John Lutz - Spark

“Commitment to revenge can be your fuel, amigo , and it can also get you killed.”

“It isn’t only revenge,” Carver told him. “If somebody wants me to turn loose of the Jerome Evans investigation, it’s because there must be something to investigate.”

“That hadn’t escaped me,” Desoto said. “But it won’t make you any less dead.”

“Beth’s waiting for me outside,” Carver said. “Why don’t you feed the tough guy’s description into the process while I examine mug shots?”

“How come she didn’t come in with you?”

“I think you make her nervous.”

Desoto didn’t say anything. Then he stood up. “Can you walk okay?”

Carver said he could. He stood up and leaned hard on the cane.

Desoto led him to a small room not much larger than a storage closet. It contained three chairs and a rectangular oak table. The pale-green walls were grease-stained and badly in need of paint. There were three stacks of thickly bound mug books on the table. The only light was from the single, dust-coated window.

“I’ll leave you here to look for the right photo,” Desoto said. “While you’re doing that, I’ll get the description in circulation.”

Carver thanked him and settled down on a hard wooden chair, making it a point not to groan with discomfort. By the time he’d dragged the first of the large, heavy books over, Desoto had left and closed the door softly behind him.

Carver was alone in the tiny, quiet room with the sun streaming like a celestial spotlight through the incredibly dirty, wire-reinforced window behind him, illuminating the rogues’ gallery in front of him.

As if it were a book of saints.

Only twenty minutes had passed before Desoto came back into the room. He was carrying a yellow file folder and some fanfold computer paper with faint dot-matrix printing on it. Hard copy, Desoto called it these days, now that he’d become computer literate.

“You still on the first book, amigo ?”

Carver said, “I want to be sure.”

“Well, I can save you some trouble, I think. VICAP had a file on your guy. In fact, there’s a wealth of information about him. He fascinates people, like a lot of predators do. Name Adam Beed strike a chord?”

Carver closed the mug book and shook his head no.

Desoto drew a fax photo from the folder and laid it on the table. The face of the man who’d attacked Carver stared up at him. Yet as he looked longer at the grainy black-and-white image he couldn’t be positive. Desoto laid another photo before Carver; in this one Beed was wearing his black horn-rimmed glasses. No doubt about who it was. He was also wearing the horn-rims in the defiant, chin-up profile shot Desoto placed on the table. He looked more upwardly mobile than criminal.

“Him,” Carver said, feeling something warm and fierce growing in his belly.

Desoto sat down across from Carver at the table. He had his suit coat on but he didn’t appear to be uncomfortable in the stifling room. “I made some calls, amigo , learned plenty about Beed. He was an accountant at a major investment firm, got into trouble with embezzlement six years ago, and did a stretch in Raiford.”

Carver stared at him. “An accountant?”

Desoto smiled. “He had your number, hey?”

“How long’s he been out?” Carver asked.

“Paroled eighteen months ago. When he was in prison he underwent a kind of metamorphosis. Within a couple of years he was nothing like the soft, white-collar type who walked through the gates. Took to weight training, martial arts, lightened up on cocaine.”

“He had a habit?”

“Oh, yes. That was why he embezzled, to support it. He was still on the stuff in prison, but he had to moderate. Despite what the public hears, drugs aren’t all that easy to get inside the walls. Not like out here, anyway. Beed got bigger and stronger, then bigger and stronger again. Then he went about getting even with an inmate who’d raped him when he was new, a tough hombre in for murder. Nothing can be proved, but it seems the fella lost his left arm in a workshop accident. Naturally enough, he won’t talk about what really happened.”

“Maybe Beed broke it off,” Carver said.

“A joke, amigo ?”

“I suppose,” Carver said. “I get fed up hearing how tough assholes like Beed are, how they plow over everybody who gets in their way.” Outside in the distance a siren warbled frantically, maybe responding to a call about a crime perpetrated by one of the world’s Adam Beeds. Carver hated the takers in life. Right now, Beed in particular. “Get on with your story,” he said.

Desoto said, “Beed became a sadistic homosexual himself, and rumor has it he murdered his cellmate. Again, nothing provable. Beed can put on an act in front of investigators or a parole board. And he still thinks and acts like an accountant. He’s conservative in dress and manner, the kind of guy you’d trust in a minute to date your daughter or keep your books.”

“Your daughter and books,” Carver said, “not mine. If Beed’s on parole, you must have a current address on him.”

Desoto laughed. “No, my friend. You aren’t hearing what I’m saying about this one. He’s different. This kind of animal breaks parole the first week he’s released, then disappears. It’s predictable, and that’s what happened with Beed. But like I said, he’s cautious. He knew he’d lose big if he got nailed for possession of illegal narcotics in prison, so the word is he replaced his cocaine habit with alcohol dependency. Not his drug of choice, but he had to make do if he didn’t want a lot of years behind bars.”

“Is that all that’s on his sheet?” Carver asked. “The embezzlement conviction?”

“That’s it, amigo. I told you he was different. I said it’s suspected he killed his cellmate, but I didn’t talk about method. The cellmate was a little guy named Kravak, in for a homicide committed while he was burglarizing a drugstore. Prison guards found Kravak dead; he’d been tortured with lighted cigarettes touched to the bottoms of his feet, his genitals, eyelids, everywhere. Took the prison doctors a while to figure out what killed him, though. A straightened wire coat hanger inserted through his rectum. It pierced everything right up to and including his heart.”

Carver pushed away his revulsion and replaced it with resolve. Some of his fear he left intact; he’d need it to keep an edge, to avoid making a dumb move based on emotion. “So Beed’s an unreserved sadist. You think I don’t know that?”

Desoto’s somber brown eyes were steady. He meshed his fingers, gold rings flashing in the blast of sunlight through the window. “Something else, amigo. They found the cellmate in a storeroom, and in the condition I just described. But also, there were bites out of him.”

Carver felt his stomach pulse against his belt buckle. “Jesus! We talking cannibalism?”

“Probably not. More like old-fashioned cruelty with a disgusting twist. It took the doctors a few days to realize they were looking at bites; things had been done to the wounds with a knife so it’d be impossible to match tooth patterns.”

Carver sat back and watched dust motes swirl in the angled shaft of sunlight bisecting the room. The siren had faded to silence outside. Maybe the bad guy was caught, and a modicum of order had been restored to the world.

“This Beed,” Desoto said, “he’s strong as an Olympic weight lifter, and he’s a psycho. He was a monster in prison, and I was told he’s been taking steroids since his release, maybe even was on them behind the walls, so he’s even more dangerous.”

Carver was getting weary of the buildup. And angry. “The man’s not a goddamn tank.”