Fury (15 page)

Wald shook his head. “Densmore’s gonna go ratsh…” He stopped. Flicked a gaze at Mrs. V. “He’s gonna lose his mind,” he finished.

Natalie Van Der Hoven got to her feet, scowling imperiously down at the detectives. “I’ll leave it to you gentlemen to work out the details,” she announced. Wald pulled the door open and stood behind it as the
Seattle Sun
contingent filed out. For a second there, just as Mrs. V. swooshed past him, it looked like Donald was going to curtsy.

Like the lady said, the details got worked out. After getting back their belongings, Corso and Dougherty would meet the cops across the street in Tully’s coffee shop. Meg was going with Donald. Up to the medical examiner’s office. Lie-detector results, autopsy reports, and photos. Corso was going with Wald, across the street to the Public Safety Building for detectives’ notes and a look at the hard evidence. Wald stepped out from behind the door.

“Come on,” he said.

Donald and Wald got off at ground level. Corso and Dougherty took the elevator all the way to the bottom. Walked down the long basement hall toward booking.

“I’d kill for a shower,” Dougherty offered.

“You and me both,” Corso said.

Corso bumped her with his elbow. “What’d you think of Donald?”

“Ooooh,” she enthused. “That is one fine boy toy,” she said.

“You really think so?”

She laughed at him. Women to the left, men to the right. The turnkey dumped the envelope out onto the battered counter. “Check your belongings carefully,” he intoned. He pushed a clipboard at Corso. “Sign on line fifty-one.”

Corso refilled his pockets and then scribbled his name on the dotted line.

“Sergeant Wald called down,” the turnkey said. “Says you guys better go out the garage entrance down here, ’cause there’s a herd of media types out front.”

Corso thanked him for the tip and then followed his directions to the garage. Dougherty was already there. She had the back of the Nikon open.

“They get the film?” Corso asked.

“No film,” she said with a smirk. “It’s digital.”

“They get the disk?”

“They got
a
disk.”

“What’s that mean?”

“They didn’t get
the
disk,” she said.

“What?”

“You heard me. I’ve still got the shots I took of the body.”

“Where—” he began.

She shook her head. “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” she said.

“I hope it was user-friendly?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

Together, they followed the green exit signs through the bowels of the building, snaking back and forth among the patrol cars and the concrete pillars until they came to a gray steel door labeled “James Street.” Dougherty grabbed the knob and stepped out, stopped in her tracks, and then suddenly turned and gave Corso a toothy grin he’d never seen from her before.

“Don’t look now, Ken, but I think Malibu Barbie’s here,” she said.

Corso stepped out into a light drizzle. Overhead, dirty clouds had swallowed the tops of the buildings. Cars had their lights on. He looked uphill. Nothing. Then downhill. Cynthia Stone in a red plastic raincoat, little matching boots and umbrella.

“You still have my number?” Corso asked.

“Yeah.”

“Call me when you finish at the medical examiner’s office.”

Dougherty said she would and then turned downhill, strode past Cynthia without making eye contact, and disappeared around the corner onto Fourth Avenue.

Corso had forgotten how Cynthia walked. That one-foot-in-front-of-the-other thing she did. The delicious way each step rustled with the silken sound of flesh passing flesh, until a guy was overcome and just had to see for himself what was rubbing together.

She held the umbrella tight against her shoulder with her right hand. The left she kept in the pocket of her raincoat. The heels of her red plastic boots clicked as she walked a circle around Corso. “You look good, Frank,” she said. “The long hair becomes you.”

Corso kept his mouth shut. On the one hand, she looked the same. Same surgically assisted profile and baby-blue eyes. On the other, she looked older than he remembered and more like her mother than he’d ever noticed before. Gonna end up with the same wrinkled, drawstring mouth that she’d be able to cinch up like a sack over everything she found in some way distasteful or disappointing.

“Aren’t you going to tell me I look good too?”

“You know how you look, Cynthia. It’s what you do.”

She looked downhill toward the corner of Fourth Avenue. “Developing a fetish for big girls, are you, Frank?”

“They’re easier to hold on to,” Corso said.

She made a disbelieving face. “You didn’t really think I was going to cling to the hull of a sinking ship, did you, Frank?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “What can I say, Frank? When it was good, it was good.” She shrugged with one shoulder. “Life goes on.”

“You always were a sentimental fool, Cynth.”

“I hear she’s colorfully decorated.”

Behind her, the sounds of car horns bounced off the damp air. The overhanging clouds gave the feeling of being in a low-ceilinged room.

“How’d you know to look for me here?” Corso asked.

She smirked. “I have my sources.”

“No, Cynth, you have a
staff
that has sources. You, personally, couldn’t find your own ass in the dark.”

She twirled the umbrella and stepped in close to Corso. Same perfume as always. “As I recall, you never had much trouble finding my ass in the dark.”

“Must have been the zeal of the organs for each other,” Corso said.

She raised a sculptured eyebrow. “So you say now,” she quipped.

“I’ve gotta go,” Corso said.

She raised the umbrella and leaned her breast against Corso’s arm. The insistent mist hissed against the plastic. “You’ve made quite a comeback, Frank.”

He looked into her eyes and remembered what Bo Holland had once said about Cynthia, a couple of years before she and Corso became an item. Back when Corso and Bo shared desk space at the
Times
, and she’d come waltzing through the newsroom, dragging every eye in her wake. Bo’d worked with her before. Someplace in Florida. St. Pete maybe. Said that she was like a beautifully appointed room, its walls lined with a series of doors, which presumably led to other wings of what must surely be a mansion. Surprise was, though, that it didn’t matter which door you chose to open, because all doors led to the backyard. What you see is all there is. At the time, Corso had attributed the bitterness of Bo’s tone to the pain of a spurned lover. You live and learn.

Corso stepped out from beneath the umbrella. “You come here to help me plot my progress through life or did you want something in particular?”

“I want in on the story, Frank. Because of you, that fish-wrap tabloid you work for has had the story all to itself for the better part of a week. You’re all the buzz on every network, but you know it can’t last.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because it’s unnatural, Frank. Big dogs eat; little dogs go home hungry. That’s just the way it is. You know it, and I know it.” She took another step his way, covering his head again with the umbrella, leaning her hip against his. “Come on…,” she intoned in her silkiest talking-head tone. “We can still share, can’t we? What have you got for tomorrow? I’ll give you an attribution.” The wind carried her scent to him again. He remembered the smell of her hair and how she liked to sing show tunes in the shower but could never quite remember the words.

Corso couldn’t resist. “What I’ve got for tomorrow, Cynth, will blow those little red boots right off your feet.” The raincoat crinkled as she leaned in it against Corso.

“Sometimes you used to prefer I leave the boots on,” she said.

Corso opened his mouth to speak, felt a sudden dryness in his throat, and instead turned and allowed gravity to pull him down the hill toward Fourth Avenue.

Thursday, September 20
3:45
P.M.
Day 4 of 6

Never heard her comin’. Not till the crash of the door. Scared the shit out of him so bad he come off the bed like a rocket, seein’ nothin’ but this shape and the new hole in the Tony Hawk poster. Same goddamn place he’d spent a half hour taping up.

“You ain’t neva moved,” she said. “Your lazy ass is esactly where I left you this morning. Din I tell you to…”

Doan know what happened. It’s like a dream or something, like suddenly I’m up off the bed standin’ in front of her. With my right fist up, all shakin’ and shit.

She stepped in closer. Talkin’ right up in his face now. Her eyes bulged in her head. “You raise your hand to me? You?” She put hers on her hips. “What all the hell I done for you…and you raise your hand to me.”

It’s like my throat is closed and won’t nothin’ come out.

“The beatins I took so’s he’d leave you be, an you raise your hand to me?” Got spit in the corner of her mouth. “They usta know my name down at Community Health from all the beatins I took on your account.”

“I din mean no—” he started.

“Where you learn that shit from, Robert? You learn that from him? Things doan go right, you just slap the bitch around some. You bust her lip, she shut the fuck up. That what ‘Big Bobby Boyd’ teach you? He teach you like that?”

“I din mean—”

“You neva mean, Robert. Neva. Shit just seem to happen while you mindin’ your own business, doan it? Big Bobby Boyd neva meant it neither. You axed him, it was like it just slipped out and ended on my face. Come back all sweet and all. ‘Sorry, baby, sorry. Neva gonna happen again.’”

He sat down on the bed and rubbed his face with both hands.

“I’ll tell you, boy…may be time for me to revaluate my priorities. Yes, sir.” She wandered across the middle of the room. “Doan need no two jobs to take care of myself. No, sir. I get by just fine on my market money.”

No way he can tell her what he seen. The eyes on that motherfucker. Neva seen nothin’ like that since Randy’s big brother took all that fuckin PCP an run facefirst through the shoe-store window. Had his paint cans in his pocket and one leg over the wall when the back doors of the van popped open. Fucker come out, wearin’ rubber gloves, went over and opened the top of the Dumpster. Both lids. That’s why he didn’t split. Wasn’t the gloves. He stayed ’cause he couldn’t figure why the guy’d need to open both of them. Damn near fell off the wall when that dude come out from the van carryin’ somethin’ in his arms. Real careful puttin’ it in, leanin’ in, like arrangin’ shit. No way he can tell her about those fuckin’ eyes and the feelin’ he’s had ever since.

He peeked between his fingers to see her looking at him like he’d never seen before, flopped onto his back on the bed, pulled the covers around his shoulders, and rolled over to face the wall. He listened to her labored breathing. Wanted to say something but couldn’t force anything through his lips. In a minute, he heard the sound of her shoes on the stairs.

Thursday, September 20
5:40
P.M.
Day 4 of 6

The cab’s headlights punched narrow channels into the dense fog. Dougherty must have had the window open. Corso could hear her voice as she told the cabbie to drive all the way down to the end. Heard the cabbie whine about how he was gonna have to back out blind, and then a minute later he heard the driver’s voice again as he told her the fare was $9.75. The interior light flickered for a moment, and she stepped out with a pile of paperwork held beneath her left arm.

“Hey,” he called as the cab began to back out of the lot.

The sound of his voice nearly lifted her from the ground. “Jesus—you scared me,” she said. With her right hand, she swiped at the fog, as if she could brush it aside.

Corso started across the pavement toward her. “Sorry,” he said.

She took several deep breaths. “I guess I’m a little spooked. Must be what happens when you spend an afternoon with the dead.”

She’d changed clothes since he’d seen her last. Motorcycle jacket. Black tights, lycra top. Shorter skirt. Different pair of Doc Martens with thinner soles and shiny silver eyelets. A sorta Janet Jackson meets Morticia Addams look.

“You smell better,” he said.

“I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.”

He laughed. “Yeah, just ask anybody. They’ll tell you.”

“I stopped at home after the morgue. About the time medical examiners start making it a point to stand upwind of you, ya gotta figure it’s time for a shower.”

Forty yards north, the fog had enveloped Kamon, the trendy Japanese restaurant at the north end of the lot. Out on Fairview Avenue, yellow cones of light poured down from the street lamps, only to be swallowed whole by the fog before ever reaching the ground. Rush-hour traffic was moving at ten miles an hour. Cold dinners tonight.

Dougherty shivered in the dampness. Used her free hand to pull the jacket tight around her. “I hate this damn fog,” she said. “It goes right through you.”

Corso nodded his agreement. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of it.”

He took her elbow and led her across the lot and down the ramp to C dock. As he used his key on the gate, she said, “A boat, huh? That’s very you, Corso. Very you.”

“You think so?”

“Sure,” she said. “Like it’s all disconnected from everything else. Just sorta like floating on the surface of things.”

Corso grimaced as he pulled open the gate. “You really ought to consider a career in radio, you know that, Dougherty? You could do one of those advice shows…you know, like Dr. What’shername there.”

“That Nazi bitch? As if.”

They walked carefully down the dock. Ten feet ahead, the concrete disappeared into the fog. The air was heavy and still. On both sides, masts and rigging appeared ghostly in the filtered light, as if they were strolling among the skeletal remains of a drowned forest. In the empty slips, the water lay still and black, like obsidian. Another thirty feet and Corso’s salon lights became visible on the right. He pulled her over in front of him. “Watch your head,” he said, pointing at a dark shape ahead in the fog.

“What’s that?”

“An anchor,” he said. Over the weekend, some drunk had docked a forty-foot Carver way too far into the slip, leaving a sixty-pound Danforth anchor suspended, head high out over the dock. “Nice,” she said.

“Home, sweet home,” Corso said as he turned into his own slip.

She stopped at the stern. Hugging herself. Hopping from foot to foot. She read the name out loud. “
Salt-heart
,” and beneath that, “
Foamfollower
.” She furrowed her brow. “Where do I know that name from?”

“It’s a name out of a fantasy book I read years ago,” Corso said.

She snapped her fingers. “Yeah, those Donaldson books. There’s three of them. What’s it called…?” she asked herself.

“
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever
.”

“Yeah. And the Saltheart character…he was like the last of a race of seagoing giants or something.”

“That’s the one,” Corso said.

“Cool name for a boat.”

Corso shivered inside his coat. “Come on,” he said. “I’m freezing.”

He climbed onboard, turned, and offered Dougherty his hand. She plopped the pile of papers into his palm and then hoisted herself over the rail in a single motion.

Corso slid the door aside and then followed her in. “Oh,” she said. “It’s warm. Feels so good.” She rubbed her hands together. Looked around. “Hell…it’s bigger than my apartment,” she said.

He took her coat and laid it on the chart table. Dumped his on top. Corso put together a pot of coffee while she gave herself the grand tour.

“It’s definitely you, Corso. All tidy and self-contained,” she announced.

“I’m thrilled you think so,” he said, handing her a cup. “How’d it go at the medical examiner’s?”

“I got everything except the lie-detector test results. They claim they were destroyed or maybe lost. They couldn’t seem to make up their minds.”

“That figures,” Corso said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

It took a little over two hours and another pot of coffee to sort it all out. To get the paperwork and the photographs into eleven separate piles. When they’d finished, Corso took the primary crime-scene photos and stood them up along the pin rail behind the settee. Piled the paperwork pertaining to each case on the cushion directly below the picture. He left a space between the first eight victims and the more recent casualties.

Dougherty held her cup against her ample chest. She moved her eyes slowly along the row of standing photographs. “God, this is eerie,” she said. “Seeing them all lined up like that. Makes me feel like I ought to cover them up so’s nobody can see them all dirty and naked like that.”

Corso walked over to the first photo. Picked up the crime-scene report. Susanne Tovar. Twenty. Last seen at about ten in the morning on January 7, 1998. Doing her laundry at the Sit and Spin Laundromat on Fourth Avenue. Found by a janitor twelve hours later in a Dumpster behind a bakery in the 2300 block of Eastlake Avenue. Raped, sodomized, and strangled. No fluid residue of any kind. Perp presumed to have worn a condom. Green polyester carpet fibers found beneath her fingernails.

The cops had worked their way back through Susanne Tovar’s social life. Found an angry ex-boyfriend named Peter Nilson who looked good for a while. Then Kate Mitchell was found thirteen days later, this time in a Dumpster in Fremont. Same MO. Same fibers beneath the nails. So much for the boyfriend.

The words “serial killer” do not appear in the detective’s field notes until the last day of January 1998. When Jennine Tate is found dead in the alley behind the Broadway market. Detective Sergeant Feeney notes that the crimes appear to be both random and stranger-related. Next to the notation he wrote “serial killer?” and drew a circle around the words, as if he was afraid they’d escape.

If Sergeant Feeney still harbored any doubts, they were dispelled when Jennifer Robison disappeared from the Northgate Mall, in broad daylight. Wearing a pair of leopard-skin stretch pants, no less. Told her shopping companion Francine Limuti that she was going to run out to the car for a blouse she wanted to return to Nordstrom. Never seen alive again. Turned up the next morning, three blocks away, behind a Red Robin burger joint, sans the stretch pants.

Sara Butler’s picture was the saddest of the lot. Only eighteen years old. The youngest of the victims. Not discovered until she’d made it all the way to the dump. Found by the gulls. Traced back to the Dumpster behind the coffee shop on lower Queen Anne, where she’d worked. Manager said she’d stepped out back for a smoke and never returned. He figured she’d quit—you know how these kids are—and didn’t bother to report her missing.

Nine days later, it was Melody Williams. A tourist from Redfield, South Dakota. On her honeymoon. Strolling the Pike Street Market with her new husband, John, who ducked into the men’s room, came out two minutes later to find his wife missing. Cops interviewed nearly a hundred people. Nobody saw a thing. She was found a day and a half later, in a First Avenue construction site less than a mile from where she’d disappeared.

To judge from the stubble, Analia Nisovic had shaved her pubic hair into a heart shape about three days before she disappeared from Westlake Center. The See’s Chocolate Shop, where she had recently been promoted to assistant manager, was found unlocked, with the receipts still in the till. Of the eight women, she’d put up the most fight. Her nose and four of her fingers were broken in the struggle.

Then, on the night of April 2, while the city was suffering through the coldest spring in its history, Leanne Samples came staggering down that snow-covered service road and the city heaved a collective sigh of relief. The giddiness lasted for all of three days, until somebody drops a dime and says the body of Kelly Doyle can be found in a trash bin on Sixth Avenue South. Unlike the others, however, the tipster doesn’t wait around for the cops to arrive. Dead body number eight was just different enough from the others to cause concern. Could it be they had the wrong guy in jail? Medical examiner said the cold weather made it impossible to pinpoint the time of death. The body was frozen solid. Same MO. Matching ear tag cinches it. Gotta be Himes. Another giant sigh whooshes through town.

Now, damn near three years later, they’ve got two more. Alice Crane-Carter and the girl they’d seen earlier today. Yet to be identified. Same fibers, different tags. Only difference between the old and new victims was that the level of violence had increased. The new victims had facial contusions. Number nine, Alice Crane-Carter, had suffered a fractured cheekbone and a broken eye socket. No report yet on the unnamed girl.

Corso walked into the galley and put his cup in the sink. Dougherty stood in the salon staring at the photos. “You okay?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I’ll tell you what, Corso,” she said. “If this is the kind of thing you do for a living, it’s no damn wonder you’re one weird dude.”

“I used to think I’d get used to it,” he said. “You know…like something inside me would scab over and I wouldn’t feel it anymore.”

“Did it?”

“No. All I got was the urge to be alone.”

He lifted the coffeepot. She shook her head no. “What now?” she asked.

Corso thought it over. “They’re running the new murders story tomorrow. Gives me a full day to pull something out of this stuff. So I guess we call it a day and go to bed.”

He put his coat on and then held her motorcycle jacket out for her. She thought about snatching the coat from his hands, but instead turned her back and shrugged herself into the jacket. Zipped it all the way up. Corso pulled a set of keys from his jacket pocket. He swung the keys between his thumb and forefinger.

“Sometime tomorrow we’re going to have to retrieve the paper’s car.”

She yawned. “I forgot about the damn car.”

“Let’s start early,” he said. “Himes is getting short on time.”

Corso again dreamed of the cobbled street. He stood on the uneven stones and watched, fascinated, as the three soldiers rudely turned one man after another away from the door. Sometimes providing a rough kick in the pants to speed the victim on his way. Laughing heartily among themselves at the joy of it all. Then—suddenly—the street is empty and the soldiers turn their leaden eyes his way. When he comes forward, the sound of boots and rifles snap around the stone walls. Without a word, they form a line to the right of the door and come to attention. They salute.

As Corso closes the door behind him and begins to climb the narrow stairs, the walls on all sides seem to float away…leaving the building sheathed in rags. He steps up. His hands clutching the rails as he moves toward the light at the top of the stairs.