Page 13 of Deja New
SEVEN
Prisons were like hospitals and gas stations: No matter where they were, or what size they were, or who ran them, or who was in them, they always smelled the same. Cleaning products and sweat, with a slight aftertaste of urine and ennui.
“Urine and ennui”? Get a grip, Chambers.
Detective Jason Chambers put his book (The Gashlycrumb Tinies: A Very Gorey Alphabet Book)*aside to focus on the Drake contingent, who were nearly finished jumping through the bureaucratic hoops necessary to visit an inmate in the state of Illinois.
He’d inherited the Drake file from his predecessor, a dour grouch who had never warmed up to Angela Drake and didn’t mind if she—or anyone within bitching distance—knew it.
“One of them Insighter freaks,” Detective Kline had confided. “Had the fucking balls to tell me I was Joey Vacher!”
“Who— Oh. You mean Joseph Vacher?”
“Yeah, if you can fuckin’ believe it.”
“This was upsetting news?” Chambers guessed, barely making an effort to appear interested.
“Yeah, no shit.” Kline had been packing his desk, an exhausting (judging by the moon-shaped sweat stains on his tan shirt) and smelly (going by... well... the smell) task he seemed glad to break off from. He slumped into his desk chair, which let out a wheeze as it took his weight. “Said it right to my face! ‘Hey, Kline, you used to be some dumbass frog serial killer.’”
Chambers, who had spent far too much time with Kline in the last month, had an idea what the problem was. “Which you took exception to. Not the part about you being a killer...”
“Nowaywas I ever that loser.”
“Just notthatkiller.”
“Damn right!” Kline rubbed his sweaty forehead, turning drops of sweat into dark streaks. It was amazing how filthy you could get just pushing files around.
“Your standards,” Chambers guessed, “would have been too high in any life.”
“Hey, if I was ever gonna kill myself like a pussy, I would have done it right the first time. Stupid SOB managed to fuck that uptwice.Cut his own throat—lived. Shot himself—lived. In the face! Twice! Lived! How the fuck can you fuck that up?”
“I’ll assume that’s rhetorical.” Chambers himself had taken a statement from someone who had jumped off a three-story building and lived (a quadriplegic to the end of her days, but alive) and met a teenager who had aimed for his own eye, butthe bullet ended up plowing a path around the circumference of his skull, leaving him with a shocking scar and no loss of cognitive function. He hadn’t even lost the eye. In other words: Such things happen, as any doctor, cop, or Insighter could testify.
Kline ignored him and plowed ahead. “Even setting aside that bullshit, if I was gonna be some creeper frog psycho—”
“Isn’t your wife French?”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“I wasn’t.”
“If I was gonna kill anyone, I woulda stuck to one sex. This guy was all over the place—a woman, teenage girls, teenage boys. And shepherds! He’s creeping around the countryside murdering friggin’ shepherds! What thefuck? Nowaywas that me.”
“You would have eschewed shepherds,” Chambers guessed. “And killed a higher class of people.”
“Like hookers!”
“You think herding sheep is worse than prostitution?”
Kline ignored the question. “I wouldna been sloppy about it, either, I don’t care if we’re talking this month or fifty years ago.”
“Or a hundred twenty years ago, since that’s when Vacher was active.”
Kline made a waving away motion with both hands. “Snatched his last victim in earshot of her family. She kicked up a fuss andboom!Fucker’s caught. I wouldna got caught. And if I did get caught, I wouldna confessed. And if I did confess, I wouldna pussy out by trying for an NGI.*And if I did pussy out with anNGI, when it didn’t work I’d have taken my death sentence like a man. This guy, they had to drag his pussy ass to the chopper.”
“Guillotine.”
“I mean, fuck!”
