Fury

by G. M. Ford

  He’s feeling shaky but sacs up. “What about it?”

  “About the guy in the black van,” Goth Girl say. And now he feels cold all over. Got goose bumps up and down his arms. He don’t say nothin’.

  She’s sweepin’ her head around like a searchlight. “What’s this van?” she want to know. “This guy?” The big guy ask her if she been watchin’ the thing wid that Himes guy on the tube all week. She say “yeah” ’bout what a shame they got to let him go and all. How the likes of that Himes fella ought to be either dead or in the jailhouse.

  Big guy say, “We think maybe Robert got a look at the real killer,” and all of a sudden, it sound like somebody pulled the plug. Real quiet like. Then she say, “You know what this man’s talkin’ about, Robert? You see somethin’ like that?” He don’t say nothin’. Just tryin’ not to piss his pants. She gives him the brow.

  “You know what he’s talkin’ about, doan you?”

  “This had nothing to do with tagging,” Ponytail say.

  Goth Girl tell him, “The tag’s already painted over.”

  “Wasn’t no tag. Just some damn letters.”

  “’Cause you got interrupted,” the guy say.

  “You know all this shit, why you down here talkin’ to me?”

  She reach over, slap him in the ear. “You watch your mouth,” she say. When he don’t say nothin’, she get all up in his face. Grab him by the chin, make him look in her eyes. “You know somethin’ about this, doan you?”

  Ain’t no point in tryin’ to lie. He nods. She puts the voice on him. “You better tell these people what you seen.” She lets go of his face. “Maybe all you stayin’ out all night finally do some good for a change. Go on…tell them.”

  “I seen him,” he say, “after he put somethin’ in wid the trash, he come around the front and I seen what he looked like.”

  All of a sudden, they the ones not sayin’ shit.

  Chapter 23

  Friday, September 21

  8:23 P.M. Day 5 of 6

  “Skinny little white guy. Weird eyes. Somewhere around thirty-five or forty. Wearing some kind of blue or black uniform. Driving a primer-gray van with quarter-moon bubble windows in back.”

  “Maybe a cop. Maybe not. Depending on which kids you believe.”

  Corso nodded as he forked the last piece of hot turkey sandwich into his mouth. They were ensconced in a booth in Andy’s Diner, a landmark greasy spoon consisting of an interconnected maze of converted railway cars. Dougherty had long since inhaled an order of meat loaf and mashed potatoes, followed by a humongous piece of cherry pie à la mode. She sat leaning against the wall, squeaking her thumb along the rim of her water glass.

  Corso washed the turkey down with a healthy swig of milk, then gestured toward Dougherty with his fork. “You remember what Buster Davis told us about the gate?”

  “He said somebody must have climbed over.”

  “But all three kids say no.”

  “So?”

  “So…he also said that there were only two keys. Said he had one and his security company had the other.”

  “So you’re thinking what?”

  “Security guard,” Corso said. “It fits with the guy wearing a uniform, and it’s consistent with the FBI profile. Not only is it a perfect job for a loner, but it explains how somebody could be familiar with all the different locales where the bodies have been found.”

  “What do we do?” she asked.

  Corso thought it over. “We call the cops. Like the god-fearing citizens we are.”

  Behind the counter, a short-order cook in a stained white T-shirt was flipping eggs and hash browns. The place was deserted.

  “I hate giving that Densmore asshole anything,” Dougherty groused.

  “No argument there,” Corso said. “If Himes wasn’t sitting on death row and I wasn’t sure this guy was going to kill again real soon, I’d be inclined to let them figure it out for themselves.”

  “You’re right,” she sighed. “We can’t take the chance. I couldn’t live with myself if it turned out to be this guy and he killed again.”

  Corso dabbed at his lips with a white paper napkin. Pulled his phone from his pocket and pushed a few buttons. Asked for the general number of the Seattle Police Department. Said thanks and dialed again. Asked for Lieutenant Andrew Densmore. Said it was an urgent matter of police business. Waited with the phone held an inch from his ear. Dougherty heard Densmore come on the line. “Densmore,” he barked.

  “It’s Frank Corso.”

  Silence for a moment, then a bitter laugh. “What is it, asshole?” the cop asked. “After tonight’s fiasco you still don’t think you’ve fucked things up enough yet?”

  Corso wasn’t sure exactly what Densmore meant but said, “I think I’ve got something for you.”

  “You haven’t been listening to me, have you, Corso?”

  “I may have a line on the real killer.”

  “I’m gonna tell you one more time, Corso. If you and circus girl so much as sniff at my investigation, I’m gonna ream the both of you.”

  “Listen to me—” Corso began.

  “No,” Densmore said quickly. “You got something to say, why don’t you say it to Tiffany Eyre or maybe to her parents.”

  Corso felt a steel ball bearing roll down his spine. “Who’s—” he began.

  “We found Tiffany this morning in a Dumpster on Union Street.” Corso had to force the phone against his ear.

  “Why don’t you talk to her parents?” Densmore sneered. “If you think you’ve got something to say, say it to them. Tell ’em how you and that rag you work for muddied up an ongoing investigation. Tell ’em how we might have had the guy by now if you’d kept your goddamn nose out of it.” The line went dead.

  Corso sat for a moment, staring at the phone.

  “They’ve got another dead girl.”

  Dougherty brought both hands to her mouth. “Oh…God…so soon.”

  “Motherfucker,” Corso said.

  The word had barely escaped his lips when he noticed the waitress scowling by the side of the table. Big red hands on half-acre hips. “Earlene,” the badge said.

  “You kiss your mother with that mouth?” she wanted to know.

  “Sorry,” Corso said. Across the table, Dougherty grimaced.

  The waitress pulled the check from her pocket. “Anything else?” she asked. When they said no, she dropped the check onto the table and squeaked out of view.

  “Well?” Dougherty said.

  “He’s winding up. The killings are going to get closer together. He’s working his way into a murder frenzy.”

  Suddenly Dougherty’s expression froze and she was pointing one of her black-tipped fingers out over Corso’s head. He looked back over his shoulder. The cook had come out from behind the counter. He was sitting on a stool, shoveling eggs and hash browns into his mouth, gazing up at the silent TV mounted against the ceiling in the corner of the room.

  Split screen. Photo of Walter Leroy Himes. Another of the death chamber. Cut to CNN logo. Washington State Penitentiary, Cynthia Stone reporting…gold graphic “LIVE.” Cynthia behind her serious face. “We are now less than thirty hours from the event…” The screen went black. The cook dropped the remote, wiped his mouth. Spoke to Earlene.

  “World’d be a better place without that Himes fella,” he said.

  “Amen,” she said.

  “We’ve got a problem,” Corso said.

  “What did I tell you about using ‘we’?”

  “A serious problem.”

  Hawes scoffed. “Let me tell you about problems.” He waved his arm toward the newsroom. “I’ve got to be ready. I’ve got to pretend that Himes might get a stay. Which means I’ve got thirteen people I can’t send home on a Friday night. All of whom had plans and who now hate me, and all of whom I’ve gotta pay time and a half while they’re out there, cursing me under their collective breaths and wishing I was dead.”

  “I think I’ve g
ot a serious lead on the murderer.”

  “So…call the cops.”

  “I did. They don’t want to hear about it. Guess what?”

  “I’ll bite.”

  “They’ve got another dead woman. Number eleven.”

  Hawes sat forward in a hurry. “Says who?”

  His face darkened as Corso filled him in. “But the kid didn’t actually see a body,” he said when Corso had finished.

  “No.”

  “What was your impression of the kid?”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say he was being straight with us.”

  Hawes blew the air from his lungs. “Then we’ve definitely got to notify SPD.”

  “I did,” Corso said again.

  Hawes reached for the phone, stopped his hand in midair. “Maybe Mrs. Van Der Hoven ought to…,” he said after a moment.

  “You ask me, our mutual popularity is at an all-time low.”

  “Funny, but subscriptions are at an all-time high,” Hawes mused.

  “You suppose there’s a connection there?”

  “I prefer not to think about it.”

  “We could go public. Save our asses by writing the story.”

  Hawes rolled his eyes. “And if we’re wrong?”

  “Then it’s like the Atlanta bombing all over again. The poor bastard in the van becomes the new Richard Jewell.”

  “And if we’re right?”

  “Then we just gave away one hell of a story.”

  “At least our asses would be covered.”

  “That’s the Pulitzer spirit,” Corso said.

  “You got a better idea?”

  “We’ve still got a full day. Maybe Dougherty and I can turn this guy.”

  “And where is the indispensable Miss Dougherty?”

  “I took her home. We’ve been at it since the news conference yesterday morning.”

  “The news business is tough that way.”

  “We’ve gotta do something.”

  Hawes rocked in his chair as he thought it over. “You got a plan?” he asked finally. Corso told him what he had in mind.

  Hawes winced and nodded simultaneously. He folded his stubby arms across his chest and leaned so far back in his chair his feet came off the ground. Corso watched his lips move in and out as he tried to square the idea with himself. “You know what it’s like to go to the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference every year as the managing editor of the Seattle Sun, Corso?” Corso said he didn’t. “I’m like”—he searched for a word—“plankton. The absolute bottom of the food chain. The bar conversation stops every time I slide onto a stool. The big-timers look at me with a combination of pity and something more like terror. As if my presence reminds them of how bad things could actually get.” He sat forward. “I stopped going a few years back. Got to the point where if one more of those guys gave me that patronizing little smile, I was going to pop him one.” He looked up at Corso. “This year’s event is in Denver, right after the Pulitzers in April. I was thinking this morning that I might just go. Maybe do a little smiling of my own.”

  “Then we better hope like hell I’m not right and that he doesn’t kill again between now and tomorrow night.”

  Hawes folded his arms even tighter. Full straight-jacket hug.

  “Bite your tongue,” he said.

  Chapter 24

  Saturday, September 22

  9:21 A.M. Day 6 of 6

  Yuppies love brunch. Especially on weekends, when, having survived yet another week in their cubicles, they come lurching out of their high-priced hovels to migrate purblind toward the bistro du jour, where, after an hour or so of waiting in the rain, they’re awarded a table at which they languish well into the shank of the afternoon, sipping oceans of latte and picking at divine goat cheese omelets.

  Julia’s Bakery was packed to the rafters. Headline on the Seattle Times read “Judgment Day.” The Post Intelligencer blared: “And One to Go!” The clock on the wall read 9:21 before Corso and Dougherty squeezed inside, shuffled their way through the service line, and then, for want of a table, back out the side door into the parking lot.

  Corso set his coffee atop a blue mailbox and zipped his coat. The fog had disappeared. Leaving acrylic-blue skies, marred only by occasional patches of fast-moving clouds. “You look remarkably status quo today,” he offered. Beneath her full-length black leather coat Dougherty wore a white blouse and a pair of blue jeans tucked into black cowboy boots. She’d changed her lip and nail colors from the usual black to fire-engine red. She looked like a bigger version of fifties pinup girl Betty Paige.

  She glared at him and grunted.

  He retrieved his coffee. Blew away the steam. She rolled her cup between her hands. “Where do we start?”

  “Four crime scenes each.” He recited the list from memory.

  “What about the other locations?”

  “We’ll do this one together. Just to make sure we’re on the same page.”

  “This one?”

  “Yeah, remember? Susanne Tovar, the first victim, was found out back of here in the bakery’s Dumpster.”

  “What about the hotel?”

  “Buster Davis is our control group. Since he’s the one got us started on this thing, I want to call him last. That way, whatever we find out today won’t be tainted by what we already know.”

  She stopped a strip of cinnamon roll just short of her mouth. “I don’t understand.”

  “If we call Buster first and ask him what security company he uses, then we’ll have that company implanted in our heads while we’re out there knocking on doors. It’s better to do it blind. It’s just human nature to try to prove what you already know. When we’re all done, we’ll see how many duplicates we get, and then we’ll call Buster.”

  He gestured with his cup. “Come on.”

  They crossed Eastlake Avenue and stood on the sidewalk looking back at the bakery. Corso pointed north. “We’re going to have to do everything commercial within a square block of each dump site.”

  Dougherty stuffed the last of the roll in her mouth. Held up a finger as she chewed and swallowed. She spread her arms. “Across the street like this too?”

  “Yeah. If it’s a neighborhood like this, you know, mostly residential with its own little business district, try to do every storefront. We’ve got one woman found three blocks from the Northgate Mall. If it’s like that, wall-to-wall businesses for ten blocks all around, then we’re going to have to do the best we can.”

  Together they walked to the far end of the block. Holiday Travel on one corner, Rory’s pub across the street. Corso opened the door to Holiday Travel and stepped aside, allowing Dougherty to enter first. A young woman. Thick, wheat-colored hair, held back from her face by a tortoiseshell clip. Tapping away at the computer. She swiveled a one-eighty in her chair. Found a big smile.

  “I’ll bet you two want to get out of the rain,” she said hopefully.

  “Sounds great to me,” Corso said. “But unfortunately, right at this moment, I don’t think time is going to allow.”

  “I’ve got seven days, eight nights in Mazatlán…airfare, hotel, continental breakfast…four forty-nine ninety-five, double occupancy…plus tax, of course.”

  He gestured toward Dougherty. “My friend and I were thinking about renting that vacant storefront up at the end of the block.”

  “Oh,” the woman said. “I hadn’t noticed anything was empty.”

  “Up past the Italian restaurant,” Dougherty said.

  “We were wondering whether or not the building owners provide security or whether it was something we’d have to pay for out of our own pockets.”

  “Oh no,” she said. “We can barely get the real estate corporation to fix the plumbing. Security comes out of the individual merchants’ pockets.”

  “Who do you use?” Corso asked.

  She pulled out a sliding shelf in her desk. A business card was taped to the wood.

  “Reliable Security. In Shoreline. S
ame as everybody in the building. They supposedly give us a group discount.” She waved an unbelieving hand. “Supposedly gets us a discount from our insurance companies too. So, I guess it probably evens out in the end.”

  Corso thanked her. She pulled a business card from a silver holder on her desk.

  “Holiday for all your travel needs,” she said.

  Corso thanked her again, stuffed the card in his jacket pocket, and followed Dougherty out onto the sidewalk. “At this point,” he said, “a week on a beach sounds pretty good.”

  Dougherty’s laugh was anything but amused. “Yeah. I’ll break out my thong.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Dougherty. As far as I’m concerned, you’re the very flower of American womanhood.”

  “I’m the whole goddamn garden.”

  “I’m serious,” he said.

  “So am I,” she said. She bopped him on the arm. “But thanks for the thought, big fella. What now?”

  Corso pointed across the street. “Let’s start over there.”

  They split up. Corso did the florist, Dougherty the tavern. Corso the pizza joint, Dougherty the café. It took an hour and fifty-five minutes to work the neighborhood. Corso pulled the car keys from his pocket and held them out. “You take the car. I’ll cab it.” He checked his watch. “Where do you want to meet?”

  “This is going to take forever,” she said.

  Corso pointed north along Eastlake Avenue. “Half a mile up the road there’s a place on the left called Bridges.”

  “I know it.”

  “How late are the stores open?”

  “On a Saturday night? Till nine probably.”

  “Let’s meet at Bridges at nine-thirty.”

  5:56 P.M. Day 6 of 6

  “Move to the front of the cell.” The voice clattered through the concrete and steel, like a dry stick drawn along a fence. Walter Leroy Himes rose from his bunk and shuffled toward the light. He remained expressionless as he leaned his back against the cell door and stuck his arms out through the bars. Practiced hands snapped a cuff around each wrist. “Clear,” a metallic voice called.