The Lesson of Her Death (16 page)

Slocum squinted at the glass-enclosed bookcase behind Watkins. No, it was a grapefruit the guy had put in there and forgotten about. Maybe an ostrich egg.

Earl Watkins was short and round and wore a tight blue button-down dress shirt. Round metal-rimmed glasses hung on his nose. His mouth was a squooshed O above a deep cleft chin. “Take a pew.”

Slocum settled onto the hard oak chair. “Say, what is that?”

He followed the deputy’s finger. “That? It’s a skull. See the bullet hole?” Watkins, a huge Capitol rotunda of a man, with flags of sweat under his arms, was a special agent, Violent Crime Division, State Police.

Slocum said, “We’re hoping you could shed some light on this situation we’ve got ourselves. Help us out with a profile of the killer. I’ll tell you, there’s some spooky stuff involved.”

Watkins asked slowly, “Spooky stuff?”

Slocum gave him a summary of the Gebben murder then added, “Happened on the night of the half-moon and underneath her was this cult knife.” He handed Watkins a photocopy.

The large man looked at it briefly, without emotion. “Uh-huh. When was her birthday?”

Slocum blinked. He opened his near-empty briefcase and looked into then closed it, remembering the exact spot where he’d left the rest of the file on his desk. “Uhm, I’ve got somebody compiling all that stuff. I’ll get you a copy.”

Watkins then asked, “Multiple perpetrators?”

“Don’t know. Were a lot of footprints around. Mostly men’s. I had pictures taken of them. I’ll get you copies if you want.”

“Naw.” Watkins studied the photocopy of the knife. “Uh-huh, uh-huh. Did he cut her?”

“No. Strangled.”

Watkins said, “I don’t know what this insignia is. You have any idea?”

“They look sort of German. Like the Nazis, you know.”

“It’s not a swastika.”

“No,” Slocum said, “I don’t mean that. I saw this TV movie. The Gestapo had these insignias—”

“Not the Gestapo. The SS. The
Schutzstaffel.”

“That’s it, yeah. Lightning bolts.”

“Only those were parallel. These are crossed.” Watkins waved the sheet. “Knife have any manufacturer?”

“No. Just ‘Korea’ stamped into the end.”

“The hasp,” Watkins said. “When the guy raped her, how much come was there?”

Slocum sought the answer in the ceiling of the office. He thought that Watkins asked this too eagerly and he
wondered if Watkins, who wore no wedding ring, was gay. “The ME estimated three ounces.”

“Uh-huh,” Watkins said. He linked his fingers and cradled the back of his head. He asked Slocum dozens of questions: whether restraints were used, if the killer found the victim or kidnapped her, if there was evidence of alcohol, how Jennie’s body had been arranged in the flowers, whether foreign objects had been inserted into her anus or vagina, how attractive she was, if there were lip marks or other evidence that the killer had drunk her blood or urine.

“That’s pretty damn gross,” Slocum said, offended at the question.

“Any fingerprints?”

“On the knife, yeah. Then a mess of ’em other places too. I’m having somebody check those against known sex offenders’.”

“That’s a good place to start.”

“I’m making damn sure this situation isn’t gonna happen again,” Slocum said with relentless sincerity.

“Are you now?” The state detective seemed amused. He scratched at the photocopy then gazed absently at the black toner that came off on his thumb. Watkins interrupted Slocum’s account of the goat found in the grade school by saying, “Tell me about number two.”

“Only one goat I heard about.”

“The other
victim?”

“We’ve got no other victim. Just the Gebben girl.”

“When you called,” Watkins said, examining a slip of paper, “you said
killings.”

“Did I? There’s only one now. But we’re worried that we’ll have a repeat in the next week. With the full moon, you know.”

“Steve Ribbon’s your sheriff, right?”

“Yep, sure is.”

“And Hammerback Ellison, he’s Harrison County sheriff? They’re both up for reelection next fall.”

The dividing line between what he should say and
what he shouldn’t had always been blurry for Jim Slocum. “Yep. I believe so. I’m not sure they’re running.”

Watkins wiped a wave of sweat off his forehead. That was the smell, Slocum recognized. Sweat. Not onions. Watkins grinned. “Lotta folk say Steven Ribbon’s bubble’s a little off-plumb.”

Slocum’s eyes weaseled away from Watkins’s and he studied the spine of
Modern Sociopathology
. “I don’t know about that.”

“Naw, I suppose you wouldn’t.” Watkins smiled like he’d hit a hole in one. “Well, you, want to make this more’n what it is—”

“Hey—”

“That’s your all’s business.” Then the smile left his face and he said, “With only one killing and on these facts it’s way too early to know what you’ve got. You need more information.”

“Can’t you give us some idea, going on the assumption it’s a cult?”

“I can give you the textbook profile for a classic cult killer if you want. But don’t take it to the bank. I’ve got no idea whether it applies or not.”

“I understand that. Sure.”

“That said, you want me to go ahead?”

“Shoot.” Slocum straightened up and flipped his notebook open. As he did so he glanced at the skull and had a passing thought.
Where could a man get himself one of those?

“Dogit,” Amos Trout said. “Why’d it have to happen just now?”

“Always the way. You oughta—”

“Can’t afford a new one. You gotta patch her.” Trout stood with the mechanic in the left bay of the Oakwood Mall’s Car-Care Center, looking down at the tub of water so grimy it might have come from Higgins Creek downstream of the old paper mill. In the tub was
a Goodyear tire and out of its side was escaping a steady stream of greasy bubbles.

Trout, forty-four, was wearing dark slacks and a short-sleeved white shirt. He had thinning hair, cut short and combed back. In his plastic pocket protector were three pens, a tiny calculator and a sales tax chart. Trout sold carpeting at Floors for All. He looked sadly at the bubbles. “What’ll it cost for a patch?”

“Five seventy-five.”

“I could do it myself, I was home,” Trout said.

“You ain’t home.”

“Looks to be a pretty slow leak and she got me all the way here this morning. I could just pump her up and take my chances.”

“You could. You wouldn’t want to do that, without you had yourself a good spare. That’s my opinion.”

Trout wouldn’t have been so concerned about the tire if after he closed up tonight he and the wife weren’t driving up to Minnesota to catch big lazy muskies and sit in lawn chairs while they drank cocktails out of the back of their beige accordion Travel-All. And it was going to be four weeks before he got back to thirteen-ninety-five acrylic pile your choice of colors pad included free if you buy today.

“Plug her,” he said. “And do a good job. I’m about to put some road under that Buick.”

Four blessed weeks thank you Lord though I’m sorry about the wife part.

The tire man went to work. After a moment he held up a piece of glass like a Dodge City doctor who’d just extracted a bullet from a gunslinger’s arm. “There she be. You had steel belteds it wouldn’t even’ve dented em.”

Trout studied the glass. “I knew I picked up something. Tuesday night I was coming back late on 302. And you know that curve by the dam? Blackfoot Pond? Where everybody fishes?”

The mechanic slicked a plug with glue and began driving it into the puncture. “Uhn.”

“Well, I went around the curve and this fellow comes running up right into my lane.”

“Maybe your lights’re on the blink. I could check—”

“They’re fine except one high beam’s out of whack.”

“I can just—”

“That’s okay. And so I went off the road so’s not to hit him. Wham bam just like that. He froze. I went over a beer bottle. You know it’s those fishermen, they leave all kinds of crapola around. They don’t do that in Minnesota.”

“They don’t?”

Trout said, “Scared the living you know what out of me, seeing that fellow. He looked scared as I was.”

“Don’t blame him. I wouldn’t wanta be Buick feed myself.”

“Yessir.” Trout looked at his watch. It was two o’clock. He paid for the plug. “You sell propane?”

“You got a tank, you can fill it.”

“No, I mean for a Coleman.”

“Naw, gotta go to the Outdoor Store for that.”

“Guess I better. Long lunch hour today. But, hell with it, I’m almost on vacation.”

The sound of the gears buzzing was just audible over the wind that hissed past his ears.

Jamie Corde upshifted as he came to the crest of the hill on Old Farm Road. Below him, a hazy mile away, the school sat in a field—tar-topped brick buildings squatting in a couple of acres of parking lots and lime-green grass.

This was his favorite stretch of road—a sharp decline of smooth asphalt, which if you caught it at the right time of day was pretty much traffic free. Although he now rode a fifteen-speed Italian racing bike, the boy had often surged down this road on his old three-speed
Schwinn, which was mounted with a speedometer. On a summer day with tires fat from the heat inflation he could hit fifty miles per hour before he had to brake for the stop light where Old Farm crossed Route 116.

He started downhill.

Jamie Corde loved to run and he was a ragingly fast runner, but he knew that nothing could beat the feeling of speed not of your own making—flying down a mountain of snow in Colorado or racing down a slope like this one, effortlessly, the gears ratcheting beneath your toe-clipped feet. As if the powers of nature were taking you someplace you couldn’t find by yourself.

The bike was steady under his strong arms as the dotted centerline became a single gray blur. He leaned forward to cut the drag and concentrated on nothing but steering around patches of pebbles. He did not think of his mother or his sister, he did not think of his father. With the exception of a few images of Greg LeMond in the Tour de France, Jamie Corde thought of speed and speed only.

Halfway down the incline, to his enormous delight, he passed a car. True, it was an old Volkswagen diesel and it was being driven by someone who resembled Mrs. Keening, his antiquated Latin teacher. But it was nonetheless a car and he had outraced it, feeling with utter ecstasy the motion of the driver’s head as she glanced at him with disapproving awe.

A half mile ahead at the foot of the hill lay the intersection. He noticed with disappointment that he had timed his assault on the slope wrong. If he had waited three or four minutes at the top and started his descent just as the stoplight had turned red, he might have arrived when it was green and he would have swept smoothly through. But the light was now changing to yellow. Route 116 was heavily trafficked and was favored by this particular light, which kept drivers on Old Farm Road waiting impatiently for long minutes.

He slowly squeezed the rear brake lever.
Thonk.
A sudden sensation. Something had struck his right calf.
He believed he had hit a small animal—a field mouse or chipmunk—and it had been flung up against his leg by the hissing wheel. Almost simultaneously his hand on the brake lever began to cramp. He glanced at the handlebars and noticed that the lever was all the way to the metal.

Jamie looked down at the rear wheel. What had struck his leg had not been an animal. It was the rubber pad of the rear brake shooting from its housing. The metal seemed slightly bent and he realized with horror that when he had lifted the bike onto the pegs in the garage last night, he must have hit the steel jacket that held the pad, loosening it. His father had warned him a dozen times to be careful when he placed the bike on the wall; he continually ignored the advice.

He was two hundred yards from the intersection and still accelerating, approaching forty-five or fifty. The bike began to vibrate. He gripped the handlebars with trembling fists as he swept over stones and branches; he was going too fast to maneuver around them. Sweat of panic burst from his neck and under his arms. He felt the icy chill as the moisture evaporated in the slipstream. Jamie gently squeezed the front brake. No effect. He squeezed harder and the rear end of the bike rose suddenly, nearly sending him tumbling head-forward over the front wheel. He was now a hundred yards from the intersection. He kept as much pressure on the front brake as he dared but still the bike continued to speed up.

A stand of tall oaks flashed into his vision and vanished. A roadside truck, some fence posts. The shoulder here was narrow. Paralleling his mad course was a barbed wire fence that would lacerate him if he were to set the bike down in the gravel beside the road.

Jamie Corde, an A-minus science student, knows that terminal velocity in earth atmosphere is approximately one hundred and thirty miles an hour, he knows that human organs cannot withstand instant deceleration from any speed above fifty. He glances up at the
cross-traffic along Route 116, trucks and cars whizzing past. Tears—from the wind, from his panic—streak from his squinting burning eyes and disappear into his hair. He sits up to increase wind resistance. He remembers a prayer from Sunday school. He drags his feet on the asphalt but shreds the running shoes’ nylon toes quickly. He lifts his feet to the pedals and the bike hurtles forward once again.