Final Epidemic

by Earl Merkel

  “That’s Cappie Arnold—Henry Capshaw Arnold’s his legal name. Used to run with Trippett and his bunch. ’Bout six months ago, I stopped seeing him around the county. Turns out he picked up and moved—good riddance to bad rubbish, but he and Orin Trippett were always thick as thieves.”

  He pushed the card to April, who studied it before tucking it into her inside pocket.

  “Any idea where Arnold went, Deputy McGuire?”

  “After I heard what happened to Mr. Casey and you, I . . . kinda asked some people.” McGuire had a look on his face that Beck would not have wanted aimed in his direction. “Called in some favors, you might say. Seems Cappie went on down to Denver, got him a place down there.”

  “Thanks,” April said. “We’ll check with the Denver PD, see if they have an address on him.”

  “They don’t; I already called. But I convinced a guy here to come up with one. Wrote it on the back of the picture. Don’t think he’s got the stones to lie to me—but if it ain’t the right one, I’d appreciate you lettin’ me know.”

  Once again, McGuire picked up the cigarette pack. His fingers caressed it almost teasingly, Beck noticed, before returning it to its place.

  “Ask me, that’s where I’d start looking for Trippett. Who knows? Maybe run across the guy who done that to your friend’s leg too.”

  McGuire looked at Beck, a pointed look on his features.

  “And, my advice? This time, college teacher or not, take along a gun. You get the chance, sir, you use it.”

  Chapter 38

  Denver, Colorado

  July 23

  They parked several houses away from the address McGuire had provided in a tough-looking neighborhood on the southwest side of the city. It was almost one p.m. by now. There were few locals in evidence, and those who were looked knowingly at the Crown Victoria before walking on.

  “Maybe we should just hang out a sign,” April muttered to Beck. “This damn thing screams out ‘unmarked car.’ At least to these people.”

  She looked at her companion.

  “We can wait here and give everybody a chance to figure out which house we’re watching,” April said. “Or we can go up and kick the door right now.”

  “You decide.” He gestured at his leg. “You’ll have to do the kicking.”

  April frowned at the house, pensive.

  “Rental agent says a woman signed the papers,” April reminded Beck finally. “And those flowers on the porch don’t look like something a man would do.”

  “Okay. So?”

  “So let’s try the direct approach. You wait here and I’ll go knock. If a woman answers the door—or even some bozo who works the late shift—I’ll play it by ear. If it’s Trippett or this Cappie Arnold, I take him down, hard.”

  “It doesn’t sound too gallant of me, sitting in the car while a lady with a concussion does the hard work.” Beck grinned at the look April shot him. “Great plan. Go ahead.”

  She exited the car quietly and walked the distance to the porch, making it look casual. Beck watched April climb the stairs, lift her hand to knock—and then stop, bending close to the wooden door as if to study its grain.

  She looked toward the car and beckoned him.

  When Beck reached the porch, gamely trying to keep his limp to a minimum, April spoke in a low voice.

  “Somebody else had the same idea about kicking doors,” she said. “Looks like they got here first.”

  Beck bent low. The wood around the lockset was splintered, and a piece of the broken hardwood trim had been carelessly attached on the jamb. “That’llsure keep out the lowlifes,” April murmured. She took a deep breath. “Okay—let’s do this.”

  She raised a closed fist and knocked hard, once.

  The impact opened the door a half inch before something solid stopped it.

  Beck sniffed the air, suddenly tense. There was a faint bathroom smell, and something else—a metallic odor that was tantalizingly familiar to him, almost like the scent of fresh copper pennies.

  April looked at Beck and reached to the small of her back, her hand out of sight under her jacket.

  “Ms. Tompkins!” she said, in a voice meant to sound firm and authoritative. “Lubella Tompkins—are you there?” Nobody answered; the apartment was silent in a way that raised the hairs along the back of Beck’s neck.

  “We’ve got trouble here,” April said in a low voice. “You smell it?”

  He nodded.

  She drew her hand from under her jacket, producing a surprisingly large automatic pistol.

  It’s like a replay of yesterday,she told herself, recalling the trailer’s ruined door.Beck’s probably wondering if women go through doors the normalway anymore. Irrationally, the thought almost made her giggle.

  Instead, she raised her voice and said loudly, “This is the FBI, Ms. Tompkins. We’re coming in now,” and with her shoulder pushed hard against the door. Something broke with a loud snap, and the door lurched open another half foot.

  “Hell with this,” April muttered, and slammed her body hard against the wood. The impact forced the door open enough for her to squeeze through.If somebody’s waiting with a gun, she thought bitterly,I’m dead meat.

  She pushed hard with her legs, and heard more sounds like wood breaking. With her shoulders and upper body through the opening, the added leverage allowed her to push through completely. The copper-penny smell was much stronger here, as was the stench of feces. As she cleared the stubborn doorway, her arms came up extended, and she swept the room in an arc through the sights of her Glock.

  Sunlight streamed through the large side window, dappling the bare wooden floor through curtains that had seen better days. April’s peripheral vision noted the chair that had been jammed against the inside doorknob, broken from the force of her entry. Her eyes swept past the low pile of matted, stained rags heaped on a kitchen table in the center of the room, and she felt a wave of relief that the house was empty.

  Then her mind registered what her eyes had seen, and it recoiled in horror and disgust.

  “Jesus,” a voice breathed from behind her. Beck was staring at the pile of rags that were not rags, his mouth slightly open and his eyes almost expressionless in disbelief.

  Don’t lose it now,April’s mind ordered her, and she spoke roughly as much to herself as to Beck.

  “If you’re going to be sick, do it outside in the yard,” she growled, and Beck looked at her as if she were a stranger. But she didn’t notice, because the floor and the walls and the ceiling had now caught her full and undivided attention.

  “Oh, my God,” she said.

  The wooden floor under the table had drawn much of the fluid into itself; the walls bore red-brown stripes of varying length and weight where gravity had tugged at the flying drops. She noted all this, almost academically.

  But it was the ceiling that held her gaze.

  From a fixture that hung over the torn remains of Lubella Tompkins, partially congealed drops of blood dangled like miniature, brown-red stalactites. Until now, April had never realized how much blood a human body held.

  “I don’t want to do much guessing,” April O’Connor said into the telephone she held to her face. “But, unofficially, it appears she died sometime this morning.”

  “She was tortured?” Frank Ellis’s voice, as it came over the receiver, was pitched unnaturally high.Shock, maybe, April thought, and felt a flash of anger.I’m the one who had to look at her, dammit. . . .

  “Yes,” she said instead. “Whoever it was had rigged up a kind of gag he could push deep down her mouth, or pull out a little. She could talk when he let her, but not scream. It looks like the son of a bitch took his time with her. And when he was done, he took a little more so he could really enjoy it as she died. Probably took a last look at his work before he went out the door.”

  The professional demeanor of her voice faltered, for just a moment. “Frank, this was one sick bastard. I’ve never seen anything so sadistic.”

/>   There was silence on the line.

  “Is your Dr. Casey there? Rather, is he still functioning?”

  April looked over her shoulder. “He’s doing fine,” she lied.

  “Yeah.” Her SAC’s voice was unconvinced. “Okay. Stick with him until you hear different from me. I’ll give you a few minutes, then alert Denver PD. It sure isn’t protocol, but unless you two want to hang out with the Denver homicide squad for the foreseeable future, you better secure the place and be gone. Trippett is still out there. I need you looking, not filling out reports for the local cops. And O’Connor—watch your back, and his. Stick to Casey like glue.”

  April closed her cellular phone with a snap that was brisk and authoritative, wishing that she felt like either. She turned to Beck, who stood nearby. His eyes were studiously avoiding the table and the burden it bore.

  “Let’s go, Beck. My boss is calling the locals, and we’ll just confuse them if we’re still here.”

  He acted as if he had not heard her. When he spoke, his voice was intense with emotion.

  “April, this guy enjoys what he does—I could tell when he had me hanging by my wrists,” Beck said. “But he isn’t totally out of control. He tortures when he wants information. He knew to come here looking for Trippett; he needed to know where to look next.”

  Beck looked at the torn figure on the table, and April could see the effort it took.

  “Beck, we have to—”

  “If this woman knew anything, trust me—she told him.”

  Beck looked around the room and stiffened.

  “Orshowed him,” he told April. Beck crossed the wooden floor, careful to avoid the blood smears that traversed it in parallel tracks. Then he bent, and when he came up there was the weighty thickness of a telephone directory in his hands. Beck held the directory up to April.

  “Look at this.”

  On the cover was the red-brown imprint of three fingers.

  There were smudges inside, randomly spaced as if by fingers desperate to find the proper listing. The last stain was on a page diagonally bisected by a jagged rip; the bottom of the page had been torn from the book. Only a corner of the display ad that had been the focus of such frantic interest was still visible.

  “Something called the Mile-Hi,” April said. “It’s a theater.”

  It was 1:11P .M. when April and Beck arrived at the Mile-Hi Theater; it was also already too late.

  On a normal midsummer afternoon, even the Mile-Hi would have been thronged with teenagers, seniors looking for the matinee rate, bored housewives. Not today; today, there were virtually no witnesses at all. Because of the flu, movie theaters had been shut down along with every other form of group entertainment. All they had, as they pushed through double doors and into the theater lobby adjacent to the men’s room was a fourteen-year-old freshman at Denver Central High School. His name was Danny Carroll.

  Thus far in his young life, Danny had identified two overwhelming passions. One was film: Danny loved movies. His room was festooned with marquee posters and books filled with cinematic lore. He had seen most of the films made by Spielberg—at least once; had worn out a pirated director’s cut ofApocalypse Now; and had memorized every cut and arcane camera angle inPsycho —the Hitchcock original, of course. His single other passion was a slightly less complicated attraction to the Big Gulp soft drinks he habitually bought at a 7-Eleven convenience store near his home.

  The former passion had driven him to the Mile-Hi this afternoon for the same reason it did every afternoon: in exchange for old posters and a permanent pass for free admission, Danny handled janitorial tasks at no charge.

  But it was the latter passion—indulged freely, possibly excessively, prior to his arrival at the movie house—that compelled him directly to the men’s lavatory immediately after he had unlocked the lobby doors.

  According to the statement he later made to police, Danny Carroll had noticed a smoky, slightly sweet odor when he entered the men’s room—“kind of like after you set off a Black Cat, you know, or a bottle rocket. I figured somebody had been screwing around, like maybe lighting a match for a cigarette or something.”

  Whatever his theories, the inherent internal pressures of sixty-four ounces of Pepsi Cola outweighed his immediate curiosity. It was only when he finished dealing with this first priority and was turning from the urinals that Danny noticed the pool of bright red on the white-tiled floor. It was slowly spreading from under the half-closed door of one of the stalls.

  Danny Carroll bent slightly, low enough to see the pair of shoes flanking the toilet’s base, long enough to note the drips that fell, regular as a leaking faucet, on one shoe’s instep.

  “Hey,” Danny called tentatively. “You okay in there?” There was no answer. Carefully, the boy pushed against the stall’s door.

  Inside was Orin Trippett, sitting half-slumped on the toilet. His eyes were open wide, and a trail of blood was still oozing from a neat, perfectly round hole precisely in the middle of his forehead. On the wall behind his head, a much less precise splatter of congealing blood, bone and brain formed a madly abstract pattern.

  Remotely, in a deepening state of shock, Danny noticed something else.

  The side pocket of the jacket the dead man wore had been ripped away violently. It was as if someone had been impatient to take possession of whatever had been carried there.

  Chapter 39

  Denver, Colorado

  July 23

  Ilya threaded his way through the traffic as carefully as possible. He was uncertain about who he was following, though he was very clear about what had just taken place.

  The theater had been quiet when he arrived a few minutes before one o’clock. He had expected to buy a ticket, intending to pay for it with a twenty-dollar bill because the price of things American still occasionally surprised him. Ilya made a practice of paying with larger bills, on the theory that a man who received change was less memorable than a person whose underpayment was called to attention.

  But there had been no one at the ticket window.

  He wondered if the woman called Lubella had lied to him. He thought not: she had seemed, ultimately, quite cooperative. At one point, on her hands and knees, she had even scrambled across the bare wood floor of the living room to where the telephone directory was kept: eager—in fact, by then desperate—to find for Ilya the movie theater’s address. In her wake, she had left red-brown streaks of her own blood to mark her path.

  No, he was sure: she had told him what she had believed true. By now, Ilya had an instinct for such matters.

  So he had finished with her—not hurriedly, but in a manner befitting the relationship they had developed. And then he had left, taking nothing but the scrap of paper she had provided. That, and his memories.

  All he had to do was to come here and find a way to persuade the man to leave with him—quietly and willingly, if possible, though the latter was a secondary consideration. He did not anticipate significant difficulty in this.

  But outside the theater, he had immediately sensed something was amiss. And so he waited and watched from his parked automobile, trusting the unerring instincts that longevity in his particular profession had fostered.

  Finally, there had been movement from inside the theater. He had zeroed in on a gut-heavy man wearing a faded camouflage jacket at the far side of the lobby. The man had just pushed through a set of double doors—leading, Ilya presumed, to one of the viewing rooms. Even at the distance, Ilya noted that the jacket was bulky and loose fitting. That, and definitely too heavy for the midsummer weather.

  But clearly,Ilya thought,it is the kind of apparel a man might wear if he had something he wished to conceal beneath. And the man is being cautious as he crosses the lobby—trying, a bit too obviously, to look casual about it.

  He watched as the thickset man walked across the expanse of empty marble flooring, his left elbow pressed against his side. To Ilya’s not inexpert eye, the jacket seemed to hang awkwardly the
re; the warning bells sounded even louder in the Russian’s mind.

  He is hunting,Ilya decided.

  And so he waited. From the corner of his eye, he saw the man enter the lavatory. No more than a minute later, he heard it. Few “silenced” weapons are worthy of the name: even from his car, the muffled pop was unmistakable to one familiar with the technology.

  And that was more than enough. Ilya did not believe in coincidences.

  The Russian already had his engine started by the time the unknown assassin exited the Mile-Hi and climbed into his own vehicle, parked well down the street. Ilya carefully pulled into position behind it.

  And now, more than a half hour later, Ilya had made his decision.

  This man I am following has secrets I need to share,he thought.He is a man I must meet. And now it is time.

  He began to look for a suitable place.

  Twenty yards ahead, the vehicle—a light truck,the Russian thought,what they call here a “pickup” —slowed as it turned a corner onto a tree-lined residential street.

  Ilya followed, whistling a tuneless melody of anticipation.

  He was certain now. The trailing vehicle had swung in an arc, settling again in his rearview mirror as the car behind him straightened. It was the same car, a dark green Chevy Malibu, and it had been behind him for the past twenty minutes—hell,Cappie thought,maybe even since I left the damn theater.

  He was puzzled, but not worried. Cappie Arnold had been playing a double game for almost a year now, working closely with Orin at the same time he kept the militia’s Jap patron appraised of what was happening behind the scenes. It was a situation that would have turned a more stress-prone man into a basket case; ironically, Cappie’s lack of imagination had only served to sustain him.

  I mean, hell—even a damn Jap got a right to watch his back, dealing with the likes of—Cappie chuckled, dimly aware of the irony involved—well, of guys like Orin and me. Just shows he’s a careful kinda guy.