Spark

13

Only twenty minutes had passed before Desoto came back into the room. He was carrying a yellow file folder and some fanfold computer paper with faint dot-matrix printing on it. Hard copy, Desoto called it these days, now that he’d become computer literate.

“You still on the first book, amigo?”

Carver said, “I want to be sure.”

“Well, I can save you some trouble, I think. VICAP had a file on your guy. In fact, there’s a wealth of information about him. He fascinates people, like a lot of predators do. Name Adam Beed strike a chord?”

Carver closed the mug book and shook his head no.

Desoto drew a fax photo from the folder and laid it on the table. The face of the man who’d attacked Carver stared up at him. Yet as he looked longer at the grainy black-and-white image he couldn’t be positive. Desoto laid another photo before Carver; in this one Beed was wearing his black horn-rimmed glasses. No doubt about who it was. He was also wearing the horn-rims in the defiant, chin-up profile shot Desoto placed on the table. He looked more upwardly mobile than criminal.

“Him,” Carver said, feeling something warm and fierce growing in his belly.

Desoto sat down across from Carver at the table. He had his suit coat on but he didn’t appear to be uncomfortable in the stifling room. “I made some calls, amigo, learned plenty about Beed. He was an accountant at a major investment firm, got into trouble with embezzlement six years ago, and did a stretch in Raiford.”

Carver stared at him. “An accountant?”

Desoto smiled. “He had your number, hey?”

“How long’s he been out?” Carver asked.

“Paroled eighteen months ago. When he was in prison he underwent a kind of metamorphosis. Within a couple of years he was nothing like the soft, white-collar type who walked through the gates. Took to weight training, martial arts, lightened up on cocaine.”

“He had a habit?”

“Oh, yes. That was why he embezzled, to support it. He was still on the stuff in prison, but he had to moderate. Despite what the public hears, drugs aren’t all that easy to get inside the walls. Not like out here, anyway. Beed got bigger and stronger, then bigger and stronger again. Then he went about getting even with an inmate who’d raped him when he was new, a tough hombre in for murder. Nothing can be proved, but it seems the fella lost his left arm in a workshop accident. Naturally enough, he won’t talk about what really happened.”

“Maybe Beed broke it off,” Carver said.

“A joke, amigo?”

“I suppose,” Carver said. “I get fed up hearing how tough assholes like Beed are, how they plow over everybody who gets in their way.” Outside in the distance a siren warbled frantically, maybe responding to a call about a crime perpetrated by one of the world’s Adam Beeds. Carver hated the takers in life. Right now, Beed in particular. “Get on with your story,” he said.

Desoto said, “Beed became a sadistic homosexual himself, and rumor has it he murdered his cellmate. Again, nothing provable. Beed can put on an act in front of investigators or a parole board. And he still thinks and acts like an accountant. He’s conservative in dress and manner, the kind of guy you’d trust in a minute to date your daughter or keep your books.”

“Your daughter and books,” Carver said, “not mine. If Beed’s on parole, you must have a current address on him.”

Desoto laughed. “No, my friend. You aren’t hearing what I’m saying about this one. He’s different. This kind of animal breaks parole the first week he’s released, then disappears. It’s predictable, and that’s what happened with Beed. But like I said, he’s cautious. He knew he’d lose big if he got nailed for possession of illegal narcotics in prison, so the word is he replaced his cocaine habit with alcohol dependency. Not his drug of choice, but he had to make do if he didn’t want a lot of years behind bars.”

“Is that all that’s on his sheet?” Carver asked. “The embezzlement conviction?”

“That’s it, amigo. I told you he was different. I said it’s suspected he killed his cellmate, but I didn’t talk about method. The cellmate was a little guy named Kravak, in for a homicide committed while he was burglarizing a drugstore. Prison guards found Kravak dead; he’d been tortured with lighted cigarettes touched to the bottoms of his feet, his genitals, eyelids, everywhere. Took the prison doctors a while to figure out what killed him, though. A straightened wire coat hanger inserted through his rectum. It pierced everything right up to and including his heart.”

Carver pushed away his revulsion and replaced it with resolve. Some of his fear he left intact; he’d need it to keep an edge, to avoid making a dumb move based on emotion. “So Beed’s an unreserved sadist. You think I don’t know that?”

Desoto’s somber brown eyes were steady. He meshed his fingers, gold rings flashing in the blast of sunlight through the window. “Something else, amigo. They found the cellmate in a storeroom, and in the condition I just described. But also, there were bites out of him.”

Carver felt his stomach pulse against his belt buckle. “Jesus! We talking cannibalism?”

“Probably not. More like old-fashioned cruelty with a disgusting twist. It took the doctors a few days to realize they were looking at bites; things had been done to the wounds with a knife so it’d be impossible to match tooth patterns.”

Carver sat back and watched dust motes swirl in the angled shaft of sunlight bisecting the room. The siren had faded to silence outside. Maybe the bad guy was caught, and a modicum of order had been restored to the world.

“This Beed,” Desoto said, “he’s strong as an Olympic weight lifter, and he’s a psycho. He was a monster in prison, and I was told he’s been taking steroids since his release, maybe even was on them behind the walls, so he’s even more dangerous.”

Carver was getting weary of the buildup. And angry. “The man’s not a goddamn tank.”

“No, he’s much more dangerous. He’s got a brain, he’s more maneuverable than a tank, and meaner. Follow his advice, amigo. Give your apologies to Hattie Evans. Say your good-byes and continue to live.”

“And the law will take over the case?”

Desoto shrugged with elegant sadness. “There are no witnesses to Beed’s attack on you, and as I said, he would have an alibi even if we did manage to locate him and pick him up for violating parole. So there still isn’t enough to warrant an official investigation of Jerome Evans’s death. If it were up to me, maybe, but I have to answer to the higher-ups. That’s why I sent Hattie to you, hey?”

“And now you’re telling me to turn her away.”

“Yes. You can’t bring her husband back to life, which is what she really wants. Instead you’ll join him in death. I know how you think, amigo, how you get fixated.”

“It’s my job to get fixated. That’s the kind of game we’re in and you know it.”

“Maybe that’s how you think of it, like some kind of game. That I understand. But this Beed is much more than an opponent; he’s a force. You should hope he goes somewhere else to cause problems. Or you could wait until a bullet from his dangerous world claims him.”

“But you know he won’t go somewhere else,” Carver said, shifting his weight over his cane and standing up. “And there’s no way to predict the where or when of bullets.”

Desoto stood also, buttoning and smoothing his suit coat. “Which is why you should go back to Del Moray and tend to other business.”

He seemed to be waiting for Carver to agree. Hoping.

“Thanks for this,” Carver said, limping toward the door.

“Amigo, you gonna smarten up and quit this thing? I mean, I’m in a way responsible for what might happen.”

“I’ll think about it,” Carver said. He reached the door and opened it, waiting for Desoto to catch up.

But when he looked around he saw Desoto leaning back against the table with his arms crossed, his ankles crossed, losing the crease of his expensive slacks. He was gazing at Carver with infinite sadness.

He said, “You lied to me, my friend, when you said you’d think about quitting. Am I right?”

“No. I’ll think about it. Anybody would.”

“But you won’t quit.”

“Probably not.”

“Would it kill you to quit?”

“Part of me.”

“Isn’t that better than all of you dying?”

“No.”

“Hmph!”

Carver supported himself with a hand on the doorknob, passing the tip of his cane back and forth over the floor in a compact, sweeping motion. Desoto knew why he’d come here. Knew what he’d do with the information. Now, because the information was more volatile than he’d imagined, he was pressuring. The way higher-ups in the department pressured him. He should understand that.

Carver said, “They ever find that arm?”

Desoto didn’t smile, but then Carver hadn’t expected him to.

He limped from the room.

Behind him, Desoto said softly, “Then stay in touch. Stay alive.”