Blood Men: A Thriller

Suction Cup Guy had a real name and Suction Cup Guy was murdered. His name was Arnold Langham and his friends called him Arnie. He was a husband and a dad and his forty-two years on this earth all ended when he was tossed from the apartment building. The suction cups were attached to him, he was stripped and dressed in a trench coat, one of his fingernails found buried in the roof as he tried to fight for survival, the reason for the staging still unknown. Langham no longer lived with his wife—hadn’t lived with her since he’d beaten her up badly enough to spend three years in jail for it. The wife wasn’t a suspect because she’d taken their son and moved north and west enough to hit the next country in line with New Zealand. Other than beating up his wife, Langham doesn’t have any other criminal record—no assaults, no rapes, no breaking and entering. A couple of speeding tickets but that’s all. He worked full time on an assembly line making control boards for motorized wheelchairs. It was an active case, but the urgency had dissipated—it’s the way it was when one case you were working dealt with a wife-beater, and there was another case dealing with a group of bank robbers who killed two people while stealing what turned out to be 2.8 million in cash. It was about priorities—and at the moment the bank robbery was everybody’s priority. Suction Cup Guy would have to wait. It was a shame that for the hundreds of man-hours invested so far, all they had were transcripts of pointless interviews and a burned-out van. They didn’t even have the dye-pack-damaged money. He’d have thought any ruined money would have been dumped with the van and set on fire, but forensics—at least so far—had found no traces of it. No currency—no red ink. All he has are a lot of unanswered questions, two bodies in the ground who deserve to be put to rest, and a wife who was cold to him most of the weekend. The job was interfering with his family life. The last weekend before Christmas and he should have been spending it with his wife and daughter and their new baby boy, and at the rate the investigation is going his son will be in school and his wife will have left him before it’s over. He’s been lucky so far in that he hasn’t missed any Christmases, but he’s certainly missed plenty of other occasions; each one his wife remembers and, in times of arguments, reminds him of. Sometimes she reminds him he’s the reason they’re having children so late, and that he’s the reason they’re going to be in their sixties before the kids are old enough to move out of home.

There are plenty of criminals on the street who occasionally do a favor for the cops in return for some minor charges being overlooked. But this time there’s nothing. The men responsible have involved nobody else. The cash, if not damaged, hasn’t been circulating anywhere. Whoever did this knew what they were doing. They got out of the bank almost two minutes before the police arrived. Reading criminal records has led to hundreds of possibilities, but linking enough names together to form the gang that robbed the bank has been impossible. They’ve conducted almost two hundred interviews already and he wonders if any of the men who actually stormed into the bank have been spoken to. Probably. Hard to know.

Schroder is sipping at a cup of cooling coffee and has just hung up from a phone call from the prison. Turns out Edward Hunter went to see his father today. He wonders what would prompt him to do that after all these years.

There’s a knock at his office door. “Somebody here to see you,” an officer says.

“Who?”

“He says he has some information about the robbery.”

“Another psychic?” Schroder asks. Whenever there is enough media coverage of a tragic event, the psychics come out of the woodwork. Jonas Jones, an ex-used-car dealer turned “renowned” psychic investigator who appears on TV giving “serious criminal insights” to cases the police have been unable to get a handle on, has already left over a dozen messages and has been banned from going any farther than the foyer in the police station.

“Worse. A shrink.”

“Jesus.”

“You want me to send him in?”

The thing about shrinks is that sometimes they can be worse than psychics. At least the psychics will put on a show. They’ll light a few candles and pretend they’re talking to the spirit world or tuning in to some kind of vision.

“Not really, but go ahead.”

Benson Barlow is mostly bald with a serious comb-over, and Schroder wonders what other psychiatrists would say about it. In his midfifties and with a beard, the only thing missing from the shrink are elbow patches on his jacket and a pipe—but maybe that stuff he leaves in the office. After shaking hands, Schroder offers him a seat.

“The officer said you have some information about the robbery?”

“Well, in a way.”