Cutter (3 page)

Al
l
I
nee
d
t
o
d
o
i
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wai
t
fo
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the
m
an
d
suddenl
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ther
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the
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ar
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Righ
t
a
t
m
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fee
t
.

An
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th
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bes
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par
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f
th
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whol
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swee
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dea
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fo
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the
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tha
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absolutel
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painles
s.
The
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neve
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fee
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th
e
initia
l
incisio
n.
Thei
r
slee
p
i
s
alway
s,
alway
s
undisturbe
d
.

Chapter Four

We were waiting in the weeds because Doc was sure that this guy would hit again. We were not playing by the rule that said we waited until he struck repeatedly so that we could start putting together a pattern. Killers like this guy wanted to come back to a location where they felt comfortable. The Lakeshore was a great place for a hit because there was plenty of natural cover for someone like our guy. Trees, brush, vegetation of all kinds. Plenty of places to lurk behind. Anybody on their own was like the antelope that brought up the drag on a herd. He got picked off as a straggler.

Doc had his headset on and was listening to his jazz station from Evanston. I was the ears for the first hour. Jack Wendkos was parked with another detective in a car near the edge of the beach.

The police decoy’s name was Edna Millett. She was just out of the Academy, so I was nervous about the whole concept of staking her out like that African antelope at the ass end of the herd. She had volunteered for this, and there was no reason for our red-headed Captain to deny her request. Not with all the sexual harassment and discrimination suits that were flying around the City. So she got her wish. Edna was armed, but it would only take a second to slash her throat, and the killer would be back into the weeds before we could come help her.

The ME, Dr Gray, had explained to us that the stabbing wounds below that gutting slit were done post-mortem. In other words, the cutter waited until after the fact to tear her corpse up a little more. Our copper shrinks told us it was a sign of rage. Doc thought our psychiatrists had an uncanny sense of the obvious.

‘No shit, the guy was angry. Who cuts open a live human being, helps himself to her major internal organs, and then gouges the living shit out of her thighs and lower abdomen? No, this guy is definitely an unhappy person,’ Doc cracked.

Wendkos raised me on the hand-held radio.

‘Anything, Jimmy?’

‘Doc is listening to Thelonious Monk. He always tells me who it is I’m not hearing. Him and his headset.’

‘Let me hear from you. I’m getting nervous over this kid Edna ... When is she due?’

‘In about two minutes. You got any shakes from where you two are sitting?’

He was paired with Neil Pierson, a brother Homicide.

‘Nothing. Slow night.’

I could hear Wendkos’s partner rustling some papers. Either a newspaper or some fast-food wrappers. It was hard to tell over the hand-helds.

I clicked off.

‘Dave Brubeck.’ Doc pointed to his headset. ‘“Blue Rondo a la Turk”.’ He smiled.

He started bobbing his head like a teenager whose ear was attached to a boombox.

Then we heard a rustling about twenty yards straight in front of our position, which was behind two thick oak trees.

‘It’s a little early for Edna, ain’t it?’ Doc asked when I tapped his shoulder twice.

He tore off the headphones and clicked off the radio in his jacket pocket. 

‘Edna? Where are you?’ I asked into the headset I put on. Edna was hooked up with a small earpiece and a microphone on top of her bulletproof vest and windbreaker.

‘I’m about two hundred yards from your position by the trees ... Yo
u
ar
e
at those twin oaks, right?’

She sounded as nervous as I was. She was a twenty-four-year-old kid. An ex-stewardess who thought crosscountry flights with geezers who told sexually suggestive jokes to her were a giant drag. So she entered the Academy and became a copper.

‘We’re right where we’re supposed to be. There’s someone else between us and you. Copy?’

‘Where?’

‘About fifty yards to forty yards in front of us. You want us to check him and abort?’

‘I’m running out of distance. I should be almost on top of him.’

‘Fuck it, Edna. If it feels wrong we’ll pop him before you go another step. Say it now. Hurry!’

‘I’ll keep going. Pull up behind him. Copy?’

‘We’re coming out, Edna. Keep your eyes open and palm that fucking Nine.’

I radioed Wendkos we had a shake. I told him the approximate location of that sound I heard, and then the four of us were closing the ground between the noise and Doc and me. Wendkos was approaching the intruder from the east; we were headed north. There was a lot of undergrowth between us and Edna and between us and whatever was a few feet in front of us. It was a black night. No moon. Total cloud cover. But we couldn’t hit whoever was crunching through the vegetation in front of us because he would bolt, and then we wouldn’t know if he had bad thoughts about our young ex-stewardess.

Forty yards into our sprint and I heard her.

‘Don’t you move!’ she shrieked loudly enough for Doc and me to hear clearly. But we still couldn’t see her. Too much greenery still obscured her.

In fifteen or twenty more strides we were in a clearing and we could now see Edna. She had assumed the shoot position, her hands and arms extended before her. She had the Nine gripped in both hands, and it was pointed straight ahead of her at a kneeling figure.

When we finally got close enough, we saw that the kneeling man was wearing only a T-shirt and a pair of gym shoes. When Doc flashed the big light on the guy, we saw ‘Why Bother?’ printed on the back of the white T-shirt.

We rushed around him and saw that he had no pants or underwear on. He was quivering like a pooch that had been left out in a thunderstorm.

‘Jesus, don’t shoot me! I di’n’t mean nothin’!’

Then he vomited. Right over Edna’s expensive running shoes. I had this revulsion churning inside me. Edna was a pretty girl. Brunette. Well put together. And she’d left all those nice, sterile flights across North America to wind up in a pitch-dark park by Lake Michigan so that some cheesedick wienie-flasher could expose himself to her and then puke all over her toes. It didn’t seem dignified to me. It didn’t seem worth all that trouble for a woman to make it through the Police Academy.

‘I should shoot you for getting sick all over this nice young lady,’ Doc told the half-naked quiverer.

‘Please don’t shoot me!’

‘Shut the fuck up!’ Doc snapped.

Wendkos and Pierson had finally arrived.

‘We got lost in these weeds,’ Jack apologized.

‘You didn’t miss a thing,’ I told the two late arrivals.

Pierson started to snigger.

‘You aren’t really gonna shoot me, are you?’ the kneeling man whined.

‘Take off your shirt,’ Doc demanded.

There were three flashlights trained on this johnson-waggler.

‘Huh?’

‘Take off that shirt or I’ll shoot you right in your prized possession,’ Gibron told him. 

The shaking man tore off his T-shirt.

‘Now wipe the lady’s shoes. And I mean clean.’

Three more uniformed patrolmen emerged from the surrounding trees and bushes. They watched as the flasher cleaned up Edna’s Adidas footwear. The flashlights were still aimed at her shoes as he finally finished the job.

‘Now put that T-shirt back on,’ Doc concluded.

‘You can’t be —’

‘Motherfucker, you get that thing on your back or I’ll kick your sorry ass all the way downtown. When we get there
,
the
n
you can take it off,’ Doc Gibron explained.

I saw the perp wince as he put the shirt back on, just as Doc had ordered him. Wendkos cuffed him, and then Doc and I walked him back to our Taurus. Edna was riding back to the downtown headquarters with us.

The flasher got into the back seat with me. I didn’t want this reeking, butt-naked asshole sitting next to Edna on the long ride. I saw that she was grateful as I indicated that I’d be sitting in the back seat with her very first perpetrator.

This guy was a pee-pee-wiggler. Nothing more. We went back to the park and found his pants, but there was no sign of a knife. He didn’t appear to be a cutter. We charged him with assault and public indecency and with a couple other minor beefs, but he was not our guy.

He had no ether on him, either. He would have had no place to keep all the things our man had used in the killing of Genevieve Malone, the girl who went down in that same stretch of woods by the beach.

Randall Osborne had a sheet, though. He’d exposed himself twice before. Been nailed both times for short hitches in County. But no trace of violent behavior, so we had apparently come up empty.

The ether showed up on the corpse and in the blood work-ups Dr Gray had done at the morgue. So we knew our cutter put them to sleep and then did what he did to them. As I say, Doc was convinced that this wouldn’t be a one-time Charlie. The man did a very workmanlike job of removing Genevieve’s innards. That was all pro workmanship. The thing that disturbed me was the little rage number with the post-mortem mutilations. It was like this guy was of two minds. First he took care of business, and then he thought he owed himself a little something for all the effort and for all the potential danger. If he just wanted to kill and maim, why take all the trouble to be fastidious about the initial cutting? And then get sloppy and brutal with the remaining thrusts? I didn’t like mystery homicides. I enjoyed the no-brainers, just as my partner the good doctor did.

Randall went to jail and Edna was beginning to wonder if she could ever get the stink off her Adidas shoes.

‘Stick ‘em in the washing machine,’ Doc suggested. The three of us were in my office. It was very late. Way past the end of our regular shifts.

‘Are you kidding?’ she retorted. ‘These are three-hundred-dollar runners. I’ll do these by hand.’

She was a pretty girl. Reminded me of another pretty police employee that I was two hours late meeting up with. Natalie Manion, our evidence expert. The redhead and love of my middle-aged life.

Edna left the office, but the cheesy odor of vomit lingered.

‘Open the fucking window,’ Doc groaned. ‘I couldn’t say it before because I thought I’d embarrass the kid.’

I went over to the window that overlooked the Lake and propped the window open with the crank that extended the glass outward.

A fresh breeze from Lake Michigan wafted into my cubicle.

‘The Captain pisses and moans when we open these. He says it upsets the fucking thermostats,’ I told my partner.

‘The Boss didn’t have two pukey shoes in his office,’ Doc countered. ‘You think I jumped the gun by putting together this little ambush at the Lake, Jimmy?’

‘I don’t think so. No. I trust your intuition.’ 

‘This guy might like to expand his horizons, his hunting grounds. I was hoping we’d get lucky.’

I nodded. Doc knew that I thought his call was a good one. If we had caught the prick tonight, we could’ve saved a life. Suddenly the scary thought was inside us both. I could see it on his face. There would be another cutting very soon. Maybe elsewhere, maybe right back where we just were, at the Lakeshore. But this time we wouldn’t be there because manpower cost big money. Everybody knew that dirge.

Doc got up wearily.

‘I thought we had a good shot ... I don’t like clever killers, Jimmy. They try too hard to be smart, evasive. I got the feeling we just dialed up one of that very kind. Get ready for the long haul, Jimmy P.’

He waved and left my cubicle. The odor of the retch-covered gym shoes had finally departed the premises, so I cranked my window shut. But the fragrance of the Lake and of the beach lingered.

My phone rang. I knew it was Natalie and I knew I was in a pile of something that made Edna’s shoes smell like a springtime garland.