Lark

by Forrest, Richard;

  Lark made another note. “I’ll include a wooded location. Anything else?”

  “They both had long hair.”

  “That could be coincidental.”

  “Why don’t you feed in two composites and see what the computer comes up with? Include the hair on one and not on another. By the way,” Horse continued, “I think I know what he used on the last girl. I’ve got one in my garage.”

  “You never cease to amaze me. Could you find it in yourself to tell me what in hell you’re talking about?”

  The large patrolman stared into the hall as if he were seeking some placid vision he needed to establish his mental equilibrium. “I know what he put in her to do that.”

  “Some sort of surgical implement, I would think.”

  “A frog gig.”

  Lark knew instantly that the suggestion made sense. He would call the medical examiner and suggest the possibility. He wrote the words “frog gig” on his pad and underlined them. For a brief moment he was elated that another piece of the puzzle now fit, and then he looked back at the words he had just written and their implication struck him. He had a quick montage of the young girl in the woods and the blood-soaked clothing that the ME gradually peeled from her body.

  “Go home, Horse.”

  “You’re coming to dinner tonight.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Nory’s expecting you.”

  Lark agreed to the inevitable. “I’ll get the composites on the computer and then drive over to your house.”

  Lark looked over his notes. There were so few clues, so few consistencies in the two murders that his composite might be a futile effort. He was enveloped in an enervating depression that seemed to preclude physical action and rational thought. Is this what his life had become? This piecing together of grisly mutilations of the innocent, was this the sum total of more than two decades of work and effort?

  The ringing phone jolted him and he reluctantly reached for the receiver. “Yeah.”

  The medical examiner started in midsentence. “Not your jurisdiction on that body in the woods, but thought you’d like a verification on the cause of death. She died of a massive hemorrhage leading to cardiac collapse. No sign of gag marks and she was the victim of an oral sexual assault.”

  “How about a frog gig as the instrument?”

  A pause. “Yes, that might have done it. I’ll pursue that line of thought.”

  Lark hung up. Years of investigative routine made him reach for the phone again and dial the crime lab. Soho answered. “Lark here. Anything on those tire marks we found in the state forest?”

  “Got it. In checking on the tread pattern, size, and type of tire as contrasted to the depth of the impressions, we’ve come up with only one type of vehicle—an RV.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A recreational vehicle.”

  “Like a self-contained camper?”

  “You got it, Lieutenant.”

  The final call was to the state-police barracks. They had an ID on the victim and Lark wrote her name and address down in his notes. He was grateful that his office would not have to notify the family. He pulled the typewriter over to the desk and with two fingers began to type his composite. The lack of undergarments along with mutilation would be his prime factors. In addition to the ordinary systems, he would put his composite on line to the FBI computer in Quantico, Virginia. The recently created Federal National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime was said to have listings on all unsolved homicides for the past several years. He had never utilized that system before and had no idea of its worth.

  Horse Najankian presided over a leg of lamb, while at the far end of the table his wife, Nory, was surrounded by an attacking flotilla of serving dishes. Najankian children of varying sizes and sexes filled the remainder of the long table and surrounded Lark.

  “I do hope you like lamb, Lieutenant,” Nory said. “It’s quite a treat for us.”

  “Of course I do,” he said as he smiled at her. Lark hated lamb, just as he hated all meat that wasn’t hamburger. He would eat and savor it and request seconds. He owed his partner that much.

  The dinner swirled about them. Children recounted the day’s events and Horse laughed a great deal between bites of the huge meal. Lark felt estranged from the table, as if he were floating above them and silently observing their good humor and mutual love. He was an alien part of it.

  “You’re going to get busted one day,” Horse told Nory.

  Lark snapped back to attentiveness, his fork poised in midair. “How’s that?”

  “She’s stealing from the store where she works. That’s what it is when you come right down to it.”

  “I prefer to think of it as my personal food-stamp program,” Nory replied.

  Lark looked at the leg of lamb. “I don’t understand?”

  “My wife has this thing about old people,” Horse said. “She wants to upgrade their diet at the expense of the supermarket.”

  “Some of those old people live on small pensions and a little social security,” Nory said. “I know they don’t have enough money to eat right and I can tell about their diet when I check them out. So I charge them less.”

  “Are you allowed to do that?” Lark asked.

  “Well, not really. But if a chicken is two-ninety-eight I charge them one-ninety-eight as if I made an error. Some of my customers have gone from dog food—and I know they don’t have a dog—to lamb chops.”

  Horse shook his head. “One of these days they’ll grab you.”

  Lark left the Najankian house and drove back to headquarters, where he parked in a deputy commissioner’s slot. Depression rolled over him as he gripped the wheel and stared ahead at a blank brick wall. He felt the weight of the Python in its holster. Police officers have the highest incidence of divorce, alcoholism, and suicide of any profession except psychiatrists. He thought the comparison ironical, but sobered with the realization that he qualified in a couple of those areas and was working on the third.

  In the computer room a printout was stacked neatly in a pile with a piece of scrap paper clipped on top that contained his name. He picked up the first sheet and glanced at it quickly and then returned to the top of the list and began to read each item carefully.

  He was horrified at the number of entries, and wondered why the match hadn’t been made months or even a year earlier by another jurisdiction. As he riffled through the sheets, he could see what happened, or more specifically why it hadn’t happened. The murders had occurred in a myriad of jurisdictions over five states, in rural areas serviced by small police departments. The victims had died in a number of different ways, and the newness of the Quantico system had precluded anyone from discovering the similarities earlier. The profile they had fed into the computer included two important facts: the victims were fully dressed, but their underwear was missing. Lark felt that had been the key factor.

  There were thirty-two young women in New England whose deaths matched his profile.

  They had a serial murderer of gigantic proportions on their hands.

  11

  Lark parked in front of Horse’s house and honked. The front door opened and his partner ambled down the walk toward the pickup. He wore regulation shoes, uniform pants, and a checkered sports coat. He looked like a half-dressed cop.

  “Are you half in uniform or half out? This is a plain-clothes assignment, you know.”

  “Lieutenant, I got one going-to-Sunday-meeting suit, and I been wearing that. Riding around with you, the pants take too much of a beating. So I got my uniform pants on.”

  “Any officer assigned to plain clothes can get an authorization to buy a civilian suit or sports outfit at a reasonable cost.”

  “Tried. The captain turned me down because this is only a temporary assignment for a couple of more days.”

  “Uh huh.” The truck pulled away from the curb as Lark handed Horse the computer printouts. “Take a look at these. After I went through them las
t night, I ran the composite through the computer again to cover the rest of the country. Nothing else turned up that matches our cases. Our guy is working New England.”

  Horse’s eyes widened as he flipped through the pages. “There’s a couple of dozen of them.”

  “Thirty-two, to be exact.”

  “Where are we starting?”

  “At Middleburg University. I called the Federal National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crimes in Quantico and they told me that one of the people who helped set up their program is a psychology teacher here in Middleburg. Let’s see what he has to say.”

  Professor Donald Rasmussen didn’t look preppy, tweedy, or professorial in any manner. In fact, he was larger than Horse, wore sneakers, blue jeans, and an open red sport shirt. His full beard and mass of half-corrected blue books were the only indications of his profession. As they entered, he waved them to a couple of chairs by the window. He finished grading a blue book and swiveled his chair to face them. “You have killings,” he bluntly stated.

  “I called Quantico and they told me you were down there last summer on a research grant to help them set up their system on serial murders.”

  “I was,” Rasmussen said. “And we had damn little to work with. You know, of course, there isn’t any definitive literature on serial murders. Everything we do is breaking new ground.”

  “People have been killing people for a long time,” Lark said. “And often in large lots.”

  Rasmussen stripped two sticks of gum and plopped them in his mouth. His jaws worked in massive movements, as if signaling his agreement with Lark. “They sure have, but we’re not talking mass murder here, we’re talking serial killings.”

  Horse looked bewildered. “It seems to be the same thing. Both are killings of large numbers of people.”

  “The motivations are entirely different,” Rasmussen said categorically. “The mental constellations are different and the methods they use are different. If some unhappy kid goes up in a tower and blows a couple of dozen people away, that’s mass murder. A guy loaded down with a personal arsenal walks into a fast-food outlet and guns down a dozen men, women, and children—that’s also a mass murderer. A guy who picks up single victims time after time over weeks, months, and even years, and kills them, that’s a serial killer. The only similarities between the two types are that neither killer knows his victim beforehand and they kill in quantity.” He extended a hand toward Lark. “Let’s see what you have.”

  Lark handed him the computer sheets and the files on the two murdered girls they had discovered. Rasmussen began to flip through the material with astonishing rapidity as he speed-read the facts. “Nice composite you fed into the computer. I’m pleased to see that the system works. Any identification of the girl you found in the state forest?”

  “I checked with the state police and found that they ID’d her almost immediately,” Lark said. “They already had a very comprehensive missing-person file open on her, complete with photographs.”

  “Any similarity between the victims’ backgrounds?” the teacher asked.

  “Outside of general age, dress, and a vague physical appearance, they were as different as two young women can be. Victim number one was a burnout who really fucked around; number two was an honor student and active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a Mormon.”

  Rasmussen flipped back through the printout. “Each killed in a different manner and yet all sexually mutilated.” He read further. “God! Frog gigs, surgical instruments, wood-burning sets, power tools … This guy’s a real sickie. He’ll keep this up until you catch him. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Lark replied. “Can you give us any direction? What sort of monster are we looking for?”

  “The most difficult kind,” Rasmussen said. “A hidden one.” He gestured at a group of bulging files cluttering a table. “I’ve done a couple of papers for the journals and law-enforcement publications, but we’re only just now scratching the surface of the serial killer.”

  “They told me at Quantico that you knew as much as anyone in the country about this kind of killing.”

  Rasmussen gave a high brittle laugh that belied his size. “Sure, and once I tell you everything I know you still won’t know anything.” He jolted his chair forward and leaned across the desk. “Here are the statistics: there are more than five thousand unsolved homicides each year in this country. The day when we could look to husband, wife, or lover as the killer is past. This means that from a ninety-percent solution rate ten years ago, we now have twenty-six percent of our homicides unsolved. Why? Because people who don’t know each other are killing each other.”

  “Armed robbery is on the increase. That would account for some.”

  “Right!” Rasmussen interjected. “Some, but not all. There’s a bunch of guys out there who drive the highways and cross state lines to pick up people and kill them. Because they’ve been doing it in different locations and with different methods, like your guy, we weren’t even aware of their existence until recently.”

  “There’s always a pattern,” Lark said. “Bad guys who do banks for a living tend to do them the same way job after job.”

  “And there’s a bank-robber mentality,” the psychologist said.

  “Sure there is,” Lark agreed. “Guys who do banks don’t do liquor stores. What kind of guy are we looking for, Doc?”

  “Okay. This man is a sexual psychopathic sadist, and believe me, that’s a lethal combination. To be more exact, characteristically he does it periodically, he hurts the victim in ways that often mutilate, there is concomitant sexual excitement, occasional revisiting the scene of the crime, and worst of all for you, he usually exhibits fairly normal behavior between the crimes.”

  “Have you been able to develop the profile further than that?”

  Rasmussen picked through one of his file folders and lifted out a single sheet. “Here’s all that I’m sure of: the man you are looking for is between the ages of twenty-five to thirty-six, and he probably grew up in a marginal home environment. He tends to select victims of murky background, such as prostitutes, or people he thinks come from this background, such as hitchhikers. He is driven by an obsessive hate of women and is forced to mutilate them, often after a torture session of varying length. Between his episodes, he might easily be married, with a normal-appearing heterosexual relationship. He is often a quiet and well-mannered-appearing individual who gives no outward signs of violence. In almost all instances, he himself is a victim of child abuse and from a broken home.”

  “And it’s random,” Lark muttered to himself. “How in the hell are we going to catch this bastard unless we catch him in the act?”

  “You might try putting his past murder scenes under surveillance,” Rasmussen said. “Often these individuals are endowed with a rich fantasy life. If they can’t immediately find a victim when the urge overtakes them, they often revisit one of the past locations where they killed.”

  “There’s a problem with that, Doc,” Lark said.

  “What’s that?”

  “This guy takes his murder site with him; he kills them in a recreational vehicle.”

  On the drive back to police headquarters, Lark stopped at a bookstore and purchased the largest map of New England that he could find. They nailed it across the wall in the small office. He sat at the desk compiling lists from the printout while Horse tacked numbered thumbtacks into the map at each murder location.

  “There they are, Lieutenant,” Horse said as he stepped back.

  Lark looked at the groupings on the map. They dotted the New England states. The southernmost tack was the body discovered in Middleburg, the case that had begun this investigation. The farthest north were those in mid New Hampshire and Vermont. “What’s that one doing in the middle of Boston?”

  Horse peered at the tack. “Number twelve. A death in the Roxbury section of Boston.”

  Lark flipped through the printout until he came to th
e case. “Whip marks,” he read aloud. “The victim was partially unclothed and death was due to suffocation, probably due to an excessively tight gag. I don’t think that one matches our MO. Take out the Boston victim and you see how all the others are in rural areas.”

  “Middleburg wasn’t. He practically put the victim in the downtown area.”

  “It looks rural, you can’t see the houses from the highway. What have we got?”

  “Twenty of the victims were left in state or national forests and were usually found in an area not far from a pond or lake. Each of the recreational areas is only a few miles from a major highway,” Horse said.

  “The first victim we found in town, the second in the Nahug State Forest, which is only a few miles from here.”

  “Three other victims in our ten-mile radius,” Horse said, “but the rest are strewn all over hell and back throughout New England.”

  “Not quite.”

  Horse took another look at the map. “Well, they are sort of bunched in areas outside Portland, Maine, and Laconia, New Hampshire, but that’s not much of a pattern.”

  “Let’s move on to time sequences,” Lark said. “I’m going to give you a list of those death dates we have that are firm within a day or two.” He began to pick dates from the printout and call them to Horse in a monotone. “It seemed to start in 1983; the first one in April, that’s victim number one. Two and three in May of that year, four and five in June, one in July, another in August, two in September, and one more in October of that year. Two more bodies were found that year, but no accurate estimate on the time of death.”

  The time sequence extended over a three-year period with the majority of the bodies discovered in two-week intervals, beginning in April and extending through September.

  “You know, Lieutenant,” Horse said when they had finished dating the pins. “We started with thirty-two, took one out, and that left us with thirty-one. This guy began three years ago, and from April through September he’s killing them on the average of two a month.”