The Lesson of Her Death

by Jeffery Deaver

  They had been dating off and on for a year when Okun fell in love with Jennie Gebben. After the breakup with Jennie, Okun and Dahlia continued to see each other on occasion and more rarely to have lethargic sex. Not a word was ever spoken about marriage, monogamy or even vaguer commitments.

  Although he was more frank with her than with anyone else at Auden, tonight she was unknowingly taking part in an experiment Okun was just about to commence.

  He turned on the overhead light and lit a cigarette. He stared at a flap of paint on the ceiling, a flap that for some reason always made him think of the severed portion of Vincent van Gogh's ear. "I was in Leon Gilchrist's office today."

  "He's off someplace, isn't he?"

  "San Francisco. Poetry conference at Berkeley."

  "He doesn't seem like the UCB sort."

  "I have no idea what sort he is. The strange sort."

  Dahlia said, "He's brilliant."

  "Stating the obvious diminishes you," Okun said, a homemade aphorism he used often.

  "He's cute," she said.

  "Cute? Bullshit."

  "Well, I don't know. Maybe not. He's intense. I have trouble picturing him. He's nondescript."

  "Oxymoron. How can he be intense and nondescript at the same time?"

  She blotted her sable groin with his sheet. "I don't know."

  "He had a draft of my evaluation for the faculty committee in his desk."

  "You went through his desk?"

  "Do you know what he wrote in it?"

  She asked, "How could you burgle his desk?"

  "He said he did not want to work with me next semester. And he recommended that my advisor look long and hard at my dissertation."

  She was shocked. "He what?"

  "He said I was arrogant and lacked sufficient depth to be a talented professor. He said if the school insisted on hiring me after conferring the degree, it should be as a librarian."

  This was all true. When Okun had first read the words on Gilchrist's evaluation form he had felt physically ill. He now had some distance, but reciting the professor's scathing critique made his hands quiver with rage.

  "Brian! Why did he say that?"

  "He's a vengeful prick is why. I'm as smart as he, I have more social skills and I want his job. He's figured that out."

  "Why were you going through his desk?"

  Okun barked, "I'm his graduate assistant. If I can't have access to his desk, who can?" He then added coyly, "Can you keep a secret?"

  "Brian."

  "It's something I've been wrestling with. I've got to confide in somebody. It's about him. Gilchrist."

  "You're dying to tell me."

  "I shouldn't."

  "Tell me."

  "Did you know that he and Jennie Gebben had an affair?"

  "The girl who was killed? Ohmagod!"

  "From almost the first week in September."

  "No!"

  "He's into S and M."

  "I knew that," Dahlia said, surprising Okun, who had fabricated this detail--as he had the fact of the affair itself. He asked where she'd heard this. She shook her head. "Don't know."

  Okun continued, "He used to tie her up and whip her tits. Oh and he'd piss on her. I think she pissed on him too."

  "God."

  Her wide-eyed expression of shock was delicious. Okun smiled then chuckled silently. Dahlia frowned across the pillow at him then grimaced and slapped his arm. "You're making this up, you fuck."

  He laughed hard. "I doubt Gilchrist knew Jennie from, excuse the expression, a hole in the wall. But you swallowed it raw."

  "Prick. So you going to start a rumor, are you?"

  Okun said, "He's not going to crater me with a bad evaluation. He's dumped on the wrong person."

  "But he could be arrested!"

  "Divorce yourself from simplicity, darling.... He was in San Francisco when she was killed. They'll find that out soon enough. I don't want him to go to jail. I just want to make him sweat."

  "You know what I think?"

  "I'm vindictive and petty?" he asked, curious.

  "I think you should cut out the part about getting pissed on. That's too sick for words. Nobody around here'd buy that."

  "Good point," Okun said, always willing to take good advice. "A little paraphilia goes a long way. Kiss me."

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  "Because you scare me, Brian."

  "Me?"

  "Yes, you."

  "Kiss me."

  "No."

  "Yes," he commanded. And she did.

  The security guard led Corde and Ebbans through the garbage room of Jennie's dorm to an emergency exit.

  It was early the next morning and the air was humid and filled with smell of lilac, dogwoods and hot tar from roofers forty feet above their heads.

  Corde and Ebbans had returned to the dorm to see if they could find Emily. Corde thought they might catch her before she left the dorm. She wasn't here although her bed had been slept in and the bar of Camay in the cream-color soap dish was wet. The detectives had waited in her room for nearly twenty minutes but she never returned. Just as the antsy guard seemed about to complain, Corde glanced out the window into the parking lot.

  "Huhn."

  He'd written a note to Emily on one of his business cards and had left it on her desk. He then had said to Ebbans, "Follow me."

  Ebbans did, trailed by the guard, a man with a huge swelling of latticed nose, who hadn't smiled at the men all morning.

  Bill Corde pushed the stained bar on the gray fire door and stepped into the parking lot behind the dorm. The three men walked along a small grassy strip that separated the building from the parking lot. Grass and weeds. And oil drums painted green and white. Corde asked the guard, "Are those the school colors?"

  "Nope. They'd be black and gold."

  "Ugly," Ebbans said.

  "You salute it, you don't wear it," the guard grumbled. "Least, I don't."

  They saw however that not all the oil drums were green and white.

  One was black.

  "Fire?" Corde asked now as he walked up to the drum.

  "Pranks." The guard rubbed his great crosshatched nose and muttered, "That the way they be. Think they own the world, the students, you know what I'm saying? Be spoiling stuff for everybody."

  Corde peered into the drum.

  "Let's get it over. But slow."

  Together they eased the heavy drum to the ground. A small avalanche of ash puffed up a gray cloud. Corde and Ebbans went onto their knees and probed carefully, trying not to shatter the thin pieces of ash. There were two blackened wire spirals that had been the spines of notebooks. The rest was a mostly unrecognizable mound of ash and wads of melted plastic.

  Corde found several fragments of unburnt white paper. There was no writing on them. He eased them aside. He then found half a scrap of green accounting printout paper filled with numbers.

  "What's this?"

  Ebbans shrugged. "I don't do brainy crimes."

  Corde put the scrap in a plastic bag.

  Ebbans plucked a small pair of tweezers from the butt of a Swiss Army knife and reached forward. He gently lifted a bit of crinkly purple paper. All that remained was the upper lefthand corner.

  March 14, 1

  Jennie Ge

  McReyn

  Aude

  New

  "Her letters," Ebbans said. There was triumph in his voice. "There you go, Bill."

  "A pile of ash is all they are."

  Ebbans often worked like a dog on scent. "Maybe, maybe not. Let's keep going and see what we can find."

  Together the men crouched down and began their search again. When they finished, an hour later, they had nothing to show for their effort but the scraps of paper they had found right off, and two uniforms filthied, it seemed, beyond saving.

  Even from the distance he sees fear in their eyes, in their posture, in their cautious gait.

  Driving along Cress Street, a shortcut to th
e Sheriff's Department, Bill Corde watches people on the sidewalks of New Lebanon. Shades are drawn. More than the usual number of stores have not yet opened this morning although it is a glorious spring day in a town that has wakened early for a hundred and fifty years.

  The people are skittish. Like cattle in thunder. Corde drums the steering wheel and wishes he hadn't compared his good citizens to fed-out slaughter animals.

  Ace Hardware, Lamston's, Long's Variety, Webb's Lingerie and Foundations.... Stores or the descendants of stores identical to them that have been here forever. Stores he has walked past for years, stores he has shopped in and answered 911 calls at, stores whose owners he sees at PTA meetings. But today, as he cruises slowly in and out of elongated morning shadows, Corde hardly recognizes the street and its occupants. He feels what a soldier feels in an occupied foreign city. He thinks of his own time in uniform--when he once got lost in an old quarter of Berlin.

  Corde stops his cruiser at the Main Street light.

  A sudden crack on the window makes him jump.

  Gail Lynn Holcomb--a high school classmate of his--knocks again with red knuckles. He cranks the glass down and looks up at her frowning overly powdered face.

  "Bill, how's this thing going?" There is no need to be more specific. She continues, "Should I keep Courtney out of school? I'm thinking I ought to."

  He smiles to reassure her and says she doesn't have to worry.

  But he sees that the words are pointless. She is worried. Oh, she's terrified.

  And as he tells her that he thinks the Gebben killing is an isolated incident he observes something else too. He sees that she resents him.

  Corde has been a small-town deputy for nine years, which is about eight years longer than it takes to understand the ambiguous status of cops in towns like New Lebanon. People here respect him because they've been taught to, and what small-town people are taught when young stays with them forever. People knock on his windows with fat, nervous hands and ask his advice and invite him to Rotary Club lunches and buy peanuts from him at the PTA fall fund-raiser. They josh and nod and shake his hand and cry against his solid shoulder.

  But there's a distance that's real and it's big and it never shrinks. Because if Bill Corde stands for anything it's that the long arm of malice can reach into the center of this safe little town, where it ought not to be; New Lebanon doesn't deserve the same fate as East St. Louis or the South Side of Chicago or the Bronx, and Bill Corde is uniformed proof that its fate is different in degree only, not kind.

  What Corde sees now in this agitated blond bundle of Gail Lynn, gone heavy on potato chips and cola and cello-wrapped cookies, unskilled with the makeup brush, but a good mother and a good wife, is this very rancor.

  Oh, how she resents him!

  Because she now must fight daily, amid the noise of soap operas and sitcoms, with her husband and daughter about locking doors and latching windows and chaperoning dates and which routes to take to and from jobs and shopping centers and schools ...

  Because tomorrow morning Courtney with her thick wrists and bright blue eye shadow might walk uncautiously into a Middle School girls' room, where a man waits in a stall, holding a narrow wire destined for a young girl's throat....

  Because life for Gail Lynn Holcomb is already a relentless series of burdens, and she surely doesn't need this one too: this murmur of utter fear that grows louder and louder each day that Bill Corde, sitting calmly in his safe and secure black-and-white Dodge, fails to catch this lunatic.

  "We're doing everything we can," Corde concludes.

  The light changes.

  "Don't you worry now," he adds, and pulls into the intersection. She does not respond beyond pressing her flecked lips together and staring at the car as it turns onto Main Street.

  SPECIAL TO THE REGISTER--INVESTIGATORS from the New Lebanon and Harrison County Sheriffs Departments have developed a profile of the so-called "Moon Killer," who raped and murdered a 20-year-old Auden University co-ed on April 20, the Register has learned.

  Criminal behavior experts have reported that the man, whose motive may have been to sacrifice the victim as part of a cult ritual, is probably in his late teens or early twenties and white, and he lives within ten miles of the murder site.

  The man might be obsessed with occult literature, much of which will be pornographic in nature. He may have a history of sexual problems and may himself have been abused as a young child.

  He may come from a broken home, and at least one parent was a hostile disciplinarian. He is a loner.

  There is no known religion or cult in which human sacrifice to the moon is or was practiced. This means that the "Moon Killer" might have created his own "religion," as did Charles Manson or Jim Jones. The moon may be significant because in mythology and certain religions it represents the female. It is women that the killer fears and hates.

  Investigators are considering the possibility that the recent murder is related to the beating death last year of another Auden co-ed, Susan Biagotti, 21, a resident of Indianapolis.

  It is believed that the killer may act again on the night of the next full moon, Wednesday, April 28. Deputies and Auden campus security police have intensified patrol efforts and are urging young women to avoid going outside alone.

  Corde dropped the Register on Jim Slocum's desk and said, "How'd this happen?"

  Slocum rubbed his cheek. "You got me. Steve had an idea to have me go up to Higgins and talk to the state boys. Just a spur-of-the-moment thing."

  "Didn't you check out the roads and the mall, like I asked?"

  "Did that too. Put nearly two hundred miles on the cruiser. Didn't find diddly."

  "Well, did you talk to a reporter?"

  "Why would I talk to a reporter?" He frowned and slapped the newspaper with his hand. "Where I was maybe a little careless was I wrote up a memo after I talked to the State Police and circulated it to everybody on the case. It's in your in basket. Didn't you see it? You know what I'll bet happened is something got leaked from the state."

  Corde was angry. He shouted throughout the office, "No reporters! Nothing goes to the press without clearing it with me. Understood?" Four deputies nodded, stiff-faced with unjust accusation.

  "But Bill," Slocum said, "there's a lot that adds up. Look at this moon thing. The 'lunatic' message, the knife--"

  Corde snapped, "Damned coincidence."

  "Everybody knows about the full moon. Remember Ed Wembkie?"

  Corde said, "This is not some guy got foreclosed out of his farm and went crazy."

  "Ed killed that banker on the night of the full moon."

  "Was also the day the marshal tacked up the auction notice. And what's this talk about Biagotti? Who brought that up?"

  Slocum shrugged. "We are looking into it. Or at least you said you were going to."

  "Jim, I don't care that it's accurate," Corde said in a low voice. "I care that it's being talked about in the press." He punched the newspaper. "There's nothing we can do about it now. But in the future--"

  "In the future I won't trust them state boys," Slocum said earnestly. "That's for damn sure."

  Corde stared at the article for a moment. He clicked his tongue. "Okay, what's done's done. Now, I'd like you to get out to the truck stops and along 116, put up some fliers asking for witnesses. That route's a feeder for the interstate if you're coming from Hallburton."

  "That town's mostly dead, Bill. I doubt there'd be any truck traffic."

  "Do it just the same. Fast-Copy's delivering them this afternoon."

  "Uhn," Slocum said.

  Corde continued into his office. He cracked open the window. Before he could sit down T.T. Ebbans walked up to his desk, carrying his own Register.

  Ebbans said angrily, "We got ourselves a leak, looks like."

  Corde snorted and swung his door shut. "It's not a leak if the sheriff doesn't mind." He dug into his in box and found Slocum's memo. It presented most of the same information that was in the article. Ac
ross the top Slocum had scrawled: Something to think about. Corde handed the memo to Ebbans, who read it and said, "Watkins knows what he's about but it's too darn early for this sort of profile. He should know better."

  Corde nodded toward Ribbon's office. "You know something, T.T.," he whispered. "Steve'd look like a genius, he stops a cult killer in his tracks, don't you think? Especially if he could tie the Biagotti killing to this guy."

  "I guess," Ebbans said, "but he wouldn't, you know, hurt the case just to do something like that."

  Corde shrugged. "We catch this guy, five'll get you ten Ribbon mentions Biagotti at the same press conference. Also with this Moon Killer poop he's taking a lot of focus off the school, which is where he doesn't want the focus to be."

  "Why not?"

  "You don't live in New Lebanon, T.T. Hell, the school damn near pays our salaries. If Auden goes, what've we got? Precious little. Farms. A few dealerships. Insurance."

  Corde tossed the Register into the trash. He began pacing slowly and then stopped abruptly. "You know, I can't let that go."

  Ebbans looked at him quizzically.

  "Woman came up to me today and she was mighty spooked, like she had the killer on her tail. Some paperboy or milkman comes to somebody's front door and he's going to get himself shot. Who's going to come forward with evidence if they think they're going to get gutted by a werewolf or something?"

  Ebbans said, "The stories've run already, Bill. There's nothing you can do about it."

  "Yeah there is."

  Corde picked up the phone. He called the Register and then WRAL, the local TV station in Higgins. He asked them about deadlines and if they'd be interested in a statement about the Auden co-ed case by the chief investigator. He took down some information then hung up. After Corde hung up Ebbans glanced toward Ribbon's office and raised an eyebrow. He sang, "He ain't gonna like it."

  Corde shrugged and proceeded to spend an agonizing half hour composing a release. After a dozen rewrites he slipped it over to Ebbans.

  New Lebanon Sheriff's Department investigators are following several leads in the rape and murder of an Auden University co-ed. Although it has been suggested that the murder was cult or sacrifitial, investigators have said that this is only one possibility and, they are also exploring the possibility that a friend or acquaintance of the victim's from Auden University may have been somehow involved. Anyone with any information is urged to immediately contact the New Lebanon Sheriff's Department in complete confidentiality.