Simple Simon

Chapter Seven Process of Elimination

The lone door to the Chocolate Box swung open into the brilliant light of the early spring day, patches of snow still on the ground, and uniformed Marines staring seriously from their perimeter posts at Brad Folger. After a moment he saw their eyes track in another direction and followed the lead.

Kudrow walked slowly along the gravel bed that ringed the Chocolate Box just inside the inner fence. He knew he’d be causing havoc in the security center right then, trampling the buried motion sensors as he was, but he honestly didn’t give a damn. He needed air. He needed to walk in the open. He needed to think.

He did not, however, need Folger.

Granite pebbles grinding beneath expensive shoes brought Kudrow’s walk to a halt. He looked up and stared through the several layers of wire toward the woods beyond still more wire, letting Folger come to him. When his assistant was alongside he said, “I take it you’ve heard.”

White mist flared from Folger’s nostrils. “Nick, end this, now, before we all end up in prison.”

“I’m tiring of your resistance, Bradley,” Kudrow said, as if referring to an annoyance that could be driven off with the swat of his hand.

“Nick, the kid is with his doctor, who is married to a ranking FBI agent, who just happens to be running the investigation of Bell!” Folger glanced toward the Marines, but they were out of earshot.

“I’ll note your concern.”

“God dammit, Nick!” Folger swore, loud enough now that two Marines did look, briefly, before turning discreetly away.

Kudrow snatched his glasses off and snapped his head toward Folger. His small, myopic eyes glared at the shorter, younger man, saying much before the words came. “Bradley. I don’t have to say to you what I can say to you. Do I?”

Folger’s eyes fled first, then his face, looking off to the same woods that Kudrow had gazed at. He breathed deeply, haltingly, and felt almost like laughing, but nothing was funny. Everything, however, was quite absurd, and quite awful. “I never thought you’d do this to me.”

“I’ve done nothing,” Kudrow reminded and warned his assistant, then replaced his glasses.

Folger nodded. “Yeah.”

“I hope I don’t have to.”

Now Folger did chuckle, at himself, for being so damn naive to believe that G. Nicholas Kudrow had once saved his ass out of pure humanity. One mistake. One lousy mistake.

“You find this amusing?” Kudrow asked, mildly perplexed.

“Fucking hilarious, Nick,” Folger answered through a pained grin. “You’re good. You know that?”

Kudrow again looked off toward the trees and thought of whitetail season, the crack of the rifle, the taste of venison.

“You kept it real close, right up to the chest, making me feel like you weren’t even looking.” Folger swallowed hard. “You kept that card to play later. Right?”

“Stop worrying,” Kudrow said with irritation. “You think you’ve sinned?” His head shook slightly. He knew real sinners. “You’re a saint, Bradley.”

A saint. Folger was certain the authorities wouldn’t characterize him as such if Kudrow played his ace. “You have all the cards, Nick. The whole fucking deck. Who else do you own…or rent as needed?”

Kudrow told himself that when this was all over, when the next season opened, he was going to go into the field and bring down a magnificent buck with just one shot. Dead on. A clean kill. “You don’t want to know what I know, Bradley. You might wonder what we work so hard for.”

“Yeah,” Folger agreed with offhand sarcasm. “Yeah. That’d be a shame.”

A venison tenderloin sizzling on the grill. Kudrow could hear it, could smell it. But he could not see it. All his mind’s eye could manage to conjure at the moment was the face of the FBI agent he’d seen in a photograph transmitted from one of the field teams. A black man, a serious, hard looking man, with careful eyes and determination cut into the jaw line.

A smart man.

An uncompromising man.

“He’ll have to be removed,” Kudrow said to the distant treeline.

“As in gotten rid of, done away with, eliminated,” Folger observed. “You suggest it like it’s no harder than lighting a cigar. Do you really think it’s that easy?”

“Removal through less than lethal means,” Kudrow explained. “It is possible. Quite possible.”

“And how is that?”

Kudrow had been considering how it might be done before Folger’s interruption, and there was one, and only one, course to follow to that end.

“I’m going to run it by Rothchild,” Kudrow said. He looked to his assistant to measure his response. Folger had one hand over his quivering right eye, the other cast toward the ground. Without a word he showed Kudrow his back and walked away.

Conrad Cabral, in thirty years on the Seattle Police Department, sixteen of those working homicide, could not remember seeing an arm bent at the angle it had been on the body of this male. At least they were reasonably sure it was a male. No genitalia had been found as yet, and the face was no help, chopped and even bitten as it was. There were no breasts, but then the chest had been opened with a rough X cut from each armpit to the opposite hip bone, making certain determination doubtful until the medical examiner got a look.

But the damn arm. As the police photographer’s strobe pulsed, Cabral stared at the limb from his vantage point aside the queen bed in room 1312 of the downtown Seattle Hilton. It was the only one of the four limbs not bound, and it was twisted around at least once, wrinkling the skin and underlying tissue near the shoulder. The distorted hand at its end was shoved into the bloody cavity opened across the sternum, as if reaching in for something.

“Three stooges,” Cabral said aloud, drawing the attention of his partner, Zack Norris, scratching notes a few feet behind.

“Huh?”

Cabral turned back to Norris. “The arm. Moe used to grab Curly’s arm and twist in around and around until it would look like that, you figured.”

“I thought he twisted Shemp’s arm,” the photographer interjected.

Cabral thought. “Coulda been Shemp, I guess.”

Norris put his notebook away. “You ever see one like this?”

“Nope.”

An evidence technician exited the bathroom, stepping over a pronounced blood trail. Norris looked his way and asked, “You find the dick?”

The evidence technician shook his head and held up a clear bag that contained bloody towels. “Just these. Someone cleaned up. Showered and all. Even dried their hair. Long and black.”

“Have the toilet pulled and the plumbing checked,” Cabral directed. “It could be stuck in the pipes.”

Norris came around the bed, his eyes sweeping the walls spattered with red, marveling at the amount of blood both there and on the bedding. “The mattress acted like a sponge.”

Cabral nodded and thought quietly to himself as the photographer burned through two more rolls. “Zack, does this look like some fun gone bad?”

“It looks like something bad gone bad.”

Rage, mutilation, revelry in the corpse, positioning of the body after death (God, please, after death, Cabral hoped). It was a textbook serial murder, the most important word being ‘serial’ in this case. “This wasn’t their first time.”

“Nope,” Norris agreed, pulling his notebook again, ready for his partner’s direction.

“Run the method through NCIC,” Cabral instructed as he bent forward to examine the feet. The toenails were gone. “Be real specific.”

Norris made a few notations. He would take care of the paperwork and fax the request to the National Crime Information Center as soon as they got back to the office. And considering the nature of the homicide, it was likely there’d be a quick ‘hit’ if any at all. Some killers left their signatures at crime scenes, and some crime scenes were signatures in themselves. Norris was betting on the latter.

“Give me that desk receipt,” Cabral said, and Norris fished it out of a pocket and handed it over.

“Susan Pu,” Cabral said, reading from the credit card impression.

“Long black hair,” Norris offered.

Cabral passed the receipt back, impatience welling. “Go do the NCIC paperwork now.”

“Right now?”

Cabral looked at the body. “Yep.”