Open Season (27 page)

She raised her eyes to me, openly crying now, the toughness suddenly gone. She looked like a kid in dirty clothes, her body shaking helplessly. “If you ever catch him, could you blow his balls off for me?”

I knelt and put my arms around her. The embrace was prompted by more than mere sympathy. Through her suffering, Susan Lucey had just illuminated one of the murkier corners of the case. Ski Mask’s reaction to the information she had given him went a long way to connecting him emotionally to Kimberly Harris rather than to Bill Davis. While I still didn’t know specifically what Ski Mask was after, I now felt pretty sure it wasn’t solely to get Davis out of jail. Susan Lucey had paid a large price to get me that information. I was definitely in her debt.

After a short while, she stopped sobbing and pulled back a little. Her hands were clasped in her lap. Her face was flushed and bruised and wet with tears. “Fuck, I probably would have met someone like him sooner or later. I probably will again. It’s the turf.”

She hesitated a moment and then gave me the best—and longest—kiss I’d ever had in my life. It left me misty eyed and breathless. “Thanks for the coffee maker, you creep.” She said it without a smile.

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Despite the wide scope of our search for Kimberly Harris’s activities during her three-day weekends, none of us really believed we’d hit pay dirt searching train, bus or cut-rate car-rental files, so all of us that morning had taken either travel agencies or the airline. The airline was going to take longer, of course. Its records were not held locally, and we sent one man across New Hampshire to hunt them down. But in principle, for once we were on the right track.

At the end of a long afternoon plowing through box after box of computer printouts, we found two travel firms that clicked. One of them had handled tickets for a Miss Julie Johnson on seventy percent of the right dates, and another had ticketed a Mr. L. Armstrong for the same dates and destinations.

I found Brandt in his office at about six in the evening. He was sitting in virtual darkness—only his desk lamp on—with his feet on the table and his chair tilted back. His eyes were closed and he was smoking.

“Rough day, huh?”

“Long, yeah.”

“How did the board go?”

“On and on. I gave them more than they had and less than they wanted. They let me know, in their words, that my ‘future hangs in the balance.’ Utter crap, of course; they’re confusing my job with my life. Typical asshole pomposity.”

Unusual words for a usually unflappable man. I was hoping his condemnation wasn’t universal—one of those assholes was a woman for whom I had a particular fondness. “Did they all come down that hard?”

He sighed. “No, not all.” Then he chuckled. “Your own Miss Zigman was her normal levelheaded self, but she was wise enough to lay low in the storm. What have you got?”

“Julie Johnson and Louis Armstrong had a penchant for flying the same airplanes to the same places, at least according to two separate travel agencies.”

“Louis Armstrong?”

“The irreverence of torrid love, I guess. They certainly had an eye for glamour: Vegas, Lake Tahoe, Miami, San Francisco—all the hot spots. We interviewed the agents who booked most of the tickets. It was all done in cash, and it sounds like Kimberly did the arranging for both of them, although she was apparently in disguise—dark glasses, hair hidden, stuff like that. Just enough hocus-pocus to make her impossible to forget. I guess that makes the guy a well-heeled married local, or at least one with access to funds. From what Susan Lucey told me about Kimberly’s taste in men, I would also assume he’s—as they say—mature in years. Either that or a shy-but-precocious fifteen-year-old.” Or, I thought, even Ski Mask himself.

“Good.” He still hadn’t opened his eyes or moved. “Now what?”

“Now I go to Boston. I have a date tonight with a friend at the police department.”

“In search of Pam Stark?”

“Yup.”

“Happy trails. Don’t get mugged.”

I called Gail before I left and congratulated her on surviving the afternoon. She said Brandt had displayed the stoicism of Saint Sebastian and had fared about as well. I apologized for not showing up last night and told her not to expect me tonight either. I had a feeling that what I would find in Boston would keep me out of town for a while. Her reaction was matter-of-fact, with no hint of the emotion she’d shown the day before. The see-saw was back in balance, thanks to me, and for that, idiotically, I was now sorry.

To me, driving to Boston at night is slipping toward the heart of a gigantic landlocked amoeba, whose thin and ragged outer fringe extends far beyond its inner core. From narrow, unlit New Hampshire farm roads, lights gradually begin to cluster along the sides of the highway. Occasional houses become occasional towns; the towns begin to link first tenuously with filling stations and a restaurant here or there, then with modest “miracle miles”—commercial stretches of small retailers, low-rent discount stores, and fading supermarkets. Finally, still well over an hour from the city, suburbia takes over in an endless chain of lights and malls and parking plazas and increasingly maddened traffic. By the rules known only to these particular urbanites, behavior behind the wheel metamorphoses into animal cunning. Speed limits are ignored, traffic lights are useless; drivers maneuver for room and advantage, speeding and braking, flowing from one side of the road to the other in a ceaseless attempt to get ahead of the other guy. I entered Boston, as always, like a leaf in a torrent, my only thoughts turning on ways to avoid the rocks.

I finally beached myself downtown, not far from the city’s government center, and entered the Boston Police Department’s main building on Stuart Street. I found Don Hebard as promised, loitering outside the records division, a plastic coffee mug in hand.

“Welcome to Beantown.”

“You people actually call it that?”

“Sure, sometimes. Especially to tourists.” He led me through a set of double doors and signed in. “How was the traffic?”

“Probably what you’d call normal.”

“Go on red, stop on green?”

“Yeah. Why don’t they do that in New York or anywhere else I’ve been?”

He continued down a hallway and ushered me into a large room jammed with floor-to-ceiling shelf units stuffed with cardboard boxes. There was a counter near the door with a computer monitor on it. “Ever been to Rome or Athens or Cairo?”

I shook my head.

“Well I have—once each. I was on one of those Mediterranean whirlwind tours—real waste of money. It’s my theory that when all of us came over to this great American melting pot, some of us opted to stay in Boston. Now the reason we did that was some cosmic genetic glitch we share with people who ended up in Rome and Athens and Cairo. It’s that gene that makes us all drive the same way.”

I nodded in silence. The less I said the better. I’d forgotten Hebard never took comments about the traffic or the weather as mere icebreakers. To him they were subjects of real merit, comparable to religion and sports.

“What’s the name?”

“Stark, Pamela.”

He entered it on the computer and watched a spume of green letters wash across the screen. “Shit.”

“What?”

He pointed to a series of numbers. “That means it hasn’t been put in the data banks yet.” He waved at the room beyond the counter. “All that is going on computer, along with everything that comes in now, but we haven’t quite finished. I’m afraid your girl is buried in the stacks.”

He copied the reference number from the screen and led me behind the counter. We walked up and down looming, claustrophobic corridors, checking numbers, until he came to a halt and dropped to his knees. I joined him on the floor.

“I never find these things at waist level, you know? It’s started to make me wonder.”

I helped him pull the box off the bottom shelf. “You didn’t drop by the Cairo Police Department, did you?”

He looked serious and pursed his lips. I took the box from him and stood up, flipping it open. “What’s the last number?”

He rose slowly and gave it to me. I pulled out the appropriate folder and handed the box back. “You got some place I could read this ?”

He led me to a table against the far wall and left to get some more coffee, still lost in thought. Hebard was no longer a street cop; he was in administration. It gave him lots of time to wonder about things.

Pamela Stark’s file consisted of some mug shots, a fingerprint card, and a badly typed arrest report, along with all the paperwork attending an overnight stay in the Boston jail.

I compared the picture I had of Kimberly Harris—taken the morning she was found with a belt around her neck—to the shot of a young and sulky Pamela Stark. It was a match. It made me feel odd, seeing her alive for the first time. I’d looked at the other picture so often it had become her real portrait, rather than the face of a muscleless corpse.

I stared at the mug shot for a long time. She wasn’t beautiful in the advertisement sense—no chiseled cheekbones or aristocratic brow. She had the look of an aging teenager whose choices now would determine her appearance. She could either carry her cheerleader softness into gentle maturity, or lose it to bitterness, hardship, and the grind of a hopeless life. From the little I knew of her, she’d opted for the former by dancing near the latter, obviously a shortcut that hadn’t worked out.

According to the report, she’d been busted virtually off the bus while selling her favors to an undercover cop. She claimed she’d been in the city less than twenty-four hours, had no pimp, no family or friends in the area, no lawyer, little money, and no remorse. It was the arresting officer’s opinion that this would not be the last time she and the police would do business. She gave her home address as 24 Stone Creek Road, Westport, Connecticut. She also gave her age as nineteen.

Hebard saw me writing down the address. “You know to take that with a grain of salt, I guess.”

“How big a grain?”

He looked at the arresting officer’s report. “She hardly sounds like the virgin-from-Peoria type; stupid maybe, but not impressed by authority. I’d say you could eat the whole salt-shaker. She was above the age of consent and pleaded guilty; there was no reason for us to check the address—or the name, for that matter. Still, you never know.”

He reached over my shoulder and picked up the photo. “Pretty girl. Very pretty, in fact.”

“Before and after.” I handed him the picture I’d been carrying around.

He looked at them both. “Kind of gives you a queer feeling, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

I WOKE UP
in the middle of the night with a start. Gail’s arm, thrown across my chest, tensed instantly.

“What is it?” Her voice was a hard, urgent whisper.

I reached over and touched her cheek. “I’m sorry. It’s nothing. I just thought of something.”

She lifted her head and looked around, her face half covered with a cascade of hair. “God, you scared the hell out of me.”

“No, it’s all right. Go back to sleep.” I noticed the glowing red numbers of the digital clock beyond her; it was 2:43 A.M. She lowered her head back to the pillow.

I hadn’t really been asleep, at least not in a deep sleep. In fact, I’d only returned from Boston a half hour ago. I’d taken Gail at her word, albeit twenty-four hours later, and had slipped into her bed as quietly as possible, waking her just enough to say, “Hi.”

She moved closer, wrapping one leg around my own, a glutton for snuggles. “What woke you up?” Her voice had regained a sleepy fuzziness.

“Bill Davis said all along that the drugs we found at his place were planted there, something we never paid much attention to. But if he was telling the truth, then that means someone else bought them beforehand, probably the same guy who killed Kimberly—I mean, Pam Stark.”

“Who’s Pam Stark?”

The interruption surprised me, as if everyone should know what I knew. “That’s Kimberly’s real name; at least I think it is. It’s the name she used when she was busted for soliciting in Boston four years ago.”

Her eyes became more focused. “Hey, that’s right. You’re supposed to be in Boston now. What’re you doing here?”

“I thought I was going to go from there to wherever was listed on the arrest sheet, but the address was a phony, at least according to directory assistance, so I came back home. But that’s not important—”

“Right—now you’re sniffing after heroin. Isn’t that a little hopeless?”

“Not if we apply the same wishful thinking we’re using in the prednisone search. If we do that, it gives us a hunchback buying drugs in a back alley—something a local pusher is liable to remember for quite some time.”

“Find the pusher and you find the buyer?”

“If we’re lucky. If nothing else, the pusher might remember the hump, in which case we know for sure the guy we’re after definitely had a long-term prescription, which would help cut down the search a lot. It also wouldn’t hurt as a piece of backup evidence.”

I smiled at the ceiling. The machinery was finally beginning to turn in our favor—or at least it wasn’t turning against us. We had the off chance of pinning a physical deformity to someone who’d had close ties to Kimberly—possibly along with a prescription naming that someone—we’d matched her with a man during her three-day weekends, and we’d given her a new name, possibly a real one. It was all pretty iffy, but it was developing. We were already combing the area looking for Ski Mask, we’d soon be asking the Connecticut local cops to locate any and all families named Stark, and my bright idea about tracing the drug sale—as unrealistic as it might seem—was making me beam. Things were happening. I felt like a man who was slowly slogging his way to the firmer ground at the edge of the swamp.

Gail kissed the inside of my ear. That always sent shivers down my spine. “My hero. You’re so smart.” She slid her thigh up between my legs. “I’m all awake now.”

“I can tell.” Her hand slipped down across my stomach and she giggled. “You’re all awake too.”

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