Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

Kristine Kjarstad shrugged. She felt good again, in charge. By this evening I’ll have the answer to that, she thought.

“Beats me,” she said.

Eileen McCann nodded.

“Are you religious, Kristine?”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

She felt the ground give way beneath her again. Eileen McCann smiled for the first time.

“It’s just that I don’t want to offend anyone’s sensibilities,” she said. “It seems to be so easy to do these days. I myself am a Catholic of the cafeteria variety, and last year I received from an ancient aunt a perfectly hideous calendar featuring photographs of the present pope which I put up on the wall in here, largely to get it out of the house. A coworker who recently converted to Islam objected to this, and the Chief made me take it down. His secretary had taken him to court about a Matisse print he had bought to brighten up his office, on the grounds that the seminude subject was, quote, demeaning to her as a woman and a blatant act of sexual harassment in the workplace which made her feel raped by proxy, unquote. So you have to tread delicately.”

“I’m kind of a go-along, get-along Episcopalian,” Kristine replied.

Eileen McCann nodded.

“That’s sufficient for my purposes.”

“Which are?”

“To remind you, and myself, that the human brain favors connections over disjunctions. In other words, we are programmed to privilege data which appear to generate patterns over data which call patterns into question. Hence the eternal temptation of God, and the corresponding necessity of an organized theology by means of which these temptations can be safely controlled.”

Kristine sat looking at her in amazement. How little we know about anyone, she thought, and how much we presume.

“Descending from the theological to the criminal,” McCann continued, “we are faced here with a situation in which the temptation to make connections is almost overwhelming. These killings seem to exemplify all the things we fear most about the society we live in. Random violence, the killer at the door, your name on some unknown agenda. We need to construct a theory to connect and contain these events. What worries me is that in satisfying that urge, we may find ourselves ignoring the facts which tend to contradict any such thesis.”

“Such as?” Kristine demanded.

“Such as the absence of any conceivable motive. People don’t just travel all over the country committing acts of violence without some reason. If it’s a terrorist group, how come they aren’t publicizing their activities? And who are they targeting? In your case they killed a baby, in Kansas a cripple, here a realtor and a lawyer. What’s the connecting thread? It doesn’t exist. There’s no discernible victim typology, by age, gender, ethnicity, profession, religion or social level.”

Kristine Kjarstad nodded.

“I see what you’re saying here, Iles. But I still think there is a pattern.”

“Because of this Atlanta case? Tell me about it.”

Kristine hesitated.

“It doesn’t sound like much. Two whites and three blacks in a firefight. One on either side was killed, the other white is in the hospital.”

“I don’t see the connection.”

“There may not be any. But the white guys were armed with.22 Smiths loaded with this Stinger ammo, and they were carrying a case with handcuffs and a roll of duct tape. I figure they were on their way to hit a house when they ran into a different kind of trouble. Anyway, I’m going down there to speak to the survivor.”

Eileen McCann raised her eyebrows.

“You’re going to Atlanta?”

She sounded disapproving. Kristine felt a need to justify herself.

“I know it’s a long shot, but this could be one of the biggest things in years, Iles. We’d be national celebrities!”

She immediately regretted this last remark. I’ve been spending too much time with Steve Warren, she thought.

“You might, Kristine,” Eileen McCann replied pointedly, “but it would take more than a mere homicidal conspiracy to get this mug on coast-to-coast television. Anyway, I think you’re allowing your dreams of stardom to run away with you. Our presumptive killers don’t have a monopoly on Smith amp; Wesson handguns or fragmenting bullets. Nor is there any reason to suppose that they are the only ones to have realized that handcuffs are the best way to-”

“There’s something else,” Kristine interrupted. “The guy who was killed was going under the name Dale Watson.”

Eileen McCann waved her hand impatiently.

“Dale Watson’s dead. That’s one thing we know for sure. His father went to the morgue and ID’d the body.”

“So the guy in Atlanta is using the name as an alias. But why that name?”

They stared at each other.

“Maybe he read about it in the papers,” McCann suggested. “A kind of copycat thing.”

“Maybe. But that’s kind of weird too. Like you said, these people seem to go to enormous lengths to avoid leaving any clues. So you’d think they’d be smart enough not to use a name which is already known to the police in connection with a similar crime.”

Eileen McCann looked at her for a long time.

“What time is your flight?” she asked.

“I have to check in by one.”

McCann glanced at her watch.

“I’ll give you a ride. We can pick up a bite to eat on the way.”

Much to Kristine’s surprise, Eileen McCann turned out to be something of a foodie. The “bite to eat” consisted of eight helpings of delicious dim sum at a restaurant in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood called Lincolnwood. Eileen was relaxed, witty and informative about her work, colleagues and the sociocultural microclimates of the northern Chicago suburbs. By the time they reached the airport, they were talking like friends.

Instead of dropping Kristine at the curb, Eileen parked in the short-term facility and accompanied her inside, then abruptly dashed off to use the bathroom without saying good-bye. Kristine headed for the gate, where the plane was boarding. She found her seat and settled back with a copy of Vanity Fair she had bought at Sea-Tac the night before.

The plane had leveled off at cruise altitude when she looked up to see Eileen McCann walking down the aisle toward her.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“God, I hate flying!” the other woman exclaimed. “Two hours without a smoke.”

She smiled and shrugged.

“Here’s the deal. You get the TV coverage, and they can stick me on NPR and local radio. Even my mother conceded that my voice wasn’t so bad. Or as she tactfully put it, ‘If you could date by phone, the guys’d be all over you like an old coat.’”

She settled into an empty seat across the aisle, pulled out a battered paperback and didn’t utter a single word for the rest of the flight. Kristine dozed.

The descent into Atlanta was bumpy, the landing hard. It was pouring with rain, sheets of it falling from a sky the color of mud. They exited the plane, passing through an intermediate zone of clammy air before the air-conditioning took over. It was like walking through a hot shower. Among the crowd at the gate was a tubby black man with glasses and a mustache holding a piece of cardboard with Kristine’s name written on it in pink marker.

“Were you sent to pick me up?” she asked him.

“You Miss Kjarstad?”

He pronounced it perfectly.

“That’s right.”

“I figured you far taller, more intense,” the man went on with a broad smile. “The Nike type. Charlie told me about that. He was very impressed, you knowing Greek and all.”

She recognized the voice now. He had called her the day before to make final arrangements for her visit.