I WOULDN’T presume to read a man’s soul. His mind is hard enough.
But the man standing in the foyer of his third-floor apartment was making it all too easy. He was going to hell, and he knew it. It was only a matter of time.
“I assume this is a sit-down conversation?” asked Palmer, not so much leading us into his living room as just assuming we would follow him.
He found his way into what was clearly his preferred armchair as Elizabeth and I sat down opposite him on a faded brown couch. His apartment faced the street and had a western exposure, the late afternoon sun filtering through half-open venetian blinds. There are those who might see God in the resulting streaks of light. Others might only see the dust particles floating in the air.
“Mr. Palmer, have you been watching the news about the serial killer with the playing cards?” asked Elizabeth.
“The Dealer,” he said. “News people havin’ a field day with it.”
Perhaps it was good that he was sitting down, because Elizabeth cut right to the chase. “We have reason to believe you might be his next target,” she said.
Sitting down be damned. Palmer barely even blinked. “What reason is that?” he asked calmly.
“There’s something those news people don’t know yet,” said Elizabeth. “It’s a card that this so-called Dealer left behind on his last victim.”
“Do you mean the joker? Because I saw that on the television earlier,” he said.
“That’s another thing that hasn’t gone public yet,” she said. “Whoever killed those four young men today wasn’t the Dealer.”
I watched Jackie Palmer’s forehead crinkle in thought beneath his short-cropped gray hair. I tried my best to see the young man with the cornrows who walked out of the courthouse after being found not guilty so many years ago. That picture was one of a handful featured in the article I’d read about him. He wasn’t smiling then, and he wasn’t smiling now.
“It was another gang, then, huh?” he said.
“Yes,” said Elizabeth. “The card we’re talking about is the jack of spades.”
“You think that’s supposed to be me, huh?” he asked.
“We do, Mr. Palmer,” she said. “Does that concern you at all?”
“The Dealer is hardly the first person who’s wanted to see me dead, Detective.”
“Yes,” said Elizabeth. “But he might be the last.”
“What do you want from me?” he asked.
“Your cooperation,” she said. “Help us catch this guy.”
“You mean you want to use me as bait,” he said.
Elizabeth wasn’t about to sugarcoat it. “I’m afraid you’re bait no matter what we want.”
“Then let him come,” he said. “I’ll be ready for him.”
“That’s all we’re really asking, Mr. Palmer. Let us be ready right along with you,” she said. “We have officers who would—”
He waved a hand, stopping her. “You do whatever you want, but you do it outside this apartment. You understand?”
“We want to make sure we can protect you,” said Elizabeth. “The best thing would be if you didn’t leave your apartment, at least for a while.”
Palmer leaned forward in his armchair, his finger jabbing the air. “Whoever this son of a bitch is, the last thing I’m going to do is be afraid of him, you hear? Because that’s worse than being dead.”
Jackie Palmer was living with the kind of guilt that doesn’t swallow someone whole. Instead it nibbles away over time until there’s nothing left except resignation. He couldn’t care less about saving himself. But what about saving others?
Tick-tock…
It was time for another approach.
“Mr. Palmer, I can’t speak for Detective Needham here, but to tell you the truth, I don’t really give a shit whether you live or die,” I said.
Of all things, he smiled. “Is that so?”
“Yes,” I continued. “What I do care about is the next victim, the one who comes after you.” I paused and held his stare. I was hoping that maybe the image of that innocent army recruiter had surfaced somewhere behind that crinkled forehead of his. “You can’t save the dead, Mr. Palmer. But you can still save someone else from dying.”
Five minutes later, Elizabeth and I were back in her sedan outside Palmer’s brownstone.
“Nicely done,” she said. “I’ll tell the mayor, and we’ll coordinate with Saxon for logistics—how many officers around the clock and where to station them in and out of the apartment.” She rolled her eyes. “Ideally before Palmer changes his mind.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I was about to say when my phone rang. Tracy’s number popped up. He was calling from his cell.
Only it wasn’t Tracy.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Dr. Reinhart,” he said. “I knew I was right to choose you.”
Chapter 66
I COULD feel the rage building and burning inside me. The fear. The panic.
No—I couldn’t give in to it. All that stuff only gets in your way when you need to get things done.
I suddenly had a lot of things to get done.
“It’s him,” I mouthed first to Elizabeth, who immediately knew what she had to do. She bolted out of the car—and out of earshot—so she could call in a trace on the Dealer’s location off my cell number. That was a gimme.
Now things got tricky.
Tick-tock…
I tightened my grip on the phone. “Where is he?” I asked.
“Do you mean Tracy?” he answered, although it took me an extra second to put the words together. He was using a voice modulator, the kind that changes both pitch and cadence on the fly. One second he was Darth Vader. The next an alto in the Vienna Boys’ Choir.
“Where is he?” I asked again.
“You know me better than that, Professor,” he said. “I presume he’s still back at that Starbucks looking for his phone. You can’t put anything down in this city, not for a second.”
“Say the words, and I’ll believe you,” I said. “Tell me he’s safe, that you didn’t harm him.”
The sound of his laughter through the modulator was like that of the devil incarnate. “He’s safe,” he answered finally. “This isn’t about the innocent.”
“All your victims…explain it to me…they’re so guilty they deserved to die?” I asked.
“What do you think, Professor?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Lawyers ask questions they already know the answers to, but I don’t.”
Elizabeth caught my eye through the windshield. Her head was cocked, her phone wedged between her ear and shoulder. She was pinching her fingers, pulling her hands apart as if she were stretching taffy. It was the symbol they give a newscaster who has a minute to fill but only ten seconds of copy. In other words, keep him talking.
Tick-tock…
“Do you know what I think? I think you’re a little ahead of schedule,” said the Dealer.
“I caught a break,” I said. “I got lucky.”
“Luck is the by-product of preparation, Professor. You of all people know that,” he said. “But yes, the gang members…trying to steal my act. They were gang members, weren’t they?”
“Yes,” I said. “Did you watch the news?”
“I’m watching everything,” he answered.
Forget the modulator. There was no masking what he meant by “watching everything.” He wasn’t talking about his TV habits.