Me, Myself and Why? Read online

  Just about when I was about to give up, one of the men George had been chasing blasted out of the alley in front of me holding—would this day never end?—a tire iron. Within two seconds, he saw my badge and decided his best course of action was to take a

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Swing wide

  Sweeeet chariot

  Turn those wheels and carry me home!

  Bad day to be you.

  Silly.

  Goose.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  I awoke to find the unconscious—and possibly dead—body of David the Duke (birth name: Tyrone Lee; DOB: 4/4/82) at my feet. He was a sprawl of dirty and bloody denim, strappy and bloody T-shirt, and steel-toed and bloody boots.

  Ah, there, one of the boots moved. Less paperwork. Excellent.

  I turned to look for George. The two men he was chasing were, if my partner’s past actions were any indication, destined for colostomy bags and exploratory surgery. Not to mention all the weeks of physical therapy.

  Sure enough, as I explored the alley two blocks away, I began to hear a familiar voice, punctuated by pounding sounds.

  “Huh? Do you like people hurting you for something you can’t help? Huh? Huh?”

  I had to admit, I was almost impressed. George’s fists were a blur; each “huh?” was punctuated with another blow. It sounded like he was punching hamburger. Which, in a way, he was.

  “How about I cut that swastika off your arm and make you eat it? Huh? Huh?”

  We were likely going to be here for a bit, if for no other reason than we would have to call an ambulance for each of the pulverized skinheads and then wait for the sirens. And I had no intention of putting a stop to any of it. It was more therapeutic than hypnosis, and infinitely more interesting to watch.

  “You get that this just proves to everyone that you’re a closeted fag, right? Right? How about that?” There was a crunch as George broke Don Black’s nose. Two against one—that was hardly fair when you were up against someone as ruthless as my partner.

  “Because if you don’t like it, then why the hell do you keep beating up homosexuals?” Thwack. Thud.

  George was never going to get those stains out of his suit.

  “Don Black?” Whump. “Kevin Strom?” Whu-thud. “And your other fellow Nazi, the one who got past me. David the Duke, you pathetic closeted anti-Semitic bag of shit? You formed your little club and named yourself after a bunch of ignorant crackers. Most of whom were too stupid to stay out of prison—that is, when they weren’t filing fraudulent income tax returns.”

  I pulled up a pack of cigarettes I had bummed from David the Duke—he was not using them, after all. I cracked it open, found two inside with a lighter, took one, lit the cigarette with the lighter, and took a deep inhale. I was not a regular smoker, but now and again I found the occasional cigarette to be soothing.

  “Hey, Cadence?” A yowl of pain from Kevin Strom as George seized his testicles and twisted. “You got anywhere to be in the next half hour?”

  “Shiro. And no.” I flapped a hand at him, smoke trickling out of my nostrils. “Take your time.”

  “Hear that, scumbag? The one person at work who’s crazier than I am thinks I should take—my—time!”

  “I beg your pardon. I am certainly not the one person at work crazier than you.”

  “Oh, cram it up your ass, Shiro!”

  I took another drag, idly wondering about what never failed to set George off. Not only was he amoral and conscience-free, he was not gay or Jewish. Neither was anyone in his family, by his own admission. And yet he had, figuratively speaking, many many homophobic and anti-Semitic scalps on his belt.

  Mysteries, mysteries.

  “Have you looked in a mirror lately, you cowardly puke? How many teeth do you even have left? The average IQ score in your pathetic gang is 112 and none of you made it past the middle of your junior year in high school.”

  I took the cigarette out and studied it. Cadence did not smoke. Finding a cigarette in her hand would upset her. Smelling the smoke—tasting it in her mouth—that would upset her, too. Not in a traumatic sort of way, to be sure. But it would still be deeply irritating.

  “The master race?” A bubbly moan. “Give me a break! No, never mind, I’ll give you one.” There was a final crunch, and then silence.

  I puffed and waited.

  George hurried out of the alley and stalked past me, muttering under his breath. His dark hair had flopped into his eyes. His green eyes—interesting, the strangest people I knew all had green eyes, hmm—were slits of extreme piss-off. His face was spattered brow to chin in a fine red spray of what I took to be back-splatter, probably arterial. His suit jacket looked like he’d dipped it in red paint before leaving the alley. His tie, which had a pattern of turtles split in two swimming in bloody soup, had real patches of crimson on it.

  “That was nicely done, George. Your punches are getting more economical all the time.”

  “Go to hell.”

  I took the cigarette out of my mouth, studied it, thought about discarding it, and then had a truly wicked idea. I sucked in one last puff and fell into step behind the Anti–anti-Semitic Avenger. “Michaela will be annoyed.”

  “I give a shit.”

  “No. You do not. Really, George, in front of civilians? On a city street? There are only a hundred ways to do what you do without getting caught—and you know every one of them.”

  “Maybe it’s not about not getting caught.”

  “Oh, quite possibly.” I was not sure where George thought he was going; our car was still hissing on the curb, and at the least, we needed a tow.

  Either way, playtime was over.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  “Iuugh! KACK! Oh my good—KACK—jiminy gosh!” I coughed and spit and then coughed again.

  “Knock it off,” George snapped, and I was shocked at his appearance. He looked like he’d gone ten rounds with the Rock’s stunt double. He looked, in other words, almost as bad as our car did. That would be the third car he or I had totaled in five weeks. (Though to be fair, Adrienne had totaled the last one; I was but an innocent.)

  “Rrrggghh. Oh. Oh my goodness. Ick . . .” I bent at the waist and nearly barfed all over my shoes. What the—my—what the hell was a cigarette doing in my mouth?

  “Oh that wretch! That fiendish rotten—” Words failed me. I spit the cigarette out and then scrubbed my tongue with my fingers. My mouth tasted like an ashtray after a sparrow spent the weekend pooping in it.

  This was Shiro’s idea of a joke, that hard-hearted shrew. Like Adrienne, she got bored if she stayed too long; unlike Adrienne, she could plan. Sisters’ tricks on each other were not always kind.

  “I don’t smoke!” I raged, almost running after George. “But what will you bet I’ll have to deal with the lung cancer issues, huh? Huh? Who is dumb enough to smoke these days? I could have been burned! I could have aspirated on my vomit and died! I could have—uh—nicotine-stained fingers! Oh, rats, my mouth.” I untucked my shirt and scrubbed at my tongue with my shirttail. “Do they still make Topol? I’m not going to use Topol!”

  “Brush your teeth with strawberry douche, see if I care. Come on.”

  “Well. That wasn’t very nice at all, you know, and—George?” Wow, he was really putting some distance between us. I had seen him like this only on the day the little group of skinheads he’d spent nineteen months tracking down were acquitted of murder charges. Oh boy. He hadn’t been able to get the blood out of his carpet and ended up moving to a new place—and losing his security deposit. Shiro (of all people!) had helped him move to his new condo near Riverplace.

  “George? Hey, wait up! I’m not doing all this paperwork, you know. You made the mess; you fill out the forms. And get Michaela to sign off on them. And the next time Shiro sticks anything tobacco-related in my mouth, could you kindly bust her in the ribs?”

  With a final, defeated retch, I managed to recover from my near-death experience and h
urried after my partner.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  We got a cell call as we jumped into a taxi. Federal agents, hailing a cab—nothing like a fresh humiliation in the middle of the workweek. What we heard was even worse news than Shiro’s long-term plan to kill me with lung cancer.

  There was another ThreeFer crime scene. Two in twenty-four hours? Awful, awful to contemplate. This wasn’t escalation; it was lunacy. What the heck was going on?

  We were told where to go and we promised to get there pronto. I groaned inwardly because I’d have to cancel my date with Jim Clapp. I knew he’d still be at the Cop Shop, so I dialed his direct number.

  “Homicide, Clapp.”

  “Hi, it’s me.”

  “Cadence?”

  “Yeah, listen—I’ve got to hit a scene. I’m afraid I’m going to have to cancel.”

  A perplexed silence on his end; I was about to repeat myself, louder and slower, when he said, “But you already canceled our date.”

  “What?” When had that happened? I realized Shiro must have done it when she came forward at the earlier scene. Drat that girl! She had a lot of nerve, canceling my dates. I didn’t cancel hers! Not that she’d had a date since . . . uh . . . hmm. “I mean, uh, right. Right! But maybe we can reschedule.”

  “Uh-huh,” Jim replied, sounding puzzled and amused. “Sure. Call me whenever.”

  I disconnected the call and glared at my reflection in the taxi’s backseat window. “If you can hear this,” I muttered, “you stay out of my dating life, you hear me, sis? Just stay out.”

  There wasn’t an answer. Not that I’d been expecting one.

  I sighed. The taxi driver shifted into third and put the hammer down. Traffic was light, so we would get to the new scene in just a few minutes.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  We pulled up outside a steak house in South Minneapolis with the amusing name of the Strip Club.

  We saw the taxi off, flashed our IDs at a clearly amused uniform, and joined her in the doorway. “Is it?”

  “Looks like.”

  “Two in one day?”

  “Yup. Pretty nasty in there.” The uniform, Officer Baylor, a trim brunette with big dark eyes and the cheekbones of royalty, shook her head. “Luck.”

  “Thank you, Off—”

  George swore in the middle of my gratitude. “He’s clearly escalating, the jerkoff. I had tickets to Jim Gaffigan, damn it!”

  “Escalating?” Officer Baylor asked. That was too mild a word, kind of like describing the sun as “shiny.”

  I guess I better hold up a sec and explain. The more serial killers kill, the more they want to kill. It’s like getting high. The first couple times you smoke or snort or whatever, it’s more than enough. But eventually, you have to do more and more of your drug of choice to get back that first, intense high.

  Serial killers are no different. They can start out killing one or two victims a year . . . and then every six months . . . every month . . . every week. It proved to be the downfall of several of them, notably Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy. Escalation led to sloppy thinking and worse.

  Now here we were with two crime scenes in one day.

  Two crime scenes in the city where I lived and worked.

  This was the best time to catch serial killers. They weren’t as careful. They made mistakes. Too bad that the whole time they were being careless, the body count was racking up like pins in a bowling alley.

  One of the problems with escalation is that it doesn’t work. It’s not a quick cure; it’s not any kind of cure at all. It merely makes everything worse. So the killer—honestly puzzled by this—takes more lives. And is enraged and confused when that doesn’t work, either.

  It’s important, if difficult, to keep in mind that serial killers honestly feel cheated out of what’s theirs. That the cops have no business messing in their private lives. As Ann Rule put it in the awesomest true-crime book ever, “What Ted Bundy wanted, Ted should have.” So glad I didn’t have to work any of his crime scenes; may his soul be shrieking in hell for a million zillion years.

  They don’t stop trying, either. They really think that if they can kill just the right person, they can be normal. Be real. If it weren’t so aw-ful, I could feel sorry for them. But it is awful, and I don’t.

  “We caught a break, though,” Baylor was saying. “There’s a live victim.”

  “What?” Try as I might, I couldn’t keep my jaw from sagging. “Are you kidding?”

  “She’d better not be,” George offered. “I never kid when I’m forced to miss Jim Gaffigan. D’you know I bought these tickets over six months ago?”

  “The victim, George. Focus, please.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Baylor continued. “She locked herself in the pantry while our adorable li’l ThreeFer was going to work on victims one and two.”

  “Is she hurt?”

  “She says not, but she won’t come out.”

  “Does she know I have Jim Gaffigan tickets?”

  Officer Baylor merely stared at George, a not uncommon reaction.

  George prodded me. “Go on in, Cadence. Work your good-girl magic.” He managed to say this without gagging, luckily for him. “I’ll stay out here and—Nance!” Baylor and I jumped as George shrieked loudly enough to shatter windows. “I see you over there, Nance! Turn out your eight zillion pockets now!” Jerry backpedaled, alarmed, as George marched over to him.

  “You guys.” Officer Baylor was certainly getting an eyeful today. “You, uh, have your own way of doing things, huh?”

  I shrugged. “So, you want to show me?”

  “Sure.”

  So Shiro fights. And Adrienne hurts. Me? I am good at talking to people. I love to talk to people. Which has come in handy on more than one occasion.

  Like now! Oooh, I couldn’t wait to talk to the poor thing. Finally, finally, finally a break.

  I fell into step behind the officer, catching a few glimpses of body bags and the ME, Dr. Gottlieb. She was crouched over a zippered bag, stripping off her gloves and tossing a casual wave in my direction.

  Officer Baylor led me to the kitchen and showed me the (locked) pantry door.

  “It locks from the inside?”

  Officer Baylor nodded.

  “Why would somebody want to lock herself inside a pantry?”

  “You mean, besides avoiding the psycho hacking people up in the dining room?”

  “Well. Yes. Besides that. Never mind, Officer, I’ll take it from here. What’s her name?”

  Baylor shrugged, tugged off her hat, and ran her fingers through her short brunet hair. “She won’t say.”

  “Oh. Okay, thanks.” Yes, you’ve been loads of help, Officer; don’t know what I’d have done without you. I better not say it out loud, though. Being surrounded by death and blood and misery (not to mention Dr. Gottlieb’s perfume) was no excuse for being mean.

  I rapped on the pantry door while around me the hustle and bustle of crime-scene processing went on. “Ma’am? My name is Special Agent Jones; I’m with the FBI. Can I speak with you?”

  “Go away!”

  “I can’t, ma’am.” My partner wrecked our car and our cab left two minutes ago. Hmm. Prob’ly should keep that to myself. “Are you hurt?”

  “What if he comes back?”

  “Then my partner will shoot him in the face,” I promised. It wasn’t a lie, either. George considered a day without a civil rights violation the worst sort of lost opportunity.

  Silence. Then, “You come in. By yourself.”

  “Sure. D’you have any crackers in there? I skipped lunch.”

  Another pause, broken by the snick of the lock being disengaged.

  I stepped inside and prepared myself to meet the first live victim after more than a dozen attacks.

  Date? What date? Now I was glad Shiro had canceled for us. Maybe I’d leave her a thank-you note somewhere.

  Or not.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

 
; The pantry was cool and dry and well lit, with shelves of dry goods going back at least eight feet. The as-yet unnamed victim was crammed as far away from the door as she could get—understandably.

  I flashed what I hoped was a friendly and sympathetic (but professional—mustn’t forget that) smile. “Hi. I’m Cadence Jones. You’re having an awful day, aren’t you?”

  The victim, a dark-haired, brown-eyed woman of average weight and (I was pretty sure) height, made a sound halfway between a bark and a giggle. She looked like she was in her late forties, but my estimate could be off by as much as ten years, depending on what the stress of the day had done to her face. “You could say that.”

  “D’you mind if I sit?”

  She shook her head, further messing up her hair, which had probably been pinned back in a neat bun when she left her home that morning. Now it fell around her face in dark straggles.

  I sat cross-legged across from her. My gun dug into my hip and I grimaced and moved it over an inch.

  “D’you want to tell me . . .” Everything? What happened? What did he look like? Why did you survive? Did you know the other two victims? Tell me tell me tell me every single thing.

  Whoa. Calm down, Cadence. I tried to get a grip on myself. The last thing I needed was Shiro thinking I needed rescuing. She was a disaster at interpersonal relations, and would scare this poor woman worse than she already was.

  I took a deep, steadying breath and asked, “Can you tell me your name?”

  “Tracy. Tracy C-Carr.”

  “And how did you come to be here tonight, Ms. Carr?”

  “Dinner. I was supposed to meet a blind date.” She laughed, the sound not unlike breaking glass. “Everybody knows blind dates aren’t any fun, but I never dreamed—I never thought—”

  “Sure, sure. Prob’ly would have been a good night to watch reruns, or empty out your TiVo account.”