Brockton
KATHLEEN’S SHAKING HAD FINALLY stopped, but mine was just starting. The difference was, my wife had been shaking with fear; I was shaking with fury. I stared at Kittredge. “What do you mean,” I snapped, “you’ll ‘put in the request’? That’s not nearly good enough, Detective.” Kittredge opened his mouth to speak, but I cut him off angrily. “A killer—a sadistic serial killer—has just delivered a human finger to my wife, and the best you’ve got to offer is ‘I’ll put in the request’?” Kittredge and I were huddled in the hallway outside Kathleen’s office, and we weren’t alone; uniformed officers guarded each end of the hallway, and they could probably hear every angry word I spoke, but I was too distraught for diplomacy. “You should be saying to me, ‘We will guard her night and day until we catch this guy.’ What the hell would he have to do to get that kind of response, instead of ‘I’ll put in the request’?”
“I know you’re upset, Dr. Brockton,” Kittredge began.
“You better believe I’m upset,” I interrupted. “This is my wife he’s threatening now. You’ve seen what this guy can do. You’ve seen what he’s already done.”
He nodded. “I know. I know. Look, if I were in charge of patrol, I’d give the order in a heartbeat. But I’m not in charge of patrol, so I have to run the request up the chain of command. Please understand that. I feel sure everybody up the line will agree it’s important. But that’s the protocol I’ve got to follow.” I wanted to break something, possibly Detective Kittredge’s neck. “Look, let me call it in right now. You and your wife can stay here while we wait to hear back. There’s a dozen KPD and UT cops here now. Hell, that’s as much protection as the president gets.”
WHILE WE WAITED, KITTREDGE interviewed Kathleen in a vacant Nutrition Science classroom. I paced the hall outside, but not for long. After two laps of the hall, I knocked on the door, then entered the room. “Sorry to interrupt,” I said to Kittredge. “Any idea how long this’ll take?” I saw surprise and annoyance in the detective’s eyes.
“Probably not more than half an hour,” he said in a level voice, “but I want to make sure we don’t miss anything—some little something that might give us a lead. I’m sure you can appreciate the need to be thorough.”
“I’m not rushing you,” I said. “Just checking. I need to dash back to Anthropology for a few minutes. I just wanted to make sure I’d have time.” He nodded. “I’d like to see you again before you leave,” I added. “I’d like an update on what the plan is.” He nodded again—curtly this time—as I turned to go.
I jogged back to the stadium and scurried down the outside stairs, between the crisscrossed steel girders, then entered the basement and unlocked the door of the bone lab. The lab was empty—empty of the quick, that is, though full of the dead. The newest arrival was the freshly scrubbed skeleton of the woman whose photograph—arriving in the mail shortly after her death—had been a message that I had failed to grasp. A message from a killer who seemed to be lurking just around the corner of my subconsciousness, and drawing closer all the time.
There was something else significant about this woman, something lurking around another corner of my mind, just out of conscious reach—some other sign or message. I knew it was there, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I’d realized this while pacing the hall as Kathleen and Kittredge had talked. Whatever the message was, it was not printed on photographic paper; this one was written on the woman’s bones. It had to be.
The bones were laid out in anatomical order on the long table beneath the windows—Tyler had brought them up from the Annex early in the morning, before heading across the river for another day of bug watching—and as I crossed the lab, I noticed that the angled slats of the Venetian blinds cast lengthwise shadows on the bones, creating the illusion that the dead woman was behind bars. Sentenced to death without parole, I thought grimly.