He tapped his fingers on the dashboard, thinking quickly. Again he took out his wallet and this time peeled off two fresh hundred-dollar bills. He handed them to Cheri. “Here, please.”
Cheri just stared at the money. But instead of taking it, she dropped her face into her hands and wept. “I don’t have a pimp!” she yelled between snot-filled sobs. Daniel knew it was over.
All his planning and preparation for naught. He could track down Barnes again, fairly easily in fact. But the other targets in his dossiers were at least as worthy. And he had a schedule to keep.
He watched the truck pull out of the parking lot and turn onto the highway’s entrance ramp. Its taillights disappeared over a ridge, two fireflies in the night.
Edgar Barnes was a lucky man indeed. For as long as he lived, he would never know that at one time he was only fifteen minutes and one underage prostitute away from becoming nothing more than a head on a stick. Now Cheri had Daniel’s undivided attention. He was about to rub her back, comfort her, and then remembered that victims of abuse don’t like to be touched in normal ways. So he sat there awkwardly.
“Shh . . . shh” was all he could think to say as she cried. Finally, she quieted down. “Can I take you home?”
Cheri chewed on her fingernails. Shook her head. “I can’t.”
“No home?”
“I ran away two months ago.” Daniel was silent, allowing her to continue. “My mother’s boyfriend . . .”
Daniel smiled as if he understood. “A jerk?”
“He started visiting me . . . in my room, at night.”
Daniel expected her to begin sobbing once again. But she was dry-eyed. Stoic.
“You told your mother?”
“I told her.” Cheri suddenly looked older. Almost too old. Daniel shuddered.
“But she didn’t believe you,” Daniel offered, trying to help.
She smiled bitterly. “Oh, she believed me.”
“But?”
“I think she was wondering what took him so long to start.”
There was nothing he could say to that. There was really nothing anybody could say.
“So what was the money really for?” Daniel finally asked.
She looked at him like he was the crazy one. “What do you think? Food, a place to stay, toothpaste, tampons . . . maybe even a movie if I’m being honest. I really like The Hunger Games movies. I read all the books.” Daniel fought back a smile. Despite her predicament, and her temporary vocation, she was so . . . normal. “But if I tell people I have a dangerous pimp, they take pity on me. The good ones do at least. The ones like you.”
With LMF393 now just another license plate on the highway, Daniel was no longer in a rush. He looked deeply into her eyes, the best way he knew to impart seriousness. “Cheri, how much would it take for you to make a new start of it? Not for a night or two, but a clean break.”
Cheri stared at the stranger, scarcely believing what she was hearing. She was too shocked to do the actual calculations in her head and was never much good at math anyway, so she blurted out the first number that seemed reasonable. “Five thousand dollars.”
She expected him to burst out laughing. Instead, he turned off the engine, took the keys out of the ignition, and got out of the car. She watched him walk around the back of the vehicle, wondering what he was up to. He popped the trunk. It blocked her view.
After a few seconds of rummaging around, he got back into the Lexus and closed the door. “Please take care of yourself and be careful. I can tell you’re a special young woman,” he said, handing her a stack of bills held together by a wrapper. “It’s ten grand.”
For the third time that night, for the third time in this very car, Cheri began to sob.
“Who are you?” she asked once she finally regained control. “My guardian angel?”
Daniel blushed. The compliment warmed his heart, even if some people would disagree with her assessment. Would disagree vehemently.
In fact, some people might call him the Angel of Death.
NINE
The toilets at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport were outfitted with an automatic seat protector, giving every new visitor a fresh sheet of plastic on which to sit, making the stalls the most pleasurable and hygienic of any major US airport.
Czarcik sat on the toilet. His pants were pulled up and buttoned. He needed privacy, not relief. Carefully, he tapped out a bump of coke onto the side of his hand and snorted it. Then he tossed the empty baggie between his legs and flushed the toilet.
He subscribed to the maxim that breakfast was indeed the most important meal of the day, whether eaten, drunk, or snorted. It had been a restless night, and he wanted to be sharp for his meeting with Detective Ringland.
To prevent the likelihood of a delay, he had booked the first flight of the day, and as expected, it took off on time.
Czarcik spent the majority of the two and a half hours to Dallas studying the crime scene photos of Luis and Marisol Fernandez. The murders were brutal yet so controlled. A combination rarely seen in the field but all too common in B movies and paperback novels.
A delusional psychotic might be able to pull it off. Somebody who was convinced they were doing God’s—or some deity’s—work, who wouldn’t make mistakes caused by anger or compulsion. But this didn’t feel right to Czarcik. The crime scene was clean, not clinical. Done with practical, not obsessive, purpose.
The perpetrator had obviously enjoyed his work. There were touches that seemed personal. Czarcik was still convinced the killer didn’t know his victims. But how could something this ritualistic be completely random?
The plane touched down on the tarmac of Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport just as the midmorning sun was breaking through the clouds. Czarcik had been sitting in the same position for hours, and his shirt was already stuck to his back. He desperately needed a shower.
He deplaned without incident and headed out of the airport. The car-rental shuttle miraculously appeared just as he stepped off the curb, whisking him off to the rental office, where he was given whatever passed for a compact car nowadays.
A decal on the bottom left corner of the windshield warned of a $250 cleaning fee for smoking in the vehicle. Czarcik smiled and lit up a cigarette. He blew the smoke into the vents and then crushed the butt on the floor of the parking garage. At the exit, as the agent was checking his paperwork, he sniffed audibly and alerted her to the presence of stale smoke. She apologized profusely and asked him if he wanted a different car. “Don’t bother,” he assured her. “I’m in a bit of a rush. Just didn’t want to be charged for it.” The agent nodded and made a note on the rental contract.
It was a half-hour drive to the Gillette County Sheriff’s Department, where Detective Ringland had promised to meet Czarcik. He took the bypass around Dallas, both to save time and because the view of sagebrush and rusty oil derricks was more palatable to him than shiny new skyscrapers.
The visitor parking in front of headquarters was practically empty, and Czarcik had his choice of spots. He killed the engine and reached into the back seat for his sport jacket. He wasn’t sure if protocol dictated he wear one, and because he wasn’t sure if Ringland was a stickler for protocol, he put it on. At least it covered his dripping-wet back.
“Morning. How can I assist you?” the woman behind the reception desk asked as Czarcik entered the building. She might have been the same woman he had spoken to the previous night, or everybody in Texas just might share the dispatcher’s disagreeably pleasant disposition.
“My name is Paul Czarcik. I have an appointment to see—”
“Lance Ringland.” A large, fleshy man bounded over to Czarcik, his hand outstretched. “Pleasure to meet you.”
Czarcik shook what felt more like a bear paw. “Detective. Thank you for seeing me.”
Detective Ringland had the body of an oversized varsity lineman and the baby face of a high school freshman. Czarcik would have bet his next drink that this was a ma
n once nicknamed “the Gentle Giant.” He was clean shaven with a tight crew cut. Only a smattering of gray around his temples betrayed his real age.
He placed his hand on Czarcik’s shoulder collegially. “Judging by how quickly you got down here, I know you’re eager to begin, but how ’bout a cold sweet tea to refresh you? Most Yankees aren’t accustomed to the Texas heat.”
“I appreciate that, Detective Ring—”
“That’s twice in twenty-four hours, hoss. It’s Lance. We don’t stand on ceremony down here.”
“I appreciate that, Lance. But if it’s all the same to you, I’d just as soon get started.”
A hint of disappointment flitted across Ringland’s face but melted back into his accommodating features just as quickly.
“Come on,” he said, heading to the rear of the station and motioning for Czarcik to follow. “We’ll get right into it.”
The adage was true. Everything was bigger in Texas, including Detective Ringland’s office.
While even the relatively pampered agents in the BJE had to make do with shared desks and dilapidated cubicles, their counterparts in the Lone Star State had room to spare. Behind Ringland’s desk was a window that looked out over a neatly manicured municipal field. Goalposts and backstops could be seen in the distance. It could have been the office of some ritzy park commissioner were it not for the photos of the Robertson crime scene tacked to the wall adjacent to the desk. Ringland pointed to them. “I had these prepared for you.”
Czarcik stood in front of the photos, hands on his hips, soaking in every detail. An unlit cigarette hung from his mouth. “May I smoke in here?” he asked without looking at Ringland.
“I’m sorry, no.”
Czarcik didn’t really hear him. He was overwhelmed by the brutality in the photos. Ringland’s description on the phone didn’t do it justice. This was the work of some incomprehensibly cruel artist.
Judge Robertson, or what was left of him, was tied to a chair. The flesh had literally been peeled from his face at different depths. A square piece on his cheek revealed the white bone underneath. On his forehead, running horizontally from his temple to the bridge of his nose, hung another strip. This wound reminded Czarcik of his sidewalk, shoveled after the first snowfall.
The one saving grace was that Judge Robertson’s face was so badly mangled that it retained little of its human form.
It was easy to forget that the thing in the photograph had once been a living, breathing person.
“No DNA?”
“None,” Ringland confirmed. “He must have worn gloves because, according to forensics, the skin wasn’t sliced off with a razor or a knife.”
“How’s that?”
“It was pulled off slowly.”
Judge Robertson’s torso had suffered similar abuse. The longest fleshless strip began at his shoulder and continued down the back of his arm until it reached the elbow, from where the flap had then been torn off. The exposed purple muscle looked like something hanging in a deli.
All in all, there were about a dozen separate wounds on the body.
“I assume he bled to death,” Czarcik observed.
No answer. Czarcik turned around. Ringland was shaking his head. “The son of a bitch never hit a vein, or an artery, if you can believe that. The ME put the cause of death as a heart attack.”
“A heart attack?”
Ringland nodded solemnly. “From the pain.”
Czarcik turned his attention to the knots. He placed his finger against the glossy photo paper and traced the close-up of the rope’s swoops and curves. A constrictor hitch. IDA had flagged it, and she was never wrong.
Ringland moved close to Czarcik and rapped his knuckles on the photo. “Same knot as the one on your vic?”
“Looks that way.”
There was no need for Czarcik to explain that only one of his knots was identical to the ones used to tie up Judge Robertson.
It was the knot that secured the chicken around Marisol Fernandez’s neck.
Czarcik was convinced that the killer had taken his time, as he had with the judge. The complexity of the knots bore this out.
There was another link, which the killer had made absolutely no effort to hide, maybe one that he wasn’t even aware of.
The sheer brutality of his crimes.
This was not nearly as subjective as he probably assumed. Sometimes wanton cruelty could be as instructive as a fingerprint or a drop of blood.
“Lance, I think I will take that sweet tea now.”
Ringland smiled and pressed the intercom on his phone. “Doris, two teas please, if you wouldn’t mind.”
After placing the order, Ringland sat down in his soft leather desk chair and motioned for Czarcik to take a seat across the desk from him. Once the drinks were delivered, Ringland detailed the history of the case far more thoroughly than Czarcik expected, including Judge Robertson’s reputation as a no-nonsense adjudicator, the numerous enemies he could have made on the bench, the fateful video of him abusing his daughter, and the political fallout.
Czarcik listened politely without interrupting. By the time Ringland was finished, so was the sweet tea. The Texan was right about one thing. It was damn fine tea.
“I have something for you,” Ringland said, wagging his finger at Czarcik, as if he just now decided to bestow a gift upon his new friend. He pushed himself away from his desk with considerable effort and walked over to a metal filing cabinet against the wall. He pulled out a stack of manila folders, slapped them on the desk in front of Czarcik, and plopped back down into his chair, wiping his brow with the back of his hand.
“Soon as we found him, I had my boys request the judge’s most contentious cases. Got some help from the courthouse on this one.” Ringland motioned to the files. “About twenty of ’em right here. Have to imagine our man is in there somewhere.”
Czarcik was convinced he wasn’t. But he didn’t want to explain the reason why. This would entail a longer and ultimately futile conversation of which he had no desire to be a part, so he just nodded gratefully.
Meanwhile, he kept going back to one number. Ten thousand. Which was approximately how many people had initially viewed the video of Judge Robertson beating his daughter.
That’s who his suspect was. Any one of them.
Before takeoff, Czarcik downed three double 7 and 7s at the airport bar. Following a minor delay, the flight back to Chicago was smooth, and he slept deeply until the wheels of the plane hit the tarmac at O’Hare. He dreamed of three things: a hard workout, a stiff drink, and a break in the case.
He took care of the first one upon landing and the second a few hours after.
Relaxing in bed, he took a few big swigs of Wild Turkey and mentally went over everything he knew about the murders.
The physical evidence was flimsy at best. Even the most conspiratorial investigator would find it a mere coincidence that similar knots—not that uncommon—were found at two different crime scenes in two different states. The victims had no relation to one another—one a shit-kicking Texas judge, the others low-class urbanites. While all of the murders were extremely brutal, the method of execution was different. Judge Robertson had had the flesh peeled from his still-living body. Marisol Fernandez had been bludgeoned to death, and her husband had lost his head.
The one thing all the victims had in common was that they deserved to die.
Czarcik sat up and took another swig, taken aback at his own choice of words. Deserved. He slipped a cigarette between his lips but didn’t light it.
Deserved. According to whom? In these two cases, the ones most qualified to make this determination were the ones least likely to enact the retribution. A frightened wife and young children.
Besides, avenging angels were for the Bible and comic books. And, at least for now, Paul Czarcik believed in neither.
TEN
Chicago Police Chief Eldridge Watkins sat behind his massive, gleaming mahogany desk, glaring at Czarcik.
Chief Watkins’s office was a further reflection of his personality. Uncompromising order. Two standing flags flanked his desk: Old Glory and the city of Chicago’s, with its four red stars sandwiched between two powder-blue stripes. The walls were covered with framed commendations, not unlike Czarcik’s, only these were prominently displayed behind glass to enhance their visibility, not used as a convenient surface to cut cocaine. There was the chief’s diploma from the Chicago College of Criminal Justice, a photo of him with Bears legend Gale Sayers, and another photo, this one old and water damaged, of what looked to be his parents on their wedding day.
A bookshelf contained bound copies of the department’s budget going back to the previous decade, along with various pamphlets from other city services. There was also a leather-bound copy of the King James Bible and a first edition of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.
Chief Watkins had risen quickly through the ranks of the CPD, especially for a black man. Until the new millennium, the department hadn’t been known for its progressive employment policies. Watkins had made his bones on the street, walking the beat in some of the city’s worst neighborhoods. Every promotion he earned was well deserved—and probably overdue—and he met the challenge of each new position with his inimitable mix of integrity and dedication.
The Chicago Sun-Times, the more conservative of the city’s two daily papers, extolled his uncompromising approach to justice. In interviews, Watkins was dismissive of what he considered irrelevant justification for the rampant crime endemic in the predominantly black South and West Sides. He was interested in prevention and punishment, not root causes, which were the domain of sociology students.
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