I scooted across the floor and got behind a sofa, my gun trained on the kitchen. The cellular was in my pocket, and I took it out with my left hand.
“Hey, Jack!”
He was behind me. I turned, bringing around the .38, pulling the trigger…
Latham.
He had tape over his mouth, and the maniac was using him as a shield, the gun jammed under his jaw.
I managed to jerk my shot over their heads.
“Drop it. Now, or he dies.”
Latham’s face was pure panic, eyes unbelievably wide, moans coming from his throat.
I let the gun fall.
“Good girl. Now get up.”
I pulled myself to my feet, using the sofa. My bad leg was shaking so hard, it could barely support me.
“The phone. Put it away.”
I stuck it in my pocket. Had my surveillance team heard the shots? Doubtful. They were over a block away.
“What happened to your face, Charles? Cut yourself shaving?”
“Such bravado in a hopeless situation. You’re a hero to the end, Jack. But how are you going to handle this, hero?”
He shoved Latham in front of him, aiming his weapon. I watched, helpless, as he shot Latham twice in the back.
Latham flopped forward, his head bouncing off the floor. Then he was still.
“Any more smart comments?”
I limped to Latham, but the killer rushed over and kicked me in my bad leg. I howled, dropping to the carpet.
“Do I have your attention now, Jack?”
He kicked again, this time at my head. Motes of light burst in my skull, a fireworks display of pain.
“Looks like the coward is kicking your ass. Maybe you’re the one who’s going to cry for her mama. Isn’t that what you said on the news?”
I tried to focus, looking for where I’d dropped my gun. He followed my gaze and picked it up.
“You know why I said those things.” My head was swimming, my leg on fire.
“Naturally. To get me to come after you. You should be happy. It worked.”
My cell phone rang. Neither of us moved.
“It’s the team checking in.”
“Keep it simple. You’re making dinner. Everything is fine. One wrong word…”
He put the barrel of his gun to my bloody pants and pressed. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from crying.
“Make it good.”
I spoke through my teeth. “You want them to hear me scream?”
He relieved the pressure and I sucked in a breath before answering the phone.
“Yeah?”
“You okay, Lieutenant? We heard what might have been gunshots.”
“We’re fine. Making dinner right now. Everything is peachy.”
“Peachy” was the code word. They’d be here to rescue me within a minute, if I lived that long.
“Just checking.”
He hung up. They did know the code word was “peachy,” didn’t they?
“Good job, Jack. Now we’ll go for a little ride. Where’s your surveillance?”
“A block away. Down Leavitt.”
“Okay. We’re going out the alley. My truck is back there. Get up.”
I struggled to get to my feet, putting all my weight on my good leg. He wound his hand in my hair and jerked me upward. Then he pulled my head to his face. I felt his breath on my neck, sour milk and rotten meat.
“We’re going to get to know each other, Jack. Like only a man and a woman can. We’re even going to make a little movie.”
He licked my ear. The revulsion I felt was so intense, I had to pull away, ripping out some of my hair in the process.
“Oh, it won’t be so bad. I’m going to make you famous, Lieutenant. Our video will be on every news show in America. They’ll have to edit out the nasty parts, though.”
My cell phone rang. The signal. I dropped to the floor and covered my head just as the door burst inward.
Gunshots. Breaking glass. A moan. One of my guys went down in the doorway, and Charles ran away through the kitchen.
I pulled myself along the floor, over to Latham, checking for a pulse.
Faint, but there.
“Harris!”
He was kneeling next to the fallen body of his partner, a cop named Mark.
“I’ll call for backup!” I told him. “He has a truck out back. Go!”
Harris took off after the killer. I found my phone and dialed 911, saying the most dreaded words in police lingo.
“This is Lieutenant Jack Daniels out of the two-six, officer down…”
After giving them my badge number and an address, I crawled over to Mark, who was pitched face-first on the carpet. Shoulder wound, a bad one. I kept pressure on it.
A minute later the place was surrounded with cops. Latham and Mark were carted off in ambulances. They tried to take me too, but I put up such a fight, they gave up.
Harris came back. He’d chased the killer on foot down an alley, but the perp had gotten away in a plumbing truck. He got a plate number, and it matched the one Phin gave us.
Benedict arrived shortly thereafter. “You okay, Jack?”
I was sitting at the kitchen table, an ice pack pressed to my leg. “He got away again, Herb. Even worse — he got my gun.”
The thought of him killing someone with my weapon was almost as sickening as the thought of him torturing me to death.
“On the way over, I got word from the hospital. Your date has a collapsed lung and internal bleeding. He’s in surgery. But it looks pretty good.”
“How about Mark?”
“Stable.” Herb put his hand on my shoulder. His eyes were kind. “This wasn’t your fault. We couldn’t have known he was waiting here for you.”
“Yes we could have. This would all be over now if I’d just used some common sense and thought about it. He’d been following me, Herb, saw me with Latham, and followed him instead. If he dies…”
“You aren’t the bad guy here, Jack. You didn’t pull the trigger.”
“As if that makes a difference.”
“It does, and you know it. Why don’t you come over? Bernice is keeping the pot roast warm for me. There’s more than enough.”
I shook my head.
“Jack, there’ll be plenty of time to beat yourself up later. Come to my house and eat.”
“I’m going to the hospital, check on Latham.”
Herb frowned, but knew there wasn’t any point in arguing. I stuck around for a bit longer, sulking, and then limped out to my car and went to the hospital.
Latham was in Recovery. The doctor said he was still critical, but the outlook was good. I’d found an address book near his kitchen phone and called his parents. They came about an hour later, crying. We all sat vigil late into the night. None of us slept.
At five in the morning Latham’s eyelids fluttered, and he awoke briefly. His gaze met mine.
“I don’t want you here,” he said.
I went back to my apartment.
There was a bottle of whiskey in the kitchen cabinet.
Since sleeping wasn’t an option, I hit the bottle until I passed out.
Chapter 36
I WOKE UP TO PAIN.
Leg pain. Headache pain.
Emotional pain.
One more layer on the shit cake.
It was almost two in the afternoon. My stomach was doing a mambo, protesting all the liquor I’d consumed. I dropped two Alka-Seltzer in a glass of water and drank it before they finished dissolving.
I called the hospital. Latham was stable. His parents didn’t let me talk to him. Couldn’t blame them, I guess. I considered sending flowers, or at least a card apologizing, but they would only be reminders of me, the person who put him through hell.
My stomach settled down some, so I swallowed three aspirin to help with my other aches. I was due for a day off, but didn’t feel that I deserved one. After a shower I scrubbed the bloodstains out of my pants. Then I shelved the guilt f
or later, and went to work.
Captain Bains wanted to see me. I gave him the blow-by-blow, filled out the requisition form for a new gun, and picked one up at the Armory.
It was homecoming week for the media. The Gingerbread Man’s letter was all over the news last night, as was the discovery of the third woman. The incident at Latham’s fueled the fire. Internal Affairs began conducting an investigation of the loss of my weapon. Bains told me to keep a very low profile, and the word to the world was I’d been suspended pending an inquiry.
Unofficially, I was still on the case. I just wasn’t allowed to be connected with it. We live in a political world.
After working with a police artist to improve our composite photo of the perp, I grabbed a vending-machine ham on rye and went down to the shooting range to try out my new .38.
I spent an hour there, shooting round after round into paper silhouettes, imagining each one was the Gingerbread Man. When I was finished, my gun was hot to the touch and the stench of cordite had penetrated my clothes and hair like cigarette smoke.
When I got back to my office, Benedict was waiting.
“We matched prints off the third Jane Doe. Army record. Reserves. Her name was Nancy Marx. You up for it?”
“Let’s go.”
We took the elevator because I wasn’t anxious to start bleeding again. Benedict drove. Nancy Marx had lived in a townhouse on Troy, off Irving Park Road. Herb already had a search warrant, should there be a need to break in.
There was no need.
“May I help you?”
A woman answered the door. Elderly, gray, wrinkled, someone’s grandmother. My heart clenched.
“I’m Lieutenant Daniels. This is Detective Benedict. Does Nancy Marx live here?”
“Did you find her? I called this morning, but I was told I couldn’t fill out a missing person report until she’d been missing two days.”
“Are you related to Nancy?”
“I’m her grandmother. What’s going on? Where’s Nancy?”
In less than two sentences I destroyed this woman’s life. If there was one part of my job I hated the most, this was it. Herb and I stood there, awkwardly, while she went from shock, to denial, to hysteria, and finally to depressed acceptance, moaning like a ghost haunting an old love.
We took turns trying to comfort her.
After the initial outpouring of emotion, they always wanted to know how and why.
We told her the how. We didn’t know the why.
“She didn’t suffer,” was all we could offer.
The autopsy report had confirmed this. Nancy Marx died from a broken neck. How the ME figured that out from examining an array of body parts amazed me.
“But who did this to her?”
“We don’t know yet, Miss…”
“Marx. Sylvia Marx. Nancy’s parents, my son and daughter-in-law, died in a car accident seven years ago. She was all I had left.”
We lost her to sobbing again. Benedict made some coffee in the kitchen, and I sat with the old woman on the couch, holding her hand.
“Mrs. Marx, did your granddaughter have any enemies?”
“None. Not one. She was a good girl.”
“How about a boyfriend?”
“No one steady for a while now. Nancy was popular, she dated a lot, but there hasn’t been anyone serious since Talon.”
“Talon?”
“Talon Butterfield. Didn’t really care for him much. He fooled around on her. They were engaged too. Lived together for a while, and then she moved in with me earlier this year, after she broke up with him. It was nice to have her home.”
Her gray eyes began to blur again.
“Did Nancy know anyone named Theresa Metcalf?” I showed her a picture.
“No. Can’t recall. Is she dead too?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Pretty thing, like my Nancy.”
I had her look at other pictures, of the first Jane Doe, and of the recent composite of our perp.
“I’m sorry, but no. I don’t know any of them.”
“Do you have an address for Talon Butterfield?”
“No. I don’t think Nancy does either. When she left, he moved out of town. They haven’t been in touch, as far as I know. Do you think Talon was part of this?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out, Mrs. Marx.”
“I never liked the boy, but he wasn’t a killer. He loved Nancy. He just couldn’t keep his drumstick in his pants.”
Benedict brought us coffee, and we asked a few more questions. After they yielded nothing, we got permission to search Nancy’s room.
It was small, modest, and neat. Her drawers held no secrets. There were no letters, no appointment books, no bills, no canceled checks, nothing at all.
It occurred to Herb that maybe Nancy’s things might be somewhere else. Not too many people did all of their paperwork in the bedroom. We decided to ask Sylvia. She was in the den, petting a white cat, staring at a framed picture of her dead grandchild. The cat jumped off her lap and fled when we approached.
“Mrs. Marx, did Nancy have a checkbook?”
“She kept it in the kitchen, in the utility drawer.”
“Canceled checks as well?”
“Nancy had one of those cards. Like a credit card, but it drew from her checking account. The bank keeps the canceled checks.”
“How about an address book? Or credit card statements? Or personal letters?”
“She has a box of papers that she never unpacked after moving in. It’s in the closet there. Did you find anything from Talon?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. Nancy gathered up everything, pictures, gifts, cards, and threw it away when she left him. But I was thinking. If you want to find out about him, you could ask that private detective.”
“Ma’am?”
“Nancy hired a private detective to spy on Talon when she thought he was being unfaithful.”
My heart rate went up.
“Do you remember his name?”
“Let me think. Nancy actually went out with him a few times, after Talon. She brought him to the house once, and he pinched my bottom.”
Sylvia Marx giggled, tears still in her eyes.
“Henry, was it? Henry McGee. No, McGlade. Henry McGlade?”
“You mean Harry McGlade?” Benedict asked.
“Yes, that was it. Harry McGlade.”
Jackpot.
Chapter 37
HE HAS TO GET RID OF the truck.
That isn’t part of his plan. His fingerprints are all over the damn thing. Even if he spends an entire day wiping it down, he’ll never clean it completely.
And his fingerprints will lead them to him. He’s never taken the pains to establish a new identity. He never thought that they’d get close enough for it to be necessary.
He goes over it all again in his head, goes over what they have.
They know his face now. But with some hair dye and a shave, that can be changed. There’s nothing connecting him to the truck; he stole it in Detroit and put stolen Illinois plates on it. He has no business license. His driver’s license is current, but shows an old address, and he never bothered to update it after getting married and moving.
But there are some links to his present address. The phone company and the electric company. The IRS. Credit cards. The bank. If the cops get his name, they’ll be able to find him without much trouble. And once they find him, they’ll be able to convict. In his cockiness, he’s giving them his DNA. Not the smartest move, in hindsight.
He has to move quickly, establish a new ID. Maybe even go to one of those doctors who can laser away your fingerprints. He’ll disappear, resurface someplace else. Maybe even leave the country. There were plenty of women around the world to have fun with.
But first he has to finish the job here.
He takes a bus back to his house after ditching the truck in an all-night parking garage. Jack isn’t on his mind for the momen
t. All of his focus is on the last victim. She’ll be the easiest of all. No stalking necessary. No need for the truck. If he plays it right, he won’t even need the Seconal.
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