Darkness, Take My Hand

  Thousands of them. Gone. A country unto themselves. A half-dreamt litter of misplaced lives. So many of them, I assumed, were dead. Others, I’m sure, had been found, always worse off than when they’d disappeared. The rest of them were cast adrift and floating like a traveling carnival across our landscape, passing like blips through the hearts of our cities, sleeping on stone and grates and discarded mattresses, hollow-cheeked and sallow-skinned, eyes blank and hair filled with nits.

  “It’s the same as the bumper stickers,” Bolton said.

  “How so?” Oscar said.

  “He wants Kenzie to share his postmodern malaise. That the world is off its hinges and can’t be reattached, that a thousand voices shout inane opinions at one another and not one will change any of the others. That we are constantly at cross purposes and there’s no holistic, shared accumulation of knowledge. That children disappear every day and we say, ‘How tragic. Pass the salt.’” He looked at me. “Sound right?”

  “Maybe.”

  Angie shook her head. “No. Bullshit.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Bullshit,” she said. “Maybe that’s part of it, but it isn’t all of his message. Agent Bolton, you’ve accepted that we probably have two killers, not just one little Evandro Arujo on our hands. Correct?”

  He nodded.

  “This second one, he’s been waiting or, hell, incubating for two decades. That’s the prevailing theory, right?”

  “That’s it.”

  She nodded. She lit a cigarette and held it up. “I’ve tried to quit smoking several times. You know how much effort that takes?”

  “You know how much I would have appreciated it at this moment if you’d succeeded?” Bolton said, ducking from the cloud of smoke which filtered over the kitchen.

  “Too bad.” She shrugged. “My point is that we all have our addiction of choice. The one thing that gets us to our soul. That is us, in a way. What couldn’t you live without?”

  “Me?” he said.

  “You.”

  He smiled and looked away, slightly embarrassed. “Books.”

  “Books?” Oscar laughed.

  He turned on him. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, nothing. Go on, Agent Bolton. You the man.”

  “What kind of books?” Angie said.

  “The great ones,” Bolton said, a little sheepish. “Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Shakespeare, Flaubert.”

  “And if they were outlawed?” Angie said.

  “I’d break the law,” Bolton said.

  “You wild man,” Devin said. “I am appalled.”

  “Hey.” Bolton glared at him.

  “What about you, Oscar?”

  “Food,” Oscar said and patted his belly. “Not health food, but real tasty heart-attack food. Steaks, ribs, eggs, chicken-fried steak and gravy.”

  Devin said, “What a shock.”

  “Damn,” Oscar said. “Just went and made myself hungry.”

  “Devin?”

  “Cigarettes,” he said. “Booze probably.”

  “Patrick?”

  “Sex.”

  “You,” Oscar said, “are a whore, Kenzie.”

  “Fine,” Angie said. “These are the things that get us through, make life bearable. Cigarettes, books, food, cigarettes again, booze, and sex. That’s us.” She tapped the stack of flyers. “What about him? What can’t he go without?”

  “Killing,” I said.

  “That’d be my guess,” she said.

  “So,” Oscar said, “if he’s been forced to take a vacation for twenty years—”

  “No way he’d make it,” Devin said. “No fucking way.”

  “But he hasn’t been calling attention to his kills,” Bolton said.

  Angie lifted a stack of flyers. “Until now.”

  “He’s been killing kids,” I said.

  “For twenty years,” Angie said.

  Erdham came in at ten to report that a man wearing a cowboy hat and driving a stolen red Jeep Cherokee had blown a red light at an intersection on Wollaston Beach. Quincy Police had given chase and lost him on a steep curve of 3A in Weymouth, which he maneuvered and they didn’t.

  “Chasing a fucking Jeep on a curve?” Devin said in disbelief. “These Mario Andrettis slide out, but a somersault machine like a Cherokee holds the curve?”

  “That’s the size of it. Last seen heading south over the bridge by the old naval yard.”

  “What time was that?” Bolton said.

  Erdham checked his notes. “Nine thirty-five on Wollaston. Nine forty-four when they lost him.”

  “Anything else?” Bolton said.

  “Yeah,” Erdham said slowly, looking at me.

  “What?”

  “Mallon?”

  Fields stepped into the kitchen holding a stack of small tape recorders and at least fifty feet of coaxial cable.

  “What’s that?” Bolton said.

  “He bugged the entire apartment,” Fields said, refusing to look at me. “The recorders were fastened by electrical tape to the underside of the landlord’s porch. No tapes inside. The cables fed into a junction port up on the roof, mixed in with the cable TV and electrical and phone lines. He ran the cables down the side of the house with the rest of the wires and you’d never notice unless you were looking for it.”

  “You’re shitting me,” I said.

  Fields gave me an apologetic shake of his head. “’Fraid not. By the amount of dust and mildew I found on these cables, I’d say he’s been listening to everything going on inside your apartment for at least a week.” He shrugged. “Maybe more.”

  26

  “Why didn’t he take off the cowboy hat?” I said as we drove back to Angie’s.

  I’d left my apartment behind gratefully. Currently it was filled with technicians and cops stampeding around, ripping up the floorboards, covering it in a cloud of fingerprint dust. One bug was found in the living room baseboard, another attached to the underside of my bedroom dresser, a third sewed into the kitchen curtain.

  I was trying to distract myself from the deep incision made by my total lack of privacy, and that’s when I fixated on the cowboy hat.

  “What?” Devin said.

  “Why was he still wearing the cowboy hat when he blew the light in Wollaston?”

  “He forgot to take it off,” Oscar said.

  “If he was from Texas or Wyoming,” I said, “I’d say okay. But he’s Brockton boy. He’s going to be aware of a cowboy hat on his head while he drives. He knows there’re Feds after him. He’s got to know that once we found the eyes we’d figure he was impersonating Lyle.”

  “Yet he’s still wearing the hat,” Angie said.

  “He’s laughing at us,” Devin said after a moment. “He’s letting us know we’re not good enough to get him.”

  “What a guy,” Oscar said. “What a swell fucking guy.”

  Bolton had his agents stashed in the apartments on either side of Phil and in the Livoskis’ house across from Angie’s house and the McKays’ behind it. Both families had been paid well for the imposition and put up downtown at the Marriott, but even so, Angie called them both and apologized for the inconvenience.

  She hung up and took a shower while I sat in the dining room at her dusty table with the light off and the shades drawn. Oscar and Devin were in a car down the street and they’d left two walkie-talkies behind. They sat on the table in front of me, hard and square, and their twin silhouettes looked like transmitters to another galaxy in the soft dark.

  When Angie came out of the shower, she wore a gray Monsignor Ryan Memorial High School T-shirt and red flannel shorts that swam around her thighs. Her hair was wet and she looked tiny as she placed ashtray and cigarettes on the table and handed me a Coke.

  She lit a cigarette. Through the flame I had a momentary glimpse of how drawn and afraid her face was.

  “It’ll be okay,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “They’ll get him befo
re he ever comes near this place.”

  Another shrug. “Yeah.”

  “Ange, he won’t get to you.”

  “His batting average has been pretty good so far.”

  “We’re very good at protecting people, Ange. We can protect each other, I think.”

  She exhaled a missile of smoke over my head. “Tell that to Jason Warren.”

  I put my hand on hers. “We didn’t know what we were dealing with when we pulled out of the Warren case. We do now.”

  “Patrick, he got into your place pretty easily.”

  I wasn’t prepared to even think about that right now. The violation I’d been living with since Fields held up those tape recorders was total and ugly.

  I said, “My place didn’t have fifty agents—”

  Her hand turned under mine so that our palms met and she tightened her fingers around my wrist. “He’s beyond reason,” she said. “Evandro. He’s…nothing like we’ve ever dealt with. He’s not a person, he’s a force, and I think if he wants me bad enough, he’ll get to me.”

  She sucked hard on her cigarette; the coal flared and I could see red pockets under her eyes.

  “He won’t—”

  “Sssh,” she said and removed her hand from mine. She stubbed out the cigarette and cleared her throat. “I don’t want to sound like a wimp here or the pathetic little woman, but I need to hold someone now and I…”

  I came out of my chair and knelt between her legs and she wrapped her arms around me and pressed the side of her face against mine and dug her fingers into my back.

  Her voice was a warm whisper in my ear. “If he should kill me, Patrick—”

  “I won’t—”

  “If he should, you have to promise me something.”

  I waited, felt the terror rattling up through her chest and squirming out the pores of her skin.

  “Promise me,” she said, “that you’ll stay alive long enough to kill him. Slowly. For days, if you can manage it.”

  “What if he gets to me first?” I said.

  “He can’t kill us both. No one’s that good. If he gets to you before me”—she leaned back a bit so her eyes could meet mine—“I’ll paint this house with his blood. Every last inch of it.”

  She went to bed a few minutes later and I turned on a small light in the kitchen and read through the files Bolton had given me on Alec Hardiman, Charles Rugglestone, Cal Morrison, and the murders of 1974.

  Both Hardiman and Rugglestone looked numbingly normal. Alec Hardiman’s only distinguishing characteristic was that, like Evandro, he was extremely handsome, almost to a degree you’d consider feminine. But there are plenty of handsome men in the world, several of whom hold no sway over anyone.

  Rugglestone, with his widow’s peak and long face, looked more like a West Virginia coal miner than anything else. He didn’t look particularly friendly, but he didn’t look like a man who crucified children and disembowled winos.

  The faces told me nothing.

  People, my mother once claimed, cannot be fully understood, only reacted to.

  My mother was married to my father for twenty-five years so she probably did a lot of reacting in her time.

  Right now, I had to agree with her. I’d spent time with Hardiman, read how he’d turned from an angelic boy into a demon overnight, and nothing could tell me why.

  Less was known about Rugglestone. He’d served in Vietnam, been honorably discharged, came from a small farm in East Texas and hadn’t had any contact with his family in over six years by the time he was killed. His mother was quoted as calling him “a good boy.”

  I turned a page of the Rugglestone file, saw diagrams of the empty warehouse where Hardiman had inexplicably turned on him. The warehouse was gone now, a supermarket and dry cleaner’s in its place.

  The diagram showed me where Rugglestone’s body had been found, tied to a chair, stabbed, beaten, and burned. It showed where Hardiman had been found by Detective Gerry Glynn, who was responding to an anonymous call, curled naked into a fetal position in the old dispatch office, his body saturated with Rugglestone’s blood, the ice pick four feet away from him.

  How had Gerry felt, responding to an anonymous tip, walking in and finding Rugglestone’s body and then finding his partner’s son curled up with the murder weapon?

  And who had called in the anonymous tip?

  I flipped another page, saw a yellowed photo of a white van registered to Rugglestone. It looked old and uncared for and it was missing the windshield. The interior of the van, according to the report, had been hosed down within the last twenty-four hours prior to Rugglestone’s death, the panels wiped clean, yet the windshield had been demolished only recently. Glass filled the driver and passenger seats, glistened in rocks on the floor. Two cinderblocks rested in the center of the van floor.

  Somebody, probably kids, had tossed the cinderblocks through the windshield while the van was parked outside the warehouse. Committing vandalism while Hardiman committed murder only a few feet away.

  Maybe the vandals had heard noise from inside, recognized it as something insidious and called in the anonymous tip.

  I looked at the van for another minute, and I felt something akin to dread.

  I’ve never liked vans. For some reason which I’m sure Dodge and Ford would love to eradicate, I associate them with sickness—with drivers who molest children, with rapists idling in supermarket parking lots, with childhood rumors of killer clowns, with evil.

  I turned the page, came upon Rugglestone’s toxicology report. He’d had large quantities of both PCP and methy-lamphetamine in his system, enough to keep him awake for a week. He’d counterbalanced these with a blood alcohol level of .12, but even that much booze, I was sure, couldn’t override the effects of so much artificial adrenaline. His blood would have been electrified.

  How did Hardiman, twenty-five pounds lighter, manage to tie him down?

  I flipped another page, found the postmortem report of Rugglestone’s injuries. Even though I’d heard both Gerry Glynn and Bolton’s accounts, the magnitude of damage done to Rugglestone’s body was almost impossible to comprehend.

  Sixty-seven blows from a hammer found under a chair in the dispatch office with Alec Hardiman. Blows came from a height of seven feet and from as close as six inches. They came from the front, the back, the left, and the right.

  I opened the Hardiman file, placed the two side by side. At his trial, Hardiman’s defense lawyer had argued that his client had suffered nerve damage to his left hand as a child, that he wasn’t ambidexterous, that he couldn’t have swung a hammer with such force using his left hand.

  The prosecution pointed out the evidence of PCP in Hardiman’s system, and judge and jury agreed that the drug could give an already deranged man the strength of ten.

  No one believed the defense attorney’s argument that the PCP in Hardiman’s system was negligible compared to the amount found in Rugglestone’s and that Hardiman hadn’t added to it with speed, but cut into it with a combination of morphine and seconol. Add the alcohol to the mix, and Hardiman was lucky he could stand that afternoon, never mind perform physical feats of such staggering magnitude.

  He’d burned Rugglestone in sections over the course of four hours. He started with the feet, and just before the fire had worked its way up to the lower calves, he doused it, went back to work with the hammer or the ice pick or a straight razor, which was used to lacerate Rugglestone’s flesh over one hundred and ten times, also from right and left angles. Then he burned the lower calves and knees, doused the flames again, and so on.

  Examination of Rugglestone’s wounds had revealed the presence of lemon juice, hydrogen peroxide, and table salt. Facial and head lacerations had shown evidence of two facial compounds—Ponds cold cream and white Pan-Cake makeup.

  He’d been wearing makeup?

  I checked the Hardiman file. At the time of his arrest, Hardiman, too, had been found with traces of white Pan-Cake compound in the roots of the hair c
losest to his face, as if he’d wiped it off but hadn’t had time to wash his hair.

  I rifled through Cal Morrison’s file. Morrison had left his house at three on an overcast afternoon to head for a sandlot football game at Columbia Park. His house was less than a mile away, and while police had checked every possible route he could’ve taken, they’d found no witnesses who’d seen Cal past the point when he waved to a neighbor on Sumner Street.

  Seven hours later, he’d been crucified.

  Forensics teams had found evidence that Cal had spent several hours lying on his back on a rug. A cheap rug, the kind cut in sections unprofessionally, so that tufts of it stayed in his hair. The rug had also contained sediments of oil and brake fluid.

  Under the nails of his left hand, they found type A blood and the chemicals used to form white Pan-Cake makeup.

  Detectives had momentarily entertained the idea that they could be looking for a female killer.

  Hair fibers and plaster casts of footprints quickly discounted the theory.

  Makeup. Why were Rugglestone and Hardiman wearing makeup?

  27

  Around eleven, I called Devin on the walkie-talkie and told him about the makeup.

  “Bothered me too at the time,” he said.

  “And?”

  “And it ended up being just one of those incidental things. Hardiman and Rugglestone were lovers, Patrick.”

  “They were homosexual, Devin—that doesn’t mean they were cross-dressers or fems. There’s nothing in any of these files about them ever being seen wearing makeup.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Patrick. It never added up to shit. Hardiman and Rugglestone killed Morrison and then Hardiman killed Rugglestone, and if they were wearing pineapples on their heads and dressed in purple tu-tus at the time, it wouldn’t change those facts.”