Triple Play, page 13
part #1 of Jake Hines Series
The Chief was leaning against his desk with his arms folded, wearing his Kill-the-British expression. “You get your call from the paper yet?” he asked before I was all the way into the room.
“The paper?” I said, getting that feeling you get right after you’ve hit a deer in the dark, that feeling that says “Ohshit trouble,” even before you bump your nose on the windshield.
“Somebody from this department phoned in an anonymous tip about those goddam pictures,” he said, furiously. “Jim Burgess called me at home last night, said they’d received this phone call from somebody who wouldn’t give his name but gave very detailed information about the pictures that were on the bodies. Jim was able to describe ‘em to me to perfection. He said of course they’d never print anything on an anonymous phone call, but he thought it was kind of sneaky of me to hold something back like that without letting him know I was doing it.
“Shit!” Frank punished the rug with his huge, heavy shoes. “You know how hard I’ve worked to get good rapport with the media.” He pronounced it “re-pour.” “I told him we thought it was important to have a few details unpublished, something we might be able to use to evaluate a suspect when we got one. But Burgess said, look, this is an independent source, I don’t feel I can sit on this and do nothing, if you don’t help me I’m going to have to start nosing around. In the end, what I had to do, I brought ‘em both down here, Burgess and Task together so I wouldn’t get accused of favoring print over TV, and showed them the goddam pictures, so they could see they would never want to print them in a family newspaper or show them on the local station. They took notes, you shoulda seen that. They’re going think of some acceptable way to describe them, they say, starting tonight. Can you beat that?” Frank ventilated, flouncing around his office like an outsize mother hen that just got chased off her nest, “some acceptable way to describe them! How the bloody Christ do you suppose they’ll do that? A body with its pecker carved off, and another guy with the damn thing shoved down his throat?”
“Did he say if it was a male or a female?” I asked. “The caller?” I thought maybe a simple question or two might cool him down. I should have known.
“I asked him. He didn’t want to say. They have to protect their sources,” he did a devastating imitation of the editor’s prim little lisp. “What the Christ do I get to protect? If I find out who made that call,” Frank promised me fiercely, “I am going to have his head on a pike by the front gate! Sonofabitch! Didn’t I fully explain my purpose, wasn’t I explicit with you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, then! Who’d you forget to tell?”
“Nobody,” I said, as firmly as if I was sure. And I was, almost. I had done the best I could to pass the word to everybody, all along the trail of people who had anything to do with those pictures, that the Chief insisted they remain a secret. But even if I hadn’t, why would anybody from the department phone the paper? Any cop I’ve ever known would rather squirt seltzer up his nose than get a reporter on his tail.
“Bullshit!” Frank roared. “Somebody dropped the dime, and I wanna know who it was! This is important! You’re gonna make me up a list of everybody who handled those pictures, and we’re gonna have a Come To Jesus meeting and get to the bottom of this!”
“Fine,” I said, beginning to get really pissed myself. I was buried in work already; I didn’t need any list-making chores. Besides, I’d rather fight alligators in a slime pit than attend one of Frank’s Come To Jesus meetings. I mean, grown men sitting around in blue uniforms with tears in their eyes? Give me a break.
“Let’s all sit down and make little lists,” I hollered at him, “Why don’t we start a whispering campaign too? That way you can get everybody in the department mad at everybody else! Then this freaky killer that we came down here to talk about can keep right on having fun, chopping up guys in parks. We won’t bother him any, we’ll all be busy with our goddam lists.” I swooped up my pile of notebooks and pictures off the end of his desk, and stomped out the door.
I wasn’t very far down the hall when he caught me. He can still move pretty fast. His big hand gripped my shoulder and his voice said, very quietly, next to my ear, “Wait a minute.”
We stood facing each other in the busy hall, both breathing a little fast and immediately aware that we looked ludicrously like a pair of teenagers in a lovers’ quarrel.
“Shit, Jake,” Frank said. “Come on and let’s get some work done. That phone call made me mad. I’m sorry.”
I shrugged and we both laughed, awkwardly. We went back in his office. Frank grabbed a pot of coffee and poured us each a cup.
“Let’s look at pictures first,” I said, and then to cover my embarrassment at having said that dirty word so soon again, I got busy adjusting lights and window shades to get illumination without glare. I showed him the complete set of Wahler prints, then cleared them away and laid out all the LaPlante pictures.
“You see what I mean?” I asked him, “How carefully it’s all arranged? These are not smash-and-grab killings, Frank. There’s no evidence of hurry or accident at either crime scene. Nothing that spells anger or passion. And no indication of a struggle. Now–” I took away the LaPlante set, then selected four prints, two from each set, that I thought showed traces of wheel marks, and put them side by side in front of him. I pointed over his shoulder, asking, “You see here…and over here…Couldn’t these be traces of wheel prints from a two-wheeler?”
I read him my transcription of Anne Condon’s interview.
“I know her,” Frank said, “I remember their store. You’re right, she’s a totally credible witness.”
“All right,” I said, “If we believe her story about what she saw, doesn’t it seem likely that what you see in these pictures are the remnants of two-wheeler tracks, that the murderer tried to brush out before he left? Remember he’s working in the dark.”
“Possible, anyway. Let’s say, for now, possibly these are wheel tracks. But then where are we going with this story? A man gets killed someplace else, we don’t know where. His killer puts him on a two-wheeler, puts the two-wheeler in a truck. Brings him to a public park in the middle of the night, puts him in a softball uniform, chops pieces off his body, arranges this mutilated body in an obscene pose, and leaves him there?” He stared intently at the far wall, pulling at his nose. After a minute he cleared his throat, moved his shoulders uncomfortably, and protested, “It’s so…elaborate. It seems so unnatural. Why would anybody–to send a message, you keep saying. A message saying what, Jake?”
“Put that aside for now,” I urged him. “Do you agree the truck and the two-wheeler explain what we couldn’t explain before, how the body could be there on the ground so neat with no sign of a struggle?”
“Oh, sure, that part…He had to do all his cutting after he got to the site, though, right?”
“Yes. Otherwise there’d have been blood dripped all over the sidewalk, through the gate, and all along the path to the softball diamond, in Wahler’s case, and likewise across the sidewalk and all over the grass from wherever he parked his truck at Willow Creek Park, in the LaPlante case. He’d never have been able to clean it all up, Frank, working in the dark the way we know he had to do.
“Now, admittedly, I don’t have a time frame for the delivery of the second body yet. I haven’t had time to find out if anybody in the Willow Creek neighborhood sighted the truck. But at Pioneer Park, we can pinpoint the time fairly accurately. Harley and Vince logged a drive-by of the area between midnight and twelve-twenty. Mrs. Condon saw the delivery truck arrive sometime near twelve-thirty, and she thinks it left soon after one o’clock. At one-thirty, Harley and Vince drove by again and saw the gate open, and that’s when they went in and found the body.”
“Uh-huh. The time kind of worries me. It’s pretty close, isn’t it? To do all he had to do? Get the body and the cushions in there, arrange it, do the cutting–”
“And take the picture, remember, and pin it on. He had to take the picture after the body was arranged. Of course, we don’t know for certain that there was only one man. He could have had help. Somehow…I can’t seem to picture that; the whole thing feels like one man with one mission, to me. If the body was already in the uniform, on the two-wheeler,” I said, “He could do it, I think. Just about. He could have had the cushions under the tarp with the body, too. He’d have to be a strong man, organized, who’d thought it through in advance, knew just what he wanted to do.”
“Mrs. Condon was pretty sure it was a man she saw?”
“Right.” I read that part of her interview to him again. “Now, the other interviews–” I gave him the scanty, mostly negative, results of five days of talking to everybody I could find. They covered a lot of paper but they didn’t take us far. Frank was already glancing at the clock. It was nearly eight.
“Let me summarize what I’ve got from autopsies,” I said. “You understand, DNA results won’t be back for several days, and the second set of BCA test results won’t come back till Monday, toxicity, hair and fiber, dirt comparisons, all that. But whatever else BCA is able to come up with won’t change the fact that both bodies show definite evidence of strangulation…” I laid it out for him.
“So on the basis of what you’ve got now we have these strong similarities,” Frank ticked off, “Both victims strangled, no evidence they died of anything else. Both bodies mutilated after death. Strong suspicion the genitals in the second victim’s mouth came from the first victim’s body. And both bodies dressed up in this apparently meaningless softball player’s getup that doesn’t seem to signify anything because they didn’t play ball, nobody can seem to remember that they ever played ball.”
“No. Well, LaPlante did, in high school. His mother’s looking for a picture of him in his uniform then. But not since then, and that would be, what, four or five years ago.”
“Uh-huh. What have you got that connects the two of them, then? They work together, drinking buddies, what?”
“Well, that’s the hell of it, Frank. So far, they don’t connect to softball and they don’t seem to connect to each other. I asked the LaPlantes, did Wahler come to the house, was he somebody your son mentioned? They don’t remember ever meeting or seeing him. I asked Vince just now; he says he saw LaPlante frequently after local sports events and doesn’t ever remember seeing Wahler till he found him dead. I haven’t had time to call Tammy Wahler yet.” Frank saw my little wince, and grinned.
“Be careful how you ask her,” he said.
“I’ll give her plenty of space,” I said. “Also, remember Ace Barber, our deadbeat Dad? I’ve got a guy in St. Paul helping me, trying to match up mutilation crimes, in the three states that are after him, with the periods of his residence in those states. And I lifted two pieces of junk mail out of his wastebasket, on the strength of that warrant I had, and I’m having them tested for prints. If we get anything I’ll get St Paul to put ‘em in their computer and try for a match with anything we got from the Wahler crime scene. I really don’t like him for these crimes at all, but I figured I had to check it out. One trap I’m trying to avoid, Frank, is getting too set on the idea that these crimes have only one perp. We could have one originator and a copycat.”
“Okay. But if the Barber lead doesn’t pan out, Jake, you hand off the Ace Barber follow-up to one of the other detectives, hear? We want to co-operate with other states on these deadbeat Dad cases, but for now I want you concentrated on these two murders and nothing else.”
“Right,” I said. The clock said twenty minutes to nine. “About the FBI, Frank, can we put that decision off till Monday? Can’t do anything about it today anyway. And I’d rather talk about my list of questions.”
Frank drank the last of his coffee and stared at the bottom of the mug. “Yes. Wait. Let me ask one first. Did the schools come up with any promising leads to the equipment?”
“No. Oh, and I just remembered that, good thing you asked. Andy Dornoch says I can see his lost-and-found Monday, but I haven’t had an answer to my question about midnight deliveries to the park. I’m gonna call him at home,” I said, making a note, “as soon as I get outa here, and find out about that.”
“Oh, I’ll see Andy at this Elks Lodge event at Bryant Field. He told me some time ago he’d be handling the loudspeaker equipment. I’ll remind him to call you. Okay, shoot, first question.”
“Okay. Assume for the sake of argument that Anne Condon saw the killer at Pioneer Park Sunday night, and not just some deliveryman. Why did he lock the gate behind him when he went in, but leave it standing open when he came out?”
“He forgot,” Frank said. “He was in a hurry.”
“Maybe. But he seems so organized, so cool. He locked the gate when he went in, to insure that he wouldn’t be disturbed while he did his business, right? Why wouldn’t he take the same care to lock it again on the way out? Or at least close it. If he’d even closed it, Greeley and Mundt would have assumed it was locked like before. Then the body probably wouldn’t have been discovered till morning, like the second one. But by leaving the gate standing wide open…it was almost as if he wanted to be sure somebody would find it earlier. But why? Why would he care?”
“See what you mean. Something about time–a better time for finding a body? Huh. No time’s convenient for finding dead guys, in my experience…I’m drawing a blank on that one, Jake.”
“Second question: Why does he take the picture?”
“For kicks. What else?”
“Maybe. Think of it, though. A picture taken with a flash bulb in the middle of the night in a darkened public space…it increases the risk of discovery enormously. Kind of hard to see how it could add to the fun. Unless for some reason it’s a necessary part of what he’s trying to do.”
“Really, I think you’re trying to be too logical, here, Jake,” Frank said. “If the guy’s a freak, who’s killing people for thrills, we can’t be expected to understand him. I mean, describe his behavior, sure, match it to a pattern if we can. But we can’t expect to understand his motivation like we’d understand each other. Forget about understanding. We just have to catch him.”
“Yeah, but look at the organization and the–I’m tempted to say the hard work that’s gone into what he’s done so far. You have to give him this: a guy who gets his victims into a costume, dresses them up and stands them on a two-wheeler in a truck, and moves them around to where he wants them to be, he’s going to a lot of trouble, Frank. He isn’t just bashing and slashing at random, this is no mad dog running amok. He’s trying, in some very painstaking way to say…something…and the pictures have to be part of that. So I think we should consider what they could be saying.”
“Which is what?”
“I have no idea,” I said, and Frank laughed sharply and said, “Swell. How many more of these brilliant questions you got? I gotta leave here in five minutes without fail.”
“One more. Where’s the hand?”
“The what?”
“The hand, Frenchy LaPlante’s hand.”
The Chief rocked his big chair back on its springs so hard it squealed, and fixed me with his pale blue glare. “You never found his hand? It wasn’t around there anyplace in the park? You sure?”
“Three squads searched all yesterday morning while we were guarding the space. And we put it on the afternoon duty list, for every car that had any free task time. Willow creek Park and the two blocks around it have been gone over inch by inch, quite thoroughly. The hand wasn’t there.”
Frank stared dismally out the window.
“Shit,” he said softly. “So you think…?”
“It figures, doesn’t it?” I said. “The hand is for the next guy.”
Frank punished the springs on his chair for a couple of minutes. Suddenly he smashed his fist hard into a pile of papers in the middle of his desk. The crash startled me so much I almost fell out of my chair; papers flew all over, and he hurt his hand. He sat back with an aggrieved look, cradling his sore hand in his left armpit.
“God damn it, I hate this,” he said. “I’m responsible but I don’t control anything. There’s somebody out there that’s calling all the shots, and we’re not even close to knowing who he is or what he’s going to do next. The one thing we know for sure is that we’ll hate it when we do find out. And now I have to go and umpire a ball game? It feels like an absolutely ridiculous thing to do, but I promised so I gotta go do it. Shit.” He stood up, straightened his clothes, took a couple of deep breaths and finally said, “Yeah, well, see ya later.”
He left me sitting there, cowed and miserable, and went charging out the door looking cross and dangerous as a grizzly bear. I hated being around him when he got like this, but I did understand how he felt. He was furious about the information leak. And until we made substantial progress on these two murder investigations, he felt jumpy and defensive about being anyplace but the station. But he’s never been able to say no to anybody, so he’s doomed to run around like a nut all weekend, umpiring games, passing out prizes and toting potato salad. Besides getting exploited by every civic do-gooder within a hundred miles, he’s on call to his wife and five kids, and both his parents, and about a hundred McCafferty relatives. Monday morning saves his life every week; seven straight days of Frank’s weekends would kill anybody.
Usually, he seems to thrive on being indispensable. But the way he looked this morning, I devoutly hoped none of the youth of Rutherford decided to question any of his calls.
I went back to my office and called Andy Dornoch at both his numbers. His secretary’s recorded voice answered at Parks and Recreation, reminding me that the office was closed until Monday, and inviting me to leave a message. When the beep sounded I said, “Andy Dornoch, goddammit, call Jake Hines this minute before you take another breath!” and hung up.
Ten rings on his home phone got me nothing but echoes. I felt frustration churning in my gut, so I took a deep breath and put him deliberately out of my mind. Frank would talk to him at the tournament and he would call. I wanted to keep working through my chores, not bog down on any one item and not get involved in any more emotional issues. That’s always the best way, in police work: keep slogging along. You turn over a hundred rocks and don’t find any worms? Turn over another hundred. Or, harder still, go back and find that first hundred rocks, and turn those suckers over again.
