Cutter

by Laird, Thomas

  Doc was grinning. He thought this girl wanted to jump my old bones. Jack had a nonplussed stare going her way. It didn’t appear that he saw the appeal in Ellen Jacoby.

  ‘You’re quite certain he was with you all that time on those dates?’ Doc finally asked, breaking an awkward silence.

  ‘Yes. I’m sure,’ she said. She was looking directly at me.

  We wasted a few more minutes asking unimportant questions, but she didn’t lose her poise. She was confident when we came in, and she and her story hadn’t been shaken since. So it was time to stop wasting time. We’d have to keep an eye on Ellen Jacoby and Marco Karrios — but from a distance. You could bet that Marco and his girlfriend knew all about the subject of harassment.

  We offered her our thanks. She kept staring at me with those eyes. Like she was a witch trying to mesmerize me. I almost laughed out loud as I excused the three of us, but suddenly there was nothing funny about her staring. We walked out of the apartment and out to our car.

  ‘That bitch is definitely wrong,’ Jack muttered.

  ‘Why? Because she didn’t eyeball you the way she did our Lieutenant?’ Doc cracked.

  ‘No. It ain’t jealousy here, Doc. There’s just something wrong with her,’ Jack countered.

  ‘I’ve seen her before but I can’t remember where it was,’ I told them.

  Her face danced in my mind like something dangling at the end of a pole. Like a piñata, with all the goodies inside it. If only you could whack it with a stick and make all the insides come pouring out. There was something besides her face that I remembered, but it was too deeply embedded for me to dislodge it.

  ‘Well shit, I’ll be thinking about her all goddamned day now,’ I admitted.

  ‘The redhead wouldn’t approve,’ Doc suggested.

  ‘The redhead’s got nothing to worry about. Jack’s correct. This female is definitely wrong. But I’m not sure she has a damn’ thing to do with our principal focus in this case. And where the fuck’s Marco?’

  ‘We forgot to ask,’ Jack laughed.

  ‘Maybe she’s psychic,’ Doc said. ‘She willed us not to ask about her beloved.’

  ‘There’s something stronger than that coming out of her,’ I told my two colleagues.

  ‘I think this girl has put the spell on you, guinea. What do they call it? The evil eye?’

  ‘How could someone named Jacoby have an evil eye?’ I told Doc. ‘That’s a Sicilian thing.’

  ‘Yeah. You’re right,’ Gibron admitted.

  Something stirred inside me, just then.

  ‘What’s wrong, Jimmy?’ Jack asked.

  ‘I ... I don’t know. I thought I ... Jesus, let’s get back downtown.’

  Doc was driving, but he looked over at me in the front passenger’s seat from time to time as we cruised south down Lakeshore Drive.

  I was preoccupied with Ellen Jacoby all of the rest of the afternoon, but nothing came to me. I couldn’t place her. I saw her face and I knew I’d come across her before. And I knew it’d been a long time since I’d encountered her, but I still couldn’t fix a date and a place as to where I’d come in contact with her.

  I was all preoccupied when I was with Natalie, as well. She asked me what was troubling me.

  ‘It’s like trying to think of a word, but you can’t recall it. You think you’ve got it, but it eludes you. That’s what I’m going through with this damn’ woman. She’s the lover of a guy we’re watching.’

  ‘For The Farmer?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You think she’s his accomplice?’

  ‘Maybe not. I just know I’ve seen the damn’ woman before and it’s irritating the hell out of me. Doc thinks she’s cast a spell on me. She kept staring at me during the interview.’

  ‘She’s a witch?’

  ‘No. She’s somebody I know I’ve seen before.’

  ‘Maybe shedid cast a hex on you, Jimmy.’

  ‘You’re the only woman with magical powers in my life.’

  ‘Then why’re you so upset about her?’

  ‘I can’t shake her. It’s like an itch square in the middle of your back, just out of reach.’

  ‘Come here and I’ll scratch it.’

  She sat down next to me on her own sofa, she lifted my shirt up, and she proceeded to rub my back.

  ‘I’ll get over it. I never forget a face ... Doc called it "the evil eye". Like those old Italian women ... Like those old black-dressed Sicilian women ... It still won’t come, God damn it!’

  She took hold of my face between her hands.

  ‘You look into these eyes. There. Right there. I’ll take the hex off ... See? I can stare and glare with the best of them.’

  Then she kissed me, and it was as if Natalie had broken that so-called spell. Ellen Jacoby’s familiar face disappeared and I was left with no one but my fiancée in front of me.

  I felt a burden had been lifted. I reached up and put my hands over her hands. Then I kissed her.

  *

  We kept surveillance on Preggio, Repzac, and Karrios. We also had the whole squad keeping a lookout on any other offender who might fit the bill of The Farmer. My gut instincts did not preclude keeping the file open on potential cutters other than the three I’d got on my shortlist.

  The file on Preggio was still incomplete. We were missing a lot of bio information on him, and it was troubling me. I didn’t like blanks when it came to a suspect’s sheet. And Preggio wouldn’t be forthcoming with any information since we’d had our one chat and we had nothing further to haul him downtown for. There was this stumbling block called The Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We had to be aware of those small details where we worked. So if he was not willing to fill in the blanks, we had to fill them in for him.

  We started with his prints. You got arrested, you made prints. We ran the prints to the FBI, and guess what? He was indeed military, and contrary to the lousy odds Doc and I established, Preggio was indeed in the Medical Corps during the Gulf War. All three of our boys had ties to Band-Aids and gauze. And knives. And even if they hadn’t trained as medics, the Army still taught them how to use a blade. But not so much about how to remove the innards of a guy you were wasting. At least,I didn’t recall learning how to dissect some sorry son of a bitch I was supposed to be killing. We went through all the combat training before we were shipped off to Vietnam in the late sixties. Luckily, I never had call to use a bayonet. Just the MI6, and that rifle with its choice of automatic and semiauto fire was quite sufficient for me.

  So Preggio completed the trio. All of them veterans of the same short war. All of them sex offenders with crimes against women and/or adolescent girls. All of them in the same age range. None of them were without current female companionship.

  I could still see that sweatshirt-hood racing up that fence at the giraffe enclosure.

  The sick feeling of guessing wrong about The Farmer hit me, as it did about three or four times every day. I remembered Doc said we had to leave the door open to other possibilities besides Preggio, Repzac and Karrios. He was right. But my stomach still said it was one of them. Maybe it was my ego, my pride.

  The Farmer was down for retooling. He had had a close call with the woman at the Zoo, so now he was retrenching. Changing his ad on the Internet. God help Matty McGinn find him again. I would be pushing it to go back to Billy Cheech for any new information. He was my cousin, so I didn’t particularly want to see him get killed. Jail, he deserved. Death, no. He was a petty thief, mostly. He was not a made man and he probably never would be because I didn’t think he had the sack to kill people.

  Our boy was lying low, waiting for his comeback. And if Doc and Jack and I didn’t hurry, he’d be notching number three on the handle of that razor-sharp knife he was an expert at using.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The old man sipped from his can of Diet Dr Pepper. He was not as old as he looked. He was just sixty-three, but he looked ten years older.

  ‘Dr Gray, do you think our guy
would have to have had a medical background?’ I asked the ME.

  ‘Not necessarily, Jimmy. Why would you think that?’

  He sipped slowly at his soda pop again.

  ‘Because of the skill he showed in cutting out the organs.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean he was a physician in training. A couple of courses in dissection could’ve got him where he’s at ... Why are you stuck on that theme about med school?’

  ‘Because that’s how we came up with our three boys. From the computer and from the profile. Their age range is twenty-five to forty, their race is white, and they were all medics in the Gulf — and one guy served at the tail end of Vietnam, right before the fall of Saigon in 1974-5.’

  ‘So the computer made all these hits, and wa-la, here are your three primary suspects. How many guys were on the list before the cut?’

  ‘Something like thirty-eight.’

  ‘Jesus, Jimmy. That leaves thirty-five extras in your scenario. You’re putting a lot of faith in that damn’ machine.’

  ‘You sound more like Doc every time I talk to you, and now you’re scaring the shit out of me, Dr Gray.’

  ‘You’ll survive. You’re not gonna be shaken by what some old quack told you ... I’m just trying to say that you might be overplaying the hits from the computer on their history as medics. I read all that crap about the ages of white serial killers, and I know it’s supposed to work. But let me tell you, Lieutenant, the knife work on those two women is not exceptional. It’s workmanlike. Not messy. But not extraordinarily skillful. A good butcher could have done those two jobs. After he’d dosed them, they became like slabs of meat, didn’t they?’

  ‘No. Not really, Doctor.’

  ‘Stop being so goddamnedspiritual with me, Parisi. I’m talking about their physical bodies. I know they were human beings. Give me a little credit. But the task of removing those organs from dead human beings is nothing like the skill it takes to remove all those parts from a living person and the skill it takes to replace those same items and keep said subject alive ... Am I coming through, Lieutenant?’

  ‘Yeah. I think so. I know you guys know your business.’

  ‘We’re not meat-cutters, I’m telling you. But the guy who did these two ladies could very well have been on about that kind of primitive level, so I’m saying I wouldn’t get all caught up in what a wonderfulsurgeonthis clown seems to be to you and to some of the media. They’re comparing The Farmer to Jack the Ripper, who might well have been a medico. I say bullshit, Jimmy.This guy’s a novice cutter. Neat, but no superstar. You want a super-star, watch a neurosurgeon do his thing ... Now, if there’s nothing else?’

  A meat-cutter. A butcher. All that improbability went right down the shitter. The computer picked these three on common hits. And I was the guy who was convinced the machine gave me three good names to pursue. And Dr Gray ripped me a new anal aperture for being stuck on them, for insisting it had to be one of them.

  The list of molesters — the original one — had almost forty names. And the only common hits were the race (white) and the age range (25-40), and the military business. And forty was probably a bit too old for the standard serial murderer. My machine detective suddenly appeared to have warts. What if I was spending all this time on the wrong suspects? That singular obsession had been gnawing at me ever since Doc had brought the notion up. The Medical Examiner made my own innards sink when he tore up all my theories about a war-vet medic being the guy. It sounded so good until Gray got hold of it, and now ...

  You went on until the end. All I could do was eliminate the three of them and then start on the rest of the list when I saw that Repzac, Karrios and Preggio were just beeps that matched on the cyber system. Then I would be right back at the beginning.

  But it was the women who kept me thinking there was a reason to go back and keep hacking at them. Three women. I knew the woman at the zoo belonged to one of them. Three women who had the general body size, give or take an inch or two of height, to keep them on the playing field.

  The woman was the key. If I found her, I found The Farmer.

  *

  Janice Ripley, Repzac’s live-in, had long, sandy-blonde hair. She was a little tall — about five five. But it was close enough to make her a possible. Jack Wendkos had never made her face clearly. The hood had been drawn and the sunglasses had covered much of her visage. He couldn’t be sure exactly what she’d looked like.

  Doc and I met with Ripley at Repzac’s apartment on the North Side. Repzac was at work, she told us as we entered the middle flat of a three-level. Jack was at work downtown, waiting for the results of possible fingerprints on the hood we’d found at Brookfield.

  Her eyes were unlike those of Ellen Jacoby, Karrios’s lover. They were more vacant than brilliant. They looked at you, then around you, and then at nothing in particular. I was thinking drugs. I looked over at Doc and he watched me before I began.

  ‘We’ve asked you about these dates before, Ms Ripley. Before you give us the answer you did last time, I want to remind you that if you withhold evidence in a capital crime you’re looking at major heat.’

  ‘Major heat?’ She smiled. But there was no amusement in her face.

  ‘That means a lot of years of incarceration,’ Doc explained.

  ‘Oh, I understand,’ she said.

  Now her eyes were focused out the front window, behind Doc and me.

  ‘Are you waiting for someone?’ I asked.

  ‘Huh? ... Oh, no. I was just looking to see if the sun was out. It’s getting cold. Winter’ll be here before —’

  ‘You understood what I said, did you?’ I questioned her.

  ‘Sure. I wouldn’t lie about something like murder. I read about the two killings. They were horrible. Just horrible. How could anyone do a thing like that? ... I know Daw couldn’t. He just couldn’t.’

  ‘You’re aware of his criminal record?’

  ‘Sure,’ she told me. ‘Daw didn’t do it. He had a juvy record, so they just picked him out because he was an easy mark.’

  ‘Are you using?’ I asked her.

  She sat there, but now she was watching me carefully.

  ‘Hey man, I —’

  ‘Hey, shit. Are you using, Janice?’ I asked her again.

  ‘Are you narcin’ me, Lieutenant?’

  ‘No. I’m Homicide. Remember? But if you’re into things you shouldn’t be, you could put your boyfriend — Daw, right? — into a world of shit. Unless, that is, the two of you are already into that world of shit. Is that the way it is, Janice?’

  She averted her eyes to the window once more.

  ‘I think I don’t want to talk to you guys anymore. Not without a lawyer, anyway.’

  ‘Okay,’ Doc told her. He left his card on the coffee table in front of her. ‘But if you want to jump the ship your boyfriend’s sinking with, call me and let me know ... Janice, you ought to come down and see the pictures we’ve got. You might want to buy a night-light so you can keep a good eye on Daw before you go to sleep.’

  ‘I don’t think I want to talk to you anymore, Detective.’

  She stood now, and her glare was angry and resolute. I might’ve been wrong about the drugs. Or maybe all that spacey shit was part of an act.

  ‘Call if you change your mind,’ Doc insisted.

  We walked out the front door.

  ‘Was she the fence climber, Jimmy P?’

  I opened the driver’s side of the Taurus, out by the curb.

  ‘If she was as sober as she was at the end of the conversation, I could see it, yeah.’

  *

  We had to drive all the way up to the northern suburb of Lake Forest to find Caroline Keady, Preggio’s third member of his little love triangle.

  We called on the phone first, just to make sure that we wouldn’t waste time and gas for the trip. We also gave County a call before we intruded on their territory. County was very cooperative.

  We had to drive a quarter-mile along their driveway befo
re we pulled up to the estate. ‘It ain’t a house,’ Doc told me. This was the ritzy part of northern Illinois. It was where the yuppies settled when they cashed in their stocks and when they inherited Dad’s bucks. This was the old rich section of the Chicago area. It was probably the most affluent area in striking distance of the city. There were no mean streets in Lake Forest, but that didn’t preclude there being a few mean and ornery human creatures up this far north, just off Lake Michigan.

  As we also expected, Caroline didn’t answer the door. A butler did. But he didn’t resemble Jeeves. He was not British. He was Filipino, with a very pronounced accent. I felt like joshing him about his green card, but we didn’t have the time to mess with him.

  We waited in the library. It was on the main floor, just past the staircase. Caroline Keady showed up in less than five minutes. Doc was checking out the beautifully bound books that were shelved all around us.

  The girl walked in wearing raggy-assed blue jeans. But I saw a very expensive brand name on the rear of them as she turned and closed the doors behind herself.

  ‘This is all very embarrassing. I don’t know why I’m involved in this ... investigation,’ she sputtered.

  I identified Doc and myself, we showed her our credentials, and then I got down to it as Doc carried on checking out the tomes in leather.

  ‘You know Jimmy Preggio.’

  ‘Yes. Or you wouldn’t be here. Right?’

  ‘Look, Caroline. We’re not here to flame up on you. We’re interested in Preggio ... You were at his place several times in the last few weeks?’

  She was right on the money with her size, complexion, hair color. It was a mousy brown, my wife Erin would have called it. She was not outstanding in the face, but she was attractive, like the other two. And there was a very up-front sexuality about her, as there was with Jacoby and Ripley.