Michael Connelly - The Scarecrow

He was suddenly grabbed from behind by the back of his T-shirt’s collar and yanked backward down the hall. He managed to look up and see it was Alma.

“You are a very bad little boy!” she scolded.

“No,” he cried. “I wanna see my-”

“Not now, you don’t!”

She dragged him back through the beads and into the dressing room. She pushed him down onto the pile of feather boas and silk scarves.

“You are in big troub-What is that?”

She was pointing at him, finger aimed low. At the place where he felt strange feelings begin from.

“I’m a good boy,” he said.

“Not with that, you aren’t,” Alma said. “Let’s see what you’ve got there.”

She reached down and put her hand under his belt. She started to pull his pants down.

“You little pervert,” Alma said. “I’m going to show you what we do with perverts around here.”

Wesley was frozen in terror. That word she called him. He didn’t know what it meant. He didn’t know what to do.

The sharp knock of metal on glass cut through the music and the dream. Carver jumped up in his seat. Momentarily disoriented, he looked around, realized where he was, and pulled the buds out of his ears.

He looked out the window, and there was McGinnis, standing in the street. He was holding a leash that led down to the collar on a little pip-squeak dog. Carver saw the fat Notre Dame ring on his finger. He must have hit the window with it to get his attention.

Carver lowered the window. At the same time, he used his foot to make sure the gun he’d placed on the floor was out of sight.

“Wesley, what are you doing here?”

The dog started yapping before Carver could answer, and McGinnis shushed it.

“I wanted to talk to you,” Carver said.

“Then, why didn’t you come up to the house?”

“Because I also have to show you something.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Get in and I’ll take you.”

“Take me where? It’s almost midnight. I don’t under-”

“It has to do with that visit from the FBI the other day. I think I know who they’re looking for.”

McGinnis took a step forward to look in closely at Carver.

“Wesley, what’s going on? What do you mean ‘who they’re looking for’?”

“Just get in and I’ll explain it on the way.”

“What about my dog?”

“You can bring it. We won’t be long.”

McGinnis shook his head like he was annoyed with the whole thing but then walked around to get into the car. Carver leaned forward and quickly grabbed the gun off the floor and put it into the rear waistband of his pants. He’d have to live with the discomfort.

McGinnis put the dog in the backseat and then got into the front.

“It’s a she,” he said.

“What?” Carver asked.

“The dog’s a she, not an it.”

“Whatever. She won’t pee in my car, will she?”

“Don’t worry. She just went.”

“Good.”

Carver started driving out of the neighborhood.

“Is your house locked?” he asked.

“Yes, I lock up when we go on walks. You never know with the neighborhood kids. They all know I live alone.”

“That’s smart.”

“Where are we going?”

“To where Freddy Stone lives.”

“Okay, so now tell me what is going on and what it has to do with the FBI.”

“I told you. I have to show you.”

“Then tell me what you’re going to show me. Have you talked to Stone? Did you ask him where the hell he’s been?”

Carver shook his head.

“No, I haven’t talked to him. That’s why I went to his place tonight, to try to catch him. He wasn’t there but I found something else. The website the FBI was asking about. He’s the guy behind it.”

“So as soon as he hears that the FBI came by with a warrant, he takes a hike.”

“It looks that way.”

“We need to call the FBI, Wesley. We can’t look like we were protecting this guy, no matter what he was into.”

“But it could hurt the business if it blows up in the media. It could bring us down.”

McGinnis shook his head.

“We’ll just have to take our lumps,” he said emphatically. “Covering it up will never work.”

“All right. We go to his place first and then we call the FBI. Do you remember the names of those two agents?”

“I have their cards at the office. One was named Bantam. I remember it because he was a big guy but his name was Bantam, like the bantamweight class in boxing, which is the small guys.”

“Right. Now I remember.”

The lights of the tall buildings in downtown Phoenix spread out before them on both sides of the freeway. Carver stopped talking and McGinnis did likewise. The dog was sleeping on the backseat of the car.

Carver’s mind wandered back to the memory the music had conjured earlier. He wondered what had made him go down the hallway to look. He knew the answer was tangled down deep in his darkest roots. In a place no one could go.

I never left my hotel room Saturday, even when some of the reporters on the weekend shift called and invited me over to the Red Wind for cocktails after work. They were celebrating another day on the front page with the story. The latest report being on Alonzo Winslow’s first day of freedom and an update on the growing search for the trunk murder suspect. I didn’t feel much like celebrating a story that was no longer mine. I also didn’t go to the Red Wind anymore. They used to put the front pages of the A section, Metro and Sports over the urinals in the men’s restroom. Now they had flat-screen plasma TVs tuned to Fox and CNN and Bloomberg. Each screen adding insult to injury, a reminder that our business was dying.

Instead I stayed in Saturday night and started working my way through the files, using Rachel’s notes as a blueprint. With her in Washington and off the case, I felt uncomfortable leaving the profiling to nameless, faceless agents on the task force or as far away as Quantico. This was my story and I was going to keep out in front on it.

I worked late into the night, pulling together the details of two dead women’s lives, looking for the commonality Rachel was sure was there. They were women from two different hometowns who had migrated to two different cities in two different states. As far as I could tell, they had never crossed paths, except on the outside chance that Denise Babbit had gone to Las Vegas and happened to catch the Femmes Fatales show at the Cleopatra.

Could that be the connection between their murders? It seemed far-fetched.

I finally exhausted that pursuit and decided to approach things from a completely different angle. The killer’s angle. On a fresh sheet of Rachel’s notebook paper, I started listing all the things the Unsub would have needed to know in order to accomplish each murder in terms of method, timing and location. This proved to be a daunting task and by midnight I was spent. I fell asleep in my clothes on top of the bedspread, the files and my notes all around me.

The four A.M. call from the front desk was jarring, but it saved me from my recurring dream of Angela.

“Hello,” I croaked into the phone.

“Mr. McEvoy, your limo is here.”

“My limo?”

“He said he was from CNN.”

I had totally forgotten. It had been set up by the Times ’ media relations office on Friday. I was supposed to go live to the nation on a weekend show that ran from eight to ten on Sunday mornings. The problem with that was, it was eight to ten East Coast time, five to seven West Coast time. On Friday the show’s producer had been unclear where in the show they would go to me. So I had to be ready to go live at five.