Her Last Scream

by J. A. Kerley

  He pointed to a fresh hole in the ground and pulled a wad of tissues from his pocket, tossing them to the floor. Rein lowered her jeans and panties and positioned herself over the hole. He backed up a few feet, feeding out rope. Finished, she wiped with the tissue. A dark stain caught her eye, blood.

  She’d started her period.

  Rein turned away and secured her jeans. The man stood across the room, shovel in one hand, and rope in the other. Rein thought a moment, stepped back from the hole, stared at her captor as if waiting for him to perform a task.

  “What?” Trotman said.

  “Cover it up so we don’t have to smell it.” She put a whisper of demand in her voice. He frowned and started forward, stopped himself.

  “Cover your own shit,” he said, throwing the shovel to the floor. Rein picked up the implement and began slowly scraping puffs of dirt over her excretion, feeling the shovel’s weight and balance.

  “Enough,” he ordered. “Set the shovel down.”

  Rein judged the distance to her captor at a dozen feet. He had his end of the rope wrapping a wrist.

  “Just another little bit,” she said.

  Her captor tugged the rope, pulling Rein off balance. “Put the shovel down, whore!”

  Again, she thought. Do that again, harder. She started to scrape another puff of dirt into the hole. He yanked hard, the rope pulling Rein toward him. She launched, bound legs jumping twice, halving the distance, quartering it. Rein swung the shovel like an ax, the blade slicing toward his head. He threw up his arm in wide-eyed defense, ducking. The shovel slammed his shoulder and swooped over his head. He dove back, tightening the rope, a flaming wire around Rein’s neck.

  She tumbled to the floor.

  “YOU WHORE!” Trotman screamed, his words echoing down the rock corridors. He put his foot on her chest and pulled the rope tighter, cutting deep into her flesh. Rein felt her face swelling, saw the rock walls begin to swim in a lazy circle. Her eyes felt like they were about to explode. Rein’s captor moved his foot to her throat as he leaned low, sniffing the air above Rein like a rare wine.

  His nostrils flared. “You went ripe,” he said. “I smell it.”

  He went to the corner, opened a trunk and produced a rag and a metal bottle.

  Cruz and I sent everyone from the room except for Sinclair. I tried to keep the incredulity from my voice as I studied the professor. “You’re saying the hardcore misogynist in the chat room – HPDrifter – is some guy in your own department?”

  “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Sinclair said. “There was no doubt Trotman was HPDrifter. The asshole I’d been trying to dissect for weeks was just down the hall from me. I was pretty sure Drifter worked in a university setting. He was always ragging on college women and intellectuals. And he referred to my in-process diatribe as a manuscript, the proper academic term.”

  “What’d you do when you found out?” Cruz asked. “With Trotman?”

  “We were alone in the office yesterday. I tried to bond with him, pretending to be half screwy, affecting some anti-women attitudes. He was scared and pleased in equal measure, not knowing the best way to please Daddy. I made sure to pat his skinny butt, a little homoerotic behavior is catnip to these pinheads. I invited him to dinner this weekend.”

  “Why?”

  “To pretend to buddy-bond for another week or so, find out what made him tick – part of my research – then chuck his ass out the door.”

  “That’s too weird,” Cruz said. “The guy you’re after is a colleague.”

  “I started thinking about it,” Sinclair said. “And it made perfect sense. If you’re a misogynist statistics student who lives in this locale, getting into the Sociology department here would be a coup.”

  Cruz nodded. “The Women’s Studies department is part of the Sociology department.”

  “The plan was, in its own nasty way, inspired,” Sinclair continued. “Little Bobby Trotman doubtless saw himself as a master spy gathering information about the enemy. If you dream yourself as leading an uprising against women, where better to battle them than from behind enemy lines?”

  “Unfortunately,” I said, “Robert Trotman didn’t just dream of leading an uprising, Professor. He was commanding one.”

  Cruz and I stepped outside and told the center folks they could return to the meeting room, and to hang loose. Liza Krupnik looked worn and I figured she was dreading telling her boss she’d grabbed his papers. We still had the issue of the security code given to Bromley, then to Bemis, who’d opened the system as if cracking a coconut. Cruz had some calls out. Her cell rang and she took it. I watched her face turn to puzzlement. She stepped to the curb and stared upwards with a confused frown. She ended her call with her head shaking.

  “Campus security reports that Trotman’s not in the Sociology building,” she said.

  “You got his address, right?” I said. “Where he lives?”

  “We’re already there, Carson,” she said. “We’re at his front door.”

  “What?”

  She pointed to the apartment above the Beacon. “According to university records, Trotman’s been living above the bar for one year and two months.”

  Robert Trotman’s rooms had less personality than the waiting room at a muffler-repair shop. There was a chair in which to sit, a folding table from which to ingest food, a chest of drawers for the scant array of clothing. His bed was a mattress beside a shade-less lamp. The kitchen held only a stove, microwave and refrigerator, nothing in the latter save for a carton of apple juice and a dozen cheap frozen dinners. The bathroom held the basic personal-maintenance items. There was no television, no radio.

  There was, however, a professional-grade camcorder set on a tripod and aimed across the street at the center. “I’ll bet he records every second,” Cruz said, checking the angle of the lens. “Who goes in and out, license plates. Everything.”

  “Cerberus,” I said. “The dog that never sleeps.”

  We creaked across the age-warped floor, not covered by so much as a ratty rug. “It’s like a shell in here,” I said. “Not even a computer.”

  “He probably uses a laptop,” Cruz said. “Boulder has free wifi everywhere.”

  I stood back and studied the sad and desolate digs. Something didn’t add up, and I thought of obsessive people I’d dealt with in the past.

  “Trotman doesn’t live here,” I said.

  “What are you talking about, Carson?” Cruz said. “It’s a shitty little life, from the looks of things, but –”

  “He eats and sleeps and performs his ablutions here. But he doesn’t live here.”

  “Ah. You mean he comes alive somewhere else.”

  “Where he lives the fantasy. Where he’s not Robert Trotman, minor academic assistant in statistical analysis or whatever.”

  “Scary shit,” Cruz said, checking a closet. I saw her start to close the door, pause, stick her head back inside. The next thing I knew she was on her hands and knees, leaning her head to the floor.

  “Think the camera is something, Carson?” she said. “Come take a listen.”

  I dropped to hands and knees and listened between slats in the floor. I heard the jukebox in the bar, an old Green Day piece. I listened closer.

  “… maybe we should contact other centers and …” Madrone.

  “… hold on until the detectives find out something that …” Balfours.

  “… you found and copied my little piece of fiction, Liza? …” Sinclair. Laughing, thankfully.

  “We’re directly above the meeting room,” I said. “You can hear every word.”

  Cruz shook her head. “Didn’t Madrone say they had meetings and training sessions down there? Talking about everything from procedures to passwords?”

  “Answers that question,” I said.

  Chapter 60

  We figured Bromley and Trotman were in league, having met over the net or via one of Bromley’s trips to the law firm’s Colorado escape in Aspen. Trotman had
wormed into the university job and taken up residence above the bar. His spying provided the password to the center’s computer. Then Bromley put Bemis on the job and they gained all the access they needed.

  When a woman boarded the train, Trotman positioned himself to intercept her. We figured he was probably watching as Lainie Krebbs emerged into the Boulder night, hoping she was free. He followed her, found out where she was living, passed the word to Bromley, who discovered the woman’s husband was a fellow Mobilian. He reeled the ridiculous Krebbs into his net like a panfish.

  I relayed the bizarre story to the center’s people. Sinclair pulled me aside. “You don’t think my piece, my false work in any way helped them …”

  “This madness started before you put out your bait, Dr Sinclair,” I said. “You did nothing but draw interest.”

  “How long have they been killing?”

  “We’re uncertain. One woman from Mobile was found in Denver. A woman found in Utah. They abducted a woman in Florida and held her until her boyfriend could come from Boise to kill her. Plus we have butterfly Lady: a woman found in the Mobile dump who’s never been identified.”

  Sinclair frowned. “butterfly?”

  “She had a tiny tattoo on her back, a butterfly.”

  I saw Sinclair waver as if about to faint. I grabbed his arm.

  “What’s wrong, Professor?”

  “Dr Bramwell, our head of Gender Studies, has a tattoo like that.”

  “Is she Hispanic, athletic?”

  He nodded. “Her father’s from the US, but her mother’s from Ecuador. She’s a bicycle fanatic and a skier.”

  I guided Sinclair to a bench outside the Beacon where he sat with his head in his hands. traffic whizzed by, oblivious to the drama a dozen feet away.

  “Trotman begged Dr Bramwell to let him into the department,” he said softly. “She took pity on the guy because he seemed so lost. She had him doing statistical analyses of women’s salary histories in various fields. She was getting suspicious of his conclusions, thought him a bit sloppy.” Sinclair looked at me. “Jesus, Detective, what if she confronted him about it?”

  I looked into the stream of cars and bicyclists moving past, considering the ease with which Trotman could have waylaid the woman. No eavesdropping, no computer passwords, simply arrive shortly before Bramwell was due to leave the country. Trotman had likely taken her to some offsite lair, kept her for a week or so, and called his buddy Nathaniel Bromley.

  “Can you run up to a place in Missouri, brother? I’ll have a package for you.”

  We thought butterfly Lady a runner in the system, but in all likelihood she was a woman who had performed a kindness for Robert Trotman, paying the ultimate price for her compassion.

  The day had been long and wearing, a mix of luck and coincidence, despair and hope. The next step was finding Robert Trotman, which would take manpower and a blizzard of Be On the LookOuts. Cruz’s people worked while we grabbed snippets of sleep, starting afresh in the morning. It turned out that Robert Trotman had grown up in a tiny desert community between Boulder and Denver. The local cops had been canvassing the old digs, and we headed over there, finding a rough outskirts neighborhood of desolate trailer courts and tight streets with bungalows falling into rotting disrepair. Everything seemed the color of desperation.

  The sun still low in the desert-wide eastern sky, Cruz conferred with a young guy in uniform, nodded, walked back to the car. “We’ve got something,” she said, pulling from the curb. “Miz Emily Adams, school nurse at Bellville Elementary School. Been there twenty-one years. She became agitated when asked about Robert Trotman.”

  The principal led us to the office of the school nurse, walls dressed with colorful children’s drawings. Nurse Adams was a small and round woman in her fifties, brown hair going gray, her eyes dark and piercing over the tops of her half-glasses.

  “I recall little Bobby from the fifth and sixth grades. Some children stay with you, but so do nightmares.”

  “Nightmares?” Cruz said.

  “It was a dysfunctional family. Abuse. As bad as I’ve ever seen.”

  “You met them, then?”

  “I went to the house to talk to the mother once. Robert had head lice and I wanted to explain treatment and prevention.”

  “The father wouldn’t let you in?” I said.

  “The mother. She was a big woman, drunk. Unwashed. She bellowed at me to get off her property and never come back. Her breath was the worst thing I ever smelled, and I’m a nurse.”

  I looked to Cruz. “Doesn’t sound like the kind of woman who’d take much abuse.”

  “Not the mother,” Adams said. “She ruled that house like the Queen of Crazy.”

  “Mother was the abuser?” Cruz said.

  “The husband was handicapped, a leg gone up high, one arm missing at the elbow. I heard from another teacher she’d push over his wheelchair on the porch, kick him around, call him every name in the book while he tried to crawl back to his wheels. If that was in public, I can’t imagine behind closed doors.” Adams’s face wrinkled as if smelling Trotman’s mother’s breath. “There was no morality in that house. Nothing was normal.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  Adams lowered her voice. “The school psychologist told me. She wanted me to understand why Robert was put in foster care later that year.”

  We thanked Nurse Adams for her help and were walking out the door when she spoke. “Detectives?”

  We turned. Nurse Adams swallowed hard. “When I was checking Robert for the lice, he had a foul odor coming from him. I asked him what that smell was.”

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “He said it was Mommy.”

  “We’ve got a hit, Harry,” Sally Hargreaves said from the chair on Nautilus’s front porch, calling over her shoulder and into the house. “A patrol car just made the ID.”

  The door opened. “Bromley?”

  “He’s back. His big bright car is parked a half-block down the street from the women’s center.”

  “Then lawyer-boy still doesn’t know Krebbs is at the Prosecutor’s office singing his lungs out.”

  Hargreaves grinned as she stood. “Sometimes staying incommunicado can be a bitch.”

  “Tell the cops to detain Bromley if he tries to leave the area, Sally, but otherwise they’re to stay out of sight.”

  Hargreaves relayed the message as they strapped on their weapons and moved the operation to the cruiser in Nautilus’s drive.

  Chapter 61

  We stood outside the school as Cruz checked with her people, busily tearing apart the box Robert Trotman had placed around his life. “No one’s found a single friend,” Cruz said as we turned toward the car. “What Trotman does have is permits for four weapons, and those are probably just the ones on the books.”

  “Gimme the news.”

  “A Ruger Bearcat .22 revolver, a Colt .45 six-shooter with a ten-inch barrel, a 30-30 Winchester Model 1894 …”

  “Cowboy-style guns,” I said.

  Cruz laughed without mirth. “You haven’t heard the best. Trotman has a Henry .45 magnum lever-action rifle. Guess what the model is called.”

  I shrugged. “The Ranger?”

  “The Big Boy.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “HP Drifter has his Big Boy loaded.”

  We climbed into the cruiser. Cruz said, “Seems the only real people this loser ever associated with were in the department. They were as close as he ever came to human interaction, and he killed one of them.”

  We went to the Sociology department of the university. Sinclair’s office was relatively spacious, the walls taken up with books stacked on end, on sides, on tops of one another. “I’ve been reading every online communication with Trotman–Drifter,” he said. “Trying to see into him.”

  “Trotman couldn’t have given away much,” Cruz said. “He spent fifteen hours a week down the hall and you never noticed.”

  “But now that I know, plac
es and actions make more sense.” Sinclair said. “Drifter mentions hiking from Stegosaurus ridge toward the notch.”

  Cruz thought for a second. “From the Flatiron Mountains to Saddle Rock.”

  Sinclair nodded and turned back to his printouts. Cruz and I went down the hall to Liza Krupnik. She was curled in a chair. Her eyes were red from crying.

  “He really killed Dr Bramwell?”

  “I’m sorry, but it doesn’t look good,” Cruz said.

  Krupnik suppressed a shiver. “There were times we were alone together.”

  “He was probably happily using you. He knew you worked at the women’s center?”

  “Of course. He always seemed interested in what we did. Now I know why.”

  “Did you tell him when you had meetings and such?”

  Krupnik nodded to her wall. “All he had to do was check my calendar. It’s all there.”

  I studied the wall. Another mystery solved. Trotman knew whenever the center folks gathered to discuss business, changes in procedures, passwords and so forth. He’d be a few feet above with his ear to the floor. Trotman may have been subject to several pathologies, but he was a hell of a planner. Obsession can do that.

  “Trotman was your friend?” Cruz asked Krupnik.

  “I felt sorry for him because he seemed so afraid. Especially of Dr Sinclair. Robert practically ran when he saw the professor coming.”

  “Odd,” Cruz said.

  “Not really,” I said. “Sinclair is big, strong and outdoorsy. Assertive. Unabashedly masculine. Sinclair’s everything Trotman wishes to be, consciously or subconsciously. It’s probably less fear of Sinclair than awe.”

  We heard the big voice of Sinclair boom down the hall.

  “DETECTIVES! Come here!”

  We jogged back to find Sinclair waving a page of print. “A sentence from a month back. I asked, or rather, Promale asked, ‘Where is your favorite place to escape the whores, Drifter? Where do you go when it all gets too much?’ He replies, ‘Neverland.’ Another online character asks, ‘Like Peter Pan? LOL’. Drifter says, ‘My Neverland is a world of its own. I am king of Neverland, the Guy whose day is about to come.’ I thought it seemed odd at the time, but Drifter had flights of weirdness. I never made a connection until thinking regionally.”