The Missing and the Dead: A Bragg Thriller
Read The Missing and the Dead: A Bragg Thriller Online
Authors: Jack Lynch
THE MISSING AND THE DEAD
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1982, 2014 Jack Lynch
ISBN: 194129832X
ISBN-13: 9781941298329
Published by Brash Books, LLC
12120 State Line #253
Leawood, Kansas 66209
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Wake Up And Die
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Truth Or Die
Yesterday Is Dead
Die For Me
PROLOGUE
F
or the first time in his life he had to figure out what he was going to do with a body. He didn't have much time for it, either. And it had to be very nearly foolproof if he wanted to preserve his identity and, perhaps, his wife's sanity. She had said that to him the last time they'd had to pack up and dash off, leaving no trace, assuming new roles.
"One more time and I'll lose my mind."
No hysterics. His wife wasn't that way. In fact, she had been the one to hold him together during the rockier times of his long career. She was firm and strong. She understated things. If she told him she was afraid of going to pieces, so be it. And it had been their last slapdash move. Into retirement for John Roper—his most recent identity—and the Hobo, the name by which he was known in certain police and prison circles. Retirement also for the reclusive painter, Pavel, who conjured portraits of his victims to curb the blinding headaches. Good-bye, all. Retirement time. Ta-ta. They traveled abroad for the better part of a year. In style and comfort. God knows he'd earned it over the years, along with enough money to do it.
He opened the hood to his Land Rover and stood staring bleakly at the engine. His mind was on other things. Nearly thirty years. God Almighty, that was a long time to have gotten away with it all. Not a serious miscue, either. Not one mistaken victim. Never an arrest. Probably stalked at one time or another by more lawmen than in the history of crime and punishment. His wife, poor girl, who could blame her? Moving here and there and then
off someplace else. The new identities. A career of role-playing, that's what it had been, long before the term had become jargon. The ever more clever and involved arrangements for solicitation and payoff, all those codes and maps, the letter drops and midnight phone calls...
It was intricate mental work. He felt sure that was what led to the headaches. Anybody burns out after a while. An outsider, he knew, would suspect some form of guilt or remorse for his victims, but such was not the case. He and his wife used to talk those things through, long into the night. His work was no more demeaning than that of the heroic young warrior. And certainly more noble than that of the vivisectionist with his tortured animals. He never consciously hurt anybody. Something quick and sure, for the most part, a rap on the head followed by a needleful of arsenic. Quick and very nearly painless.
And there were, he knew with utter certainty, a lot of miserable bastards out there who he'd gotten rid of. Not that he ever let such judgments influence his work. But it was a fact and he knew it, and knew as well that many of the police who pursued him would equally have clapped him on the back for having helped purge some of the world's scum.
But back then, as the Hobo, he hadn't thought about such things. And as the name suggested, he was a moral tramp in those matters. If the price was right, if he could set it up to guarantee execution and escape, he would do it, be the victim saint or scamp. He couldn't let those things gnaw at him.
There, of course, had been those who paid society's price for the work that the Hobo did. Among the hundreds who had hired him over the years, there had been plenty whose boasting, stupidity, drunkenness or conscience had led to their own arrest or confession. But none of them ever knew enough about the Hobo to identify or describe him, which was only fitting. The Hobo was but a smoking gun. Let the twisted or jealous or hate-filled or greedy minds that conceived the act in the first place pay the price of it.
Pavel, a different, creative side of his nature, had emerged late in his career, after the onset of the crippling headaches. One of his victims, a young man in Oklahoma, had realized at the last moment what was about to befall him, and had exhibited a stark, terror-filled expression. It had been unsettling, to say the least. Back home, he told his wife about it. And in one of those quantum leaps the mind is capable of, she had urged him to try to capture the expression on canvas. He'd been doubtful at first. He'd never been more than a half-hearted painter at best. It was a challenging discipline and he'd seldom used it for anything else, working his mind the same way he worked his muscles, in order to meet the demands of his profession.
But he'd tried it. He'd painted the young man's face, as best he could recall it, and the headaches had receded to little more than an annoyance.
He had thought about that some in the years since. Wondering if somehow that portrait business was what had very nearly unraveled his identity and led to his capture in Southern California. But he couldn't think of how it might have, any more than had a dozen other facets of the aging process. His work, though, had taken a ragged turn there. He knew that, now. He should have stuck with sap and needle, rather than get into the decapitation business. It was messy and awful, and dangerous. But to curb the headaches, he'd found it was very nearly the only manner of impending death that could evoke the stark fear he could later reconstruct on canvas, and through whatever chemical workings of the brain, banish the headaches. He didn't even like to think about that late period.
He liked to dwell more in the present. He and his wife had talked and thought about the roles they would assume in retirement. They had decided to return to California. It was a large enough place so there could be little fear of having events in one end of the state connected with those in the other. And his wife always had wanted a garden. To watch the growing cycle through
the seasons. That pleased her, and they'd never been able to do that before. He, on the other hand, was able just to kick around and feel the soil and tramp the hills and read voraciously and putter at the palette, as his wife put it.
He might have known it was too good to last. In recent days there had been a disturbing sequence of events. Call it chance or whimsy or whatever, Fate was showing him her heels. First had been that surprising showcase of the Pavel portraits in San Francisco. He'd had to take quick steps there.
And now, there was the detective. The very man who down south years before had tripped him up, forcing his retirement. And just minutes ago he had been in the heart of town, asking his questions. He was the man who had made the connection between John Roper and the Hobo and Pavel. What in God's name could have brought him to Barracks Cove?
No matter. He was there, that was the thing to be addressed. Fortunately his wife had recognized him and helped steer the man out to their home. He would be arriving soon, and he would have to be killed. No question about that. That's why the Land Rover's hood was raised and he pretended to be fussing with the engine. At his side, on the fender, was a dirty rag. The detective would drive up, get out of his car and address him. He in turn would look up, turn, and take up the dirty rag to wipe his hands and to grasp the pistol concealed within it and then blow out the man's brains, just like that. No time for nonsense. Not even a hello. No, sir.
Then there would be the body. He'd never had to conceal a body during his years in the business. But he had to this time and he had to be very good about it. His wife had told him. She couldn't move again. She just couldn't bring herself to do that again.
He had a half-baked plan. That was his strong suit, of course, the mental work of planning these things. It had pulled him through time and again. It was the surprises he hated.
And then, just as he heard the sound of a car's engine approaching the old road leading to their home, another, absolutely sickening
thought occurred to him. He was a sitting duck, now. He still had enough confidence in his nerves and skills to kill, but this time he couldn't fade away after.
And suppose, just suppose, there was another. Oh, God, what if there were somebody else who could make the same connections the approaching detective had? What might he look like? Who would he be? Dear God. Who?
ONE
I
agreed to look for a young man named Jerry Lind only because I owed a couple of favors to Don Ballard, who runs the publicity department for one of the local television stations. Ballard had asked me to speak with the missing man's sister and to do what I could to help her. The sister was a station personality of the sort that made me feel radio is going to make a big comeback some day. Her name was Janet Lind. She was one of the new breed of "happy talk" deliverers of the day's events, a member of the station's Now News Team. She had developed a flair for it, along with a repertoire of about thirty posturings, and she managed to trot out each of them at least once while we chatted in a small interview room in the bowels of the station out on Van Ness Avenue.