Creatures of Appetite (23 page)

C
harlie “Bird” Parker
wailed away at his classic “Now’s The Time,” Thorne’s personal favorite composition from the Bird. In fact, when the song ended, Thorne skipped back and played it again, so far five times in a row, waiting for the “Bird” to bring him home.

Thorne moved the white queen to block the dark knight that threatened the white king. He turned the board around to consider it from the black side. Thorne made another move and put the dark rook in position. He spun the board and examined the white position. Other than to move chess pieces, Thorne had not stirred from his desk for hours.

“Agent Thorne?”

Thorne glanced up to see Johnson staring at him.

“What?”

“It’s one o’clock in the morning.”

“So?”

Thorne moved his white queen again, countering the black attack. He spun the board back around.

“So, uh,” Johnson stuttered, “Norm’s been gone for awhile and … I think I’m gonna go home now.”

“So go.”

Johnson blinked. He turned and went back to his desk. Norm had said to stick around as long as the fibbie did and it sure didn’t look like he was going to able leave any time soon.

Thorne made his final move with a dark knight. He leaned back.

Checkmate.

Fucking checkmate.

Black wins.

It’s over.

“FUCK!”

Thorne angrily swept the chessboard off of the table. He stood and kicked a desk chair across the room. Johnson, startled by the sudden noise, ran over from his desk and stopped a few feet away from the FBI agent, struck dumb by the sight of Thorne in a rage.

“MOTHERFUCKER! COCKSUCKER!” Thorne pounded the table with his fist. He noticed Johnson.

“You know what REALLY bothers me about this whole fucking thing?” Thorne said. “Besides everything? Look at this, fucking look at this,” Thorne pointed at the map of Nebraska.

“The first kill was WAY over here, in North Platte, hundreds of miles away from where McNeil lives. What’s the first rule, what’s the first thing they hammer into your skull at the academy?”

“What?”

“First rule in school, serial killers start close to home and work out. That’s how it is, ninety-five percent of the time. But not our Iceman, he’s onto us, knows the rules already, seen the movies, knows every contact leaves a trace, knows to leave false forensics, knows basically what we look for and for some reason went backwards to end up ten miles away from where he lived.”

“But …”

“Question one. You think McNeil was that smart? Answer, no, he was not. Question two. Where was he really going? What was he working towards? Was his goal to kill little girls until he got to his neighborhood and then take his own life? And if so, why?”

“Well, he must have known that we were onto him.”

“How? How could he fucking know what we were doing? Look at the Iceman’s pattern. A straight, very nearly evidence-free line to Denton, Nebraska. We get to Denton and a fingerprint is LITERALLY dropped at our doorstep. A fingerprint that leads to a suspect that ALMOST fits the profile, a suspect who is very conveniently dead as Dillinger AND has a house full of evidence. Question three. Is every number and decimal point in this equation accounted for? Answer. No. It doesn’t fucking add up.”

“But we got him, right?”

“You … NOT listening. McNeil … NOT smart enough. Why are you still here? Go home. Get the fuck out of here!”

Johnson walked quickly back to his desk, anxious to get away from Thorne, reflexively grabbing recently arrived faxes from the fax machine. Thorne was definitely a grumpy scary fucker and Johnson just knew he was going to be stuck here all night with this cuckoo.

Thorne kicked his desk. He stalked over to the map of Nebraska and glared at it. Charlie “Bird” Parker worked on his temper and Thorne finally relaxed and sighed. Thorne noticed a computer printer next to one of the desks.

It was an Epson Stylus 700.

“I am a fucking simpleton,” Thorne said to himself. “Johnson!”

Johnson popped back up like a prairie dog, too scared to disobey.

“Who uses this printer?”

“Everybody on this side of the room, Agent Kane, Gerry, Jeff, you. Andy. Me. Why?” Johnson blew a sigh, wondering when this night would be over and he would be quit of this whacko fed. He flipped through the faxes in his hand.

“Why?” Thorne grabbed his jacket. “We’re a long way past why! I need a car and I need it now, Johnson!”

Johnson, suddenly startled by one of the faxes in his hand, froze before he could answer.

“Johnson! You’re not listening again! What is it?”

“This came in an hour ago and it’s probably a joke, but …”

Eyes narrowing, Thorne swiped the paper from Johnson. He read it and looked up at Johnson.

“Can you find whose number this is?”

“Yeah, I just have to …”

“Do it!”

Johnson scurried off.

Thorne looked at the fax again. Scrawled in large block letters, it read:

TO: THORNE

FR: ICEMAN

RE: THE HEARTLAND CHILD MURDERS

DEAR FEDERAL JAGOFF,

TASTE NEEDS TO BE TAUGHT.

Thorne dug into his pocket for his cell phone.

“Shit,” Thorne said. “Kane.”

T
he noise
of the storm woke Kane.

She was wrapped in Scroggins’s arms in his bed, naked and warm under several quilts and a thick comforter. Kane did get to see his bedroom after all and it was everything she thought it would be. Kane glanced at the alarm clock on the table next to the bed. Half past one and the blizzard was still going strong.

Kane looked at Scroggins asleep next to her. He snored and though it was a bit loud, it was kind of cute, too. She gently moved his arms off of her and slid out of bed. Scroggins snorted and rolled over on his side away from her. He wrapped the comforter around him and snored even louder.

This noise might be a problem in the future, if we have one. Don’t want to think about that now, Kane thought. Great sex, great release and that’s good enough. For now.

Kane sat on the bed and fished for her panties under the covers. In the movies people always seemed wake up after a marathon sex session still clad, magically, in their underwear. Kane had to look for hers and in the dark, too.

Her panties were the only article of clothing to make the trip upstairs to the bedroom, everything else got left downstairs on the couch when Gerry scooped her up in his arms and carried her to bed. She finally found her panties and slid them on. Putting on one of his T-shirts, Kane padded out of the bedroom.

There’s another bathroom up here, if she remembered correctly, right down the hall from the bedroom. Kane found it and sat on the toilet without turning on the light. Kane peed and giggled at herself. I’m already comfortable enough here that I use the bathroom with the door open, she thought.

Kane flushed the toilet and stepped out of the bathroom. She heard a strange noise downstairs and stopped before going back to the bedroom. She tiptoed to the stairs and peeked down to the lower landing.

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The fire in the fireplace had burned itself down to glowing embers. Kane heard it again, the noise, a low buzzing noise. Her weapon lay on the coffee table where she’d left it. She tiptoed downstairs to the living room.

The buzzing noise got louder. Kane picked up her pistol and searched for the source. The light on the alarm panel next to the front door was still green. Okay, she thought, that means nobody has come in or gone out.

So where was that noise coming from?

Kane tracked the buzzing sound and found that it was coming from her pants on the floor. She picked her pants up and took her cell phone out of the pocket. She’d left it on vibrate but it ceased buzzing before she could answer. Went to voicemail. The phone screen informed her that she had missed several calls. She didn’t recognize any of the numbers but it was probably Thorne, fucking with her. Fuck him, she was off duty.

Kane sighed and set the phone and gun aside for a moment in order to put her pants back on. She picked them back up and headed back to bed, phone in one hand and gun in the other.

Her cell phone vibrated again on her way up the stairs, startling her.

“Hello?” she answered.

“Kane, where the fuck are you?”

“Thorne?” Kane whispered. “Why are you calling me, don’t you ever sleep?”

“Where the fuck are you?”

“What do you care, where the fuck are you?” Kane retorted.

Some miles away, Johnson navigated his truck with great care through a wall of swirling snow on the highway while Thorne talked to Kane on his cell phone from the passenger seat. Johnson was pale and shivering and not just from the bitter cold. He was very scared, he’d lived in Nebraska all his life and he knew that people who got stuck outside in weather like this often froze to death.

“Goddamn it,” Thorne said. “Where are you, are you shacked up with Scroggins at his house?”

“That information is none of your goddamn business.”

“Listen to me and answer the fucking question, Kane! Are you with Scroggins?”

“You’re going mental, Thorne. Yes, I am with Gerry at his house,” Kane whispered into her phone. “We’re both adults and fuck you if you don’t like it. I’m hanging up and turning off my phone now.”

Kane slid back into the bedroom. Scroggins was still rolled over on his side and snoring. Kane set her weapon on the table next to the bed.

“Wait, Kane! We tried calling his home but the phone line at his house is out. Is he there? Have you been with him all night?”

“Yes, all right?” Kane whispered. “I’m looking at him right now. Why?”

“Where was he at eleven-thirty?”

“In bed, Thorne. We were both in bed. Why?”

Kane slipped into bed and poked Scroggins, who was still snoring, with her free hand. He grunted but didn’t wake up.

“The Iceman is still alive,” Thorne said over the phone.

“What?”

“The Iceman is still alive, MacNeil isn’t the Iceman. The Iceman sent me a fax at eleven-thirty. The number I got the fax from is Scroggins’s home number, you understand me? I got a letter from the Iceman and it was faxed FROM Gerry Scroggins’s house!”

“It’s not Gerry, can’t be …”

“It’s either him or somebody else is in the house,” Thorne’s phone crackled with static interference.

Kane noticed the closet door opposite the bed was cracked open just a tiny bit. It hadn’t been open before, that she knew. It had been closed tightly. She’d been looking at it while on top of Gerry. It had definitely been closed. She nudged Scroggins again.

“Gerry,” Kane whispered. “Wake up.”

“We can’t get hold of the local PD out there, everything’s fucked because of the blizzard. We’re on the way to you now but we gotta wade through the snow!”

The closet door slowly creaked open an inch wider and stopped. Kane’s eyes widened. She grabbed her weapon off the nightstand and pointed it at the closet.

“Kane, you’d better get out of that house!”

“He’s here,” Kane whispered into her cell phone. “I think he’s here in the room.”

“Don’t try and take him, Kane, just get out of the house!”

The closet door creaked open a bit more. Kane set the phone down on the nightstand but left the phone open and connected to Thorne’s call. The end of Kane’s pistol shook. She poked Scroggins with her free hand.

“Gerry? Gerry, wake up.”

The closet door creaked open another inch. Kane brought her free hand back to her grip on the pistol and tried desperately to steady her aim. The closet door creaked open an inch more and then in a rush it fell all the way open.

The dead body of Gerry Scroggins fell out of the bedroom closet and onto the floor, throat cut and eyes staring wide.

The man in the bed next to Kane suddenly leapt up on top of Kane as she screamed in terror. The Iceman punched Kane in the face and knocked the weapon out of her hand. Kane’s pistol flew across the room and discharged, leaving a bullet in the ceiling of the bedroom and the smell of cordite in the air.

The Iceman got a hand around her throat and another one around both of her wrists. Kane slid one of her legs out from under him, wedged her foot against his waist and gave a big push. It wasn’t enough to get him completely off but created just enough distance for Kane to free one of her hands.

“Kane!” Thorne screamed from the cell phone. “Get out of there!”

Kane punched the Iceman in the face and knocked him off the bed. Kane dove off of the other side of the bed and searched frantically for her weapon.

It lay on the other side of the room and she scrambled on all fours for it. Just as she put her hand on her weapon, the Iceman kicked it away.

The Iceman zapped Kane on the side of her neck with an electronic stun gun and knocked her out. He rolled her over onto her back, checked her pulse and opened one of her eyes to take a look at the dilated pupil.

“Such lovely eyes,” he said.

“Kane?” Thorne shouted over the cell phone. “KANE!”

The Iceman picked up the cell phone from the nightstand and delicately hung it up.