In Laymon's Terms

“Ok. I’ll be following up on some stuff—maybe get a line on where the hook was purchased, so if you get the machine, ring the cell phone.”

“Got it.”

Nick held up the plastic playing card, turning it over several times in the light to catch the leering face of the Joker, over and over again. There were too many variables to make sense, he thought, looking over the coroner’s report, wondering what the significance was. Each blond man had an Ace from a single playing deck fish-hooked to his heart, but that hadn’t been all of it. The sex angle was disturbing, but not enough of a lead to go on. It was almost haphazard, this killing...He’d scoured the Block in Baltimore, looking for a sex club that might somehow give him a connection among the four men. Nothing came up. They’d each visited every strip club in the city, and were repeat customers, though neither business nor friendship connected them.

It had to be the sex, he thought, over and over, but fingering the Joker he knew he was dealing with a lot more. He was sitting at the LuckyLust, a strip joint near the harbor, watching the happy-hour crowd leer at a less-than-attractive blonde woman gyrating onstage. She had frizzy, bleached hair, and the same blank stare as the rest of them, cellulite lining her legs and buttocks. The men were glassy-eyed, sipping over-priced beers and waiting for the right moment to let her know they were thinking about her. The floor was sticky. He felt a little sick, and a little embarrassed when his cellular phone rang. It only generated a handful of stares.

“Yeah,” Nick said.

“Another five bodies were found at Seven Locks. You’d better come down.” Officer Briggs had a rough voice, and even Nick could tell he was nervous.

“Anything different?”

“You could say that...”

“Same guy?”

“Definitely—but he’s building an interesting M.O.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve got a problem...”

“What kind of problem?”

“I can’t really talk about it on this line. You really should come down.”

“I’m on it...One question—”

“Yeah?”

“Did he do them on the river?”

“Yep.”

“I’m on my way. Make sure the news doesn’t get ahold of it.”

“I don’t think it’s the news we’ve got to worry about, this time.” The phone gurgled static and went dead. Nick took a last glance at the woman dancing, before leaving. He knew the only kind of trouble that wasn’t the press, had to be the Feds.

Mara kept digging into the meat of the fish with her thumbs and a sharp cleaning knife as the talk radio crooned on in tones of monotony, various political issues flooding her small barn in Frederick, Maryland with background noise. The pond had been good to her today. Her hands were tired and her fingers were sore, blisters forming where there once were calluses to mark her lily white hands, now darkened with a day’s tan, mingling with bits of blood and fish gristle...tainted. She clawed with her fingernails, scraping at the sinewy fibers, pulling out guts and innards much more anxious than she had been angry before—always angry in the beginning.

Cleaning fish reminded her of the government, and the game laws. Her muscles flexed, and she wiped the sweat off her brow with the back of her oversized hands. She was proud of them, what they could do for her. How they could feed her.

Mara was hungry...hungry for attention, hungry for validation, vindication, vestal purpose. Most of all, she was hungry for the truth.

She found her way in beneath the bone. Her diligent scraping had paid off, and she smiled wildly at her success—a smooth pocket engulfed her index finger, rubbery and slick. The tail still twitched, and the head still moped with a mouth that opened and closed, even though it had been removed from the body already. Catfish were so damned hard to kill, she thought.

The feeling of warm fish-skin along her arm was warm like the sun on her face when she woke up for the first time, realizing the entire corruption, all at once. It was symbolic and frightening—the awesome plan that had been in motion for more years than she cared to admit, far beyond her study at the University of Maryland, or Johns Hopkins. It was American University that really stimulated her appetite for knowledge...her appetite for politics. But to become a senator or a house official was not enough; she could not waste her time that way. She was far more intelligent than that, and country folk at heart—she had to be true to her roots. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer, Mara thought. In the end, it was better to keep her enemies as far from her as possible. She couldn’t get herself killed. Not early on, anyway. She was still flying above the radar, unsuspected and uncorrupt in the eyes of the American Government.

Mara paused, listening to the radio.