by Leif Wright
But today, he wasn’t thinking about the episode. He was thinking about Chris Jackson. Had the little man really killed someone? It was difficult to believe. It wasn’t like a client had never confessed to murder before. Chris’ case, however, was striking because murder was so completely out of character for him. A psychotic break, even, wouldn’t have been so disconcerting. But that would have been different. He would have exhibited some other symptoms than beating some poor woman to death.
Chris was clearly aware of what he had done and of it being wrong. But he was … joyful at the memory of the details of what he had done. In a sociopath—or even a psychopath—that would be par for the course, but Chris was clearly neither of those, which made his joy something more dangerous. For himself, and possibly others.
The trembling in the corners of his mouth—that could have been fear, guilt, excitement … almost anything. Lipscomb’s hunch was it was a sign of more darkness to come. Whatever cliff Chris had fallen over, he hadn’t hit bottom yet. He liked the way the murder made him feel. And that was bad news.
Lipscomb’s body turned the car onto the feeder street that led to his house. His hand switched on the turn signal, his foot kicked the car out of Cruise, and stopped for the signal light, where a nondescript camera snapped his picture, just as they did at almost every intersection in the city.
The odds were very good that Chris would try to kill again, but because he hadn’t said so, Lipscomb’s hands were tied. And that was the toughest part of his job. Breaking confidentiality might save a life, but Lipscomb would end up with a career that focused on reciting the phrase “You want fries with that?”
His body pressed the garage door opener and pulled the Beamer into the garage beside the Triumph sitting underneath a tarp. A set of Snap-on tools sat, unused, in a brand new toolbox at the front of the motorcycle. He always meant to become a grease monkey tinkerer, but the time never seemed to materialize.
His body walked into his house and navigated to the office, sitting down in front of last year’s iMac and wiggling the mouse to wake it up. He pulled up Google and searched for the local newspaper, clicking through dates until he found what he was looking for—the lead (his news editor sister, climbing the heights of a dying industry in New York, would have corrected his mental dictation to “lede”) story: “Police probe local woman’s death.”
A photo of police and ambulance workers milling about importantly accompanied the headline. He clicked the headline. A pop-up window interrupted, proclaiming how GLAD the newspaper was that he was on its site, and informing him that he could read four more articles for free before it would require him to have a subscription to read more. Stupid business model, he thought absently. News was a commodity, and no one would pay for it if they had an alternative.
He closed the pop-up, and the story appeared. Pearl Edwards, seventy-four, retired elementary teacher, had been found bludgeoned to death in the bathroom of her home. Neighbors were shocked and horrified. Of course they were, Lipscomb thought. What else would they be?
The old lady was quiet, mowed her lawn twice a week, and kept to herself, neighbors told the newspaper. The sheriff, John Humphrey, said his office was pursuing leads, and that physical evidence from the scene—including DNA—was being processed.
DNA. He remembered Chris saying the old woman bit him. Maybe he wouldn’t be a danger to society after all—if the police had his DNA, wasn’t it just a matter of time until he was caught? You couldn’t get away with anything anymore, now that DNA was around. He wondered if he would be called to testify. Or evaluate Chris’ fitness to stand trial. What would his opinion be? Was Chris competent? Did he know the gravity of his actions? Was he capable of understanding the implications of what he had done? If someone had asked these questions a week ago, the answers would have been easy. Chris Jackson was a normal—if a bit sad sack—guy with normal morals and understanding of morality. After today, the question of whether Chris was competent really was a coin toss.
He banged his head on the iMac’s screen. It would have been so interesting to talk to him more, to plumb the depths of his motivations, his self-delusion. Maybe he could get the court to assign him to Chris’ case in prison and he could continue with him.
Either way, once a week definitely needed to be accelerated if the police somehow failed to figure out that Chris was the killer.
14
IT’S AMAZING THE THINGS PEOPLE TAKE FOR GRANTED. WALKING, talking, shitting on purpose. The ability to stand up. Being able to scratch their noses. Or their balls—or vaginas. Did women scratch their vaginas like men scratched their balls? Robby mentally furrowed his brow. It was a rare complete unknown. Like vaginas themselves. He had seen plenty of them online, but they were, he pardoned his mental pun, a complete black box.
He would love to see one in person, but he couldn’t imagine himself enjoying a charity lay or paying someone to have sex with him, which really put him out of the running for ever seeing one firsthand. Still, it would be nice to find out how one felt. The guys online seemed to enjoy it.
But his bleak future prospects for sex weren’t the biggest problem bugging Robby today—he largely resigned himself to that years ago, when testosterone was still coursing through a brain cruelly disconnected from the body the hormone was trying to encourage to reproduce. Today, his problem was his inability to get his body to sniffle. Instead, his body struggled to breathe past obstructions, rattling with every breath.
It was miserable.
Just one sniff would help, he knew. One little voluntary action, as simple as breathing a bit harder.
“Haaaaaa!”
Nothing. No sniff. Just more rattling, more air trying to wend its own way through the blocked airways of a body that couldn’t even muster the tiniest bit of help for it. He was getting pretty good at moving his left pointer finger, and now he could control his eyes enough to focus on one thing as long as he wanted to. And he could keep himself from going to the bathroom—within reason—until someone arrived to help him. But of the thousands of connections between brain and body that had to be there for business to go on, those few were all that seemed to function. It was frustrating, because he could feel everything, so the connections—at least going from the body to the brain—worked. But the ones from the brain to the body seemed to short circuit somewhere along the line.
Rattle.
His lungs weren’t filling up with air completely, he could tell. He felt like none was there at all. But there was nothing he could do about it. He understood the physiology of it all, how oxygen was absorbed into the blood, which then carried it to millions of cells, which used it to fuel the molecular combustion that kept them living and fulfilling their functions. He knew that a cell starving for oxygen functioned at lower levels, even dying if starved enough. He knew that need for oxygen was why physical activity demanded the heart to speed up, increasing the volume of oxygen available to fuel the cells doing all the work. So he knew the rattling of air into his lungs was starving all the cells in his body of their life-giving fuel, and that he should probably lie down instead of using his finger to search the databases he had found on the Internet, but this was important, so he suffered through it.
Of all the truck stop records he investigated from 1992, ’93, ’94, and ’95, five truckers had been at four of the six locations at the right times. But none had been at all six. Well, two had, but none at the right times. All five were interstate truckers for freight companies. One drove a car carrier, which Robby had discovered was the highest-paying trucking gig, and two drove refrigerated trucks—the second-highest-paying.
There were two options, as he saw it. Either his theory was wrong, or the times were off. It seemed to him that forensic science in the early ’90s had been more a guessing game than science, and the times were probably off. Where the well-intentioned investigators of those days fell short in knowledge, however, they had been virtuosos of record keeping, so Robby had hope that digging into the files deep
ly enough might let him re-evaluate the times that had been officially recorded.
That’s what he was doing today, poring through the online records of a college that studied the entomology of human corpses—what kinds of bugs were found on them, which could now tell investigators with surprising certainty how long a body had been dead. Any investigator with sufficient motivation could do the same work much more quickly than Robby, but he also knew none of them had the kind of free time he did. What else was he going to do?
In Fayetteville’s case from 1993, investigators had found cheese fly larvae and had dismissed them as common maggots—an oversight that Robby believed led them to misidentify the girl’s date of death by as much as a few weeks. It would be hard to say just how far off they were, but she almost certainly died weeks before the official report stated. Damp, cool conditions may have also helped mislead the investigators. The cold might have contributed to the absence of beetles, which investigators had noted when determining her time of death.
In Texarkana in 1995, Poecilochirus mites, which feed on fly eggs, may have led to an incorrect date of death—much later than the actual date of death. Today, investigators would record that fact into their notes, but in 1995, it was less common knowledge.
By expanding those two deaths to their more likely windows of time, Robby had been able to place two truckers at all six truck stops at the appropriate times during the three-year lot lizard murder spree. It had taken six months of work, painstaking, frustrating work, but as he rattled through a cold today, Robby had two suspects, neither of whom had appeared on police radar in connection with the deaths.
Yet here they were, both still actively driving.
A cop would simply call them in and interview them. But Robby wasn’t able to do that. He had to come up with some other way to narrow down which was the more likely suspect.
But he was drawing a blank. And that was unacceptable.
Something would make itself apparent to him, he knew. He had nothing, if not lots of time.
15
PAPER. WHY THE HELL WAS SO MUCH STILL ON PAPER? IT WAS STUPID. Why not send cops out with iPads, let them take notes onto a database, include pictures taken with the iPad, and avoid an office that looked like a post-bombing World War II bunker, with boxes and papers stacked haphazardly everywhere?
Bain held her head in her hands and sighed.
She wished DNA were as magical as the public assumed it was. She wished people’s names were encoded into their DNA. She wished whatever white male with a predisposition to hypertension had done this would walk into the police station and confess.
After a while, all the pieces of paper started looking alike. Blood spatter evidence, witness statements, crime scene sketches, times, dates, minutiae. It all started to blur. That was her cue to go home.
Until someone knocked on her door.
“Traffic camera footage is on the server,” Keith Moore said as he poked his head in the door, looking like what Bain considered to be the typical IT guy. “Log in as you and they will be under ‘My Updated Files.’”
“Thanks, Keith,” she said tiredly.
“Oh,” he said, poking his head back in, just as he had seemed poised to leave. “There is also footage from a Quik Trip and a Qwickee Mart. And a self-storage place.”
“Thank you.”
She sighed and logged in. Forty-two files popped up.
“I need coffee for this shit,” she said to the jumble of papers, getting up, stealing the pot from the squad room and taking the whole thing to her office. It pissed everyone off when she did that, but today she was in no mood to coddle a bunch of little boys in uniform. By now, they should know where the coffee was.
She sat down at her desk and poured herself a cup, preparing to fast-forward through video files. After double-clicking on the first one, from an intersection a block away from Pearl Edwards’ house (and Jessica Vann’s), she took a sip, immediately spitting it back out.
“Motherfucker!” she screamed, noting immediately the snickers from outside. Without realizing she had moved, she opened the door to her office, where it seemed like a dozen officers had gathered. “Decaf? REALLY?”
The guys burst into laughter. Bain couldn’t help but smile at the idea that her coffee thefts had become infamous enough that the guys were confident in pranking her on it. Everyone hated decaf, so they must have known she’d steal the pot today.
“By the way,” Russell said as the laughter died down, “we’re pretty sure there’s a rookie curled up in a corner downstairs who could use an apology, Miss Detective.”
Bain rolled her eyes. “That douchenozzle had it coming,” she said. “And I only smile once a day, so he’s shit out of luck. Now where can I find some decent coffee?”
“Starbucks is just down the street,” he said. “I’ll have a big mocha.”
“Venti,” she corrected calmly.
“No, a mocha.”
“Venti is the size,” she said impatiently.
“That’s what she said,” he replied to another eye roll. Without another word, Bain walked out to her car and drove to the Starbucks. At least the guys weren’t pissed about her habit of stealing the coffee.
As she ordered, it hit her: the letters on the old lady’s head. They were the key. The same guy had committed both assaults, using the same method—brutal beatings. Whatever he had hit the old lady with had left impressions of itself in her head. Finding that object could help develop a list of suspects who had purchased such a thing. That, and comparing the videos, looking for one car appearing at both locations, could really narrow it down.
“I better get two,” she told the perky barista with hairline acne. “I’ll be up awhile.”
Back at the station, Russell smiled wryly as she handed him his Mocha.
“Fag,” she said casually as she gave him his girly coffee.
“Takes one to know one.”
As soon as she opened the door to her office, she had to laugh. Atop her desk was a new Keurig coffee maker with a red bow on top.
Behind her, Russell laughed. “We thought it was about time we congratulated you for making the big time,” he said. “And maybe now we can all have coffee.”
“Fag,” she said again as she turned around to thank him.
“Takes one to know one,” he replied and hugged her. “Good job on the job, Decaf.”
She shoved him away. “Oh, so now I have a nickname?”
“Kinda fits, don’t you think?”
“Thank you,” she said. “I really appreciate the gift. This case is keeping me up nights.”
“Well, I’m proud of you, big boy,” he said. “You’re gonna kick this case’s ass.”
“Glad somebody thinks so.” She gave him a fake punch to the jaw and turned around to start watching videos—and figuring out how to work the fancy coffee maker.
16
THE SANTA UNIFORM WAS TUCKED NEATLY TOWARD THE BACK OF THE austere closet, behind an ocean of black. Everything in the closet was black except for that suit. And the collars on the shelf above the hangers. On the floor was a line of inexpensive shoes polished to a mirror finish, some resoled more than five times. Above those was a homemade portable altar, its wood stained with age, the stains worn clean with the impressions of two knees repeatedly wearing small ruts into the wood.
On the door knob to the closet hung an old Rosary, handmade in Mexico two hundred years ago, worn almost down to nubs with the passing of thumbs and forefingers through two centuries of prayers. Beside that, on a tiny wooden table, sat an old Latin Bible open to the fifth chapter of Matthaeus—“blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth”. The leather cover of the book was cracked, crumbling, and kind of smelly. The pages, yellowed and fragile, were nearly transparent, hand-written ink bleeding through from one side to the other, ink turning a reddish-brown as the iron inside it oxidized.
Across from the table was a single bed, sheet and blanket tucked in so tightly that a quarter woul
d bounce off. Next to that was a small porcelain basin filled with a small puddle of water blessed on the Feast of the Epiphany.
Father Sean Brien still wasn’t used to being called “bishop”, even a year later. He refused to wear the gaudy robes except when the Holy See required him to, and he still insisted his subordinate priests call him “father”, not “bishop”. A priest’s duty, he had said so many times he feared it might become a platitude, was to humbly serve the Lord, to fulfill the role to which he had been called, but eschew the praise and recognition of men, waiting instead for that blessed day when the trumpet would sound and then he might hear that blessed voice say those coveted words: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant; enter into the joy of thy Lord.”
The robes of bishop had been banished from his tiny spartan room, relegated instead to a closet closer to the cathedral. He wanted no part of them in his everyday life—nor did he allow talk of the rumors that he might be next in line for Cardinal. Rubbish like that encouraged otherwise faithful servants to focus more on their careers than on the service of the Lord who had called them to it. The work of bishop—the minutiae of dealing with subordinate parishes—was intended to be delegated, he believed, while the bishop himself concentrated on the spiritual health of his bishopric. His calling was to pray and preach, not to sign papers and review spreadsheets. And the priests loved him for it.
So did his home congregation, which had been listed among the fastest growing in the Western Hemisphere. His priests regularly sought him out for confession, an honor he cherished deeply—and an intimate relation they would do anything to protect.
He sighed as he thought about it, and about how a poor kid from Jersey could have risen so far at such a young age—less than fifty, and already talk of Cardinal … and maybe even the first American pope. He knew he would later have to repent for such prideful thoughts, but he indulged himself this one anyway, a small moment of ambition. It had been a long, hard road, but he had trod every step with prayer, repentance, and humility.