Jack of Spades Read online

  “Let me tell you what first made me think of Pendleton,” Spader said.

  “Yeah, why don’t you do that?”

  “I was going through the task force members’ notes, the ones I had copies of. I was looking at Wilkins’s notes—he’s looking into the local college dropouts—and I came across Pendleton’s name.”

  “He went to college?”

  “One year at Suffolk University.”

  “So? Wilkins said Golding was a dropout, too, right?”

  “But Golding had a witness. His wife was there. Besides, if you were going to make up a story, would you pretend you’d sucked a guy’s penis?”

  “You got a point.”

  “Okay,” Spader said, “so that got me thinking about Pendleton. And I pulled out his photo and started just, I don’t know, letting my mind wander. Playing ‘what if?’ And I asked myself, ‘What if this guy wasn’t in a wheelchair? Could he be our guy?’ ”

  “And you decided he could be? Putting aside the wheelchair thing for a second, what about his build? The guy’s kind of skinny and everyone’s been using the word stocky to describe Galaxo. And with Pendleton being thin like that, he’s probably not strong enough to do what Galaxo does. And don’t think I’m forgetting for even a second that Pendleton’s in a goddamned wheelchair.”

  “As for their builds, Pendleton’s thin, but think about it. Galaxo wears a running suit. He could easily wear a couple of layers of clothes underneath it. No one’s touched the guy, so there’s nobody to say, ‘Hey, I felt his chest and it seemed like he was wearing a bunch of clothes under there.’ No, instead, people see him looking bulky or whatever and describe him as stocky. And as for him not being very strong, well, he’s a little skinny, but I remember his arms looked strong enough. Probably got that way wheeling himself around for years.”

  “Until he finally decided to just get up and start walking around instead?” Dunbar chuckled.

  “Just listen to me, will you? I’ll lay it all out for you. First of all, Galaxo is jam-packed full of shit. That whole choice thing he’s doing? It’s bullshit. He’s doing that to screw with us. We’ve been under the impression that he was driven by his need to demonstrate the arbitrariness of the world or the government or whatever, but it’s bullshit. The choices mean nothing to him. He’s not even offering real choices.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Finneran said Galaxo went crazy when he chose to lose his genitals rather than his eyes.”

  Dunbar looked at him. “That’s pretty unbelievable, though, don’t you think? I’d have to keep my equipment, wouldn’t you?”

  “That’s not my point, Gavin.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Anyway, Finneran said he felt certain Galaxo wanted him to choose his eyes. When he didn’t, the guy went batshit and beat the holy hell out of him, then he plucked out Finneran’s eyes anyway.”

  “Even though he chose to lose his sausage and potatoes, the crazy bastard.”

  “Right. So, obviously, Galaxo had an agenda. He had a plan and Finneran threw a wrench in it. Ever heard of Hobson’s choice?”

  “Hobson? He that guy used to be with the Middlesex detective unit?”

  “No. Hobson’s choice means a choice that looks like a free choice but isn’t really a choice at all. All this time we thought he was giving people choices, but I don’t think he was. I bet he was forcing a certain choice on them. Each time, he offered options knowing full well which one his victims would pick. Golding had the choice of sucking on Galaxo’s penis or his wife losing a breast. For anyone who truly loves his wife, that’s not that hard a choice. Lisbon was given the choice of losing his feet or having acid poured on his face. Who wouldn’t choose to have his feet cut off? Especially if you looked like Lisbon did. The guy was handsome, remember?”

  “We don’t know what Galaxo offered Yasovich.”

  “No, but I bet what the guy turned down was a lot worse than having his tongue cut out. And last night, Finneran had to choose between his genitals or his eyes. I’m saying that Galaxo was sure he’d choose to keep his genitals, but he was wrong. And you said it yourself, a lot of guys would rather go blind than lose their equipment. And when Finneran made the ‘wrong’ choice, at least in Galaxo’s mind, the lunatic freaked out and took out his eyes anyway, which confirms what I’m saying.”

  Dunbar chewed on that for a few seconds. “What about Pendleton?” Dunbar asked. “What were his two choices again?”

  “Under my theory, they don’t matter. But Pendleton said Galaxo threatened to pull all his teeth out or cut off his ear. I don’t know about you, but to me, that one’s kind of a toss-up. None of the others were, not really, but that one was. But there’s more.”

  “Yeah?”

  Spader nodded and took a bite of his tuna sub. “As I said, I was going through a stack of notes taken by our task force members. I came across something I hadn’t seen before, or at least don’t remember seeing. One of our investigators—Amanda, I think—was interviewing Pendleton’s neighbors to see if they saw or heard anything that night. This one neighbor, right next door, was apparently watching when Pendleton left that night with his mother to go to the hospital. Watched her wheel him out, stick him in the van. What she said to Amanda, was, ‘At least they left his good ear.’ Amanda followed up and found out that the childhood accident that permanently scarred the left side of his face had also mutilated his right ear. The neighbor said it a lot of it was gone, and what was there was ragged.”

  When he’d first seen the photos of Pendleton, hanging in his house, Spader had been impressed with the guy’s unwillingness to hide the scars on his face. He thought now that it was simply more likely that he was more embarrassed by the appearance of his damaged ear than he was of his scarred face.

  Dunbar was thinking again. “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying Galaxo’s whole entire choice thing is a red herring. He does it to throw us off, to make us read something into his psyche, into his motivation, that isn’t there. I’m saying that the choices Pendleton said Galaxo gave him never happened because Pendleton is Galaxo and he cut off his own ear. What better way to deflect suspicion than to make yourself look like a victim? We’ve seen that before in other cases, only they don’t usually go so far as to cut off their own ears. Only here, it wasn’t that much of a loss, because it was little more than scar tissue anyway.”

  Dunbar frowned, stuffed the last of his hot dog into his mouth, and chewed. Finally, he said, “I’m having trouble with him bringing himself to our attention by posing as a victim. Forget that he has to cut his own ear off to do it. What I mean is, let’s say he doesn’t do that. We wouldn’t even know his name right now.”

  “Maybe there’s a connection between the victims after all, one we just haven’t found yet. If so, he figures we’ll find it soon enough and then we’ll start looking at him anyway, so he gets proactive, makes himself look like a victim, and figures he’s above suspicion then.” Dunbar was nodding. Spader continued. “Or maybe he just gets off on screwing with us. He’s playing a game with us, going around killing people, cutting body parts off, whatever, and the game’s more exciting for him if he makes it riskier for himself. Wouldn’t be the first time a perp got off being part of an investigation. Guys committing crimes and then coming forward as purported eyewitnesses.”

  Dunbar rubbed his chin. “Okay, I gotta admit, Galaxo has proven that he’s a bad guy. Pretty fucking cruel. So it’s a little weird that he’d cut off Pendleton’s bad ear when he could have taken the poor bastard’s only good one.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I still can’t get over the wheelchair thing, John,” Dunbar said, “but let’s try to forget that for a second. And I gotta tell you, that’s tough for me to forget, even for a second. But let’s say you’re right and Pendleton’s really Galaxo. Why would he cut off his bad ear and not his good one? We were bound to learn that.”

  Spader shrugged. “He probabl
y picked the ear in the first place as the body part to cut off because he knew he could part with it. The guy’s been disfigured most of his life. His face is a mess and his ear was a mess. The one feature he had on his head that wasn’t screwed up was his left ear. Even though his accident left him, well, ugly, maybe he had just enough vanity in him that he couldn’t part with his one normal feature. Thank God for that vanity, or I might not have tumbled to him.”

  “You’re getting way ahead of yourself, John. I’ll admit the ear thing is suspicious, and I’ll grant you that the choices Galaxo gave him seem more like a toss-up than what we know he offered other victims, but the guy’s still a cripple, remember? How do you get around that?”

  “I’ll worry about that later. But think about what we’ve got so far.” Spader ticked the points off on his fingers. “First, Pendleton’s a college dropout, like our profile says Galaxo likely is. Second, he’s an only child, also like in the profile. Third, I think Pendleton might have something against his father, which, again, is in the profile.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Remember all those pictures in his house? Dozens of them. But I didn’t see any of the old man. Not one. My guess is, if he were a nicer guy when he was alive, they’d have at least one picture of him in the house.”

  “Maybe the wife didn’t like him and it’s her choice.”

  “Even so, the odds are that if he wasn’t easy for the wife to live with, he probably wasn’t much easier for Stanley to live with.”

  “Okay,” Dunbar conceded. “There’s a chance he didn’t get along with his old man, though we’re speculating on that one. But didn’t the profile say that the father was probably alive?”

  “Shit. I forgot that. But no profile is a hundred-percent accurate. Dwight W. Daniels can’t be expected to get everything right on the nose.”

  “It’s a strike against your theory, though.”

  “A small strike, maybe. Okay, so what are we up to? Four, right? So fourth, he’s the only victim that we know about who was given a choice that wasn’t an obvious one, at least to most people. Fifth, he has his ear cut off, and it turns out it’s his ear that’s already mutilated. You admitted that if Galaxo was going to only take one ear, and he had to choose between a perfectly good one or a disfigured one, he’d probably take the good one and leave the guy with the bad one.”

  Dunbar nodded, but said, “How about Pendleton’s mother, though? She had real burns on her neck, made by a stun gun. You saying he threw on the mask, zapped his own mother, then hit her with chloroform and stuffed her in a closet? Then he went into the other room, cut off his ear, and called nine-one-one?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “It might be, if the guy weren’t in a fucking wheelchair.”

  Spader tossed the untouched second half of his sandwich into a trash can they passed. “Maybe he’s been faking all this time. Or maybe he got better.”

  Dunbar shook his head, but gave it some thought. “I don’t know about that, but you think maybe he could have hired someone to do this shit for him, to wear the mask, to go after those victims? Had the guy cut his ear off to throw us off the track?”

  Spader shook his head. “I don’t think so. He wanted to hire someone to hurt those people, he’d just have them hurt or killed. The way Galaxo is working, screwing with his victims’ minds, he’s enjoying what he’s doing. You don’t hire someone to do it like that. You do it yourself. I think maybe it could be Pendleton. I think maybe he can walk. I could be wrong, I know, but I say there’s enough here to make me want to check into the guy a little more carefully. I’m not saying I’m sure it’s him, but he’s worth a closer look, don’t you think?”

  He ripped open the Twinkie wrapper. “I think we should run it by Sally.”

  “Shit no. Why?”

  “Because he told you he wants to be kept in the loop.”

  Spader thought for a moment. “Shit, all right. Let’s go.”

  “Tell me how it goes.”

  “You’re not coming?”

  “It’s your theory. I don’t even buy it. You want me sitting next to you looking skeptical?”

  “Coward.”

  Dunbar shrugged and bit off half his Twinkie.

  “Get out of my office,” Detective Captain Struthers said.

  “Cap—” Spader began.

  “We’re talking about the crippled guy, right? The one with the missing ear? The one who hasn’t walked in twenty years? Have I got that right?”

  “Yes and no,” Spader said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Yes, you’re talking about the right guy, but no, maybe we’re wrong about him not being able to walk.”

  “Galaxo cut the guy’s goddamned ear off, Spader.”

  “Or he did it himself.”

  “Get out of my office.”

  “Just hear me out, Cap.”

  Struthers jammed the heels of his hands against his eyes and pushed hard. Then he sighed and said, “Let’s have it.”

  Spader laid it out for him, like he had for Dunbar. When he was finished, Struthers told him again to get out of his office.

  “Captain, I just want to call Beverly PD, have them put a couple of uniforms down the block from Pendleton’s house, see what the guy does.”

  “Request denied.”

  “But Galaxo could strike again any day now. Maybe tonight. Besides, it wouldn’t even be our manpower here. Beverly would probably okay the surveillance if we asked them to.”

  “No way. You’re a good detective, I admit that, and normally I’d back you on this, but you’ve given me no good reason to believe the cripple can walk, much less break into homes and kill people and all the other shit he’s doing. The press is killing us, getting a ton of mileage out of Galaxo, out of the Jack of Spades—which, for Chrissake, I should have seen coming. The DA’s squeezing my balls because the governor’s office has his nuts in a vise grip. Right or wrong, John, everyone above us on the food chain is worried about how we’re coming across to the public right now.”

  “Who’s gonna find out if Beverly PD stakes out the guy’s house for a little while?”

  “You’re not that naive,” Struthers replied. “Word will get out. And when it does, when they find out I’m asking local police to watch a guy who’s been in a wheelchair for twenty years, waiting to see if he walks out of his house, cuts off some guy’s nose or something, then goes back home and hops back into his wheelchair…word gets out about that and we’ll look like schmucks, which won’t make DA Rawlings or Governor Winthrop real happy.”

  “Captain—”

  Struthers held up a hand, silencing Spader. “Look, John, you know me, better than a lot of the guys around here know me. I’m not as political as some folks in my position. I’m not afraid to take personal risks to do what’s right. I’m not afraid of the press and I’m not so in love with my job that I’ll risk public safety to keep my ass behind this desk. But you have to understand, I’ve been given clear guidance on how the DA wants things handled and, in the absence of strong evidence that that way is wrong, I’m gonna follow my instructions as best I can. Besides, you’ve given me no reason to believe that the cripple can walk.”

  Spader shook his head. “But I think I have.”

  “Anyone tell you they ever saw him get out of his wheelchair?”

  “No, but—”

  “Anyone say they ever saw him strolling around his backyard, maybe?”

  “No, but we never specifically asked.”

  “You don’t think one of the neighbors would have mentioned that if they’d seen it? Pretty suspicious behavior for a paraplegic, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Just because no one’s seen him walk—”

  “In over twenty goddamned years, Spader.” He sighed. “And there’s something else.”

  Spader waited.

  “There’s been a little talk that maybe you aren’t giving enough credence to the possibility that our old friend Eddie Rivers has
taken to wearing a yellow alien mask.”

  Who the hell had been talking behind Spader’s back? Fratello, probably. Maybe Wilkins. “Not true. I’ve been considering that theory, working that angle. But I think it’s bullshit.”

  “Somebody told me today our tip line received two calls saying that someone matching his description was seen in the area of the latest victim’s apartment. What’s his name…Finneran. Have I got that right?”

  Spader sighed. “Rivers is long gone, Cap.”

  “Did the calls come in or not?”

  “They did. Both anonymous, which is a little suspicious.”

  “You never got anonymous tips before?”

  “Sure I have, but this is the second victim, the second attack where we got calls saying Rivers was in the area, and every one so far has been anonymous.”

  “What’d the callers say?”

  “One said he saw someone who looked like Rivers eating at a diner less than a mile from Finneran’s apartment just a few hours before the attack. The other caller said he saw Rivers, or someone who looked like him, hanging out on Finneran’s street, just a couple of blocks away.”

  “You look into them?”

  “Yeah. Each time I sent troopers over to where Rivers was supposed to have been seen, had them show his picture around, ask people if they saw him. No one said they did. I think it’s Galaxo himself calling in, trying to waste our time, send us off in the wrong direction. But, as you can see, I’m following up leads, working that theory, too.” He paused, then added, “But I still think Pendleton may be Galaxo.”

  Struthers took a deep breath. “Spader, I went out on a limb for you, really far out, ’cause I thought you were the best cop for this case. And I still think that and I’m glad I put you on it. But I can’t tell you how badly I don’t want you to make me sorry I did.”

  “Won’t happen, Cap’n.”

  Struthers regarded Spader for a moment. “Listen close now. You want to keep looking at Pendleton, you do it on your own time. You want to watch his house, you go right ahead. But you keep looking for the real guy under that mask in the meantime, okay?”