by Blake Banner
“Yes… You think so?”
I stood and held out my hand. “Thanks for your help, Mr. Fischer.”
The lights were starting to come on as I climbed into my car and closed the door. The air was a grainy dusk touched with wet amber and red. I sat, drumming the wheel and watching the dark close in. I fired up the engine and drove slowly the short distance back to the precinct. By the time I got there, it was dark.
Dehan looked up from her laptop and watched me sit down. We sat staring at each other for a while. It was a comfortable habit we had gotten into. When I switched on my computer, she returned to her research. After half an hour, I leaned back and said, “Dave is lying to his uncle.”
Her eyes peered at me over the top of her screen. I explained about my meeting with Fischer and then pointed at my computer. “I have scoured Google with every variation and permutation of IT conferences, and there are no major computer conferences that occur regularly on the third weekend of July and the first weekend of December.”
“You going to ask him where he’s been going for the past twelve years?”
“Not yet. I want to know the answer before I ask him. See if he lies.”
“We haven’t got enough for a warrant to see his bank and credit card records.”
“I know… Another couple of weeks and we could follow him. But something tells me we haven’t got a couple of weeks.”
I picked up my phone and called Bernie at the bureau.
“Stone. What can I do for you?”
“Hey, Bernie. I need a favor…” I explained the situation to him and concluded, “I know you cannot check his bank records and credit card without a warrant, so I am not asking you to do that… But I was thinking you might be able to come up with a creative idea, because I know in my bones that this killer is building up to another kill. You hearing me…?”
“Yeah, I’m hearing you, John. Email me his details, and I’ll give it some thought and get back to you.”
“Appreciate it, Bernie.”
Dehan was watching me with no expression at all. Behind her the window looked very black.
“You just asked a special agent to break the law.”
“You misheard. I specifically asked him not to. How are you doing?”
“I can certainly add to your general state of confusion, if that’s what you mean. I have been trawling through what is available in public records, and Peter has an interesting past.”
“Oh, God…”
“He was orphaned at the age of four. Witnessed both his parents killed in a robbery. They were both knifed. He was adopted at the age of five, and eleven years later, at the age of sixteen, he left home and started working, doing menial jobs—burger joints, shop assistant, that kind of thing. Got his driver’s license at seventeen and at eighteen got his job as a sales rep for Canadian American Chemicals. Progressed rapidly. Married Jenny at twenty-one and that same year took out a mortgage on the house he now owns.”
“Okay…”
“There is more. He attended St. Mary’s Catholic School, primary and secondary. I managed to track down one of his teachers—still works at the school, and I went over and had a chat with him.”
“Good work. What did you find out?”
“Don’t interrupt. He remembered Peter very well. He said the staff were all aware that he was adopted and that he had had a very traumatic experience. The parents were supposed to take him to a child psychologist on a regular basis, once a week, and for the first couple of years, they did and he seemed to be doing okay. He was a shy, timid child, but he was making friends, and the teachers kept an eye on him to make sure there was no bullying and that kind of stuff.
“But he said, around the time Peter turned eight, things started to go wrong at home. Word from the other parents was that Dad had started drinking heavily. Peter started missing days at school. When he did turn up, Mom sometimes had bruises. Teachers tried talking to her, she got mad, told them to mind their own business—the usual shit. When Peter started turning up with bruises, they contacted social services, who looked into it and concluded there was not enough evidence to do anything. A visit to the house apparently showed the house was clean, both parents were sober and seemed happy. The kid was shy, but that was to be expected. He had stopped going to the psychologist, but the parents were under no obligation to take him if they deemed him to be okay.”
“That explains why he left home at sixteen.”
“Yup.”
I rubbed my eyes. Brilliant drops of water were trickling down the black glass behind Dehan’s head. For some reason, they were making me sleepy. I really wanted to go home and sleep. I sighed. “We have to start eliminating suspects.”
She gave a humorless laugh. “You may want to rephrase that. And speaking of which, the lab phoned. The soap was mixed with chicken’s blood. There were no prints anywhere. The shoe print on your mat would be a man of about five ten to six foot. The tread belongs to a fairly uncommon shoe. It’s European and you’d have to buy it online or go to Europe.” She was leafing through pages in her notebook. “Gallardo. A Spanish shoe. Handmade, real leather, they have a website—gallardo.com.”
I typed it in and looked at their shoes. They were nice. I memorized the tread.
“Maybe, Dehan, maybe at last we have something.”
TWELVE
I dropped Dehan at her apartment and then passed by the shopping mall to get a bottle of Floradix liquid iron. When I got home, I checked the back door was bolted, poured some liquid iron into a tumbler, and went out on the porch. The road was silent but for the gentle patter of drizzle on the leaves. Nothing moved except the leaves of the evergreens bowing gently in the icy breeze. The gleam of the streetlamps on the wet blacktop gave it a feeling of desolation. I wondered if he was out there, watching me. I carried my glass down to the sidewalk and stood looking first one way, then the other, scanning the small front gardens, identifying each car by owner. There was nothing I could see that was out of the ordinary.
I went back up the steps to the porch, where the door stood open. I smelled the liquid iron. It was awful. I bent and carefully spilled it all over the porch. Then I went inside to make myself a steak and sleep the sleep of the babes and angels.
I was in bed by ten, and by four seconds past, I was asleep. I slept deeply and solidly for five hours. At three I woke up, and for a couple of seconds I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming or not. My front doorbell was ringing incessantly. I heard a car door slam and the rising pitch of a car pulling away, then fading. I pulled on my pants, slipped my automatic in my waistband, and went downstairs. There was a note on the mat, and the bell was still ringing.
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.”
