"I'll just be a minute or two. We'll attend to you. Be good boys and girls," he told them in a cracked voice, all the doors of the car wide open. He was oblivious to passersby. In fact, at that second he gave a shit for little or nothing. Mercifully, he saw no one in the street. He walked back inside.
He put the man on his stomach, tethered to the four corners of the bed with cords. Pulled the gag away for a moment with a hand which looked like a large human hand but which had the power of pliers or vise grips. Out of sight was a coiled length of wire and another object.
"Hello," he said softly in his rumbling basso. "I fed your dogs. I gave them some stuff out of the fridge. I couldn't find any scraps of newspaper to feed, them."
"You listen to me, you—"
"Oh, my. Oh, my, Mr. Esteban. I don't suggest you speak again unless I ask you to do so," Chaingang said in the quietest voice with which he was capable of speaking.
"Gravida—that's what I'm going to call you. Our pet name." He cooed. "Gravida, be a good girl and tell Daniel why you put all those dogs in the pen and gave them only pieces of paper to eat. Do that for me, Gravida, Why? Try to make me understand."
"Fuck you, cocksu—"
"I see. All right, Gravida. Perhaps you're not in the mood for an intimate conversation at this time. You might prefer sex. Eh? Is that it? Would you like some physical intimacy?" He did something and the gag was reaffixed.
"I wish you'd speak with me first. I know you must have some reason for starving all those helpless little puppies but, frankly, I'm not feeling too well myself. I just want you to know, before we have a little sex together, how much I hate you. If I had more time—if I didn't have other pieces of monkey shit to deal with—I'd take you out and peel you, kill you inch by inch, keep you alive for days, but…"
Chaingang could hardly breathe. He had to get out of there. This was a luxury he could not afford.
"I see from your pictures and things you're into buttfucking, eh? So that's the way we'll go, Miss Gravida." The man felt something large and hard inserted in his rectum. "My goodness, we're large back there. You're a real donut, aren't you? Do you know what's inside you now?" The man on the bed squirmed and moaned.
"Obviously, you're really into it. Ready for your last orgasm? Good. I think you'll find this a genuinely moving experience."
He forced another deep breath. Uncoiled the end of the wire out the door, pulled the thing as hard as he could and flattened against the outside wall as the concussive blast from the last grenade—the frag up John Esteban's butt-got his ass off for the last time.
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27
Trask finally kicked his cold, but his chronic stupidity-that he hadn't kicked. It was crazy, but he was still locked into this story that had cost him his gig at KCM, and that was continuing to threaten him with a jail cell. Once again, he was in his ride, parked near the police headquarters, monitoring that damned hidden mike. He'd told himself the reason was that he was going to get up the nerve to go in and get it—but deep inside he knew there was no way. He wasn't really waiting to see Hilliard, or some other cop he knew by name, leave the building so that he could go up to the metro-squad room and ask if they were in, using that as an excuse to be in the building. He was here because he was drawn by that damned bug—he wanted to know what was going on in a case that had become an obsession.
Crucifixion Killer Strikes Again!
That was the banner headline across the front of a morning tabloid, which he was perusing as he sat monitoring background noise in Llewelyn's office.
Federal agents today joined investigators from the Kansas City Metro Squad, the Homicide Unit of the Crimes Against Persons Division, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the Violent Crimes Task Force, in an investigation into the death of John Esteban…
It is believed that an explosive device, such as the military fragmentation grenade which police say caused the explosion of a fleeing motorist's abandoned car…
He finally realized he was seeing something that was part of a submerged iceberg. It was pointless to listen for scraps. The cops—assuming they knew anything of substance at all, which he doubted—had no real handle on the apparently senseless and disconnected homicides.
It would be suicide to go up there after the microphone. He'd forget about it. When and if it were discovered, even if they managed to trace it back to Bob's Electronics—his name wasn't on file there, and after a while, it was unlikely his face would be remembered. If he didn't go back to get it, or return to the electronics shop, he could write his indiscretion off as a real bad idea and go on from there.
Trask started the car, pulled out, and drove to the nearest Dumpster, where he ripped out the tape and deposited both it and the earpiece. The radio receiver went into the first creek he crossed.
Lieutenant Llewelyn was far from the cop shop. He and a cluster of coppers and forensics people were at Mount Ely, where Kansas City Homicide detectives had found the place where the sniper blew off the heads of the bikers.
"The killer had to come up here after they were on the crosses," Llewelyn said. "For what purpose—target practice? It makes no sense at all. He'd killed up close—Ms. Hildebrande. If he was the one using the rifle grenades, he'd have taken the head shots down there. Somebody went to a lot of work to get into this position. The doer who did the bikers was under surveillance, it appears to me. We're looking at two killers, at least. Maybe more. The grenade guy, the guy with the machine gun and a .22 pistol, he's just part of the picture. The rifle grenades—that's somebody else. And when we match up forensics through the national computer we run into a wall.
"We got reporters now crawling all over the place. They say the mutilation murders—the hearts ripped out—and the size and description of the—grenade perpetrator all match the M.O. and appearance of Chaingang Bunkowski, who as we all know is slammed down on death row. We're telling the reporters—yeah, we don't know if it's a copycat killing spree or what. But we got a partial off a shell casing and the national printout came back as 'I.D. deleted.' Ran it by the feds and got zip.
"I'm just guessing—but who do you know ever killed like this but the infamous Mr. Bunkowski? Suppose, just for the sake of being the devil's advocate, he escaped from prison? They decide not to publicize it, for all the obvious reasons. When we inquire to the warden at Marion he says, 'Yeah, Bunkowski's in solitary.' But he's really here. Whacking bikers and other citizens. Wouldn't that theory explain why some asshole decides to delete his fingerprint identification? Figure it's for 'national security' or some such bullshit?"
"Yeah," Hilliard said. "That could fly. But who's the other asshole?"
Everybody just stood there. Nobody was speaking. They had the expressions of animals at night, when they're caught in the headlights of a fast-moving car.
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28
"Mr. Conway," the veterinarian explained to the tall, heavyset man, "we'll certainly do our best. But what do you want us to do if in a reasonable time we can't find good homes for all of the dogs?"
"How much would you want to continue to board them, say, for a year? If you couldn't find homes for them?"
"Just the cost of the dog food, I suppose. We could donate the care and feeding." The vet had been carefully selected by Daniel, who had tried to find someone who genuinely cared about animals. His sense of it was that the puppies would do as well here as anywhere, until homes could be found. This was the second vet who'd taken twenty dogs. He'd told them they'd been rescued from the Rutledge, Missouri, Animal Auction, which was a notorious marketplace frequented by "dog bunchers," who specialized in selling large numbers of animals to medical laboratories.