by Blake Banner
I cocked the gun, stood to one side, removed the chair, and opened the door. Nothing happened. The bell was still ringing. I peered outside. There was nobody on the porch and nobody visible in the street. There was a toothpick wedged in the bell. I pulled it out and the ringing stopped. I examined it to see if it had been chewed. It hadn’t.
I closed the door, got my surgical gloves from my jacket pocket, and picked up the note. I sat in my armchair and read it.
Well, Detective Stone, here we are at last. It has been a long time coming. I confess I had given up. Your colleagues twelve years ago were anything but persistent. They were no mach for me and, ironically, I found that demoralizing. That bestial hunger, that daemon that dwells within me, fell into a long slumber. But now I realize it was simply waiting for it’s moment of destiny, an opponant worthy of my genius. And here you are, finally, ready to do battle. I shall not disappoint you.
The Beast is awake and hungry, be prepared.
I read it over several times, assimilating the elaborate wordiness, the slightly infantile attempt at archaic English, the misspelling of “match” and “opponent,” and the misused apostrophe in “its.” I scanned it and saved a copy on my computer, printed a copy, and put the original in an evidence bag, then called the precinct for a crime scene team to come over.
They arrived fifteen minutes later, and after I’d chatted to Frank—the team leader—for five minutes, I told them to help themselves to coffee and lock up when they were done. Then I sent Dehan a Whatsapp telling her I wouldn’t pick her up in the morning, and went back to bed to sleep another four hours.
Next morning, I had a couple of messages waiting for me when I got to my desk. The first was an email from the San Diego PD, with several attachments. Detective Ramirez had heard that I was looking into unsolved dismemberment cases, and had remembered one from the summer of 2005. He had taken the trouble to dig it out and send it to me.
I printed it and read through it. There wasn’t much. Some workmen had found a torso in the wasteland near the MCAS Miramar airfield. It was female and the arms, legs, and head had been removed. As with our arms, whoever had done it had some skill, though not perhaps the skill of a surgeon. The rest of the body was never found. There was practically no forensic evidence, and they were never able to go any further with it.
I looked at the date. The torso was found Monday, July 18. Exact time of death was impossible to determine, but decomposition was in its earliest stages. The body being out in the open air, that would suggest it had been there only a very short time.
I checked the calendar for 2005. I didn’t need to, but it pays to be thorough. The eighteenth was the Monday following the third weekend.
The second message was from the sheriff of Lyman County in South Dakota. He didn’t know if it would be of any interest to me or not, but a few years back, 2012, they had found some human remains just outside Oacoma. It seemed to be a woman’s skull. Judging by the work that had been done on her teeth, it was a modern skull. By the state of decomposition, she had been dead several years. But that was about all they could determine. I sat and stared at the window and wondered if the weather was any better in South Dakota than it was in New York.
My phone rang. It was Dehan.
“You awake yet?”
“No, this is my answering service. Where are you?”
“I’m at the lab. You should come over.”
“I’m on my way.”
Half an hour later, I left my car in the parking lot and met Dehan outside the lab. She looked at me curiously.
“You okay?”
“Sure. What’s he got?”
“I’ll let him tell you.”
Frank looked at me and grunted as we walked in. “I am no expert,” he said, “but if you want this man for an organized serial killer, you had better start looking elsewhere. It is possible, of course, that he is becoming overconfident, but…” He shook his head and pulled a face, as though he didn’t like what he’d just said.
He walked over to the table where he had the bottle, the knife, and the note laid out. He pointed at the bottle and said, “He didn’t wear gloves. What he did was wipe the weapons clean after the killing. My impression…” And he paused here to stare at me for a moment. “My impression is that he was so excited by the killing that he couldn’t be bothered to be careful.”
I frowned. “Hence the enormous strength of the blow that was meant to stun him but actually killed him.”
“Exactly. I don’t know if you noticed the wet footprints?” I shook my head. He shrugged. “By the time you got there they had probably been trampled over, but we photographed them. If you study the photographs, I would say he actually ran, doing sidesteps like a tennis player, as the victim walked away from him—” He mimicked the action, with both fists closed as though he were holding a racket, or a bottle by the neck. “—and gave him an almighty double-handed backhander that smashed his vertebra and broke his neck.”
“So did you recover anything?”
He held up a hand. “Wait. I am making a point here, John. He left partials on the bottle and on the knife. But he obviously thought, as most people do, that you can’t leave a print on paper. Actually, paper is an excellent surface for leaving prints because it absorbs sweat and oil from the pores. You apply disulfur dinitride and the print comes up brown. Voila…” He led me to the note that had been pinned to Hank’s back. It was covered in clear prints. “They are being run through IAFIS as we speak.”
“That’s good news. That’s very good news.”
“Hmmm…” He didn’t sound convinced. “But you have a problem, John. Compare that behavior with your visitor from last night.” He led me over to the other note. “The only prints on this paper are yours. This paper was handled with surgical gloves from the moment it came out of the pack, to the moment you picked it up.”
I looked at Dehan. “That is conclusive as far as I am concerned. We are dealing with two different people.”
She was nodding. “Zak and somebody else.”
Frank said, “Somebody very careful and very meticulous.”
“Though not about their spelling.”
He smiled. “No, not about their spelling.”
An assistant poked his head around the door and said, “We have a hit on the prints, Frank.” He handed him a piece of paper. Frank glanced at it and handed it to me. Dehan came and looked over my shoulder.
She murmured, “Zachariah Brunell. Wanted on multiple charges of assault, assault with a deadly weapon, rape… the list goes on. Wanted in thirty out of fifty states, but not in Maine. Not in New England.”
There was a mug shot. It was Zak. I nodded. “Well, now he is wanted for murder.”
I called the precinct and had the lieutenant contact the Maine PD and send a couple of cars out to the Hellfire Club, though I was pretty certain Zak wouldn’t be there. So I had him put out an APB too.
We sat in the cafeteria, looking out at the rain falling steadily in the parking lot. I told her about my visitor and the two emails.
“I thought we could go to South Dakota. If we take it in turns to drive, we can do it in a day.”
She nodded.
“Something tells me this could be the head that belongs to the arms.”
She nodded again. “But it’s not Lynda. Lynda is out in Connecticut, probably in the lake where they had their rally.”
“We could take a small detour on the way back from Oacoma.”
She chuckled. “Small.”
“We can ask Duchess County to drag the lake, but I’d like to have a look first.”
“Sure. So who are we looking at, Stone?”
“You notice the spelling? So meticulous about everything else, but sloppy in his spelling.”
“I also noticed the rather grandiose language. You know what it reminded me of? Gamers.”
“Gamers?”
“Yeah, they play online computer games. They take on the identity of some dragon-slayer
hero from some fantasy universe like Conan the Barbarian or Lord of the Rings, and they go on quests and do battle with orcs and dragons and all that shit.”
“Computer fantasies…” I thought for a moment. “Fischer said that Dave suffered from dyspraxia and dyslexia.”
“We need to find out where Dave was in July 2005. The date fits, third weekend of July. But where? No word from Bernie, huh?”
I sighed and glanced at my watch. “You need to collect a toothbrush?”
She shook her head. “I can pick one up on the way.”
“So, let’s go.”
THIRTEEN
The weather in South Dakota in November is very cold, but there were at least broken clouds, and it was a relief to see patches of blue among the gray. We crossed the bridge over the Missouri, from Chamberlain to Oacoma, at eleven the next morning. I had called ahead and arranged to meet Sheriff Pete Marlow at Al’s Oasis at eleven thirty, but he was already there drinking coffee when we arrived.
He was a big man with a beard and an easy smile. He offered us coffee, but I said I’d like to see where the skull was found, and the skull itself. He gave that smile that says “city folks is always in a hurry” and led us out to his Ford pickup.
We clambered in and he glanced at Dehan in the mirror. “It ain’t far. Shoot! Nothin’s far in Oacoma.” We crossed the I-90 and drove through the town. It was leafy and quiet, and sometimes you could imagine you were not in a town at all, but driving through open parkland. We crossed over a small rail track and turned onto Gilbert Avenue, and then took a dirt track down onto rolling green slopes that were dotted with occasional copses. He drove to the top of a small hill and stopped.
“We’ll walk it from here,” he said. “It’s about three or four hundred yards down, through them woods.”
There was an icy wind sweeping down from the north. It clawed its way through your clothes and bit into your skin. I saw Dehan wince and shudder as she pulled her hair from her face.
We were in a small delta valley. On my left, I could see the Missouri about a hundred and fifty yards away, huge, slow, and green, snaking past. Ahead of us, at the bottom of the valley, was a dense woodland that said there was a creek down there, feeding the trees with water on its way down to the big river. As if to confirm my thoughts, the sheriff pointed down and said, “That there is the North Fork creek, runs down to the river, yonder. That’s where we found it.”
We started to walk down the slope toward the woods, with condensation billowing from our mouths as though we were all smoking cigarettes. Dehan asked, “Who found it?”
“It was a family out walking their dogs. It’s nice ’round here, and the town folk like to go out in the evening or on the weekend. It was the dog found it, in the creek. God knows how long it had been there.”
The trees had grown dense, and you could hear the sound of water running and splashing below. Finally, we came out onto a narrow riverbank. The creek was maybe twenty feet across and fast flowing. Marlow pointed upstream.
“We figured maybe the body was upstream. If it wasn’t buried, the coyotes would get to it, and if the head come loose, maybe the water carried it down. We went up and searched. We took a couple of dogs, but we never found anything.”
I asked him, “Did you look downstream too?”
“Yup, but we never found anything there, neither. Plus, when the boys at the lab had a look, they said she hadn’t decomposed in water. There was very little sign of water erosion on the skull. They said their best guess was that the skull had only been in water for a short while. What a short while was they didn’t care to say.”
I pointed upstream, where he had pointed moments before. “So if I follow this creek back up that way, I will eventually come to the I-90…”
“Yup. You got three bridges side by side. You got the eastbound and the westbound, and then you got Highway 16. They all cross over the creek at the same point.”
Dehan was breathing into her hands and said, “The I-90 is going to take you all the way to Seattle. But before you get there, you are going to come to Butte, where the I-15 is going to take you south all the way to San Diego MCAS Miramar.”
The sheriff looked at her like she might be crazy, but he was too polite to say so. I said, “What are you, an atlas?”
She shrugged. “I know my roads.”
I turned to the sheriff. “Can we see the skull?”
He began making his way back up the slope through the trees. “I figured you’d want to. It’s in the truck. I made you a copy of the file we have on it. It ain’t much, but it’s all what there is.”
We got back to the truck, and he yanked open the back. There was a blue-and-white cooler, which he opened and withdrew a cardboard box from. From that, he extracted a human skull. It gave me a frenzied grin which, oddly, was devoid of all humor because the eyes were dark and hollow. The jaw was still attached, but when I tipped the skull back I could see there had been some dental work done.
I asked him, “Were any attempts made to extract DNA?”
He shook his head. “We haven’t got many resources, Detective Stone. There was nobody missing from my county, nor any of the neighboring counties.”
“Sure. Can I borrow the skull? I can get my commander to submit a formal request…”
“I’ve already prepared the paperwork. All you have to do is sign the receipt. Ain’t no darn use to me, and if you can find out who the poor girl was and give her family some peace, I figure it’s more use to you than me.”
We took care of the paperwork and then went and checked in at the Oasis Inn. There was a cute parade of shops whose fronts were made out to look like old Western buildings, but inside they were the same prefab shops you’d find in New York or Los Angeles. Dehan stood staring at them a while and said, “It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, Stone? They had the originals, they got rid of the originals, and then made fakes to look like the originals they got rid of.” I smiled and she started walking toward Al’s Oasis. “What will they do next century, do you think? Will they make fake fakes to look like the real fakes we have now?”
“Probably.”
We had a couple of buffalo burgers and beer and sat by the window. It was good to see patches of sunlight on green grass, and blue sky through broken clouds.
“After lunch we’ll go over the river to Chamberlain and have the skull sent to the forensic anthropologist. I figure there might just be enough material to get some DNA. If the head and the arms prove to be the same person, we’ll be getting somewhere.”
She chewed and thought. “So we have a rough sketch of somebody who maybe has a route from San Diego, via South Dakota, to New York. Who selects victims at random, young women, kills them, dismembers them, and then distributes their body parts along the route.”
“It’s possible, yes.”
“He is a narcissistic fantasist who is probably obsessed with Conan the Barbarian-type computer games and can’t spell.” I finished my buffalo burger and nodded. “It is beginning to sound a lot like Dave. Two gets you twenty, Dave has been visiting San Diego in July and some other Californian location in December.”
I was still nodding as I wiped my mouth. “It certainly looks that way.”
That was when my phone rang. It was Bernie.
“Bernie, tell me you have some good news.”
“I have news, John, I don’t know if you are going to consider it good. Also, bear in mind you cannot use this in court because it was not legally obtained.”
“I know, Bernie. Tell me what you’ve got.” I put it on speaker and laid the phone on the table.
“You couldn’t find where your suspect was going because there are no such conferences. For the dates you’re talking about, every year for the past fourteen years he has been attending, in July, the San Diego Comic and Sci-Fi Fantasy Convention, and in December, the Fantasy Gamers’ Convention in Los Angeles.”
For a moment, I felt oddly depressed. I said, without much feeling, “That is perfect,
Bernie. Where has he been staying? Is it always the same hotel?”
“Hold your horses there, pal. That is by no means the whole story. Because while he has been enjoying the events of the conventions during the day, by night he has been enjoying a very different kind of entertainment.”
I frowned. “Really? Like what?”
“In San Diego he goes nightly, like clockwork, to the Bull Rhino Club on Mission Gorge, at a cost of two hundred bucks a night. And in L.A. he goes to the Angels Massage Parlor on Olympic Boulevard.”
“So, twice a year he gets away to satisfy his fantasies without his mother or his uncle knowing about it.”
“That’s what it looks like, John.”
“Thanks, Bernie. That is really helpful. Take it easy.”
“Sure thing. One more thing you might be interested to know. For the last thirteen years, he’s been seeing a psychoanalyst twice a month.”
He hung up and Dehan and I sat staring at each other. What else could we do?
FOURTEEN
We were both exhausted, so we didn’t discuss it anymore. After dispatching the skull, we went back to the motel. I left her at her room, showered, and slept until six. There is something disconcerting about going to bed when it’s light and waking up when it’s dark. I lay for a while staring into the darkness above me and wondering where I was and if anybody had left me a note.
Then memories came back. The skull. David. The brothels. I put on the light, had a shower to wake myself up, and got dressed, thinking of Al’s Oasis and the eight-ounce sirloins I had seen on the menu.
I knocked on Dehan’s door, and she came out with wet hair and a big smile on her face. She put a silver pendant on a chain in my hand and turned her back to me, lifting her hair up to expose her neck. “Put it on me, will you?”
