“It’s perfectly safe,” he said. “I can even stay inside if you like.” He glanced at my hand, still under the table, still holding my pistol, and grinned. “Besides, you are the one with a weapon, are you not?”
I inclined my head.
“As you should be, Trooper.” He winked and looked smug.
We sat looking at each other with yet another silence ticking away between us. He pulled a set of keys out of his pocket and slid them across the table to my left hand. “Have a look,” he said. “I’ll sit right here. Promise.”
I took the keys with my left hand and slid my pistol into the holster on my belt. “I think I will.” I gave him my most intimidating cop look. “You stay here while I do.”
“Knock yourself out,” said Hatton with a small grin.
The air outside was brisk, and darkness had fallen while we spoke. I got the long-barreled flashlight out of my car. His Lincoln was parked in the back of the lot, behind the open kitchen door. Light spilled out through the doorway and cast long shadows through the lot.
The black canvas convertible top was up, and I pointed the flashlight through the driver’s side window. I recognized two things immediately, the car was unlocked, which I thought was strange for such a valuable car, and the interior was immaculate as if it had been recently detailed.
I opened the driver’s side rear door and played my light across the white leather back seat. I didn’t expect to find anything so simple as a greasy shoe print that was Aten Kennedy’s size, but I thought maybe there would be a scuff in the leather—anything to disprove Hatton’s version of the tale. I walked around the car, looking for dents or scars in the surface that might indicate Hatton had smashed someone’s head against the car.
Of course, there was nothing visible, and I doubted daylight would expose anything earth shattering either. If things had gone the way Marcus had said, and the car was marked up, Hatton would not have come to me.
I slid into the car on the passenger side. It felt cavernous inside the car, and looking across to the driver’s side, it seemed like you would need an intercom to have a conversation if the top was down. The fold-up arm rest was down, creating a separation in the huge bench seat.
I opened the glove box, looking for the receipt Hatton had mentioned, but it was empty—not even an insurance card was inside. I made a disgusted noise and slapped the glove box closed.
“I lied about the receipt,” said Hatton.
With my heart pounding, I peered through the windshield, into the shadows cloaking the farthest extent of the parking lot where it sounded like the voice had come from. I couldn’t see a thing.
“Why would you lie about something like that?”
I heard the scrape of a leather sole on asphalt, now sounding like it came from behind the car to the left. “If I’m honest, and I almost always am, I was hoping to get to speak to you without all that hubbub inside the diner.” His voice sounded like Jax.
I got out of the car and pointed my flashlight at where I thought that scraping sound had come from, but there was nothing there—not even a scuff mark. “And what do you have to say that you couldn’t say inside?” I should have felt uneasy to be out here alone with a man who was still the best suspect I had, but I didn’t. I felt irritated and a little hostile—another two nails in my coffin as far as my wife was concerned.
“This case… This ‘Bristol Butcher’ thing. Neither Liz nor I have any part in it, but I know you think we do. I’d like to be left out of the rest of the investigation.” This time, his voice seemed to come from the darkness in front of the car, but a bit to the left. It no longer sounded like Jax.
“For that to happen, I have to clear you of any involvement. You need to be honest with me about everything. No more silly little games to get me into the parking lot alone, as if I’m your prom date or something.”
He chuckled. It was more like a suppressed cackle than a quiet laugh. “Point taken. The thing is, I don’t want to explain anything else or have you poking any further into my life or Liz’s. I hope you can understand that. I’m not in the mood for this, and Liz is above such things. I think it would be best for you to simply move on to finding the real killer.”
I held my hands up, palms pointed at the starry sky and shrugged like a kid in the principal’s office. “As I said, I have to rule you out. I just can’t take your word for it and move on. If you were the victim of a crime, you’d pitch a fit if I did that on your investigation.”
“Come now, Detective. You ignore possibilities all the time.”
The voice sounded like it was right behind me—like he’d spoken in my ear. I whirled around, my hand going to my pistol, but the lot behind me was empty all the way to the kitchen door.
Hatton chuckled from somewhere off in the darkness.
My irritation at being startled grew into a certified annoyance at this arrogant fool. “I follow the best evidence I have. Right now, that evidence points to you and your friend Liz. Your dumb little parlor tricks are not helping you, either.”
Hatton stepped forward out of the shadows ten feet from where I was standing. He looked at me with a raw intensity that was unsettling. “You think I’m being rude, do you?” His hands were in his pockets.
I sighed and shook my head in exasperation. “You don’t think this farce is rude?”
He laughed, long and loud. It was a very unsettling noise—like fingernails grating across sandpaper, or two cats fighting outside your window at night. “No, you misunderstand me. Of course, it is rude to drag you out here to listen to a pack of lies. At the same time, you think I’m a serial killer capable of prolific acts of violence, yet what concerns you is my rudeness.”
“And that is funny?” I asked, my face growing hot in my rising anger at this pedantic giant of a man.
“No, no. You think I’m a serial killer; that is what amuses me. What kind of evidence can you possibly have that points to a man as sick as I am? A man so sick from the chemo drugs that he weighs approximately the same as a ten-year-old girl.” A smile was on his lips, but his eyes seemed anything but amused.
“We found DNA on Aten Kennedy. I believe it’s your DNA.” I was lying, of course, something that sometimes helps spur an investigation along, but that isn’t what I was doing. I just wanted to crush his smug tone of voice. “We know all about you. The cave. The car.” I waved my hand at his Lincoln.
Again, he laughed, his loud, abrasive cackles ringing across the parking lot. “You are funny, Hank. I didn’t expect that.” He smiled to himself and nodded his head. “Surprising,” he muttered.
His manner grew grave. “You don’t have DNA. You didn’t even know my name until I called you. You don’t know anything about me. If you did, you wouldn’t have taken this meeting.” His voice sounded vicious as he uttered the last sentence.
“Is that a threat?”
“I don’t threaten,” he snapped. “I’m not a talker. I do, Hank. I do.”
I thought I heard real emotion in his voice for the first time. “I know more about you than you think, and I’m learning more and more as we continue to chat.”
He looked at me with a strange expression on his face, his head tilted a little to the side. Maybe it was eagerness and greed, or maybe it was simple lust. His eyes glinted with humor. “I’ll bite,” he said with a malicious little smile playing across his lips, and the skin on his nose all wrinkled up like the skin across the snout of a snarling dog. He paused, letting the moment draw out. When I didn’t react, his smile faded, and he went on. “What do you know about me? What are you learning?”
“You can make light of this if you like, but it’s true.” I tried not to sound a bit unnerved by his strange behavior.
Hatton spread his arms with his palms up. “Enlighten me, please. One is never too old to learn.” His eyes twinkled with what looked like genuine amusement. “You’re a tough guy, aren’t you?”
“Whoever is using the cave the papers talk about is a cannibal.”
<
br /> Hatton’s pleasant expression faded. “Do go on.”
“Hit a nerve, did I?”
Hatton waved his hand at me as if he were tossing something into the weeds. He looked annoyed, his smile fading altogether. He seemed irritated with the turn of the conversation, but not enough to outweigh his curiosity.
“What the papers don’t say is that the cave was used by multiple killers. There are too many bodies for one man to be responsible. The timeline is unbelievable.”
“Oh really?” The tension melted out of Hatton’s bearing. Until it was absent, I hadn’t realized that he’d been wound up tight, ready to spring. His annoying, smug smile surfaced again on his face but again didn’t extend all the way to his eyes. “I was right before. You know nothing.”
Something inside me wanted to wipe that smile off his face again. “I do know one thing for certain.” I took a small amount of pleasure in seeing his arrogant expression falter again.
“I’ll bite,” he said again. This time, his smile turned nasty.
“I know I’ll be on you like the hair on your back. I’ll be in your life up to my eyeballs until I either get enough to arrest and convict you, or I can rule you out and be done with you forever.”
He sneered at me, and that expression did reach his eyes. “I had such high hopes for this meeting, too.” His voice was laced with sarcasm. “And tell me, Hank, if I were the man you want, why would I not just leave the area now before you get enough so-called evidence to convict me?”
“Because that would be an admission of guilt. Once I had that knowledge, I would be on you like a tick on a dog. I would follow you and catch you.” I looked at him with an intensity equal to his. “And plus, it would be an admission that I’m right. You can’t admit that. Your ego won’t let you.”
“So, you are going to follow the killer wherever he may lead? Are you prepared for what that might require?” His tone of voice was nasty, all pretense of politeness gone.
“I can assure you, I will do what I say,” I said, feeling full of bluster and as obvious as a lying twelve-year-old.
“You would leave your job? Your pretty little wife? Your child? Your possessions? Everything that defines your petty life?” He scoffed. “I don’t think so.”
I just stared at him, wondering what had possessed me to meet with this man in the first place.
A smug little smile bloomed on his face. “I didn’t think so.”
“Let me tell you something, Hatton.”
He made a prissy little gesture, which I took as permission to go on.
“My petty life, as you call it, is defined by investigating smug assholes like you. People who, like you, think they are too smart to get caught. I’ve made it my business to be the guy that can and does finish the chases that no one else can. You and people like you are my area of expertise.
“I’ve chased down serial killers before. If you are a killer, you go ahead and run. Every time you look over your shoulder, it’s my face you will see. I’ll have handcuffs and an order of extradition in my coat pocket. Or stay here and pretend I don’t know anything. It will all amount to the same thing.”
Hatton’s expression grew somber. “I appreciate your honesty, Hank, and feel I should reciprocate.” He closed the rear door on the driver’s side and slid behind the wheel. “You are making a grave error in your reasoning.”
I walked around to the driver’s side of the car, standing next to the rear door on that side. “Educate me,” I said. It wasn’t lost on me that he’d flipped back to the polite persona. I was willing to bet that when Hatton moved, it would be from a place of cold reasoning, rather than anger or rage.
He pulled something out of his pocket, and I tensed, my hand moving to the butt of my pistol. He chuckled. “I told you, Hank. You are perfectly safe from me tonight,” he said. He held up another set of car keys and jingled them. He then slipped one of them into the ignition, and I relaxed. “You assume all so-called serial killers think alike. More to the point, you assume they all run to a place where you can, with a letter from your lieutenant, be in a position of authority. What happens when someone runs to a place where there is no extradition? What happens when you follow someone to a place where they are the authority, and you are the one who will be hunted?”
I grunted. “I suppose the same thing that will happen when I follow someone to Lilliput.”
Hatton looked at me without recognition.
“Jonathan Swift. Gulliver’s Travels, just another fictional place from someone’s imagination.”
Hatton laughed. “I like you, Hank. You remind me of someone I had a lot of fun palling around with many years ago. His name was Jon Black. Jon Calvin Black.”
I shrugged. The name seemed familiar for some reason, but for the life, of me I couldn’t place it.
Hatton shook his head, looking sad. “You people have no sense of family. No sense of the past.” He perked up and put his hands on the steering wheel. “But perhaps, in the future, we will be friends, too,” he said and then started the car. He turned and looked at me like a mongoose looking at a snake. “There is just one more thing I want to tell you.”
“I’m still here; I’m still listening.” I wasn’t really listening though. I was playing the conversation back in my mind, trying to find something he said that would give me grounds to slap the cuffs on him and put him in a cell—even if it was only for one night. But he had said nothing actionable; he had only made implications and innuendoes.
He ducked his chin to his shoulder and then nodded like a coquettish school girl. He put the car into drive, his foot on the brake splashing red light across the parking lot. “I was with you that night in my abattoir. Your instincts for the hunt are quite invigorating.”
As the words rang in my ears, I seemed to be trapped in a world defined by slow motion, but he’d made a mistake. Finally, I had him. My hand was still on the butt of my pistol, and I was trying to draw it, but it seemed like I was mired in an invisible viscous fluid. It was like one of those dreams where you can’t get away, can’t move fast enough to avoid the Bad Thing, except this was real, and the Bad Thing was about to get away.
Hatton was leering at me over his shoulder as the car started to pull away from me at idle. “Chase me!” he yelled. He took his foot off the brake and gunned the engine. The big Lincoln roared toward the back of the parking lot, tires shrieking, both front doors slammed shut by its momentum. “Catch me if you can, Hank!”
My gun was free of the holster at last and was rising into firing position. My other hand snapped forward to support my shooting hand. “Stop!” I yelled. “Hatton, stop!”
I could hear him cackling over the roaring engine. The car slewed around in a large, sloppy half circle until it was facing me—and the only exit of the parking lot. I could see Hatton’s eyes glinting through the windscreen. A huge predatory grin was plastered on his face.
My pistol was halfway between my hip and the place I was most comfortable shooting from. I was a point-shooter, relying on muscle memory to put the bullets where I wanted them instead of using the gun’s sights to aim. I was good at it. I didn’t need time to aim, so I was fast on the trigger.
The car roared at me, head lights still off, and its tires shrieking like demons.
As I was about to pull the trigger, Hatton waved and swerved the big car off line, pointing the nose so he would miss me by a car length. Despite the relief that washed through me, I was angry and disappointed, because as Hatton probably knew, with the direct threat to my life alleviated, I couldn’t risk a shot at the car with an unknown backdrop like the shadowy rear parking lot and whatever lay beyond the weeds and shadows.
“Stop, Hatton! You are under arrest!” I yelled, knowing it was senseless but unable to just stand there and watch him drive away.
He waved again, extending his arm out the window and flapping his hand around and then blipped the Lincoln’s horn. He roared by, and time seemed to catch up to me. I spun on the balls of my
feet and sprinted after the car.
The car roared through the front parking lot, tires screaming as he slid from the lot out onto West Henrietta Road. I ran toward the street and then changed my mind and cut toward my cruiser, ignoring the sickening pain that shot through my knees as I did so. I put my gun away and ripped the door open. I jumped in and cranked the engine, snapping on the siren and lights. As soon as it caught, I slammed the car into a sliding J-turn, sliding until the front of the car pointed at the road. I raced south on West Henrietta, straining my eyes to catch a glimpse of that big black Lincoln’s tail lights.
I had lost him, though, and took my foot off the gas. I turned off the emergency lights and siren and radioed in to put out an APB I spent an hour canvassing the streets of Henrietta, but Hatton had gotten away clean.
As I sat in my car, more than a little dejected, I tried to comfort myself with the knowledge that Ben Carson was watching Tutor’s house and had no doubt heard the APB. He’d be on the lookout for Hatton, and with any luck, would nab the bastard before morning. I couldn’t think of a better man than Ben to be sitting out there on the side of the road in an unmarked car, waiting to snap cuffs on Hatton’s bony wrists.
Fifteen
“At the time, it didn’t dawn on me that he was being so specific about the people I loved. I thought he was just talking. How much I wish I’d realized he was talking about Jane and Sig. I would have pulled my pistol and shot him in the face, consequences be damned. That might have saved Ben Carson’s life, but I doubt it. It didn’t help when I finally did shoot him.” I shrugged.
Meuhlnir was looking at me, one hand to his chin, stroking his beard. “All this talk—”
“Meuhlnir,” I said. “I’m sitting here feeling like you know more than you are willing to tell me.”
“They’ve done this before,” he said in a quiet voice. “They’ve brought people from your klith, and from other stathur—places, or realities if you like—as well.”
“Why? What do they want from me?”
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