“All that matters is that he believes it.”
“Or that they do,” I said. “He keeps saying we.”
Booger studied me for a long moment, like maybe it was the first time he had ever looked at me. He said, “On your scale, do I rate somewhere?”
“You’re on the scale, Booger.”
“Where?”
“You’re on it. That’s as good as I can say. I’ve kind of got other things on my mind right now.”
Booger took a swallow of his beer. “All right,” he said, still not looking right at me. “That’ll do. That Caroline girl, she’s not dead.”
“What?”
“The picture they sent of the three dead girls. The Caroline girl. Way I figure it, she’s not dead. At least that’s not her in the picture.”
Booger got the photo, put it on the table. “I thought this looked wrong before, but we got caught up in other business. I been thinking on it again. It’s Photoshopped, my friend. What you got here is the girl in the middle, twice. Ronnie it says. The one called Caroline, that’s Ronnie again, but with a blond wig on. It’s shot in the same place, and they’ve covered her up some so she’ll look different, and it’s a reverse image, but it’s her. You see that little mole on Ronnie’s cheek? I got a good look at it earlier. When we were in the church with her body. The mole is prominent, even with her skin rotting. The mole is on the other side of her cheek now, in the picture, and the blond wig makes her look a little different, but look at those empty eye sockets, the eyes are near closed up just the same as the girl in the middle, and there’s a little wrinkle in the eyelid that’s on both the body with the Caroline label and the one with the Ronnie label.”
I grabbed the photograph and studied it.
“I look at a lot of photographs of dead bodies,” Booger said, “so I’m observant about that kind of thing. I got all these books with that stuff in them. It calms me.”
“Dead bodies?”
“Reminds me I’m not one of them. And another thing, there’s a pattern.”
“What pattern?” I said.
“Two girls were killed the same way, and that’s a pattern, and it means it may have been done before. So there could be an even bigger pattern. There could be some kind of records somewhere of this kind of shit. It might show a connection to the killer, or killers.”
“That’s smart, Booger. It really is.”
“It is, isn’t it? Another thing, there were those flyers about the preacher, Judence. He’s talking at ten in the morning on the campus. Why would they put the flyers in there? Call me a high yellow?”
“Because it means something to them,” I said.
“They are telling you all the facts without stating them. They want to do it all like an onion skin, peeling a layer at a time. It’s a game within a game, and there may be a game within that. Tabitha and…what was his name?”
“Ernie,” I said.
“They got in the middle of a plan, and so they became part of the plan and didn’t know it. Caroline has to be alive and in on all of this, otherwise none of it fits. Those two dumb kids messed up the Geek and Caroline’s plans for the DVDs, and they got snapped.”
“The blackmail scheme?”
“It’s too complicated to be just about money,” Booger said, scratching at his ass.
“Everything is about money or sex,” I said.
“Even money and sex are part of something else, my man. Power. I know their kind better than you. I am their kind.”
“I hope not.”
Booger grinned at me. “Thing you got going is I like you. Them I don’t like. And the fucker called me a high yellow because he wanted to insult me, so I don’t like him.”
I looked at Booger. His eyes were as cold-looking as the ice machine in my refrigerator.
“Wasn’t for me,” I said, “would you try to stop something like this, whatever it is?”
“I don’t know, bro. Maybe just to be in the game myself. Actually, I kind of admire this whole wonderful mess they’ve created. Thing you got going is I’ll help because this girl means something to you.”
“I appreciate that, Booger. As for Caroline, I’ve suspected she was alive for a while. Just never could wrap my head around the idea completely. Not until you pointed out that’s not her in that photograph.”
“That’s the difference in me and you,” Booger said, and he got up and went to the refrigerator and pulled a beer out, still talking. “I listen to what I’m really thinking, not what I should be thinking. Want a beer?”
“No thanks.”
Booger came back, screwing the cap off the beer as he sat. “Way I see it, they want to cause trouble with this Judence guy. One thing I got from your notes was that Caroline was involved with a preacher who had some, shall we say, negative views about the brothers. I don’t think these folks really give a shit one way or another about race. There’s a thrill in manipulation. Women do it all the time. They know how to use that good thing. Using it, they can get a man to do almost anything they want, including murder. There are some guys, the ones got the bullshit talk, the promises, that’s their form of pussy, and they can talk so smooth everyone wants a piece of their ideas and their glory, even if they make less sense than a motorcycle jacket on a poodle. And religion, man, it’s got heaven. There’s people want to believe that so bad they can already taste the air there. Politicians, they promise a chicken in every pot, and they promise the poor a pot to put it in.”
“You’re losing me.”
“I’m saying they like to see everyone else look silly so they look smart. And they like to kill because it is soothing and powerful and controlling.” Booger took a swig of his beer. “I’m a goddamn sociopath, so I should know.”
Beat the Clock
38
I let that settle in for a while. I sat back in my chair and thought. Booger drank his beer and let me think. I feared they would call at any moment, giving me instructions, and I feared they wouldn’t. I thought about Belinda. I thought about the bodies, the leather maidens. I thought about all the notes and the flyers and I thought about Booger, who was like them, sitting in my rented duplex, drinking beer on my couch, thinking more clearly about my notes than I had.
I looked at my watch. It had grown very late.
I told Booger I was going to the paper, taking my phone with me in case of calls. I asked him and Mr. Lucky to hold down the fort. He said, “Now, if someone I don’t know comes through that door, I may just terminate them. You understand that?”
“Don’t let anyone hurt you,” I said, “but don’t kill anyone just for the hell of it. I want to find Belinda.”
“I’ll blow their kneecap off and stand on their leg until they tell me where she is.”
“That I can live with,” I said.
“Sure you don’t want me to go with you?”
“Not this time. I need you here in case they decide to contact by arriving in person.”
“You’re just saying that because you know it makes me excited to think I might get to shoot someone.”
“I am a tease.”
I drove over to the paper and used my key to go inside. I went to the little basement where Mercury worked. The light was on and Mercury was there.
He said, “My God, Cason, it’s past midnight, what are you doing here?”
“You said you worked late, so I took a chance.”
“It’s not all that chancy,” he said. “I’m here a lot. Still putting old files into computers. I’m thinking, I get it finished I’ll be able to sleep again. I was just about to leave and wash the paper dust out of my throat with about a gallon of malt liquor, then I got to download some pornography for my home computer. It damn sure won’t get done if I leave it to the dog. Want to join me in a drink?”
“A nice offer, my friend, but I’m going to pass. I’m riding the wagon a little. Before you go, can you do a kind of cross-check for me? I’m doing some research on a series of murders, and I need an expert.”
/>
“You’re flattering me.”
“I’m trying.”
“Would this still be about the Caroline Allison disappearance?”
“In a way,” I said. “I want to do some across-the-board comparisons in different towns, for a variety of things, and I need someone who has the skill and the programs to do it.”
Mercury grinned at me. “You have come to the warehouse, my friend. It’ll be a nice break from what I’m doing.”
I smiled, like it was all just work-related. I told him I wanted to check on murders where women were skinned, careful not to let him know I had seen just such a thing in our town this very night.
I could tell he was curious about what that might have to do with Caroline, but he didn’t ask. He surfed from one place to another on the Internet, cackled to himself a few times, stretched several times, cracking his back and neck when he did, and then he began to print out bits and pieces here and there from the computer.
“Wow,” he said. “I don’t know where you came up with this business, but there have been a number of these skinning things. All women. They run all the way from Wisconsin to Texas.”
“Can you check for any kind of similarity in those towns where the skinnings took place? Anything that appears in one town that appears in the others.”
“That could be all kinds of things,” Mercury said.
“I know. But give it a shot. Start with fairs and carnivals. I’ve got a hunch.”
Mercury typed a bit, paused, said, “Fairs and carnivals and circuses and horse shows and local festivals. The festivals are connections only in that all these towns have some festival or another. Blueberry Festival, Crawfish Festival, Multicultural Fest. Every town has that kind of thing, so no real deal on that.”
I thought for a moment. I thought about Stitch, and how he looked, and it was a long shot, probably a dud, typecasting from Ernie and Tabitha, but I said, “Put the festivals aside for a moment,” I said. “Look at the carnivals.”
“Again, all these towns will have carnivals. They pass through on a regular basis. That’s how they make a living.”
“Try to find a particular carnival in the towns where the murders took place, one where the dates of the murders and skinnings and the passing of the carnival are similar.”
He did, and after a moment, he said: “You got certain carnivals and circuses that have been through all these towns, and you got a carnival that not only was in all these towns, but at the same times you asked about. It was going from Wisconsin to Texas, from Texas to Wisconsin. Fact is, the carnival was here in Camp Rapture, but there’s no connection. No woman skinned.”
I didn’t correct him.
“That carnival was here?”
“Several months ago.”
“Was it here when Caroline went missing?”
“No. It came before she went missing.”
“What about the last murder and the last carnival?” I asked.
“The last murder was in Kansas, a skinning. That was two years ago. You want more specifics on that?”
“Not just yet. I don’t guess there’s any way to look at who worked in these carnivals?”
“Not that I know of. You might find the owners, but a lot of these carnival people are seasonal, or they know when to meet up, and they are paid cash under the table. So there’s no list. I know, because my aunt worked in a carnival as a bearded lady. ’Course, her beard was glued on and she had also been Miss Carthage, Texas, when she was younger. She did the bearded lady thing for two, three years. She had a crush on the guy who worked the whirligig. They got married and he became an accountant and she sells Mary Kay products. Without the glued-on beard.”
I tried to smile in a way that didn’t let on that at this moment in time I didn’t give a shit about the romance of false bearded ladies and whirligig operators.
“What I want to know then is if there is something else these towns have in common?”
Mercury pursed his lips and twisted them around and cocked his head toward the ceiling. I didn’t mean to, but I looked up as well. The tile up there was black and white and in squares. I had a sudden urge to count them.
“All right,” Mercury said, “let me try something else.”
I sat down in a chair and tilted my head back on the headrest and started counting tiles. After a while, I shifted the chair and counted some more. I paused and took out my phone and looked at it to make sure the ringer was on and the battery had power. Yes and yes.
I went back to counting the checkerboard tiles. It soothed me and kept me from pushing Mercury, bad as I wanted to. It kept me from thinking about Belinda in the hands of those cold-blooded killers and that I had left a self-confessed sociopath killer waiting in my living room with a .45 named Mr. Lucky.
“Here’s something interesting,” Mercury said. “Well, there’s a lot interesting. But let me start with the small stuff and move upstairs. Every one of these places had a series of slightly odd events during the times of the skinned women. It didn’t all happen on the days the carnival was there, but a little before or after, and sometimes during. One of the women was found out in a field, made up like a scarecrow, on a post, wearing a hat, dressed in a black coat. Or rather what was left of her was on a post; she was skinned and stretched over a frame, then someone had put the coat and hat on her. All the others were skinned too, and found in different ways, different positions, and there were notes found at all the sites, inside the women’s skulls, but at the same time all this was going on, lesser weird things were happening: cows were found dead in front of schools in a town in Wisconsin. Silly things like yard gnomes were stolen and later were found in prominent buildings: schools, courthouses, that sort of thing. In another town, in Oklahoma, during the night, someone took the back doors off an entire row of houses. That took some goobers, something like that. You know what you’re doing, you can take a door off, but that requires some time and attention and maybe some noise. Man, you got something going here, but I got a feeling it’s more than you’ve told me. You want to tell me?”
“Games,” I said. “Someone is playing games, and it always ends badly. Whoever is doing it arrives with the carnival, then the games begin, and gradually become less gamelike.”
“The skinnings?”
“That’s right. Then they move on to the next carnival site. You notice it’s not every town, and it’s not every time the carnival arrives, so this is someone who works there part-time. Someone of a transient nature. Someone who knows how to hide out in large towns without giving himself away. A night person. A work-as-needed kind of guy, or guys. Someone experienced at this kind of work, who can pick up a carnival job as needed.”
“And when he’s with the carnival he plays his games,” Mercury said.
“And sometimes when he’s not. But the carnival is the original connection. Maybe he has money now, from somewhere, and this time is his own.”
“There’s something else,” Mercury said. “There’s this pattern of the games, the pranks, gnomes, dead cows, and then the murders, and finally there’s one other connection in all these towns. You holding on to your ass?”
I assured Mercury that I was.
“Here’s the biggie. And these events were in the news. I remember some of them, but they took place over a period of time, so there was nothing to link them. There were assassinations.”
“There were what?”
“Assassinations. There’s not a better name for it. In Wisconsin, at a rally for gay rights, the speaker was shot from a distance. A professional hit. It made all kinds of stink.”
“Hell, I remember that,” I said. “I was living in Houston then.”
“And in Arkansas a team mascot wearing one of those outfits was killed.”
“What kind of outfit?”
Mercury scrolled around on the screen. “Team called the Indians. A high school team. A kid got shot, seventeen years old. And get this, they figure someone positioned themselves under the stands, wit
h a silencer, and shot the kid, right through the big Indian head he was wearing, and killed him. Here’s an added corker: the kid was a real American Indian. At a Texas university, an animal mascot, a longhorn steer, was stolen, killed and found cooking on a barbecue grill in front of the post office. The first assassination, though, was of an armored car guard. This was Illinois. Guard would sit in the car and open the door and let the smoke out while his partner went inside, I guess to get more money. He wasn’t supposed to do that, open the door that way. Someone shot him with a .22 rifle, probably silenced. The money was taken before the other guard even knew about it, over three million dollars, and no one has got a clue to this day who took it. They just took the armored car and drove it off, and it seems that an accomplice followed in another vehicle. They dropped the car off in a church parking lot minus the money and a bunch of cashier’s checks. All that was left were some wrapped coins. Later that day, the car and the guard’s body were found. Few days later, the checks that were in the rip-off were mailed back with a thank-you note for all the money. It said: ‘The money was nice, but we can’t cash the checks easily enough, so we are returning those to show our appreciation.’”
“More games,” I said.
“You have a pattern,” Mercury said. “A real pattern. A real goddamn mystery. Murders. Skinning. Assassinations. And someone with stolen money.”
I thought: Who was the little girl who loved mysteries, puzzles and games, and the darkness of Edgar Allan Poe, the bleakness of Jerzy Fitzgerald?
Answer: Caroline.
She couldn’t have been in on all the assassination business, any of that stuff. It happened over too many years. She would have been a kid, and I had some idea where she was during that time.
But Stitch, he fit. He was the one behind it all. He had other accomplices then. But now he had added Caroline to his team. Why and how I didn’t know, but I was sure of it. As sure as I was that if I ever caught up with Stitch or Caroline and they had harmed Belinda, they would never live to see another day.