A Visible Darkness - By Jonathon King Page 0,61

he’d bent to pick up a can on the street that day. And I remembered the hands, huge and swollen and powerful.

“Anybody know where this junk man lives?” I asked.

“Nobody pay no attention to him,” said the crew leader. “Once we start talkin’ about him, everybody seen him around, but nobody know him.

“Dog here say he thinks he live with his momma somewhere’s over on Washington by the river,” he said, tipping his head to one of his crew. “But he ain’t sure where.”

The table was silent for a full minute. Nothing more was coming.

“I appreciate the help,” I finally said. “You’ve got my cell number. If you see this junk man, call me.”

“No, no, no,” said the Brown Man, turning bold. “I ain’t callin’ nobody down on my own corner. An’ that means you too, truck man. Don’t be parkin’ cross the street messin’ wit my business no more. That’s part of the deal, too.”

“I’ll call you, G,” said the crew leader, stepping between us. “But you better come quick we find out this junk man been doin’ what you say.”

I was driving around the zone, aimlessly. If the dark junk man didn’t know anyone was after him, maybe he’d still be on the street, doing whatever he’d been doing during the daytime for who knows how long.

I was thinking about his eyes, the dark tunnels under the shadows of his brow when he looked up and caught my own. Were they eyes that could hold the kind of remorselessness it would take to steal innocent lives for a few hundred dollars? Eyes that could look away while he crushed an old man’s throat? I’d seen the eyes of killers before.

“Taking the walk” they called it in Philly, when the arrested or convicted would be walked in their shackles and cuffs from a court hearing back to the jail. They would purposely be taken across an open-air corridor so the press cameras could all get a shot. Some group of cops would always be assigned to do crowd control, holding back the TV guys who wanted to stick a microphone in the guy’s face and asked the inevitable stupid question, “Why’d you do it?”

I’d been on the detail when they walked Heidnik. When he looked up to see who’d asked the question, he caught my eyes as I held back the line. Just the quick contact made a shiver flutter at the hairline on the back of my neck. Maybe it was the knowledge that investigators had actually talked of Heidnik’s possible cannibalism. Maybe it was just the possibility of pure evil that made you see what couldn’t humanly be there. But neither television nor the movies ever got it right.

While driving I had unconsciously taken myself back into the alley behind Ms. Thompson’s house when the cell rang.

“Freeman.”

“Richards,” she said. “The crime scene guys got a match off some fingerprints from the doc’s car. Some guy named Eddie Baines. He was in Marshack’s forensics unit three years ago for a couple of months on a theft charge. We got an old home address for him, and SWAT is headed out there now. Can you meet us?”

She sounded in control, but pumped.

“Give me the address,” I said.

A cop stopped me at a roadblock three blocks away from the house. I gave the uniformed officer Richards’s name and he called it in over his radio.

“Somebody will have to take you in,” he said.

Down the street the road was blocked again by two squad cars parked nose to nose. People who had been evacuated from their houses were milling around, talking to the cops and probably getting little answer for their questions. Another officer jogged up and told me to follow him to the command post. Richards, Diaz and two SWAT officers were working from the side patio of a small stucco house. Richards introduced me around and then filled me in.

“His place is the beige one across and to the left.” I peeked around the corner. The house had a dilapidated look that followed the neighborhood trend. All the shades were down. The driveway was empty. The roof had a deep sway in the middle as if part of the air had been let out of the place.

“The phone has been disconnected for years,” she continued. “Neighbors say that Eddie used to live there with his mother, but they hadn’t seen either of them for quite a while.”

“How old’s the mother?” I asked.

“From what we know she’s got to be