Authors: Ed Gorman
New Title 1 (11 page)
1
This is the page that Jane Avery—make that Chief of Police Jane Avery—pushed in front of me while I was eating breakfast in a sunny booth in Fitzwilly's Cafe the next morning. She wore a crisply laundered new blue police shirt and dark blue pants with knife-sharp creases. In the sunlight, her freckles were more vivid than ever, and her tiny nose and white, white teeth more fetching than ever.
"Does any of this sound familiar?"
"I haven't swallowed my waffle yet."
"I'm not kidding, Jim."
"Neither am I. I've got a mouthful of food."
"So swallow."
I swallowed.
"First of all," I said, "this is a form that relates to sexual homicide."
"After she was killed, she was raped."
"God," I said, trying not to think of the odd vulnerability that had always rested in Nora's eyes.
I looked over the form some more. "Eleanor Saunders. Chicago. Age thirty-eight."
"And her companion's name was Karl Givens."
I just looked at her. Didn't say anything.
"Maybe you knew her under some other name."
"Who said I knew her?"
"I watched you look at that blue Cadillac last night, when they were bringing the Saunders woman out. You knew her, all right."
A waitress came. Jane ordered coffee, black. It was nice in here, mote-tumbled sunlight streaming through the front window, an early 1960s Seeburg jukebox standing in the comer, with maybe even a few Fats Domino songs on it, and mostly quiet people in work clothes who knew and seemed to like each other. A place like this in the city, at 8:12 A.M., would have been a madhouse.
"You going to tell me about her, Jim?"
"Didn't know her."
"Look at me and tell me you didn't know her."
I raised my eyes from the last of my waffle. "Didn't know her."
"You're lying."
"I didn't know that you called visitors liars."
"You do if you're chief of police. And if your guest happens to be lying."
The waitress came back with her coffee. "Thanks, Myrna," Jane said.
She sipped her coffee.
"You going to invite me over for dinner tonight?"
"I don't know yet, Jim. You really make me mad."
I'd put our remarks down to normal man-woman banter until just now. She really was angry, but she was so quiet about it, I hadn't been able to tell until she'd told me.
"I'm sorry."
"Then you're really not going to tell me how it is that you and the dead woman came to town on the same day, at the same time, and how she got herself murdered and how you claim not to have known her?"
"How do you know we arrived the same day at the same time?"
"I checked. That's my job."
"I wish you'd calm down."
"I wish you'd tell me the truth."
"How about the man with her?" I'd almost called him Vic.
"What about him?"
"Is he still alive?"
"Not for much longer. If he doesn't improve by noon, they're going to put him on a helicopter and take him to Iowa City. But even that probably won't do much good."
"I really do wish you'd invite me over tonight."
She stood up and clattered a quarter on the table. "I really do wish you'd tell me the truth."
She left.
2
In the car, I spent twenty minutes going through Peary's profile. Here we had three suspects:
Cal Roberts
Richard McNally
Samuel Lodge
According to Peary's profile, and he'd been just about the most skilled profiler I'd ever worked with, these were our man's personality characteristics:
Above-average intelligence
Socially competent
Sexually competent
Demands submissive victims
At some point, I'd probably send the FBI Behavioral Science Unit all the material that Peary had gathered.
These days, the FBI is inundated with so many requests for help from local police departments that there's now a long waiting line. The budget doesn't allow for the FBI to accept every case, so the trickiest ones tend to get taken first.
This is where I can help small-town police departments. Because I'm a former employee, I know whom to call and what kind of specific help to ask for. I can usually speed things up. Then, when the FBI returns its assessment of the material, I can show the local police how to implement it into their investigation.
Which is just what I was trying to do as I sat there—to think of the three suspects in light of Peary's eight-page profile.
The trouble was, the three men could all fit the profile—until I knew more about them and their patterns, anyway.
And that was going to take a lot more work.
3
The prison grapevine can get a story around in less than an hour. By then virtually everybody in the place will know the same tale.
Well, this one day, there's a very special tale going around and its consequences can be seen in the cafeteria where this rabbity little guy with thick glasses sits eating his soup—alone.
Usually you see the little guy with his buddies but not today because he ain't got no buddies no more.
He learned less than two hours ago that he has the first confirmed case of HIV in the prison.
And nobody wants to be around him.
AIDS is just now starting to fill the TV screens and the front pages of newspapers and there's a lot of hysteria. Gays getting beaten up everywhere. An AIDS hospice getting burned down in the middle of the night. Some little kid barred from school because a veritable lynch mob of parents come screaming to the school board.
Everybody in the prison industry knows that when AIDS starts to really hit the prison, there is going to be hell to pay.
Anal intercourse being the most efficient method of transmitting the disease—well, in a prison full of horny men reluctantly willing to screw each other even though they'd much rather screw women . . .
Well, it's going to be terrible.
This is the background as he lies awake on the upper bunk one night and listens to the guy below him weep.
Tries to pretend he doesn't hear.
Tries to pretend he doesn't know what's really going on.
But he does know.
This sorta pretty kid got passed around among all the important cons and now—
Well, you can bet there are a lot of important cons lying awake tonight, too, wondering if they're soon going to get the word from the infirmary that . . .
"You awake?"
"Yeah."
"Sorry for crying," the kid says.
"It's all right."
"It's just I'm scared."
"I know."
"You ball anybody since you been in here?"
"Huh-uh. I don't like men. I like women."
"You're probably all right, then."
"Unless I pick it up some other way, " he says. He's a real hypochondriac. He wishes he had a different guy living on the bunk below.
"Don't you watch TV?"
"Yeah."
"Well they explain that. You can't get it from drinking out of the same glass or just touching somebody or anything like that."
"That's what they say, anyway."
"You don't believe them?"
"Huh-uh."
"How come?"
"They're just trying to keep everybody calm. They don't want people rioting in the streets and stuff like that."
"You ever seen anybody with it in the later stages?"
"Yeah."
"Pretty terrible."
"Yeah."
"I hope I die before I get that bad off, " the kid says. "Except I'm scared to die."
Neither speaks for a long time.
Just listen to the prison night.
"How about you?" the kid says.
"How about me what?"
"You afraid to die?"
"Sure. Especially from some faggot disease."
"I guess I don't like that."
"Don't like what?"
"Being called a faggot."
"Oh."
"We're human beings, too, you know."
"Just give it a rest, kid, all right?"
"I resent it, man. I mean if you really want to know. I don't call you names, why should you call me names?"
"You don't call me names because I'm not a faggot."
"That's it, you sonofabitch."
And the kid jumps off his bed and puts his fists up like he's in some kind of bad-ass fight with an invisible opponent and then he starts coming closer and closer to the top bunk and—
He lashes his foot out and kicks the kid real hard in the mouth. The kid starts wailing and weeping right away.
All the cons who've been listening in are laughing their asses off.
Some fairy boy with AIDS, this is exactly what he's got coming.
The kid cries himself out, just the way little babies do, and then finally crawls back up on his bunk and goes to sleep.
Sixteen months later, the kid is down to eighty-one pounds and can't hold any kind of food they try to feed him in the infirmary.
He's losing a pound a day.
The story is all over the prison.
God, eighty-one pounds.
Sure glad I never screwed him.
Benny screwed him. Benny won't admit it. But Benny screwed him.
During the time it takes the kid to die, eight more HIV-positive cases are reported in the prison.
His hypochondria is getting real bad. Even though he's extremely careful never to touch anybody in any way, he's terrified that he's going to get it anyway.
He's convinced that the government is lying. He's convinced that he's never going to leave this prison alive.
No two-thousand-dollar-per-month retainer is going to help him now.
For the first time, he starts daydreaming about escaping from here.
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