Every Wickedness (3 page)

“Nah, but I can’t figure out why you’re so nice to him,” Tim said. “You might be giving him ideas.”

Beth shook her head. “Bobby’s just lonely.” Loneliness was something Tim O’Malley, with his
GQ
good looks, would probably never understand. Even back in Eureka Springs, a fourteen-year-old who still had a paper route was a geek. Beth felt sorry for Bobby, though she had to admit he’d been hanging around more often than she wanted lately.

“Speaking of lonely,” Tim said, “look over there.”

In-line skating his way along the sidewalk was Bobby Chandler.

“H
ey guys!” Bobby Chandler called out as he approached. At the foot of Beth’s driveway, he attempted a quick stop but failed, narrowly avoiding a collision with a no parking sign.

“Bobby, when are you going to get shin guards?” Beth asked when Bobby regained equilibrium. Judging from the condition of his knees, this wasn’t Bobby’s first mishap.

“And a helmet,” Tim O’Malley added.

Bobby ignored Tim, keeping his gaze riveted on Beth. “That equipment’s for wimps. Besides, I’ll have my stops down pat in a few days. Just takes practise.” He flashed Beth a toothy grin. “Soon, I’ll be as good on these as I am on my skateboard.” Many of Bobby’s weekends were spent practising skateboard stunts on the flat pavement at the Embarcadero Centre with dozens of other young teenagers who had nothing better to do.

“Hey, Beth,” Bobby said, “where you been tonight?”

“Way to go, Ace,” Tim muttered. “Subtle as a brick through a window.”

“I was just asking,” Bobby continued, his voice taking on a petulant whine, “because Beth’s not usually late on Fridays. I was worried.”

“That’s sweet, Bobby,” Beth said and meant it, though she hoped he interpreted the word “sweet” the way she’d intended it. “I was downtown, at that police information night.”

“The Spiderman thing,” Tim said. “I was there too, for awhile. Funny we didn’t spot each other. Whole city’s gone crazy. Some of my customers are buying German Shepherds. The client I called on this morning has an arsenal in every purse. Mace, beepers, nail files, you name it. Guess you must have the same stuff, Beth, after what happened to Anne.”

Beth nodded. “I feel like I’m living in Fort Knox. An armed guard can’t be too far off.”

That was all the encouragement Bobby Chandler needed. “Don’t you worry, Beth,” he told her. “Soon I’ll be able to chase anybody on these things.” He looked at his skates again. “If that guy shows his face around here, he’ll have to deal with me.” Bobby teetered, then regained his balance.

“Say, Sport,” Tim O’Malley said, “why don’t you wheel yourself home and change modes of transportation? The Spiderman could show up at any time. Wouldn’t want to see you hurt yourself.”

Bobby’s face went crimson. “Tim,” Beth cut in quickly, “didn’t you say something about a late dinner?” She knew Tim was trying to be helpful, but she couldn’t conspire so obviously against Bobby. There was no crime in being lonely.

“Yeah, you’re right. Can I talk you into joining me?”

Beth caught Bobby’s frown. She shook her head. “I can barely make it up these stairs. You enjoy yourself.”

“Always do.” Tim unlocked the door to his van, climbed in, checked his appearance in the rear-view mirror, then he rolled down the window. “Remember, Beth, there’s such a thing as too friendly.”

“I get the message. Have fun.”

“What was that about?” Bobby asked once Tim had driven away.

“Oh, Tim just wants me to be cautious,” Beth lied. “We were talking about the Spiderman before you came.”

Bobby skated up Beth’s driveway and stood beside her. “Boy, you sure get a lotta mail.”

Beth’s brass mailbox was crammed, the lid wedged open with the overflow.

“Bills mostly.” Beth glanced through the pile, again wishing Bobby wouldn’t feel quite so comfortable on her property. “Here’s a coupon for Dino’s pizza. Half price. Maybe you could take a girlfriend.”

Bobby took the coupon. “You like pizza, Beth?”

She shook her head. “Bad for my waistline. It’s been a long day, Bobby—”

“Hey Beth,” Bobby cut in, “you think Tim O’Malley’s good lookin’?”

The question caught her off guard, but Bobby’s wide-eyed gaze made it clear he expected an answer.

“I haven’t thought too much about it, but yes, I suppose. Tim is an attractive man. Now I really should —”

“If he’s so good lookin’, seems he should be spending more time with a girlfriend, that’s all.”

“How Tim spends his time is none of our business. I’m going in now, Bobby,” she said firmly. “Talk to you soon, okay?”

“I’ll just wait here until you’re safe inside,” Bobby said behind her.

Beth mounted the steps to her front door, punched in the number code, and hurried indoors. Oddly, she was glad of Bobby’s presence on the driveway, though how he would have climbed the steps on roller-feet to thwart a potential intruder she didn’t know.

Since Anne’s death, Beth’s arrival-home ritual had changed. Before, she would drop everything in the entry hall, scoop up her ginger tabby, Samson, and murmur endearments while she opened a can of kitty stew in the kitchen. Now, she kept everything in hand — purse, mail, car keys — and reactivated the alarm, peeked around the kitchen corner, opened the pantry door, checked all closets upstairs and down before returning to the kitchen where a disgruntled cat posed expectantly by his food dish. Jim Kearns had reassured her that such behaviour was normal, but he didn’t tell her how long she would need this obsessive routine. Beth hoped her panic attacks would subside
soon before she turned into a complete nutcase.

It was only when Beth set her stack of mail on the desk in the living room and glanced out the window that she noticed Bobby Chandler was still standing on her driveway. His unexpected appearance startled her for a moment, then she realized why Bobby hadn’t left. She gave a thumbs-up signal, mouthed the words “I’m okay,” waited for another toothy grin, then waved as Bobby skated off down the street toward home.

My fourteen-year-old guardian angel, Beth thought, as she drew the louvered shutters across the bottom half of her windows. Lucky me.

T
he sight of Clement Street brought a smile to Jim Kearns’s face, the first genuine smile he’d exercised in weeks. He could almost feel the burden of lives-too-abruptly-ended leave him. For what seemed like ages, he had been operating in two gears — Automatic Pilot and Pissed Off. Robotically, he had already followed up on hundreds of leads, screened calls, and chased down criminals skulking in bushes, only to turn up a string of false alarms and one very frightened skunk.

The victims’ relatives, co-workers, and friends had also been interrogated, to no avail. Lydia Price’s ex-boyfriends all had alibis up the wazoo; her co-workers adored her. And so it went with Carole Van Horne. No backstage jealousies, no string of broken-hearted lovers, just a nice lady who loved to sing and dance. Monica Turner’s client list revealed nothing to Kearns other than, in his opinion, there were far too many men in the city who enjoyed pedicures. The scuzzball agent who screwed Natalie Gorman the night she disappeared was guilty of many things, among them possession of enough cocaine to render a football team senseless. Still, though he managed to deposit his semen in Natalie and feed her a few empty promises, he could not
be connected to her murder. Anne Spalding’s ex-husband, while stooping low enough to beat the shit out of the flight attendant, wouldn’t, it seemed, sink to the level of killer. So the dead were of no help to Kearns. That pissed him off.

The known perverts — peepers, flashers, gropers — had been rounded up and brought in for questioning. A few, harbouring grandiose delusions, claimed to be the Spiderman, cashing in on the killer’s cult status for their fifteen minutes of fame. Kearns and Manuel Fuentes fetched and carried like bellboys at the Mark Hopkins. The low-lifes got gum, water, diet soda, whatever they wanted. Short of serving caviar and Dom Perignon, the police catered to the scum, because the scum had rights. When the killer was caught, he’d be screaming about his rights, too. Another piss-off.

Plainclothes cops patrolled the killer’s dump-sites, expecting him to appear like magic to reminisce about his handiwork. Gawking locals and tourists alike appeared instead, armed with cameras, wanting their pictures taken on the spot where one of the victims had been left. Serve them right if Kearns made them watch one of the autopsies. They’d puke their guts out, have nightmares for weeks. Maybe then the public wouldn’t be so fascinated.

Rumours were rampant about the condition of the victims’ bodies. The less-scrupulous journalists reported savage mutilations, assuming that the
police force’s reluctance to divulge details meant something ghastly had occurred.

And it had, but there was nothing Jack the Ripperish about it. Each victim was found fully clothed. There was no evidence of sexual penetration, no saliva, no fingerprints. But each woman’s right wrist bore the killer’s signature, a two-inch long testimony to the horror that had taken place.

Truth be known, his boss was pissing him off too. Until this week, Kearns thought flaring nostrils occurred only in novels, but this morning he’d seen the real thing up close and ugly, and Elliott Lloyd, the Captain of Inspectors, was cranking up the heat. Through the left side of a perpetually crooked mouth, he said, “Five women dead, Kearns.”

As if he didn’t know.

“Two squads working this thing. Fourteen of our best, hand-picked by you.”

As if he couldn’t count.

“Your annual salary is how much again?”

Not enough, Kearns thought bitterly.

Whether Lloyd had spent his youth compensating for his physical puniness, Kearns didn’t know, but somewhere along the way the captain had practised the art of intimidation and had perfected a stare so icy it could freeze the devil in hell.

The Spiderman wasn’t a conventional criminal, Kearns wanted to say, and no amount of conventional investigating would smoke this snake from his
hole. But Lloyd was levelling another stare at him, so Kearns had remained mute.

Kearns shook off the residue of his job, parked his Crown Victoria, and made his way along the sidewalk toward his one-bedroom apartment above the Russian bakery.

Here was where real people lived. The aroma of Asian cuisine assailed his nostrils mingling with a rich tomato-basil odour from an Italian bistretto. The German deli where he bought his favourite knackwurst on a bun was closed, but the Irish pub, where he used to quaff a Harp lager (or seven), was still going strong. It paid for a cop to live in this kind of neighbourhood where he could kibitz with shop owners and customers of all kinds and colours. It helped him understand both the perpetrators as well as the victims of crime.

“Hullo, Jimmy!” Ahead, Henry Ng appeared on the sidewalk, a soiled apron around his waist. In his hand was a decapitated duck. “Graduating night school next week. You come for supper. English pretty good, yes?”

Kearns smiled. “You’re a regular Richard Burton, Henry.”

“I know. Focking amazing, heh? You catch spider yet?”

“Only a few under my sink, Henry,” Kearns said, then crossed over to the other side of the street.

Henry hollered after him. “You catch bastard, Jimmy. I make him like this!” Henry waved the headless duck in the air.

Kearns nodded, and the crush of responsibility returned. It didn’t matter that the fourteen officers on his task force were immersed in the Spiderman, inhaling the minutiae of the case files until they were cross-eyed; as long as the madman was loose, it was Kearns’s ass on the line.

He remembered his earlier promise that the public would have no more deaths to mourn. Yet he knew, deep down, that for him to catch the lunatic’s scent, another murder was exactly what he needed.

Inside his apartment, he called out, “I’m home, Mary,” and untied his shoes, leaving them, as always, heels to the baseboard, in the hallway. It had always been one of the things they chuckled about — why he would insist on lining his shoes up like twin soldiers, when there was a perfectly decent closet not two feet away.

He wiggled his toes, sure his swollen feet would never fit inside shoes again. The TV came on next, as always. He didn’t care much what was on. The company of human voices, no matter how inane the chatter, dissipated the funereal quiet of the apartment.

He checked his voice mail. His therapist had been playing phone tag with him all week, and this was her third attempt to get him an appointment. He erased her message and shuddered to think what would happen if his visits to a shrink became known by his squad. For all his pontificating about coming clean with feelings and encouraging his men to communicate, Kearns knew he couldn’t do the same.

He was a bald-faced hypocrite, plain and simple, but a cop who took antidepressants and participated in therapy sessions also became a full-fledged member of the Rubber Gun Squad, complete with accompanying whispers and a quiet desk job. Until Kearns’s superiors got in step with the times, he was safer locking his blues in the closet.

Kearns got organized — bottle of ginger ale, remote control, and a bag of pretzels on the end table beside his chair, his daily dose of Paxil from the bathroom, the video taken at the Fairmont popped into the VCR. Once he sunk into his favourite chair, he knew it would be game over. Probably fall asleep there, like most nights, fully clothed. Mary had been gone five years now, and it was still a toss-up as to what was worse — sleeping alone or eating breakfast alone.

Exhaustion had burrowed through to his bones, that awful whacked-out, rag-doll feeling brought on by his medication and the depression that crouched in wait for him.

The naugahyde recliner squeaked when he settled into it. The ginger ale didn’t fizz. The video made him more miserable, with its sea of anonymous faces staring at him, counting on him to bring in the killer. And was he among those faces, the lunatic who preyed on the vulnerable? If he was, Kearns couldn’t tell. The video camera wasn’t likely to catch a fleeting glimpse of some Manson lookalike, with a big red X on his forehead.