“So you want me snooping around the hospital, looking at who is on staff and trying to establish patterns, see if any alarm bells go off.”
“Yeah. You’ll want to do that. And you’ll also want to go down there.” Ness nodded toward the shantytowns below them. “You’ll want to look into it all, I’m guessing. In your files is a whole list of leads the detectives on this case have run down in the last two years.”
“I saw that. Haven’t spent any time on it yet, though. I didn’t want to put ideas in my head until I had my own impressions.”
“Well, you’re in for a treat. Just to give you an idea, we’ve looked into reports of a voodoo temple, an abortion clinic, a secret cult, and a self-confessed soul eater. We questioned a hunchback that eats his supper with a medieval sword and a hatchet, depending on the day of the week. A woman on Carnegie, not too far from where Victim Number Three lived, was reported for her collection of headless dolls. A couple detectives went by and questioned her. The dolls came in several variations. Some were simply missing their heads, but others were cut up in pieces and put in tiny burlap bags. Lots of amazing details,” Ness said, the sarcasm dripping from his voice. “She sells them on Euclid Beach as souvenirs. Calls them Torso Dolls. People buy them. So she keeps making them.”
“Hey . . . times are hard,” Malone said, monotone. “A girl’s gotta eat.”
“We thought we had a lead when one of our complaints involved a man—a Negro named One-Armed Willie—who knew both Flo Polillo and Rose Wallace, Victim Number Three and Victim Number Eight. He has a sheet a mile long, and the brass got excited. But he has one goddamn arm. He gets by pretty well, considering, but there is no way in hell he’s the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. He isn’t physically capable of it.”
“Yeah. And the problem with scapegoats is the murders don’t stop when you lock ’em up.”
“Yeah. Inconvenient.” Eliot smiled ruefully, but he was suddenly weary. He removed his hat and ran his fingers through his haystack hair.
“You okay, Ness?”
“I’m okay, Malone. Just haven’t been sleeping a whole lot. And when I do, it’s usually on the couch in my office.”
“Edna kick you out?” Malone only asked because he knew Ness was going to tell him.
“No. She left. And I don’t see the point in going home most nights.”
“She left for good?”
“Yeah. She stayed at her mother’s house after Christmas. I came back alone. She doesn’t want to be here anymore.”
“She doesn’t want to be here? Why not?” Malone swept his hand toward the rows of shanties lining the base of the cliff below them. If he squinted, the clusters and outcroppings looked like a filthy, tattered quilt. A tattered quilt in a junkyard.
Ness was silent.
“I’m sorry, Ness,” Malone grunted. He wasn’t very good at sympathy.
Eliot sighed, wrapping his arms around the big wheel and staring down into the ramshackle jungle. “Yeah. Me too. But I’m also . . . relieved.”
“I understand that.” He did. When Irene had asked him to go, he’d been relieved too. It was exhausting being responsible for someone else’s happiness.
“She said she would come back for some of the public functions I’ll need her for. Keep the papers quiet. Not for me. I don’t really care. But Congressman Sweeney keeps hammering Mayor Burton over this Butcher business. Democrats and Republicans, you know how it is. Everybody’s always looking for an angle to bury each other. But I don’t want to be a political liability.”
“Gotta keep up appearances,” Malone said, tone dry. Eliot knew all about appearances, and he juggled that part of the spotlight well, even though he’d never been very political himself. Politics and public service, even in the bureau, was all about appearance. Malone had learned that the images most people presented to the world didn’t reflect reality. Which, for some reason, had his thoughts bouncing back to Dani Flanagan. She had her own methods of getting at the truth.
“Do you think there’s such a thing as a . . . sixth sense?” he asked Eliot abruptly.
Eliot frowned at him, distracted from his marital woes. “Like prescience?”
“Nah. Not foreknowledge. Not that. More like . . . an ability to see things other people can’t. Or maybe see isn’t the right way to describe it either. It’s more like a heightened sense of touch. You hold something and you know . . . where it’s been.” He didn’t know if that was what Dani did, exactly, but he needed to keep it simple.
“I’ve never heard of anything like that before. Although, come to think of it, my mother seemed to always know where I’d been.”
Malone sighed.
“Now what’s this about?”
Malone waved his hand. “Nothing.”
“You seeing things, Mike?” Ness felt his head like he was checking for fever. Malone swatted his hand away, but Eliot was smiling again.
“Not me. No. Though I used to see colors around people when I was younger. Some murky. Some bright. I always thought I was seeing the color of people’s souls.”
“Oh yeah? What color do you think my soul would be?”
“Green. Pea green, with a shot of shit brown,” Malone said without hesitation or inflection.
“Ha!” Ness spat, laughing again.
It was actually the same blue as his eyes. He’d seen it a few times, hovering around Eliot like a shadow. Over the years, he’d glimpsed a few colored halos clinging to various people, but he always looked away.
He looked away again, staring at the window, but he couldn’t let the subject rest. “I guess I’m just trying to decide what I believe and what I don’t, Ness.”
For a moment both men were silent, lost in the conundrum of personal faith.
“Capone had a guy—a numbers guy—who could do sums in his head,” Malone continued, pensive. “Didn’t matter what it was, he could spit it out. He was great at cards too. It wasn’t magic. Wasn’t voodoo. It was just . . . something he could do that the rest of us couldn’t.”