by M. K. Gilroy
It’s quarter to five. Willingham and Reynolds are holding a press conference in forty-five minutes at city hall. The mayor, police chief, and a whole lot of other muckety mucks will be on the podium. Zaworski has been allotted two minutes—and not a second longer—for opening remarks. I heard Commander Czaka was expecting to speak and is not happy that it’s Zaworski slated to be in front of the press.
Don and Martinez have the TV on WCI-TV in the living room. It’s a house rule. Have to be loyal to family. Big Tony is directing operations with some uniformed officers outside. My security detail is about to be increased. The consensus is that I represent our best chance of bringing Dell in, whether it be taking his calls and talking him into turning himself in, or staying on the phone long enough for them to triangulate his location—or by serving as bait. They don’t think he’s through with me, either way.
My phone rings. Private number.
“Hi, Dell.”
“Hi, Kristen.”
“Where are you?”
“I can’t tell you. You know I’ve got big troubles.”
“I know. So why don’t you come over and let’s talk. Are you in Chicago, Dell?”
“C’mon. I’m not that dumb.”
“Well, not coming in is not smart and I’ve always thought of you as a smart guy.”
“It’s interesting that now that you want something from me, you’re incredibly attentive,” he says with sadness. “I wish we could have talked like this before. You were always too preoccupied to really be there. Always multitasking and never doing any one thing all the way.”
“It’s been a tough couple of months, Dell. I’m listening now.”
He pauses for a second, considering. “You know, I’m thirty-four years old and have never had a girlfriend for more than a couple of months. A lot of women think I’m great, because I’m okay-looking and I spend a fair amount of money on them. But I was never good at relationships. Too many problems growing up. You were the first woman I really thought I could get to know. Do you know you were my significant other longer than any other woman in my life? Even if you didn’t think of me the same way—I got it—that’s still what you were to me.”
Alarms are ringing in my head. If he isn’t the Cutter Shark, he sure is sounding like him. I’ll be known forever as a serial killer’s significant other.
“I feel bad that I just didn’t have the same feelings for you as you did for me, Dell. But I can’t really force myself to feel something I don’t, right?”
“I wonder if you feel anything at all.”
I consider that and reject it, but answer, “You might be right,” anyway.
He sighs. “It’s good to hear you admit that.”
I let him digest that a sec. I feel like a fisherman, allowing the hook to set in deep. “So when can we get your troubles sorted out? When are you going to come and talk to me?”
“I don’t know. You won’t really understand. Your family is perfect. And I wanted to be a part of that.”
“What happened to your family, Dell?”
“It was bad. Dad left. Mom couldn’t cope so she killed herself. On his way back to pick us up and take us to Loveland, of all names, my dad was killed in a car accident. We got passed around foster homes.”
My antennae have sprung to attention and are sounding alarms. Us. We. “Dell, I thought you were an only child. And I didn’t know your parents had died. I assumed they were still alive.”
“How would you know? You never bothered to ask. I told Kaylen, Jimmy, your mom. But I waited for you to ask.”
I close my eyes. I really can be a self-involved jerk sometimes.
“I figured you and your people knew by now. I have a brother.”
“A brother. You have a brother?” My brain starts racing, all the missing pieces filling in gaps, like the last few pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
“Yes. We got separated a couple years after my dad died. He was incredibly difficult. So mostly we grew up in different foster homes. I made out pretty good; he didn’t. When I finally found him, I was in college. He was only seventeen, but he’d been in jail three times and countless juvenile homes. I put him in a nice place for troubled youth sponsored by a church I attended, and that seemed to help for a while, but when I tried to move him in with me and get him back in school—or at least help him find a job—he started disappearing for months at a time.”
“When was the last time you saw him, Dell?”
“Six, I don’t know, maybe seven months ago.”
“Tell me right now; is he the guy we’re looking for?”
There is a long enough pause that I wonder if he’s hung up.
“I don’t know for sure,” he says quietly, “but I’m afraid he is.”
I can’t bring myself to say serial killer or Cutter Shark. But he knows and I know what we’re talking about.
“What do you know for sure, Dell?”
“Not much. He emptied a bank account I keep for rainy days. It’s not the first time. He went back to my place in Durango and stole some other stuff, too. He might not have thought of it as stealing, though. He thought of the place as his, which I wanted. I wanted him to feel like he had a home. Always. But I found some things on my office computer there that are disturbing.”
“You haven’t done anything bad or criminal yourself?” I ask Dell.
“Of course not. You really think I could?” Pain now etches his voice.
“You need to come in and help us right now, Dell. It’s your only way out of this mess, and your brother’s best path toward help. You have to come in.”
“Let me think about it and call you back.”
“Don’t hang up, Dell.”
“Kristen, I’ve got to. And you’ve got to understand. You have sisters. This is my brother we’re talking about. I don’t know for sure he’s done anything wrong.”
If he believed that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
“Promise me you’ll call back in the next hour. This is bad, Dell. And not just for your brother.”
He hangs up before I can ask him what his brother’s first name is. I whirl toward Don and Martinez, who are looking at me with wide eyes and stunned expressions. I was concentrating so hard I wasn’t even aware they were listening.
I know the FBI has monitored the entire call from Washington, DC, but will whoever is listening know what to make of this—particularly in light of the fact that Dell is minutes away from being listed as the official Cutter Shark suspect to the world?
“We have to get to Willingham and Reynolds,” I nearly shout. “They can’t give Dell’s name and picture to the press.”
67
The ChiTownVlogger
June 8, 5:55 p.m.
JOHNSON HIT UPLOAD. Two minutes later he heard a ping indicating it was live. He decided to watch one more time.
• • •
“Welcome to the jungle, we take it day by day . . . ”
A BAD CASE OF SUMMER TIME BLUES scrolls across the screen.
“We’re going to keep this short and sweet, my admirers and enemies in Chicagoland and around the world. Zdrahstvooy—that’s ‘hello’ in Russian for all my fans in Moscow. Your ChiTownVlogger, the only reporter on the planet who has exclusive access to the Cutter Shark, has a direct message for Deputy Director Robert Willingham of the FBI and Police Commissioner Michael Fergosi of the Chicago Police Deparment.
“Just in case any cynics out there think I’m withholding information that could lead to the apprehension of the Shark—be assured I am a humanitarian before I am a reporter. Mayor Doyle is the master of whisper campaigns and, in an attempt to discredit my reports and take some of the heat off him and his cronies, I don’t want him conducting one of his trademark smear jobs complaining that I’m sheltering a serial killer. Elections are only four months away. Of course he’ll win, but he wants to win big to show an air of invincibility.
“What’s the message I found in a bottle that washed up on the shore of
Lake Michigan? There’s good news and bad news. Which do you want first? I’ll start with good news. The Cutter Shark plans to leave us in the near future. Our city will be safe once again—though not because of anything the combined forces of the CPD and FBI did.
“But here’s the bad news. He’s planning one more kill. He said he wanted to say a special good-bye to us. There is one other detail he sent me. I don’t know how big of a deal this is. But he said nothing else will happen until summer. Not quite two weeks until you can move throughout our city with a feeling of relative safety.
“I can hear my critics already—and we know they mostly reside at city hall and the offices of what we commonly refer to as the ‘main-stream media.’ They will say that by going live I am jeopardizing the investigation and inciting a public panic.
“As is so often the case, they have missed the point. Airing this report won’t change the Cutter Shark’s plans. He wants the authorities to know what he is up to because he doesn’t believe they can do anything about it. In medieval times they would say he has thrown down the gauntlet.
“As to public panic. Don’t blame me. I’m just a private citizen. And if the police can’t do any better than they have so far, I may join the stampede out of town!
“The jungle is heating up, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Stop back often. It may be good news or bad news or both—but at least it’s real news.”
68
I HAD TROUBLES getting online tonight so I couldn’t download and print a copy of the New York Times crossword puzzle. I did find a copy of the large-print edition of TV Guide that my mom brought over earlier in the week. They publish a puzzle every week. The clues that didn’t have anything to do with TV were way too easy. But most of the clues had to do with TV, and since I don’t watch much, I was in trouble. I did get the three-letter word for a fuzzy, extraterrestrial, sitcom character right away. Alf.
At least I think so, even though I never connected any of the three letters with another word. Another day, another meeting.
• • •
Our task force meeting went a couple of hours. We met at city hall in a conference room a few doors away from the mayor’s office, where Zaworski and Willingham were holed up with the politicians. The news conference that was called to announce a big break in the Cutter Shark case was cancelled. I can’t believe how close they came to plastering Dell’s name and face across the planet. As we waited, Don speculated they were working on damage control. I agreed with him.
The conference room was even nicer than the one we use at the regional office of the FBI in the State Building. An assistant to the mayor brought in a tray of glasses—they looked like real crystal—with the city’s seal etched on the side. There was an ice bucket and a full assortment of soft drinks. She came back a few minutes later, pushing a cart with full coffee service. That’s where most of us headed. Van Guten never moved, but nodded in the direction of the new group in from DC, and one of the FBI guys got her a small green bottle of San Pellegrino and a glass filled with ice cubes.
The brass walked in and Reynolds did most of the talking. He confirmed that Dell has a brother who was in and out of mental institutions from an early age. Willingham looks gray and weary. Maybe he got chewed out, too. He asked how everyone missed the brother. He saved his harshest glares for Reynolds and Van Guten. Blame is working its way down the food chain. Who is next? Reynolds, ever the cool customer, went on to explain that Dell’s brother, Dean, grew up with a different last name than Woods in the course of getting volleyed around the foster care system and was essentially “lost.” Van Guten announced she had run Dean’s data through a series of psychological corollary tests she uses. She thinks Dean Pierre, his last known pseudonym, fits the bill for our Cutter Shark. More so than Dell.
I think we already have that figured out without your tests, I thought to myself.
“Our top priority is finding Dean Pierre,” Reynolds continued. Duh.
He told us agents were being dispatched to Pierre’s previous known cities as we spoke. His picture will be posted on every law enforcement bulletin board in the United States of America, including every port authority, to make sure he doesn’t flee the country. Every cop in Chicago will be distributing his picture to shop owners, bartenders, waitresses, bank tellers, hotel and motel clerks, and anyone else who might remember seeing his face in the past year. The decision has been made not to officially put his face on TV or the newspapers yet—but that will happen within hours anyway. Someone from CPD will make a call to a friend at one of the stations and pictures will be smuggled to the outside world.
As we met, I looked at Dean’s pictures from every angle I could turn my head. Dean and Dell are certainly not twins but I can see the family resemblance. Dean has lighter hair and is clearly the bigger of the two. His shoulders are wide enough that he could be a linebacker for the Bears. He has to lift weights. This is a guy who could have punched me in the kidneys and put me down in a hurry.
“Priority number two is Dell Woods,” Reynolds said.
I knew he wasn’t the Cutter Shark, but no argument from me on that point. He has to come in and tell us everything he knows. If he won’t, he needs to be brought in. Instructions have been given to all law enforcement agencies that it should be assumed that both Dell Woods and Dean Pierre are armed and dangerous. I don’t think Dell is a threat to anyone but himself, but I understand that intentionally or not, he’s been aiding and abetting a potential killer and he, too, must be approached with extreme caution. I feel bad for him in a whole new way.
But I was right. He’s not the killer.
I am the obvious link to Dell, so my cell and home phones, my email and social networks—I only have fifteen friends on Facebook, which is embarrassing—will remain on live-access with federal agents both in DC and here in Chicago. After my parking lot incident, which everyone now assumes was Dean and not Dell—they are keeping a security detail assigned to me until the case is resolved. As boring as my life can be, I don’t envy the mind-numbing nothingness that my babysitters have ahead of them.
How long will this go?
We watched the ChiTownVlogger’s latest report on the Cutter Shark. Our killer is obviously using him to send us a message, and a tech crew is monitoring all the ChiTown Vlogger’s communications to find out how—and the message is quite clear: the next murder will happen on June 21, the first official day of summer, or shortly thereafter. Unless he’s smart and runs—we have his picture after all. Can we believe the message that his work is coming to a close in Chicago? He’s short on his city death quota, but his pattern is so messed up, I doubt even someone as deranged as him is going to worry about symmetry and order. But if he’s in the acceleration cycle Van Guten described, is he in enough control to wait? To leave?
The meeting raised more questions than answers.
I wonder again how we will know he is gone? How long will I need to watch my back? Always and forever I can hear Mr. Barry say.
As the meeting drew to a close, I asked the question that woke me up in the middle of the night: “If Grace Mills was Plan B, who do we think was Plan A?”
Everyone just stared at me. Me? “If it was me, I’d be dead,” I said.
“We’ve talked about that,” Blackshear said, “and have a couple ideas. Maybe something or someone interrupted him. Maybe he was just sending a warning then but didn’t plan to kill you at that point—but does now. He did refer to his victim as ‘special.’ So taking out someone who has investigated him and who is under police protection would well qualify you as special.”
• • •
I brush my teeth for the second time tonight. I shouldn’t have eaten that oatmeal cookie from the batch Vanessa made for us. I use the bathroom—no pink in my pee, my new obsession—wash my hands, and pad to my bedroom. I check the windows and then walk through my entire apartment to make sure everything is closed and locked up. I am going to call Klarissa back when I lay down, but as I pull back the cove
rs on my bed there is an envelope sitting on my pillow.
My skin crawls, and I glance around, although I know I’m alone.
How in the heck did we miss that?
69
I PUT THE call in to Konkade. Reynolds is the task force commander, but Konkade handles the details.
“Konkade here.”
“Sergeant, this is Detective Conner.”
“Good evening, Kristen. I’m so pleased you are calling me to wish me a good night’s sleep. That is why you’re calling isn’t it?”
I sigh. He laughs.
“Didn’t think so,” he says. “I take it my wife is going to have to watch Desperate Housewives by herself tonight. What have we got?”
After explaining, I get off the phone and call Don.
• • •
Mom can’t come to my apartment without doing some cleaning. Thank you, Mom, I think, now that my place has become the new task force headquarters.
Konkade’s last instructions to me were not to touch anything. I was too tired to exercise my incredible powers of levitation, so I disobeyed his orders and put my tired rear end on the kitchen counter to wait.
Konkade called Bruce, the techie, but he was down at his mom’s house in Kankakee, at least an hour and twenty minutes from my place, even with no traffic on a Sunday night, so Konkade called Jerome next. Jerome showed up to handle the evidence. I’m praying it’s not a mushy card from my mom that she left on my pillow. I’ve never known her to refer to me as Detective—or misspell my first name. The envelope reads: Detective Kirsten. Maybe it’s the barista from JavaStar. He writes “Kirsten” on the side of the cup almost every time.
Jerome is first on the scene—you know you’re having a great week when your apartment is officially the center of a serial murder investigation not just once, but twice within forty-eight hours—and he lets me know he lives less than ten minutes away. I let him know that my mom had vacuumed and dusted after his last visit here, so he sure as heck won’t find much in the way of evidence—or dirt. But he still puts on his miner’s hardhat with a blue light and spends thirty minutes examining every square inch of my bed and bedroom.