The Deadline (9 page)

He let his hand drift across her naked belly.  Their child floated under his palm, safe and warm.

“That was nice,” she said.  “We should go out on dates more often.”

“Yes.  That ice cream must have had something special in it.”

“I’m sure you’ll go order a gallon of it to be delivered every week now, but next time it’ll take more than an ice cream cone to charm me, buster.  Maybe a whole sundae,” she teased him.

“That’s not a bad idea,” he said.  Quite naturally, the next thing out of his mouth was, “I love you, Claire.  Did you know?”

“I know.”

Morgan laid his head against her breast and drifted.  He heard Claire’s heart surging beneath him, bringing him back into rhythm with the world.  In a few moments, maybe longer, he began to dream.  Claire let her fingers skim lightly across his shoulders and he awakened with a start.  He didn’t know if he’d slept for seconds or hours;  time had fallen out of rhythm again.

“I’m tired,” he said.  He rubbed his eyes and groped for his pants.  “I should go back down to the paper and get the stuff.  It’ll only take a few minutes, then we can turn in early.  We’ll go for a drive tomorrow, up to the Sun-Seven.  We’ll visit Aimee’s grave and see the place where she lived.”

Claire covered her nakedness with a small pillow and blew him a kiss.

Morgan dressed again, minus the tie, and walked back down to the paper.  It was only five blocks but his legs felt heavy, his eyelids stiff.  The front door was locked but the alley door was open.

He stacked the plates, silverware and leftovers in the cooler, then began to fold Claire’s checkered tablecloth.

Malachi Pierce’s letter fell to the floor.

Morgan picked it up and slumped into his chair, weighted down by it.  He tapped the torn envelope against his knee and studied the coarse handwriting on it, but didn’t open it again.

As a police reporter, he’d spent much of his professional life in close quarters with bad people who got what they wanted through intimidation.  Most of their threats — menacing phone calls, hateful letters, petty vandalism, almost always anonymous — were empty.  Morgan knew every crime reporter was a lightning rod for the simmering contempt of the people he covered.  It came with the territory.

That’s why Pierce’s letter disturbed him.  He’d only felt real fear once before, that Halloween night in 1993 when the phone rang at his home in Oak Park.

P.D. Comeaux was on the other end.

“Trick or treat, Jeffie.  This here’s your favorite boy comin’ ‘round to see what kind of sweets you’ve got at your house tonight,” the unmistakably voluble voice of the serial killer drawled over the line, as clear as if he were next door.

A jolt of ice-cold adrenaline surged through Morgan’s veins.  It had been more than a year since Illinois extradited Comeaux to South Dakota, where he was convicted and sentenced to die at the maximum-security prison in Sioux Falls.  The last time Morgan heard P.D. Comeaux’s voice was at his sentencing, when the remorseless killer told the Hispanic judge to “kiss my lily-white ass.” 

Now Comeaux seemed to be in the same room.  Had he escaped and come looking for the man who helped end his malignant life on the road?

Jesus Christ
, he could hardly breathe as the fear tumbled through him,
Claire had taken Bridger trick-or-treating and hadn’t returned.

Comeaux’s voice undulated smoothly through the receiver, like the ripples on warm water.

“Sweet things you got, too, Jeffie.  That pretty wife of yours, so blond.  I bet she’s a natural blonde, too, huh, Jeffie?  Like that bitch I done in Sturgis.  You remember her?  Her pretty blond snatch was the best I ever ate.  First a trick, then a treat ...”

Comeaux erupted in a squalid laugh.

Sandra Tarrant, a former high school homecoming queen who became a prostitute to maintain her $1,000-a-week cocaine habit, was one of P.D. Comeaux’s fourteen known victims.  In 1992, a night watchman at a used-car lot in Sturgis, South Dakota, found her naked body in an alley dumpster.  She’d been strangled with her own pantyhose, just a few days after her twenty-third birthday.

At first, investigators assumed her genitals had been gnawed by vermin, until the medical examiner told them it was a human animal, not any four-legged creature, that had chewed away her clitoris and labia.

But it was her face that Morgan remembered from the crime-scene photos.  Her eyes were slightly open in her deathwatch, pretty green eyes under dark swaths of mascara that made her bloodless face look like a silent movie star’s.  Her head was propped against a crushed cardboard box, tilting her painted face down as if she were embarrassed by her nakedness.  Her angelic blond hair fell around her shoulders, almost long enough to cover the crooked, bloody bite marks on her bare breast.

Those distinctive teeth marks, the skin scrapings under the dead woman’s fingernails, the semen smeared on the hosiery around her throat and the pubic hair in her mouth, all belonged to Phineas Dwight Comeaux.  Nine prosecutors in six states agreed South Dakota had the strongest of fourteen potential murder cases against him.  Sandra Tarrant, whose short life had once held so much promise, was their best witness.

But now Sandra Tarrant’s face wasn’t
her
face anymore.  That Halloween night, as Morgan stood in the hallway listening to her killer’s pornographic cackle, the face he remembered was Claire’s.

“Fuck you, Comeaux,” Morgan blurted angrily.  The words came from a wicked place inside him.  “You’ll burn in hell.”

“No, Jeffie,” the serial killer said calmly.  “Fuck you.  Fuck you, Jeffie.  And fuck that pretty blond, Jew-girl wife of yours.  In the ass.  And down her throat.  I will, you know.  Oh, yes.  I dream about it every night.  Just like all the others.  Yeah, I’m gonna fuck her ‘til she’s dead, Jeffie.”

Comeaux rattled with another hideous laugh, then hung up abruptly.  Trembling, Morgan instantly dialed the main number for Chicago’s Metro Police.  While he waited for the watch commander to come on the line, he checked his watch.  It was after nine, and a gentle snow was falling.  Claire hadn’t expected to be out past eight.

The night captain, who was still working Homicide when Morgan started on the beat, took a few notes about the startling call and promised to call the prison that night.

A few minutes after they hung up, the doorbell rang.

Still agitated, Morgan cradled a mixing bowl full of Hershey’s Kisses in his arm as he opened the door.

Nobody was there.

He stepped out on the well-lighted brick porch and saw nothing but gleeful little footprints spattered across the skiff of snow that was beginning to stick to the lawn.

Suddenly, his eye caught a movement in the hedge beside the walk.  Before he could raise his arm to defend himself, he lost his footing on the slick bricks and landed on his hip, scattering candy like big, silvery snowflakes.  Claire and Bridger fell on top of him, tickling him and laughing.  Bridger’s little Chicago Bears football uniform was damp from the wet night, but he giggled as he pummeled his father gently with a pillowcase half-full of goodies.

Relieved and cold, Morgan hugged both of them as if he’d never let either one of them out of his sight again.  They went back inside for hot chocolate, then turned out the lights.  Halloween was over.

The phone rang again just after midnight.

Morgan, who had been floating between waking and anxious sleep, groped for the receiver on his nightstand.  It was the Metro captain, who reported that Comeaux was still safely in his cell in South Dakota, and except for his meals and exercise periods, hadn’t been out of lockup for days.  The guards in Sioux Falls couldn’t explain how he might have gotten access to a telephone that night.  Maybe it was just a Halloween prank, the cop theorized.

Morgan knew it wasn’t.  He thanked the police captain for checking it out and hung up.  Before he snuggled back under covers against Claire’s warmth, he opened the drawer beside the bed and reached in to finger the cold comfort of his thirty-eight.

Now, three years later, Pierce invoked the specter of Comeaux.  Morgan felt sick to his stomach all over again.  He sat at his desk, pondering how Claire was again the innocent pawn of an evil mind.  His first instinct was to protect her as fiercely as he could, but he also felt so much was out of his control.  She had no part of this, but Morgan’s tormentors didn’t care.

He didn’t know with certainty how Pierce knew Claire was Jewish, but it wouldn’t have been hard to piece it together.  Morgan’s own mother had asked Old Bell Cockins to print their wedding announcement in
The Bullet
.  There it was for all his mostly Protestant neighbors in the homogenous village of Winchester, Wyoming, to read:  He’d married the former Claire Bergman, daughter of Aaron and Nina Bergman of Winnetka, Ill., in the Jewish Community Center in Chicago, in a ceremony performed by both a rabbi and a Presbyterian pastor.

How Comeaux knew was a more mysterious question.  Morgan always assumed the killer maintained close ties to the radical religious underground and its anti-Semitic conspiracy promoters, even from prison.  Using basic public records, they could discover far more about the reporter Jefferson Morgan than just his wife’s faith.  And they probably did.

So he’d never told Claire about Comeaux’s monstrous call, and he didn’t want to tell her about Pierce’s letter either.  Especially now, when she seemed to be regaining her equilibrium.

Morgan squinted against the gathering darkness of
The Bullet’s
newsroom.  The space blurred into a sullen watercolor of steel and paper and wood, the elements of his existence as a newspaperman. 

He thought about that Halloween night three years before, how he’d gone to bed with his wife that cold night without telling her.  He held her close until she fell asleep in his arms.

He thought about P.D. Comeaux, the virulent killer whose appeals would keep him alive for many more years.  So far he had admitted to the fourteen murders originally attributed to him, and every Christmas morning for the past four years, he’d told investigators about one more they never knew about.  His grisly death toll was now eighteen, and counting. 

And Morgan thought about Bridger, who died before Halloween came around again.  None of the neighborhood children ventured near the house that next year, and Morgan remembered how lonely he felt to see them hurry past without stopping.

CHAPTER SIX

B
uck Madigan didn’t look like royalty.

He had the thin hips of a cowboy and his knees bowed at painful angles away from each other.  The manure clinging to his boots was wet; the stuff that ringed the hat band of his gray felt Stetson was dry and crusted.  A wad of chewing tobacco in his cheek protruded unnaturally, throwing his otherwise patrician face out of balance.  His immense hands were weather-beaten and rough, and they bore the working scars of over fifty hard years.

He was doctoring a bloody gash on the flank of a buckskin stallion snubbed to a post in a round corral.  He plunged his ointment-slathered fingers into the wound, then painted the yellow jelly around the torn flesh.  Flies mustered on smaller cuts across the horse’s thigh and rump.  The taut muscles beneath his sleek brown coat twitched and his tail flickered like a frayed black bullwhip, but if flies had fear in them, the smell of blood inspired a far more powerful instinct.

But he
was
royalty.  Buck Madigan, the bent-up former pro rodeo cowboy now ankle deep in horse manure, was a genuine earl with an enormous Scottish estate.

Buck Madigan was also the bachelor heir to the magnificent Sun-Seven Ranch, where Aimee Little Spotted Horse had disappeared forty-seven years before.  On the phone that morning, he’d cheerfully agreed to show Morgan around, admitting there wasn’t much left to see.  That was okay, Morgan told him, because he didn’t know what he expected to see anyway.

Buck spoke softly to the horse, his voice so low and calm that Jefferson and Claire couldn’t hear what he said.  He screwed a red lid back on the yellow can of antiseptic ointment and stroked the horse’s sinuous neck soothingly.  Then he unlooped the nylon halter and freed the stallion to run out the open gate into a sloping pasture blanketed with clover.

“Fences were a bad idea right from the get-go,” he said, stepping on the middle rail of the corral gate and throwing one lanky leg over the top.  The words weren’t angry, but resigned.  “Damn fences cost as much as the land they surround.  Ain’t sure anymore what the damn fences keep out.  But I know a horse ain’t got the good sense to know where he ain’t wanted and a damn fence ain’t gonna keep him from gettin’ there.”

Buck Madigan wiped his greasy, bloody hand against his thigh, then held it out to Morgan, who noticed Madigan’s right thumb was missing.  He shook it nonetheless as he introduced Claire.

“That’s how you know a roper,” Buck said, holding up his thumbless palm.  “It’s a damn painful lesson to learn, keepin’ your thumb out of the loop.”

Claire laughed nervously, but Buck just kept talking.

“I reckon the easiest way for you to get up to the shack and the cemetery from here is for me to take you.  This place ain’t much for roads and your rig there,” — he pointed dismissively at Morgan’s miserable little car — “well, hell, we got piles of cow shit bigger’n that.”

Madigan’s sleek, diesel-powered Dodge Ram, the latest model, was parked by the corral.  They all piled in, Claire in the middle.

Before they got twenty yards up the lane, Buck Madigan stopped the truck and hollered out his window.

“Murphy ... Fiona ... come!”

Before long, two tall Irish wolfhounds, stately animals with wiry coats and proud gaits, trotted up to the truck and leaped gracefully in the back of the truck.

The Sun-Seven was the biggest ranch in Perry County.  It covered fully one-quarter of the county agent’s map and encompassed some of the best grasslands in the basin.  Just driving through the ranch on the state highway took an hour;  it might take a day to cross it on the web of dirt roads that traversed its varied terrain.

They headed northeast from the big ranch house, back behind the main corral and spring house.  For a few miles, the road had been graveled and graded, but it soon dwindled into little more than an erratic, eastward scratch across the rolling prairie.

Eager to make conversation on the bumpy ride, Claire asked about the history of the Sun-Seven.  Buck obliged.  

His great-grandfather, Graeme, the youngest of seven sons born to the eighteenth Earl of Ballantrae, was a “remittance man,” a victim of British primogeniture and his own lusty behavior.  To the chagrin of several of Ballantrae’s ladies — and the upstairs maid at his father’s estate — he was sent away from his ancestral lands on Scotland’s gray, western coast with only his father’s promise of a semi-annual payment of two hundred pounds — about one hundred American dollars at the time. 

The charming young lordling borrowed enough to buy a herd, hire cowboys and build a magnificent house on land he promised would belong to every son he ever sired.  The thought of sons left him vulnerable to the comely daughter of a powerful Tammany ward boss, to whom he was betrothed after a brief courtship.  Together, they gathered twenty-thousand head of cattle, all marked with the distinctive brand of the proud seventh son of a Scottish nobleman:  A sun over the numeral seven.

In 1886, Graeme and Anna Madigan’s only child was born.  The infant Adhamh survived his difficult birth but his mother did not.  Graeme Madigan raised his son alone.

The Madigans’ place in the new American aristocracy was sealed when Adhamh, at the passionate age of twenty-six, was elected to the Wyoming State Senate in 1912.  He served until he died of a heart attack on the Senate floor in Cheyenne in 1945.

Adhamh’s son John was called “Jack” by all who knew him.  And Jack begat Robert Roy Madigan, who grew up to ride in the rodeo and came to be known simply as “Buck.”  The Madigan line ended there;  Buck was a confirmed bachelor with no children, no heirs.

“So how did you come to have a title of nobility back in Scotland after all these years?”

Buck shrugged and splurted a brown stream of tobacco out his window.  A juicy grin spilled across his thin lips.  From the side, his distinctive Roman nose was almost regal.

“Damned if I know.  Them Englishmen got some way to know who gets the goods.  Near as I can tell, all the other branches of the family tree just petered out a few years back.  Next thing I know, some fancy-soundin’ English fella’s on the phone and tellin’ me I’m the Earl.  I kept tellin’ him my name was Robert Roy and some folks call me Buck.”

Buck winked at Claire.  Such was his nobility, borne of a kind of reverse evolution.  His bloodlines ran thick with a nobleman’s passion, a senator’s spirit, an authentic cowboy’s quiet grace, and the raw courage of a bronc rider.

In the distance, a dark ribbon of trees snaked down from the north and disappeared into the shallow washes toward the south.  Their roots suckled from Poison Creek, just ahead.  The road had all but disappeared beneath them and Buck Madigan seemed to be navigating from memory across the grassland.

He stepped off the gas for a moment, shielding his eyes against the noon sun as he searched for landmarks.  The truck growled, rolling slightly forward, until Buck spun the steering wheel hard to the left and jounced off across the range.

“Not far now,” he said.  He squirted a brown gob of tobacco out the open window.  “Somewhere right in here, up next to the crick.”

Then he saw it, whatever it was.  He aimed the Dodge’s curved hood straight toward a broad bend of the creek and gave it a little gas.  As they neared the creek, Morgan saw the bleached white bones of a tumble-down old corral and a deteriorated shack dug into the side of shallow embankment.

“An old-timer built this place to stake a claim back in the homestead days,” Buck explained as he parked beside an old corral.  “Froze all his fingers off the second winter and sold out.  This place has been here near a hundred years now, I reckon.”

The homesteader’s shack would soon seep into the prairie earth.  It was the only home Aimee Little Spotted Horse ever knew, but if her ghost still wandered here, it left no sign.

The planks of the porch were rotten.  One end of the eave had collapsed across the windowless facade, which listed like a leaky boat in a lagoon of thistles.  Five decades of rain and melting snow had carved deep crevasses in the silty hill that surrounded it.

Morgan stepped carefully among the porch’s broken boards.  Weeds poked through the rotting wood.  The wooden door, cobbled from two thick slabs of pine, had been wrenched from its bottom hinge by the sagging frame.  Morgan stood at the threshold, beneath a broken deer horn nailed over the portal, and looked inside.

A bed frame had collapsed upon itself, its foot- and headboards fallen inward on a box spring mattress long ago stripped of its ticking by rodents.  In the opposite corner, an upright, two-burner woodstove, its belly rusted through.  The oven door hung open like a toothless, hungry mouth and some small animal had built a nest inside.  The plank floor was carpeted with dried mud that must have trickled through the walls every spring, and the low ceiling dripped with dusty cobwebs.  Hanging among them on a short piece of wire was a circlet of willow, laced with dried rawhide thongs.

“What’s that hanging there?” he asked Madigan.

Madigan squinted into the dark cabin.

“That’s a dream-catcher.  A sort of Indian good luck token.  Little Aimee used to make ‘em for all her little friends.  Even give me one, once, to hang by my bed, to catch dreams.  Hell, I don’t know about stuff like that.  Can’t rightly say why they left it here.”

“I ain’t been out here in years, but I think they had a little garden up on top,” Buck said.  He and Morgan clambered up the loose slope to a flat spot, now overgrown with sagebrush.  A flicker of yellow caught Morgan’s eye.

A small cluster of tickseed blossomed beside a clump of prairie grass.  It must have re-seeded itself year after year, surviving hungry cattle and the razor-sharp wind.  It was the only sign that someone had done more than seek a meager shelter in this forsaken spot, that someone had aspired to make it a home against God’s better judgment.  In time, Morgan thought, the Lord might reclaim the lifeless dwelling, but not the flowers, which would cast their seed on the wind and never die.

Not like Aimee.

Or Bridger.

Morgan had come to see mortality as a series of accidental events, just arrhythmic beats shared by random hearts.  He’d long ago stopped looking for purpose in the mayhem he witnessed.  That’s when he stopped going to church.  He could not believe God had a plan for the baby in Cabrini Green who was hit by a stray nine-millimeter bullet, or a former homecoming queen whose body is left to rot in the garbage, or a happy little boy poisoned by his own blood.  They hadn’t shared much, except living too briefly and dying too soon.

Unhappy endings weren’t supposed to be God’s plan.  To Morgan, they weren’t any more evil than they were purposeful.  They were simply excruciating misfortunes carried by the wind and dropped where they might take root before anyone noticed.  Like tickseed.

“Whatever happened to Charlie and Catherine?  Did they stick around?” Morgan asked Buck, who was using his good left thumb and forefinger to twist a rusty nail out of a solitary weathered fence post.

“I think they went back to the rez’ up in Montana not long after their little girl passed.  Her mama sent a few nice letters to my daddy, but those stopped after a while.  Nobody knows what become of them.  She was good folks, real pretty.  And Charlie was a good hand when he wasn’t drinkin’ and beatin’ on ‘em.”

The nail came loose and Buck sidearmed it a good thirty yards, plinking it into Poison Creek.  It landed in the water with a tiny splash, as if a silvery minnow had bravely crested the surface for one shining moment.

They left the old shack to decay in peace and headed back west, the way they’d come.  After a few miles, they were in broken country, where arroyos twisted through the dry soil like empty veins.

Buck Madigan gunned his powerful truck across a dry wash and up the other side.  As they topped the hill, a small cemetery came into view, encircled by a crooked wrought-iron fence and a few scrubby cedar trees.  Sagebrush thrived inside the tumbleweed-choked fence, which protected it from hungry cattle.

The gate’s latch was rusted shut, so Buck found a softball-sized sandstone to loosen it.  The hinges were so choked with rust they screamed like the angels of Hell as he horsed the gate open.  The plaintive, persistent wind moaned all around them.

“Don’t get up here much,” Buck said, lifting some trapped tumbleweeds over the fence and watching them roll away to the west.  “My great-grandaddy’s original house was just down over there, but he moved it after the Twister of ‘Ought-two.  Damn near two hundred head of cattle just disappeared.  Put the fear of God in him, lemme tell you.  He didn’t have a goddam clue what a tornado was, and it scared the bejeezus outta him.”

Graeme Madigan’s grave, which he shared with his young wife, was marked by a pyramid-shaped block of granite topped with a sun.  It was the most ostentatious of all the markers and sat in the center of the square plot, which was easily forty feet wide.  Adhamh and Suzanne Madigan were buried together on the right side of his father.  Jack and Marie Madigan, Buck’s parents, were buried under plain marble headstones on the other side.  Jack died in 1969, leaving the place to his only son, unmarried, unrooted and unblessed with children of his own.

How odd it was, Morgan thought, that this small empire was created by man who was prevented from claiming his family’s legacy.  After Buck, there was no one left to claim it at all.

“Here she is here,” Buck said.

Aimee Little Spotted Horse’s final resting place was easily overlooked.  The stone was a cube of granite, no bigger than a shoebox, nestled so deep in the weeds, it could not be seen.

“I was near nine years old when she died, you know,” Buck said.  “Her daddy come runnin’ over to our house to call the sheriff that night she disappeared.  He was scared to death.  I knew her a little, from the summer picnics for the hired hands and from school, but we didn’t mix much.  She was Indian, you know, and them was different times.  But I felt real sad for her.  I didn’t know that little kids died and I couldn’t understand how somebody could just go away and never come back.”

Morgan put his hand on the old cowboy’s shoulder.  The muscles under his hand were rigid and hard.

“Did you go to the funeral?” he asked.

“Yeah, I come up here with my daddy for the buryin’.  He helped her daddy lower that little pine-wood coffin into the hole, real slow and easy, so it didn’t bump on the bottom.  It was like they didn’t want to disturb her no more.  Her mama was in pretty bad shape.  The preacher said some words, but I don’t recall what he said.  I got to thinkin’ after you called this morning, and I still get a little choked to think about that little girl.”

Claire yanked some weeds and kneeled on the ground beside Buck.  Beneath the thick cover of ragweed and spurge, a few wildflowers clung to life close to the ground.  They held fast to the soil, soaking up what little rain was left to them, but they survived.

“I’ll be goddamned,” Buck said.

He reached into the thicket of sticky weeds.  Morgan glimpsed a flash of silver as Buck handed something to Claire.

It was a silver vase, tarnished by weather.

It contained a half dozen dried up flowers whose wilted stalks were still slightly green.  Their shriveled petals curled around the brown seed disk, still attached and undispersed.

Claire studied the raised floral pattern on its side.  She rubbed away some dried dust, and as she tipped it to look at the bottom, fetid brown water spilled out.