Jack of Spades Page 23

  “Nice choice of words.”

  “You know what I mean. Oh, and did you notice the way he dodged my question about his doctor’s name?”

  Dunbar nodded and said, “And he kept saying how he was ready to bend over backward for us, to help us out, until you asked to look around the place, then all of a sudden he’s late for story time at the library with orphans and little handicapped kids.”

  “I didn’t hear him saying anything about orphans or handicapped kids,” Spader said.

  “I’m just saying. But you knew he’d do that, right? That’s why you asked him.”

  “I knew he’d never let us look around. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

  “Tells me he was lying. What it doesn’t tell me is how he can walk around and do what Galaxo does.”

  “But your radar’s pinging, right?”

  “Sure, but until you prove to me he can walk, I’m gonna believe he had some other reason to lie. Maybe he’s got a stash of pot somewhere, or a huge porn collection Mommy doesn’t know he has. Or, like I said the other day, maybe he’s not Galaxo but he hired some guy to do the Galaxo thing. That’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so, though like I said before, I doubt it. Besides, I just have a feeling, you know? I think Pendleton’s our guy.”

  Dunbar shook his head. “John, if he could walk, don’t you think somebody would’ve seen him do it? His mother, a neighbor, the mailman, somebody. We talked to all of ’em and nobody mentioned ever seeing the guy walk.”

  “He said it himself in there. That wheelchair’s a great alibi.”

  “I don’t know, the guy’s been sitting in that chair for twenty-one years. You can’t fake that, sit in a wheelchair for that long, if you can walk. You just can’t.”

  “I don’t know. I want to talk to his doctor.”

  “He didn’t tell us his doctor’s name.”

  “We’ll find it out.”

  Dunbar looked at the clock on the dashboard. “It’s getting late. Folks are heading home for dinner.”

  “We’ll look for the doctor tomorrow.”

  Dunbar slapped his hands together. “I was hoping you’d say that. The Sox are playing tonight. Big game against the Jays.”

  “Great. This car gets terrific radio reception.”

  Dunbar looked over at Spader. “No way.”

  “We’re watching his house tonight.”

  Dunbar groaned. “Shit, John, surveillance? Sitting outside Pendleton’s all night? Then we gotta come into work at the regular time tomorrow.”

  “That’s right.” Dunbar groaned again, so Spader added, “I need you there, too, Gavin. We’ll keep each other awake. Galaxo has been moving quickly lately. He could strike again tonight, for all we know.”

  “But if he’s really our guy, you think he’d be stupid enough to rush right out and go after somebody else, knowing we might be onto him?”

  “Maybe not, but maybe our visit spooks him enough to make him reckless. Maybe he wants to go out with a bang, give us a big finale before we get him. If so, we better be watching. Or maybe he goes the other way, wants to lie low for a while and decides to get rid of some evidence, something he’s hiding in his basement or somewhere else.” Like in a storage unit, just like Eddie Rivers. “If so, we need to follow him so the evidence doesn’t disappear.”

  Dunbar sighed.

  “Galaxo goes out late at night,” Spader said. “So I’ll pick you up after dinner, say, half past seven. I’ll bring sandwiches for a midnight snack.”

  “No thanks,” Dunbar said sullenly. “You’ll probably bring tuna. You had it for lunch and I been smelling it on your breath all day. I don’t feel like smelling it all night in the car. So I’ll bring the sandwiches.”

  “I hate egg salad. Anything but egg salad for me.”

  “And tuna.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Spader choked down the last bite of the egg-salad sandwich Dunbar had brought him and looked back down at the case file that lay open in his lap. Dunbar, chewing his own egg salad on rye, kept his eyes on Pendleton’s house. He hadn’t said a word since they’d listened to the end of the Red Sox game, the one Dunbar hadn’t been able to watch on TV tonight, the one that ended with Boston winning on a thrilling walk-off homer in the bottom of the thirteenth.

  They were parked a little farther down from where they’d parked earlier in the day when they watched Pendleton’s mother load her son into their van, but they could see the house clearly. They’d been parked there for almost four hours. The Pendletons had their shades drawn tonight, but for the first few hours of their surveillance, Spader and Dunbar could see figures moving around behind them—the slim silhouette of Mrs. Pendleton trundling around the house, Stanley’s lower, more compact form rolling once or twice from one room to another. Since a little after ten p.m., though, when the Pendletons turned out their lights and apparently went to bed, there had been no movement the detectives could see.

  Spader scanned another page in the case file. “If I’m right about the whole choice thing being bullshit,” Spader said, “the randomness of the victims, the arbitrariness of the choices offered, then that means Pendleton has an agenda.”

  Dunbar spoke with a mouthful of egg salad. “If you’re also right about him being Galaxo.”

  Spader continued as though he hadn’t heard him. “And that means he’s probably targeting specific victims and, I think, administering pre-planned punishments to each. What we don’t know is what’s driving those decisions.”

  He looked over his notes, though he had most of them committed to memory by now.

  “He cut out Yasovich’s tongue. Maybe Yasovich said something Pendleton thought he shouldn’t have said. Next was Lisbon, who lost his feet.”

  Dunbar swallowed the bite he had in his mouth and seemed about to say something, but waited until he’d taken another bite and had another mouthful of egg salad before he spoke. Spader figured he was doing it on purpose. “So, according to your theory, maybe Lisbon used his feet for something he shouldn’t have.”

  “Or neglected to use them for something Pendleton felt he should have. Next up was Pendleton himself, but we can skip him.”

  “Like I said, if you’re right about him being Galaxo.”

  Spader ignored him again. “Golding was next. Pendleton made him perform a few seconds of fellatio.”

  Dunbar stuffed the last of his sandwich between his lips and spoke again before bothering to swallow. “How the hell does that fit your theory? You saying Golding gave a blowjob to somebody he shouldn’t have? Or didn’t blow someone he should have?” Spader shrugged. “Doesn’t really fit. And they’re starting to sound pretty random to me again after all.”

  Spader plowed ahead. “After Golding was Finneran, who lost his eyes. Maybe he saw something he shouldn’t have seen.”

  Dunbar was shaking his head. “I don’t know, John. You can’t just ignore Golding and what Galaxo made him do. The whole blowjob thing doesn’t seem to make sense. I don’t see how it works with your theory.”

  “I don’t see it yet, either, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t.” He scanned his notes. His eyes fell on a page he hadn’t paid much attention to recently and he wondered if he’d missed something. Seemed like a dead end before, but perhaps he should have asked Finneran the question anyway. He flipped to his list of contacts and used his cell phone to call Newton-Wellesley Hospital. He asked to be transferred to the ICU, where a sleepy-voiced nurse answered.

  “I need to speak with a patient,” Spader said.

  “It’s almost midnight,” the nurse replied.

  “It’s important.”

  “It’s too late. The patients are sleeping.”

  “They’re all sleeping? You just checked, just now, and every one of them is sleeping?”

  A pause. “There are no phones in the patients’ rooms on this unit and I’m not going to take a phone into one this late at night.”

  “I’m a police detective. I wouldn�
�t ask if it weren’t important.”

  “Our patients’ health is important.”

  “Of course it is. Can I ask your name?”

  “Nancy.”

  “Okay, Nancy, I get it. You care about your patients. Well, I care about catching murderers. So how about checking to see if Matthew Finneran’s awake?”

  “Mr. Finneran’s jaw is wired shut. He can’t even talk on the phone. Plus he’s pretty doped up, detective. He needs a lot of painkillers.”

  “Jesus Christ, lady, can’t you just take a look in his room? Finneran was beaten within an inch of his life and had his eyes popped out of his head with a spoon. I’m thinking that seeing as his life has taken such an unexpected and unpleasant turn, maybe he’s lying wide awake in his room right now thinking about how shitty things are and how nice it would be to put the asshole responsible behind bars. I’m also thinking he may have information that can help in that regard. So why don’t you just take a quick peek into his room and, if he’s awake, ask if he’d like to answer a question or two for me, okay? Unless you’d rather that the guy who attacked him just keep doing what he’s doing, and maybe you can watch your unit there fill up with patients without their eyes or legs or—”

  She interrupted. “What about his jaw? He can’t really talk.”

  “I was thinking maybe you could relay the question for me, tell me what he says. You’ll be able to hear better than I could.”

  Spader heard the nurse take a slow breath. “I’ll see if he’s awake and wants to talk to you. If so, I’ll do what I can to help. If not, you can call back tomorrow.”

  “Fair enough. Tell him it’s Detective Spader.”

  Spader heard the receiver on the other end drop onto a hard surface. He hoped he never ended up in the ICU at Newton-Wellesley Hospital. This nurse would probably lace his food with laxatives, maybe even catheterize him every time she was alone with him. A moment later, he heard someone pick up the phone again.

  “He’ll talk to you.”

  She didn’t give Spader the chance to thank her, which was just as well, because he probably wouldn’t have.

  “Detective Spader?” the nurse said. “I’m in Mr. Finneran’s room. He’s awake but seems kind of out of it. His chart says he received morphine less than half an hour ago.” She lowered her voice. “He seems a little loopy. I don’t know how helpful he’ll be.”

  “I understand,” Spader said. “We’ll do our best. First, please apologize for disturbing him, then tell him I have just a question or two.”

  He heard her follow his instructions.

  “Okay, now ask him if he ever went to camp as a kid?”

  Nancy fell silent. “You’re kidding me. This is why you made me come in here? He’s barely conscious right now and you want to know—”

  “Nancy, you’re already there, so just ask the goddamned question, okay?”

  After a moment of frosty silence, he heard her ask the question, then he heard Finneran’s mumbled reply.

  “Detective, he’s really out of it. I don’t know how reliable any answers he gives will be.”

  “Did he give you an answer?”

  “It sounded like he said he went to camp as a kid, from age seven to age ten.”

  “Ask him the name of the camp.”

  Her sigh, released directly into the receiver, sounded loud to Spader. She asked Finneran the question and he mumbled a reply.

  “He said he wasn’t sure.”

  “Ask him again. Tell him it’s important.”

  She dropped her voice again. “Detective, he’s in la-la land.”

  “Please ask him again.”

  She did. Finneran mumbled again.

  “Well?” Spader asked.

  “He thinks he remembers, but the name is weird. Hard to tell what he’s saying.”

  Spader would have rather had Finneran say it himself, but he needed an answer, so he said, “Ask him if it was Camp Wiki-Wah-Nee.”

  “Wiki-Wah-Nee. Okay, I’ll ask.” A moment later, she said, “He might have nodded. I think that’s all you’re going to get.”

  “Ask him if he remembers a kid at camp named Stanley Pendleton.”

  She did. “No answer. I think he might be asleep.”

  “Wake him up.”

  “No, I won’t do that.”

  Spader blew out a frustrated breath. “Tell him it’s very important. Ask if he remembers a Stanley Pendleton at camp. Ask if he remembers an accident of some kind during one of his summers there, a kid falling down a hill or something, getting really hurt.”

  “Detective—”

  “Just ask the goddamned question and we’ll be done here.”

  She hesitated, then did as instructed. A moment later she said, “Nothing. No response. He’s asleep, Detective, and he’s not waking up for a few hours, at least. You want any more answers, get them in the morning.”

  Damn it. “Nancy, I—”

  “Good night.”

  She hung up. He closed his phone. Dunbar was looking at him. “I ever tell you that you got a great way with people? That was a thing of beauty. Had her eating out of your hand.”

  “I got an answer.”

  “He went to camp?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He confirm Camp Wiki-Wah-Nee?”

  “Hard to say. Maybe.”

  “If he did, I assume that tracks with other witnesses?”

  “At least one. Golding was a counselor there. Possibly another victim, but Lisbon’s wife isn’t positive about the name of the camp she thinks her husband might have attended as a kid.”

  “But she thought it could have been the one.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” Dunbar said, “so we got five victims, two of whom—Golding and Finneran—may have been at same camp at some point.”

  “And Lisbon may have gone there, too. We need to determine whether they were there at the same time. I bet they were.”

  “What about the other vics?” Dunbar asked.

  “Yasovich’s sister said he never went to a camp or worked at one. He’s a lot older than the other vics, so he couldn’t have been a camper. A counselor would have been a possibility, but his sister said no.”

  “And Pendleton?”

  “Said he couldn’t afford camp, but he could be lying.” Spader consulted his notes again. “Golding was a counselor at Camp Wiki-Wah-Nee the summers he was seventeen and eighteen. Finneran and Lisbon are about the same age. If they went there, it would have been around the same time. Taking into account the differences in their ages and Golding’s…” He did the math in his head. “They all would have been there somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two years ago.” Spader looked over at Dunbar. “You know what falls between eighteen and twenty-two?”

  Dunbar nodded. “Twenty-one. The number of years Pendleton says he’s been in that wheelchair.” Spader noticed that Dunbar’s choice of words: says he’s been. Sounded like Gavin was starting to come around. “While you were on the phone there,” Dunbar said, “I got to thinking.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I started thinking about how no one ever talks about Galaxo moving around much, you know?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, he shows up next to the victims’ beds, right? They don’t see him come in. They just wake up and he’s already there. He stuns them or knocks them out with chloroform, then they wake up and they’re tied to a chair. They never really see him walking around. By the time he leaves, they’re close to dead or they’re out of their minds with pain ’cause he just cut off some part of their body, and they don’t pay attention to how he looks like when he’s walking out.”

  Spader took the ball and ran with it. “With Golding, he was already in their living room when they got home, sitting down, no less. And he had them knock themselves out with chloroform before he left. You’re saying this supports my theory that it could be Pendleton.”

  “I’m not jumping on board with you or anything, but I’m say
ing that if the guy used to be a cripple and can by some miracle can walk again, which I still just don’t see, but I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt for a minute here, well, then maybe he doesn’t walk so well. Maybe he’s real awkward, you know? It just doesn’t look normal. So maybe he doesn’t let anyone see him walking around. What do you think?”

  “I think you might have something there.”

  “Yeah, well, like I said, I still have a huge problem with the whole wheelchair thing, but I’m just saying, you know? Anyway, what do we do about the camp angle?”

  “It’s too late to do anything about it tonight,” Spader said. “Tomorrow, though, while I’m finding Pendleton’s doctor, you can run down Camp Wiki-Wah-Nee and see if they keep their summer enrollment records going back that far. We should also have someone call Golding tomorrow and see if he remembers a kid at camp named Stanley Pendleton, or at least some kid getting really hurt in an accident there. And someone needs to ask Finneran about camp again, when he’s not tripping on morphine.”

  Dunbar nodded, then said, “Twenty-one years ago. That’s a long time. We’ll be real lucky if they have records that old.”

  Spader blew out a breath. “Yeah. But if we’re right, and we turn out to be lucky, the name of Galaxo’s next victim will probably be in those records.”

  “So will a lot of other names, I bet.”

  “We’ll run their names, too, call them all, warn them, then watch the ones who seem to fit the victim profile most closely. We’re getting close, Gavin, I can taste it.”

  “Taste better than that egg salad?” Dunbar smiled.

  “Screw you.”

  Spader looked at Pendleton’s house. Pendleton’s bedroom was in the back of the house, so Spader couldn’t see his window. But the bastard was in there, maybe deciding who to go after next. Maybe realizing he was running out of time. Maybe getting desperate. Which could make him all the more dangerous. Spader prayed he was, in fact, right and would be, in the end, lucky.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Despite it being one of the finest health care institutions in the country, packed with some of the most skilled physicians alive, all using the most advanced technology available to medical professionals, Spader found Massachusetts General Hospital crushingly depressing. He felt that way about all hospitals. He realized it might have had something to do with the fact that, when he was just seventeen years old, he’d made frequent trips to visit his father in the hospital as a cruel and powerful pancreatic cancer ate him alive from the inside out, then, just six years later, he’d shuttled his mother in and out of the same hospital as treatment after treatment failed to cure her own cancer, this one of the bone. But Spader thought his dislike of hospitals—which, of course, was tempered a little by a grudging appreciation for what they did for others, even though his parents had been beyond help—might have as much to do with the fact that very few people were ever happy to be in a hospital. Most patients were there because things were wrong with them, often truly horrific things. Spader figured that the only people who were happy to be there were parents bringing a new child into the world, and even a percentage of them went home unhappy—those whose children didn’t survive the dramatic journey from womb to the outside world, or whose children were born with deformities or other serious medical conditions. So Spader was happy to leave Mass General, to get outside again, away from the odors unique to hospitals, outside and breathing the open Boston air.