LITMIR.BIZ

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have a decent solve rate when the action is bona fide.”

      “Which is?”

      “A hundred per cent. Still, like the unhappy lady lieutenant said, this is New York. Y’all deal with more crazies in a day than Mobile does in a year.”

      Waltz spun his glass of iced tea. “Dr Prowse said you had a special gift for investigating psychos. She called it a dark gift. What’s that mean, if I may ask?”

      I repeatedly punctured a piece of romaine. I didn’t want to lie, but couldn’t tell the truth. Not fully.

      “I was a Psych major in college, Shelly. I did prison interviews with psychos and socios. Dr Prowse thought I had a rapport with them, made them drop their guard. That’s probably the gift she was talking about.”

      I sensed Waltz didn’t believe I was telling the full story. But he shifted the conversation. “I’m not ready to close this box yet. I’ve convinced those in command to give you a few days here in case we need your input.”

      I raised an eyebrow at Waltz’s ability to sidestep immediate authority. “Sounds like you went above Lieutenant Folger.”

      “A step or two. That’s not a comment on her, either personally or professionally. She seems unhappy with some aspect of her life, and it makes her brittle, but the Lieutenant is blessed with a highly analytical mind. She’s destined ever upward, as the sages say.”

      “She seems young for all the authority.”

      “She’s thirty-two, but has been climbing the ladder three steps at a time. After a degree in criminal justice – top of her class, highest honors – she started in uniform in Brooklyn, grabbed attention by using her head, analyzing crime patterns, offering realistic solutions. She worked undercover for a while, setting up sting operations, pitting dope dealers against one another, busting a fencing operation that reached from Florida to Canada …”

      “Not your ordinary street cop.” I felt a sudden kinship with Alice Folger. My departmental rise began by solving a major crime while still in uniform.

      Waltz nodded. “She seemed almost driven to prove herself as a cop. It got her noticed by a few people with clout. They touted Ms Folger to the big brass at One Police Plaza – HQ. Her supporters suggested the brass jump her in rank and send her here to be tested. We’re a big precinct and our homicide teams handle everything from street craze-os to murderous stockbrokers. It’s a plum placement for a detective displaying more tricks than usual.”

      Perhaps like you, Shelly, I thought.

      “I’m a fellow officer. Why does Folger think I’m useless?”

      “Johnny Folger, her late father, was NYPD. All three of Johnny’s brothers were on the force, one died on 9/11. An aunt works in the impound. That’s just this generation. Before that …”

      I held up my hand. “I get your point, Shelly. Folger has cop in her DNA.”

      “Or overcompensating to create the genes.”

      “What?”

      He waved it away. “Nothing. I always found families more custom and tradition than blood, but that’s my take. What it boils down to is that Folger’s a partisan. She sees you as a –, as um …” Waltz fumbled for the word.

      “As a rube,” I finished. “Someone to stumble over while the pros handle the heavy lifting.”

      Waltz sighed an affirmation. I slid my unfinished salad over to join his sandwich and leaned forward, arms crossed on the table.

      “How did I get here, Shelly? You know what I mean. How does a detective push the pause button on a homicide investigation, and get the NYPD to pull me from Mobile to New York in a heartbeat?”

      Waltz looked uncomfortable. His fingers traced the rim of his glass. “Five years ago a councilman’s daughter ran off with a cult leader, a psychopath. I tracked him down in Alaska and personally brought her back. She had a successful deprogramming and the whole nasty incident stayed under wraps.”

      I pursed my lips, blew silently. “There’s a grateful councilman on your shoulder? No wonder you could call the Chief direct.”

      He shrugged. “That and a few other successes have given me a reputation for dealing with cases like your PSIT handles, the psychological stuff. I’m allowed latitude others don’t have. An input role.”

      A thought about Shelly’s clout hit me. “Were you one of the supporters responsible for Alice Folger’s jump to the major leagues?”

      He waved it away like it was no big deal. “I saw talent, I passed her name upstairs.”

      I figured Waltz had seen a bright spark in Alice Folger and decided to drop it into an oxygen-laden environment to see if it would blaze or burn out. Judging by the veiled admiration in his voice, Folger had blazed bright.

      I said, “Where do I go from here?”

      “I’ve arranged you a hotel room nearby. Check in, get whatever you need and you’ll be reimbursed. You can come in to the department, or I’ll send reports to your hotel. I simply want you to see if you can add anything.”

      “That’s all?”

      “It’s what the lady wanted, it’s what the lady gets.”

      Lady wanted, I thought, not victim wanted. Good for Waltz.

      Waltz offered to drive me to the hotel, but needing to clear my head I started walking. I ducked into the continuing mist, my mind swirling into the events that had slammed my life into Dr Evangeline Prowse, with repercussions that would forever echo in my soul. Events I had not, could not, tell Sheldon Waltz.

      The Alabama Institute of Aberrational Behavior housed an average of fifty criminally insane men and women. It had become one of the more enlightened such institutions under the stewardship of Dr Prowse, who had made a career-long study of psychopathy and sociopathy. It was claimed no doctoral candidate in abnormal psychology could write more than five pages without citing Vangie.

      In one of her cases, a sixteen-year-old boy had murdered an abusive father, disemboweling him with a knife, a slow and hideous death by vivisection. The homicide was so savage that the local police did not suspect the boy, an intelligent and gentle soul, barely questioning him.

      Starting two years later, five women were murdered in a grim, violent and symbolic manner. After the third mutilated victim appeared, the FBI gave the case material to Vangie. She studied the bizarre and ceremonial crime scenes, detecting signs of a tormented child. The police finally turned their eyes toward a twenty-six-year-old man whose father had died in the woods years before. He confessed, was ultimately pronounced insane, and Dr Prowse petitioned for him to be brought to the Alabama Institute of Aberrational Behavior.

      I was in college at the time of the killer’s capture. Dr Prowse and I had met through that case, and had been bound by it for years.

      The father was my father. The killer was my brother, Jeremy.

       “Get back here, Jeremy, you little coward … stop that squealing … I’ll give you something to squeal about …”

       “Don’t, Daddy, please don’t, Daddy …”

      Though my father, Earl Eugene Ridgecliff, functioned as a respected civil engineer, he was diseased with anger. As children, my brother and I lived with the fear that anything – a word, a glance, a misperceived gesture – could explode into horror. My brother, older than me by six years, became the focus of our father’s physical rage, and I still awoke in cold sweats with my brother’s screams razoring through my home.

       “Help me, Mama, help me, Mama … Daddy’s trying to kill me …”

      I had never used the word murder for my brother’s actions against our father, preferring “attempted salvation”. Had Jeremy been caught and tried

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