Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

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.