Mania (6 page)

Nick had forgotten all about his lunch appointment with Laura Daly. He wasn’t hungry, and the last thing on his mind was the
Seattle Telegraph
. His cell phone vibrated in his pocket as he was stepping down the worn concrete staircase from the precinct house. He stopped to pull it from his pocket, taking refuge from a lightly falling rain beneath the branches of an old, gnarled maple tree, aware of the sound of raindrops tapping against its desiccated brown and orange leaves.

“Nick? It’s Delilah. From Laura Daly’s office.”

“Delilah, yes,” Nick said. A car sped past. A small whirlwind trailed in its wake, sending a blast of cool, wet air against his face. “Sorry. I’m in the street. It’s a bit difficult to hear.”

“That’s okay,” Delilah said. “I understand.”

Nick cringed at the consideration in the woman’s voice. More than anything else since Sam’s death, that’s what he had come to resent: everyone’s goddamned superficial pity.

“Ms. Daly asked me to call. She wanted me to remind you that you have a lunch scheduled today at noon.”

“Is that today?”

“Yes.” Delilah paused. “Ms. Daly thought you might have forgotten.”

“It’s at Enrico’s, isn’t it?”

“At the Metropolitan Café. Laura is already there, waiting for you.”

After hanging up the call, Nick stared at the phone for a few seconds, until a cascade of cold and heavy raindrops spilled off the leaves above his head, sinking through his hair and running icily down his cheeks.

Ten minutes later, Nick was seated across a table from the senior editor of the
Seattle Telegraph
in a crowded restaurant downtown, a couple of blocks from the newspaper office. Half the bistro’s clientele worked for the paper, and the room had fallen silent when Nick pulled the glass door open and stepped inside. Everyone had stopped eating, seemingly in unison, to look up at him and then over at Daly.

“You got us some pretty good pictures of the Claire Scott murder a few weeks back,” Laura Daly was saying. They were seated at a table next to the front window. The crowded restaurant was so old that its floors were uneven and the tabletops were out of plane. Nick glanced at the party next to them, wishing that Daly would lower her voice, aware that people were listening. “It’s a shame how gory the murder was. You know, we ended up having to go with some stock photos—an old mug shot from last year when the police picked her up for soliciting. The stuff you brought back—” Daly stopped short and shook her head. “Christ. It was too grisly to print. Stabbed twenty-one times, right?”

“Twenty-three,” Nick said.

“And then the bite marks.” The editor’s disgust was visible in her expression. The police had determined that the killer had bitten her. Not hard enough to pierce her skin and leave evidence they could use to identify the killer. No teeth marks they could match with any certainty to a dental plate. Hard enough, though, to have disfigured her with bruising.

“It was pretty unsettling,” Nick admitted.

“And then last week it was the same thing. With that other murder. The hobo they found in the Safeway parking lot.”

“Dickenson,” Nick said.

“Yeah, Dickenson. He was stabbed more than twenty times, too, right?”

“Twenty-six,” Nick confirmed.

“And then sliced up with a broken beer bottle? And his left hand. Jesus.”

Nick closed his eyes, and his head was filled with the image of the bum’s hand, shredded into a hundred slivers of flesh.

Nick was standing over the remains of Dickenson’s body, shielding his camera from the rain, framing a shot. The corpse had been found in a Dumpster behind the Safeway on Fifth Street, just a few blocks from the
Telegraph
building. The police had opened the lid of the Dumpster in the morning after they arrived on the scene. Two hours later, the runoff from the roof of the supermarket had filled the bin, and the bloated body was floating in filth, pulled by a weak current to the edge where a few holes had rusted through the steel. The dead man’s blood had turned the water seeping down the side of the Dumpster weakly red. Stepping back from the corpse, Nick snapped a quick picture of the pink water puddling at the feet of a uniformed cop.

When Nick looked back up at the Dumpster, he noticed the man’s shredded hand for the first time. It had been submerged beneath the corpse, but with the water rising inside the bin, the body had twisted and the torn, gruesome arm floated in bits and pieces to the surface. Nick had opened his mouth to ask the cop how Dickenson had died. He shook his head instead, turning away from the body.

“You got what you need here?”

Nick looked up at Detective Stolie. He hadn’t seen him approach. “Just one more,” he said. “Give me a second.”

As Nick was putting his camera back into his bag, he glanced up at the crowd gathered behind the police tape about ten yards back from the crime scene, and a familiar face caught his eye. By the time that he reached the small crowd, though, the boy was gone.

Nick tracked him down the next day.

“So you’re Daniel Scott? Your mother was Claire Scott?”

“That’s right.”

“You’re her birth son?”

“What do you mean?”

“She gave birth to you. She was your real mother.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know your father?”

Daniel didn’t answer.

“Do you mind if I tape this interview, Daniel?”

Daniel leaned his head into his hands. His hair was long, and he combed it back with his fingers. He seemed to make a concerted effort to regain control over himself. They hadn’t been sitting inside the diner very long. Nick clasped a small tape recorder in his hand on the red Formica tabletop, waiting for the teenager to respond.

Nick had waited for him outside the grim concrete high school on Eighth Avenue, standing at the chain-link fence that bounded school property. At three o’clock, the bell had rung, signaling the end of the school day. There was no guarantee that Daniel would be at school, but Nick had no other way of locating him. The school’s administration had an old address on file, and now that his mother was dead, he wasn’t easy to find. No one had any idea where the boy might be sleeping.

“So what do you say? You mind if I tape this?”

“What are you going to ask me?”

“About your mother mainly.”

“Are you looking for who killed her?”

Nick didn’t want to lie. “I’m a reporter,” he said. “Not a policeman. I’m not looking for your mother’s killer. The truth is, I don’t think anyone is. That’s one of the things I’m going to write about.”

“Because she was a whore.”

Nick didn’t argue. “Because she was a prostitute.”

“You didn’t know my mother, did you?”

“No. The first time I saw her, she was already dead. Out by the Green River, where she was found. That’s where I saw you the first time, too. When the police brought you there to ID her body.”

“Okay.” Daniel dropped his gaze, once again combing his hair back with his fingers. “You can record this if you want to. It’s up to you.”

Nick had spotted Daniel as he pushed his way out the school doors and started down the steps. Daniel took off the moment he saw Nick. He shoved through the crowd on the stairs and tore down the street. Nick shouted for the boy to stop. Knocking into a few students, he sprinted after him.

Nick didn’t see the car pulling away from the curb halfway down the block until it was too late, and as the car screeched to a stop, he glanced into it sideways before he was able to jump out of its way. He cradled his camera as he fell, ripping a small gash in his jeans when his knee hit the pavement. By the time he was back on his feet, Daniel had disappeared. Ignoring the angry shouts from inside the car, once again he sprinted down the street. His heart pulsed inside his ears, his breath burned his lungs. He didn’t see the small alley on his left until he was on top of it. Even before he could hear him, though, he knew that this was where Daniel had hidden himself. Slowing to a stop, he took a few tentative steps into the alley. Struggling to quiet his breathing, he kept his ears peeled, peering closely into the shadows.

“So tell me why you ran, Daniel.”

“What?”

“When you saw me.” Nick looked down at the recorder on the Formica tabletop, making sure that the tape was still spinning on its reel. “You ran.”

Daniel shook his head.

“Did you think I was someone else? Has someone been looking for you?”

Daniel took a deep breath before responding. “Not for me.”

Nick understood that he had stumbled onto something. “Who did you think I was, Daniel?”

“I saw you yesterday, too.”

“I know. I saw you, too.”

“At the Safeway. Where they found that body.”

“You ran from me then, too, didn’t you?”

Daniel didn’t respond.

“Why, Daniel? Who did you think I was?” Nick asked again.

“One of the doctors.”

Nick took the information in. “One of which doctors, Daniel?”

Daniel shrugged. “You know, a social worker. One of the doctors.”

“I’m not sure I understand why you’d run, then. If you thought I was a doctor.”

Daniel hesitated. “People say they’ve been giving them bad drugs.”

“Do you believe that?”

Daniel didn’t answer.

“Doctors are there to help people, aren’t they?”

The boy assessed the man opposite him. “You’ve never lived on the streets, have you?”

Nick ignored the temper the boy’s question triggered, burning hot inside his chest. “Tell me what that means, why don’t you? To live on the streets.”

Again, the boy shrugged. “It means different things.”

“So—what—you sleep on the sidewalk? Is that what it means?”

The boy considered the question. “It means I’m always moving. I have slept on the sidewalk, yeah. But I’m not sleeping there now.”

“Where are you sleeping?”

The boy smiled.

“But you go to school.”

“Yeah. That’s what Mom wanted. I go to school.”

Nick had waited for his eyes to adjust. Then he took a few more steps into the shadows. Three steps into the narrow alley, the light seemed to drain from the day. He glanced upward, at the brick and concrete buildings rising four stories above him on either side. As far as he could determine, the alley stretched the better part of the city block. The cobblestone corridor seemed to vanish into a black hole, though, so Nick figured it was a dead end. Daniel must be trapped. The scrape of a lone gravelly footstep echoed down the length of the alley.
Daniel?
Nick took another hesitant step forward.
I just want to talk to you.
The doorways in the buildings lining the narrow street were so dark they were black. Nick peered into the shadows, looking for movement.

He saw the blade glinting in Daniel’s hand before he spotted the boy, hidden in a shallow doorway, waiting for him. The boy had tricked him. He had led him down the alley, now he was going to ambush him. Nick’s heart pounded in his ears. He was blinded by fear. Yet Daniel wasn’t preparing to attack him. The boy wasn’t moving at all. He was standing still in the black doorway, the knife clasped in his hands. His eyes were closed, and tears were streaming down his face.

“So what are you going to do now, Daniel?”

“Now that my mother’s dead?” the boy asked.

Nick looked at him across the booth. “Yeah, now that she’s dead. Where are you going to go? How are you going to live?”

The boy took his time, and when he spoke, he didn’t answer directly. “In a way it’s going to be easier,” he said at last. “When Claire was alive, I was worried all the time, you know? She was a whore, I know that. But she was my mom, too. It was my job to protect her.”

Nick had turned the tape recorder off when he thought to ask Daniel one last question. He had already put his things back into his bag, and they were on their way out of the diner. Nick stopped Daniel as they stepped into the street. “Did you know Dickenson?” he asked him.

Daniel shrugged. “Not really.”

“But you’d seen him before?”

Again, Daniel shrugged. “Sure. He was around.”

“What do you make of what happened to him?”

“What do you mean?” Daniel was looking down the street, as though he was figuring which way to walk.

“His hand,” Nick said. “Why do you think someone would do that to his left hand?”

“He was married.”

“What?”

“Not anymore. His wife is dead. But he had this ring. This big gold ring with a diamond in it.”

“His wedding ring,” Nick said.

“Yeah. That’s right. His wedding ring. It was probably worth something, but he never took it off. Everyone knows that. Dickenson was really proud of that ring.”

“Your pictures didn’t leave much to the imagination,” Laura Daly was saying. “The irony is, your work was so thorough we couldn’t use it.”

It took Nick a moment to focus. He had lost himself in his memory. “You know,” he said, glancing across the table at the senior editor, trying to hang onto the thread of the conversation, “I’m not exactly sure why you haven’t printed some of those pictures.” He looked at his hands on the white linen tablecloth in front of him, wondering why they weren’t trembling. He felt sick, queasy.

Daly smiled, unaware, leaning forward onto her elbows. “You’re too young to remember. You moved out here what—ten, eleven years ago?”

“When I was nineteen,” Nick confirmed. “To go to the university.”

“It’s a beautiful city, Seattle,” the editor said. “We’re pretty proud people. We have a reputation, though, for being home to some fairly notorious murderers over the years.”

“Ted Bundy,” Nick said.

“And then the Green River Killer.”

“Gary Ridgway.”

“Yes,” the editor said. “That’s right—Gary Ridgway. Forty-eight acknowledged homicides. Probably the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history, a Seattle native. You can understand how people around here are gun shy. The Claire Scott murder by itself was probably enough to set people off. Another prostitute from downtown Seattle kidnapped and slaughtered and dumped in the woods. Left to rot on the banks of the Green River. People get scared it’s going to start happening all over again.”