by Ed Gaffney
And speaking of laying things out starkly, Stephanie had never heard her father speak so bluntly about his drinking. Ever. It was overwhelming. She had to blink away the tears that were suddenly making it hard to see anything.
“I am hoping that I did not mislead you into believing that your father’s condition is worse than it is,” a blurry Dr. Uppal told her. Still with the smile. “As long as Malcolm continues to take care of himself and live in a healthy lifestyle, there is every reason to believe that he can continue to keep the risks under control so that he can live a full and happy life.”
Like almost everything that had happened in the past hour, the doctor’s prediction that her father would lead a happy life caught Steph completely by surprise. She didn’t know whether it was the absurdity of the notion that the gloomiest person she had ever known would suddenly start filling in the o in Malcolm with a smiley face, or whether it was because she was so stressed out, but a spasm of giggles shook her. She knew that it would be rude to laugh, of course, so she wrestled the sound coming out of her mouth into a kind of strangled cough.
Malcolm, however, didn’t stop himself from loudly barking out the noise which he used as a laugh. “Doctor,” he said, as they stood up and shook hands, “that is a prognosis which I think we can all look forward to proving correct.”
And for a few moments, as they returned to her car, Stephanie almost let herself believe that her father was happy.
Until they turned on the car radio, and learned that the police had found another murder victim.
NINE
Dear Vera,
I hope that you don’t mind me writing to you at your home like this, but I thought that since we are going to be working together very closely for a while, it might be nice to cut through some of the red tape.
Anyway, I trust that you found the crime scene at Iris’s place everything I had described it would be.
Of course, I’ll let you know when you can expect to see my work again.
(Dubinski Evidence ID Number 40)
Detective Vera Demopolous put the creepy letter down, took a moment to put her feet up on her desk, close her eyes, and rub her neck. She was beat, and it was only two-thirty in the afternoon.
Of course, the fact that a nightmare had awakened her for good at three-thirty that morning might have had something to do with her exhaustion.
And learning that she and Springfield really were facing a new serial killer certainly didn’t help the headache.
The second victim’s name was Iris Dubinski. She had been a forty-five-year-old sales rep for Roaring Retail, a local corporation which managed malls on both coasts. She was found early that morning by a taxi driver. Last night, a call had been made to the cab company for a pickup this morning, instructing the driver to ring the doorbell, and then enter through the unlocked front door.
Of course, lying in the entryway was the very cold body of Ms. Dubinski.
Like the letter said, she had been shot three times—twice in the rear end, and once through the face. From the blood smears leading from the floor of the living room to the entry hall, she had obviously been dragged there.
And as promised, her right index finger was cut off.
“Excuse me…Detective Demopolous?”
Vera opened her eyes. She saw a forty-something man approaching, carrying two large, overfilled cardboard file boxes. He looked uncomfortable in the rumpled brown suit that he was stuffed into, maybe because he had gained thirty pounds since he bought it. His smile was marred only slightly by the bit of lunch still clinging to the corner of his mouth.
But none of that mattered. Because hanging around his neck was a state police detective’s badge. It had been a long time since Vera had seen such a welcome sight. She hastily got up and held out her hand, saying, “Hi, I’m Vera Demopolous.”
The detective had friendly eyes and a solid grip. “Sorry to barge in on you like this. I’m Ellis Yates. I was on a special assignment for the past three months, and it took HQ a few days to untangle me from that and switch me over to give you a hand. I guess you guys are a little short-staffed right now?”
Vera couldn’t stop smiling. The cavalry. Halleluiah. “A little short-staffed sounds right. Did you meet Lieutenant Carasquillo yet?”
“Yeah. He wanted me to jump in with you on those shootings that look like the old Springfield Shooter case. Like I’m going to say no.” He looked down at the boxes he was holding, and then at her desk. “Mind if I put these here for a second?”
“Of course,” Vera replied, clearing off a space for the heavy-looking things. “What are they?”
Ellis put the boxes down and pulled the lid off the top one to reveal dozens of file folders, reports, a book or two, some notebooks, some photographs. It was quite a collection, whatever it was. “Lieutenant said you were looking for any stuff we had in storage on the Springfield Shooter, so I went down to archives and dug it up. Hope that’s okay.”
Vera laughed. “That is way more than okay, Ellis. I’ve been reading through the official reports that had been entered into the computer, but this backup will really help.” She put the latest letter she’d received into the top box, then lifted it off her desk. “Follow me,” she told Ellis. “Believe it or not, we’ve got our own temporary command post.”
“Whoa. Sounds pretty impressive,” Ellis replied, as he picked up the second box, and they headed down the hallway past the water fountain that no longer worked and the men’s room, and turned in to the next doorway.
“Not exactly,” Vera explained, as she led Ellis into the nondescript little room dominated by the two-way mirror, the cafeteria-style folding table, and the four metal folding chairs scattered around it. “Lieutenant is letting us use Interview Three because my desk was overflowing.” She was wide awake now, completely reenergized by the knowledge that she wasn’t alone on this case anymore.
They set the boxes of old file material next to the street map of Springfield that Vera had laid out on the table. She had stuck Post-it notes all over it, indicating where each murder had taken place. On the other side of the map was the stack of legal pads which contained her notes, and a three-ring binder with some of the copies of the exhibits from the Springfield Shooter case. There were also a few manila folders scattered around that Vera had been using to organize some of the information on the Chatham murder.
“The eight yellow stickers are the locations where the original Springfield Shooter murders took place,” she explained. “And these two blue ones,” she continued, pointing to the Indian Oaks section of the map, where four of the yellow stickers were also clustered, “are the sites of the two murders we’re looking into.”
Ellis bent over and read the little numbers that Vera had written on each of the indicators. “Funny how murders one through five are scattered all over the place, and then six through nine, plus the two new ones we’ve got, are all jammed into Indian Oaks.”
That fact had been bugging Vera like crazy. It was one of the few patterns she had been able to identify, but she hadn’t been able to exploit it in any significant way. It was really getting frustrating.
“Is it possible that we’ve got two different killers here?” Ellis asked.
Vera was puzzled. There were obviously two different killers. Alan Lombardo was in jail when the two most recent murders had taken place—
Her expression must have betrayed her confusion, because Ellis broke into her thoughts. “No. I mean, uh, what if Alan Lombardo was responsible for the first five murders, and was wrong for six through nine? That would explain this geographic pattern. Lombardo did the first five, a second guy copycats him and does murders six through nine, and then maybe the guy takes a kind of BTK vacation. You know. Kills a bunch of people, then takes a long break, then starts up again.”
BTK, standing for “bind, torture, and kill,” was a self-styled serial killer responsible for the murders of ten people in Wichita, Kansas, in the late 1970s and ’80s. The Midwestern community
had been devastated. Then, for no apparent reason, he stopped killing. Until about twelve years later, when, even though it seemed that he would never be caught, the BTK killer reemerged, taunting police with messages. They had been lucky to catch him before he started to murder again.
“That’s exactly what I thought,” Vera told Ellis. “But I talked to the lead detective on the Springfield Shooter case, and they had this guy Lombardo absolutely nailed for all nine murders.” She grabbed the top legal pad off the stack on the table and checked her notes. “His housekeeper found a Tupperware container full of eight fingers in the guy’s freezer, next to about a ton and a half of chocolate chip ice cream. They were able to conclusively match every finger in that container to every one of the eight Springfield Shooter victims that was missing a finger.”
“Only eight? I thought there were nine.”
“He didn’t start cutting off fingers until victims number two and three. The brother and sister.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Ellis said, soberly. “I should have remembered that.”
“Remembered?” Vera asked. “I just learned about this stuff last week. You haven’t worked on this case before, have you?”
Ellis laughed. “Not exactly. I grew up in Indian Oaks. And for about three years, believe me, all I ever heard about was the Springfield Shooter.”
Wow. Talk about the perfect partner for the out-of-town girl cop from Alaska. “You mean you’re from here?”
“Born and raised in Springfield. Capo High School, Class of ’82. Go Bobcats. Dad ran the family hardware store, the whole nine yards.” A smile grew across his soft face. “I still live in the house I grew up in. I’m a total townie.” He hesitated for a second. “Anyway, I, well, this is kind of embarrassing, but after I picked up these boxes from archives, I was so hungry, I stopped to get a sandwich at a deli on the way over. While I was eating, I started reading this book that was in one of the boxes. It came out right in the middle of the investigation. Diary of a Serial Killer. You ever heard of it?”
“Not before I started reading the file,” Vera replied. “But I saw it mentioned in there a few times. I thought that it was mostly fiction.”
“Yeah, it is, sort of. Kind of a mixture. Anyway, I just used it to remind myself of some of the details. Like about the fingers. Or that he didn’t start leaving notes until the fourth victim, and that’s when he started taking credit for the first three killings. Do I have that right?”
“You got it.”
“Yeah, well, I’m afraid that’s about all I got. I’m usually more of an Internet research guy, anyway. Drives my wife crazy. I spend way too much time on-line.”
Vera opened up the box that she had carried in with them, and rummaged around until she pulled out the copy of the book that Ellis had been reading. She turned to the copyright page, and then showed it to Ellis. “This came out in March of 1983, right?”
He nodded. “Looks right.”
Vera checked some notes she’d made on another pad. “Like about two months after the fifth murder. And about three months before the sixth.”
“Are you thinking that the book had something to do with the delay?”
Vera shook her head. “Not really. I’ve just been trying to find things that happened between the fifth and sixth murders to make the killer suddenly decide to bunch all of his attacks together like this.” She pointed to the Indian Oaks section of the street map laid out on the table. “Do you remember anything in the book about Indian Oaks?”
Ellis laughed. “You mean other than the college professor?”
Vera looked at him blankly.
“You don’t remember the professor who was a suspect for about twelve minutes?” Ellis looked incredulous, but then he shook his head. “Sorry. I forgot you weren’t living here then.”
“No. I grew up in Alaska.”
“Yeah. Lieutenant Carasquillo told me. Sorry.” Now Ellis was walking around the room. “Anyway, the biggest thing that happened between number five and number six was that this book came out, and then there was a huge scandal about a local college professor being a suspect. He actually got arrested.”
“Before they nabbed Lombardo? Really?”
“Yeah. The guy who wrote Diary of a Serial Killer, Russell Crane was his name, was pretty much in it just for the money, so he wasn’t too careful with the facts. And whenever it made his book better, he just made stuff up. Like his profile for the Springfield Shooter: ‘He might be an educated man, quite possibly a high school teacher or a college professor, age such and such, who was an alcoholic,’ blah blah blah, whatever.”
“So how did the college professor get involved?”
“Believe it or not, some television reporter read the book, put two and six together, and came up with a guy who matched Russell Crane’s description. Turns out he wasn’t just any local college professor. Turns out he was this real famous author—Malcolm Ayers.”
TEN
November 11, 1982. Julie Chang was really hot. That’s not why I picked her, of course. I’m not some kind of freak. But damn. The girl was hot.
The whole sex angle didn’t occur to me until after I was inside her place. It started just like all of the others—I pulled the gun on her, gagged her, told her to get on the floor, and just as I started to tear off the tape, I realized that instead of taping her hands together behind her back, I could tape one hand to the leg of this huge piece of furniture sitting in her living room, and the other to the radiator, about an arm’s length away.
So I told her to lie flat on her back, arms apart, and sure enough. It worked!
Then I taped her feet together, and there she was. Spread out on her back, lying on the floor, looking up at me.
The way her arms were stretched out, it kind of pushed her tits out against her shirt. That’s what got me to thinking about sex in the first place. Whew. She was lucky I wasn’t a rapist. Because if I was, she would have been a no-brainer.
But the funny thing was that when she saw me looking at her body, she thought I was going to rape her.
That was kind of an interesting twist. So I decided to run with it. I brought my gun over and pointed it at her chest. She was wearing a button-down shirt with the top button unfastened, so I stuck the barrel of the gun between the next two buttons. The shirt was slightly pulled apart at that point, because her hands were taped so far away from each other. I could see the color of her bra. It was blue.
Then I pulled the gun up against the higher of the two buttons until it popped off, leaving her chest just a little more exposed.
She kind of gasped—if you can gasp with your mouth taped shut—and I said, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to rape you. I’m just going to look for a while.”
I don’t know why, but that started her crying. And that pissed me off. I mean goddammit. If I told her I was going to rape her, then fine. Crying would make sense. But I tell her I’m not going to rape her, and she starts bawling.
So I stood up and shot her.
I wish she hadn’t made me so angry. I would have liked to have stuck around for a while, but once I got started on her, the crying got louder. And that just pissed me off more, so I shot her again and again.
Before I knew it, I had emptied the clip into her.
That’s a lot of bullets for one kill.
Anyway, it gave me an idea for my next one, so it wasn’t a total waste.
Then I chopped off her finger, and went home.
(Commonwealth v. Alan Lombardo, Trial Exhibit Number 31E)
August 28
Zack Wilson had read through everything that was in his father’s old files on the Lombardo case—the trial transcript and exhibits, the appellate briefs, the printouts of the computer work files Lombardo kept at home, the police reports, the research and the notes. He was now going over one of the most disturbing of the entries found in the sadistic killer’s computer journal—the Julie Chang murder.
Zack was especially interested in the description of th
is crime, because it was the one that was most sexually explicit. Typically, serial killers had a sexual component to their psychopathology. Sometimes there was an actual sexual release at the murders, sometimes the killings substituted in a psychological way for sex, and sometimes the brutality of the acts was a sign of sexual rage.
In any event, it was interesting that in Alan Lombardo’s case, with the exception of the Julie Chang murder, there didn’t appear to be much of a sexual aspect to any of the crimes. He made a note to talk to his father about psychological testing.
The sound of someone raking leaves caught Zack’s attention. He went to the open first-floor window of their oversized old house and looked out into the side yard.
Seven-year-old Justin had set up what looked like a little obstacle course for himself. A line of three lightweight folding lawn chairs, about five feet from each other, extended into the yard. Beyond those three chairs was a picnic bench. And past that, Justin was raking together a huge pile of leaves from last fall’s pile which lay about ten feet past the bench. When he saw Zack at the window, Justin dropped the rake, waved, and cried out, “Hey, Daddy! Watch this!” Then he ran toward the house, setting himself up at the near end of the lawn chairs.
A voice from over Zack’s left shoulder said, “You sure you don’t want to tell him that jumping into a pile of old leaves is the second most dangerous thing a child can do while playing outdoors during the summer months?”
Terry had just finished taking a series of courses on insurance litigation. He was thinking about doing some plaintiff’s work for people injured by dangerous products. Because life as a criminal defense attorney wasn’t David versus Goliath enough.
But as a by-product of his recent education, Terry had become a walking encyclopedia of things that you should fear in your daily life.
As if the single father of a seven-year-old boy needed a longer list of things to worry about.
Now Kermit, Justin’s tail-wagging companion of indeterminate breeding but unquestionable loyalty, had joined the little boy.
