Season of the Assassin (10 page)

‘What’d you talk about?’ the captain wants to know.

For the first time, fear hits me squarely in the middle. I feel almost nauseous. Anglin slithers away from seven murders. We hear about his exploits in Asia only through the underworld of this city. And now an FBI man kills himself because he’s depressed.

Our first stop, later this morning, will be at Callan’s physician.

*

Dr Morley tells us that yes, Andrew Callan was suffering from chronic depression, but that he had his condition under control with the use of lithium. As long as he took his prescribed dosage, he didn’t plunge to the depths of despair. He had been on lithium for three years and had shown no ill effects. He had also not shown any tendencies toward suicide that the doctor could recall. Morley puts us onto Callan’s psychiatrist, Jack Pederson. 

Pederson sings the same refrain. Callan was fine while he was on his medication. He’d had only one bad ‘episode’ in the two years he’d visited the shrink. That had taken place only one month earlier, but it seemed that the special agent had got over the rough patch and carried on with his life.

Andrew Callan was unmarried. It’s my job to notify the sister since she’s the FBI man’s only surviving relation.

‘Somebody whacked Callan,’ Eddie intones as we drive away from the therapist’s.

It’s almost noon now, mid-shift, so we head to Garvin’s saloon to take our lunch.

We arrive at the railroad tracks, and I park the car out in the weeds that Garvin never cuts. It’s like dwarf elephant grass.

We order a couple of sandwiches and two soft drinks. I notice I’ve been imbibing less alcohol recently. I guess I’ve tried to convince myself that I need to be sober to catch this son of a bitch Anglin. Maybe I haven’t had the time for the booze. Or maybe I’m just becoming immune to its numbing effect, the main reason I drink the stuff. I don’t know.

Garvin shambles away to prepare our orders.

‘How’s Jimmy?’ Eddie wants to know.

He’d just got out of the hospital, the last letter had said. ‘He’s going back into the bush, he says. He told us that things were quieting down, but I think that’s for Eleanor’s consumption,’ I tell Eddie.

‘I’m praying for him, Jake.’

We’re sitting in a bar in Berwyn in the middle of the day. We’re currently the only two patrons. Carl Anglin eludes us like some haunted-house ghost, and a federal agent has committed suicide because he was onto Carl’s exploits close to home.

It feels like the end of something. I feel numb even without the booze.

My boy is halfway around the world, being shot at, like I was in 1944 and 1945. The whole planet’s gone mad, and here we sit, quietly having lunch.

I change my order from a soft drink to a draft beer.

‘Shit,’ Eddie says. ‘I’m with you. Hit me with a cold one too, Mr Garvin.’

[March 1999]

Mason came up with something for Doc and me. The female assistant with the legs presented the material to us in a sealed folder in our office there in Homicide. She didn’t say anything, just dropped the envelope on my desk and immediately walked out.

‘Jesus, she’s good,’ Doc moaned.

I opened the file and began to see the maze of cutouts in Anglin’s military history. But there was nothing there that we didn’t already know.

Except about his capture in the Bay of Pigs. After that he disappeared, it said, and became what the CIA people called a ‘rogue’. He was like a marauding elephant that stomped an occasional village or two and then disappeared into the bush.

It fit him perfectly, that description.

What struck me, what intrigued me, was that episode in Cuba. Anglin had to have been scared at being trapped on Castro’s island. He had to have been enraged by the lack of backup his own country provided him there. It was almost like a small-scale Vietnam. There they were, on the beach, with their lily-white asses hanging out in the tropical sun. But the troops didn’t come to save them.

So how would I react if I were Anglin, this quasi-007 with a license to terminate? I thought about who left my private parts out in the breeze and I thought about ending a few lives, here and there. But who did I rub out? Allen Dulles or some other CIA honcho? Too tough to get at. Some military chief? Who? No one put their name to the Bay of Pigs. It was too big an embarrassment. The Kennedys took some hits for the plan, but those were the guys in Camelot, those were the lords of the realm. Who was a more likely target? 

It got me back to where I’d been at the beginning. We were still trying to nab Anglin for a little conversation about the two recent murders.

I remembered reading my father’s files on Theresa Rojas. That business had been thirty years ago, and the last I’d heard was that she was still in Elgin. Healthy as a horse physically but just as far from Planet Earth as she had been three decades back.

Doc and I took a ride up to the hospital. The drive from the city took an hour and a half, allowing for traffic. We breezed through because all the road work would begin in April, a month away.

When we showed our badges to the receptionist, she called the on-shift doctor and asked if Theresa Rojas was allowed visitors. She looked up from the phone and told us there had to be a doctor in the room with Theresa and any visitor.

We asked if it could be arranged, and we saw from her look as she asked the shrink that it was a hassle for somebody. But I repeated we were there for a homicide investigation, and the receptionist said the doctor would be down in a minute.

Five minutes passed, and finally a female therapist presented herself at the desk.

‘I’m Carrie Johansen. I’ve worked with Theresa for the last two years.’

Carrie was barely five feet one and weighed maybe 100 pounds. Kinky blonde hair. And she exuded an up-front sexuality, it seemed to me. She carried herself in a manner that was aggressive and in-your-face for someone with an M.D. in psychiatry. I liked her immediately.

She walked us onto the ward.

‘What’s Miss Rojas’s condition?’ Doc asked Carrie.

‘Compared to what?’ she countered, grinning.

‘Compared to the way she was when she entered the ward,’ Doc said and smiled back.

‘She’s somewhat improved, but she’s still uncommunicative, if that’s what you want to know.’

‘She’s the best-kept secret in the case of those nurses’ murders,’ I reminded Dr Johansen.

‘We’re all very aware of that, Lieutenant,’ she shot back.

‘You’ve done a nice job of keeping it that way for thirty years,’ I stated.

‘No small feat. Not when it comes to keeping the press off your back.’

‘No. You’re right,’ I agreed. ‘The reason they haven’t been around is because she was excluded from all the paperwork,’ I continued. ‘She was whisked right out of that dorm before the media got on scene. And newsguys were a little more understanding about privacy in years past.’

Carrie nodded as we arrived at Theresa’s door.

‘The federal people are primarily responsible for keeping her unknown up to now. Not us. There are too many open doors at our place downtown. The Feds are skilled at keeping things from the public.’

She opened the door.

Theresa Rojas, aged fifty-two, sat by her window. Her gaze stayed fixed. She remained peering out the window into the sunshine of a fifty-degree pre-spring day.

‘Theresa,’ Carrie said softly. ‘We have some visitors.’

Theresa Rojas turned toward us. She was strikingly pretty, even in middle age. Her face did not show the wear of five decades. It was as if she’d been frozen in 1968. The only things that betrayed her real age were the silver streaks at her temples amid the otherwise raven-black hair with its blue sheen and the slight markings of crow’s-feet beneath her eyes. With a little makeup she’d look thirty, no older.

She looked at us. There was no expression on her face.

‘They tried everything. EST — ’

‘Electroshock therapy?’ Doc gasped.

‘Everything…Nothing rouses her. She seems as if she’s only barely connected to the rest of us. We don’t know if she’s still in that dorm room, hiding under the bed, listening to that man slaughter all her classmates and friends, or whether she’s transported herself somewhere else. We just do not know. If you’re thinking she might come out of this someday, you might be right. Just as right as supposing she’ll go on like this until she dies.’

I noticed the medicine bottles on top of Theresa’s desk.

‘What’s she taking?’ I asked.

‘Primarily tranquilizers. Nothing too mind-altering.’

I went over to the table, took out my notebook and wrote down the names of the medicines.

‘Don’t you trust my word, Lieutenant?’ Carrie asked, smiling. It was almost lewd, that grin.

‘I trust you. I just like to write down the relevant facts. I’m getting progressively more forgetful…Just like she would be — ’ I pointed to Theresa Rojas ‘ — if she were here in the real world with the rest of us.’

‘I think her memory’s intact — somewhere.’

‘Who picks up the bill here for her?’

‘The State of Illinois, partially. She has some money in her family. And there is one other donor.’

‘Namely?’ Doc asked.

‘No name. Anonymous.’

‘I don’t like that guy,’ Doc said to her.

She laughed at his pseudo-tough-guy crack. ‘A lot of things about Theresa Rojas are mysterious. She makes her own bed. Refuses to let staff take care of her laundry. She finds her way down to the laundry room where the non-committeds do their own private clothing. She takes me or whoever’s taking care of her down there and she does her own wash. Theresa refuses to take meals with anyone else. Meals are taken here, on the bed. She can be very stubborn about whatever it is she has in her head that she needs or demands…But she will not speak. She will not communicate. Not in writing, sign language or verbally. She hasn’t made a sound that anyone around here has heard in thirty years. I’m told the last utterance she made was a primal shriek aimed at a Homicide detective, thirty years ago.’

‘That would have been my father,’ I explained.

Carrie’s eyebrows rose theatrically.

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. His name was Jake Parisi.’

‘Is he still alive?’

I shook my head.

Did Theresa Rojas remember my gruff-assed old man? Did she recall how he must have been uncomfortable around this brown, beautiful
chica
? Jake had his doubts about everyone but himself. It wasn’t just a matter of different skin hues.

‘Oh,’ Carrie said and lowered her eyes.

‘This was the last major piece of business he had before he died. Carl Anglin. It was the only big-time homicide he’d been involved with that he wasn’t able to close. It bothered him until his last day. He was the cop who let Carl Anglin go.’

‘Jimmy, people didn’t blame him for that,’ Doc said.

‘I read about the case,’ Carrie said. ‘Extensively. It didn’t seem to me that the police bungled anything. It was just that their material witnesses disappeared. First the one was shot, and then we have Ms Rojas here. None of that is connected to your father, Lieutenant.’

‘Thanks for the free therapy. I feel better now.’

She snorted, and I had to laugh aloud with her.

‘Can I be with her alone for just a moment?’

Carrie looked at me quizzically. But then she relented.

‘It’s not SOP. But just for a minute. Don’t get me in trouble.’

‘I won’t.’

Carrie and Doc went away.

Then it was Theresa Rojas and me in the room, alone together.

I sat by the window, on the ledge next to her. We sat quietly.

‘Theresa, my name is Jimmy Parisi. I know my father talked to you a long time ago when you first came here. My dad’s dead. He died not too long after he came to visit you. I know when he came he was hoping for some kind of miracle. Hoping that you’d talk to him so that he could help you get justice for all those girls that Carl Anglin killed. We all know about your trauma, so I’m not going to try and tell you anything stupid, like I know what you went through. Nobody knows that except you. And now you’re all alone in that place where no one else is accepted. Nobody’s been where you’ve been. I’ve been in a war. I’ve seen as many dead people as you have — probably a lot more, actually. But I’m not saying that gets me an invitation to come inside the place where you’re at.’

Theresa was watching a woman outside who was sitting at a park bench. The woman was sobbing. She’d probably just visited a relative, a loved one, who was in Elgin for a long time. That was the way she seemed to me. I was always supposing. It was what Homicide cops did.

‘I saw torn-up bodies all over that little country. And I’ve seen countless more since I’ve done this job. I don’t know what all these therapists tell you, and what I’m saying now is just me taking my best shot in the dark, because I sure as hell am no psychiatrist…I’m trying to break down your door. We both know that. You’re resisting. You’ve resisted for thirty years. I know you’ve heard that one before…Theresa, we’re no closer to grabbing Carl Anglin than we were when he literally frightened hell out of you when he mutilated your friends in that dormitory. But if you’re really in there somewhere and if you can really hear me, I think it’s time you came back out. If you think I’m challenging you, you’re right. You’re about all we’ve got. Just like my father told you. But he never had time to come back and visit you some more. I’m going to keep coming until you talk to me, Theresa. There’s room for you over here, on this side. You’re a pretty woman, you’re in the prime of your life. I want you to come out. Otherwise Anglin’s murder count just went up by one woman.’

She tapped her fingers on the windowsill. The sound was very brief, but I heard the muted thumping clearly.

‘Theresa?’

She was still once more. I went to the door to bring Doc and the psychiatrist back in.

‘Did you try to talk to her?’ Carrie asked.

I simply looked at her.

‘Everybody does,’ she said.

‘She drummed her fingers on the window sill,’ I told her.

‘Habit,’ Carrie replied.

‘We’ll be back, in any case,’ I told her.

There was no smile for me this time.

*

On the way back to the city, Doc looked over at me from the passenger’s side of the Taurus. ‘Miracles don’t solve homicides,’ he uttered. 

‘No. You’re right.’

He sat there and stared out through the windshield.

‘Why’d you write down the names of her medications?’

‘Because I wanted to see how doped up they’ve got her.’

‘You think someone might be spiking Theresa’s meds?’

‘It’s a possibility.’

‘What if she’s simply lost, Jimmy? It happens, you know.’

‘Sure. It happens. Thirty years, Doc. She looks like some preserved specimen…I think we ought to put her under surveillance.’

‘What if she already is?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean if she’s being doped by somebody, it’s pretty obvious they’re also going to keep a close eye on her. They haven’t killed her, which they would’ve done if they didn’t think she’d veggied out permanently. They must be convinced, Jimmy. They must be sure. They could’ve made her disappear a long time ago. That’s the kind of thing Anglin’s war buddies did so well.’

‘They’ve had plenty of opportunity, sure. And you’re right. Why take a chance by whacking her when she’s one of the walking dead already?’

‘Sure. These guys don’t take unnecessary risks.’ 

‘But what if Theresa Rojas came out of it somewhere along the line? What if she recognized the medication they were giving her as prescribed mind control? What if she, a nursing student, realized that someone was trying to keep her locked up in her own psychosis?’