Tenderness (6 page)

“Right,” the old cop said brightly, as if Eric had answered the right question and won a prize. “But she had relatives here in New England. An uncle and aunt she sometimes visited.”

“I didn’t know that,” Eric said.

“You know it now,” the lieutenant said. “Four deaths, Eric. Your mother, your stepfather, Laura Andersun, Betty Ann Tersa. All within months of each other. Extraordinary, wouldn’t you say?”

And a fifth that nobody knew about, which made it
really
extraordinary
, Eric thought, saying instead: “But you said Betty Ann Tersa’s body was never found. Maybe she ran away.”

“Oh, she’s dead, all right,” the old cop said. “Isn’t she, Eric?”

Eric shook his head.

“Why are you doing this, Lieutenant? You’re about ready to retire, aren’t you? You should be enjoying life. How many years do you have left? You should think about things like that.”

“Is that a threat, Eric?”

“Of course not, Lieutenant.” Trying The Charm again. “I would never threaten you. All I want to do is get out of this place and lead a normal life.”

The old cop sighed, his frail shoulders lifting and falling. He turned away and replaced the yellow pad in his briefcase. He stood up, leaning against the table, his old man’s stomach bulging slightly against it.

“Guess we won’t see each other anymore, will we, Lieutenant?” Eric said. “I’m going to miss our meetings.” Surprised at the truth of the statement.

The lieutenant’s eyes flashed, the weariness and the sadness suddenly gone, replaced by—what? The sly look of success. But what kind of success? “I’ll be outside waving goodbye the day you’re free,” he said. But his eyes and tone of voice were telling Eric that he never expected that day to come.

That was the second surprise the old cop had pulled today—first, the names on the yellow pad and now that flash of triumph.

“Friday,” Eric said, and repeated the word for emphasis. “Friday. Wave to me Friday when I leave this place.…”

The lieutenant did not answer. His silence was ominous. He gathered his briefcase in both arms and pressed it against his chest as if to guard his old bones. He shuffled to the doorway and paused
there, looking back, the spark gone from his eyes, the momentary triumph having passed. He looked exactly like what he was. A sad and tired old man who had gone down to defeat at the hands of Eric Poole.

Eric dismissed the lieutenant from his mind the moment the door closed. Back in his room, he checked the calendar on the wall and smiled at the red circle around Friday. Glancing at his bed, he saw his book on martial arts lying on the gray spread. The book had been on the windowsill this morning when he left the room. Opening the book, he riffled through the pages, and found a note tucked between pages 72 and 73. The note, in crude handwriting deliberately disguised, said:

A favor for a favor. Watch your step. Don’t be provoked or you might not get out Friday. Or at all
.

The note was unsigned, but Eric knew who had written it.

He also had learned the secret of that flash of triumph in the old cop’s eyes.

Police Lieutenant Jake Proctor’s bad dream began again after Eric Poole came into his life. The dream always started with children crying in the distance, out of sight, their cries growing louder and nearer until they came into view. Little girls in white dresses. Running, running, fleeing some terrible object of dread, their eyes blank like unfinished drawings, their screams so fierce that he’d finally vault into wakefulness. As he did now, heart pounding, thin arms and legs trembling.

The old cop sat up in bed, trying to blink away the dream. He lit a cigarette with shaking fingers. He thought he had left the dream behind in Oregon a long time ago. But hadn’t, of course.

He crept out of bed, old bones protesting, the cries of the children finally diminishing as he stalked to the kitchen section of the apartment. Dawn, a gray phantom, lurked outside the window. As he drew water into a kettle and placed it on the stove, his thoughts went inevitably to Eric Poole. And Friday. And the plan.

Lewis had been against the plan, of course. He
was the state’s deputy commissioner of youth services and went by the book, did not like to improvise. Black and white, that was Lewis, never admitting grays. Respected facts, not instincts.

Jake’s boss, Chief Harding, didn’t mind bending the rules. Which was why Harding had ascended to the top post in the department. Knowing what had happened out in Oregon, he allowed Jake Proctor latitude. “But for Christ’s sake be careful. And take care of yourself. You’re no longer a kid.…”

Jake Proctor had been a cop for twenty-six years out in Oregon and the next twenty here in New England. He’d worked all the beats, been praised and promoted regularly and was finally named a detective lieutenant, an office where his instincts and dogged working habits brought him success but never satisfaction. His one devastating failure back in Oregon had tarnished all the triumphs of his career.

That failure focused on an image he could not erase from his mind: the riverbank on the city’s outskirts as he watched them bring another child’s body up from the swirling waters. Looking at the limp form in the arms of a rescue worker, he was stunned to realize that he had seen her before. She had made her First Communion the Sunday before at St. Anthony’s Church, where he had been a parishioner all his life. He did not know her name
or anything about her but had been struck by her sweet innocence as she came down the aisle in her white dress, hands clasped against her chest, eyes lowered. For the first time he felt the absence of a child in his life and wondered whether he had made a mistake in avoiding marriage or even a close relationship. The child passed by his pew, close enough for him to touch her shoulder.

She had been the third of what proved eventually to be five murders by a serial killer. Five children under the age of ten, snatched and strangled on the first Monday of the month, each murder exactly three months apart. The killer stalked the children like a ghost, leaving no clues behind. After the fifth murder, the killings stopped. That dreaded first Monday came and went without incident. No child’s body turned up. No stunned and weeping parents. Jake Proctor and his crew of detectives congratulated themselves, as if somehow they had actually solved the case, laughing out of a strange nervous relief. That night Jake Proctor dreamed of the crying children for the first time. Afterward he lay in bed for long minutes, thinking of the child walking down the aisle, those fragile fingers clasped together. He was suddenly glad that he had never married, never had children, and had thus eliminated the pain of impending loss. Why, then, this sudden ache that he finally recognized as loneliness?

Drinking his tea, he glanced out the window at the bleak buildings stark in emerging daylight. This old city in New England resembled the city he had fled in Oregon, needing to make a new start, as far from the scene of his failure as possible, from one coast to another. He immersed himself in the routine of police work. He didn’t mind the long hours, working overtime without putting in for extra pay, to relieve young cops with growing families. He spent his spare time chasing down evidence in old, unsolved cases. Work, he found, could be benevolent, filling the hours, the days, the weeks. Until you found that the years had passed by almost unnoticed. The failure in Oregon grew dim and distant in his memory, and the dream did not disturb his sleep anymore. Until Eric Poole arrived in his life.

A dim recollection had stirred within him as he sat in the shadows of the interrogation room watching his colleagues question Eric Poole. He instantly recalled someone he had dismissed from his mind twenty years before, the only suspect in the Oregon murders. His name came to Jake Proctor out of the mists of memory—Derek Larrington. He’d been found in the vicinity of the river in which the body of that First Communion child, and later a red-haired child named Susan Crone, had been thrown. Derek Larrington had been polite, eager to help, answering questions
without hesitation. He had recently graduated with honors from a local high school and was working that summer as a waiter to put away money toward his tuition at a state college. The questioning had been brief, simply because the boy had a logical explanation for his presence near the river: he’d been waiting for a girl. The girl, brought in later, corroborated his story. He also had alibis for the killings. He was barely eighteen—how could he possibly be a serial killer, anyway?

Jake escorted Derek Larrington to the door of headquarters after the questioning. The boy kept up a constant chatter, as if on a high, after the interrogation. Or perhaps his nervousness was manifesting itself. After a final apology to the boy, Jake watched as he went down the steps and walked briskly away. Something made Jake remain in place as Derek Larrington headed down the street. The sun flashed on the windshields of passing cars but the day remained dismal to the detective. Just before turning the corner, the boy looked over his shoulder, not directly at Jake but at the police building itself. A smile brightened his face. More than a smile, it seemed to Jake, a smirk of self-satisfaction with a hint of mischief in it. Or malice. Jake Proctor shivered a bit, despite the day’s heat. As the boy disappeared around the corner, Jake curbed an impulse to chase him down to
ask him:
Why did you smile like that?
Then:
Forget it
. Three experts had questioned the boy, and he had alibis, as well as the girl backing his story. But alibis could be manufactured and witnesses coerced, couldn’t they?
Stop it
, he told himself, caught in a spin of emotions. Was he allowing his pain and anguish to affect his judgment, a distant malicious smile to warp his instincts?

Twenty years later he witnessed another clean-cut, well-mannered boy being questioned about murder. This time, the suspect readily admitted killing his mother and stepfather. He told his story in straightforward fashion, matter-of-factly. He answered all the questions politely, as if eager to assist the police in their investigation.

Jake Proctor studied Eric Poole carefully as he displayed the scars on his arm, the bruise that remained from the fracture. Later, as he posed for the cameras, a wistful smile appeared on Eric’s face, a smile that told the world he was trying to disguise the pain within him. News photographers could not resist that wan, pitiful smile.

But Jake Proctor saw another kind of smile on Eric’s lips after he had been brought back to his cell to await the next day’s arraignment. Precautions had been taken against a suicide attempt, the boy stripped of belt, shoelaces, anything that could be used to harm himself. His movements were observed by a camera mounted in a corner
high on the wall of his cell. For some reason, Jake Proctor turned back to the cell after letting the others go on before him. He could not shake the feeling that Eric Poole was not what he seemed to be. All his answers had been too pat, almost as if they had been rehearsed. Glancing into the cell, he saw that Eric had turned his back to the camera, was holding his face in his hands, cupping his chin with his fingers. And he was smiling—that same smirk of satisfaction he had observed on that other boy’s face so long ago. A smile of secret triumph, as if he had played a trick on the entire world and was enjoying it now in solitude.

Jake Proctor went to the files, brought up on the computer the case of Laura Andersun, whose body had been found in woods near a mall less than three miles from Eric Poole’s home. Another file disclosed a girl by the name of Betty Ann Tersa, visiting locally from Los Angeles, reported missing three months ago. Despite the burns and the fractured arm, there’d been no doubt that Eric Poole had murdered his mother and stepfather in cold blood. No remorse had appeared in his eyes as he admitted to the crime. Were Laura Andersun’s murder and Betty Ann Tersa’s disappearance mere coincidences?

Thus began Jake Proctor’s investigation and later his visits to the youth facility where Eric had been sent after appearing in court as a juvenile. All
Jake Proctor’s experience and observations convinced him that Eric Poole was a serial killer, like an evil incarnation of that long-ago killer of those five children back in Oregon. The old cop did not believe in reincarnation but he believed his instincts and vowed silently to put an end to Eric Poole’s grotesque career one way or another.

The ringing of the telephone interrupted his thoughts, and Jake Proctor placed his teacup on the table.

As expected, Pickett was on the line. Jimmy Pickett was young and ambitious, passing his first year in the detective division assigned to Jake Proctor. He’d become the legs of the old cop. He called Jake every morning shortly after seven. To make sure I’m alive, Jake told him. But actually to bring him up to date on overnight reports before Jake left for the office.

“Two more days to go, Lou,” Pickett said, using the traditional shortened version of
Lieutenant
. “Think it will happen today?”

“If not today, tomorrow,” Jake said. “Or sometime.”

“Suppose it doesn’t?” asked Pickett, a natural worrier whose teenage acne still lingered on his face. “What do we do?”