Dreamsongs. Volume II

  Rogoff paused with a forkful of the mashed potatoes, and studied her thoughtfully. “Inconvenient,” he said.

  “Dad wanted Roy released, but no one supported him. The official line was that the Stanski girl was unconnected to the others. Roy had done four, and some other child molester had done the fifth.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “It’s bullshit,” Randi said. “Dad knew it and he said it. That didn’t make him any friends in the department, but he didn’t care. He could be a very stubborn man. You read the file on his death?”

  Rogoff nodded. He looked uncomfortable.

  “My father was savaged by an animal. A dog, the coroner said. If you want to believe that, go ahead.” This was the hard part. She’d picked at it like an old scab for years, and then she’d tried to forget it, but nothing ever made it easier. “He got a phone call in the middle of the night, some kind of lead about the missing kids. Before he left he phoned Joe Urquhart to ask for backup.”

  “Chief Urquhart?”

  Randi nodded. “He wasn’t chief then. Joe had been his partner when he was still in uniform. He said Dad told him he had a hot tip, but not the details, not even the name of the caller.”

  “Maybe he didn’t know the name.”

  “He knew. My father wasn’t the kind of cop who goes off alone in the middle of the night on an anonymous tip. He drove down to the stockyards by himself. It was waiting for him there. Whatever it was took six rounds and kept coming. It tore out his throat, and after he was dead it ate him. What was left by the time Urquhart got there…Joe testified that when he first found the body he wasn’t even sure it was human.”

  She told the story in a cool, steady voice, but her stomach was churning. When she finished Rogoff was staring at her. He set down his fork and pushed his plate away. “Suddenly I’m not very hungry anymore.”

  Randi’s smile was humorless. “I love our local press. There was a case a few years ago when a woman was kidnapped by a gang, held for two weeks. She was beaten, tortured, sodomized, raped hundreds of times. When the story broke, the paper said she’d been quote assaulted unquote. It said my father’s body had been mutilated. It said the same thing about Joan Sorenson. I’ve been told her body was intact.” She leaned forward, looked hard into his dark brown eyes. “That’s a lie.”

  “Yes,” he admitted. He took a sheet of paper from his breast pocket, unfolded it, passed it across to her. “But it’s not the way you think.”

  Randi snatched the coroner’s report from his hand, and scanned quickly down the page. The words blurred, refused to register. It wasn’t adding up the way it was supposed to.

  Cause of death: exsanguination.

  Somewhere far away, Rogoff was talking. “It’s a security building, her apartment’s on the fourteenth floor. No balconies, no fire escapes, and the doorman didn’t see a thing. The door was locked. It was a cheap spring lock, easy to jimmy, but there was no sign of forced entry.”

  The instrument of death was a blade at least twelve inches long, extremely sharp, slender and flexible, perhaps a surgical instrument.

  “Her clothing was all over the apartment, just ripped to hell, in tatters. In her condition, you wouldn’t think she’d put up much of a struggle, but it looks like she did. None of the neighbors heard anything, of course. The killer chained her to her bed, naked, and went to work. He worked fast, knew what he was doing, but it still must have taken her a long time to die. The bed was soaked with her blood, through the sheets and mattress, right down to the box spring.”

  Randi looked back up at him, and the coroner’s report slid from her fingers onto the Formica table. Rogoff reached over and took her hand.

  “Joan Sorenson wasn’t devoured by any animal, Miss Wade. She was flayed alive, and left to bleed to death. And the part of her that’s missing is her skin.”

  IT WAS A QUARTER PAST MIDNIGHT WHEN WILLIE GOT HOME. HE parked the Caddy by the pier. Ed Juddiker’s wallet was on the seat beside him. Willie opened it, took out the money, counted. Seventy-nine bucks. Not much, but it was a start. He’d give half to Betsy this first time, credit the rest to Ed’s account. Willie pocketed the money and locked the empty wallet in the glovebox. Ed might need the driver’s license. He’d bring it by Squeaky’s over the weekend, when Ed was on, and talk to him about a payment schedule.

  Willie locked up the car and trudged wearily across the rain-slick cobbles to his front door. The sky above the river was dark and starless. The moon was up by now, he knew, hidden somewhere behind those black cotton clouds. He fumbled for his keys, buried down under his inhaler, his pillbox, a half-dozen pairs of scissors, a handkerchief, and the miscellaneous other junk that made his coat pocket sag. After a long minute, he tried his pants pocket, found them, and started in on his locks. He slid the first key into his double deadbolt.

  The door opened slowly, silently.

  The pale yellow light from a streetlamp filtered through the brewery’s high, dusty windows, patterning the floor with faint squares and twisted lines. The hulks of rusting machines crouched in the dimness like great dark beasts. Willie stood in the doorway, keys in hand, his heart pounding like a triphammer. He put the keys in his pocket, found his Primatene, took a hit. The hiss of the inhaler seemed obscenely loud in the stillness.

  He thought of Joanie, of what happened to her.

  He could run, he thought. The Cadillac was only a few feet behind him, just a few steps; whatever was waiting in there couldn’t possibly be fast enough to get him before he reached the car. Yeah, hit the road, drive all night, he had enough gas to make Chicago, it wouldn’t follow him there. Willie took the first step back, then stopped, and giggled nervously. He had a sudden picture of himself sitting behind the wheel of his big lime-green chromeboat, grinding the ignition, grinding and grinding and flooding the engine as something dark and terrible emerged from inside the brewery and crossed the cobblestones behind him. That was silly; it was only in bad horror movies that the ignition didn’t turn over, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?

  Maybe he had just forgotten to lock up when he’d left for work that morning. He’d had a lot on his mind, a full day’s work ahead of him and a night of bad dreams behind; maybe he’d just closed the fucking door behind him and forgotten about his locks.

  He never forgot about his locks.

  But maybe he had, just this once.

  Willie thought about changing. Then he remembered Joanie, and put the thought aside. He stood on one leg, pulled off his shoe. Then the other. Water soaked through his socks. He edged forward, took a deep breath, moved into the darkened brewery as silently as he could, pulling the door shut behind him. Nothing moved. Willie reached down into his pocket, pulled out Mr. Scissors. It wasn’t much, but it was better than bare hands. Hugging the thick shadows along the wall, he crossed the room and began to creep upstairs on stockinged feet.

  The streetlight shone through the window at the end of the hall. Willie paused on the steps when his head came up to the level of the second-story landing. He could look up and down the hallway. All the office doors were shut. No light leaking underneath or through the frosted-glass transoms. Whatever waited for him waited in darkness.

  He could feel his chest constricting again. In another moment he’d need his inhaler. Suddenly he just wanted to get it over with. He climbed the final steps and crossed the hall in two long strides, threw open the door to his living room, and slammed on the lights.

  Randi Wade was sitting in his beanbag chair. She looked up blinking as he hit the lights. “You startled me,” she said.

  “I startled you!” Willie crossed the room and collapsed into his La-Z-Boy. The scissors fell from his sweaty palm and bounced on the hardwood floor. “Jesus H. Christ on a crutch, you almost made me lose control of my personal hygiene. What the hell are you doing here? Did I forget to lock the door?”

  Randi smiled. “You locked the door and you locked the door and then you locked the door some more. You’re world class when it comes
to locking doors, Flambeaux. It took me twenty minutes to get in.”

  Willie massaged his throbbing temples. “Yeah, well, with all the women who want this body, I got to have some protection, don’t I?” He noticed his wet socks, pulled one off, grimaced. “Look at this,” he said. “My shoes are out in the street getting rained on, and my feet are soaking. If I get pneumonia, you get the doctor bills, Wade. You could have waited.”

  “It was raining,” she pointed out. “You wouldn’t have wanted me to wait in the rain, Willie. It would have pissed me off, and I’m in a foul mood already.”

  Something in her voice made Willie stop rubbing his toes to look up at her. The rain had plastered loose strands of light brown hair across her forehead, and her eyes were grim. “You look like a mess,” he admitted.

  “I tried to make myself presentable, but the mirror in your ladies’ room is missing.”

  “It broke. There’s one in the men’s room.”

  “I’m not that kind of a girl,” Randi said. Her voice was hard and flat. “Willie, your friend Joan wasn’t killed by an animal. She was flayed. The killer took her skin.”

  “I know,” Willie said, without thinking.

  Her eyes narrowed. They were gray-green, large and pretty, but right now they looked as cold as marbles. “You know?” she echoed. Her voice had gone very soft, almost to a whisper, and Willie knew he was in trouble. “You give me some bullshit story and send me running all around town, and you know? Do you know what happened to my father too, is that it? It was just your clever little way of getting my attention?”

  Willie gaped at her. His second sock was in his hand. He let it drop to the floor. “Hey, Randi, gimme a break, okay? It wasn’t like that at all. I just found out a few hours ago, honest. How could I know? I wasn’t there, it wasn’t in the paper.” He was feeling confused and guilty. “What the hell am I supposed to know about your father? I don’t know jack shit about your father. All the time you worked for me, you mentioned your family maybe twice.”

  Her eyes searched his face for signs of deception. Willie tried to give his warmest, most trustworthy smile. Randi grimaced. “Stop it,” she said wearily. “You look like a used car salesman. All right, you didn’t know about my father. I’m sorry. I’m a little wrought up right now, and I thought…” She paused thoughtfully. “Who told you about Sorenson?”

  Willie hesitated. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “I wish I could, I really do. I can’t. You wouldn’t believe me anyway.” Randi looked very unhappy. Willie kept talking. “Did you find out whether I’m a suspect? The police haven’t called.”

  “They’ve probably been calling all day. By now they may have an APB out on you. If you won’t get a machine, you ought to try coming home occasionally.” She frowned. “I talked to Rogoff from Homicide.” Willie’s heart stopped, but she saw the look on his face and held up a hand. “No, your name wasn’t mentioned. By either of us. They’ll be calling everyone who knew her, probably, but it’s just routine questioning. I don’t think they’ll be singling you out.”

  “Good,” Willie said. “Well, look, I owe you one, but there’s no reason for you to go on with this. I know it’s not paying the rent, so—”

  “So what?” Randi was looking at him suspiciously. “Are you trying to get rid of me now? After you got me involved in the first place?” She frowned. “Are you holding out on me?”

  “I think you’ve got that reversed,” Willie said lightly. Maybe he could joke his way out of it. “You’re the one who gets bent out of shape whenever I offer to help you shop for lingerie.”

  “Cut the shit,” Randi said sharply. She was not amused in the least, he could see that. “We’re talking about the torture and murder of a girl who was supposed to be a friend of yours. Or has that slipped your mind somehow?”

  “No,” he said, abashed. Willie was very uncomfortable. He got up and crossed the room, plugged in the hotplate. “Hey, listen, you want a cup of tea? I got Earl Grey, Red Zinger, Morning Thunder—”

  “The police think they have a suspect,” Randi said.

  Willie turned to look at her. “Who?”

  “Roy Helander,” Randi said.

  “Oh, boy,” Willie said. He’d been a PFC in Hamburg when the Helander thing went down, but he’d had a subscription to the Courier to keep up on the old hometown, and the headlines had made him ill. “Are you sure?”

  “No,” she said. “They’re just rounding up the usual suspects. Roy was a great scapegoat last time, why not use him again? First they have to find him, though. No one’s really sure that he’s still in the state, let alone the city.”

  Willie turned away, busied himself with hotplate and kettle. All of a sudden he found it difficult to look Randi in the eye. “You don’t think Helander was the one who grabbed those kids.”

  “Including his own sister? Hell no. Jessie was the last person he’d ever have hurt, she actually liked him. Not to mention that he was safely locked away when number five disappeared. I knew Roy Helander. He had bad teeth and he didn’t bathe often enough, but that doesn’t make him a child molester. He hung out with younger kids because the older ones made fun of him. I don’t think he had any friends. He had some kind of secret place in the woods where he’d go to hide when things got too rough, he—”

  She stopped suddenly, and Willie turned toward her, a teabag dangling from his fingers. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

  The kettle began to scream.

  RANDI TOSSED AND TURNED FOR OVER AN HOUR AFTER SHE GOT home, but there was no way she could sleep. Every time she closed her eyes she would see her father’s face, or imagine poor Joan Sorenson, tied to that bed as the killer came closer, knife in hand. She kept coming back to Roy Helander, to Roy Helander and his secret refuge. In her mind, Roy was still the gawky adolescent she remembered, his blond hair lank and unwashed, his eyes frightened and confused as they made him tell the story over and over again. She wondered what had become of that secret place of his during all the years he’d been locked up and drugged in the state mental home, and she wondered if maybe sometimes he hadn’t dreamt of it as he lay there in his cell. She thought maybe he had. If Roy Helander had indeed come home, Randi figured she knew just where he was.

  Knowing about it and finding it were two different things, however. She and Willie had kicked it around without narrowing it down any. Randi tried to remember, but it had been so long ago, a whispered conversation in the schoolyard. A secret place in the woods, he’d said, a place where no one ever came that was his and his alone, hidden and full of magic. That could be anything, a cave by the river, a treehouse, even something as simple as a cardboard lean-to. But where were these woods? Outside the city were suburbs and industrial parks and farms; the nearest state forest was forty miles north along the river road. If this secret place was in one of the city parks, you’d think someone would have stumbled on it years ago. Without more to go on, Randi didn’t have a prayer of finding it. But her mind worried it like a pit bull with a small child.

  Finally her digital alarm clock read 2:13, and Randi gave up on sleep altogether. She got out of bed, turned on the light, and went back to the kitchen. The refrigerator was pretty dismal, but she found a couple of bottles of Pabst. Maybe a beer would help put her to sleep. She opened a bottle and carried it back to bed.

  Her bedroom furnishings were a hodgepodge. The carpet was a remnant, the blond chest-of-drawers was boring and functional, and the four-poster queen-sized bed was a replica, but she did own a few genuine antiques—the massive oak wardrobe, the full-length clawfoot dressing mirror in its ornate wooden frame, and the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. Her mother always used to call it a hope chest. Did little girls still keep hope chests? She didn’t think so, at least not around here. Maybe there were still places where hope didn’t seem so terribly unrealistic, but this city wasn’t one of them.

  Randi sat on the floor, put the beer on the carpet, and opened the chest.

  Hope chests were
where you kept your future, all the little things that were part of the dreams they taught you to dream when you were a child. She hadn’t been a child since she was twelve, since the night her mother woke her with that terrible inhuman sound. Her chest was full of memories now.

  She took them out, one by one. Yearbooks from high school and college, bundles of love letters from old boyfriends and even that asshole she’d married, her school ring and her wedding ring, her diplomas, the letters she’d won in track and girls’ softball, a framed picture of her and her date at the senior prom.

  Way, way down at the bottom, buried under all the other layers of her life, was a police .38. Her father’s gun, the gun he emptied the night he died. Randi took it out and carefully put it aside. Beneath it was the book, an old three-ring binder with a blue cloth cover. She opened it across her lap.

  The yellowed Courier story on her father’s death was Scotch-taped to the first sheet of paper, and Randi stared at that familiar photograph for a long time before she flipped the page. There were other clippings: stories about the missing children that she’d torn furtively from Courier back issues in the public library, magazine articles about animal attacks, serial killers, and monsters, all sandwiched between the lined pages she’d filled with her meticulous twelve-year-old’s script. The handwriting grew broader and sloppier as she turned the pages; she’d kept up the book for years, until she’d gone away to college and tried to forget. She’d thought she’d done a pretty good job of that, but now, turning the pages, she knew that was a lie. You never forget. She only had to glance at the headlines, and it all came back to her in a sickening rush.

  Eileen Stanski, Jessie Helander, Diane Jones, Gregory Torio, Erwin Weiss. None of them had ever been found, not so much as a bone or a piece of clothing. The police said her father’s death was accidental, unrelated to the case he was working on. They’d all accepted that, the chief, the mayor, the newspaper, even her mother, who only wanted to get it all behind them and go on with their lives. Barry Schumacher and Joe Urquhart were the last to buy in, but in the end even they came around, and Randi was the only one left. Mere mention of the subject upset her mother so much that she finally stopped talking about it, but she didn’t forget. She just asked her questions quietly, kept up her binder, and hid it every night at the bottom of the hope chest.