The Scarecrow (26 page)
He made the turn and there was Mr. Grable in his tuxedo, sitting on a stool. He was holding the microphone, waiting for the song to end.
The music was loud at this end of the hall, but not so loud that Wesley didn’t hear the cheers—and some of the jeers. He crept up behind Mr. Grable and looked out between the legs of the stool. The stage was splashed with harsh white light. He saw her then. Naked in front of all the men. The music pulsing through him.
Girl, you gotta love your man…
She moved perfectly with the music. As if it had been written and recorded just for her. He watched and felt entranced. He didn’t want the music to stop. It was perfect. She was perfect and he—
He was suddenly grabbed from behind by the back of his T-shirt’s collar and yanked backward down the hall. He managed to look up and see it was Alma.
“You are a very bad little boy!” she scolded.
“No,” he cried. “I wanna see my—”
“Not now, you don’t!”
She dragged him back through the beads and into the dressing room. She pushed him down onto the pile of feather boas and silk scarves.
“You are in big troub—What is that?”
She was pointing at him, finger aimed low. At the place where he felt strange feelings begin from.
“I’m a good boy,” he said.
“Not with that, you aren’t,” Alma said. “Let’s see what you’ve got there.”
She reached down and put her hand under his belt. She started to pull his pants down.
“You little pervert,” Alma said. “I’m going to show you what we do with perverts around here.”
Wesley was frozen in terror. That word she called him. He didn’t know what it meant. He didn’t know what to do.
The sharp knock of metal on glass cut through the music and the dream. Carver jumped up in his seat. Momentarily disoriented, he looked around, realized where he was, and pulled the buds out of his ears.
He looked out the window, and there was McGinnis, standing in the street. He was holding a leash that led down to the collar on a little pip-squeak dog. Carver saw the fat Notre Dame ring on his finger. He must have hit the window with it to get his attention.
Carver lowered the window. At the same time, he used his foot to make sure the gun he’d placed on the floor was out of sight.
“Wesley, what are you doing here?”
The dog started yapping before Carver could answer, and McGinnis shushed it.
“I wanted to talk to you,” Carver said.
“Then, why didn’t you come up to the house?”
“Because I also have to show you something.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Get in and I’ll take you.”
“Take me where? It’s almost midnight. I don’t under—”
“It has to do with that visit from the FBI the other day. I think I know who they’re looking for.”
McGinnis took a step forward to look in closely at Carver.
“Wesley, what’s going on? What do you mean ‘who they’re looking for’?”
“Just get in and I’ll explain it on the way.”
“What about my dog?”
“You can bring it. We won’t be long.”
McGinnis shook his head like he was annoyed with the whole thing but then walked around to get into the car. Carver leaned forward and quickly grabbed the gun off the floor and put it into the rear waistband of his pants. He’d have to live with the discomfort.
McGinnis put the dog in the backseat and then got into the front.
“It’s a she,” he said.
“What?” Carver asked.
“The dog’s a she, not an it.”
“Whatever.
She
won’t pee in my car, will she?”
“Don’t worry. She just went.”
“Good.”
Carver started driving out of the neighborhood.
“Is your house locked?” he asked.
“Yes, I lock up when we go on walks. You never know with the neighborhood kids. They all know I live alone.”
“That’s smart.”
“Where are we going?”
“To where Freddy Stone lives.”
“Okay, so now tell me what is going on and what it has to do with the FBI.”
“I told you. I have to show you.”
“Then tell me what you’re going to show me. Have you talked to Stone? Did you ask him where the hell he’s been?”
Carver shook his head.
“No, I haven’t talked to him. That’s why I went to his place tonight, to try to catch him. He wasn’t there but I found something else. The website the FBI was asking about. He’s the guy behind it.”
“So as soon as he hears that the FBI came by with a warrant, he takes a hike.”
“It looks that way.”
“We need to call the FBI, Wesley. We can’t look like we were protecting this guy, no matter what he was into.”
“But it could hurt the business if it blows up in the media. It could bring us down.”
McGinnis shook his head.
“We’ll just have to take our lumps,” he said emphatically. “Covering it up will never work.”
“All right. We go to his place first and then we call the FBI. Do you remember the names of those two agents?”
“I have their cards at the office. One was named Bantam. I remember it because he was a big guy but his name was Bantam, like the bantamweight class in boxing, which is the small guys.”
“Right. Now I remember.”
The lights of the tall buildings in downtown Phoenix spread out before them on both sides of the freeway. Carver stopped talking and McGinnis did likewise. The dog was sleeping on the backseat of the car.
Carver’s mind wandered back to the memory the music had conjured earlier. He wondered what had made him go down the hallway to look. He knew the answer was tangled down deep in his darkest roots. In a place no one could go.
I
never left my hotel room Saturday, even when some of the reporters on the weekend shift called and invited me over to the Red Wind for cocktails after work. They were celebrating another day on the front page with the story. The latest report being on Alonzo Winslow’s first day of freedom and an update on the growing search for the trunk murder suspect. I didn’t feel much like celebrating a story that was no longer mine. I also didn’t go to the Red Wind anymore. They used to put the front pages of the A section, Metro and Sports over the urinals in the men’s restroom. Now they had flat-screen plasma TVs tuned to Fox and CNN and Bloomberg. Each screen adding insult to injury, a reminder that our business was dying.
Instead I stayed in Saturday night and started working my way through the files, using Rachel’s notes as a blueprint. With her in Washington and off the case, I felt uncomfortable leaving the profiling to nameless, faceless agents on the task force or as far away as Quantico. This was my story and I was going to keep out in front on it.
I worked late into the night, pulling together the details of two dead women’s lives, looking for the commonality Rachel was sure was there. They were women from two different hometowns who had migrated to two different cities in two different states. As far as I could tell, they had never crossed paths, except on the outside chance that Denise Babbit had gone to Las Vegas and happened to catch the Femmes Fatales show at the Cleopatra.
Could that be the connection between their murders? It seemed far-fetched.
I finally exhausted that pursuit and decided to approach things from a completely different angle. The killer’s angle. On a fresh sheet of Rachel’s notebook paper, I started listing all the things the Unsub would have needed to know in order to accomplish each murder in terms of method, timing and location. This proved to be a daunting task and by midnight I was spent. I fell asleep in my clothes on top of the bedspread, the files and my notes all around me.
The four
A.M
. call from the front desk was jarring, but it saved me from my recurring dream of Angela.
“Hello,” I croaked into the phone.
“Mr. McEvoy, your limo is here.”
“My limo?”
“He said he was from CNN.”
I had totally forgotten. It had been set up by the
Times
’ media relations office on Friday. I was supposed to go live to the nation on a weekend show that ran from eight to ten on Sunday mornings. The problem with that was, it was eight to ten East Coast time, five to seven West Coast time. On Friday the show’s producer had been unclear where in the show they would go to me. So I had to be ready to go live at five.
“Tell him I’ll be down in ten minutes.”
I actually took fifteen, dragging myself into the shower, shaving and getting dressed in the last unwrinkled shirt I had in the room. The driver didn’t seem concerned and drove at a leisurely pace toward Hollywood. There was no traffic and we were making good time.
The car wasn’t actually a limo. It was a Lincoln Town Car sedan. A year earlier I had written a series of stories about a lawyer who worked out of the back of a Lincoln Town Car while a client who was working off his fees drove him around. Sitting in the backseat now on the way to CNN, I got to like it. It was a good way to see L.A.
The CNN building was on Sunset Boulevard not far from the Hollywood police station. After passing through a security checkpoint in the lobby I went up to the studio where I was slated to be remotely interviewed from Atlanta for the weekend edition of a show called
CNN Newsroom
. I was led by a young person to the greenroom, and I found Wanda Sessums and Alonzo Winslow already there. For some reason I was shocked by the idea that they could have gotten up so early and beaten me—the professional journalist—to the studio.
Wanda looked at me like I was a stranger. Alonzo barely had his eyes open.
“Wanda, you remember me? I’m Jack McEvoy, the reporter? I came to see you last Monday.”
She nodded and clicked an ill-fitting pair of dentures in her mouth. She had not worn them when I visited her at home.
“That’s right. You the one who put all the lies in the paper about my Zo.”
This statement perked Alonzo up.
“Well, he’s out now, right?” I said quickly.
I stepped over and offered my hand to her grandson. He hesitantly took it and we shook but he seemed confused by who I was.
“Glad to meet you finally, Alonzo, and glad you’re out. I’m Jack. I’m the reporter who talked to your grandmother and started the investigation that led to your release.”
“My grandmother? Motherfucker, what you talking about?”
“He don’t know what he talkin’,” Wanda said quickly.
I suddenly understood the error of my ways. Wanda was his grandmother but had been playing his mother—Moms—because his real mother was on the street. He probably thought his real mother was his sister, if he knew her at all.
“Sorry, I got confused,” I said. “Anyway, I think we are being interviewed together.”
“Why the fuck you bein’ interviewed?” Alonzo asked. “I’m the one spent the motherfuckin’ time in jail.”
“I think it’s because I’m the one who got you out.”
“Yeah, that funny. Mr. Meyer say he the one that got me out.”
“Our lawyer got him out,” Wanda chimed in.
“Then how come your lawyer isn’t here and going on CNN?”
“He coming.”
I nodded. This was news to me. When I left work Friday it was going to be just Alonzo and me on the show. Now we had Moms and Meyer aboard. I decided this was not going to go well on live broadcast. Too many people and at least one of them the broadcast censors would have issues with. I went over to a table where there was a coffee urn and poured a cup. I took it black. I then reached into a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts and chose an Original Glazed. I tried to keep to myself and watch the overhead television, which was tuned to CNN and would soon be broadcasting the newsmagazine show we were scheduled to appear on. After a while a technician came in and wired us for sound, clipping a microphone to our collars and putting an audio feed earpiece into our ears and hiding all wires under our shirts.
“Can I speak to a producer?” I said quietly. “Alone?”
“Sure, I’ll tell him.”
I sat back down and waited and after four minutes I heard my name spoken by a male voice.
“Mr. McEvoy?”
I looked around and then realized the voice had come in over the earpiece.
“Yes, I’m here.”
“This is Christian DuChateau in Atlanta. I’m producing today’s show and I want to thank you for getting up so early to be on. We’ll go over everything when we get you into the studio in a few minutes. But did you need to speak with me before that?”
“Yes, just hold on a second.”
I walked out of the greenroom and into the hallway, closing the door behind me.
“I just wanted to make sure you’ve got somebody good on the beeper,” I said in a low voice.
“I don’t understand,” DuChateau said. “What do you mean by ‘beeper’?”
“I don’t know what exactly it’s called, but you should know that Alonzo Winslow may only be sixteen years old but he pretty much uses the word
motherfucker
about as often as you use the word
the
.”
There was silence in response but not for too long.
“I understand,” DuChateau said. “Thank you for the heads-up. We try to conduct pre-interviews with our guests but sometimes there isn’t time. Is his lawyer there yet?”
“No.”
“We can’t seem to locate him and he isn’t answering his cell. I was hoping he might be able to, uh, control his client.”
“Well, at the moment, he isn’t here. And you have to understand something, Christian. This kid didn’t commit that murder but that doesn’t mean he’s this innocent young child, if you know what I mean. He’s a gangbanger. He’s a Crip and right now he’s turning the greenroom blue. He’s got his blue jeans, his blue plaid shirt, and at the moment he’s wearing a blue do-rag.”
There was no hesitation on the phone this time.
“Okay, I’ll take care of this,” the producer said. “If things fall out, are you willing to go on alone? The segment is eight minutes with a video report on the case in the middle. After you subtract the video and your intro, it’s about four and a half to five minutes of airtime with our show host here in Atlanta. I don’t think you’ll be asked anything you haven’t already been asked about the case.”