Signature Kill (20 page)
Authors: David Levien
“Oh-ho, say hello to the regular,” Gene Sasso said, turning around from stacking glasses.
Frank Behr had just walked into the tail end of a quiet Wednesday night at the Trough.
“I said I’d come by for a beer,” Behr announced, taking a seat at the bar, “and here I am.”
“Well, I’m some lucky guy,” Sasso said. He pulled a Heineken Light on tap for Behr and slid it over.
“Thanks,” Behr said, taking a sip. He’d spent the last few days crunching the license plates he’d gotten at his meeting. He had turned up no connections to the crime scenes and no known felons, besides Prilo, in attendance. He’d also gone over the video he’d shot. Plain faces, strange faces, even one guy who looked like he had his eyebrows drawn on, but no one was wearing a sign that said “Murderer.”
“How are you doing with that case?” Sasso wondered. Behr had been torn by a desire to resume his surveillance of Prilo, or to confront him, but with reams of data to check, he felt he had to be thorough. Now he wasn’t sure what to do next.
“Coming up as empty as my pockets,” Behr said.
“Of course you are. That’s why you come crawling back to your old training officer, right?”
“Is that why I’m here?” Behr asked. “Thought it was for the cold beer and fine ambience.”
“I don’t know why the hell you’re here,” Sasso said. “Hope you’re not looking to drink on credit.”
“Certainly wouldn’t pick this place if I was,” Behr said.
Sasso slung a dishrag over his shoulder and leaned his elbows on the bar top. “So where are you at?”
Behr walked him through everything, up to the community meeting and Prilo’s appearance there.
“I saw something about that in the
Star
, and wondered if it was legit or a bogey,” Sasso said.
“It was as legit as I could make it,” Behr said.
“But it was a bogey all the way,” Sasso said, laughing.
“Pretty much.” Behr laughed too.
“Until a murderer walked in.”
“Right. I’ve been running all the plates, doing geographic profiling, running a circle hypothesis.” It was a theory that suggested that serial offenders didn’t go too far from home and lived within a sphere whose diameter was equal to the distance between the two farthest offenses. Generally ten square miles.
“Right,” Sasso said. “But I’m not sure that theory holds in a car town like Indianapolis. People drive twenty, forty miles a day here and still feel like they never went anywhere.”
“That’s where I’ve ended up with it,” Behr said. “I’ve got body dumps twenty-seven miles apart.”
“Besides, even if the guy was there at your meeting, he could’ve ridden with a friend. Or walked. Or parked somewhere else. You probably don’t even have a plate on him,” Sasso said.
“That’s starting to settle in on me. Another few hours of work and I’ll be through all of it, including the dozen or so who registered on the website.”
“So you really
don’t
have squat,” Sasso said. “Except Prilo.”
“Except Prilo,” Behr agreed. “Even my expert, who was plenty skeptical at first, is ready to buy.” After the meeting, Mistretta cautioned him not to lean too far into one theory or to settle, but couldn’t disagree that Prilo’s presence slanted things heavily in his direction.
“Occam’s razor says you shouldn’t bother looking much further.”
“I don’t know if his showing up makes me like him more for it, but it makes me like him a lot for having
some
connection, for knowing something real.”
Behr drained his glass and fell silent while Sasso refilled it from the tap.
“Did I hear right about you having a kid?” Sasso asked.
“You heard right. A son.”
“Holy shit, great news. How’s that all going?”
It was a short dagger to Behr’s gut. He tried to hide it. He considered spilling his mistakes and regrets and asking for advice on how to put it all back together. But Sasso was just his old training officer and, at the moment, his bartender, and barely a friend anymore; he wasn’t his father confessor.
“Going good,” Behr said.
He felt Sasso read him, almost say something, decide not to, and then reach for the tap and draw himself beer.
“Here’s to not knowing jackshit,” Sasso said, raising a glass.
“Yep,” Behr said.
“And to your son.”
They touched glasses and drank.
“We need the quarterly numbers on Ramapo Industries,” Kenny, his manager, says, standing in his office doorway.
“Okay. I’ll have them before the weekend.” It is Thursday afternoon, so Kenny won’t have to wait long.
“And the year-to-date projections based on cash flow for Constantine. How you coming on that?”
“That I have for you now,” he says, digging around on his desk and finding a folder.
“My man, Hardy,” Kenny says.
“Paper copy, and I’ll e-mail you the file,” he says, handing over the folder.
“Good deal,” Kenny says, and leaves.
Later, he is heading to the kitchen for a coffee and comes upon a group of five people from his department. Claudia and Beth, Tom and Grant, and Kenny. They shift and get a little quiet when they see him, but he’s heard what they are talking about: their plans for the evening. He knows he makes them uncomfortable. He is a bit older than most of them, maybe that is why. Or maybe it’s the hair, the eyebrows, the alopecia universalis from which he suffers. All the hair on his body started falling out in clumps in his early twenties right when basic training ended. The doctors couldn’t explain it. It was some sort of immune system failure, they said, and suggested it could have been brought on by stress. It was right around the time of Mother’s illness and death, and grief, they said, could be a trigger. What they didn’t
recognize was that it was basic itself, with all the talk of killing and the shooting and bayoneting and hand-to-hand, that had lit a magnesium fire in him, and that checking his urges was the stressor. If he’d only recognized what was happening and started in on his life’s work sooner, it would have abated, and his whole body wouldn’t have become smooth. But it had happened the way it had happened, as all things did. Regardless, the younger set these days expects everything and everybody to be perfect, and turn away from anyone who isn’t.
After a moment Kenny clears his throat. “Colts game at eight twenty, NFL Thursday-night edition down at Scotty’s. Are you in?”
“Thank you, Kenny, guys, for the invite, but I am not in. I’ve got some stuff to do tonight.”
“All right, Hardy,” Kenny says. If there is relief in Kenny’s eyes, he can’t see it. “Next time.”
“Indeed,” he says, and goes to fix his coffee. He watches them break up and go their separate ways. He does have something to do. He has a busy night ahead of him.
Ringing …
… Why the hell is my phone ringing in the middle of the night?
Behr wondered.
It wasn’t like he didn’t need the sleep. It was four in the morning on the third day since the community meeting and it was official now: after running all the plates, parking tickets, and traffic stops in the areas of the body drops, he’d come up bone-dry. His effort had been a complete waste of time, and a third of a bottle of Wild Turkey had been his only solace once he’d finished.
The phone rang again and his mind went to Susan, calling about something wrong with Trevor, and his heart raced as he reached out and grabbed his phone from his nightstand but saw that Gary Breslau, not Susan, was the caller.
“What’s up?” Behr asked.
“It’s Quinn,” Breslau said.
“What about him?”
“Someone got him. He’s at Eskenazi, in Smith Trauma. I’m on my way there now.”
“So am I,” Behr said, putting his feet on the floor.
Behr heard the wailing before he even turned the corner and saw the police officers in the hospital hallway standing guard.
“Frank Behr,” he said, as they squared to him.
“Lieutenant said he’s good,” one of them told the other, and they pushed the door open, causing the pained cry to grow louder as he entered.
The room was full of doctors and nurses, with Breslau and a few other cops in street clothes, but was dominated by Sheri Quinn, the source of the sound, her petite figure vibrating with anguish and fear. Behr’s eyes met Breslau’s, but before they could exchange a word, a doctor cleared from the bedside and Behr got a look at a battered and mutilated Quinn. His head was massively swollen and wrapped in white bandages that were stained through with seeping bright red blood. Quinn’s eyes were blackened and closed, his nose looked broken, and his jaw appeared to be wired in place. And that was the good news. Behr’s gaze traveled down Quinn’s body, where bloody bandaged stumps were all that remained at the end of his forearms. Quinn’s hands were gone.
That was when Sheri Quinn seemed to notice Behr’s presence. With a half scream she babbled something that sounded like “You …” and started swiping feeble blows at his chest. A female nurse and another woman, perhaps a relative, got hold of Sheri Quinn’s shoulders and pulled her away.
Breslau signaled, and he and Behr retreated to a far corner of the room.
“Some workmen on a paving crew found him wandering around by the railroad tracks west of the stadium. He was all fucked up, didn’t even know his own name, but he still had his wallet in his pocket …” Breslau said, his voice low.
Behr looked at Sheri Quinn, seated now, her small frame racked with sobs.
“Blunt-force trauma to the head. Fractured skull.”
“What the hell happened to his hands?” Behr asked.
“They’re gone. Amputated, with a blow torch, is the best guess.”
I had that prick Prilo in the room
, Behr thought to himself, looking for someone to lash out at,
and I let him leave before getting something out of him …
“Ah fuck,” Behr said. “Why is he still alive?” he asked about Quinn, as quietly as he could.
“He shouldn’t be,” Breslau whispered. “The theory is he was left for dead. Between the bludgeoning and the hands, he should’ve bled out and died in a matter of minutes, and he would’ve, but the torch cauterized as it cut and the bleeding stopped pretty quickly. Somehow the tough bastard came to and got up and started walking.”
“Fuck me,” Behr said again. “This is my fault. For using him …”
“Easy,” Breslau said. “We’re thinking the same thing, that you drew the guy out, that he saw the pictures, but no one knows for sure what happened, and it’s not on you.”
“Tell me you recovered some DNA this time at least.”
“They went over his body as best they could. No DNA, no evidence of rape or sodomy …”
Thank God for small miracles
, Behr thought.
“No hits. They went over his clothes with a fine-tooth comb too and they’re still working on it.”
“And?”
“You’re not gonna believe this—they recovered hairs.”
“Belonging to the perp?” Behr practically jumped.
“Doubtful. Long. Blond. Female.”
“Are they—”
“They’re being crossed against recent victims right now. I called a guy in special to run it as we speak.”
“If they belong to a victim, then this is our guy,” Behr said. He’d struck a nerve. Despite himself Behr felt his adrenaline surge. Prilo
had
been there at the meeting, and it had incited him.
That’s when they heard some babbling come from the bed, from between the clenched lips of Quinn, and Behr heard his name.
“Tell Behr …” the babbling came again, and the nurses and doctors made room for Behr and Breslau to approach the bedside.
“I’m here, Quinn,” he said, “it’s Behr.” Even Sheri Quinn stopped crying and went quiet.
“I’m sorry, Quinn, for what happened.” Behr moved close and Quinn’s eyes flickered. “Was it him?” Behr asked, but before
he could say the name “Prilo,” Quinn babbled, “Hydroxyl … hydrox … benz …”
“What?”
“Smells like benz … benzy …”
“Smells like benzene?” Behr asked.
It wasn’t a nod, but some movement in the affirmative came from Quinn.
“What does? Where?”
“Where I was … Where he put …”
“Hydroxylated benzene,” Sheri Quinn said. “It’s a chemical used in developing film. He’s been going on about it since he came to. It’s all he’ll say. That you were right …”
The lead doctor, a man with steel-rimmed spectacles, thin red hair pressed to his temples, and an air of extreme competence, stepped forward and made himself noticed for the first time.
“We’ve got to do the procedure now,” the doctor said.
Breslau nodded and stepped back. Behr looked to him.
“He might have brain damage,” Breslau said low, pulling Behr away from the bedside. “They want to induce a coma. They need to try and control the swelling to his brain or he could end up a fucking cauliflower.”
“Shit,” Behr said, sick to his stomach. “Shit … What kind of a fucking asshole am I?”
Behr blasted the door open with a kick and stormed out to the hallway between the surprised police guards. He saw a steel medical rolling cart and picked it up, ready to smash it through a plate-glass window, when he felt hands that possessed real strength gripping his biceps, holding him back.
“What the fuck are you doing? Huh?” It was Breslau.
“I did that, in there,” Behr said, raw emotion in his voice. “I got that guy mutilated, maybe killed. He’s got kids, the wife. She could end up feeding him with a spoon. I—”
“Whoa, man. Come on. Who the fuck are you?” Breslau said. “Who are you that you think you can control everything?”
It stopped Behr cold.
“Put it down,” Breslau said. And Behr dropped the rolling tray back onto its wheels with a clang. The cops cleared a little way down the hall, giving them some space.
“I learned it by my second year on patrol same as you must’ve: we’re out there in the middle of it, but we’re not in charge of anything. You open the chute and try and ride the bull. You might think you can dictate where it’s gonna go a little, guide it once in a while. But the truth is: that beast is gonna go and do wherever and whatever the fuck
he
wants to and the best
you
can hope for is to hang on for the ride,” Breslau said.