Mania (14 page)

At last, Nick split the yellow envelope open, then tilted it upside down to empty its contents. There was only one thing inside. The police had confiscated the rest of Sam’s personal effects—his cell phone and whatever else he had in his pockets. The heavy steel wristwatch their parents had given to Sam as a graduation gift slid into his hands.

Nick sat staring at it. It had never occurred to him before how out of character it was for Sam to wear it. Everything else Sam wore reflected his success. This clumsy watch provided the only hint that Sam, too, missed their parents. That their childhood back in Wisconsin meant something to him.

Nick dropped the heavy timepiece into the envelope, then stood up and found his way back outside.

Back at the
Telegraph
, Nick was staring at the screen of his computer. His eyes appeared to be focused, but he wasn’t seeing anything on the plasma display. Instead, he was lost inside a vivid recollection from a decade before, sparked by images from the nightmare that had woken him early that morning.

Sam was standing beside their father’s desk in their parents’ study, alone in the room, looking at Nick over his shoulder, startled. Next to him, the drawer to a black metal filing cabinet was pulled open. The second that Nick had pushed open the door and wandered into the room, he understood that his brother was doing something wrong. The cabinet was kept locked, and as far as Nick knew his father held the only key. Nick saw that Sam had taken a file from the drawer and had spread it out on their father’s desk.

“They’ve got twenty-three thousand dollars in their checking account,” Sam said with a strange smile.

Despite his unease, Nick was surprised by the information. “Is that all?” he asked.

“That’s just their checking account,” Sam said. “I haven’t been able to figure out their savings yet. But they’ve got at least twice that. Some of it’s in stocks, and it’s in a couple different banks.”

“What are you looking at?”

“Come here. Take a look.” Sam waited for his younger brother to approach the desk. “These are their statements. See? Here’s the check they wrote for me last week to the admissions office at the University of Washington. Seventy-five dollars. And here’s one they wrote to your school. For soccer fees, I guess.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Why?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Aren’t you curious?”

Nick realized that he wasn’t. “I don’t care.”

“It’s only right that we know,” Sam said. “It’s important. Maybe not for you yet. But me, I’m going to college next year. Maybe I’ll want a car. Who knows? I want to know what they’ve got.”

Nick shrugged. “Nothing’s going to change if you know,” he said. “Not for me, and not for you, either.”

Sam frowned at his little brother. “That’s what you think.”

“Aren’t you afraid Dad’s going to find out?”

Sam was examining the papers on the desk again. “No,” he said, dismissing Nick’s concern. “They won’t be home for another hour. I know where everything goes.”

When the phone on their father’s desk rang, both boys jumped. It was a mechanical ring. The loud, jarring sound of a small steel bell being struck by a tiny hammer. “Jesus,” Sam said, recovering himself.

“See?” Nick exclaimed, as though the phone’s ring had snuck up on them and proved his point. “You’re going to get caught.” He reached for the phone.

“Don’t answer it!”

“What?” Nick put his hand down onto the beaten-up, heavy receiver anyway.

“Don’t pick it up, Nick!”

“Why not?”

“Wait a second. Let it ring a few times first. What if it’s Dad? You don’t want him to know you’re in the study.”

Nick waited through the course of another rattling ring, then picked up the phone. The man from the power plant didn’t want to speak to him, though. Michael Simmons was their father’s boss and, after fifteen years at the plant, a family friend. “Put Sam on the phone,” he said to Nick, and Nick understood that something had happened.

Sam’s face went blank when Nick handed him the phone, and his expression didn’t change during the short conversation. He hardly spoke. He listened to whatever Simmons had called to report, then told the man that he would talk to his brother about it. Then he handed the receiver back to Nick.

After Nick hung up the phone, the two brothers looked at one another. Sam didn’t have to speak the words. Nick understood that his parents were dead.

“Dad was driving,” Sam said. “You know how much ice there is on the road.”

Nick felt his legs begin to shake. He collapsed into the chair in front of his father’s desk. The room was going black all around him.

Their father had lost control of the car and driven head-on into a speeding truck. He had died on impact. Their mother had survived until the ambulance arrived fifteen minutes later, slowly bleeding to death, trapped inside the twisted metal wreckage of the totaled car. Her weakening cries were audible to the small group of people who gathered around the crash, gawking at the scattered mess the truck had left in its wake.

“I want Mom,” Nick said. “I want Dad. Let’s go. Let’s get them.”

“They’re dead, Nick,” Sam said. “It’s too late. They’re already gone.”

“Yo, Nick. Nicholas Wilder.”

Lost in his reverie, Nick didn’t hear the voice at all. A man appeared at his desk, waving a sheet of paper in his field of vision. Nick took his eyes from the computer screen.

The man’s name was Johnnie. One of the newspaper’s best researchers, he was three or four years older than Nick, prematurely gray. He tossed the sheet of copy on Nick’s desk. The headline screamed out at him:
Homeless Man Robs Store, Two Dead
. “This came in from New York a few hours ago. I was just setting it. Laura thought you might want to see it.”

Nick regarded the news story. “Sure, thanks.”

“You look like you could use some sleep, buddy.”

Nick glanced up at him, then shrugged. “Couldn’t everybody around this place?” He twisted the sheet of paper around and began to read.

Fifteen minutes later, he walked into Daly’s office, a manila folder tucked under one of his arms. Daly didn’t lift her eyes from the proof she was redlining by hand. “A pretty interesting series of coincidences,” the editor said, carefully X-ing out a few sentences from the body of the story. “Wouldn’t you say? A string of unprovoked, brutal murders in three different cities. Seattle. Milwaukee. New York. All of them stabbings, all of them committed by homeless men.” She raised her pen from the galley, at last looking up at Nick. “Sounds like a story, doesn’t it?” Self-consciously, she took the half-glasses from her nose and pinched them closed, then tossed them into an open drawer.

“Will you pick up my costs, Laura? I’d like to see if I can get a couple of interviews.”

Daly didn’t seem surprised by the request. “You give me a story, Nick, and I’ll pick up your flight and a rental car. If you’re flying out there just to satisfy your own personal curiosity, though, you’re on your own time.”

“I understand.”

Daly gave him an assessing look. “You’ve already booked your flights, haven’t you?”

Nick didn’t have to respond.

“So what are you waiting for?” The senior editor looked back down at the proof, finding her grip again on the red pencil she had been using to scribble her corrections.

Nick remained standing where he was. “I know I’ve been messing up pretty badly,” he said.

The gray-haired woman glanced back up.

“I wanted you to know, though. I took your advice. At the gala, I took some pictures.”

Daly set her pencil all the way down, a small smile turning up the edges of her mouth. “Is that right? You get anything good?”

Nick shook his head. “Not exactly what you had in mind.”

“No?” Daly pursed her lips, waiting for Nick to explain.

“I didn’t get the spread you imagined for the Sunday magazine. I did get these, though.” Nick set the manila folder down on the senior editor’s desk.

The first photograph was a digitally enhanced picture of Hamlin talking to the stout, mustached man as Nick had first seen them. The resolution was so good that Daly could see the beads of sweat on the heavier man’s forehead. Daly examined the picture, then slid the photograph over to one side in order to look at the one underneath: a picture of the two men seated in the middle of the empty auditorium, the heavy man’s face glowing red with the reflection of the velvet, his distress etched across his brow.

“Who is he?”

“You don’t recognize him?”

Daly shook her head. “He looks familiar. But no, I don’t.”

“I asked around here this morning. Something about the way Hamlin was talking to him bothered me.”

“The way he was pressing him,” Daly suggested.

Nick shrugged. “I guess. He was really going at him.”

“So who is he?” Daly asked again.

“Ralph Van Gundy.”

“That’s Ralph Van Gundy?” Daly leaned back in her chair, surprised. “The head of the Washington state EPA?”

Nick nodded. “I guess there’s nothing wrong with Hamlin inviting a commissioner from the Environmental Protection Agency to the gala—”

Daly harrumphed. “He’s not just a commissioner. He’s the man responsible for awarding the Elliott Bay contract to Hamlin’s waste-management company last month. That contract netted Hamlin twenty-five million dollars, what, just two, three days ago?”

“All the more reason Hamlin might want to invite him to the celebration. There’s nothing wrong in saying thank you.”

Daly gave Nick a measuring look. “You know there’s something wrong here yourself. That’s why you took these, huh? You knew there was something wrong even before you knew who this man was.”

Again, Nick shrugged. “Well, the pictures are yours anyway.”

Daly slid them back into the manila folder, then held it up toward Nick. “No,” she said.

“You don’t think it’s worth checking out?”

“I didn’t say that. You know there’s nothing I’d like more than to get my hands around Jason Hamlin’s neck.” The words had come out more bitterly than the editor intended.

Nick took the folder from Daly. “Why don’t you keep these, then?”

Daly shook her head. “I can’t.”

“Because he owns the paper.”

“It’s more complicated than that.” Daly leaned her elbows onto her desk, then rested her face in her hands, grinding her palms into her eyes. “Like I told you, Hamlin and I go back a number of years now.”

“You’re afraid of him.”

“He knows where a number of bodies are buried,” Daly said. “Let’s put it that way. You do a man like Hamlin a few favors, you end up in his debt. You understand what I’m saying?”

Nick nodded. “Sure.”

“It can wait until you get back. And like you say, there’s probably nothing there anyway. No smoking gun. But keep those pictures. Even if I can’t, there’s no reason why a freelance photographer who doesn’t officially work for the paper can’t take a run at him.” Daly looked down at her watch. “What time did you say your flight was?”

“Yeah,” Nick said. “I know. I better get going.”

Henry Dean had entered a boutique on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, armed with a broken bottle. Without warning he had attacked the first person who crossed his path. Witnesses reported that he literally cut the woman to death. He attacked her so violently that his arm had become a blur. When he was finished with her, he left her on the floor in shreds, blood pumping from her throat, her intestines oozing from a gash in her torso. After that, he turned on the store’s clerk and swung the broken bottle at him so savagely that he nearly severed the man’s head from his neck. Three other people in the store had no escape. The attack happened so fast, they fell to their knees and cowered against the wall, expecting to be killed, too. The carnage stopped, though, as abruptly as it began. Dean dropped the broken bottle and walked to the counter and grabbed a pair of Ray-Bans. He ignored the cash in the register and left the store with the sunglasses. Fifteen minutes later, the police subdued him only a block away, standing on a corner panhandling, covered from head to toe in the drying filth of his victims’ blood.

Nick had expected a monster. Instead, he found a small, wiry man with a thin face and well-groomed short brown hair. His street clothes were visible beneath the oversize orange coverall issued by the jail. His wrists and ankles had been shackled to a steel chair, and he didn’t move when Nick entered the holding cell at Rikers Island, New York. He didn’t even raise his eyes. Nick had the impression that the man was catatonic. “Henry. Henry Dean,” Nick said. The man didn’t respond, and after a few minutes, the officer who had ushered Nick in terminated the interview.

“Has he been seen by a doctor?” Nick asked the officer on his way back out through the jail.

The officer shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know anything about that, sir.”

“Has he been like this for long?”

The officer didn’t acknowledge Nick’s question.

A few hours later, Nick was on Highway 18 in Wisconsin, skirting the edge of Madison, keeping the white Ford Taurus he had rented at the airport in Milwaukee at a steady seventy-five, heading for the prison at Boscobel.

It was a bright autumn morning, and the trees along the highway were laced with gold. This was the first time Nick had been back to Wisconsin since he had followed Sam to Seattle over a decade before, after his parents had died. Nick’s thoughts, though, were elsewhere. As he made the turn from Highway 12 onto Highway 18 through Madison, something in the back of his mind was troubling him. Something particular about Henry Dean in his cell in New York. Something Nick had seen but couldn’t quite define.

Nick pulled the Taurus to a stop in front of the huge concrete prison at Boscobel just before noon. He glanced down at the green digits of the clock before switching off the engine. He had made good time. He sat for a moment in the driver’s seat, staring up at the looming maximum-security facility. The atmosphere was deceptively peaceful, almost sterile. At last, Nick opened the door onto the newly paved parking lot and stepped from the rental car. A cool breeze touched his face, carrying with it the indistinct sound of a voice issuing commands over the static of an industrial intercom from somewhere behind the prison walls. Nick gathered his jacket around his shoulders and headed for the entrance.

The prison guard who led Nick from the carpeted front offices to the interview rooms was solicitously helpful. “I haven’t had much contact with him myself,” he was saying to Nick. “But from what I hear, he’s been no problem at all inside. Keeps to himself. Doesn’t make no noise. Stays outta trouble.”

“Tell me about the trial,” Nick said.

“What trial?”

“You must have heard about it on the news.”

“There weren’t no trial. Warren pled guilty.”

“I see.” Nick tried to remember what he had read. “I thought the two Gilbert boys were arrested for the murder.”

“That’s almost right,” the guard confirmed, continuing down the wide corridor. “The police thought they killed their parents in their sleep. Like them boys out in California who killed their parents for the inheritance.”

“The Menendez brothers.”

“That’s it, the Menendez brothers. The police didn’t arrest them, though. It didn’t go nearly that far. They found Warren after a day or two, on the street. Wearing some of their clothes.”

“He confessed?”

The guard shook his head. “He didn’t have to. They found his blood in the Gilberts’ house.” They had reached the interview room, a stark, white-walled room furnished with a single table and two metal chairs. “Warren’ll be cabled and locked to this here chair.” The guard pointed at one of the painted gray chairs, and Nick noticed that it was bolted to the floor and a heavy link had been welded onto its sides to accommodate the prisoners’ cables. “Sometimes when they’re with their lawyers, we let their hands free, you know? So they can use a pen or whatever. With the press, it’s different. We leave you alone in the room with them so you can talk, but we keep them cabled.”

A few minutes later, James Warren was led hobbled into the austere room by another guard. His hair had been cropped short, but Nick recognized him from the articles he had read online. He moved as though his limbs were heavy as lead, like he had to control each movement independently. The guard shackled him into the chair opposite Nick.

“I’ll be just outside the door if you need me,” the guard said, straightening back up. “You won’t be able to see me, and I won’t be able to hear you. But I’ll be watching everything that goes on in here.”

When the guard closed the door behind him, its glass panel became a bright mirror, and, catching sight of himself, Nick was surprised by how disheveled he appeared. He had boarded the plane to New York without a change of clothes, and he was dressed in the same jeans he had been wearing for a couple of days now, the same wrinkled shirt. James Warren and he could easily have exchanged chairs.

“Thank you for agreeing to give me this interview,” he began. “My name is Nick Wilder. I’m with the
Seattle Telegraph
.”

Warren raised his eyes. Nick understood from his expression that the man was perplexed by the distance he had traveled for the story.

“There’ve been a few crimes committed recently,” he explained, “in New York and Seattle, that are pretty similar. Like the one you’re in here for. I’m just following up leads.”

“I don’t remember doing it,” the prisoner said. His voice was sluggish, so deep it sounded like it was being played back too slowly on an old vinyl record.

“You don’t remember committing the murder?”

“I can see the bodies,” Warren said. “But it’s like I’m looking at a photograph. I don’t know. Maybe it was a photograph.”

“Do you think you’re innocent?”

Warren shook his head. He didn’t know how to answer.

“Why didn’t you ask for a trial? Why would you enter a plea if you don’t know that you’re guilty?”

“They don’t try people like me.”

“It’s your right.”

“Do you really believe that?”

Nick looked at the man, struck by his apparent intelligence. “Did you know the Gilberts? Before, I mean.”

“I never saw them once.”

“What were you doing in their neighborhood? Mequon is a pretty wealthy suburb.”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember how I got there.”

“Does this happen to you often? Do you black out like this sometimes?” Nick realized that he was holding his breath. After the blackouts he had himself experienced recently, he wanted to hear Warren’s answer.

Warren didn’t respond. His face had gone unnaturally still. He closed and then opened his eyes.
A slow-motion blink,
Nick thought.

“Are you mentally ill, James?” Nick asked him.

“You always call me Jimmy,” the prisoner said.

“What?” It felt to Nick as if he had been slapped in the face. “What did you say?”

“You know all this already.”

“Do I know you somehow?”

Warren tipped his head back. “Come here, Doc.”

Nick didn’t move.

“Come closer, Doc,” the prisoner said again, lowering his voice nearly to a whisper. “I don’t want them to hear.”

Nick waited, then rose from his chair and leaned closer to the prisoner. Warren pulled away, drawing him backward like a magnet. “How’d you get those cuts and bruises on your face, Doc?”

“What?”

“Come closer so you can hear.”

Nick moved close enough to smell the man’s sour breath.

“You’re the one who told me to do it.” Warren spoke the words like he was imparting a secret.

“What?”

“Aren’t you, Doc?”

“I don’t know what you’re—”

“Come closer. Let me tell you something.”

There was a loud rap on the door’s glass panel: the guard warning Nick to keep his distance from the cabled prisoner. Nick looked toward the mirrored door just in time to catch sight of Warren’s head rushing toward him. He shrank from the man’s teeth, his gaping mouth, but Warren’s head still grazed his own, hammering him in the forehead where he was already bruised. The room was filled with Warren’s unrestrained laughter.

The door swung open and the guard rushed in. “That’ll be enough, Warren,” the guard said, shoving him backward in the chair. “You okay?” he asked Nick.

Nick took a deep, measured breath, shaken. “Yeah,” he said. “Fine.”

“I gotcha, Doc,” Warren said.

“That’ll be enough, Warren,” the guard repeated. “The interview’s over.”

“Sorry, Doc. You heard the man. The interview’s over.”

“I’m going to take Warren out of here,” the guard said to Nick. “I’ll be back for you in a few minutes.”

“Listen, Doc,” Warren said as the guard unshackled his cables from the chair’s arms and legs. “How is it back in Seattle? It starting to rain yet?”

A flash of recognition went off in Nick’s head, blinding him—an image of Henry Dean, sitting like a statue, cabled to the chair inside the holding cell at Riker’s Island. The collar of a dark blue T-shirt had been visible at the top of his orange jail-issue coverall. Nick hadn’t paid attention to it at the time. It struck him now what had been bothering him since seeing Henry Dean.
The T-shirt.

“That rain gets to you, doesn’t it, Doc?” Warren’s face rearranged itself into a broad smile. “After a while, it really starts to get inside your head.”

Nick recognized the T-shirt. He had only been able to make out part of some green and white lettering on the shirt, but he knew the typeface. Henry Dean, arrested for murder in New York, had been wearing a Seattle Mariners T-shirt.

“It gets to where a man can’t see, it rains so much. It gets to where a man has stars in his eyes all the time.”

You got stars in your eyes, Jerome?

Nick felt his blood turn to ice. “Wait,” he said.

The guard had unfastened the locks from Warren’s chair. He was helping the prisoner to his feet, beginning to lead him from the room.

“Just one more question.”

The guard stopped, holding Warren still next to him. The prisoner sagged on his feet.

“You’re from Seattle. Aren’t you?”

Warren didn’t respond. Another smile spread across his face. He tugged on his cables and lifted his feet, step by lethargic step, leading the guard out of the room.