Nest

  “Gladly,” Kate said, and meant it. She wanted John’s killer found and punished.

  She wanted him dead.

  AJ turned back from the doorway. “Look, Kate, I want you to know that I’ll keep digging, but I don’t think this is going to turn out to be an ordinary case. There are too many strange things about it.”

  “Like John chaining a killer up in his basement?”

  “That would be at the top of my list, especially since I knew John and I would never have thought him capable of doing such a thing. Knowing John, he had to have had a powerful reason.”

  Kate frowned, staring down at the floor as she ran the conversation back through her mind. She looked up. “I just thought of something. When John was on the phone with me when I got back in town, before he told me to run, he told me that he’d gone to put flowers on our parents’ grave.”

  “What of it?”

  “He said that someone was watching him.”

  AJ’s brows drew together over her dark eyes. “Really.”

  “I told him that it was probably just someone putting flowers on another grave—and it probably was. John was pretty fearful when he was out by himself, so he might have imagined it.”

  “I don’t really believe in coincidence,” AJ said.

  “I have to tell you, I never have, either. That’s why I’m mentioning it.”

  “I wish I understood what the hell was going on and what it all means.”

  “You think you’re confused?” Kate asked. “I’m upside down and inside out.”

  AJ smiled reassurance. “I’ll be there to help you figure it out. You won’t be alone in this, I promise.”

  “Thanks. That means a lot to me, it really does.”

  AJ handed Kate a card. “I put my number in your phone, but keep this handy as well, just in case. It’s my personal card. It has my cell and my home phone number, so you should be able to get me anytime, day or night.”

  The card had a City of Chicago badge printed beside her last name. “Just like the one you gave John?”

  She nodded with a deadly serious demeanor. “Listen, Kate, don’t be afraid to call me. Anytime. I mean it. I don’t live that far from here.” She leaned in and pointed. “See? There’s my address. I can be here in no time. Lights flashing, guns blazing.”

  Kate smiled as she used her first finger to mimic the detective’s earlier imitation of a gun. “Guns blazing.”

  “I mean it, Kate.”

  “I know.” Kate knew that AJ wished John had listened and that he had called her. She very well might have been able to help him. AJ didn’t want Kate to make the same mistake of not calling for help.

  “Will you call me if you hear any more from Jack Raines?”

  “Absolutely.”

  AJ paused in the doorway, as if trying to decide something. She tapped the palm of her hand against the doorjamb, considering. She finally turned from staring off into the darkness to look back at Kate.

  “Angel.”

  Kate’s nose wrinkled. “What?”

  “My first name. It’s Angel. Angel Janek. You asked me before what the ‘A’ in ‘AJ’ stood for. It stands for Angel.”

  Kate folded her arms and shrugged. “That’s a great name. A wonderful name. Why wouldn’t you want to tell people?”

  AJ made a sour expression. “I’m a female homicide detective. I have to be tough if I want to be respected. Angel just sounds … I don’t know, froufrou. I’ve always been afraid that if people knew my name was Angel they wouldn’t take me seriously.”

  Kate studied the other woman’s eyes for a moment. “I think the perception of a person’s name is shaped by their character. Genghis Khan sounds like he could be a monk in a monastery if you didn’t know anything about him. The name only sounds intimidating because the man was.

  “As strong as you are, I don’t think people would take your name lightly. You said yourself that day by day there is more sympathy for the devil. I bet that the people on our side of civilization would think of you as an avenging Angel.”

  “Avenging Angel.” AJ smiled. “I like that. I should have met you sooner. But I think I’m stuck with AJ, now.”

  As she walked to her police cruiser, she turned, walking backward for a moment, pointing her finger gun at Kate like she had in the police car.

  “You’re everything John said you were, Kate Bishop.”

  As she watched the woman climb into her police cruiser, Kate smiled at the thought of the way she was always an invincible hero in her brother’s eyes, but then the smile faded.

  Kate leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb and folded her arms as she watched the taillights of the unmarked police car vanish down the empty street.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  Bare branches clattered together as they swayed to and fro in fitful gusts of wind. The night felt hostile. Somewhere out there in the darkness was a man who had murdered her brother. Watching the taillights of the police car vanish into the darkness, Kate felt an unaccustomed, crushing weight of loneliness.

  Something else she had never really thought about before also occurred to her. Besides the man who had killed her brother, there were other killers out there as well. There always had been murderers and always would be. Some of them got caught. Some didn’t.

  At that very moment some of those killers were on the hunt. Some would find their prey. This night, every night, someone would die at the hands of one of these human monsters. This night, every night, there were people going about their lives who didn’t know that they were about to meet a violent end.

  Kate closed the door and locked it.

  On her way to the kitchen she saw the flashing light on the message machine. Exhausted, she ignored the message light and instead went into the kitchen, unplugged the coffeemaker, rinsed the pot, and put the cups and spoons in the dishwasher.

  When she flicked off the lights, she paused to look out the window into the backyard. With the lights in the kitchen off she could finally see into the darkness outside. The private backyard was dark, silent, empty.

  Her laptop was still on the counter, where she had left it plugged in to charge when she stopped off at home before going to the hospital to see Wilma. Despite how tired she was, she gave in to a nagging thought. She put her phone in the pocket of her jeans, unplugged the laptop, and took it to the table.

  Kate sat in the dark kitchen for a time, staring at the bright screen, feeling an odd sense of anxiety about what answers it might hold. She knew she should go to bed. It was already late. She had gotten up at four that morning to catch the earlier flight. She was beyond tired—both emotionally and physically—and already well into her second wind.

  The thought of genetic mutations and the evolution between hunter and prey and all the rest of it was starting to feel distant to her. Kate had trouble fitting it into her sense of life, her sense of reality. She had always thought of the world in terms of lots of good people and some bad people. Simple as that. What had seemed compelling as AJ had described it was beginning to lose its hold on her.

  Most of the people at KDEX Systems were good people. Her job was to find those few who weren’t and get them out of the company. Some of those were really bad people. But there were much worse people in the world, people she had never encountered before. People like Edward Lester Herzog.

  John had encountered one of that kind.

  She needed to call the funeral home, but it would have to wait until morning. There were a number of other demands swirling through her mind. She needed to get back to work and give her boss a report about Dallas. The office, she knew, would be a bit frantic that she address other pending cases. Dallas had diverted a great deal of her time—more time than usual—but it had proven necessary.

  Despite her apprehension, she finally opened a page for Amazon and typed in “A Brief History of Evil.”

  She clicked on the link to the book by Jack Raines. The cover was a decidedly dark illustration of a wet, narr
ow cobblestone alley between the irregular shapes of old buildings constructed of beams and stucco. She thought it looked like a scene out of the Dark Ages in Europe. In gloomy corners here and there she could see what looked like bundles. It could have been accumulated debris, or even the artist simply being vague with the treatment of shadows.

  Or they could have been bodies.

  It certainly didn’t look like the kind of place one would want to walk alone at night.

  It looked like the kind of place where one would not be at all surprised to find bodies.

  A Brief History of Evil had a two-star rating out of five. Kate was surprised that people didn’t think much of it.

  There was a list of one-star reviews in a line down the right side, punctuated by a single two-star review. Kate had to scroll a long way down to find any of the better ratings.

  The top “Most Helpful Review” from a confirmed purchaser had given the book one star. The review had been voted most helpful by seventy-eight people. Kate scanned down the length of the long review to get a general sense of what it had to say. The reader was indignant that the book had even been published. Apparently seventy-eight others agreed with him.

  While seventy-eight wasn’t anywhere near a significant number for books that sold in the tens of thousands, the review was pretty damning, because the reviewer said that he had worked in law enforcement his whole professional life, specializing in criminal profiling, and he hated to see this kind of sham profiling by amateurs who didn’t know what they were talking about. He said that the book was mostly pop psychology and wordy filler and Raines was a phony giving the real professionals a bad name.

  Kate’s heart sank a little. She had thought that maybe this book by Jack Raines would have some answers and be able to help her understand what John had been able to do—as well as her own reactions to the photos AJ showed her.

  Another reviewer felt she had been duped into buying what she expected to be a book about the history of serial killers, but it was more like the stuff an amateur would self-publish and any good reviews were probably written by the guy’s mother.

  The next review said that the book was written at a fourth-grade reading level and repeated itself ad nauseam. Another reviewer agreed, saying that the awkward writing was an embarrassment to the English language and Raines really needed to go back to school and learn the basics. Many recommended other books.

  Kate’s awareness from analyzing a lot of data at her job told her that such a tiny number of reviews compared to how many people had read the book were meaningless. Still, almost all of the people who reviewed it gave it one or two stars.

  While Kate knew that the relatively small number of people who had written bad reviews were unreliable guidance, what was troubling was that a lot of reviews were by police officers who said that the author didn’t know what he was talking about. They pointed out that Jack Raines didn’t understand police procedure or know how investigations were actually conducted. Few as there were, they left a wedge of doubt in her mind.

  Kate was a little surprised by how vicious the reviews were, since it wasn’t a book promoting a political view. It was supposedly a book about the horrors of the murderers among us. She reminded herself that the people who haunted the internet loved to hate. There were, after all, lots of people who gave a thumbs-down to videos of kittens.

  Something bothered her, though, something that seemed a little off about the reviews. Kate couldn’t quite put her finger on it. It felt to her like what she was seeing might be an inkling of a contrived agenda that the retailer’s algorithms—designed to detect false promotion, not malice—would overlook.

  She wondered if she thought that only because she was so tired. Or because in her job she was so used to looking for ulterior motives that she always tended to suspect everything and everyone. Or maybe it was because AJ had made so much of Jack Raines, and the reviews didn’t seem to match what the detective said.

  While most of the reviews agreed in their blistering criticism, buried down near the bottom there were a few good reviews that were passionate in their defense of the book, but those were lost beneath all of the negative reviews.

  Kate’s heart sank a little. She wondered why AJ had thought so much of the book that she would call Jack Raines.

  Kate had been planning on ordering the book that night. Disappointed, she instead closed the cover of her laptop.

  When AJ had talked about the book and Jack Raines, it had given Kate the spark of some indefinable hope, but now, like her brother’s life, that spark had been extinguished. She felt hollow.

  As she headed down the hallway to her bedroom, turning off lights along the way, she felt like something potentially valuable, something that would help her understand what John could do, what she could do, had just been lost to her. In the dark hallway, she felt silly for having harbored hope of some kind of larger explanation to it all, some understanding of the connections. AJ had said that it was the connections of everything that had intrigued her.

  Kate knew, though, that not everything in life could be explained or connected. She guessed that what had happened to John and her with those photos was one of those mysteries that would simply never be explained.

  People often believed things because they wanted them to be true. AJ must have wanted what Jack Raines told her to be true.

  Kate began to wonder if she had been fooling herself about the photos, fooling herself into thinking that she had some kind of latent ability. Perhaps it had been dumb luck or a simple hunch. After all, she was pretty good at hunches in her work, pretty good at picking out the guilty party. But having hunches was different from being able to tell that someone was a killer.

  As frightening as it had been to look at the photos of killers, there had also been something oddly electrifying and exciting about it—like as a child finally finding someone when playing hide-and-seek. A discovery. It was a sense of a small triumph, or an insight.

  At least it had been. Now that sense was fading.

  As she kicked off her shoes and unbuttoned her blouse, she dismissed A Brief History of Evil as a dead end. Somehow, it was depressing to do so. She felt as if she had just lost a bit of hope for finding out what had really happened to John, a bit of hope for shining a light into a dark corner of her own mind.

  Looking into the bathroom mirror as she washed off her makeup, she wished she could talk to John about it all. He wouldn’t have been able to help her understand any of it, of course, but he would have listened patiently, smiling at her the whole time.

  When she curled into the fetal position on her side and pulled up the covers, she finally began to cry.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  Kate slung her purse up onto the table before walking through the metal detector.

  “Good morning, Miss Bishop,” came a familiar, husky voice from behind the security podium on the far side of the check-in station.

  Kate smiled briefly at the bear of a security guard dressed in a dark blue shirt and black tie. “How have you been, Carlos?”

  “My wife still cooks me dinner, so I guess I can’t complain.”

  A small group of well-dressed people waited as the two security women, in the same security uniforms, inspected purses, bags, and briefcases. After Theresa, one of the two, had performed a cursory inspection of the contents of her purse and handed it back, Kate thanked her and then hooked the strap over her shoulder.

  Carlos lifted a page on his clipboard. “My printout says you aren’t scheduled back until tomorrow.”

  “Caught the culprit, caught an earlier plane,” she said in simple explanation.

  “Ah,” he said with a knowing nod. “Good for you.”

  Carlos called her name as she started for the elevator. She turned back to see what he wanted.

  He stepped away from his station to come over to her. “Listen, Miss Bishop. I think you should know that one morning, a couple days back, this young man came in wanting to know wher
e your office was. He said he had an appointment with you.”

  Kate frowned. “An appointment with me? For what?”

  “He said he was here to apply for a job.”

  Kate’s frown deepened. “Not only do I not have any appointments with anyone, I don’t handle that kind of thing.”

  “I know. He told me that a friend of his, a Mr. Baker, had told him that he was to go see you about a job. He said that this Mr. Baker was supposed to have set it up.”

  “I don’t know a Mr. Baker.”

  Carlos didn’t look at all surprised. “I was pretty sure you didn’t. People sometimes try talking their way past us. They think that if they can see someone in person they have a better chance of making a pitch to get a job.

  “I didn’t like this guy’s attitude. He was acting like I was a petty annoyance preventing him from getting in to see you. Rather than tell him that he wasn’t on my list of scheduled visitors, or that you didn’t do any of the hiring, I told him you weren’t in. He asked when you would be back. I didn’t want him getting in your hair, so I told him that you had gone to Atlanta to open a new office and you would be gone for the rest of the year.”

  Kate smiled. They didn’t have an office in Atlanta. “What was his name?”

  “He said his name was Bob.”

  “Bob.”

  “Yeah, but he didn’t look like a Bob to me.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  Carlos shook his head. “No. When I asked his last name he flipped me off and left.”

  “What did he look like?”

  Carlos scratched his jaw as he thought. “Curly bleached-blond hair cut close to his scalp. Brown eyes. About your height—five-nine, five-ten or so. He was wearing baggy blue shorts and a D.A.R.E. T-shirt. Black with red lettering. Hardly what one would wear to a job interview at KDEX.”

  Kate nodded as she tried to think of who the guy could be or if she had ever heard of anyone by the last name of Baker. Neither sounded familiar.

  “All right, thanks, Carlos. If you see him again let me know.”