Triple Play, page 15
part #1 of Jake Hines Series
Pokey got there while the doctor from Methodist Hospital was examining the body, on a gurney in the yard. They noted temperature, rigor, and lividity, examined the bruises left on Dornoch’s neck by the rope, and agreed to transport the body to the hospital morgue for the weekend. Pokey said he’d schedule an autopsy at the lab Monday morning.
“I just found him hanging from a tree in his yard,” I said. “How much cause of death do you need?”
“Law says I gotta confirm,” he said, squinting up at me in the noisy yard. The D.A. had arrived, and a couple of vans from the TV and radio stations. “You getting kinda fed up with all this dying stuff, Jake?” I turned away from his shrewd little pinched face, so wise from his many trips to Hell and back.
“We don’t usually bunch ‘em up like this,” I said.
“Oughta make new rule, probably,” Pokey said, “guys wanta off themselves, least they can do is pick slower week.”
“Damn straight,” I said, but my smile felt stiff.
Then Parks and Recreation people began coming by to see if they could help, along with off-duty cops, and city employees from other departments. Dornoch had worked for the municipality of Rutherford for over twenty years, and been Director of Parks and Recreation almost ten. Everybody owed him favors. When his peers learned they’d been working with this helpful, cheerful guy who was secretly hurting so much that he’d decided to hang himself in his yard, they began to feel like insensitive clods. To absolve themselves, they came to his house and stood around in the way.
The block filled up with teachers, scout leaders, coaches, United Way execs, Head Start tutors and AIDS March organizers. They clustered in anxious clumps, in the yard first and then spilling out into the street and down the block, telling each other how if they’d only known, they would have done anything, absolutely anything, my God, Andy was just such a helluva swell guy, you know? Frank went into crowd-control mode, and began appealing to people to move out. It was touchy work, and it took a long time, because these were all friends, not strangers. And while they were obstructing traffic in the neighborhood, so were most of the neighbors. It was a surreal scene, clusters of distressed people wearing T-shirts with silly slogans on them, holding on to each other and keening softly, crying on their running shoes, loaning each other scruffy wads of Kleenex dug out of their shorts.
As soon as Pokey took charge of the body, Frank told me, “I’m gonna assign Anderson to be the detective in attendance at this autopsy, Jake. This is a suicide, it’s got nothing to do with the cases you’re working on, and you’ve got enough to do without it.”
“Good by me,” I said, “anything more I can do for you?”
“Hell, no,” Frank said, “I got enough cops here for a firefight. Why don’t you go on back to what you were working on? If you can remember what it was, can you?” He looked at me with some concern; I must be showing a little wear and tear.
“No problem,” I said. Like everybody else, I tend to say “No problem” just as problems spin completely out of control. I got in my car, dug out my phone book, and looked up Jay Billingsley’s number. He answered after eleven rings, sounding exasperated. When I said my name he said, “Jake, you promised...”
“You won’t believe this,” I said, “but I just took pictures of another dead body.”
“Shit, Jake. Maybe I should just nail my door shut, I don’t feel safe on the street any more. What the hell has gone wrong with this town?”
“I dunno. But could you possibly do one more set of pictures?”
He thought a minute. “Okay, “ he finally said, “If you’ll do something for me. I don’t have anybody to help in the shop Monday, and I’m gonna be dead meat from working all weekend. Will you come by and get your pictures Sunday night? I’m gonna close up Monday and just put a sign on the door.”
“You got it, buddy.” I said, “Thanks.”
Traffic was badly snarled as far south as Twentieth Avenue, but once out of that two-block area it was as though the hullabaloo in Dornoch’s yard never happened. The rest of Rutherford dreamed on through a golden afternoon. The tennis courts were full. Homeowners were raking and clipping and planting, all along the street. My watch said one-thirty. Could that be right? It felt like a couple of days since I had parked in front of Dornoch’s house.
Jay’s assistant wrote up my order without a word; evidently he had come out of his burrow long enough to tell her I was coming. I stapled the receipt alongside the earlier one, and we wished each other a great weekend, like old pals.
I headed back downtown toward the station, trying to get my brain sorted out. What had I been going to do after I saw Dornoch? I had a vague recollection of working my way through a list. Wait, was it records? I was getting ready to evaluate some records. Why? Then I remembered: the list of serial murders from the FBI
Oh boy, won’t that be keen, I bitched to myself as I headed back downtown. A nice long list of serial murders. Such an original answer to the question of how to spend a beautiful Saturday afternoon in the glorious month of May: crouch down in a dim little cubicle in a stuffy building, and comb through old records of unspeakable crimes. What could possibly be more appropriate, when you’ve just finished photographing one of your colleagues dangling from a rope in his yard? Then maybe, on the way home tonight, just for the sake of consistency, I could get attacked by birds.
Wallowing in self-pity got me halfway back to the station, before I remembered I still owed myself lunch. I couldn’t face tacos at the drive-in, the pleasure I’d been planning before I found Andy Dornoch. I just stopped at a Wendy’s, and played that salad bar game where you see how many calories you can possibly pile on top of lettuce. I believe I may have topped my previous personal best.
10
✜
At the department, the telephone console was crackling with traffic. Word of Dornoch’s suicide had spiraled outward from Eighteenth Avenue, spreading alarm and confusion. All along the path of the rumor, Rutherford householders were calling the station, hoping for a denial. As soon as the distressing news was verified, most of them added a second question, pretty much along the lines of, “What is this town coming to, anyway?”
Tom Cunningham and his support staff were keeping up with the heavy telephone traffic okay, but dealing with the high anxiety was tough. They were using every one of the counseling skills they’d learned in Psych 101, layering on reassuring words and quiet, soothing tones of voice. They were probably all going to go home tonight and kick the cat.
I waved, got a couple of distracted nods in reply, and scuttled into my office, which on second thought didn’t seem all that unnattractive. “No Ma’am, I really don’t believe there’s any reason why you should cancel your family reunion,” I heard Cunningham say in his most reasonable voice, as I stepped inside. With the door closed, the chatter went away. Tom’s fax was waiting for me, a thick fan-fold of apparent serial crimes, nationwide. They were strings of killings, with similarities so striking they were presumed to have been perpetrated by one person, or possibly, the appended note pointed out, one perpetrator and one or two imitators. Jesus. Imitators. Like Rich Little doing John Wayne.
Since no killer had been positively identified in any of these series, all were considered ongoing, though some had been inactive for several years. Tom’s note acknowledged that he had made no finds involving softball gear, but directed me to the section involving mutilations.
I settled down to read, beginning with the cases Tom had marked. The first set of killings had plainly targeted prostitutes, so I ruled it out. A second set, in which the victims were all boys and young men, held my attention for some time. But all the victims exhibited clear signs of anal intercourse before, during and even after death. Since neither of my victims had been sodomized, I marked that set “unlikely.”
One string of murders, through the south-central states, had been labelled “The Play-School Murders,” by the tabloids, because the bodies had all been posed the way little girls pose their dolls: sitting on a chair at a table, or propped up in bed with toys. Three of the Play-School murders had occurred within the last year and a half, so the killer appeared to be still active.
For a few minutes, I considered the possibility that the Play-School Murders, and my two victims as well, might be laid at the movable doorstep of Ace Barber, the deadbeat Dad. But I had gathered substantial evidence that placed Ace and his roofing business in Iowa and Michigan near the times when the last three murders on the printout list were committed, in Texas and Louisiana. Considering Ace Barber’s limited finances and battered pickup, that much fast travel looked like a stretch.
I read back and forth in the series, my hopes going up and down. None of the victims had been put into a costume, nor had the killer made any use of sports paraphernalia. Several victims had been female, too, and the mutilations performed on them indicated a fixation with mammaries. Still, the posing aspect held my attention. I highlighted the names and phone numbers of the investigating personnel in the three most recent states. I could call them on Monday. At least I’d be talking to guys who’d been consulting some of the same sources I had; maybe they could save me some time.
At first, I had to force myself through the reading. I conducted a quiet dialogue with the ugliness of the material, muttering, “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” and, “Ah, shit,” twisting around in my chair and making faces at it. The list was poorly printed, on flimsy fax paper, fan-folded into a slippery pile; a couple of times I dropped it, and had to pick the whole smeary mess up off the floor and put it back in order before I could go on. My reluctance to read through the sordid contents compounded my aggravation with the paper it was printed on; I was basically at war with the entire task.
After half an hour, it began to get more routine, and by the second hour I was having trouble keeping my mind on it. The relentless narrative of evil took on a deadening banality. Many of the medical terms were only partly comprehensible to me. And several investigators seemed to think they could make the information more palatable by writing their reports in psychobabble about “stereotypical behaviors,” (when did “behavior” get pluralized?) and bureaucratic jargon about “agent/vector factors.” These show-offs just layered boredom and confusion on top of the other horrors I had to confront. Forced to read phrases like, “parameters of opportunity,” and “reliable markers for sociopathology,” my brain turns into a mouse, and begins digging an escape tunnel.
When I realized that I had been staring at the same section of the report for five minutes while actually planning a rock garden, I folded the paper carefully open at the account of the second Houston outrage, marked it with a paper clip, and reached my mug down from bookshelf. Maybe more coffee would help.
I had my hand on the doorknob when the telephone rang.
“Jake?” the Chief said, in an odd, strangled voice. “Is that you?”
“Last I knew,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Can you come back out here to Dornoch’s house right now, please?”
“Well….sure. What do you–you want me to bring anything or…?”
“No. Just come right now without talking to anybody.”
“Right.” Plainly, Frank was in no mood to chat.
Keilly and Forbes were walking foot patrols, front and back, at Dornoch’s house. “Chief said tell you he’s in the kitchen,” Keilly said, looking harassed. He hustled on down the sidewalk, to move a carload of gawkers along. I went in through the dark, cool front hall. The living room was on my right, the dining room on my left, past the stairway. A swing door at the far end of the dining room led to a pantry, and then to the kitchen. Frank was standing by the sink, wearing plastic gloves. His face looked flushed and sore, as if he’d been scalded.
“We found Dornoch’s brother in LaCrosse,” he said, without preamble. “I told him Dornoch was dead. Explained to him about Loretta being in the hospital. Told him there was nobody but him to take charge of the house, see about a funeral, all that stuff. He said of course he’d come over, but he’s got a small business and a big family, and it might take two or three days to make arrangements. So I promised him I’d look after the house till he could get here.
“I started through, locking windows, checking faucets. Thought I better see there’s nothing spoiling in the refrigerator,” His voice cracked. “Opened this thing up–” He strode to the big upright and flung open the two sides, refrigerator and freezer, at once. The interior was spotlessly clean and white. The few food items inside didn’t come close to filling it. So it was easy for me to see that only one item lay on the second shelf on the freezer side.
“It’s a hand,” I said.
“Of course it’s a hand, goddammit,” Frank said. “Is it the one you’ve been looking for?”
“Oh…well…how could it…God, Frank, you think?”
“You tell me,” Frank said, impatiently. “Does it look like the other one?”
I’m no good, it turns out, at assessing the appearance of hands that have been severed from their owners. It’s harder than you might think. In the first place, I didn’t want to look at it any longer.
“Please, Frank,” I said, “close the door a minute.” We faced each other in the dark, cool kitchen, across the gleaming brick-patterned tile floor and neat pine cupboards.
“Why would Dornoch have Frenchy LaPlante’s hand in his freezer?” I pleaded. “That doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“Why would he have anybody’s?” Frank asked. “So is it LaPlante’s or isn’t it?” His relentless blue stare bored holes in my face while a grandfather clock, somewhere in the house, clicked loudly over and began to boom the hour. It was four o’clock.
“I can’t be sure,” I said, against a rising feeling of certainty, “until we get the lab open and compare it to the one on LaPlante’s body.”
“Do it,” Frank said. “Call the station, get them to find somebody’s home number, get a doc down there to open up for us.”
I made the call. On an impulse, then, I called Pokey’s house. His wife said he was working in the yard. I waited while his quick, hard footsteps pounded toward the phone. I asked him if he’d care to come down and have a look.
“Is Pope Catholic?” he asked, adding, in a disgusted, irrelevant aside, “stupid quack grass always gonna win in this yard anyway.”
“Congratulations,” I said, “now you know everything the natives know about lawn care.”
We all converged on the Hampstead County lab within a few minutes. Frank and I sat in the front seat of his car until Jason Stuart arrived. We had the hand between us, in a clear plastic baggie, and neither one of us wanted to stand around a parking lot holding it.
Once we got inside, it only took three minutes to establish, to everybody’s satisfaction, that the hand from Dornoch’s freezer looked just like the one on Louis LaPlante’s body. It was pale and fat-fingered, with black hair growing thick across the back, down to the first knuckle joint, and broken, dirty fingernails. Pokey and Stuart were satisfied with the match-up in wounds, where the hand and wrist went together.
“Gotta prove it, though,” Frank said. “Is a blood test enough?”
“Good for starts,” Jason Stuart said, “if there’s any ambiguity we’ll do a DNA test.”
“Okay,” I said, “and I’m calling BCA right now, to ask for a crew to come down here Monday morning and help us with Dornoch’s autopsy.”
Pokey looked put out. “What we need that Chang kid for? Looks pretty routine to me.”
“A zillion good pictures,” I said, dialling, “and more DNA tests, if we need them. And hair and fiber tests, which might start to be worth their weight in gold now. Something to put Dornoch at the scene of those other two killings…”
A young-sounding person named Lee answered the phone. I couldn’t decide if the voice was male or female, and the name offered no clue. It made me realize how much of my phone personality is gender-specific; I started out warm and winning and shaded off toward hearty and collegial. It was all wasted on Lee, who reacted to a third request for assistance from Rutherford like somebody hearing about sliced bread for the first time.
“Wow, this is terrific!” Lee crowed. “Boy, wait’ll Chang hears this, he’s gonna shit a brick!”
“Uh-huh. Can we confirm for Monday morning at nine, then, Lee?”
“Oh, you bet. We’ll make certain there’s a van sitting right here, loaded and ready to go. Jimmy would never speak to me again if I let anything screw up his chance to get in on another Rutherford call. Come to think of it he’s in the building now, you want to hold on a minute?” I didn’t, particularly, but Lee had already clicked off. I sat through some sappy elevator music for forty-five seconds, and then Jimmy’s voice said, “Jake? You got another mutilation murder, no kidding?”
“No,” I said. “We’ve got what looked like a simple suicide by hanging till a few minutes ago. But now we’ve found some evidence that appears to link it to the first two murders. But there’s no mutilation, Jimmy, no softball uniform, no picture on the body, none of that stuff. Just evidence that doesn’t seem to make any sense. So what we’ve got here is a genuine mystery, do you like that?”
“God, yes,” Chang said softly.
“Hair and fiber, Jimmy, think hair and fiber. A lot more blood typing. Maybe another DNA test, bring a kit. Dirt samples. We need a common thread. Something that puts some one person at the site of all three deaths. And about pictures, do you think you can get Trudy again? She did a heck of a job for us before,” I said, using the truth deviously.
“Oh, Jake, pictures and fingerprints are really just routine, any competant technician will do just as well,” Chang said, blissfully self-absorbed. “But okay, if you like I’ll see if she’s on duty Monday. And I’ll see you at the lab there at what? Nine o’clock?”
I hung up and listened to Frank, in high gear on his phone, telling Cunningham to detail two more squads to Dornoch’s house, for a complete search.
