“Insanity runs in families.” Herb shoved the remainder of the churros in his mouth.
I rolled it around in my head. Could our perp be the father, taking over where his son left off?
Only one way to find out for sure.
“Want to go for a ride?”
G
ARY, INDIANA, LIES
forty minutes east of Chicago. I filled Herb in while he drove, covering everything I’d done over the last few days. Rather than praise my heroics, Benedict latched on to the mundane.
“I can’t believe that asshole McGlade is getting married. She a hooker?”
“Haven’t met her yet. That sounds about right.”
“Currency must be changing hands. There’s no other way. Unless the woman has some serious mental problems.”
“I told you about the fire, right?”
“Twice. Hey, if Bud Kork’s our man, how does the rental car fit in?”
I shrugged. The other five Eclipses on my list had been found, their side mirrors intact.
“He could be working with an accomplice. Or Bud Kork might not be our man. Or maybe the fireman ID’ed the wrong car. Or maybe the car that lost the mirrors wasn’t driven by the killer—maybe it was just a citizen who panicked.”
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Lots of maybes.”
“Someone killed Diane Kork and burned down her house. Someone familiar with the Gingerbread Man case.”
“Could be a copycat.”
I made a face. “In the thirty years you’ve been a cop, have you ever encountered a copycat killer?”
“Not once. But it happens all the time on
CSI.
”
Herb took a box of orange Tic Tacs out of his ashtray and offered them to me. I declined, and he emptied the whole box into his mouth.
“Maybe,” he said, the candy clicking against his molars, “Diane Kork is the killer. She put a fake tattoo on the woman in the video, making us think she’s dead.”
“I don’t think so. The tattoo was hard to see in the video.”
“Still, we can’t rule it out. We haven’t found her body, and after what she lived through, maybe it pushed her over the edge.”
“Diane Kork was a schoolteacher. Whoever shot me missed my head by less than an inch.”
“Could have had lessons. Or could have gotten lucky.”
Herb called Dispatch on his cell, and had them check if Diane Kork had a FOID card. Illinois required all gun owners to have one. The info came back quickly.
“No firearm owner ID for Diane. But she could still have a gun.”
“Doesn’t feel right to me. It’s someone else. I told you about the suitcase.”
He frowned. “The guy’s keeping trophies.”
Thrill killers liked to keep little reminders of their deeds. The burned human hair probably came from a scalp. And I knew the curved piece of metal was the underwire from a bra, having been poked by enough of them in my time.
“If Diane Kork were the killer, I don’t think she’d keep a victim’s bra.”
“Could have been Diane’s bra.”
“Was it her hair too? We can call the Feebies, get a lecture about how rare female serial killers are, and how none have ever been found that take trophies from their victims. No, Herb, it’s someone else. Someone picking up where Charles Kork left off. Someone who knows the case.”
“That could be twenty million people, Jack. Maybe more. Is the movie out on video yet?”
“I hope not.”
Before
Fatal Autonomy
became a crummy series, it was a crummy made-for-TV movie about the Kork case. I’d been forced to watch some of it; Harry had conned me into being a technical advisor.
“For verisrealityitude,” he’d said.
My input had been ignored, and the movie turned out to be a travesty. But it still had a lot of real facts in it. And after the case ended, there were the inevitable quickie true crime paperbacks, and that TV documentary.
Much of the world knew about the Gingerbread Man. It made me reconsider the copycat angle.
Herb slowed for the toll. We were about to get on the Skyway, Chicago’s largest bridge. It ran about eight miles long, and high enough to see deep into Indiana. Our view proffered a smattering of factories, their gigantic chimneys spitting copious amounts of smoke and filth, staining the overcast sky. Industry wasn’t pretty.
We drove in silence for a few minutes before Herb finally spoke.
“I’m scared.”
I reached over and touched his arm.
“You’ll be fine, Herb. Even if it is cancer, you’ll get through it.”
“That’s what Bernice says.”
“Smart lady.”
“I’m the homicide cop, and she’s stronger than I am.”
“People deal with death in different ways, Herb.”
Drizzle accumulated on the windshield. Herb hit the wipers, causing a dirty rainbow smear.
“Do you ever think about death, Jack?”
“Sometimes. I almost died yesterday, in the fire.”
“Were you afraid?”
“At first. Then I accepted it, and I was just sad.”
Herb’s voice, normally rock solid, had a quaver in it. “My father died of cancer. Strongest man I ever knew. By the end he weighed ninety pounds, had to be spoon-fed.”
I thought of my mother, steadily losing weight despite the feeding tube. I pushed away the image and tried to be jovial.
“Don’t get your hopes up, Herb. You’ll never weigh ninety pounds.”
My joke fell flat. Herb looked out of his side window. We passed a particularly ugly factory, its smokestack belching flames like the great Oz’s palace.
“What scares me the most is no longer existing. Everything I am, everything I think, everything I feel, all of my memories and thoughts and dreams—erased. Like I’ve never been here at all.”
“You’ve got family, Herb. And friends. They’ll remember you.”
Herb’s face was a mask of sadness. “But when I’m dead, I won’t remember them.”
We continued down I-90 east for another twenty minutes. The expressway was newer, and the asphalt better, on the Indiana side. It ran parallel to a train track for a while, and then we turned north on Cline and west on Gary Avenue, and we were soon on the plains, no buildings for miles.
I checked the MapQuest directions.
“We’re looking for Summit. Should be coming up.”
“Nothing’s coming up. Except some cows. Hey!”
Herb pointed to the right. I followed his finger to a large bale of hay.
I didn’t laugh, but at least he’d snapped out of his funk.
Summit turned out to be a dirt road, and it ended at a 1950s prefab ranch, the front yard overgrown with weeds. Ancient appliances and rusty old farm equipment peppered the property, and an old barn that looked like Godzilla had stepped on it sat behind the house.
“Is this it?” Herb asked.
“Has to be. There’s no place else.”
“It looks like the shack from
The
Beverly Hillbillies.
”
“Or
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
”
Herb parked next to a Ford pickup truck that looked old enough to run on regular gas.
“Ready to meet the monster’s father?”
Herb nodded and we got out of the car. The closer we walked, the worse it looked. The roof was missing half its shingles. Several boards on the front porch had rotted away. So much white paint was flaking off the sides, the house looked like a paper birch tree.
I took out my badge, and noticed Benedict already had his in hand. Wouldn’t be smart to surprise the occupant. It was too easy to picture him crouched behind the front door with a shotgun, waiting for strangers to trespass.
Herb hesitated before getting onto the porch, eyeing it dubiously. I went first. The warped wood groaned, but it took my weight. Benedict followed, stepping gingerly.
I knocked, a thin, hollow sound.
“Bud Kork? This is the police.”
We waited.
No answer.
I knocked again.
“Mr. Kork? We see your truck outside. We know you’re home.”
A voice filtered through the closed door. “Come on in. I’m getting dressed.”
I looked at Herb, and we both put our hands on our holsters. He pushed the door open, and I went in fast and stepped quickly to the left.
The house was dark and smelled like something had died under the floorboards. A single fly buzzed around in the stuffy, fetid air. I located a switch on the wall and flipped it on, bathing the room in a sickly yellow glow from a bare forty-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling.
The room took the word
mess
to new heights.
There were several stacks of old newspapers, piled high as my shoulder. A dozen broken television sets, some older than me, lined up along the walls. A large box of rusty gears sat atop a cracked aquarium filled with dry grass. The walls were bare, except for a dusty framed portrait of a severe-looking Jesus, staring down from heaven. The caption beneath read:
God is always watching.
Herb followed me in, pausing to look around. He was humming something softly, which I recognized as the violin riff from the shower scene in
Psycho.
I stepped over a bushel basket of balled-up Wonder Bread bags, and walked toward the doorway at the end of the room.
“Mr. Kork?”
“In the kitchen.”
He had a cracked, broken voice, like he might burst into tears. I navigated more garbage and peeked through the doorway.
A painfully thin old man stood in the tiny kitchen, his entire body twitching and shaking from Parkinson’s disease. He wore a stained white undershirt that hung on him like drapes, and a pair of beige slacks, equally stained, with holes in both knees. His face was a skull with a thin layer of age-spotted skin stretched over it. Thin, colorless lips. A hook nose. Bulbous, rheumy eyes. His head was bald, but he had bushy white eyebrows long enough to comb, and enough ear hair to stuff a pillow.
I showed him my star.
“I’m Lieutenant Daniels. This is Sergeant Benedict. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”
He nodded, his oversized Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “About the devil. Questions about the devil.”
I stepped closer, the stench of his body odor preventing me from getting within touching distance.
“What about the devil, Mr. Kork?”
“Well, you know all about the devil, don’t you? You’ve met him.”
“I’ve met the devil?”
Parroting tends to draw people out, make them more compliant. Even if they weren’t making sense.
“The devil. Charles. My son. Terrible boy. Knew it from the day he shot out his mother’s cloaca.”
“Cloaca?” Herb raised an eyebrow.
“Her dirty bits. Female parts. His mother was a harlot. The whore of Babylon. Bore me the devil for a son, praise Jesus Christ Almighty in heaven above.”
Bud made the sign of the cross, then fished a black rosary from his pocket and kissed it with trembling lips.
I frowned. This wasn’t our guy. He couldn’t have made the video of Diane’s death, or shot at me in her house. He was too disconnected, too frail, the Parkinson’s too advanced.
“Where is your wife, Mr. Kork?” Herb asked.
“Roasting in the flames of hellfire.”
“Do you have other children?”
Kork looked beyond us, into space. “Had a daughter. My blessed little angel. Helper and defender of mankind. She sits at God’s right hand and watches me from heaven, protects me from sin and from myself and from unnatural urges.”
“She’s deceased?”
His eyes glazed over. “Taken from me. By Charles. The devil took my angel. Matthew 4:1; ‘then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.’ Corruption of the flesh, of the soul, my poor little girl.”
“Do you have any other relatives, Mr. Kork?”
He shook his head. “No flesh of my flesh, no blood of my blood.”
“Cousins? Nephews?”
He made fists and pounded on his thighs. “NO FLESH OF MY FLESH AND NO BLOOD OF MY BLOOD!”
This wasn’t getting us anywhere.
“Jack . . .” Herb nudged me and pointed with his chin. Behind Kork was a refrigerator, old enough to still be called an icebox. Next to that, an open pantry, the shelf inside loaded with mason jars.
The law was clear when it came to search and seizure. A cop can only search if given permission, or with a warrant. Kork inviting us into his house wasn’t the same as permission to search, but if while in the house we saw evidence of anything illegal or suspicious, the evidence was admissible in court.
The mason jars lining the shelf looked to be the same type as the jar full of toes. I sidestepped Kork and peered into the cabinet.
“Mr. Kork, what’s this?”
I pointed to a jar full of small round things. Some were tan. Some pink. Some green.