Fixer (16 page)

Tyrell, who had been standing in the back of the room with Violet and Corry, declared, “I do.”

“What’re you gonna hunt?” asked Mondo suspiciously, rubbing the knuckles on his right hand, said hand having recently connected with Charlie’s chin.

“I dunno,” Charlie said. “Maybe someone’s got a cow out there or something.”

“You gonna hunt a
cow
?”

“Deer,” Violet suggested.

“There’s deer?” Charlie asked.

“Corry’s seen ‘em. A few times; right, honey?”

Corry, for his part, said nothing nor further indicated the existence of wildlife outside in some nonverbal way. His eyes flitted about the room as if he were following the trail of microbes. More than a couple of the Bluff commune members realized at that moment that it hadn’t been the drugs; the boy was just creepy.

“I’ve seen ‘em too,” Tyrell claimed. “Gotta be a couple dozen around here. It’ll be easy.”

“There you go,” Charlie said cheerily, putting on his very best “things are gonna be all right” face, which looked pretty convincing despite a recently dislodged tooth and an eye that was swollen half shut. “Who else wants to come?”

*  *  *

There was a reason nobody had discovered the cellar to the farmhouse before. One had to go outside to get into it. For Violet, who had never been in a home with an underground level, much less one without internal access to said level, this was particularly mystifying. She couldn’t imagine anything less practical. Then she spotted the unused outhouse twenty paces from the back door and immediately reevaluated that assessment.

Charlie led her and Tyrell—and Corry, who wasn’t leaving his mother’s side after seeing all the adults in the house go insane at basically the same time—around the side to a snow-covered, slanted . . . something. Violet’s first thought was that it was for a skateboard or a dirt bike, up until Charlie cleared off the snow to reveal twin metal doors built into a cement frame. Threaded through the handles was a chain with a padlock.

Charlie reached into his shirt and pulled out a key tied around his neck, which she’d always thought he wore as a statement of some kind, albeit one that only Charlie fully understood.

“You keep it locked,” Tyrell observed.

“Man, like I said; there’s guns down here. Course I keep it locked.”

Pulling the chain free, he and Tyrell managed to get one of the doors open. It creaked unappreciatively and kicked off a dust cloud of orange rust. For some reason, this made Vi want to hold Corry closer.

“After you,” Tyrell said. 

Charlie peered down into the cellar, which was pitch-dark. There were steep cement steps leading down that looked to have claimed many ankles and necks over the years. Rather than try his luck in the dark, Charlie knelt in the snow, reached under the unopened door, and produced a large-beam flashlight. After testing it to make sure it still worked, he disappeared into the ground.

Tyrell and Vi looked at one another. Corry whimpered. “Yeah,” said Tyrell, “I don’t wanna go down there much either, little man.” He smiled and got Corry to smile back. “But you ain’t gotta worry. You know that, right?”

He stepped down halfway and then popped up again. “Light’s on. C’mon.”

Charlie had found the light in the cellar, which consisted of a bare bulb with a pull chain. It was enough to illuminate the center of the room but not much else. Thus, the flashlight was still of use. By the time Violet and Corry got there, Tyrell and Charlie were already checking out the gun cabinet.

“Cold,” remarked Corry. Violet hugged him closer.

“It sure is,” she said. “Weird, isn’t it? Colder in here than it is out there.”

“It’s the ground,” Charlie said without turning. He was trying to work a combination lock while Tyrell held the flashlight for him. “Kinda like being in a really roomy coffin down here.”

“Can we not talk about coffins right now?” Tyrell said. “ ‘Specially since one of us was about to end up in one up there.”

“I wasn’t worried,” Charlie said confidently.

“It was outta hand, man,” Tyrell said.

“You were a big help.”

“Did you see me linin’ up to take a swing?”

Charlie blew on his fingers to keep them from freezing up and tried the combination again. Either his memory was too frozen to work right or the lock was. “Could’a stopped it. They’d listen to you if you told them to stop.”

“Yeah, well . . . maybe you’re too pale to appreciate this, but it’d take a lot to put this black man between a mob and whatever it is they after. Hell of a lot more than your honky ass, that’s for goddamn sure.”

Charlie got the lock to pop open, finally. “They’re not like that,” he said, while working the bolt from the cabinet. “Nobody cares what color you are.”

Tyrell laughed. “Everybody’s like that. Some just hide it better’n others. So let’s see what we got in here.”

Charlie pulled open the door to the cabinet while Tyrell illuminated the contents. Tyrell whistled. “Damn,” he said.

Charlie smiled. “I call shotgun.”

*  *  *

Within the Bluff commune, opinions differed as to precisely what happened after that. The problem was that once the hunting party returned, there was a great deal of shouting, confusion, and blood, and that can only lead to misunderstandings.

What they could all agree on was that Charlie and Tyrell had left the basement with Violet and Corry in tow, both of the men holding large guns and planning to seek out and kill a woodland creature. Violet had gone because she’d seen the deer and because she was one of the few people in the farmhouse who could talk sense to both of the armed parties. Corry’s participation had hinged partly on his prior viewings of the local fauna, but primarily on his not wanting to leave his mother’s side.

Most everyone could also agree that when the hunting party left the immediate vicinity, Charlie and Tyrell had been arguing about the very large boiler in the cellar that Tyrell had seen and that Charlie nonetheless still insisted did not exist. 

The only other thing that was unquestionably true was that they’d returned two hours later absent a portion of Charlie’s right leg.

Charlie, screaming obscenities, was helped in through the back door and onto the floor in the hallway by Tyrell, who immediately slumped over next to him, exhausted. Charlie then proceeded to bleed more or less all over the place and curse some more because nobody in the house was sure what to do.

“
Help me
, you hippie fucks!” Charlie shouted. 

This swung the group into action. Happy Sammy yanked off his prized tie-dye and used it to staunch the blood while Mondo took off his rope belt and tied it tightly around Charlie’s right thigh just above the wound. Someone pointed out that one did the same thing when trying to find a vein in an arm, and that perhaps it was then a
bad
thing to do, insofar as with the arm it made the vein pop out some more. The last thing Charlie needed was his vein popping out when part of it was already exposed to the air. Mondo ignored them and did it anyway, which was good, as it ended up saving Charlie’s life.

With various persons then helping Charlie to the living room couch or helping Tyrell back to his feet, the rest of the group took on the important business of trying to guess what happened. The preliminary consensus was that Tyrell had finally gone and shot Charlie, like they always figured he would one day.

In the confusion, nobody really noticed Violet and Corry reentering the house, Vi slowly and carefully removing her son’s snow clothes and checking him for the tenth time just in case she missed a buckshot wound somewhere the first nine times she’d looked. 

Violet could have probably explained what happened had anybody asked. That is, she was there at the time of Charlie’s wounding and could attest to the order of events as they transpired. If pressed as to
how
it happened, she would have been forced to admit she didn’t really know, because what had happened simply didn’t make any sense.

As Charlie lay on the couch, all at once very quiet, looking pale, and in great need of professional medical care, Tyrell tried to explain things.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I was ahead, following some tracks. I heard his gun go off and found him like that . . . walked him back fast as I could . . .”

“You sure you didn’t just shoot him yourself?” accused Happy Sammy.

“Why would I have brung him back, asshole?” Tyrell snapped.

“He needs a doctor. We should try the telephone,” Harriet said. “If it’s working today.”

“Where are the guns?” Mary-Mary asked nervously.

“Left ‘em,” Tyrell said. “Couldn’t carry both him and them. I’ll go back later—”

“I think you had something to do with this,” Gingham said, fixing her gaze on Tyrell. She said it quietly and solemnly, and with the sort of conviction that got people’s attention. It had a galvanizing effect on the room. She wasn’t the only one who felt this way.

“I agree,” said Happy Sammy.

Tyrell instinctively took two steps back. He didn’t look surprised—more like resigned. As if he always expected one day it would come down to this.

“What was that?” Mondo asked. He was beside Charlie, who had begun to whisper something at around the same time Violet and Corry had pressed their way into the room. 

“I said,” Charlie began, louder, “it wasn’t Tyrell.” Tyrell visibly relaxed, while everyone else just looked more confused, especially when Charlie raised his arm and pointed a finger at Corry. “It was him,” he said. “It was the boy.”

Chapter Eleven

Now

“You weren’t surprised,” Corrigan was saying. “You
expected
to see that.”

“We expected something,” she agreed, reflecting that he was far more agitated about this than he should have been.

“What else was at those crime scenes that you didn’t show me?” he snapped.

Two hours had passed since she’d given him the tour of Erica’s apartment. They were now sitting in one of the interrogation rooms in the Central Square police station, which happened to be right down the street from the crime scene. It was also the main headquarters for the Cambridge police department, but that did not mean they had a tremendous amount of extra space to spare for the FBI—hence the interrogation room. It was a smallish chamber with what one might call a window, only in the sense that a portion of one wall was accommodating a rectangular piece of glass. But it was at the top of the wall and covered on the inside by bars and on the outside by about fifty years of exhaust grime. Illumination—no light of value came from the window—consisted of a very depressing overhead tubal fluorescent that had a tendency to dim briefly every thirty seconds or so, as if someone in the building were operating a very small electric chair. There was one door, two wood chairs, and a metal table affixed to the floor, with handcuff loops on its edge. It was the most depressing room Maggie could remember spending time in. Which was perhaps the point.

It was also, being very small, not the greatest place to be when facing an angry man the size of Corrigan.

“The same legend turned up at every scene.”

“ ‘Kilroy was here’?”

“Yeah. At first it was just considered graffiti, but when they found it on the wall where Professor Offey’s bookshelf had been standing, it was obvious someone had left it as a message.”

Corrigan sat and mused for a moment. “And that’s when the FBI was called in.”

“That’s about right.”

“I saw the pictures of that crime scene. I don’t recall seeing anything on the wall.”

Maggie sighed and sat down. The chair creaked loudly, quite annoyed at having been put to work. She pulled out a cigarette. “Okay, here’s the timeline,” she began. “Offey ends up crushed by the bookshelf, but nobody finds him right away because it happened late at night in the back of the library in a secure private area. He gets found about three hours later by one of the security guards doing his rounds. The door to the office has been closed the whole time, but he sees the light under the door. He lets himself in, figures out the professor is dead, and calls the cops.”

“He knew right then it was suspicious?” Corrigan asked. “Because it was designed to look like an accident.”

“Standard procedure. Besides, what do most people do when they find a dead person?”

“Dunno. Never found one,” Corrigan said, lying.

“Right. So the cops show up and good for them, they’re sharp enough to notice the brackets on the wall that were supposed to be holding up the bookshelf. No one’s really thinking murder just yet, but it’s interesting. They close off the scene, take pictures, call homicide.”

She took a sharp drag of the cigarette. It occurred to her that there was no smoking in the building and further that she didn’t particularly care. “Homicide shows up a couple of hours later, and the lead investigator—guy named Masterson, who you’ll probably meet at some point—says ‘what’s up with the note on the wall?’ But nobody can remember seeing it before. And since the scene had been closed, the only obvious conclusion was that a cop had written it.”

“That’s where I would have gone.”

“But while Cambridge PD was in the middle of an internal witch-hunt, someone pointed out it wasn’t the first time the message had turned up at one of the scenes.
That
was when Masterson called me.”

“You personally?”

“Old friends,” she said without elaboration. “The internal investigation didn’t end up going anywhere. At worst, we could have maybe pinned the writing on Offey’s wall on one or two of the guys who’d been in the room alone during the time the message appeared, but neither of them could be put at any of the other scenes, and we knew the message was also on the wall at the subway station and carved on the windowsill where the kid fell to his death. So the thinking became that the killer left it behind. It was the first time anybody really entertained the notion. We began thinking we might have a serial on our hands.”

“Again with the invisible killer,” Corrigan said. He seemed to have a very strong negative reaction to this idea, more so, perhaps, than most people would when confronted with the notion. Maggie found that curious.