Fury

by G. M. Ford

  “You knew,” Kesey said in a tone that suggested that if Corso could find out, anybody could find out. “In any organization the size of the SPD, leaks are to be expected. Considering how many people from the original task force knew about the tags…I’m amazed it hasn’t hit the papers before.”

  “We’ll be the first to admit that these new developments certainly cast something of a shadow,” the DA said. “We are in constant communication with the governor, but as of this moment”—he spread his hands—“we have absolutely nothing that would warrant a request for a stay of execution.”

  “Not to mention that it’s an election year,” Hawes growled. “Governor Locke would rather be set on fire than have to stop the execution. He’ll take less heat for juicing Himes by mistake than he would for letting him go, even if Himes really was innocent.”

  “And you want us to hold the story of the new murders?” Corso asked.

  The chief was suddenly red in the face. “You have to. We’ll be inundated. A hundred nuts will confess. We’ll get thousands of phoned-in leads. The story will bring our current investigation to a standstill.”

  “What’s in it for us?” Hawes asked.

  “What do you want?” Kesey asked.

  “We want access to information on all ten murders,” Corso said. “We want copies of the field notes from the original detectives. We want copies of the autopsy results and the accompanying photographs, and we want a look at all forensic evidence.”

  Again the room erupted. Corso shouted them down. “And we want all of it between now and four o’clock this afternoon. If we don’t have everything we’ve asked for by then, we go public.”

  The district attorney got to his feet and walked over two places. Put his arms around the chief and the mayor and pulled the three of them into a tight, muttering knot.

  Dorothy Sheridan sat openmouthed. Hale straightened up. The chief was the color of an eggplant. The mayor’s pallor was more like old custard. They exchanged disgusted looks.

  “We keep the holdbacks,” the chief said. “We have an ongoing investigation to consider here.”

  Corso agreed. Kesey worked his lips in and out a couple of times and then looked over at Donald and Wald.

  “Donald…you and Wald see to it these people get what they need,” he said.

  Both cops opened their mouths to protest. “We can’t let civilians—” Donald began. Kesey raised his voice. “Did you hear what I said, Lieutenant Donald?”

  “But—” the cop started.

  “Did you?” Louder this time.

  “Yessir,” Donald snapped.

  “What about you, Sergeant Wald?” the chief asked. “Any questions?”

  “No, sir,” Wald said.

  Without another word, the chief and the mayor joined Hale in the full upright position and marched out like Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

  “You do have a way about you, Mr. Corso,” Mrs. V. said the moment the door closed behind Dorothy Sheridan.

  Corso turned to the cops. “How do you want to do this?” he asked.

  Donald ran a hand through his hair, which, of course, fell perfectly back into place. He scratched the side of his neck. “Somebody is going to have to go to the medical examiner’s office with one of us,” he said, “and somebody is going to have to go across the street with the other, I guess.”

  Wald shook his head. “Densmore’s gonna go ratsh…” He stopped. Flicked a gaze at Mrs. V. “He’s gonna lose his mind,” he finished.

  Natalie Van Der Hoven got to her feet, scowling imperiously down at the detectives. “I’ll leave it to you gentlemen to work out the details,” she announced. Wald pulled the door open and stood behind it as the Seattle Sun contingent filed out. For a second there, just as Mrs. V. swooshed past him, it looked like Donald was going to curtsy.

  Like the lady said, the details got worked out. After getting back their belongings, Corso and Dougherty would meet the cops across the street in Tully’s coffee shop. Meg was going with Donald. Up to the medical examiner’s office. Lie-detector results, autopsy reports, and photos. Corso was going with Wald, across the street to the Public Safety Building for detectives’ notes and a look at the hard evidence. Wald stepped out from behind the door.

  “Come on,” he said.

  Donald and Wald got off at ground level. Corso and Dougherty took the elevator all the way to the bottom. Walked down the long basement hall toward booking.

  “I’d kill for a shower,” Dougherty offered.

  “You and me both,” Corso said.

  Corso bumped her with his elbow. “What’d you think of Donald?”

  “Ooooh,” she enthused. “That is one fine boy toy,” she said.

  “You really think so?”

  She laughed at him. Women to the left, men to the right. The turnkey dumped the envelope out onto the battered counter. “Check your belongings carefully,” he intoned. He pushed a clipboard at Corso. “Sign on line fifty-one.”

  Corso refilled his pockets and then scribbled his name on the dotted line.

  “Sergeant Wald called down,” the turnkey said. “Says you guys better go out the garage entrance down here, ’cause there’s a herd of media types out front.”

  Corso thanked him for the tip and then followed his directions to the garage. Dougherty was already there. She had the back of the Nikon open.

  “They get the film?” Corso asked.

  “No film,” she said with a smirk. “It’s digital.”

  “They get the disk?”

  “They got a disk.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “They didn’t get the disk,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. I’ve still got the shots I took of the body.”

  “Where—” he began.

  She shook her head. “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” she said.

  “I hope it was user-friendly?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

  Together, they followed the green exit signs through the bowels of the building, snaking back and forth among the patrol cars and the concrete pillars until they came to a gray steel door labeled “James Street.” Dougherty grabbed the knob and stepped out, stopped in her tracks, and then suddenly turned and gave Corso a toothy grin he’d never seen from her before.

  “Don’t look now, Ken, but I think Malibu Barbie’s here,” she said.

  Corso stepped out into a light drizzle. Overhead, dirty clouds had swallowed the tops of the buildings. Cars had their lights on. He looked uphill. Nothing. Then downhill. Cynthia Stone in a red plastic raincoat, little matching boots and umbrella.

  “You still have my number?” Corso asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Call me when you finish at the medical examiner’s office.”

  Dougherty said she would and then turned downhill, strode past Cynthia without making eye contact, and disappeared around the corner onto Fourth Avenue.

  Corso had forgotten how Cynthia walked. That one-foot-in-front-of-the-other thing she did. The delicious way each step rustled with the silken sound of flesh passing flesh, until a guy was overcome and just had to see for himself what was rubbing together.

  She held the umbrella tight against her shoulder with her right hand. The left she kept in the pocket of her raincoat. The heels of her red plastic boots clicked as she walked a circle around Corso. “You look good, Frank,” she said. “The long hair becomes you.”

  Corso kept his mouth shut. On the one hand, she looked the same. Same surgically assisted profile and baby-blue eyes. On the other, she looked older than he remembered and more like her mother than he’d ever noticed before. Gonna end up with the same wrinkled, drawstring mouth that she’d be able to cinch up like a sack over everything she found in some way distasteful or disappointing.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me I look good too?”

  “You know how you look, Cynthia. It’s what you do.”

  She looked downhill toward the corner of
Fourth Avenue. “Developing a fetish for big girls, are you, Frank?”

  “They’re easier to hold on to,” Corso said.

  She made a disbelieving face. “You didn’t really think I was going to cling to the hull of a sinking ship, did you, Frank?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “What can I say, Frank? When it was good, it was good.” She shrugged with one shoulder. “Life goes on.”

  “You always were a sentimental fool, Cynth.”

  “I hear she’s colorfully decorated.”

  Behind her, the sounds of car horns bounced off the damp air. The overhanging clouds gave the feeling of being in a low-ceilinged room.

  “How’d you know to look for me here?” Corso asked.

  She smirked. “I have my sources.”

  “No, Cynth, you have a staff that has sources. You, personally, couldn’t find your own ass in the dark.”

  She twirled the umbrella and stepped in close to Corso. Same perfume as always. “As I recall, you never had much trouble finding my ass in the dark.”

  “Must have been the zeal of the organs for each other,” Corso said.

  She raised a sculptured eyebrow. “So you say now,” she quipped.

  “I’ve gotta go,” Corso said.

  She raised the umbrella and leaned her breast against Corso’s arm. The insistent mist hissed against the plastic. “You’ve made quite a comeback, Frank.”

  He looked into her eyes and remembered what Bo Holland had once said about Cynthia, a couple of years before she and Corso became an item. Back when Corso and Bo shared desk space at the Times, and she’d come waltzing through the newsroom, dragging every eye in her wake. Bo’d worked with her before. Someplace in Florida. St. Pete maybe. Said that she was like a beautifully appointed room, its walls lined with a series of doors, which presumably led to other wings of what must surely be a mansion. Surprise was, though, that it didn’t matter which door you chose to open, because all doors led to the backyard. What you see is all there is. At the time, Corso had attributed the bitterness of Bo’s tone to the pain of a spurned lover. You live and learn.

  Corso stepped out from beneath the umbrella. “You come here to help me plot my progress through life or did you want something in particular?”

  “I want in on the story, Frank. Because of you, that fish-wrap tabloid you work for has had the story all to itself for the better part of a week. You’re all the buzz on every network, but you know it can’t last.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because it’s unnatural, Frank. Big dogs eat; little dogs go home hungry. That’s just the way it is. You know it, and I know it.” She took another step his way, covering his head again with the umbrella, leaning her hip against his. “Come on…,” she intoned in her silkiest talking-head tone. “We can still share, can’t we? What have you got for tomorrow? I’ll give you an attribution.” The wind carried her scent to him again. He remembered the smell of her hair and how she liked to sing show tunes in the shower but could never quite remember the words.

  Corso couldn’t resist. “What I’ve got for tomorrow, Cynth, will blow those little red boots right off your feet.” The raincoat crinkled as she leaned in it against Corso.

  “Sometimes you used to prefer I leave the boots on,” she said.

  Corso opened his mouth to speak, felt a sudden dryness in his throat, and instead turned and allowed gravity to pull him down the hill toward Fourth Avenue.

  Chapter 18

  Thursday, September 20

  3:45 P.M. Day 4 of 6

  Never heard her comin’. Not till the crash of the door. Scared the shit out of him so bad he come off the bed like a rocket, seein’ nothin’ but this shape and the new hole in the Tony Hawk poster. Same goddamn place he’d spent a half hour taping up.

  “You ain’t neva moved,” she said. “Your lazy ass is esactly where I left you this morning. Din I tell you to…”

  Doan know what happened. It’s like a dream or something, like suddenly I’m up off the bed standin’ in front of her. With my right fist up, all shakin’ and shit.

  She stepped in closer. Talkin’ right up in his face now. Her eyes bulged in her head. “You raise your hand to me? You?” She put hers on her hips. “What all the hell I done for you…and you raise your hand to me.”

  It’s like my throat is closed and won’t nothin’ come out.

  “The beatins I took so’s he’d leave you be, an you raise your hand to me?” Got spit in the corner of her mouth. “They usta know my name down at Community Health from all the beatins I took on your account.”

  “I din mean no—” he started.

  “Where you learn that shit from, Robert? You learn that from him? Things doan go right, you just slap the bitch around some. You bust her lip, she shut the fuck up. That what ‘Big Bobby Boyd’ teach you? He teach you like that?”

  “I din mean—”

  “You neva mean, Robert. Neva. Shit just seem to happen while you mindin’ your own business, doan it? Big Bobby Boyd neva meant it neither. You axed him, it was like it just slipped out and ended on my face. Come back all sweet and all. ‘Sorry, baby, sorry. Neva gonna happen again.’”

  He sat down on the bed and rubbed his face with both hands.

  “I’ll tell you, boy…may be time for me to revaluate my priorities. Yes, sir.” She wandered across the middle of the room. “Doan need no two jobs to take care of myself. No, sir. I get by just fine on my market money.”

  No way he can tell her what he seen. The eyes on that motherfucker. Neva seen nothin’ like that since Randy’s big brother took all that fuckin PCP an run facefirst through the shoe-store window. Had his paint cans in his pocket and one leg over the wall when the back doors of the van popped open. Fucker come out, wearin’ rubber gloves, went over and opened the top of the Dumpster. Both lids. That’s why he didn’t split. Wasn’t the gloves. He stayed ’cause he couldn’t figure why the guy’d need to open both of them. Damn near fell off the wall when that dude come out from the van carryin’ somethin’ in his arms. Real careful puttin’ it in, leanin’ in, like arrangin’ shit. No way he can tell her about those fuckin’ eyes and the feelin’ he’s had ever since.

  He peeked between his fingers to see her looking at him like he’d never seen before, flopped onto his back on the bed, pulled the covers around his shoulders, and rolled over to face the wall. He listened to her labored breathing. Wanted to say something but couldn’t force anything through his lips. In a minute, he heard the sound of her shoes on the stairs.

  Chapter 19

  Thursday, September 20

  5:40 P.M. Day 4 of 6

  The cab’s headlights punched narrow channels into the dense fog. Dougherty must have had the window open. Corso could hear her voice as she told the cabbie to drive all the way down to the end. Heard the cabbie whine about how he was gonna have to back out blind, and then a minute later he heard the driver’s voice again as he told her the fare was $9.75. The interior light flickered for a moment, and she stepped out with a pile of paperwork held beneath her left arm.

  “Hey,” he called as the cab began to back out of the lot.

  The sound of his voice nearly lifted her from the ground. “Jesus—you scared me,” she said. With her right hand, she swiped at the fog, as if she could brush it aside.

  Corso started across the pavement toward her. “Sorry,” he said.

  She took several deep breaths. “I guess I’m a little spooked. Must be what happens when you spend an afternoon with the dead.”

  She’d changed clothes since he’d seen her last. Motorcycle jacket. Black tights, lycra top. Shorter skirt. Different pair of Doc Martens with thinner soles and shiny silver eyelets. A sorta Janet Jackson meets Morticia Addams look.

  “You smell better,” he said.

  “I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, just ask anybody. They’ll tell you.”

  “I stopped at home after the morgue. About the time medical examiners star
t making it a point to stand upwind of you, ya gotta figure it’s time for a shower.”

  Forty yards north, the fog had enveloped Kamon, the trendy Japanese restaurant at the north end of the lot. Out on Fairview Avenue, yellow cones of light poured down from the street lamps, only to be swallowed whole by the fog before ever reaching the ground. Rush-hour traffic was moving at ten miles an hour. Cold dinners tonight.

  Dougherty shivered in the dampness. Used her free hand to pull the jacket tight around her. “I hate this damn fog,” she said. “It goes right through you.”

  Corso nodded his agreement. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of it.”

  He took her elbow and led her across the lot and down the ramp to C dock. As he used his key on the gate, she said, “A boat, huh? That’s very you, Corso. Very you.”

  “You think so?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Like it’s all disconnected from everything else. Just sorta like floating on the surface of things.”

  Corso grimaced as he pulled open the gate. “You really ought to consider a career in radio, you know that, Dougherty? You could do one of those advice shows…you know, like Dr. What’shername there.”

  “That Nazi bitch? As if.”

  They walked carefully down the dock. Ten feet ahead, the concrete disappeared into the fog. The air was heavy and still. On both sides, masts and rigging appeared ghostly in the filtered light, as if they were strolling among the skeletal remains of a drowned forest. In the empty slips, the water lay still and black, like obsidian. Another thirty feet and Corso’s salon lights became visible on the right. He pulled her over in front of him. “Watch your head,” he said, pointing at a dark shape ahead in the fog.

  “What’s that?”

  “An anchor,” he said. Over the weekend, some drunk had docked a forty-foot Carver way too far into the slip, leaving a sixty-pound Danforth anchor suspended, head high out over the dock. “Nice,” she said.

  “Home, sweet home,” Corso said as he turned into his own slip.

  She stopped at the stern. Hugging herself. Hopping from foot to foot. She read the name out loud. “Salt-heart,” and beneath that, “Foamfollower.” She furrowed her brow. “Where do I know that name from?”