“Why all the investigation?” I said.
“To prove who killed them.”
I sat down in a chair opposite. The men with the guns were on either side, just as Bullet-head had promised. And Grime talked, just as he had promised.
“I brought some of my sketches down.”
Grime pulled a canvas off the table.
“This is a self-portrait of me working on Michigan Avenue. I call it Michigan Avenue Mime.”
Grime grinned a row of teeth, crooked and mossy, but they were all there.
“Want to see one of my routines?”
Before I could say no, Grime had drawn both of his hands close together over his head. He looked up through spread fingers, turned his palms flat, and fought against an invisible ceiling dropping from above. Then he slipped his hands to either side and pushed against the heaviness of his imaginary walls. Finally, Grime dropped his palms in front of his face, peered through his fingers at me, and mimed fear. I wondered if this was the last thing his victims saw in their short bit of life.
“Not bad, huh?” the killer said. “I had real talent. You want to see another sketch?”
He pulled a second self-portrait off the table. This time it was Grime the Mime entertaining a group of kids.
“This is me at Brody’s Ice Cream Emporium. Get it?”
Grime coughed up a laugh and took a look around. I didn’t get it. Neither did anyone else. It was a tough room, but Grime kept on.
“Brody’s. The company with fifteen favorite flavors. I worked as their mime. Fifteen flavors. Fifteen bodies. Get it?”
I smiled.
“Got it.”
“This is one of my Disney paintings.”
Grime pulled out a painting of the Seven Dwarfs. It was winter, and the misshapen Dwarfs were sitting around a campfire, shovels tossed aside, trying to stay warm. Grime provided running commentary.
“Walt Disney was a mentor of mine. I love the Dwarfs. Sleepy, Sneezy, Happy, Doc. Every year I do a different season. This is The Dwarfs in Winter.”
“You do these in your cell?”
“Yeah. I do forty or fifty of these every year. Next up is summer.”
“Same scene?”
“Always the woods.”
“Where’s Snow White?”
Grime smiled again. Everything except his eyes.
“Not there, is she? Why are you here?”
Grime put the painting away and took a sip of water.
“I mean, I read your letter. New information about my case. You knew that would get my interest.”
I nodded.
“So how can you help me?” he said.
“I don’t think you’re innocent, John.”
Grime’s face remained flat.
“I don’t really give a shit what you think, mister. How can you help my case?”
“I think you had an accomplice. Tell me about it, and maybe I can help.”
Grime took another hit on the water and leaned back in his chair. His belly strained against the buttons of his shirt. Prison-issue blue.
“You know I serve Mass in here? Ask the chaplain. Altar boy.”
Another pause.
“You have a lawyer, John?”
“A fucking fleet of them.”
“Ask them. An accomplice changes your case. Changes the evidence. Maybe gets you a new trial. Where you sit, that’s a good thing.”
“What makes you think I didn’t do them all myself?”
“Like I said, tell me about it, and maybe I can help.”
“No, fuck wad. You tell me about it. Or get the fuck out of my jail.”
I leaned forward. Grime didn’t move.
“I’m your best chance, John. Believe it or don’t, but I can prove you had help. Now tell me about it.”
“Why should I give it to you?”
“Why not?”
“Maybe I think it’ll keep me alive.”
“Want me to show you a calendar with your execution date on it? I’m figuring sometime next December. Enjoy.”
“You don’t get it, do you?”
“Tell me,” I said.
“This is so much bigger than the murders now. I’m so much bigger.”
Grime blinked once and looked at me like a high school kid might look at a frog just before he dissects it. Kind of funny, but mostly curious.
“You know how many people die each day?” he said.
“No, I don’t.”
“Hundred fifty thousand a day. Ten thousand since you sat down here. Look it up.”
“I’m not following you, John.”
“You’re not following me. No one follows me. That’s the point. Shit, for every person alive right now, there are billions who are already dead. Billions. So where the fuck do you get off saying these fifteen are so special?”
Grime used his foot to flip open the brown binder again. It fell flat to a picture of a girl named Donna Tracey. About seventeen years old, with long, stringy hair and bad skin. Looked like a mug shot.
“Just part of the herd,” Grime said. “Millions of them, scraping along, sucking down their Big Macs, listening to their tunes, flipping through the idiot box. That’s the life, mister. Get out of the house, drink up some warm beer, then wrestle with a wannabe car mechanic in a backseat somewhere. Like they invented sex.”
Grime closed the binder with his foot.
“Get knocked up at what? Fifteen, sixteen? For what? To procreate? Propagate the species? Fuck that. Just another generation of mediocrity. Spitting out their mediocre kids. Then trudging along to a grave. These fifteen just got there a little earlier.”
“And no one really gives a damn about any of them. Right, John?”
Grime craned his neck and took a look around the room. No one had moved. Everyone was listening. The killer loved it, which was okay. As long as he kept talking, I was in the game.
“You look like a smart guy,” Grime said. “Let me ask you something. You know the name of your great-grandfather? Great-grandmother? How about we go back another generation, great-great-grandfather? That’s less than a hundred years ago, but most people have no fucking idea. Their own flesh and blood. So fucking sacred. Once you’re in the ground, you’re gone. Within fifty years. Like you never existed.”
“But not that way for you, huh?”
“Probably not, mister. Probably not. So you say these assholes are going to kill me and you have a way out. I say, so what. Kill me. I’ll live forever anyway.”
Grime looked past me. To Bullet-head.
“I’m done here.”
With that he stood up and held out his hands. The officers redid his cuffs. In front of his body. Then they began to pack up his files.
“Sorry, Kelly. Maybe you have something. Maybe you don’t. Just not enough in it for me.”
“You already have what you want?”
“Looks like it.”
I stood up and moved closer. Trying to get in the killer’s space, change the dynamic.
“What if you could walk away from this?” I said. “Even a little bit. Don’t you think the legend would only grow? And if you were ever released, how big would that story be?”
Grime paused as they secured the hallways outside. He looked for all the world like a broken-down old man, one who liked to have sex with little girls and squeeze their necks until they were dead. By his own estimation, one of this generation’s immortals. Tell the truth, I figured he wasn’t that far off. Then the serial killer leaned forward and, for the first time since I entered the room, surprised me.
“Tell you what,” he said. “You do your own legwork. See if you can make the case. Otherwise, I talk and it comes right back here. Sits in my lap.”
“Fair enough. But I need something.”
A guard grabbed Grime by the elbow and began to tug.
“Time to go,” Bullet-head said.
“I’ll think about it,” Grime said. “But understand, you start down this road, you might end up under a house, too.”
He smiled when he said it. I think Grime enjoyed the notion. Then he left the room. Bullet-head stayed behind.
“Who picks up his stuff?” I said.
The guard shrugged.
“Are you kidding me? The guys fight to get to carry this stuff up to his cell. One of those paintings goes into someone’s locker. Sell it on eBay for twenty grand.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding.”
We walked together through a couple of locked doors and back down an open breezeway. The yard was to my left, a scattering of inmates smoking cigarettes and lifting iron in the cold.
“You get what you need?” Bullet-head said.
“Not yet.”
“Yeah, well, Grime is an asshole.”
“Not well liked in here?”
“Guy like that. Rep like that. He pays to stay alive.”
“Really?”
“Sure. Carton of smokes a month or we find him in the shower with a shank in his neck.”
We came to the end of the breezeway. Bullet-head turned a key and opened another door. An officer waited on the other side.
“Here is where I get off. Good luck, Kelly. Hope you learned something.”
We shook hands. I walked down another long passageway, through three more doors, and back to the shakedown room. A female correctional officer passed over my keys, money, and wallet without a word. I filled my pockets and was about to leave when a phone buzzed. The officer whispered a few words into the receiver, looked up at me, whispered a few more, and hung up.
“Mr. Kelly,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Wait just a moment.”
I sat back down. Two minutes later Bullet-head pushed back into the room.
“Kelly. Glad we caught you. Your boy wanted to give you something. Already cleared it with the warden.”
Bullet-head handed me a piece of paper.
“Just a note. Yeah, we took a look at it. Doesn’t mean anything to me, but there it is.”
I unfolded the note from Grime, just a single line of type.
CST…9998.
Bullet-head watched me closely.
“Mean anything to you?”
I shrugged.
“Nothing. Not yet, anyway.”
CHAPTER 44
I actually knew what Grime’s note meant the moment I saw it. It was the same method cops used to file away news clippings in a homicide book. CST stood for Chicago Sun-Times. I Googled their archives, but they went back only two years online. I could have called a Sun-Times reporter and asked for a favor, but one journalist in my life seemed like more than enough. I punched in Diane’s cell. She picked up on the first ring.
“Where are you?” she said.
“Nice to talk to you, too. I’m at my office, Googling with no apparent effect.”
“When did you get back from Menard?”
“Couple of hours ago,” I said.
“I left you a message.”
I looked at the blinking light on my machine. Not for the first time.
“I know.”
“Michael, you need to return your messages.”
“I know.”
“I was waiting to hear how it went with Grime. And don’t tell me you know.”
“Okay.”
“How did it go?”
“Actually, I don’t know,” I said. “In fact, that’s what I’m working on. I need access to the Sun-Times clip morgue. You guys can do that, right?”
“How far back?”
I took a glance at Grime’s note.
“September 1998.”
“What day?”
“Let’s just keep it at September until I get down there.”
“You don’t have to come down. I can access the clips from your computer. Is this going to be good?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“I’m leaving now. Be there in a half hour. Did he creep you out?”
“Grime?”
“Who else?”
“See you in thirty.”
I had just hung up with Diane when Rodriguez punched in.
“We got test results back from Miriam Hope’s bedsheets,” he said.
“And?”
“The same guy who helped Grime in 1995, raped Elaine Remington in 1997, and cried in Miriam’s bed three weeks ago.”
“Some guy.”
“Yeah. For my money he’s also grabbing twelve-year-olds and leaving Grime’s semen behind. Just for kicks. What did John himself have to say?”
I told him about Grime and the note he gave me.
“What do you think?” Rodriguez said.
“I don’t know. Diane Lindsay is coming over. We’re going to go through the clip file.”
“Can she keep her mouth shut for a bit?”
“She will.”
Rodriguez didn’t like it but held his fire.
“Fine. If she helps us ID this guy, we give her the exclusive. Biggest story any of us will see.”
“You got that right,” I said.
“Keep me posted. And remember, Kelly. Me, you, and Lindsay. That’s it until we find this guy.”
I hung up the phone and looked past a week’s worth of mail, to a single package sitting on my desk. A missive from the desert. Most likely a waste of time. But there it was. Waiting to be opened.
CHAPTER 45
T he FedEx package from Phoenix had lain there for three days. As promised, Reynolds had included the entire Gleason murder book along with a note that read, “Where the fuck is my file?” The detective knew me not at all and yet very well. I packaged up a copy of Remington’s street file and posted it to Phoenix. Then I began to wander through the Gleason homicide.
The first thing I pulled out were a set of autopsy photos. Carol Gleason looked up at me from the examining table, eyes flying open in surprise, a small neat hole drilled through her breastbone. In death, she looked a lot like John Gibbons, and that bothered me. I was about to dig into the forensics report when my buzzer rang. Five minutes later Diane was set up on my Mac, ready to sleuth.
“Okay, I need the date,” she said.
Diane turned her face my way and held out her hands. I handed over Grime’s scrawl.
“I told him I thought he had an accomplice. He basically told me to take a hike. Then, as I was about to leave, he sent this down.”
“Sent it down?”
“From his cell. With one of the guards.”