All the Dead Fathers (21 page)

The second
E,
John Ettinger, was on the
OUT
list, and someone ought to warn him. She called the skip tracer she'd hired to find addresses for the five remaining
OUT
s but got a message. His office was closed for the weekend.

Next she called Cuffs to tell him what Michael had said, but he already knew. Apparently the cardinal had a real thing about him lurking around in the seminary woods, because he'd been warned that if he were found again anywhere on the premises he'd be arrested and charged with criminal trespass, and he was to inform her that she—as his employer—would be charged as well.

Cuffs said he could go back now and finish up the job he'd put on hold and make the guy who hired him stop whining. “If I pick it up again I'll have to see it through all the way to the end. But if you want me to stay on here, I will. And the whiner and the cardinal and whoever can all go fuck themselves.” He said if he got caught near Villa St. George he'd deny he was working for her and say he'd gone back on his own. “If they charge me I'll tell the goddamn judge I couldn't stand to see any harm come to those poor fucking pervert priests.”

She told him to go back to his other job.

*   *   *

When she finally checked out of the hotel it was late morning, bright and sunny. She drove around in circles for a few minutes, looking behind her, then headed for the city. On the way, she had an idea. She drove to O'Hare Airport, parked the Celica in the “long term” lot, rented a dark red Chevrolet Impala, and continued on downtown.

At her office she carried her mail to her desk and sat down to sort through it. There wasn't much. The usual catalogs, a few bills … and one postcard. Her name and address taped on the front this time were in embossed printing on what appeared to be thin white card stock. Again the postmark was Chicago, and again the message on the back was hand-printed in block letters:
READY OR NOT
.

37.

Kirsten wasn't sure how long she sat there and stared at the address taped to the postcard before she finally reached down and pulled open the bottom right drawer of her desk. Her box of business cards was there, and beside it in the drawer was what was left of one of the cards after her name and address had been cut out.

She hadn't opened that drawer in months, so the address could have been cut out, and the remnant left behind, at the same time as the
Smithsonian
was taken. Or it could have been done two days ago, when the magazine was returned.

While she was processing that, her cell phone rang. This time it was Dugan. He'd seen TV reports about Truczik's murder. From what he said it was apparent that there'd been no information given about who found the body, no mention of her at all.

“You must have heard about it, right?” Dugan said.

“Um … yeah. How could I miss it? It's all over the news.”

“Wasn't Cuffs supposed to be out there providing security?”

“He didn't start until sundown,” she said, “and he was at the retreat house. The murder was earlier, at a golf course a mile away. Was there anything on the news about Cuffs showing up?”

“No, they're not saying much of anything.
Was
he there?”

“What he told me was that he heard a siren and went to see what was going on. Anyway, he's off the case now. The cardinal doesn't want him hanging around out there, I guess.”

“Really? And what about you? Are you—”

“They're promising increased security at the retreat house, and the FBI's involved. And that sheriff's investigator from Rockford … Wardell … I guess he's got some new information. So it looks like law enforcement's working this thing pretty hard. What can I do that they can't?”

“Right,” he said. “And what about that postcard stuff? Anything more on that?”

She'd been hoping he wouldn't ask that because she wanted to stick to the truth, more or less. “I'm watching my back. Haven't seen anyone.”

“Good, but be careful, okay? Anyway, I should get going. We'll be tied up all day out here. The weather's great, of course, but I won't see any of the outdoors till long after sundown. This program is intense, and my team— But you don't wanna hear me blab on and on about that. Talk to you later. Love you.”

“You, too,” she said. “'Bye.”

She
did
want to hear him blab on and on, though. About anything. She'd have spent the whole day listening to him blab.

*   *   *

She left the Impala downtown and took a cab home. All of the entrances to their building were quite secure and she felt safe there. So safe and snug inside, in fact, that she made herself go outside and run five miles along the lakefront in the afternoon. It was still warm and sunny, and the jogging paths were crowded. Later she walked a mile to a Thai restaurant for supper. And walked back.

She didn't spot anyone following her. What she
felt,
though, was another matter. Frequently, and regardless of where she was, she would feel someone's eyes on her. She knew the feeling was a reaction to being stalked, certainly not based on observation and fact. And even if it were true that someone was out there somewhere, watching her, they wouldn't attack her from a distance. That would be too remote, too cold, for such a person. Anyway, she wasn't about to lock herself up in the apartment.

Inside or out, though, she did a lot of thinking, much of it fruitless, and made a few phone calls.

None of the priests turned up dead all day Saturday.

*   *   *

In the morning she went out for the papers and was home eating breakfast when, at five after nine, two FBI agents came. On Sunday, for God's sake. She made them wait until nine-thirty before she let them in. She didn't know if they were the same agents Wardell had spoken so disparagingly of. If not, they easily could have been, except that the whole time they were there only one of them spoke, the tall thin one. The one with the bodybuilder's physique wrote things down in a little black notebook.

“You're interfering with a police investigation,” the tall one said.

“I don't believe I am,” she said. “Plus, you're not police, you're—”

“We're special agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We're assisting with, and coordinating, an interstate investigation being conducted by a number of police jurisdictions. Nonpolice participation is interference … and it's not welcome.”

“What, specifically, are you asking that I stop doing?”

“It's not a request,” he said. “It's a directive.”

“About what, specifically? Not to talk to my own uncle? Not to bring what I believe to be helpful information to an investigating officer? Not to walk around a golf course in the rain and trip over a body? What?”

“The coincidence you pointed out to Sergeant Wardell is—”

“Jesus! The killer might change course, sure. But so far she's done
K, I, R, S,
and
T.
You think that's a coincidence?”

“She?”

“It was a woman who left the phone message for Truczik. You know that. Even
you
guys can't believe that if he called back and a
man
answered, he'd have gone out to meet him. And if you think the order these murders are following is a coincidence, tell that to Anthony Ernest. Or John Ettinger … wherever he is. Or to Michael Nolan, the only
N
on the list.”

“What have
you
told them about this … theory of yours?”

“Nothing. I've told Sergeant Wardell.” These guys were either amazingly stupid or deliberately avoiding the truth. “I certainly wouldn't want to
interfere
with anything an elite group of geniuses on the federal payroll dreams up.”

“No ma'am, I'm sure you wouldn't.” His eyes narrowed, and she knew she had crossed the line. “Keep this in mind,” he said. “A five-minute phone call from one of us ‘geniuses,' and you'll be getting notice from the State of Illinois that your private detective's license has been placed on probationary status. For that reason alone, I'm sure you wouldn't want to take any action that could be construed as interfering in a multiple murder investigation.” He shrugged. “Am I beginning to make myself clear?”

She backed off a little, but the problem was they had their own prejudged answer to everything. When she told them about the postcards, the agent advised her that if she thought the words
HERE I COME
or
READY OR NOT
constituted a threat upon her person she should file a report at her local police station. Later he suggested that the woman who called Truczik could easily have been a man. Gay men in particular, he said, were good at imitating women's voices.

Through it all she tried to stay cool, but it wasn't easy. By the time the two men left they'd renewed their threat about her license, and she hadn't made any new promises or any new friends.

*   *   *

She spent the rest of Sunday much as she'd spent Saturday, including another run along the lakefront. She called Dugan and he sounded tired, but enthusiastic and caught up in his mock-trial workshop.

She resumed where she'd left off Saturday, churning the facts through her mind, trying to identify this killer who knew her name … and
used
it. It wasn't someone who'd learned who she was just last week, either, because whoever it was had been spelling out her name from the start. And whoever it was had to know she would eventually pick up on it. And didn't care. Maybe
wanted
her to.

She considered the phone message for Truczik a crucial factor, a turning point in helping her analyze what was going on. That phone call was so significant, in fact, that making it must have signaled a new phase in the killer's thinking, too.

In the public's mind, sexual misconduct by priests seemed to be linked almost exclusively with homosexuality, and much of what Kirsten had read and seen in the media seemed to assume the killer was a male victim of abuse. But Truczik's caller must have been a woman, whatever the FBI guys wanted to think. And the person who had shown up at Stieboldt's hospital room was a woman, too. A woman who smiled a lot, just like the woman who'd been at Bunko's when Kanowski was there. So, statistics and profiles and public perceptions notwithstanding, it appeared that this particular serial killer was probably a woman.

She concluded with even more certainty that the priest killer and her own “Here I come, ready or not” stalker were one and the same. The alternative—that two unrelated crazies knew her name, and both just happened to pick the same time to move into her world—was too big a coincidence to be credited. So it was one person with a bizarre two-item agenda: to kill abusive priests and to terrorize her. And the person was not a stranger.

Both in her years as a cop and since then, she'd made plenty of people unhappy. Ruined their lives, in fact, at least as far as
they
saw how their lives should go. Most of those people, though, were run-of-the-mill criminals pursuing their careers, and they were aware that she'd merely been pursuing hers. Many of them she couldn't even remember, and didn't need to. What she needed was a list of seriously disturbed persons with grudges against her personally. That list wouldn't be very long. And it wouldn't require a review of any records. All she needed was a sheet of paper, and her memory. She came up with a list of eleven people and then, using no tool other than her own judgment, whittled it down to six.

Four of the six were men. One of those was a cop gone bad named Walter Keegan, who might have been crazy and vengeful enough but was most assuredly dead. She didn't think she was looking for a man, and checking out the other three men would be slow going on the weekend, but using the Internet, the telephone, and some creative misrepresentations, she did the work. She was able to verify that Theodore Kopp was in a facility for the criminally insane outside Louisville, and that Carlo Morelli was a guest of the state of Illinois, in Pontiac Correctional Center. The final man, a strangely fastidious killer named Victor Utz, was unaccounted for. Utz hated Kirsten, but he was a tiny man, physically weak, and—more important—would never kill in a way that might splatter blood all over his person.

Eliminating Utz got her to where she thought she should be, because she believed the crazy in question had to be a woman. Of the two women on the list, Adele Wacker had to be well over seventy and, like Utz, was a physically small person. Again, though, Kirsten did the work, and she located Adele in a nursing home on the northwest side. That left Debra Morelli, Carlo's sister. She was a large, strong woman, psychosexually disturbed, and with ample reason to be very unhappy with Kirsten.

A mark against Debra's candidacy, of course, was that she was almost certainly dead. Still, of all those on the list—male or female—she was the one Kirsten could most easily imagine slicing off a man's skin or body parts, or impaling him with an umbrella. And unlike Walter Keegan, who was certainly dead—Kirsten had seen the bullets tear into him—Debra Morelli was only
almost
certainly dead.

No one claimed to have seen Debra die, but there was no evidence of her being alive, either; and there should have been, given the bloody circumstances surrounding her last sighting. So the cops were
assuming
she was dead. Not to mention that lots of people had been fervently
hoping
she was … including Kirsten.

*   *   *

So Kirsten knew what she had to do on Monday. But meanwhile Sunday came and went, and no priests turned up dead that day, either.

38.

At four
A.M
. on Monday, Debra was on the road.

Time was racing by, but she had used her weekend well. Lots of rest, two workouts. She had never been stronger. She burned all the bloody drop cloths from the van along with the clothing, hers and that of the dead Stieboldt, and gathered up what was left of the pervert from the feeding room in the hog shed. She was fond of her two hogs and treated them kindly, but she'd learned how to withhold their food and make them very efficient. What bones they'd left she sawed up and scattered over several dumps. She was glad Stieboldt was the only one, so far, she'd had to bring home with her.