Her Last Scream (6 page)

We had nothing on Larry Krebbs. That meant studying him from the periphery, starting with his employer. Allied Technologies was a big green steel box in a warehouse district in south Mobile. A fenced-in compound outside held stake trucks, outsized crates and sections of industrial tubing. traffic whizzed by, work vehicles and semis hauling goods.

Inside the building it was cool and smelled of plastics. The reception area was a room with a desk and several battered filing cabinets. Behind the desk was a chunky woman in her early forties wearing a purple pantsuit. Her face was big-eyed and button-nose cute, but overly powdered and hard at the eye-corners. The nameplate on her desk said
Marge Glenny, Office Mgr
.
She finished ticking out something on a keyboard before looking up.

“Help you fellas?”

We showed our credentials and Harry asked to see the boss.

“That’s Mr Choy,” Miz Glenny said. “Sam Choy. He’s our CEO, COO, and C-about everything else. Can I tell him what it’s about?”

“Larry Krebbs works here, right?” I asked.

“Not my fault,” Miz Glenny said with a frown.

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

“You don’t want to talk to me about Larry, because I don’t have much to say and not much of it is good.”

I felt a thrill run down my spine as office Mgr Glenny picked up the phone to announce us. We’d fer-sure stop back at her desk.

Choy’s office had paneled walls, acoustic ceiling tiles with fluorescent fixtures, a simple desk. In the corner was a drawing table strewn with blueprints. Choy was in his mid forties, compact, with intelligent eyes behind red-framed glasses, wearing khakis and a gray silk shirt rolled to the elbows. His short hair was hipster-spiked and he less resembled a guy who made pipes than a partner in a Silicon Valley start-up.

“Larry’s worked with us for three years,” Choy said, frowning through the lenses. “Is there a problem?”

We laid out the facts. Choy seemed shaken initially, but gained composure after a few quiet seconds. “Larry rarely talks about his personal life. I only met Mrs Krebbs once. She was very quiet.”

Harry leaned in. “Mr Krebbs has something of a strident personality, Mr Choy. When I think of office accountants I think of quiet people with –”

“With thick glasses and a pocket full of pens and so forth,” Choy nodded. “People who let the numbers speak.”

“Pretty much. Mr Krebbs seems to enjoy goading people.”

Choy looked out the window as a semi rolled past with coils of steel chained to the trailer. He turned back to Harry and me, his voice lowered. “We’re a small company that stays alive by underbidding competitors. That means keeping costs low. We don’t short-change our people, but we take advantage of economic advantages when it comes to hiring.”

It took a beat for me to catch on. “You’re saying Krebbs works cheap, Mr Choy?”

“We pay him eighty-two grand a year. Someone with a comparable skill set could get a hundred.”

“Because Krebbs’s skill set doesn’t include people skills, right?”

Choy nodded. “Larry’s a bit … opinionated. Probably why he had a checkered employment history. But when he applied here, we figured the pairing would work if he stayed in his office and ran numbers.”

I wanted to see Krebbs’s work environment and nodded down the hall. “Which office is his?”

“There isn’t one. Nine months back Larry decided he could do everything from home, e-commute. Given his effect on some of our staff, we thought the arrangement worked out better for everyone.”

Except his wife,
I thought. The best part of Lainie Krebbs’s day probably started the moment hubby walked out the door. Then, nine months ago, Krebbs is home every second of every day, watching, complaining, correcting. Miz K takes several months of it, then books for greener pastures. But somehow, Lainie Krebbs ends up submerged in excrement in Denver’s sewage treatment center, her corpse blind and mutilated.

We stopped at Miz Glenny’s desk on our way out. When we asked if she felt comfortable talking about Larry Krebbs, her eyes sparkled. “He brought Lainie to an office party, a mousy little thing with no hips but decent tits. She was always shooting Larry the nervous eye like she was being graded on how she did. It was funny at first, then it got sad when I heard things about him.”

“Heard from where, Miz Glenny?” I asked.

A smug smile. “Larry’s aunt moved in next to one of my best friends. The aunt says Larry’s messed up about women. He’s got two college degrees, but every woman he dated or married was a high-school dropout. The oldest one he ever married was twenty-nine and he was forty-one. That was Lainie.”

Harry said, “Larry is a charmer?”

Glenny cawed. “Think it through. You’re a half-pretty bimbo with no education, a string of leech boyfriends, and living hand to mouth in some rathole. One day you meet this big white-collar dude with all his teeth and a barber haircut, a guy with a college degree and a real job. It feels like you hit the lottery … until he starts weirding out.” Glenny cackled wickedly.

Harry said, “How’d you and Krebbs get along, Miz Glenny?”

“The first week he was hitting on me, wanting to get me out to lunch. Then I was talking one day to a delivery lady – Myrna from FedEx – telling her how I’d left my first husband and got the house. Larry was eavesdropping. When Myrna left he accused me of betraying my husband, stealing from him, saying I should hang my head in shame. Larry was really hot, shaking and everything. I actually felt scared.”

“What happened?”

“I told him spying was a chickenshit thing to do and if he said one more word I’d go to Mr Choy and file a complaint.”

“What did Larry do?”

“He started wringing his hands like a little kid and hauled ass back to his office, slammed the door. He never spoke to me after that. Of course, we hardly crossed paths either.”

“That being about the time Larry switched to working at home?” I ventured, taking a shot in the dark.

“Yep. Just a couple weeks later.”

I pictured Krebbs huffing and puffing, then Glenny getting in his face and forcing him to retreat. In the mind of a guy like Krebbs, he’d been defeated, shamed. So he retreated to a situation he could control: Home with the wife.

“Do you know if Lainie Krebbs held a job?” Harry asked.

“Larry said a real wife stayed home to cook and clean and be spread-ready when hubby has the hornies.” Glenny paused, as if replaying in her head what she’d been saying. She shook her head.

“What is it, Miz Glenny?” I asked.

“I said I didn’t have much good to say about Larry. Guess I don’t have anything good to say about him.”

When Tommy had rolled in the night before with a case of beer and proceeded to ignore her while he spooled fresh line on to a fishing reel, Treeka had hidden her joy – it meant he and his buddies were blowing off work for a day of angling in the mountains. Twenty minutes after Tommy left, she was on the bus to Boulder, this time alerting the center that she was coming.

Treeka arrived to find the paper-folding woman, Carol, had been joined by three other women. Carol told Treeka to tell all of her story, to leave nothing out, especially the worst stuff. One lady, older and dressed in a business suit, did nothing but take notes while the others asked questions.

“
No children, right?
”

“Tommy hates kids. He faked like he liked them ’til we got married. Then he made me get pills and an IUD. He watches me take the pills. When we get some money ahead he says I have to get my tubes tied.”

“
Did you ever call the police?
”

“Tommy hunts and fishes with some county cops, so maybe they wouldn’t do anything. And even if the cops put Tommy in jail, when he got out he’d tear me apart and bury my parts in the mountains. He says he can put them where even the coyotes won’t find them.”

“
Do you believe him?
”

Treeka thought for several long moments. The women had told her to be completely truthful, it was very important.

“Yes, ma’am,” she said. “All the way.”

“
Do you have anyone close to you? So close you couldn’t bear to not see them again?
”

“Not any more. All the people I love are gone.”

“
How often does your husband beat you?
”

“Two–three times a week. It’s getting worse.”

“
Does he rape you?
”

“I’m his wife and Tommy says a man can –”

“
Does he force you to have sex when you don’t want it?
”

“Yes, ma’am. In a way.”

“
What do you mean, ‘in a way’?
”

“A lot of time he can’t, I mean, he doesn’t …”

“
We understand. Your black eye … from Tommy
?”

Treeka nodded. “As soon as one starts to fade, another takes its place.”

“
Are there other ways he hurts you?
”

Treeka lifted her blouse, showing scrapes from punches and skin pinched purple with bruises. The women gave Treeka a cup of tea and went to a back room to talk together. Treeka didn’t know what they were talking about, but they were gone a long time. When they returned, Carol sat beside Treeka and took her hand.

“We’re going to tell you about an option you might consider, Treeka. But before we tell you, you have to take a vow of secrecy. You can never tell anyone what we’re about to discuss …”

Harry and I spent the next day investigating Krebbs, finding nothing beyond his sorrowful history with women. We found ex-wives two and three: Two was a frightfully heavy woman who slammed the door in our face and said she never wanted to hear “that goddamn name again”. The other was a blank-faced woman in a decayed trailer park, her skin and teeth ravaged by Methedrine. She was stoned or tripping and said she’d been married three times since then and “Larry wasn’t real bad”, though I didn’t think she was remembering Krebbs.

I called the Krebbster and said we had a few more questions to ask, hoping to push him into a misstep. When the forensics types figured out a decent time-of-death estimate, we could find out where sweet Larry was at the time of our murders.

Krebbs opened the door with a flourish, the toupee pasted tight, grinning like man who’d just filled an inside straight. Harry and I pulled off our shoes and stepped inside. I took the lead.

“We’ve been talking to a few folks, Mr Krebbs, and a few more questions come to mind, all involving your former relationships with women. The unions don’t seem real, uh, what’s the word I’m looking for, Detective Nautilus?”

“Stable,” Harry said. “Or mature, maybe.”

I snapped my fingers. “That’s it. Like a guy with deep insecurities. I’m thinking troubled adolescent here … a guy who needs to elevate himself by –”

“That’s all I need to hear,” boomed a voice from behind us.

Harry and I spun to see a guy about five-eight, lean and whippy, with cold eyes and tight-pursed lips, a self-important mouth. The face was angular, photogenic and topped with a haircut that probably cost more than any suit in my closet, a face we knew only from the news. T. Nathaniel Bromley was a prosecutor-turned-partner at the law firm of Blackwell, Carrington & Bromley, its clients including some the largest concerns in the region.

“Are you harassing my client?” Bromley snapped.

“Harassing how?” Harry said, trying to hide his amazement. We weren’t surprised Krebbs had lawyered up, but had expected one of those attorneys that advertises at bus stops. Plus word had it that Bromley had retired last year at age forty-six. The move had surprised many, but it was what I’d have done in Bromley’s expensive shoes. The man had big money and big connections, socially and politically. Why not relax and live it up?

But this version of Bromley didn’t look relaxed.

“You were insulting Mr Krebbs’s character,” he continued. “Using the death of his wife to mock him. That’s disgusting, Detectives. Mr Krebbs’s wife was the insecure one, given to flights of drunken fantasy. It’s to Mr Krebbs’s credit that he put up with such erratic behavior over a period of years and –”

“Did you just call Lainie Krebbs a drunken liar?” I said. “Which one of us did you accuse of character assassination, Nate?”

Bromley pointed to the door. “This farce is over. If you wish to talk rationally to my client about his wife –”

“Not
wife
, Bromley,” I said, ignoring Harry’s elbow in my ribs, our signal for me to ease up. I’ve gotten pretty good about heeding the nudge, but Bromley was pushing my buttons. “It’s
wives
, plural. Your client goes through sad little girls like most people go through toilet paper.”

“Out now,” Bromley said. “Expect to hear from your chief.”

We left, Harry removing me by my elbow. “Lawd,” Harry said as we got in the car. “Not only does Krebbs have Nate Bromley as his mouthpiece, you go and piss Bromley off.”

“He pissed me off first.”

Harry headed back to the department to regroup. We’d never encountered Bromley in a courtroom; the criminal cases his firm defended never involved anything as coarse as homicide, leaning more toward embezzlement, stock swindles, and mail fraud. I recalled a recent case in which Bromley had defended a computer-hacking whiz, a bespectacled man-child of twenty-seven who’d danced effortlessly past firewalls and security programs to steal credit-card numbers, buying PlayStations and plasma TVs and anything made by Apple.

Defending credit-card theft was about as deep in the dirt as BC&B got, and I recalled the hacker had skirted prison, Bromley’s deal calling for his client to make financial restitution, do fifty hours of community service, and promise to go forth and never hack again. My cop buddies and I had sneered at the deal, thinking the punishment far too light for the charges, but the public seemed unconcerned, several in the courtroom gallery cheering the decision, like Bromley had dragged an innocent man from the gas chamber seconds before the pellets dropped.

The day was waning, the tops of the live oaks along Government Street turned amber by the fading sun. I’d opened the conference-room window and could smell the Mobile River a few hundred yards east. There was a jazz concert in Bienville Square and the joyous music of a Dixieland band danced though the streets. A scattering of gulls wheeled in the air and a ship’s horn sounded on the bay.

I turned from the window. Harry sat at the table, his fingers tented beneath his chin. We’d asked Sally Hargreaves if she wanted to sit in and bump thoughts, but she said she had an important meeting which, given personal experience, I took as a date.

“Two victims,” I said to Harry, reprising the thoughts I’d been mulling at the window. “Same killer. One vic in –”

“Same methodology,” Harry corrected. “Not the same killer. Not yet.”

“I’m making the assumption for brainstorm purposes.”

“Are you assuming Krebbs is the killer?” Harry asked.

I nodded. “When forensics tightens the time of death we’re gonna put Krebbs in Colorado. A plane ticket, gas receipt, won’t take much.”

“How you figure Krebbs knew his wife ran to Colorado?”

“My money’s on a private investigator,” I said, making the money-whisk with my fingertips. “Larry-boy’s got the money. He finds the missus is hiding around Denver, races up and abducts her, finds a torture site. I’ve been in the region before. One direction is miles of open desert, the other is mountains. Everywhere is a hiding place. Krebbs lets his psycho side bloom, then makes a final statement by dumping the body in the sewage tank.”

“What about our Jane Doe here in Mobile? butterfly Lady.”

I smiled and gave it a few seconds to build the drama, wishing I had a drum-roll machine. “I think she’ll turn out to be Krebbs’s first wife, Harry. There are a shitload of details to fill in, but Wife One is the Ur-bitch, where it all started for Larry-boy.”

“The first wife? You sure?” Harry leaned forward, trying to keep his voice noncommittal, but I was hooking him.

“I can feel it, bro. Wife One and butterfly Lady are the same. They’re bookend murders. By killing the first wife and the last wife, Krebbs symbolically murders all the women in between.”

“Bookend?”

“I just made that up. Pretty cool, right?”