The Laughterhouse: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  “I should have stayed in jail,” he says, then stuffs the wipes into the plastic bag with the diaper. He swings it around and knots it, then throws it in the same direction he threw the nail, decides it’s not far enough, then goes and retrieves it. He puts it outside instead.

  He puts a fresh diaper on Octavia, pulls her pajama bottoms back up, then sets her back in the car seat and clips the straps into place.

  He puts her between her sisters. “Hello,” she says again.

  He gets the duct tape and cuts a strip for her mouth and finds he can’t bring himself to place it.

  “Bufwiffy,” she says, then giggles. If she doesn’t fall asleep soon, he’ll have to duct tape her. Then her little face scrunches up, turns red, and then she smiles again. The room smells.

  “Goddamn it,” he says.

  “Bufwiffy.”

  He reaches into the bag and grabs another diaper along with the duct tape.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  John Morgan is awake and has a coffee ready for me in his lounge. The smell perks me up a little, which is a bit of a surprise because I hadn’t realized I was starting to fade. I apologize for having to interview him so early, but he doesn’t seem to mind. We sit down in opposite couches with a coffee table between us with magazines squared up in a pile in the center, a mixture of fashion and architecture topped off with a TV Guide, which has recently been used as a coaster. His wife is in bed, either asleep or trying to fall asleep. The coffee is hot and pretty good and couldn’t be any more appreciated. Morgan’s salt-and-pepper hair is sticking up on one side from hours buried in a pillow and his right sideburn is bushier than his left for that same reason. He’s wearing a robe with pajamas underneath.

  “Brad was, well, he was a great accountant,” John says, “and will be hard to replace. You heard about Edward Hunter?”

  Edward Hunter was an accountant whose family was killed, and who wasn’t happy to let the police find justice for him. Instead he found it himself, and now he’s in jail for it. He’s the man Brad’s wife mentioned earlier.

  “I’ve met him,” I say.

  “Nice guy. Really nice guy,” he says, “but you know, crazy people often are when they know how to hide the crazy.”

  That’s as good a way of putting it as I’ve ever heard.

  “There was always something . . . something odd about him, I suppose,” Morgan says.

  “It was Edward’s workload that Brad had taken on?”

  “Not all of it. We split it up, but Brad certainly had a share of it.”

  “So he was working extra hours.”

  “We all are,” he says.

  “Was Brad, to your knowledge, seeing anybody at the firm?”

  “Seeing? He saw people every day.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  For two seconds he looks confused, and then he slowly shakes his head, surprised at how slow he was to get my point. “You mean was he sleeping with anybody?”

  “That’s what I’m asking.”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “He work late tonight?”

  “Yeah. We all did. We left at the same time.”

  “When was that?”

  “Probably around ten thirty.”

  “He give anybody a lift home?”

  “No, we were the last two to leave.”

  “When you hired him, you were aware he was having problems where he last worked?”

  He blows at his coffee, then sips at it slowly, taking a few seconds to think about his answer. “I heard about it,” he says. “But nothing was proven, and Brad was a great accountant and didn’t deserve to be judged on rumor. In his time with us he’s never put a foot out of line. I’ve been doing this for a long time now, Detective, and people in the workplace are always making shit up to get other colleagues into trouble. It’s nothing new. What I do know is nobody at our firm has made any kind of allegation like that.”

  “What else can—”

  “Is it true, the way they say it happened?” he asks, leaning forward as if ready to receive a secret. “That somebody just knocked on his door and killed him in front of his wife?”

  “I can’t discuss any of the facts at this stage,” I tell him.

  “Jesus, I mean . . . Jesus,” he says. “Tomorrow we’re going to be . . .” He shakes his head. “How can he be dead?” he asks. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “It never does,” I say, but that’s not true. Sometimes it makes perfect sense. “What else can you tell me about him? Was he happy at work? He have lots of friends? Was he well liked, hated, did he steal stationary and take long smoke breaks?”

  John Morgan leans back into his chair, and for the next thirty minutes we talk about Brad Hayward, and most of what he says sounds like a eulogy, only good things making it into the final cut of John’s summation. I don’t doubt any of it. I also don’t doubt that somebody out there will say all the opposite things about Brad Hayward. I listen close and take notes and try to figure out how or if Hayward’s cheating ways made an impact on what happened to him tonight.

  When we’re done he leads me to the door.

  “Are you going to find the man that did this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it related to the Gran Reaper?”

  “Possibly,” I tell him, wondering if the media already knows.

  “And I heard on the radio before you got here that there’s been another one. That’s four already,” he says. “What in the hell is going on?”

  I don’t have an answer for him.

  I head back to the car, the people in this street tucked into their safe little world. The temperature has stabilized around a crisp forty-seven or forty-eight degrees. The nights will stay that way for a few more weeks until getting down to thirty, then below thirty over the winter. Either way this will be over by then—either we’ll have this guy in custody or he’ll have run out of people to kill. I pull out my cell phone and call Schroder and tell him I’m done with Morgan and he rewards me by telling me there haven’t been any further homicides—at least that we know of. I lean my head against the headrest and close my eyes, then just as quickly open them in case they stay closed for six or seven hours. I wipe my face with the hand not clamping my cell phone to my ear and the stubble scratches at my palm. A quick look in the mirror and I notice I’m looking like shit. That happens to me a lot these days.

  “I got something for you,” he says.

  “Yeah?”

  “Breakfast. If I don’t eat something I’m not gonna last much longer. Meet me at Froggies.”

  I drive into town, glancing at the cell phone on the passenger seat, waiting for it to ring, waiting for Schroder to tell me there’s a change of plan because victims numbers five and six have just showed up. I reach town without the call coming, and reach Froggies Diner on Hereford Street about two blocks down from the police station.

  Froggies Diner has only been around for five years but feels like it’s been here forever. Within days of it being built it became a second home to every cop on the force, most of us spending at least five hours a week there. The hours between seven and nine in the morning you’re sometimes lucky to find a seat. It’s styled on a clichéd roadside diner, a long Formica counter with bar stools, red vinyl booths running along a length of windows, posters of old New York hanging up on the walls. There’s a jukebox in the corner that plays CDs and MP3s, the early morning sunlight coming through on a low angle and reflecting a full spectrum of colors off the plastic and glass casing. The door swings open into a bell that dings when I walk in. I’m thinking at six in the morning Schroder is going to be the only one inside when I get there, but he’s not—the diner is about a quarter full of tired cops who all look just as bad as Schroder, who looks about as bad as me. Detective Kent is sitting in a booth nursing a coffee and staring out the window while talking animatedly on a phone. I watch her for a few seconds and she turns and catches me, then smiles. I smile back, hold her look for two m
ore seconds, then walk over to Schroder who is at the counter.

  There’s a plate of bacon and eggs and mushrooms in front of him, next to him a plate with the same thing waiting for me. I haven’t stepped in here in three years. There’s a coffee for him and a coffee for me, both of which are steaming hot, and it’s the temperature that’s stopping me from knocking them both back. I sit down next to him. There’s a short-order cook out the back working away at his own breakfast. One waitress is carrying out an order while another is wiping down the counter. The waitress carrying the order has a tight T-shirt that fits her extremely well, it has 5×5=25 on it, and beneath that it says Good times. She catches me staring and she isn’t sure whether I’m doing the addition or looking at her breasts, wondering what those good times are. She turns around. On the back her T-shirt says 4x4=15 and then Bad times.

  “What did you get from Morgan?” Schroder asks.

  “Hayward was a model employee. He left work alone at around ten thirty. That time of night it’s a fifteen- to twenty-minute drive home tops. Wife called the police at eleven thirty-two. She guesses he’d been home ten minutes before she went to check on him. That gives him a good thirty unaccounted minutes.”

  “Maybe not that unaccounted,” Schroder says, his words softened by the mouthful of bacon. “I’ve just spoken to the ME. I told her your theory. She’s given the body a preliminary look and found traces of lipstick on the victim’s penis.”

  “So either he was having an affair,” I say, “and could only spend thirty minutes on it, or he saw a prostitute.”

  “Or maybe he just really, really liked lipstick,” Schroder says.

  “You got something you want to confess?” I ask him.

  He laughs. “Even if he did see a hooker, there’s nothing illegal about that.”

  “There is if she isn’t paying her taxes.”

  “Yeah, maybe Hayward was giving her accounting advice in exchange for her services.”

  Now it’s my turn to dig into the bacon. It has that crispy texture you get when bacon is burned just a little, which is what I like to call perfection. I eat one slice and can’t stop. I jam a second into my mouth, some egg, some mushroom, and the flavors are starting to wake me up. I reach for my coffee but it’s still too hot.

  “We should fingerprint his belt, and also the car. Maybe we’ll get a match. Maybe she’s in the system somewhere for shoplifting or drug possession,” I say, not wanting to stereotype all prostitutes, but at the same time knowing the odds of her having a conviction are pretty good.

  “Yeah. Good idea.”

  “I asked John Morgan about where they park. They use a nearby parking garage, which would have provided a much easier location to murder somebody. He’d have had time to write his message too. Why not just wait there? It sure as hell makes more sense than following him into his garage and running away from his house.”

  “Yeah. Doesn’t make sense,” Schroder says. “Listen, I got something else for you too,” he says, and he stuffs his last piece of bacon into his mouth, leans back, and reaches into his pocket. “This is yours,” he says, and he hands me my badge and ID, two things I gave up three years ago when I resigned.

  “I’m back on the force?” I ask, barely containing my excitement.

  “It’s temporary,” he says, then starts in on the eggs. “But should be permanent if you don’t screw it up. Just follow the rules and do what’s asked of you and no more.”

  “Does it come with a car?”

  “Don’t push your luck,” he says. “But you do have your driver’s license back, which means all that driving you keep doing is now legal.”

  I run my thumb over the metal badge. I remember the last time I saw it, laying it down on my office desk and walking away. I turned my back on the job because everybody in the department suspected I was the reason my daughter’s killer had disappeared. I thought quitting my job was the best way to keep a low profile. It worked. At least until I killed again.

  “A lot’s happened,” Schroder says, pausing with the food to test the coffee temperature, which he tries to cool by blowing on it. “You haven’t earned it back, but circumstances dictate the situation, Theo, and you can do some good here.”

  “Thank you,” I tell him, and I slip the badge and the ID wallet it’s enclosed in into my back pocket.

  “You can thank the superintendent. He’s the one who made the decision. And the best way to thank us both is to make neither of us look like idiots.”

  I remember him running through the field yesterday to take a leak behind a tree. “I won’t,” I tell him.

  “Hurry up with your breakfast,” he tells me, “because we’ve got a briefing at seven.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Dr. Stanton is awake. He tries to cower deeper into the trunk when Caleb opens it. Caleb has never seen a man look so panicked. He has the look of someone who doesn’t know if his children are dead or alive. He should warn him that this is the easy part, that with what’s coming up this was the wrong time to be scared. There is a lump on the side of his head the size of a golf ball—he’ll have one hell of a headache, but he’ll live. His arms are bound behind him and his pajamas are all wrinkled to shit and his ankles are tied together.

  “Your daughters are okay,” Caleb tells him. “But if you don’t do what I ask, I’m going to hurt them. I’m going to cut off their faces and mix them all up so you won’t know who the fuck you’re looking at. Do you believe me?”

  The doctor nods but says nothing. Caleb can see he’s very much believed.

  “See, that’s the thing, Doctor, in the past you’ve believed the wrong people, but it’s good to see you’ve learned from those mistakes. Do you know who I am?”

  A shake of the head.

  “No, I didn’t think you would. Life has moved on and I look a little different, I suppose, from when I was in the papers back then. But we’ve never met. I’ve been watching you over the last few weeks and learning even more about you over the years, but there are some things about you I didn’t figure out. I see your wife left you. That’s a shame,” he says, “because it would have been fun to kill her in front of you. In jail, it’s been hard to learn things, but sometimes we have access to the library and the Internet. It’s amazing how much shit there is on the Internet,” he says, and it’s true. It’s one of the things that has surprised him the most since coming out of jail—just how far the boundaries of privacy have eroded. People put their life stories online. They update their friends about how they are feeling. His update would say Caleb is angry.

  The world was bat-shit crazy.

  “Dote hurt eye chilren.”

  Since arriving here half an hour ago, the scene has started to change. The slaughterhouse is a little more lit up than it was before, it’s soaked in the early morning misty light that is a hundred shades of gray, the trees look cold and foreboding, as if among them hide the creatures from any one of a thousand nightmares. Then he realizes that he is one of those creatures, that he is the boogeyman Dr. Stanton never dreamed about. He reaches in and grabs the doctor’s nose. He twists it without any care or hesitation and there’s a clicking sound and the nose springs back into shape. Blood drains out of it as the doctor thrashes about. It flows down the side of his face and past his ear, but he’s going to be okay. When it comes to banged-up noses, Caleb has had plenty of experience, and this one was dislocated, not broken. After ten seconds he’s sick of watching him.

  “Get on your feet,” Caleb says.

  “What do you want?” he asks, looking up from the trunk, the blood still flowing, but way slower now. He’s been crying and dirt has gotten stuck to the tear trails on his face.

  “Get on your feet,” Caleb repeats, showing him the knife.

  Dr. Stanton, with his hands behind him, tries to climb out, and ends up rolling out of the trunk and falling onto his side on the ground, the wind knocked out of him.

  “There’s nowhere to run, and nobody to hear you scream for help.�
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  “Who are you?” Stanton asks, and he sniffs, then spits out a wad of snot and blood. He gets to his feet, puffing and swaying a little.

  “You still haven’t figured it out?”

  “No.”

  “You remember James Whitby?”

  “James Whitby? No, who the hell . . .” he starts, then stops, and Caleb can see that it’s coming to him. “But . . . he’s dead.”

  “That’s right.”

  “He was . . . was murdered,” Stanton says, frowning.

  “Come on, you’re almost there.”

  “You’re . . . you’re the man who killed him. You’re . . . you’re Caleb . . . Caleb Cole?”

  “You got it.”

  “Oh Jesus, Jesus,” he says, shaking his head, sending drips of blood from the end of his nose into the dregs of night. His eyes are wide, his face full of an awareness of the past and of his immediate future. “None of that was my fault,” he says, his voice getting high. “I was just doing my job, and I did the best I could with the resources I had. I promise you that, and what he did—I’m sorry, I’m truly sorry.”

  “Sorry?” Caleb says, amazed at the word. “Sorry? That’s all you have say? That you’re sorry? Where were your apologies when I was in jail for the last fifteen years?”

  “I—”

  “Shut up,” he says, and he punches the doctor in the stomach as hard as he can, the impact making both men double over, Stanton winded, Caleb clutching his hand against his stomach and cradling it. When he’s able, he pulls the duct tape out and slaps it over the doctor’s mouth. Stanton draws ragged breaths through his damaged nose. Caleb is tempted to cut a small hole in the tape to help him breath, but he’s so angry that he’ll keep on cutting and next thing he’ll be left with three useless kids and one dead doctor. Instead he grabs him by the hair and pulls him toward the slaughterhouse, leading him inside.

  So one day is going to turn into two. No big problem. And like he thought earlier, it gives him time to figure out what he’s going to do with Ariel Chancellor. Right now, the only thing he needs to figure out is how best to get comfortable. It’s going be tough when all he has to deal with are concrete floors and the occasional leftover piece of furniture.