“Major breakthrough there,” Vern snorted.
“Right. But we may get a match when we collar this guy, so stay tuned. Anyway, I’m thinking it’s obvious the victims were killed elsewhere—probably all in the same place, but who the hell knows—and dumped shortly thereafter at the locations where they were found. They were left where they probably wouldn’t be discovered right away but beyond that no effort was made at concealment. Just the opposite: all the bodies being posed, like you see in the photos, says to me the doer expected them to be found and wanted them seen that way.”
“And wanted to keep that picture in his head. Think back on it, get off on it all over again,” said Will.
“Demeaning the vic, thumbing his nose at us,” said Ferguson.
Don got up and went to the fridge for another root beer as he read. On the way back he grabbed a breadstick from beside the toaster and took a bite, looked at it and tossed it into the trash. “The nipples of Victims Two and Three severed with a very sharp knife or other edged instrument while the girls were still alive,” he said. “Victim One’s nipples were not cut off but had been severely bitten and probably also placed in some type of serrated clamps, possibly electrical, again while the victim was still alive.” Don flipped some more pages. “On that subject, all three girls were kept alive at least twelve hours after abduction. Nichols may have been held captive for as long as four days.”
“Implies some kind of secure location,” said Vern. “Isolated or maybe soundproofed.”
“Guy couldn’t have had a regular job,” said Ferguson.
It was obvious from the way they talked that they’d worked their way out along this line of thought before, but that’s how cops are. They just never burn out on going back over things they don’t completely understand.
“Ligature marks on the wrists and ankles suggest all three girls had been tied, untied and retied several times,” said Don.
“Doing stuff with them, making them do stuff,” said Will. “Posing them for photos, maybe?”
“That’d fit,” said Vern.
“On at least one occasion, presumably at the point of death, each victim had struggled violently against her bindings, which we think probably consisted of the kind of clothesline you buy in grocery stores, so no help there. Toxicology reports Miltown and Seconal taken orally in Peyser and the third victim, Venables. And whatever this is—I can’t pronounce it—a muscle relaxant, I think, in all three.” Don took a drink of his root beer.
“To help him control them,” said Will. “Not to make it easier on them.”
“You know it.”
“What’d the asshole do with the cut-off parts, I wonder?” said Vern.
“Dunno,” said Don. “But off the record, the ME says the first place he’d look is in the guy’s freezer.”
“Godamighty,” said Will.
“Death in all cases was by asphyxia secondary to ligature strangulation,” Don said. “Based on the location and appearance of the neck markings and on autopsy findings, the medical examiner believes all three girls were hanged.”
I flinched, my heart seeming to skip a couple of beats.
“Hyoid fractures in all three,” Don continued, “but no fractures or major displacement of cervical vertebrae and no spinal cord injuries, so there was no drop. Just dangle-and-strangle, the ME said.” Don rubbed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, then took a deep breath. “This is conjecture, but it’s possible the hangings were ceremonial or ritualistic in nature, based on the practically identical placement of nooses and bindings in all three cases. The noose, by the way, was apparently formed by use of a common slip knot, with the knot placed in precisely the same spot behind the left ear in each case. No concessions to convenience or circumstance there, I’d say.”
“Had to be just so,” said Will.
I was dizzy. L.A. and Diana had moved up tight against me and were looking over my shoulders. I could hear and feel their breathing, and L.A.’s hand gripped my arm. I didn’t want to hear what was coming.
Don said, “Although all the victims had been penetrated and injured vaginally, because of the absence of semen there’s no direct evidence of vaginal intercourse per se. However, all three victims had performed oral sex, and semen was also present to indicate that all of them had been sodomized, probably repeatedly and probably both before and after death. Abrasions of the clitoris and adjacent tissues in all cases suggests the victims were repeatedly masturbated. He wanted them to come.”
L.A. sucked in her breath.
“And of course for our main trademark—and if you’ve got any ideas on what the hell it means, please enlighten me—each girl died with a white silk scarf tied in a four-in-hand and stuffed into her vagina.”
L.A. made a loud gagging sound as her fingers bit into my arm like a dog’s teeth, and suddenly I saw everything—what had happened to L.A. and the other girls, and who had done all of it. My heart lunged against my ribs and my ears roared with a continuous thunder. I wanted to cover L.A. somehow and keep the world from hurting her any more. But she stumbled away and bounced off the wall as she ran down the stairs and out the front door. A few seconds later Don came up the stairs, followed by Will with his gun held down beside his leg, Ferguson and finally Vern, puffing and cramming in his shirttail as he climbed.
“Jim, Diana,” said Don, looking around. “I didn’t know you guys were here. What happened? Sounded like somebody was choking.”
“It was L.A., Dad,” said Diana. “I think maybe she got sick.”
The men asked more questions, the way cops do, but I wasn’t really listening. I knew L.A. wasn’t sick, at least not physically, and I thought I knew where she was going, but I didn’t know what to say to Don and the others about it.
“I think she’s going to be all right, sir,” I finally said. “I’ll find her.”
Will put his gun up as I ran past him down the stairs.
8 | Turnabout
I RAN HALF BLINDLY, as hard as I could, but every block I covered seemed to take a century. L.A. was nowhere to be seen. When I bounced off a passing Volkswagen, went down and rolled against the curb, the concrete ripping the skin from one knee, it all seemed to happen in slow motion, the driver standing in the middle of the street behind me yelling as I scrambled to my feet and ran on, “Hey! Are you all right? I never saw you coming—what the hell’s the matter with you?” I didn’t slow down, didn’t feel any pain even though my jeans below the knee were already soaked with blood. All I could think about was how fast L.A. was and how many steps I had lost by falling.
Shit, I screamed in my mind, shit shit shit, gritting my teeth, trying to run faster, not giving a damn when I knocked some kid completely off his Schwinn on the sidewalk and heard him screaming and cussing behind me. More seconds lost.
By the time I made it to the front walk of Gram’s house my legs were rubbery and I felt like I was inhaling fire. All I could think about was how far ahead of me L.A. had gotten. Fighting to catch my breath, I looked at the house, the dark windows, the open garage. This was market day, the Roadmaster nowhere to be seen, and there was no movement or sound anywhere around the house.
But it wasn’t empty, I knew.
Opening the front door, I stepped inside, where I heard the kitchen radio playing faintly. Gram’s station, Patsy Cline doing “Crazy.” The radio being on wasn’t unusual. Gram generally left it that way when she didn’t expect to be gone long. That thought, along with the Roadmaster being gone, gave me hope.
But just inside the kitchen doorway I could see Jazzy’s body lying slack and motionless against one leg of a chair, and the air buzzed with the most terrible energy I’d ever felt in my life.
I moved as quietly as I could across the front room and into the hall, trying to minimize the squishing sound my blood-filled sneaker made with each step. The bathroom door and the door to Gram’s room stood open as usual, both rooms empty and dark. I couldn’t see whether the door to my own room was open or not,
but the hallway in that direction was unlit and felt cool and empty. I visualized my bat, leaning in a corner of my closet. I could almost feel the taped grip in my hands.
But there was no time for that.
Then I was at L.A.’s door. It was closed, which it never was unless she was inside. I swallowed hard and turned the knob, letting the door swing open on its own.
What I saw burned itself into my brain like a cutting torch, and I knew in that second that no matter how long I lived it would never leave me.
Reality began coming in stop-action flashes: The killer pinning L.A. on the bed, one hand over her mouth and nose . . . his other hand tearing at the fly of her Levi’s as he kneels between her legs . . . L.A. bucking and twisting, clawing at him, trying to kick him, her eyes insane as she fights to breathe . . . the killer seeming not to notice her struggles, his mind in some unknowable place, his veined pink cock out and erect above her . . . the killer catching sight of me, letting go now of her jeans, dragging the back of his hand across his mouth as if trying to wipe away something invisible, mumbling thickly, “Bis—” . . . the alien sound of my own raw scream as I dive at him, slamming the man who all her life has called himself L.A.’s father against the wall . . . driving one fist and then the other against the side of his head, again and again and again.
“Kill you, you fucker,” Cam rasped, trying to block the blows, struggling to free himself of my weight. But I was nearly his size now, and crazy with rage. He covered his head with his arms, and I punched with everything I had at his ribs and kidneys, still screaming, trying to break his bones, crush his organs, stop his heart.
At the same time L.A., jeans and panties down on her hips, had twisted around on the bed, one hand darting under her pillow and coming out with my Swiss army knife. Quick as a cottonmouth, with exactly the same odd wrist motion the old woman had demonstrated that day at the tracks, she drove the blade into Cam’s groin.
He shrieked like a jungle bird, looking down in disbelief and clapping his hands over the rapidly widening circle of red at his crotch. Blood spurting from between his fingers, he seemed to be trying to hold himself together as he scuttled sideways off the bed and ran stumbling from the room, whimpering and gagging. A few seconds later I heard the van’s tires spinning and throwing gravel as he accelerated out of the alley behind the house.
L.A., panting, her lips already swollen and turning purple from Cam’s blows, pulled up her jeans and rebuttoned them. She looked at me, her eyes filling, saying, “He must have followed me here. I think he killed Jazzy.”
I was gasping for breath, and all I could do was nod. There was no way I could shield her from this, nothing I could do to fix it.
She shouldered past me on her way to the kitchen, saying, “How’d you know I was here?”
“I knew you’d come for Jazzy before you ran away,” I gasped out. “I saw it.”
She knelt over Jazzy and laid her hand on the little dog’s chest.
“I can feel a heartbeat,” she said, her voice breaking. “She’s not dead.”
“What happened to her?”
“She bit him and he kicked her against the edge of the door,” L.A. said. “Then he kicked her again when she tried to get up.” She carefully lifted the small furry body. “Get my bicycle, Bis.”
9 | Accountings
JAZZY WASN’T permanently damaged, only knocked out, the vet said. We should watch for any sign of convulsions and keep her quiet. He accepted the eight dollars and change we were able to scrape up between us and agreed to send us his bill for the rest of his fee “sometime when I get around to it.”
Later that day, after a desperate couple of hours of cleanup that took us from L.A.’s bed all the way out the front door, around the camellias and across the driveway, we faced Gram as she came in with her bags of squash, tomatoes, snap beans and cantaloupes. On the theory that simpler is almost always better when lying, we told her the best story we could think of, that Jazzy must have been hit by a car but was going to be okay. It was a touchy moment, and I held my breath as Gram eyed my torn and bloody jeans, bunged-up knee, and L.A.’s face, then looked up at me with one eyebrow raised.
“I fell,” I said.
“We both did,” L.A. said.
“I see,” Gram said. She examined Jazzy carefully, inquired about the vet’s diagnosis and orders, gave both of us a stern look over her reading glasses and said, “Are you two in any kind of trouble?”
“No, ma’am,” I said with every ounce of false conviction I could dredge up. And Gram seemed to buy it, maybe because in fact it remained to be seen whether we were in trouble or not, so technically there was no actual lie in my eyes at this point.
She sighed and reached out to take Jazzy from L.A., saying, “Let’s see if some warm milk will help.” One more hard look from Gram as she turned to take Jazzy back to the kitchen, and we were over that hump.
Cam was another story. He had apparently tried to make it to the hospital, but because of bad luck, bad driving or maybe just bleeding out, he lost control of the van and crashed into the overpass railing. He was already dead when the ambulance got there, so he’d lived less than fifteen minutes after we last saw him. To my amazement nothing was ever said about any unexplained crotch wounds.
Of course this simplified things no end from my point of view, and I decided to be grateful for the luck and let it go. But what I learned about the wreck afterward was puzzling. As for Cam himself, the damage was so bad that there was no way he could be spackled back into shape for viewing, which made the funeral a closed-casket affair. On the other hand, some things you might think would be fragile came through the wreck with hardly a scratch. One of them was the cheap camera Cam had kept under the driver’s seat, which turned out to have a roll of film in it with pictures of the girls, all of the images hard to look at and impossible to forget, but also a couple of shots of a different girl, one none of us recognized. They were taken from a distance and it was obvious the girl, who I thought looked a little like L.A., didn’t know anyone was taking her picture. It was Don who pronounced the final police consensus.
“She would have been next,” he said.
The pictures weren’t clear enough to really make out her face but the short stretch of sidewalk and hedge in the background turned out to be only a block or so from the Crest, which was fairly close to the center of the section of town where all the girls had either lived, gone to school or had friends. All this, along with the fake uniform shirt with a Crest logo sewn on above the pocket the investigators found stuffed inside one of the van’s door panels, convinced them he had grabbed the girls by posing as a theater employee.
Under the heading of odd news, Don said some homeless guy told the cops he saw an old woman with ragged clothes and a funny hat standing on the opposite side of the road watching as Cam crashed. He said there was a blue jay or something flying around her head, and swore the lady disappeared into thin air a second or two after the crash. But according to Don he was so full of gin that for all the good he did them as a witness he might as well have seen pink elephants.
Aunt Rachel laid low after the wreck, so nobody knew how Cam’s death had affected her, but when Mom heard about it she gave me a big smile and a thumbs-up.
The gist of the reactions I heard generally came down to some variation of, What goes around, comes around, but all Hubert said as he bit into his chili dog was, “Well boo-fuckin’-hoo.”
Gram’s take was biblical. She said, “ ‘He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind.’ ”
As for me, I had my usual confused morass of thoughts and feelings. Somewhere in the process of trying to work them out, I watched a news clip of Amanda Peyser’s mother on Channel 5.
“I pray to God no other parent will have to go through what we did,” she said, dabbing at her eye with a tissue. “I’m thankful the monster who took Amanda is g-gone, and other girls like her ca-can be safe.”
I stared at the screen, hardly believing wh
at I was hearing. I stood up and turned off the TV. “How can she say that?” I asked L.A. “How can she think there’s any such thing as safe?”
After thinking it over for a minute L.A. said, “She’s just mad at everybody who didn’t lose their kids.”
I sat back down, and neither of us spoke for a while. Finally I said, “The only thing we know for sure is Cam’s never gonna hurt anybody else.”
“So give yourself a gold star,” L.A. said. “For once in your life take credit for something good.”
Take credit for Cam’s death? It sounded ridiculous to me, but then if you looked at it from her standpoint the idea did make a certain kind of sense. One of the truest things Gram and Dr. Kepler had taught me was that knowledge is a two-edged sword, though I sometimes privately suspected it had a lot more edges, not to mention sharp points, than that. Either way, nothing could have made the basic truth of the concept plainer to me than my state of mind right now. Because at this moment, regardless of what it might say about me, I now knew for a certainty that I would have personally killed Cam a thousand times over to save L.A. from a hangnail, and done it with a song in my heart.
I don’t really know why we even went to the funeral. I doubt Gram would have insisted on it, but maybe the force field created by her sense of the fitness of things compelled us. Or maybe it was guilt over feeling no guilt that Cam was dead.
Brother Wells preached over the casket just like he would anybody else’s, except for not saying much about Cam being among God’s children or walking with Jesus now or any bullshit like that.
“We are gathered here today to bid earthly farewell to Camden Lee Rowe . . .” he said.
And there they were, all three names.
“His life’s journey is done and he walks among us no more. As we are all imperfect vessels, unworthy of the limitless love of our Heavenly Father, we can make no claim to understand all that God has wrought . . .”