“Maybe I think it’ll keep me alive.”
“Want me to show you a calendar with your execution date on it? I’m figuring sometime next December. Enjoy.”
“You don’t get it, do you?”
“Tell me,” I said.
“This is so much bigger than the murders now. I’m so much bigger.”
Grime blinked once and looked at me like a high school kid might look at a frog just before he dissects it. Kind of funny, but mostly curious.
“You know how many people die each day?” he said.
“No, I don’t.”
“Hundred fifty thousand a day. Ten thousand since you sat down here. Look it up.”
“I’m not following you, John.”
“You’re not following me. No one follows me. That’s the point. Shit, for every person alive right now, there are billions who are already dead. Billions. So where the fuck do you get off saying these fifteen are so special?”
Grime used his foot to flip open the brown binder again. It fell flat to a picture of a girl named Donna Tracey. About seventeen years old, with long, stringy hair and bad skin. Looked like a mug shot.
“Just part of the herd,” Grime said. “Millions of them, scraping along, sucking down their Big Macs, listening to their tunes, flipping through the idiot box. That’s the life, mister. Get out of the house, drink up some warm beer, then wrestle with a wannabe car mechanic in a backseat somewhere. Like they invented sex.”
Grime closed the binder with his foot.
“Get knocked up at what? Fifteen, sixteen? For what? To procreate? Propagate the species? Fuck that. Just another generation of mediocrity. Spitting out their mediocre kids. Then trudging along to a grave. These fifteen just got there a little earlier.”
“And no one really gives a damn about any of them. Right, John?”
Grime craned his neck and took a look around the room. No one had moved. Everyone was listening. The killer loved it, which was okay. As long as he kept talking, I was in the game.
“You look like a smart guy,” Grime said. “Let me ask you something. You know the name of your great- grandfather? Great-grandmother? How about we go back another generation, great-great-grandfather? That’s less than a hundred years ago, but most people have no fucking idea. Their own flesh and blood. So fucking sacred. Once you’re in the ground, you’re gone. Within fifty years. Like you never existed.”
“But not that way for you, huh?”
“Probably not, mister. Probably not. So you say these assholes are going to kill me and you have a way out. I say, so what. Kill me. I’ll live forever anyway.”
Grime looked past me. To Bullet-head.
“I’m done here.”
With that he stood up and held out his hands. The officers redid his cuffs. In front of his body. Then they began to pack up his files.
“Sorry, Kelly. Maybe you have something. Maybe you don’t. Just not enough in it for me.”
“You already have what you want?”
“Looks like it.”
I stood up and moved closer. Trying to get in the killer’s space, change the dynamic.
“What if you could walk away from this?” I said. “Even a little bit. Don’t you think the legend would only grow? And if you were ever released, how big would that story be?”
Grime paused as they secured the hallways outside. He looked for all the world like a broken-down old man, one who liked to have sex with little girls and squeeze their necks until they were dead. By his own estimation, one of this generation’s immortals. Tell the truth, I figured he wasn’t that far off. Then the serial killer leaned forward and, for the first time since I entered the room, surprised me.
“Tell you what,” he said. “You do your own legwork. See if you can make the case. Otherwise, I talk and it comes right back here. Sits in my lap.”
“Fair enough. But I need something.”
A guard grabbed Grime by the elbow and began to tug.
“Time to go,” Bullet-head said.
“I’ll think about it,” Grime said. “But understand, you start down this road, you might end up under a house, too.”
He smiled when he said it. I think Grime enjoyed the notion. Then he left the room. Bullet-head stayed behind.
“Who picks up his stuff?” I said.
The guard shrugged.
“Are you kidding me? The guys fight to get to carry this stuff up to his cell. One of those paintings goes into someone’s locker. Sell it on eBay for twenty grand.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding.”
We walked together through a couple of locked doors and back down an open breezeway. The yard was to my left, a scattering of inmates smoking cigarettes and lifting iron in the cold.
“You get what you need?” Bullet-head said.
“Not yet.”
“Yeah, well, Grime is an asshole.”
“Not well liked in here?”
“Guy like that. Rep like that. He pays to stay alive.”
“Really?”
“Sure. Carton of smokes a month or we find him in the shower with a shank in his neck.”
We came to the end of the breezeway. Bullet-head turned a key and opened another door. An officer waited on the other side.
“Here is where I get off. Good luck, Kelly. Hope you learned something.”
We shook hands. I walked down another long passageway, through three more doors, and back to the shakedown room. A female correctional officer passed over my keys, money, and wallet without a word. I filled my pockets and was about to leave when a phone buzzed. The officer whispered a few words into the receiver, looked up at me, whispered a few more, and hung up.
“Mr. Kelly,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Wait just a moment.”
I sat back down. Two minutes later Bullet-head pushed back into the room.
“Kelly. Glad we caught you. Your boy wanted to give you something. Already cleared it with the warden.”
Bullet-head handed me a piece of paper.
“Just a note. Yeah, we took a look at it. Doesn’t mean anything to me, but there it is.”
I unfolded the note from Grime, just a single line of type.
CST…9998.
Bullet-head watched me closely.
“Mean anything to you?”
I shrugged.
“Nothing. Not yet, anyway.”
CHAPTER 44
I actually knew what Grime’s note meant the moment I saw it. It was the same method cops used to file
