What am I doing?
Folger departed briskly, Bullard and Cluff on her heels. Waltz headed to a meeting with the DA on another case. I stood on unsteady legs and checked my watch: Ten thirty a.m. It was an hour earlier in Mobile. I blotted sweat from my forehead with my sleeve, took a deep breath and dialed my cellphone. Twelve hundred miles away in Mobile, my partner, Harry Nautilus, picked up.
“Cars? Jeez, what the hell’s going on? Are you still in NYC?”
I pictured Harry frowning into the phone, a six-four black man in a forty-eight long jacket, probably yellow or neon green. The pants might be plum, or mauve. Harry loved color and no one dared tell him it sometimes didn’t love him back.
“I’ll be here for a few days, Harry.”
“Why? I mean, one minute you’re here, the next you’re –”
“Jeremy escaped,” I said. “He’s in New York.”
“What?”
“He somehow coerced Vangie Prowse into bringing him here. Vangie’s dead, Harry. Jeremy killed her and another woman. He did terrible things to the bodies. He’s exploding.”
“Lord Jesus,” Harry whispered. “How in the hell did he get out?”
“I don’t know. Some kind of ruse. Maybe he got hold of a weapon, or found some security failing. It should have been impossible, but he did it. Listen, Harry, I know the State Police will be handling it, but could you take a look at the Institute, find out how –”
“Did you tell them, Cars? Did you tell them he’s your brother?”
I couldn’t find my breath. The day seemed to come crashing in and my eyes filled with tears. I gasped, wiped my face on my shoulder. Waited for Harry to tear into me, to tell me I was an idiot. Or worse.
Instead, Harry said, “Tell me what you need me to do, bro.”
We talked for a few minutes. After hanging up, I slunk toward the exit carrying a paper bag bulging with copies of the files faxed to Waltz by the Alabama State Police. On the way out I saw Alice Folger in a shadowy meeting room by herself, watching a television like something major depended on the outcome. I couldn’t see the screen or hear the audio, and wondered if it was a news program with NYPD featured in some way, or perhaps a verdict on a case she’d worked.
I crept by to the other side of the hall, shot a glance at the TV screen. I saw a suited man pointing at colored lines bisecting the nation’s midsection.
Alice Folger was hypnotized by the Weather Channel?
I returned to the hotel and set the files on the table, pushing them to the far side. Guilt at my inability to tell the cops the truth pooled in my guts like cold oil. There was more to feel guilty about: Even though a specialist in psychological crimes, I had never read the details of my brother’s murders. I had always feared that, in reading the cold facts of Jeremy’s cases, I might see a monster, and not the tormented child who killed his father after years of unspeakable misery …
I am just past my tenth birthday. Jeremy is sixteen. One day, playing alone in one of the forts Jeremy and I built in the woods behind our house, I walk from the trees to find the county police at our house. There is a policeman on the dirt drive of our house, another at the wheel of the car. The cop in the drive is looking at my mother, three steps up on the porch. Jeremy is on the porch as well, sitting a dozen feet away in the glider. He looks between the policeman in the car and the one in the drive, his eyes pensive.
The policeman’s hat is off and he is holding it over his privates. He is tremendously old, fifty maybe. He removes his mirrored sunglasses, his face creased with sorrow. I hear his words in soft groupings.
“I’m so sorry, ma’am …
“The coroner’s there now, no need for you to see such a …
“We’ll find this madman, ma’am, this person …”
I look to the police car and see the second policeman through the open car door. Younger. He’s reloading one of those cameras where the film turns into pictures as you watch. He sets the camera aside and his eyes study me. Strangely ashamed, I look at the ground. When I look up again, he is studying Jeremy. Then the moment passes and the cops turn to dust in the hot air. My mother stands in the yard like a statue. Jeremy rocks the glider to and fro, a faraway smile on his face.
I had never asked Jeremy about the day our father died. I had hated the man. When he left for work in the morning, I watched the truck disappear down the road and prayed for his death. A retaining wall cave-in, crushed under a bulldozer, falling from a bridge. I had a dozen hopeful scenarios.
Please God, make him die today in a gasoline explosion …
Instead, it was my big brother who finally exploded. Only later, after interviewing a hundred fiercely dysfunctional minds, did I realize Jeremy’s explosion had saved me from an escalating madness destined to end in a house full of dead bodies with the standard news bites from the neighbors.
“We never knew the Ridgecliffs real good, but they seemed decent enough …Earl didn’t seem the kind of man to do that to his family and hisself …it’s a tragedy, is what it is …”
Jeremy knew how it would end, and took the only course he could take. I am alive because my father never got the chance to kill me.
Every breath I take is a gift from Jeremy.
I arrayed Jeremy’s files before me in chronological order, starting with paperwork generated the day my father died. One of the first officers at the scene was Jim Day of the county police. Though higher-ranking officers had been in early attendance – Sergeant Willis Farnsworth, Lieutenant Merle Baines, Captain Hollis Reamy – it was Day who wrote up the report. It may have been that Farnsworth, Baines and Reamy wanted to avoid paperwork, not unusual for guys with the rank to lay the work on others; but it could also have been Day’s eye for minutiae and vocabulary for description.
Victim’s intestine, Day wrote, appeared to have been severed at lower end and pulled like rope from the slit in victim’s abdomen. This “rope” extended across the ground for a dozen feet. And later in the report: A kidney appears to have been thrown with great force into a tree, bursting like a water balloon. Fragments were on the ground at the tree’s base.
And near the conclusion of the report, Day noted that, “the scene seemed one of total anger. The feeling was of a threshold crossed, some form of decision acted on.”
It took an hour to read Jim Day’s details and descriptions. When finished, I was soaked in sweat and my hands shook, forced to experience the crime as it unfolded. I’d heard the screams for mercy, smelled the cut-copper reek of flowing blood. My mind’s-eye watched my brother cut my father apart with a knife I’d used to slice bologna.
I blotted sweat from my brow and pushed aside the six-inch-tall stack of copies generated by Jeremy’s remaining murders of the five innocent women. I’d get to them later.
Tomorrow for sure.
Twilight painted the air a clean and fragile blue as Jeremy Ridgecliff rode a subway car downtown. He was feigning sleep while shooting sidelong glances at his quarry, a pasty little man, fortyish and balding. He was dressed in khakis and a gray wool cardigan, and had wary, flickering eyes that often shot to the tattered briefcase locked beneath his arm.
Jeremy had spent the afternoon wandering in the library, never going too far from the Political Science stacks and the Archived Newspapers: Cheese for a very special kind of mouse.
Had he found one?
Jeremy had watched the man working in a carrel, muttering to himself and making