The deli owner eyed me up and down and asked my name. The first thing that came to mind, for whatever reason, was Captain America, from the Avengers comics, so I gave his name.
“Steve Rogers,” I said.
The old man gave me a broom, and I went to work.
After a couple of days of doing the floors and the windows, he gave me a clipboard full of papers and had me take inventory of the whole store—every can, every bottle, every pack of gum. As the inventory was coming to a close, I knew the hospitality would run out quickly, so once I palmed the money for that last day, I took off again on the bike, and I lived under the name of Steve Rogers till I almost forgot my real one.
I guess I always felt like I was running from something, something that was always at my heel. I had no destination because there was no escaping it, but I was always running, and I had to wonder how much of that applied to this traveling Rose Killer. Was he running away from something, or was there a destination for him? And if there was, what in God’s name would happen when he got there? What were the chances that Evelyn was the end of that journey?
Whatever this guy was doing, it obviously threw all the investigators way off. There’s no such thing as an immaculate crime scene, I know that much. And with the fact that several state agencies let this guy slip through their fingers, I had little faith that our minuscule police force could accomplish what those people couldn’t. I wasn’t a fucking sleuth, and I wasn’t a goddamn defender of the public, but I knew this was something I’d have to talk to Pearce about.
There are many things the papers can’t mention about crime scenes. These are the bits of information the cops hold back, the ones that only the killer could know about. And in regards to serial killers, which this sick fuck definitely was, they do all kinds of crazy, fucked-up shit at crime scenes. Pearce, being who he was, had access to that information, and if I could squeeze any of it out of him it would only help me take this sonofabitch down when the time came.
I folded the Edenburgh newspaper and dropped it on the floor next to my stool. I was sweating, and I felt this throbbing at my temples that I knew wouldn’t go away until the next morning. I opened up my copy of the Evelyn Post and leafed through the pages, just to calm myself down.
It didn’t work.
The Post informed me that there had been a church break-in the night before, the lock on the back door jimmied open with a crowbar, in all likelihood. Nothing was taken, nothing broken. And a woman who lived about ten blocks away from me had been reported missing. I would definitely have to call Pearce.
“I told you I had a funny feeling,” I told Pearce on the phone that night.
“And I told you your funny feelings scare the shit out of me.”
“I try.”
“Either you’re psychic or you’re the world’s most evil man.”
“A little of both. Have the Edenburgh cops contacted you guys, or vice versa?”
“They put out a description when the girl went missing, just in case she came thisaways, but that was pretty much it.”
“Listen, man, you gotta figure out what they know. I only know what I read in the papers, but that’s not everything. They may have a suspect, a description, a car, anything. Anything to help with this lady missing here.”
The missing woman was a drinking woman, in the sense that whoever bought her a drink got to take her home. She was single, with a little boy at home. The kid was the one who reported her missing. A good Christian family had taken him in until his mother decided to show up again, but my gut instinct told me that was something beyond her to decide. Her name was Gloria Shaw.
“So far, she’s just missing, Marley, and that’s it.”
“But you can’t deny the coincidence.”
“No,” Pearce said solemnly. “I guess I can’t.”
When we got off the phone, I immediately lit a precious cigarette, then cut the new articles out of the papers and put them up on the wall.
EIGHT
Abraham stuck his head in through the long window in the wall. “I need a Louisiana Burger with cheese fries. Hold the slaw.”
“I need a new truck,” I said.
“Don’t start,” he said, and he rushed back behind the counter.
The lunch crowd was just beginning to filter in. There were maybe five or six people in the restaurant, but that number would quadruple within half an hour.
The investigation into Judith Myers’s murder over in Edenburgh was going horribly, which was expected. Their police were even more useless than ours.
The Gazette wasn’t reporting anything about any new leads or any such thing, but what they did print was an extended history and hit sheet about the traveling scumbag, a time line of his reign of terror going all the way back to the beginning. The information was good for me—I mean, none hurt—and the handful of pages voicing the population’s outrage over the crime only added fuel to the fire. I wasn’t worried about what would happen when that full moon came around.
Out in the restaurant, I heard someone ask for me by name. I couldn’t place the voice, but it didn’t sound like a lawman. Abraham said I wasn’t around, just like I always told him to just in case anyone ever came around for me, but I couldn’t help myself from peeking through the window to see who was out there.
It was Anthony Mannuzza, the kid from back East, all duded up in a pair of blue slacks and a silk button-down shirt with flared sleeves. His hair was slicked back. I could smell his cologne all the way from the kitchen. The fruit looked like a backup singer for the fucking Bee Gees.
I poked my head out the window and said, “Hey, kid, you’re still hanging around?”
“Yeah,” he said, smiling. “I’ve got to see how all this plays out, don’t I?”
“What do you mean?”
“This thing with the dead guy,” he replied.
I lit a smoke and pushed my way through the double doors. He took a step back.
“That’s kind of morbid, isn’t it? Putting your sexy little life on the back burner for some small-town antics?”
“To hell with that. Like I said, this is great material.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “Things pretty much went down the way you said. Animals and all.”
“Is that the word from the cop guy that was in here?”
“You mean your most glamorous model?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s affirmative.”
“Huh. In a way, that’s too bad.”
“Why’s that?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “It just sounded too weird to be true. I mean, how many animals eat people?”
“All of ‘em, you give ‘em the chance.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” he said.
“You going to be on your merry way, then?”
He gave me a look like he wanted to hit me, but something in his eyes let me know that he knew it would be the most foolish thing he ever did.
He’d finally made me smile.
“I don’t know. Maybe. I got a room over on Lincoln already …” Lincoln was over on the east side, in the rough part of town.
“A regular Charles Kuralt,” I mumbled.