Rouse the Demon: A Krug & Kellog Thriller (The Krug & Kellog Thriller Series Book 3)

by Carolyn Weston

  When she picked up the receiver, she heard the click of an extension. A clumsy eavesdropper, Lotte had as usual forgotten to turn off the kitchen radio. Literally, in this house the walls had ears…

  “Miss Crewes?” A nasal voice was quacking at her through the receiver. “This is Burns speaking, Frederick Burns. I’ve got a proposition that’s going to interest you…”

  But Mr. Burns was wrong, and Adrian soon hung up on him. “My God,” she said ruefully when Lotte loomed in the doorway five minutes later, “what a ghoul that one was! He’s the worst yet.”

  “What is this?”

  “That stupid phone call. Didn’t he sound like the sort who’ll come through the windows next? Oh, never mind,” Adrian added, having learned from experience that Lotte would never admit to eavesdropping on phone calls. “Some obnoxious reporter. The sixth today. Isn’t it awfully early for you to be leaving?”

  “We don’t fix no hours.” Lotte’s mouth turned down. “Is all very well, this looking after things,” she grumbled, “but who will pay? I don’t work for nothing.”

  “If it worries you, why don’t you call Mr. Myrick? I have his San Francisco office number right here.”

  “Sure, so then he thinks I am money-crazy like an American.”

  Adrian suppressed a giggle. “Whatever you think best. I’m sure you know better than I do.”

  “Ja. So.” Lotte shifted restlessly. “Is time to go, anyway. I am at Annaliese if something happens.”

  Adrian glanced out the window. She had meant to leave when Lotte did, but now it seemed such a waste of time. The street was still bright, bathed in summer sunlight which would last for hours. Nothing happens when the sun is shining. “All right, Lotte,” she said dismissingly, “see you tomorrow.”

  As soon as the front door had closed, she was sorry she had stayed. For now the silence was like a held breath, the walls around her seemed to resonate. The house is still listening, she thought. And anything can happen.

  In a way that was decidedly against regulations, Krug leaned against the door, trying to force the latch. A smell of frying onions floated through open windows next door. Swallowing hungrily, Casey tried to see through the closed sliding-glass panes into Judy Flesher’s apartment. But the curtains were drawn; his own dim reflection looked back. Starving pig. They never told you at the Academy how many home-cooked meals policemen missed.

  “You still looking for that kid?” The loud disembodied voice made them both jump. It was the neighbor they had talked to before. The onion fryer. Behind the rusty window screen next door, her face hovered pale and ghostly. “Haven’t seen her since you were here before,” she was saying. “Believe me, if I had, she’d know it, all right! I mean, it’s one thing to live dirty the way she does. But when it gets so your neighbors can smell it, I say it’s time to do something. You wouldn’t believe the stink that’s coming out of that place!”

  “Windows are closed,” Casey said. “How can you smell—”

  “I’m talking about out back. You just go on back there, you don’t believe me. Why, it’s terrible! Turns your stomach right over. Can’t you do something about it? You’re cops, aren’t you? Somebody’s got to—”

  “All right, ma’am,” Krug stopped her. “Isn’t our line of work, but we’ll take a look.” He walked off while she was still talking—around the front of the building to the other side.

  Each apartment had a back door, a narrow cinder-block stoop, each with a garbage can sitting beside it. Sour-faced, Krug sniffed the air as they counted their way back to Judy Flesher’s door, one from the end. “No wonder they got a stink,” he muttered, “garbage sitting under their windows like this.” He kicked irritably. “Few thousand dog turds don’t help any, either. Want to bet the mutt’s hers? Those squawkers never smell their own—” He stopped abruptly, staring at Casey, who was holding his breath to keep from gagging. “Jesus,” he breathed, “Jee-sus!” and in two strides he was at the smallest of the two open windows—Judy’s bathroom, Casey guessed. With one punch Krug shoved his fist through the half-rotted screen and pulled it loose so he could shove his head in for a look. Casey heard him groan. Then Krug pushed himself back, his ruddy face purple now, contorted with rage. “That goddamn stupid old sonofabitch! She couldn’t take a look in there. Oh, no, not her!”

  “Is it—”

  “You’re goddamn right!” Then Krug took off, and at the first back door, began to pound furiously.

  TWENTY

  “Lord’s sake, how was I to know?” The manager’s shrill, quavering voice floated without a pause through the open windows. “I’m no mind reader I could tell the poor thing was laying in there. Now, could I? I ask you. Wasn’t a sign of anything wrong, so how was I to—”

  “For Chrissake, somebody shut her up,” Krug snarled. “We got enough here without listening to that crazy old bat.”

  “Let her talk,” said Timms. “Maybe she’ll entertain the sightseers enough to keep ’em out of our hair.”

  “Fat chance,” one of the medical men muttered. “All that’s keeping those fools from climbing through the windows is the smell in here.” He kept coughing hoarsely. “God, what a stink! I never smelled one as bad as this. What we need here is gas masks.”

  “You got any opinions?” the lieutenant asked him.

  “Well, under conditions like this…” Hesitating, he brooded over the swollen corpse. “Strangulation maybe. Lot of discoloration when they go this long. Look here at the neck.”

  Gagging behind the handkerchief which he held clamped over his nose, Casey looked, then stepped back hastily, bumping into Krug.

  “Finger marks, I’d say,” the medical man was saying. “Nine chances out of ten we’ll find the hyoid bone broken.”

  “How about time?”

  “Hard to tell when the time of death is days instead of hours ago, Lieutenant. And in weather like this…”

  “All right, we’ll leave it for the morgue freaks to figure out. Would you guess it could be as far back as Monday?”

  “It’s possible, yeah.”

  As Timms rose from a squatting position, his knees cracked and he groaned unconsciously. “Could be coincidence, I suppose. But we’d better go with a connection theory to start with.” Somber-faced, weary, he glanced around the tiny apartment. “Some pad, hah? Looks like a grease monkey instead of a girl lived here.”

  There was a battered couch which obviously converted into a bed at night, a stained armchair with broken springs, a table and two straight chairs in one corner. Through the bar-type pass-through into the kitchen, they could see a rusty stove and an old refrigerator. The sink was full of dirty dishes, and on the drainboard lay a heap of trash—mostly empty cartons from frozen TV dinners. The only reading material in the place appeared to be a stack of dog-eared comic books on the bar counter.

  Timms was inspecting a shiny motorbike which stood propped on its stand near the back door. “Hell of a place to park this. Looks new to me. Be interesting to know who gave her the money to pay for it.”

  “Mother probably,” Krug guessed. “Who gets elected to notify?”

  “Let Vegas PD handle it. If they can reach her soon enough, she can probably catch one of the commuter flights tonight.”

  “Lieutenant,” Casey ventured, “if Judy was hanging around Myrick’s after the group left—”

  “So they claim,” Krug interrupted. “Which means nothing, right?”

  “All I meant is, she might have seen the killer, Al.”

  “And brought him home with her? You’re dreaming, genius. That story about seeing this bike there could be so much bullshit. Didn’t I tell you,” he said to Timms, “I had her pegged for their scapegoat? For my dough, we ought to hold the whole gang as material witnesses. Lay you even money we can break one of ’em down before tomorrow morning.”

  “Sure, and in the meantime we�
��ll have sixteen different citizens’ committees down on us for violating their rights. We’ll question ’em, of course. Keep hammering. That’s all we can do.” Timms gnawed his lower lip. “The first thing we get back, let’s eyeball that transcript of the Monday meeting. If there isn’t any sign she was there, we’ll have a handle to start pumping with.”

  But the typewritten transcript of the Monday tape clearly showed that Judy Flesher had been present at the meeting, if only for a short time.

  “So there goes our handle.” Timms sighed. “But here’s an interesting item.” In the quiet squad room, his voice echoed hollowly as he read from the transcript, “ ‘You a real heavy chick since you connected, hunh, baby?’ Sounds to me like the Flesher kid was backsliding.”

  “If she was,” Casey suggested, “that might account for their hostility toward her.”

  “Bullshit,” Krug growled. “I still say they’re setting her up.”

  A word from the blurry transcript caught Casey’s eye. “ ‘Pigsucker,’ ” he murmured, then aware of sudden tension, he said, “Quote,” hastily, pointing it out. “Here, before that part the lieutenant just read. ‘Pigsucker, you a real heavy chick,’ et cetera.”

  Krug was peering over his shoulder. “So what about it?”

  “Could be jive language for an informant.”

  The three men stared at each other. Timms was the first to speak. “That doesn’t make sense. Or does it? Maybe she was playing both sides of the street?” He rubbed his jaw, considering. “Better check out Narco on both counts. But listen,” he warned, “don’t get locked in on any theories yet. Because we could be way off, completely wrong on all counts. For all we know, this is a nut case of some kind, so maybe this is just the beginning. Like two down—and how many more to go?”

  TWENTY-ONE

  The light was failing, but she had to go on. A boy on a skateboard whirled by on the sidewalk. Next door the forgotten lawn sprinklers whirred peacefully, creating a river in the gutter. How much confirmation do you need? Adrian raged at herself as she switched on the lamp. The truth was, she knew, she was afraid to go out into that dusky hall outside the sliding door. But she must soon. And it would take every ounce of her courage.

  Deciding to skip the balance of the June tapes, she had started on the July section. The sooner she was done, the better, she had told herself. Surely a spot check ought to be sufficient.

  The first tape her hand had fallen on was dated July 17. Adrian pulled it out of the stack she had left on her desk yesterday when the house was sealed. Sliding the reel out of the box, she fit it on the spindle, then threaded the tape quickly. Punching the play button, she had leaned back, waiting, bored by now.

  But this time no voices came forth, young and screechy with woe, with outrage, with callow self-importance. And as she listened to the gentle hissing, the quiet around her seemed deadly again, the room suddenly chill. Adrian speeded up the tape, then slowed it again. Nothing. Deliberately, for her fingers were unsteady now, she removed the tape from the spindle and tried another—July 14. Then another, July 12. Then July 10, and finally, July 7. All had been erased; the damage was intentional.

  Feeling stricken, as if some heavy black suspicion of illness had turned suddenly virulent in her, Adrian fit the July 3 tape on the spindle. The subtle hissing where voices had been was like the whispering of something sentient but mindless. Then a kind of hesitation in the mechanism of the tape machine alerted her, made her lean forward. From the speaker came a clicking, then an unmistakably human moan.

  Adrian sat like stone, all the hairs on her body stirring; her eyes were fixed on the slowly turning reel. A sighing breath whispered out at her, then another, and another. Then a strangled sob came, so eerie, so immediate and heartrending that it seemed torn from herself—echo of the nightmare cry that wakes you.

  But it was not her voice. Nor was it her imagination. What she heard, Adrian knew, could be the voice of Stephen Myrick’s murderer.

  “What I like about you day guys,” Smithers, one of the night tour men, was saying, “is your application. Know what I mean? Work all day and half the night. Don’t want to rub it in, fella, but—” The phone interrupted him.

  It was scarcely eight o’clock, but to Casey it seemed as late as Smithers’s exaggeration—the middle of the night. Doggedly he kept pecking at the typewriter, scowling at the triplicate form rolled in the platen. Krug had gone to the airport to meet Judy Flesher’s mother. They would be lucky, Casey knew, to get out of there by midnight. Two murders now. His fingers felt thick as he typed steadily, translating violent death into flat official language. TV dinners and comic books. A fat, friendless sixteen-year-old strangled and left to rot…

  “Yes, ma’am, he’s still here,” Smithers was saying into the phone cautiously, “but he’s off duty now. Is there something I can—Oh, I see…Well, just a minute, ma’am, I’ll see what I can do.” Grinning at Casey, he covered the mouthpiece. “Some babe for you, swinger, and only you. She says it’s important.”

  Joey, Casey thought, consumed by a vision of softness and gaiety as he grabbed the receiver. With any luck at all, maybe he could get away by eleven and meet her somewhere…

  “Kellog speaking,” he announced himself pompously, relief and joy ballooning in him. “Any little thing I can do for you?”

  “Well, I’m not sure—But I must confess I’m awfully glad you’re still there.”

  Casey’s balloon burst. “Who is this?” But he knew as soon as he spoke, and regretted his tone. “Sorry, it’s Miss Crewes, isn’t it? What can I do for you?”

  “Don’t quite know.” Her voice was unsteady. “Suppose what I really need is someone to talk to.”

  Casey glanced at Smithers, who was pantomiming a frantic embrace, kissing the air with a juicy smack. Clown, he thought bitterly. “Anything in particular, Miss Crewes?”

  “It’s something on the tapes. On one tape, I mean. A kind of—well, I don’t know how to describe it without sounding melodramatic. Could you…” Her voice faltered. “Could you possibly come by Dr. Myrick’s now?”

  Casey suppressed a groan. “Miss Crewes, you ladies shouldn’t be in that house after dark.”

  “I realize. But when you hear this—”

  “Can’t, Miss Crewes, that’s privileged material.”

  “I suppose I deserve that.” He could hear her rapid breathing. “It could be one of the patients. I don’t know. Can’t tell. But I keep thinking—well, maybe it’s the one who killed him! Please,” she added quietly. “I know it’s foolish. It’s only a voice. But I’m here alone…”

  “Be right there.” Casey shoved the receiver at Smithers. “Keep her talking till I get there.” Then he bolted out and down the stairs.

  What it cost her to go into that gloomy hall, find the light switch and open the front door when he knocked, was more than Adrian would ever care to admit, even to herself. “There you are,” she said as calmly as she was able. And he smiled as if he had a finger on her pulse. “Come in, and welcome. Hope you don’t mind, but I hung up on your associate.”

  “Doesn’t matter, Miss Crewes. Here, I’ll take care of the door. You go ahead.” And as she crossed the hall to her office, she heard him testing the deadbolt lock twice. Not courtesy, after all—policeman’s caution. “The back door is the same sort of lock, isn’t it?” she heard him saying, as if to himself. “And the French doors off the driveway are sealed.” A careful as well as cautious policeman. The kind of care, she thought, that makes you aware of peril. Even the windows in her office seemed hazardous now. But instead of drawing the shades, Adrian sought her chair, amazed by the weakness which had come with relief.

  He didn’t waste any time discussing whether the tape was privileged material or not, for which Adrian was grateful. Instead he studied the list of tapes she had monitored, then seated himself on the scarred love seat, listening without comment to
the hiss of the tape, the eerie sobbing so like that, she thought now, of a grief-stricken ghost.

  “Lasts thirty seconds,” he commented. “Or is there more?”

  “No, that’s all.” Adrian shut off the tape recorder. “I’ve listened to the rest. He must have realized he’d pressed the wrong button.”

  “You’re sure it’s a man, Miss Crewes?”

  “No, I’m not. I used ‘he’ meaning ‘X.’ ”

  “You’re sure it’s not Dr. Myrick?”

  “Positive. Whatever he was into,” she added, “this isn’t a stunt of some kind. It’s someone in real distress.”

  “Sounds that way.” He hesitated. “You’re familiar with the machine—What do you think happened, Miss Crewes?”

  “There’s only one thing that could have happened. He—X—erased the tape, then ran it back through the machine. But somewhere along the way he pressed the wrong button, and it started to record again.”

  “Seems strange he wouldn’t have erased it.”

  “Maybe he didn’t realize he’d—well, made any noise.”

  “Possible. But anyone familiar enough with how the machine works to be able to do all that damage…”

  “That’s assuming he’s rational.” Adrian hesitated. How bored he looks. And tired. Why would anyone want to be a policeman? “That sobbing sound,” she went on. “Surely no one in his right mind—” But she saw she had lost him; behind his courteous, seemingly attentive expression, she sensed his mind casting in other directions.