Chapter 9: A Confession Dedicated to Persephone 03
“I really don’t think this is a good idea,” Olga said. “Why did that Jones specifically ask for you?”
They had followed Hestal all the way to the parking lot. Apparently, the lawyer intended to head to the police station first to meet up with Officer Hardy and the others, and then—deliver a large sum of money into the hands of that Martin Jones. No matter how you looked at it, this sounded like a suicide mission.
Hestal pulled the car door open forcefully: “It might be because half a year ago, after his daughter was imprisoned, he came to our firm and made a huge scene. I was the one who stepped in and talked him down back then—he wanted to appeal, and Davis and I made him give up that idea.”
“So he’s clearly going to blame you for his daughter’s death too. I thought he was just shooting at you unintentionally at noon today. He could have killed you, you know?” Albanino pointed out.
“What else can I do? He still has a hostage—my employee’s only daughter—and my employee is still lying in the ICU.” Hestal frowned and retorted, “Do I have any other choice?”
They stood at an impasse for two seconds, and finally Albanino took a step back as if conceding: “Fine, fine. Remember to tell Bart for me that I tried to stop you.”
Setting other things aside—most importantly, he really didn’t want the material he had just carefully selected to be shot dead by some tasteless kidnapper and extortionist before he even had a chance to use it. Albanino truly hated having to repeatedly revise his to-do list. The whole business of the Westland Pianist colliding with his killings was already more than enough for him to deal with.
Hestal stared at him fixedly. This person’s blue irises were so pale in color that they always made his features seem harsh and unkind. Now, under the glow of the dim yellow streetlights, those eyes took on a gentle greenish-brown hue. He paused, seemingly with profound meaning, and then said to Albanino: “Do you really think I feel nothing at all?”
“You feel nothing about the things you’ve done, do you?”—they had ultimately circled back to this topic in the end.
The deranged serial killer Mr. Albanino Bax was unmoved, and even felt a slight urge to applaud this person’s superb acting skills. He just didn’t know whether Olga would fall for it—but that was a separate question altogether.
He and Olga stood at the edge of the parking lot, watching the man drive away, heading in the direction of the Westland City Police Department. Then this man would work with Officer Hardy to devise a plan whose usefulness was still impossible to determine, and which would very likely lead him to an end of being shot dead.
They listened as the sound of the car finally merged into the river of interwoven red and white lights on the street. Olga coughed once and asked, “…So, are we two going back for another drink?”
“Forget it,” Albanino smiled bitterly. “It’s almost nine now, and I need to head back too. I have the early shift every morning.”
Olga scrutinized him critically, tilting her head slightly to one side, her soft black hair flowing over her neck and shoulders like a dense, abundant river. She asked abruptly, “Al, are you really, sincerely trying to hook up with him?”
“‘How exactly do you manage to put ‘sincerely’ and ‘seduce him’ together in the same sentence?” Albanino raised an eyebrow exaggeratedly, accusingly.
“Because I’m guessing you have no intention of developing an intimate romantic relationship with anyone, so either you’re sincerely seducing him, or you’re casually seducing him—there’s still a difference in degree.” Olga shrugged. “If you’re really worried, just go to the police station with him. Bart won’t kick you out.”
“I’m not worried. Don’t use that profiling stuff on me.” Albanino lied. In truth, he was quite worried—worried that his white paint would be dug out by that clueless criminal again. If Hestal really was the Westland Pianist, he’d have a bit more confidence in him—he really hoped he was—but what if he wasn’t?
He had to confirm this, the sooner the better. It was closely tied to the next part of his plan.
“I’m a criminal psychologist, not a mind reader.” Olga wagged a finger at him and smiled. “All right, Al. If you insist you’re not worried, then let’s just go home for now. We’ll hear the follow-up from Bart tomorrow—and if he took a bullet from that Jones fellow, then we won’t have to worry about whether the Sunday Gardener will kill him or not.”
…That consolation really didn’t sound comforting in the least, but that was just Olga’s nature.
As Olga waved goodbye to him and was about to leave, Albanino couldn’t help but call out to stop her.
“What if you’re right?” he asked. “What if the Sunday Gardener really is by his side?”
He guessed that Olga would take this question as a normal expression of concern, because he had obviously—once again, briefly—fallen in love, and his “friends” had witnessed him briefly dating different girls and boys, deeper than a one-night stand, shallower than a relationship.
He would be an attentive lover for anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, never more than three, and then he would break up and start over with someone new.
He knew the girls at the Forensics Bureau all liked him—or, to put it more bluntly, used him as the object of their late-night sexual fantasies. But they had all seen enough of him to know better than to get into a real romantic relationship with him, because it could only end in nothing.
Doing so was somewhat heartless, but it was necessary. A loner who avoided socializing was more likely to attract police attention, and three months was the limit of what he could endure. He understood his situation well—three months was not long enough for his lover to discover his inability to empathize with them, but three months was long enough for him to grow tired of perfecting his disguise in front of the same person. At that point, he needed to start over from scratch, all for the sake of a boring sense of novelty.
So Albanino could largely understand the mistaken assumption the girl at the forensics bureau’s front desk had made when she saw Hestal coming to find him. She would think: a poor soul, another casualty of Dr. Bax’s failed relationships—this one, too, would end up heartbroken.
He didn’t know how much Olga’s thoughts overlapped with others’. Olga was a smart person—but not smart enough, otherwise she would have caught him long ago.
Now, the profiler smiled.
“We both know the Sunday Gardener, Al,” she said simply. “If that’s the case, Hestal is as good as dead.”
“Simple: here’s three hundred thousand dollars, and here’s the address.” Hardy, utterly exhausted, said to Hestal. He pointed to the backpack full of money on the table and the note beside it, while countless police officers busily hurried about anxiously nearby. “You drive yourself to deliver the stuff to the location he specified. He’ll contact you using this phone.”
“I fail to see which part of this plan could be called ‘simple.'” Hestal said dryly.
“It will be,” Officer Hardy assured him, though he himself didn’t sound confident at all. “We’ll have people following you, we’ll have people lying in ambush at his designated location, and we’ll put trackers on you—many, many trackers. The moment he shows himself, we’ll catch him immediately.”
He paused, then said as if making a promise: “We will guarantee your safety.”
Something in Hestal’s expression told Hardy that his own safety might not be his primary concern—in fact, Hardy didn’t even know how things had come to this: Hestal Armalite, the notorious mob lawyer whose daily job was getting genuinely guilty men off the hook, who outside the courtroom wouldn’t spare a single pitying glance at the victims’ families cursing and pointing at him. And now, this guy was going to help them rescue the little daughter of one of his employees, from a madman who would fire indiscriminately inside an office building.
“Do you think she’s still alive?” Hestal asked slowly.
“I expect she’s still alive,” Hardy couldn’t hold back that final sigh, “but that guy… I don’t know either. He specifically asked to see you. We have no other choice.”
Hardy swallowed the last thing he wanted to say. He wanted to say: it’s also possible the other side wants to see you just to hurt you, just like he shot your employee.
And Hestal looked at him, his lips pressed tight. The man who rarely smiled said nothing more, and simply dragged the heavy backpack off the tabletop.
Albanino, of course, did not “go home separately” as Olga had suggested.
He had tailed Richard Norman for three months, and was thoroughly familiar with the behavioral patterns of the man and his closer subordinates. That was why, thirty minutes later, he was standing in a narrow alley in the lower district.
The security in this area was atrocious—far worse than the worst that ordinary people living in Westland, who could be caught in a shooting at any moment, could possibly imagine. The narrow streets ran with sewage, rats squeaked as they scurried past street corners; the air was thick with the sour stench of rotting garbage. Apart from the occasional vagrant lingering on the nearby streets, not even the streetwalkers would loiter in this place.
If this place had ever been equipped with surveillance cameras, they had long since been destroyed beyond repair—or even stripped down, with every salvageable component pried off and sold.
And this was the only route home for Richard Norman’s most trusted subordinate.
What was somewhat reassuring was that Norman’s gang wasn’t the kind of… rigidly hierarchical, ancient lineage of organized crime that had been developing since the immigration waves of centuries past. The Norman brothers’ gang had grown out of prison, gathering under its banner a crude lot of men with criminal records. Albanino liked this situation—at least dealing with this sort of lineup rarely required much mental effort.
Three months of reconnaissance had absolutely paid off. Richard’s deputy always passed by the alley after nine o’clock, somewhat drunk, reeking of alcohol and marijuana smoke. Albanino lurked in the darkness, listening to the man drag his heavy footsteps past. As long as he timed it just right—
He darted out from his hiding place at the mouth of the alley, clamped an arm around the man’s neck, and dragged him into the alley. A muffled, garbled noise escaped the man’s constricted throat, and as he hauled him into the alley, he dislocated one of his shoulders and slammed him hard against the wall.
Albanino’s day job was far simpler than this: the dead on the dissection table wouldn’t suddenly lash out and attack, and he preferred to slit his own prey’s throat with a single cut.
He clamped one hand tightly over the man’s mouth, drew the knife from the small of his back with the other, pressed down on the man with the weight of his body, and with one slash severed the quadriceps tendon of one of his legs.
The pain drew a muffled wail from the man’s throat, his breath hitting Albanino’s leather-gloved palm in a warm, damp gust—truly unpleasant. But at least this way, the leg on the side he hadn’t pinned down wouldn’t thrash around anymore. He heard the blood dripping along the hem of the man’s jeans, pattering into the sour stagnant water on the ground.
Albanino leisurely wiped the blood off the blade on this person’s shoulder, then slowly pressed the blade into his throat, sinking into that fragile skin. A low hiss escaped the other’s throat, his eyes staring at him in terror under the dim glow of the distant streetlights on the main road.
Albanino smiled at him, perhaps showing some teeth, his face terrifying. In any case, when he moved the hand covering the other’s mouth away, the guy let out a terrified wail: “You’re the one from the police station that day—?!”
Yes, he had been standing outside the interrogation room window the entire time; quite a few people should have seen him.
“I just want to ask you a few questions,” he said with a smile to the terrified fellow, “You just need to answer yes or no, alright?”
Of course things couldn’t possibly go smoothly. Even if you were only facing a coward who pushed all the blame onto others, things still couldn’t possibly go smoothly.
By the time Hestal received the kidnapper’s contact call, he had already arrived at the designated location. He was driving, so he could only answer the phone through his Bluetooth earpiece. The kidnapper’s voice was so close it felt as if it were right by his ear—Martin Jones’s voice trembling with neurotic agitation.
“The method of exchange has changed,” said the father who had lost his beloved daughter. “I will tell you the address. Follow my instructions.”
—Good. This meant the kidnappers still had some level of caution. At the very least, the squad of officers Hardy had stationed at the original location had been wasted. Hestal curved the corner of his mouth coldly in the darkness, feeling a seething itch at his fingertips as they gripped the steering wheel.
“May I ask?” he said calmly. “Is the girl still alive?”
“This is not the time for you to negotiate with me!” the other party roared hysterically over the phone. “Throw away the tracker the police gave you, and then follow my instructions!”
“Sounds like you’re quite certain a tracker exists?” Herstal asked calmly.
“I know what those cops are usually up to.” Jones said hoarsely. “Do as I say, or every word of nonsense you utter will be visited upon that little girl.”
“Okay. Okay,” Halstar replied coldly. “I’m on my way.”
Although he didn’t know whether the other party’s threat was real or not, it was better not to take the risk. If the other party insisted on searching him once he arrived, and found the tracker on him, there would be no way out. Halstar held the steering wheel with one hand, fished a small device out of his suit pocket, and tossed it out the window.
He didn’t hear the small metal object hit the ground, and he wasn’t worried about it either.
The guy with Albanino’s knife pressed to his throat said, with remarkable creativity, “Who the hell sent you—?”
Albanino cleanly drove a knife between his ribs, which very effectively shut the other man up.
He did not truly enjoy the process of tormenting someone, but if there was any method that could shorten his work time, he was more than happy to try it. After all, the one before him was the rare sort—a fellow who could still serve some purpose before death, whereas most people Albanino encountered were worth far more after they died than when they were alive.
But he made sure not to sever any dramatic artery. The last thing he needed was some arterial blood enthusiastically spraying all over him. Fortunately, the other man’s autumn clothing kept the blood from splattering everywhere.
He repeated in a good-natured tone: “Do you understand?”
The other party was so pale from the pain that he nodded like a sieve shaking, the knife at his neck keeping him from even daring to turn his head.
“Good,” Albanino continued to smile amiably, “your boss who just unfortunately passed away, Richard Norman, he was jealous of his younger brother, right?”
Although he had absolutely no idea why he was being asked this question, the ashen-faced fellow still nodded.
This answer was not unexpected—after all, Hestal had said as much himself at the time. Albanino nodded and continued asking, “I know that while your boss was alive, you were with him almost every day. Tell me, did he arrange for anyone to murder his younger brother?”
The other party’s expression was almost one of terror: “How did you—”
Albanino pressed the blade a little deeper into the other man’s neck, his voice as low as a breath: “I only need answers. Try to keep it simple.”
“Yes! He arranged it!” The man’s voice was so strained with tension that it came out shrill and grating. “A failed attempt—he bribed a thug to shoot Thomas in the back, but Thomas found out. The thug died too. No one would—”
“All right, all right, that’s enough.” Albanino said with a smile. The man tremblingly stopped there, and Albanino waited for him to finish gasping that breath as if he were about to die, then continued asking: “Who else knows about this?”
The man answered, trembling: “Almost no one! If anyone found out about something like this, the gang would fall into infighting… I arranged it for my boss. Later, the guy who was bribed got caught. My boss didn’t know if Thomas would go through legal channels to come after him, so he contacted his lawyer. Other than that, no one—”
Albanino heard the answer he wanted to hear. That meant the next step of the plan was clear.
“How many people on Thomas Norman’s side know about this?” Albanino asked with keen interest.
“No one!” the man answered quickly. “He didn’t get the chance to find out the truth. Anyway, Thomas’s men beat that little thug up, but who would’ve thought the guy had a heart condition? They went too far, and he died before he could rat out my boss!”
Albanino could almost picture the scene: Richard Norman had hired someone to murder his own younger brother, and after the plot was exposed, he’d frantically summoned Hestal Amaret to discuss countermeasures, terrified that once the thug confessed, his brother really would throw him in prison. His brother Thomas had been right—this man truly was reckless and cowardly.
When that thug died of a sudden illness, did Richard Norman feel a sense of relief? Did he see it as a gift, sparing him from one more headache and allowing him to maintain a semblance of peace with his brother?
In any case, this might truly have been a gift for the Westland Pianist.
The Pianist had glimpsed inspiration in this incident, and most importantly, it was safe. Only three people knew about it: the Pianist himself, who kept silent; Richard Norman himself, who was dead; and this fool before him, who would never connect what the Pianist had done with that murder of a blood brother, and who obviously would not confess in front of the police that his boss had once tried to kill his own younger brother.
There was not even any known evidence. Even if the police belatedly caught on and reopened questioning with this matter, no one would admit to it again. The gangs of Westland had long since learned to wield the charm of adamant denial.
Of course, when you hold a knife to someone’s throat, they’ll admit to it, but that’s a different matter altogether.
“So,” Albanino laughed, and when he spoke again his voice was almost gentle, “regarding that murder case, only you and Attorney Amaretto know about it now, is that right?”
He wanted to struggle to answer something, or perhaps he had anticipated something from his question—in any case, his face turned a terrifying ashen gray. A hissing plea burst from his throat, and Albanino merely smiled, smiled, his smile so abundant it could drown a living person.
He seized the other’s throat again, gripping him, and turned him into a position with his back facing him, so as to avoid blood splattering onto his body.
Then he slit the other’s throat with a single stroke, cutting through the windpipe and artery. The pain was brief, and then everything was over—a surrender to the inevitable black sleep. Blood spread across the cheap fabric as if it cost nothing, trickling thickly and stickily onto the ground.
Then Albanino released his grip, letting the man fall to the ground. He stood there without moving until the strange gurgling sound of blood bubbles rising in the other’s throat gradually faded away into the cold night.
He would load this person into his car, the trunk already lined with plastic sheeting in anticipation of a scene like this; he also had blood-stained gloves, a hoodie covered in spatter-patterned bloodstains, and a blood-drenched knife to deal with.
He would thoroughly clean the knife with bleach, burn his clothes and gloves to ashes, and then bury the remnants in the several acres of wilderness around his suburban home. The corpse was disposed of in the same way—unneeded flesh and organs were dismembered, chopped up, and scattered across the ground, where coyotes and birds roaming the wilderness could pick the minced meat clean in a single night. The charred bones were smashed with a hard object, and the powder was buried beneath the wildflowers and lettuce growing in his backyard. Most of the remains he didn’t use in his creations were disposed of that way, and afterward people couldn’t even find a single intact bone in the soil.
But this outfit wasn’t the one he wore when he went to the bar, and there was no need for Olga and Hestal to know that his car was now parked in a dark alley—he had actually driven away from the bar: compared to killing someone in this godforsaken place, driving under the influence really wasn’t much.
—In other words, all of this was just the daily work of a serial killer.
Albanino continued making his daily work plans in his mind, listing that long, endless table, while standing before the gradually cooling corpse, he pulled out his phone and made a call.
“Bart,” he said to the other end of the line after the call connected, “Hestal should have told you that he was with me and Olga before he went to the police station… Yes, I know what happened. I’m still very worried right now. If possible, I’d like to go take a look too. Can you tell me the location for the ransom drop? If possible, I’d like to meet up with you there.”
He listened to the other party’s reply, and slowly revealed a cold smile.