Quentin Altman grew more attentive. Twenty-eight-year-old Kimberly had been strangled to death eight months ago. The murder occurred two weeks after a similar killing — of a young female grad student. The two deaths appeared to be the work of the same person but there were few forensic leads and no motive that anyone could determine. The cases prompted a task force investigation but eventually the suspects were cleared and the case grew cold.
Tall and gaunt, with tendons and veins rising from his pale skin, reporter Wallace tried — usually unsuccessfully — to tone down his intimidating physique and face with brown tweed jackets, corduroy slacks and pastel shirts. He asked the cop, “You remember how the whole town was paranoid after the first girl was killed? And how everybody was double locking their doors and never letting strangers into their houses?”
Altman nodded.
“Well, look at this.” The reporter pulled latex gloves out of his pocket and put them on.
“Why the gloves, Wallace?”
The man ignored the question and dug a book out of his battered briefcase. Altman got a look at the title. Two Deaths in a Small Town. He’d never heard of it.
“This was published six months before the first killing.” He opened the book to a yellow Post-it tab and pushed it forward. “Read those paragraphs.” The detective pulled on his CVS drugstore glasses and leaned forward.
The Hunter knew that now that he’d killed once, the town would be more alert than ever. Its soul would be edgier, its collective nerves would be as tense as an animal trap’s blue-steel spring. Women would not stroll the streets alone and those who did would be looking around constantly, alert for any risk. Only a fool would let a stranger into her house and the Hunter did not enjoy killing fools.
So on Tuesday night he waited until bedtime — 11:00 p.m. — and then slipped onto Maple Street. There, he doused a parked convertible’s roof with gasoline and ignited the pungent, amber liquid. A huge whoosh… He hid in the bushes and, hypnotized by the tornado of flames and ebony smoke swirling into the night sky above the dying car, he waited. In ten minutes behemoths of fire trucks roared up the street, their wailing sirens drawing people from their homes to find out what the excitement might be.
Among those on the sidewalk was a young, demure blonde with a heart-shaped face, Clara Steading. This was the woman the Hunter knew he had to possess — possess completely. She was love incarnate, Amore herself, she was Beauty, she was Passion…. And she was also completely ignorant of her role as the object of his demented desire. Clara shivered in her bathrobe, standing on the sidewalk, along with a clutch of chattery neighbors, as they watched the firemen extinguish the blaze and offered words of sympathy to the dismayed owner of the car, who lived a few doors away.
Finally the onlookers grew bored, or repulsed by the bitter smell of the burnt rubber and plastic, and they returned to their beds or their late-night snacks or their mind-numbing TV. But their vigilance didn’t flag; the moment they stepped inside, every one of them locked their doors and windows carefully — to make certain that the strangler would not wreak his carnage in their homes.
Though in Clara Steading’s case, her diligence in securing the deadbolt and chains had a somewhat different effect: locking the Hunter inside with her.
“Jesus,” Altman muttered. “That’s just what happened in the Kimberly Banning case, how the perp got inside. He set fire to a car.”
“A convertible,” Wallace added. “And then I went back and found some passages that’d been marked. One of them was about how the killer had stalked his victim by pretending to work for the city and trimming the plants in a park across from her apartment.”
This was just how the first victim of the Greenville Strangler, the pretty grad student, had been stalked.
Wallace pointed out several other passages, marked with asterisks. There were margin notes too. One said, “Check this one out. Important.” Another jotting was “Used distraction.” And: “Disposing of body. Note this.”
“So the killer’s a copycat,” Altman murmured. “He used the novel for research.”
Which meant that there could be evidence in the book that might lead to the perp: fingerprints, ink, handwriting. Hence, the reporter’s CSI gloves.
Altman stared at the melodramatic dust jacket on the novel — a drawing of a man’s silhouette peering into the window of a house. The detective pulled on his own latex gloves and slipped the book into an evidence envelope. He nodded at the reporter and said a heartfelt “Thanks. We haven’t had a lead on this one in over eight months.”
Walking into the office next to his — that of his assistant, a young crew-cut detective named Josh Randall — he instructed the man to take the book to the county lab for analysis. When he returned, Wallace was still sitting expectantly in the hard chair across from Altman’s desk.
Altman wasn’t surprised he hadn’t left. “And the quid pro quo?” the detective asked. “For your good deed?”
“I want an exclusive. What else?”
“I figured.”
Altman didn’t mind this in theory; cold cases were bad for the department’s image and solving cold cases was good for a cop’s career. Not to mention that there was still a killer out there. He’d never liked Wallace, though, who always seemed a little out of control in a spooky way and was as irritating as most crusaders usually are.
“Okay, you’ve got an exclusive,” Altman said. “I’ll keep you posted.” He rose then paused. Waited for Wallace to leave.
“Oh, I’m not going anywhere, my friend.”
“This’s an official investigation—”
“And it wouldn’t’ve been one without me. I want to write this one from the inside out. Tell my readers how a homicide investigation works from your point of view.”
Quentin Altman argued some more but in the end he gave in, feeling he had no choice. “All right. But just don’t get in my way. You do that, you’re out of here.”
“Wouldn’t think of it.” Wallace frowned an eerie look into his long, toothy face. “I might even be helpful.” Maybe it was a joke but there was nothing humorous about the delivery. He then looked up at the detective. “So whatta we do next?”
“Well, you’re going to cool your heels. I’m going to review the case file.”
“But—”
“Relax, Wallace. Investigations take time. Sit back, take your jacket off. Enjoy our wonderful coffee.”
Wallace glanced at the closet that served as the police station’s canteen. He rolled his eyes and the ominous tone of earlier was replaced with a laugh. “Funny. I didn’t know they still made instant.”
The detective winked and ambled down the hall on his aching bones.
* * *
Quentin Altman hadn’t run the Greenville Strangler case.
He’d worked on it some — the whole department’d had a piece of the case — but the officer in charge had been Bob Fletcher, a sergeant who’d been on the force forever. Fletcher, who’d never remarried after his wife left him some years before, and was childless, had devoted his life to his job after the divorce and seemed to take his inability to solve the Strangler case hard; the soft-spoken man had actually given up a senior spot in Homicide and transferred to Robbery. Altman was now glad for the sergeant’s sake that there was a chance to nail the killer who’d eluded him.
Altman wandered down to Robbery with the news about the novel and to see if Fletcher knew anything about it. The sergeant, though, was out in the field at the moment and so Altman left a message and then dove into the cluttered and oppressively hot records room. He found the Strangler files easily; the folders sported red stripes on the side, a harsh reminder that, while this might’ve been a cold case, it was still very much open.
Returning to his office, he sat back, sipping the, yeah, disgusting instant coffee, and read the file, trying to ignore Wallace’s incessant scribbling on his steno pad, the scratchy noise irritatingly audible throughout the office. The events of the murders were well
documented. The perp had broken into two women’s apartments and strangled them. There’d been no rape, sexual molestation or postmortem mutilation. Neither woman had ever been stalked or threatened by former boyfriends and, though Kimberly had recently purchased some condoms, none of her friends knew that she’d been dating. The other victim, Becky Winthrop, her family said, hadn’t dated for over a year.
Sergeant Fletcher had carried out a by-the-book investigation but most killings of this sort, without witnesses, motive or significant trace found at the scene, are generally not solved without the help of an informant — often a friend or acquaintance of the perp. But, despite extensive press coverage of the investigation and pleas on TV by the mayor and Fletcher, no one had come forward with any information about possible suspects.
An hour later, just as he closed the useless file, Altman’s phone rang. The documents department had blown up images of the handwriting and was prepared to compare these to any samples found elsewhere, though until such specimens were found the officers could do nothing.
The techs had also checked for any impression evidence — to see if the killer had written something on, say, a Post-it note on top of one of the pages — but found nothing.
A ninhydrin analysis revealed a total of nearly two hundred latent fingerprints on the three pages on which the marked paragraphs appeared and another eighty on the jacket. Unfortunately many of them were old and only fragments. Technicians had located a few that were clear enough to be identified and had run them through the FBI’s integrated automated fingerprint identification system in West Virginia. But all the results had come back negative.
The cover of the book, wrapped in print-friendly cellophane, yielded close to four hundred prints but they too were mostly smudges and fragments. IAFIS had provided no positive IDs for these either.
Frustrated, he thanked the technician and hung up.
“So what was that about?” Wallace asked, looking eagerly at the sheet of paper in front of Altman, which contained both notes on the conversation he’d just had — and a series of compulsive doodles.
He explained to the reporter about the forensic results.
“So no leads,” Wallace summarized and jotted a note, leaving the irritated detective to wonder why the reporter’d actually found it necessary to write this observation down.
As he gazed at the reporter an idea occurred to Altman and he stood up abruptly. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Your crime scene.”
“Mine?” Wallace asked, scrambling to follow the detective as he strode out the door.
* * *
The library near Gordon Wallace’s apartment, where he’d checked out the novel Two Deaths in a Small Town, was a branch in the Three Pines neighborhood of Greenville, so named because legend had it that three trees in a park here had miraculously survived the fire of 1829, which had otherwise destroyed the rest of the town. It was a nice area, populated mostly by businessmen, professionals and educators; the college was nearby (the same school where the first Strangler victim had been a student).
Altman followed Wallace inside and the reporter found the head of the branch, introduced her to the detective. Mrs. McGiver was a trim woman dressed in stylish gray; she looked more like a senior executive with a high-tech company than a librarian.
The detective explained how they suspected the book had been used by a copycat as a model for the killings. Shock registered on the woman’s face as she realized that the Strangler was somebody who’d been to her library. Perhaps he was even someone she knew.
“I’d like a list of everybody who checked out that book.” Altman had considered the possibility that the killer might not have checked it out but had merely looked through it here, in the library itself. But that meant he’d have to underline the passages in public and risk drawing the attention of librarians or patrons. He concluded that the only safe way for the Strangler to do his homework was at home.
“I’ll see what I can find,” she said.
Altman had thought that it might take days to pull together this information but Mrs. McGiver was back in minutes. Altman felt his gut churning with excitement as he gazed at the sheets of paper in her hand, relishing the sensations of the thrill of the hunt and pleasure at finding a fruitful lead.
But as he flipped through the sheets, he frowned. Every one of the thirty or so people checking out Two Deaths had done so recently — within the last six months. They needed the names of those who’d checked it out before the killings eight months ago. He explained this to her.
“Oh, but we don’t have records that far back. Normally we would, but about six months ago our computer was vandalized.”
“Vandalized?”
She nodded, frowning. “Somebody poured battery acid or something into the hard drives. Ruined them and destroyed all our records. The backup too. Somebody from your department handled the case. I don’t remember who.”
Wallace said, “I didn’t hear about it.”
“They never found who did it. It was very troubling but more of an inconvenience than anything. Imagine if he’d decided to destroy the books themselves.”
Altman caught Wallace’s eye. “Dead end,” the cop said angrily. Then he asked the librarian, “How ’bout the names of everybody who had a library card then? Were their names in the computer too?”
She nodded. “Prior to six months ago, they’re gone too. I’m sorry.”
Forcing a smile onto his face, he thanked the librarian and walked to the doorway. But he stopped so suddenly that Wallace nearly slammed into his back.
“What?” the reporter asked.
Altman ignored him and hurried back to the main desk, calling out, “Mrs. McGiver! Hold up there! I need you to find out something for me.”
Drawing glares and a couple of harsh shhhh’s from readers.
* * *
The author of Two Deaths in a Small Town, Andrew M. Carter, lived in Hampton Station, near Albany, about two hours away from Greenville.
Mrs. McGiver’s copy of Who’s Who in Contemporary Mystery Writing didn’t include street addresses or phone numbers but Altman called the DMV and they tracked down the specifics.
The idea that occurred to Altman as he was leaving the library was that Carter might’ve gotten a fan letter from the Strangler. Maybe he’d written to express some admiration, maybe he’d asked for more information or how the author had done his research. If there was such a letter the county forensic handwriting expert could easily link the notation with the fan, who — if they were lucky — might have signed his real name to the letter and included his address.
Mentally crossing his fingers he placed a call to the author. A woman answered. “Hello?”
“I’m Detective Altman with the Greenville Police Department,” he said. “I’d like to speak to Andrew Carter.”
“I’m his wife,” she said. “He’s not available.” The matter-of-fact tone in her voice suggested that this was her knee-jerk response to all such calls.
“When will he be available?”
“This is about the murders, isn’t it?”
“That’s right, ma’am.”
A hesitation. “The thing is…” Her voice lowered and Altman suspected that her unavailable husband was in a nearby room. “He hasn’t been well.”
“I’m sorry,” Altman said. “Is it serious?”
“You bet it’s serious,” she said angrily. “When the news got out that Andy’s book, you know, inspired somebody to kill those girls he got real depressed. He cut himself off from everybody. He stopped writing.” She hesitated. “He stopped everything. He just gave up.”
“Must’ve been difficult, Mrs. Carter,” Altman said sympathetically, reflecting that reporter Wallace wasn’t the first person to wonder if the novel had inspired a copycat.
“You have no idea. I told him it was just a coincidence — those women getting killed like he wrote in the book. Just a weird coincidence. But these reporters and,
well, everybody, friends, neighbors… They kept yammering on and on about how Andy was to blame.”
Altman supposed she wasn’t going to like the fact he’d found proof that her husband’s book had probably been the model for the killings.
She continued, “He’s been getting better lately. Anything about the case could set him back.”
“I do understand that, ma’am, but you have to see my situation. We’ve got a possibility of catching the killer and your husband could be real helpful…”
The sound on the other end of the line grew muffled and Altman could hear her talking to someone else.
Quentin Altman wasn’t surprised when she said, “My husband just got back. I’ll put him on.”
“Hello?” came a soft, uneasy voice. “This’s Andy Carter.”
Altman identified himself.
“Were you the policeman I talked to a while back?”
“Me? No. That might’ve been the case detective. Sergeant Bob Fletcher.”
“Right. That was the name.”
So Fletcher had talked to the author. There was no reference in the case file that he recalled. He must’ve missed it. He reiterated to Carter what he’d told the author’s wife and the man said immediately, “I can’t help you. And frankly, I don’t want to…. This’s been the worst time of my life.”
“I appreciate that, sir. But that killer’s still free. And—”
“But I don’t know anything. I mean, what could I possibly tell you that—”
“We may have a sample of the killer’s handwriting — we found some notes in a copy of your book that make us think he might’ve written them. And we’d like to compare it to any letters from fans you might’ve received.”
There was a long pause. Finally the author whispered, “So he did use my book as a model.”
In a kind voice Altman said, “It’s looking that way, Mr. Carter. The underlined passages are the ones that fit the M.O. of the two murders. I’m afraid they’re identical.”
Altman heard nothing for a moment then he asked, “Sir, are you all right?”
The author cleared his throat. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you. I just… it’d be too much for me.”
More Twisted: Collected Stories, Vol. II Page 29
