CHAPTER TEN

Kate poured Detective Janek another cup of coffee while trying to sort out a flood of conflicting emotions. She wouldn’t have wanted John involved in any way, but on the other hand her brother had done something good, something truly worthwhile. It bothered her that John had been burdened with such a terrible secret, but what was most distressing was that the kind of men he had feared since he was little had been brought into his life. AJ had brought those men into his life.

“So you never told anyone on the police force about John helping identify Herzog or any others?”

AJ gave her a look. “If I had told anyone in the department I’d likely have been fired and a flock of lawyers would have descended on us, demanding that every one of the convictions I’d worked on be thrown out—and they probably would have been. I’d have been condemned by the press for manipulating a helpless mentally handicapped man who didn’t know any better.

“Worse, though, word would have gotten out and John would have been dragged into a public spectacle. I’d have been sent off to traffic duty—if not the unemployment line—and John would have been prey for every kook, sleazy reporter, and religious nut within a thousand miles. His house would have been a circus and John would have been at the center of it, terrified, without me able to protect him any longer. Secrecy was essential to protecting him.”

“Then why is he dead?”

AJ let out a heavy sigh as she merely shook her head.

Kate rubbed a thumb up and down the side of her coffee cup. “I guess I can see the spot you were in. But that still doesn’t make it right.”

AJ stared at Kate for a long moment, then broke the gaze and reached over to her satchel, bringing out a white envelope. She pulled out a smaller stack of photos than she had the first time and again drew the rubber band back over her wrist.

AJ carefully took a photo off the top and slid it across the table so that it was facing Kate. She didn’t say anything. The face of the man in the photo looked unremarkable.

Kate knew what the detective wanted. She looked up and reached across the small table to take the stack of photographs out of the woman’s hand. She picked up the first photo AJ had shown her, put it on the bottom as she leaned back, and then looked at the top picture. It too, was unremarkable. She moved it to the bottom. She quickly shuffled through the stack, one at a time, briefly looking at each face. She only had to look at each one for a second to know that she felt nothing before moving it to the bottom of the stack.

When she recognized the first photograph and knew she had been through the entire stack, she handed the deck of photos back to the detective.

“Nothing. I didn’t feel anything from any of them. I guess I can’t really do it. The other one, the one of Herzog, must have been a fluke. Is that what you wanted to know?”

AJ was slow in answering. “What I want is for you to tell me the truth. If you didn’t have a reaction to any of the photos, then that’s what I want to know.”

The detective returned the photos to her satchel, but came up with another envelope, this one manila.

Kate heaved a sigh and snatched the envelope from AJ’s hands before she could even take out the photos. Kate drew the rubber band back over her own wrist and started shuffling quickly through the photos, growing irritated that the detective kept pushing this right after John had been murdered.

She hurried through the stack of photos as scattered thoughts raced through her mind. Life was going to seem empty without having to do all the things she had done for John. What was she going to do with John’s house? She had grown up there. She could move back, but she couldn’t imagine living in the house where he had been murdered. Should she sell the place, maybe do the same with her uncle Everett’s place?

She was hardly paying any attention to the procession of men she was seeing, when the eyes of a man rocked her like a lightning bolt. The photo brought her thoughts to a sudden halt.

Her hand with the photo froze. She couldn’t look away from the eyes in the photo. Her insides felt as if they twisted into a knot. Her mouth went dry as a sheen of cold sweat broke out across her face.

“What do you see, Kate?”

Kate finally looked up from the terrible eyes in the photo to the detective’s dark, steady gaze.

Kate swallowed. “Him. This is the one you want.”

She handed the photo to AJ. The detective turned it over to read the name on the back.

“Really,” she whispered to herself before taking another look at the face. She finally took the rest of the photos from Kate’s trembling fingers.

“Like Herzog?” she asked. “You had the same kind of feeling that you had when you looked at Edward Lester Herzog?”

Kate nodded weakly. She was shaken by the eyes in the photo but managed to find her voice. “Is he someone you have in jail? A test the way you did with John? Someone already convicted?”

AJ shook her head. “No. Not yet, anyway. He made me a little suspicious, but no more than a lot of other people.”

“John’s body is hardly even cold, yet. Do you really expect me to step right in and take his place, now? Is that it? You expect me to help you ferret out killers?”

AJ leaned back in the booth and folded her arms, the stack of photos still in one hand. She fixed her dark gaze on Kate. In that moment she looked very much the intimidating police detective, a woman of focused intensity.

“Recently,” she said in a soft voice, “the decomposed remains of a child were found by workers in a landfill—just a few random bones. We brought in cadaver dogs to find the rest. Instead we found another boy’s body, a more recent kill that was still mostly intact. I’m looking for who killed them.

“The man in the photo has a little boy. I suspected that he beats the boy even though I had no proof of that. But I saw the look in that little guy’s eyes. He lives in an area of the city with lots of unattended kids, lots of fatherless kids. The last boy we found had lived with his single mother about a mile and a half from the man in the photo.

“We haven’t identified the first boy, yet, but we did the second. I’m the person who showed up and introduced that boy’s mother to what would turn out to be the worst day of her life.

“Having a little boy of my own, I could understand her reaction and sat with her for a couple of hours. Not that it did much good. She was hysterical and in shock. She said her son had come home from school and was at home when she got in from work. Once she was home, he was allowed to go out to play with his friends. That was the last time she saw him.

“Her ex-husband is a drunk. She lived with her mother for a time after he left her. She moved several times. He never came to see his son. She hasn’t seen him in years. He lives out of state, now. She had one ex-boyfriend who was a womanizer and had simply moved on to other women. She couldn’t imagine anyone having a grudge against her, or who hated her. She seemed like a quiet woman, minding her own business, with a job, doing her best to make ends meet.”

AJ turned the stack of photos in her hand, showing Kate the one on top, the one that had rattled her. “The only reason I even interviewed this guy is because he called the sanitation department complaining about his trash not being picked up. That put him on our radar. It was simply another of many clues that we routinely follow up.

“He seemed like nothing more than an irritated guy who works nights as a tractor-trailer mechanic and wanted his trash picked up on schedule. I told him that I was questioning him because I wanted to know if he could tell me anything unusual about the sanitation workers who picked up his trash. A few of them made me suspicious. He said he only knew that they missed his trash a lot and he wanted something done about it.

“So, you tell me, Kate. What would you like me to do about the man in that photo? What should I do about you picking him out? Should I just forget about him until someone else’s child is murdered? Let another life be cut short? Let another mother have to go through that kind of hell?

“Should I pretend you didn’t have a reaction to that photo in the hope that maybe we’ll catch the killer after he kills the next boy, or after he kills a few more? Maybe we’ll find a good lead, then. Is that okay with you? Should I forget about the guy you just identified because John’s body isn’t even buried yet and instead wait for some more bodies to show up?

“You tell me, Kate. Is that what you want me to do?”

“No, of course not,” Kate said in a quiet voice as she cleared her throat. “I don’t want him to hurt anyone else.”

“Well neither do I. John was just like you. He didn’t want those men to hurt anyone else, either.”