Acceleration Page 6

  Just me. Most of the passengers take the exit for the bus terminal. I tail her to the Wilson Avenue exit.

  Does she live close by? Has the nut followed her home before? Is he waiting up there on the street?

  There are no addresses listed for his targets in the diary. From his notes, that was his next step, scouting their neighborhoods. But the last entry is at least two weeks old by now. So how far has he gone? Losing the diary might have set him back a bit, but I’m sure he's got their schedules committed to memory.

  I give her some distance so I’m not too obvious. A departing train drags a breeze down into the station, flipping the pages of a phone book deserted on the stairs, cooling the sweat on my forehead. On the sidewalk a busker is doing a bad imitation of Jimi Hendrix on his electric guitar, hooked up to a whiny amplifier. I spot Cherry hurrying by the noisemaker with her hands over her ears. Hanging back, I study the crowd for anyone suspicious. Cherry waits for the light at the corner and glances back, scowling at the guitarist. Under the harsh glare of the streetlights her pale skin looks ghost white. Her eyes shift and she catches me watching her.

  Look away. Look away, I tell myself. My gaze darts to the guitarist, then back to the woman. To the street and back to her. I must look like one suspicious character, standing there at the top of the stairs.

  First rule of surveillance you pick up from any cop show: see, but don’t be seen. Well, that's blown.

  The light goes green, and she crosses with the crowd. I trail behind with my head down. Trying to stick to the shadows, doing my best to stay out of range of the streetlights, I track her for a couple of blocks. She turns onto a side street where it's just her and me on the sidewalk. There's nobody that I can see watching from the other side of the street.

  Are you here? Hiding in the dark under the trees, in the shadows between parked cars? Are you hunting tonight?

  I’m sweating buckets now. The heat seems to rise from the baked pavement. Swiping at a drop that hangs on the tip of my nose, I watch the woman glance behind her to where I’m following half a block back. Instinctively I slow down, which I realize makes me even more suspicious.

  Don’t worry, I wish I could say. I’m here to save you.

  Which would scare the crap out of her.

  Cherry speeds up now, not breaking into a run or anything, but enough so I know I’ve spooked her. I stop and let her go, keeping an eye on her as she climbs the steps to a three-story apartment building. She fumbles for her keys, drops them, finally gets the door open, and rushes inside.

  Damn! What the hell am I doing? I just terrified that woman—stalking her when I’m supposed to be protecting her. I’m doing what Roach does, except I’m sure he's way better at it.

  I wipe my forehead dry on the sleeve of my T-shirt and turn back for the subway. I’m in way over my head.

  Where was my plan? God knows he's got one. He's been training for this his whole life.

  Me, I’m just the guy who found his book.

  I’ve got to go back to the diary and study it like a Bible, find where he slips up and gives himself away.

  There's got to be something.

  TWELVE

  When I get home it's a few ticks before midnight. Mom's up watching Nightline, where they’re discussing a bloody coup someplace I’ve never heard of—one of those countries that keep changing their names. But a new name can’t change who you are or where you’ve been.

  “I missed your call,” Mom says to me as I kick my shoes off.

  Joining her on the couch, I squeeze my brain trying to remember what she's talking about. “What call?”

  She's got that pissed-off stare, not looking at me on purpose. “Exactly. What call?”

  Now I get her. “Oh, sorry, Mum. The time got away from me.”

  “I phoned around to your friends. Vinny told me you had a late date.”

  When Vin gets an idea in his head, you need a sledgehammer to knock it out.

  “Wasn’t really a date.” I try to explain.

  She turns to me with interrogator eyes. “Was there a girl?”

  “Mmm. Yes.”

  “Were you alone with this girl?”

  “Yes.” Sort of.

  “That's what they call a date, honey.”

  The interrogator softens now, giving me the once-over like she hasn’t seen my face every day for the last seventeen years. Maybe she's checking for lipstick, hickeys, or crumpled condom wrappers sticking out of my pocket.

  “Am I forgiven?” I ask.

  She squinches her eyes in consideration. “Will you call next time?”

  “I'll call, I'll fax, I'll e-mail—”

  “Smart guy.” She slaps my knee. “So, is she as smart as you?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “She pretty?”

  “I guess.” I didn’t exactly spend my time with Cherry thinking about whether she was smart or pretty.

  She waits for more, but when nothing comes, she shakes her head. “Well, don’t go gushing all over the place about it. That's all I get? A grunt, a ‘don’t know,’ an ‘I guess’?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know. I guess.”

  A heavy sigh. Then she says, “Hungry?”

  I didn’t realize it till she asked, but I’m starving. “Sure.”

  “Grilled-cheese sandwich?”

  “Maybe two?”

  “My little piggie,” she calls me, poking me in the stomach.

  Surreal is the word for how things feel right now. I’ve spent the last couple of hours fumbling around trying to find one particular psycho in a city that must have hundreds of them. And now, after a hard night of stalking, sweating, and confusion, I’m home eating Mom's grilled-cheese sandwiches, chatting about an imaginary date I was just on.

  Later, somewhere between late-night talk shows, she nudges me awake. “Get to bed. You have to be up early tomorrow.”

  I think I'll sleep tonight, even with nothing settled— with some things even muddier than before. Some Chinese guy once said a thousand-mile journey begins with a single step. Well, my first step was kind of a stumble.

  But it was a step.

  THIRTEEN

  Last fall, when I was dead to the world, sleepless and swallowed by guilt, Dad cornered me in my room.

  I was sitting at my desk, staring at a history textbook. I’d read the same paragraph four times and still didn’t know what it was about. Dad walked in and started wandering around.

  “What's this?” he said, picking up a Stephen King Mom had bought for me weeks before.

  “A book,” I said.

  “Any good?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He tossed it on top of the radiator, then went and sat on the foot of my bed. Dazed and confused was my natural state back then, so I was just kind of staring into space when Dad started waving his hand.

  “Can I have your attention here?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I mumbled, using all my strength to pull things into focus. “What's going on?”

  “What's going on is you’re walking around like a zombie. I don’t like it.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Sorry does nothing,” he told me.

  There was a long silence. I waited, tapping my pen against the desktop while he picked at a Band-Aid on his thumb. He always had some kind of cut from work. When I was little, he’d tell me, “Those machines have teeth.” And I thought that was for real, that they were actually taking bites out of him.

  “I saw this thing on Sixty Minutes one time,” he said. “About a secret service agent who was assigned to protect President Kennedy the day he got shot. He was riding on the running board of the follow-up car behind Kennedy's, keeping an eye on the crowd. When he heard the first shot, he thought it was just a firecracker. But then he saw the president lurch to the side and grab his neck. The second shot missed. The agent jumped from the follow-up car and ran to catch up to Kennedy. But there was no time. A couple seconds later the third shot hit the president in
the head. He was down and dying by the time the agent jumped on the back of the car and started crawling toward him.”

  I had no idea what this story had to do with anything, so I just sat there waiting him out.

  “You have to understand, this guy's whole job—his whole life—was about taking a bullet for the president. Anyway, so now it's fifteen years later and Mike Wallace is interviewing the agent on Sixty Minutes. And the guy's still a wreck. ‘If only I’d been a second faster,’ he says. ‘If only I could have made it in time to take that third bullet.’ The guy's just destroyed, shaking and weeping. And Mike's saying how there's no way he could have made it in time. It just wasn’t humanly possible.”

  I rubbed the back of my neck, getting tired from focusing my attention for so long. In his clumsy way, Dad was trying to tell me something.

  “So I’m watching this poor guy. Destroyed by guilt, really eaten up by it. Even though it was impossible for him to have done anything.” Dad looked up at me. “And you know, I really got it.”

  He stood up and started pacing around behind me. It's a small room for all that agitated energy.

  “I’ve been a guy a lot longer than you have,” he said. “And I gotta tell you, it doesn’t go away—that thing, the belief or whatever, that one day you’re going to be a hero. All guys think that. It's bred into you. Every movie you ever see tells you that one day you'll get your chance. It doesn’t go away, either. I’m still waiting for mine.”

  I could hear him behind me, cracking his knuckles one by one. “The thing is, you don’t know if you could have saved that girl. She might have even pulled you down with her.” He was quiet for a moment. “Tough to live with not knowing. But what choice have you got?”

  I nodded, but it was obvious to both of us that this wasn’t sinking in.

  “I hear what you’re saying,” I said, hoping that would end the conversation.

  “No, you don’t,” he sighed. “You’re not hearing me.”

  I turned to glance over my shoulder at him, standing by the window, leaning his arm on the sill.

  “Hear this,” he said. “You’re worrying your mother. Seeing you like this is really killing her.”

  I frowned. Why was he trying to make me feel even worse? Then it hit me what he was doing.

  “You’re trying to guilt me into not feeling guilty?” I said.

  He nodded. “Something like that. Whatever works, kid.”

  Back when I got arrested for the B and E, the worst part wasn’t Dad shouting at me over and over “What were you thinking? What were you thinking?” The worst part was the way Mom looked at me. Like she was looking at a ghost. Like she’d lost me. When we got home from the station, she came to me in my room. She didn’t say anything. She just grabbed me and hugged me, held me tight. It was almost violent the way she did it, half knocking the wind out of me.

  So Dad's Kennedy story didn’t do it for me. The head doctor and the pills didn’t do squat. But when I started to see how Mom was looking at me, that did it.

  Wasn’t quick, or easy. But I had to wipe that look from her eyes.

  Guilt versus guilt.

  Whatever works.

  FOURTEEN

  People in the Jungle dream of one thing on summer nights. They toss and turn, smothered by the heat. Lying limp in puddles of sweat, they dream of the cool relief of an ice-breathing air conditioner humming softly to them in the dark. Air conditioners are as rare as college diplomas in the Jungle.

  When it gets so bad you think your toes are melting, that's when we head for the one place where winter still reigns in the heart of summer.

  The Ignatius Howard Public Library, also known as the Igloo. The temperature in there stays at a constant deep freeze all summer—room temperature, if you live at the North Pole.

  It wasn’t my idea to bring Wayne. I had a bite after work and then called Vinny to come with me. I needed someone to talk to about all this stuff, and I figure he's got the kind of brain power I’m going to need to find my killer.

  When we were heading out, Wayne was sitting in a lawn chair out front of B building, soaking his feet in a kiddie pool. “Hey. Where we going?” Wayne called out.

  “Library,” I told him. “You don’t want to come.”

  I said that because I knew Wayne was going to bug us if he came. You can’t take him anywhere. I mean, I like the guy—he's the brother I never wanted—but bring him to a library and you’re asking for a riot.

  “They have the Internet, don’t they?” Wayne asked.

  I groaned inside, and groaned outside in case Wayne wanted to take the hint. But he told us to wait, he was going to grab his shoes.

  “Do we make a break for it?” Vin said.

  “No good. He knows where we’re going. There is no escape.”

  What you should know about Vinny and Wayne is that they’re sort of friends by default. Me and Wayne have been hanging out since we used to eat dirt together in the sandbox in the park. Vin came along about five years ago and fell in with me. The way I figure it, Vinny's the brains of our operation, Wayne's the muscle, and I’m the soul—or maybe the lower intestine. Who knows?

  Everybody's cranky in this heat. As we walk the four blocks to the Igloo, Vinny starts in on Wayne. “I think they have some comic books at the library,” Vin says. “So you won’t have to strain anything.”

  Wayne fakes a laugh. “You’re killing me. Hey, did they ever make a comic about that dolphin? You know, the one in that movie? What was he called?”

  They’re like kids fighting in the backseat. “Play nice now,” I tell them.

  Wayne's not finished, though. “Was it… Flipper? Yeah, that's right, Flipper. Now where have I heard that name before?”

  Vin's been trying to shake that name for five years. He tries his best to keep his hand out of sight, thinking people have to forget sometime. But a really nasty nickname never dies—it'll go on your gravestone.

  So love is in the air between them, like the stink of hot tar, when we walk into the Igloo and feel that sweet frosty blast.

  Wayne moans way too loud, saying “Oh yeah, baby, that's the stuff.” Me and Vinny quickly separate ourselves from him and head for the stacks, while Wayne greets the woman on the desk with, “Hey, you got filters on the Internet computers here? Or can you look up anything?”

  God knows what he's going to look up.

  Vinny goes to check out the new fiction shelves. I stop at one of the library catalog computers and punch up the Subject category. So what do I type? Is there a listing for psychos or nutcases’! I keep it simple and decide on murder. Which leads me to the true crime section.

  When I see the size of the section, I have to wonder, who reads this stuff? I mean, suspense novels like The Silence of the Lambs, okay. But real blood-and-gore serial murder? Is that supposed to be entertainment?

  Standing in front of the section is a fiftyish woman flipping through a book with photos that would give Charles Manson nightmares. She looks like a heavy smoker, gray hair, gray skin, yellow fingers. The book with the crime-scene pictures goes into the pile she's collecting. She looks like someone you’d expect to see at a bingo game, playing ten cards and arranging her Beanie Babies mascots for luck.

  I scan the titles on the shelves. Helter Skelter. The Hare Krishna Murders. The Stranger Beside Me.

  I don’t know, it's not like I’m looking for a story to read. Thrills and chills and all that crap. I don’t want a movie of the week.

  Then one catches my eye. Loving Death: Inside the Mind of the Serial Killer. I read on the jacket that the author is a former FBI agent who tracked down these killers. That's what I need, a little guidance from a pro. I go find where Vinny's set up with a stack of fiction and graphic novels, over by the windows that let in the late-afternoon light. The Igloo's got these blue chairs you can really sink into, and I take the one next to Vin.

  “Whatcha got?” he asks.

  I show him the cover. “Murder book. What’re you reading?”
>
  “It's called Watchmen. A classic graphic novel. Real genius. Hot stuff.”

  Hot is one thing we’re not. Now that we’ve been melting for the last month in the un-air-conditioned real world, the air in the Igloo tastes like it's been imported from the Himalayas. You almost expect to find frost lining the shelves. My brain's been limping through the heat wave, but this place gives me some focus, wakes me up. Which is what I need right now.

  It doesn’t take long to realize I’ve found what I’m looking for. This guy, Mason Lucas, was a profiler for the FBI's behavioral science unit. A psycho hunter. Cops and agents sent him notes and crime-scene photos from unsolved murders. Lucas went over all the evidence: autopsy reports, how the body was disposed of, and police interviews with family and friends of the victim. All the little gruesome details. Then he’d put together a profile of the unknown killer for the local cops.

  It's pretty wild, the things he figured out about the killers just from notes and Polaroids. Lucas talks about how serial killers leave behind a kind of personality fingerprint when they murder someone. You are how you kill—that kind of thing.

  Mason Lucas leads me through what goes into the making of serial killers. They usually come from broken families, having histories of abuse and neglect. As kids they felt powerless, with no control over anything in their lives. Which sounds like a lot of people to me, like some of my neighbors in the Jungle. But only the tiniest fraction of a fraction of these kids will grow up to kill people. These psychos are also pretty smart—not evil-genius Hannibal Lecter smart, but with a little higher than usual IQ's.

  Then there's something profilers call the Homicidal Triad—three childhood behaviors that are shared by most serial killers. The Triad goes like this:

  1) Cruelty to animals. These guys get off on torturing dogs, cats, and anything small and furry they can get their hands on. It gives them a sense of power—life-and-death control over another creature.

  Bed-wetting. That surprises me. Hard to picture these lean mean killing machines as former members of the rubber-sheet brigade. But this wetting the bed stuff ties in to their lack of control, and the frustration and shame they feel over it.