Darkness, Take My Hand (17 page)

“What was that?”

He nodded and closed his eyes, drummed the fingertips of his cuffed hands on the table. When he spoke, his voice seemed to come from the corners of the room and the ceiling, and the bars themselves—anywhere but from his mouth:

“I said, ‘Eviscerate them, Patrick. Kill them all.’”

He pursed his lips, and we stood there waiting, but it was useless. A minute passed in complete silence, as he remained that way without so much as a tremor coursing his tight, pallid skin.

As the doors opened and we walked out into the corridor of C Block past the two guards posted as sentries outside the cell, Alec Hardiman sang the words, “Eviscerate them, Patrick. Kill them all,” in a voice so light but rich and strong that we could have been hearing an aria.

“Eviscerate them, Patrick.”

The words flowed like birdsong down the cellblock corridor.

“Kill them all.”

Lief led us
through a maze of maintenance corridors, the sounds of the prison muffled by the thick walls. The corridors smelled of antiseptic and industrial solvent and the floors had the yellowish shine of the floors in all state institutions.

“He has a fan club, you know.”

“Who?”

“Hardiman,” Lief said. “Criminology students, law students, lonely middle-aged women, a couple of social workers, some church-group types. Pen pals who he’s convinced of his innocence.”

“You’re shitting me.”

Lief smiled and shook his head. “Oh, no. Alec has this favorite thing he does—he invites them to visit, to see his eminence in the flesh or some such. And some of these people, they’re poor. They spend a life’s savings just to get here. And then guess what ol’ Alec does?”

“Laughs at them?”

“He refuses to see them,” Dolquist said. “Always.”

“Yup,” Lief said. He punched numbers into a keypad by the door in front of us and it opened with a soft click. “He sits in his cell and looks out the window as they walk back down the long road to their cars, confused and humiliated and alone, and he jerks off into his hand.”

“That’s Alec,” Dolquist said as we came out into the light by the main gate.

“What was that crack about your father?” Lief said as
we left the prison and headed toward Bolton’s RV sitting halfway down the gravel walkway.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. As far as I know, he didn’t know my father.”

Dolquist said, “Sounds like he wants you to think he did.”

“And that cowlick shit,” Lief said. “Either he did know you, Mr. Kenzie, or he made a hell of a guess.”

Gravel crunched under our feet as we crossed toward the RV and I said, “I’ve never met the guy before.”

“Well,” Lief said, “Alec’s good at fucking with people’s heads. I heard you were coming, I dug this up.” He handed me a piece of paper. “We intercepted this when Alec tried to send it by one of his couriers to a nineteen-year-old boy he’d raped after he knew he was HIV positive.”

I opened the note:

I handed the note back as if it were on fire.

“Wanted the kid to be afraid even after he was dead. That’s Alec,” Lief said. “And maybe you never did meet, but he asked for you specifically. Remember that.”

I nodded.

Dolquist’s voice was hesitant. “Do you need me?”

Lief shook his head. “Write me up a report, have it on my desk in the morning, and I think we’re okay, Ron.”

Dolquist stopped just outside the van and shook my hand. “Nice meeting you, Mr. Kenzie. I hope everything works out.”

“Same here.”

He nodded but wouldn’t meet my eyes and then he nodded curtly at Lief and turned to walk away.

Lief patted him on the back, a slightly awkward gesture, as if he’d never done it before. “Take care, Ron.”

We watched the little muscular man walk down the path
a bit before he stopped and seemed almost to jerk to his left and cut across the lawn toward the parking lot.

“He’s a little weird,” Lief said, “but he’s a good man.”

The great shadow of the prison wall cut across the lawn and darkened the grass and Dolquist seemed wary of it. He walked along its edge, in the strip of sunlit grass, and he did so gingerly, as if he were afraid he’d step too much to his left and sink through the dark grass.

“Where do you think he’s going?”

“To check on his wife.” Lief spit into the gravel.

“You think what Hardiman said was true.”

He shrugged. “Don’t know. The details were precise, though. If it was your wife, and she’d been unfaithful before, wouldn’t you go check?”

Dolquist was a tiny figure now as he reached the edge of the grass and cut around the shadow of the prison into the parking lot before disappearing from view.

“Poor bastard,” I said.

Lief spit into the gravel again. “Pray Hardiman don’t make someone say that about you someday.”

A sudden stiff breeze curled out of the dark shadows under the wall and I shrugged my shoulders against it as I opened the back door of the RV.

Bolton said, “Nice interviewing technique. You study?”

“I did my best,” I said.

“You did shit,” he said. “You learned absolutely zero about these current killings in there.”

“Oh well.” I looked around the RV. Erdham and Fields sat at the thin black table. Above them, the bank of six monitors played five recordings of our interview with Hardiman, the sixth covering real time as Alec sat in the same position we’d left him in, his eyes closed, head thrown back, lips pursed.

Beside me Lief watched the second bank of monitors on the opposite wall as a series of prisoner photos rolled across, angry faces being replaced by fresh angry faces at a rate of six every two minutes. I looked over and watched Erdham’s fingers whiz over a computer keypad and I re
alized he was rifling through the prison files of every inmate.

“Where’d you get authorization?” Lief said.

Bolton looked bored. “A federal magistrate at five this morning.” He handed Lief a writ. “See for yourself.”

I looked up at the bank of monitors above his head as a fresh row of convicts materialized. As Lief bent beside me and went over the writ slowly, his index finger running under the words as he read, I watched the six convicts’ faces above me until they were replaced with six more. Two were black, two white, one had so many facial tatoos he could have been green for all I could tell, and one looked like a young Hispanic except his hair was a shock of pure white.

“Freeze that,” I said.

Erdham looked over his shoulder at me. “What?”

“Freeze those faces,” I said. “Can you do that?”

He took his hands off the keyboard. “It’s done.” He looked at Bolton. “None of them are a match so far, sir.”

“What’s a match?” I said.

Bolton said, “We’re running every inmate’s file against all prison documentation, no matter how minor, to see if there’s any sort of relationship with Alec Hardiman. We’re nearing the end of the “A”s now.”

“First two are completely clean,” Erdham said. “Not a single incident of contact with Hardiman.”

Lief was staring up at the monitors now too. “Run the sixth,” he said.

I came up beside him. “Who is that guy?”

“You seen him before?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He seems familiar.”

“You’d remember that hair, though.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I would.”

“Evandro Arujo,” Erdham said. “No match on cellblock, no match on work detail, no match on recreational time, no match on—”

“Lot that computer won’t tell you,” Lief said.

“—sentencing. I’m punching up incident reports now.”

I looked at the face. It was smooth and feminine, the face of a pretty woman. The white hair contrasted starkly
with large almond eyes and amber skin. The thick lips were also feminine, pouty, and his eyelashes were long and dark.

“Major incident, number one—Inmate Arujo claims he was raped in hydrotherapy room, August sixth, eighty-seven. Inmate refuses to identify alleged rapists, requests solitary confinement. Request denied.”

I looked at Lief.

“I wasn’t here then,” he said.

“What was he in for?”

“Grand theft auto. First offense.”

“In here?” I said.

Bolton was standing beside us now and I could smell the Sucrets on his breath. “Grand theft isn’t maximum.”

“Tell that to the judge,” Lief said. “And the cop whose car Evandro totaled, who was a drinking buddy of said judge.”

“Second major incident—suspicion of mayhem. March eighty-eight. No further information.”

“Means he raped someone himself,” Lief said.

“Third major incident—arrest and trial for manslaughter. Convicted June eighty-nine.”

“Welcome to Evandro World,” Lief said.

“Print this,” Bolton said.

The laser jet hummed, and the first thing out was the photo we were all staring up at.

Bolton took it, looked at Lief. “Was there contact between this inmate and Hardiman?”

Lief nodded. “Won’t find documentation of it, though.”

“Why not?”

“Because there’s what you know and can prove and what you just know. Evandro was Hardiman’s bitch. Walked in here a half-decent kid to do nine months on a car theft, walked out nine and a half years later a fucking freak show.”

“How’d he get that hair?” I said.

“Shock,” Lief said. “After the gang-bang in hydro, he was found on the floor bleeding from every orifice with his hair shocked white. After he got out of the infirmary, he went back into population because the previous warden
didn’t like spics, and by the time I got here, he’d been bought and sold a thousand times and ended up with Hardiman.”

“When was he released?” Bolton said.

“Six months ago.”

“Run all his photos and print them,” Bolton said.

Erdham’s fingers flew back over the keyboard and suddenly the bank of monitors showed five different photos of Evandro Arujo.

The first was a mug shot from the Brockton PD. His face was swollen and his right cheekbone looked broken and his eyes were tender and terrified.

“Crashed the car,” Lief said. “Hit his head on the steering wheel.”

The next was taken the day he arrived at Walpole. Eyes still huge and terrified, cuts and swelling gone. He had rich black hair and the same feminine features, but they were even softer, still carrying a hint of baby fat.

The next one was the first I’d seen. His hair was white, and the large eyes were altered somehow, as if someone had scraped off a layer of emotion the way you’d scrape the thinnest film of egg-white from the shell.

“After he murdered Norman Sussex,” Lief said.

In the fourth, he’d lost a lot of weight and his feminine features seemed grotesque, the face of a haggard witch on a young man’s body. The large eyes were bright and loud, somehow, and the full lips sneered.

“The day he was convicted.”

The final photo was taken the day of his release. He’d streaked his hair with what looked like charcoal and gained weight, and he puckered his lips at the photographer.

“How did this guy get out?” Bolton said. “He looks completely deranged.”

I stared up at the second photo, the young Evandro, dark-haired, face clear of bruises, eyes wide and afraid.

“He was convicted of involuntary manslaughter,” Lief said. “Not murder. Not even man two. I know he cleaved open Sussex without provocation, but I couldn’t prove it. And wounds on both Sussex and Arujo at the time were consistent with those of men who’d been in a shank fight.”
He pointed at Arujo’s forehead in the most recent photo. There was a thin white line creasing the forehead. “See that? Shank mark. Sussex couldn’t tell us what happened, so Arujo claimed self-defense, said the shank belonged to Sussex, and he draws eight years, because the judge didn’t believe him, but he couldn’t prove otherwise either. We got a serious overcrowding problem in our prisons, in case no one told you, and Inmate Arujo was in every other respect a model prisoner who served his time, earned his parole.”

I stared up at the various incarnations of Evandro Arujo. Injured. Young and scared. Blighted and ruined. Gaunt and barren. Petulant and dangerous. And I knew, beyond any doubt, that I’d seen him before. But I couldn’t place where.

I rifled through possibilities:

On the street. In a bar. On a bus. In the subway. Driving a cab. At the gym. In a crowd. At a ballgame. In a movie theater. At a concert. In—

“Who’s got a pen?”

“What?”

“A pen,” I said. “Black. Or a marker.”

Fields held up a felt tip and I snatched it, pulled a photo of Evandro out of the laser printer and started scribbling on it.

Lief came up and looked over my shoulder, “Why you drawing a goatee on the man, Kenzie?”

I stared down at the face I’d seen in the movie theater, the face in a dozen photos Angie had taken.

“So he can’t hide anymore,” I said.

Devin faxed us
a copy of Evandro Arujo’s photo from the set Angie’d given him and Erdham fed it into his computer.

We crawled north on 95, the RV stuck in a midday traffic snarl as Bolton said, “I want an all-points issued on him immediately,” to Devin, then turned and barked at Erdham, “Punch up his probie’s name.”

Erdham glanced at Fields and Fields hit a. button and said, “Sheila Lawn. Office in the Saltonstall Building.”

Bolton was still talking to Devin. “…five eleven, one hundred sixty-three pounds, thirty years old, only distinguishing mark is a thin scar, one inch long, on his upper forehead, just below the hairline, shank wound…” He cupped his hand over the phone. “Kenzie, call her.”

Fields gave me the phone number and I picked up a handset and dialed as Evandro’s photo materialized on Erdham’s screen. He immediately began to punch buttons and enhance the texture and color.

“Sheila Lawn’s office.”

“Ms. Lawn, please.”

“This is she.”

“Ms. Lawn, my name’s Patrick Kenzie. I’m a private detective and I need information on one of your parolees.”

“Just like that?”

“Excuse me?”

The RV lumbered into a lane that was moving an inch or two faster per minute and several horns blared.

“You don’t think I’m going to reveal anything about a
client to a man claiming to be a private investigator on the phone, do you?”

“Well…”

Bolton was watching me as he listened to something Devin said, and he reached out and grabbed the phone from me, spoke into it out of the corner of his mouth while still listening to Devin through his other ear.

“Officer Lawn, this is Special Agent Barton Bolton of the FBI. I’m assigned to the Boston office and my identification number is six-oh-four-one-nine-two. Call and verify who I am and keep Mr. Kenzie on the line. This is a federal matter and we expect your cooperation.”

He tossed the phone back to me and said to Devin, “Go ahead, I’m listening.”

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” she said. “I feel chastised. By a man with a name like Barton no less. Hold on.”

While I was on hold, I looked out the window as the RV switched lanes again and saw what the tie-up had been. A Volvo had rear-ended a Datsun and the owner of one of them was being escorted down the breakdown lane to an ambulance. His face was covered in blood and pricked with small shards of glass and he held his hands in front of him awkwardly, as if he wasn’t sure they were attached anymore.

The accident wasn’t blocking traffic anymore, if it had ever been, but everyone had slowed to a standstill to get a proper look. Three cars ahead of us, the backseat passenger was recording it all on video camera. Home movies for the wife and kids. Look, son, severe facial lacerations.

“Mr. Kenzie?”

“I’m here.”

“I’ve been chastised twice now. The second time by Agent Bolton’s boss for wasting the FBI’s precious time on something as trivial as protecting my client’s rights. So, which of my choirboys do you need information on?”

“Evandro Arujo.”

“Why?”

“We just need it, that’s all I can say.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

“When’s the last time you saw him?”

“Two weeks ago Monday. Evandro’s punctual. Hell, compared to most, he’s dream.”

“How’s that?”

“Never misses an appointment, is never late, got a job within two weeks of his release—”

“Where?”

“Hartow Kennel in Swampscott.”

“What’s the address and phone number at Hartow Kennel?”

She gave it to me and I wrote it down, ripped off the sheet and handed it to Bolton as he hung up the phone.

Lawn said, “His boss, Hank Rivers, loves him, said he’d hire nothing but ex-cons if they were all like Evandro.”

“Where’s Evandro live, Officer Lawn?”

“Ms. is fine. His address is, lemme see…here it is—two-oh-five Custer Street.”

“Where’s that?”

“Brighton.”

Bryce was right next door. I wrote down the address and handed it to Bolton.

“Is he in trouble?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “If you see him, Ms. Lawn, do not approach him. Call the number Agent Bolton just gave you.”

“But what if he comes here? He has another appointment in less than two weeks.”

“He won’t be coming there. And if he does, lock the door and call for help.”

“You think he crucified that girl a few weeks ago, don’t you?”

The RV was moving briskly now, but inside, it felt like traffic had come to a dead stop.

I said, “What would make you think that?”

“It was something he said once.”

“What did he say?”

“You have to understand, like I said, he’s one of the easiest parolees I have and he’s never been anything but sweet and polite and, hell, he sent me flowers in the hospital when I broke my leg. I’m no virgin when it comes
to ex-cons, Mr. Kenzie, but Evandro really seemed like a decent guy who’d taken his fall and didn’t want to take another.”

“What did he say about crucifixions?”

Bolton and Fields looked at me and I could see that even the usually disinterested Erdham was watching my reflection on his LED screen.

“We were finishing up here one day and he started fixating on my chest. At first I thought, you know, he’s checking out my breasts, but then I realize he’s staring at the crucifix I wear. Usually I keep it tucked under my shirt, but it fell out that day and I didn’t even notice until I caught Evandro looking at it. And it wasn’t just a benign look, it was a bit obsessive, if you know what I’m saying. When I asked him what he was looking at, he said, ‘What do you think about crucifixions, Sheila Lawn?’ Not Officer Lawn or Ms. Lawn, but
Sheila
Lawn.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, ‘In what context?’ or something like that.”

“And Evandro?”

“He said, ‘In the sexual context, of course.’ I think it was the ‘of course’ that really got to me, because he seemed to think it a perfectly normal context in which to consider a crucifixion.”

“Did you report this conversation?”

“To who? Are you kidding? I have ten men a day, Mr. Kenzie, who say far worse to me, and they’re not breaking any laws, though I could consider it sexual harassment if I didn’t know that my male colleagues hear the same thing.”

“Ms. Lawn,” I said, “you jumped right from my original questions to asking if Evandro crucified someone, yet I never mentioned wanting him for murder—”

“Yet you’re hanging out with the FBI and you said I should hide if I saw him.”

“But if Evandro was such a model parolee, why would you make that leap? If he was so nice, how could you think—”

“Of him crucifying that girl?”

“Yes.”

“Because…You put things out of your mind every day in this job, Mr. Kenzie. It’s, well, what you do to keep at it. And I’d completely forgotten that crucifix conversation with Evandro until I saw the article on that girl who was killed. And then it came back fast and I remembered how I’d felt as he looked at me, just for a second, while he said, ‘In the sexual context, of course,’ and the way I felt was dirty and naked and completely vulnerable. But more than that, I felt terrified—again, for only a second—because I thought he was considering…”

There was a long silence as she groped for words.

“Crucifying you?” I asked.

She inhaled sharply. “Absolutely.”

“Beyond the hair-coloring and the goatee,” Erdham said as we watched Evandro’s photograph take on full color and total clarification on the LED screen, “he’s definitely had his hairline altered.”

“How?”

He held up the last photo taken of Evandro in prison. “See the scar from the shiv on his upper forehead?”

Bolton said, “Shit.”

“Now you don’t,” Erdham said and tapped his screen.

I looked at the photo Angie’d taken of Evandro exiting the Sunset Grill. The hairline was at least a half-inch lower than it had been when he left prison.

“Now I don’t think that’s necessarily part of a disguise,” Erdham said. “It’s too minimal. Most people would never notice the change.”

“He’s vain,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“What else?” Bolton said.

“See for yourself.”

I looked at the two photos. It was hard to get past the shock of white hair turning to dark brown at first, but gradually…

“His eyes,” Bolton said.

Erdham nodded. “Brown naturally, but green in the photo Mr. Kenzie’s partner took.”

Fields set down his phone. “Agent Bolton?”

“Yeah?” He turned away from us.

“His cheekbones,” I said, noticing my own reflection transposed over Evandro’s in the screen.

“You’re good at this,” Erdham said.

“No go at either his address or his place of work,” Fields was saying. “Landlord hasn’t seen him in two weeks, and his boss said he called in sick two days ago and hasn’t been seen since.”

“I want agents at both places yesterday.”

“They’re already on their way, sir.”

“What about the cheekbones?” Bolton said.

“Implants,” Erdham said. “That would be my guess. You see?” He punched a button three times and Evandro’s photo was magnified until we were staring at nothing but his calm green eyes, the top half of his nose, and his cheekbones. Erdham touched a pen to the left cheekbone. “The tissue here is much softer than it is in that photo. Hell, there’s almost no flesh in that one. But here…And see how the skin seems almost chapped, just a bit reddened? That’s because it isn’t used to being stretched out that far, like skin over a blister that’s on its way to the surface.”

“You’re a genius,” Bolton said.

“Definitely,” Erdham said and his eyes lit up behind his glasses like a little kid’s looking at birthday candles. “But he’s pretty damn smart, too. He didn’t go for big changes which would alarm his probation officer or a landlord. Except for the hair,” he said hurriedly, “and anyone would understand that. Instead, he went for subtle cosmetic changes. You could run this current photo through a computer, and unless you knew
exactly
what you were looking for, it might not match up with any of those prison photos.”

The RV tipped a bit as we made the turn onto 93 in Braintree, and Bolton and I palmed the roof for a moment.

“If he thought that far ahead,” I said, “then he knew we’d end up looking for him or at least for someone who looked like that.” I pointed at the computer screen.

“Absolutely,” Erdham said.

“So,” Bolton said, “he’s assuming he’ll be caught.”

“Seems to be the case,” Erdham said. “Why else would
he duplicate some of Hardiman’s murders?”

“He knows he’ll be caught,” I said, “and he doesn’t care.”

“Might be even worse than that,” Erdham said. “Maybe he even wants to be caught, which means all these deaths are some sort of message, and he’s going to keep killing until we figure out what it is.”

“Sergeant Amronklin told me some interesting things while you were on the phone with Arujo’s probie.”

The RV turned off 93 at Haymarket and again Bolton and I had to push against the roof to maintain balance.

“Such as.”

“He caught up with Kara Rider’s roommate in New York. Ms. Rider met a fellow actor in a class three months ago. He said he was from Long Island, only made it into Manhattan once a week for this class.” He looked at me. “Guess.”

“The guy had a goatee.”

He nodded. “Went by the name Evan Hardiman. Like that? Ms. Rider’s roommate also said, and I’m quoting here, ‘He was the most sensual man who ever walked the earth.’”

“Sensual,” I said.

He grimaced. “She’s, you know, dramatic.”

“What else did she say?”

“She said Kara said he was the best fuck she’d ever had. ‘The be-all and end-all’ was how she described it.”

“She got the end-all right.”

“I want a psych profile immediately,” Bolton said as we rode up in the elevator. “I want to know everything about Arujo from the moment they snipped his umbilical to now.”

“Got it,” Fields said.

He wiped his face with his sleeve. “I want the same list we ran on Hardiman, cross-refeRenee everyone who ever came in contact with Arujo while he was in prison and have an agent at every one of their doorsteps by tomorrow morning.”

“Got it.” Fields scribbled furiously in his pad.

“Agents sitting on his parents’ house if they’re still alive,” Bolton said, taking off his coat and breathing heavily. “Shit, even if they’re not. Agents on the homes of every girlfriend or boyfriend he ever had, on any friends he’s had, any girls or boys who ever spurned his advances.”

“That’s a lot of manpower,” Erdham said.

Bolton shrugged. “Minuscule compared to what Waco cost this government and we might actually win here. I want recanvasses of all crime scenes, fresh interviews of every BPD slug who touched them before we came on the scene. I want all principals on Kenzie’s list”—he ticked off on his fingers—“Hurlihy, Rouse, Constantine, Pine, Timpson, Diandra Warren, Glynn, Gault—reinterviewed and extensive, no,
exhaustive
checks run on their backgrounds to see if they ever crossed paths with Arujo.” He reached into his breast pocket for his inhaler as the elevator came to a stop. “Got it? Get to it.”

The doors opened and he charged out, sucking audibly on the inhaler.

Behind me, Field asked Erdham, “’Exhaustive’—is that spelled with one dick or two?”

“Two,” Erdham said. “But they’re both pretty small.”

Bolton loosened his tie until the knot hung at his sternum and dropped heavily into the chair behind his desk.

“Close the door behind you,” he said.

I did. His face was deep pink, his breathing ragged.

“You okay?”

“Never better. Tell me about your father.”

I took a seat. “Nothing to tell. I think Hardiman was reaching, trying to rattle me with bullshit.”

“I don’t,” he said and took a small hit off his inhaler. “You three had your back to him when he said it, but I was watching him on film. He looked like he blew a load when he said your father was a yellow jacket, like he’d been saving it for maximum impact.” He ran a hand through his hair. “You had a cowlick when you were younger, didn’t you?”