In-Laws and Outlaws (9 page)

Follow-ups to the story said the kidnappers were still at large. The only other thing the
Globe
had to add was that Connie Decker had been hospitalized.

No wonder; anybody would go off the deep end after a thing like that—I was surprised that Connie had managed to function at all. And no wonder Annette didn't want to talk to me about it; I'd had no idea Theo's death had been so grisly. Oh Jesus, that poor kid! Poor Connie and Raymond, and poor everybody else too. And I'd been off playacting in China while the family was going through this torture; and because it was death elsewhere, I'd remained untouched by it.

I left the library and started walking, heading east on Boylston past Copley Square. Thank god I'd not asked Connie about the kidnapping, and I would respect the silence Annette had imposed on me for her sister-in-law's sake. Connie didn't have a lot of resources to draw on; I was sure the only way she'd learned to live with what had happened to Theo was to put it all firmly out of her mind. Human kind cannot bear very much reality, the poet said. You got that right, T. S.

I hadn't been walking more than a minute or two before I started getting uncomfortably warm; it was June, after all, and I was working up a sweat. Good. What I really wanted was to hit something, but maybe I could sweat off my tension instead. Right ahead was the Public Garden; I turned in, hoping the stately trees and the flowers in full bloom would lighten my black mood. I passed a young couple trying to persuade their dubious four-year-old that he would reeeeelly love a ride in one of the Swan Boats.

On the face of it, Theo's death would seem to have no relationship to the recent deaths of his father and his three cousins. The newspaper had said nothing about any terrorist organization claiming credit for the kidnapping, although there'd been plenty of speculation about just that at the time. But whatever was going on then, it did seem unconnected to the present tragedies. There were, however, two elements in common between then and now. The first I dismissed as insignificant: all four of the youngsters had been away from home when they met disaster. For all I knew, that was true of all kidnappings; and as for murder—well, it was bound to be easier to kill someone who was not locked away in the safety of his home. So scratch that; the victims' being away from home wasn't a coincidence so much as it was a requirement, from the criminal point of view. The other element in common was not so easy to dismiss.

Mutilation.

The Deckers didn't follow the barbaric practice of open-casket viewing, thank heaven. But even if they did, opening the casket would not have been possible for any of the four who'd died this year. Bobby and Lynn with their smashed skulls, Ike with his nearly severed body, Raymond burned beyond recognition. Even if the bodies of the first three could have been reconstructed enough to make a presentable appearance, everyone who viewed them would be thinking of the mutilation just the same. Morbidly I wondered what Raymond and Connie had done about Theo's remains. Cremation, I supposed.

Without realizing it I had passed all the way through the Public Garden; I crossed Charles Street to Boston Common, where a lot of student-type people were lolling around, enjoying the warm June weather. I looked for an empty patch and plopped down, heedless of grass stains.

Maybe I just wanted a connection between Theo's gruesome death and what was going on now; that way I'd have an explanation of all the ugliness, a sort of explanation. Mad Arab terrorists, following some logic that made sense only to themselves, out to assure their places in Muhammad's promised paradise of delights by killing rich American infidels in the here and now. How many lives did a ticket to heaven cost?

But it made no sense; Raymond and the three kids had not been killed for glory, for publicity, for satisfying the demands of a power-hungry religion centered on the other side of the world. They were all four
private
killings, done swiftly and mercilessly and without fanfare. No gang of wild-eyed terrorists was running around the northeastern corner of the continent killing Deckers wherever they could find them. No, the reason had to be closer to home.

Perhaps the mutilations that so bothered me were not all that much out of the ordinary, callous as that might sound; perhaps that kind of hate-filled violence was less unusual than I thought. The way of the world now? There was a time in the not-too-distant past when you could go about your business knowing that most of the people you were going to meet in your life would be decent people. But not now. Certainly not now. You'd be a fool to live your life that way now. Barbara Tuchman once said that the Nazi offenses committed against humanity and permitted by the rest of the world had the effect of breaking through some sort of moral barrier—like breaking the sound barrier. It's as though once we understood what evil man was capable of, all the rules broke down.

But if terrorists didn't kill Raymond and the kids, then it had to be one individual known to the family, it seemed to me. So where did that leave us? With copycat killings? Someone who hated the Deckers so much that he chose a way of murdering his victims that was bound to remind them of the way Theo had died? Opening old wounds as well as inflicting new ones? Oh, that was a
lot
of hate. Surely the family would know if they'd made an enemy capable of such outrageous retaliation; how could anyone keep that much hatred hidden all the time? And if the murders were a form of retaliation … retaliation for what?

I stood up, brushed off my clothes, and tried to remember where Boston's financial district was. On the other side of the Common, if I recalled correctly. Walking distance; I set out. By the time I reached the Old South Meeting House at the western end of Milk Street, I'd gotten my bearings back.

The buildings on Milk Street weren't especially large, but they imposed their own kind of authority. The firm of Decker Investments, now Decker and Kurland, occupied an old building that had once housed a branch of the long-defunct Second National Bank. The façade boasted the thick columns and heavy lintel that seemed to be the architectural symbol of financial stability everywhere. One of the first things Raymond Decker had done when he'd assumed control of the business was to gut the building. Keeping the exterior intact, he'd had an entirely new structure built inside the old shell—an office designer's high-tech dream of adequate wiring for computers, fax machines, electronic tickers, wrap-around screens, all the other accoutrements of modern business. Going into Decker and Kurland was like entering an ancient Greek temple only to find yourself aboard a spaceship.

Michelle wasn't in, but Rob was. I had to wait ten minutes while he finished a phone conversation; his courteous but unsmiling secretary settled me comfortably with a cup of coffee in a little alcove off the reception area. It was midafternoon; I'd missed lunch, but what I'd learned earlier in the day had pretty much killed my appetite. The brief wait gave me a chance to get oriented. Decker and Kurland was no paper-littered circus of manic rushing and shouting; on the other hand, the pace was not leisurely, either.
Measured
was the word. Efficiency and control were the watchwords here.

Rob came out of his office carrying his own cup of coffee, still looking too thin and ailing. “Ah, Gillian,” he said edgily as he sank down into a chair next to mine, “there is a breed of human being that is dedicated to the proposition that contracts were made to be broken. And the breed is proliferating.”

“Problems?”

“Oh, a group of whiz kids in Texas is trying to play us off against some other investors they've got lined up. We can't permit that, of course.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Now, what can I do for you?”

I told him where I'd been that morning and what I'd learned, hurrying past the details when I saw his face tightening. Rob listened without speaking as I suggested my copycat theory. “It has to be someone who wants to hurt the entire family,” I went on, “either some kook insanely envious of the Deckers … or someone you know personally. Has anyone in the family made
that
kind of enemy?”

He didn't answer right away. Then he said in his raspy voice, “We make enemies all the time, every time we pull off a successful deal.”

“Anyone crazy enough to kill to get even? Rob, I know you must have gone through all this a thousand times, but remember it's still new to me. I want to know what's been done.”

He nodded. “When we first realized the accidents were not accidents, we sat down and drew up a list of all the people we could think of who might bear grudges against us. We turned the list over to our private investigators.”

“What did they find out?”

“Not a damned thing, so far. They're still investigating Raymond's death, but they came up with nothing about Bobby's. Or the other two. Too much time had passed, you see. They couldn't trace the whereabouts of most of the people on the list for the times of the murders.” A look of pain passed over his bony face. “I'm beginning to think we'll never know who or why.”

“Could it be a personal enemy? Instead of a business rival, I mean.”

“I wouldn't know who. We're on good terms with most of the people we know—and the others, well, there's no passionate hatred involved. Nothing like this.”

“Rob, your detectives had to have found
something
.”

He sighed. “You'd think so, wouldn't you?”

“Well?”

He seemed to be thinking it over. Then abruptly he stood up. “Come into my office. I want to show you something.”

I put down my coffee cup and followed him. He closed the door behind us and unlocked one of the drawers of his desk, taking out three folders which he handed to me. I opened the top one. “The detectives' reports?”

“You have the right to know everything we do,” he said, “which isn't much, unfortunately. Read the reports, Gillian—read them carefully. Maybe a fresh pair of eyes will see something the rest of us are overlooking.” He consulted his watch. “I have a meeting. Stay here, take as much time as you like. We'll talk again later.”

I felt a twinge of guilt as I watched him leave; the last thing Rob needed was for some long-lost relative to show up and start asking questions. But that's what I'd done, and since I'd already asked the questions … I sat down at Rob's desk and opened the folders.

For over an hour I read the reports—names, dates, places, none of which meant anything to me. Everyone the Deckers had been able to think of who might be a secret enemy had been investigated by the firm of detectives they'd hired. Going on the assumption that one person was responsible for all the killings, I couldn't put my finger on any single name on the list and claim that person made a good suspect. One man was known to be in Canada when Ike Henry was killed by a car in Toronto, but he'd been testifying before a Senate committee in Washington when Bobby Kurland was killed on a Vermont ski slope. Another who'd been in New York when Lynn Ferguson was murdered in her hotel bathtub had been recuperating from surgery in a California hospital at the time Raymond Decker burned to death at Martha's Vineyard. And so it went, with all of them; even those whose whereabouts couldn't be verified for one of the killings had what looked like ironclad alibis for one or more of the others.

Of course, there was always the possibility that one of these people had hired someone to do his killing for him. But once you started thinking in terms of contract killings, you were right back where you started—with a list of names. They were names of people who could be guilty as hell or pure as the driven snow, with no way in the world of knowing which. Rob was right; the detectives had, in effect, found nothing.

If this were a television show, I would skim quickly through the reports and pick up immediately on the one seemingly insignificant item that would ultimately lead us to the identity of the killer. But nothing like that happened; I read the reports over and over, and nothing at all suggested itself to me. If anything, I ended up fairly well convinced that everyone on the Deckers' list of potential enemies was innocent. I didn't want to believe that; because if these hideous killings were not motivated by business dealings, that left two equally unpalatable alternatives. One was that the motivation was a personal one and the killer was somebody close to the Decker family circle, a possibility that was even more disturbing than the idea of an impartial avenger out to get his own back because it introduced the element of personal betrayal. The other alternative was that the killer was a crazy whose identity couldn't be reasoned out, or deducted from available evidence, or investigated into existence; he could only be caught in the act.

But that's what we were left with: an unknown nut or a known betrayer. Even the investigating detectives had suggested the person they were looking for would most likely be found among the Deckers' circle of personal acquaintances. One investigator had spelled out his conviction that the killer was no crazy out for kicks; his reason was that the murders had no element of braggadocio to them. The killings were done quietly, under circumstances that could allow the deaths to be mistaken for accidents; but most crazies killed for recognition, the detective said. In that one investigator's mind, there was no doubt whatsoever that the killer was close to or part of the family.

Part of
the family?

Well, that was a natural thing for him to think, I supposed. In his line of work he'd probably come across parents who killed their children or worse, if there was anything worse. There was no reason for the investigator to understand the Deckers' obsession with family; most people wouldn't understand it, I imagined. I wasn't even sure I did; but I did know it was real. I knew it was so real that it could stimulate feelings of resentment strong enough to tempt outsiders into taking drastic action of some sort. Look at me; I'd taken action of a more innocent sort when the family got to be too much for me.