Remember last time, when we talked about guys who want to live out their fantasies? The late Ray Dees, who tried to live out a dream of being a hero and ending up on TV. Dr. Sniper cured his ills with a strong prescription: Lead pill, administered at high velocity through the medulla oblongata.
Still...That one reminded me of another, similar tale. A young man would find out about people his age who'd recently died. He'd go to their wakes, ingratiate himself with surviving family members, and quietly swipe one of the deceased's personal effects. Nothing too big, usually just a small pin or something.
"This generation is a wicked generation; it seeks for a sign, and yet, no sign shall be given to it..." --Luke 11:29
Bob Bletcher called Cath that day and asked her to come to the Public Safety building. He was having trouble with a man whose wife had just been murdered. He wanted to see her one last time, but, since she was murdered, her body was evidence. Besides, she'd been viciously cut up, and Bletch argued that Mr. Cort--that was his name, see--really wouldn't want to remember her that way.
Bletch realized that it was a losing battle, so he fobbed Cath off onto Mr. Cort and called me. He, Jack Giebelhouse, and I would go have a look at the crime scene. Meanwhile, I called Peter Watts and asked him to have a look at Mrs. Cort's remains.
We met up at Forest Glen Cemetery's graveyard at noon. (You seriously thought we were going to meet at night? No, no, no...We're smarter than that. Don't tell anyone.)
Bletch and Giebs watched as I descended a ladder into the hole where Mrs. Cort was attacked. There was no body, of course--that was under examination back at the morgue. I did find a calla lily down there...I can only assume she was holding it while she was attacked. I took it into my hands, and I saw a series of flashes: a man's hand, holding a knife, attacking Mrs. Cort, her screaming face distorted by a thick plastic blanket. Atop the grave, a man--the killer--tossed the lily onto Mrs. Cort's body.
The vision faded away, and the killer's shadowed face was replaced with Peter Watts' gleaming dome. "Nothing very useful off the body," he said. "Looks like she didn't have time to put up much of a struggle."
As we walked past headstones, Bletch related the last moments of her late son, Jeffrey Cort: college running-back; won a major game; celebrated over drinks--a lot of drinks--with his teammates; tried to drive home, and had a blind date with a tree while going 60 mph. At least he was by himself.
I was more interested in the murderer. Here's what I guessed: he knew her, but his anger wasn't directed at her. More specifically, he was angry about someone else. He slashed away at her body, but not her face--if he'd had a grudge against her, he'd have gone for the face first.
Giebs was incredulous. "He knew who she was, but it wasn't about her?" he asked. "He sliced her up, but it wasn't directed at her?" He's a million laughs, I tell you. Then again, he has a point: My work is somewhat harder to understand than his, because, not only do I have to look for clues in everything, but I also have to find nuance in those clues, and every little nuance holds many different possibilities.
The four of us headed to the small church near the cemetery, and we found Mr. Cort and his daughter Greer sitting down. Bletch introduced me to him, and, once he'd collected himself, led me to his late son's body. I asked how many people came in, and before anyone else could get a word in edgewise, Greer mentioned a one "Ray Bell," a friend of his from school, one their son apparently never mentioned.
Something must have caught her eye just then--something that had been there, but was now missing. His college-football pin.
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| Hello again, dear readers! Let's play a game of "Spot the Difference!" Can you find what's different between the two images? I've made it easy for you! |
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The next day: Giebs, Bletch, and I pored over the Evening Post's birth and death notices. I had a couple of articles from the same edition, sent out about two days ago. One was the BMOC's death notice; the other was about a fisherman named Ray Bell, who'd made a record-setting catch in Sammamish.
A fisherman who also swipes personal belongings from funerals for people he doesn't know? And who kills next of kin? I've had to help solve some weird crimes before, but something's really not kosher here. Just then, it hit me: That's not his name...he's using it as an alias.
Later that afternoon, we gathered at a small riverbank. Somebody found a young woman, probably no more than 19 or 20, floating through the water. Terrible waste of a life...I found the message, "STOP LOOKING," carved onto her abdomen. Cryptic, as usual. At this stage, I don't know who it's meant for. The safest guess, and the one Bletch thought of: It's meant for us.
Watts and I were in the middle of an investigation when Giebs called to tell us about a possible lead. There's this halfway house for paroled convicts in town, and it's called the Diebstahl Group Home. Our lead, a juvie called James Dickerson, lived there. "Ray Bell" smelled like a red herring...I told you.
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Bletch took me and a few officers to the group home. I wish he'd been a little more casual about all this, but Bletch went in like gangbusters and started pounding on the door. Of all things...Scare him off, that's all we need.
Connor, the guy in charge of the group home, was less than helpful. He fumbled with his keys and stalled for time, and Dickerson was slipping out of our fingertips all the while.
With Dickerson a lost cause, we decided to make the best of it and conduct a more low-key investigation from here on. I went down to the basement and found an open window. That's probably how he got out. Connor came down and told me that it led to the alley. That's definitely how he got out.
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Once back upstairs, we asked Connor a little more about James. He asked if the boy had done something bad, and Bletch confirmed that this was the case...he hesitated a little, as if even he wasn't sure. Connor said something about how James wasn't "programming," and that he was full of anger and denial. Coming from him, it sounded like a lot of slapdash jargon he'd read somewhere but didn't fully understand.
I noticed a poster on the wall, intended to motivate the house's guests to stay on the straight and narrow. Among its platitudes, I noticed "never stop feeling" and "never stop looking." "Never stop looking..." Where have I seen that before? It forced me to reconsider Connor's "well-meaning guardian" act. Meanwhile, Bletch somehow convinced our potential accomplice to commit himself to one good deed. He pulled up one of the baseboards and produced a cigar box and a number of small journals.
Among the trinkets within that box was Jeff Cort's football pin.
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I asked Cath to meet up with us at the police station. We showed her our findings, and she concluded that our friend Dickerson was a textbook case of "lost child," and swiping from dead people was his way of expressing his need for family. Bletch and Giebs were skeptical (understatement of the year), but I can't blame them. We still had him on murder, don't forget.
Included within the stuff he'd taken were several letters, all stamped "Return to Sender" and addressed to a Ms. Peggy Dechant in Redmond. Cath surmised that she might be his biological mother.
Later--much later than I'd care to admit--Bletch came and found me just as I was getting off the phone with the Johnson family. I found them in one of Dickerson's journals, so I called and asked about him. They told me their son had just died--surprise, surprise--and that he more than helped them through that time.
You know how they say, "He was an all-right kind of guy until something bad pushed him 'over the edge'?" That's the problem: Dickerson didn't fit the typical serial-killer profile at all. No edge; no pushing. I needed a fresh angle. Too many cases like those of the Frenchman and the Dead Letters Killer have given me tunnel vision.
Peter Watts joined us and told us what he'd found on Mrs. Cort's body. Her body itself didn't have much to say; the skin was too distressed from all the cuts. Her clothing, on the other hand, carried a significant clue: pollen from a calla lily. Watts showed us a few Polaroids of time-exposures he'd done, and one from about fifty minutes in showed the message "STOP LOOKING."
I looked down at the journal on my desk and pulled the pen from its spiral binding. It was a promo pen for "Skorpion Salvage," a junkyard just outside of town. The "S" in "Stop Looking" matched that of Skorpion's logo.
Bletch took the cue and went there with a few other cops. When he came back, he told me that James tried to split, but some guard dogs bit him bad enough for him to need an ambulance.
Cath went to visit Peggy Dechant earlier that day, and met with little success. Apparently Peggy had James when she was a teenager, and she thinks of him as a mistake. Although...Cath did say that James approached her much later on and potentially scared her off from ever changing her mind in the near future.
Meanwhile, we had James Dickerson in custody. Giebs and Bletch were interrogating him, and he kept insisting that he didn't kill either of the two victims. I want to believe him, sure, but his honesty so far leaves much to be desired. His birth mother thought as much, too: she refused even to stand up for him.
Finally, Dickerson broke down and confessed that he killed Mrs. Cort and that girl. If he was lying before, when he said he was innocent, then he's really lying now. Just telling Bletch and Giebs what they want to hear.
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That night, Cath and I were on the way home. Way up in heaven, St. Peter was having spaghetti for dinner, and had just gotten around to straining the pot of noodles. (A little less colorfully, it was raining cats and dogs.)
I got a red light at the intersection. Through the curtain of rain, I saw a mother cross the street with an umbrella in one hand and her young child's hand in the other. Cath was expressing her regret that there were so many kids out there just like James, and her fear that many of them would, in time, turn violent. "People full of holes," she said. "Like James: living off the fantasy that his mother will somehow make everything better."
Visions of the last two murders flashed before my eyes. I was then granted a vision of Ms. Dechant being killed in the same way and getting those words carved into her: "STOP LOOKING."
"The words. "STOP LOOKING," I said. "It was a message to James, a warning." There was no time to lose. I made for the Dechant household.
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By the time I got there, someone had already smashed in the glass on the front door. I could faintly hear the sound of running water--upstairs, probably. For what must be the...damn it, I've lost count of how many times I've ignored the little voice at the back of my head that tells me I'm charging headlong to my death.
Peggy was sitting in a corner, bleeding and in shock, but alive. James--at least I assume it's James--had already started in on her. I moved in to help her, and then I felt a thick power-cord wrap around my neck and tighten. Pure adrenaline kicked in as I kicked off the walls, smashing pictures and the glass door of the shower in the process. I slammed his head against the wall one, two, three times, but I couldn't get the cord off my neck. My one hope was to get my assailant into the tub and drown him. With one final effort, I pushed off the bathroom wall and landed him into the water. None of your "get him in and let him break free" stuff you see in horror movies--I kept my weight on him and made sure he was at least unconscious.
When I was satisfied that he was at least half drowned, I pulled my water-rat out of the drink and got a good look at him.
Connor.
I tied him up with his own power cord and called in the cavalry.
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EMTs had Peggy in their care, and the cops had Connor in cuffs. And Bletch was laying down the law. "Should have waited for us, damn it!" he barked. I didn't have time for his bluster. "She'd be dead by now," I said.
Soundly defeated, he tried to enlist Catherine's aid. It worked, to a point: She raised a couple of good arguments. I'll remember her words until the day I die: "I don't want to ask myself, 'Am I strong enough to be alone?'"
As for James Dickerson...He'll spend the rest of his life committing victimless, nickel-and-dime larcenies. He's not worth my time or the police's. If I can, though, I'll make an effort to check in on him every now and then.
Even after all that, I'll bet you anything that he just went back to his papers and found yet another "death in the family" notice. So long as he doesn't cross a line, I won't judge him.
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At first, I didn't think much of "Blood Relatives." There was nothing really unique about it at first; it seemed an inconsequential narrative. After a second look at it, my opinion has changed a little.
When I first started doing the
Millennium entries, one of my first comments concerned the series' relatively small scale. It could have been "OH MY GOD NEXT WEEK ANOTHER RELIGIOUS ICON! ANOTHER APOCALYPSE!" But no: it's just one man going after one mass murderer or serial killer or whatever. It's also a series of character pieces.
"Blood Relatives" does something similar to "Dead Letters": it gives us a situation of duality. There, it was Frank Black and Jim Horn. Here, it's James Dickerson, the ex-juvie in the halfway house; and Connor, his warden. Both of them are searching for family in some way, and the duality is a matter of extent. James Dickerson is content with his small possessions, which grant to him the illusion of family. Connor, on the other hand, is a jealous, possessive man, whose need for a family drives him to kill, and send the message to young James: "STOP LOOKING." (Either "stop looking" because the only family he's going to get is with Connor, or "stop looking" because he'll be dead, too, if he keeps looking.)
Connor's madness sets the narrative into motion and also makes things worse. Had he allowed the lad to go to his funerals, there would have been no problem at all. The missing college pin would have otherwise gone unnoticed, or, if noticed, then dismissed after a moment's thought. But no: Connor had to go and kill Mrs. Cort...why, exactly? If he wants James all to himself, what good will pinning two murders onto him and sending him to prison do? (There's some bluster at the beginning about James' breaking curfew and re-establishing ground rules, but it carries some uncomfortable overtones of a relationship gone sour.)
In the end, "Blood Relatives" is a story about people who aren't thinking clearly. James' birth mother, Peggy Dechant, wasn't thinking clearly when she got pregnant as a teenager. She put the baby up for adoption and continued on with her life.
Meanwhile, James went through the foster system, which no doubt messed with his thinking enough to make him want to swipe belongings from recently-dead youths--totems, really, from which he might absorb some of their memories and live through their eyes for a while.
Finally, there's Connor, a guy who runs a halfway house, presumably to make a little extra cash on the side, and who finds himself way in over his head. The stress of actually having to take responsibility of James in particular screws up his thinking, and he comes to see murder as a means of maintaining power and control. Like the thorn in his side, Connor has his own totems in the form of the "Skorpion Salvage" logo and the "Never Stop Looking" sign, which lurk in his subconscious and manifest when he kills. (This logo has narrative weight as well. James sometimes hides in the junkyard's cars, and Connor is familiar enough with the place that he seems to have found the boy there several times before.)
I didn't really enjoy adapting and commenting on "Blood Relatives" as much as I did on "Pilot," "Gehenna," and "522666." In fact, it's sort of the first episode that I just don't
like very much at all. Most of the episodes so far have had some kind of a unique life and personality of their own, but this one feels listless and bland.
If there's one other thing I can say about it, it plays out like a comment on a
Lifetime movie. There's an estranged son, his biological mother and his current caretaker, and it would normally end with the mother defeating the "bad guy" and accepting her long-missing son into her life again.
Except that doesn't happen here. The intruder breaks in and swiftly takes the mother out of the action. Fortunately, Frank Black exists outside of the story's conventions, and he goes back to stop a potential tragedy. Everything seems to end happily, but Frank's outside intervention alters the story: most notably, there's no feel-good reconciliation between mother and son. She leaves him behind once more, and he goes on, just as he did so many times before.
Sometimes there just isn't a happy ending, not even for those who deserve it the most.
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(Millennium copyright 1996, Ten Thirteen Productions and 20th Century Fox Television. All screenshots are property of Ten Thirteen Productions and 20th Century Fox Television. All rights reserved. Special thanks to
Millennium--This Is Who We Are for episode transcripts, which helped me adapt the episodes.)
