“Not exactly,” she agreed.
The courtyard building was clean, well lit. The panel of names and buttons looked new, metallic. Most of the name plates next to the buttons were filled in, neatly printed. None of the name plates read “Yunkin” or anything like it. There was, however, one plate that read: THIBIDAULT, MANAGER.
Flack pressed the button next to the name. No response. He pressed again. Then he put his thumb on the button and didn’t let up until he heard a voice, tinny and distant, say, “Come back in the morning.”
“Police,” said Flack.
“Crap,” sighed the tinny voice. “Coming.”
A few seconds and Flack heard something on the other side of the solid wood door. There was a slightly larger than standard peephole. The eye that appeared was wide open.
“Hold it up,” said the man beyond the door.
Flack held up his ID, knowing there was no way the man could possibly read it through the hole. The door opened. The black man who stood there wore dark slacks, a green shirt and a matching green cowboy hat. He also held a pair of sunglasses in his hand.
“Poker night,” the man explained. “Just heading out.”
He was no more than five foot five and weighed no more than a hundred and fifteen pounds.
“I’m looking for a man. Late twenties. White. About my height. Walks with a limp.”
“Melvoy,” the little cowboy said.
“Melvoy what?”
“No,” said the man. “Lee Melvoy. Apartment Two-A right over mine. What’s he done?”
“Is he in?”
“Heard him go out about an hour ago, maybe less. What’s he done?”
“I’d like to take a look in his apartment,” said Flack.
“Don’t you need a warrant?”
“I’ve got one.”
“What’s he done?”
Flack showed him the warrant. He had picked it up from Judge Abbott a few hours earlier. It gave no address, but it read, “the residence of one Keith Yunkin.”
“He’s a quiet guy.”
“Jeffrey Dahmer was a quiet guy,” said Flack.
“Yeah. Melvoy do something bad?”
“Looks that way.”
“Knives,” said the cowboy.
“Knives?”
“He sells ’em. Shop on Stoneman. All kind of knives. Says right on the window, ‘Bohanan’s Collectables, Combat, Cutlery.’ Works there. Guns too. He stab somebody?”
“Let’s go look at his apartment so you can get to your poker game, cowboy.”
When they got to the apartment, Thibidault opened the door, reached in and hit a switch. A light came on in the overhead fixture in the middle of the ceiling.
They stepped inside.
The one-bedroom apartment was as clean and sparse as a monk’s cell. Flack had seen apartments like this. He had even seen a monk’s cell. Monks get murdered too. Not often. Sometimes monks are murderers. Not often either.
“Keeps it clean,” said Thibidault. “I wish all the tenants were like him.”
“Be careful what you wish for,” said Flack.
The living area held one straight-backed wooden chair with curlicue arms. The chair faced a low dresser atop of which was a fifteen-inch television set. Next to the chair was a wooden-topped desk table with black metal folding legs. In a corner to the left was a cot covered by a sheet under a khaki blanket. The blanket was pulled tight. A pillow rested at the head of the cot. The pillow showed no sign of wrinkle.
There was one thing on the wall and one thing only. To the right of the cot was a framed black-and-white photograph of a teenage boy and a crew-cut young man. The boy’s hair was tumbled over his forehead. The man had his arm over the shoulder of the boy. The photograph had been blown up as much as it could bear without losing the image to grain.
“That’s him,” Thibidault. “The older one, only he don’t smile, never saw him smile. I don’t know who the kid is. Okay if I go now?”
“The kid’s name is Adam,” said Flack, moving toward a closed door to his left. “And no, I’d appreciate it if you stayed.”
Thibadualt sighed deeply.
Flack might want a witness, depending on what he found or didn’t find. The impatient man at his side wouldn’t be much of a witness, but he would be better than none at all.
Flack moved to the closed door, opened it and reached over to turn on the light.
“Never been in there,” said Thibidault. “Not since Melvoy moved it.”
A small plywood desk sat in the middle of the room. On top of the desk was a computer that hummed in sleep mode. Against the wall to the right were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Simple. Planks nailed neatly together. Magazines, neatly lined up, were piled on the lower shelves.
On the wall to the left were two old, battered, unmatched display cases with glass windows. Behind the glass windows were neatly displayed knives, none large, most in sheaths or folded closed. There were about two dozen of them. Through the glass panes Flack could see that the blades that were visible were sharp and glistening.
On the back wall was corkboard on which a series of photographs had been pinned with small plastic push pins.
“Who’re they?” asked Thibidault.
Flack looked at the photographs of Patricia Mycrant, James Feldt, Timothy Byrold, Ellen Janecek, Paul Sunderland and another woman and four more men. At the bottom left-hand corner of the photographs of this day’s victims was a red check mark.
“Some friends of your Mr. Melvoy,” said Flack, moving to the bookshelves, Thibidault at his side.
Flack picked up a magazine. Thibidault looked over his shoulder as he flicked through the pages of Beautiful Children magazine.
“Jesus Christ, he’s a perv,” said Thibidault.
“No, he was doing research.”
“Research?”
There was a wireless phone on the desk next to the computer. Flack picked up the phone and pressed the redial button.
“Jeffrey?”
“No, Ellen, it’s not Jeffrey,” said Flack. “It’s Detective Flack.”
“My mistake,” she said.
“A big one,” said Flack. “Did you get a call from Adam Yunkin?”
“No,” she said.
“From Jeffrey?”
She didn’t answer.
“Did you tell him where you are?”
No answer.
“Get out of that room,” said Flack. “Now. There’s a policeman outside your door. Get him.”
“But…”
“Get him,” Flack demanded.
“Wait,” she said. “There’s someone at the door.”
“Don’t…” he shouted, but she couldn’t hear him. She had put the phone down.
12
CONNOR CUSTUS WOKE UP looking at the ceiling of a dimly lit hospital room. He was feeling no pain but he knew that his lack of agony was only a result of the temporary solace of medication. He didn’t know what they had given him, but it was working. His own drug of choice under comparable circumstances in both the recent and past had been morphine.
Connor welcomed the haze, knew that all he had to do was close his eyes and he would be asleep again, but such was not to be. He caught a movement to his right and turned his head to see a vision, a beautiful woman who reminded him of a girl in a Sicilian village whose name escaped him at the moment. The girl in the village was a beauty. So was the drug-induced vision at his bedside.
He began to close his eyes again when a voice said, “Custus.”
He recognized the voice, the policewoman who had been at the rim of the pit, Hawkes’s partner.
“A mistake has been made,” he croaked, throat dry, slightly sore from dampness and the dust of a dead building.
A straw touched his lips. He drank. The water moistened his throat and tongue.
“A mistake?” Stella asked.
“I’m in heaven being served by an angel,” he said. “That is certainly a mistake. I belong elsewhere. I’m not com
plaining, mind you, but if the system fails at this level, than how far behind is total chaos in the universe? I assure you my question is philosophical and not rhetorical.”
“You like to talk,” said Stella, standing above him.
“It’s cultural and genetic,” he said. “Most of the people in the inbred town I came from in Australia like to talk, take pride in it, get little work done because they’re so enamored of their voices and words.”
“Good,” she said. “We have a lot to talk about.”
“I’d prefer to wait till dawn,” he said. “I can promise a greater coherence and willingness then.”
“I’d prefer you less coherent and less willing at the moment,” she said.
“Let me guess. Irish and Italian,” Connor tried.
“I’m Italian and Greek,” she said. “And you are not Australian, you’re Irish and in trouble.”
“Ah, when was I not? How is the good doctor?”
“Doctor Hawkes is fine,” she said.
“Send him my regards.”
“I’ll let you do that yourself tomorrow. Want to tell me what happened?”
“By ‘what happened’ I assume you mean the murky events of this morning before I was swallowed by the sullen earth.”
“That’s right.”
“Memory fails me,” he said, flexing his fingers, starting to feel life in them. “Trauma does that sometimes. I fear I’ll never remember. Selective amnesia.”
“Then I’ll tell you,” she said, sitting in an uncomfortable blue naugahide chair.
Custus tried to turn his head toward her, but she was now just out of sight. He could hear her voice as he had in the rain-filled hole, in the darkness just hours ago. Was it hours? How long had he been here? Damn. He was waking up. There would be pain now unless he got more medication, agonizing pain in his broken ankle, numbing pain in his side.
“I’ll listen better with something to quell the coming pain in my broken limb and wounded body.”
“When I finish,” Stella said.
“You’re tired,” said Custus.
“I’m tired,” she agreed. “Want to hear my story?”
“Bedtime story?”
“Something like that.”
“Then by all means, though the promise of a powerful narcotic would make me a much more attentive listener,” he said. “And I gather that’s what you want.”
“It’s what I want,” she said. “I’ll call the nurse when I’m done.”
“Then by all means launch into your tale.”
“You were hired by Doohan to blow up the bar,” she said. “He told you the bar would be empty in the morning, that it usually was except for the cook and that the days of rain would keep even determined morning drinkers away. Worse case, Doohan said he’d get rid of the customers, tell the cook to go home because of the weather.”
She looked at Custus, who said, “Not quite, but close enough if it were reality and not a tale.”
“You planted the explosives the night before. Why didn’t you bring the bar down then?”
“If I were telling this fanciful tale,” Custus said, “I would say that Mr. Doohan had no alibi for the night, but he had a perfectly good one for the morning when he was supposed to be sitting in the barbaric chair of his dentist, whom he had called with an emergency. The telling touch would be that the dentist would confirm that Doohan did, indeed, have an emergency, a missing filling, an open nerve.”
“But…?” said Stella.
“Ah, let’s see,” said Custus. “What if the dentist were not in, what if the storm of the century canceled his office hours?”
“What if?”
“He might go to the bar as he did every day,” said Custus. “He might, if the tale were true, wait for me to come, try to stop me, get me to put off the sweet experience for another day.”
“But he didn’t,” said Stella.
“Let’s, to keep the conversation going and not deprive me of the company of a beautiful woman, let’s assume he did not? Water?”
Stella reached over, took the water-filled paper cup from the bedside table and held it out to Custus who pursed his dry lips over the straw.
“Refreshing,” he said. “So, we return to the tale?”
“So, alibi gone, Doohan hurried back to the bar knowing you were going to bring the place down. You argued in the street. He had a gun, the one Doctor Hawkes found you with. It’s registered to Doohan. I’d guess he kept it behind the bar. The two of you argued. You went into the bar. He shot you. You took the gun from him and shot him. A shot hit the wet dynamite. Wet dynamite has been known to go off at the slightest spark, sometimes even spontaneously.”
“A bit too fanciful here for me,” said Custus. “I believe I’m falling asleep.”
“I’ll keep you awake,” Stella said. “The story gets better, much better.”
“How could it?”
“You had talked Doohan into hiring you to blow up the bar,” she said. “You probably gave him a very good price for your services. My guess is you tricked him into providing a paper trail, probably increasing his insurance.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you weren’t doing it for the money he was paying you.”
“I didn’t do it at all,” he said. “I just like talking, imagining that—”
“Detonators?” she said. “You purchased detonator caps through a low-level drug dealer named DJ Riggs. He can identify you.”
“A drug dealer,” Custus mused. “They make fine witnesses, I’m told.”
“This one’s a hero. Saved a baby’s life this morning.”
“You have the imagination of Rabelais. Down a dark and winding road into a forest wherein dwells an avatar, an avenging angel by the name of Stella. Now, if you would, I’d like that medication and a long sleep. And in the morning, I should like to open my eyes and see not your beauty but the face of an attorney assigned to defend me. In any case, much as I love talking, I’m going to close my eyes and dream of you.”
“Connor Custus,” she said, “you are under arrest for the murder of…”
And even without the comfort of medication, he closed his eyes and was asleep.
Ellen Janecek went to the door of the hotel room.
She checked the dead bolt and resisted the urge to look through the small glass circle in the door. She had seen a movie in which a man had put his eye to one of those peepholes. A single shot had come through the hole and burrowed into his brain. She had also seen a television episode in which a man had gone to a door after someone knocked and was torn to pieces by a shotgun volley through the thick wood panels.
Ellen stood at the side of the door and said, “Who is it?”
“Message from the front desk,” came a male voice.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. An envelope dropped at the desk. Man asked that it be delivered to you.”
“What man?”
“I wasn’t on the desk when it came.”
“Slip it under the door,” she said.
“I don’t think it will fit.”
She looked down at the bottom of the door. There was about a quarter of an inch opening.
“Try,” she said. “If it doesn’t fit, just leave it in front of the door.”
“I can’t do that,” he said.
“Then take it back to the desk.”
Something scuttled by the door and a thin, white envelope poked under the small opening.
“Anything else I can do?” he asked.
Maybe he was just waiting for a tip. He wasn’t going to get one, not if it meant opening the door.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Right,” said the man.
She pressed against the wall and listened. The thin carpeting masked his footsteps. She thought she heard a slight jingle, maybe keys in his pocket. The sound moved away. She reached down, pulled the envelope in and quickly pressed herself back against the wall next to the door.
/> She did not panic. Panic was not part of her being. Caution was. He had almost tricked her. She should have known that the call had not come from Jeffrey. She should have known it wasn’t his voice no matter how much the caller had tried to hide the truth. But she loved Jeffrey. There was no question about that. She was no child molester, not like the others in the group. This was unfair, but she had grown used to life being unfair.
She tore open the envelope.
The note inside read: “Ellen, Another time. Another place. Adam.”
“Mr. Sunderland. Police.”
Paul Sunderland had been reading a book, Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat. Well, he had been trying to read it, but he kept imagining the mutilated bodies of the three people who had been in his group only two days ago. He kept imagining the man he had known as Adam, the quiet, calm man who listened thoughtfully as other people talked. He could imagine Adam standing over Patricia Mycrant with a knife in his hand. What he could not imagine was what the police had said Adam had done with the knife.
Paul got up, put the book aside. The hotel room smelled musty. He hadn’t brought his inhaler. It would be a long night, a sleepless night.
“Yes?” he called.
“We think Adam Yunkin is in the hotel,” said the policeman. “He just left a note for Miss Janecek.”
“How did he—?” Sunderland began.
“He called her cell phone. She told him where she was. We’ve got to move you both to another location. Detective Flack is on the way.”
“Oh shit,” mumbled Sunderland.
“Let’s go,” the policeman said urgently. “Leave your things. We’ll have someone bring them.”
Sunderland was still dressed but barefoot. He moved to the door and said, “I’ve got to get my shoes and then…”
He opened the door.
Somehow he wasn’t surprised. Did he know, suspect at some level that he would be facing Adam Yunkin? Paul was at least as big as the man he knew as Adam. Paul was also in good shape. Forty minutes each morning at the gym, twenty of those all out on the stationary bike. The man he had known as Adam didn’t appear to be armed, but Paul knew that was certainly not the case.
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