I
t was raining again. I heard two things, the steady
drumming of the rain and the click of my bedroom door as
Trish came in. I lay still for a moment, listening to her
footsteps as she approached my bed. I had been in a deep
sleep for all of ninety minutes: the digits on the clock
beside the bed told me it was now 4:52. I blinked my eyes
and gradually came awake, aware of her presence a foot or
two away. She stood for a long minute, then leaned over
and touched my shoulder, shaking me gently.
“It’s time,” she said.
“Yeah, I’m awake.”
“We gotta get going.”
She went away and I lay there for another minute,
thinking about what we had discovered in the night. I
thought about five old murder cases in five different
cities, and about the blind woman the killer had left
alive in Maryland.
I hit the shower. Thought about it some more as I
stood in the steam.
I smelled bacon as I came downstairs. She stood in the
half-dark kitchen, cooking by the light from the smoke
hood over the range.
“Didn’t we just eat?” I asked in a
surprised tone of voice.
“Such as it was.”
But my appetite is always good in the morning and I
was hungry again. I sat at her kitchen table and let her
pamper me.
“Scofield and Kenney are due in at six-thirty,
more or less, according to the flight plan they filed in
L.A.,” she said. “We should play it safe and
be there with time to spare.”
I agreed with that. We were probably safe if we could
leave in another ten minutes. We were already slightly
south of town, and that would give us a full hour to make
the few miles to Sea-Tac before the rush hour began.
I asked if she’d gotten any sleep.
“Didn’t even try,” she said, handing me
a plate of food. She sat across from me with her own
plate and said, “I can’t sleep with stuff
like this going on.”
She had been thinking about the sequence of those five
old murder cases and had come up with a point of logic
that had escaped us at midnight. “The cases all
followed the Grayson lettering sequence, in precise
order.
A
came before
B
, then came
C, D
, and
E
, all within days of each other. Think about that a
minute. Picture a map of the United States and ask
yourself, if you were going to kill people in five
different parts of the country, how would you go about
it? I’d do the two in the West first because
I’m out here already and it’s closer. Do
Idaho first, then fly to Phoenix. Then go east and do the
others, St. Louis, then New Orleans and Baltimore, in
either order. What the killer did, though, was St. Louis
first…
A
. Then he went to Phoenix,
B;
then he flew clear back across the country to
C
, Baltimore. Then back across the country again to Idaho.
Then back again to New Orleans. Does this make sense? Not
unless you’ve got Grayson’s list and can see
the connections.”
“It’s like he couldn’t see anything
beyond the list.”
“Just get there, do it, and move on the next
one.”
“Whatever it was, the urgency was so great he
didn’t even think about geography.”
She shivered. “This is a real crazy one
we’ve got here.”
“And he’s still out there doing
it.”
Forty minutes later we were sitting in a maintenance
truck at the end of a concourse where the smallest
airline carriers and various private flights were routed.
Our driver was a cheerful fellow named Mickey Bowman, who
ran the airport’s public relations office and
didn’t seem to mind being roused from bed when
Trish had called him at three-thirty. I knew a little
about the odd relationships that sometimes develop
between PR people and the press—the Denver cops had
a public affairs specialist with the rank of division
chief, and depending on who held the job, you could
sometimes see the good and bad of what he did on the
front pages of the Denver newspapers. If he stonewalls,
they dig out the facts anyway, only they write them in
such a way as to make his boss look stupid, silly, or
devious. A good PR guy knows when to promote and when to
back off and do the gal a favor. He is always in when the
press calls: he never gives her the feeling that, all
things considered, he’d rather be in Philadelphia
than sitting in a maintenance truck at six o’clock
on a rainy morning talking to her. He is an expert at
damage control, and if the story is going to be critical,
he sometimes earns his pay more for what’s left out
of a piece than what’s put in.
Bowman had been a reporter himself in a previous life
and he knew the routine. He knew what her deadlines were,
just as he knew that she seldom did stories of that
nature. “We’d like to meet a guy at the
airport, Mickey,” she had said, “and
we’re not sure yet whether we’ll want to
announce ourselves after he gets here.”
Bowman’s dad had been in the Seabees in the big
war, she told me later: he had passed along that can-do
mentality to his son. Bowman was waiting when we arrived.
He got us through security, verified when and where
Scofield’s plane would be coming in, and now we sat
with Trish wedged tight in the seat between us, the
airport VISITOR tags clipped to our lapels.
I sat quietly splitting my concentration. One side of
my brain listened to the shoptalk between Aandahl and
Bowman while I thought about our killer with the other
half. I thought about a blind woman in Baltimore who had
been left alive in the middle of a nine-day rampage, who
had later gone mad and been committed. Trish was telling
Mickey Bowman about a great public-relations man she knew
by phone but had never met. The guy worked for United
Airlines in Miami, and he had all but written her first
big story for her on deadline. A plane had been hijacked:
FBI sharpshooters had gotten under the aircraft without
the hijacker’s knowledge, and one was trying to
crawl up the plane’s nose assembly before the
gunman figured out where they were. The United man had an
office window that looked down on the scene. Trish sat at
a desk across town, her phone rigged through a headset,
taking verbatim descriptions as the United guy talked the
story out to her. “They killed the hijacker,”
she said, “but I’ve never forgotten that PR
man. You’re pretty good yourself, Mick.”
This was high praise from someone who never dealt in
bullshit, and Bowman knew it. “Mickey used to be a
bureau chief for the AP in Indianapolis,” Trish
said for my benefit. I joined the small talk and learned
a few things about wire-service reporters. But I was
still thinking about the blind woman in Maryland.
At six-thirty sharp a burst of noise came through
Bowman’s radio. “Your bird’s on the
ground,” he said. At almost the same instant a car
materialized, a black Cadillac that came slowly up the
runway and stopped, idling about thirty yards to our
right. The two men sitting in the car would be Scofield
bodyguards, I guessed. Bowman started his engine and
cleared away the steam from our windows with his air
blower. I had to hand it to him: he must be curious as
hell about the story we were doing, but he never
asked.
A sleek-looking jet nosed its way around the corner
and came toward us. “Well, what do you
think?” Trish asked. I told her I tried not to
think, I just react, and Bowman laughed when she did not.
She was letting me call the plays, at least for now. It
had been my decision to get on Scofield’s tail as
soon as he touched down at Sea-Tac; I just wasn’t
comfortable waiting around for him to show up at the Four
Seasons. When you’re dealing with a fruitcake like
Pruitt, a lot can happen in ten miles.
The plane taxied in and came to a stop. The ground
crew rolled out a steel stairwell, a door opened, and a
man got out and popped open an umbrella. Then Rodney
Scofield stepped out in the rain. I didn’t need a
formal introduction: he was an old man whose snowy hair
curled in tufts under the edges of his hat, whose ruddy
face—as near as I could tell from that
distance—was all business. This was his clambake,
he was the boss. The grunt beside him held the umbrella
over his head, and the two grunts in the Caddy got out
and stood at attention. He was at the bottom of the
stairs when Leith Kenney emerged from the aircraft.
Kenney looked just as I’d pictured him, which
doesn’t happen often when all you have is a voice
to go by. He had a neatly trimmed beard: he was slender
and tall and had the word
bookman
stamped all over him. He was carrying a small suitcase,
which he looked ready to defend with his life. He
reminded me of a diplomatic courier in wartime,
transporting top secrets with the valise chained to his
wrist. But I was willing to bet that this suitcase
contained nothing but money.
Here we go, I thought.
We went south, a surprise. I was happy to have done
something right for a change and picked up Scofield at
the airport. The Cadillac whipped into 1-5 and headed for
Tacoma like a homing pigeon. Bowman followed without
question: Trish would owe him a big-league debt when it
was over. The Caddy cruised at the speed limit and Bowman
kept our truck two or three cars behind it. We
didn’t talk: just sat rigid, tense in the seat.
After eight or ten miles, the Cadillac turned off the
highway and took to a two-lane, state-numbered road.
Bowman dropped back but kept him-in sight, cruising along
at forty.
The rain had stopped and the sky was breaking up into
long streaks of blue. A stiff wind blew down from
Rainier, buffeting the truck as we rocked along. I
thought we must be due east of Tacoma now, skirting the
city on Highway 161. It was small-town suburban, broken
by stretches of open country. Snow blew off the mountain
in the distance, a swirling gale driven by the same wind
that rolled down the valley. We came to a river, crossed
it, and arrived in the town of Puyallup.
The Cadillac stopped. Pulled off to the side of the
road.
We drove on past and I got a glimpse of Scofield and
Kenney confering over something in the backseat.
“They’re looking at directions,”
Trish said. ‘’
Double-checking.‘’
“Then we’re almost there.”
Bowman hung a left, did a quick U-turn, and came
cautiously to the corner. We could see the Cadillac still
parked off the road in the distance. We sat at roadside
and waited.
They came a minute later. Bowman allowed just the
right gap to develop, then swung in behind them. I
wasn’t too worried: none of the guys in the Caddy
looked like pros to me, meaning the only way they’d
make us was by accident. The Caddy hung a right, into a
road that ran along the river. The place they were going
was about half a mile along, a small cafe well back from
the road. There was a gas pump out front and a couple of
junk autos at the east side of the building. The yard was
unpaved, puddle-pocked from all the rain. “Pull
in,” I said, and Bowman did, taking a position
between cars on the far end. Scofield and Kenney got out
and went in, leaving the two grunts alone in the car.
“Well,” I said. “Looks like we fish
or cut bait.”
“Let me go in,” Trish said. “At
least if Pruitt’s in there he won’t know me
on sight.”
“Okay, but do it quick. Get us three coffees to
go, then get back out here and tell me what’s going
on.”
She clutched her raincoat and struggled through the
wind to the front door. I got back in the truck and
waited. Bowman didn’t say anything, and in a minute
I forgot he was there. I thought about Pruitt and
Grayson, and about the blind woman in Baltimore. And I
was suddenly very nervous.
One of Scofield’s grunts got out of the Caddy
and tried valiantly to light a cigarette. No smoking
allowed in the old man’s car, I thought. But the
wind was fierce and at last he had to give it up.
The cafe got busy. It was a workingman’s joint,
the customers coming and going in blue jeans and flannel.
The slots in front of the building were now filled in
with cars, and another row had begun out near the road
behind us. A young couple brushed past, then two farmers,
then a guy in coveralls who looked like the town grease
monkey. They all converged at the front door, just as the
door swung open and Trish came out.
She stepped aside, clutching a brown paper bag against
her breast. I got out and let her into the truck and she
gave me the news. Our friends had taken a booth at the
far end of the dining room and were sitting there alone,
waiting.
Trish gave out the coffees. “Hope you
don’t have to be anywhere,” she said by way
of apology to Bowman. He just grinned, well aware of the
points he was piling up with her, and said his time was
her time. He’d need to call in at nine and make
sure a few things got done: other than that, he was all
hers. More people came and went, old men in twos and
threes mixed with the occasional loner. They would fill
up the tables in a corner, eat their soft-boiled eggs and
gripe as old men in small towns have always done about
the thieves and sons of bitches running things in
Washington. I could fit right in if they’d let me:
a helluva lot better that would be than sitting out here
like three bumps on a log. This was a difficult place for
a stakeout. But you’d be much too conspicuous out
on the road, so you took what the situation gave you and
hoped you blended in. I hunched down in the seat till my
eyes were level with the dash. I could still see
everything that went on at the front door.
Bowman and Trish were talking shop again. I listened
but did not hear. Then we all settled into that quiet
restlessness that always seems to come in the second
hour. I replayed the case in my head, trying to remember
everything from the top. Slater walked into my store and
we did our little macho dance. I crossed swords with
Pruitt, came to know Eleanor and the Rigbys, absorbed the
legend of the Graysons, met Huggins and Amy Harper. But
through it all I kept thinking about a woman I had never
met and probably never would, a blind woman who had gone
crazy in Baltimore.
I got my chance at her when Bowman went to make his
phone call. “The guy in Baltimore,” I said.
“When he called you back, did he say anything about
the particulars of that particular case?”
“He read me some stuff from the clips. I made
some notes.” She opened her purse and got out her
steno pad. “I spent more time with him than the
others because of the blind woman.”
“Yeah, the blind woman.”
“What’re you thinking?”
“I don’t know yet. Go on with what he told
you.”
“The victim’s name was Allingham. He lived
with his wife on the outskirts of Baltimore, a suburb
called Ellicott City. Nice house, secluded neighborhood,
well-to-do people in their midfifties.”
“And the wife survived.”
“Not only survived, she seemed to’ve been
deliberately left alone. He came into the room with her.
She could hear him breathing.”
“
Him
…did she say it was a him?”
“That’s how the clips had it.
He
came in…
he
stood there breathing hard. She knew what was happening,
too: knew they had an intruder and he had just killed or
seriously hurt her husband. Blind people see better than
we think.”
“What else?”
She flipped a page. I looked at her notes and saw a
cryptic brand of shorthand, probably something of her own
making that was unreadable to the rest of the world.
“Her name was Elizabeth. She was never a credible
witness. She just sank into darkness after that. But who
could blame her?”
I closed my eyes and tried to see it. Irish said,
“The cops thought it might’ve been her dog
that saved her. She had this German shepherd Seeing Eye
dog, very protective. They say the dog raised hell when
the cops arrived. They had to bring in a dog man to
muzzle him before they could interview the
widow.”
“I don’t think the dog had anything to do
with it.”
“How so?”
“Dogs don’t usually discourage that kind
of killer, at least not for long. If he’d wanted
her, he’d go through the dog to get her.”
“Maybe the noise scared him off.”
“Maybe. And I can’t help wondering how she
could hear the killer breathing if the dog was
barking.”
“Who knows what she really heard? But look, are
you going somewhere with this?”
“I don’t know yet. It’s just nagging
at me. Did any of your news guys mention ashes at the
scene?”
“No, but that wouldn’t be in the clips.
The cops never…”
“But you did say the house in New Orleans was
torched and burned.”
“Yeah, the cops there thought it was done to
cover up the murder.”
“They may’ve told the press that, but
I’ll bet there were some cops down there who
didn’t believe it.”
“What’re you thinking?” she asked
again.
“Might’ve been somebody burning a book. He
left it burning and the fire spread and burned the
house.”
Bowman had come out of the restaurant, standing off to
one side to grab a smoke. I looked at Trish and the
question that had nagged at me all morning bubbled up and
out.
“Why would he leave the blind woman
alive?”
“You tell me.”
“Because of her blindness. That’s the one
thing all the others had in common that made her
different. They could see.”
“He knew she couldn’t see him.
Couldn’t identify him.”
“That’s the logical answer. But this bird
wasn’t thinking logically. And I can think of
another possibility.”
She shook her head. “I must be dense.”
“There was something in the book. Something they
could see and she couldn’t. Something that had been
put in or bound in by mistake. Something so awful in the
killer’s mind that it had to be retrieved, and
anybody who had seen it killed.”
“I don’t know, Janeway.”
“I don’t know either. I’m just doing
what cops always do in murder cases, I’m playing it
through in my head. Maybe he never intended to kill
anybody. But he went to St. Louis to get his book back,
and Hockman wouldn’t play. Now we get into the
collector’s mentality. Hockman suddenly knew he had
something unique. He wasn’t about to give it up,
not for Jesus Christ, not for Daryl Grayson himself. The
only way to get it from him was to kill him.”
“Keep going,” she said, but her voice was
still laced with doubt.
“The killer was single-minded, you figured that
out yourself. He flew from
A
to
B
, and so on. He had one thing on his mind, getting that
book. There was a desperate urgency to it, the cause
transcended geography, transcended everything: he
couldn’t think about anything else. So he gets to
St. Louis and Hockman won’t give it to him. He
whacks Hockman, maybe in a fit of rage. Now he’s a
killer.”
I let that thought settle on her for a few
seconds.
“Let me tell you something about killers,
Trish…something you might know but never thought
about. There are people who never kill till they’re
forty, fifty, then they kill a dozen times. That first
one pushes them over the edge, sets them on a dark path
they never intended to travel. The first one’s the
catalyst: there’s no question after that. He goes
to Phoenix and this time he doesn’t even ask. He
wades in, kills the people, takes the book. And so it
goes.”
“Until he gets to Baltimore…”
“And he walks into the room and there’s
this woman, obviously blind, with a dog and all, maybe a
cane leaning against a table. She’s blind, she
didn’t see anything, she’s not part of this.
He leaves her alive.”
“But who’d go to such a length?
Who’d do something like that?”
“Only one guy I can think of. The guy who made
it.”
Her eyes opened wide. “Jesus, Janeway,
what’re you thinking?” she asked for the
third time, her voice now an urgent whisper.
“Did you ever talk to the coroner who did the
Graysons?”
“No,” she said in a tiny voice.
“There was never a reason.”
“There was never any doubt that it was really
Darryl and Richard Grayson who died in that
fire?”
She never got to answer because Bowman came back and
got in beside us. We sat in the car, still as death,
thinking about it.