Grimoire Diabolique

When the EMTs brought the guy in, it looked like he must’ve sat down in a bathtub full of blood. “Damn it!” Parker shouted, thinking I’m off duty in five minutes! I ain’t got time for a cut-down!

Dr. Parker was completely bald; he was also in charge of Emergency Room Cove 4 tonight, and had been for the last twelve hours—or make that eleven hours and fifty-five minutes. He was pulling noon-to-mids for eight days straight, but he had tomorrow off. It would sure be nice to just go home and get some sleep, but this bleeder looked like a two- or three-hour string-job at least.

“Don’t forget your Hippocratic Oath,” Moler, his intern, remarked with a mordant grin. Moler had a short beard and a wise ass. “Looks like you miss Leno tonight, daddy-o.”

“Just get the meat on the table,” Parker ordered. He smirked as Moler and the gurney-jockey hoisted the unmoving patient up onto the crash table. “What’s the guy’s stats, Ben Casey?” he asked the EMT.

The EMT gave him the finger. “Looks like a single GS high and inside of the right thigh. We slapped a tourniquet on and brought him in.”

“Don’t EMTs have to go to school anymore?” Parker said. “How come you didn’t ligate the wound in the ambulance?”

“Because we picked him up on Jackson Street, about two minutes away, Dr. Dickhead,” the EMT replied.

These fuckin’ meat-wagon jocks, Parker thought. They got no respect for doctors anymore.

“All that blood?” Moler observed. “The bullet might’ve hit the femoral artery.”

“Duh,” Parker said. “At least the Two Stooges out there know how to strap a tourniquet.”

“The guy’s type is A-pos, Shemp,” the EMT added. “Have fun. I’m out of here.”

“Thanks for staying to help out,” Parker shot back.

“Hey, that shit’s your job, I just drive. You’re the guy getting a hundred and fifty k a year. Have fun.”

The EMT left. Eat shit and die, Parker thought.

“We need three pints of A-pos in C4, stat,” Moler said into the phone and hung up. Then he leaned over the victim, squinting at the blood-drenched groin. “Looks small, looks like someone popped him with a .25, maybe a .32. Aimed for his cock but missed by an inch.”

Close but no cigar. Parker snapped on Tru-Touch sterile gloves. “They picked him up on Jackson, at this hour? He’s probably a john, picked up a hooker, got rough, so she shot him.” Parker got them all the time. “Can’t say I blame her.”

“Probably right—”

A draft wafted. The cove door swung open, and it was the EMT again. “Oh, and I forgot to tell ya. We checked the guy’s wallet when we picked him up—he’s a homicide captain with city PD.”

“Move it!” Parker yelled. “Fuck!”

But Moler was shaking his head. “Come on—the guy’s dying.”

“I don’t want a damn cop dying on my table! Get the hemos and the shears! We’re doing a cut-down right now!”

Shiny instruments clinked; Moler rushed the tray over, then raised the pair of Sistrunk-brand German fabric shears.

Parker put on his monocular, a plastic headset sort of thing with a single lens fitting over the eye; he’d need it to see the broken arterial walls. The completely baldhead, along with the monocular, made Parker look like a Nazi mad scientist.

Once the wound was exposed, he would cut laterally along the femoral artery and with a nearly microscopic needle and thread, perform a pre-op ligature in order to affect a cessation of the arterial blood flow. “Go!” he shouted. “Cut his pants off!”

“Roger that,” Moler said. The shears cut right through the waist of the slacks and the leather belt like onionskin paper.

Parker turned momentarily, snapped up an Arista scalpel. Its stainless-steel flash winked at him in the overheads. But before he could turn back around to the patient, he heard Moler’s dismal mutter.

“Oh, shit—”

“What!” Parker barked. “Don’t tell me he 64’d!”

“Naw, but… You better take a look at this. I think we got the guy they’ve been writing about in the papers…”

Dr. Parker finished turning. He closed the eye over which the monocular rested and looked down with his other eye. Moler had indeed expertly cut the patient’s pants off with the shears, and the boxer shorts as well. And when Parker saw what lay there, he knew immediately what his intern meant.

The “patient” had been carrying a severed human hand in his undershorts.

I guess I knew Jameson was the one the moment after the police shrink explained the psychiatric profile. But what tagged it was when Jameson took me to his Belltown condo and showed me those pictures. He introduced me to his wife, then showed me the row of framed snapshots over the mantle. One was a picture of him as a child, his father’s arm around him.

But no mother.

The lack of the facilitation of a nurturing touch…

My name’s Matt Hauge; I’m a crime reporter for the Seattle Times. The other papers were calling the killer the “Handyman,” and I guess that’s why Captain Jay Jameson had come to me in the first place. A couple weeks ago, he walked right into my office and said, “I need your help.”

This was a cop, one of the bigwigs—a captain up for deputy chief. Cops generally hated press people but here’s this tall, imposing guy flashing his shield in my face and asking me for help.

“This Handyman shit—that’s my case,” he said..

“It’s my case too,” I countered.

“Yeah. That’s why I’m here.” He sat down, pulled out a cigarette, asked if I minded if he smoked, then lit up before I could answer. Now that I think back, I should’ve known even then. This guy looked like a perv. He had lines down his face like a James Street speed freak. One eye looked a teeny bit higher than the other. And he had this weird dirty blond hair spiked with grey and a tan, roughened complexion like a waterman. He didn’t look like a cop. He looked like a killer.

“I know it’s your case,” he said. “You think I’m here for shits and giggles?”

“Pardon me, Captain?” I said.

“Every newspaper in the goddamn state is printing all this tabloid shit about the case. They’re making me look like the most incompetent cop in the history of the department. And this ‘Handyman’ tagline they’re pushing? It sounds ridiculous, and it makes me look ridiculous.” Jameson got up, closed my office door, then returned to his seat. Plumes of cigarette smoke seemed to follow him around like lingering spirits. “What is it with press people anyway?” he said next. Then the son of a bitch tapped an ash on my carpet. “The first thing you do is accuse the police of inefficiency, and then you gotta slap these horror-movie taglines onto any repeat crime you can get your hands on.”

“It’s a way of increasing the identifiability of the event to a mass readership, because it helps sell papers. But I might remind you, Captain—before you flick more ashes on my floor—that I’m one journalist who’s never used that tagline and has never criticized the police in their efforts to catch the killer.”

“Yeah. That’s why I like you.”

By the way, the so-called “Handyman” Case involved a fairly recent sequence of murders in the downtown area. Three women so far: two known street prostitutes and one homeless woman. All three had been found strangled to death, their bodies carefully hidden along the Jackson Street corridor. And all three had been found with both of their hands missing. Cut off with an ax or a hatchet.

“And don’t worry about your floor,” he went on. “What? Your big paper can’t afford janitors?”

“Captain Jameson, for a man coming in here asking for help, you might need to learn a few lessons in sincerity.”

“Oh, fuck that shit. Don’t be a creamcake. The only good journalism about this case that I’ve seen has been written by you. I want to make a deal.”

“A deal? For what?”

“There’ve been more than three girls. That info’s gonna get leaked eventually. I want you to break it first. I’ll tell you everything about the case the press hasn’t heard. You’ll look good.”

“Yes sir, I guess I would,” I realized. “But what’s the catch?”

“You make me look good along the way. You write for the most respectable paper in the city. All I’m asking is for some slack. I give you the goods, but when you write it, you say my unit’s doing its best. And when we catch this fuck-up… you put in a good word for me. Deal?”

“No deal,” I said. “You’re bribing me. You’ve got balls coming in here telling me this. I’m a newspaper reporter for God’s sake!”

“I wouldn’t call it bribery.” Jameson showed a big toothy grin, then flicked more ashes on the floor. “That descrambler you got? Sounds smalltime, but did you know it’s now an FCC first-degree misdemeanor? A federal crime? Get’cha a year in jail and a five-grand fine for starters. Then let’s talk about your Schedule C deductions. Newspaper writers with freelance gigs on the side? You pay Miscellaneous income tax, right? Those pseudonymous articles you wrote for The Stranger, The Rocket, and Mansplat?”

You son of a bitch, I thought.

“Can we talk?” Jameson asked.

Seattle’s never been a city known for its crime rate. Thirty-six murders last year in the entire Seattle-Metro area. Compare that to L.A., New York, Washington D.C. and at least a dozen others tipping a thousand. What we’re known for instead is the Space Needle, the Monorail, and the largest fish depot in the hemisphere. Microsoft and Boeing. Happy times and happy people. Low unemployment, and no state income tax. No partisan politics and no potholes. And more NEA and college grants per-capita than any major metropolis in the country.

A good place to live.

But then there’s the downside that no one sees. Higher temperatures in the winter and wide-open welfare policies wag false promises to the destitute—it’s a magnet to the hopeless. They come here looking for the yellow-brick road but all they get is another bridge to sleep under, another dumpster to eat out of. Just take a walk around Third and James, Yesler Street, the trolley bridge on Jackson. You’ll see them trudging back and forth on their journey to nowhere. Stick-figures in rags, ghosts not quite incorporeal yet. Their dead eyes sunk into wax faces and bloodless lips asking for change or promising anything you want for twenty dollars. There are so many of them here, so many of these non-people with no names, no backgrounds, no lives.

The perfect grist of a psycho-killer.

“Our total’s sixteen so far,” Jameson admitted. “But that’s not even the worst consideration—”

“God knows how many others are out there you haven’t found,” I said.

“You got it.”

Jameson had brought me to his office at the city district headquarters. A large tack-board hung on the wall with sixteen pieces of paper pinned to it. Each piece of paper showed a victim’s name, or in several cases just the letters No ID and a recovery date.

“How’d you manage to keep it quiet for so long?” I asked.

“Luck, mostly,” Jameson grumbled. “Until recently, we’d find one here, one there. Isolated incidents, the victims were all nobodies: hookers, street trash. And we have our ways of keeping stuff away from the press.”

“So you knew about this all along,” I said, not asked.

“Yeah, for over three years.” He was standing by the window, staring out as he talked. “Every single police department in the area is still the laughing stock over the Green River thing. What could we do? Have another one of those?”

“That’s not the point, is it?”

He turned, a tight sarcastic smile on his face like a razor slash. “You fuckin’ press guys. My job’s to protect the residents of this city. It’s not gonna do me or them any good if they find out this shit’s been going on for years.”

“And the victims?”

“So what? I don’t give a shit about a bunch of whores and crackheads. I don’t work for them—I work for the real people. And it sure as shit doesn’t help when you press guys bend over backwards to trash the police. If you’re not complaining about increased burglary rates you’re complaining about kids buying cigarettes. It’s all our fault, huh? The police aren’t doing enough.”

I almost laughed at his insolence.

Jameson winced. “I’m just generalizing so don’t be an asshole. Fuck, I’m forty-nine years old, been breaking my ass out there since I was a nineteen-year-old cadet. I’m a shoe-in for deputy chief, then all of a sudden a couple of dead junkies make the papers, and there goes my promotion.”

“So this is all about you,” I said. “You’re just worried that this case will queer your promotion.”

“I don’t deserve the shit, that’s all I’m saying.”

That may have been true, at least in a sense. Eventually, I found out that Jameson had the highest conviction rate of any homicide investigator in the state. A lot of promotions, commendations, and even a valor medal. But now, after so many years on the department, his bitterness was draining like an abscess.

“You’ve covered this up for three years,” I pointed out. “How’d the papers get wind of these last three?”

He sputtered smoke in disgust. “One of the construction crews building the new stadium found two in one day, and one of the workmen’s wives writes for Post-Intelligencer. So we were fucked. Then a couple days later some egghead from UW’s botany department finds the third body stuffed into a hole in one of the original drain outlets to the Sound. That fuckin’ outlet had been out of service for seventy years, but this guy’s in there with hipwaders collecting samples of fuckin’ kelp and sea-mold. Then we were really burned. Three bodies with the same m.o., in less than a week? Next thing I know, me and the rest of my squad are getting pig-fucked by the press.”

“Your compassion for the victims is heart-rending, captain,” I said.

“Let me tell you something about these ‘victims,’” Jameson shot back. “They’re crack-whores. They’re street junkies. They steal, they rip people off, they spread AIDS and other diseases. If it weren’t for all this walking garbage that this candyass liberal state welcomes with open arms, then we wouldn’t have a fuckin’ drug epidemic. Shit, Health and Human Services pays these fuckin’ people with our tax dollars! They sell their goddamn food stamps for a quarter on the dollar to buy crack. The city spends a couple hundred grand a year of our money giving these animals brand-new needles every day, and then millions more in hospital fees when they OD. Sooner or later society’s gonna get fed up… but probably not in my fuckin’ lifetime.”

“That’s quite a social thesis, captain. Should I start my next article with that quote?”

“Sure,” he said. “But you’ll have to have it transcribed.”

“Transcribed?” I asked.

“They won’t let you have a computer or typewriter in prison. Between the FCC violations and the tax-evasion, they’ll probably give you five years, but don’t worry. I’m sure they’ll parole you after, say, a year and a half.”

Okay, so maybe I’ve cut a few corners on my taxes, and I almost never use that descrambler… but I didn’t know if he was kidding about this stuff or not. And Jameson didn’t look like the kind of guy to kid about anything.

“Now that we’ve got that settled—come on. I need a drink.”

Jameson wasn’t kidding about that either, about needing a drink. He slammed back three beers—tall boys—in about ten minutes while I sipped a Coke. Of all places, he’d taken me to The Friendly Tavern at James Street and Yesler, what most people would call a “bum” bar. It was on the same block as the city’s most notorious subsidized housing complex, a couple of liquor stores and two bail bondsman’s. Right across the street was the county courthouse.

“You sure know how to pick the posh spots,” I said.

“Aw, fuck all those ritzy socialist asshole pinkie-in-the-air places up town,” Jameson replied. “I want to drink, I don’t want to listen to some bald lesbian read poetry. I don’t want to listen to a bunch of fruitcake men with fingernail polish and black lipstick talk about art. I’ll tell ya, one day Russia and the Red Chinese are gonna invade us, and this’ll probably be the first city they take. When they get a load of the art-fag freak show we’ve got going on here, they’ll just say fuck it and nuke us. All this fuckin’ tattoo homo Goth shit, women in combat boots, guys with Kool-Aid-colored Mohawks swapping tongues in public and girls sticking their hands down each other’s pants while they’re walking down fuckin’ Fifth Avenue. Everybody wearing black, of course—’cos it’s chic, it’s sophisticated. Everybody with all this ridiculous metal shit in their face, fuckin’ rings in their nose and lips, rivets in their tongues. Nobody gives a shit about global terrorism or the trade-deficit—all they care about is getting their dicks pierced and picking up the next Maryland Mansion album.”

“I think that’s Marilyn Manson,” I said, “and, boy, you’re packing a whole lot of hatred, Captain.”

“I wouldn’t call it hatred.”

“Oh? You consider the homeless, the drug-addicted, and destitute to be, and I quote ‘walking garbage’ and you’ve just railed against alternative lifestyles with more invective than a right-wing militia newsletter. If that’s not hatred, what is it?”

“Focused animosity.”

“Ah, thanks for the clarification,” I said, amazed at this guy.

“The world doesn’t ask much, you know? Work a job and obey the law—that’s all anyone needs to do to be okay in my book.” He slugged more beer, then glanced around in loathe. “The art-faggots, the dykes and the pinkos? I guess I can put up with them—most of ’em got jobs and they tend to stay out of the per-capita crime percentages. I’m just sick of seeing it, you know? Fuckin’ pinkos.”

“Didn’t that term die out in the ’70s?” I speculated. “Like when All In The Family went off the air?”

Jameson didn’t hear me. He took another slug of beer, another loathsome glance around at the bar’s patronage. “But this shit here? The rummies, the winos? They’re the ones that get my goat. Ever notice how shit-hole bars like this are always full the first week of the month?”

I squinted at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s ’cos on the first of the month, they all get their four-hundred-dollar SSI checks. Then they come here and sit around like a bunch of waste-products and drink till the money’s gone. Then the rest of the month they pan-handle or mug people for booze money.”

I had to protest. “Come on, Captain. I read the crime indexes. Incidences of the homeless mugging citizens are almost non-existent. They pan-handle because there’s nothing else they can do. And they drink because they’re genetically dependent on alcohol. They can’t help it.”

“Gimme a break,” he said. “I’m not surprised at something like that from lib journalist. Jesus Christ. Everything’s a disease today. If you’re a lazy piece of shit, you’ve got affect disorder. If you’re a fat fuck, it’s an inherited glandular imbalance. If your kid’s a wise-ass, smart-ass punk fucking up in school, it’s amotivational syndrome or attention-deficit disorder. What they all really need is a good old fashioned ass-kicking. Crack ’em in the head with a two by four enough times and they’ll get the message that they gotta pull their own weight in this world. And these fuckin’ rummies and crackheads? Oh, boo-hoo, poor them. It’s not their fault that they’re dope addicts and drunks, it’s this disease they have. It’s this thing in their genes that makes them be useless stinking fuck-ups on two legs. Put all that liberal shit in a box and mail it to someone who cares. I’ll bet you give money to the ACLU and ACORN. If they had it their way, we’d all be paying seventy-percent taxes so these fucking bums could drink all day long and piss and shit in the street whenever they want.”

This hypocrisy made me sick. If anyone in this bar were an alcoholic, it was Jameson. “You know something, Captain?” I said. “You’re the most hateful, insensitive asshole I’ve ever met in my life. You’re an ignorant bigot and a police-state fascist. You probably call African-Americans niggers.”

“Naw, we call ’em boot-lips and porch monkeys. You don’t see white people prancing down the street rubbing their fuckin’ crotches and playing cop-killer rap out of those ghetto blasters, do you? I’se Amf-nee, I’se Tyrome. Kill duh poe-leece.. Kill duh poe-leece.”

“I’m leaving,” I said. “This is incredulous. What the hell am I doing even sitting here with you? What the hell has this got to do with your psycho killer?”

“Everything,” he said, and ordered his fourth beer. “It doesn’t matter what my views are—you’re a journalist, you’re supposed to report the truth. Even if you hate me… you’re supposed to report the truth, right?”

“Yeah, right.”

“Well none of the other papers are doing that. None of them have even queried my office to ask anything about the status of our investigation. It’s easier just to write these horror-movie articles about the three poor victims who were brutally murdered by this killer, and about how the big bad police aren’t doing anything about it because they don’t care about street whores or the homeless. They want to make this look like Jack the fucking Ripper so they can sell more papers and have something to talk about at their pinko liberal bisexual cocktail parties.”

I finished my Coke, grabbed my jacket off the next stool. “I’m out of here, Captain. You’ve given me no reason to stay and listen to any more of this bullshit. You want me to write a news article about police diligence regarding this case? That’s a laugh. You haven’t shown me anything. In fact the only thing you’ve shown me is that the captain of the homicide unit is a drunk and a bigot. And go ahead and report me to IRS and FCC. I’ll take my chances.”

“See? You’re just like the others—you’re a phony.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you haven’t even asked me the most important question. Why? Because you don’t care. All you care about is putting the police on the hot-seat just like all these other non-writing chumps.”

It was very difficult for me to not walk out right then. But I have to admit, I was piqued by what he’d suggested. “All right. What’s the question I didn’t ask?”

“Come on, you went to college, didn’t you? You’re a smart guy.” Jameson drained half of the next beer in one chug, then lit another cigarette off the last stub. “When you’ve got a string of related murders, what’s the first thing you’ve got to do?”

I shrugged. “Establish suspects?”

“Well, yeah, but before you can do that, you have to verify the common-denominators of the modus. Once you’ve done that, you gotta pursue a workable analysis of the of the motive. Remember, this is a serial killer we’re talking about, not some meth-head punk knocking over 7-Elevens. Serial killers are calculating, careful. Some guy all fucked up on ice goes out and rapes a girl—that’s easy. I’ll have the fucker in custody in less than forty-eight hours and I’ll send him up for thirty years. But a serial killer?”

“All right, I don’t know much about this kind of stuff,” I admitted. “After all, this is Seattle, not Detroit.”

“Good, good,” he said. “So we establish the m.o., and with that we can analyze the motive. Once we’ve analyzed the motive, then we determine a what?”

“Uhhhh….”

“A psychological profile of the killer.”

“Well, that was my next guess,” I said.

“Only until we’ve established some working psych profile can we then effectively identify suspects.”

“Okay, I’m following you.”

Shaking his head, he crushed the next cigarette out in an ashtray that read Yoo-hoo, Mabel? Black Label! along the rim. “And? From the standpoint of a journalist, the most important question in this case is… what?”

The last guy in the world I wanted to look stupid in front of was Jameson. I was stressed not to say the wrong thing. “Why, uh, why is the killer… cutting off their hands?”

“Right!” he nearly yelled and cracked his open palm against the bar-top. “Finally, one of you ink-stained liberal press schmucks has got it! The police can’t do squat until they’ve established an index of suspects, and we can’t do that until we’ve derived a profile of the killer. Why is he killing these girls and taking their hands?”

“But…” My thoughts tugged back and forth. “If he cuts off their hands, they can’t leave fingerprints, can’t be identified, and if they can’t be identified, your investigation becomes obstructed.”

“No, no, no,” he griped. “In my office I showed you the ID list. We ID’d more than half of the victims already. A lot of the girls still had their ID’s on their bodies when we found them. So what’s that tell you?”

“The killer doesn’t—”

“Right, he either thinks he’s hidden the bodies so well that they’ll never be found, or he doesn’t care if they’re ID’d. And, from there, the most logical deduction can only be?”

“He’s… taking their hands for some other reason?” I posed.

“See? I knew you were smarter than these other bozos.” Jameson actually seemed pleased that I’d figured some of it out. “That’s what we’ve done. We’ve put more man-hours into this investigation than fucking Noah put into the Arc. The killer’s collecting their hands. And when we find the reason, we’ll get our suspects. Here, take this,” he said, and reached down to his floor. What he hauled up was a briefcase. It felt heavy enough to contain a couple of cinder blocks.

“What is this?” I asked.

“The entire case file.”

I sat back down, put on my glasses, and opened the case. “This looks like over a thousand pages of data.”

“More than that,” Jameson said. “Sixteen hundred so far. You want to be an honest journalist—”

“I am an honest journalist,” I reminded him.

“—then do your homework. Read the fucking file, read the whole thing. And when you’re done, if you can honestly say that me and my men are being negligent, then tell me so… and I’ll resign my post. Deal?”

I flipped through the fat stack of paper. It looked like a lot of work. I was fascinated.

“Deal,” I said.

“I knew you wouldn’t walk out on this.” Jameson, half-drunk now, rose to his feet. “I’ll talk to ya soon, pal. Oh, and the beers are on you, right?” He slapped me hard on the back and grinned. “You can write ’em off on your taxes as a research expense…”

Jameson was afflicted by the very thing he condemned: alcoholism. That much was clear. But in spite of his hypocrisy, I had to stick to my own guns. I’m a journalist; to be honest, I had to be objective. I had to separate Jameson’s drunken hatred and bigotry from the task. Not a lot of newspaper writers do that, they jump on the easiest bandwagon—and I’ve done that myself—to please their editors buy increasing unit sales. The Green River Killer is the best example in the Pacific Northwest… and it was all a sham, it was all hype. Everybody jumped on the state’s favorite suspect… and it turned out to be the wrong guy. I knew I was better than that, so I decided that it didn’t matter that Jameson was a reckless racist prick. All that mattered was the quality of the job he was doing.

And it looked like he wasn’t doing half-bad.

That briefcase full of paper he gave me? He wasn’t exaggerating. It was the entire investigatory file on every victim, going back for three years. Jameson and his crew had left no stone unturned, no evidential hair uncombed, and no speck of evidence unexamined. Of the victims who had been identified, the few who’d had traceable living relatives, Jameson had personally made the notification. Not an informal letter or a soulless phone call. The Captain himself, as the major case investigator, had traveled to locales as far of as Eugene, Oregon; Los Angeles; Spokane; and in one case, San Angelo, Texas, to notify the next of kin. All departmental expenditure invoices were included in the case file; Jameson had made these trips on his own time and at his own expense.

The evidence was another thing. Jameson had cut no slack whatsoever on pursuing even the minutiae of the crime-scene evidence. Even thoroughly decomposed and mummified victim’s bodies had been analyzed to the furthest extent of forensic science. From things I’d never heard of like particulate-gas chromatographs, iodine and neohydrin fingerprint scans, atomic-force microscopy assays to simple gumshoe door-to-door canvassing. Sure, when Jameson had a load on, all of his hateful pus came pouring out, but from what I could see, when he was sober, he was a state of the art homicide investigator. The guy was doing everything in his power to solve this case. It didn’t matter that he was an asshole. It didn’t matter that he was a raving caustic racist. Jameson was doing it all. He was working his ass off and getting no credit at all from the local press.

Then I had to weigh my own professional values. And I had to be honest. I didn’t like this guy at all, but that wasn’t the point. So I told it like it was when I wrote my piece for the Times. I reported to the readers of the biggest newspaper in the Seattle-Metro area that Captain Jay Jameson and his veteran homicide squad were doing everything humanly possible to catch the “Handyman.”

The writers for the other papers about shit when they saw the detail of my article. My article, in fact, made the others look uninformed and haphazard. It made them look like the same exploitative tabloid hacks that Jameson accused them of being. But that didn’t mean I was letting Jameson off the hook. If he slacked off or screwed up in any way, I’d write about that too. I gave the guy the benefit of the doubt because he deserved it. The rest was up to him.

Another thing, though. The case file contained several hundred pages of potential psychiatric analyses. I’m not stupid but I’m also not very well versed in psych-speak. On every profile prospectus, I saw the same name: a clinical psychiatrist in Wallingford named Henry Desmond. I needed more of a layman’s synopsis of these work-ups, to make my articles more coherent to the average reader.

So I made an appointment to see this guy, this Dr. Henry Desmond.

“I appreciate your seeing me on such short notice, Dr. Desmond,” I said when I entered the spare but spacious office. A pencil cup on his desk read: Thorazine (100 mgs) Have A Great Day! One the blotter lay a comic book entitled Dream Wolves, with cover art depicting what appeared to be sultry half-human werewolves tearing the innards out of handsome men.

“So you’re the journalist, eh?”

“Yes, sir. I’ve got a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

“My last patient claimed to be about to give birth to a litter of extraterrestrial puppies. Her question was would I prefer a male or female. So I can assure you, any questions you might have will be more than welcome considering the usual.”

Extraterrestrial puppies? I wondered. I took a seat facing the broad desk. Dr. Desmond was thin, balding, with very short blonde hair around the sides of his head. The dust-gray suit he wore looked several sizes too large. In fact, he looked lost behind the huge desk. A poster to the side read: Posey Bednets And Straitjackets. Proven To Be The Very Best Three-, Four-, And Five-point Restraints In The Industry.

Some industry. “I’ve got some questions, sir, about the—”

“The so-called ‘Handyman’ case, yes?”

Jameson must’ve talked to him, but that didn’t make a whole lot of sense because I never told Jameson I’d be coming to see Desmond. “That’s right, sir. I’m fascinated by your clinical write-ups regarding—”

“Potential profiles of the killer?”

“Yes.”

He stared at me as of chewing the inside of his lip. “What you need to understand is that I don’t officially work for the police. I’m a private consultant.”

“So it’s not cool with you that I mention your name as a consultant in any future articles I may write?”

“No, please. It’s not… cool.”

Great, I thought. A cork in a bottle.

“But I’d be pleased to answer any questions you may have on an anonymous basis. The only reason I must insist on anonymity is probably obvious.”

“Uh,” I said. “I’m sorry, sir, but it’s not quite obvious to me.”

The doctor let out the faintest of snorts. “If you were consulting with the police about a serial-killer case, would you want your name in a newspaper that the killer himself could easily read?”

Stupid! I thought. “No, sir. Of course not. This kind of thing is new to me, so I apologize for my naiveté. And I guarantee you that your name won’t be mentioned.”

“Good, because if it is, I’ll sue you and your newspaper for multiple millions of dollars,” he said through a stone cold face. “And I’ll win.”

I stared back, slack-jawed.

“I’m kidding! My God, can’t anybody today take a joke?”

I nodded glumly after a long pause. A funny guy. Fine. Just what I need.

“I trust it was the good Captain Jameson who sent you?”

“No, sir, he didn’t send me. He gave me the case file to examine, and I saw your name on the prospective profiling data, so—”

“What do you think of Captain Jameson?” Desmond asked. “He’s quite a character, isn’t he?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but only my lips quavered.

“Come on, son. Tell me the truth. I’m forbidden by law to repeat anything you say.”

I guess he was right. Doctor-client privilege and all that, even though I wasn’t a patient. So I said it. “I think Captain Jameson is a clinical alcoholic with enough hatred in him to burn down the city…. But I also think he’s probably a pretty effective homicide investigator.”

“You’re correct on both counts,” Desmond acknowledged. “He’s a tragic man in a tragic occupation. You’d be surprised how many of my patients are veteran police officers.”

This struck me as odd. As a psychiatrist, Desmond could not legally verify that Jameson was a patient. And I’d never suspected that he was.

Until now, perhaps.

“You profiles,” I said to move on.

“They’re not profiles, not as of yet. Think of them as possible profiles.”

“Er, right. I’ve read every page of the caseload compiled thus far, but I’m still a little shaky on a lot of it. These are highly clinical terms, I need layman terms.”

“All right. Understood. So go on.”

I must’ve sounded like I was babbling. “Well, er, sir, it seems that you’ve, uh—”

“Compartmentalized the potential clinical profiles into three groups?”

“Yes, and—”

“And you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.”

My shoulders slumped in the chair. “You hit the nail on the head, doctor.”

Dr. Desmond stroke his bare chin as if he had a goatee. “What’s the first question a paramount journalist such as yourself might be inclined to ask after examining to full details of this case?”

I’d already learned this one the hard way. “Why is that killer taking the hands? It can’t be to obfuscate fingerprint discovery because he’s clearly demonstrated a total lack of concern as to whether or not the authorities positively identify the victims or not.”

“Excellent,” Desmond said.

“Which means that the killer is collecting the hands, for some unknown reason.”

“Well, not unknown. There are several suspected reasons detailed in the case file.”

I nodded. “That’s what I’m not clear on, sir.”

In his hand, Desmond was diddling with a small pale-blue paperweight that said PROLIXIN - IV & IM on it. “Consider the most obvious symbological reference. There’s been no evidence of semen or prophylactic lubricant in the vaginal barrels or rectal vaults of any of the victims, which indicates a sexual dysfunction. He’s picking the women up and strangling them, then he’s cutting of their hands. This is a strong evidence signature; the crime describes an inner-personal pathology. So you’re right. He’s collecting their hands. Possibly as trophies. The same way Serbs severed the heads of so many Bosnians. The same way the T’u Zhus removed the penises of invaders from nearby tribes. Yes? Taking parts off the enemy. Offending parts.”

Suddenly, I was beginning to see. “But who’s the enemy in this case?”

“Clearly, the mother. The first profile possibility indicates someone who was severely abused as a child my the mother-figure. A woman who beat the child, with her hands. A woman who molested the child, with her hands. The mother who invaded the child’s private parts—with her hands.”

It made some sense… but there were still more possibilities. “And the second profile?” I asked.

“The converse. The polar opposite, in a sense. No abuse in this instance but simply a lack of the necessary primal need to be touched—by the mother. We’re talking about the sheer lack of the facilitation of the nurturing touch. All babies need to be touched by the mother. If they’re not, the incidence of subsequent sociopathy is increased by one hundred percentage points. Put a newborn hamster in a cage by itself, and it dies in a few days. Even if it’s regularly hand fed by a human. Put it in a cage with a dummy mother, and it lives but later in life it becomes violent, anti-social, homicidal. It’s never touched by the mother. Any mammalian species that aren’t nurtured by the mother never grow up right. Then put this in human terms. Humans—the most complex mammalian species. They bear the most vulnerable newborns, which require constant attention by the mother to survive. The mother’s touch. Infants who aren’t sufficiently touched by their mothers suffer numerous psychological disorders. Theodore Kaczynski, the world-famous Unabomber, never became socially adjusted in adulthood in spite of his high IQ and expert propensity for mathematics. Why? Because complications shortly after his birth required him to be incubated for several weeks—separated from his mother’s nurturing touch. It’s something that all babies need, and he didn’t get it. Look what happened later.”

The office sat just behind the McDonald’s on Stone Way; all I could smell were french fries and Big Macs, which kind of threw me for a loop: smelling fast food while listening to psych profiles seemed bizarre. “Both of those descriptions make sense,” I said. “But I’m wondering—just how crazy is this guy?”

“In Profile #1, the perpetrator may be quite ‘crazy,’ to use your term. He may be psychopathic or merely sociopathic, but more than likely the former. He’s probably in the mid- or late-stages of a hallucinotic syndrome, and has long since experienced a mid-phased episodic reality break.”

Christ, I thought. You need a doctorate in psychiatry just to talk to this guy. Talking to him’s worse than reading his write-ups. “The clinical terms are way over my head, Dr. Desmond,” I admitted. “If you could dumb this down a little?”

“Clinically, we would call Profile #1 a graduated bipolar symbolist. The effect of his illness has a tendency to switch off and on at times relative to his delusion, and to put it in general terms, when he’s off, he’s able to function normally in society, but when he’s on, he is indeed ‘crazy.’ He becomes overwhelmed by some facet of his delusional fixation to the extent that he hallucinates. The women he murders are symbols. He sees his victims as his mother, as the self same person who so heinously abused him as a child.”

“Jeeze, that sounds pretty serious.”

“Well, it is given the gravity of the crimes. It’s unusual, though, that someone could maintain this level of bipolarity for three years. If there’s anything ‘promising’ about the diagnosis, it is the graduated aspect. He’s gradually becoming more and more insane; eventually—soon, I would say—he’ll lose his ability to maintain social functionality. And he’ll get caught rather quickly.”

Promising? I thought. Odd choice of words, but then he’s the shrink. “What about Profile #2?”

“More complicated, and less predictable,” Desmond began. “Profile #2 is functionally similar in that the killer is suffering from a symbolic bipolar personality disorder. But he’s not experiencing any manner of hallucinosis and his delusions are conscious and quite controllable. The fantasy element takes over. It’s probably quite like a dream. When he’s murdering these women—and severing their hands—he’s immersed so deeply in the delusion that he’s probably not even consciously aware of what he’s doing. It’s a fixation disorder that’s run amok. Am I losing you?”

“Well, a little, yes.” A little, my ass.

“He’s dreaming of something he never had. Only, regrettably, he’s acting out the dream in real life. Is that synopsis cool with you, young man?”

But I still didn’t get it. “A dream… of cutting off hands?”

“No, no. Be intuitive. The perpetrator doesn’t see it that way. He sees it as claiming what he never had as a child. Remember—the facilitation of the mother’s nurturing touch. All infants need to be touched; the perpetrator was not. That should answer your question about what exactly he’s doing with the hands.”

I stared at him, gulped. And the implication was disgusting. “You mean he’s… taking the hands—”

“He’s taking the hands home,” Desmond finished, “and putting them on his body. His mother is at last touching him. Nurturing him. But now, in adulthood, the delusion is so thoroughly contorted and transfigured—he’s probably masturbating with the hands too.”

What a screwed up world, with screwed up people. “Christ,” I said. “That’s… sick.”

“But so is our perpetrator,” Desmond added. “There’s quite a bit in our world that’s sick, twisted, wrong. And quite a few people in it who don’t see it that way.”

“But the third,” I said, “the third profile.” I put my glasses on and looked back at the marked pages of the case file. “You called it a ‘fixated erotomanic impulse’. What’s that mean?”

Desmond’s pate glimmered in a sun-break through the window. He shrugged his shoulders. “It means that in the case of this third potential profile, the killer is simply a sociopath with a hand fetish.”

Simply a sociopath with a hand fetish, I thought. The terms just rolled off this guy’s lips like me talking about baseball.

“It’s the most remote possibility but also the worst as far as apprehension is concerned.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“It’s remote because sociopaths rarely engage in mutilation crimes. But they’re infinitely harder to apprehend because sociopaths, as a rule, aren’t insane; therefore they’re less likely to make a mistake that could lead to arrest. Sociopaths are skilled liars. They’ve had their whole lives to practice. Their amorality isn’t a result of mental defectivity. They know what’s right and what’s wrong, but they choose wrong because it suits them.”

They choose wrong, I thought. But Desmond had said this profile was the least likely. “If you had to make a choice yourself,” I asked him, “which of the three would you put your money on?”

Desmond tsk’d, smiled a thin smile. “Abnormal psychiatry isn’t an objective checklist. Profile indexes exist only through the documentation of known information. So it stands to reason that there’s quite a bit out there that we don’t know yet. It would be of little value for me to make a guess. All I can say is it’s probably one of the three. But you should also consider a sexual detail that should also be obvious.”

Dumb again. Dumb me. “And that would be?”

“The absence of evidence of rape. No semen in any orifice, no evidence of sexual penetration. Considering any of my three profiles, the possibility should properly be addressed that the killer is at the very least unable to achieve erection in the presence of a woman, or he may be sexually incompetent altogether.”

“This is a lot of data you’ve given me, sir, and I’m grateful,” I said, pushing my glasses up the bridge of my nose. The insights he’d given me would make for a great, comprehensive series of articles on the killer. “I really appreciate your time.”

“My pleasure, young man.”

I grabbed my stuff to leave, but then he held up a finger to stop me.

“One last point, though,” he said. “In the cases of Profiles #1 and #2, there’s a considerable formative likelihood that the killer’s mother was either a prostitute, a drug addict, or both.”

“That’ll help my article too. Maybe if the killer reads it, it’ll scare him into making a mistake, or stopping.”

Desmond creaked back in his padded chair. I’m not sure if he was smiling or not, just nodding with his eyes thinned and his lips pressed together. “Perhaps it will,” he said so softly it sounded like a flutter.

“Thank you,” I said. But then something caught me—two things, actually, both at the same time. Behind Desmond’s head, the late-afternoon sun burned, an inferno. And then my eyes flicked down to the doctor’s desk blotter.

It was one of those calendar blotters, each top sheet a different month. The Tuesday and Thursday boxes for all four weeks had this written in them:

J.J., I thought.

Captain Jay Jameson.

That’s when I knew Jameson was it. It hit me in the head like someone dropping a flowerpot from a high window. There were still a few holes, sure. But it was one of those things where you just knew. It was a presage. It was something psychic.

I just knew.

I knew I had to go see him. I knew I had to get him out. But before I could even make a plan, Jameson walks right into my cubicle the next day.

“There he is. The lib journalist.”

I glanced up from my copy, stared at him.

“Hey, I’m just joking,” he said. “Lighten up, you’ll live longer.”

“You come here to bust me for my descrambler.”

“What’s a descrambler?” he said. “And tax evasion? Never heard of it.”

“Why are you here, Captain? You want to square up with me? Those four Old English tallboys cost me $3.50 a pop. Us lib journalists don’t make much.”

“Good,” he said. He rubbed his hands together. He grinned through that weird lined, tanned face, the shock of blond-gray hair hanging over one eye. “Let me make it up to ya. Dinner at my place. You ever had broiled langoustes with scallop mousse? My wife makes it better than any restaurant in the city. Come on.”

This was a great opportunity but… “I’ve got a deadline. I’m a crime writer, remember? I’ll be here at least two more hours writing up the robbery at the Ballard Safeway. My boss won’t let me out of here till it’s done.”

Jameson jerked a gaze into the outer office. “That’s your boss there, right? The fat guy in suspenders with the mole on his neck bigger than a bottlecap? I already talked to him. Safeway can wait. You’re off early today, boy.”

“What are you talk—”

Jameson lit a cigarette, then tapped an ash on my floor. “Your boss has sixteen parking tickets he thought his brother in the public safety building buried. I showed him the print-out from the city police mainframe.”

That’ll do it. I looked through the door at my boss, and all he did was frown and flick his wrist.

“All right,” I said. “I guess Safeway can wait.”

“Honey? This is my good friend Matt Hauge,” Jameson introduced. “This is my wife, Jeanna.”

I cringed when he said good friend, but I also knew I had to play along now. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Jameson,” I said and shook her hand. She looked about mid-forties but well tended. Bright blond hair, good figure, probably a knockout in her younger days. What’s a good-looking woman like this doing with a busted racist drunk like Jameson? I wondered. They didn’t fit together at all. They both looked out of place standing there together. A shining figurine and a rubber dog turd.

He’d driven me from the paper to his Belltown condominium. Nice place, clean, well appointed, which didn’t look right either. It was easier to picture Jameson living in an unkempt dump with smoke-stained walls, dirty dishes in the sink, and cigarette burns in a carpet that hadn’t been vacuumed in years.

“Hi,” she said with kind of a wan smile. “Jay hasn’t stopped talking about you.”

“Oh, really?” I replied.

“Oh, God, since your article in the Times came out, he’s been like a kid at Christmas.”

So that’s what this was all about. The red carpet treatment. Jameson’s ego and pride wouldn’t let him say it, so he let his wife do it. This was his way of thanking me for giving him a good shake in print. Or maybe it’s just his way of continuing the bribe, I considered.

“From what I can see, Mrs. Jameson, your husband’s doing a top-notch job in investigating this case,” I told her. “The other writers in this city have chosen not to acknowledge this—and that’s wrong. I’m not doing your husband any favors here; I’m just writing it the way I see it.”

“Well,” she went on, “we’re really grateful to you.”

“No need to be, ma’am. Because if your husband drops the ball now… I’m going to write about that too.” Then I shot Jameson a cocked grin.

“I don’t drop the ball,” Jameson told me and immediately lit a cigarette. “Don’t believe me? Check my performance ratings.”

“I already have,” I said. “And you’re right.” Then I glanced over at the TV in the corner. “Say, is that a descrambler you’ve got there?”

“Funny guy. I like a lib journalist with a sense of humor,” he said, slapping me hard on the back and showing me into the dining room. Warm, exotic aromas swam around the room. “What would you like to drink?” Jameson’s wife asked.

“A Coke would be fine.”

Another hard slap to the back. It was getting old. “Come on, have a drink,” Jameson insisted. “You’re off duty.”

“Maybe later,” I said, half lost of breath.

“Dinner’ll be right up,” Jeanne said, then disappeared into the aromatic kitchen.

Jameson and I sat down at the table simultaneously. I knew I had him pegged, but I also knew I still needed more. This was the big league. He was a decorated city detective, I was just a reporter.

“Look, man,” he said. “I ain’t too good at, you know—expressing gratitude? But your article really helped me out. Not just me but my whole squad. So… thanks.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” I said. “Like I just got done telling your wife, your step on your dick, I’m gonna write about that too.”

“I hear ya—”

“And it’s not just one article, you know. I’m writing a series of related articles about the killer,” I informed him.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. This isn’t just some fly-by-night crime piece. It’s a comprehensive serial-killer story. People want to know, so I’m gonna tell them.” It was time to play the card. “I’ve already talked to Dr. Desmond, and he gave me a lot of clinical info on the case. It’ll be a highly informative series.”

Jameson’s jaw dropped so hard I thought his lower lip would slap the dining room table. “You-you-you’ve talked to Dr. Desmond?”

“Yeah, sure. I saw his name on those profile write-ups you gave me. My next article is going to detail his first profile: the killers who’s cutting off his victim’s hands out of a symbolic and hallucinatory act of revenge. Then I’ll write another about the second profile: the homicidal fantasist whose taking the hands to facilitate what he never got as a child. The nurturing touch of the mother.” I paused for a moment, just to gauge his reaction.

All he did was look at me real funny.

“Yeah, he gave me all kinds of insights for my series,” I added. “It could get national notice.”

“Uh, yeah, sure,” Jameson said. Was he faltering? Did I throw him a hard slider? “Desmond’s an odd cookie, and talk about ego? Shit. He can barely walk into a room ’cos his head’s so big. But he does know his shit. That guy can slap a profile faster than the president can whip it out.”

“I wouldn’t put it in quite those terms, Captain,” I said, “but Dr. Desmond does seem to be a qualified expert.”

Jeanne brought out the drinks, then smiled bashfully, and said, “It’ll be just another minute.”

I nodded as she scurried back to the kitchen. “So what are we having?” I asked Jameson. “Linguini and something?”

“Langoustes. Petite lobster tails from Britain. Flash-broiled in garlic and lime butter and topped with scallop mousse.” Jameson half drained a can of Rainier Ice. “I hope you’re hungry.”

“I’m starving. Missed lunch.”

“Oh, yeah. Bet’cha hate it when you have to put in ten hours.”

“Ten? Are you kidding me. Ten’s an easy day.”

Each time Jameson dragged on his cigarette, I watched a third of it burn down; then he’d light another. “Look, I’m sorry about all that shit I said a few days ago. I didn’t mean it—it wasn’t me. I was just having a bad day, you know?” He grinned. “Even racist police-state cops have bad days.”

“Thank God I never pulled up my sleeve. Then you would’ve seen my Maryland Mansion tattoo.”

“Oh, you’ve got one too?” Jameson exploded laughter, a bit too loudly.

Dinner was served, and I have to admit, I’ve probably never had a better seafood meal in my life. The scallop mousse melted in my mouth, and those langouste things tasted better than any lobster I’ve ever had. During the meal, we tried to talk openly, but Jameson—the more he drank—dominated the conversation with cop talk. After a while, I could see that his wife was getting uncomfortable, even embarrassed, and after a little more time, she just gave up. I felt sorry for her.

“So we’re all standing around the morgue slab with the M.E.!” Jameson bellowed after his fifth beer, “and the corpse cracks a fart! I kid you not!”

Yeah, I felt really sorry for her.

“So then Dignazio says, ‘Damn, he must get his chili dogs at Schultze’s ’cos that fart smells just like mine!’”

The poor women just wilted where she sat.

“This was a fantastic meal, Mrs. Jameson. Thanks very much,” I said. “But I guess I better get going now.”

“Bullshit!” Jameson said. Then he put his arm around me and shook me, all the while looking at his wife. “Honey,” he said. “I gotta take this boy out for a nightcap, all right? I gotta teach this man to drink!”

“No, really—” I started.

“Come on, don’t be a candyass!”

“Just be careful,” Mrs. Jameson said.

I’m no big drinker but I still had a few things to snuff out. Bar-hopping with Jameson would provide the perfect opportunity.

We got up to leave. That’s when I noticed two of framed pictures along the fireplace mantle; there were just a few.

I put my glasses on an looked.

A wedding picture of a much younger Jameson and his wife. Some snapshots of old people: relatives, I presumed. Aunts and uncles, grandparents and the like. A freeze-frame of a beautiful cheerleader wagging pom-poms and doing a split-it was obviously Jameson’s wife back in high school days. Then—

A framed picture of a dark-haired adult with his arm around a cock-eyed kid with a bad haircut.

Jameson, I thought. The kid’s Jameson…

“No kid yet, I see,” I said and took my glasses off. I suspected this might be dangerous ground but I had to go for it.

“No,” Mrs. Jameson peeped.

“Not yet,” Jameson piped in. “We’re still waiting for the right time.”

Man, you’re fifty and she’s gotta be forty-five, I thought. Better not wait much longer.

Jameson jangled his keys. “Come on, lib. Let’s go have some fun.”

I turned to his wife. “Mrs. Jameson. Thanks very much for the excellent meal. You could get a job at any restaurant in town; you’d blow all of those master chefs out of the water.”

The woman blushed. “Thank you. Come by again soon.”

“Later, babe,” Jameson bid and yanked me out of there. He guffawed all the way down the stairs to the parking garage.

“So where you wanna go?” he asked. “A strip joint?”

“And all this time I thought you were gonna take me to hear bald lesbians read poetry,” I joked.

“Aw, fuck that shit,” he answered, beer fumes wafting out of his mouth. “Let’s see some meat.”

“Pardon me if I’m misinformed, Captain, but there really aren’t any strip joints in Seattle. The girls all gotta wear bikinis via county code, and the only thing you can drink there is orange juice or sodas.”

Another loud guffaw. “Pal, you don’t know the strip joint I know!”

I’m sure I don’t, I thought. When we’d just stepped into the elevator into the parking garage, I slapped my breast pocket. “Oh, shit.”

“What’s wrong? You just shit your pants?”

“I left my glasses in your condo,” I admitted.

“Well go on back up and get them and I’ll get the car.” He elbowed me. “And no funny business with the wife… or I’ll have ta kill you.”

He burst more laughter as I jogged back up the stairs.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Mrs. Jameson when she answered my knock. “I left my glasses here.”

“Oh, come in,” she said. I could smell from her breath that she’d already had a stiff one since we’d left. “Were would they be?”

“The table, or maybe the mantle when I was looking at the pictures,” I said.

I scanned the table—nothing.

“Here they are,” she said, picking them up off the mantle.

“Thanks.”

“I apologize for the way Jay gets sometimes,” the words stumbled from her mouth. “He has a little to much to drink, and… well, you know.”

You ain’t kidding I know, I thought.

“But you should also know that your article really pumped him up,” she went on. “I haven’t seen him happy in years, but your article really made him happy. He’s worked hard for so long. It’s wonderful to see someone give him recognition in the press.”

I shrugged. “He’s doing a good job on the case. That’s why I wrote the piece.”

“Well, anyway, thank you,” she said.

The look she gave me then? Christ. She brought her arms together in front, pressed her breasts together. Her nipples stuck through her blouse like golf cleats. Fuck, I thought. Is she offering herself to me… for the article?

“If you don’t mind my asking,” I changed the subject. “What’s this picture here?” I pointed to the man with his arm around the boy. “Is that your husband, the child?”

“Yes that’s him with his father,” she told me. “Jay was seven. His father was killed a few weeks after that picture was taken.”

“Oh… I’m sorry.” My eyes scanned the photos. “Where’s his mother?”

“Jay never knew his mother,” she said. “She ran out the day he was born.”

The facilitation of the mother’s nurturing touch, I thought as Jameson squealed his Grand Am out of the parking garage. Everything I’d observed so far backed up everything Desmond had told me…

“So how’d you like the grub? Better than the cafeteria at the Times?”

“It was fantastic. Your wife is one dynamite cook.”

“Yeah, she’s a good kid,” he said. “She’s hung with me through thick and thin, and believe me, there’s been a lot of thin. Too bad I can’t do more for her.”

“What do you mean?”

He steered down Third Avenue. “It didn’t help when you brought up kids. Last couple of years, it’s been like playing pool with a piece of string.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“But that’s my problem, not yours,” he perked up. “Let’s go have some fun!”

We rode a ways. The streetlights shimmered as the warm air roved down the avenue. We stopped at a red light at third and Marion, and several homeless people approached the car.

“Shine your windshield for a buck, mister,” a decrepit man said.

“Get the fuck away from the car!” Jameson yelled. “I just had it washed!”

“Hey, mister, relax. We was just askin’.”

A woman in rotten clothes approached the other side of the car. Toothless. Staggering.

“Tell that junkie bum bitch to get away from my car!” Jameson yelled.

Then he yanked his gun out of his shoulder holster.

“Are you nuts!” I shouted at him.

The two vagrants scampered off, terrified.

“Yeah, you better get out of here, you pieces of shit!” Jameson yelled. “Christ, you people smell worse than the bottom of a fuckin’ dumpster!”

“What the hell is wrong with you, man?” I said. “You can’t be pulling your gun on people for shit like that.”

Jameson reholstered his pistol, chuckling. “Cool off. I just wanted to put a scare in ’em. Bet they shit their pants, huh? See, I just saved the city a cleanup fee. Usually they shit in the street.”

.”They’re homeless, for God’s sake. They got nothing.”

“Fuck that pinko shit,” he said, then bulled through the red light.

It occurred to me then that Jameson had a harder load on than I thought. “Hey, look, Captain. You’re pretty lit. Why don’t you let me drive? You’re gonna get pulled over at this rate.”

Jameson laughed. “Any cop in this city pulls me over, he’s transferred to the impound lot in the morning. What’s up your ass?”

“Nothing,” I said. I knew I had to grin and bear it. But I still had a few more questions to ask. Just be careful, I told myself.

“Fuckin’ junkies, fuckin’ bums.” Jameson’s eyes remained dead on the street. “Everybody asking for a handout. I never asked for no handouts.”

“Some people are more fortunate than others,” I said.

“Oh, don’t give me that liberal pantywaist bullshit,” he spat, spittle flecking the inside of the windshield. “I never had nothing. My father died when I was seven, died in a fuckin’ steel mill when an ingot fell on him off of lift-clip. After that I got hocked into the fuckin’ foster care system. So I don’t want to hear no shit about poor people from poor environments. I got out of that hellhole, graduated high school, got my degree, and now I’m running the fuckin’ homicide squad in one of the biggest cities on the west coast.”

But I was still remembering what his wife had said. “What, uh, what about your mother?” I asked.

Jameson lead-footed it through another red light. “My mother? Fuck her.” Beer fumes filled the car. “My mother beat feet the same day she dropped me. That dirty bitch wasn’t nothing but a junkie whore. She was street-shit. She was walking garbage just like that whore just tried to smudge up my windshield. Far as I’m concerned—I never had a mother…”

It got to the point where almost anything Jameson did or said would support some facet of Dr. Desmond’s profile. A prostitute for a mother, who abandoned him at birth. No nurturing touches as an infant, no mother figure in the formative years. An ability to control his symbolic delusion to the extent that he can function in society and maintain steady employment. A man who is probably married but probably doesn’t have children. A man with a mounting inability to perform sexually.

I also found it interesting that Jameson’s favorite places to drink were bars in the derelict districts, bars in which any of the sixteen previous victims might easily have hung out. I wondered what Dr. Desmond would think about that?

Oh yeah, I knew he was the one. But what was I going to do about it?

The next couple of hours were pretty paralyzing. Jameson dragged me around to three more dive bars, getting drunker in each one, his hatred boiling. Loud, obnoxious, belligerent. At one point I thought one of the barkeeps was going to throw him out, but I prayed that wouldn’t happen. Knowing Jameson—and as drunk as he was—he’d probably yank out his gun, might shoot someone. But before that could happen, I got him out of there.

Then the end came pretty fast after that.

“I’m a crime reporter for the Times.” I flashed my press ID to the two doctors in the ER. “Earlier tonight, I was with Captain Jay Jameson of the city police homicide unit—”

One of the doctors, a balding guy with long hair, squinted over at me from a scrub sink. “You know that guy?” The doctor’s nametag read Parker.

“That’s right. I was drinking with him in some area bars,” I admitted. “When his name was logged in as an in-patient, the night-editor at my paper contacted me.”

“Fuck, the guy was drinking,” another doctor said. This one was big, with a trimmed beard; his nametag read MOLER. He was taking instruments out of an autoclave. “No wonder his blood was so thin. He damn near bled to death right in front of us. He took three pints before we could stabilize him. What happened?”

“I was dragging him out of a bar about two hours ago,” I told them. “He was pretty drunk. I was about to put him in the car when he bolted. The guy just ran off across Jackson and disappeared under the overpass. I couldn’t find him. The biggest reason for my concern is Captain Jameson said some things to me tonight that lead me to believe he may be—”

“This psycho who’s been killing girls and cutting off their hands,” Parker finished.

I stared at them, slack-jawed. “How—how did you know?”

Dr. Moler snickered. “When the EMTs brought him in, he had a severed hand in his pants.”

“Jesus,” I muttered. “What happened to him?”

“Looks like after he ran off from you,” Parker explained, “he must’ve picked up a hooker, then he made his move, but she shot him. He was lying in the middle of Jackson when the EMTs found him. But it must’ve been his second girl of the night ’cos he already had one hand on him.”

“Shit,” I said. “I called the cops the minute he bolted, told them my suspicions, but they didn’t take me serious.”

“We’ll show ’em the hand we found in his pants,” Moler said. “Then they’ll take you serious.”

“So you said his condition is stable?” I asked.

“We stabilized the blood loss and ligged an artery. But the x-rays showed a cranial fracture—hematoma. He’s prepped for more surgery but I wouldn’t give him more than one chance in ten of making it.”

“Where is he now?” I asked. “I really need to talk to him.”

Parker pointed across the ER. “He’s in the ICU prep cove. Second floor’ll be down to take him up in a few minutes. You want to go see him, go ahead. But don’t hold your breath on him regaining consciousness.”

“Thanks,” I said, and at the same moment several paramedics burst through the ER doors with what looked like a burn victim on a gurney. “Great!” Parker yelled. “My relief’s two hours late, and now I got a spatula special!”

I rushed to the prep cove and there he was: Jameson. Tubes down his throat, tubes up his nose, strapped to a railed bed. An IV line ran from a bag of saline to his arm. He looked dead.

“Hey, hey,” I said. I patted his face. “I guess you’re in a coma, huh, Captain? Well you know what? They got you for the whole thing now. I knew you were the one.”

His slack, lined face just lay there like a bad wax mask. “Once Dr. Desmond finds out the details, he’ll realize that his profile fits you to a tee. He’s a smart man. He’ll back up my allegation one-hundred percent.”

I patted his face a few more times. No response.

Then I took the needle-cover off the hypodermic I’d brought along. “Yeah, I knew you were the one. I knew you were the perfect dupe to take the fall.” The hypo was full of potassium dichlorate. It’d kill him in minutes and wouldn’t show up on a tox screen. I injected the whole thing into his IV connector.

Then Jameson’s eyes slitted open.

“You’re a pretty damn good cop, Captain,” I gave him. “You got any idea how hard I worked burying those bodies over the last three years? And there are twenty-one, by the way, not sixteen. You did a great job of keeping ’em out of the papers… until those last three. Just dumb luck for me, huh?”

He began to quiver on the bed, veins throbbing at his temples.

I leaned down close to his ear, whispered. “But that really screwed up my game when the victims started making the press. I thought I was gonna have to lay low now, get the junkie bitches from out of town. But you solved all that for me.”

I grinned down at him. His eyes opened a little more, to stare at me.

“Yeah, I knew you were the one, all right. The minute Desmond explained those profiles to me, and when I saw that picture of you with your father. No mother, just a father who died the same year. And, Christ, man! You were Desmond’s patient! The press’ll eat that up! Homicide cop seeing a shrink—homicide cop turns out to be the killer. It’s great, isn’t it? It’s perfect!”

See, after I dragged him out of that last bum bar, I shoved him in the passenger seat of his car. The drunk bastard had already passed out. I drove down Jackson when there was no traffic, cracked him hard in the head with the butt of my own piece, then shot him in the groin. I was aiming for the femoral artery, and I guess I did a damn good job of hitting it. He bled all over the place; I knew the fucker was going to kick.

Then I stuck the hand in his pants and shoved him out of the car.

The whole thing worked pretty well, I’d say.

“Don’t die on me yet, asshole,” I whispered, pinching his cheeks. “See, Desmond had it right with his profiles. Only it turns out the real killer was the least likely of the bunch—just a sociopath with a hand fetish.”

It was hard not to laugh right in his face.

Jameson’s hand raised an inch, then dropped. He was tipping out but I gotta give the old fucker credit. He managed to croak out a few words.

“They’ll never believe it,” he said.

“Oh, they’ll believe it,” I assured him. “What? You’re gonna tell them what really happened? Not likely. In two minutes you’ll be dead from cardiac arrest.”

“Lib motherfucker,” he croaked. “Pinko piece’a shit…”

“That’s the spirit!” I whispered. “Go out kicking! But—”

His eyelids started drooping again. This was it.

“Not yet! Don’t die yet,” I said, squeezing his face. “There’s still one more thing I haven’t told you, and it’s something you gotta know.”

Spittle bubbled from his lips. I could see him struggling to keep his eyes open, fighting to keep conscious just a few more seconds.

“Remember when I went back up to your condo to get my glasses?” I said. “What do you think I did to your wife, dickbrain? That hand they found in your pants? It was your wife’s right hand!”

Jameson tremored against his restraints. He shook and shook, like someone had just stuck a hot wire in him. Down the hall, I could hear the elevator opening, the crash team coming to take him up to surgery. Don’t bother, guys, I thought.

But just before Jameson died, I managed to tell him the final detail. “That’s right, I stuck her right hand in your pants, Captain. And her left hand? I got it safe, right here with me.”

Then I patted my crotch and grinned.

They took him up, and his obit ran the next day… along with everything else. Homicide captain investigating the Handyman Case, found with his own murdered wife’s hand in his pants? The same shrink he was seeing for alcoholism and sexual dysfunction corroborating that Jameson fit the profile?

Case closed.

And don’t forget what Desmond said about sociopaths. They’re skilled liars. They’ve had their whole lives to practice. They know what’s right and what’s wrong, but they choose wrong because it suits them.

That sounds good to me.

I’ll just have to bury the next bodies deeper.