Spare Change Read online

  “He does,” Richie said. “It is much better to be one of the ones he likes.”

  “I understand that,” I said.

  Richie broke off an edge of his second muffin and ate it.

  “Felix says you had something going with a police chief on the North Shore,” Richie said.

  “I did,” I said.

  “And?”

  “Now I don’t.”

  “What was the problem?” Richie said.

  “He was still hung up on his former wife,” I said.

  Richie nodded. He drank some coffee and put the cup down and smiled at me.

  “You understand that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  Richie nodded, slowly looking at the surface of the coffee in his cup.

  “I understand it, too,” Richie said.

  “Time now,” I said, “for a pregnant silence.”

  “And then chitchat about Rosie some more,” Richie said.

  3

  I loved my father. My sister and I had competed with my mother for his attention all our lives. I was thrilled to have him sharing space with me. To be working with him on something important was a kind of victory. It was also odd.

  They had an office for him at police headquarters. But he spent a lot of time in my loft. He was on the phone a lot. He was in and out a lot. At the end of the day, we usually had a drink together before he went home. I looked forward to the drink. And I looked forward to his going home.

  On a bright, perfect Tuesday morning in early July he called me at seven-thirty, just after I came back from walking Rosie.

  “I’ll pick you up at eight,” he said. “There’s been another one.”

  The body had been found in among some tall reeds beside the Muddy River in the Back Bay Fens. It was a man, maybe fifty-five, wearing a powder-blue jogging suit and brand-new white sneakers. He’d been shot behind the right ear. There were three coins beside his head. The Boston Homicide commander was there, a big, tough, well-dressed man named Quirk. There were a dozen other cops, and half a dozen members of the press, including two television people.

  “Phil,” Quirk said.

  “Martin,” my father said. “This is my daughter Sunny.”

  “Captain,” I said.

  We shook hands.

  “So far,” Quirk said, “it’s same-o same-o. Wallet is still with him, a hundred and twenty dollars in it. There’s no sign of sexual activity. No evidence of any assault except the gunshot that killed him. Haven’t, obviously, got the bullet yet. But from the look of the wound, there’s nothing unusual about the weapon.”

  My father was looking down at the man. He squatted and pushed blood-stiffened hair aside to look at the wound.

  “A nine, maybe,” he said. “Or a .38.”

  “Sure,” Quirk said. “Maybe a .40. It didn’t exit his skull. So the ME will tell us.”

  “And then what will we know,” my father said.

  “Nothing much,” Quirk said. “But we should be used to that by now.”

  My father nodded.

  “Do a walk-through yet?” he said.

  “Yeah,” Quirk said. “I’ll have one of the crime-scene guys take you through it.”

  The crime-scene guy was a young woman with copper-colored hair, which she wore in a ponytail. We stood with her on the sidewalk near Park Drive. Her name was Emily.

  “Perp must have followed him in here,” Emily said.

  She stepped onto a barely discernible path that led toward the reeds and the river. Daddy and I followed her.

  “He had some scissors with him,” Emily said, “and a shopping bag, with half a dozen cut weeds in it. We figure he was getting himself stuff for some kind of floral arrangement.”

  We paused next to some truncated weed stalks.

  “This is where he was cutting the reeds,” Emily said. “Already matched them with the ones in the bag. He was probably going to cut some more, because he still had the scissors in his hand when he was shot. They landed a few feet away from him when he went down.”

  “And he didn’t go down here,” I said.

  “No.”

  Emily led us along the slight path.

  “He moved on, looking for just the right reed,” Emily said. “Down here.”

  We were at the crime scene.

  “He found the right reed,” Emily said. “He stopped, started to cut it, and the perp…”

  Emily pretended to shoot with her forefinger and thumb.

  “Bang, bang,” Emily said.

  “Twice?” Daddy said.

  Emily almost blushed.

  “No. Excuse me,” Emily said. “I was just dramatizing. As far as we can tell now, it was one and out.”

  My father didn’t say anything.

  “Footprints?” I said.

  Emily shook her head.

  “Ground’s marshy,” Emily said. “And doesn’t hold a print. Even if it did, people come in here all the time. Smoke dope. Drink. Have sex. Cut reeds. Look at birds.”

  “What’s his name?” Daddy said.

  Emily pulled a small notebook from her shirt pocket and opened it.

  “Eugene Nevins,” Emily said. “Lives on Jersey Street. He’s wearing a wedding ring. No one answers his phone, it’s his voice on the answering machine, and the apartment listing is his name only.”

  “Widowed or divorced, maybe,” my father said.

  “Gay maybe,” I said. “Not a ton of straight men out cutting reeds for a floral arrangement.”

  My father nodded.

  “Any next of kin?”

  “Not yet,” Emily said. “We’re looking.”

  “When did it happen?” Daddy said.

  “We’ll know better after they get him onto the table,” Emily said. “We’re guessing five, six, seven o’clock yesterday evening.”

  “No one heard a gunshot.”

  “No one reported one,” Emily said. “Lot of traffic noise all around the Fenway that hour. Summer day everyone’s got the windows closed, a/c on.”

  “You could probably fire off a handgun in Quincy Market at noon, and no one would report a gunshot,” my father said.

  “It doesn’t sound like they think it does,” Emily said.

  “And they don’t want what they heard to be a gunshot,” Daddy said. “They got other things to do.”

  “Emily,” I said. “How cynical does that sound?”

  “Captain Randall has earned the right to it, ma’am.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I guess he has.”

  4

  Rosie and I were both fed and walked for the night. She was asleep on the bed with her paw over her nose, half under a pillow. I was beside her in my pajamas, reading photocopies of letters that the Spare Change Killer had sent to my father twenty years ago.

  Dear Captain Randall,

  First, congratulations on being named to head the Spare Change Task Force. It’s a nice name, “the Spare Change Killer.” I like it. And after only two events. Don’t fret. There will be more. Wouldn’t want you to get bored (ha, ha). Do you wonder why I always leave some change at an event? That’s for me to know and you to find out, isn’t it?

  Good hunting,

  Spare Change

  It was laborious block printing, as if the letters were drawn rather than written.

  Dear Phil,

  You don’t mind if I call you Phil, I hope, now that we’ve begun to establish a relationship. I know you think of me often, as I do likewise of you. I wonder if we’ll ever meet? Of course, it’s always possible that we have met and you don’t know it. You know what they always say, Phil, it’s a small world. Anyway, how’s the investigation going? I like how hard
you are working on establishing a pattern. I’m sorry to tell you that from my end, you don’t seem to be getting anywhere.

  Let’s stay in touch.

  SC

  Beside me Rosie snored softly. The overhead lights were off. I was reading in the small circumference of my bedside lamp. The rest of the loft was dark. The only real sound in the loft was Rosie and the soft rush of the air-conditioning. But the sound of the disingenuous voice from twenty years ago seemed to have materialized in the silence and the darkness. It hung in the air of my loft as if I could actually hear it.

  Dear Phil,

  How are you doing? As I guess you know, I’m doing quite well. The last event was especially good. It’s fun to get them totally unaware. Walking along and then pow! Dead. You suppose that is why I do this, Phil? For the fun of seeing them go down? I bet you’d like to know that. Maybe I don’t even know it…or maybe I do. I’ll be looking for you on the television.

  Be good. (Not like me, huh?)

  SC

  I put my hand on Rosie’s flank as she slept beside me. She was warm and solid. I kept my hand on her as I read the rest of the letters. When I was done, I picked up the new letter and reread it. Same block printing. Same voice. Same person? No way to know. Several of the letters had been published in the papers twenty years ago. Anyone who cared to could find them and mimic them. Or the recent one could be authentic, the simpleminded voice connected to the block printing. The way it was written influenced how it sounded. Form and content? I should have paid more attention in freshman comp. Maybe I could find a forensics English teacher.

  I put the letters on the floor, and shut off my reading lamp, and lay on my back looking into the darkness, and tried to think obliquely about what I’d read, as if maybe I’d see better if I didn’t look right at it.

  No point in trying to think about the old murders. No one had solved them in twenty years. Focus on the new ones. I’m Spare Change.

  I’m walking around the city with a loaded gun. It’s much heavier when it’s loaded. I see somebody I want to kill. Do I follow the person? Waiting for my chance? Do I walk up behind the person and pull the trigger without a word? I shoot him only once. I know what I’m doing. I’m confident he’s dead. I put the gun away. I put the coins down. Do I linger and watch from someplace? Do I get a kick out of seeing the body discovered? Watching the cops arrive? Or do I walk away without another glance. Get my enjoyment from the newspaper accounts. The television stand-ups with the crime scene in the background. “Glamour-puss TV person reporting live…” Do I do this for the publicity? To feel important? Why write to Daddy? Why the beloved adversary crap? All the murders, the two new ones, the earlier seven, had in common was that they were done in places where they could be done covertly. I have never broken in to any place and shot someone. I have always been outdoors, in the city, near the public but out of sight. Along the river. Under an overpass. Down an alley. In a public parking garage. Is that how I pick my victims? Wait around in a good place to shoot, and wait for someone to wander by? Or did I preselect on some obscure basis and follow them around until they went someplace where I could shoot them unobserved?

  I was right back to why. Why does Spare Change do it? Why leave the coins? They’re not always the same denomination of coins, but always three of them. And why now? After twenty years. If it was the same guy, what caused him to stop? And what caused him to start again? What if it was a copycat? What set him off? Or her. Most serial killers were men. But it didn’t have to be a man.

  My eyes had adapted to the darkness, and I could see the outlines of my home. My easel under the skylight. My table and chairs in the bay. My kitchen counter. My silent television. Rosie was small and substantial beside me. My gun was where it always was at night, in the drawer of my bedside table.

  5

  We met in a big room in the mayor’s office at Boston City Hall. From the outside, Boston City Hall looks like Stonehenge rising in massive isolation in the middle of a big, empty brick plaza. Inside is less welcoming: gray slab stone and harsh light, as if somehow the building were more important than its function.

  The mayor was a much more human presence than the building. He presided quite genuinely over the meeting, just as if it wasn’t taking place in a misplaced Gothic castle. The police commissioner was there, and Captain Quirk, and the head of State Police Homicide, Captain Healy. The Commissioner of Public Safety was there, and a man named Nathan Epstein, who was Special Agent in Charge of the Boston FBI office. There was a woman from the Suffolk County DA’s office, and a guy from the AG. There were also assistants and associates of all of these high-ranking people, plus my father, plus his assistant, which was me.

  “As you speak,” the mayor said, “please identify yourselves. I don’t want to waste time now with introductions, and I don’t know if everyone knows everyone.”

  He looked around the room. No one objected. The mayor nodded once.

  “We’ll keep a record of the meeting,” he said. “But it will be a private record for our own information. We’re not going to succeed with the Spare Change killings without a free and uninhibited flow of information. So forget turf. And don’t worry about how it sounds. We have a common goal. Hell, a common need. So I urge you to speak freely, and, if I may, I urge you not to bullshit me. Or each other.”

  The mayor looked at the Boston Police commissioner.

  “Beth Ann,” he said, “why don’t you start.”

  She was a lean woman in a tailored gray suit. Her eyes were pale blue. Her hair was verging on gray. She wore a wedding ring.

  “Beth Ann Hartigan,” she said. “Boston Police commissioner. We’ve been getting good cooperation from our friends at the state level, and from the federal government as well.”

  She nodded at Epstein.

  “We have increased police presence on the streets of Boston by a third. We have supplemented our own resources with state officers and federal marshals.”

  “Is it a visible presence?” the mayor said.

  “That is our hope, but I don’t know. I think to make the public fully comfortable we’d have to flood the city with far more men and women than we have, than all of us have.”

  The mayor nodded.

  “Well, the public will perceive what it perceives,” he said. “There are more police persons looking for the killer?”

  “Yes,” Hartigan said. “The absolute maximum number we can pull together.”

  “How about the progress of the investigation?” the mayor said.

  “Captain Quirk is in charge of that for us,” Hartigan said. “I’ll ask him to address that.”

  The mayor looked at Quirk.

  “Go ahead, Captain,” the mayor said.

  “Martin Quirk, Boston Homicide commander. Progress is too strong a word. We’ve put together a pretty good team to chase this guy down. Special Agent Epstein from the FBI. Captain Healy from State Homicide. Phil Randall, who was in charge of the original case, has come out of retirement to consult for us. Epstein has provided us a profile from the FBI—tells us the killer is a white male, between twenty and forty-five, some education but nothing advanced or specialized. Couple years of college maybe.”

  “How do they know that?” the mayor said.

  “Place where he did the crimes. Language he uses in his letters to the police.”

  Quirk looked at Epstein.

  “Maybe a little guessing.”

  Epstein smiled and shrugged.

  “And?” the mayor said.

  “And we’re nowhere,” Quirk said. “We don’t know who he is. We don’t know why he does it.”

  “What about the coins?” the mayor said.

  “They may be just to tag the crime,” Quirk said. “Let us know it’s him, something nonincriminating, so if he got picked up and we found change i
n his pocket it wouldn’t mean anything. Most people have change on them.”

  The mayor nodded.

  “Or,” Quirk said, “it may be just something he does to confuse us, and there is no meaning to the coins. Or it may mean something really important to him, but it doesn’t mean anything to anyone else.”

  “Have you had any forensic psychiatry input?” the mayor said.

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  Quirk shook his head.

  “He kills for reasons we don’t understand,” Quirk said. “We don’t know why he did it twenty years ago. If it’s the same guy. We don’t know why he stopped. We don’t know why it’s started again.”

  The mayor looked at my father.

  “Phil?” he said.

  “Phil Randall,” my father said. “I got nowhere with it first time out. I thought then, and I still think, that what will eventually happen is he’ll make a mistake. He’ll choose the wrong place to do the shooting, and someone will spot him during the commission. Or his gun will jamb and the vic will ID him. Or one of us will get lucky and walk in on him in the act.”

  “What we are going to do,” Quirk said, “is flood the next crime scene, try to seal it off, if it’s someplace where we can, in the hopes that maybe he hangs around to watch.”

  “Do you think he might?” the mayor said.

  “FBI profilers think he might,” Quirk said. “Our shrinks think he might.”

  “How will you know him?”

  “If he’s still carrying the murder weapon,” Quirk said.

  “Jesus Christ,” the mayor said. “You’re going to search everyone in sight?”

  “Everybody we seal inside the crime-scene area,” Quirk said.

  “Men and women?” the mayor said.

  “While we’re at it,” Quirk said. “Why take a chance that the profilers are wrong.”

  “You’ll have some female officers there.”

  “We will.”

  “Even so,” the mayor said, “the civil libertarians will go crazy.”