Fury (16 page)

Friday, September 21
9:23
A.M.
Day 5 of 6

“Stop,” Corso said.

Apparently this command carried a far greater sense of urgency in North Africa than was customary in south Seattle. The Somali cabdriver locked up the brakes, rocketing Corso and Dougherty forward into the plastic shield separating the front seat from the back. Corso glowered at the driver, who was all shrugs and wide-eyed innocence.

Dougherty looked over. “You said stop,” she said.

“I meant soon,” Corso groused.

“You’re never satisfied, you know that?”

The meter read fifteen and a quarter. Corso gave the guy a twenty and told him to keep the change. Corso and Dougherty stepped out onto South Doris Street. With a chirp of the tires, the cab continued west, turned left at the Aviator Hotel, and disappeared.

Dougherty looked around. “And why in hell are we stopping here anyway? The damn car’s up around the corner.”

Corso jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. The alley gate to the murder scene was open. “Let’s have a look.”

“No way.”

“Come on.”

“The last time I listened to you I ended up in jail.”

Corso swung a hand around. “All the cop stuff is gone.”

“Smelling like cat shit.”

“Come on.”

The alley ran between a Peterbilt truck-parts distributor and a boarded-up auto-body shop. Ahead in the courtyard, somebody was whistling in between grunts, making it impossible to catch the tune. Dougherty tugged at the back of Corso’s coat. Corso kept moving forward until he cleared the buildings.

A turquoise pickup truck from the late fifties was backed up to the rear wall of the Aviator Hotel. Next to the truck, a man knelt on the ground, pouring something from one red plastic bucket into another and then back. Grunting each time he hefted a full bucket. Whistling between grunts.

“Excuse me,” Corso said, moving forward.

The man looked up. He was about seventy, a bit bent but still powerful-looking. He wore the same clothes as the day before when Corso had seen him talking with Densmore and Wald, red plaid shirt, jeans, worn through at the seat, short rubber boots, and long rubber gloves. He grunted as he levered himself to his feet.

“I hep you?” he asked.

Corso strode quickly forward with his hand extended. “I wanted to apologize.”

“You best not be sellin’ somethin’,” the man said.

“No, sir. I just wanted to apologize for any trouble or inconvenience we might have caused you yesterday when we…” He pointed upward. “The roof.”

“That was you they busted up there?”

“Miss Dougherty and I.”

The old man gave a hearty laugh. “Wasn’t that just sumphin’,” he chuckled. “That fella thinkin’ I was gonna let him come in the hotel after. Cop or no cop, you ain’t comin’ in nothin’ of mine smellin’ like that.” Just as suddenly as he’d laughed, his face fell into a frown. “Almost enough to make a body forget about that poor girl…layin’ there like that. All by herself and such.” He pulled the glove from his right hand and shook with Corso.

“Buster Davis,” the old man said. “Given name’s Clyde, but my mamma took to callin’ me Buster, on account of how I always wanted a pair of them Buster Brown shoes I seen on the TV. Wid the kid and the dog inside the shoe. Name just sorta stuck.”

Corso introduced Dougherty, then asked, “You the one found the body?”

“Sure did,” he said sadly. “Damnedest thing to be findin’ that early in the mornin’ too. Doin’ what I do every mornin’, just comin’ out see what kinda stuff I gotta paint over and I notice the Dumpster lid’s open. I keep ’em shut on accounta the raccoons.” He stroked his chin as he recalled the moment. “And there the poor thing was, laying there in her altogether and all. Damnedest thing.”

Corso pointed at the gate. Eight feet of chain link with four rows of barbed wire decorating the top. “That gate lock?”

The old man eyed him narrowly. “Wouldn’t be much point to it bein’ there if it didn’t lock, now would it?”

“Whoever left her there must have come through the gate.”

“Same thing the cops said and I tell you the same thing I tol’ them. Whoever it was musta climbed over and opened it from the inside. Ain’t but two keys to that gate. I got one and the security company got the other.” He waved a gnarled hand. “For all the damn good they doin’ me for the money I’m paying ’em. Can’t even keep the kids from paintin’ on the damn wall. I got to come out here every damn day and waste my time painting over crap like that.” He pointed up at the windowless back wall of the hotel, where someone had taken spray paint and written “FUR” in ornate, sweeping letters.

Dougherty stepped around the men and walked over to the wall.

“Just painted the damn wall, last thing Wednesday night, ’fore I went down to the Eagles for the evening. Get up in the damn mornin’, find that poor little thing in there wid the rubbish.”

“It’s not finished,” Dougherty said. Both men turned her way.

“What’s not finished?” Corso asked.

“The tag.” She pointed up at the letters on the wall. FUR in gold. “It’s supposed to say ‘fury,’ with the tail of the Y making a circle around the whole thing. I’ve seen this one before. It’s all over the place.”

“Best not be all over the place for very damn long,” the old man said. “City fine you a hundered-ninety dollars you leave that stuff up on the wall.”

“Really?” Corso said. “Even if it’s your wall?”

“Specially if it’s your wall. Were up to me, I’d just leave it up there. Looks better than them old bricks anyway. Not like anybody gonna see it back here. But the city says no. Got them an ordinance, you know.” He threw up his hands. “Which reminds me, I better get myself to work here, ’less it starts rainin’ again and I never get the damn thing done.” He offered his hand again to Corso, who took it.

“Nice meetin’ you folks,” he said, nodding at Dougherty. “You-all try to stay out of trouble now,” he said with a grin before turning back toward his work.

Dougherty took Corso by the elbow and steered him back through the gate. They turned left on South Doris and began walking west, toward the hotel.

“Did you hear what he said?” she asked.

“About painting over the graffiti on Wednesday night?”

“Which means the place was tagged sometime before Thursday morning, when he found the girl’s body.”

“And you’re thinking the vandal might have been at work when the murder came down. Maybe saw something.”

“No self-respecting tagger would leave his tag unfinished. The tag is their whole trip. It’s their artistic identity.”

“How is it you know so much about it?”

“I did a photo journal on taggers for
The Stranger
,” she said, naming Seattle’s most visible alternative paper. “Got to know quite a few of the artists.”

“Artists, my ass,” Corso scoffed as they reached the corner of South Doris and Homer and turned right under the bare trees.

“Lighten up, Corso. Expression comes in a lot of different flavors.”

“Graffiti is hardly art.”

“A hundred years ago they said the same thing about photographs.”

The Chevy was right where they’d left it the day before. While Corso warmed the engine, Dougherty unlocked the back door, leaned in, and checked her camera case. Satisfied that everything was intact, she slid into the passenger seat.

“What now?” she asked.

“You think you could find the kid?”

“Probably,” she said. “I know some people.”

Corso wheeled the car around the block, turned left on Airport Way, and headed back downtown. “Where to?” Corso asked.

“It will have to be after dark,” Dougherty said. “Taggers aren’t morning people. The whole scene is kinda nocturnal.”

“You want to come with me? I’ve got to work my way through that stuff we got from the cops.”

Her eyes turned inward. She shook her head. “If I never see those pictures again, it will be too soon. Besides, I’ve got a treatment on my face this afternoon. Why don’t you take me home? Pick me up again at…say…six or so.”

She flipped on the radio. Rob Thomas singing “Smooth” in front of the Carlos Santana band. She began to move in the seat. Corso reached over and turned it up.

Friday, September 21
4:20
P.M.
Day 5 of 6

Like Mad Fred said: The only thing the dead knew for sure was that being alive was better. Corso sat backward in the teak chair, resting his forearms across the top rail. He moved his head slowly, taking in the dead women one last time, as if, in their final eight-by-ten ignominy, they might yet have a tale to tell.

Outside, the wind had died. The slap of waves against the hull had stopped just after noon. By three, the fog had come rolling in from the Sound, advancing over Queen Anne Hill like a gray-clad army, reducing C dock visibility to twenty feet.

He’d been through it all. Just over two hundred pages. Ten women. All brunettes. The youngest, Sara Butler, had turned eighteen only a month before her disappearance. The oldest, Kelly Doyle, had been twenty-seven at the time of her death. Nine locals, one tourist. Williams, Mitchell, Crane, and Tovar had been married. The rest single. Each of the women still wore her jewelry, but no trace of the clothes or shoes had ever been found. No connection, be it personal or professional, had ever been found among the victims. Husbands, boyfriends, and bosses had been systematically eliminated as suspects. Every known sex offender within five hundred miles had been hauled in and questioned. The first eight ovine ear tags had been of a type not used since the late sixties, a fact that made the tags not only impossible to trace, but which, at the same time, squelched any possibility of a copycat killer. The new tags were sold in forty-four locations in King County alone. The cops were working that angle.

All total, nearly five months of investigation by the SPD, the Washington State Patrol, and the FBI had turned up nothing but some green polyester fibers and half a dozen stray pubic hairs, which any competent defense attorney would argue came from the Dumpsters.

Corso got to his feet. Stretched. Massaged the back of his neck for a moment and then ambled into the galley, where he dropped to one knee and rummaged around under the sink. He came out with a small card-board box and carried it back to the salon, where, one at a time, almost reverentially, he put the photos and the files facedown in the box and then slid the box back under the sink. He checked his watch: 4:25.

“The stuff we got from the cops is a hundred-percent useless,” Corso said. “I spent the day going over everything.” He shook his head. “They’ve done what they could, but they’ve got bupkis. This guy’s going to have to make a mistake before they get a line on him.”

Mrs. V.’s face was grim. “How many more lives is that going to cost?”

Corso shrugged. “The good news is, his level of violence is going up. He’s working himself up to a frenzy. It’s what these guys do. With each new killing, it takes more and more to get them off. They start to feel invincible. Next thing you know, even the organized ones start to get a little sloppy. Hopefully somebody in charge will be paying attention when it happens.”

“Meanwhile…Mr. Himes,” she began.

“Yeah,” Corso said. “Meanwhile, Mr. Himes. We don’t come up with a smoking gun, old Walter Lee’s gonna buy the farm.”

“And you’re still convinced of his innocence?”

“Innocent”—he waggled a hand—“I don’t know. I go back and forth about that. What I
am
sure of is that he got a bad deal in court. If nothing else, he ought to get a new trial.”

A silence settled over the room.

With a sigh, she put her palms on the desk. Got to her feet.

“Guess who’s on the payroll?”

“I’ll bite, who?”

“Miss Samples.”

“Doing what?”

“Subscription complaints. We needed some new help in a hurry. She said she’d like to try. Mr. Harris says she’s absolutely marvelous. Totally unflappable. Seems she has a homily for every occasion.”

Corso smiled at the thought of Leanne telling some irate subscriber who didn’t get his paper how “Mama said…all things come to those who wait.”

The grin faded when Mrs. V. said, “You wouldn’t believe the volume of hate mail we’ve received in the past eight hours.”

“Over what?”

“Over our suggestion that Mr. Himes may not be guilty. It seems that a great many of our fellow citizens are in favor of executing Mr. Himes whether he’s guilty or not.”

“That’s what idiots do, isn’t it? Whenever reality fails to match their little preconceptions, they demand that reality forthwith be changed.”

“You’d think they’d have
some
interest in justice.”

“They can’t,” Corso said. “They’d have to admit that every day of their lives they’re probably rubbing shoulders with the likes of Walter Leroy Himes. They like their villains remarkable. Evil geniuses who want to conquer the world or eat your liver with beans…something like that.”

“I’m sure you have an opinion on why that is?”

“’Cause the more remarkable the villain, the farther removed it is from them. They don’t actually know anybody like Hannibal Lecter.” He waved a hand. “Child-molesting rednecks. Hell, they’ve got relatives like that. That’s what really scares the hell out of them.”

She nodded. “What did somebody once say about how the law is practiced in courts, but justice is dispensed in alleys?”

“That’s it, exactly,” Corso said. “We ought to reinstate public executions.” He met her amused gaze. “I mean it. Right out in the town square. Westlake Center. High noon. After church on Sunday. Everybody gets to see the system in action. Gets to let off a little steam. You know…bring a lunch. Bring the family. Make a day of it.”

“You’re terrible,” she said with a chuckle.

“No…I mean it. It’d be like a weekly cautionary tale. They could wire ’em up for special effects like that Porter guy over in Montana.”

She winced at the memory. A couple of years back, triple murderer Stanley Porter had been electrocuted at the Montana State Penitentiary. As horrified witnesses watched, eight-inch flames had burst from Porter’s ears. Several sensitive souls had fainted dead away. Turned out they’d had a dead short in the system. Not that it had mattered much to Stanley Porter. He’d had his fifteen minutes. For a while there, seemed like half the cars in Montana had one of those “Stanley Porter is alive and medium-well” bumper stickers.

“Way I figure it,” Corso said, “you let a kid see a couple of dozen felons doing their impression of Bunsen burners, and we’ll have a lot fewer of the little turds showing up at school with guns.”

“I’d like to think we’re too civilized for such spectacles.”

“That’s the problem. We’re too damn civilized. We raise these kids out in little isolated patches of suburbia. Buy them any damn thing their diseased little minds can imagine, protect them from all harm, and what do we get? We get these lonely little nerd boys who blow our brains out over breakfast one morning and then go down to the high school and kill everybody who’s feeling better than they are.”

“You’re feeling very passionate about things this afternoon,” Mrs. V. noted. Corso rubbed the side of his face. “It’s that—what did you call it the other day? That quixotic spark of mine.”

“We’re imperfect; ergo our systems are imperfect,” she said.

Corso ran his hands through his hair. “I had a professor once who said the greatest trait a reporter could possess was a tolerance for ambiguity.”

“You think he was correct?”

“Only up to a point. Too much tolerance and you become amorphous. You wake up one morning, everything’s so friggin’ hunky-dory that you’re nobody in particular.”

“How so?”

“Because things like intellectual certainty and moral outrage and righteous indignation are the engines of society. Self-satisfied tolerance never accomplished a damn thing except to muddy up the waters of what’s right and what’s wrong.”

He opened his mouth to say something else, but instead merely laughed at himself. “Listen to me. Jesus. I must be tired.” Corso turned and crossed to the door. “I’ve got to pick up Dougherty. We’re following an artistic lead.”

He tried to muster a final smile, but couldn’t get his face to go along with the program. Opened the door and stepped out without a backward glance. Violet Rogers was tapping away at her keyboard. He walked past her desk and pushed the elevator button. Violet looked up. Gave him a wink.

“You know, Violet…I’ve been thinking about what you said the other day. About how maybe I was mad at God and all.”

“And?”

“And I think maybe you’re right. I think maybe I am.”

A muted tinkle announced the elevator’s arrival. The door slid open and Corso backed in. Violet shook her head sadly. “You better hope she don’t get mad at you back.”

Corso pushed the button. Rode to street level, where the little Hispanic guy was behind the security desk. They exchanged silent nods before Corso jerked open the door and stepped outside.

The night air clung to the skin like wet linen. He hunched his shoulders, crossed the sidewalk to where the Datsun was parked in a tow-away zone. Looked up toward First Avenue, where the fog had swallowed even the darkness, leaving the city puffy and whiter than white. He started the engine. Clicked on the head-lights. Watched the beams disappear down a black hole about twenty feet out.

She pulled the leather jacket tighter around herself as she stepped onto the concrete. Corso killed the engine and got out of the car.

“This will probably go better if I go in alone,” she said.

He gave her a two-fingered salute. “I’ll be right here. You have a problem, you just call my name.”

In three steps, she was enveloped by the fog. Corso listened to the fading sound of her boots on the concrete. Overhead, half a dozen orange lights cast a velvet glow. The school was gone, but the playground remained. What used to be the Martha Shelby Middle School was now nothing more than three concrete walls with a basketball hoop bolted to each wall. The city had dedicated the space for graffiti artists and skaters. “Graffiti City” the taggers called it. The de facto agreement was that the cops would leave Graffiti City alone. Smoke your underage cigarettes. Toke on those pipes. Stay out late. Spite your parents. But…keep it off the streets and don’t wake the neighbors. It starts leaking out into the streets or we get any complaints and the party’s over.

As much as Dougherty hated the fog, the cool mist soothed her cheeks and forehead. Her face felt like it was sunburned and about to crack to pieces. The sound of a basketball slapping against the concrete echoed around the walls. To the left, a trio of preteens sat on the ground smoking contraband cigarettes. She heard voices ahead in the gloom. Three more steps and the outlines of two guys emerged. Shrill laughter erupted from somewhere deep in the enclosure.

They were maybe sixteen. One white. One Hispanic. Uniform baggy pants and oversize stocking caps. Plaid jackets buttoned all the way up. Passing a pipe.

“Hey, Cholo…look what we got here,” the white kid said.

Her mouth suddenly felt as cracked and dry as her face. She knew better than to let them get started on their routine. Let ’em get worked up and they could be dangerous.

“I’m looking for Torpedo,” she said.

Torpedo was the street name for one of the kids Dougherty had photographed for a piece about graffiti artists. They’d gotten along well. He’d been her guide through the underground world of taggers and skaters. His tag was the word “Boom” in the center of the rainbow-hued explosion. Made his taggin’ rep puttin’ his mark on cop cars, then made himself a legend tagging the space needle Christmas Eve, ’98.

“I got a torpedo for you, baby,” the other kid said.

The first kid stepped in close. He smelled of weed and stale sweat. He put a hand on her ass and gave it a little tweak. She slapped his arm away.

“Keep your fucking hands to yourself,” she said.

“You hear that?” the Hispanic kid asked. “She gonna kick yo ass for you, boy.” White boy laughed and grabbed his crotch. Moved his package up and down.

“Come on, baby. Got just what you need right here.”

Dougherty felt her throat constrict as she checked out the area he was fondling and then stared him down.

“At best you got about half what I need right there.”

The Hispanic kid bent at the waist and pointed at his friend. “Hoo hoo hoo.”

White boy lost his sense of humor. Started bopping around like a spastic rapper.

“You got some mouth on you, bitch…you know that?”

She felt a finger of fear on the back of her neck. Much as it pained her, she was about to scream Corso’s name when a figure stepped out of the fog.

“I hear somebody usin’ my name in vain?”

Torpedo. Finely wrought features and some of the longest eyelashes she’d ever seen. Multiracial. A little of everything. Claimed to have been in seventeen separate foster homes. He’d grown since she’d seen him last. Tall as she was now. Still wore the biggest pants she’d ever seen. Obligatory plaid jacket buttoned to the throat and one of those knitted Scandinavian wool hats with the earflaps. Reindeer cavorting across the front. Festive like.

He stopped. Pointed at her. “The pitcher lady,” he said. He walked over and slapped her five. “You gonna makes us famous again?”

“Maybe, if we can get rid of the stoner boys here.”

He turned toward the pair. “You heard the lady,” he said. “Take your weed-smellin’ asses up the road.” White boy opened his mouth to speak. Torpedo reached languidly into his pants pocket. Left his hand in there. Everybody got stiff all of a sudden. Had a little E.F. Hutton moment, until Whitey’s friend reached over and put a hand on his pal’s arm. They passed a look. “No problem,” the Hispanic kid said, showing Torpedo his palms. Together, they backed silently off into the gloom.

Torpedo inclined his head to the left and then started walking that way. Dougherty followed. She heard shouts and the clank of the ball on the rim. More dribbling.

Torpedo walked all the way to the east wall. Leaned his back against it. He straddled a puddle. Dozens of bloated cigarette butts bobbed like an armada.

“I been thinkin’ ’bout you lately,” he said.

“About what?”

“’Bout how we need some more help to get our story out. To tell people what’s really happenin’ out here. Not that crap they put in the paper.”