Triple Play, page 18
part #1 of Jake Hines Series
Two closed doors faced each other at the end of the hall. The one on my right was a small bathroom, with one small window over the sink that was closed and locked. The room on the other side of the hall was a little sewing room, with many cupboards. It held spare furniture, a work table, and a double closet with floor to-ceiling doors. The window, which faced the back yard, was open a few inches above the sill. Crossing the room, I noticed one door of the closet slightly ajar, and swung my left arm out absently to close it.
The door swung violently back, and hit the end of my middle finger so hard I heard the bone crack. I screamed at the top of my lungs. Somebody lunged out of the closet and knocked me down, going flat-out for the door.
My right hand found something that moved, a stool or a small chair. From the floor, I threw it as hard as I could at the figure running away. It thudded into his back, driving him forward so he smacked into the door across the hall. He turned with blood streaming down the front of his face, his right hand groping at his back. I had my feet under me and was getting up, but the right hand came away from his back holding a gun that must have been jammed in his belt there, and as I pushed up and forward I saw I was going to be too slow getting out of the way.
Then cause and effect seemed to come unglued. I heard the double roar as the big gun fired two shots, but I never felt a bullet hit me. The momentum of my lunge carried me crashing into the stacked furniture in the corner behind the open door. A lot of shouting followed, and the hall seemed to explode. Wedged behind a broken table, I flailed at a tangle of chair legs poking into me. My left hand was trapped under my body. It hurt so much I was going to throw up. Then Frank flew in through the door, yelling, “Jake?”
He began digging me out, shouting, “You all right? You shot or what?”
“I don’t know,” I said. He threw most of the chairs off me and I pulled myself up. “My hand…” I held out my left hand. The middle finger stuck up at an odd angle. It hurt me desperately, but no blood was running out of it. “It doesn’t seem to be shot, though,” I said, wonderingly. I patted myself here and there, tentatively, with my right hand. “I don’t think I got shot at all, Frank.”
Which was true. I hadn’t. Because Amy Nguyen, easily outdistancing the other two police officers to the top of the stairs, had braced her two small arms to textbook rigidity, and put a clean shot through Harley Mundt’s left shoulder.
12
✜
Frank was right; the rest was routine police work. Pokey and the other docs, in the course of Monday morning’s autopsy, found that Andy Dornoch had a broken larynx and massive bruises on his upper body, indicating he died in a choke-hold.
Jimmy Chang did brilliant work with the rope; he proved the fibers above the limb of the tree were crushed back toward the body, because it was hauled across the limb with the body already in it, and then tied.
He found hair from all three crime scenes that matched, and then matched it to hair still on Dornoch’s body. That placed Dornoch at the first two crimes. And Jimmy’s DNA studies showed conclusively that the penis out of LaPlante’s mouth came off Wahler’s body.
Harley Mundt had already explained Crazy Week to me, of course. We were doing all this work to prove what we already knew, that Dornoch had killed the first two men and Mundt had killed Dornoch. Because Frank said, “Confessions aren’t worth shit after perps get a lawyer. Prove it.”
Frank gave me all the help I needed for a thorough search of Dornoch’s house. It took two days. Al Stearns found the picture we were looking for, inside a long-overdue library book from Hillside High School that was under the socks in Dornoch’s bureau.
“Here,” Stearnsy said, handing it to me with his face turned aside, looking as if he thought one pair of plastic gloves probably wasn’t enough to protect him from the contamination of touching it.
It was an old Polaroid shot of Amanda Dornoch, naked, having sex with three young men. Wahler and LaPlante were in, or mostly in, their softball uniforms, and smiling broadly. Wahler’s penis was in Amanda’s vagina; LaPlante’s was in her mouth. The picture had obviously been taken by a third male, using his left hand. His face and body were outside the picture frame, but his right arm, in the sleeve of a softball uniform, extended across Mandy’s body from the lower edge of the photo. With his right hand, he was jacking off on her belly.
“Good work, Stearnsy,” I said, trying to make it sound as if we’d just finished a roadside cleanup and were about to be awarded two tickets for the turkey raffle. Stearnsy looked as if he might get sick on me. I put the picture in a paper evidence bag. “We can wind this up, now, I guess,” I said to the rest of the search party. We were not a jolly group. Cops hate the shit that rolls over them when other cops commit a crime, and everybody in the department knew that Harley Mundt was sitting in cell forty-three at the Hampstead County jail.
“I knew he’d figured it out,” Mundt told me. He stared blindly into the corner of the interrogation room, where I went every day during the week after he got out of the hospital after surgery. I had the middle finger of my left hand bandaged into a plastic cast; it still hurt some at night and I had pills for the pain. Harley was wearing an upper-body cast, and had his arm in a sling. Amy’s bullet had passed through his upper arm, penetrated his chest cavity, nicked the bottom of his collarbone in front and shattered the scapula, the large shoulder bone behind.
Harley was co-operative, at first, waiving his right to an attorney and seemingly glad of a chance to tell somebody all about his terrible secret. We drank gallons of coffee together, more sociable, suddenly, than we’d ever been in the two years since he joined the department. I got to know him well, a truly discouraging experience.
“Mandy really belonged to the top clique, the kids who ran everything,” Mundt said. “She thought she was kinda…oh, y’know, better than most of us, because her parents had a nice house and they gave her everything, pretty clothes and trips in the summer. She was always bragging about where she’d been, and that. But came party time, she wanted to be one of the fast ones. Liked to get down. Then she’d get friendly with the rowdy bunch, guys like Frenchy and Jim and me.
“It was after a ball game in Senior year, a bunch of us had a kegger, and we got a couple bottles of vodka too. We really got blitzed, all of us. Mandy was even drunker than the rest of us, she’d been on some kind of a crazy grapefruit and cottage cheese diet all week, and the booze really went to her head. She seemed like she was ready for anything. So Jim rented a motel room and we all went in it together and…” He shifted in his chair. His glance slid past me and back to the corner.
“We didn’t rape her. I know her Dad wanted to believe we did, but she went willingly. She mighta done a bunch of stuff she wouldn’t have done if she was sober, but we didn’t pour the stuff down her throat, either.
“But then afterwards, the next week? She acted like we were dirt. Like, she kind of realized it got outa hand, so she turned over a new leaf. Started hanging with the kids that pulled grades and sucked up to teachers and stuff. Frenchy and me went up to her before the next game and said, ‘Hey, Mandy, wanna come party with us after?’ and she wouldn’t even talk to us.
“So I had these pictures that I took that night, I don’t think she even remembered me taking ‘em. I told the guys, I said watch how I make this bitch behave. I waited till study hall, and I found her in the library. I laid one of my pictures right across the top of the page she was reading, and I whispered in her ear how from now on, she better be nice to me, or maybe I’d just deliver one of these to her old man.
“She slammed the book shut on the picture and got up and left. She had an unexcused absence from the next class, and the next day they said she was home sick. I phoned her two or three times, trying to get her to come out of the house, but her Mom wouldn’t call her to the phone, she said she was sick.
“One of her friends, not so long after that, told Frenchy and me and some of the guys, that Mandy Dornoch was suffering from depression. Frenchy said, ‘What’s she got to be depressed about, a great ass like that?’ and we all laughed, but this girl went off in a huff.
“Mandy never did come back to school, though. We all went ahead and graduated, and later that summer Mandy died. She just laid up there in her room and starved, till she got so depressed she took pills, I guess.” He shook his head. “Crazy broad.”
We were both silent for some time. “Harley,” I asked suddenly, “why did you go on to college if you didn’t like school?”
He glared into his coffee. “Stupid rules we got in this state. You have to have two years of college to join the police force. I always knew I wanted to be a cop, I like the status and I like the benefits. Damn good retirement.” He kicked a table leg and said angrily, “I guess that’s all gone to hell, now, huh? And it’s not my fault, none of it, I had to defend myself against that crazy old man.” He brooded. After a minute, he shrugged and asked, “Why? What made you ask about school?”
“Just curious. How’d you even get into college if your grades were so bad?”
“My SAT’s weren’t that bad. And my Dad had a friend who knew the Dean. They persuaded him to let me do some summer tutoring and try one semester. Then I started balling a chick who was a real dog, but one of these brains that got straight A’s. She was real grateful for the attention, and she made freshman year a breeze for me.” He chuckled.
“Well, and so you got through school, and joined the department, and you figured this business with Mandy was all behind you, right?” I asked him.
He stared at me incredulously. “I never even thought of her again,” he said, “why should I? She was nothing to me, we never even dated, not really.
“But right away when we found Wahler, as soon as I saw the uniform and that picture and the way he had been cut, in my heart I knew who did it and why. That’s why I threw up. But at the same time I couldn’t believe anybody’d be so crazy… It just seemed so nuts. So I kept trying to convince myself that maybe it was just a coincidence. Then we found Frenchy, and I knew, beyond any doubt, I was gonna have to kill that crazy bastard or he was going to cut me up and leave me in a park too.” He shivered. “Boy, I had nightmares, thinking how he was going to arrange that hand on me just so, and then take that goddam picture.”
“I still don’t understand,” Frank said, when I reported this conversation to him, “why Dornoch was okay with this for five years and then started killing the guys in the picture.”
“He never saw the picture till now. His brother Steve explained that for me. He said, ‘I’ve been worried about him for weeks, ever since he put Loretta in the hospital this last time. There was something about papers–he was trying to do some kind of long-term commitment and he needed to find her birth certificate. He spent a long time going through all the papers in the house and…he never told me, specifically, about that picture,’ Steve said, ‘but the next time we talked he said he’d found the explanation for what happened to Amanda. And ever since then, he hasn’t been a bit like himself, just very vague and distracted. At first I thought it was natural, his daughter gone and then having to put his wife away like that. But he didn’t seem to snap out of it the way he always could before.’ ”
“Poor bastard,” Frank said. “Okay, so–and the gear and uniforms were old stuff that accumulated in his lost-and- found over the years, I suppose.”
“Right. The uniforms were from a City League team that was all put together, a few years ago, and then lost its sponser at the last minute. That’s why they matched, and were all unmarked. Dornoch had been doling them out as mid-season replacements. Grieve remembered them.”
“Uh-huh. Well, what else from all those questions you kept throwing at me? Oh, have you figured out yet why the gate was open, that first night?”
“Pretty sure. After I thought about it. He told me himself, the next morning. The first groups scheduled to use Pioneer Park, Tuesday morning, were Head Start. Dornoch wanted to be sure those little kids wouldn’t be the ones to find the body. He left the gate ajar so the cops would find it first. See, he knew how often the park was patrolled at night. That’s why all of this worked so well for him, because he knew the system for all the city facilities, inside and out.”
Frank stared out the window a minute. “How do you suppose he figured out the third man was Mundt?” he said. “I’d never have known, from that picture.”
“Who says he did? I mean, Mundt thinks he did, that’s why Mundt killed him. And that’s why he went back into the house to look for the picture. You didn’t forget to lock that window, by the way. Harley climbed the drain pipe and jimmied the lock through the frame. He was absolutely convinced, and he still thinks, that if we’d found that picture we’d have known he was the third man, and that he was the one who killed Dornoch. But that’s Mundt’s guilt talking.
“He got obsessed with the idea of Dornoch coming after him, just the way Dornoch intended him to. That’s what the polaroid pictures on the bodies were for, Frank. Dornoch arranged those bodies the way he did, each one punished for precisely what he did to Amanda, and then took the picture and put it there, to send a message to the third man, ‘This is what’s in store for you.’
“It must have been driving Andy Dornoch out of his tree, the way you kept any news of the pictures out of the paper and off TV. Dornoch phoned in the anonymous tip, Frank, I’m sure of that. He was getting desperate by Friday night, because he’d killed both the men he knew about, and he figured he had to get the description of the pictures out there so the third man would show himself. It’s so ironic. Because the one thing he didn’t have to worry about was the third man getting the message. Harley was right here in the department, he knew all about the pictures. And Harley took the bait just the way Andy hoped he would.”
“That’s what the whole crazy business with the uniforms and pictures was all about, then? Dornoch was trying to get the third guy to come after him like that?”
“Yup.”
“Jeez, you suppose it never occurred to him he could get killed himself? Or maybe he didn’t care by then.”
“Killers often suffer from over-confidence. Dornoch had stalked two men in the dark and strangled them from behind with a cable, and he was sure he’d be quicker than the third man, too, if he could just get him to show his face. Remember, we don’t know that much about Andy Dornoch’s Vietnam experiences. He may have had more practice killing guys in the dark than any of us gave him credit for. But Harley Mundt, as I humbly admit”–I held up my finger cast–”is fast and strong and dangerous.”
“Tell me about it. How the hell did he get through all our screening tests? Makes me mad every time I think about it, guy like that in the department.”
“You’re going to have to think like the rest of the guys in the department, Frank,” I said. “They’re already saying, ‘He may have worn the uniform, but he wasn’t really a cop.’
“Besides, what test should have caught this? It’s off the charts, isn’t it? You’ll never devise a system that will predict everything about human behavior. Mundt was doing all right till this came up. He might have gone his whole career and never done anything to apologize for.”
“You think that? A killer? A guy who’d do what he did? I don’t believe that.” Frank thrashed around in his chair. “Bother’s the hell out of me. Makes me feel like I don’t know anything about judging character, after all these years. Shit! If you hadn’t of yelled like that, he’d've killed you sure. That’s the one thing I do feel good about,” he said, beaming at me, suddenly, “is that you remembered what I told you about yelling, all those years ago when I was training you.”
I nodded brightly, smiling at him. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. “I used to teach it to all my trainees,” he rambled on, sitting back in his groaning chair, enjoying himself for the first time in days, “I’m gonna remind all my FTO’s to put it back into the routine training. It’s one of those simple things, that we get so damn clever and high tech and forget about”–he swiveled noisily around and smiled fondly out the window–”that when you get in a tight spot and you can’t get to your weapon, the best thing to do is holler your head off. Sometimes it’ll scare off an attacker. Sometimes, like it did for you at Dornoch’s house, it’ll get you some help. And you remembered it in a very tight spot, that’s what I feel so good about.”
It didn’t seem like the right time to tell McCafferty that I just yelled like that because Harley Mundt scared the piss out of me.
Trudy Hanson was impressed, when she heard how my snapshots of broken bark made a difference in the case. She inspected them carefully, and offered several pointers about how I could improve my camera technique, insider stuff like, “Try not to cut off the bottom of the object you’re aiming at.” I absorbed as much advice as I could at the time, but I pointed out that we were pretty busy with the Dornoch autopsy. I asked her if she’d be willing to show me some more neat tricks if I came up to St. Paul.
“Well…sure,” she said, looking at me uncertainly. “You mean come to the lab some morning and–”
“Not exactly,” I said, “I was thinking more like go out for dinner and dancing some night. And compare f-stops and stuff.”
She flashed a million megawatt grin that almost made me pass out. “Why, Jake!” she said, “You fox!”
We agreed on Friday. I took the afternoon off, got a haircut and a shoeshine and bought a new jacket, and was on her doorstep at seven o’clock precisely. That took some restraint, because I had been waiting around the corner since six-thirty-five.
She had her hair up in some kind of a wonderful do, in curls on top with little tendrils hanging down. She was wearing a blue dress that matched her eyes. It was demurely cut, not particularly short or revealing, but it fit her in a subtle, clingy way that managed to look both elegant and titllating. I had used the drive to the Cities to debate the relatives merits of a quiet little dinner versus a big night out. As soon as I saw Trudy Hanson’s dress, I discarded all thought of quiet corner booths, and uncorked Plan A.
