The Poet (55 page)

“It’s coming together,” he said. “Another one for the studies, I suppose. These people-if you can call them that-never cease to amaze me. Every one of them, their stories … each one of them’s a black hole. And there’s never enough blood to fill it.”

Rachel pulled out a chair and sat across from him. I sat next to her. We didn’t say anything. We knew he wanted to go on. He reached over with a pen and tapped the side of one of the laptops.

“This was his,” he said. “It was recovered from the trunk of his car last night.”

“A Hertz car?” I asked.

“No. He arrived at Data Imaging in an eighty-four Plymouth registered to a Darlene Kugel, thirty-six, of North Hollywood. We went to her apartment last night, got no response and went in. She was in the bed. Her throat was cut, probably with the same knife he used on Gordon. She’d been dead for days. It looked like he’d burned incense, slopped perfume around to hide the smell.”

“He stayed in there with her body?” Rachel asked.

“Looks like it.”

“Were those her clothes he was wearing?” I asked.

“And the wig.”

“What was he doing dressed like her, anyway?” Rachel asked.

“Don’t know and never will now. My guess is he knew everybody was looking for him. Police, the bureau. He thought it was a way to leave her place, get the camera and then maybe get out of town.”

“Probably. What did you get from her place?”

“There was nothing that was of much use inside, but her unit had two parking spaces assigned to it in the garage and we found an eighty-six Pontiac Firebird in one of them. Florida plate, it came back to Gladys Oliveros of Gainesville.”

“His mother?” I asked.

“Yes. Moved there when he went to prison so she’d be close for visits, I guess. Remarried and changed her name. Anyway, we opened the trunk of the Pontiac and found the computer, some other things, including the books Brass found in the picture from the cell. There was an old sleeping bag. There’s blood on it and the lab has it. The initial report is that there is kapok in the insulation.”

“It means he put some of his victims in the trunk,” I said.

“Which accounts for the hours they were missing,” Rachel added.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “If he had his mother’s car, what about the car from Hertz in Phoenix? Why would he rent a car if he already had one?”

“Just another way of confusing the trail, Jack. Use mother’s to move from city to city, but then he rents one when he moves in for the kill on the cop.”

My confusion over the logic of that theory showed on my face. But Backus dismissed it.

“Anyway, we haven’t gotten the Hertz records yet, so let’s not get sidetracked. For the moment, the computer is what’s important.”

“What’s in it?” Rachel asked.

“The office here has a computer unit, works with the group in Quantico. One of the agents, Don Clearmountain, took this last night and broke down the coding by about three this morning. He copied the hard disk to the mainframe here. Anyway, it’s full of photographs. Fifty-seven of them.”

Backus used his thumb and forefinger to pinch the bridge of his nose. He had aged since I’d last seen him at the hospital. Aged badly.

“Children?” Rachel asked.

Backus nodded.

“Jesus. The victims?”

“Yes … before and after. It’s horrible stuff. Truly horrible.”

“And he was transmitting these somewhere? Like we thought?”

“Yes, the computer has a cellular modem as Gordon … as he guessed. It, too, is registered out of Gainesville to Oliveros. We just got the records a little while ago.”

He indicated some of the paperwork in front of him.

“There are a lot of calls,” he said. “All over the place. He was into some kind of net. A network where the users were interested in these kinds of photographs.”

He looked up from the papers at us, his eyes sick but defiant.

“We are tracing them all now. We’re going to make a lot of arrests. A lot of people will pay for this. What happened to Gordon will not be for nothing.”

He nodded more to himself than us.

“We can compare the transmissions and the users to the bank deposits I found in Jacksonville,” Rachel said. “I bet we’ll be able to know just how much they paid for the photos and when.”

“Clearmountain and his people are already working on it. They’re down the hall in the Group Three offices if you want to stop in.”

“Bob?” I said. “Did they look at all fifty-seven photos?”

He looked at me a moment before answering.

“I did, Jack. I did.”

“They were only the kids?”

I felt my chest tightening. Whatever I had told myself about being emotionally deadened to my brother and what had happened was a lie.

“No, Jack,” Backus said. “There are no pictures of those victims. None of the police officers, none of the other adult victims. I guess …”

He didn’t finish.

“What?” I asked.

“I guess those kinds of photos would not have been profitable to him.”

I looked down at my hands on the table. My right hand was beginning to ache and felt clammy under the white bandages. I felt relief go through me. I think it was relief. What else is it that you feel when you learn that there are no photographs of your murdered brother’s body out there all over the country, floating out there on the Internet and ready to be downloaded by any sick individual with a taste for it.

“I think when this gets out about this guy, there’ll be a lot of people who’ll want to throw a parade for you, Jack,” Backus said. “Put you in a convertible and drive you down Madison Avenue.”

I looked at him. I didn’t know if it was an attempt at humor but I didn’t smile.

“Maybe sometimes vengeance is just as good as justice,” he said.

“They’re pretty much the same if you ask me.”

After a few moments of silence, Backus changed the subject.

“Jack, we have to get your formal statement. I’ve got one of the office’s stenographers set up for nine-thirty. Are you ready?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be.”

“We just want the linear story. From A to B, don’t leave any detail out. I thought, Rachel, you’d handle that, ask the questions.”

“Sure, Bob.”

“I’d like to get this wrapped up today and submitted to the DA tomorrow. Maybe we can all go home then.”

“Who’s doing the package for the DA?” Rachel asked.

“Carter.”

He looked at his watch.

“Uh, you have a few minutes but why don’t you go down the hall and ask for Sally Kimball. She might be ready to go now.”

Dismissed, we stood and headed for the door. I watched Rachel, trying to judge whether she was annoyed at being assigned to taking my statement while the local agents were tracing Gladden’s computer records, which seemed at the moment to be the more exciting branch of the investigation. She showed nothing and at the door of the conference room she turned and told Backus she’d be around if he needed anything else.

“Thanks, Rachel,” he said. “Oh, and Jack, these are for you.”

He held up the stack of pink message slips. I went back to the table and took them.

“And this.”

He raised my computer satchel from the floor next to his seat and handed it across the table to me.

“You left that in the car yesterday.”

“Thanks.”

I studied the stack of pink slips. There must have been a dozen of them.

“You’re a popular man,” Backus said. “Don’t let it go to your head.”

“Only if they give me that parade.”

He didn’t smile.

While Rachel went to look for the stenographer I stood in the hallway and looked through the messages. They were mostly repeats from the networks but a few print reporters had called, even one from my hometown competition, the Denver Post. The tabloids, of both the print and television variety, had left messages. There was also a call from Michael Warren. I noted from the 213 callback number that he was still in town.

The three messages that intrigued me the most weren’t from the news media. Dan Bledsoe had called just an hour earlier from Baltimore. And there were two messages from book publishers, one from a senior editor at a New York-based house and one from an assistant to the publisher at another house. I recognized both imprints and felt a mixture of trepidation and thrill course through my chest.

Rachel came up to me then.

“She’s going to be a couple minutes. There’s an office down here we’re going to use. Let’s wait there.”

I followed her.

The room was a smaller version of the one we had met Backus in, with a round table and four chairs, a side counter with a phone, and a picture window with a view east toward downtown. I asked Rachel if it would be all right if I used the phone while we waited and she said go ahead. I keyed in the number Bledsoe had left and he picked up after one ring.

“Bledsoe Investigations.”

“It’s Jack McEvoy.”

“Jack Mac, how you doing?”

“I’m fine. How are you?”

“A lot better since I heard the news this morning.”

“Well, I’m glad, then.”

“You did good, Jack, putting that guy in the hole. You did real good.”

Then how come I don’t feel so good, I thought but didn’t say.

“Jack?”

“What?”

“I owe you one, buddy. And Johnny Mac owes you one.”

“No you don’t. We’re even, Dan. You helped me.”

“Well, just the same, you get back out here one day and we’re going to go for crabs at the tavern. It’ll go on my tab.”

“Thanks, Dan. I’ll be out.”

“Hey, what about this G-girl who’s been in the papers and TV? Agent Walling. She’s a looker.”

I looked over at Rachel.

“Yeah, she is.”

“I seen the clip on CNN of her walking you out of that store last night. You be careful, young man.”

He managed to get a smile out of me. I hung up and looked at the two messages from the publishers. I was tempted to return the calls but thought better of it. I didn’t know much about the publishing industry, but back when I was writing my first novel-the one later left unfinished and hidden in a drawer-I’d done a little research and decided that if I ever finished the book I’d get an agent before I went to the publishers. I had even picked the agent I would seek to represent me. Only I had never finished a book to send to him. I decided I would look up his name and number again and call him later.

Next to consider was the call from Warren. The stenographer still had not arrived in the office so I hit the buttons for the number he had left. An operator answered and when I asked for Warren I saw Rachel immediately look up at me with quizzical eyes. I winked at her as the voice on the line told me Warren was out of the office. I told her my name but left no message or callback number. Warren would have to think about missing the call when he got that.

“Why were you calling him?” Rachel asked after I hung up. “I thought you two were enemies.”

“I guess we are. I was probably going to tell him to go fuck himself.”

It took me an hour and fifteen minutes to tell my story in full detail to Rachel with the stenographer taking it down. Rachel primarily asked leading questions, designed to move me along through the story in chronological order. When I got to the shooting, her questions were more specific and for the first time she asked what my thoughts were at the time of specific actions.

I told her I went for the gun to simply get it away from Gladden, nothing more. I told her of my idea to empty the weapon once the struggle ensued and how the second shot was not deliberate.

“It was more him pulling the gun than me pulling the trigger, you know? He just tried for it one more time and my thumb was still in the guard. When he pulled it, it went off. He kind of killed himself. It was like he knew what was going to happen.”

We went a few more minutes after that, with Rachel asking some follow-up questions. She then told the stenographer she would need the transcript the next morning for inclusion in the charging package that would be submitted to the district attorney.

“What do you mean, ‘charging package’?” I asked after the stenographer had left the room.

“It’s just a term. We call it that whether we are seeking a charge or an indictment or not. Relax. We obviously aren’t seeking anything here but a finding of self-defense, justifiable homicide. Don’t worry, Jack.”

It was early but we decided to get lunch. Rachel said she’d drop me by the hotel afterward. She had work to do back at the field office but I’d be done for the day. We were walking down the hallway when she noticed the door marked Group Three was open and she looked in. There were two men in the room, both sitting at computers, paperwork on the keyboards and on top of the terminals. I noticed a copy of the same book I had on Edgar Allan Poe on top of one of the agents’ monitors. He was the first to notice us.

“Hi, I’m Rachel Walling, how is it going?”