Fury (9 page)

“A possible religious element.”

“Oh?”

“The team felt that the Dumpster angle might have had symbolic overtones. The perp went to a lot of trouble in the way the girls were arranged. In several cases, he rearranged the contents of the Dumpsters so he could lay the girls out the way he wanted. As if he were trying to say something. They had the feeling that the ceremonial nature of the arrangement was his way of justifying his actions. Almost as if by placing his victims just so, the perp was saying that he had a right to do what he was doing.”

“That’s pretty goddamn crazy,” Corso said.

“A lot crazier than Himes has ever been.”

“And you shared all this with the Seattle Police Department?”

Lewis leafed back to the front of the report. “SPD received the report on April fifth, nineteen ninety-eight. Three weeks after the arrest. Two months before trial.”

Corso flipped through his notes. “A while back you said that the way the Trashman dallied with his victims was ‘one of the holdbacks.’ Were there others?”

Lewis nodded but didn’t speak. “The tags,” he said after a moment. Corso waited. “Ovine ear tags,” Lewis said. “In the left ear of each victim.”

“Ovine?”

“Sheep,” Lewis said. “Postmortem, he punched a hole in the earlobe and tagged each of them like livestock. Drew a heart on the tag with Magic Marker.” Lewis slid over a glossy photograph from the report. Mercifully, it was an extreme close-up. Dark hair obscuring the eye. The nape of a thin neck dotted by bits of eggshell. A white plastic band, doubled and connected to the left ear by a rivet.

Crooked little heart drawn on the white plastic.

Corso raised his eyes to meet Lewis’s. The agent shrugged. Retrieved the photo. Closed the report. Got to his feet. He started for the door.

“Off the record,” Corso said to his back.

Lewis stopped and turned. “Yes?”

“Just between you and me and the wall. You think SPD got the right guy? You think Himes is the Trashman?”

“No way,” Lewis said. “I didn’t think so then, and I don’t think so now.”

“The killings stopped.”

“Most likely he’s in jail for something else. Maybe he moved. Maybe he died.” His lips formed a crooked smile. “Look on the bright side, Corso. You’ve got a whole four days to figure it out.”

Tuesday, September 18
11:22
A.M.
Day 2 of 6

“Robert.” That voice from downstairs. Sounded like a machine needed oil. He was glad for the sound of the damn radio. Even some lame-ass Doobie Brothers shit about Jesus bein’ all right was better than the voice.

“Robert” again. He rolled over and faced the wall. And what the hell was with the Robert shit anyway? How many times he have to tell her? Nobody but her call him Robert. Name be Fury. You ask anybody. They’ll tell you that man Fury is a taggin’ fool. Look around, man. Fury’s name is everywhere.

“Robert.” Oh crap, she was coming up the stairs. Maybe she’d forget about the missing tread. Serve her right to bust her ass. He heard her grunt as she stepped over the hole. Shit! He rolled over, swung his legs upward, and put his feet on the floor. Rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. Eyeballs felt like they were full of sand. He cracked his eyes open, glanced at the digital clock on his nightstand: 11:25. On her way to work. Get through the next five minutes and her sorry ass be gone till late.

The door banged open. Bustin’ a bigger hole in his beloved Tony Hawk poster.

“Let’s go,” she said.

“Hey…hey,” he managed to croak. “What’s happening?” She stood there, hands on hips, making that pissy face of hers. “I doan know, Robert. I’m working too damn hard to keep track of what’s happening anymore.” Oh, man…not this shit again. He bent his head and began picking the lint from between his toes. “I’ll tell you one thing, though, whatever is happening, happened about three hours ago. Ain’t nothing much going to happen, you doan get yourself out of bed in the morning, boy.” He tried not to groan. Jesus, ain’t got no respect for me at all.

“So where you lookin’ for a job today?”

He checked the window. More rain. Can’t look for work in the rain.

“Doan gimme that look!” she hollered.

“I din’ say nothin’.”

“What kind of look is that? Getting a job is what folks do when they ain’t going to school no more. No cause to be lookin’ at me like that. I’m not the one got myself expelled from Garfield High School. So now you get your butt out there and find yourself a job. You think I’m spending the rest of my life supportin’ yourself, you gotta nother think comin’. You hear me, young man? Anotha think comin’.”

“I been lookin’,” he protested.

“Maybe do something profitable wid your time, insteada hangin’ out wid losers like that Tommy Hutton and that other one wid the thing in his tongue, wid them damn spray cans of you-alls, vandalizin’ other people’s walls and everything.”

“I’m lookin’, Mom,” he said. He unwound himself from the covers and got to his feet, stretched his arms over his head hoping his morning hard-on would drive her out of the room.

“Gonna be late tonight. You be here when I get home. You hear me?”

He wanted to tell her to page him. Call whenever she got through screwin’ that fat Korean grocer she work for. Instead, said, “Yeah…sure.”

She gave him another long dose of the pissy look and said, “This here is serious shit. Robert. Ain’t about no job pushin’ burgers…the question is about what in hell you gonna do wid the rest of your life. And believe me, baby, you listen to your momma here—the rest of your life is a hell of a long time.”

No, Robert thought, the question is…where in hell am I gonna get eighteen bucks for paint? This kinda shitty weather, nothin’ but the best will stick. Cheap shit just roll down, make a puddle on the ground.

She turned and left the room. Left the damn door open. No respect at all.

Wednesday, September 19
7:00
A.M.
Day 3 of 6

She brought the morning paper. Dropped it on the seat between them. “FBI—No Way!” A cup of Starbucks coffee steamed softly between her hands.

“Morning,” she said. Her eyes were puffy around the edges, and a faint pillow mark dented her right cheek. “You want to hear what I got yesterday?”

“Too early,” Corso growled. “You’d just have to tell me again.”

“Good,” she said, sipping the coffee, rolling the cup in her hands. She snuggled the cup against her chest, pointed at the paper. “Quarter to seven in the morning and that was the last paper left in the machine,” she said.

“Hawes said the plant’s got orders to keep printing today’s street edition until somebody tells them to stop,” Corso said. “CNN was quoting us this morning.”

She leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes.

“You want to drive?” he asked, hoping like hell she didn’t.

“No” was the last word she said until Corso stopped for gas on the outskirts of Yakima, two hours later. He was pumping gas when she buzzed the window down and poured out the leftover coffee. “Where are we?” She yawned. Corso told her.

“Halfway?” she growled as she stretched in the seat.

“More or less.”

She headed for the ladies’ room while Corso pumped gas. She was standing by the passenger door when Corso emerged from the station. Her breath rose in front of her face.

“Cold over here.”

“At least it’s not raining.”

Overhead, a mouse-gray sky moved at warp speed. Sliding east as a single sheet of slate, rolling toward the horizon and the upper Midwest beyond.

“Really different from Seattle.”

Two totally different ecosystems. West of the Cascades, along the I-5 corridor, was what most people thought of as the Pacific Northwest. The evergreen rain belt running the length of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Puget Sound, Vancouver Island, rain forests, rocky coasts, software geeks, and the omnipresent latte stands. East of the Cascades was another world. High desert. Scrub pine and manzanita. Creosote bushes and delicate wildflowers. Hot as hell in the summer, cold as hell in the winter. Grapes, fruit trees, pickers, and cowboys.

“You ever been this side of the mountains before?”

“First time,” she said.

She watched with amusement as Corso closed his eyes and stretched his back one last time. Held his arms out horizontally and did some twists, then got back in the car. She followed suit. Buckled up. Looked over at Corso. Shook her head. “You’re a weird dude, you know that, Corso?”

He started the car. Sort of smiled, but didn’t answer, so she dropped her voice an octave and did a bad Corso impression. “‘Why do you say that?’”

“It’s the way you never seem to pick up your end of the conversation.” She saw his eyebrow move and figured he must be listening. “I tell you I was moved to tears by a piece of your work and your response is to go into a coma and then ask me if I remember Leanne Samples, which—if you don’t mind me saying, Corso—wasn’t exactly the response I was looking for.”

He pushed the accelerator several times, racing the engine in neutral. “If there’s a script, maybe you oughta give me a copy,” Corso said with a grin.

“Of course there’s a script. It’s how people get to know one another.”

She reached over and turned up the heat. “Today—you know—two minutes ago when I just told you this was the first time I’ve been over here.”

“Yeah? What about it?” he asked.

He pulled the shift lever down into drive and checked back over his shoulder. A tandem livestock carrier roared by, leaving the air full of straw. And then another screaming along in the blurred air of the wake.

“Ninety-nine guys out of a hundred would have taken that as an opportunity to ask me how long I’ve lived in Washington. Where I came from…yadda yadda. Most guys would give me some sort of little geography lesson to show me how much they know. How smart they are. You know, like showing off. That sort of stuff is just what comes next in the conversation.”

“I’m not good at small talk,” Corso said.

“Of course you are!” She slapped the paper on the seat. “Anybody who can beat an exclusive story like this out of the FBI is the Picasso of small talk.”

Corso grunted.

“Hell, you haven’t even asked about the goddamn tattoos. I know damn well you must know the story. Everybody knows the goddamn story. All the weird shit I’m supposed to have all over me. By now most guys are tripping all over themselves wondering if all the shit they heard is true.”

“Well, is it?”

“What?”

“True that you have some pretty weird shit on you.”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“I’m not saying it never crossed my mind,” Corso admitted.

“So why haven’t you asked?”

“I didn’t want to pry.”

“You pry for a living.”

“The cops ever find—”

“Brian,” she said, shaking her head in the darkness. “Brian Bohannon. They think maybe he’s in southern France somewhere. His parents are very wealthy. I’m sure they’re supporting him. They see the whole thing as some sort of boyish prank. Can’t understand what all the fuss is about. They offered me money not to press charges against him.”

“How’d they get them off your face?”

“Lasers,” she said. “Dermabrasion.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s where they freeze a section of your face and then sand it.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“And of course the always exciting chemical peel.”

“What’s that do?”

“That makes the rest of your face look like a burn victim’s, so you can’t see where the designs were.”

In the darkness, Corso winced. “Hurt?”

She shrugged. “The pain I can handle. It’s the money that’s killing me,” she said. “I’ve had over twenty treatments so far for my face.” She brought her fingertips to her cheek. “They say, in another year or so, I’ll just look like I had bad skin as a teenager.”

She laughed bitterly.

“Of course, my HMO says the removal procedures are elective and won’t pay for it.”

“No parents or anybody to help you out?”

He couldn’t be sure, but he thought perhaps she laughed. “My parents had other plans for me. They’re from a little town in Iowa. Robbinsville, Iowa. Two
b
’s. They didn’t approve of my moving to Seattle. They didn’t approve of photography as a career for me. They didn’t approve of my lifestyle, and they particularly didn’t approve of Brian. The way they see it, what happened to me was some kind of divine retribution.”

They rode in silence for a moment.

“What the hell was this guy thinking?” Corso asked.

“He was thinking that if he couldn’t have me, he was going to make damn sure nobody else was going to have me either. ‘Nobody leaves Brian.’ That’s what he said just as I was passing out. ‘Nobody leaves Brian.’ Like he was in the third person or something. He left a note in his shop. Said I would remain for all eternity…his palette, his personal work of art.”

She pulled her jacket over her chest and settled back against the door with her eyes closed. He mashed the accelerator and sent the white Chevy Citation lumbering out onto I-85, rolling south toward the tri-cities and the Columbia River. The eastern Cascades were capped in snow. The low hills were swathed in orchards. Rows of gray, skeletal trees filled the valleys and wound like a bezel around the cut, brown contours of the hills. Apple and pear and peach and cherry. Amputated for winter and huddled together for warmth. The kind of dead, lifeless country that comes alive and green only around the rivers and creeks, and even then after lifetimes of toil. The kind of artificial Eden that, for reasons too many to enumerate, would forever elude the likes of Walter Leroy Himes and his kin.

No…Walter Leroy and his ilk were remnants of those folks whose sole contribution to modern society has been an uncanny ability to make sagging front porches look comfortable. Walter was a direct descendant of those untimely souls who, by indolence or ignorance or both, always managed to arrive places a day late and a dollar short, always to find the rich bottomland already under the plow, and themselves relegated to the hardpan at the edge of town, to the steep, deep “gullies and hollers” between hills or to these “touch and go” arid, barren acres where the irrigated prairie suddenly becomes desert and blows away.

His parents came from North Carolina for the trial. From a little hamlet in the extreme northwestern part of the state. Damn near in Virginia, folks said. An “end-of-the-road” town called Husk, North Carolina. Neither had been outside Ashe County before. Christ the Redeemer Reformed Baptist Church held a bake sale and a raffle to raise the money for their pilgrimage. Flew out of Charlotte on a great silver bird.

They sat side by side in the front row. LO-retta-accent-on-the-first-syllable Himes was an immense woman with dyed, cat-black hair and a penchant for wildly flowered tops. No more than a couple of biscuits and a piece of rhubarb pie from four hundred pounds, she sat there every day, frowning and fanning herself with a white plastic fan that had “Jesus Is Coming” stenciled on the back.

Walter Leroy inherited his height from his father, Delroy. Stoop straightened and ironed out, Delroy Himes would have measured at least six-eight. Maybe more. All sinew and bone, loose inside a clean pair of coveralls. Missing a finger from each hand. Everything knotted and twisted and worn out by a lifetime of struggle, he never said a single word. Let his wife do the talking for both of them. As Delroy was undoubtedly aware, LO-retta was more than up to the task.

Every day after the proceedings, she held forth on the courthouse steps. Rain or shine. Talked about how her boy was “tetched” and shouldn’t rightly be on trial at all; cried and told about how Walter Lee, as she called him, “dinna have a violet bone in his body.” How he “neva shoulda got so far from them thet loved and unnerstood him.” ’Bout how Jesus, whose name she miraculously transformed into a three-syllable word, loved her boy and was “just awaitin’ to take him on home.”

Another two hours and the Chevy crossed the Columbia River just north of Richland. Running fast and smooth and brown…navigable all the way up into Idaho.

They crossed the Snake River at Pasco, then turned onto 12 East. Sign said
WALLA WALLA
45. Corso reached over and jostled Meg Dougherty awake.

To the west, a broad butte ran the length of the valley. Rock, milk-chocolate brown, rising as a gentle mound near the bottom, then suddenly straightening to cliffs for the upper hundred feet. Four antennas were spaced along the flat top, their intermittent red lights blinking against the dense gray clouds. The dark sky silhouetted a pair of red-tailed hawks, who rode the cold currents in lazy circles, heads down, feathered fingers making minute adjustments to the ever-changing wind eddies.

To the east, the Walla Walla River running straight as an arrow and the Blue Mountains barely visible through the haze. Corso checked his watch—12:15. Forty-five minutes before they were scheduled to see Walter Leroy Himes.

They were parked forty yards from the front gate of the Washington State Penitentiary. The walls were thirty feet high, concrete with the original river rock peeping through in places. Topped with a maze of coiled razor wire that somehow gleamed without the aid of sunlight. The enclosure must have been half a mile to a side. At each corner a red octagonal guard tower rose above the battlements.

A steady breeze carried mist from the river and the smells of onions and steel. Bright yellow sawhorses divided the parking lot in two, creating a gauntlet through which arriving cars must pass. Half a dozen helmeted county cops manned each side of the division. On one side, the anti-capital punishment crowd milled about, sipping lattes and waving handmade signs, demanding an end to the killing. All Volvos and fancy outdoor gear, they looked out of place on this side of the mountains.

On the other side milled the “eye-for-an-eye” crowd. Wads of chew. Beaten pickup trucks and motor homes. The damaged and the lonely and the lost. The tattered, gone-broke farmers and the slit-eyed fraternity boys who’d finally found a venue worthy of that red anger they carried inside. No surprise. The murder mavens outnumbered the forgiveness folks at least ten to one.

Dougherty and Corso both rolled down their windows. The civilized crowd was chanting something, but Corso couldn’t quite make out the words. On Dougherty’s side, Lynyrd Skynyrd blared from a scratchy speaker. “
Sweet Home Alabama
…”

The nearest cop detached himself from the lines and made his way over to the driver’s window. All boots and black leather, behind a gigantic pair of aviator shades. Lose the white helmet, he could take Dougherty to the prom.

“No visitors today,” he said. “They’re on lockdown.”

“We’ve got an appointment,” Corso said. “Corso and Dougherty from the
Seattle Sun
. We’re here to see Walter Leroy Himes.”

The cop stepped back a pace, turned his head, and spoke into the microphone on his shoulder. After a moment, he leaned down into the window. Put his black-gloved hands on the window frame. “Lemme see some ID,” he said. Corso and Dougherty fished around. Found it. Corso handed it over.

Satisfied, the cop handed the ID back to Corso. “Drive down to the gate,” he said. “And take it easy. I don’t want you to hit one of my officers.” He looked down the tube of milling humanity between the car and the front gate. “I’d put the windows up if I were you. The crowd’s a little restless today. Couple hours ago, we had a pair of good old boys sneak over into the peaceful section and kick some ass. Now even the loveniks are spoiling for a fight.”

The cop backed up, motioned with his arm. Corso eased the car forward. The minute the Chevy began to move, the crowds on both sides of the aisle began to surge toward the barricades. The cops stepped up, waving batons. On the right, one of the barriers tipped, driven onto two legs by the surge of the crowd. Corso felt his throat tighten. A pair of cops wrestled the barrier back in place. Corso pulled his eyes back to the road just in time to see a full can of Bud Lite land on the hood of the Chevy, stopping their breaths. The spewing can bounced high into the air and disappeared. A half dozen similarly slung weapons arched across the gap in front of the car. Aimed, not at the car, this time, but at the protesters on the other side.