Silent Night

Silent Night

Stephen Lochton Kincaid

Shapiro met Ricker outside the door to Interview Room #2. Ricker, a middle-aged buffalo of a man, was huffing and puffing, the remaining fringe of his hair curled up in wild tufts and cowlicks like the ocean in the middle of some terrific storm, having made his way from central booking where he had just dropped off a guy for a drunk and disorderly. The guy had been waving a buck knife around in Sherman Park, stark naked, screaming “OLLIE OLLIE OXEN-FREE!” at the top of his lungs. This despite the fact that it was twenty-degrees outside and a big winter storm was starting to blow in off the lake.

It was a busy time of year. Shapiro knew full well. While most people found their Christmas cheer at home with their families, some of them (too many of them, in Shapiro’s humble opinion) found it at the bottom of a bottle, or at the end of a needle. Shapiro no longer wondered about these strange occurrences around the holidays. After fifteen years as a cop in a city notorious for its violence, it had all become a little mundane for him.

But this … this was truly disturbing.

“Whatta we got, Mike?” Ricker asked, nearly wheezing.

“Jesus, Bill. You should lay off the cigarettes.”

Ricker waved at him impatiently. Get on with it.

Shapiro ran down a high-level synopsis of the case, and Ricker, having finally caught his breath, gave a low whistle. They turned then, almost as if pulled by the same string, to look at the suspect handcuffed to the stainless-steel table in the middle of the room. The man, who could have passed for a caricature of a Norman Rockwell Santa Claus, sat looking at them through the one-way glass, calmly, expectantly.

A little chill ran down Shapiro’s spine. It was stupid, he knew, but he had the distinct feeling that this man not only knew they were outside the room discussing him, but that he could actually see them standing out here.

“So it’s just a fact-finding mission, then?” Ricker asked, and Shapiro started a bit.

He nodded. “Yeah, he’s confessed to all three murders.” Not that the guy had any choice in the last one, Shapiro thought. Getting caught red-handed wasn’t just a stupid cliché; they’d had to scrub the blood off the guy’s hands just to take his prints.

The wind picked up then, howling around the corners of the building, blowing the first skirls of snow down the streets, and the lights flickered. The storm was going to test the city’s aging infrastructure, Shapiro thought.

“Well, might as well get started,” Ricker said, glancing at his watch. “It’s already been a night.”

“Yeah,” Shapiro agreed, not knowing then how long the night would get. By the time it was over and he crawled into bed next to the softly snoring shape of his wife, cold and sleepless-dumb and exhausted to the point that even his bones seemed to ache, he would have put over twenty-three hours on the clock.

The man, perfectly at ease, watched them as they took their seats across from him, his eyes sparkling, a little smile curling the corners of his lips.

“Hello, Mr., um, Claus. Is that what you want to be called?” Ricker asked, chuckling.

The man chuckled along with him. “Well, that is my name,” he said, and then, unbelievably, dropped them a wink.

“Right,” Ricker said, agreeably enough. They had found no identification on the man during the intake process, but there was no point in getting him agitated about it now. Besides, for all they knew, he really could have changed his name; he obviously had a couple of cogs loose in the machinery upstairs. “My name is Mike Ricker, and this is Bill Shapiro. This is just a preliminary conversation to sort out some facts. First – you’ve been read your rights, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve waived your right to legal counsel for the time being – also correct?”

“Yes.”

“So remember, if at any point in time you would like a lawyer—”

“Wave my hand and one will appear?” the man suggested. Another chuckle and a wink. The man’s laughter was infectious; both Shapiro and Ricker grinned in spite of themselves.

“Yes indeed. As you probably know, we are being recorded.”

“Of course.” His eyes flicked, rather disinterestedly, to the blank eye of the camera watching above the one-way plate glass window, then back to Ricker. “Now gentlemen, what would you like to know?”

Ricker glanced at Shapiro. Now that the legal wrangling was over, it was his turn. Shapiro opened his folder and riffled through some pages, but it was mostly for show. He had already memorized the file. Shapiro was a damned good detective. “Let’s start with Carl Weberly. What can you tell us about him?”

“Ah, Mr. Weberly.” The man tilted his head back and closed his eyes as if in contemplation. When they opened again, they were no longer sparkling; it was as if all the mirth had been drained out of them. “Yes, he was the first. I still didn’t know if I could do it. It was Friday, December 19^th. I followed Mr. Weberly out of the Sundowner Bar on Michigan Avenue, around two-thirty in the morning. He was still wearing most of his moth-eaten Santa Claus outfit, staggering and muttering to himself.

“When he stumbled into an alleyway, I walked up behind him, quietly – I can be very quiet, you know – and shot him in the back of the head while he was relieving himself against the wall. Twice.”

The man spoke in the calm, dispassionate tone one might use while reading items off a shopping list. What he said, though, matched all the facts of the case, even the ones not printed in the newspapers. Shot in the back of the head. Twice.

When Shapiro had arrived on the scene, Carl Weberly, a sixty-seven-year-old security guard who moonlighted as Santa Claus for the last dying mall in the Washington Park area, was lying face down on the alley floor. There were two holes in the back of his head. His right hand had been twisted around his neck as if he had been slapping at a mosquito that had bitten him. His beard, which was real, and normally white with some gray at the roots, was tinged yellow and pink from sopping up blood and piss for three hours.

“I had to use a gun,” the man explained – yes, and Shapiro had some questions about that gun. It had been laid neatly on top of a trash can in the alley, almost as if the killer had wanted it to be found. The gun looked like a Glock nine-millimeter, had the same sights and handgrip and barrel, but had no markings whatsoever. No country of origin, no serial number. And those marks hadn’t been filed off, either – there were no abrasion scratches. Other than some gunpowder from the two shots fired here, it looked brand new, as if it had just been stamped and rolled off the assembly line. 3-D printed? Maybe… but it looked too clean for that to Shapiro, too manufactured.

But those questions would have to wait; the man wasn’t finished:

“I didn’t know if I could do it. No, let me clarify that – I didn’t know if I would be allowed to do it. As it was, it felt as if I was moving against a very strong wind. It took all of my strength to pull the trigger. And it seemed as though some force was working against me. I stumbled in the alley once and fell to my knees. I never fall. Then, when I went to shoot him, there was nothing, just a click. The safety was on. But I know that I had switched the safety off when I started following him. I know it. Luckily, Mr. Weberly was so inebriated that I doubt if he could have heard a freight train barreling toward him.

“The next one was easier, though. It only felt as if I was moving against a stiff breeze. And there were no complications. I was waiting for Mr. Brewer in the back seat of his Honda Civic on the evening of December 21^st. Not a very comfortable car for a man of my proportions, but as you may have heard, I can make myself fit into some very tight spots.”

The chuckle that followed this was very dry and neither Shapiro nor Ricker felt inclined to join in.

“Anyway, when he leaned back in the seat, I stabbed him. Heart, lungs, kidneys, and lastly, the throat.

“Everything changed with Mr. Brewer, as I knew it would, using my hands like that. I could feel it. I felt better than I had in years. I felt like my strength, my vitality – my very essence – was returning.

“Which brings us, finally, to tonight. I must admit, gentlemen, I felt some regret with Mr. McKesson. Unlike Mr. Weberly, the alcoholic, or Mr. Brewer, who only turned in about one-third of his Salvation Army pot every night, Elmer McKesson was an upstanding citizen. Retired professor at the University. Former city council member. Alderman at St. Andrew’s. He was seventy-six years old, his knees were bad and his back was worse, but he still volunteered to play Santa Claus for several hospitals and charities around the city. The children adored him.”

The man’s eyes, which were the light blue of the sky on a clear spring morning, dimmed then. He sighed.

“But there can be no exceptions.

“McKesson had a model train layout in his house. It was magnificent – took up most of the basement – with little people and cars and houses and a river made of glass running through it. He often invited the kids in the neighborhood to come over and play with it, and never minded the occasional broken piece.

“While McKesson was running his trains around the tracks tonight, I snuck out of the closet and strangled him with a wire garrot.

“McKesson surprised me. He put up much more of a fight than I was expecting. He slammed me against the wall, hard enough to knock photographs and knickknacks off the shelves. I tightened my grip and the wire cut into his neck. He started bucking like a wild horse. I held on. Finally, he fell across the train layout, scattering the little people, his eyes bulging, blood spilling across the tracks. His mouth opened and closed like a dying fish.

“That’s when Mrs. McKesson came downstairs to see what the commotion was. I’m afraid I gave the old dear a bad fright. She nearly didn’t make it back up the stairs, she was so hysterical. I waited there, at the house, for the police to come.”

The man had left a lot unsaid, in Shapiro’s opinion. Mrs. McKesson was so terrified that she’d had a heart attack. She’d collapsed in the living room while talking to the 911 operator. When the paramedics found her, they had to pry the phone receiver out of her arthritic hand. She was resting now (probably with the help of a heavy dose of morphine, Shapiro thought) in a hospital bed at Northwestern.

Police had found the suspect sitting at the kitchen table, calmly eating some cookies and milk he’d taken out of the McKesson’s refrigerator. In the police report, they’d found a bloody handprint on the glass and little smudges of blood on the cookie he was eating.

“Any questions, gentlemen?”

Millions, there were millions of questions jumbled now in Shapiro’s head, but the first thing he asked, perhaps because he was still thinking about that bloody handprint was:

“Your fingerprints. How did you get rid of them? Fire? Acid?”

“I’m a magical being, gentlemen. I have fingerprints no more than I have a blood type.” He paused, his head tilted, considering. “I’m not even sure if I have blood.”

Until then, he had kept his hands curled lightly on the table in front of him. Slowly, he spread his fingers out for them, as much as the cuffs would allow, a magician revealing that the cards had completely disappeared, ta-da, so they could inspect his hands. The palms of those hands were perfectly smooth, they saw. No lines or creases.

“Did you expect me to tell you what you both got for Christmas when you were eight years old? I could, you know. But would you really fall for those parlor tricks?”

“Okay,” Ricker said, leaning back in his chair and barking out a laugh. “Okay.” Ricker looked calm enough, but that laugh had a shaky quality that Shapiro had never heard from his partner before. “Let’s suppose that you are good ole Saint Nick, riding down from the north pole on his magical sleigh and eight tiny reindeer. Then why…?”

“Why murder these three men? Because, gentlemen, I’m the real Santa Claus.

“Christmas spirit is dying. It’s been dying for over a hundred years. It makes you two feel sad and depressed. But do you know what it feels like for me?” He looked from one to the other with a frank, beseeching expression. “It burns. It feels like there’s a rat made of fire writhing in my chest, biting and clawing its way out. I’ve been living with this pain for so long.

“And then I realized, these men, these … impostors … were diluting the Christmas spirit. How can anybody truly believe with all these cheats and fakes running around?

“It was difficult – I spent years thinking about it, and even the thoughts felt ponderous and slow moving against that inertial force. But I worked at it. Even the steady dripping of water can wear down rock over thousands of years, you know. And when I finally wore it down enough to take action, I started in the city where Christmas spirit was at its lowest ebb. Naturally.” He stopped, seemingly satisfied.

Shapiro wasn’t convinced. “So why’d you let yourself get caught?” he asked. The words had barely left his mouth when the lights went out.

It took less than a minute for them to come back on, but being trapped in the darkness with this man was an eternity. Time seemed to run down. A dark shape was all they could see, and that shape melted, a tallow candle burning down to an indistinct and grotesque lump. The man continued to talk, his voice changing slowly, from a resonant, pleasing baritone, to something that was sinister and no longer human, the burbling of a brackish stream over a riverbed of skulls. His breath became the stink of putrefaction. Shapiro thought, Shut up! Jesus Christ, just shut up! because his mind was cracking, he could feel the very fabric of reality unwinding like someone had pulled at a loose thread, a multitude of stars blinked out and died, entire planets were snuffed out, but he couldn’t talk, couldn’t breathe, his hand opened reflexively and his file fell to the floor, pages whispering for what seemed like eons, and still the man talked on:

“Because you are to be my heralds, gentlemen. Shout it from the rooftops, whisper it in the taverns, whatever you’d like. But spread the word, gentlemen. Let everyone know about my transformation. Let them know that I’ll never stop… not until Christmas spirit has been restored.”

When the lights came back on, the man was looking at them calmly, expectantly. The sparkle was back in his eyes. A little smile was curling his lips.

Without saying a word, both Ricker and Shapiro fled the room.

“Jesus Christ, did you see—”

“I didn’t see anything,” Ricker snapped, his face the color of an old linen bedsheet. His hands were shaking. He was trying to fish his pack of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket, even though he knew he couldn’t smoke in here, and managed to crush them in the process.

The lights flickered again, and both of them turned to look through the one-way glass, already knowing on an instinctual level exactly what they would see.

The man was gone.

“Aw, fuck,” Ricker said, almost mildly.

They locked up the building, of course. Searched all the floors. Even the rooftop and the basement, where all they found were yellowing files and one forgotten mousetrap, the moldering skeleton of a rat with a broken neck still caught in its sprung hasp.

“What do you want me to do?” Captain Wisnewski demanded. “Lock up every Santa Claus on the street? Two days before Christmas?”

That was exactly what Shapiro was thinking, but didn’t say.

Instead, they put checkpoints on all the bridges and highways, more patrolmen on the streets. Every Santa Claus was stopped and asked for identification. But in the increasingly foul weather, it was impossible. In the end, they never found him.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing was that no security camera ever got a good picture of him. The footage in Interview Room #2 never came out; the screen turned black from the moment he entered the room until he disappeared. The technician had no explanation for it. In all the videos from the other cameras in the building, of which there were many, it seemed that his face was always turned slightly away, as if he had known where the cameras were and when they were recording all along.

Christmas eve.

Shapiro woke to the sound of something on his roof, tap-tap-tap. Exhausted, his eyelids slowly rolled up, and he saw two silver eyes staring back at him in the gloom. He sat bolt upright, holding in a gasp, before the eyes resolved into two spots of light on the glass of a framed picture hanging on the wall. They were reflected from the streetlight outside.

The wind picked up then and the tap-tap-tap-ing increased. Just a loose shingle, he realized, and let out one long, shuddery breath.

His wife rustled beside him but never woke. God bless our ability to sleep when sleep we must, he thought blearily. He got up, urinated, and went back to bed. He tried to fall asleep but only tossed and turned.

Eventually, he got back up, opened the gun safe on the wall, and got out his service pistol. He carried it back to bed and slid it quietly under his pillow. He laid back down, feeling the comforting shape of it through the pillow under his head. Only then he was able to go back to sleep.