The Christmas Killer (19 page)

When Jake arrived for his shift, there was one car in the station’s parking lot. As he walked towards the door, Gail got out and joined him on the steps.

‘I hope it’s not too early,’ she said. ‘The chief said you’d be too busy to squeeze this in during the day.’

‘It’s fine,’ Jake said.

Jake showed her to the small conference room. He left her there while he ducked into the detective bureau to make a couple of coffees, which he brought back.

‘You didn’t bring your couch?’ he joked.

She smiled politely, but it was clear that today was not about fun. This was business. Jake sat on the plastic chair she had set out for him.

‘Have you had counselling before?’ she asked, blowing on her coffee.

‘Whoa there!’ said Jake, smiling. ‘This isn’t counselling. We chew the fat; you sign the paperwork, and the colonel gets off my back.’

Gail looked at him for a moment before she spoke. ‘That’s not how it works,’ she said. ‘You pushed a journalist and threatened to punch him.’

‘I didn’t push …’ he started, but he knew there was no point arguing. Whatever he had or hadn’t done physically, there was no getting around his temper. He realized he sounded like a child, protesting his innocence. ‘I have no problem with journalists,’ he went on.

She picked up a file. ‘I’ve been doing my research. This isn’t the first time.’

‘I didn’t push Ford yesterday.’ He kept his voice even, but his blood pressure was rising.

‘But the other time? Adam Banks?’

‘That was … a very different situation.’

She looked at him. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘Me and him had a difference of opinion …’ He shifted in his seat. ‘I am not a violent person.’

‘You hit a man a few months ago and got yourself suspended. And then you wanted to hit a man yesterday,’ she said.

Jake didn’t answer. He knew how it looked.

‘Detective, I believe in my profession,’ Gail told him. ‘And I’m not going to let you get out of this simply because you want me to. I can’t sign off on the paperwork until you start talking honestly. So we could be meeting here every day for the foreseeable future. Understand?’

The thought flashed through Jake’s mind that spending an hour with this woman might not be such an ordeal. Then his mind flashed to an image of his wife’s exasperated face after their daughter’s teddy bear
massacre. A wave of self-loathing tumbled through his chest, as powerful as any leak from his ulcer.

Gail gave him time to take a breath, then she continued. ‘You’re not comfortable with direct questions so let’s start with small talk. You’re new to Littleton?’

‘Moved here from Chicago a few months ago, just before Jakey was born.’ He could see where this was going.

‘And why did you leave Chicago?’

Why? There were so many reasons.

‘We wanted a quieter pace of life, somewhere nice to bring up the kids.’

‘You could have moved to the suburbs,’ she said.

He couldn’t dance around it. She had his file.

‘There were personal factors as well.’

‘You mean the fight with the journalist?’

He let the silence hang for a few minutes, but finally he nodded. ‘That was one reason.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Banks was a buddy of mine. We were at school together, then I went to Chicago and joined the PD. When he moved to Chicago we would meet up most weeks for a few beers.’ Jake paused and picked at his fingernails.

‘And …’

‘One night I was heavy into a case, and it was getting to me. I met him that night, and I had one too many.’

‘Did you get into a fight?’ Gail asked.

‘No.’ Jake rubbed the back of his head. ‘Umm … we
had a solid witness to a major gangland hit, a guy who could put two of the big players away permanently.’ He stopped to clear his throat. ‘But it was a tough case to make; the witness had to be carefully managed, and kept safe. I told Adam about it, friend to friend.’

Jake stopped and looked out of the window of the office. After a long moment of silence he looked back at Gail. She nodded for him to continue.

‘Turns out “friend” doesn’t appear in journalists’ dictionaries. Two days after I told him, the story of the witness was on the front page of the fucking
Chicago Tribune
, morning edition.’ Again he paused.

‘Yes?’ encouraged Gail.

‘And our witness did not live to see the evening edition,’ said Jake. He could see the man’s face in his mind: young, tough, no-bullshit kind of guy. Jake had told him that there were risks involved in being a witness, but he still wanted to testify. Said something about ‘good people not standing by …’

‘Wow,’ said Gail. ‘That must have been rough.’

‘It was. He was just married—’

‘I meant on you.’

Jake paused. He had never thought about it like that. It was his fault the guy had died. He deserved no pity. ‘I nearly got fired. The case fell apart. The two gang bosses walked. Had an ulcer ever since.’

‘And that’s it?’

He drained his coffee. ‘Refill?’

‘And is that it?’ she asked again.

He shrugged. ‘More or less. I got back on the job, but it was always hanging over me. So I came here. The timing was right – the baby … And my mother was beginning to show signs of a mental decline. She’s living with us now.’

‘You’re changing the subject.’ Gail just looked at him, silently waiting, the file in her hand like a gun she could raise and discharge at any time.

Jake caved in first. ‘I went to Banks’s house. I was furious. A witness was dead. He said he was sorry it had gone south, but he had done nothing wrong. I was shouting at him; he wasn’t backing down. And I shoved him. That was all. It sent him halfway down the hallway. He took a bit of a tumble. Didn’t know my own strength, I guess.’

‘I’ve seen the medical report.’

Jake caught the tone. A simple shove would not inflict the injuries that she had read about.

‘Well, Adam …’ Jake wondered how to put it. Then he remembered who he was talking to. ‘Adam took a swing at me. He missed. By this time my instincts and training were kicking in. It became an actual fight.’ Jake sighed. ‘He came off worse.’

Gail held up the report. ‘Broken nose and two teeth missing.’

He nodded. ‘There were charges but he had them dropped. That’s what got me off the hook.’

‘Any idea why he didn’t press charges?’

‘He knew he had it coming?’ said Jake with a shrug.

‘Or perhaps he valued your friendship?’ suggested Gail.

‘Then he shouldn’t have sold me out,’ said Jake swiftly, but the thought troubled him. He had never asked himself why Adam had walked away from the assault charges.

‘And now?’ said Gail after another pause. ‘How is your life?’

‘Everything is going swimmingly.’ He didn’t mention the trouble with Faith over the weekend.

‘
Swimmingly?
’ Gail said and smiled. ‘You’ve had a move, a new addition to your family; you’re looking after your mother, and it’s going
swimmingly
?’ she went on. ‘Must be the first family since the Waltons where that’s happened.’

Jake smiled and relaxed a little. This was safer ground.

‘It’s a fucking nightmare!’ he said with a grin. ‘My mom isn’t capable of looking after herself. So when the vacancy came up here in Littleton I applied, got the job and moved my mother in with us. Leigh is finding it tough. Faith is finding it tough. And the baby’s picking up on it. It’s … stressful to say the least.’

‘How do you handle stress?’

‘Very well.’

‘Hmm, I saw that yesterday.’

He laughed. ‘You got me there.’

‘Can you remember,’ she began – they were on to standard psychotherapy now – ‘if you have always been so short-tempered? Were you like that as a child?’

‘I don’t know,’ he replied, trying not to sound glib or evasive.

She did not look like she was going to accept this. ‘Come on.’

‘I don’t really remember much. Truthfully. There was always just my mother. She was a nurse, and we moved around quite a bit when I was young. I don’t really remember my father. I must have been very young when he left us.’

‘No contact since?’

Jake paused. He couldn’t remember. It was not a thing he had ever spoken to his mom about. There were no pictures of his father, and he didn’t even have a name. What the man had done for a job was a mystery. Where he had gone was another one.

‘Does your mother ever talk about him?’ Gail pushed. She reached out and touched him gently on the back of the hand. He wasn’t sure if she was supposed to do that.

‘I’ve asked her about him once or twice, but she never said much,’ he said, feeling himself frown as he fought to focus. ‘I vaguely remember a man when I was small. I don’t know if he was my father, but I don’t think I liked him. He frightened me. Other than that, nothing. Just vague memories. I’m not sure if they’re memories or just fantasies I put together based on things my mother said.’

‘That’s not unusual,’ said Gail. ‘Lots of our memories are a mix of reality and fiction.’ She sat back in her chair, staring right at him. ‘You don’t look convinced.’

Jake shook his head. ‘It’s not that I disagree,’ he said. ‘I just … feel like I don’t really know who I am, where I came from.’

‘Who you are is made up of so many different things. Your past is only one part of that. And you’re a different person in different circumstances. You’re one person at work, another person at home. You’re another person when you’re alone with your wife.’

Gail’s voice almost tailed off at the last word. Her cheeks reddened a little. ‘Do you and your wife get along well?’ she asked.

How to answer that? Each day would need a different response. So he just shrugged.

Gail stood up. ‘I think that’s enough for today.’ Jake felt a pang of regret that their meeting was over. He wanted to spend more time with her. He wanted it so much that he knew he absolutely shouldn’t.

Two hours later the call came. He had been dreading it all morning, and when 9 a.m. passed, then nine thirty, he began to think he might catch a break and the call might not come.

There was plenty to keep him busy, to keep his mind off it, including a couple of false leads phoned in by well-meaning citizens who had let their paranoia get the better of them. It was the church service and the appeal for witnesses that drew out the whack jobs. There were plenty of people now, all willing to testify that they had seen a tall man or a short man, a black man or a white man, either before or after each of the murders. All fantasy: there wasn’t a common thread running through them. But each call had to be logged and followed up. To miss one might be to overlook the vital clue that would crack open the case.

But with each false lead, Jake could feel his ulcer burning.

Then, at about two minutes to ten, the phone rang.

‘Detective Austin,’ he said as he picked up.

‘This is Judy at the switch. There’s a report of another murder. Can you take the call?’

The caller was a construction worker in a panic. ‘Er, yeah. I found a body. It’s horrible. I just went in to clear the place up, and I found it.’

‘Are you OK, sir?’ asked Jake. ‘Where are you?’

‘The warehouse over on Poughanni Road – the one we’re going to knock down today. There’s a body on the floor.’

It stood on its own on some waste ground. The interstate was edging close to it, and it was one of a number of buildings scheduled for demolition this week. By Christmas Eve parts of Littleton were scheduled to look like they were victims of a blitzkrieg.

Jake stopped at the wooden door and drew his focus inward, trying to keep himself centred. After a moment he walked through the door into the chilliness of the disused building.

The warehouse was vast and empty.

Mills tapped him on the shoulder and pointed: the far wall. Jake nodded. He could see it, a bundle of clothing that had to be the body. He set off across the cold concrete floor, and even from some distance away he could see that it had suffered the same death as the other three. Dark patches on the face where eyes should have been looked back at him.

The body seemed bigger than the others, though not
by much. And the clothes were wrong. Jake stared for another minute before the truth dawned.

‘Shit!’ he muttered under his breath.

The victim was not a woman.

‘Ditto,’ said Mills. ‘This changes everything.’

Their theory was now untenable. They were back to square one. Again.