Hush (31 page)

"What about the police logs?" she asked,
leaning back in her seat so she could stare at him.

"I'll pick them up on the way back."

"That'll be cutting it close."

"I'll call them in if I have to."

"Police logs? Nobody wants to take police
logs over the phone."

"I'll be back in time. Don't worry."

Two weeks ago, she would have told him to get
his ass over to Area Five. Today she just smiled and told him to
have fun, then settled back in front of her computer.

In his car, Alex thought about how his life
had changed—all because of a murdering psycho. He hated to think of
it like that, but there it was. The senior editor of the Chicago
Herald actually knew his name now, and he was being given real
assignments—real, actual, satisfying assignments. And Maude was
almost treating him as an equal rather than a pain in the ass.

He slowed his little red Protege for the
tollbooth, tossed in the coins, and floored it, not waiting for the
light to turn green. The only people who waited for a green light
were geezers traveling through on their way to Michigan.

Everybody else might be running red lights,
but not me. I'm no lawbreaker. No, sirree.

The Protege was a nice car, but it was the
cheapest model offered; the windows had to be hand-cranked, and he
could hardly hear the stereo because of road noise. Before long,
he'd be able to trade up, get a car with power windows, a good
sound system, and a lot more insulation.

They said the Madonna Murderer was driven by
an intense hatred for his mother. Mother and son. He and his mother
got along really well, but some of his friends weren't so lucky.
They had weird relationships that could only be described as
volatile. Oedipus. Now, there was a kinky concept, but maybe not so
far-fetched. Maybe he would do a piece on that. Yeah. He'd run that
by Maude. See what she thought.

Faint music drifted to him from beneath the
noise of the engine and the roaring of the semis that surrounded
him. His roommates made fun of him because they said he liked to
listen to bad music. He turned up the radio all the way. Van Halen.
Guy music. Cock rock. Sure it was stupid. Sure it was loud, but it
was primal, empowering.

He sang along, pounding a hand against the
steering wheel.

Yeah, his life had turned around.

The cemetery ended up being one of those
hidden, deserted places you sometimes came upon in the heart of the
city. Following the directions he'd been given over the phone, Alex
turned off the street and took a dirt road overgrown with grass. He
drove beneath dense foliage, past toppled tombstones, until he
reached the far south edge of the cemetery. He sat there a moment,
wondering if he should turn around and get the hell out of there,
when a man stepped out from behind a large stone. He waved and
smiled.

The guy was pale and thin, a little geeky,
Alex supposed. Totally harmless. Alex shut off the car engine and
got out.

"Alex Martin?" the man asked, smiling, then
casting a nervous glance over his shoulder.

"The same."

Alex pulled a pen and reporter's tablet from
the breast pocket of his shirt while approaching the man, who still
stood nervously near the tombstone. "Thanks for calling me," he
said. "I want you to know I won't divulge anything about you. Not
what you look like, or where we met. Nothing."

"I know," the man said, nodding and
smiling.

"You can tell me as much as you feel
comfortable with."

"I wanted to ask you something."

"Shoot."

"About the dead-baby letter."

A flicker of irritation passed through Alex.
Always the dead-baby letter. Was he never going to get the credit
he deserved?

"It was a lie, wasn't it?"

"What do you mean?"

"The baby didn't write the letter, did
he?"

"I don't follow you."

"The baby didn't write the letter," the man
repeated, more insistently this time. "Somebody else wrote the
letter, didn't they?"

"Yeah . . ." Alex said, nodding slowly,
wondering what the hell was going on. He'd gotten himself a real
head case here.

"You wrote the letter, didn't you?"

"I had some help."

"From the police?"

"I can't tell you that."

"From Detective Irving? Did he help you write
the letter?"

"I said, I can't tell you that."

This was a total bust, like so many of the
letters they'd received in reply to the dead-baby piece. There were
a lot of nuts out there, and Chicago seemed to have a surfeit of
them. Looked like he'd be back in time to get the police logs
posted after all. Goodbye, Pulitzer. "Did you have something you
wanted to tell me?"

"I don't want you to print any more
letters."

"That's not up to me. I'm just a small cog in
a big wheel."

"You're a traitor, Alex Martin. That's what
you are."

"To who?"

"To the babies."

"The babies?" Alex had had enough. He turned
and began walking toward his car.

"I'm talking to you!"

"Go fuck yourself." The words were tossed
angrily over his shoulder.

From behind him came a rustling sound, a
scurrying.

Alex turned in time to see something sparkle
in a small shaft of sunlight that cut through the trees above his
head. An axe. The guy must have had it hidden behind the tombstone,
Alex thought in detached disbelief. A fucking axe.

Ivy gave Jinx a full fifteen minutes of
lavish attention to make up for leaving him in what amounted to day
after day of solitary confinement. She petted him and brushed him
and talked to him in the high voice that made him smile at her with
his eyes.

It was a good thing cats didn't have the
ability to anticipate tomorrow, or next week, or next month.
Otherwise he might revolt, especially since he hadn't grown up in
such confined quarters. At one time he'd been wild and free,
walking leisurely through tall grass, sniffing at dandelions. He'd
climbed trees and rolled in the dirt. He'd dozed in the shade of a
lilac bush while blue jays screamed at him from above.

Ivy and Max had spent the previous day going
door- to-door, following up on former patients of the Elgin Mental
Hospital who had backgrounds in math. The statements were much more
in-depth than the original questionnaire. Two men had seemed
promising, but they'd both come up with solid alibis for the nights
of the murders. And none of them had triggered anything in Ivy.

But would he? If she came face-to-face with
the man who'd savagely and grotesquely attacked her in the middle
of the night, would she know he was the one? Or would she smile and
nod and go her own way? It was highly probable she'd seen him
already, maybe even made eye contact, maybe even spoken to him.

Because that's the way it was with many
serial killers. They blended. They moved among the masses, changing
color to match their background.

Ivy locked her apartment, all the while aware
of the camera directed at her door as she inserted the key. He
wasn't coming back, not to her building anyway. He'd made the
statement he'd wanted to make and was too smart to allow himself to
be videotaped. That assumption didn't keep her from watching hour
upon hour of tapes of people coming and going from the
building.

They'd caught a couple of drug deals going
down, and a prostitute working out of her apartment, another guy
stealing welfare checks from tenants' mailboxes. The few suspicious
men who'd slipped in without keys had checked out as being friends
and relatives of tenants.

He wasn't coming back.

"Hear about your buddy?" the officer at the
front desk asked when Ivy arrived at Area Five.

"Who's that?"

"Alex Martin. A body with his driver's
license and press ID was found somewhere on the north side of Area
Five in a Catholic cemetery."

Her breath caught. "Has he been positively
identified?"

"No, but his car was there too."

The room took on a haze of unreality. If the
officer continued to elaborate, Ivy didn't hear it because there
was too much noise in her head. Alex Martin? Dead?

Carrying the fog with her, she moved blindly
through the checkpoint to take the stairs to the second floor. She
burst into the task-force office, almost crashing into Max. "What's
this about Alex Martin?"

He grabbed her arm and turned her back
around. "I tried to call, but you must have had your phone off.
Come on. Let's go check it out."

Once they were in his car racing toward the
crime scene, Max filled her in on what he knew. "Last month we had
a body turn up that appeared to be the victim of some kind of
ritualistic sacrifice. That body was found in a cemetery."

"Any leads?"

"A few of circumstantial evidence, but
nothing solid. The circumstantial points to a gang of teenagers or
young adults who may have taken up Satan worshipping."

"And you think this is another sacrificial
murder? Why Alex Martin? And why did you want me to come
along?"

"When the cops got there this morning, they
found a broken snow globe a few feet from the body."

When he'd told her about the possible
sacrificial murder, Ivy had actually felt relief rim through her.
It had nothing to do with the Madonna Murder case. She was in no
way to blame. Now she felt overwhelmed by horror, guilt,
remorse.

"It's because of the letter," she said in a
low voice.

"We don't know that. It may have nothing to
do with the Madonna Murders. It could be someone using it as a sick
trick, or using it to throw us off. That's what we're going to have
to find out."

Of course, she reasoned. Of course the
presence of a globe didn't mean it had been left by the Madonna
Murderer. Everybody knew he left a snow globe at every scene. Any
maniac could copy him.

The cemetery was deep and narrow, no wider
than the domestic lots that flanked either side of it. A place
forgotten, with many of the tombstones knocked to the ground years
ago by kids committing their first crimes. After cutting their
criminal teeth there, the delinquents had moved on to bigger
offenses. If they didn't respect the dead, who did they
respect?

The grass hadn't been mowed all summer, and
not last summer either from the feel and look of the fallen
branches hiding under tangles of dead grass, ready to trip an
unsuspecting visitor.

"It doesn't look as if anybody's been buried
here for years," Ivy said.

"A lot of these little cemeteries have been
forgotten," Max told her, picking his way between fallen stones.
"This is probably owned by a church that died out years ago."

The crime scene was at the back of the
cemetery where trees towered over the ambulance and crime
technician van, washing everything in a dense darkness. At the
border of the grounds, undergrowth grew as thick and secretive as a
jungle.

There was an altar a few feet from where the
tangled jungle began, a place where Easter mass must have been said
at one time.

Side by side, Ivy and Max approached the
scene, walking in the paths created by tires of the vehicles on
location. A little red car was being loaded onto the back of a
wrecker so it could be hauled to the crime lab. The local FBI was
there, along with a couple of homicide detectives Ivy had met
briefly at Headquarters.

Shutters were clicking while another
technician ran a video camera.

One of the detectives spotted them and broke
away from the group. "As soon as we found the broken snow globe I
gave you a call," he said as he approached.

"Does it match the others?" Max asked.

"Hard to say. The thing's shattered. Even the
figurines inside. The victim's body has been here awhile— it looks
like crows have been making a meal out of him. My guess is, the
globe was placed next to the body, on the altar, but
something—probably a bird— knocked it down."

"Any idea what the victim was doing
here?"

"Not yet. After we get a positive ID,
Homicide will be procuring statements from fellow employees,
friends, and relatives."

"Get copies to me as soon as you can."

"The grass around the altar has already been
vacuumed, so you can walk on it. We aren't done with the body and
the altar itself." He glanced at Ivy, then back to Max. "It's
pretty bad. Hacked up with an ax is my guess. A couple of our guys
got sick. I haven't seen that happen in a long time."

Max suddenly wished he hadn't waited for Ivy
to show up. Now he realized it might have been a little insensitive
on his part. She'd become so much a part of everything that he
hadn't stopped to think. For a moment, he'd forgotten that she
wasn't used to seeing dead bodies on a weekly basis.

As the detective walked away, Max turned to
Ivy. "You can hang back if you want."

That, of course, was taken as a challenge.
Her chin went up, the line of her lips straightened.

She came along.

It was bad. Really bad.

The body was lying faceup on the altar, its
severed arms not far away in the grass. The eyes were gone, most
likely ravaged by birds, leaving two black holes staring up at the
sky. The face was bloated. Blowflies and maggots churned in every
opening, giving the body a strange sense of life.

"It's Alex Martin," Ivy said numbly, able to
make out enough of his features to confirm his identity.

"This can't be the work of the Madonna
Murderer," Max said in a low voice, so only Ivy could hear.
"Killing an adult male?"

"I don't think you should eliminate the
possibility so readily. There are exceptions to every rule of human
behavior."

"We can't afford to spend time going in the
wrong direction."

The Madonna Murderer hadn't struck in more
than two weeks. Everyone was expecting a new murder any day now,
and they couldn't afford to waste time on false leads or clues.