“The good life, huh?”
“At least it’ll be better than this life.” He paused. “So what are you doing with junior, here?”
Joe Mac motioned to Jodi. “She told you. She took the missing person report on my grandson, and she wants to follow up.” He shrugged. “I figured I’d ride along. Maybe offer a little advice. What’s the harm?”
A long silence.
“That’s it, huh? How come I don’t believe you?”
“What else can I do but give advice?” asked Joe Mac. “You know I’m blind as a bat. I can’t carry a gun. I don’t have arrest powers. I’m not even bonded anymore. All I can do is sit and listen and tell her what I think.”
“Can’t she just call you at the end of the day? Like Dear Abby?”
“It won’t hurt nuthin’ for me to ride along with her, Steve. And you know how it works. Sometimes you have to be there.”
Brightbarton’s laugh was tragic. “You have no idea what you’re asking, buddy. You honest-to-god have no idea.”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
There was a shifting; Brightbarton had leaned forward. “All right, Joe. Listen up. This guy ain’t no joke. Not even the FBI is willing to send normal agents after him. They’re gonna send Hostage Rescue if they ever have him cornered. You listening?”
“I’m listening.”
“So what are you gonna do if you stumble into him? I don’t know if you’ve checked lately, but you’re blind, Joe. This guy could pull out a piece, walk right up to your face, and blow you away, and you wouldn’t even see it coming. Or are you gonna put your life in the very uncertain hands of Little Ms. Junior Detective, here, who’s never been in a gunfight in her entire life?” Brightbarton shifted. “Have you ever even pulled your gun, Jodi?”
“Well, I –”
“No! You haven’t!” Brightbarton answered. “I checked with your supervisor! You’ve mostly been doing paperwork for the goons downtown.”
“I don’t plan for us to get that close to him,” said Joe Mac. “If I get a feeling, I’ll call you, and you can send SWAT.”
Brightbarton made a sucking sound with his teeth before he stood and walked around to the front of the desk. “You know that’s not the point, Joe. The point is that you’re asking for my blessing to go after this guy. And this psycho makes Charles Manson look like Billy Graham. He’ll come at you with a gun, a hammer, and a noose. And what you got? You got an old blind man’s cane. That’s all you got. And I wouldn’t exactly call that a fair fight. And you say you’re just here to observe? Well what if he don’t care if you’re just here to observe? What if he takes it kinda personal that you’re looking to plant him?”
Brightbarton cursed before adding, “Son, you need to get it straight who you’re dealing with before you put her life in danger. This guy is The Devil! One of his victims was a six-month-old baby boy! And you expect me to let you, a blind man who can’t find his face with a map, wander around asking questions about where to find Satan himself? Don’t you care about living or dying? Don’t you know what this psychopath will do if he thinks you’re on his trail? If he doesn’t kill you outright – which he ain’t gonna do! – he’ll break every bone in your body and hang you from the neck until … you … are … dead. And there’s not a thing you’ll be able to do about it! You’ll be at his mercy. And this guy can’t spell ‘mercy.’”
“You’ve read all the files?” asked Joe Mac.
“Yeah, yeah,” Brightbarton leaned back against the desk. “I read every one of them a thousand times. I take my job seriously.”
“What else can you tell me?”
Brightbarton replied with unconcealed frustration; “So you don’t intend to take my advice? You intend to go after this guy, anyway?”
“I guess so.”
“Well you’re gonna die, Joe.”
“Everybody dies.”
“Yeah, but not everybody gets in line for it.”
“So what else you got?”
With a tired sigh Brightbarton continued, “You were at the briefing. I can’t add anything to it. He’s in his mid-thirties. He’s white. He’s smart. He’s strong. He doesn’t take anything. Doesn’t leave anything. We got no clues, hairs, or fibers. He doesn’t have any motive that we can understand. He doesn’t seem to be associated with any of the victims in any way. He uses a different car, a different disguise every time. We find the cars later, but he torches them, so we don’t have any prints or DNA. He kills old people, young people, black, white. He seems to choose victims at random, so we can’t predict where he’s gonna strike next. There’s no pattern that we can see.”
“Were all the victims found shortly after sunset?” asked Joe Mac.
“Not all of them. Some weren’t found ‘till the next day. But we’ve thought about that connection with sunset, and I don’t think it means anything. It just took longer to find some than it took to find others. That archeologist seems to think religion has something to do with it but, personally, I think he’s just an overdressed bookend. He doesn’t know any more about how to be a detective than Little Ms. Moffat, here.”
Joe Mac heard a step in the door as Brightbarton said, “Hey, Jack.”
FBI Special Agent Jack Rollins replied, “Sorry, captain, I didn’t know you were busy.”
“That’s all right. What can I do for you?”
“We got another one,” said Rollins.
Brightbarton hesitated. “Another kid?”
“No, I understand it’s an old man. But he was killed the same way. Bones broken, and then he was hung in a tree. It’s way north of the city, so the state has jurisdiction. But it’s one of ours, for sure. I’ll have a file for you by the end of the day.”
“All right,” said Brightbarton. Then he added, “Jack, I want to introduce you to Detective Jodi Strong. She’s an addition to the NYPD task force.”
There was a significant pause before Rollins remarked, “Welcome to the team, Detective Strong.”
“Jodi.”
“Jodi. Just call me Jack.”
Jodi must have nodded because she said nothing. Then Brightbarton added, “And this is an old friend of mine, Joe Mac Blake. Joe was the best homicide man this city ever had – the best homicide man any city’s ever had.” He grunted softly, “Joe’s retired – a line-of-duty incident, but we think he might be able to help out as an advisor.”
Rollins must have been staring, but Joe Mac wasn’t certain until the FBI man said, “Welcome you to the team, Joe. I don’t mean to use a cliché, but it’s never been more true than now: We need all the help we can get.”
“We won’t get in your way,” said Joe Mac.
“Don’t worry about it. If there’s anything I can do for you, let me know.” There was a faint shuffling in the door. “I’ll get that file for you, Steve.”
“One question,” said Joe Mac.
Rollins answered, “Yes?”
“Can you set us up a meeting with that professor of archeology?”
“Of course. When?”
“Soon as possible?”
“Sure. I’ll call Detective Strong’s cell when I’ve got a time.” A pause; clothes rustling. “Jodi. Joe. Be careful.”
“Thanks, Jack,” said Jodi.
He was gone.
Nobody spoke for five seconds, and Joe Mac was carefully following every conversation up and down the hallway to make sure – as much as possible – that the FBI agent had truly departed. Finally, Brightbarton said, “What was that, Joe? I just told you that that egghead is useless.”
Joe Mac considered his words and said, “I don’t know. There’s something about what he said.” He paused. “Or didn’t say. I want to talk to him.”
“About what?”
“I’m thinking that he might be onto something. I just don’t know what it is.” Joe Mac turned his face to the side as if he were watching. Then he said, “We need the files.” A pause. “And we need a desk.”
Brightbarton stood, and Joe
Mac heard him lift a box; he set it down solid. “Here’s copies of everything, Strong. Good luck. You can use Sanders’s old office. Turn left out the door. Second door on the right.” He sniffed. “All I can say is this guy’s a ghost. Personally, I think he’s got specialized training. Probably Rangers. Special Forces. Delta. Who knows?”
Joe Mac said nothing, but then realized that his image must be far more disturbing than he knew because Jodi asked, “Joe? What’s wrong?”
“I’m thinking he’s too good,” said Joe Mac.
Stillness lasted until Jodi asked, “Are you thinking he might be a cop?”
Joe Mac frowned, “He’s somewhere in the floor plan. And I don’t think we’re going to catch him by chasing him. We’re gonna have to figure out where he’s going next and lay up for him. That’s why we gotta figure out what his motive is. When we understand why he’s choosing them, we’ll catch him.”
Brightbarton muttered, “Joe, we’ve looked for motive a million times, and all we’ve come up with are a lot of hair-brained theories with nothing to show for it. Now, I’m sure he does have some kind of crazy motive. But it’s incomprehensible.”
“Nah, we just don’t comprehend it yet.” With each breath, Joe Mac was feeling more at home. “Have you cross-checked the victims?”
“Son, the computers have cross-checked everything.”
Brightbarton sat; “There’s nothing that links them, and we have, believe me, cross-checked where they shopped, where they got their food, their clothes, their insurance, their groceries. We’ve looked at where they bought their pillows and pets and everything else they ever bought. We checked their phones and computers for possible links and came up with nothing. We checked anniversaries and parents and genealogies and every other thing. Some went to church, but some didn’t. There’s no thread that ties them together except for the fact that they were all on this guy’s list.” He took a moment. “I can’t figure it unless he’s just picking them at random. And that means his next victim could be anybody at any place at any time and that’s gonna be a nightmare.”
He was quiet before he exclaimed, “What am I saying? It’s already a nightmare. We might as well tell everybody out there to just carry a gun wherever they go. And that would include everywhere they go inside their own house because this guy could be your husband, and some poor wife won’t have a clue.”
Joe Mac stood. “You ready, kid?”
“I’m ready.” Jodi walked to the desk, and Joe Mac heard her grunt as she lifted the box. He knew it was a lot heavier than most people would suspect.
Jodi walked past him.
“No, thanks. I got this.”
“I’m blind.”
“And crippled, too. Yeah, I can see that.”
* * *
Sanders had understandably left almost everything in his office.
Joe Mac didn’t blame him. Sanders had been looking at this office every day for the last twenty years. Now that he had reached the age of blessed retirement, he didn’t want a single thing in his new life to remind him of the old. He wanted to make as clean a break from police work as possible in both his world and mind.
“At least he didn’t leave his gun and badge,” Jodi remarked as she methodically unloaded the box.
“Nah,” said Joe Mac, “your gun and badge is cut and dried. There’s a little man at a desk in an empty room. You hand him your badge. He tosses it in a cardboard box. Then, if you want, you can keep your leather and your piece. You just have to pay for it. He takes two minutes to explain your pension and benefits and that’s it.”
“No going away party?”
“Not even a watch.”
“What’d they give you after thirty-five years on the job and being injured and losing your eyesight?”
“A ride home.”
“Pigs.”
Her cell phone rang, and she answered. “Strong.” There was a moment before she replied, “Right. Five o’clock at the museum. We’ll be there. Thanks, Rollins. Yeah, we’ll let you know what we get. Later.”
Joe Mac lifted his head and found the scents and sounds of the building more familiar than the scents and sounds of his own home. But that wasn’t hard to understand. He had spent far more time in this building over the past thirty-five years than any home he’d ever had. In a sense this building was his home. And he discovered himself following every conversation hovering in the open door with a sense of déjà vu.
If he’d been in on the discussion, he could have advised them on the best judge for the case and what to expect from forensics. He could have told them what the CODIS used by the FBI was likely to contain in terms of DNA. He could have told them what the Shooting Review Board was going to say over a rookie shooting his daughter dead when she came home in the middle of the night, surprising him. He had been in on all these conversations a million times. He’d worked a thousand shootings involving rookies and veterans, and he could almost predict the Review Board’s decision for any crisis that might come down the pike. But he was getting distracted by problems flowing through the door and reined in his mind.
“What do you see?” Joe Mac asked; he had taken a seat in a folding chair, and Jodi was sitting at the desk.
“I’m looking through these files to see how many of these were reported by anonymous callers,” Jodi answered. “It looks like fifteen were reported by whom we assume is the killer since he wouldn’t leave his name. The rest were reported by family or strangers who obliged us with their names and addresses, so I guess you’re right. If they’re not found fast enough, he calls it in.”
“Separate the ones that weren’t hung from a tree.”
“I already have. Four weren’t hung.”
“That’s not what I said.”
She paused. “Then what did you say?”
“I said to separate the ones that weren’t hung from ‘a tree.’”
With an audible sigh, she began sifted through files, rattling pages with the sound of rapid searching and reading. After only one minute she said, “Okay. Seven of these were hung from beams, rafters, or steel girders located inside or outside warehouses, old buildings, condemned houses – places like that. No real pattern that I see. Oh, and one was hung from a chandelier. That’s fancy.” She hesitated. “That means sixteen were hung from trees.”
“What about the children?”
“All the children were hung from trees.”
“You already checked, huh?”
“First thing I did.” Jodi leaned back in Sanders’s creaky old chair. After a moment, she said, “So you think this guy is hiding his true motivation – which is to kill an unknown but particular group – by killing all the rest of these folks, too? And that’s why he didn’t bother to hang every single one of them from a tree? He just wanted to hang them as quick as he could and get out of there to confuse us?”
“It’s an idea,” Joe Mac answered with a ponderous tone. “What other groups were hung from a tree?”
Joe Mac waited until she said, “Okay. All the black males. All the women. All the children. All the white males under the age of thirty-three. So it could be any one of those groups. It can’t be the older white males because those are the ones he hung from any convenient pillar or post.”
“All right,” Joe Mac murmured. “That gives us a place to start.”
“Joe, I respect you, but that’s all this is – a pretty lame place to start. In these files, there is absolutely nothing to back up this idea.” She paused and Joe Mac could imagine her turning the chair, so she could gaze out the window. “Where are we even gonna begin looking for this guy? He could be anywhere!”
“Motive,” said Joe Mac. “We need a motive.”
“Joe,” said Jodi with exasperation, “this guy’s motive is nowhere in sight. We only know that he broke their bones and hung them and that goes about as far as a flying ashtray when it comes to motive.” She muttered something indistinct before, “Okay, so it’s a “religious” motive. But Good God! There’s
a by-god-zillion religious motivations and psychoses and pathological religious reasons to kill someone if that’s what cranks your tractor. That doesn’t get us anywhere, either.”
“First, we find out why he selected them. Then we find out how he selected them, and when we find that we’ll find him.”
“Yeah, yeah, Joe, you keep saying that. But so what if we understand that his motive is religious? What does that get us? It could still be one of a zillion people with a bazillion different religious motives. Like this guy is the only religious nutcase in town? Have you been to a mental asylum lately? Everybody in there is religious! They’re also crazy as a soup sandwich! Determining that this guy is selecting people because he has a religious psychosis is not what I would call progress.”
“We’ll see,” said Joe Mac. “What time is it?”
“It’s time,” said Jodi. “Let’s go to the museum and see what kind of dead end this egghead can lead us down.”
* * *
Although she had been here a dozen times, Jodi was always impressed by the New York City Museum of Natural History.
It was a colossal monument to Greek architecture – a work of art in itself – with an aura of genius in the exacting precision of the stonework, the commanding colonnades, the wide, welcoming steps that led to majestic twin doors twenty feet high. It was wired with every alarm system known to mankind, although Jodi could think of nothing anyone would be likely to steal from this cavernous repository of petrified bone, prehistoric images of Homo sapiens along with uncountable dinosaur relics and more.
There were vast ethnographic and archeological collections that boggled the mind plus examples of textiles, coinages, thrones, headdresses, weapons, shields and every other remnant portraying the evolution of the human civilization.
Some of the hypothetical archeological displays revealed highly evolved civilizations that virtually dominated the Earth, and yet nothing was known of them. The only clues that existed were tidbits of steel weaponry discovered more than three thousand years before the Hittites popularly invented steel in Palestine. And one mysterious civilization – a kingdom which even now remained unnamed – had discovered the secrets of creating glass, of hot and cold running water, of determining the dates of droughts or monsoons by the mere rotation of the Earth and stars more than 6 thousand years BC. And Jodi herself had been stunned to see the fossilized footprint of some type of humanoid being that radiocarbon-dated to 420 million years BC. Before that eye-opener, she thought – like most people – that Australopithecus, man’s earliest ancestor, dated to a mere 4 million BC. It had been a moment when Jodi accepted the fact that science knew virtually nothing. Instead, science was just a constant unfolding of inexplicable fossils and “gravitrons” and every new “discovery” only led to another mystery.
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