Omens (19 page)

He considered the question. “No. I suspect you have no intention of going home until you’ve found your place in the world. Or until you see a pair of Jimmy Choos you can’t live without. Your current lack of funds, though, will make it difficult to hire me. But I have a solution.”

“Of course you do.”

“I will accept promissory notes due one month after your twenty-fifth birthday, when you receive the trust fund set up by your adoptive father. The extra month should allow you ample time to access the funds.”

“Done your research, I see.”

“Of course.”

“Why do you want this case?” I asked. “Yes, you can probably soak me for some serious cash, but your firm isn’t struggling for business. I’ve done my research, too. You’re successful enough that you don’t need to shill for clients.”

He opened his mouth.

I lifted my hand. “No, let me guess. Anything I can deduce is infinitely more trustworthy than anything you’re going to tell me.”

“Careful, Ms. Jones, you might offend me.”

“I owe you one for the Jimmy Choo jab. By the way, I’m a Louboutin girl, and their new line isn’t out until fall, so I won’t be going home for money until then.”

The faintest quirk of a smile. “I stand corrected.”

“As for why you’d do this? If you freed Pamela Larsen, your professional star would ascend into the stratosphere. That’s why you took her appeal. Except she didn’t like your strategy, so you lost your chance. This evidence isn’t good enough to pursue without a paying client. I can be that client.”

“You could be.”

“No, Mr. Walsh. I’m not that gullible. Or that desperate. Bill me for this morning, as per our original agreement.”

So what was in those pages Gabriel had removed from the file? That most valuable and elusive prize for any defense lawyer: a plausible alternate suspect. Jan Gunderson’s older brother, Christian.

On paper, Christian Gunderson was ideal. Midtwenties. A loner. Socially awkward. Anger-management issues that had led to three arrests for assault. Two charges had been dropped, probably because they’d been against family members—his father and his sister, Jan.

The police had zeroed in on Christian as soon as Jan and her fiancé were killed. Shortly before the deaths, Christian apparently had a huge fight with his sister, and Peter had interceded, whereupon neighbors swore they heard Christian threatening him.

But that didn’t explain the first three pairs of murders. You could suggest Christian had killed only Jan and Peter and then made it look like the other deaths, but the pattern fit too well, including details never released to the press. There was no evidence that Christian had access to those details.

Then investigators found a link. Christian and the first female victim, Amanda Mays, had both attended City College. The police theory was that pretty, vivacious Amanda rebuffed an advance from Christian. Maybe she said she was engaged, which she was. Maybe he’d stalked her, watched them together. Then he snapped and killed them both and tried to make it look like an occult murder.

Police found a more tenuous link to victim number two, Lisa Tyson. She’d worked within two miles of Christian’s job. Police postulated he’d seen her. Maybe he asked her out. Or maybe after his experience with Amanda, he just stalked her. Then he killed Lisa and her husband, Marty.

There was no obvious connection to couple number three, but police didn’t care by then. He’d killed four people and decided he liked it.

Then came his fight with his own sister, and he decided to make it four. After all, he’d gotten away with it so far. It was like being his own copycat killer.

So why wasn’t Christian Gunderson arrested? Because within hours of the police questioning him in his sister’s death, he hanged himself. The family—the parents and their remaining daughter—closed ranks after that. They could not recall why Christian and Jan argued and the neighbor who heard the threat was angry with the Gundersons for refusing to contribute to a new fence. Amanda Mays? Never heard of her. Not Lisa Tyson, either. And besides, Christian had been home every time a couple was murdered. Friday was family movie night. Check with the corner video store—Mrs. Gunderson rented a movie every Friday.

The police kept trying but found no solid evidence to link Christian to the crimes. Then they processed the blood that linked the second murder to Pamela Larsen and left the Gundersons to their grief.

The evidence against the Larsens still held. Of course they’d explained it away. The blood? The Larsens did a lot of hiking with little Eden. They’d been to that patch of woods before the murders, and Pamela vaguely recalled cutting her hand on a fruit salad lid. The knives? Again, they were outdoorsy. Todd fished. He also had a bad habit of leaving his knife uncleaned in the tackle box, until Pamela found it and swore the smell would never come off, so she made him buy new ones. The eyewitness? Everyone knew eyewitnesses were notoriously unreliable.

The jury didn’t buy it.

The Larsens were tried and convicted. The public had their monsters locked up where they belonged.

I
’d lied to Gabriel. I couldn’t just drop this. Not yet. I needed to know more. I was sure I could get more. My dad used to give me every problem-solving task that could arise in a department store, from shoplifting to public relations. That did not give me the skills to investigate murder, but if I had more details, maybe I
could
interest one of those innocence projects, which—unlike Gabriel Walsh—wouldn’t charge me for its efforts. I still wanted these answers, needed these answers. Which meant I had to do what it took to get them.

After leaving Gabriel, I stopped back at the apartment to grab my memo pad and headed to the library.

My research did not go well. The only mentions I found of Christian Gunderson were newspaper accounts dramatically labeling him another victim of the killers. Unable to cope with the horrific death of his sister, the sensitive soul took his own life. If that was his epitaph, no one was going to appreciate me suggesting he may have been her killer.

The articles had mentioned a younger sister, Anna. I could speak to her … if I could find current contact information. I couldn’t. I did find something on Christian’s mother, though. An obituary. She’d died three years ago. The only address I found for a living, close relative was for Niles Gunderson—the mentally unstable father who’d mistaken me for Pamela and attacked me.

Definitely not.

Sunday morning I was in a cab, taking the first step in my investigation. Ida and Walter had offered me the use of their car anytime I needed to make a trip “to the city,” but I didn’t feel comfortable taking them up on that offer. Not yet.

So I was footing the big bill for a cab to Chicago. And where was I going? To pay a visit to Niles Gunderson.

Madness, of course. But it was the only avenue of investigation I could see. He must have been off his meds when he came to the house. By now he’d be back home, on his regime and lucid. With my new look, a little role-playing, a few shadows, and a lot of luck, I might be able to convince him that I was an old friend of Anna’s looking for her phone number. I’d tried calling of course but he wouldn’t answer. Maybe because he didn’t recognize the number.

When I reached the apartment, I knew the “few shadows” part of the equation would be easy. A week ago, I’d have said Gunderson’s building was little more than tenement housing. Now, having seen actual tenements, I knew better.

It was just a tired building on a tired street, filled with people who looked equally tired, trudging along without even a glance my way. Inside, the building was quieter than I might have expected. Darker, too. Hence the shadows. It was like walking into a tunnel, gray and gloomy and empty, with dark walls and irregular lighting.

As I made my way up to Gunderson’s fifth-floor apartment, I began to think that maybe this desolate place wasn’t exactly where I wanted to meet a man who’d tried to kill me.

This was crazy. Bat-shit crazy. With every step, I thought of new and more colorful descriptions of my decision to visit Niles Gunderson. But I kept walking.

His door was at the far end of the hall. I gathered my courage and knocked. As I did, I noticed something on the floor. A splash of red.

Blood.

It took only an eye-blink to tell me it was just a plastic poppy, the kind you wear at Remembrance Day, though we were about as far in the calendar as you could get from November 11.

I made a face and rubbed my nose. The building smelled of garbage and cooked food, but I’d just caught a whiff of something worse.

I knocked again, louder now. Still nothing.

My gaze tripped back to the poppy and stayed there, as if glued to the sight.

It’s a damn poppy. So what?

But even when I looked away, I could feel the poppy niggling at me. A clue? I snorted. If a dropped poppy could tell me anything, I’d need to be Holmes himself to figure it out.

I rapped again, but by now didn’t expect an answer.

There wasn’t a dead-bolt keyhole. I looked down the hall. All clear. Couldn’t hurt to try. As I reached for the knob, my gaze caught on that damned poppy again. I stopped and pulled my sleeve over my hand. Then I turned the knob, testing the door before I…

It opened.

I glanced around. Then I pushed open the door and slipped inside. As I did, the smell hit me.

Death.

It smelled like death.

I chastised myself for being overly dramatic. No matter how sheltered one was, it was hard to reach the age of twenty-four and not know the smell of decay, if only a dead mouse in the basement. Judging by the state of Niles’s apartment, a rotting mouse or two would probably go unnoticed for a while.

Yet I knew the smell didn’t come from dirty dishes. Or even dead mice.

When I walked into the kitchen and saw Niles Gunderson—slumped back in his chair, mouth open, eyes closed, two flies feasting on an open sore on his chin—I didn’t think,
Oh my God, the poor man is dead
. I thought,
Shit, there goes my only source
.

After the shock passed, I
did
think of how pitiful he looked, how old and how broken. Twenty-two years ago, he’d been living the American dream. Son of immigrants. College educated. White-collar job. Wife. Three kids. House in the suburbs. Then Death paid a visit and decided to stick around. One child savagely murdered. Another dead by his own hand. Finally, Death claimed even his wife—the only person keeping him from the final descent into … I looked around. Into this. Dead in a filthy apartment. No one to notice. No one to care.

I suppose my next move should have been to call the police. Or flee the scene. But if no one had found Niles yet, they weren’t likely to in the next few minutes. Besides, there was no sign of trauma, other than that wound on his face, which seemed like a shaving nick that the flies had taken advantage of.

This all sounds remarkably calm of me. Yet I was not calm. Something was wrong here. Seriously wrong.

It was like that discarded poppy niggling at me. A steady whisper snaked past.
Pay attention.

I rubbed goose bumps from my arms and found a phone in the living room. I didn’t use it to call 911. I just wanted Niles’s phone book, which I found beside the phone.

I used my sleeves again when opening it, even if logically I knew there was no way they’d be dusting a phone book for prints after a natural death. The book was falling apart, many of the numbers faded, people who’d passed out of the Gundersons’ lives years ago. The only recent entries were for health care workers and pharmacies and delivery services. Except one. A recently changed address and phone number for “Anna.” His daughter.

I made a note of the number and then flipped through the book. Nothing grabbed my attention, possibly because that niggling feeling kept drawing me back to the kitchen. Finally, I closed the book and pocketed my note. One last look. Then I was leaving.

I rounded the corner. Niles Gunderson was upright in his chair, staring at me. Flies covered his chin. Maggots crawled from his mouth. And his eyes—he had no eyes, just empty sockets staring—

My hands flew to my own eyes, palms pressing against them, brain stuttering, some part of me screaming, “See! I told you something was wrong!”

I took a deep breath and let my hands fall away, and when they did, I saw Niles as he’d been before—slumped back in his chair, dead. His eyes were closed. No maggots. Not even any flies.

Something moved to my left. I jumped so fast my feet tangled, and I grabbed the counter. A dark shape stretched across the kitchen floor until it covered Niles, and I turned to see a shadow coming through the open balcony curtains. There, perched on the railing, was a raven. It flapped its wings, and the shadow retracted to normal size.

I slowly walked to the balcony doors. The bird sat there, watching me. It cocked its head.

“Shoo,” I whispered. “You aren’t supposed to be here.”

As I said the words, I saw the little girl from my dream, shaking her fist at the raven as it perched on a flayed, eyeless corpse.

The bran know better. They aren’t supposed to disturb the dead. It’s disrespectful.

The raven opened its beak and croaked. Then it spread its wings and swooped at the window, talons out. It hit the glass, claws scraping, and let out a raucous caw.

“Ewch i ffwrdd, bran!”

I heard the words the little girl had spoken, and it took a second to realize they came from me, shouted so loud my throat hurt. The bird let out a noise, almost like a hiss. Then it pushed back from the window, twisting in midair before flying off.

I stood there, staring after it. When I swallowed, my throat ached, and I remembered saying the words. Shouting them. Standing in the kitchen of a dead man, shouting.

I got out of there as fast as I could.

I
f the Romans could have fortified their cities the way the human brain fortifies itself, we’d still be wearing togas. The mind is an amazing piece of biomachinery, really. A serious threat presents itself at the gate and up fly the walls, standing firm in the face of earth-shaking revelations, ideological bullets, and plain old logic.