The Cruelest Cut

by Rick Reed

  What Kooky had was Maddy Brooks’s car. He had been relieved of duty at the crime scene, and had been put out with the teams scouring the countryside for any further evidence. He had literally stumbled upon the car when he fell into a large drainage ditch.

  The area around the old radio station was farming country, and had been spared the normal urban spread. Because of the heavy rains in the Midwest, large drainage ditches were a necessity to keep the crops from washing away.

  Kooky was born and raised inside Evansville’s city limits, and even though he’d seen the behemoth ditches from the road, he had never been this far out in a farm field. He had just come out of copse of scrub trees that bordered another field when the ground disappeared beneath him. He toppled right over the edge and onto the hood of a small blue Toyota.

  Liddell looked at the shiner Kooky was sporting around his right eye. “You really get into your work, don’t you son?” he said with a grin.

  “Think you can find the car again?” Jack asked, glaring at Liddell.

  “Yes, sir,” Kooky said. His right eye was beginning to swell shut, and his uniform was covered in mud from his climb out of the ditch.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  Chief Dick arrived at the crime scene like a visiting dignitary. All that was missing from his black limo with its dark smoked windows was a couple of flags displayed on the front hood. Captain Dewey Duncan, newly recovered from his hemorrhoid surgery, jumped from the vehicle and smartly moved to the passenger compartment to hold the door open.

  Dick unfolded his lanky frame from the backseat and barked orders to the uniformed officers around him, thinking that this is what he was meant for, command at a major crime scene. He felt alive for a change, and even the ass-chewing he had received from the mayor wouldn’t bring his mood down.

  “Where is Detective Murphy?” he demanded of one of the uniformed officers.

  The officer looked at the chief with a confused expression and shrugged.

  “Dammit, Officer! What’s your name?” Dick sputtered. Had to be a rookie to not recognize the chief of police. And he didn’t even address him as sir. What kind of dummy is the police academy turning out these days? he thought.

  “Officer Parker, sir,” the officer said, coming to attention.

  Well, that’s better, Dick thought. He didn’t know that Officer Parker had been on the police force for nine years and had been awarded for bravery twice. He didn’t know these things because the lives of the police officers under him were of no concern, except when they crossed his path. He was also unaware that Officer Parker was actually mocking him by coming to an exaggerated stance of attention, or that several of the other officers present were sniggering behind his back.

  “Find Murphy for me, son,” Dick ordered, and while Parker saluted smartly and hurried away, he looked around for the command center. He had expected the crime scene commander, or Captain Franklin at the very least to meet him when he arrived at the crime scene. He was visibly upset that no one of any rank was present. But, at least I’m here now, he thought, and with that he began barking orders again.

  He pulled three officers off perimeter security duty and told them to set up a tent near the entrance to the gravel drive, to create a place for the news media to gather. He brushed off their questions of how they were supposed to get a tent and bullied his way to the open door of the radio station. He was glad that the news media hadn’t arrived yet because he hadn’t been briefed. He just hoped Murphy would arrive soon, so that he could find out what was going on here.

  Jack watched as a crime scene tech photographed the blue Toyota from every angle, and then he descended into the ditch. There was no hurry to get inside the car because the license plates had come back to Maddy Brooks. Unlike crime shows on television, things didn’t happen in thirty minutes, and it could possibly be late night or even tomorrow before the vehicle would get a thorough going-over, inside and out. Time was important, but destroying evidence for the sake of satisfying curiosity was plain stupid.

  “No blood visible,” one of the crime scene techs said to Jack. “There’s a purse inside. Do you want me to look?”

  Jack thought about it. “Leave it until you get the car out,” he said. “We can move the car if you’re ready.”

  Jack motioned for Kooky to call the waiting wrecker. He just hoped the wrecker wouldn’t get hung up in the muddy farm fields before it reached the ditch. The ground had taken a good soaking from the overnight rain, and he could feel his feet sinking slightly from his own weight.

  “Star,” Liddell said from beside him, gesturing to the call letters on top of the towers.

  “What?” asked Jack.

  “The riddle or rhyme that Eddie told you on the phone,” Liddell said. “The answer is a star. He hung her on that tower deliberately so that we would find her, and to complete his riddle. STAR radio station.”

  “That’s too smart for Eddie,” Jack said, but maybe Eddie was smarter than he was giving him credit for.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  Chief Richard Dick hurried to his car, almost bowling Captain Duncan over in his haste to get into the driver’s seat.

  “Sir?” Captain Duncan said, reaching for the door handle on the passenger side and finding it locked. The window came down, and Dick snarled at him, “Get a ride back to headquarters with someone,” and then drove away.

  Dick glanced in his rearview mirror at a dumbfounded Captain Duncan, who was standing in the gravel lot looking every bit a lost child. He liked Duncan. Duncan was useful. But what he had in his coat pocket was more important at the moment than anyone’s feelings.

  He took the cassette tape from his pocket and, with sweating palms, looked at it in horror. It was identical to the one that someone had shoved under his office door. It had to be Jansen, he thought. Jansen was the one that bugged the mayor’s office. Jansen was the one that gave the tape to Maddy and left a copy under his office door. That’s why Jansen had looked so relieved when I ordered him to take a long vacation out of town, he thought. “But I’m on to you now, you bastard,” Dick said angrily.

  Suddenly, the sheer lunacy of what he had just done struck him like a hammer blow, and he could hardly take a breath. He pulled the car onto a turnaround and stopped. Dear God, what have I done? he thought. Then, Maybe I can take it back. But he knew that would not be possible now.

  He had gone into the abandoned STAR radio station building, and had bullied his way past the young patrolman standing guard. Crime scene officers seemed to be everywhere but inside the building. He saw the pile of clothes lying a few feet away and approached curiously. Somewhere deep inside him a warning voice was telling him not to touch anything, to leave it for the crime scene techs to collect. But then he had spotted the corner of something hard and plastic sticking out of the jacket.

  He had stooped and, to his credit, used the end of his pen to extricate the object without touching it. But when he saw what it was, his heart almost stopped. Without even thinking, he had picked up the cassette tape and was looking at it when that moron patrolman stuck his head in the door and asked if he needed anything. He had yelled, “Yes, I need you to stand your goddamn post!” The officer had hurried back outside, and Dick had pocketed the cassette tape.

  There would be no way to explain having the tape. No excuse to have handled evidence. And at a murder scene, of all the stupid things to do.

  He had luckily brought his briefcase with him and now took out the cassette player that he had put inside. He pushed the cassette he’d found back at the crime scene into the slot of the player, clicked the Play button, and turned the sound up. He heard himself saying on the tape: I don’t think we should give in to this killer’s demands, Thatcher.

  He ejected the tape and stuck it in his pocket. Now what do I do? Destroy it? He was out in the county. Nothing around except long stretches of nothing. He could just throw it in the road and drive over it a few times. Leave it there. But that might be risky if someone saw him
doing that. And what if one of the officers at the scene had seen the tape with the pile of clothes before he took it? He had to get to his office and erase it. Then if someone came looking for it, at least it wouldn’t have anything incriminating on it. Better yet, he might burn it. He knew that with the new technology out there, someone would probably be able to recover the sound on an erased tape. And once again he wondered, Who uses cassette tapes these days?

  Eddie had spent a fitful night in the abandoned house. The dream was worse this time, and he had awakened with bloody knuckles and found fist-sized holes punched in the thick plaster walls of the room where he had slept. He couldn’t remember getting up or punching the walls. He could barely remember what the dream was about. But he remembered the preacher, and he could still feel the pain in his backside.

  He also remembered what he and Bobby had done to the preacher. The revenge they had got for what they had endured during their childhood. Burning was too good for the bastard. But burning the preacher alive was a good way of acquainting him with the place he surely was now.

  He looked around for Bobby, but he wasn’t there. Lately, Bobby seemed to be gone a lot. Eddie dug around in his duffel bag and took out an emery stone and the book of rhymes. He sat Indian-style on the floor and propped the emery stone between his feet and sharpened the corn knife with one hand while clumsily flipping through the book with the other.

  “What’cha doing, bro?” Bobby said from behind him, causing him to jump and drop the knife.

  “Dammit, Bobby!” Eddie said sharply. “Don’t do that!” He picked up the knife and noticed the book had flipped open to a page.

  “That’s the one,” Bobby said, nodding at the open book.

  “Yeah,” Eddie agreed, with a grin on his face. “You’re right, Bobby. Time to get it done, man.”

  Bobby smiled at him, and for a second Bobby looked like death itself—a skull with red eyes staring straight into Eddie’s soul. Then the specter was gone.

  “We’re gonna do him at the last place anyone would suspect, Bobby,” Eddie said, and then stuck the point of the sharpened knife deep into the floor at his feet. On the open book, the caricature of a man in a white dressing gown and cap was jumping over a lit candle.

  “That’s perfect Eddie,” Bobby said, proudly. “Perfect. But how about we go out in a blaze of glory, bro?”

  Eddie listened closely to Bobby’s idea, but he didn’t tell Bobby that he had already planned on doing just what Bobby had suggested. Bobby liked to be the one that came up with the plans. No harm in letting him think this was all his idea.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  Liddell was waiting for Jack outside the war room. “Crowley and Garcia have been working full bore on the telephone angle,” Liddell said.

  Garcia looked up as they entered the room and smiled. “Mark has been working with someone with the military to try and locate the Kids’ Kingdom phone by its signature.”

  “Any luck?” Jack asked.

  Mark rubbed the back of his neck, looking very much like the stereotype of a country boy. “Well, I met this fella at a training session in Washington, D.C., who works for Army CID. He owes me a little favor.”

  Jack knew that CID was the Counter Intelligence Department, the military equivalent of the CIA, or the FBI, but with more limited authority. Actually, they had no authority outside federal property, specifically military bases.

  Garcia gave Mark a reproachful look and said, “Some little favor, big guy.” Then she explained, “He saved the guy’s life, Jack.”

  “Anyway,” Mark said, quickly, “he’s going to see what he can do to locate the phone for us. He’s got some connections that might be able to trace the phone even if it’s turned off.”

  “Can they do that?” Jack questioned.

  Mark grinned. “He said he’d do what he could, so I guess he can get it done.”

  Jack wondered what other technology was out there that regular street cops, like him, would never know about, never have access to on a regular basis. “That’s great, Mark. I knew there was some reason we kept you on this.”

  “What do you mean we?” Garcia said, a smirk playing at the corners of her mouth. “I only wanted him around because he’s eye candy.”

  Crowley turned red and excused himself from the room.

  “Angelina, you’ve got to cut him some slack. He’s not ruined like most of us around here. I think you embarrassed him,” Jack said.

  “You think?” Garcia said, with a big smile.

  “You’ll never get to her,” Bobby said. Eddie was sitting behind the wheel of the van and watching the front of Harwood School. He’d spotted Katie Murphy’s car in the parking lot and had decided to watch for a while. He spotted the plainclothes cops immediately. He’d have to get her during school, and that would be risky. He smiled.

  “I’m gonna take her right out of class,” Eddie said.

  “Well, you’d better have a place to stash her right away,” Bobby said. “Cops are gonna be on us like flies on shit.”

  “I got the perfect place,” Eddie said with a sneer. “We’ll be right under their noses where they won’t be sniffing around.”

  “So, how you gonna get her out of the classroom, Eddie?” Bobby said. The sound of his voice made Eddie look closely at him.

  “You feeling okay, Bobby?” Eddie asked. But it was obvious that Bobby didn’t feel okay. He looked terrible. His complexion was ghostly pale, and he kept rubbing at a spot on his forehead like a dog with a rash.

  Bobby didn’t answer. He just laid his head back and looked out the side window.

  “Go ahead and take a nap,” Eddie said. “I got this covered, bro.” He looked at the back of Bobby’s head for a long minute, and was concerned for him. He hadn’t been the same since Eddie got out of the joint. But it was almost over now. Just one more to go, and then they would end Murphy’s worthless existence. And about fuckin’ time, too, he thought.

  The brown Crown Vic rolled down the street in front of Harwood School. The two men in front had been assigned by Captain Franklin himself, to keep an eye on Jack Murphy’s ex-wife. They’d never seen the woman, but Franklin had given them a good description and they soon found her car. They weren’t clear on why they were not to approach her and introduce themselves so they could be sure what she looked like. All they had been told was to watch and report and not let anyone go near Katie.

  “How much of this shit have you done before, Charlie?” the younger of the men said to his plainclothes partner.

  Charlie had been a uniformed copper for fifteen years before he managed to get into the detectives division. The fifteen years had seemed to fly by compared to his last two years in plainclothes. Most of the last two years he’d had to take every shit job that came down the pike.

  It was always, “Charlie, go get us some lunch,” or, “Charlie, you got the midnight shift.” They, his superiors, didn’t seem to think he could do anything but sit on his ass or fetch things for them. It was like being a rookie patrolman all over again, and he was wondering if he should have just stayed in uniform where his seniority counted for something. But then, he remembered, the little puke he’d gotten stuck with on this detail was even newer than him. So…

  “There ain’t nothing going on here,” Charlie said with more anger in his voice than was necessary. The better to keep the new guy in line. “Murphy’s ex can take care of herself for an hour or so. Take me to get some coffee, Mike,” he ordered his junior partner. “And shut the fuck up for a while, will ya?”

  Mike chuckled at his partner’s insults. He was just happy as hell to get a chance to work plainclothes.

  Mike put the car in gear. He had pulled out from the curb, when he heard his call sign come over their radio, saying, “Two-David-three.”

  Charlie picked up the microphone and said, “Two-David-three, go ahead.”

  “Signal nine your last detail,” the dispatcher said.

  “Ten-four,” Charlie said and put the mi
crophone back in its hook. “Well, I don’t know what’s going on, but let’s go get coffee.”

  Mike didn’t understand. “Won’t that be dangerous for Mrs. Murphy, Charlie? I mean, what if something happens to her because we ain’t here?”

  Charlie gave him a disgusted look. “You heard the dispatcher, junior. Signal nine. That means we aren’t assigned to this detail anymore.”

  When Mike still looked unsure, Charlie said, “Look, maybe they have another team set up. Maybe someone in the neighborhood spotted us and called in, so now we gotta move out of here. Hell, I don’t know. All I know is that a signal nine means we’re done. So move it!” he ordered his junior partner.

  Mike pulled away, looking back at the school until it was out of sight. He had a bad feeling about this.

  Chief Dick found himself once again riding the elevator to the third floor of the Civic Center. He was on his way to get another ass-chewing for things that were not within his control. And once again, he stopped at one of the mirrored columns in the third-floor hallway, checking that his brass was polished, his shoes shined, and seams straight. The face that looked back at him from the column was gaunt and pale. Rings had formed under his eyes overnight, and his mouth was dry, lips chapped.

  He took several deep breaths and then pushed open the heavy door to the mayor’s office, where the cynical look of the secretary made his blood boil. As she announced him on the intercom, he swore under his breath that one day he would get even with that bitch. Then he stood erect and pushed through the inner door.

  He’d found out about Captain Franklin’s little stakeout detail on Murphy’s ex-wife, and since Franklin hadn’t consulted him about it, he called them off. They needed all the detectives they had for other duties. Besides, Franklin was being paranoid. No one was going to bother Murphy’s ex-wife. Now if it was his current wife, maybe he would have thought twice about pulling the detail. Or, if Franklin had come to him and requested it, he might have let them stay a little longer. But in the end, the decision was up to the chief of police. And that was him. Not Captain Franklin. And definitely not Jack Murphy.