Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

  Which would mean David Beaumont would be next.

  No, no, she told herself, it was all just too wild, too weird. There was no way to prove that the killers were the same, no way to link the two together. And there was no one at the Liberty Police Department that would listen to the ramblings of a sick ex-cop anyway, so getting all worried about it would do nobody any good. And the pain that seemed to envelope her stomach reminded her that she was no longer a cop, only a bus driver leading a quiet, boring life. It was all just too crazy. It all had to be just a series of strange coincidences.

  She looked at the file, sitting closed on her kitchen table across from her bland breakfast. She should give it back, or give it to the Beaumont boy if he came back, though she didn’t think he would - the kid was gone, getting out before all this craziness started. She didn’t need it any longer, and keeping it would do her no good. She had some crazy ideas, and that’s all they were - crazy. No need for her to get mixed up in things she had no business being involved in.

  The phone rang, startling her. She set the TV remote down beside the remains of her bland breakfast and got up to answer it.

  “Hello?”

  The phone connection crackled, and Norma wondered if there were any phone lines down yet. Storms always took down a lot of tree branches, and out here in the country they often snapped phone lines, knocking out service for hours, even days.

  A voice came back to her, sounding distant in the static.

  “Yes, may I please speak to Norma Jenkins, please?”

  “You got her," Norma answered. Great, another bill collector. "Can I help you?”

  There was another pause. “Hi, my name is Julie Noble and I’m with the FBI. God, this static is horrible, isn’t it?”

  The FBI.

  A stiff chill swept up Norma’s arms, causing her hands to clench even tighter on the handset of the phone. Did she just say that? “Yeah, the weather’s getting pretty bad out. Did you say you’re with the FBI.?”

  “Yeah, I am. I’m assuming you’re aware of the Lisa Stevens case.”

  “Uh-huh. She was killed on Monday night. And you’d have to be blind and deaf not to know about that case. Why?”

  There was another long pause. “Sorry, but I’m trying to pack. Another question: Do you remember anything about the murders you had there in 1978? They involved a suspect named Jasper Fines and occurred in April of...”

  “1978. Yeah, I remember,” she interrupted, her stomach flaring with sudden pain. Too many memories. What, was this lady psychic or something?

  “Sorry, but my ulcer is really killing me. Yeah, and I think I know where you’re going with your question, and I’ll make it easy for you. Yes, there’s a strange connection between the cases.”

  Quiet on the other end, stretching out to the point that Norma thought the woman might’ve hung up or something, and then: “How did you know that’s where I was going?”

  “Well, I used to be a cop. And the connections I really can’t speak about - I have no idea who you are. Maybe you’re just a very bright reporter.”

  “I’m no reporter, I assure you. And if you don’t mind me saying, you still sound like a cop. I’d like to come down there and interview you, Norma. I can leave tonight and be there in the morning. What do you think?”

  The pain in her gut flared again, but she tried to ignore it. The woman was going to drive all the way down from D.C. in this weather to talk to her? Maybe Norma wasn’t the only one making connections, but it seemed like an amazing coincidence to her. Things like this never happened in real life, did they? “Yeah, but the weather is getting really bad. Are you sure you want to risk it?”

  “Uh-huh. I’m already almost packed, and I’ve already cleared it with my boss. I’ve got some interesting reports that you should look at, and I think we could help each other out. I’ll call you in the morning, okay?”

  “Sure, and be careful.”

  “Okay, and thanks. I’ll see you tomorrow, around 10.”

  Norma Jenkins hung up the phone and grabbed a couple of pills from her pocket and downed them dry, feeling them starting to dissolve in her throat. Her stomach felt like a hurricane in her gut, moving and churning, and she could taste the coppery hint of blood in her mouth, a sure sign that she would start coughing up blood soon.

  The prescription-strength antacid tablets helped a little but the pain came upon her anyway, and Norma raced into the bathroom, barely making it to the toilet before her stomach heaved. Norma kneeled before the toilet, heaving and spitting the blood and bile out. It was a pain she just wanted to leave her, as if expelling the contents of her stomach could just take the ulcer with it and she would be free. Her body heaved, over and over, until there was nothing left in her. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, she stood and flushed the toilet, turning to see herself in the mirror. Blood spotted her face and stained the top of her robe, and her sunken eyes and wayward hair made her look like some kind of insane killer, streaked with the blood of his victims.

  Norma knew what was coming, suddenly.

  She bent and cleaned as much as she could from her face and robe, and she combed water through her hair with her fingers. She looked a little better, but Norma knew that each time her stomach churned, it was simply eating itself up. Her body was tearing itself up from the inside, the corrosive acids that should have been contained in her stomach leaking through two ragged holes and working on the other delicate tissue inside her, eating away at them. Her doctor had told her that unless the ulcers could be contained and managed by medicine and a stress-reduced lifestyle, they could kill her.

  And now she understood what he meant. This was the worst it had ever been, the worst she had ever imagined - she felt weak in the knees and dropped the toilet seat cover, sitting on the toilet and hugging her arms around her stomach. She felt light-headed and suddenly cold, sure signs of blood loss, and she could also feel the churning and clawing in her stomach, but it was better now - some of the acid was gone, for now.

  Norma knew that things weren’t going to get any better for her soon, with the FBI woman coming to interview her and the stress of her knowledge of the murders taking place now and their seeming connection with Jasper Fines’ reign of terror so many years ago. His coming had been a devastation to this little berg, and as a going-away present to her, he had given her enough guilt for ten lifetimes, a horrible memory that had borne the pain that had wracked her body daily since. There was no way to avoid the stress, as her doctor had told her to do, and that meant the pain would only get worse and worse until it consumed her.

  And for the first time, Norma Jenkins didn’t reject the idea outright. The pain would be over, once and for all. She would have finally paid the price for just laying there on the road that night.

  The policeman assigned to watch over Sally and her recovery had filed his case report on Wednesday evening and the report contained a lengthy report on her recovery. He had spoken with her doctors and they had informed him that she was making a good recovery, the coma now past her. For now, she was out of immediate danger. Her body was healing itself nicely, and what had once been a gaping hole in her shoulder was now bandaged up and healing well, the bullet removed and passed along to investigators.

  Also included near the end of the report was the mention of the words that Sally had spoken in the brief period when she’d been awake, and the cop making the report had mentioned them only because they hadn’t made any sense. To him, the words had sounded like a location or maybe the name of a town, but no one in the station house had ever heard of a town named “Liberty”, so he’d included the word in the report for future reference. Anything mentioned by a victim could turn out to be important, so including it could not hurt.

  The Florida division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was located in Tallahassee because most state divisions of the FBI were located in each state capitol. A copy of the report filed on Sally was forwarded to their office on West Main Street along with copies of e
very other report filed by every other police agency and office in the state. Most case files filed by the individual jurisdictions concerned petty crimes and were ignored, boxed up and sent to a company in St. Louis that would transfer the paper files to both microfiche and computer data for later storage and retrieval. All crimes in each state were eventually reviewed by the FBI, but in most cases they were not reviewed for several months, or they were reviewed because a suspect was apprehended or a string of similar crimes occurred. The data was compiled and used in later reports, but for the most part, the FBI only stored and reviewed the case files, almost never getting involved.

  But in murder cases, the files were routinely reviewed immediately by the FBI agents in each state office.

  The file containing the report on Sally’s recovery landed on the desk of an agent in the Tallahassee office, and he reviewed it along with several other reports. He and the rest of the Florida office were interested in the Sally case because it had also involved the gruesome death of a law enforcement official, something no one ever liked to see, and he was personally pleased to hear that she was recovering nicely. There was too much death, too many murders out there already. From the report it sounded like the girl had a fiancé and a nice life ahead of her, and this horrible thing that had happened to her was bad enough - getting past it and on with her life would be a challenge, but she sounded strong and the case agent felt that she would be fine, eventually.

  The words “Going to Liberty” intrigued the FBI case agent. The girl had fought her way out of a coma and opened her eyes to see her fiancé standing over her, crying, and the first thing she had said were those three words? Why hadn’t the first words been her fiancé’s name, or something about her pain or her family? Why those words?

  The case agent tended to agree with the cop who had filed the report - the words sounded like the name of a place or town.

  The case agent picked up his files and moved over to a desktop computer, one identical to hundreds of other desktop workstations in a hundred other FBI regional and state offices. The computer was linked to a central computer in Washington D.C. via secure landline.

  He tapped the keyboard to bring it out of the screen saver and typed in a command, and soon he could hear the internal modem dialing up to connect with the main FBI Bulletin Board in D.C. The screen beeped at him after a few seconds and, after entering his name and password, he saw a menu with several options. He chose “Location Database” and after a second or two of accessing, a new screen popped up. He had accessed a massive DVD-ROM database published yearly by the U.S. Geological Survey up in Reston, Virginia, that stored the names and locations of thousands of cities, towns, lakes, rivers, and other geographical features all over the word.

  He typed in the word “Liberty” and hit ENTER, and waited for a response from D.C., glancing at the large map of the U.S. over the workstation. There were a lot of places out there, and even if Liberty wasn’t the name of a town, maybe something would come back.

  Something did. There were three towns named Liberty: one in northern Illinois, another in Virginia, southwest of D.C., and one in Alabama east of Montgomery. Using the mouse, the case agent pulled up little maps of each. None of them appeared to be near any large rivers or large cities, so drug way stations were eliminated for the most part, an automatic concern for an FBI agent in Florida, the busiest state in the Union for drug trafficking and importation.

  On a whim, he clicked out of the geographical files and brought up the recent crimes option, and again entered the word “Liberty.” Perhaps the girl had heard the words while she had been in the company of the maniac who’d killed that cop in Carrabelle and tried to kill her. Maybe there was some kind of connection...

  After a few minutes the answer came back. No recent major crimes reported in the Liberty in Alabama, and only a couple of recent arson fires in the Liberty in Illinois. But the Liberty in Virginia was different: they had an unsolved murder on the books, and when the case officer saw the date of the murder, he stopped what he was doing and stared at it. SEPTEMBER 18.

  That was five days AFTER the rookie cop had been killed and Sally had been shot through the shoulder. And there were two other unsolved deaths the day after. Could there be some connection?

  The case agent was an experienced field investigator and had seen enough strange things to accept the possibility; maybe the cop-killer had mentioned the name of his next town. But it was several hundred miles away - why would he go there? And why mention it in front of the girl? Surely he had planned on killing her too, but why take the risk?

  Either way, it was information that someone in D.C. might find interesting. The case agent picked up the phone and dialed the hotline number for the FBI Situation Desk in Washington, D.C.

  Julie Noble had sat on the I-95 southbound and for over four hours, traveling at the amazing speed of less than 10 miles an hour. She had missed most of the normally bad Friday afternoon traffic by leaving her home in Falls Church around 1:00 p.m., but the weather had caused several bad wrecks and combined with the sheets of rain falling from a dull, leaden sky, the main southbound artery out of the D.C. area was a mess.

  It was a little after 5:00 p.m. now, and she was in a Bob Evans restaurant just south of Dumfries, sipping on a cup of warm coffee. The weather outside was only getting worse, and the reports she had heard on the radio predicted only worse weather as the hurricane moved up the coast. The weather guys on the radio had said that they had never seen anything like this, but evidently Hurricane Mandy was spinning and churning its way up the coast very slowly, so the rain was here to stay. Rivers and lakes were rising, and floodwaters were washing out roads in the southern part of the state.

  Julie finished her coffee and the last of her blueberry pancakes and headed out into rain that seemed to falling almost horizontal, a very strong wind blowing in from the east. Rain blew across the parking lot as she walked to her car, and she pulled her jacket around her tighter, cursing herself for not bringing something warmer. The directions she’d gotten to Liberty were easy, and a phone call to the only motel in town, a Motel 6, had gotten her a room. She started up her car and pulled out of the parking lot, heading south.

  The report from the policeman in Florida was made and filed away along with the rest of the dozens of reports from all over the nation that came into the FBI daily. The man working the Situation Desk in the basement of the FBI Headquarters building in Washington, D.C., was concerned with the horrendous weather outside, and when his replacement came in at 3:45 p.m. to work the 4-12 shift, the exiting man only mentioned a few important items to him. He was far too concerned about his commute to Rockville, Maryland to worry about filling in his replacement on every single item sitting in the inbox, and he hurried down to the underground garage to begin what would turn out to be a three-hour drive home. Water was starting to back up on the shoulders of the Beltway, threatening to flood the main road around the Nation’s Capital, and the man’s commute home would be one of the worst he’d ever undertaken in the five years he’d worked in downtown D.C.

  His replacement reviewed the incoming messages and entered them into the computer, but he saw nothing in them that was terribly important. He did not read the Friday edition of the FBI’s Daily Bulletin until very late in his shift, and his tired mind did not make any kind of connection between the killing in Liberty, Virginia and the homicide in Florida.

  David was on the water again, only this time he wasn’t with Bethany. The ocean stretched out for as far as he could see in every direction, but this time he was alone on a small island, one of those castaway islands that you see in the cartoons, a ten-foot wide hump of sand with a palm tree growing right up out of the middle of it.

  The big wooden raft from before was fifty feet away, and on it David could see Bethany and Lisa and his Aunt Gloria, and a half dozen others. People he knew. They were frantically paddling away from the tidal wave that arched up over their raft, and David was yelling at them to paddle faster,
but it wasn’t going to help. The wave and the hurricane behind it were almost upon them, and curiously it seemed like David was free from danger, like the wave was just coming for the raft and would leave him unaffected.

  But there were birds over the raft, lots of them. And more, who dipped and flapped and spun around in the air, nipping at the front of the wave. It looked like they were trying to slow the wave down, or something, and David knew that that was impossible - the wave was just too big, too powerful. The sky seemed full of birds of all different types. One of the birds broke off from the wave and flew over towards him and his little island. It was a big black bird and it looked like the one he had seen at the turnout up in the mountains. It dipped down from the sky and flew straight at him. The bird was coming fast, and screaming at him, its webbed feet out in front of it like it thought it was an eagle, swooping in to grab a meal, and just as it was about to hit him he dove out of the way...

  And swerved the car, barely missing the oncoming truck.

  He sat up, slapping his leg and shaking his head. He was in his car, low and unhappy sounds still issuing from beneath the hood, and he’d swerved back into his lane of traffic and pulled over to the shoulder. He was pushing himself too hard and had fallen asleep at the wheel. The dream was an odd one, odd enough to wake him up.

  He had to get control of this. He was tired and pushing himself, but he would be no good to Bethany if he wrecked his car and died in some fireball.

  The dream was creepy, even though it seemed like he had only been asleep for a moment. The raft and hurricane and tidal wave were like that freaky dream a couple of weeks ago, but this time he had been safe and the others were in danger. Some of the people he had seen on the wooden raft were already dead, but others were not. And a couple of people he hadn’t recognized at the time but now remembered where he had seen pictures of them - they had been his parents. All those people on the raft, people he was connected to, and they were all in danger. They had all been frantically paddling towards his little island. What was his head trying to tell him?