Pursuit

by Gene Hackman

  The letter, when it came, bore a Kansas postmark.

  Julie stared at the crumpled envelope. She scolded herself for being so suspicious; after all, it could be one of a hundred different things: a thank-you from a traffic warning, a donation request from Hungry Children of Kansas. A long-forgotten relative.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d gotten a personal letter at the station house. Just in case, she used a letter opener and a pair of scissors to handle the envelope. She held the mailer with the point of the scissors while slitting the glued flap with her opener, pulling out one sheet of paper along with an earring. Though hammered flat, the earring looked familiar. She also noted a number of newspaper clippings glued to a piece of plain white paper.

  Sometimes a complete word had been taken from a headline. Other times just a series of different letter sizes and fonts:

  I have my eye on your daughter. Hope things are going well for you.

  Or did I already say that? One of these days I’ll pay you a visit. Can’t help wondering how you found me. That tap on the shoulder in the middle of the night will be me.

  Mr. C

  Julie called on George Rogers, their resident forensics guy. “Rogers, I’ve got a letter that needs looking at. Could you come down to the basement and pick it up?”

  He showed up in no time. “Hey, nice digs. How do you rate, Sarge?”

  “Just one of those sliding promotional things. Being in the right place at the wrong time.”

  “What do you have?”

  Julie explained the letter, her case, which he’d heard about, and that she knew who sent it. “Could you get this to the FBI, Detective Devlin, and Captain Walker? After you’ve done your thing with it, of course.”

  Julie thanked him and called Todd about lunch.

  They ate in their favorite hamburger joint, Julie getting her obligatory turkey burger while Todd loaded up on his Double Daddies—a huge bacon-laden sandwich with two beef patties, cheese, and all the trimmings.

  “You’re gonna die young. You know that, don’t you?” Julie asked.

  “But happy as a pig in slop.”

  “Oink.”

  They talked about Charles Clegg. “Damn,” exclaimed Todd. “I wished I’d been there at the warrant service.”

  “Yeah, me too. It would have been exciting watching you waddle down that dirt road with a greasy sandwich in your hand, chasing our Mr. C.”

  “Is that what you’re calling him now?”

  “That’s what he’s calling himself. I think Jackson Ross is a little annoyed we didn’t wait for him. He isn’t calling much,” Julie said.

  “Maybe he thinks you didn’t want him there because you maybe want some extrajudicial remedies in this case.”

  Julie didn’t respond.

  Todd changed the subject. “So, you say, Kansas postmark. But it’s easy enough to drive across the border and drop off a letter. Could you tell where in Kansas?”

  “No, it was blurred. The stamp looked wrinkled, so maybe that’s why the town name came out illegible. Only Kansas was clear.”

  “Probably doesn’t matter; it’s just a ruse, anyway.”

  “You think?”

  They parted, agreeing to meet later. Julie took her time driving back to the station.

  “This seems like a joke. No offense, Sergeant, but wouldn’t you agree?” Walker opened up the conversation with Todd and Julie.

  “It’s not terribly original, like if some square dude read a lot of police thrillers. But to answer your question, Charles Clegg kidnapped my daughter and was responsible for the death of my best friend. Not much of a joke there.”

  “Well, yes. What I meant was, it’s exactly the way you describe it. A copycat would be a ‘dangerous man.’ ” He made air quotes with his fingers. “He is dangerous, but maybe not a creeper-in-the-middle-of-the-night kind of guy. As I said, a wannabe. He wishes he had the balls to walk into your bedroom in the middle of the night.”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Todd said. “He ran the sergeant off the road, had the presence of mind to scout out Thousand Pines and establish an elaborate scheme there with the dog business. He kept Cheryl locked up a couple of weeks. I think—”

  Julie reached for her clipboard. “I’ve got some new info. Excuse me, Todd. I ran a word search on the name Clegg. Looked at some microfiche from local newspapers too. Nothing much of interest except two little items in the Kansas City Star newspaper’s morgue. Listen to this: February 10, 1993. Blurb in the nuptials section. ‘Mrs. Priscilla Linn of Kansas City, Kansas, would like to announce the engagement of her daughter, Patty, to Mr. Charles Clegg of Affton, Missouri.’ Affton, by the way, is close to Drew Box Factory. It goes on, ‘The couple’s planned marriage will be held at the Olathe Bible Church on March 30, 1993.’ ”

  “And . . . And what?” Walker asked, along with a “Get on with it” gesture.

  Julie checked her anger at her boss’s impatience. “The ‘and what’ is this: first, a brief article in the Star, September 18, 1993. ‘Woman’s body discovered in trash container behind Old Town Mall. An unidentified female in her early twenties was discovered by the driver of a Dumpster truck.’ Goes on to describe the victim. Then the following day, ‘Charles Clegg, husband of the previously unidentified woman left dead in a trash container on Sunday last has identified the woman as his recent bride. Police, in an earlier news conference, stated Mr. Clegg was not a suspect in what authorities are now calling a homicide. Mr. Clegg, when contacted by this reporter, said he had been across the state in Saint Louis at the time of his wife’s disappearance. Authorities confirmed Mr. Clegg’s alibi.’ ”

  The room took on the somber ambiance of a funeral parlor.

  “Anything else?” Walker was the first to break the silence.

  “Rogers confirmed the presence of a postmark from Olathe, Kansas. The same town where Charlie and Patty were married. Coincidence? I think not.” She hurried on. “Can we convict him of his wife’s murder? Unlikely, but—” She leafed through her notes. “This is a duplicate of a ticket issued on September 14, 1993, by a trooper on I-70 outside of Kansas City, Missouri. It lists as the lawbreaker our Charlie boy traveling east with a broken taillight and expired insurance.”

  “Right, that’s the day before they found the wife,” Walker said.

  “The ticket was issued at eleven thirty, twenty miles from location of the body. They discovered the wife eight hours later.”

  “There’s no doubt this guy’s dirty,” Todd said. “But how do we find him?”

  Walker held up his hand as everyone began to speak at once. “Hold it, guys. But he’s had time to cross the equator. I don’t know if we have a shot at him.”

  Julie didn’t agree but kept it to herself. “Here’s another carrot to chew on. Tuck Gerard, Charlie’s former foster parent, and a woman thought to be his common-law wife, died in a fire at a gas station Mr. Gerard operated not far from where our Mr. Clegg was brought up. No evidence, but the locals called it suspicious.” She waited. “I’m just saying.”

  The meeting broke up without any plan and, above all, without a revelation.

  Barton, when contacted, said it would be a good time for him to take a long weekend in Chicago with Cheryl. After the usual “don’t dos” to her daughter, Julie felt comfortable being separated for the three days.

  Julie’s cell rang.

  “Sergeant Worth?”

  “Yes.”

  “We have an APB on a break out of Western Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center. You’re assigned a roving patrol on I-70 between Boonville and Independence until further notice. You will get continued details on your cruiser’s radio within the next ten minutes from Captain Walker.”

  “How many escapees do we have?”

  “Three was our last report.”

  “Am I to meet my partner on the road?”

  “Detective Devlin has been sent to Kansas City to assist there. For now, you’re on your own, Sergeant. Sorry.
”

  Julie hustled into her bedroom to change, choosing her work boots, rough whipcord trousers, and a layered sweater arrangement. The last time she’d been on a fugitive hunt, she ended up in a farm’s pigpen. She and Todd wrestled around with a low-life who bellowed he “weren’t gonna be hauled off to no dang hoosegow.”

  She took other calls in her cruiser and was halfway to Columbia before Todd got through.

  “Did Walker call, Sergeant?”

  “Yeah, couple minutes ago. Told me all hell broke loose and that you were sent to KC—which the dispatcher already told me. Also, that I was assigned to roving patrol on Route 70. Where are you?”

  “Breezing along doing a hundred, getting close to KC.”

  They spoke for another few minutes and then hung up, promising to keep in touch.

  Contacted by the coordinator of the hunt, Julie was reassigned to Sedalia, a town just south of the interstate. She received a description of the escapees and their possible destinations, based on former places of residence, friends, and old haunts.

  At close to midnight, a call came in saying the three men were cornered in an abandoned warehouse close to Cameron, Missouri. Todd called and filled her in on his being stuck with a whole cadre of law enforcement in a standoff involving hostages and SWAT. The whole nine clusterfuck yards.

  Julie signed out with her dispatcher and checked in at a Motel 6. The next morning, she grabbed a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee to go and headed back toward Saint Louis, recognizing the busy intersection that she and Todd passed on their way to Jefferson City. It had been the day she got news about Cheryl. Or to be more accurate, a girl fitting Cheryl’s description. She thought about a couple items on her to-do list. One which, regardless of how hard she tried to convince herself of its nonrelevance in the grand scheme, was the incarceration of Charles Clegg. The second important to-do was making sure that Cheryl wasn’t permanently damaged by her abduction.

  Clegg’s capture would lay to rest many of Cheryl’s nighttime dragon fears.

  Julie’s thoughts turned back to Clegg and the long, complicated pursuit of the little worm. She wondered if the prick might have gone back home to the “spread,” his onetime foster home in the early years—it was in the direction. She pulled her car around to head back toward Calhoun, Missouri.

  The lone country road bent and straightened and then bent again. A symbolic pattern of her life since meeting up with Charles on a similar road at the other end of the state. Her accident reminded her about country road drivers. Don’t trust them passing you when they’re twenty miles over the speed limit. And if they seem off, they probably are.

  She went just under the limit on the long stretch of road just before the Gerard spread. A half mile past the entrance, she spotted a break in the state-owned wire fencing. Missouri highway command was responsible for an enclosure bordering its roads, to keep livestock off the thoroughfare. The opening occurred when an older tree fell across the four-foot-high wire. She drove through and then a short distance into the woods.

  Once out of sight of the road, she stopped and quickly came up with a plan. It became whirling thoughts of ground formerly traveled, with the acquisition of her shotgun, the mandatory visual on her automatic. A hat, just because it happened to be there, and her cell. She considered backup, communicating to the powers that be, but settled for a stern reminder to herself. Do the job, do it right, by the book.

  In truth, why wouldn’t he head for home? This place where he had met best friend, Bink, and taken his name. One would hope the name change was a tribute, not merely a disguise.

  Julie trod through the woods. Slash from rotted trees and overgrown vines to her left and barren land on her right where she and Todd had driven in to speak to Jimbo Gerard. She was aware of a stench long before she reached a view of the house, probably burnt garbage or a barbequed pig or fawn.

  She stopped in the middle of a quiet animal path. Crows cawed their presence and gathered in a patch of reddish grass in a clearing before her. They scattered as she settled.

  Viva, Las Vegas! Oh, viva—” Charles stopped singing. He propped his guitar on his lap and watched a flock of blackbirds rise out of the pines off to his right. They seemed only moderately provoked. As they circled, he pedaled the old porch swing, remembering moments of stolen pleasure on a similar swing years earlier. Heck, maybe this same one. This spot where he and Bink would sneak around, occasionally giving the swing a shove to hear its telltale squeak. The point always to be to pester Tuck and Gloria. Miss Big Boobs.

  He watched again as the crows resettled in the distant pines. He pushed his elbow against the porch swing’s chain support and tried once again to make a C-flat chord on his Gibson. When the birds moved again, he thought a deer might have been foraging in the woods. Not able to complete his accompaniment, he sat down the guitar beside him on the swing and thought about his chores. He had kindling to chop, dishes to rinse, a whole shitload of laundry to swill around. But first, a back-to-work continuation of what he liked to call “Jimbo the fire king and his systematic disappearance.” The pit behind the house had originally been used as a trash incinerator.

  Charles stoked the still-amber remains of his early morning fire. Jimbo was slowly vanishing. Limbs and heavy objects loaded above the shoulders, along with a healthy dose of four-dollars-a-gallon premium gasoline, blazed bright.

  Plastic-wrapped final remains, bagged and ready. Tears in the industrial black bags were evidence of Jimbo’s attraction to all of God’s creatures. Overnight, raccoon and muskrat alike, maybe a few squirrels, went to work on Charles’s former tormentor.

  Rekindling the blaze with a couple pine stumps, Charles once again gazed out at the murder of crows.

  Julie waited for the birds to settle and then moved once again up the incline parallel to the farmhouse. After a hundred yards, she turned to complete the right angle that would bring her to the back of the house.

  She heard singing as she neared, that same familiar, nasal grieving. She recognized the poor attempts at note making, the continuous sliding up to and past the proper mark. The warble and wobble of Charles Clegg’s passion.

  His face glowed as he wielded a long stick, poking at a fire. She circled behind an old barn to surprise him from the back. The smell, a pungent mixture of rotting flesh and sweet pine.

  “Hello, Charlie.”

  “What the hell?” He jumped, fighting for balance on the rocky surface surrounding the trash pit. “Who are you? What do you want?”

  She took off her cap and shook out her hair, still keeping the shotgun trained on his midsection. “You left your house in such a hurry, Charles. Was it something I said? The light business, that was precious.”

  “I got scared, afraid you people would think I done something wrong—”

  “Why would that be, Chuckie?”

  “I didn’t do nothing. You gotta believe me.”

  “Why do I ‘gotta’? What reason? Can you name one?”

  “What is it you think I’ve done? Go on, tell me.”

  “Murdered your wife?”

  “Nope, didn’t happen. I swear, I was back in my place, close to where I work, really.”

  “Really? What about the speeding ticket you got a couple hours before they discovered the body? The ticket was issued over two hundred miles from ‘your place.’ Oh, and how did you manage to get rid of Tuck? You lit his cigarette for him, and he and some woman just happened to burn up?” She waited for a response. “Do you remember Angelina Hogar? Sweet girl, nice, but now very damaged.”

  “Who?”

  “Her name is scratched on the floor of your basement, Charlie Boy.”

  He shook his head, as if dismissing her. “You won’t shoot me.”

  “Won’t I? Try me. Make a funny move, brother. See what it feels like to have a double ought gnawing its way through your belly button.” Julie looked at the black plastic bundle on the ground. “What’s in the bag, Clegg, your lunch? By the way, where’s Jimbo Gerard, owner
of this mess?”

  He didn’t answer. Just dropped his head and shuffled his feet.

  “Open it up. Now.”

  Charles reached down and pulled apart the yellow ties on the trash bag.

  “Open it.”

  “I did.”

  “All the way.” Julie motioned with the shotgun. “Whatever is in there, take it out. Do it.”

  Charles held the bottom of the bag and raised it to his side. “This was in the field across the way. I don’t know what it is, I was just getting rid of it, I swear.” The innards slipped into the fire pit, the slimy mass sizzling as it settled into the fresh coals.

  “Ah, Jesus.” Julie gagged.

  Charles heaved the heavy mop handle at her. She tried to duck, but the lance-like weapon nicked her under her right eye as Clegg leapt across the burning pit and hightailed it toward the barn. Blurry eyed, Julie fired her scatter gun at the bouncing figure. She saw him stumble and disappear. She turned, cranked in another round, and went in the opposite direction around the barn. Charles had crawled and then sat with his back against the outside of the flaked wood siding.

  “Where are you hit, killer?”

  “Don’t call me that. I did what was necessary for salvation. For the human race.”

  Julie threw off a fake laugh. “Do you recall a young girl you abducted in the woods, coming home from school? Years ago. She would have been maybe sixteen at the time.”

  He said nothing.

  There were probably a number of victims; how could he remember them all? “She fought with you, tore a ring from around your neck that was on a chain. Was the death of that kid salvation? Does it jog the memory, Romeo?” She watched as he slid his hand down toward his leg. “What about Lulu?”

  Nothing.

  “Her mom’s name was Venus.”

  He rubbed the back of his buttocks and leg with his bloody hand.