Dave Zeltserman - Bad Thoughts

A raw panic took hold. As much as Elaine Horwitz tried to fight it, it seemed to grow within her, replacing the very breath that was being pushed out. She knew it was showing in her eyes. She wanted to scream.

A smile broke out over Winters’s face. An almost pleasant smile. “That’s a good girl,” he said warmly. “That’s right, darling, scream. Stretch those red lips of yours wide and scream your head off. Wider please. A bit wider. This knife has to go somewhere.”

As much as she tried, Elaine Horwitz couldn’t fight it.

A Brookline police cruiser was parked in front of Elaine Horwitz’s office building. Its lights were off and the cop sitting in it looked bored. Shannon pulled into the parking lot behind the building and ran back to the cruiser. The two FBI agents pulled up behind it.

“Why aren’t you in there?” Shannon asked the cop, incredulously.

“You’re the guy who called?”

“I asked you why you’re sitting here on your ass-”

“Hey, look, it’s three-thirty in the morning. The building’s empty. There’s no sign of any forced entry-”

“Her car’s still in the parking lot!”

The cop looked stunned. “Maybe somebody gave her a ride home,” he offered defensively.

One of the FBI agents was getting out of the sedan. “Okay, what’s this about?”

Shannon ignored him. The entranceway to Horwitz’s building was protected by a glass security door. Shannon tried it, found it locked, and kicked it in. Obscenities were shouted out from behind him. Someone tried to grab him by the arm, but he pulled free and ran to Elaine Horwitz’s office. The door to it was also locked. A familiar rancid smell filtered through it. He kicked the door and felt it splinter. He kicked it again and fell with it as it crashed open.

“You goddamn psycho,” one of the FBI agents was yelling at him, “you better fucking stop right now.”

He had a service revolver trained towards the middle of Shannon’s body. Shannon ignored it. From where he was lying he could see Elaine Horwitz’s desk. There was a body lying on top of it.

“Oh shit,” the FBI agent murmured as he fumbled for the lights, the color dropping out of his face. He lowered his revolver.

The body on the desk was Elaine’s. She was naked, on her back, her legs limply hanging over the edge, her hands tied behind her. As Shannon got closer he saw the knife angling out of her mouth.

“Don’t touch anything!” the FBI agent ordered hoarsely. Elaine Horwitz’s normally pale skin had turned an awful gray. Shannon put a hand to her neck. The skin still felt warm. Then her body twitched and a gurgling noise came out of her.

Shannon yelled out for him to get an ambulance. Then to no one in particular, “She’s still alive, you sonofabitch.”

The Brookline detective taking Shannon’s statement looked uneasy. “Who told you he was going to kill her?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you said he told you?”

“No, I didn’t. I said I dreamed he told me.”

“And you don’t know who this guy is?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Nobody told you anything ahead of time?”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe you heard something? Maybe you had second thoughts what to do about it?”

Shannon just shook his head.

“How about a phone call? Sometimes I get calls in the middle of the night and I don’t even realize I’m answering it. Could it have been something like that?”

“No. There were no phone calls.”

The detective looked uncomfortable. He drummed his fingers across his desk. He didn’t like this dream stuff. Even though Shannon worked in Cambridge, even though he was suspended, he was still a fellow officer. Otherwise the questioning would have gone differently.

“So you’d say you had a, uh, premonition about the attack?” the detective asked hopefully.

Shannon decided to make things easier for his fellow officer. He told him that was what happened. A premonition. When he was first brought to the station he had agreed to a Breathalyzer test and then to giving blood and urine samples, so the detective didn’t bother asking about drug or alcohol usage. The tests would answer that better than Shannon could. After signing his statement, the detective asked Shannon if he could wait around. Someone from the FBI wanted to talk to him. Shannon pointed out that there were two FBI agents there now, but the detective just shrugged and turned to some paperwork.

While he waited, he called the hospital Elaine had been taken to but they couldn’t tell him much. Only that the damage to her had been severe and that she’d probably be in surgery most of the morning. If she survived that long.

Agent Douglas Swallow arrived after eight o’clock. He seemed uninterested as he read over Shannon’s statement.

“Do you have anything to add?” he asked.

Shannon shook his head.

“Well, then, thank you for your time.” And Agent Swallow turned away from him.

The FBI agent’s attitude bothered Shannon. There was something behind it, some card Swallow thought he had. Shannon tried to think it through, but he was too tired. Instead, he drove to Beth Israel Hospital. The front desk couldn’t give him any status about Elaine, only that she was still in surgery.

Shannon sat and waited. A heavy weariness had soaked into his joints. It tugged at him. It tried to force his eyes closed. He struggled against it. He fought like hell to stay awake. At that moment he didn’t feel up to facing Winters.

Pig Dornich had tried calling Shannon from the Raleigh-Durham airport and again after he landed in Boston. He knew about Charlie Winters, about his release from prison four months before the murders started up again, and wanted to talk to Shannon before going to the police. But, and the magnitude of it left him overwhelmed, this was at least sixty murders over a twenty-year period. He tried his best to get ahold of him, but, well, Shannon would just have to hear it secondhand.

While he drove from Logan airport to his office in Malden he thought about the two cousins crisscrossing the country and about all the corpses they left behind. Twenty years ago they ended up in Sacramento. He pretty much guessed what happened with Shannon’s mother, that Charlie took a nap while Herbert did the murder. When he had gotten Charlie Winters’s arrest report faxed to him he knew why Winters had a thirteen-year-old boy in his trunk when the police had stopped him. He also knew why the recent murders were being done. In a way it was remarkable that things had worked out the way they had, almost as if the sonofabitch knew about Shannon’s blackouts. It was as if he knew when they happened, that he knew Shannon could be convinced he was doing the murders himself.

As Dornich pulled into the garage he heard over the radio about Elaine Horwitz. He recognized the name and remembered her as Shannon’s therapist. The report had her in critical condition. A grim determination tightened the flesh around his mouth. You’re losing your touch you goddamn psycho, he swore silently.

The adrenaline that had been pumping through him fizzled out. He felt tired all of a sudden. Weary to the bone. Looking in the rearview mirror he saw the eyes of an old man. If he had been a little smarter, a little quicker, a little more on the ball, that woman wouldn’t have been carved up. Charlie Winters would’ve been locked up already with the key thrown the hell away.

Dornich stopped outside his door. He smelled a rotting, rancid odor coming from his office. He wondered whether he had left any food out. As he opened the door the smell assaulted him. He realized rotting food couldn’t have caused that odor. Maybe if a raw sewage pipe had opened up into his office…