Fixer

by Gene Doucette

  The only other thing that was unquestionably true was that they’d returned two hours later absent a portion of Charlie’s right leg.

  Charlie, screaming obscenities, was helped in through the back door and onto the floor in the hallway by Tyrell, who immediately slumped over next to him, exhausted. Charlie then proceeded to bleed more or less all over the place and curse some more because nobody in the house was sure what to do.

  “Help me, you hippie fucks!” Charlie shouted.

  This swung the group into action. Happy Sammy yanked off his prized tie-dye and used it to staunch the blood while Mondo took off his rope belt and tied it tightly around Charlie’s right thigh just above the wound. Someone pointed out that one did the same thing when trying to find a vein in an arm, and that perhaps it was then a bad thing to do, insofar as with the arm it made the vein pop out some more. The last thing Charlie needed was his vein popping out when part of it was already exposed to the air. Mondo ignored them and did it anyway, which was good, as it ended up saving Charlie’s life.

  With various persons then helping Charlie to the living room couch or helping Tyrell back to his feet, the rest of the group took on the important business of trying to guess what happened. The preliminary consensus was that Tyrell had finally gone and shot Charlie, like they always figured he would one day.

  In the confusion, nobody really noticed Violet and Corry reentering the house, Vi slowly and carefully removing her son’s snow clothes and checking him for the tenth time just in case she missed a buckshot wound somewhere the first nine times she’d looked.

  Violet could have probably explained what happened had anybody asked. That is, she was there at the time of Charlie’s wounding and could attest to the order of events as they transpired. If pressed as to how it happened, she would have been forced to admit she didn’t really know, because what had happened simply didn’t make any sense.

  As Charlie lay on the couch, all at once very quiet, looking pale, and in great need of professional medical care, Tyrell tried to explain things.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I was ahead, following some tracks. I heard his gun go off and found him like that . . . walked him back fast as I could . . .”

  “You sure you didn’t just shoot him yourself?” accused Happy Sammy.

  “Why would I have brung him back, asshole?” Tyrell snapped.

  “He needs a doctor. We should try the telephone,” Harriet said. “If it’s working today.”

  “Where are the guns?” Mary-Mary asked nervously.

  “Left ‘em,” Tyrell said. “Couldn’t carry both him and them. I’ll go back later—”

  “I think you had something to do with this,” Gingham said, fixing her gaze on Tyrell. She said it quietly and solemnly, and with the sort of conviction that got people’s attention. It had a galvanizing effect on the room. She wasn’t the only one who felt this way.

  “I agree,” said Happy Sammy.

  Tyrell instinctively took two steps back. He didn’t look surprised—more like resigned. As if he always expected one day it would come down to this.

  “What was that?” Mondo asked. He was beside Charlie, who had begun to whisper something at around the same time Violet and Corry had pressed their way into the room.

  “I said,” Charlie began, louder, “it wasn’t Tyrell.” Tyrell visibly relaxed, while everyone else just looked more confused, especially when Charlie raised his arm and pointed a finger at Corry. “It was him,” he said. “It was the boy.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Now

  “You weren’t surprised,” Corrigan was saying. “You expected to see that.”

  “We expected something,” she agreed, reflecting that he was far more agitated about this than he should have been.

  “What else was at those crime scenes that you didn’t show me?” he snapped.

  Two hours had passed since she’d given him the tour of Erica’s apartment. They were now sitting in one of the interrogation rooms in the Central Square police station, which happened to be right down the street from the crime scene. It was also the main headquarters for the Cambridge police department, but that did not mean they had a tremendous amount of extra space to spare for the FBI—hence the interrogation room. It was a smallish chamber with what one might call a window, only in the sense that a portion of one wall was accommodating a rectangular piece of glass. But it was at the top of the wall and covered on the inside by bars and on the outside by about fifty years of exhaust grime. Illumination—no light of value came from the window—consisted of a very depressing overhead tubal fluorescent that had a tendency to dim briefly every thirty seconds or so, as if someone in the building were operating a very small electric chair. There was one door, two wood chairs, and a metal table affixed to the floor, with handcuff loops on its edge. It was the most depressing room Maggie could remember spending time in. Which was perhaps the point.

  It was also, being very small, not the greatest place to be when facing an angry man the size of Corrigan.

  “The same legend turned up at every scene.”

  “ ‘Kilroy was here’?”

  “Yeah. At first it was just considered graffiti, but when they found it on the wall where Professor Offey’s bookshelf had been standing, it was obvious someone had left it as a message.”

  Corrigan sat and mused for a moment. “And that’s when the FBI was called in.”

  “That’s about right.”

  “I saw the pictures of that crime scene. I don’t recall seeing anything on the wall.”

  Maggie sighed and sat down. The chair creaked loudly, quite annoyed at having been put to work. She pulled out a cigarette. “Okay, here’s the timeline,” she began. “Offey ends up crushed by the bookshelf, but nobody finds him right away because it happened late at night in the back of the library in a secure private area. He gets found about three hours later by one of the security guards doing his rounds. The door to the office has been closed the whole time, but he sees the light under the door. He lets himself in, figures out the professor is dead, and calls the cops.”

  “He knew right then it was suspicious?” Corrigan asked. “Because it was designed to look like an accident.”

  “Standard procedure. Besides, what do most people do when they find a dead person?”

  “Dunno. Never found one,” Corrigan said, lying.

  “Right. So the cops show up and good for them, they’re sharp enough to notice the brackets on the wall that were supposed to be holding up the bookshelf. No one’s really thinking murder just yet, but it’s interesting. They close off the scene, take pictures, call homicide.”

  She took a sharp drag of the cigarette. It occurred to her that there was no smoking in the building and further that she didn’t particularly care. “Homicide shows up a couple of hours later, and the lead investigator—guy named Masterson, who you’ll probably meet at some point—says ‘what’s up with the note on the wall?’ But nobody can remember seeing it before. And since the scene had been closed, the only obvious conclusion was that a cop had written it.”

  “That’s where I would have gone.”

  “But while Cambridge PD was in the middle of an internal witch-hunt, someone pointed out it wasn’t the first time the message had turned up at one of the scenes. That was when Masterson called me.”

  “You personally?”

  “Old friends,” she said without elaboration. “The internal investigation didn’t end up going anywhere. At worst, we could have maybe pinned the writing on Offey’s wall on one or two of the guys who’d been in the room alone during the time the message appeared, but neither of them could be put at any of the other scenes, and we knew the message was also on the wall at the subway station and carved on the windowsill where the kid fell to his death. So the thinking became that the killer left it behind. It was the first time anybody really entertained the notion. We began thinking we might have a serial on our hands.”

  “Again with the invisible ki
ller,” Corrigan said. He seemed to have a very strong negative reaction to this idea, more so, perhaps, than most people would when confronted with the notion. Maggie found that curious.

  “We didn’t think any such thing. The investigating cops had just missed it was the argument. And the camera didn’t pick it up because of a trick of the lighting or something like that. None of the answers were all that great, but they were better than anything else we had. Up until Jamie Silverman.”

  Corrigan nodded. “Bathtub,” he said simply, with the expression of a man who hadn’t been able to get a certain image out of his mind.

  “I was at the scene as soon as the cops were that day, and so were Hicks and Masterson and a few other people who’d started to take this seriously,” she said, cautiously omitting the fact that Hicks was actually there to try and prove Maggie was wasting federal time on the investigative equivalent of a snipe hunt. “By the time we arrived, the water was cold and so was the bathroom. But it’s a funny thing; when you put four or five people together in a small enclosed space like that, it starts to heat up. Silverman had one of those glass-paneled shower doors. They were clear when we first stepped in, but after an hour or so, the doors started to fog.”

  Maggie hesitated. Even after what had happened in Erica’s apartment, she had trouble admitting something like this out loud. Finally, she said, “I saw it happen personally.”

  “What happen?” he asked, although it was hard to imagine he didn’t already know what she was talking about.

  “The words spelled themselves out in the fog on the shower door.”

  “Kilroy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You think the invisible killer is a Styx fan?”

  Maggie smiled. “The ‘Kilroy was here’ messages first turned up in World War II. Whenever GIs were sent off someplace, they’d find the message scrawled and left there for them even, as legend had it, if they were the first ones to arrive. The prosaic explanation was that they were done by James Kilroy, a naval shipyard inspector, after which the practice was picked up by other soldiers.”

  “Maybe he’s your killer,” Corrigan said with a slight smile. At least he was calming down a bit.

  “I would think he’d be too old, provided he isn’t dead.”

  “Perfect,” he said. “You’re looking for a ghost already.”

  She laughed. “It’s not a ghost. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a ghost.”

  “Well, when you’ve eliminated the impossible . . .”

  “Sherlock Holmes? You’re quoting me Sherlock Holmes? I didn’t know you read.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” he said, offhand. “Look, call an exorcist or something. I can’t help you.”

  “I think we both know that’s not true,” she said flatly.

  He stared at her. “What the hell are you talking about?” he asked. “Is this more of Calvin’s bull?”

  “I saw your expression when Tanya spoke. Something there struck a chord. I need to know what that is.”

  “It’s not relevant,” he said. “I already told you that.”

  She’d had about enough. “I have tried to be understanding, Corrigan, because I know this kind of thing can be difficult, but . . .”

  “What did he tell you?” Corrigan half-shouted.

  “Fine,” she said. She reached into the leather portfolio at her feet and pulled out a thick file, slapping it on the table.

  “That would be?” he asked.

  “Your life.” She flipped it open, talking as she paged through. “You know, I completely understand why you don’t want anything to do with Professor Calvin. Because if someone did this to my life? I’d be pretty pissed off about it, too.”

  “He gave that to you?” he muttered.

  “Seems talking to you gave him a pretty interesting idea, only he needed to collect more data and you cut him off. Again, don’t blame you. But as he told me, truly great ideas only happen once or twice in the lifetime of a scientist—if they’re lucky—and he wasn’t about to let this one go. So he hired a couple of people to collect whatever data they could. It’s funny; he got more on you than the FBI did. I might want to look into who did his investigating for him, see if they could do some work for us.”

  Corrigan, who wasn’t taking his eyes off the pages in her hand, said nothing.

  “Anyway, this idea of his had legs. But all he had was a theory, and it was such an outlandish theory he figured he needed to get some testing done to see if it proved out. So he contacted Michael Offey for help with that. Offey had been working on it up until his death, using a mixture of handpicked postgrads and sharp undergrads. Seems like he co-opted half the damn school.”

  She’d stopped leafing through, but had her hand down on the page, preventing Corrigan from seeing exactly where she’d stopped.

  “The victims,” he said. “They were all working on something Calvin had figured out, and he’d figured it out from meeting me. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. I didn’t know any of this until after I questioned Calvin. He recognized me.”

  She held up the page. It was a copy of a photograph showing her next to Corrigan, standing just close enough to imply they were more than casual acquaintances.

  “Based on my hairstyle, I think the picture’s at least five years old,” she said. “Anyway, like I said, I sympathize.”

  Maggie slid the page back into the folder and continued flipping through. “He didn’t connect the project with Offey to the deaths either, not right away. But something I said made him put something else together. Something about ghosts killing people.”

  Corrigan stiffened slightly. “I don’t see the connection, Maggie.”

  “You do. You just don’t want to. Why don’t you tell me what happened to you at McClaren?”

  “The hospital?”

  “The same,” she said.

  “It’s been closed for years. I remember something about a patient killing some people there a while back.”

  “Of course you remember,” she said, still flipping the pages in front of her. “Vividly, I would think.”

  She stopped at the appropriate page and slapped it on the table. The image was from a thirty-year old edition of the Boston Globe. The text had a basic rundown of what Corrigan had just recapped, but that wasn’t the interesting part. The interesting part was the photograph to the right of the text. It showed police escorting staff members from the building. In the foreground was a dark-haired young woman in an orderly’s uniform escorting a small boy away from the door, her arm wrapped protectively around his shoulders. To anybody who had ever met Corrigan Bain face-to-face there would have been no question who that little boy was.

  Maggie said, “So now I’m asking again—what happened at McClaren that day?”

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with this,” he said quietly.

  “Oh bullshit. C’mon, you know the stories. There was no way one man alone did all of that killing. I’ve seen the police records, Corrigan. Three different survivors in separate statements claimed to have been attacked by someone they couldn’t see. Ghosts, they said. Sure, they were mental patients, but . . .”

  “McClaren has nothing to do with this!” Corrigan shouted, jumping to his feet. “So you leave me—you leave my life—out of this!”

  He brought his palm down hard on the top of the table, which was fortunately made entirely of metal or else Maggie would have been showered with wood fragments.

  “Now give me that file,” he growled, “so I can burn it.”

  For the first time she could remember, Maggie Trent was afraid of Corrigan Bain; the tightly reined man she’d known for twelve years was nowhere to be seen. So she handed over the folder, not mentioning it was a copy. Calvin still had the original and she had another copy at the office.

  He snatched it out of her hand and stormed off without another word.

  Maggie sat by herself for a few minutes, long en
ough for her to convince herself that she wasn’t trembling. Guess I touched a nerve.

  “Well,” she said to nobody, “that went great.”

  Packing up her files, Maggie realized she’d never gotten the chance to tell Corrigan the most important piece of news about this case: Erica Smalls had survived the attack.

  PART TWO

  THIRTY YEARS PAST

  Chapter Twelve

  The Fastest Boy Alive careened fearlessly down Trapelo Road at a speed that was beyond the ken of ordinary mortals, many of whom stepped aside in awe as he raced past them, past the cars also making their way down the hill, past the sound barrier even. Or so the Fastest Boy Alive figured. He’d only learned there was such a thing as a sound barrier a couple of weeks ago, and all he remembered about it was that when you broke it, it made a big noise. He figured that was how people ahead of him knew he was coming. Surely they couldn’t hear, as he did, the tires of his dirt bike as they whined a distinct A-sharp note against the wind that was also drying the sweat out of his T-shirt and whipping his hair against his ears so hard it stung.

  The tightness in his calves and thighs was also carried off by the wind along with, more reluctantly, six months of cabin fever. Spring had finally arrived, and nothing was going to stop him from enjoying this moment—not the impossibly steep climb to get to the highest point on Trapelo, and not Violet, who hated the Fastest Boy Alive and would very much rather have him pretend to be little Corry Bain all the time.

  This stretch of road was more or less typical of the area—narrow, winding, and steep, with parked cars where there was no room for them. Corry was pretty sure the road was old enough to make sense back when people used horses and such to get around. Sometimes he wished he could use a horse. It’d sure be lots more fun than Violet’s Dodge Dart, which smelled like exhaust and pine. The Dart had more trouble with the Trapelo hills than he did on his bike. Surely a horse would do better than both. Maybe it wouldn’t smell any better, though.