“No, really—” I started.
“Come on, don’t be a candyass!”
“Just be careful,” Mrs. Jameson said.
I’m no big drinker but I still had a few things to snuff out. Bar-hopping with Jameson would provide the perfect opportunity.
We got up to leave. That’s when I noticed two of framed pictures along the fireplace mantle; there were just a few.
I put my glasses on an looked.
A wedding picture of a much younger Jameson and his wife. Some snapshots of old people: relatives, I presumed. Aunts and uncles, grandparents and the like. A freeze-frame of a beautiful cheerleader wagging pom-poms and doing a split-it was obviously Jameson’s wife back in high school days. Then—
A framed picture of a dark-haired adult with his arm around a cock-eyed kid with a bad haircut.
Jameson,
I thought.
The kid’s Jameson…
“No kid yet, I see,” I said and took my glasses off. I suspected this might be dangerous ground but I had to go for it.
“No,” Mrs. Jameson peeped.
“Not yet,” Jameson piped in. “We’re still waiting for the right time.”
Man, you’re fifty and she’s gotta be forty-five,
I thought.
Better not wait much longer.
Jameson jangled his keys. “Come on, lib. Let’s go have some fun.”
I turned to his wife. “Mrs. Jameson. Thanks very much for the excellent meal. You could get a job at any restaurant in town; you’d blow all of those master chefs out of the water.”
The woman blushed. “Thank you. Come by again soon.”
“Later, babe,” Jameson bid and yanked me out of there. He guffawed all the way down the stairs to the parking garage.
“So where you wanna go?” he asked. “A strip joint?”
“And all this time I thought you were gonna take me to hear bald lesbians read poetry,” I joked.
“Aw, fuck that shit,” he answered, beer fumes wafting out of his mouth. “Let’s see some
meat.
”
“Pardon me if I’m misinformed, Captain, but there really aren’t any strip joints in Seattle. The girls all gotta wear bikinis via county code, and the only thing you can drink there is orange juice or sodas.”
Another loud guffaw. “Pal, you don’t know the strip joint I know!”
I’m sure I don’t,
I thought. When we’d just stepped into the elevator into the parking garage, I slapped my breast pocket. “Oh, shit.”
“What’s wrong? You just shit your pants?”
“I left my glasses in your condo,” I admitted.
“Well go on back up and get them and I’ll get the car.” He elbowed me. “And no funny business with the wife…or I’ll have ta kill you.”
He burst more laughter as I jogged back up the stairs.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Mrs. Jameson when she answered my knock. “I left my glasses here.”
“Oh, come in,” she said. I could smell from her breath that she’d already had a stiff one since we’d left. “Were would they be?”
“The table, or maybe the mantle when I was looking at the pictures,” I said.
I scanned the table—nothing.
“Here they are,” she said, picking them up off the mantle.
“Thanks.”
“I apologize for the way Jay gets sometimes,” the words stumbled from her mouth. “He has a little to much to drink, and…well, you know.”
You ain’t kidding I know,
I thought.
“But you should also know that your article really pumped him up,” she went on. “I haven’t seen him happy in years, but your article really made him happy. He’s worked hard for so long. It’s wonderful to see someone give him recognition in the press.”
I shrugged. “He’s doing a good job on the case. That’s why I wrote the piece.”
“Well, anyway, thank you,” she said.
The look she gave me then? Christ. She brought her arms together in front, pressed her breasts together. Her nipples stuck through her blouse like golf cleats.
Fuck,
I thought.
Is she offering herself to me…for the article?
“If you don’t mind my asking,” I changed the subject. “What’s this picture here?” I pointed to the man with his arm around the boy. “Is that your husband, the child?”
“Yes that’s him with his father,” she told me. “Jay was seven. His father was killed a few weeks after that picture was taken.”
“Oh…I’m sorry.” My eyes scanned the photos. “Where’s his mother?”
“Jay never knew his mother,” she said. “She ran out the day he was born.”
««—»»
The facilitation of the mother’s nurturing touch,
I thought as Jameson squealed his Grand Am out of the parking garage. Everything I’d observed so far backed up everything Desmond had told me…
“So how’d you like the grub? Better than the cafeteria at the
Times?
”
“It was fantastic. Your wife is one dynamite cook.”
“Yeah, she’s a good kid,” he said. “She’s hung with me through thick and thin, and believe me, there’s been a lot of thin. Too bad I can’t do more for her.”
“What do you mean?”
He steered down Third Avenue. “It didn’t help when you brought up kids. Last couple of years, it’s been like playing pool with a piece of string.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“But that’s my problem, not yours,” he perked up. “Let’s go have some fun!”
We rode a ways. The streetlights shimmered as the warm air roved down the avenue. We stopped at a red light at third and Marion, and several homeless people approached the car.
“Shine your windshield for a buck, mister,” a decrepit man said.
“Get the
fuck
away from the car!” Jameson yelled. “I just had it washed!”
“Hey, mister, relax. We was just askin’.”
A woman in rotten clothes approached the other side of the car. Toothless. Staggering.
“Tell that junkie bum bitch to get away from my car!” Jameson yelled.
Then he yanked his gun out of his shoulder holster.
“Are you nuts!” I shouted at him.
The two vagrants scampered off, terrified.
“Yeah, you
better
get out of here, you pieces of shit!” Jameson yelled. “Christ, you people smell worse than the bottom of a fuckin’ dumpster!”
“What the hell is wrong with you, man?” I said. “You can’t be pulling your gun on people for shit like that.”
Jameson reholstered his pistol, chuckling. “Cool off. I just wanted to put a scare in ’em. Bet they shit their pants, huh? See, I just saved the city a cleanup fee. Usually they shit in the street.”
.”They’re homeless, for God’s sake. They got nothing.”
“Fuck that pinko shit,” he said, then bulled through the red light.
It occurred to me then that Jameson had a harder load on than I thought. “Hey, look, Captain. You’re pretty lit. Why don’t you let me drive? You’re gonna get pulled over at this rate.”
Jameson laughed. “Any cop in this city pulls
me
over, he’s transferred to the impound lot in the morning. What’s up your ass?”
“Nothing,” I said. I knew I had to grin and bear it. But I still had a few more questions to ask.
Just be careful,
I told myself.
“Fuckin’ junkies, fuckin’ bums.” Jameson’s eyes remained dead on the street. “Everybody asking for a handout. I never asked for no handouts.”
“Some people are more fortunate than others,” I said.
“Oh, don’t give me that liberal pantywaist
bullshit,”
he spat, spittle flecking the inside of the windshield. “I never had nothing. My father died when I was seven, died in a fuckin’ steel mill when an ingot fell on him off of lift-clip. After that I got hocked into the fuckin’ foster care system. So I don’t want to hear no shit about poor people from poor environments. I got out of that hellhole, graduated high school, got my degree, and now I’m running the fuckin’ homicide squad in one of the biggest cities on the west coast.”
But I was still remembering what his wife had said. “What, uh, what about your mother?” I asked.
Jameson lead-footed it through another red light. “My mother? Fuck her.” Beer fumes filled the car. “My mother beat feet the same day she dropped me. That dirty bitch wasn’t nothing but a junkie whore. She was street-shit. She was walking garbage just like that whore just tried to smudge up my windshield. Far as I’m concerned—I never had a mother…”
««—»»
It got to the point where almost anything Jameson did or said would support some facet of Dr. Desmond’s profile. A prostitute for a mother, who abandoned him at birth. No nurturing touches as an infant, no mother figure in the formative years. An ability to control his symbolic delusion to the extent that he can function in society and maintain steady employment. A man who is probably married but probably doesn’t have children. A man with a mounting inability to perform sexually.
I also found it interesting that Jameson’s favorite places to drink were bars in the derelict districts, bars in which any of the sixteen previous victims might easily have hung out. I wondered what Dr. Desmond would think about that?
Oh yeah, I knew he was the one. But what was I going to do about it?
The next couple of hours were pretty paralyzing. Jameson dragged me around to three more dive bars, getting drunker in each one, his hatred boiling. Loud, obnoxious, belligerent. At one point I thought one of the barkeeps was going to throw him out, but I prayed that wouldn’t happen. Knowing Jameson—and as drunk as he was—he’d probably yank out his gun, might shoot someone. But before that could happen, I got him out of there.
Then the end came pretty fast after that.
««—»»
“I’m a crime reporter for the
Times.
” I flashed my press ID to the two doctors in the ER. “Earlier tonight, I was with Captain Jay Jameson of the city police homicide unit—”
One of the doctors, a balding guy with long hair, squinted over at me from a scrub sink. “You know that guy?” The doctor’s nametag read Parker.
“That’s right. I was drinking with him in some area bars,” I admitted. “When his name was logged in as an in-patient, the night-editor at my paper contacted me.”
“Fuck, the guy was drinking,” another doctor said. This one was big, with a trimmed beard; his nametag read MOLER. He was taking instruments out of an autoclave. “No wonder his blood was so thin. He damn near bled to death right in front of us. He took three pints before we could stabilize him. What happened?”
“I was dragging him out of a bar about two hours ago,” I told them. “He was pretty drunk. I was about to put him in the car when he bolted. The guy just ran off across Jackson and disappeared under the overpass. I couldn’t find him. The biggest reason for my concern is Captain Jameson said some things to me tonight that lead me to believe he may be—”
“This psycho who’s been killing girls and cutting off their hands,” Parker finished.
I stared at them, slack-jawed. “How—how did you know?”
Dr. Moler snickered. “When the EMTs brought him in, he had a severed hand in his pants.”
“Jesus,” I muttered. “What happened to him?”
“Looks like after he ran off from you,” Parker explained, “he must’ve picked up a hooker, then he made his move, but she shot him. He was lying in the middle of Jackson when the EMTs found him. But it must’ve been his second girl of the night ’cos he already had one hand on him.”
“Shit,” I said. “I called the cops the minute he bolted, told them my suspicions, but they didn’t take me serious.”
“We’ll show ’em the hand we found in his pants,” Moler said. “
Then
they’ll take you serious.”
“So you said his condition is stable?” I asked.
“We stabilized the blood loss and ligged an artery. But the x-rays showed a cranial fracture—hematoma. He’s prepped for more surgery but I wouldn’t give him more than one chance in ten of making it.”
“Where is he now?” I asked. “I really need to talk to him.”
Parker pointed across the ER. “He’s in the ICU prep cove. Second floor’ll be down to take him up in a few minutes. You want to go see him, go ahead. But don’t hold your breath on him regaining consciousness.”
“Thanks,” I said, and at the same moment several paramedics burst through the ER doors with what looked like a burn victim on a gurney. “Great!” Parker yelled. “My relief’s two hours late, and now I got a spatula special!”
I rushed to the prep cove and there he was: Jameson. Tubes down his throat, tubes up his nose, strapped to a railed bed. An IV line ran from a bag of saline to his arm. He looked dead.
“Hey, hey,” I said. I patted his face. “I guess you’re in a coma, huh, Captain? Well you know what? They got you for the whole thing now. I knew you were the one.”
His slack, lined face just lay there like a bad wax mask. “Once Dr. Desmond finds out the details, he’ll realize that his profile fits you to a tee. He’s a smart man. He’ll back up my allegation one-hundred percent.”