Night bait, page 22
He shot her a faint, sheepish smile, as if embarrassed. "As you have said, a good time."
"Well, if the money's right—"
"I'll pay whatever you ask, within reason of course." He chuckled. "Say five hundred dollars for three hours or so?"
"Five hundred, huh?" She feigned disinterest, but secretly felt like wetting herself at the mention of so staggering a sum.
He nodded, still smiling a bit.
"You got it," she said. "Let me see if I can find a cab to take us to a motel."
"Well, if you don't object, I would rather drive there in my own car. Perhaps I am paranoid, but I don't trust some of these cab drivers."
Cherry laughed and thought: What the hell? For five C-notes, you can carry me on your back. "Okay. Where's your car?"
"Over in the lot across the street. You'll have to direct me to the motel. I have a terrible sense of direction."
She dropped her arm from the bus stop. "No problem. Let's go."
The rain was coming harder now, and the two of them broke into a slow trot across 14th Street and dashed under the pale orange, unlighted Gulf sign. The dark parking lot opposite the gas station was empty save for three cars. Cherry lifted each sleek leg over the steel cable which bordered the parking lot, then followed her John to a blue Mercedes parked next to the daytime attendant's ticket booth. A rusty white sign hung in the booth's window, which read: THE MANAGEMENT ASSUMES NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR LOSS OR DAMAGE TO PATRON'S PROPERTY. Cherry eyed the man's car and thought eagerly, This guy's got to have money out the ass. Who else could afford a classy set of wheels like this with today's gas prices?
She waited on the passenger side as he got in and reached over to unlock her door. She climbed in and slammed the door with a fat thud, happy to be out of the increasing rain, and happier still to have found a John with big bucks on a shitty night.
She seemed to sink in the soft bench seat. "I have to see the money first."
"Yes, of course." He still had that repressed, schoolkid grin on his face. He removed a shiny black wallet from his breast pocket. Cherry's eyes widened, and her face lit up like an arcade when he opened the wallet, which was chock full of bills. He handed her five portraits of Ben Franklin, each note crisp and sharp as a razor blade, as if they had come off the presses yesterday.
"Care for a cigarette?"
Cherry looked up, still engrossed with the wad of cash in her little hand. "Oh, no thanks... You know, I sometimes do special things for a little extra."
"I will keep that in mind," he said in his strange accent, and lit his cigarette. As he started the car, Cherry noticed the cigarette's peculiar odor. It smelled milder than most, but sweet like honeysuckle. Then, when she looked closer, she saw that it was wrapped in black paper.
Through the rain-beaded windshield, the clock in St. Thomas Tower read: 1:13. Cherry folded her pay in half and stuffed it into her tiny purse. The night finally paid off, she told herself. I hung in there and picked up a bigwheel.
"Here, let me lock your door," the man said, with smoke pouring from his mouth. "With crime the way it is, you never know who might try to hold you up at a traffic light." She leaned forward, and he reached behind her to push down the doorlock on her side.
As he pulled his hand back from the lock, Cherry heard a single snap! in her right ear. She didn't feel anything until it was over, but by the time the man's hand was back in his lap, she felt a sharp jab of pain in the side of her neck. An instant later, she began to feel woozy; her head began to gyrate, and she looked at the man dumbfoundedly, rubbing the sore spot of skin. He was no longer smiling; instead, he watched her with a straight face, and he held up the orange tip of his cigarette, the way the German officers did in the war movies. In his other hand, he grasped a shiny silver object, but it was too dark in the car for her to tell what it was.
"What—what did you do?" she slurred.
The man did not answer. He just kept watching her with deep, meticulous intent.
After another few seconds had passed, Cherry was reeling in her seat, her head nodding. Everything around her became a soft blur, and her brain felt so fuzzy that she couldn't think right.
Very slowly, her eyes began to close.
When it was obvious that she had lost consciousness, the man pushed Cherry's doubled-over body down into the seat so that she could not be seen from the outside. He adjusted the knob on the radio and turned in some soft music. Then he pulled the car out of the shadow-boned parking lot and turned onto L Street, which would eventually lead him, not to the motels, but to Massachusetts Avenue, to his concealed home in Georgetown.
And Cherry breathed in silent, peaceful wisps, her face buried in her lap, her hands limp at her bent knees. Though she would not be dead for at least another thirty minutes, her life might as well have ended right there in the car. She would only know a few more moments of consciousness—
—when she would wake up from her drug-induced sleep to find herself naked and shivering in a bathtub full of cold water.
—when she would look up, terrified, and see the man whom she had picked up standing by the tub, wearing black rubber gloves and a pair of rubber overshoes.
—when she would see a green extension cord plugged into the socket by the sink, and she would follow its course up the wall, over the frame of the doorway, and straight down, and she would notice that the other end of the cord had been immersed into the water, and that the last several inches had been stripped bare.
—when she would look up at him again with huge eyes, shaking her head wildly back and forth, and feel the immediate impulse to scream and scream and scream, but find that she could not because there was something stuffed into her mouth which was so large that it would be difficult to even breathe.
—when she would finally realize who she had mistaken for a typical John, and she would try to get out of the tub, moving faster than she had ever moved in her life, but not fast enough because at the first inkling of escape the man would flick a switch and pain of a kind she had never known would surge through her body, and her muscles would tighten around her bones, and she would wriggle and twitch and convulse, and her head would beat into the tile wall, and her eyes would start to bulge out of her skull.
Then she would be dead.
And what the man did to her after that would not matter. But still, she might as well have been dead the minute she got into the car with him. She should have stayed in that night, or better yet, she should have remained as Patricia Juliette Dubois; she should never have decided to become a prostitute. Cherry's time was up. It was the last trick she would ever turn. She was going on a one-way ride.
The office was very dark.
"There's no reason for you to hang around here anymore," Dignazio said to David Elliot. "It's four in the fucking morning. We've gone through half the list; we can do the rest tomorrow. Go home and get a couple of hours' sleep."
Elliot raised his head in the darkness and nodded without saying anything. With a sigh of exhausted frustration, Dignazio unfastened the knot of his tie and slipped it out from under his stiff white collar. The only light in the room came from the fluorescent lamp on the desk. One bulb still needed to be replaced, and from where he was sitting, Dignazio could barely see Elliot, who sat slumped in the chair directly in front of the desk.
Dignazio felt the urge to gripe. "I should've known that Mullins and his goddamned Major Case Squad wouldn't come up with anything but a lot of horseshit. They make a big deal out of this whole thing, but all they give us are a couple of names of people who don't have a thing to do with the case. Fifty cents holding up a fucking dollar everytime."
Elliot tilted his tired head. "We still have about twenty suspects to look into. You never know what we might find out."
"Oh, I know what we'll find out, all right. We'll find a bunch of smalltime assholes with solid alibies. That's what we'll find. The Electrocutionist isn't on this list."
"Don't give up the ship."
"I won't. I'm the captain, remember? I have to stay on this ship till it sinks. Mullins is going about it all wrong. This investigation crap is leading us to a dead end."
"Have you asked him about decoys again?"
Dignazio shook his head, scowling. "Yeah, I asked him. And the answer's still no. I think the old fart's gone over the deep end. I don't know what he expects me to do. He just won't go for another decoy deployment. I guess all we can do is sit with our fingers in our asses while Mullins and his squad play hunt and peck with a bunch of remote suspects. First, he tells me no more decoys because he doesn't want to risk losing another officer, then he turns right around and tells me to catch The Electrocutionist at all costs. It's like playing pin the tail on the donkey with no tail."
"Still, there's hope."
"Not much. Not without a whole squad of decoys."
"The killer will make a mistake one of these days."
"Maybe he will, but we can't just sit around and wait for this guy to step on his dick. That means more time and more bodies. Investigation's going nowhere. The homicide squad's going nowhere. Chet and Vickie are going nowhere. This whole operation is a great big circle jerk. And everybody's screaming for the police to do something. What a kick in the ass." The scowl seemed permanently pressed into Dignazio's face. He stood up from the desk, and with his hands in his pockets, he faced the office's only window, looking out into the night sky, the city lights, and the rain. It had been raining for several hours now without a sign of letting up. The constant stream of water which battered against the window looked like running threads of mercury on the pane of glass. "Christ, what's with this town anyway? You'd think we were living in a Brazilian jungle with all this fucked up weather. All it ever does is rain and rain and rain. Pretty soon, they'll be issuing us rowboats instead of police cars."
Elliot chuckled through his nose and stood up. "I'm going home to get .some sleep. See you in the morning."
"It already is morning."
"Whatever. Aren't you going home?"
Dignazio shrugged abortively. "Fuck, why bother? Be kind of silly for me to drive all the way home just to come back in a few hours. I'll sleep here."
"Okay. I'll see you in a while."
Dignazio was still looking out the window when Elliot left. All he could see was the muddled fusion of blackness and rain which covered the city like a funeral cloak. He felt physically old that night, twice his age, like a bedridden one-hundred-year-old man who still had his senses but could no longer do anything. He sat back down at this desk, listening to the hum of the fluorescent tube and the rain-splatter outside. Exhaustion sapped him, and he wished he could go to sleep. But too much went on in his mind to allow that. It had been nearly a week since he had deployed Chet and Vickie on the street, yet no results had surfaced. Such a big chance for a longshot, he thought dismally. Why do I think The Electrocutionist will continue to go after whores? Maybe he'll go back to the pubs in Georgetown like he's done twice before. Maybe I should move Chet and Vickie there. Why do I think something will come out of this charade?
Bent and weary, he stared down at the pile of manila folders stacked in the middle of his desk. Half of the original pile was gone now, half of Mullins' prospects crossed off the list. Yesterday, Mullins had given him the first wave of possible suspects. The newly formed Major Case Squad had run a computer probe and had lifted the files on everyone in the city who had a criminal record of sexually related crimes and offenders with histories of mental illnesses. And Dignazio's homicide squad, along with the rest of the criminal investigation division, had begun questioning everyone in the file, but thus far clearly none of those questioned knew of or had anything to do with The Electrocutionist Case. Two days of hardpressed investigation for nothing. He still had about twenty more suspects to check out, but he couldn't shed the feeling that the entire investigation was useless. This case called for a different kind of police work, and his only hope rested in the possibility that Mullins, after seeing that the investigation had failed, would change his mind and allow Dignazio to put a flock of decoy officers back on the street. But even that was no guarantee, so all he had going for him at the moment was his own unauthorized decoy operation with Chet and Vickie Anderson. And it was beginning to look like that was equally as useless. One decoy on the street wasn't much to lay his faith in. And aside from that, it was obscenely illegal and dangerous.
He sat in the same position for nearly an hour, only thinking. At 5:15, a few stray beams of sunlight reached into the sky through the clouds and signaled for the start of a new day. But to Dignazio, the past week seemed like a day in itself which dragged to no end. He placed his hand on the stack of manila files and ran his thumb along the edge. A white adhesive tag had been applied to the upper right-hand corner of each folder, and on each tag, the suspect's name had been typed in capital letters, last name, first name, middle initial. But that's all they were to Dignazio: names. Names without faces or bodies. Meaningless and inconsequential. He wasn't after names; he was after a killer.
He picked up a few of the folders and flipped through them, quickly examining the information in each. A rapist here, a child molester there, a few sexual assaults, some kinks, one guy who used to work in a funeral parlor arrested for sexual activity with an embalmed corpse. He didn't bother to look through all of them. The city was full of nuts; they couldn't afford to waste time investigating each of them. He was only interested in one nut, and he didn't think he would find him in that stack of manila folders. What was that old cut he had heard years ago? You're so dumb that you probably think a manila folder is a contortionist from the Philippines? Somehow, it didn't strike him as being funny anymore.
The nametag on the folder at the bottom of the stack read: MAURICE, MICHAEL, M. But Dignazio didn't bother looking at that one. Elliot would get around to it later.
He jumped in his seat when the phone rang. The sound of its bell was strangely loud, almost violent. The receiver vibrated. He picked it up in the middle of the second ring.
"Dignazio, homicide."
A pause.
"What? Shit. All right...Peace Cross? I'll be there in a few minutes."
NINE
On Sunday morning, about thirty minutes after Dignazio had received his phone call, the sun cracked over the concrete horizon of 14th Street, and its warm rays fell onto the street through the gaps between the buildings, mingling with the damp air. The evening's rainstorm had tapered off and stopped at four-thirty. The clouds had dispersed, opening great blue holes in the sky through which the light of dawn glimmered a hue of brilliant orange. Usually, this time signaled the night's end for the flocks of prostitutes who prowled the block. At the first sign of morning light, they would drift away and retreat to their hidden lairs like fleeing souls. But on that particular morning, only one such girl remained on the street by daybreak, a slender girl in a blue dress, wet from standing in the rain all night. When the storm had first begun, she had moved from the open corner of Vermont and Κ Street to stand under a narrow portico erected over the entrance of an office building. And in spite of the relentless downpour, she had stayed there all night long. Now she walked the entire length of Vermont Avenue, turned, and proceeded to a parking lot near Lafayette Square, where she got into an off-white station wagon and drove away.
"This is getting to be a joke," Vickie said to Chet, huffing the words out like a pouting child. "I'm sopping wet, cold, tired; my legs hurt, and for all that, I think I saw three Johns all night."
"Where's your perseverance?" Chet asked. "You can't expect to catch a killer in one night. No need to get uptight."
"I'm not uptight. I'm just getting a little weary of standing around on Vermont like a scarecrow in a whore's suit. The Electrocutionist has already picked up five girls on the block. He'll stay away from now on, if he's got any sense."
"We're hoping that he hasn't got any sense. He'll keep coming back."
Vickie dismissed her doubts with an agreeable shrug. "Well, it doesn't matter to me. I don't have much else to do with my time. The money's not bad... Speaking of money, when do I get paid again, if that doesn't shatter your existential hopes for me?"
"Another day or so," he said. "If you're running low, I'll see if I can get it to you tonight."
"No, it's not that. I guess I shouldn't bother you guys about money anyway. Everytime I think about it, I also think about Jennifer and Diane Slezak and that Congressman's kid. Makes me feel kind of—"
The small police radio cut Vickie's words off. A little red light came on; the radio speaker crackled and squelched. Then the voice of the female dispatcher said; "Five zero one S."
Chet brought the mike to his lips. "Five zero one S."
"Five zero one S, eighty-six with five zero zero at intersect four-fifty and Blandensburg for confirmed eighty-one."
"Ten four." He said it very slowly, and he hung the mike back up on its clip with a look of anguish on his face.
"What was all that gibberish about," Vickie asked.
"Dignazio wants us to meet him at Peace Cross."
"Peace Cross? That's not even in the district. What for?"
"They found another body, and since he called for us, it must be another victim of The Electrocutionist. What's the quickest way to Bladensburg Road from here?"
"Just take New York Avenue all the way down and veer left."
Chet followed Vickie's instructions, and ten minutes later, they were driving past Fort Lincoln Cemetery and crossing the district line into Maryland. As the car rolled over the gradual slope of Bladensburg Road, they could see the colossal Peace Cross, which jutted up from the ground at the grass-covered circle of the intersection. Nearing the scene, Vickie spotted several cars parked around the site, inside a ring of red signal flares. Chet was able to drive directly to the scene without delay. Had it not been for the early hour, they would've had to wait behind the traffic line of accident-gawking ghouls.
The brakes whined as Chet brought the wagon to a halt and shut the motor off. They both got out at the same time, and Vickie noticed several different kinds of police cars there: two white Prince George's County Police cars, a bright yellow Maryland State car, and another white cruiser with fancy emblems on the doors and the words CALVERT CITY spelled out in blue letters along the rim of the trunk. There were also two D.C. cars and an unmarked which presumably belonged to Dignazio because he was standing with some other men by the cross. Chet and Vickie stepped up onto the grass court of Peace Cross just as the two county cops and the state trooper were leaving. Dignazio was talking to another officer with sandy-colored hair and a thick ox-like neck. The officer had his hands spread out, and he was saying, "I don't want you to think I'm punting this one on you. But there's no doubt about who did it."
