’im and maybe keep ’im from killing again.”
“Yes. Since this girl’s dead already . . . and we were just thinking about starting with Heard’s son—”
“Hunh?”
A Fa t h e r ’s L a w
153
“It’s strange, this new killing. Wonder if it is really linked with the others?”
“Hard to tell. We’ll know something soon.”
“Sleepy?”
“No. You?”
“No. But you didn’t get a wink of sleep last night.”
“I was a bit dopey. Earlier today. But I’m more wide awake now than I ever was in all of my life.”
“It’s always like that,” Ed sympathized.
“Say,” Ruddy asked of the chauffeur, leaning forward, “is your radio-telephone working?”
“Yes, sir. It’s right before you, down a bit toward the fl oor-board.”
“Oh, yes.”
“If you pick up the receiver and wait till the light fl ashes green, you’ll get a line.”
“Thanks.” Ruddy lifted the black receiver, and when the light glowed green, he asked the operator amid brittle static for Commissioner King’s office. When put through, he was told that naturally the commissioner was not in but that he could leave any messages he wanted. Ruddy informed the secretary that she must tell the commissioner: he was canceling the inaugural ceremony, scheduled for two o’clock in the afternoon, and he was also postponing the slated staff conference, which was to be held at four P.M.; that he would be absent in the fi eld, giving his reasons as “the urgent nature of the new developments that were taking place in Brentwood Park.”
He hung up, feeling free now to give himself over without reserve to what lay ahead.
“Gosh, you weren’t an hour too soon, Chief,” the chauffeur said as Ruddy hugged the car handle, balancing himself against the tight pull of a steep curve.
154
R i c h a rd W r i g h t
“Looks like it,” Ruddy mumbled in an uncommunicative tone. “No facts as yet on this new fi nd?”
“Nothing, Chief. Just what came over the wire about fi nding a girl’s body.”
“Hummn . . .”
“A workman found the body?” Ed asked.
“Yes, sir. But he seems on the level.”
“Funny, eh? It comes just a bit after you took the oath of office,” Ed commented.
“I was thinking about that,” Ruddy said almost defensively.
Ten minutes later, both Ruddy and Ed, following an officer with a flashlight, plunged into high wet grass and thick tree leaves and struggled toward an area ahead, which was il-luminated by blinding spotlights. Yeah, a regular paradise for muggers. The cuffs of his trousers were becoming heavy and waterlogged from the limp, dew-wet grass.
“We must map out this little-used path in these woods right away,” Ruddy growled angrily.
“Yeah. This surely ain’t it,” an offi cer volunteered.
“Why in hell would a young girl come in here?” Ed asked, more of himself than of Ruddy.
“You got me there. I’d rather walk a mile on asphalt than wade through here,” Ruddy said. “But some people have odd ideas.”
“Her body must be somewhere near that path one keeps hearing about,” Ed hazarded.
“Maybe.”
“These damned wild woods are more frequented than we imagine,” Ed observed.
“People who live in cities dote on savage places like this,”
Ruddy said.
“Looks like it.”
A Fa t h e r ’s L a w
155
Far ahead, through wet leaves, Ruddy could glimpse bits of dazzling yellow light.
“Not far now,” the offi cer grunted.
“I see the lights,” Ed announced.
A minute later the officer said, “Here we are, sir.”
He pulled aside a bunch of slender tree branches so that Ruddy and Ed could step into the full glare of the circularly grouped spotlights. A dozen or so officers and plainclothesmen stood in a rough semicircle. Ruddy pressed forward and a few officers made way for him, calling out softly: “It’s the Chief; let
’im in.”
Ruddy halted abruptly. He stood gazing down at the prone body of a young girl who lay half on her stomach and half on her side, as though her body had twisted itself while in the act of pitching headlong toward the ground. The girl’s body pressed down wet weeds more than two feet tall.
“Has anybody seen that path?” Ruddy called out.
“Yes, sir. It’s about half a mile from here.”
“Then she was running, trying to dodge somebody,” Ruddy said. “Even a damn fool wouldn’t walk in here.”
“That seems about it, Chief,” somebody chimed in.
A cheap, white handbag, the handle of which was still clutched in the still, waxen, stiff fingers, lay partly opened with most of its contents spilled out: a handkerchief, now wet and soggy; a brown comb with a few strands of blond hair; an address book, swollen from humidity; a gilt-colored lipstick; a powder case; a cheap paperback love novel, now swelling with dew; a billfold fairly thick with what seemed like paper money; a few opened letters; a batch of keys; and other odd items. A light wind was still blowing and it was agitating the girl’s cheap skirt, which was pulled a few inches above her right knee, reveal-ing a short sweep of white thigh. The girl’s tiny hat was still on
156
R i c h a rd W r i g h t
her head, tied by a pink ribbon under her chin, the knotted bow out of sight now. Both of the nylon stockings had been ripped.
The long blond hair, worn loose and tied in a ponytail at the back of her head, was tangled and wet about her face and shoulders. A tiny band of gold ring—not a wedding ring—showed in soft glints around a dim blue stone on the middle finger of the girl’s left hand. Ruddy had to stoop and peer in order to study the girl’s face, and he saw a bullet wound high in the middle of her forehead.
“Felled like an ox,” he breathed.
“Done at point-blank range,” Ed said.
“Exactly like the other wounds,” Ruddy said.
“A .38?” Ed asked, looking up.
“Yes, sir. Seems like it.”
“Identification?” Ruddy asked.
“Yes sir, Chief.” The voice was that of Captain Snell.
“Oh, Captain. You’re there,” Ruddy complimented the man.
“And I’m amazed to see you here, knowing you had no sleep last night,” Captain Snell said. “We’ve been into the handbag. Her name is Janet Wilder. Aged twenty. We got that off her Social Security card. She lives at 931 Beachcomb Street—in Brentwood—that’s way over where there’s a new housing development. She worked as a wrapper, it seemed, for Swift’s, in the stockyards.”
“Any signs of sexual molestation?”
“No sign of any. Of course, the coroner will be able to tell definitely. But I’d say no, from the looks of her clothes,” the captain reported.
“Anything seems to be missing?”
“Doesn’t seem like it so far,” the captain said. “We’re going to check to find out what she had on her, besides what we see here. It seems that she’s just been paid off. Her paycheck is here—calling
A Fa t h e r ’s L a w
157
for eighty-one dollars and sixteen cents, minus income tax. And there is four dollars and forty cents in cash in the handbag.”
Ruddy stood and pulled off his cap and felt the cool night air on his hot forehead.
“What was she doing in these goddamned woods?” Ruddy demanded with savage compassiion.
“Looks like she was taking a short-cut, Chief,” somebody said.
“She took one.” Ruddy was wild with impotent grief.
“We just heard about that path tonight,” Ed murmured.
“Any idea when she died?” Ruddy asked.
“The coroner’s rough estimate is about two P.M. this afternoon—that is, Chief, yesterday afterno
on, for it’s after midnight now. She must’ve died at once. Rigor mortis is beginning to set in.”
“No signs of a struggle?”
“None whatsoever.”
“No clues?”
“No, not yet. About five of our officers are fanning out with flashlights and beating the bushes. We’ll be able to see better tomorrow morning.”
“This is undoubtedly a repetition of those three past murders,” Ed stated stoutly.
“Seems like it,” several voices sounded at once.
“Captain Snell, get to her home and notify her kin and pick up whatever you can from ’em,” Ruddy ordered, sighing.
“Yes, sir, Chief.”
“Photos have been taken?”
“Yes, sir. They just fi nished, sir.”
“Go over that handbag for fingerprints—just to make sure that we don’t overlook any bets,” Ruddy ordered.
“Yes, sir.”
158
R i c h a rd W r i g h t
“Any sign of footprints at all?” he asked of the assembled offi cers.
“None, sir,” Captain Snell answered. “You see, this grass here is now wet with dew. Whatever could have been seen is now gone. The dew made it rise and take its old stance again, and the leaves, if they’ve been pushed aside, have also gone back to their original position.”
“Yeah. I see that.” Ruddy sighed. “We never seem to be in time for our killer.”
“Here comes somebody,” Ed announced, pointing to an advancing cone of yellow light that wobbled in the darkness, a wobble that indicated a man walking.
Jock Weidman pushed forward, bareheaded, his face red and streaked with sweat and wet and showing scratches and bruises where tree twigs had whipped about his cheeks.
“I lost my cap somewhere,” he said idly.
“Anything, Jock?” Ruddy called.
“Hi, Chief,” Jock answered. “I’ve found something. A hole . . .
freshly dug . . . about a quarter of a mile from here. Looks to me like somebody was digging up a buried gun. In fact, there seems to be the shape of something that looks like a .38 molded into the clay there.”
“Jesus . . . let’s get there!” Ruddy yelled.
“A clue of some kind at last,” Ed yelled.
“I want a cast made of that hole at once,” Ruddy ordered, plunging forward.
“Chief, the dew is still falling,” Jock said.
“That’s why we must shelter that hole,” Ruddy said.
“I did, Chief,” Jock said. “I put newspapers over it.”
“God, good for you, Jock,” Ruddy thanked his man.
“Get that plaster guy here quick and let ’im take a cast of this,” Ruddy called.
A Fa t h e r ’s L a w
159
“Yes, sir,” an eager chorus of voices answered.
“Don’t know if there is any chance of fi ngerprints,” Ed spoke pessimistically, panting as they half ran and half walked.
“Maybe not,” Ruddy agreed.
Jock was at their side, puffing, for he had been over this route and was now retraveling it. Ruddy saw that his coat was sticking to his skin.
“Jock, get to a car and get your clothes changed as soon as you show us this hole,” Ruddy advised.
“It’s nothing, Chief.”
“No backtalk. Do as I tell you,” Ruddy scolded him. “Don’t want any of my men getting sick on me.”
“Okay, Chief.” Jock’s voice held a note of gratitude.
Five minutes later they stood over a gaping brown hole amid tall grass.
“Goddamn,” Ruddy breathed. “Now, what made ’im rush here and dig up that gun?”
“We won’t know maybe till we catch ’im,” Captain Snell murmured.
“Captain, get to that girl’s house, like I told you,” Ruddy snapped.
“Yes sir, Chief,” Captain Snell answered and vanished.
“Not much of a chance for any kind of prints there.” Ed spoke studiedly. “Sometimes a print will adhere from one object to another. But that clay is already losing its shape. This is a goddamn luckless case.”
“Well, take a mold quick, anyhow,” Ruddy pressed. “You can never tell. Maybe that .38 has certain defects that’ll show.
Now, we’ve got to find that gun. The killer has it. No wonder we could never find it—with its being buried here. Who in all hell would’ve thought of digging in this godforsaken wood for a .38? But what is he going to do with it? He’s got one victim with
160
R i c h a rd W r i g h t
it already, but he did not dig it up for that. He’s going to use it.
He thought enough of digging it up to risk being seen, for he knows we’re looking for ’im high and low.” Ruddy looked at the circle of offi cers fl anking him. “Men, we are looking for a desperate killer. He’s reached into our force and laid low the son of one of our men, Detective Heard. Before that, for some fantastic reason, he killed four times, twice each time he struck. Now, this is the sixth killing. I’m canceling all leaves. The search for this killer has priority over everything. And I’m asking Commissioner King to make it priority number one for the whole city of Chicago! Our police department is not going to rest until this killer has been had by the heels!”
C H A P T E R 1 3
Having dispatched the station’s standing corps of stool pigeons to the city’s four corners to listen or snoop for possible leads or information; having assigned the squads of detectives to their various chores; having issued strict orders to keep all developments out of the press for fear of tipping off the murderer that his victim had been found—in short, having seen to it that all the traditional and routine aspects of the investigatory apparatus had been set in motion, Ruddy, instead of going home to sleep, sat alone in his new offi ce, feeling the powerful tug of fatigue but somehow gripped by an irrational urge to resist resting.
The thought—that until now he had not dared to let himself think—was standing up full and imperative in him. It had not risen suddenly, that question, yet it could not be said that it had stolen upon him. Long before this murder case had broken, and long before he had had any notion that he would ever be a chief of police, there had slumbered in him a secret fear for Tommy. But that fear had been nameless, intuitive, tugging tentatively at his heartstrings, and he had never been able to tell why. Whenever he thought of Tommy, he thought of his own
162
R i c h a rd W r i g h t
young manhood and there was an unbridgeable gap between them; there were no kindred parallels upon which he could rely. He had always consoled himself with the thought that he had not given the boy enough of his attention, and that in this modern world too great a distance of experience and attitude loomed between the generations of fathers and sons. But what he was looking at now as a possibility was no distance; it was an absolute pouring out from another world governed by other laws.
The hard kernel of that question had been sown in his mind by Ed’s long and highly speculative analysis of who the murderer could possibly be and what motive could have sustained such cold-blooded and brutal slayings. And that was why, when Ed had talked and argued, an anxious sweat had broken out upon his brow. At first he had merely stared noncommittally at the magical logic of Ed’s suppositions, as though peering into the wrong end of a telescope, sensing and feeling the horror of a remote possibility; the whole idea had hovered somewhere between his subconscious mind and his rational outlook, and then, as he had stood there above the dew-damp body of that slain girl, he had wondered who on earth was close enough to him to have known that he had become the head of the police of Brentwood Park, who on earth close to him had had in his past experience that shock of living that would have made him feel outraged toward all the moral and institutional laws of the world?
The question was: Was Tommy, his son, his flesh and blood, the murderer he sought? And Tommy—for reasons Ruddy had no cause at the time to suspect—had not been at home for lunch yesterday! W
hy had he rushed off into the unknown after their first long talk, a talk in which the boy had confessed having sustained an unbearable shock? Tommy had been missing at
A Fa t h e r ’s L a w
163
the very moment that the girl had been fleeing the demon who had slain her.
No, no, that could not be. He was tired, too tired to think; his nerves were overwrought. He was letting the responsibilities of his job weigh him down and cloud his better judgment.
There was no reason on earth why a horror like that should so much as touch his life. No, it could not be true; it was crazy. And he was crazy even to think it!
But Ruddy was not completely his own master; years and years had gone into the making of him into a policeman and he could not control the cold and logical workings of his own mind. Given a certain set of hard facts, given a possible motive, given a cold and stiff corpse, his mind, in spite of his feelings, leaped inevitably toward guilty possibilities.
Just how badly had Tommy been hurt? “Maybe not much, or he would have talked to me about it,” he muttered half aloud. Yet he knew that there were some shocks too deep for speech, that left the heart and mind numb, that sent one’s tired and restless legs wandering down lonely black night streets. In his talking to poor Marie he too had felt the shock, the senselessness of what had happened to her and Tommy, had been swept by a blind surge of fury against the very foundations of the sentient universe. And if he had felt that, what must poor Tommy have felt?
Yet no matter how much logic appeared to be in it, it just could not be true. It could not possibly happen to him or to any member of his family. Did not his hands hold the law? Had he not done his part as a father and a citizen? Sure, there were freakish accidents in life, but they always visited other people, people who had somewhere deep down in their lives something to be corrected, some justice due them, some debt that they had not paid society or their fellow men or their God. But, in
164
R i c h a rd W r i g h t
the very split second of thinking this, Ruddy knew that it was nonsense. First of all, he knew nothing of such matters. Only the Church knew. But he could never go to Father Joyce with this kind of story. Why not? Well, one just did not. Something in him told him that he could not trust the Church even in matters of this sort.