“Interesting.” His voice was almost a whisper. “So if you are able to judge the worth of another human life, you are yourself, by inference, superior to that life.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Are you better than Hitler?”
“Absolutely.”
“Stalin?”
“Yes.”
“Pol Pot?”
“Yes.”
“Me?”
“You?”
He nodded.
“You’re not a killer, Gerry.”
He shrugged. “Is that how you judge? You’re better than someone who kills or orders others to kill?”
“If those killings are done to victims who pose no real physical threat to the killer or the person who orders the killing, then yes, I am better than them.”
“So you’re superior to Alexander, Caesar, several U.S. presidents, a few popes.”
I laughed. He’d set me up and I’d felt it coming, but I hadn’t seen where it would come from.
“Like I said, Gerry, I think you’re half Jesuit.”
He smiled and rubbed his bristled scalp. “I’ll admit, they taught me well.” His eyes narrowed and he leaned into the table. “I just hate this idea that some people have more of a right to take a life than others. It’s an inherently corrupt concept. You kill, you should be punished.”
“Like Alec Hardiman?”
He blinked. “You’re part pit bull, aren’t you, Patrick?”
“What my clients pay me for, Ger.” I reached across and refilled his shot glass for him. “Tell me about Alec Hardiman and Cal Morrison and Jamal Cooper.”
“Maybe Alec killed Cal Morrison and Cooper, too, I don’t know for sure. Whoever killed those boys was making some kind of statement, that’s for sure. Crucified Morrison below the Edward Everett statue, shoved an ice pick through his larynx so he couldn’t scream, cut off pieces of him that were never found.”
“What pieces?”
Gerry’s fingers drummed the tabletop for a moment, his lips pursed as he decided how much to tell me. “His testicles, a kneecap, both big toes. It fit with some other victims we knew about.”
“Other victims besides Cooper?”
“Not long before Cal Morrison was killed,” Gerry said, “a few winos and hookers from the Zone downtown to as far away as the Springfield bus depot were murdered. Six in all, starting with Jamal Cooper. The murder weapons varied, the victim profiles varied, the methods of execution varied, but Brett and I believed it was all the work of the same two killers.”
“Two?” I said.
He nodded. “Working in tandem. Conceivably it could have been one guy, but he would have had to be astonishingly strong, ambidextrous, quick as lightning.”
“If the murder weapons and MO and victim selection were so varied, why’d you think it was the same killers?”
“There was a level of cruelty to the kills like I’d never seen before. Never seen since, either. Not only did these guys enjoy their work, Patrick, but they—or he—were also thinking of the people who found the bodies, how they’d react. They cut a wino into a hundred sixty-four pieces. Think about it. One hundred and sixty-four pieces of flesh and bone, some no bigger than a fingertip, left on the bureau top and along the headboard, spaced out on the floor, hanging from hooks along the shower rod in this little flophouse room down in the Zone. Place ain’t even there no more, but I can’t drive by the space it used to occupy without thinking about that room. A sixteen-year-old runaway in Worcester, he snapped her neck and then twisted her head around a hundred eighty degrees, wrapped it in duct tape so it would stay that way for the first person through the door. It was beyond anything I’ve ever come up against, and no one can tell me that those six victims, all still officially unsolved cases, weren’t killed by the same one or more people.”
“And Cal Morrison?”
He nodded. “Number seven. And Charles Rugglestone, possibly, would be number eight.”
“Wait,” I said, “the Rugglestone who was friends with this Alec Hardiman?”
“You bet.” He raised his glass, put it back down, stared at it. “Charles Rugglestone was murdered in a warehouse not far from here. He was stabbed with an ice pick thirty-two times, bludgeoned with a hammer so hard that the holes in his skull looked like small animals had been living in his brain and decided to eat their way out. He was also burned, piece by piece, from his ankles to his neck, most of it while he was still breathing. We found Alec Hardiman passed out in the dispatch office with Rugglestone’s blood all over him and the ice pick a few feet away, his prints all over it.”
“So he did it.”
Gerry shrugged. “Every year, because his father asked me to, I visit Alec at Walpole. And, maybe, I dunno, because I like him. I still see the little kid in him. Whatever. But as much as I like him, he’s a cipher. Is he capable of murder? Yeah. I don’t doubt that for a second. But I can also tell you that no single man, no matter how strong—and Alec wasn’t all that strong—could have done what was done to Rugglestone.” He pursed his lips and downed the shot. “But as soon as Alec went to trial, the killings I’d been investigating dried up. His father, of course, retired not long after the arrest, but I kept looking into the
Morrison murder and the six that came before it, and I cleared Alec of involvement in at least two of those.”
“But he was convicted.”
“For Rugglestone’s murder only. Nobody wanted to admit that they’d suspected a serial killer was out there and didn’t notify the general public. No one wanted more egg on their faces after the son of a decorated cop was arrested for a brutal murder. So Alec went to trial for Rugglestone’s murder and he was sentenced to life in prison and he’s up at Walpole rotting away. His father went to Florida, probably died trying to figure out where it all went so wrong. And none of this would matter, I suppose, except that someone crucified Kara Rider on a hill and someone else gave you my name and the name Alec Hardiman.”
“So,” I said, “if there actually was more than one killer, and Alec Hardiman was one of them…”
“Then the other one’s still out there, yeah.” Dark pockets had formed under his eyes and hollowed them out. “And if he’s still out there after almost twenty-something years, and he’s been holding his breath all this time for some sort of comeback, I’d say he’s probably pretty pissed off.”