Hush (28 page)

"How far would you go for a story?" she
asked.

"I'm not sure. It would depend on the
situation."

"You gotta have guts," she said. "Did I ever
tell you about the time I posed as a hooker to get a story?"

Looking at her now, he couldn't imagine. He
would have shuddered, but he was too polite to do so.

That evening, Alex called his mother. "Did
you get the copy of my article?" he asked, even though he knew she
had to have gotten it since he'd sent it by overnight courier.

"I'm so proud of you!" his mother said.
Sometimes she would spout a mouthful of shit just to build his
confidence, but he and his mother were close and he knew her
enthusiasm for his article was genuine. He told her about the new
piece they'd be running.

"It isn't dangerous, is it?"

She would never quit worrying about him. He
smiled at her small-town naivete. "No, not dangerous at all."

Psychiatrists had labeled him
obsessive-compulsive, but he just liked things done in a certain
way, a certain order. Nothing wrong with that. If a particular
order wasn't followed, he couldn't concentrate on anything else
because there was always a chaos shouting and shouting and shouting
at him, making a clutter in his head. The only way he could make
the clutter go away was to go over everything again, doing it
right. And then he had to do it more than once. Like when you wrote
the wrong letter, and then you had to print over it to correct it.
You had to print over it again and again and again, so the right
letter became dominant.

At 8:05 every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday,
he caught the 427 bus at the corner of Winslow and Hughes to head
to his part-time job at the computer- software company Astral
Plain. Just before boarding, at precisely eight o'clock, he bought
a copy of the Chicago Herald and Chicago Sun Times. He didn't read
them until he got on the bus. He couldn't even peek at the front
page when he picked it up. Instead, he'd make the print and the
photo all blurry, so he couldn't cheat, so he couldn't see it
before it was time.

As the bus pulled laboriously away from the
curb, he would sit down and open the Chicago Herald.

He was making the paper all the time now.

Several days ago, he'd read about the deaths
of April and Joshua Rodrigez. He loved to read about himself while
he was sitting right in the middle of the world. In plain sight. He
was smart. And they were stupid. So stupid.

Today there was no picture of attendants
lifting a gurney with a black body bag into the back of an
ambulance. Instead, there was a huge photo—it took up the entire
top half of the page—of a stuffed bear. A baseball glove. A
graduation cap. A telescope. A Beatles album. Sgt. Pepper. Which
was the album that marked a turning point in their career. It had
songs like "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," and "Lovely Rita."

His eyes tracked down.

Dear Madonna Murderer,

A letter. A letter to him.

Excited, intrigued, he lowered the paper and
looked around.

There was the smelly old bitch who rode the
bus all the time. Some college students with their backpacks and
weird hair, their pierced faces. They didn't smell, but they
bothered him almost as much as the stinking ones. Then there was a
girl in an orange fast- food uniform with white cuffs and a yellow
smiley button on her collar below her ugly, frowning face that
said, Have I told you about today's special? Nobody was looking at
him. Nobody noticed him. He was invisible. The invisible man, able
to move freely among the masses without danger of being seen. His
gaze dropped back to the paper.

Dear Madonna Murderer,

I'm writing to you from the cemetery. Why the
cemetery? Because I'm the baby you killed three days ago. It's
lonely out here. And dark. It's always dark. When they were
throwing the dirt on top of me, I was so scared. I cried and cried,
but nobody heard me. Why did you kill me? Wait. Don't tell me. I
think I understand. I think you may have done it because you love
me. Is that it? Do you love me? And you didn't want me to have to
suffer through life the way you have suffered. Am I right?

I know how hard you've had it. I know that
your mother hasn't always been good to you. But I'm lonely. And
sad. I'll never have a chance to do any of the things children do.
You've taken that from me. I wish you hadn't done that, I wish you
hadn't killed me. I wish I could have made up my own mind about
life, you know?

It was signed Joshua.

He stared and stared at the name. How stupid
did they think he was? He sat there and pick, picked at himself,
pulling and picking, pulling and picking until all of his eyelashes
were gone.

The bus lurched to a halt. People got off.
People got on. And suddenly he realized this was his stop.

He folded the paper and jumped to his feet,
hurrying down the rubber walkway, diving through the back doors
just before they closed, the rubber seals brushing his
shoulders.

Standing on the sidewalk in a furious rage,
he attacked the paper, tearing it and tearing it into smaller and
smaller pieces, finally shoving it deep inside a trash container.
When he looked up through a red haze of anger, people were staring
at him.

"Fuck you!" he screamed, spit flying. "Fuck
you!"

Responses to the dead-baby letter began
arriving the following day. Most showed up as letters to the
editor, a few were sent directly to Alex. Suddenly he was a pseudo
star. Upon receiving the day's mail, he would put the letters in a
sealed plastic bag and take them directly to Homicide. At the front
desk, he was issued a temporary pass and allowed to venture where
no Alex Martin had gone before.

The majority of the letters they'd received
so far were from outraged readers, full of accusations of
exploitation and sensationalized journalism. But others were
clearly written by someone who was disturbed. It would be the job
of the police department's certified document examiner and forensic
linguist to come up with a description of the disturbed writer.

Alex had done his homework, and he knew that
document examinations could be one of the most effective ways to
link a suspect to a crime. One of the earliest cases in which a
document examiner played a key role was the Lindbergh kidnapping.
But it would take the skill of a forensic linguist to come up with
an even more telling profile. By examining the order of the words,
the usage, the patterns of speech, the linguist could determine
gender, education, and ethnic background. A good examiner could
often pinpoint the area of the city in which the suspect had been
raised.

In the second floor Madonna case room, the
letters were carefully sorted and examined, three of them raising
hopes of legitimacy. Then they were sent to the crime lab, where
the letters and envelopes would be photographed and examined for
any microscopic fibers. From there, they would go downstairs to the
document examiner.

Other proactive measures were also being
taken. The cemetery where the latest victims had been buried was
being staked out, and expectations among the task force were high.
They needed this break.

Harold Doyle had been a certified document
examiner with the Chicago Police Department for nine years. He'd
worked on kidnapping cases, and poisoning cases, bank robberies,
counterfeiting, and embezzlement. He was good, but not cocky. As
soon as he received the letters from the crime lab, he faxed copies
to the FBI office in Quantico, and to Patty Hund, the Chicago-based
linguist. Then he began his own careful examination.

He would study the letters with a
high-powered microscope, then begin the tedious search to see if a
match could be found in the questioned documents. The paper would
be run through an ESDA, Electro Static Detection Apparatus, which
filled in indentations with graphite, and copies would be sent to
every government office where signatures were on file.

It wasn't his job to dissect the contents of
the letters, but he read them all the same. The first was
handwritten using black ink. The characters were small, the
indention left on the paper deep.

It's bad enough that you allow scenes of
violence to dominate front-page news, but you’ve now descended to a
level that could only be called trash journalism. Do you think
these kinds of tactics will gain more readers? Do you think it will
make the killer feel so bad that he'll come forward and confess?
Don't insult his intelligence.

The next letter was written in a more
feminine hand, small and cramped, with a slant to the right. A
cursory glance told Doyle that in all likelihood it had been
written by a woman in her sixties. But he would examine it anyway,
and file a report.

Letter to the editor.

Shame on you. How do you think the families
of the victims feel, seeing a letter "written" from their dead
grandson, or nephew? How do you think that made them feel, to open
the paper and see that? I am canceling my subscription. Shame on
you.

The last letter had been printed on an
ink-jet printer and was similar to the first except that it was
addressed to the Police Department.

CPD.

The letter in yesterday's paper is an open
admission of your lack of expertise. Anyone reading it will see it
as the desperate plea it is, an admission of your total bafflement.
Why not simply run headlines that read, WE HAVEN'T GOT A CLUE?

Have you no pride? Have you no shame?
Resorting to such juvenile tactics. Why don't you get out your
junior-detective kit?

Doyle suspected that the first and last
letter had been written by the same person, but it would be up to
Patty Hund to make that determination.

The sound of the ringing phone woke her.

Heart pounding, Ivy lifted the receiver to
her ear, fully expecting to hear that there had been another
murder.

"In your profile you said he may have
intended to major in math. Well, everything is numbers."

"Max?"

Ivy pressed the button that illuminated the
green light on her travel clock. 2:50 A.M.

"All of it. The thirteen stab wounds. Then
the twenty-two stab wounds. Even the number of your old apartment,
although that was probably a very strange coincidence. But someone
who deals in numerology might argue that there are no
coincidences."

The brain fog began to lift, and she
remembered that Max had left Headquarters a few hours early to take
Ethan to a hockey game miles away in Michigan. "Where are you
calling from?"

"My car."

"I thought you weren't heading back until
tomorrow."

"I decided to drive straight through after
the game. I didn't want to be away any longer than I had to.
Ethan's asleep in the passenger seat, and I've been listening to
one of those weird programs you sometimes pick up in the middle of
the night. It's about numerology."

She scooted higher in bed. "My old apartment
was 283. That doesn't go along with your theory."

"Yeah, but in numerology you add all the
numbers together."

"And that makes thirteen. . . ."

"Exactly. Everything he was doing sixteen
years ago was based on the number thirteen, even down to the
thirteenth victim, Claudia Reynolds."

"Is that why he stopped? I was number
thirteen?"

"Possibly."

"But the babies . . ."

"For some reason, he doesn't count them.
Probably because he doesn't think of their passing as punishment.
He's always rationalizing his role in their death. He's playing
God, sending them someplace where he thinks they'll be better off.
Thirteen symbolizes death and birth, the end and the beginning.
Change and transition. For some reason, his number has now changed
from thirteen to twenty-two."

"But two and two is four."

"Twenty-two is a master number," he
explained. "It doesn't break down. And get this—twenty-two means
'mastery on all planes.' 'Supreme power.' 'Special abilities.'"

She turned on the bedside lamp and reached
for the tablet and pen she kept within arm's reach in order to jot
down any ideas that might come to her in the middle of the night.
"I think you might be onto something." Her heart was beginning to
beat a little faster. "If you're right about this, then that would
mean he plans to kill a total of twenty-two mothers. Where is this
knowledge going to take us? How can it help?"

"Considering the killer's fascination with
numbers, I think it's only reasonable to surmise that he might also
work with numbers. Like a math teacher, or an accountant maybe.
Numbers would be his life. We need to go back and check with the
area mental hospitals to find out if any patients were math
teachers or accountants."

"I agree."

"Sorry to wake you up, but I had to run this
by somebody. Sometimes things that seem so rational in the middle
of the night make no sense the next day. I had to know."

"I'm glad you called."

"Go back to sleep," he said, the signal
breaking up. "I'll see you in the morning."

"We got a few results back while you were
gone. Nothing breaking." "I'll pick you up on the way so you can
fill me in.

"Could you—" Max motioned to his coffee as he
turned the car onto Grand, heading in the direction of Area Five.
On the way to Ivy's, he'd stopped and picked up a half-dozen bagels
and two cups of coffee from Bagels, Bagels, and now he ate as he
drove.

In the passenger seat, Ivy pulled the plastic
drink tab from the lid, and passed the coffee to him.

"Anything come of the DNA testing?" he
asked.

"It was too degraded for the lab to get
anything from it."

"He's too smart to give us something that
easy. How about the drugs? Any leads on the drugs used in the
babies?"