The Cruelest Cut (14 page)

Deputy Chief Dick had stormed from the meeting after ordering Jack not to talk to the news media without consulting him first, and then hurried down the hallway toward the main Civic Center building. Liddell chuckled at the retreating gangly figure.

“What's so funny?” Jack asked.

“Double Dick getting mad and running out of his office,” Liddell said and laughed even harder.

“Don't laugh too hard, gentlemen,” Captain Franklin said, coming up behind them. “It's not over yet.” Franklin told the men to meet him in the chief's complex in five minutes, then stepped back into the meeting room with the chief and closed the door.

“How does the captain do that?” Liddell whispered. “One minute he's not there, and the next minute he's right on top of you. Spooky, that's what it is.”

Jack wasn't concerned about Franklin. He was worried about what Franklin had said. Chief Pope had looked worried, and Franklin had been complacent during their meeting. That wasn't in the nature of either of them. The only thing Jack could deduce from their behavior and the aggressive behavior of Double Dick was something that he couldn't bear thinking about.
Chief Double Dick,
Jack thought, then pushed the thought away. His dad had taught him that you don't worry about things you have no control over. But if he had a chance, he would deep-six any plans Double Dick had of becoming chief of police.

He and Liddell headed for the next meeting. More and more, that was what police work was becoming. A bunch of meetings with people who had nothing more to worry about than what the news media was going to say. It was no wonder the older cops were retiring in droves.

 

“How bad is it?” Franklin asked Chief Pope.

Pope was seated at Deputy Chief Dick's desk, and Franklin sat on the edge of the big desk. Pope looked at his detective captain and wondered what would happen when they had both been replaced by the mayor's men. Well, at least Captain Franklin was safe as far as rank and pay were concerned, since captain was a merit system rank. His own position as chief was less tenable, however, and he would go back to his former rank of lieutenant when he was no longer the chief.

The irony of it was he had never been interested in making rank, so he had stopped testing at the rank of lieutenant. Then he had been appointed by the previous mayor to the position of chief of police. In the ten years he had held the position, he had never been inclined to test for rank. Now he would pay for that.

But his thirty-plus years on the department had been good for the most part, and he had no big regrets. He could step down while he was still the chief and pull the pin on his badge—retire.
But what about these poor guys?
he thought.

“Charles,” he said, always opting to use first names when they were alone, “this is what's going to happen.” And he told Captain Franklin what he knew of the mayor's plan. When he was finished, he took a deep breath and asked, “Would you like to be reassigned anywhere while I still have the authority to do it?”

Franklin shook his head. “Believe it or not, I still have faith in these guys,” he said more confidently than he felt.

“I've got faith, too,” Pope said. “But the cold facts are that Hensley is going to replace me regardless of the outcome of this case.”

Franklin was silent. He knew Pope was right.

 

Garcia had given them their first solid connection in these cases, but it wasn't one that Jack would have preferred. It was bad enough when he suspected the killings were aimed at him, but now it appeared that these particular victims had been targeted because of their connection to him in the news media.

They were back in the chief's conference room, and Garcia had put a city map up on one wall. Over this she had pinned a clear sheet of plastic. All the locations of the murders were marked with red grease pencil. Jack started to correct her, to tell her that the actual scene of Timmy Ryan's death was where the fishing rod was found and that Timmy Ryan's body had been carried to the place it was found, but he didn't want to interrupt her thought process.

“And down the side here I've put pictures of the victims along with a few photos of the scenes,” she said. “I thought this would help you visualize the cases as a whole instead of individually.”

Liddell put his arm around her thin shoulders. “I love this little gal,” he said with a grin.

“Don't break her, Liddell,” Jack said.

“Sorry,” he said, and sat down.

Garcia pointed to another display. This one was complete with photocopies of the notes that had been received by Maddy Brooks at Channel Six and those found with the bodies.

“These are the notes. As you can see, the notes sent to Maddy Brooks are slightly more complete than the ones found with the bodies.”

“He likes her,” Liddell suggested.

“Well, I think it might be deeper than that,” Garcia said, and then stopped as if she had overstepped her duties. “I mean, I had some, uh, thoughts on something else.”

“Go ahead, Angelina,” Jack said.

“Call me Garcia,” she said, then, “Well, this is going to sound crazy.”

“This whole thing is crazy,” Jack reminded her. “Go ahead.”

She picked up one of the Mother Goose books that Jack had gotten from Katie and flipped to the back where there was a foldout map of Mother Goose Land. “I found this in the back of this book and, well, it struck me as kind of, I don't know, kind of important.”

Jack and Liddell looked at the colorful map complete with characters, houses, Humpty Dumpty's great fall, haystacks, and all the other rhymes in Mother Goose's world come to life. Jack saw what she meant in a heartbeat.

“Can we blow that up to a bigger size?” he asked her.

She reached behind her and unrolled a poster-sized transparency copy of the map. She then put the transparency over the city map marked with all the scenes, and it all came together.

There at the top of the map was Punch and Judy, not quite directly over the house of Anne and Don Lewis, but close enough. Near Jack's cabin was the setting where Tommy Tittlemouse was fishing in a large ditch. The Old Woman in a Shoe was to the west.

“Where's Little Nancy Etticoat?” Liddell asked. He had caught on easily.

“Yeah,” Garcia said sadly, “that's where I kind of lost my idea.”

Jack had been studying the map. He said to Liddell, “Do you have the address for Tisha Carter? Her home address?”

Garcia pointed to the lists of victims and witnesses she had pinned to the board. “Her address is in those apartments near Green River Road and Bellemeade Avenue,” she said.

Jack lifted the Mother Goose map, found Tisha's apartment on the city map, and marked it with the grease pencil. When he overlaid the Mother Goose map on the city map, Tisha's apartment location showed through, but there was nothing on the Mother Goose map associated with it.

“Wow!” Liddell remarked. “Why didn't I think of that?”

“Bite me,” Jack said, then, “Sorry, Garcia.”

“If you hadn't said it, I would have,” she said, surprising both men.

“He says you are to go right in,” the mayor's secretary said to the angry deputy chief.

Dick ignored her and pushed through the mayor's inner office door. “You've got to appoint me now, Thatcher,” he said.

Mayor Thatcher Hensley sat behind his desk and leaned back in his comfortable leather chair, a smile playing on his lips. He was used to the deputy chief's tirades. He also knew that Chief Pope was currently occupying the deputy chief's office space after lending his own several offices to the investigative team working on the recent slayings. He had to hand it to Pope. It was a gutsy move to kick Dick out of his own office. But he knew what Richard Dick had overlooked. He knew that it was the move of a desperate man. Pope knew he was out on the plank, and all it would take is one small shove.

“Calm yourself, Richard,” he said. “Have a seat.”

Dick hated it when the mayor was condescending like this, and that was exactly how he took the mayor's cool and calm demeanor when everything they had planned was going to hell. He wondered again how he could have ever tied his career to this priggish, spoiled, rich kid.

“Well, you won't be calm when you hear the chief's new plan, Thatcher. I can tell you that,” Dick said hotly.

Mayor Hensley leaned forward, elbows on his desktop, fingers steepled. “Tell me.”

 

“What the hell do you mean, she won't interview me?” Thatcher Hensley yelled.

Deputy Chief of Police Richard Dick smirked at his boss. He was glad to see the man humbled, even if it was just a little.
Now who needs to remain calm?
But it was not a time to gloat. It was important that they regain control of the situation.

“Thatcher, she's just one station. We still have good contacts with the other television, print, and radio media,” Dick said.

“Just one station!” Thatcher yelled. “She's got the goddamn exclusive on this,” he blustered, “and it's your fault, Dick! It's all your fault!”

“Now wait a minute. I'm not the only one that decided to let her tag along with Murphy,” Dick protested. He could see where this was going, and he didn't need the mayor looking for plausible deniability by making a “scorched earth” scenario out of a plan that was still salvageable.

He looked at Mayor Thatcher Hensley. He had known Thatcher's father, Thatcher Hensley Senior. Senior was almost as tall as Dick was, with a muscular frame and dark Hollywood looks. He'd been successful in everything he had tried and had made a fortune in the steel industry before getting involved in politics. He'd served four consecutive terms as mayor by popular vote.

Thatcher Junior must have been a true disappointment to his dad. He had none of the old man's looks and seemed to be the antithesis of his father, this most recent outburst only proving what a loser young Thatcher was.

Thatcher's lower lip was trembling, and he nervously rubbed at a spot over his right eye that had developed a nervous tic.

“We can still come out of this all right,” Dick said, and the mayor's face eagerly turned toward him. “I've got control of any media releases now,
and,”
he stressed, “I've got control of the investigation as well.”

The mayor's face turned dark, and he said, “How the hell does that help us?”

Dick spoke in a conspiratorial tone. “We let Murphy do his damn interview.”

The mayor looked dumbfounded. “I thought that was something we wanted to avoid, Richard.”

“Trust me,” Dick said and smiled. “By the time this is over, you will be able to fire both Murphy and Pope.”

 

The television stage lights were hot. Jack felt a trickle of sweat running down his neck as he sat alone, onstage, while a dozen or so people rushed about the newsroom like their asses were on fire. Jack noticed that Maddy Brooks seemed to be the only person in the room unaffected by the frantic atmosphere. He watched her going over last-minute directions with the two cameramen, marking a correction, giving instructions, nodding. While she was in her element here, he was nervous.

He'd given dozens of interviews to the news media in his career, but they were mostly impromptu, on the spot, and he was usually more confident. He had never been in the television station until recently and wasn't prepared for the “hurry up and wait” attitude.

He'd arrived exactly on time and had been instructed to sit in one of the chairs behind the news counter. The chairs looked comfortable, but in reality they were so worn with use that the seats were lumpy and hard, and he didn't want to think of the sorts of “funk” he was sitting in.

A station flunky had rushed over to him “to get him ready,” and Jack had refused both makeup and a bottle of water. Ten minutes later, under the hot lights, he now wished he had taken the water. If they didn't get this interview over soon, he would melt into a little puddle.

Maddy came over exuding phony gratitude and sat in the chair next to him. The stage set was divided into two areas by the long, curved, desktop. To Jack's right was the main stage where the news anchor team would start the session, and then the cameras would commit to Jack and Maddy. Or, at least, this is what Jack imagined.

“You look great, Jack,” Maddy said, smoothing his jacket lapels and repositioning his clip-on microphone.

He wanted to say “bite me” and get up and leave, but it was too late. The lights came up to full intensity and then dimmed, and one of the cameras cued to the main stage. Clark Jameson and Tonya Simpson, the Channel Six news team, were smiling their postcoital smiles at no one.

“Showtime,” Maddy whispered to Jack and patted his hand.

Thatcher Hensley sat in his conference room with Deputy Chief Dick and Chief Pope, all of the men watching the wall-mounted plasma screen intently.

The news announcer said,
“You're watching Channel Six television. All the news, all the time.”

“You know this is crazy, don't you?” Chief Pope said to Dick.

“What? You don't have confidence in your own man?” Dick responded. The mayor stared at the screen, ignoring the talk.

“Did you even get an outline of the questions they're going to ask Murphy?” the chief asked.

Dick grinned. “You can't really think Murphy will stick to the questions,” he said and looked back at the television as the faces of the Channel Six news team filled the screen.

Pope wished he could put a stop to this, but the mayor seemed in total support of Dick.
Still.

“Mayor Hensley, I really don't think this is the way to do this, sir,” Pope said.

Hensley ignored him, and then it was too late.

The news announcer said,
“And now for the news.”

A strikingly handsome and smiling face filled the screen.
“Hello, I'm Clark Jameson
.” Then Jameson's face was replaced by an equally striking woman's face. The smile on her face was practiced, but no less pleasing for it.
“And I'm Tonya Simpson. Tonight, our own Maddy Brooks is bringing you more on the Mother Goose killings. With her, to tell the story in his own words, is Detective Jack Murphy, the chief investigator assigned to these horrendous murders. Maddy?”

The camera angle changed and zoomed in on Maddy Brooks. She jumped right into the story.

“With me tonight is one of the Evansville Police Department's most decorated officers, Detective Jack Murphy.”

The camera panned out, now showing both Maddy and Jack Murphy. His expression was deadpan, his message to the viewers an obvious “I was forced to come here.” Maddy smiled and continued.

“Detective Murphy has been kind enough to come into the station to answer questions about the string of recent murders committed by the sadistic killer the investigators have dubbed ‘Mother Goose.'”

The camera panned in for a full-face shot of Jack. He looked barely restrained but said nothing.

The camera panned back to Maddy Brooks.

“Well, uh, Detective Murphy. Can you tell us how many murders you have attributed to the Mother Goose killer?”

The screen filled with Jack's face, and he leaned forward slightly, looking stern.

“First of all, Maddy, your television station came up with the name ‘Mother Goose.'”

 

Off-camera, Maddy's smile slipped, her face flushed with embarrassment and anger.

“Maddy, the Evansville Police Department is currently investigating numerous homicides of which we believe some share a commonality. But we haven't said that any of these were committed by one individual or set of persons. This information was something that you came up with in your last broadcast and, quite frankly, I don't know where you got it.”

The camera panned back to Maddy, who was struggling to overcome her anger.

Maddy looked toward the director, then back into the camera.

“Detective Murphy, don't you feel that our viewers deserve to know all there is to know about a psychotic killer that is loose among them?”

Jack looked away from his camera and directly at Maddy Brooks.

“Maddy, I believe the public has a right to protection by their law enforcement officials. And that includes protection from an unscrupulous news media that wants to raise their ratings by causing panic and chaos.” Maddy tried to talk over him, but Jack had turned back to his camera and continued.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please don't be used by these people. I assure you that when we, your police, have something to release to you, or if we feel that there is something we can tell you to better protect yourselves, then Marlin Pope, our chief of police, will release the information to
all
of the media”—he stressed the word
all
—“and not just to one station that is trying to scoop everyone else.”

While Jack was speaking, Bill Goldberg was standing and looking dumbfounded, and Maddy Brooks was looking angry. But Clark Jameson and Tonya Simpson seemed to be enjoying the show, since it was not at their expense.

“As far as the name Mother Goose is concerned, you may have something, Maddy. Who knows? Maybe his mommy or daddy didn't love him. Maybe he was sexually abused by the family dog. Maybe he didn't get a Game Boy when he was little. Sick people do sick things. But we will catch the killer. We always do.”

The director was frantically waving his arms for the cameraman's attention, then making slashing motions across his throat. “Go to commercial. Go to commercial!” the director yelled, and an advertisement for some new piece of personal workout equipment guaranteed to give you tighter butt muscles in one week came on the television screen.

Back in the mayor's conference room, a shocked Marlin Pope looked down at his hands. His career was over. So was Jack's.

 

The cheap television set exploded against the floor of Eddie's room. He stomped back and forth through the rubble, crushing the pieces under his heavy camo boots.

“Sadistic?” he screamed. “Psychotic?” He picked up the broken television tube and threw it through the window. “Did you hear that bastard, Bobby?” But Bobby just sat on the edge of the bed, unconcerned.

“I shoulda killed that bitch!” Eddie spat the words out and looked angrily at Bobby. “Why didn't you let me, Bobby? What's wrong with you, man? All you ever do is tell me to do shit. You don't do anything, bro. Know what I mean? When are you gonna step up, man?”

His anger had boiled over and was starting to cool. He knew it wasn't Bobby's fault. It was Murphy's fault. Hell, Murphy hadn't been angry. Or scared. “I'll make him scared, Bobby,” he said through clenched teeth. “I'll make them all scared.”

Someone started banging on the door to his room. He could see through the shattered window that it was one of the Indians that owned the place. They had probably already called the police. He grabbed his duffel bag and looked around the shitty room. Nothing he could do about fingerprints now.

He kicked the door open in the startled woman's face and knocked her to the ground. He delivered another kick to her face, then stomped her head repeatedly until she stopped moving. He hoped he had killed her, but there wasn't time to hang around. They had to move.

 

Jack walked into the detectives' squad room to the deafening sound of applause and cheering. Several uniformed officers and civilian employees had come to greet him as well. He couldn't have felt worse.

He had ended the interview at Channel Six by getting up, yanking his microphone from his jacket, and walking off camera. It had been a soul-cleansing experience, having the last word with the likes of Maddy Brooks, but it had been career suicide, and he was afraid that it would cost more than just his career by the time the dust settled.

Double Dick had set him up, and he'd played right into the devil's hands. At first he had been glad that Dick hadn't shown up at the station, and then he became a little angry that he was being left there to field questions that should have been answered by the administrative types. But it had all been a trap. Dick had expected Jack's temper and arrogance would get him in trouble. Hell, he'd been counting on it.

Jack looked around the room at the brightly smiling faces, but instead of supporters and friends, he saw a pack of hounds baying and gnashing teeth. In a way, what he'd done, and the way these professionals had reacted to his behavior, was no different than the animalistic behavior he'd just accused the news media of displaying. Like a crowd cheering on a fight, except the crowd wouldn't be bloodied or bruised by the encounter. And in Jack's book, that made them all cowards. They wanted to see the bloodshed, but at a distance. He shut the door on their surprised looks and their calls for him to join them and walked to the chief's complex.

In the chief's conference room, he found Liddell and Angelina Garcia huddled around her computer screen.

“Jack, you've got to see this!” Liddell said and moved back to let Jack stand behind Garcia.

Jack was relieved that no one was asking questions or talking about what he'd just done at Channel Six.

Garcia had created a map on the computer. She punched a key, and the Mother Goose Land map was layered over the city map. Jack didn't see the significance at first. This is the same stuff they had already done on the wall maps. Then she highlighted only the nursery rhyme locations. She struck another key, and the computer generated a dotted line, traveling from the first rhyme to the second and so on, and when the line was complete the computer had drawn the shape of a five-point star, a pentagram.

“I programmed parameters into a search engine that would instruct the computer to ignore any correlates outside the city limits, with a secondary set of instructions that if a correlate was outside the city it would search for any secondary correlates for that particular piece of data. The program was searching for recognizable patterns including geometrical patterns and…” Jack put a hand on her shoulder.

“I didn't understand anything you just said, Garcia. But I can see the star. Good work,” he said and smiled at her when she looked up.

Liddell smiled at him, leaned in to Jack's ear, and whispered, “She's single, Jack.”

“Would you grow up?” Jack said, pushing him back.

“Besides, I might be gay,” Garcia said from across the room.

Both men looked at her. “She's got good hearing, too, pod'na,” Jack said.

“But I'm not gay,” Garcia said hurriedly. “So don't repeat that.”

Captain Franklin stuck his head in the doorway and said, “Jack. A minute,” and disappeared again.

“Try not to stick your other foot in your mouth while I'm gone,” Jack said to Liddell and went to see the captain.

Liddell yelled after him, “You don't have to talk without an attorney present!” Then to Garcia, he said, “If they fire him, I'm quitting.”

She looked sympathetic, then curious. “Is he always so brash? Jack, I mean. You know, telling that reporter off like that.” Liddell didn't answer, and she continued. “Not that he wasn't right. But I would never have the nerve to do something like that.”

Liddell looked at her and smiled. “Nerve is one thing Jack has plenty of, darlin'.”