The Shadow Man (45 page)

He put the writing pad down on the arm of the chair. He wondered whether Walter Robinson had managed to get his composite drawing prepared. He was suddenly overcome with the desire to see the man he’d been so close to for those few seconds in the darkness of his apartment. I am beginning to understand you, Shadow Man, he whispered to himself. And the more I understand, the more light falls across your shadow.

He looked at the books gathered about him, and abruptly was struck with an idea. I’m looking in the wrong place, he thought. I’m asking the wrong people. The rabbi, Frieda Kroner, Esther at the Holocaust Center, all the historians - they’re all the wrong people. They know only of the fear and the threat the Shadow Man created. I must find one of the men who helped create the Shadow Man.

Simon Winter picked up a book from the stack beside him titled: The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. He flipped through it swiftly, until he found an organizational chart. He wrote down some numbers and designations on his sheet of notes, and then took a deep breath.

A long shot, he thought. But I’ve seen longer. And it’s something you wouldn’t expect, would you?

He collected his things and rose. There was a bank of telephones just outside the library, and he repeated the

numbers for Esther Weiss at the Holocaust Center and for the historians he’d spoken with as well. For a moment he saw his reflection in the plate-glass window of the library front door and noticed his lips had been moving as he’d kept up his one-sided conversation. This amused him. Old people are forever talking to themselves, because no one else will listen. It is a part of the harmless madness that age brings. Sometimes they talk to absent children, or long-lost friends, or missing brothers and sisters. On occasion they converse with God. Often they speak animatedly to ghosts. Me, he thought, smiling to himself, I talk to a hidden killer.

Walter Robinson, too, was frustrated.

The composite drawing of the Shadow Man stared back at him from his desktop. The Identikit technician had drawn the face with a small, almost mocking grin, which irked the detective immeasurably. Not the drawing per se, but the smile, because it spoke of elusiveness and anonymity.

He had begun to perform several routine chores of detection, the sorts of tasks that detectives everywhere do, and which they are accustomed to meeting some successes with. But so far his own efforts had been fruitless. He had faxed the partial thumbprint taken from Sophie Millstein’s throat to the FBI labs in Maryland, to see if their computer could come up with a match. The marriage of fingerprint technology and computers has been slow in developing. For years matches were performed by human eyes. This, of course, required the detective seeking a match to know who his suspect was, so that a technician could then compare the crime scene print with a properly taken exemplar. Only in the last few years has computer technology been created allowing an unknown print to be fed into

a machine and an identity plucked from the millions of prints taken from the fringe population. Dade County’s computer, a smaller version of one operated by the FBI, had already failed. Robinson did not hold out much hope that the agency would be any different. And, owing to the immensity of the FBI sample, the examination would take upward of a week, and he did not know if he had a week to spare.

He’d spent several irritating hours at a computer screen, searching through records for some sign of the Shadow Man. There had been two entries with the word shadow under known aliases, but one of these was a Hispanic hit man in his late twenties, presumed dead himself, a victim of the usual narcotics dispute, and the other was a rapist working in the Pensacola area, who had been given the sobriquet by the local newspaper. He’d tried some variations on the phrase, but without success. He’d even been clever enough to tie into the Miami Beach tax rolls, using the German Schattenmann, but this had been a dead end.

He had tried entering the national criminal computer data base, with key words such as Holocaust and Jewish, but the one had been negative and the other had produced a lengthy list of various synagogue and cemetery desecrations, also listed under Hate Crimes.

He had tried the word Berlin with an equal lack of success. Efforts with Auschwitz and Gestapo and other links were hopeless.

He had not actually expected any success, but every time his computer blinked the reply no entry found, it renewed his frustration.

He had also gone back into the Miami Beach department’s cold case file, wondering whether there might be other signs of the Shadow Man’s work in ancient cases, but so far he’d been unable to find anything. Certainly there

were unsolved homicides with Jewish victims, and probably some of these were Holocaust survivors, but whether they’d once come from Berlin, and how and where they’d survived the Holocaust, were not the sort of details contained in the files. Backtracking through cases five, ten, perhaps twenty years old, would take days. He had held the files in his hands and thought to himself that surely one, two, maybe more, could be the Shadow Man’s handiwork. For an instant he thought of the men and women the Shadow Man had trapped in wartime Germany, and he realized the cases he held were as lost to him as those murders were.

The thought made him swear loudly, a torrent of obscenities, heard by no one.

Walter Robinson rose from his seat and started to stalk around the desks in the homicide office with all the intensity of a newly captured wildcat, hoping that motion might dislodge some thought that would lead him into a profitable electronic avenue. Every detective keeps in mind such salient memories, such as the Son of Sam case in New York, solved when someone finally checked on every parking ticket issued near one of the crime scenes. He moved from one side of the room to the other, stopping once to spend a minute or two staring out the window across the city, which baked beneath the midday sun. Then he hiked back to his desk, picked up the composite drawing, and holding it in front of him, continued pacing around the room.

He looked up only when he heard the voice ask him: ‘Is that our man?’

Simon Winter was standing across from him. Robinson nodded, covered the space between them in a quick step and handed the old detective the picture. Winter held it in his hands for a moment, staring hard at the lines of the

drawing. His eyes seemed to absorb every detail, imprinting them on his own memory. Then he smiled cheerlessly:

‘Pleased to meet you, you sonofabitch.’

What he did not say was: So, you’re the man who tried to kill me.

‘Now,’ Robinson said, almost offhandedly, ‘all we have to do is put a name to that face.’

‘A name …’

‘Then I’ll nail the bastard. You can take that to the bank. That’s all I need. A name. Then his next stop will be the Dade County Jail. A brief stopover on the bumpy ride to Death Row.’

Winter nodded. ‘Tell me, Walter, have you ever hunted a man involved in multiple homicides?’

‘Yes and no,’ the detective replied. ‘That is, I busted a drug dealer once who’d killed four or five rivals. And I was part of the team that nailed that serial rapist who was working up in Surfside. We always thought there were probably some homicides that we could have made him on, especially up in Broward County, but nothing came of it, and he went away with a zillion-year sentence. But I know what you’re really asking. You want to know about Ted Bundy and Charlie Manson and John Gacy and the Boston Strangler and all the others, and you’re wondering whether I’ve ever participated in one of those investigations, and the answer to that is no, I haven’t. Did you?’

The older man smiled. ‘I took a confession once, a guy sat across from me, smoking cigarettes, drinking Coca-Colas. That was back when they came in those six-and-a-half-ounce bottles, and you could polish off one of those suckers in a gulp or two. It was hot, and there was only this little fan running in a corner of the room, and it was late at night, and it seemed like every time I got that guy another Coke, he’d confess to another killing. Little boys,

mostly. He liked little boys. This was down in the southern part of the county, not too far from where the Everglades reach down and touch the bay. Redneck country. He was a transplanted good old boy. Should have been humming “Dixie”. Couple of scraggly tattoos, three-day-old beard, beat-up baseball hat. Could hardly read and write. He got up to maybe seventeen, eighteen confessed killings by the time the sun came up, and so we took him out. He was going to give us the tour, you know? I felt like a bus driver at a goddamn tourist trap, like some sort of nightmare sightseer, thinking about what sort of final hours those kids had had with this bastard. We used a Jeep at first, then that got stuck, so we had to switch to one of those swamp buggies, the ones they use for crossing the hammocks, with a big old airplane engine in the back roaring away. He was trying to show us where he’d left the bodies, but hell, there’d been so much rain and sun, and that place, well, everything looks pretty much alike, and he wasn’t the brightest light ever either, so we didn’t come up with much. Ended up just charging him with the one case that we’d made him on. He went to the chair, always claiming there were others out there. Lots of others. And, you know, every so often some hunter or fisherman came across some bones out in the woods and muck, and I used to think maybe it was that guy’s handiwork, but there was no way of telling.’

Simon Winter shook his head as he ransacked the memory.

‘It bothered me for years. It still bothers me. All I could think about was all the people out there, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, hell I don’t know, who didn’t get an answer from me. You know, that’s one of the most important jobs a policeman can provide: certainty. When you can give it out, no matter how terrible it is, then you

must do it, because it is a helluva lot easier for people to live with even if it’s the worst certainty in the world, than to be left not knowing. Damn that swamp. It can cover up anything.’

Walter Robinson nodded. ‘Now we could fly over those spots in a helicopter, shooting the terrain with an infrared camera, and pick up the heat from a decomposing body.’

Winter sighed. ‘Science is wonderful.’

‘So…’

‘Well, I remember thinking, listening to this guy, wondering when he was gonna quit, and he never quite did. You get this sensation that you’ve been dropped down a well. It’s dark and dank and you might never get out, and even if you do, all you’ll remember is the nightmare. I think our guy is a little like that.’

Robinson took a deep breath. ‘I’m having some trouble sleeping. Even with …’ He paused and Simon Winter filled in for him:

‘… pleasant company?’

‘That’s right. Even with company. That obvious, is it?’

Winter grinned. ‘I was a detective once.’

Robinson gave a small shrug. ‘I had nightmares the other night.’

‘What sort of nightmares?’

‘Pretty much what you’d expect. Where you’re watching someone drown and you can’t do anything about it. That sort of thing.’

‘You know what used to frighten me the most?’

‘What?’

‘That there were other guys, like this good old boy that killed seventeen, eighteen, or maybe more kids, and that they were out there and not only could I never get them, but that they’d live and do these terrible things to poor children who never had a chance, and then they’d grow

progressively more awful and get old and finally die peacefully in their sleep, never touched, never threatened, never anything other than one hundred percent evil. And now, I’m old too, and I worry that maybe there isn’t a Heaven and there isn’t a Hell. Because, goddamn it, it truly bothers me to think that if we can’t catch these guys on this earth, they can just disappear into the great oblivion without being held in the slightest way accountable. That’s what gives me nightmares.’

Walter Robinson rubbed a finger across his forehead. ‘I hadn’t thought of it that way.’

‘That’s what makes this job so important, Walter. We like to think that there’s a higher court. We hope there is, but there just might not be, and if there isn’t, then it’s completely up to us. Just us. Nobody else.’

‘You’re a philosopher, Simon.’

‘Of course. All old men are.’

‘They are out there, you know. That’s what we’ve learned, since you retired. Not just one or two, but more than we can count. Perverts of every stripe and color. Killers of unique styles and approaches.’

‘But this guy,’ Winter glanced down at the composite drawing, ‘this guy isn’t a sex fiend or a pervert or some star-crossed megalomaniac. He’s not Bundy and he’s not Gacy and he’s not Charlie Manson. Something else motivates him.’

‘What do you think that is?’

‘Hate.’

‘He hates his victims? But he barely knows them.’

‘No, he knows them well. Not them exactly, but who they are. But more importantly, he hates what they mean to him. They share a past. But I’ll wager his hate goes back further. And what he wants to kill is history.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, he has never known anything other than anger.’

The younger man slowly bent his head to the picture. ‘That makes sense,’ he said after a moment. ‘Maybe that’s what has me screwed up.’

‘How so?’

‘I can understand perversion. I can understand blowing away the competition. I can understand shooting your husband for cheating on you. I’ve always been able to understand just about every reason for murder there is. But not this guy. Not yet. And that has me worried,

Simon.’

The old detective smiled. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that perhaps I have not given you enough credit.’ Then he scratched at his head in a mock curious motion. ‘So, maybe if that is what moves this guy, don’t you think we might try to find the source?’

‘The source of his hatred?’

‘Precisely.’

Winter reached into a small backpack that he carried, which contained some books and his notepad, and which made him think of himself as the oddest student walking the earth. He handed a piece of paper to Walter Robinson, who glanced at it quickly, then looked up with some confusion.