Lark

by Forrest, Richard;

  There were many threads that led to Maurice Grossman, and one of them would lead to physical evidence strong enough to hold up in a court of law. Somewhere there were answers.

  He snatched up the phone on its first ring. “Lark here.”

  “You had better get downstairs pronto,” Horn said. “It has really hit the fan.”

  Lark walked down the hall to the far interrogation room where Maurice Grossman was held. The door was open and a cluster of men stood poised in the entry way. Frank Pemperton and Horn dominated the group. Lark pushed his way past the men in the door.

  Maurice Grossman, his mouth open, was still in the chair. His head was thrown back as he stared lifelessly at the ceiling.

  “What in the hell happened?” Lark asked.

  “You and Horn scared the poor bastard to death, that’s what happened,” Pemperton said.

  14

  Lark was on the phone with the state medical examiner. His hands were clammy. He wanted a drink. Not a beer. A drink of hard liquor, something raw and burning that would dissolve the rock resting in the pit of his stomach.

  He had never scared anyone to death before—at least he didn’t think he had. The truth of the matter was, for the past several years his collars had been young men so zonked on various substances that the impending end of the world would have elicited a mild shrug.

  She came on the line. “I told you that I’d call as soon as I could.” Her voice was edgy and tinged with impatience.

  “It’s sort of important to me, Doc.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Most of my prisoners don’t die on me like that.”

  “I wouldn’t expect so.”

  It was his turn to be impatient. “Dammit! Can you give me anything?”

  “I can give you short shrift if you keep hounding me. Let me see if we have a preliminary report. Hold it a second.”

  Jesus! He was hyperventilating. That would have to stop. Where the hell was she?

  She was back on the line with an audible rustling of papers. “I’ve got it. Your man died of a massive anteroseptal myocardial infarction.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He had a massive heart attack.”

  “At his age?”

  “He suffered from familial lipoproteinemia. It affects at an early age and was probably genetic in origin. There was no way to predict it, and he was probably unaware of the condition.”

  “Then we didn’t scare him to death?”

  “Well, not hardly. If he was under extreme stress, it would have elevated his blood pressure, increased his heart rate, and caused glandular changes that might have hastened the attack. You didn’t kill him; it would have hit in a few weeks anyway.”

  “Thanks.” Lark hung up.

  “I’ve got your and Horn’s report on the incident,” Frank Pemperton said from the doorway.

  “The ME just gave me a prelim. Grossman had a congenital heart condition. All we took was a few weeks or months of his life,” Lark said bitterly.

  “You and Horn are a pair that would scare the life out of most citizens.”

  “You know, I don’t really need that, Chief.”

  “I don’t really need suspects kicking off in my police station, particularly suspects who also happen to be radio personalities.”

  “In other words, Lambert is slinking around.”

  “Exactly,” Frank Pemperton said tiredly. “You wouldn’t recognize Grossman from the obituaries. Instead of a dirty disc jockey, he has somehow turned into an esteemed broadcast journalist. They’re after ass, Lark.”

  “Grossman may have killed more than thirty women.”

  “Do you have any evidence of that? Can we even suggest such a possibility?”

  “No,” Lark replied. “All that I have are a few circumstantial oddities and a strong hunch. There’s nothing physical that we can use. Without his confession we would never have gotten an indictment.”

  “Then what was he doing here?”

  “I had a hunch!” Lark felt himself losing control. “Any good cop has to go on his hunches.”

  Frank’s voice was not raised, but its tone was unmistakable. “Don’t try to intimidate me any further. I’ve taken enough from you recently, and my patience is at an end. Now, let me read it to you. There’s going to be a stink about that guy dying in our office, make no mistake about that. And you had better damn well give me something to go on. We have to implicate him in these killings or find ourselves another killer. Do you read me?”

  “I hear you.”

  “You had better do more than hear. Let me lay it out as clearly and concisely as I can: someone’s going to take a fall for what happened, and it isn’t going to be me. You, my boy, with your terrific background as the tough cop, are going to go, if anyone does. Do you understand?”

  “How much time do I have?”

  “I’ll give you as long as I can hold them off.”

  Horse Najankian directed traffic with true flair. It was all in body English. From his position in the center of the intersection at Main and First he dominated the eight lanes of vehicles converging on the grid. A white gloved hand with extended fingers pointed with militarylike precision at the right lane of Main Street. The hand snapped back in a swing. The signal was obvious, and traffic jumped to obey. Like a general commanding hordes of charging calvary he continued his directions.

  Lark heeded his partner’s signal and started through the intersection only to stop next to Horse. “We’ve unfinished business,” he said to the traffic cop.

  “Leave me alone and move on,” Horse said smartly.

  “Get in.”

  The cars on First moved through the intersection until commanded to halt by another imperious gesture. “I like traffic.”

  “You’re without a pension if you don’t get in the truck now.” Lark leaned across the seat and opened the door on the passenger’s side.

  Horse got in. “You give me no choice. Let them sort themselves out.”

  “Gridlock on First and Main,” Lark said into the radio.

  Horse looked at Lark obliquely as they drove through the streets of Middleburg. “Where are we going?”

  “Station WGBZ.”

  “Horn told me what happened when he called me at home and put me back on traffic. Have you cleared this with him?”

  “I will when we get back.”

  “You don’t need me for this, Lieutenant.”

  “I need you when I say I do.”

  “You know, Lark, you aren’t so tough.”

  “I’m mean enough to chew you up and spit you out.”

  “That pension threat was a low blow.”

  “I had to get your attention.”

  Horse sighed. “Okay, what’s going on? Do we still have the guru and the Lawton kid as suspects?”

  “Negative. The Lawton kid was in jail during the last murder, and the Magus-guru and his girl left town before it happened. That leaves Grossman, and we have to tie him in so we can close the file.”

  “Or find someone else?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that I never believed Grossman did the killings. As they say, I think it’s party or parties unknown.”

  Lark pursed his lips. “We don’t have anything on any parties unknown. Load your gun and shut up.”

  The athletic station manager of WGBZ was putting golf balls into a cup when they were ushered into his office. The Middleburg Times crime reporter, Randy Lambert, still wearing the same rumpled suit, lounged in a comfortable chair holding a drink of bourbon and Coke.

  The station manager missed his putt when he saw the two police officers standing in the doorway. “I heard what you did to Johnny. I want you to know that we’re doing an exposé on it. This isn’t going to drop. You and the police department are going to pay for hounding Johnny that way.”

  “I’ll probably get a Pulitzer for my exposé in the paper,” Lambert said as he finished his drink and clinked ice.

/>   “I’d like to see Maurice Grossman’s personnel file and any other date you have on him. I also want the station logs for the entire time he was here.”

  “Bug off,” the station manager said as he bent his head to putt. “You get nothing without a court order.”

  “That can be arranged.”

  “The lieutenant hates paperwork,” Horse said. “If he has to go to trouble like that, he might not be too pleasant.”

  “Pleasant like he was to the Méndez kid,” Lambert said as he helped himself to more bourbon from a bottle on the credenza.

  The station manager looked up from his putt. “Méndez? Who’s that?”

  “He fell down the stairs, that can happen during an arrest,” Horse said in defense.

  “He fell down the stairs twice,” Lambert added.

  Lark sighed. “Well, if I have to get a court order, I’ll do it when I take that DJ in the front window down for booking.”

  “What?” The station manager missed a putt by a yard.

  “That’s right. I thought you should know that he’s flashing his member to a bunch of teenage girls standing outside.”

  “That’s a lie!”

  “I’m a witness,” Horse said. “He was completely unzipped and waving it back and forth. I think he was playing a record by the Doors at the time.”

  “This is extortion.”

  “The lieutenant hates to go through the paperwork of booking minor offenses,” Horse said.

  “I like your style,” Lambert said.

  “What are you doing down here?” Lark asked the reporter.

  “The same thing you are, getting background on Maurice Grossman. It’s going to be one hell of a feature story. Prominent radio personality beaten to death during police interrogration.”

  “The medical examiner said he had a congenital heart problem.”

  “You guys all stick together.”

  “You want me to bust that DJ now or let him finish his program, Lieutenant?”

  “Now,” Lark answered. “We can’t have such goings-on.”

  “Okay,” the station manager said as he slammed his putter into a golf bag in the corner. “What do you want me to get?”

  They worked in the station manager’s office, who, once he had begun to cooperate, cooperated with a vengeance. He kept sending in more material as if he wanted to crush them with the very weight of the files. Little of it pertained to Maurice Grossman.

  “We don’t need that,” Horse said as a secretary tried to deliver a year’s supply of tapes. He had just returned from a trip to Lark’s office, and now their meticulous time chart, listing the killings on a map, rested on top of the credenza.

  They began to recapitulate Johnny Gross’s movements by using the logs, tapes, interviews, and receipts. As the office sank into shadows, Horse threw the overhead light, moved a mass of tapes from an easy chair, and sank back against the cushions. “When are you going to admit it, Lieutenant?” The guy was at a broadcasting convention when the body found on Mark Street was killed.”

  “Admit what?” Lark snapped. “That he outsmarted us? What’s with you, Najankian, taking a break?”

  “It doesn’t work out.”

  “It does. There’s a hole somewhere. Maurice Grossman, aka Johnny Gross, has been knocking off women for years.”

  “You’re looking for a hole that doesn’t exist.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “The trouble with you, Lieutenant, is that you’re like most street cops: everyone is guilty until proven innocent.” Horse stalked the room, snatching up receipts and notes on telephone calls they had made to other stations where Grossman had worked. He pointed to the map. “He couldn’t have killed the girl on Mark Street.”

  “He had no real alibi for the girl in the state forest.”

  “Or this killing.” Horse pointed to another pin. “But during his time in Springfield he was doing a telethon when victim twenty-seven was murdered. It doesn’t work.”

  “More prerecorded broadcasts or he could have used his wife to sign credit receipts for places he wasn’t at. The man was smart.”

  “You’re reaching.”

  Lark’s gaze shifted from one pile of documentation to another. “He’s all we have.”

  “You want to lay it on a dead man so that we can close files? What happens when there’s another killing with the same MO?”

  “Then we’re back to square one.”

  “You are. I’m back on traffic.”

  Lark dropped the personnel file he had been holding. “I wonder where they keep the booze.”

  “It’s on the credenza behind the map. There’s no answers in a bottle.”

  “Jesus, Horse, do you have any other inspirational messages to impart?”

  “There’s something up there.” He made a sweeping gesture across the map with its mass of minutely inscribed detail. “But we just aren’t seeing it. There’s a pattern that ought to tell us something.”

  “Not necessarily. The guy picks his victims at random.”

  “They all fall into the same age group and most were hitchhiking,” the uniformed officer replied.

  “They and a million other women. He’s a serial killer picking his victims over a five-state area.”

  They both stared at the map with its colored pins denoting the locations of murder.

  “The info tells us a couple of things,” Horse said. “The victims reach up to mid-Vermont and New Hampshire.”

  “And every other rural area through New England.”

  “Wait a minute!” Horse waved his hand over the map at the upper regions of New England. “There aren’t any killings in upper Maine or in the White Mountains, and the same for Vermont. The guy has limits. Limits in time or driving distance or something. He’s also got a home where he lives.”

  “Unless he lives in the camper.”

  “I don’t think so, because of the periodic nature of the killings. They happen in regular intervals, planned intervals. We also know that he’s begun to send tapes of his killings to Grossman at this station. I think he lives within the range of this station.”

  “Which narrows it down to a few hundred thousand people,” Lark said.

  “Of which half are women, some are too young, and others are too old. We’re looking for a guy between twenty and forty who lives near here and owns a camper.”

  “Which is still too broad,” Lark said.

  Horse returned to the map. “There has to be something in the pattern, the time and the reason for the sequence.”

  “Like the fishing season.”

  “As best we can tell from the medical evidence available,” Horse said, “he does it every ten to fourteen days for part of the year.”

  Lark’s interest was piqued sufficiently to temporarily overcome his depression. “Do the dates always fall on weekends?”

  “Once in a while, they are simply ten days to two weeks apart. It’s as if he gets a couple of days off every two weeks or so and goes traveling for entertainment.”

  “Okay, let’s recap what we know about his games: from the tapes and the profile Rasmussen gave us, we know he’s a guy between twenty and forty; from the tire tracks and the door sounds we recorded, we know he’s driving a recreational vehicle.”

  “And that he kills them inside the camper,” Horse added.

  “After torturing them without a gag, which means that he’s made some unusual modifications to the inside of his camper to stifle sound.”

  They began to get caught in the excitement of the analysis. “He sent tapes to Gross, which means he has a permanent home within twenty miles of here,” Horse said.

  “He kills in ten- to fourteen-day cycles, probably days he has off from his job shift.”

  “Shift?” Horse looked puzzled.

  Lark waved a deprecating hand. “I think in terms of shifts because I’m a cop and have worked days and nights all my life.”

  “Yeah, but except for those of us on traffic, the department work
s a twenty-eight-day shift cycle, including days off.”

  “That’s because we change shifts every month,” Lark said impatiently. “Most places work a permanent day-and-night shift.”

  “My brother-in-law in Scranton works a ten-day rotating shift, and has for years,” Horse said.

  “Ten days on and four off?”

  “Something like that. He likes it because those four-day chunks of time give him the opportunity for hunting or—”

  “Fishing,” Lark interrupted. He stood stock-still in the center of the room. “There can’t be many plants and businesses in a twenty-mile radius that work a rotating shift.”

  “And when we find the ones that do, we could compare their dates with our time chart. Jesus, Lieutenant, I bet there’s only a couple, maybe one, in our area that would fit our time chart.”

  “And of the men on that shift in that particular factory, how many would own campers?” Lark shook his head. “It’s thin, but it’s all we have.”

  Randy Lambert entered the room. He reminded Lark of a cat he once had who looked furtive on the most mundane of missions. “I’ve been downtown, Lark, and I’ve got it all.”

  “Good for you, Randy.”

  “We’re busy, sir,” Horse said.

  Lambert ignored the comment. “You and that big jigaboo scared the fucker to death.”

  Lark’s fist instantly lashed out and connected with Lambert’s face. The reporter tumbled backward over a chair and fell in a heap against the far wall. Lark brushed the bruised knuckles on his hand.

  “The lieutenant believes in instant retaliation,” Horse said while trying not to smile.

  “You’ll pay for this, Lark! I swear to God, I’ll haunt you in my column every damn day until you’re kicked off the force. And that doesn’t include the lawsuit I’m laying on you tomorrow.”

  “You do that, Randy,” Lark said, “and you won’t be able to leave your driveway without a traffic ticket. Drink one beer in a bar and you won’t make it home without a DUI charge. Twenty-two percent of the police force in this town is black, and they’re going to hear what you said. One word, one column about this, and your name goes to every black cop in town.”