I don’t know why, but Chief Plackett had one of those fancy floor-standing globes in his office, a world the size of a beach ball. I stared into the blue South Pacific, wishing I was there. Plackett studied me from behind his wide and gleaming desk. The morning fog hadn’t burned off, and the world outside his window was gray.
He said, “You stand what, Detective Ryder, height-wise?”
“Uh, six one.”
“And you weigh what? One seventy, one eighty?”
“Somewhere in there.”
“And you got into an altercation with a man who is -” Chief Plackett picked up a letter from his desktop, scanned it - “five six and weighs a hundred twenty-five pounds?”
The letter was from Channel 14 station management and had been delivered first thing this morning. I gathered the chief had spent an hour on the phone with various folks from the station.
“Chief,” Harry said from beside me, “in my estimation Detective Ryder was provoked into -”
Plackett cut Harry off with an upraised hand. “And not only did you threaten this man with bodily harm, you physically assaulted him.”
“I gathered his shirtfront in my hand. Perhaps rather suddenly.”
Plackett quoted from the letter: “…proceeded to lift him to his toes, holding him elevated until his face turned red.”
“His face is naturally sort of red,” Harry said.
“Not now, Nautilus.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you do this, Detective Ryder? Are these statements true?”
“Sir, I think the camera tapes might reveal the man in question verbally goaded me into -”
The chief threw the letter to his desk. “I don’t give two hoots what he said to you. You’re a cop. You’ve endured worse verbal abuse, right?”
I jammed my hands into my pockets, looked down. “He caught me at a bad time.”
Plackett walked to his window, looked out over the morning traffic. “Luckily, the station is willing to let it disappear. I had to talk to people, call in some markers, make some promises. You understand?”
“Not really, sir.”
“We owe them for not taking legal action. Or worse, airing a tape I understand is profane and embarrassing. This incident happens what - three days after you receive the Officer of the Year commendation? I don’t have to tell you about the black eye if the Mayor got wind of this.”
“I’m sorry, Chief.” I’m not sure I was, but saying so was the protocol.
“I hate owing the media anything, Ryder. I shudder to think what the payback’s going to be.” He frowned. “You getting any closer on that case with the woman in the motel? The case that seemed to spark this confrontation?”
“It’s proving to be difficult, but I’m hopeful we’ll -”
“No leads? No tips? Nothing? This is your field, Detective. You’re our specialist.”
I paused, heard my mouth say, “We’re pursuing a small conjecture based on a phone tip. Something to do with art.”
“Is this a solid lead?”
“It’s all we have at the -”
“Dismissed.”
“Art?” Harry said as we retreated from Plackett’s slammed door. “Are you talking about whatever-the-hell that dropped into the paralegal’s palm the other day?”
“I was talking about the old guy that called, asking about art in the motel room.”
“The lunatic?”
“He wasn’t a lunatic. More like a codger. Did you want me to tell the chief what we really have, which is…” I zeroed together my thumb and forefinger.
“You got a point there, hairy and scary. I’m going to go see what I can dig up from candle outlets. Maybe this freak bought himself fifty candles on a credit card, then used the same card at the florist. You think that happened?”
I headed to the front desk, where the phone logs could be accessed. The address was across the mouth of the Bay, on Fort Morgan Highway. My caller’s name was unfamiliar, not surprising. I jammed the address in my pocket and hustled out the door.
After an hour’s drive I turned onto a rutted drive cutting through vines and brush. Slash pines towered overhead. I drove two hundred feet to the rear of a cream-colored bungalow facing the Bay. I cut the engine and drifted up behind a dark-windowed Dodge Ram 2500 pickup, black, the diesel-engine job with twin chrome tailpipes like torpedo launchers. The truck had a rack above the bed, long tubes of PVC piping on the rack. Rod tubes, I surmised; a surf fisherman.
Seeing nothing threatening in the surrounding brush, I tiptoed to the front of the house. A glider hung on the small porch, its slatted seat and back shiny with wear. I heard boats on the Bay. Gulls above. The low hum of the AC. Water lapped the pilings of a dock stretching fifty feet into the water, a small runabout at its terminus.
A man’s voice from behind me. “Freeze.”
I froze. “I’m with the Mobile Police. I’m looking for -”
“Shush, sonny Jim. Move your hands away from your body, like you’re flying. I got a .45 here. Blow a hole in your gut big enough to toss a cat through.”
The voice of my caller, Art Man. Where had he come from? The air? I lofted my arms outward.
“Listen, Mr -”
“Ease out your ID, two-finger scissors. Move toward the weapon, you’ve bought yourself a headstone.”
I plucked out my badge and ID, flapped it open, held it facing the rear.
“OK,” he said. “Drop your drawers and fart ‘Moon River’.”
“What?”
I turned to find a man in his mid to late sixties, middle height, slender build. His eyes were pewter beneath a flop-brim hat. His shortsleeved shirt was plaid, his arms tanned even deeper than his face. Reading glasses hung from a yellow cord around his neck. Paint-spattered khakis fell to battered running shoes. He was leaning against a tree with his arms crossed. He didn’t have a gun.
I felt my face redden with embarrassment and anger. “You were in the truck?”
“I heard you coming and jumped inside. A smarter fellow would have checked there.” He shook his head. “You got a few things to learn yet, son.”
“Your name would be one of them.”
“Former Alabama State Police Detective Jacob C. Willow,” he said. “Follow me, Ryder. You look like you could use a drink.”
We went inside. He ambled to the kitchen and left me standing in the living room. It was bright and sizeable, a small kitchen-dining area to the rear. I studied a nearby bookshelf; tomes on fishing and boating mingled with a dozen or so biographies. Three running feet of shelf was dedicated to true-crime volumes, hardcover mostly. A thick accordion file nestled against a copy of Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi’s account of the Manson Family murders. There was a low table between the couch and a couple of chairs. Willow reappeared with two glasses of lemonade.
“Sit yourself down,” he said, pointing to the couch. “Don’t wait on me to be polite.”
Willow handed me a glass and raised a gray eyebrow. “I take it you’re here because some old coot made a twenty-second call about a death in a motel, right? Are your leads that slim, Detective? Is it that kind of case?”
“Maybe I should ask the questions here,” I said, fairly pleasantly, considering I’d been bushwhacked by an old coot.
He appraised me with his eyes, nodded. “Fair enough. But first let an old timer establish his credentials…”
He took the chair across from me. Jacob Willow was sixty-seven years old. He’d been with the State Police for twenty-five years, seven in uniform, the rest as an investigator, primarily in the lower third of Alabama. No one had ever offered an administrative position, knowing he wouldn’t have accepted. His retirement party had been a dozen years back and he’d left after thirty minutes. It took him three minutes to sketch his background and he signaled completion by rising and beginning to pace. I cleared my throat.
“Art, Mr Willow. Remember? It’s the word that brought me here. You haven’t used it once.”
“I wanted to establish my history, my credentials. It’s important.”
“I’m backgrounded. Now I need foreground.”
“The news reports of the dead hooker mentioned candles. I needed to know if you also found a piece of artwork.”
“I’m obliged to tell you nothing. I will tell you no art was found in the room.”
“You’re sure?”
“The best technician at the Alabama Forensics Bureau worked the room. Nada on the art side.” I didn’t mention the art that dropped into Lydia Barstow’s hand, still considering it coincidence. “How about telling me why art is so important to you?”
He walked slowly to his window, looked over the Bay. A wavering strand of pelicans skimmed past his dock.
“I’ve been watching for things like this. Watching for years.”
“For a dead prostitute tied to artwork?”
“For Marsden Hexcamp to resurface.”
The name was familiar, but vague, like a faded notation on an old calendar.
“Hexcamp? Serial killer? Back in the sixties?”
Willow walked to the shelf and retrieved the accordion folder, pulling a file from it, thick with what appeared to be newsprint. “Hexcamp’s first killing was a hooker. He left candles in the room. The similarity struck me.”
“When was this murder, Mr Willow?”
“July 17, 1970.”
I raised an eyebrow. “This Hexcamp, he still alive?”
“He was shot dead on May 15, 1972.”
I resisted rolling my eyes. “Over a generation ago, Mr Willow. Maybe it’s no longer rele-”
He tossed me the file. “A taste of poison from the past, Detective: news clippings from the Hexcamp days.”
I politely studied a few articles, some with photographs. Though headlines repeated words like Maniac and Perverted, Hexcamp looked as threatening as a model for The Gap. The final and largest headline was Mysterious “Crying” Woman Kills Hexcamp, Commits Suicide in Courtroom.
I said, “From what I see, the articles are long on speculation and short on fact. Sensationalism. Hexcamp and several of his followers do seem seriously deranged.”
“The articles only hint at the madness. He killed slowly and with glee, claiming it was research into the last moment of life, the final beauty. And yet, he moved easily through society, having all the social graces, utterly charming, a gifted conversationalist, an artist who studied at a world-famous art school in Paris, the academy of something or other. The only American to win a full scholarship there, so I’ve heard. A fine mind powering an immense ego, horizon to horizon. Unfortunately, his charisma and good looks were in roughly the same proportion. He drew women and men like a flame pulls moths. But inside he was a dark force, a hellish mutation.”
“Sociopathic. There’s a lot of it going around.”
“The newspaper articles don’t come close to explaining the darkness festering in his brain, Detective. Or his effect on others. The effect may be lethal, even to this day.”
I said, “Marsden Hexcamp is as dead as a sausage, Mr Willow. A difficult condition from which to be deadly.”
Willow took a deep breath, dry-washed his face with his palms. “There’s a rumor Marsden Hexcamp kept a collection of his thoughts and deeds. Like an artist’s portfolio. A visual distillation of his thoughts on…death. It’s rumored his artwork is highly prized and moves in a small circle of people who revere its message. It’s hard to pinpoint - no one talks to the public about it.”
“Twice I heard the word rumor.”
Willow sighed, sat back. “There’s no solid confirmation such a collection actually exists.”
“People obviously believe it does. Do you?”
“I’ve heard people claim they held pieces from Hexcamp’s portfolio. They were adamant.”
“Folklore often blooms from psychotic killers, Mr Willow. Think of Jack the Ripper. Or Jesse James, society turning the venomous into the misunderstood. It adds to the mystique, provides a thrill.”
“I know that. But I also knew something about these people. They were, are…afflicted, in their way, but not given to exaggeration.”
“Who are they?”
“Collectors of serial-killer memorabilia.”
Such folks weren’t unknown to me. My haphazard college career took me at last to the Psychology Department at the University of Alabama, where part of my study involved traveling to prisons and mental institutions throughout the South, interviewing some of the most horrifying psychopaths and sociopaths on the face of the planet. Nearly every one of them had a “fan club”: sick men and women who clamored for communications and souvenirs from celebrity murderers.
“I’ve met a couple of them,” I admitted. “A guy who collected scribblings from incarcerated crazies. A woman who not only did the same, but proposed to every killer who sent her something. They were small, pathetic people. Sick, but harmless.”
Willow nodded. “That’s the bulk of them. There’s another contingent - no less sick, but far wealthier, able to indulge themselves, to collect more esoteric and expensive memorabilia.”
“Like what? David Berkowitz’s high chair?”
“Items from the scene. Or used in the killing itself. A bloody hammer. A ligature. Clothing is big. If it stinks with shit from a death-released sphincter, so much the better.”
I studied Willow’s face. “You’re not kidding, are you?”
“I wish.”
The typical homicide scene came to my mind: all involved items bagged, tagged, and locked away in the evidence room.
“There can’t be much of that stuff around,” I said.
Willow shot me a crooked smile. “Making it all the more valuable.”
“Where does it come from?”
“The trial ends, the evidence goes to a property room. Money changes hands. Pieces slip out.”
I checked my watch; I’d put two hours into this already, another hour before I’d be back in Mobile. I stood, said thanks for the hospitality, jiggered the stiffness from my knees, and headed outside. Willow dogged my heels to the car and watched me climb inside. He stared through the open door, waiting for me to say something. I settled on the truth.
“I don’t particularly know how to end this conversation, Mr Willow. It’s been interesting.”
He frowned. “Interesting is what people say when they don’t want to call someone crazy.”
I fired up the engine. “I’m not downplaying anything you’ve told me. All I could do today was listen. You were a detective. What would you do in my shoes?”
“Keep an open mind,” he said, pushing the door shut.
I stopped in Willow’s drive just short of the road and called the department. No news on our Jane Doe. Harry’d found nothing on large candle sales; not surprisingly, he added, since, “every fourth store in the world sells the damn things.”
I turned west on Fort Morgan Highway and drove to the ferry, catching the timing perfectly and pulling on board just before the ramp lifted. The ferry went from Fort Morgan to Dauphin Island, crossing the battleground of the Battle of Mobile Bay. Wreckage from that fierce conflict still ghosted the waters beneath the waves, and no matter how hot the day, I never made the crossing without suppressing a shiver.
I’d had my own form of passage over the Bay as well. Three years back, long after Jeremy had slain our father with a hunting knife, I found the weapon hidden in our family’s basement. I tucked it beneath my shirt and rode the ferry across the Bay. Midpoint in the journey I tossed the knife overboard, figuring the water had seen so much violence, one more small memento of horror would not be noticed. I’d felt better from that moment on, somehow cleaner.
In my dreams I have thrown that knife away a hundred times.
Since the ferry landed less than a mile from my home, I went to grab lunch before taking the strange tale of Marsden Hexcamp to Harry. Turning the corner to my place, I saw a car in my drive, white and nondescript. Someone was sitting on the picnic table beneath my house, staring out at the long blue of the Gulf.
I knew that form. It was Ava.
Her eyes startled when she turned to the sound of my wheels over shells. My heart dropped; it was evident she didn’t want to see me. The half-hearted wave confirmed it. I got out, walked beneath the house.
“I thought you were in Fort Wayne,” I said.
“I flew down to finish a few chores, legal things. I’m renting out my house down here until I…decide what to do with it. I rented a small place in Fort Wayne. It’s small, but windows everywhere, light. It’s by a place called Lakeside Park…”
She was trying for cheery and up-tempo. I stared the notion away. “You weren’t going to tell me you were in town?”
She closed her eyes. “Not this time, while we’re -”
“While we’re what? Breaking up? Having a trial separation? What are we doing? Tell me.”
Her eyes watered. A tear fell down her cheek. I wanted to reach out and brush it away, feel the warmth of her face, her hair. I had never felt this way about a woman; it was a foreign land and no one had taught me a word of its secret language. And yet somewhere deep within, I felt a sense of betrayal at her having kept me distant while she made decisions I’d thought were ours, not just hers.
I said, “I can’t make sense of this, Ava.”
“Maybe there isn’t any. Yet.”
“I know you have horrible pictures in your mind. They fade. It takes time.”
“Nothing’s fading, Carson. It’s getting louder. It terrifies me.”
“A madman fixated on you. That was the sum of your involvement. Fate selected you and you can’t change it. No matter how fast or far you…” I caught myself, but not fast enough.
“You were about to say ‘run’, weren’t you? No matter how far or fast I run?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes it does.”
I jammed my hands in my pockets and watched the waves fall and retreat. “It’s not important.”
“Don’t patronize me. Tell me the truth.” There was a note of anger in her voice. If she wanted the truth…
“Here today, gone tomorrow. Sounds like running to me.”
“That’s cold, Carson.”
I felt a hard prickle of anger in my gut. “Cold is telling me you were leaving after you’d already decided to. Cold is cutting me out. Cold is showing up here when you were sure I wouldn’t be home.”
Three days of frustration burned from my mouth so fast I didn’t hear it until it was over. “Just what was between you and me, Ava? A handy-dandy little pick-me-up? An extended nooner? Do I look different now you’re off the bottle? Hi, I’m Carson Ryder. I’d like you to meet my girlfriend, Ava Davanelle, but she sobered up and ran away.”
I wanted to provoke anger from her, hardedged and visceral, a volcanic eruption of emotion that might carry with it a moment to understand, an explanation. Instead, Ava looked at the sea. Her eyes were greener than wet emeralds.
“I’m leaving now,” she said. Her shaking hands started to cross between us, wanting to hug, to hold. Needing understanding, or just comfort.
I kept my hands pocketed and turned toward the water, like there was something more interesting in the waves. She started crying and I listened to the sound of her retreating footsteps and the closing of the car door. I turned when she was a block gone and moving away.
“What did you come here for?” I yelled. “Just to look at the damned water?”
And then even the sound of her engine was gone.