The Anniversary Man (16 page)

Ray Irving sat at his desk with a cup of black coffee and trawled the internet, looking to understand more about the original murders that were apparently being replicated. He read some pieces about Harvey Carignan, the man whose 1973 murder of Kathy Sue Miller had been replicated in the death of Mia Grant. He found a quote about Carignan from a man called Russell Kruger, a Minneapolis PD investigator. ′The guy′s the fuckin′ Devil,′ Kruger had said. ′They should have fried him years ago, period, an′ they would have queued up to pull the switch. When he was dead they should have driven a stake through his heart and buried him, digging him up a week later to ram another stake in, just to make sure he was fuckin′ dead.′

He also found a piece about the execution of Kenneth McDuff, the murderer whose 1966 triple killing had been re-created with the deaths of Luke Bradford, Stephen Vogel and Caroline Parselle. McDuff had been executed on November 17th, 1998 in Walls Prison, Huntsville, Texas. He was responsible for at least fifteen homicides and, according to reports from those present, not one anti-death penalty protester had shown up. His execution was overseen by the Assistant Warden-in-Charge of Executions, Neil Hodges.

Hodges was quoted as saying, ′People think this is all painless and stuff like that. It ain′t. Basically, they suffer a lot. They are sort of paralyzed, but they can hear. They drown in their own fluid and suffocate to death really. Yeah, we get problems. Sometimes the guy doesn′t want to get on the table. But we have the largest guard in Texas here. He gets them on that table, no problem. They are strapped down in seconds. No problem. They go on that mean old table and get the goodnight juice, whether they like it or not.′

Irving looked at the clock above the door. He felt a disquieting sense of unease in his lower gut. It was six-forty. Another hour before he left for Carnegie′s. He drank his coffee. He craved a cigarette for the first time in as long as he could recall.

He took note of the fact that there seemed to be websites running for those who possessed a particularly unhealthy interest in the lives and deaths of serial killers. He considered himself someone who could not be easily surprised, but in some of the articles he found disturbing indications of idolatry and fixation. An obsessive and compelling desire to know what really went on in the minds of Jeffrey Dahmer and Henry Lee Lucas and their ilk as they butchered dozens of human beings did not seem such a healthy pastime.

Still - in some small way akin to slowing to look at a car crash - Irving found himself drawn back to Kenneth McDuff, the man′s final hours, the report that had been posted about what had really happened at his execution.

This was the man responsible for the deaths of Robert Brand, Mark Dunman and Edna Louise Sullivan in August 1966, the killings that were described in the statement that Karen Langley had shown him. Irving recalled the complete lack of humanity displayed by this man as he repeatedly raped a sixteen-year-old girl and then choked her to death with a three-foot broom handle. It had taken thirty-two years to finally bring him to justice. McDuff had been given three death sentences in 1968, two years after the Brand/Dunman/Sullivan homicides. Those death sentences were later commuted to life, and McDuff had been freed on October 11th, 1989. Within days he murdered again. Two years later, on October 10th, 1991, he inflicted an excruciatingly torturous death on a prostitute. Five days after that he killed another woman, and four days after Christmas, he kidnapped a five-foot-three, 115-pound woman from a car wash. Her raped and murdered body wasn′t found for seven years. On and on it went - a catalog of brutality and inhumanity that McDuff seemed incapable of stopping. And he didn′t just kill his victims, he savaged them. He bludgeoned with sticks and clubs. He raped with a sadistic fury that gave veteran investigators nightmares. He blew off his victims′ faces at point-blank range, he slashed and butchered them with knives.

Irving went back to the report of McDuff′s execution, and couldn′t help but feel some sense of retributive satisfaction in reading it.

McDuff had been driven the fifteen miles from Ellis Unit to the Walls. He was given a cell, in it nothing more than a bunk, a small table and a chair. Beside it was a strictly no contact cell, the door covered with a fine steel mesh screen. McDuff ate his final meal - two T-bone steaks, five fried eggs, vegetables, french fries, coconut pie and Coca-Cola. At 5.44 p.m. he was given a pre-injection of 8cc two-percent sodium pentothal. Waiting silently, in an adjacent room, were the extraction team, all of them attired in protective clothing and armed with mace. At 5.58 p.m., McDuff learned that the Supreme Court had denied his final request for a stay of execution. Witnesses were already arriving, and were being escorted through the main prison gate and directed toward the Death House viewing room. At 6.08 p.m. McDuff was invited to leave his cell and walk to the chamber. He did not resist. He was laid on the gurney and left for an hour before the straps were tied. Paramedics inserted two 16-gauge needles and catheters into both of his arms, each of them connected by tubing to the executioner′s position. A cardiac monitor and stethoscope were attached to McDuff′s chest. The curtains that separated the chamber from the viewing room were drawn back and Warden Jim Willett asked McDuff if he had any final words.

McDuff simply said, ′I′m ready to be released. Release me.′

In the viewing room sat the seventy-four-year-old father of Robert Brand, the eighteen-year-old boy who′d been murdered alongside Mark Dunman and Edna Sullivan thirty-two years earlier.

Over the next ten seconds McDuff was injected with sodium thiopental, a fast-acting anaesthetic. After a further minute he was given 15cc of saline to ease the passage of 50mg/50cc Pancuronium bromide, a curare-derived muscle relaxant that paralyzes respiratory functions. McDuff would have felt an intense pressure in his chest, a suffocating feeling that made him instinctively gasp for air, and dizziness and hyperventilation, his heart beating faster and faster as his entire nervous system was barraged with poison. McDuff was then unable to move, but was still capable of hearing and seeing. His eyes dilated, every hair on his body erect, and then a further 15cc of saline opened his veins in readiness for a massive dose of potassium chloride. When injected intravenously potassium chloride burns and hurts. It immediately disrupts the chemical balance of the body. It causes extreme contraction in every muscle, and when it reaches the heart it causes it to stop beating. Unable to scream, McDuff would have felt nothing but an excruciating cramp enclosing his heart. After a further two minutes he was examined and pronounced dead. Another witness, Brenda Solomon, mother of one of McDuff′s victims, was moved to say, ′He looked like the Devil. He′s going where he needs to go. I feel happy . . . I feel wonderful.′

At the bottom of the article Irving noticed that the author had given the cost of the drugs used to kill McDuff. Eighty-six dollars and eight cents.

Irving sat back in his chair, closed his eyes and pondered. He had aspired to make detective, had left Narcotics and Vice to come to Homicide. He had studied and crammed and stayed up late to pass exams and gain qualifications. None of it had prepared him for the horrors he had witnessed, but Irving - cynical and bitter though he could sometimes be - still believed in the fundamental goodness of Man. He believed that those who killed, even in an explosion of jealousy and hatred, were in the minority. But such things as this, these sadistic murders, and the state executions that seemed nothing more than the most coldly precise and bureaucratic revenge, were a world apart from most peoples′ lives. It was the eternal question: life imprisonment or execution? Was it really an eye for an eye?

And who were such people, Irving asked himself. And why were they this way? In one further article he read, another convicted serial killer stated simply, ′There was nothing they could have said or done. They were dead as soon as I saw them. I used them. I abused them, and then I killed them. I treated them like so much garbage. What more do you want me to fucking say?′

In the silence of his office, of the corridor beyond, the question was right there at the front of Ray Irving′s mind: If Langley and Costello were right, if they were right, then there was someone out there deliberately carrying on where these people had left off . . .

He rose from his desk and stepped out of the room. There was no-one else around. The lights in the offices further along the corridor had been switched off.

He felt disturbed, uneasy. For the first time since his childhood he experienced that same sense of disquiet that crawled over you when you were alone in a dark house.

He went back for his jacket, his car keys, and then hurried out of the room and down the stairwell.

He was relieved to see familiar faces on the ground floor, to acknowledge the desk sergeant, and then he was out into the street, the hubbub of crowds and traffic, the noise and smell and sounds of the city.

He thought once more of John Costello, the approaching rendezvous at the Carnegie Deli - and the bizarre riddle about the speeding car. Assumption limits observation; an old saw given him at the Academy a thousand years ago.

Assumption limits observation, and observation is for the purpose of seeing what is really there, not what you expect to be there.

Irving buried his hands in his pockets and made his way down the ramp to the underground car park.

A
tear-shaped mark on the detective′s tie. Such a mark would come out with a clean cloth and some club soda.

John Costello counted the diamonds in the pattern on that tie. There were thirty-three, thirty-five if you took into consideration the two that were partly obscured at the edge of the knot.

The shadows around Irving′s eyes told John Costello that Ray Irving was tired of being alone.

Alonefatigue.

Something such as this.

Irving was a difficult man to read. There were angles, and the angles gave the impression of depth, though Costello could not be sure the depth was there.

Costello was aware that someone had died. Someone important. People wore such a thing as if a second skin.

′Were you married?′ he asked Ray Irving.

Irving smiled. ′No, I wasn′t married. Why d′you ask, Mr Costello?′

Costello shook his head. Said nothing.

They had been seated for a good eight or ten minutes before Costello told him why he had chosen the restaurant.

′I looked you up back in June, after the Grant girl was killed. It wasn′t difficult to find out which precinct you were from, and then someone I know saw you in here a couple of times. We figured you couldn′t live too far from here if you frequented this place.′ Costello smiled.

′We?′

′A friend of mine . . . an acquaintance really.′

Irving shook his head. ′I′m missing something here, Mr Costello . . . you say you looked me up in June?′

′Right.′

′And what would you look me up for?′

′Curiosity.′

′About what?′

′About who was going to run the Mia Grant case. We - I - was curious as to whether you would learn anything that wasn′t already known.′

A waitress appeared to Irving′s right.

′I′m okay,′ Costello said. ′You want something, Detective Irving?′

Irving shook his head.

Costello smiled at the waitress. ′Some coffee . . . just some coffee for now, please.′

The waitress brought a cup, filled it, left a jug of half-and-half.

Irving leaned back and looked closely at John Costello. Apprehension? Suspicion? Simply ill-at-ease? There was something unreadable in Costello′s expression.

′Tell me what you know about these killings,′ Irving asked.

′Not a great deal more than you, Detective. Someone, perhaps more than one person, is replicating killings from earlier serials. That′s the way it appears to be. The intriguing thing to me is that of the three detectives that are involved in these seemingly unrelated investigations, you are the only one who came down to talk to Karen Langley.′

′You′re her researcher, right?′

Costello nodded.

′Well, Mr Costello—′

′John.′

′Well, John . . . you can imagine my first thought—′

′That I might be your man?′

Irving was caught off-guard once again. The meeting at the newspaper office, the message left at the hotel, the fact that they were now sitting together in Carnegie′s. He felt pre-empted at every step. This was not the way it was supposed to be.

′Well, you can imagine my reaction to the article,′ Irving said. ′You mentioned the fact that Mia Grant might have been responding to a want-ad for some work in Murray Hill.′

′I think we said there was a strong possibility.′

′So the question is—′

′How did I know that?′

′Right.′

′I looked at where she lived. I looked at where she was found. Figured that if she′d been en route somewhere then it more than likely would have been Murray Hill. Got a copy of the freep, scoured the ads, found the only one that a girl of her age might have been responding to—′

′I know that,′ Irving interjected, ′I understand that. But the thing I don′t understand is why you figured she might be on her way to a job interview.′

Costello frowned, seemed bemused by the question. ′Because of Kathy Sue Miller.′

′The original victim.′

′June third, 1973. The girl killed by Harvey Carignan.′

Irving could feel irritation and frustration rising in his chest. ′Yes, Mr Costello - John - yes I understand that,′ he responded, with a touch of impatience. ′But even knowing who Kathy Sue Miller was, raises a question. You′d have to be familiar with a murder that happened nearly twenty-five years ago to even get the similarity between the two. You′d have to know that Kathy Sue Miller had been on her way to a job interview even to go looking in the freep. That′s the question that needs to be asked. And then these later killings, these two girls—′