Dark Specter

19

The day after she had spoken to Charlie Freeman, Kristine Kjarstad caught the red-eye to Chicago, arriving at five in the morning. Considering the hour, O’Hare was a hive of activity. It had a buzzy, big-city feel in striking contrast to the quiet, deserted spaces of Sea-Tac the night before. Kristine could remember nothing in between except one glimpse of some town on the prairie, lines and clusters of lights like molten plasma showing through cracks in the black surface crust.

She went into a cafe staffed by two male Hispanics sporting huge gilt rings, and ordered a bran muffin and a mug of coffee that would have put the place out of business in a week back in latte-land. Dawn was just breaking, patches of dark blue sky appearing against the lowering clouds. Living in a city defined by hills and water, Kristine had been amazed by the scale and regularity of Chicago as they overflew the vast grid of streets which seemed to stretch away forever, with highways and railroad lines overlaid on it like cross-hatching.

Here at the airport, it paraded its character in a different way, in the sheer variety of the people around, and in the way they presented themselves. Two paunchy men wearing tractor caps and baggy leisure outfits sat opposite two scrawny women in thick-rimmed glasses, stud earrings and floppy pantsuits. Next to them, a group of businessmen in Italian suits were trying unsuccessfully to ignore a woman making a full-frontal fashion statement in a slinky, skin-tight sheath. There was a hip black dude too cool to look at anyone, a slutty woman of about thirty with heavy makeup and come-on hair, a crop-haired guy with tattoos on his arms and macho-military clothing, women in two-piece suits with a full complement of matching accessories.

It all made Kristine feel dowdy and provincial. Seattle was a pleasant place to live, but it was not a sexy city. No one dressed to impress, there was little eye contact and street life was like her mother’s cooking: bland, wholesome and homogeneous. She was so used to being invisible that it was a shock to find all these people eyeing her, sizing her up, weighing and measuring her. A sense of anxiety came over her, a panicky suspicion that this whole trip was based on a delusion which would instantly collapse under the weight of scrutiny it would be exposed to out here in the real world.

Rather than go through another humiliating interview with Dick Rice, she had taken a couple of days off, parked Thomas with his father and bought the ticket herself. If she came up with the goods, she would bill the department. If not, she was stuck with the tab. But it wasn’t the money that worried her so much as the prospect of being revealed as an unsophisticated, self-important hick, like some small-town genius who keeps bugging the Patent Office with plans for inventions you can buy for twenty-nine cents at any drugstore.

Outside the terminal, she picked up a cab to Evanston. The vehicle was an old Dodge with spongy shocks, a high-pitched whine from the transmission and a tendency to pull to the right when they braked. The backseat was covered in a crocheted afghan, like a sofa in a blue-collar living room. The driver was a Pakistani who had been in the country for two months. He was courteous and voluble, but seemed to have only the vaguest grasp of the local geography.

“Evenstone, Evenstone, Evenstone,” he chanted softly. “Nice town, nice streets, nice people, but is not a good place to go from here. In the city, no problem. I am seeing signs, “Evenstone,” even though I do not myself go there at this time. But from here is very difficult, I think.”

Kristine finally went back inside and bought a street map from which she gave the driver directions. The route turned out to be very straightforward, north a ways on Highway 294 and then east along a street called Dempster running dead straight for eight miles to the shores of Lake Michigan.

The cab let her off in the wedge of shops and offices a few blocks wide which constituted the miniature city’s downtown area. She tipped overgenerously, got a receipt, and then spent about five minutes going over various possible routes back to Chicago. The driver listened with a look of increasing desperation, like a man who suspects that he may never see his family again. Eventually Kristine gave him the map as well, and the Dodge lurched off, leaving a smudge of black exhaust smoke on the still air.

Her appointment with Eileen McCann wasn’t until eight o’clock, and since nothing in Evanston was open yet, she decided to wander around and pick up the feel of the place. The broad, tree-lined streets leading to the lake were lined with brick apartment buildings fixed up like fake castles, with leaded windows, crenellated roofs and turrets with arrow slits, and huge mansions in Tudor or New England style, each standing on a lot big enough to accommodate six houses like her own.

She spent a while walking along the lake, then wandered back under a low iron railroad bridge into a neighborhood of slightly less grandiose properties a few blocks inland. This area may have been on the wrong side of the tracks, but it wasn’t exactly skid row. The houses were spacious and well proportioned, the yards deep and well tended with mature trees, the streets broad and quiet. It was only when she saw the sign reading MAPLE that she realized she had stumbled on the site of the crime that had brought her there.

The house itself was four blocks farther south. She spotted it at once by the FOR SALE sign. The name of the realtor had been changed from Bonnie Kowalski to Evan Krebb. It was a lugubrious half-timbered affair with a ground floor in brick, a fancy arch over the front door, and steeply angled roofs rising to Gothic peaks. After all the unwelcome publicity the property had received, moving this home was going to be a real test of Mr. Krebb’s salesmanship.

Kristine walked on, shaking her head slowly. Of the many questions to which she wanted answers from the wounded gunman in Atlanta, none obsessed her more than the choice of target. Between the Sullivans’ home in Renton and this Victorian pile lay a socioeconomic gulf as wide as the distance between the two towns themselves. What conceivable criterion could bridge such a gap?

There were plenty of other mysteries, of course. The Dale Watson who had been involved in the Evanston case was dead, but another one had appeared in Atlanta. Was this just a coincidence, or was there a generic “Dale Watson” of whom these two were simply examples? Above all, what was the purpose behind such senseless killings? With any luck, Kristine thought as she strolled back to the center of town, she would have the answers to all these questions by that evening. Her connecting flight left at one-thirty, getting into Atlanta three hours later. By five, or shortly after, she would be at the surviving gunman’s bedside.

Despite what Charlie Freeman had said, she didn’t think it would be too hard to make him cooperate. The detail of the Nike Air Jordan basketball shoes clinched it. She felt sure that the man in intensive care in Grady Memorial Hospital was one of the two who had taken part in the Kansas City shooting, where he had stepped in the pink paint hurled in a last act of desperation by Winston Jones, the handyman. And he had also been at the house in Renton, where Jamie had seen the shoes from his hiding place. But their owner didn’t know anything about this. He thought he was safely anonymous, supposedly the innocent victim of an unprovoked street attack. Best of all, he had no idea that Jamie Sullivan had survived.

Kristine had already put together her game plan. She wouldn’t ask questions, she would make statements. She’d start by describing the Renton and Kansas City killings in great detail. Then she’d confront him with a copy of her interviews with Jamie, carefully edited to exclude the fact that the boy hadn’t actually seen the killers. Finally, at the psychologically precise moment, she would drop in the detail of the Nike Air Jordans. That would be enough to make him talk, she calculated, particularly in his weakened condition. The case against him was airtight, and in a death-penalty state. The shock of discovering that his crimes were known, documented and witnessed, added to the prospect of enduring weeks of agony in the hospital only to end up dangling from the end of a rope, would surely be enough to break even the strongest and most stubborn spirit.

At exactly eight o’clock, Kristine Kjarstad presented herself at the front desk of the police station and asked for Eileen McCann. While she waited, she surveyed her reflection in a glass door across the room. With the image she had formed of Eileen McCann in mind, she had given some thought to her own. Finally she had settled for a gray cotton-blend suit, sober but expensive, with a stiff backbone of polyester to help resist the rigors of an overnight in cattle class. Add her executive-style briefcase, and she figured she was a match for anyone.

It turned out she needn’t have bothered with any of these elaborate preparations. In person, Eileen McCann was a sad frump, overweight and out of shape, a chain-smoking fashion victim for whom every day was a bad-hair day. She greeted Kristine coolly and invited her into a small, immaculately neat office. The walls were bare, the papers and books neatly stacked, the furniture modern and functional. Even the cigarette butts in the ashtray were aligned as precisely as they had been in the pack.

“Do you have an interesting life, Ms. Carstad?” McCann asked when they were seated. “Professionally, I mean.”

Kristine shrugged.

“King County is pretty big. It stretches from the ocean all the way up to the mountains, and surrounds Seattle on three sides. So we get our share of the action.”

McCann crushed out her cigarette and laid it beside the others in the ashtray.

“I envy you. Crimewise, Evanston is strictly bush league. The most interesting case I’ve had until this thing was an alleged date rape involving two students from the Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary. And the only interesting thing about that was trying to figure out which of the parties involved was lying most about what. So yesterday, instead of trying to break through to a new level in the video game which my partner thoughtfully downloaded into our computer, we worked the phones and the fax and contacted four hundred law enforcement agencies and state prosecutor’s offices across the country. Correction, three hundred ninety-two.”

Kristine looked suitably impressed.

“That must have taken hours.”

“Jeff went home at five, but then he has a home to go to. I stayed till eleven. I made a few more calls out west, where they were still at work, then collated the data we’d come up with. I didn’t even notice the time, to tell you the truth. I was too damn excited.”

“You found something?”

Eileen McCann wrinkled her unlovely nose.

“I would hardly have brought the matter to your attention otherwise, Detective Carstad.”

“Call me Kristine.”

The other woman appeared to consider this offer carefully.

“OK. And you can call me lies.”

“Iles?”

“That was my father’s name for me. My mother always referred to me as Miss Eileen. ‘Well, Miss Eileen, straight As again, huh? Looks like you must have brains, at least. Let’s hope so, child, because that face sure as hell won’t pay your freight.’ She was typical lace-curtain Irish, hypocritical with outsiders, ruthless with her family.”

She passed Kristine a sheaf of neatly typed pages.

“OK, here’s my homework from last night. As you’ll see, our makeshift poll elicited six matches to add to the two we already know about.”

“Make that three. After I called you, I found out about what looks like another one, in Atlanta.”

Eileen McCann lit another cigarette.

“I’d like to hear about that later, Kristine. As I was saying, we came up with six cases which fit the broad parameters you outlined on the phone. In reverse chronological order, they are St. Louis, Los Angeles, Oklahoma, Columbus, Salt Lake City and Houston.”

Kristine scanned the first sheet, which provided brief details of location and timing for each crime. The earliest was four years ago. The rest had occurred at irregular intervals since then, anywhere from a few weeks to several months.

“You sure got a quick response out of the LE As involved,” she said, partly to cover her embarrassment at not having done the same thing herself weeks before.

“They mostly didn’t even have to consult their files,” McCann replied crisply. “The kind of thing we’re talking about here is so unusual it tends to stick in the minds of the investigators however long ago it was. Most of them were able to tell me what I wanted to know then and there, over the phone.”

She consulted a copy of the document she had given Kristine.

“As you can see, Houston is chronologically the first of the presumed series. The victims were three males in their twenties and a prostitute they had brought back from a bar. The men were living in a trailer. They had a dog loose in the yard. A lump of raw steak was wedged in the chainlink. When the dog came to investigate, it was shot with a.22-caliber automatic silenced with the nipple from a baby bottle which was found discarded at the scene. One of the guys comes to the door and is shot between the eyes. One of the others tries to grab a rifle on the wall, doesn’t make it. The other and the hooker are both shot in the head at close range.”

Kristine had been following the typed report.

“They used regular CSA ammo, no handcuffs or gags, and an automatic, not a revolver. Apart from that, the MO fits.”

“You’d expect some variation. They’d refine the details as they gained more experience. For instance, realizing that the benefit of being able to suppress the noise from an automatic was outweighed by the disadvantages of leaving behind identifiable ejected cartridges or wasting time hunting around for them. On the other hand, the similarities may just be superficial. The Houston PD wrote it off as some kind of lowlife feud. The victims all had records going way back. Maybe they’d made one too many enemies.”

Eileen McCann tapped the ash from her cigarette.

“But take a look at the next one. Salt Lake City, a widow living alone with her cat. No criminal connections there, and no hint of a motive. The victim had almost eight hundred bucks in a vase sitting in plain view right there on the mantel, but it was untouched. Plus there’s a second victim who just happened to be there at the time, a neighbor’s kid who came by for piano lessons. He heard the shot and ran, but they caught up with him at the back door, which was locked, and took him down too. Which is maybe why they’ve started using the restraints and the gags by the time we get to Columbus, Ohio. That way they can go through the house and secure all the victims before they start shooting.”

Kristine turned the page. Her heart was pounding with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. If this was a series, it was one of the biggest things in years. The investigation would make or break her career, and not just her career. “It’s theirs to screw up,” Dick Rice had told her. Now it was hers.

“What happened in Columbus?” she murmured.

“A doctor and her teenage son are having dinner when someone comes to the door. A neighbor sees two men on the stoop but pays no attention. She remembers the time, though, because Jeopardy is just beginning. When the woman’s husband gets home shortly afterward, he finds his wife and child shot dead. A patrol car a few blocks away is there within seconds. Not more than ten minutes have elapsed since the shootings, but the killers have disappeared.”

Kristine nodded absently, following the script in front of her.

“And then Oklahoma,” she remarked, just to make it look like she was on the case.

“Right. Two gay guys. It looks like one of the killers posed as a deliveryman that time. The cops found the pizza still in the box on the porch. Bought as a takeout, paid cash, no record. Guy comes to the door, sees the box, relaxes. “There must be some mistake, buddy.” “Isn’t this 3468 Roanoke?” “Sure, but we didn’t order a pizza.” Blam, blam. Los Angeles, an illegal immigrant and three friends playing cards one evening. Nothing new there. St. Louis’s kind of instructive, though. This is a classy high-rise with a security guard, closed-circuit TV, the works. Our guys turn up in overalls and say they’ve got a sofa which Mr. Miller in 308 ordered from the store. Mr. Miller isn’t home, as they’ve no doubt ascertained by phoning a few minutes before. The guys show the guard the sofa they’ve got right there blocking up the lobby. “We just need to stick it inside the door of the guy’s apartment,” they say. “It’ll take two minutes.” So the guard lets them into 308, where they pull guns and cuff and gag him. But-get this-they don’t kill him.”

Kristine Kjarstad looked up with a puzzled expression. She’d lost track of her place in the text, overwhelmed by the other woman’s dominant personality.

“So who did they kill?”

Eileen McCann stubbed out her cigarette and added it to the growing pile.

“Some newlyweds who’d just moved in. They used the guard’s master key to get in. But that’s not significant. The point is, why didn’t they shoot the guard too? The guy was with them for almost ten minutes. He was able to give the police a full description. If these guys are so ruthless they kill kids and babies, why do they spare a witness who could send them both to the gas chamber? They make a big point of not leaving any evidence behind, no prints, no spent cartridges, no traces of any kind, yet they have this guy at their mercy and let him live! Why?”

Kristine Kjarstad shrugged. She felt good again, in charge. By this evening I’ll have the answer to that, she thought.

“Beats me,” she said.

Eileen McCann nodded.

“Are you religious, Kristine?”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

She felt the ground give way beneath her again. Eileen McCann smiled for the first time.

“It’s just that I don’t want to offend anyone’s sensibilities,” she said. “It seems to be so easy to do these days. I myself am a Catholic of the cafeteria variety, and last year I received from an ancient aunt a perfectly hideous calendar featuring photographs of the present pope which I put up on the wall in here, largely to get it out of the house. A coworker who recently converted to Islam objected to this, and the Chief made me take it down. His secretary had taken him to court about a Matisse print he had bought to brighten up his office, on the grounds that the seminude subject was, quote, demeaning to her as a woman and a blatant act of sexual harassment in the workplace which made her feel raped by proxy, unquote. So you have to tread delicately.”

“I’m kind of a go-along, get-along Episcopalian,” Kristine replied.

Eileen McCann nodded.

“That’s sufficient for my purposes.”

“Which are?”

“To remind you, and myself, that the human brain favors connections over disjunctions. In other words, we are programmed to privilege data which appear to generate patterns over data which call patterns into question. Hence the eternal temptation of God, and the corresponding necessity of an organized theology by means of which these temptations can be safely controlled.”

Kristine sat looking at her in amazement. How little we know about anyone, she thought, and how much we presume.

“Descending from the theological to the criminal,” McCann continued, “we are faced here with a situation in which the temptation to make connections is almost overwhelming. These killings seem to exemplify all the things we fear most about the society we live in. Random violence, the killer at the door, your name on some unknown agenda. We need to construct a theory to connect and contain these events. What worries me is that in satisfying that urge, we may find ourselves ignoring the facts which tend to contradict any such thesis.”

“Such as?” Kristine demanded.

“Such as the absence of any conceivable motive. People don’t just travel all over the country committing acts of violence without some reason. If it’s a terrorist group, how come they aren’t publicizing their activities? And who are they targeting? In your case they killed a baby, in Kansas a cripple, here a realtor and a lawyer. What’s the connecting thread? It doesn’t exist. There’s no discernible victim typology, by age, gender, ethnicity, profession, religion or social level.”

Kristine Kjarstad nodded.

“I see what you’re saying here, Iles. But I still think there is a pattern.”

“Because of this Atlanta case? Tell me about it.”

Kristine hesitated.

“It doesn’t sound like much. Two whites and three blacks in a firefight. One on either side was killed, the other white is in the hospital.”

“I don’t see the connection.”

“There may not be any. But the white guys were armed with.22 Smiths loaded with this Stinger ammo, and they were carrying a case with handcuffs and a roll of duct tape. I figure they were on their way to hit a house when they ran into a different kind of trouble. Anyway, I’m going down there to speak to the survivor.”

Eileen McCann raised her eyebrows.

“You’re going to Atlanta?”

She sounded disapproving. Kristine felt a need to justify herself.

“I know it’s a long shot, but this could be one of the biggest things in years, Iles. We’d be national celebrities!”

She immediately regretted this last remark. I’ve been spending too much time with Steve Warren, she thought.

“You might, Kristine,” Eileen McCann replied pointedly, “but it would take more than a mere homicidal conspiracy to get this mug on coast-to-coast television. Anyway, I think you’re allowing your dreams of stardom to run away with you. Our presumptive killers don’t have a monopoly on Smith amp; Wesson handguns or fragmenting bullets. Nor is there any reason to suppose that they are the only ones to have realized that handcuffs are the best way to-”

“There’s something else,” Kristine interrupted. “The guy who was killed was going under the name Dale Watson.”

Eileen McCann waved her hand impatiently.

“Dale Watson’s dead. That’s one thing we know for sure. His father went to the morgue and ID’d the body.”

“So the guy in Atlanta is using the name as an alias. But why that name?”

They stared at each other.

“Maybe he read about it in the papers,” McCann suggested. “A kind of copycat thing.”

“Maybe. But that’s kind of weird too. Like you said, these people seem to go to enormous lengths to avoid leaving any clues. So you’d think they’d be smart enough not to use a name which is already known to the police in connection with a similar crime.”

Eileen McCann looked at her for a long time.

“What time is your flight?” she asked.

“I have to check in by one.”

McCann glanced at her watch.

“I’ll give you a ride. We can pick up a bite to eat on the way.”

Much to Kristine’s surprise, Eileen McCann turned out to be something of a foodie. The “bite to eat” consisted of eight helpings of delicious dim sum at a restaurant in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood called Lincolnwood. Eileen was relaxed, witty and informative about her work, colleagues and the sociocultural microclimates of the northern Chicago suburbs. By the time they reached the airport, they were talking like friends.

Instead of dropping Kristine at the curb, Eileen parked in the short-term facility and accompanied her inside, then abruptly dashed off to use the bathroom without saying good-bye. Kristine headed for the gate, where the plane was boarding. She found her seat and settled back with a copy of Vanity Fair she had bought at Sea-Tac the night before.

The plane had leveled off at cruise altitude when she looked up to see Eileen McCann walking down the aisle toward her.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“God, I hate flying!” the other woman exclaimed. “Two hours without a smoke.”

She smiled and shrugged.

“Here’s the deal. You get the TV coverage, and they can stick me on NPR and local radio. Even my mother conceded that my voice wasn’t so bad. Or as she tactfully put it, ‘If you could date by phone, the guys’d be all over you like an old coat.’”

She settled into an empty seat across the aisle, pulled out a battered paperback and didn’t utter a single word for the rest of the flight. Kristine dozed.

The descent into Atlanta was bumpy, the landing hard. It was pouring with rain, sheets of it falling from a sky the color of mud. They exited the plane, passing through an intermediate zone of clammy air before the air-conditioning took over. It was like walking through a hot shower. Among the crowd at the gate was a tubby black man with glasses and a mustache holding a piece of cardboard with Kristine’s name written on it in pink marker.

“Were you sent to pick me up?” she asked him.

“You Miss Kjarstad?”

He pronounced it perfectly.

“That’s right.”

“I figured you far taller, more intense,” the man went on with a broad smile. “The Nike type. Charlie told me about that. He was very impressed, you knowing Greek and all.”

She recognized the voice now. He had called her the day before to make final arrangements for her visit.

“You’re Lamont Wingate, right?”

The man stuck out his hand.

“Pleased to meet you.”

Kristine turned to introduce her companion.

“This is Detective Eileen McCann of the Evanston City Police. She also has an interest in this case.”

Lamont Wingate shook Eileen’s hand too.

“It’s my pleasure to welcome you to Georgia, ladies.”

“But I thought we arranged to meet at the hospital,” Kristine said. “There was no need to come all the way out here to the airport.”

Lamont Wingate suddenly looked serious.

“Yeah, well, there’s been a change of plan, you see. I’ve been trying to reach you all day. If I’d known you were in Evanston, I’d have called there. The thing is, I’m afraid you’ve made a wasted trip.”

Kristine felt her stomach contract painfully.

“What do you mean?”

“That guy you came to talk to? He’s dead.”

“No!”

It was a shriek. Eileen McCann put her hand on Kristine’s arm.

“You mean he had a relapse?” she demanded.

Lamont Wingate shook his head.

“Did it hisself. Called the night nurse as she passed on her way back from tending to another patient and asked her for a drink. She went off to get it, he lifted a hypodermic needle off her cart. Time they found him, it was too late. ‘Exsanguinated,’ they called it at the hospital. Found an artery and stuck the needle right in there. Blood pressure does the rest. The mattress was soaked right through.”

He shook his head sadly.

“I sure am sorry you ladies had to come all this way for nothing.”