The Dead Man (32 page)

"Where was Corliss that night?"

"I don't know."

"How could you not know? That would be the first thing I would have asked him."

"Give me some credit. I didn't get to ask him that or anything else. The university agreed to settle on the morning I was supposed to take his deposition."

"Corliss told me that he didn't want to settle, that the university made him. What do you know about that?"

"That's bullshit. Corliss was covered by the university's insurance policy. The insurance company had to provide him with a defense, hire a lawyer to represent him, the whole shot. Except the insurance policy didn't cover my claim for punitive damages so Corliss hired a good friend of mine to represent him on that claim. After the case was over, she told me that the university and the insurance company wanted to go to trial but that Corliss was scared shitless about giving his deposition. I had made a settlement demand within the insurance company's policy limits, which meant they could settle the case and get Corliss off the hook for punitive damages. She threatened to sue them for bad faith for exposing Corliss to a judgment for punitive damages if they didn't settle, so they caved."

Abelson's information was like everything else in this case, filling some of the gaps while leaving the most important questions unanswered. Corliss was drowning in circumstantial evidence but there were enough holes in the case against him for any decent defense lawyer to exploit. There were multiple explanations for the incriminating evidence and nothing to place him at any of the crime scenes. If the prosecutor was as conservative as Quincy Carter claimed, he would run from the case, saying it was all shadows and no substance unless Carter or I could come up with something more solid.

"There had to have been a reason Corliss was so afraid to give his deposition. Maybe he was worried that you'd find out something he wanted to keep secret or that you had figured out his secret and were going to drop it on him in the deposition. You checked me out while we were on the phone. You must have done more than that with Corliss. What did you have on him?"

"I hired an investigator who worked backward from the time Corliss came to Wisconsin to the day he was born. He didn't have a track record at the other universities where'd he worked or gone to school. Not so much as a student complaining about a grade. What are you looking for?"

"Four people who were participants in Corliss's dream project have been murdered in the last couple of months. Each of them died the way they dreamed they would die. I think the killer knew about their dreams and staged their murders to mimic their nightmares. Each of them had also been abused when they were kids and the killer may have chosen them because of their history of abuse."

"I handled a serial killer case when I was in the DA's office. I'd say you're looking for someone who was abused when he was a kid."

"More likely than not."

"One of my psychology experts who, by the way is an honest whore, told me to focus on why Corliss became a psychologist. He said that a lot of people are attracted to the field because they want to figure out why they or their family are so screwed up. In Corliss's case, it was both. Turns out his family was a dysfunctional mess and Corliss had his own issues."

"Like what?"

"Like his father beat him, his mother, and brothers and sisters until one day his mother didn't get up off the floor. The father went to jail and the kids went to foster care. Corliss knew all about vulnerable kids like Kimberly Stevens because he'd been one."

"I'd say that made your odds of winning your case a lot better than seventy percent."

"Close as you can get in this business to a sure thing, except nothing makes me more nervous than a sure thing. What's it do for you?"

"Makes me nervous."

The storm died during the night, dawn breaking with the roar of grinding chain saws and the rumble of pavement scraping snowplows. Sunlight flashed across the frozen landscape, rebounding with a blinding glare, ice and snow a convex mirror.

The house lost power during the night, the digital clock in my bedroom saying three A.M., trailing my watch by four hours, when two enterprising kids who lived down the street rang the doorbell at seven, handed me my newspaper, and offered to shovel the driveway and front walk for fifty bucks. They laughed when Roxy and Ruby christened the snow around their boots, one of them exclaiming
awesome, dude
, while the other took video with his cell phone and uploaded it to YouTube. I hired them because my car was nowhere in sight, meaning that Lucy was digging Simon out of the snow instead of me.

I flattened the
Kansas City Star
on the kitchen counter, the headline above the fold—"Police Suspect Serial Killer"—knocking me back. A color picture of paramedics wheeling Anne Kendall's black-bagged body out of the Harper Institute was bordered on the right by a vertical stack of thumbnail headshots of her, Walter Enoch, Tom Delaney, and Regina Blair and, on the left side, by another stack featuring Milo Harper, Sherry Fritzshall, Anthony Corliss, Leonard Nagel, and me.

Mine was the Bureau's official photo, what we called the yearbook pose, eyes and head straight on at the camera, half-serious, half-smiling, and no toothy-goofy grin. It was the same picture the
Kansas City Star
had used when a reporter named Rachel Firestone did the stories on Wendy and the drug ring. She hadn't pushed when I refused to give her an interview, investigating the same way she wrote—tough but fair.

Rachel had the byline on this story, detailing the murders of Anne Kendall and Walter Enoch without embellishment, knowing that the facts packed all the punch she needed. She reported that the police had reopened their investigations into the deaths of Tom Delaney and Regina Blair, citing unnamed sources suggesting that they may have been the first two victims of a serial killer that also killed Enoch and Kendall. A police department spokesman called speculation about a serial killer premature but declined further comment, citing the sensitive nature of the ongoing investigation.

Special Agent Manny Fernandez, media spokesman for the FBI's Kansas City Regional Office, said that the Bureau was cooperating with the police department in the Walter Enoch murder investigation while also pursuing leads about another case that were developed based on the stolen mail found at Enoch's house, saying that they were close to making an arrest. Agent Fernandez declined comment when asked if the suspect in that case may be connected to the murders.

Firestone ended her story by reporting that Jason Bolt was filing suit against the Harper Institute for the wrongful deaths of Delaney and Blair, quoting Bolt's allegations that the institute had been negligent in its hiring and supervision of Anthony Corliss and alleging that the dream project was reckless, dangerous, and irresponsible. Bolt was quoted saying that he had been retained by Anne Kendall's parents and would be filing a wrongful death case on their behalf within the next week and that he was trying to locate any surviving heirs of Walter Enoch to make certain their rights were also protected. Rachel gave Sherry Fritzshall the last word, Sherry denying Bolt's allegations and calling the deaths of the dream project participants a tragedy for them, their families, and the institute.

The story stretched onto page two where there were sidebars written by Rachel and boxed in a panel alongside the main story. The first was about Leonard Nagel's criminal record, the second about the lawsuit against Corliss and the University of Wisconsin over Kimberly Stevens's death, and the third announced that Milo Harper had taken a leave of absence from the institute for personal reasons and that Sherry Fritzshall had replaced him as president. Sherry was quoted as saying that these changes had been planned for some time and were unrelated to the deaths of the dream project participants.

The last sidebar was about me, reprising my history with the FBI, the drug ring, Wendy, and my movement disorder. Firestone quoted Jason Bolt saying that the institute had waited too long to hire a director of security and then compounded that mistake by hiring someone whose disability should have disqualified him from the job, describing my hiring as part of the institute's continuing pattern of fatally flawed judgments.

I wasn't surprised by the newspaper coverage. The murders of Anne Kendall and Walter Enoch were sensational enough on their own. The prospect that they were victims of a serial killer was a reportorial windfall. Toss in a billionaire who walked away from the crown jewel of his empire without explanation, a registered sex offender killed while fleeing the police, and an ex-professor and an ex-FBI agent who left their last jobs under a cloud, all of whom worked for the billionaire, and Rachel Firestone must have felt like she'd died and gone to heaven twice over.

She had excellent sources, including, I assumed, Jason Bolt and Eric Abelson. Someone in the police department must have briefed her as well, no doubt off the record and only after Rachel promised anonymity.

The Bureau spokesman, Manny Fernandez, wasn't speaking off the record. He was sending me a message, reminding me that my forty-eight hours were almost up. Kent had promised me that if I didn't turn over the drug money, the Bureau would do things Dolan's way, which was shorthand for getting ugly.

It wouldn't matter whether they could make a case against me. They would ruin me with more than the innuendo hinted at in the newspaper. There would be a news conference. A sober-faced Fernandez would rehash the case, disclose Wendy's letter with the irresistible but unsupported conclusion of its contents, labeling me as a person of interest in the investigation of the missing money and encouraging me to come forward and tell what I knew.

They would bang the drum as often and as long as it took to convince the world that I had betrayed the public trust and gotten away with a crime. My denials and explanations would be footnotes to the story, my reputation the first casualty, my chance to spend the rest of my life doing more than wandering the aisles at the Bass Pro Shop the next. And, if they were lucky enough to find Wendy's letter and leverage it into an indictment, they would force me to spend my disability payments on attorney's fees before sending me to prison.

I couldn't sit back and wait for any of that to unfold, depending on luck and justice, both of which were blind, to get it right. Anthony Corliss was the lynchpin, the only name on my list of suspects whether the list was short or long. He didn't ooze menace like Anthony Hopkins in
The Silence of the Lambs
or any other cinematic thrill killer but evil isn't always obvious. More often it's hidden behind a banal façade, stunning us when it's finally revealed.

No one else fit the profile as well as Corliss. No one else was as connected to the victims, knew their vulnerabilities, and shared their tormented history. And no one else had as many questions to answer.

Lucy didn't pick up when I called and neither did Simon. I was starting to shake from sitting around and doing nothing. I had to get out of the house, clear my head, and find a way to get to Corliss without falling apart.

I pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt, hiking boots and a barn jacket, wrapped a scarf around my neck, and tugged a wool cap around my ears and left the house, paying the teenage snow shoveling crew on my way out. They pocketed the money and cut over to the next block south looking for more business.

A city snowplow had made one halfhearted pass down my block, leaving a slick hardpack on the pavement bordered by a foot high wall of snow shoved against the curb, blocking driveways and imprisoning cars that had been left on the street. I headed east toward The Roasterie Café, a coffee shop a few blocks away on Brookside Boulevard.

I was near the end of the next block when a black SUV turned onto the street from behind me, the driver at first matching my slow pace. Glancing over my shoulder, I couldn't tell whether the driver was looking for an address or just being careful or was following me and not caring that I knew, relying on the fact that I was too far from home to turn back. The windows were tinted, the sun adding an impenetrable glare, making the driver invisible. The car didn't belong to any of my neighbors and it wasn't a typical Bureau surveillance vehicle.

I scanned the street. No red-faced, over weight, out of shape, middle-aged men were shoveling their driveways, auditioning for heart attacks. No kids in mittens and ski caps were launching sleds off the slopes of their yards or rolling a snowman to its feet. No moms in boots and bathrobes were wading through the snow, clutching their nightgowns to their throats while fishing for the morning paper.

I was out in the open on icy, snowy terrain, alone, exposed, and unarmed when the driver accelerated, wheels spinning and whining against the snowpack, the chassis shimmying, tires gaining purchase, the car closing the distance before I could react, skidding to a stop, the front end sliding past me and kissing the snowbank. The driver lowered the tinted window. It had been months, but I hadn't forgotten Rachel Firestone's volcanic red hair, emerald green eyes, and disarming smile.

"You could have phoned. Would have been a lot safer," I said, pointing at her right fender, buried in the snow.

She threw the car into reverse and yanked it free, then shifted into drive, aiming true east, standing on the brake, and making the SUV shudder and me shake.

"How's that?"

"Better, but you still could have phoned."

"You turned me down for an interview the last time and I wasn't sure you'd take my call after the story in today's paper."

"I'd have said hello."

"But that's it."

"Hello and good-bye," I said and started walking.

She followed, her car gliding alongside me. "It's news. You're news."

"Your luck, not mine."