The Oedipus Murders

by Casey Dorman

  She set down the book and reached over and removed the tea bag from her cup and laid it on the edge of the saucer. Then she took a sip of the tea—still too hot to drink—and picked up the book. She skipped the long introduction and the several prefaces to earlier editions and instead turned to the book’s beginning. It was a history of the work on dreams up to the point of the publication of the book, which was in 1900. She read just enough to be amazed by the author’s confidence and lack of ambiguity in claiming the validity of his method. Phrases claiming “proof” or that “there can be no doubt as to the truth of this assertion,” proliferated. Sigmund Freud was persuasive, although his exhortative language would be shunned by any modern-day scientific journal or publisher.

  It would take forever to wade through the book, the writing of which was dense and arcane, filled with concepts and constructions from a previous era, more like reading a Dickens novel, or, given its subject matter, a story by the Marquis de Sade, than a scientific treatise. She flipped to the index and found several mentions of anxiety dreams in chapter seven, which she knew was the most famous and oft-quoted chapter of the book.

  She turned to the section, which was labeled “The Function of Dreams.” Taking a sip of her now sufficiently cooled tea, she began reading.

  Freud claimed that one of the functions of dreams was to allow the dreamer to continue sleeping, despite the presence of disturbing thoughts from his unconscious mind, such thoughts having been provoked by experiences during the recent waking hours. These thoughts became disguised and acted out in the imagination in such forms that, while they might contain some anxiety, would not wake the sleeper. As such, they allowed for some “discharge” of excitation from the unconscious, which, although the original unconscious thought was pleasurable because it represented the fulfillment of a sexual wish, had turned into anxiety because of the need for repression of the wish.

  She had to admit that she found the theory fascinating, even compelling, had she not known that modern theorists seriously questioned Freud’s findings. Not that there was universal agreement as to “the function of dreams,” or even that they had a function. Current theories ranged from the idea that dreaming is an evolutionary adaptation that allows us to practice “flight or fight” reactions in our sleep to Sir Francis Crick’s idea that “we dream in order to forget.” Crick, the discoverer of DNA, thought that dreaming allowed us to form new connections between experiences to replace older, outmoded ones—a nightly updating that rids us of useless mental connections and thoughts, much as a computer overwrites old information on its disk and replaces it with new.

  Susan couldn’t help but reflect on some of her own dreams. She still had nearly monthly somnolent, anxiety-filled reveries related to graduate school, particularly the examinations she’d had to pass in order to obtain her doctorate. That had been the period of her life most filled with anxiety and, despite Sir Francis Crick’s claims, not something she seemed able to forget. She suspected that those situations in her present life that re-aroused her own questions regarding her competence were what provoked the reminiscences of the examinations taken several years ago.

  But Freud had a different idea. He claimed that anxiety dreams represented subconscious sexual thoughts. And, as if to cement his legacy as one who chose his own path toward scientific validation, he picked one of his own dreams to prove his point. His explanation of the sources of his dream, which had occurred when he was seven or eight years old and which he interpreted thirty years later, ranged from a play upon a childhood friend’s name, to Biblical illustrations, to a memory of his grandfather’s face when he was in a coma, which was then transferred to the face of his mother in the dream. Most of Freud’s analysis seemed to Susan to be of not only questionable scientific status, if not veracity, but extremely forced.

  The second dream offered in proof of Freud’s conjectures caught her attention. It was from a twenty-seven-year-old man who recalled a recurrent nightmare from his childhood. The dreamer had been physically abusive to a younger brother whom his mother had predicted would be killed by him one day. Susan immediately thought of Bonaventure’s bizarre reaction to the death of his own brother, with Bonaventure having become paralyzed in one leg. The dream described by Freud was one in which the dreamer was pursued by a man with an axe, but the dreamer’s legs became paralyzed and he was unable to run away. He awoke in a state of anxiety. Here again was the paralysis, which Doctor Farquhar had described as a component of Lucas Bonaventure’s dream. Freud’s interpretation was that the axe and the paralysis represented castration anxiety, this time provoked by Oedipal wishes toward the dreamer’s mother, but related also to his anxiety about the death of his brother.

  Had Lucas Bonaventure read this dream and Freud’s interpretation and provided it to his psychiatrist in order to prove that he was neurotic? She knew that she was grasping at straws. The evidence for her theory was even more insubstantial than Freud’s supposed confirmation of his anxiety dream theory on the basis of the two childhood dreams he had cited. What would Doctor Farquhar say to her conjectures? No doubt that she understood neither psychoanalytic theory nor how the unconscious mind works, both points to which she was forced to agree. But she did understand the cleverness of psychopaths, despite their almost always fatal impulsivity and poor judgment. After all, it didn’t take the intelligence of a Ted Bundy, who had in fact studied psychology, to copy a dream from the most famous work ever written on the subject and to try to pass it off as his own.

  She did not know, for a fact, how closely Lucas Bonaventure’s dream resembled the one discussed by Freud. She knew that it involved a feeling of paralysis in his legs and that his symptoms, and perhaps the dream also, were related in some way to his brother’s death. She would have to find out more. She took a long sip of her tea and reflected on the fact that it was fortunate that Doctor Farquhar seemed eager to talk to her. She would take advantage of his eagerness.

  Chapter 29

  Ben Murphy got off the telephone with his granddaughter. She had told her grandfather that the caller was sincere, she was certain of it. However, when she had put her on hold to put her grandfather on the line, the caller had hung up. Luckily, Terri, his granddaughter, had typed the message even as the caller was speaking it, and it had appeared almost instantly on her grandfather’s computer. After she had hung up, Terri could only tell Murphy that the caller had been a female.

  The caller’s message was that she had seen a car fitting the description of Regina Bonaventure’s Mercedes the night of the woman’s disappearance. It had been parked near the edge of the parking lot overlooking Crystal Cove beach. Someone, a man or woman, had gotten out of the car and was pulling something large out of the back seat, then carried it into the grass and underbrush between the parking lot and the cliff overlooking the beach. The caller hadn’t called the police because she herself wasn’t supposed to have been in the parking lot that night. Following that statement, Ben’s granddaughter had tried to transfer the call to her grandfather, but the caller had hung up. Her phone had left no caller ID.

  Perhaps it was an underage girl who had been parked with a boyfriend in the parking lot, Ben thought to himself. Someone who didn’t want her parents to find out she’d been there or whom she was with. He debated whether to call Abe Reynolds. It was already eight o’clock at night and Reynolds probably wouldn’t be in his office. The information could wait until morning. It was the third week since Regina’s disappearance anyway. Another twelve hours wouldn’t matter. But Ben’s curiosity wouldn’t let him wait.

  The sign on the gate to the parking lot, which was on the Pacific Coast Highway, about a half mile from the shopping center from which Regina Bonaventure had disappeared, said that it closed at ten p.m. Ben didn’t know if that meant that the gate would be locked or just that anyone still there would be told to leave. Anyway, it was only eight-t
hirty so he drove through the gate and parked at the other side of the lot, nearest the cliffs. There were still about twenty other cars in the lot, presumably their occupants still on the beach below, even though it was already dark.

  Ben got out and walked to the edge of the parking lot. The lot itself was several hundred yards long. In the quiet of the evening, he could hear the waves rolling in on the sandy beach below. The car that had been seen—perhaps Regina’s car—could have been parked anywhere along the cliff’s edge. Ben walked to the end of the pavement. There were several trails, perhaps six of them, leading toward the beach. He assumed that if a killer were attempting to hide a body, he either would have carried it down to the beach and thrown it into the sea or buried it among the underbrush, but not near one of the well- worn trails. No bodies had washed ashore since Regina went missing, so the odds were that if a body had been disposed of, it was still somewhere on top of the cliffs.

  The body, if there was a body, could be anywhere. He wished that he had the been able to talk to the person who’d made the phone call so that he would have a better idea as to the exact spot, but that was not the case. Unless the person called back, there was no way Ben could figure out where the car had been parked or where to search among the underbrush. If he just began tramping around at random, it was highly unlikely that he would be able to find the body and very likely that he would destroy any evidence that might be present near the crime scene. He got back in his car. Better call Abe Reynolds in the morning.

  — — —

  Thirty uniformed cops and two cadaver-sniffing dogs, both German Shepherds, combed the brushy area around the Crystal Cove parking lot and the beach below. Abe Reynolds had asked the park rangers to close the parking lot at Crystal Cove, since the beach area was designated as a state park. The men and dogs fanned out along the cliff-top between the parking lot and the cliff’s edge and combed every inch of the underbrush. The dogs found no scent along any of the six trails leading to the beach. Abe’s men made a thorough search among the rocks and sand spits leading into the water but found nothing.

  As the search crew made its way slowly through the underbrush between the edge of the parking lot and the cliff, the two dogs suddenly became alert, their bodies stiffening and their ears pointing forward as they sniffed the air. Both of them ran directly to a spot between two three-foot high coastal shrubs. Both dogs pawed and sniffed at the recently disturbed ground. Their handlers pulled the straining dogs back.

  “Bring shovels,” Abe Reynolds shouted. He and Ben Murphy stood back while crime scene photographers took pictures of the area before any digging began. Murphy was dressed casually in jeans and sneakers and his usual Dodgers baseball cap, but this time he wore a blue nylon windbreaker and dark sunglasses. The temperature was in the high sixties with a strong wind blowing in from the ocean, and the sky was pristinely blue.

  As soon as the officers with shovels began digging, one of them shouted, “There’s something buried here.” The crime scene team took over, carefully lifting shovelfuls of dirt and putting them in bags. A dark plastic bag began to be revealed. The diggers carefully dug around the bag, their hands in gloves so as not to destroy any fingerprints. Soon two plastic bags, taped together, emerged from the shallow grave. When it was completely visible, one of the crime scene men cut one end of the bag open with a scalpel-like instrument. He peeled back the plastic to reveal the contents “It’s a dog!” the officer cried.

  “Shit!” Abe Reynolds said.

  As the crime scene officer peeled back more of the plastic, the head and torso of a large Collie dog, in the early stages of decomposition, emerged.

  “That’s a young dog,” Ben Murphy told the detective. “Odd for him to die. Odd place to bury him.”

  Abe looked at him. “I don’t know. My daughter’s cat got hit by a car and I buried the body in a field away from the house. Told my daughter the cat had run away. People do that kind of thing.” He bent down and looked more closely at the dog “This isn’t what we’re looking for.”

  Ben wasn’t sure if he was frustrated or relieved. Finding the dog’s body left him no closer to finding Regina, but it did keep open the possibility that she was still alive. It was becoming an increasingly slim possibility, he thought. “Why don’t you have your lab find out what killed it?” he said.

  Reynolds gave him a skeptical look. “That’s a lot of wasted effort. It’s just a dog. This has nothing to do with Regina Bonaventure’s disappearance.”

  “It happened the same night, according to my anonymous caller and we’re only a half mile from the restaurant where she was last seen.”

  “That dog hasn’t been in the ground more than a week, I can almost guarantee that,” Reynolds answered.

  Ben agreed. “So keep your men and dogs looking. This might not be the only grave around here. But I’d still be curious how a dog this young died.”

  Reynolds’s instructed his men to continue the search. “We’ll see. Depends on how backed up the coroner is. I don’t even know if the coroner will autopsy a dog, come to think of it.”

  “If he will, it could give us some more information. You never know,” Ben replied.

  An hour later, the head of the search crew declared the area clean.

  “A wild-goose chase, I guess,” Ben Murphy told Detective Reynolds. Ben was leaning against Reynolds’s car.

  “Thanks for calling us anyway,” Reynolds said. He held a paper cup from Starbucks in one hand and now and then took a sip of coffee. “Too bad the caller didn’t identify herself.”

  “Probably wasn’t supposed to be here herself. Afraid her parents would find out if she made an official report. But there are lots of white Mercedes and lots of reasons someone might park here and dispose of something at night. I’d say it was the dog, except I agree with you that it would be more decomposed if it had been here for nearly three weeks, even wrapped in plastic bags.”

  “How many calls you getting a day?’

  “Thirty to forty. More at first, but now it’s settled down. Probably go down to just a few a day in a week or so.”

  “And this is the first one that looked like it might be something worth following up?”

  “First one. Mostly they’re inquiries about the size of the reward rather than real tips. Since it’s known that Bert Knowles is putting up the money, and it’s his daughter that is missing, a lot of them are from the Santa Barbara area. A lot of people up there have seen a lot of suspicious things. They don’t seem to realize Regina went missing down here.”

  Reynolds shook his head. “That’s the downside of offering a reward for tips on a crime. People will report almost anything. Don’t know why they think they’ll get paid when they know their tip is bogus.”

  Ben nodded. “This one seemed real, though. This beach is less than a mile from where Regina was last seen. It made sense that maybe someone dumped her body here; except they didn’t I guess.”

  “I’ll talk to the coroner about autopsying the dog, but I think you’re right, this one was a red herring. But don’t let that stop you from calling me if you get another one that sounds promising. We’ve got almost nada ourselves.”

  “Nothing more on the guy who smashed his car into the truck?”

  “None of his prints, no evidence that he did anything that night other than go to the bar and have a few drinks. We’re not giving up on him, but frankly, I hope it’s not him or we won’t be able to get any clues as to what happened to the Bonaventure woman.”

  “How about Lucas, the husband? I talked to him and he doesn’t seem very broken up about his wife being missing.”

  “He’s a person of interest, verging on becoming a suspect in another case over in Irvine. This time it was definitely murder. But all th
e evidence is circumstantial. Our psychologist thinks he’s responsible for that one too.”

  “I met with her—your psychologist—she’s bright. We talked about my granddaughter’s interest in psychology. Dr. Lin mentioned that Irvine had called her in on another case that involved Lucas and his shrink, but she didn’t tell me that Lucas was actually a suspect.”

  “His shrink could be too, for that matter. He found the body and he knew the victim.”

  “That case got anything to do with this one?”

  “Other than Bonaventure being involved, you mean? Not that I know of, but Doctor Lin is talking to the shrink. Bonaventure signed a release, so she may dig up connections we don’t know about.”

  “Always distrust a coincidence, is one of my mottos,” Ben said. “I hope Doctor Lin finds some connections, because I’m willing to bet they’re there.”

  “We’ll see,” Abe said, throwing his empty coffee cup into a trashcan next to his car. “But I think you’re right.”

  Chapter 30

  When Lucas arrived he headed straight for the couch and lay down, putting one arm across his eyes. “I can’t stop thinking about Regina. I know that something bad has happened to her. The police seem to think so too.”

  George was surprised that Lucas’ defenses had collapsed so easily. He had become more concerned about his wife since Sherry died, probably because he had lost the person upon whom he’d displaced his anxiety since his wife’s disappearance. “You’re worried more about your wife than you were before?”