Grimoire Diabolique

“Pardon me, Captain?” I said.

“Every newspaper in the goddamn state is printing all this tabloid shit about the case. They’re making me look like the most incompetent cop in the history of the department. And this ‘Handyman’ tagline they’re pushing? It sounds ridiculous, and it makes me look ridiculous.” Jameson got up, closed my office door, then returned to his seat. Plumes of cigarette smoke seemed to follow him around like lingering spirits. “What is it with press people anyway?” he said next. Then the son of a bitch tapped an ash on my carpet. “The first thing you do is accuse the police of inefficiency, and then you gotta slap these horror-movie taglines onto any repeat crime you can get your hands on.”

“It’s a way of increasing the identifiability of the event to a mass readership, because it helps sell papers. But I might remind you, Captain—before you flick more ashes on my floor—that I’m one journalist who’s never used that tagline and has never criticized the police in their efforts to catch the killer.”

“Yeah. That’s why I like you.”

By the way, the so-called “Handyman” Case involved a fairly recent sequence of murders in the downtown area. Three women so far: two known street prostitutes and one homeless woman. All three had been found strangled to death, their bodies carefully hidden along the Jackson Street corridor. And all three had been found with both of their hands missing. Cut off with an ax or a hatchet.

“And don’t worry about your floor,” he went on. “What? Your big paper can’t afford janitors?”

“Captain Jameson, for a man coming in here asking for help, you might need to learn a few lessons in sincerity.”

“Oh, fuck that shit. Don’t be a creamcake. The only good journalism about this case that I’ve seen has been written by you. I want to make a deal.”

“A deal? For what?”

“There’ve been more than three girls. That info’s gonna get leaked eventually. I want you to break it first. I’ll tell you everything about the case the press hasn’t heard. You’ll look good.”

“Yes sir, I guess I would,” I realized. “But what’s the catch?”

“You make me look good along the way. You write for the most respectable paper in the city. All I’m asking is for some slack. I give you the goods, but when you write it, you say my unit’s doing its best. And when we catch this fuck-up…you put in a good word for me. Deal?”

“No deal,” I said. “You’re bribing me. You’ve got balls coming in here telling me this. I’m a newspaper reporter for God’s sake!”

“I wouldn’t call it bribery.” Jameson showed a big toothy grin, then flicked more ashes on the floor. “That descrambler you got? Sounds smalltime, but did you know it’s now an FCC first-degree misdemeanor? A federal crime? Get’cha a year in jail and a five-grand fine for starters. Then let’s talk about your Schedule C deductions. Newspaper writers with freelance gigs on the side? You pay Miscellaneous income tax, right? Those pseudonymous articles you wrote for The Stranger, The Rocket, and Mansplat?”

You son of a bitch, I thought.

“Can we talk?” Jameson asked.

««—»»

Seattle’s never been a city known for its crime rate. Thirty-six murders last year in the entire Seattle-Metro area. Compare that to L.A., New York, Washington D.C. and at least a dozen others tipping a thousand. What we’re known for instead is the Space Needle, the Monorail, and the largest fish depot in the hemisphere. Microsoft and Boeing. Happy times and happy people. Low unemployment, and no state income tax. No partisan politics and no potholes. And more NEA and college grants per-capita than any major metropolis in the country.

A good place to live.

But then there’s the downside that no one sees. Higher temperatures in the winter and wide-open welfare policies wag false promises to the destitute—it’s a magnet to the hopeless. They come here looking for the yellow- brick road but all they get is another bridge to sleep under, another dumpster to eat out of. Just take a walk around Third and James, Yesler Street, the trolley bridge on Jackson. You’ll see them trudging back and forth on their journey to nowhere. Stick-figures in rags, ghosts not quite incorporeal yet. Their dead eyes sunk into wax faces and bloodless lips asking for change or promising anything you want for twenty dollars. There are so many of them here, so many of these non-people with no names, no backgrounds, no lives.

The perfect grist of a psycho-killer.

“Our total’s sixteen so far,” Jameson admitted. “But that’s not even the worst consideration—”

“God knows how many others are out there you haven’t found,” I said.

“You got it.”

Jameson had brought me to his office at the city district headquarters. A large tack-board hung on the wall with sixteen pieces of paper pinned to it. Each piece of paper showed a victim’s name, or in several cases just the letters No ID and a recovery date.

“How’d you manage to keep it quiet for so long?” I asked.

“Luck, mostly,” Jameson grumbled. “Until recently, we’d find one here, one there. Isolated incidents, the victims were all nobodies: hookers, street trash. And we have our ways of keeping stuff away from the press.”

“So you knew about this all along,” I said, not asked.

“Yeah, for over three years.” He was standing by the window, staring out as he talked. “Every single police department in the area is still the laughing stock over the Green River thing. What could we do? Have another one of those?”

“That’s not the point, is it?”

He turned, a tight sarcastic smile on his face like a razor slash. “You fuckin’ press guys. My job’s to protect the residents of this city. It’s not gonna do me or them any good if they find out this shit’s been going on for years.”

“And the victims?”

“So what? I don’t give a shit about a bunch of whores and crackheads. I don’t work for them—I work for the real people. And it sure as shit doesn’t help when you press guys bend over backwards to trash the police. If you’re not complaining about increased burglary rates you’re complaining about kids buying cigarettes. It’s all our fault, huh? The police aren’t doing enough.”

I almost laughed at his insolence.

Jameson winced. “I’m just generalizing so don’t be an asshole. Fuck, I’m forty-nine years old, been breaking my ass out there since I was a nineteen-year-old cadet. I’m a shoe-in for deputy chief, then all of a sudden a couple of dead junkies make the papers, and there goes my promotion.”

“So this is all about you,” I said. “You’re just worried that this case will queer your promotion.”

“I don’t deserve the shit, that’s all I’m saying.”

That may have been true, at least in a sense. Eventually, I found out that Jameson had the highest conviction rate of any homicide investigator in the state. A lot of promotions, commendations, and even a valor medal. But now, after so many years on the department, his bitterness was draining like an abscess.

“You’ve covered this up for three years,” I pointed out. “How’d the papers get wind of these last three?”

He sputtered smoke in disgust. “One of the construction crews building the new stadium found two in one day, and one of the workmen’s wives writes for Post-Intelligencer. So we were fucked. Then a couple days later some egghead from UW’s botany department finds the third body stuffed into a hole in one of the original drain outlets to the Sound. That fuckin’ outlet had been out of service for seventy years, but this guy’s in there with hipwaders collecting samples of fuckin’ kelp and sea-mold. Then we were really burned. Three bodies with the same m.o., in less than a week? Next thing I know, me and the rest of my squad are getting pig-fucked by the press.”

“Your compassion for the victims is heart-rending, captain,” I said.

“Let me tell you something about these ‘victims,’” Jameson shot back. “They’re crack-whores. They’re street junkies. They steal, they rip people off, they spread AIDS and other diseases. If it weren’t for all this walking garbage that this candyass liberal state welcomes with open arms, then we wouldn’t have a fuckin’ drug epidemic. Shit, Health and Human Services pays these fuckin’ people with our tax dollars! They sell their goddamn food stamps for a quarter on the dollar to buy crack. The city spends a couple hundred grand a year of our money giving these animals brand-new needles every day, and then