The Man From Primrose Lane Part 6

Sackett had said he was available right away, if David wanted. So he had called Mich.e.l.le, who readily agreed to another last-minute afternoon of babysitting-she was saving up for some kind of phone called an Android and a couple more shifts would put her over the top. Tanner had thrown a conniption when she arrived, one of those five-alarm screamers where his face turned blue and the world waited for him to breathe. It was David's fault, of course. He spent so much time with the boy, even these brief departures were wearing on his son, making the boy lethargic and slightly paranoid. Eventually, though, he had brokered a truce with Tanner in which he promised to build him a fort out of couch pillows and blankets if he would stop screaming. He had even told Mich.e.l.le that Tanner could eat supper in there if he wanted-which he did. Duh.

A steel door beside David opened and Detective Sackett stepped out. He was dressed in a plain blue polo shirt tucked into blue jeans. On his left hip rested his sidearm, a weapon out of place on his boyish body, and his badge. On the other hip, his walkie-talkie and cell phone. If he was older than David, it wasn't by much. He didn't smile when he saw David, but David had a hunch he wanted to and only chose to remain stoic because he thought that was a part of his job that he wanted to experience.

"Mr. Neff?" he asked.

David stuck out his hand, which Sackett accepted. "David," he said.

Sackett nodded and introduced himself to the writer. "Nice bag," he said, motioning toward the large leather satchel slung over David's shoulder. It was wrinkled, beat-up, and a little dirty. "It's seen some action."

In fact, it had saved his life on one occasion, but that was a story for another day. Its weight was a comfort to him, like having his father's hand on his shoulder.

"Follow me," Sackett said, ushering David into the detective bureau.

Down a long, windowless, beige, and undecorated hallway, through a dingy wooden door, was the bureau: a square brown and orange container of a room with four empty desks piled high with paperwork and framed pictures of family. This room smelled of gun grease and old hot dogs. There were no windows.

Sackett sank into the chair beside a desk less cluttered than the others. Two pictures were tacked to a corkboard above his head. One, a picture of a slender woman with dark hair sitting with a pigtailed baby girl on a city park swing: the detective's wife and daughter, David a.s.sumed. The other, a school picture, slightly outdated, of a redhead beauty with soft cheeks and a galaxy of freckles tracing the bridge of her nose like a half mask. Katy, he thought. She looked about eleven, but he could see her adult self in the sharp set of her jaw and the Cheshire grin that twisted first up, and then down at the ends. Obviously, the detective believed she was a vital clue to the ident.i.ty of the Man from Primrose Lane.

"So..." David began, digging into his bag and pulling out a reporter's notepad and a blue Bic.

"Wait up a second," said Sackett. "I just want to say that I've never done this before, spoken to a reporter or writer or whatever. Normally they don't let us do this. I'm open to sharing information with you because I think our leads have dried up and maybe getting some stuff out in the papers might generate something new. But there's some things I obviously can't talk about."

"Sure."

"And I haven't read your book, either. I hope you don't take offense. I'm not much of a reader. But my wife read your book when it came out and she loved it, so I'm sort of doing this for her. Against my better judgment."

"Okay."

"Also, I did some background on you. Asked around. Talked to the Medina County Sheriff's Department, who didn't have the best things to say about what you do."

"They wouldn't," said David. "They executed the wrong guy when they executed Ronil Brune."

"And now Ohio doesn't have capital punishment and so when we catch the real bad guys these days, we can't sentence them to death. Because of your book."

The Serial Killer's Protege had set off a chain of events that had ultimately led to the overturning of capital punishment in the state. It was a fact that he actually took great pride in. "You're still calling him Joseph Howard King?" he asked, pressing on.

"I don't know what else to call him until we find his real name."

"Some people call him the Man from Primrose Lane."

"Well, I always called him the Man with a Thousand Mittens," said Sackett. "But what I wanted to tell you was, while those sheriff's deputies kind of despise you for what you did, they also have a great deal of respect for you, at least the lieutenant out there. He told me you should have been a detective instead of a reporter. He said you would have been a good one. That's why I'm talking to you."

David was surprised by this sentiment. Since the publication of The Serial Killer's Protege, he had specifically avoided driving through Medina County, afraid of being pulled over for a burned-out taillight and winding up in some small-town gulag for the rest of his life. One retired deputy who had invested a lot of time in putting Brune away had written him a letter in which he had called David a "media wh.o.r.e" and promised to "rearrange" David's facial features if he ever saw him in town.

"So what do you want to know?" asked Sackett.

"Well, first of all, you gotta tell me why you call him the Man with a Thousand Mittens," he said. "Then tell me about the day you found the body."

Sackett reached into his desk and pulled a cigarette from a pack of Camels. He lit it, took a long drag, and expelled the noxious smoke into the air, where it hovered, undisturbed, at the ceiling. He pointed to David's shirt pocket, where his traveled pack of Marlboros peeked out. "You can smoke, too, if you want," he said. "Promise not to give you a ticket."

It would take too long to explain his mental cigarette habit, so David just shook his head.

"All right," Sackett said. "Here goes."

For the next half hour, Sackett recounted his discovery of the dead body inside the house on Primrose Lane, how he had found hundreds of mittens in the closet, how he'd discovered the trail of blood leading to the blender, how the maggots sounded as they plopped out of the hole in the dead man's chest, how Billy Beachum had bolted in the kitchen. As he talked, he kept a steady chain of coffin nails in the corner of his mouth, such that, by the time he had finished, the room was a cloud and David's clothes were forever infused with the essence of cheap tobacco. Finally, Sackett flipped a switch on the wall and a fan turned on somewhere in the bowels of the building, sucking the fumes into ceiling vents, slowly clearing the air and replacing it with that odd fragrance of boiled hot dogs. David's notebook was half full of his blue-inked shorthand, a mishmash of cursive, print, and hieroglyphics. This, of course, was only a start and, David suspected, information that was no longer as relevant as it must have seemed to Sackett four years ago, in 2008.

"I've got a bazillion questions for you," said David.

"Shoot."

"What was Beachum delivering that day?" he asked.

"Some incidentals," said Sackett. "And a Geiger counter."

"A Geiger counter?"

"Yes."

"For what? Was anything radioactive?"

Sackett shook his head. "We had a team from Akron U come check it out. They didn't find anything unusual."

"It's a strange request, though."

"Yeah," said Sackett. "The guy made a lot of strange requests. Was there some method to it, some plan? Or was it just a guy going crazy from isolation? n.o.body knows because n.o.body knew him, not really."

"Except the guy who killed him."

"Maybe it was just a robbery gone wrong," said Sackett.

David laughed. "But the fingers. Cutting off the man's fingers and turning them into pulp in the blender. That seems a little personal."

The detective leaned back and considered the writer for a long moment. "I hope I can trust you," he said. "We're building a relationship here. I'll give you some things, like I said, because we're in a corner with this one. But I got to know I can trust you."

"Do you want to talk off the record?"

Sackett nodded.

David set down his notebook. "Off the record," he said.

Sackett leaned forward and lowered his voice. "There's a reason why I'm the only one still on this case," he said. "The coroner is about to revise her ruling."

"To what?" asked David.

"Officially, it will be ruled 'unknown.' But we believe it was something like a suicide, in the end," he said. "The bullet missed the man's heart. Clean shot. Missed every major artery, bone, and organ. He would've lived if he'd called for help or walked to a neighbor's house. It was the loss of blood from his fingers that actually killed him. He just sat there and bled to death, waited to die. The coroner's forensic team determined that the man did not put up much of a struggle when his fingers were removed. The lacerations were smooth and definitely perimortem-that means they were cut off before he was dead. We think he cut off his own fingers. First with a knife. Then with a cigar cutter, one of those little guillotines, when there were not enough fingers left to hold the knife steady. He might have put the cigar cutter between his knees, put his remaining fingers in the holes, and squeezed it closed that way. Then he fed them into the blender, probably after whoever shot him left. That's just conjecture, of course. But we have the knife and bloodied cigar cutter and no gun."

"s.h.i.t," said David, rubbing his chin as he processed this information. "He was hiding his ident.i.ty. He knew that if he went to the hospital, they'd find out who he really was. So he got rid of his prints. But what about his palms?"

"Sliced with the knife. We got a partial from one. But not enough to feed into IAFIS or anything."

"Is it true the house was cleaned of fingerprints?"

"As far as we can tell, Joseph Howard King wore those mittens every minute of the day. The feds spent a week in there. Spent a whole week and all they came up with were two latent prints. One on the back of the headboard of the man's bed. The other was inside the lip of the toilet's reservoir tank. They are from two separate individuals, we're sure. But we don't have anything to compare them with, so we don't know if either one is from our man or if they're prints from movers and plumbers."

"Weird."

"This man didn't ever want to be found," said Sackett. "What was he so afraid of? What was he so afraid of that he decided it was better to die than to reveal his ident.i.ty? That's what I'm trying to figure out. There are few clues to go on. And now that it's no longer a straight-up homicide, the department doesn't really want to spend more of its resources tracking down far-flung leads. The FBI has lost interest. Well, that's not entirely true. There is a retired agent named Larkey. He worked on a number of missing person cases before he left the bureau. He's consulting on this case."

"What's your relationship with the FBI?"

"Shaky on a good day. Hard to say if they've shared everything they know about our guy. Bunch of overpaid accountants playing cop. A couple good ones, but they don't give those guys much of a leash anymore. That's all off the record, of course. On the record again, I would say that the Akron Police Department welcomes the FBI's help and cooperation."

"And there's no decent picture of this guy, huh?" asked David. "Other than the blurry photos they used in the paper?"

Sackett raised a finger and spun in his chair. He rifled through the desk behind him for a minute before coming up with a glossy photograph, which he handed to the writer.

The first thing David noticed was that the photo had been digitally altered, cropped, and enlarged from its original size until the pixels stood out like little circles of color, like those impressionist paintings, like a Manet. In the foreground was a shoulder draped in maroon rayon. Behind the shoulder was the profile of an old man with a long face. His skin wrinkled and sagged on the side in deep dark creases. His eyebrows were thick caterpillars, so white they were nearly iridescent. He stared ahead with a scowl set upon his face. Again, David was reminded of his uncle Ira.

"That's my little brother," said Sackett. "That guy behind him is the Man with a Thousand Mittens, Joseph Howard King, or whoever you want to call him in your book."

"You took this?"

Sackett nodded. "Only known picture of him," he said.

"That's a h.e.l.l of a coincidence," David replied.

The detective took the photograph back. "Good detectives don't believe in coincidences," he said. "And I didn't think writers did, either."

David suddenly realized that Sackett was staring at him in a way that he didn't like, a deep stare that seemed to reach into his mind through his pupils, rooting around in there like a probe. "What?"

"Nothing."

"Is something wrong?"

"Nah," he said. "Well, I mean, you didn't know him, did you?"

"What do you mean?"

"It looked like you recognized him when you looked at that photo."

"You're good," said David, with a sense of unease. He felt their friendly connection starting to fade like an FM station around the first bend of Appalachian foothills. Sackett hadn't liked David's reaction to the photo. Not one bit. "He just looks like my great-uncle Ira. That's what I noticed. But, really, only as much as I look like Jim Carrey."

Sackett laughed. But the laugh sounded canned. So David changed the subject, quickly.

"Tell me about Katy Keenan," he said. "And this notebook you found in the house."

But the detective looked at the clock in the corner, which read a quarter past four. In the end it always comes down to time.

"We'll have to talk about that next time," said Sackett. "I got a few reports to file before five. Give me a call later in the week and we'll set something up."

"Thank you for your time," said David.

"Welcome."

He stood up but then the detective spoke again.

"David? What about the other photo? The one above my desk. Do you recognize the girl in that picture?"

"Sure," he said. "It's Katy Keenan."

"No, it isn't," said Sackett. "It's Elaine O'Donnell."

David recoiled. Because Elizabeth had always been on the outs with her parents since he'd known her, he had never seen pictures of her grade school years, never looked over her shoulder while she went through family alb.u.ms. He had that one photo of her as a young girl, curled up on the couch, and then nothing until the ones he'd taken himself, while they were in college. But yes. That's what his wife-and her twin sister-surely would have looked like at ten years old. He didn't know what to say. "You're right," he managed.

"I've been working on her cold case for years. It's far outside my jurisdiction, so I do it in my spare time. It was such a big case when we were kids, remember? I was always drawn to it, even back then. A weird hobby. Anyway, they do look alike, don't they? Elaine and Katy."

"At that age, they certainly did." Now that he had been confronted with the resemblance for the second time, he was left wondering what he was truly looking for in Katy. The implications were unsettling.

Sackett nodded. "Don't f.u.c.k me over for helping you," he said.

David didn't say anything but waved goodbye instead. He knew better than to make promises this early in a story. Besides, he had to get ready. For the first time in many years, he was going on a date.

EPISODE FIVE.

TANNER'S HOBBY The honeymoon almost destroyed their marriage. The cruise was a present from Elizabeth's aunt, Peggy, a gift that David suspected her estranged parents had secretly contributed to. A week in the Caribbean; Jamaica, Belize, someplace called Charlotte Amalie. It was a week after their wedding, a month after they graduated from Kent State. She had just gotten a job working the circulation desk at the Kent Free Library; he'd moved from the community paper to an alternative weekly in Cleveland called the Independent. It should have been a nice respite before a new life. Instead it was h.e.l.l, from the moment they boarded the Carnival Elation until Elizabeth stepped onto the aft deck three days into the journey, intending to commit suicide.

You had to call it a squall, a storm like this. It beat at the monstrous shiny-white ship as they boarded, rocking the gangway as they inched along. By the time they were halfway up the ramp, Elizabeth was rubbing at a migraine behind her temples. By the time they reached the top, David had ralphed his breakfast over the side, into the gulf.

"We can take a nap in our room," he said, rubbing Elizabeth's back as they waited to board. "It'll be okay."

Though they were large for cruise-industry standards, David found their quarters to be smothering. They couldn't take a Tums or a Tylenol because their luggage wouldn't be delivered for another hour, so they lay in the dark above the covers on the double bed and held each other. Outside, the squall took hold of the boat, pitching it slowly to one side and then the other. At times, the good ship leaned so far that David was sure it was going to flip like the Poseidon. He could feel the walls lean in on him and thought of his grandfather's claims that the walls of the submarine in which he served in WWII had bent inward during emergency dives as the pressure outside grew and grew, reminding everyone that nature, in the end, would eat them up, would swallow them whole.

Somewhere in the dark, he found sleep. He awoke in the dark, and he was alone.

"Elizabeth?"

He sat up and touched his eyelids as they opened and closed. They were open but he couldn't see the faintest trace of light.

"Elizabeth?"

He reached into the darkness but could not be sure his arms were even there. Slowly he walked forward, probing ahead of him. His left hand hit the door to the shower, stubbing his index finger. He felt around for a switch but could not find one. The ship tilted to port and he clunked his right knee against what must have been a chair pushed under a table. He rubbed at the bruise forming there and then collided with the far wall with a weak thud that smarted his nose. There, he felt something. A thin b.u.mp in the wall.

The light clicked on from above like the voice of G.o.d, full and brilliant and blinding. He looked around. No Elizabeth. What time was it? He felt as if he'd slept for days. There were no clocks in here.

David opened the door and peeked out. To his right, the hall seemed to stretch forever, dozens of identical doors on either side painted a dull, calming blue. To the left, more of the same. Still no luggage. He ducked back in for his card key, and set out to find his wife.

A map posted in the elevator promised this was the best route to the main floor, where the buffet and pool were located. Alarm set in as soon as the doors opened. The first thing he noticed was that it was dark on the other side of the windows that lined the cafeteria. Night had come, bringing with it rolling clouds illuminated by long streaks of lightning breaking like tree branches, above an angry sea. He must have slept for eight hours, at least. The second thing he noticed was that the buffet area was empty. No one was eating. No one was serving. He had not seen a single person since he'd left their room. Had he slept through an evacuation? Was he on a ghost ship?

A siren sounded from hidden speakers, a trilling noise. "Ladies and gentlemen," said a soothing male voice, "this is your captain speaking. The time is now nine-thirty. The Newlywed Game will begin in the auditorium momentarily. The casino has opened and there will be a Texas Hold'em tournament commencing at ten. Bingo at ten-thirty in the Blue Room. Also, there is a complimentary sushi bar in the library. It's still choppy outside but radar shows clear skies in our future. Hang tight and we'll have you through this soon. Thank you for riding Elation."