by Ingrid Black
“Don’t call you what?”
“JJ,” he said. “I hate it. I always hated it.”
“Sorry,” I shrugged. “I didn’t realise you felt so strongly about it.”
“You never bothered to ask,” he said, and then, as if to cover his embarrassment for having been so touchy about a mere name, he said: “Nice apartment.”
“Make yourself at home,” I said. “I’ll get the coffee.”
From the kitchen, I watched him walk over and take a seat, leafing idly through a pile of academic periodicals on the low table in front of him.
“The Journal Of Research On Crime And Delinquency... The Canadian Journal Of Criminology And Corrections... Advances In Criminological Research,” he read out as he rifled through them. “I can see your reading habits haven’t changed much.”
“There’s a copy of the National Inquirer in there somewhere, if the other stuff’s a bit too highbrow for you,” I said, spooning coffee into the cafetiere. “Apparently, the latest issue says that Nixon was an alien. Like this is supposed to be a surprise. Or was it Jerry Springer? I can’t remember. One or the other.”
“Are you ever serious about anything?”
“Not if I can avoid it. Here.”
I handed a cup to Kaminski then sat down opposite him across the table, taking my chance to get a better look at him in a brighter light. The deranged look had almost entirely vanished now, replaced by something that looked more like weariness. The sort of weariness that makes your bones ache with the misery of the effort of staying awake and the greater misery of not knowing why it’s even worth staying awake to begin with.
“So,” I said. “You going to tell me what this is all about?”
Chapter Twenty-One
Kaminski didn’t answer directly. For a long time, he didn’t answer at all. He just nursed his cup of coffee like it was winter out and he needed the warmth. Eventually he put it down on top of one of the magazines, reached into his pants, took out his wallet and opened it up.
He withdrew a photograph and held it out to me.
Taking it in my fingers, I saw a picture of a woman in her mid-thirties, with her hair in dreadlocks and wearing shades. She had just turned round, perhaps someone had called her name, and the camera had caught her unguarded and unposed. She was laughing.
“Is this your wife?” I said.
“Heather,” said Kaminski. “Her name was Heather. I met her through work. She was a secretary in one of the field offices. She wanted to be a Special Agent. She was going out with someone in the FBI at the time, he didn’t want her to get involved, said it was too dangerous, but I encouraged her. Told her to go for it. You only live once.”
The words caught in his throat, and he looked away, to the window, staring out, then took another swig of coffee. By the time he spoke again, it was as if nothing had happened.
“I didn’t make a move at first because, like I say, she was with this other guy. Then they split up and I took the chance to ask her out. We got married three months later. Had our honeymoon in Vegas.”
“I never had you down as the marrying type,” I said gently.
“I wasn’t. You know me. Girl in every port. Marrying was never on my agenda. Then Heather came along. You said it yourself the other day. People change. We all do.”
“You want to tell me what happened?”
“We were living in New York, at my apartment. You remember my apartment?”
“I’ll never forget it. Your office had more human touches than that place.”
“Heather gave it the human touch. She made it more homely. She bought curtains, new stuff for the bedroom, sheets in pastel colours, all that kind of shit. There were ornaments everywhere too. She filled the place with them. I don’t know why women buy them.”
“I don’t either,” I admitted.
“I didn’t mind. I was glad she was making the place her own. She was still working as a secretary, but I was seeing if I could get her on a training programme for the Bureau. I had these visions of us working together. Man and wife crime-fighting team.” He smiled at the memory. “It was probably insane, but when you’re in love you think insane thoughts. Maybe that’s how you know you’re in love.”
“What happened?”
“I was home that day. A rare day off. I’d spent the day pottering around the place aimlessly, enjoying being free. She was at work. On the way home, she called to ask if there was anything we needed. I said we needed milk. That was the last time I spoke to her. She never got home. A couple of days later, they found her. She’d been abducted, murdered. Her body was dumped down by the river. The rats had eaten away half her face. She still had the milk in her bag when the body was found. That and a Hershey’s Cookies ‘n’Creme candy bar. She knew I loved those. I found out later she’d stopped off at a 7/11 couple of blocks from the apartment. Somewhere between there and home, she disappeared.”
The flow of words was halted again.
His hands gripped the cup tightly.
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. I hate people who take refuge behind those trite catchphrase, but what else was there to say?
“The man who found the body and raised the alarm,” Kaminski said, “was called Buck Randall.” He said the name with distaste, like each syllable hurt. “Buck Randall III, for Christ’s sakes. He was a prison officer on Death Row down in Texas. The Terrell Unit. You know. He told the police he was up in New York seeing friends and sightseeing, and just saw her body on the mud down by the river when he was passing over the bridge.”
“You obviously didn’t believe he found it merely by accident.”
“Nor did the cops initially. They said he was edgy, he kept changing little details of his story, nothing that amounted to anything in itself but taken together set your alarm bells ringing. You know how it is. When they examined the CCTV footage from the store where Heather had bought the milk on the way home, they also discovered that he’d been in the store around the same time. He’d followed out of the store couple of minutes after she left.”
“That’s some coincidence.”
“Damn right it was. I checked his records and I also found he had priors for assaulting his ex-wife. An ex-wife, what’s more, who’d later disappeared herself after moving, supposedly, to Arizona, only no one in Arizona had ever heard of her. He’d also been questioned about another murder in New Mexico five, six years ago. I knew it was him. He probably saw Heather in the store, targetted her there. The cops let him go. Said they had no evidence. Forensics didn’t match. He had a witness who said he met him in a bar down the street five minutes after he left the store. What could they do? They held him for a while, questioned him, next thing he’s walking out of there, no charges, nothing.”
“It was risky,” I said, “being the one to discover the body. He must’ve known his face would show on the CCTV.”
“Some of these bastards get a kick out of taking risks like that. Who knows what goes through these assholes’ heads? You were in the FBI. You studied the same stuff as me. They have impulses we can’t even begin to fathom. They take trophies, they want to be acknowledged, they play games with the cops.”
“But the cops didn’t think so?”
“They told me to go home. They even made a complaint about me to the Bureau.”
“A complaint?”
“They said I was harassing them. Harassing them. What are they? Choir girls? More like they couldn’t stand the fact I wasn’t willing to simply let the whole thing go. Sure, what was my problem? It was only my wife.”
“How did the Bureau react?”
“I was hauled in and told to drop the whole thing. Take six months off. Go to Barbados. You know the kind of bullshit they pull. They said I’d feel better if I had a break, that maybe I’d be able to put it all in perspective. That’s the word they used. Perspective.”
“I’m guessing you didn’t make it to Barbados.”
“I told them to stick their job. I quit. Said I couldn�
��t see the point anymore. Upholding justice and going after the bad guys and all that crap when I couldn’t even protect my own wife, when a woman’s murder could just be put down on the It Can Wait shelf.”
“What was your plan?”
“I just wanted to do some digging. I’d been in the FBI. I knew how to find things out. I wanted to find out all I could about him. From what I’d seen of the crime scene in New York, I knew the whole thing had been planned more closely than they thought. There was a determination there. A direction. That kind of thing didn’t come out of nowhere. The guy who did it had either done it before or, even if he hadn’t, he’d do it again.”
“So you followed him back home?”
“To Huntsville,” he nodded. “I got an apartment near the prison where he worked. I didn’t need money. I had plenty of that saved. My folks were dead by then, they’d left me some stocks, and a house that I could sell quickly if I needed extra cash. I found out where Randall lived. I found out where he went to the gym, where he hung out with his friends, the bars where he drank, the strip joints where he usually went after work. I used to sit a couple of tables away from him and he had no idea who I was. Probably thought I was another pathetic inadequate loser like him. It was hard, though. I had a hunch that maybe he was committing his crimes away from Texas, maybe he took a trip each vacation somewhere new and did what he had to do. I couldn’t know if or when he made a booking. What was I to do? All I could do was follow him around and wait for him to make a mistake.”
“And did he?”
“He didn’t put a foot wrong,” said Kaminski. “He went to work, he came home, he visited his little elderly mother in Austin once a week. So that’s when I had to start making some new moves. Taking some risks. I found some of the people he worked with inside the prison, and asked a few questions. I found out that Randall was pretty close to a guy inside named Jenkins Howler. Howler had killed a few women about ten years back and had spent the whole time in prison since waiting to get what was coming to him. You know that much. You checked him out. He and Randall were apparently thick as thieves. Randall used to bring him in books, dirty magazines, give him extra rations, that sort of thing.”
“Very cosy,” I said.
“It’d make you sick,” said Kaminski. “Howler was scheduled for execution in two months’ time, they were going through the usual appeals and stuff, I used to see crowds protesting outside the prison sometimes, though it wasn’t going to do any good. Howler was dead meat. But it didn’t surprise me that Randall and Howler were friends. If Randall was the sort of man I thought he was then he was bound to find the company agreeable, right? Those people can smell their own. Could be it was getting so close to Howler that had given Randall the courage to act out his own fantasies, who knows? Maybe Howler had seen his weakness and worked on him, wanting someone to continue the good work after he’d gone. I didn’t have it nailed yet, but I knew that I was getting close, that this was the key to where it all lay.”
“It sounds like there’s a but coming up,” I said.
“There was a big but. One morning I got a knock on my door from the local police. Someone had tipped them off to where I was, what I was doing. It was my own fault. I took too many risks asking round about Randall. I got too close to him. The cops were there to warn me to stay away from him. He’d taken out a restraining order on me. I wasn’t allowed within half a mile of where he lived and worked. They said he was afraid I was going to do something. I reminded them it was a free country and I could go where I liked. They reminded me that there was an arrest warrant pending if I stepped one inch out of line.”
“So let me guess. You flew straight back to New York and forgot all about it.”
Kaminski smiled genuinely for the first time that night.
“You know me well,” he said. “I kept my head down for a few days, realised I needed to go more carefully. Only it didn’t turn out that way. Couple of weeks later, Randall did a bunk. He didn’t come into work one day, or the next, contacted no one to tell them where he was. Next thing I know the police are back, accusing me of having murdered him.”
“You must admit you were the obvious suspect.”
“Thankfully, like I said I’d been keeping my head down, hanging out, doing normal stuff, and there were plenty of people who could vouch for me. But it was tricky for a while. They even tried to suggest that I’d paid off some hit man to finish him off.”
“You hadn’t?” I said.
He looked at me across the table.
“If I wanted Randall dead, I’d have finished the job myself,” he said starkly, and I believed him. I remembered the similar threats Todd Fleming had made earlier that day about the man who killed Marsha Reed. Kaminski wasn’t the only one who felt the need for revenge. “But at least I thought now they’d listen, now they’d know that Randall was up to no good. He’d realised I was onto him and that was why he’d flitted. How obvious did he have to make it before they’d see? But they still wouldn’t listen. Told me to forget it again. That I was obsessed. They said I was the one who needed locking up. They said it was being afraid of me that had made Randall run, and he’d turn up eventually when he felt safe again. They actually felt sorry for the guy. They said I was persecuting him. They couldn’t see I was the victim, I was the one who was suffering. I felt like I was further away from my goal than ever. I wasn’t ever going to find him now. He could be anywhere. I couldn’t even be sure he was still in the States. For all I knew, he’d gone down to Mexico...” Behind Kaminski, the sound of the traffic was dulled, lessened. I realised how long we must have been talking.
I stole a glance at the clock and saw that it was 2am.
“What did you do?”
“I didn’t really have a plan,” he admitted. “I thought maybe I’d go back to New York and see if I could persuade some of the guys in the Bureau to help me out, see if they could turn up Randall somewhere in the system. It’s not so easy to vanish. There’s social security numbers, people need to rent cars, take planes. He was bound to leave a trail some time. Slugs always do. Part of me also thought that if I could get them to provide me with lists of similar attacks on women, maybe women killed in convenience stores, 7/11s, that maybe I’d get a pattern in my head of what he’d done before and be able to predict where he might hit next.”
“Sounds like a long shot,” I said.
“It was a long shot. It was the longest shot I’ve ever attempted in my life. I was just grasping at straws, trying not to sink. As it happened, what I actually did was just hang around Texas for a few months to see if he came back. I’d reached the end of whatever ingenuity I had. I was spent. And then,” he paused for effect, “I got something in the mail.”
“The newspaper clipping at the hotel,” I said.
“The very same. That clipping told me about the death in Dublin of a woman I’d never heard of, and a typewritten note saying Are you really going to give up that easily? It said that if I really wanted to meet up with him, I had to fly to Dublin and book in to the hotel where you tracked me down under the name Buck Randall and wait. He’d make contact.”
“What did you think?”
“What did I think? I didn’t know what to think. I couldn’t see how a woman being run over in Dublin connected to what Randall had done to Heather, and yet there it was in black and white. He’d sent it to me. It had to mean something.”
“You’re sure it came from him?”
“By that time, I wasn’t sure about anything. But I didn’t have the luxury of sitting round waiting to see what would happen. I was out of ideas. It was all I had. I found an internet cafe and went online to see what I could find out about her, but I didn’t find out much more than was contained in the news item I’d been sent. It wasn’t exactly the kind of story CNN had covered in depth, put it that way. But I did learn that she’d been writing to Jenkins Howler. And then I was more confused than ever. She’d been writing to Howler, and now she was dead. Had Howler sent Randall o
ver to kill her? You know what those relationships are like. They’re sick enough to start with. They certainly don’t want the woman they’re writing to striking up another sick romance with the next guy along on Death Row after they’ve gone. What better way of putting a line under the relationship than to have her done away with?”
“But she hadn’t been killed,” I reminded him. “She died in an accident.”
“Exactly. And there was one other flaw to the theory.”
“She died whilst Randall was still in Texas.”
“So how could he have done it? Yeah, that was the problem. But there was still the same question. Why then had Randall sent me the note telling me about this woman? I had a few theories about that. That he wanted us to continue whatever game we’d been playing elsewhere. That he hadn’t liked the odds back home, and preferred to take his chances elsewhere, in a new arena, and that this was the lure to get me to follow him. Equally, I wondered if there was more to the woman’s death than met the eye, and I knew I wasn’t going to learn the answer to that out in Texas. That’s why I came to Dublin.”
“Why didn’t you just give the note to the police in Texas? Or the FBI?”
“They hadn’t listened to me all along. Why should they suddenly listen now? They’d just think it was more evidence I was for the funny farm. Or they’d say I sent it to myself or something. I’d be wasting my time - and worse, they’d know what my next move would be. They’d know I was bound to follow Randall to Dublin. I’d have made it too easy for them.”
It sounded fair enough.
I lifted the empty mugs and carried them back into the kitchen.
“I checked out Cecilia Corrigan’s death myself,” I told him as I rinsed out the mugs and put them into the dishwasher, “and I absolutely don’t think there was anything more to it than an accident. The local police know who did it, he was never under any suspicion, there were witnesses. There was nothing mysterious about it at all.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s the part that got me. I seemed to be back again where I started. And that’s why I thought about contacting you, seeing if you could help. You were on the outside too, like me. The difference was that you know this city and I don’t. If anyone could find Randall, I knew it was you. Especially after you found me.”