Kane

by Steve Gannon

  “This is ridiculous. What are we supposed to have done?”

  “Now!”

  Reluctantly, Wes stood. Hands above his head, he shuffled forward. Turned. Briefly, Julie saw his face. For the first time since she had known him, Wes looked afraid.

  The man stood behind Wes. Abruptly, the flashlight beam arced to the ceiling and descended with dazzling swiftness. Julie heard a hollow clunk, as though someone had thumped a melon.

  “Uhh…” Wes groaned, sinking to his knees. Again the brutal arc of the light. Wes crumbled to the carpet, twitching like a clubbed steer.

  Instantly the beam flicked to the bed. “Don’t make a sound, Mrs. Welsh. If you resist, I’ll hurt your husband.”

  “You’re not the police.”

  “Shut up.” The man moved to the door and retrieved a small bag from the hallway. He knelt beside Wes. Julie heard the sound of a zipper. This can’t be happening, she thought. In desperation, she considered making a run for it. If she could get to the front door…

  Too far. And what about the children?

  After placing a knee in the center of Wes’s back, the man reached into his bag and withdrew something. He fumbled at Wes’s hands and feet, then wrapped a strip of cloth around Wes’s head, taking numerous turns. Next he moved to the bed.

  “There’s cash in my purse downstairs,” Julie said, hearing the fear in her voice. “My husband has more in his wallet, and there’s jewelry on the dresser. Take whatever you want and go.”

  “I intend to.” The man moved closer. Slowly, he played his light over Julie’s body, the beam traveling the revealing fabric of her nightgown from shoulders to waist and back again, lingering on her breasts.

  Julie pulled up the sheets.

  “Keep your hands raised,” the man said huskily.

  Julie lifted her arms. “Please don’t hurt us.”

  “I said if you cooperated, no one would get hurt, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, but-”

  “Didn’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “I lied.”

  “No, please,” Julie begged. “You don’t have to-”

  The first blow struck her temple, driving her against the headboard. The second broke the bridge of her nose, sending a warm salty gush onto her face.

  At first she didn’t feel the pain. Instead, dazed and disoriented, she experienced a kaleidoscopic burst of light and a confusion of images. She shook her head, trying to clear her vision. For the next few seconds she hung suspended in a limbo of shock and disbelief, feeling her wrists and ankles being fastened to the corners of the bed and a terrible choking gag being wrapped around her face. Moaning, she clung to the belief that this couldn’t be happening to her. To someone else, maybe. Not to her.

  When he finished, the man leaned over her. “There’re two little details I have to take care of first,” he whispered, his voice as gentle as a lover’s. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  Taking his bag with him, the man disappeared into the darkness. Julie lay stunned, gulping against the seep of blood running down the back of her throat. Sucking air through her gag between swallows, she struggled to clear her mind.

  Panicking won’t help. There has to be a way out. Think!

  Lifting her head, she could make out Wes’s body beside the bed. He wasn’t moving. Straining, she tried to reach the knots at her wrists. Couldn’t. She fought against her bonds. They held her fast. At last, sobbing with exhaustion, she lay still.

  Minutes later the man returned. By then Wes had begun to stir. The intruder stopped to inspect Wes’s restraints, then crossed to the bed. Humming, he set his bag on the comforter.

  Numbly, Julie watched as he withdrew a number of cylindrical objects. One he placed on the nightstand, two others he distributed about the room. She heard the strike of a match, smelled the acrid tang of sulfur. A grotesque dance of light and shadow flickered across the ceiling.

  Candles.

  At that instant, Julie Welsh realized she was going to die.

  The man stood beside the bed. “Do you know who I am?”

  Julie stared up, her eyes wide with terror. And suddenly she knew, recognizing the soft tones of the man who had dented her fender. She also realized that wasn’t what he was asking.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  Through tears of helplessness, Julie nodded.

  “Good.”

  Almost reverently, the man withdrew the remaining contents of his bag. He held up each in turn, rotating it in his gloved hands before Julie’s eyes. They were ordinary objects, household objects: a small scissors, clothesline rope, a length of pipe, a tape recorder, camera, and a short-bladed kitchen knife. Yet as the bag surrendered its items, Julie came to know the horror that was to be hers. Sensing that her terror gave the man pleasure, she tried not to show it… and failed.

  After he had emptied his bag, the man picked up the rope, then the pipe and scissors. Humming softly, he turned toward Wes. Helpless, Julie watched as the man dragged her husband to the bathroom door. There he forced Wes to a kneeling position, passed a loop of rope under his arms, and fastened him to the knob. A second rope went around Wes’s throat, the pipe through the coils. Terrible minutes passed. Sobbing, Julie witnessed her husband’s hideous mutilation, able to do nothing.

  Satisfied with the results of his surgery, the man returned to the bed and removed his clothes. Never taking his eyes from Julie, he turned on the tape recorder and set it beside the candle on the night table. Next he climbed onto the bed. Leaning down, he whispered in her ear, his breath hot and fetid as he told her what he had done in the children’s rooms.

  And then he began.

  It started slowly. At first gentle, almost tender, the bites gradually grew in force and urgency, burning across her torso with stinging insistence, no place inviolate. Unable to scream, Julie whimpered and writhed as their ferocity increased, dumfounded by the excruciating sensation of being chewed and bitten and savaged, of feeling human teeth tearing into her flesh. And then came the knife.

  For what seemed forever, Julie Welsh drifted through a nightmare of degradation and torture, a netherworld in which the concept of time lost all significance. Instead, she existed from moment to moment, experiencing an eternity of anguish in the passing of a heartbeat. Often she believed she could endure no more, only to experience some renewed misery at the hands and teeth and blade of the man who had come in the night. Occasionally she lost consciousness, suspended in a haze of oblivion where her suffering seemed blissfully distant. Cruelly he brought her back, again and again, returning her to the unfathomable horror of her torment. And as always, when she returned, she saw his malignant, bottle cap eyes floating above her, watching…

  Rain beat against the bedroom window, continuing long into the night. The droplets drummed against the glass, streaking like tears across the panes, trickling down in twisted rivulets. From time to time, when the man paused to prepare some new diversion, Julie gazed into the darkness beyond. In a distant part of her mind she wondered when it would be over. She prayed it would end soon.

  It did not.

  Hours later death came to Julie Welsh, arriving on wings of agony and despair. As her ordeal drew to a close at last, her final thoughts were of her children.

  25

  A girlfriend of Julie’s discovered the bodies the following morning. Upon arriving at the Welsh house, Newport Beach detectives quickly recognized the murder pattern as consistent with the ongoing Candlelight Killer investigation. Accordingly, they sealed the premises and contacted the task force. Upon receiving their call, Lieutenant Huff dispatched two investigative teams to the scene-Barrello and Fuentes from Orange County, Deluca and me from LA-reasoning that each team had worked a prior occurrence and thereby stood a chance of noticing something others might miss. To my surprise, Snead didn’t object.

  Later, the task force met for the second time that day. The two Newport Beach homicide investigators who had first arrived at the Welsh house, having subseque
ntly been detailed to our unit, stood at the back of the crowded room. With their addition, the task force now numbered fifteen.

  Lieutenant Huff arrived late. He entered accompanied by Dr. Sidney Berns, the forensic psychiatrist who had attended our first meeting. The room quieted, the mood bleak. Lieutenant Snead stepped to the front. “Who wants to lead off? Barrello?”

  Yes, sir,” said Barrello, shuffling through his notes. “Preliminary results indicate that the victims died last night between the hours of twelve midnight and four AM. The children were smothered with plastic bags. Liver temps indicate they were murdered about two hours before the parents. The husband was strangled with clothesline rope and a length of pipe. The woman died of multiple stab wounds.”

  “Same guy,” said Huff.

  “Yes, sir. No doubt about it-candles, plastic ties, cut eyelids, the murder knife taken from the kitchen.”

  “We’re still holding back several of those descriptors,” interjected Snead. “There’s no chance of a copycat?”

  “No sir. No chance.”

  “What about the woman? Bites? Multiple knife wounds?”

  “The official eight-by-tens aren’t available yet, but Kane took some shots. It’s worse this time.”

  “Kane? You have those pictures?”

  I handed a deck of photos to the man on my left, who passed them down the line one by one. As the photographs circled the room, even the most hardened detectives fell silent.

  Finally someone spoke. “What kind of animal would do this?”

  No one ventured an answer.

  “Let’s keep moving,” suggested Huff. “Kane, anything to add?”

  “It’s definitely the same guy,” I said. “There are differences, though. This time he came over a side gate and turned off the electrical power at the meter outside. We found shoe scuffs on the gate and got footprint casts in the dirt by the patio. Mud on the carpet indicates that he entered the house through a patio door off the family room. No sign of a break-in.”

  “What, no tampering with the garage lights?” Snead said sarcastically.

  “No, sir,” I admitted, adding, “One of the family cars did have a recent scrape.”

  “In that case, is there any indication that the Welshes visited a repair shop? An estimate, insurance papers, anything?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  “So the Welshes’ vehicle has a scraped fender, like a million others in the city,” Snead pointed out with exaggerated patience. “Look, Kane. The killer jumped a side gate and entered the Welshes’ home through an unlocked door, not the garage. He turned off the power at the meter, requiring no prior reconnaissance. And there’s no indication he visited the scene on any other occasion. It’s time we forget your garage reconnaissance theory and concentrate on the facts.”

  I bristled. Earlier that day, following the discovery of the Newport Beach murders, Alonzo Domingos had been released from custody. As a result, I knew that Snead had spent a good portion of the afternoon getting chewed out in the chief’s tenth-floor office. “I know what’s crawling up your skirt here, Lieutenant,” I shot back. “It wasn’t my idea to pop Domingos. I was the one who wanted to put him under surveillance, remember?”

  “If it hadn’t been for your initiating that line of investigation in the first place, we would never have-”

  “Finger pointing won’t accomplish anything,” Huff interrupted. “We all look bad on this, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Barrello, finish your report.”

  Barrello referred again to his notes, then shook his head. “That’s mostly it,” he admitted regretfully. “None of the neighbors saw or heard anything. The coroner’s doing the posts tomorrow. As for the lab work, we took swabs and smears from each victim, pubic combings and found hairs from the bed sheets and bathrooms, and prints from the doors, bedrooms, and the electrical meter. The murder weapons were clean, again suggesting that the killer wore gloves.”

  “Kane? Anything to add?”

  “No, sir, except that we should cross-check everything against trace evidence from the other scenes. Maybe something will show up.”

  Huff sighed, glancing at the wall chart. Since first initiated, the poster graph had grown to a web of interconnected items that now extended halfway around the room. “Who’s got something new? Liman? You and Fuentes come up with anything linking the first two families?”

  “Nothing,” said Liman. “We went through their records, ran down everybody who had keys, and talked with neighbors, coworkers, and family members. Came up cold on all fronts.”

  Huff referred to his notes. “Shanelec? You took the plumbing logo.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Shanelec. “I’ve phoned every paint shop and magnetic sign manufacturer from here to San Diego. If the guy had a phony sign made, it wasn’t done around here.”

  “Widen your search.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Huff turned to Snead. “Any progress with the federal inquiries?”

  Snead scowled. “None,” he said, still fuming over his run-in with me. “No hits on the prints, and our NCIC inquiry turned up negative. I heard from the feds at Quantico this morning, too. Negative on the VICAP search.”

  Huff made a notation in his folder. “Okay, let’s proceed to new business. Two Newport Beach detectives are joining the unit: Dick Feimer and Greg Sugita.”

  Several members of the task force, including me, nodded at the newcomers.

  “Four other detective pairs will also be joining our ranks,” Huff continued. “Two teams from LAPD, two from Orange County.” He picked up a stack of papers from his desk, took one, and handed the remainder to Liman to distribute. “These are copies of the FBI profile we requested. Over the past weeks I’ve had a number of conversations with the Bureau, including a conference call yesterday between me, Dr. Berns, Special Agent Clay Hatcher, who’s the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office profile coordinator, and Douglas Mark of their Investigative Support Unit in Virginia. I’ve asked Dr. Berns to give us his overview on what the FBI behaviorists came up with. By the way, this report is strictly confidential. Heads will roll if any of it turns up in the papers. Sid, you want to take it from here?”

  Dr. Berns made his way to the front of the assembly. As he did, I began flipping through the pages I’d been given, noting that the FBI team had organized their work into a number of sections including victimology, crime-scene analysis, a dissection of the crimes themselves, an evaluation of the police reports and autopsy protocols, psychological conclusions concerning the killer, and a final page offering suggestions that might lead to the killer’s apprehension. This last page interested me most.

  Berns reached the front of the room, adjusted his glasses, and began. “I’ll make this quick,” he said. “The killer’s timetable has shortened. The interval between the first two murders was twenty-five days; the murders last night followed in fifteen. In addition, the killings have become more violent. We can expect these trends to continue.”

  “How can they get more violent?” someone asked.

  Ignoring the comment, Berns opened his copy of the report. “You’ll find that the FBI autopsy mostly agrees with my initial assessment-with a few noteworthy exceptions. I’ll summarize their conclusions, skimming over sections that add nothing new and discussing in more detail areas where I disagree, but I strongly suggest you read the report in its entirety.

  “First of all, the FBI’s analysis of the first two families reveals the victims to be low-risk, high-profile individuals. The third family falls in the same category. For this reason and other similarities in the crimes, including the killings having taken place in highly populated, middle class neighborhoods, the family members are not categorized as victims of opportunity and were probably selected well before their murders.”

  “They were stalked,” said Collins.

  “Correct,” said Berns. “The killer knew his victims, at least marginally. Furthermore, with the exception of replacing the husbands’ bodies in bed and cover
ing his victims with a blanket-something that the behaviorists agree is probably ritualistic and not representative of any form of remorse-the killer is making no effort at concealment. This indicates a desire for recognition. His violence is close-range and confrontational, with varying degrees of savagery inflicted on various family members, although his rage is primarily directed toward women. Nonetheless, the familial aspect of the crimes should not be overlooked.

  “Second: In brief, analysis of the crime scenes demonstrates the killer’s willingness to modify them to suit his needs. He feels comfortable in the homes, taking hours to complete his crimes. He employs disparate methods to kill each member, for the most part using materials brought with him. These factors, along with the lack of evidence found at the scenes, suggest a high degree of organization and planning, both before and after committing the crimes.

  “The third section is fairly long, but what it boils down to is this: The autopsies show that although the husbands were not sexually molested, the killer performed postmortem acts on the women, revealing a necrosadistic sexual motivation.”

  “Meaning the guy has to kill to achieve orgasm?” asked Deluca.

  “Right,” Berns replied. “Leaving the bodies in positions of repose, the killer’s use of candles, his cutting of the husbands’ eyelids, and the different techniques employed to kill other family members all demonstrate a high level of ritualism. This, taken with the degree of organization and planning shown throughout other phases of the crimes, suggests a killer who has reached an advanced state of development. In addition to torture, the other common element in his murders is a preselection of victims, probably focusing on the wife, although again the familial aspect should not be considered coincidental.

  “The next section contains the FBI’s physical and psychological assessment of the killer. It’s open to interpretation, but some parts may prove useful. Most of it parallels the analysis I already gave you, but there are a few new things. The profilers think the killer may have a record of criminal and psychological disturbances. If a criminal background is present, instances of assault and rape would be expected. If he’s been institutionalized in a mental hospital, the diagnosis would probably have been manic depressive psychosis or paranoid schizophrenia. They also think he’s of slightly above-average intelligence, and that jewelry, clothing, other personal items taken from his victims may have been given to others.”