an option,” he told Greta. “I’ll just make sure the next one both reaches the water and stays there.”

  This time the cat didn’t even look up.

  “This concerns you, too, you know. If I have to leave, I can’t take you with me. It’s back out into the cold and no Purina One Salmon for you.”

  Greta jumped off the table and walked away, tail in the air. She had gotten along just fine before Jack moved to the neighborhood, and, her exiting rear end intimated, would continue to be fine after he left.

  Damn cat.

  Jack picked up his keys and left the house, waving to his neighbor from the driveway. The guy worked at a bank, had some noisy kids and a car that would need a muffler before long, but wasn’t a bad guy, if a bit overenthusiastic about mowing on weekend mornings. Jack had forgotten his existence before reaching the street, his mind occupied with a long to-do list that had nothing to do with cat hair. He needed to put both Dillon Shaw and Maggie Gardiner out of his mind and focus on Maria Stein. She had fled an indictment once before only to set up her murderous shop in at least two more cities. That would not happen again. No matter what he had to risk to ensure it.

  Six months ago, a caseworker at the Social Security Administration had given him a list of addresses to which more than five checks arrived each month. It had been surprisingly long, and the addresses spread all over the county. First Jack eliminated any nursing homes, real ones that had a listing in the yellow pages and a website, and any government or large charity-sponsored group homes, or really any place that advertised itself as a place for seniors to spend their last years in a supportive and caring environment. The place Jack sought would not advertise, because supportive and caring would be the last words used to describe it. Hellish would be more on the mark.

  Pondering exactly how hellish had kept him from a decent night’s sleep for the past seven years.

  The caseworker believed that Jack needed this information to pursue a case of identity thieves targeting the elderly. If she called the department and asked, the case number he had given her would indeed link to such a case. She would be hard-pressed to find Jack’s name anywhere in its file, but then detectives often assisted other detectives and besides, he hadn’t asked for account access or the amounts of the checks or even the Social Security numbers—simply names and addresses, many of which were available in the local phone directory. No harm, no foul. By now she’d probably forgotten all about it, but by now more addresses may have been added. Pursuing a quarry who lived on stolen identities and untraceable finances presented many problems. It never should have taken him this long to track her down. Bile rose in his throat, forcing him to choke it back. Focus. Move forward. Master the details.

  Or they would master you.

  The first address on his list turned out to be a dilapidated home near Kinsman and East 130th. It had needed a coat of paint for at least two decades and the tiny squares of lawn sprouted more weeds than grass, but the windows had curtains and the front door looked heavy and solid. Jack pulled onto the pieces of fractured concrete that passed as a driveway, pulling close to the house as if it could provide camouflage for the vehicle. Neighborhood vandals might leave it a
lone if it seemed to belong there. Or they might be in school. Or asleep; the clock had not yet passed eight. He had stopped on his way to work.

  Once on the porch the door opened before he could reach it. A black woman, short and round, stood holding the knob, a smile already creasing her cheeks. “Can I help you?”

  He held up an ID that he had created on his home printer and presented himself as a Social Security Administration inspector. No, no, there wasn’t anything wrong, but when numerous payments came to one address they occasionally did spot checks, just to make sure, you know, that elderly folks weren’t being taken advantage of and that no fraud had occurred. “Which,” he added, “I’m sure is not the case here. It’s just a quick visit. . . .”

  He already knew from the smell he was in the wrong place. It smelled of toast and eggs and Pine-Sol instead of human decay.

  The lady at the door was Miss Ellie, and she ushered him in without further ado. An oversize bulletin board mounted on the wall at the base of the staircase announced Miss Ellie’s Home, in case any doubt lingered, as well as drawings, letters from relatives, and plenty of photos of Miss Ellie and the residents. Two large rooms sat to either side. In one four people sat around a television set tuned to the morning news. In the other, a rail-thin woman with snow-white hair used watercolors at a card table, while a man sat on a couch behind her staring at the floor.

  “You’re not listed as a care facility,” Jack said.

  “That’s ’cause I’m not. I just had this big old house all to myself, and a friend of mine needed a place to stay after her son died. Then a friend of hers—I’m not any kind of facility. We all just live here.”

  “That’s not a problem,” he assured her.

  “Come and look around.” Miss Ellie proceeded to introduce him to each of her residents. Some stared at him with rheumy eyes, others wanted to chat. The woman with the watercolors offered to do his portrait.

  Miss Ellie insisted on showing him the upstairs, though he said it would not be necessary. There were seven Social Security checks coming to the house and six people who appeared to be in good health; that was all Jack needed to know. He trusted Miss Ellie that the seventh would not be stuffed in the attic somewhere. Now he needed to leave and get to work on time.

  Still, he asked curiously: “Is there just you here—I mean, how do you take care of this place by yourself?”

  “The Lord provides,” she said as they made their way down the narrow staircase. “When I need a repair or, like last month, the hot water went out, my neighbors come over and help. Mrs. Piper’s nephew is a sweet boy, he stops by and always has a box of tools. The ladies round here bring dishes when they’ve made too much of something. He watches over His flock.”

  Jack told her she was doing an excellent job.

  “I ain’t doing nothing,” she insisted. “I’m just living.”

  He shook her hand and went back to his car, crossed the address off his list, and made a mental note to send Miss Ellie a donation when he had a chance. Anonymously, of course.

  * * *

  Friday, 9:37 a.m.

  “You want to do what?” Denny asked.

  “Check out these buildings. Hey, what’s happening with baby number three? Is she on her way or what?”

  “We thought so, but apparently she’s having second thoughts and has decided to hang around in the womb for a while longer.”

  “And who can blame her? This world can be a bit stressful.”

  The father-to-be rubbed his face, spilling a drop of coffee on his pants in the process. “Let me tell you about babies. All they do is sleep, eat, and poop. How stressful can that be? And what do you mean ‘check out’?”

  “Collect samples from the floors. If I can find the same combination of asbestos, granite, and cat hair I’ll have found our kill site.”

  “Uh-huh. I think you’re assuming these places will be empty. What if they’re occupied by, say, bad guys with guns who don’t really want you collecting samples to be used at their trial?”

  “So send the cops. They’ve got guns, too.”

  “Good idea. Except you don’t want to do that, you want to go yourself. I thought you loved our little home among the microscopes, and lately all you want to do is get out of it.”

  She sat back in the chair across from his desk, letting the base of her skull rest against the hard frame. “They won’t know exactly what I’m looking for. I won’t know exactly what I’m looking for, until I see it. I would feel a lot more confident in the samples if I could collect them myself. And it keeps the chain of custody simpler.”

  “Oh yes, you’ve always been so concerned about chain of custody.”

  “So send a cop with me,” she suggested.

  “I think that would be best. I’ll talk to Patty, have her get someone assigned to it.”

  “Cool.” Maggie bounced to her feet. “Hang in there, Daddy.”

  Denny sighed.

  Maggie returned to her desk, succumbed to temptation and did a quick check of her e-mail after microwaving the last two inches of her coffee. Then she checked on Barry Nickel’s fingers.

  The solution had worked well and they looked almost normal—except for being amputated, of course. She donned gloves, fished the right thumb out of its short jar, and dried it off with a paper towel. It did not bleed, all plasma long since drained away or dried out. It felt like a rubbery lump—in short, it felt exactly like what one would expect a cut-off finger to feel like. Maggie might be accustomed to dealing with buckets of blood and tissue-sodden clothing, but she didn’t have to get hands-on with the actual body very often. In a situation like this, it was best not to think about what you were doing. And work quickly.

  She retrieved a blank fingerprint card and dug an ink pad that still had some ink left in it out of the supply closet. Booked arrestees and even department applicants were now “rolled” on the glass platen of the LiveScan machine so ink and cards were rarely needed. She took the thumb and rolled it over the pad, pressing firmly, then rolled it again across the white card. The ridges formed a swirly pattern in black ink. But one corner of the finger remained leathery and slid against the card, so she applied a little more ink and tried again, weighting the card down this time with the ink pad. Then she had a decent right thumbprint.

  Any finger would do. If she inked the left ring finger and determined that it matched the left ring finger on Barry Nickel’s arrest record that would be just fine. But if for some reason only one fingerprint had ever been collected from Barry Nickel—a pawn slip, a traffic ticket, some sort of ID or visa—it would almost certainly be the right thumb. Besides, thumbs usually created the clearest prints, the easiest to compare. It went downhill from there, with the “pinky” finger often useless.

  She dropped the thumb back into its jar with a sigh of relief, not bothering to clean off the ink. The solution would soak it off. Then she went to her monitor and located Barry Nickel’s 10-prints collected after an arrest for possession of child pornography. They were nine years old but that didn’t matter; fingerprints didn’t change. She printed out the set and immediately saw the problem.

  But she put them side by side with the new right thumbprint, just to make sure.

  Then she sighed deeply, pulled out the other nine finger jars, and tried to send her mind to a happy place.

  Chapter 22

  Friday, 10:04 a.m.

  “Now say that again,” Patty ordered.

  Jack waited. He knew what was coming.

  With some news best delivered in person, Maggie had walked over to the detective unit, armed with her sets of fingerprint cards. Jack noticed how she held one between thumb and index finger, a little bit away from her . . . apparently even crime scene techs get the creeps. She had caught Patty at her desk, stopping in to pick up her lunch from the office refrigerator in between interviews, which included Barry Nickel’s attorney. Most of the other detectives were out as well, but Riley had been arguing on the phone with the corrections dep
artment about getting the name of the guards who had been on duty the night Brian Johnson disappeared while Jack made more coffee. He had been up late, watching Dillon Shaw wander aimlessly through the streets of Cleveland. And then Maggie Gardiner had arrived, weaving between the guy restocking the pop machine and a newbie detective dribbling a basketball while trying to get a CI on the phone.

  Of course Jack had to say something about his disappearing act the night before, and of course he had no idea what that something should be, so he intercepted her at the copier and under the humming fluorescent lights said, “Sorry about . . . bailing.”

  He didn’t say anything about “dinner” or “last night.” Nothing perked up detectives’ ears more than the words last night.

  She seemed embarrassed, uncomfortable, and distinctly irritated, but covered it well. She said, “No problem,” in a hearty tone that would convince anyone but him, then turned her back, leaned over Patty’s desk, and had a quick, murmured conversation that caused the detective to pinch the bridge of her nose, hard enough to leave a red mark.

  Jack turned around, nearly colliding with Rick Gardiner. Who regarded Jack as if seeing him in a new and very harsh light.

  “You chatting with my ex?” Rick had asked, with a complete absence of inflection.

  “Yeah. I think she has something to tell us.”

  Jack had brushed past him without further ado. He might be concerned over cat hair and elderly housing and Dillon Shaw, but he’d be damned if he’d waste two brain cells worrying about a nonstarter like Rick Gardiner.

  Now they were back in the conference-slash-storage room so that they could hear themselves think without the Coke cans and the basketball in the background. Riley had brought his phone with him. Patty kicked a carton of shrink-wrapped blank forms out of her way with slightly more violence than necessary to slump into a chair and entwined her fingers over a small pyramid of worn handcuffs. From there she bade Maggie to continue.