Pursuit: A Novel

4

Varney watched in fascination. A week ago, he had never heard of this Millikan jerk. Here he was on CNN, and they were calling him a leading expert on homicide. Varney gave a mirthless little laugh. A leading expert on homicide wasn’t some professor. It was somebody like Varney.

It was Millikan’s turn to talk. “We’re accustomed to having authorities, from the president on down, say killings like these are ‘senseless,’ or I believe the usual term is ‘random and senseless.’ They’re neither: the killer knows exactly what they were for.”

The interviewer saw a way to make his discussion appear coherent, and appear to be in control. “All right, then. Take the Louisville restaurant murders we just saw in our opening clip. What were they for?”

“Let’s ignore the superficial reason: some small offense that might have gone unnoticed, jealousy, money. What I’m talking about is the underlying reason. The killer doesn’t think he’s unilaterally attacking. He thinks what he’s doing is retaliating for things that were done to him, or making a pre-emptive strike to avoid something he fears in the future.”

“Specifically in the Louisville case, how would you know that?”

“The way I came to know it is thirty years spent interviewing dozens of killers and hundreds of eyewitnesses. But I did examine the crime scene in Louisville the night of the murders, and I’ve been following the case since then. I believe the case will be solved in a few weeks. We’ll be able to interview the perpetrator and find out exactly what—”

The moderator had been itching to interrupt, but one of the panelists was quicker. It was Cameron, and Millikan wasn’t surprised. “What we’ll find out is that it was a disgruntled employee, or a customer who got thrown out of the place that night. It would have been nothing, except he was able to get his hands on a gun.”

“As my friend Mr. Cameron knows, I’m not a fan of guns,” said Millikan. “But that’s changing the subject. We were talking about why, not how. What we’ll find is that this was a child who was abused or neglected at home. When he went to school, he was picked on or taunted, and nobody protected him. He’s been spending the rest of his life protecting himself from threats that have already come and gone—making himself less emotionally vulnerable to his parents, less physically vulnerable to the people who picked on him in school. Obtaining a gun is only one of the things he did to make himself more formidable. He’s not a good argument for gun control, because he’s not somebody who would have been harmless without a gun and simply killed because it was convenient. He’s a great argument for doing something about the way our society raises many of its children.”

“It’s easy to say that,” snapped Cameron. “But it comes down to ‘What can we do?’ We can’t disqualify a few million people from having sex and producing children. We can disqualify civilians from owning firearms.”

The moderator was getting panicky now. He could see the clock telling him he had six minutes to bump this squabble out of the endless circular argument about gun control and turn it into a news story. He said, “Professor Millikan, I want to get back to something you said earlier: that the case would be solved in a few weeks. What makes you believe that? Have the police made a break in the case?”

“No,” said Millikan. “It’s not the police. What’s happened is that the case struck a chord in unexpected quarters. A donor has put up the money to hire Roy Prescott.”

The interviewer was intrigued. “Roy Prescott?”

“He’s a private homicide specialist. Mr. Cameron and I are both acquainted with his work, and I understand he has good leads already. I would say it’s a matter of time. A few weeks, at most a few months.”

The interviewer unexpectedly turned to Cameron. “Mr. Cameron, I noticed that when Professor Millikan said earlier that it was nearly over, you didn’t disagree. Did you know this too?”

“No.” Cameron’s eyes were on Millikan. He seemed to be getting over a shock. “I didn’t.”

The interviewer sensed that he was on the edge of something.

“Can you tell me more about Roy Prescott?”

“I have no comment.” It was a statement that the moderator had never before heard on his show. Panelists didn’t say that. They interrupted and shouted to get more time to make comments. He could see that Cameron’s expression was peculiar. He was staring at Millikan, intrigued, barely blinking.

“Then, Professor Millikan, can you do better?” It was a mild barb for Cameron, to get him going again, but he was like a member of the audience now. “What makes you confident that this specialist will catch the killer?”

“The best analogy I can think of offhand is a bear hunt,” said Millikan. “A bear isn’t merely big and fast and strong, with long teeth and claws. He also knows what he’s going to do in a crisis, and when the time comes, he does it very efficiently. But the reason bears are an endangered species and we’re not, is that the hunter also knows what the bear is going to do. His larger brain is the only advantage that matters.”

The moderator tried to ignore the frantic waving of the producer, who was spinning her finger in the “wrap-up” sign. He glanced at Cameron, hoping to get a reaction in the last seconds, but Cameron seemed stunned. Reluctantly, the moderator conceded that it was too late to go on. “My thanks to Michael Cameron, former district attorney of Los Angeles and now congressman, and to Professor Daniel Millikan, author of Manifestations of Guilt, the standard text on homicide. Tomorrow night my guests will be Lilian Horvath, animal-rights advocate, and Dr. Garth Fillmore of the Boston University medical school, on the use of animals in research.”

The camera zoomed in for his close-up, and he said, “Be there.” The producer sighed and shook her head at him to show that he had cut it too close, but he shrugged happily. He had made it again, even gotten the promo in.

Varney felt the intense heat of anger on his shoulders and the sides of his neck all the way up to his scalp, so strong that he began to have the peculiar tunnel vision he sometimes noticed during a fight. But this time, there was a shortness of breath, a sensation that his lungs were partially filled with sand so there was little room for air. It was not the clean, good anger that he felt when he was fighting back. It was outrage, a bitter sense of unfairness. They were saying things about him that he couldn’t answer. They said he was stupid, that they knew everything he was going to do before he did it.

He tried to reassure himself. That pompous, stupid son of a bitch on television couldn’t do anything to him. His theories were designed just to make all the fat-ass spongeheads excited enough to sit through the next commercial.

He tried for a moment to get past his anger. It wasn’t really that Millikan guy he was thinking about. He was just the big mouth that went on television. He was so stupid, he had told Varney something he couldn’t have known any other way. He went to his computer and turned it on. He called up the phone directories and began to search.

A few minutes later, Millikan came out of the elevator into the underground parking garage. He looked at the big purple number 3 painted on the wall, then looked at the letter painted on the nearest pillar: D. His rental car was in G, somewhere on the other side. He came around the back of the elevator and saw that his car was the only one left in the visitors’ row. Cameron was standing beside it.

He took a deep breath and blew it out as he walked toward the car. When he was close enough so it wouldn’t be wasted, he put on a false smile. “Pretty good, Mike. Maybe they’ll give us our own show.”

Cameron didn’t accept the proffered pleasantry. “I waited because I want to know about Prescott.”

Millikan stopped walking and stood still. “I said it because he asked me to.”

“Asked you to?” Cameron frowned and stared at Millikan as though he were trying to climb a hill he had never suspected was there.

Millikan nodded. “That’s why I’m here. They’ve been asking me to come on for a year. I called them and said if they were going to do a show on the topic, I’d be willing to go on. I’m going to be on four other shows in the next week, just so I can mention Prescott.”

“Why are you doing anything Prescott asks? You arrested the bastard.”

Millikan shook his head. “Once, fifteen years ago, he allowed me to comfort myself with the fantasy that I was hauling him in to face questioning and a possible murder charge. He knew that very little evidence would be found, and he knew that it all supported him. He had removed everything that didn’t.” He paused. “Otherwise, I suppose he would have killed me too.”

“If you know that, then why do him a favor?”

“It’s not a favor. It’s an act of calculation. I was in that restaurant in Louisville right after it happened. I think that the one who did it is one of the special cases. He’s somebody we can’t afford to have walking down a street where our families walk. I don’t like Prescott. It costs me something to know I put Prescott into play. Well, tough for me. What I feel is nothing compared to the damage this killer has already done. He’s not going to stop unless somebody stops him. We both know Prescott is the best bet for doing that.”

“But you were a police officer.”

“I was,” said Millikan. “And you were a D.A. We both followed all of the rules.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that maybe the reason we retired and went on to other things was so we could sell out for a good cause. You’re one of the best lawyers in the country. You know that even the half-assed gun control we already have is unconstitutional, but you argue for more as though it weren’t.”

Cameron glared at him, but then his shoulders slumped in a sad, tired way. He looked older. “What the hell am I supposed to do? Wait for the Second Amendment to be repealed while thirty thousand people a year get killed? You know goddamned well it’ll never happen.”

Millikan shook his head. “I voted for you. If I lived in your district, I’d vote for you again.”

Cameron nodded sadly. “I’ll see you, Danny.” He walked off toward the other end of the floor, where a driver was waiting for him in a Lincoln Town Car.

Millikan got into his rental car and picked up the road map from the passenger seat. This was the second time in thirty-six hours that someone had called him Danny—just like the old days.

Varney stopped walking at the phone booth, then took a last look around. There was nobody near enough to hear him, and there would not be anytime soon. The gas station had been closed for hours. He put in the first two quarters, dialed the number, and listened to hear how much more he needed to deposit to reach Los Angeles, then pushed those coins in too. He wanted to hear the voice. He knew he would probably only hear a recording, but it might be a recording of Prescott’s voice. The voice would help him judge things—the man’s size and weight and age, the regional accent. The phone rang once, twice. The click was wrong. A man answered, not a recording. “Yes?”

Varney felt annoyed. He had just wanted to hear the man’s voice.

“Yes?” the man repeated. “Hello?” Varney knew that the man wouldn’t talk unless he signified his presence. He needed to let the man know he was listening. He breathed loudly so he could hear the sound in the earpiece, and instantly felt foolish. It was what perverts did to scare women.

Prescott laughed, a deep, open-mouthed guffaw. “A breather?” he said. “You’re a breather? It’s you, isn’t it? What’s on your mind? Oh, I know. You’re calling because you heard they had hired me and you want to make a deal. I’m afraid I can’t do that on this one. I understand your feelings. You know you went too far this time, and you want to be forgiven and get out of it. I’m afraid I can’t let you do that.”

Varney’s head was throbbing, and the tunnel vision was coming back. He could almost see this man—tall and thin, with long hands, and he had an accent like a big fucking cowboy. He whispered, “You stupid fucker. I called to tell you you’re dead.”

“Not very convincing,” said Prescott. The whispered voice sounded young, so Prescott made his tone patronizing. “But I understand. You want me to be scared, just like you are. I’m afraid it’s not possible. That’s just one of the differences between a boy and a man.”

“You forget, I know who you are.”

Prescott’s voice came back with a slight frustration. “Now, there’s an example of one of the other differences. You think you did a pretty good job back there in Louisville, don’t you? You stole a padlock and chain for the restaurant door. Don’t you know that, even at night, stores have surveillance cameras aimed at their front doors? I got you on tape, Slick. That’s more than you know about me. I can pick you out anytime, but you won’t see me coming.”

Prescott paused and listened to the silence. He hoped that the man on the other end was feeling a moment of pure terror: of course there were surveillance cameras. Every time some poor jerk broke into a liquor store they had him on tape. How could he have forgotten? Prescott waited patiently for the outburst.

The voice was sick with anger. “You’re full of shit.”

“Too bad you slipped up that way on your first try.”

Varney said, “There were no mistakes, and it wasn’t my first.”

“Oh? What else have you done? How many?”

“I don’t keep track,” said Varney. “Enough.”

“You’re not old enough to lose count,” said Prescott. “I know you’re scared to say what they were. I’m just asking a number.”

Varney said, “Columbus, Ohio, a year ago in November. Phoenix in January. Houston in April. Pittsburgh in May. Danville, Illinois, in May. Biloxi in July. L.A. in July.”

“What are those?”

“Look them up. You’ll see.”

The line went dead. Prescott hung up the telephone and sat in his office, looking down at the surface of his desk. He should have been up and pacing and feeling jubilant. He had succeeded. Having Millikan go on TV had worked. He’d had no right to expect the man would see Millikan so soon. But what had happened did not feel pleasant enough to be a victory.

When Prescott had been a boy, there had been a house down the street where he stopped on the way to school. He waited until a younger boy and his sister appeared, then walked with them. The younger boy was one of those whose only hope was to grow into an adult as quickly as he could: he was no good at being a child. He was skinny and unprepossessing and wore glasses. The worst thing about him was that he was smart, and he had so little sense of what other people were really thinking that he didn’t hide it, or make a joke out of it, as Prescott did.

So Prescott walked with them, made sure they got into their classrooms unmolested. He told other people he protected them because his mother made him. It wasn’t quite a lie, because if his mother had known, she would have. She would have stopped what she was doing in the kitchen and trained those big brown eyes on him for a second and said, “Too bad there’s nobody around with the guts to stand up for those two until they get a little older.” Then she would have gone back to what she was doing, pretending it had nothing to do with her. After a day or two, she would have asked, casually, “How are those Beeman kids getting on?”

The Beemans had an older brother, much older, maybe twenty-five. He lived three streets over, in a house that had two trucks parked in the driveway at night because he had an exterminator business. He was always gone too early in the morning to take the kids to school, and came home too late to pick them up. But one day after school, Prescott saw that one of the trucks was parked in the driveway at the house where the young boy and girl lived, and the older brother was there, sitting on the porch in his work clothes, drinking a Coke out of a can. He said, “Prescott. You’re a good man.” Prescott was twelve. “You want a summer job?”

Prescott said he did, without knowing what it was or what sort of pay to expect. He went home and asked his mother if that was okay, and she said it was just fine, as parents did in those days. Two weeks later, school ended and Prescott went to work. He had to get up at five and be outside Carl Beeman’s house to help him load his chemicals, traps, and tools. They worked until dark.

Prescott gained fifteen pounds that summer and grew two inches. By the end of August, he was lean, tall, and tanned, and as strong as some men. He had also listened to Carl Beeman talk. Beeman was not like his little brother. Carl was thought of as on the slow side of average, but he was given credit for his compact, functional body that had been toughened by the endless physical labor that only small businessmen are willing to endure. Prescott discovered that Carl had also developed his mind during those years, in the eccentric way peculiar to people of a contemplative temperament who spend a lot of time alone.

Carl Beeman made most of his money on rodents. He knew everything about mice and rats: how they had made their way into a building, what they had been eating, how long they had been there, how many there were. He would climb into an attic, go down into a basement, walk slowly around the outside of the house, a skilled hunter scouting the habitat before he made his plan.

As the summer went on, Beeman began to talk to Prescott while he worked, teaching him in low tones just above a whisper, and Prescott learned. The owner of the house was a bystander: the business was between Beeman and the mice. The adversaries understood and recognized each other, engaged in a primal battle for dominion over this space. The human beings whose names were on a paper filed in the county courthouse were as irrelevant to Beeman as they were to the mice. Although these people, in a way, fed and housed both sides of the struggle, they took no part in it and seldom saw the places where major battles were fought. Beeman was a good enough businessman to be sure the customers saw the casualties—rodents he carried out in plastic bags that didn’t need to be transparent but were.

Slowly, Prescott discovered that Beeman respected and sympathized with the mice. They were perfectly normal animals doing what animals did. They struggled for food, a warm, dry place, and safety. They had a good strategy: they shared a house with another, larger species that used it almost exclusively during daylight, so they used it mainly at night. The attributes of the larger species rendered it harmless to mice except for one quirk of evolution: the big, slow daylight creatures had Carl Beeman’s phone number.

Each campaign was carried out over a period of a week, with Beeman using a variety of tactics, checking daily to see how each had worked. Had he blocked all the entrances? Had the corn treated with strychnine been nibbled? Carried off? What were the mice doing on their side—chewing their way out? Prescott sighed. It was thirty-five years later now, and he had become Carl Beeman. He had been right about this adversary, and he had picked the right way to get the adversary to call. It had taken Prescott only a couple of days to select the right poison and deliver it. The killer might spend the next couple of days walking around ignoring it, but it would gradually work its way in and begin to hurt.

The killer would call again. He had to, because the need was hardwired into his brain. He didn’t just have to practice until he was smarter and stronger and more powerful. This was his destiny, the little play that he had been inadvertently raised to act out. He had been struggling to defeat the enemy that was older and bigger and had somehow always thwarted him and kept him down but had, at the same time, been oddly invisible, missing, impossible to even identify. Prescott stared at his hands. To volunteer for that role in this particular drama, a man would have to be crazy. He pushed the REWIND button on the tape recorder, picked up a pen, and waited to copy the words onto a notepad.