by Jo Robertson
“Zilch on everything,” Slater said.
“We already figured the families weren’t involved,” Kate reminded him.
“Yeah, but they might’ve seen something or gotten a description.” A futile hope, Slater knew.
“This guy’s too smart for that,” Kate said.
“We saw the Stuckey sister,” Slater said and nodded toward Bauer. “Tell Kate about the interview.”
“Angela Holster is younger than Mary by seven or eight years,” Bauer said, looking at his field notes, “so she doesn’t remember much about her sister except that Mary and her parents were always tangling about something, usually boys.”
“Any particular boy?” Kate asked.
“I guess there were lots of them. I got the impression that Mary had been around the block once or twice,” Bauer answered, casting a sheepish glance at Kate.
“Anything specific about the day she died?”
“The sister said Mary was pretty upbeat that day, going around like a cat that’d swallowed a canary, really pleased with herself.”
“Did she say why?”
“She wasn’t sure, but thought it had something to do with a fellow. Not one of the usual boys she was mixed up with. A new guy. Didn’t know who.”
Slater looked at Kate. “We’re thinking this unknown guy could be involved in her death.”
“It’s possible,” she murmured. “If it’s true, then Mary definitely knew her attacker.”
“And that also means someone around here will know him or remember him,” Slater said.
The three sat in silence a moment, contemplating the enormity of this possibility.
“Shit, I hate this feeling.” Slater ran his fingers through his hair. No one wanted to use the word “cover up.”
“How many days has it been since the last discovery, five?” Kate asked.
Slater picked up the oversized time chart they’d taken from the major incident room and were now using as a blotter on his desk and traced the dates with a forefinger. “Five days since the Mathews girl. He took the Johnston girl on October 15,” he reviewed, “and we found her body five days later on the twentieth.”
“Then Alison disappeared on Friday, the twenty-fourth. She was supposed to come home right after band practice, so no one noticed her missing until 7:00,” Bauer added.
Kate did a quick calculation. “That’s only nine days between kidnappings.”
“And Alison’s body was discovered at Ralston Park on October 25, less than a day after she went missing,” Slater continued. “We figured he did a rush job with her. It’s been a week now. When will he strike again? Tomorrow? The day after?”
Kate closed her eyes and rubbed the spot between her brows with her two middle fingers. “He’ll try again any day. If he’s accelerating like I think, he should be in the grip of overwhelming urges that weaken his judgment and make him careless.”
“There’s another possibility. That he’s left the county or the state altogether,” Slater said.
“It’s an awful thing for me to say, but I hope not,” Kate confessed.
Slater shrugged. “We stand a better chance of getting him here in Bigler County than anywhere else. I hope he’s still here, too. I want to get this psycho.”
Slater gathered up the reports and replaced them in the murder book which he put in the file cabinet behind his desk, and Bauer excused himself. While he locked the file, Kate stood looking at the notes they’d made on the time chart over the last weeks.
“Nothing’s coming in from the state or the feds today,” Slater said over Kate’s shoulder. “I’ll call an incident conference for tomorrow, and we’ll walk through the case again. Maybe by then we’ll get reports back from the labs, or one of the teams will have something.”
“My contact at Quantico promised a fax as soon as he found something.” Kate twisted her head to look at Slater. “Tell me we’re going to get him.”
“We’re going to get him,” he repeated.
“For Jennifer and Alison?”
Slater pushed confidence into his voice. “Yes, and for Kassie and you.”
Kate’s eyes were flinty with the hardness of a gun barrel, and her voice was firm and determined. “And for all the other girls he’s damaged and the lives he’s ruined in the process of playing out his sick fantasies.”
#
The man wore a gun holstered beneath his left arm under a Brooks Brothers tweed jacket. Smith saw it when the man returned to the precinct after daylight.
He was a cop, just like the woman.
Smith hated men who dressed like they were superior to everyone else, like a magazine model. And he especially despised cops. The cop-man was tall, taller even than Smith. As he’d assessed, a dark giant.
Since the man outsized Smith, he’d have to use cunning and intellect to get the upper hand. Shouldn’t be too hard. After all, brains were better than brawn. When he’d watched the man and woman together at the female’s apartment, he’d observed the proprietary way the cop-man placed his hand around the woman’s waist, the way he leaned in to listen to her words and whispered intimately in her ear. He’d nuzzled the woman’s ear and she’d playfully pushed him away.
But today they’d arrived separately, and Smith had noticed through the glass windows of the front doors that neither greeted the uniformed man sitting at the raised dais. Later, when they walked out of the building, they put space between themselves and didn’t touch hands. The man and woman didn’t even look at each other.
Good. They had argued.
Smith knew the woman wasn’t a virgin, couldn’t be one after all these years, but he expected her to have the semblance of virtue. The fresh innocence he’d first seen on her face when she foolishly opened the apartment door to him had been a sham. Now, in the dim light of the streetlamp, he saw she had a slatternly air. Even if they were mad at each other, the woman obviously enjoyed being with this man, this brute of a man who certainly used his fists to speak for him.
Smith didn’t need more proof. The woman was a whore. Just like his mother. Whores needed to be punished.
She wasn’t the pure and fresh girl she’d been when he first saw her, first took her to the cabin. Where he’d tried to – he shook his head against the memory. All these years he’d thought it was him, his fault. Now he realized the purple-eyed bitch was to blame.
He would have no trouble performing now. Then everyone would know he was a man. Not some weakling.
Not some puny girl.
Chapter Thirty-six
Even when he’d pressed her, Kate refused to let Slater follow her home. He hadn’t wanted to come inside, understanding that she needed space and time to figure out how things stood between them, but he made her promise to call him when she reached her apartment. The expression on her face showed how ridiculous she thought the request was. Bauer, Slater, and she weren’t the ones in danger, it said. Teenage girls were.
He’d convinced her to call when she got home, and fifteen minutes after he turned the key in his apartment door, his cell phone rang. Slater breathed a sigh of relief and told himself Kate was right. The killer targeted women much younger than her.
Even though he agreed, he still felt anxious.
The clock on the wall clicked every second as loud as an alarm in the silence of Slater’s apartment. She’d called over an hour ago. What was she doing now? Preparing for bed? Wearing that Stanford tee shirt he liked so much, ratty as it was? Thinking of him at all, or engrossed in the case? Missing him like he was her?
Those were all the things he wanted. He wasn’t sure what the hell Kate wanted. He’d made a mess of it all and wondered if he’d be able to repair the harm and regain her trust.
The stereo sat flush against the east wall of the living area. Slater chose a Sarah Brightman CD, the one where she sang with the tenors whose voices always left him longing for something beyond his grasp. After removing his jacket and shoes, he lay down on the couch and let the music flood over him
like a soothing balm. For a poker-faced woman, Sarah had the voice of an angel.
#
Smith decided to use the chloroform again on K. Myers even though he’d abandoned it for a time because of its toxic effects. It’d worked well with the girls here, and was a lifesaver in taking down a stout man like Marconi. He no longer cared about the risk for himself, and well, K. Myers wouldn’t be around long enough for slow-acting chloroform poisoning to be a consideration.
He snorted. This was going to be a good hunting session. He’d used chloroform when he’d taken the farm girl. He’d pilfered the chemical from the rudimentary animal hospital his employer had set up on his farm outside Rocklin, Idaho, less than a hundred miles from Preston.
Wesley Mitchell, the man on whose farm he’d worked for several years, stashed any number of drugs in his barn for euthanizing and anesthetizing the larger farm animals when they needed surgical procedures, or were old or diseased.
No reputable veterinarian would use chloroform nowadays, but it was an effective agent in the seventies and eighties. The rustic Idaho farmers were still decades behind modern thinking.
Smith had begun working for Mitchell the summer he’d dropped out of school and started his true education, traveling through Utah and Idaho in search of an antidote for the restless urges that drove him. He’d barely turned seventeen when he began working for Mitchell, but claimed that he was twenty.
When he’d seen the effect of chloroform on a horse or cow, the idea formed in the back of his mind. How much faster would the drug work on a human animal, one smaller in size and weight? The drug became an integral part of his embryonic plans.
That first girl, the Idaho farm girl, the girl-woman who now called herself K. Myers, went down like a hundred pounds of potatoes rolling off a combine. At first, he thought he’d given her too much of the chemical and wouldn’t be able to bring her out of the stupor. Even then, when he hadn’t yet formed the plan – the ritual – for what he’d do with her, he knew it was critical that she come out of her drugged state. Chloroform took away pain.
And that was exactly what he didn’t want.
He wanted her to come out of the chloroform and into the re-enactment he had planned for her, into the same suffering and agony he’d experienced all his life around girls just like her. At first, he’d just wanted to retaliate, to pay the girls back for their meanness, their bitchiness, the thousands of hurts and indignities they’d heaped on him. But at some point, that hadn’t been enough. He’d needed more.
With some of the girls he later found, he hadn’t needed to use drugs at all. Street kids went easily with any stranger who waved a bill, or the price of their next fix, under their noses. He despised the scabby look of their bodies, the track marks on their arms, the stringiness of their hair, and the greasiness of their bodies. But he put his qualms aside, and it was on these girls that he’d gradually perfected his work.
Even though the street kids were easy, they didn’t quench the blood thirst that raged in him. When he finished with them, he often remained unsatisfied. The look on their faces when he started on them was resigned and apathetic as if nothing he did to them hadn’t already been done.
The fancy, upscale girls were another matter. They smelled clean and sweet, and when the end came for them, they experienced the shock of their lives. They thought they were invulnerable, that their money kept them protected and isolated from the smuttiness of the world. They thought they’d remain forever untouched.
He relished proving to them just how wrong they were.
Smith waited another hour, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel and shifting restlessly in his seat. It’d been nearly nine o’clock when he saw the man and woman leave the precinct, each going to separate cars, the man waiting until the woman drove off before he backed out of the parking lot.
Who should he follow? He didn’t know where the man lived, but he was sure they’d end up at K. Myers’ apartment. Smith could see and smell the heat coming from them as they walked together down the steps toward the parking lot, their bodies almost touching.
The woman held herself aloof from the man, pretended indifference, but Smith knew that she couldn’t wait to rut like the animal she was.
#
Slater was dreaming the kind of dream where you knew what would happen next and desperately tried to wake up before the awful moment came.
In the dream he walked into the San Francisco house where Julie, Max, and he lived. He tossed his keys into the small ceramic dish on the entry table and called, “I’m home.” There was no answer. He’d called earlier to leave a message he’d be late for dinner, but the light blinking on the answering machine told him Julie hadn’t heard it, or had ignored it.
The downstairs lights were off. The house was eerily quiet, devoid of Max’s usual squeals. Slater climbed the stairs to the landing where a single nightlight threw its dim glow against the beige carpet.
The master bedroom was empty, Julie’s clothes strewn across the bed. The atmosphere was muggy with the heavy scent of lighted candles. Muted light shone from underneath the closed bathroom door. In the dream’s fog, Slater slow-motioned his way to the door where Max’s undershirt and diaper blocked his way into the bathroom. He picked them up and carefully placed them on a chair.
A sense that something was terribly wrong choked him.
“Julie,” he called, his dream-voice hoarse and strained with tension. His sleeping self knew what he’d find behind the door. Don’t open the door, wake up, he begged, but his ignorant dreaming self slowly turned the door knob and stepped into the candle-lit bathroom.
#
Pure instinct brought Smith to the woman’s apartment. Women didn’t like to be far away from their frilly stuff, all that goop they put on their faces and bodies. He was glad he’d trailed her instead of the cop-man.
Lurking in the tree shadows across the street from her duplex, Smith analyzed the situation. She’d gone in thirty minutes ago. Maybe he was wrong about the man and woman hooking up tonight. He glanced at his watch for the third time. It was 10:17.
He wanted to catch her tonight, but he was tired from the night surveillances he’d kept this week. And he needed to be sure she was alone, had to be careful taking this one. Her protector was dangerous.
At 10:42, the woman walked out of the apartment. She was leaving! How was he going to catch her? His hands clenched spasmodically as he slouched in his seat. She walked around the building to the back of the duplex where he’d seen her park the yellow convertible.
Furiously he calculated the change. If she reached the car, she’d get away, and he’d have to deal with the dark giant.
Now! He had to take her now!
He removed the vial from a plastic bag and quickly uncapped the 100 ml bottle of chloroform. For all its toxicity, it’d been surprisingly easy to get. He’d ordered it off the internet. Apparently now, unlike when he’d first started hunting, you could purchase anything on the internet.
He soaked a terrycloth rag thoroughly in the chemical, careful not to inhale the fumes, acrid even through the surgical mask covering his mouth. His latex gloves protected his hands, and a thick, black raincoat and low-riding longshoreman’s cap covered his body and head.
Smith slipped quietly from the van, leaving the door open, the overhead light disabled. He followed the woman around the corner as she inserted a key into the lock of the driver’s door.
Although he walked stealthily on rubber-soled shoes, she must’ve heard a sound or sensed his presence because he was several yards from her when she whirled around, fists lashing out. One fingernail caught him across the cheek and drew blood.
“Bitch,” he snarled.
He reacted with lightning-quick reflexes, punching the woman in the gut. When she fell to her knees, gasping in pain, he stepped behind her and folded the rag around her mouth and nose. Breathless as she was from the blow to the stomach, she fought like a wild animal. Finally she managed to break away and re
ach the inside of the car. She immediately slammed down the locks.
“Fucking bitch-whore,” he ground out, biting down on his lip to keep from screaming in frustration. He reached into his trousers and pulled out a pocket knife. Through the window he saw her pounding on the car horn, but she’d dropped her car keys, and the ignition was off. The effort was futile.
Smith grinned as he ripped the convertible top in several long slashes and reached in to grab her by the hair, jerking her neck back and threatening with the knife against her jugular.
“If you move, I’ll gut you like a hog,” he threatened.
The defiant look in her eyes told him she’d fight him anyway so he wrapped the arm holding the chloroform cloth around her neck, crushing her windpipe and cutting off her air. After an endless moment of thrashing about, she finally collapsed, and when he unlocked the door, her knees and hands scraped bloody as she fell from the car onto the pavement.
Glancing around the unlighted area, he dragged the woman’s body to the bougainvillea bushes that lined the parking lot. The car keys and contents of her purse were scattered on the ground.
Shit, lots of crap in there.
He shoveled up the junk, stuffed it back in her purse, and threw it out of sight into the bushes. He locked the car doors and pocketed the keys. Then he returned to his van and drove behind the duplex with the headlights off. The woman weighed next to nothing, and he tossed her into the back as easily as a sack of garbage, covering her with a canvas tarp.
Smith swiped a gloved hand across his cheek and stared at the blood on the palm. She’d drawn blood.
She was going to pay for this.
Chapter Thirty-seven
