The Poet (1995)

by Michael Connelly

  "Damn, I forgot. I've got to call in."

  I looked at my watch. It was almost eight in Denver. Greg Glenn was probably there, waiting to hear from me, refusing to release the front page to the printers until he'd heard from me. I figured the latest he could go would be nine. I looked around. There was a phone on the wall above a supplies and equipment counter at the back of the room.

  "Could you go tell them I can't sign out up there?" I asked. "In the meantime I'll just call in at the Rocky and tell them I'm still alive."

  Glenn was almost delirious when I got through to him.

  "Jack, where the hell you been?"

  "I've sort of been tied up. I-"

  "Are you okay? The wires say you were shot."

  "I'm okay. I'll be typing one-handed for a while."

  "The wires say the Poet's dead. AP quotes one source who says you . . . uh, killed him."

  "AP's got a good source."

  "Jesus, Jack."

  I didn't reply.

  "CNN's been going live from the scene every ten minutes but they don't have shit. There's supposed to be a press conference at the hospital."

  "Right. And if you can get me hooked up with somebody to take some rewrite, I can give you enough of the story for the front page. It will be better than anyone else gets tonight."

  He said nothing in response.

  "Greg?"

  "Wait a minute, Jack. I have to think. You . . ."

  He didn't finish but I waited him out.

  "Jack, I'm going to put you on the line with Jackson. Tell what you can to him. He'll also take notes off the press conference if CNN carries it."

  "Wait a minute. I don't want to give anything to Jackson. Just give me a copy messenger or a clerk and I'll dictate the story. It's going to be better than what they put out at the press conference."

  "No, Jack, you can't. It's different now."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "You're not covering the story anymore. You are part of it. You killed the guy who killed your brother. You killed the Poet. The story's about you now. You can't write it. I'm putting you on with Jackson. But do me a favor. Stay away from the other reporters out there. Give us a one-day exclusive on our own guy, at least."

  "Look, I've always been part of this story."

  "Yeah, but you didn't shoot anybody. Jack, that's not what reporters do. That's what cops do and you crossed that line. You're off the story. I'm sorry."

  "It was him or me, Greg."

  "I'm sure it was and thank God it was him. But that doesn't change things, Jack."

  I said nothing. In my mind I knew he was right about me not writing it. I just couldn't believe it. It was my story and now it was gone. I was inside still but I was out.

  Just as Rachel came back in the room with a clipboard and several forms for me to sign, Jackson came on the line. He told me what a great story it was going to be and started asking questions. I answered them all and told him some things unasked. I signed the forms where Rachel pointed as I talked.

  The interview was quick. Jackson said he wanted to watch the press conference on CNN so he would have official comment and confirmation to go with my version of events. He asked if I would call back in an hour in case of follow-up questions and I agreed. We then hung up and I was thankful to get off the line.

  "Well, now that you just signed away your life and your firstborn son, you're free to go," Rachel said. "You sure you don't want to read any of this stuff?"

  "Nah, let's go. You get the painkillers? My hand's beginning to hurt again."

  "Yes, right here."

  She pulled a vial out of her coat pocket and handed it to me along with a stack of pink phone message slips, apparently taken at the hospital's front desk.

  "What are . . ."

  There were calls from news producers at the three networks, "Nightline" with Ted Koppel, and two of the morning shows, and from reporters at the New York Times and the Washington Post.

  "You're a celebrity, Jack," Rachel said. "You went face to face with the devil and survived. People want to ask you how that felt. People always want to know about the devil."

  I shoved the messages into my back pocket.

  "You going to call them?"

  "Nope. Let's go."

  On the way back to Hollywood I told Rachel I didn't want to spend the night in the Wilcox Hotel. I said I wanted to order room service and then lie in a comfortable bed and watch TV with a remote in my hand, amenities that the Wilcox obviously didn't offer. She saw my point.

  After we stopped at the Wilcox so I could get my things and check out, Rachel drove down Sunset Boulevard toward the strip. At the Chateau Marmont she stayed in the car while I went to the desk. I said I wanted a room with a view and didn't care what it cost. They gave me a room with a balcony that cost more than I'd ever spent for a hotel in my life. The balcony was overlooking the Marlboro man and the rest of the billboards on the strip. I liked looking at the Marlboro Man. Rachel didn't bother getting her own room.

  We didn't talk much while we ate our room service dinner. Instead, we maintained a kind of comfortable silence that couples of many years achieve. Afterward, I took a long bath and listened over the bathroom speaker to the CNN report on the shootout at Digital Imaging. There was nothing new. More questions than answers. A good portion of the news conference was focused on Thorson and the ultimate sacrifice he had made. For the first time I thought about Rachel and how she was dealing with this. She had lost her ex-husband. A man she had grown to despise but someone she had shared an intimate relationship with just the same.

  When I came out of the bathroom I wore the terrycloth bathrobe the hotel provided. She was lying on the bed, propped against the pillows, and still watching the television.

  "The local news is about to start," she said.

  I crawled across the bed and kissed her.

  "You okay?"

  "Yeah, why?"

  "I don't know. Uh, whatever the relationship was that you had with Thorson, I'm sorry. Okay?"

  "So am I."

  "I was thinking . . . you want to make love?"

  "Yes."

  I turned off the television and the lights. At one point in the dark I tasted tears on her cheeks and she held me tighter than she had ever done before. There was a bittersweet feel to our lovemaking. It was as if two sad and lonely people had crossed paths and had agreed to help heal each other. Afterward, she huddled against my back and I tried to sleep but I couldn't. The demons of the day were still wide awake inside.

  "Jack?" she whispered. "Why did you cry?"

  I was silent for a few moments, trying to find the words that would explain an answer.

  "I don't know," I finally said. "It's hard. All along, I think, I was hoping in a daydreaming sort of way that I would get the chance to . . . Just be glad you've never done what I did today. Just be glad."

  Still later sleep would not come, even after I had taken one of the pills from the hospital. She asked me what my thoughts were.

  "I'm thinking about what he said to me at the end. I don't understand what he meant."

  "What did he tell you?"

  "He said he killed Sean to save him."

  "From what?"

  "From becoming like him. That's what I don't understand."

  "We probably never will. You should just let it go now. It's over."

  "He said something else. At the end. When everyone was there. Did you hear it?"

  "I think so."

  "What was it?"

  "He said something like, 'This is what it's like.' That's all."

  "What does it mean?"

  "I think he was solving the mystery."

  "Death."

  "He saw it coming. He saw the answers. He said, 'This is what it's like.' Then he died."

  45

  In the morning we found Backus already waiting in the conference room on the seventeenth floor of the federal building. It was another clear day and I could see the top of Catalina ri
sing behind the marine layer of morning fog out on the Santa Monica Bay. It was eight-thirty but Backus had his jacket off and looked as though he had already been at it for several hours. His spot at the meeting table was cluttered with a spread of paperwork, two open laptops and a stack of pink phone message slips. His face was drawn and sad. It looked as though the loss of Thorson would leave a permanent mark on him.

  "Rachel, Jack," he said by means of salutation. It wasn't a good morning and he didn't say that. "How's the hand?"

  "It's okay."

  We had brought containers of coffee with us but I saw he had none. I offered him mine but he said he'd already had too much.

  "What have we got?" Rachel asked.

  "Did you two check out? I tried to call you this morning, Rachel."

  "Yes," she said. "Jack wanted something a little more comfortable. We moved over to the Chateau Marmont."

  "Pretty comfortable."

  "Don't worry. I won't submit it for reimbursement."

  He nodded and I got the idea from the way he looked at her that he knew she hadn't gotten her own room and had nothing to submit anyway. It was the least of his worries, though.

  "It's coming together," he said. "Another one for the studies, I suppose. These people-if you can call them that-never cease to amaze me. Every one of them, their stories . . . each one of them's a black hole. And there's never enough blood to fill it."

  Rachel pulled out a chair and sat across from him. I sat next to her. We didn't say anything. We knew he wanted to go on. He reached over with a pen and tapped the side of one of the laptops.

  "This was his," he said. "It was recovered from the trunk of his car last night."

  "A Hertz car?" I asked.

  "No. He arrived at Data Imaging in an eighty-four Plymouth registered to a Darlene Kugel, thirty-six, of North Hollywood. We went to her apartment last night, got no response and went in. She was in the bed. Her throat was cut, probably with the same knife he used on Gordon. She'd been dead for days. It looked like he'd burned incense, slopped perfume around to hide the smell."

  "He stayed in there with her body?" Rachel asked.

  "Looks like it."

  "Were those her clothes he was wearing?" I asked.

  "And the wig."

  "What was he doing dressed like her, anyway?" Rachel asked.

  "Don't know and never will now. My guess is he knew everybody was looking for him. Police, the bureau. He thought it was a way to leave her place, get the camera and then maybe get out of town."

  "Probably. What did you get from her place?"

  "There was nothing that was of much use inside, but her unit had two parking spaces assigned to it in the garage and we found an eighty-six Pontiac Firebird in one of them. Florida plate, it came back to Gladys Oliveros of Gainesville."

  "His mother?" I asked.

  "Yes. Moved there when he went to prison so she'd be close for visits, I guess. Remarried and changed her name. Anyway, we opened the trunk of the Pontiac and found the computer, some other things, including the books Brass found in the picture from the cell. There was an old sleeping bag. There's blood on it and the lab has it. The initial report is that there is kapok in the insulation."

  "It means he put some of his victims in the trunk," I said.

  "Which accounts for the hours they were missing," Rachel added.

  "Wait a minute," I said. "If he had his mother's car, what about the car from Hertz in Phoenix? Why would he rent a car if he already had one?"

  "Just another way of confusing the trail, Jack. Use mother's to move from city to city, but then he rents one when he moves in for the kill on the cop."

  My confusion over the logic of that theory showed on my face. But Backus dismissed it.

  "Anyway, we haven't gotten the Hertz records yet, so let's not get sidetracked. For the moment, the computer is what's important."

  "What's in it?" Rachel asked.

  "The office here has a computer unit, works with the group in Quantico. One of the agents, Don Clearmountain, took this last night and broke down the coding by about three this morning. He copied the hard disk to the mainframe here. Anyway, it's full of photographs. Fifty-seven of them."

  Backus used his thumb and forefinger to pinch the bridge of his nose. He had aged since I'd last seen him at the hospital. Aged badly.

  "Children?" Rachel asked.

  Backus nodded.

  "Jesus. The victims?"

  "Yes . . . before and after. It's horrible stuff. Truly horrible."

  "And he was transmitting these somewhere? Like we thought?"

  "Yes, the computer has a cellular modem as Gordon . . . as he guessed. It, too, is registered out of Gainesville to Oliveros. We just got the records a little while ago."

  He indicated some of the paperwork in front of him.

  "There are a lot of calls," he said. "All over the place. He was into some kind of net. A network where the users were interested in these kinds of photographs."

  He looked up from the papers at us, his eyes sick but defiant.

  "We are tracing them all now. We're going to make a lot of arrests. A lot of people will pay for this. What happened to Gordon will not be for nothing."

  He nodded more to himself than us.

  "We can compare the transmissions and the users to the bank deposits I found in Jacksonville," Rachel said. "I bet we'll be able to know just how much they paid for the photos and when."

  "Clearmountain and his people are already working on it. They're down the hall in the Group Three offices if you want to stop in."

  "Bob?" I said. "Did they look at all fifty-seven photos?"

  He looked at me a moment before answering.

  "I did, Jack. I did."

  "They were only the kids?"

  I felt my chest tightening. Whatever I had told myself about being emotionally deadened to my brother and what had happened was a lie.

  "No, Jack," Backus said. "There are no pictures of those victims. None of the police officers, none of the other adult victims. I guess . . ."

  He didn't finish.

  "What?" I asked.

  "I guess those kinds of photos would not have been profitable to him."

  I looked down at my hands on the table. My right hand was beginning to ache and felt clammy under the white bandages. I felt relief go through me. I think it was relief. What else is it that you feel when you learn that there are no photographs of your murdered brother's body out there all over the country, floating out there on the Internet and ready to be downloaded by any sick individual with a taste for it.

  "I think when this gets out about this guy, there'll be a lot of people who'll want to throw a parade for you, Jack," Backus said. "Put you in a convertible and drive you down Madison Avenue."

  I looked at him. I didn't know if it was an attempt at humor but I didn't smile.

  "Maybe sometimes vengeance is just as good as justice," he said.

  "They're pretty much the same if you ask me."

  After a few moments of silence, Backus changed the subject.

  "Jack, we have to get your formal statement. I've got one of the office's stenographers set up for nine-thirty. Are you ready?"

  "Ready as I'll ever be."

  "We just want the linear story. From A to B, don't leave any detail out. I thought, Rachel, you'd handle that, ask the questions."

  "Sure, Bob."

  "I'd like to get this wrapped up today and submitted to the DA tomorrow. Maybe we can all go home then."

  "Who's doing the package for the DA?" Rachel asked.

  "Carter."

  He looked at his watch.

  "Uh, you have a few minutes but why don't you go down the hall and ask for Sally Kimball. She might be ready to go now."

  Dismissed, we stood and headed for the door. I watched Rachel, trying to judge whether she was annoyed at being assigned to taking my statement while the local agents were tracing Gladden's computer records, which seemed at the moment to be the more excitin
g branch of the investigation. She showed nothing and at the door of the conference room she turned and told Backus she'd be around if he needed anything else.

  "Thanks, Rachel," he said. "Oh, and Jack, these are for you."