Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

  The rain had started just after he had gone through Lexington, and then he had spent almost two solid hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic outside of Grayson to get though the scene of a big accident evidently caused by the rain. Funny how people could drive normally but when the weather changed they suddenly forgot all the common sense rules of driving. In this accident, some guy in a little car had tried to turn in front of an approaching semi- and had ended up skidding into the front of the big truck and being crushed. The trucker looked like he’d tried to stop, but the wet road and the skidding little car had made his braking futile, and because of that, David‘s ETA for making it back into Liberty was now slipping into very late Friday night.

  He cleared the radio shadow of the mountain and the report came back on, staticky and hard to hear. “...and flash floods. The bridge linked several communities to the Interstate, and until the bridge can be repaired or replaced, residents will be forced to take a long, circuitous route to get to the freeway. In other news, President Clinton and the First Family left for a weeklong trip to California, and White House spokesman Mike McCurry said that the severity of the approaching Hurricane made moving the President to a safer location ‘very prudent’. Mr. Clinton will spend Friday touring a new automobile plant in Torrance and attending a fund raiser, and...”

  David flicked the radio over to the CD and wondered what bridge they’d been talking about. The County Line Bridge on Highway 132 linked Liberty and several other small towns with Fredericksburg and the Interstate, and if that bridge were to be washed out or closed for some reason, people from Liberty and the other small towns would have to go a long way back into the country to find another crossing, going at least twenty or thirty miles out of their way. The Anne River was pretty wide there at the county line over into Fredericksburg County, and that bridge was a vital link to the rest of the world.

  So heading north and going into Liberty on the back roads might be a very good idea. He had planned to do that anyway to stay on higher ground and avoid the I-95 traffic between Richmond and D.C., but if flood waters washed out that bridge or made it impassable, David would have another three hour drive to go around. Good thing he was coming in from the west, and it was really a good thing that he’d grown up around Liberty - he knew almost every back road in the area.

  David was tired, but thinking about routes and roads and figuring out the best way back into town was keeping him awake. But the monotony of staring at the rainy highway in front of him was starting to dull his senses, and he rolled down the window for a blast of cold, rainy air. He turned the music louder, advancing to a fast, guitar-heavy song.

  The other way he could go, instead of crossing the Shenandoah mountains and then heading north to Liberty on the back roads, would be to take the 81 north in the Shenandoah Valley and then cross through Shenandoah National Park. That would guarantee him high elevations and reduce the danger of roads being washed out, but then he would have to pray that the National Park was open even though there was a hurricane coming. He didn’t know what forest rangers did when the weather got bad - did they shut down Yellowstone and turn off all they geysers when the weather got bad?

  Well, he had a couple of options, and thinking about them would keep him alert, hopefully. That and the 10 bottles of Jolt cola - “Twice the caffeine of regular colas!” - in the passenger seat floorboard. If they couldn’t keep him awake, nothing could.

  Chapter 14 - Friday,

  September 23

  When Julie woke up on Friday morning, the rain was coming down pretty hard, hard enough to make her walk to the Metro station a wet and frustrating experience. Everyone else on the Metro was soaked and looking downtrodden, so it didn’t really matter anyway that her hair looked bad after her run through the rain. As soon as she arrived at her office, she booted up her computer system and checked her email first, as she always did. There were five new messages, including an Internet mail message from her sister in California, but the message that interested her the most was a response to her appointment request with Mike Wallace, her supervisor. She rolled the square mouse on its “FBI Academy” mouse pad and double-clicked on the reply.

  Julie, I’m free first thing in the morning around 7:30, if you’re ready by then. If not, call my secretary and set something up for later in the day.

  Julie clicked on “REPLY” and typed a quick message that 7:30 would be fine and that she would see him then.

  Twenty minutes later, she exited the elevator on the seventh floor and headed into his office, mentioning to Mike’s secretary that he was expecting her. The secretary poked her head in and announced her, and then held the door open for Julie as she entered. Julie saw the donut and coffee on the secretaries’ desk and felt her stomach rumble, and she was unsure if it was from hunger or nervousness.

  “Julie, come on in,” Mike Wallace said, motioning her to the chair in front of his desk. He was on the phone, but she saw that it wasn’t the regular phone on his desk but a white phone attached to a large, blocky device that sat on a table next to his desk. It was a secure phone, allowing him to talk with a scrambled signal to anyone with a similar phone setup - those types of phones were always connected with land lines, the signals never going through the air where someone could intercept and attempt to decode them. Strangely enough, most of the Government’s most private and sensitive business was done on phones just like these, the ‘60s technology sufficing where ‘90s technology could not. He finished the call immediately and turned his attention to her.

  “Good morning, Julie. Nice to see people can be to work on time, especially on a Friday morning with the weather so bad. Okay, now what can I do for you?”

  She cleared her throat, glancing at her notes and reports a little nervously. “Well, sir, I’m not sure what if anything I’ve got here, but...well, the reports show some kind of pattern...”

  Mike interrupted her. “Julie, you were only assigned to test the Cray, so anything you might have found is gravy. Relax and tell me what you’ve found.”

  She breathed deeply for moment and smiled. “Sorry, I guess I just wanted to prove I could do what you’ve asked me to do.”

  “You already have, right?”

  She nodded. “Yes, sir. The Cray is working perfectly, the search algorithms are very fast and very good at weeding out cases and events that don’t meet the search criteria. And I think the fact that every case file for every crime in the last 30 years is stored in the same location will make this computer the most powerful crime-fighting tool to come along. It will be a very valuable asset to tracking down crimes and criminals, and the FBI will be the envy of the law-enforcement profession if word ever gets out that we have it and what we’re using it for.”

  He nodded. Her assessment was good, and at the same time she wasn’t ass-kissing anybody or anything. “So I gather the system works correctly?”

  “Yes. The hardware and software work very well together. Those guys at Cray really know what they’re doing when it comes to building a fast machine; why, just the cooling of the machine’s components with liquid nitrogen probably speeds up processing times by 148%.”

  He had heard similar reviews from other people familiar with the machine, but it was good to hear from someone who was using it on a daily basis. Maybe that huge chunk they’d paid out of their IT budget for the Cray hadn’t been wasted after all. And unlike the contractors or the budget guys, this woman had no vested interest in the final decision about the system.

  “Well, I hear that you’ve been burning the thing up. What have you been using to test it?”

  She glanced at her reports and handed a thin one to Wallace, a short sheaf of computer paper marked “Chronological”. She also passed him a map of the Pacific Northwest, and he noticed a smattering of colored dots around the Seattle area, the dots evidently marked for years in the early ‘80s. Something clicked in the back of his mind, and he realized he was looking at something related to the Black Diamond Killer case.

  Jul
ie cleared her throat and began.

  “I decided to use the search pattern we had discussed before, the one that involved searching for cases involving missing or removed body parts. The initial search algorithm came up with something like 2000 individual cases, but the longer Chris and I worked with the search instructions, the better we got at narrowing the search protocol. I was glancing through the case listings and found that most of the Black Diamond killings that occurred in Seattle in the early 1980’s involved a ‘collector’, something I had not known before. Are you familiar with the case?”

  He was instantly, and intensely, disappointed.

  He had thought she might’ve actually come up with something, but just seeing mention of the Black Diamond Killer at the start of her report confirmed that everything that followed was just a work of fiction. Hundreds of investigators had spent more than a decade trying to track down the most elusive serial killer in the history of the nation, and nothing had ever come of it.

  He remembered the early 80’s, and the shame brought upon the FBI and law enforcement agencies all over the Pacific Northwest when the Black Diamond Killer went on killing and killing and there was nothing they could do to stop him. Many investigators felt that the killings ended because something had finally happened to the killer, and other investigators, including Mike Wallace, felt that that had only been wishful thinking. He knew that the Black Diamond Killer could go on as long as he’d wanted and they would never have caught him, not unless they had caught a lucky break or something - the guy was just too good.

  His voice was sharp, and a little cold.

  “Yeah, I know the case. I was with the Bureau when it all happened. I hope you’re bringing all of this up for a good reason.”

  He didn’t mention the fact that she had found out the Black Diamond Killer had been a collector - that was something that had always been kept from the public, but readily apparent in the FBI files on the case.

  “Well, the search parameters were to look for a chronological and geographical list of unsolved ‘collector’ homicides, and the Black Diamond killings were only a small part of them.” She stood and walked around his desk, pointing at the color map of the U.S. she’d handed him. “From the data I have compiled, it looks like a ‘collector’ could have been wandering the U.S. for many years now. That map shows a listing of 326 unsolved ‘collector’ cases around the country from 1976 to present. The colored dots show years, and as you can see, a pattern is readily apparent.”

  He studied the map, trying to keep from cracking up. It was what looked like a random scattering of colors, but as he studied them, the colored dots did slowly appear to form pattern, almost like a loop. He needed to visually discount many anomalous points of data, but the "pattern" of colors started in New England in the early mid-70’s and went west to Seattle, south to L.A., and then back east to Alabama with a few dots marked “1996”.

  But what was he really looking at? The truth about the Black Diamond Killer had never been released to the public because the investigators in the case were holding that information back in case a serious suspect ever surfaced, but one never did.

  He remembered reading about the reports coming out of Seattle in 1984 and 1985, lengthy reports written by exhausted investigators as they used every method possible to find the killer, and always the reports were depressing: more killings, more deaths, no clues and no suspects. They had even stooped to the embarrassing level of bringing in psychics to assist in the case, but they had also turned up nothing, getting no further with their chanting and burning of incense than the law enforcement officials had gotten from poring over reams and reams of paperwork and reports.

  But one of the leading theories surrounding the end of the Black Diamond killings was that the Killer had simply moved away from the area. Exhaustive work had gone into searching all over the country for other cases that matched the Seattle slayings, but few had turned up. And the Seattle investigators were so glad to see the massacre in their jurisdiction end that they’re investigation after the killings ended was probably half-hearted at best.

  Julie’s report showed five similar deaths in Oregon and three in Northern California just after the Black Diamond killings ended - didn’t he remember a mention of this in some of the later reports published by the Black Diamond Task Force? Some speculation followed that the Killer had gone south to the San Francisco area, but there had never been any evidence to corroborate that theory. But what if he had gone south into California? Mike Wallace stared at the map, ignoring everything else in the room. The killings slowed after he left Seattle - but that made sense, didn’t it? If the slayings had continued in the vast numbers like in Seattle, the killer would’ve been caught. Or maybe he was just tired of killing and took a break for a year or two, only killing sporadically instead of slaying two or three women a month as he had done in Seattle.

  He looked up at Julie.

  “Now, you searched for what, exactly?”

  She pulled the report she had brought with her up to him, opening the front cover to the first page. “We searched for all unsolved cases involving ‘collection’ of a body part. At first there were many unrelated cases or cases that couldn’t have been committed by the same person due to location, but we eliminated most of those based on dates or based on the body parts removed. And in some cases the missing pieces could be explained by other reasons. These cases all follow the same method of operation and, because of location and time, they could’ve all been committed by the same person.”

  She was nervous, this all sounding so crazy as she explained it to her new boss, and she wondered what the hell she was doing up here at all, anyway. This had gone way beyond testing the Cray, and while she wanted him to know she could do what he asked, it wouldn’t be good if this looked like obsession. She might never regain his respect if this whole thing went into the crapper after she had spent so much time and so many resources on it. “Now I find it all hard to believe too, but I’ve double checked everything and it is correct.”

  He flipped to the first case report and began reading. It involved a case in Bangor, Maine in 1974. The victim was a young woman whose body was found dumped in a shallow ravine south of the town, and the coroner’s report mentioned the fact that “a piece of the victim’s thumb was not present”. It went on to mention the possibility of removal by animals but theorized that it was more likely the digit was cut prior or immediately after death, leading the coroner to advance the possibility that the killer or killers had taken the digit as part of a kidnapping or blackmail scheme.

  To Mike Wallace, the case sounded suspiciously like one of the Black Diamond killings.

  He reached forward and picked up his phone without taking his eyes off the report, buzzing his secretary. “June? Yes, cancel my 8 o’clock, okay?” He grunted his thanks, hung up, and looked at Julie. “Give me about a half-hour to look through this stuff. Wanna get some breakfast or something?”

  She nodded and left, her mind racing. What if he thought there was something to all this? She’d thought about little else in the past 48 hours, but it was one thing to track something down and create a theory to explain it. It was an entirely different thing to have your new boss pore through your work, scrutinizing every little detail.

  The sun coming up made it easier on him, but the exhaustion and aches in his muscles were wearing him down. He couldn’t see the sun for all the clouds and rain falling but the sky had lightened with the sunrise, and the map laid out on the passenger seat next to him did little to urge him on. All he could think about was her, wondering if she was okay, hoping that she was all right. He wanted to stop and call her, but he didn’t want to stop for even a minute. He would’ve done anything to be with her right now, would’ve spent every penny he had to be there.

  The music was cranked, and Rush was helping him along, singing loudly from his speakers. He was listening to Roll the Bones now, one of their later albums, with a song called Dreamline. Some of the lyrics talked abo
ut facing adversity and moving through it, getting past it and getting on with life, and that was what he was trying to do now. Almost every song on the CD had something to do with chance and coincidence and trying to make the best of what life throws at us, and he could easily understand what Geddy Lee was singing about - his life was mixed up, and he needed to stop and think it all out. But he didn’t have time to think about that now - he needed to drive. His concentration was flagging as he tried to keep an eye on the gas gauge and still watch the road. He was getting low, but it had been a while since he’d seen a station. He needed to fill up, and soon.

  The car was making some very bad noises now, but David had the music turned up too loud and couldn’t hear them. The exhaust system was almost shot - the car hadn’t been in very good shape to begin with, and now after six days of almost constant use, the strain was starting to show. He was burning a little oil, a sure sign that something was wrong in the crankcase, but the rain and clouds masked the little blue cloud coming out of his tailpipe. He was also starting to lose power on the uphill climbs, and the car had never had that much power to begin with.

  David just hoped that the car would make it all the way.

  A half hour later, she was seated back in her chair in his office, her stomach somewhat settled with bagel and coffee.