Her Last Scream

by J. A. Kerley

  “Studying law’s not for you?”

  “When I was growing up Harry told me a hundred stories about being a cop. It was like watching heroic movies in my head: good guys and bad guys, the good guys not always winning. Starting eight or so years back, you co-starred in the movies. After seeing you guys in my mind for so long, everything else seemed tame.”

  “The money’s better in lawyering,” I said.

  She laughed. “Then I’ll be a cop a few years, write a book, become the next Joseph Wambaugh.” The laugh faded, turned serious. “I don’t think you know my history, Carson. If you did, you’d realize I have a lot to pay back. Being a damn good cop – like Harry – is the best way I can think of to return all I’ve been given.”

  I had no cogent reply. Reinetta Early’s smile returned. “So whatever Harry thinks of my decision, it’s done and he’ll adjust. I just don’t want to become known in the department as Harry’s niece, that Nautilus girl.” She gave me a lifted eyebrow. “Can I trust you’ll be discreet about my secret?”

  “Mum’s the word,” I said, zipping my lips, thinking Is this a bad decision?

  Chapter 7

  The reunion ended two hours later, wrapped and bagged for another year. I said my farewells and found Harry in the driver’s seat of the Volvo, leaning forward, head on the steering wheel. He didn’t look up when I opened the door.

  “Moping?” I asked.

  “I’m tired,” he said, pushing from the wheel. “You drive.”

  I retraced our path back to Mobile. Harry stared out the window, not even tuning on his stereo system. I saw a deserted filling station at a lonesome crossroads, a corroded Hadacol sign hanging from the sun-bleached wood. I pulled in beside the rusted pumps, keeping the engine running for the AC. It was ninety-five outside, the sun a white ball in the corner of the sky.

  “What’s here?” Harry asked.

  “The story.”

  “What story?”

  “Rein said she owed a lot to people and I didn’t know the story. Tell me a story, bro.”

  Harry dry-washed his face in his palms, looked out the window for a long time, like arranging things in his head. “Reinetta lost her parents seventeen years ago,” he finally said. “Her parents, Johanna and Bayliss, were on a small boat that went down in a storm on Lake Michigan. A freak thing, blew in out of nowhere. They were visiting friends in Muskegon, Rein staying back with her granny in Greeneville.”

  “Jesus,” I whispered. “How old was –”

  “Ten. Granny was getting feeble, so the family met to decide who would raise the girl. Everyone wanted to step in, so a committee was created to vet the choices. It came up with a half-dozen possible couples.”

  “Who was Rein staying with at the time?”

  A pause. “My sister, Molly. I was around a lot, too. It was for six months, to give Rein some stability. She went through tough days, but was resilient. Her parents were spiritual, passed their faith on. Rein didn’t see them as gone forever, so that helped.”

  “The couples?”

  “The question was put to Rein, who did she want to live with? She said, ‘Can I live with all of them?’ So Rein lived with a bunch of folks over the years. A high school coach whose wife is a chemist. My cousin and her husband in Raleigh. He’s an attorney, she’s an accomplished regional actress. Then with relatives in Chicago – you met them, James and Twyla …”

  I nodded. “The trumpeter and dance instructor.”

  “Rein lived with musicians, businesspeople, athletes, science types. They’re all part of her world.”

  “Talk about raised by the village.”

  “She went on to study law and law enforcement at Old Miss. Great grades. Played on the lacrosse team. Acted in plays, musicals, everything … a reflection of everyone she lived with.”

  “But Rein didn’t become an actress or a chemist or a lawyer or a dancer, Harry,” I said. “She became a cop.”

  Harry closed his eyes and blew out a breath. “When Rein was a kid she carried a plastic gun and badge and arrested people. Called herself Harriet Nautilus, girl detective. I never figured she’d get stuck that way.”

  “You’re talking like Rein’s got an affliction.”

  “She was on a good, safe road, Carson. College, law school …”

  “I was on a good safe road myself ten years ago. Studying to be a psychologist.” I patted my mouth in a yawning motion.

  “It was different for you. You were older and a …” he paused.

  “A guy?”

  “That’s not it,” Harry snapped. “Not it at all.”

  “It’s Rein’s life, Harry,” I said quietly. “She’s a grown woman.”

  Harry stared at me like I was speaking Mandarin. “You know the kind of people out there on the streets. It’s just too damned dangerous.”

  I started to re-state my position, realized it would be like talking into a hurricane. I pulled out of the station, rolled through the crossroads and aimed toward Mobile. Harry was silent on the return trip, staring out the window and watching the phone poles blow by like measurements of time and space.

  Treeka had changed from the regional bus to a Boulder local and was now heading toward the women’s center. She felt her stomach go hollow and her heart start to race. Can I do it?

  She exited the bus and angled toward the center, veering away at the last moment, circling the block instead. Again in front of the center, she made herself stop where the center’s walk met the sidewalk. Turn! her mind screamed and she turned toward the building. Walk! her mind yelled. She walked to the door. Heart beating like it was about to tear from its hinges, she willed her hand to clasp the doorknob.

  The door opened and Treeka stepped inside. It was a tiny space, darker than outside, and Treeka’s eyes adjusted slowly, seeing chairs against the wall and a table scattered with magazines. Across the room and behind a desk sat a square-built woman in her forties with red hair and friendly eyes. She was folding blue paper into a shape.

  “How can I help you?” the woman asked, paper dancing through her fingers.

  Treeka hadn’t prepared for questions. “I’m s-sorry …” she stammered. “I thought this was s-someplace else.” Treeka backed away, hand grabbing wildly behind her for the doorknob.

  “What did you think it was, dear?” the woman asked.

  Treeka remembered the sandal shop down the block. “I-I thought it was a shoe store.”

  “Really … a shoe store?” the woman said, head canted in mock puzzlement. “Even though there are no windows displaying shoes, and the sign by the door makes no mention of footwear?”

  “I, uh, yes … I mean, no. I’m sorry, I have to be go—”

  “I think you know exactly where you are, dear,” the woman said, setting a little blue bird on her desk beside a paper giraffe, swan, and grasshopper. “Let’s talk.”

  Chapter 8

  Over the next couple days Harry and I tracked down and busted a guy who’d shot a store clerk dead before grabbing seventy bucks from the register. The arrest – combined with two other nasty folks we’d nailed the preceding week – gave us more hours to put against butterfly Lady, both of us tired of seeing her mutilated, eyeless face in our dreams. I was tapping my pencil on my desk, trying to find an angle into the case when the phone rang. Sally Hargreaves downstairs in Missing Persons.

  “How about you and Harry pay me a visit soon?” she said. “Now would be a good time.”

  Sal was in her cubicle when we arrived, staring at her monitor and twirling a lock of auburn hair. She was a few years older than me, a liquid mix of tomboy and femininity, tough, but always probing for the best in people. She carried a few extra pounds with grace and had a girl-next-door prettiness that tugged at my heart.

  “I’ve got a missing person’s request from the Denver area,” Sal said. “City workers found a woman’s body. Looks late twenties, early thirties, Caucasian.”

  “And?” Harry said.

  “The woman’s head
was bald, her breasts had been beaten …” Sal looked at me to fill in the blank.

  “No eyes,” I whispered.

  Sal nodded. “Just like here.”

  My heart accelerated its cadence. “Where was the corpse found?” I asked. “The city dump?”

  “Floating in a sedimentation tank at the Denver Wastewater Treatment Plant. We’re talking about raw sewage.” Sal had printed out the report and handed copies to Harry and me. An unknown person or persons had breached the low fence outside the city’s wastewater facility and thrown the body into the first-phase settling tank.

  “I’d sure like to see –”

  “Photos from the scene,” Sally completed, pointing to a printer firing out copies about a dozen feet away. “I already talked to the detective in charge – name’s Amica Cruz, and she’s sending what they have.”

  “You’re the best, Sal,” Harry said.

  “That would be an understatement,” Sally acknowledged.

  I grabbed emerging photos as Harry walked over. The Denver photographer had started shooting as he approached. We saw a circular tank forty feet in diameter ringed with a low railing. Then a higher angle, closer, and we saw a steel-mesh catwalk spanning the tank, a dark liquid within. The next shot showed an object in the liquid, a light form against the umber sludge.

  For the final shot the photographer had walked out on the catwalk and shot downward. I think Harry and I winced simultaneously at the picture: an eyeless woman’s face poking up through human waste, the sockets angled to the sky as if pleading, Why me?

  I picked up the phone and dialed Dr Alexandra – Alec – Kavanaugh from memory, the psychologist who consulted as the departmental shrink. She walked in an hour later, her smile warm but tentative. Since Doc K was in jeans, ballet-type slippers and a Decembrists T-shirt, I figured she hadn’t been with a patient. In her early forties, she had long white hair and quietly piercing dark eyes in a slender face. Kavanaugh moved with a fluid grace, as if not fully tethered to the earth, and reminded me of a lady wizard.

  Harry showed the Doc to the meeting room. Sal arrived and we studied photos from the two crimes: the body found at the Mobile dump and the body from Boulder, fifteen hundred miles away. Kavanaugh kept returning to the close-ups of the dead women.

  “Any thoughts, Doc?” I prodded as she studied the photos.

  “I’m pretty sure we’re seeing a symbolic de-feminization. First, their hair was taken away, a major symbol of womanhood in our society. Then the eyes, another symbol of femininity.”

  “Like breasts,” Harry said. “If the breasts weren’t exactly removed …”

  “They were injured, symbolically rendered inert. Hair and eyes removed, breasts attacked. In the killer’s eyes, he had de-feminized the women. Then he put them out with the garbage.”

  “Or sewage,” Harry added. “Displayed as what the killer thinks of them.”

  “One glitch in your theory, Doc,” I said. “The primary female sexual symbol is the vagina. There were no injuries to the sex organs in either case. Why didn’t the perp negate the vagina?”

  Kavanaugh gave me an even gaze. “Because the organ terrifies him.”

  The room went quiet. I considered Kavanaugh’s suppositions. They made sense, given the landscape of a psychopath’s mind. I grabbed for the phone.

  Because the Denver water-treatment facility was outside the city limits, the case was being handled by the Colorado State Police. The detective in charge of the proceedings was Amica Cruz, who Sal had spoken with earlier.

  “You folks down there have an ID?” she asked, hopeful.

  “Nothing, sorry. I’m calling about the port-mortem findings.”

  “I’m in the morgue staring at the deceased. The body is about to undergo the postmortem. Our pathologist, Dr Leon Lighthorse, is washing up.”

  “Has Dr Lighthorse completed an external exam?”

  “I told your Detective Hargreaves about the battered breasts. We’ve got ligature marks on ankles and wrists and a few superficial bruises to forearms. There’s a pair of moles on her left glute and a dime-sized birthmark at the rear hairline. Or where the rear hairline might normally be.”

  “How extensively was the body washed?”

  I heard the phone covered as Cruz spoke with the pathologist. She lifted her palm. “Very lightly. Enough to remove the, uh, coating.”

  “Have the doc check the lower belly for traces of gum or mucilage,” I said. “He might black-light the area.”

  “What?”

  “Please give it a try, Detective Cruz.”

  The phone was set aside and I heard voices in the background. A clank of something moved into place. More voices before the phone was picked up.

  “Dr Lighthorse found a sticky substance on the lower abdomen, a three-inch line of gum eight centimeters above the pubic bone. He suspects it’s residue from tape.” A pause. “How in the hell did you know it was there?”

  “We’ve got something similar here in the Mobile morgue. I’ll send you everything we have, reports-wise, within the hour. Can I call you later?”

  “You damn well better.”

  I switched the phone off and turned to my colleagues. Kavanaugh leaned back and tented her long fingers.

  “I’ve got a theory on the tape residue.”

  “Go for it, Doc.”

  “I’m thinking the perpetrator taped something over the vagina – fabric or paper or whatever. Put the sexual organ out of sight.”

  “Why?” Harry asked.

  “If the vagina couldn’t see him, it couldn’t exercise its power.”

  “You mean if he couldn’t see it,” Harry said.

  Kavanaugh shook her head. “My statement stands.”

  Chapter 9

  Liza Krupnik gathered a dozen academic theses for The Famous Sociologist, some an inch thick and tucked within plastic binders. A review of titles included “A History of Women’s Servitude”, “Women’s Objectification in 20th-Century Art” and “Women as Objects of Torture in the Victorian Novel”. Her denim-upholstered derrière bumped into the table behind her as she stood over her desk, the chair rolled aside to provide room, and Liza grumbled to herself. As a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant in the Sociology department at the University of Colorado, Liza thought it would have been nice to have a few more square feet of floor space. It might even allow enough room to nap comfortably on the floor.

  At present napping meant rolling the desk chair into the hall, along with the folding chair for visitors, and pushing one of the three-drawer files to the side. Only then could she roll out her yoga mat and grab a few winks in semi-fetal position. Since the miniscule office was Liza’s world for a minimum dozen hours a day, catching up on sleep was a necessity, grabbing an hour here and there as time allowed.

  An oversize calendar centered the wall above Liza’s desk, notes and deadlines scrawled in every daily square. On one side of the calendar was a Rosie the Riveter poster from World War Two, on the other Howard Miller’s artistic rendering of a no-nonsense, we’re-gonna-win-the-war Rosie rolling up her sleeve as the text bubble above proclaimed We Can Do It! On the far wall was a blow-up of Norman Rockwell’s heroic Saturday Evening Post cover featuring a short-haired, hard-muscled Rosie eating her lunch sandwich atop an I-beam, her clothes and face smeared with the dirt of hard labor and a massive riveting gun across her lap.

  A few months back, Liza had brought a date by her office when she’d forgotten to take out the departmental mail. Her date had studied the posters while Liza slid mail into her backpack. “Jeez, Liza,” her date had said, “who’s the big dyke on the pole?”

  The date had ended poorly.

  The group of reports now assembled for The Famous Sociologist, she grabbed a pencil from the coffee-mug penholder on her desk, the mug emblazoned with the likeness of the proto-feminist Emma Goldman. Liza leaned to the calendar on the board and checked off the task: Recent theses to attn of D Sinclair.

  Dr Thalius Benton Sincla
ir, The Famous Sociologist, would soon be fed for the day. It was Liza’s final deadline and she could now go home.

  Liza locked her office and turned down the long hall of doors, the majority bannered with names of professors in the department, most doors closed and locked, the day nearing dusk. She shot a glance at a door that was now locked all the time, the office of Dr Judith Bramwell, Dean of Gender Studies. Bramwell was less than two weeks into a six-month sabbatical, wandering Europe and writing. When Dr Bramwell had been here, she’d served as a buffer between Liza and Sinclair. Liza had liked her job a lot better back then.

  Only one door stood open, the similarly sized workspace of her colleague, Robert Trotman, another struggling sociology TA, his specialty being statistical analysis. Liza poked her head in the door, resisting the urge to wrinkle her nose: her friend’s office always smelled of fast food and the cigarette he snuck every two hours, his body seemingly set to a nicotinic clock.

  “S’up, Roberto?”

  Trotman’s eyes had been riveted to his computer monitor. He startled so hard that his CU ball cap spun to the floor. He became embarrassed by his fright, a shiver of crimson crossing his freckled white neck.

  “Whoa,” Liza said. “Sorry, Rob. Didn’t realize you were in the deep beyond.”

  Trotman laughed the moment aside and grabbed his cap from the floor, slapping it back over his head, prematurely balding, the front-sweeping comb-over no longer thick enough to lie. He’d had the same affliction with his beard last year, scruffy tufts of hair that seemed more like dirt from a distance. He’d finally given up and shaved it away, his skin now as clear and stubble-free as the typical adolescent.

  “No prob, girl,” Trotman said. “I thought you did your volunteer stuff tonight and I was the only one here.”

  “I volunteer tomorrow, I forgot to change the calendar.” Liza nodded down the empty hall. “The drones have flown the coop, Rob. It’s just us worker bees.”

  Trotman’s eye flickered toward the end of the corridor. “And, uh, of course …”