The Lesson of Her Death (5 page)

Slocum chose not to answer for Bill Corde and said only, “He said he wants us all to meet about the case. At four, I think it was.”

“We gotta watch our pennies, I hope he knows that. Anyway, I wanted to kick something around with you. This killing’s got me bothered. I hear it wasn’t a robbery.”

“Doesn’t seem to be.”

“I was noticing there were some parallels between what happened and a couple other cases I’d read about. It occurred to me that we might have a cult killer problem here.”

“Cult?” Slocum asked carefully.

The book dropped onto the desk. A paperback, fanned from bathtub or hammock reading.
Bloody Rites
. On the cover were three black-and-white photos of pretty girls over a color photo of a blood-spattered pack of tarot cards. “Whatsis?” Slocum picked it up.

“I want you to read it. I want you to think about it. It’s about this Satanist down in Arizona a couple years ago. A true story. There are a lot of similarities between what happened here and that fellow.”

Slocum flipped to the pictures of the crime scenes. “You don’t think it’s the same guy?”

“Naw, they caught him. He’s doing life in Tempe
but there are … similarities.” Ribbon stretched out the word. “It’s kind of scary.”

“Damn, they were good-looking.” Slocum gazed at the page of the book showing the victims’ high school graduation pictures.

Ribbon absently stroked his black polyester tie and said softly, “What I’d like you to do is get yourself up to Higgins. The state police have a psychology division up there. Follow up with them on it.”

“You think?” Slocum read a passage where the writer described what the Arizona killer had done to one co-ed. He reluctantly lowered the book and said, “I’ll mention it to Bill.”

“Naw, you don’t have to. Just call up the boys in Higgins and get an appointment.”

Slocum grinned. “Okay. I won’t fly.”

“What?”

“I won’t fly up there.”

“Why would you?—Oh, yeah, haw.” The sheriff added, “We gotta make sure word gets around about this.”

“How’s that?”

Ribbon said, “Well, we should make sure the girls in town are warned about it.”

“Wouldn’t that kind of tip our hand?”

“It’s our job to
save
lives too.”

Slocum flipped through the pictures again. Ribbon leaned forward and tapped the book. “Hang on to that. You’ll enjoy it. It’s a real, what do they say, page-turner.”

The Incorporated Town of New Lebanon reluctantly owned up to its mouthful of a name. By the time the village was chartered in the 1840s all the good names—the European capitals and harmonious-sounding biblical locales—had been taken. The final debate had pitted the New Lebanonites against New Luxumbergians. Because
the former had a respectful ring of Old Testament, the vote was predictable.

The town was in Harrison County, named after William Henry, not because of his thirty-day term as president but for his tenure as Indiana Territory governor during which he decimated native Indian tribes (Tippecanoe, of campaign-slogan fame) and allowed counties like this his namesake to congeal into what they were today: mostly white, mostly Protestant, mostly rural. New Lebanon’s economy floated on milk, corn, and soybeans, though it had a few small factories and one big printing plant that did a lot of work for Chicago and St. Louis and New York publishers (including the ever-scandalous and -anticipated
Mon Cher
magazine, scrap bin copies of which flooded the town monthly thick as shucked cobs at harvest).

Also located in New Lebanon was the only four-year college for a hundred miles. Auden University goosed the town population up to fourteen thousand from August to May and gave locals the chance to sit through performances of second-tier orchestras and avant-garde theater companies, which they boasted about being able to attend but rarely did. The NCAA was about the only real contact between Auden and the natives, virtually none of whom could afford the seventeen-thousand-dollar tuition, which bought you, times four, just a
liberal arts
degree and what the hell good was that?

The residents had ambivalent feelings toward the students. The school was a bounty, no denying: thousands of young people with nothing to do but eat out, go to movies and redecorate their dorm rooms, and what’s more there was a new brood of them every year just like hogs and veal calves. And some locals even felt a nebulous pride when Auden University Economics Professor Andrew Schoen appeared on
Meet the Press
or a book by English professor John Stanley Harrod was favorably reviewed in the
New York Times
, to which a grand total of forty-seven New Lebanonites subscribed.

On the other hand Auden was a burden. These money-shedding young people got drunk and puked and sneered and teepeed trees with toilet paper and broke plate glass. They shamelessly bought Trojans and Ramses in front of grade-school children. They walked around looking important as bankers. They burned effigies of politicians and occasionally a flag. They were gay and lesbian. They were Jewish and Catholic. They were Eastern.

Bill Corde was not a product of Auden though he was of New Lebanon. Born and reared here, he’d ventured away only for four years of service (standing guard with his M-16 over missiles in West Germany) and a few years in Missouri as a patrolman then detective in the St. Louis Police Department. He returned to New Lebanon and after six months of feed and grain, teaching Sunday school and thinking about starting a contracting business, he applied for a job at the town Sheriff’s Department. His experience made him a godsend to Steve Ribbon, whose closest approximation to police training had been the Air Force (he and
his
rifle had protected B-52s in Kansas). After a year as the department’s oldest rookie Corde was promoted to detective and became the town’s chief felony investigator.

On the neat wall above his neat desk in the hundred-and-four-year-old town building were some framed documents: a diploma from Southwestern State University and certificates from the ICMA’s Police Business Administration Institute of Training in Chicago as well as one from the Southern Police Institute in Louisville. The proof was absent but he had also taken various FBI training seminars and courses in law and visual investigation analysis. He had just returned from Sacramento and a weeklong session at the California Department of Justice.

The certificates he had proudly tacked up were simple vouchers of completion; Corde was a bad student. He collected words that described himself. He was
persistent
, he was
industrious
, he had
sticktoitiveness
. But
Bill Corde was born C-plus material and that didn’t change whether the subject was one he hated (English, social studies) or loved (criminal psychology or link-analysis-charting techniques). He wrote slowly and produced leaden meat-and-potato reports, and although as detective his official hours were pretty much eight to six he would often stay late into the night muscling through an article in
Forensics Today
or the
Journal of Criminal Justice
, or comparing the profiles of suspects in his cases with those in the NASPD’s
Felony Warrants Outstanding Bulletin
.

Some people in town—that is to say, the people who worked for him—thought Corde took his job too seriously, New Lebanon being a place where the State Penal Code’s thousand-dollar threshold between petty and grand larceny was not often crossed, and four of last year’s six deaths by gunshot were from failing to open a bolt or breach when climbing over a fallen tree. On the other hand Corde’s arrest-per-felony rate was a pleasure to behold—ninety-four percent—and his conviction-to-arrest ratio was 8.7:10. Corde kept these statistics in a thirdhand IBM XT computer, the department’s major concession to technology.

He now finished reviewing the coroner’s preliminary report on Jennie Gebben and stood up from his desk. He left the sheriff’s office and strode across the hall to the lunchroom. As he walked a quarter materialized in his hand and he rolled it over the back of one finger to the next and so on, around and around, smooth as a pool-hall hustler. His father had taught him this trick. Corde Senior made the boy practice it with his hand extended over an old well on the back of the family property. If he dropped a coin,
plop
, that was that. And his father had made him use his own two bits. Corde had seen a lot on TV recently about men’s relations with their fathers and he thought there was something significant about the way his father had taught him this skill. He had learned a few other things from his old man: His posture. A loathing of second mortgages. An early love of hunting
and fishing and a more recent fear of the mind’s wasting before the body. That was about all.

Corde was real good at the coin trick.

He entered the lunchroom, which was the only meeting place in the town building large enough to hold five brawny men sitting—aside from the main meeting room, which was currently occupied by the New Lebanon Sesquicentennial Celebration Committee.

He nodded to the men around the chipped fiber-board table: Jim Slocum, T.T. Ebbans—the lean, ex-Marine felony investigator from the Harrison County Sheriff’s Department—and New Lebanon Deputy Lance Miller. At the far end of the table, surrounded by two empty chairs, was Wynton Kresge. Corde thought,
Antsy as a tethered retriever on the first day of season
.

He dropped the quarter into his pants pocket and stood in front of a row of vending machines. He was about to speak when Steve Ribbon walked in. Corde nodded to him and leaned back against the Coke machine.

“Howdy, Bill. Just want to say a few words to the troops about this case, you don’t mind.” The sheriff’s ruddy face looked out over the men as if he were addressing a crowd of a thousand. Ribbon scrutinized Wynton Kresge who represented two oddities in this office—he was black and he wore a suit. Kresge took the look for a moment, realized he was being asked a question then said, “I’m from the college.”

“Oh. Well.” Ribbon’s voice enlarged to encompass everyone. “I just want to put my two cents in. You all are the task force on this thing. Now Bill’s in charge.” He looked at Ebbans. “Which I think is what Sheriff Ellison’s agreeable to.”

“Yessir,” said Ebbans. “I’m just a hired hand here.”

“Now between all of you,” Ribbon continued, “you got a flatbed full of investigating experience.” His burdened gray eyes rose to Corde’s. “And I’m busier’n a dog in a fire hydrant factory.…”

Corde nodded sympathetically.
You’re running and there’s an election come November
.

“So I can’t get as involved in the case as I’d like. But keep remembering, people’re going to be watching us. They’re going to be real curious how we do on this one so I want us to be pretty, you know, aggressive. Now I’ve been doing some research and I’m pretty bothered by this cult business.”

Corde was silent. It was Ebbans who asked, “Cult?”

“What I want you to do is first come up with a profile of our killer.”

Jim Slocum said, “In these situations that’s what you always have to do.”

Wynton Kresge wrote this down.

“Absolutely,” Ribbon said. “I know we haven’t had any of these kinds of killers here in New Lebanon before but I think it’s important for us to get up to speed. What you have to do with cult murderers is peg them. Find out what makes them tick.”

Kresge scribbled rapidly. Corde glared at him and he stopped writing.

Ribbon continued, “Now a profile should include two things. The physical description of our man, one, and what’s going on in his mind, two. Stuff like is he sexually repressed, does he hate his mother, does he have trouble, you know, getting it up, was he beaten as a child.…”

Corde, who had a well-used NCAVC criminal profiling flowchart tacked up on his wall, nodded solemnly and let the embarrassment for his boss trickle off.

“Sounds important,” Miller said, and brushed his hand over his excessively short crew cut.

“Absolutely,” Ribbon said. “I’ve been reading up on investigations like this. One thing that’s troubling is this moon business. Think about it. She was killed on the night of the quarter moon. That could be lunar fixation for you. And this one’s particularly troubling, you know why? Because we’ve got two quarters and a full and a new. So that’s four potential strike windows—”

“What’s that?” Wynton Kresge asked the question that Corde had been about to.

Ribbon said patiently, “That’s the entire period when our man’s likely to kill again. In this case I’d say it’s from thirty-six hours in front of the full moon till thirty-six hours after.”

Corde and Ebbans, who’d worked together on investigations for four years, got to play the eye-rolling game.

“Ah,” Kresge said, and wrote.

Corde and Ebbans played the game again.

“Well, that’s my two cents. I’ll let you boys be. Do me proud and go catch this sickie.” Ribbon left the room.

Corde took center stage. He searched for something politic to say. “All right, I suppose we might be looking at the possibility of a serial killing here but I wouldn’t go spreading that around. We don’t want to give anybody any ideas.” Slocum seemed about to speak but remained silent and Corde continued, “Now I’m going to give us ten days to get a suspect under. And I want an ID within two or three.” From his St. Louis days Corde remembered the forty-eight/four rule in homicide investigations: If you don’t identify the perp within forty-eight hours of a killing, the odds are it will take at least four weeks to find him.

“Also,” Slocum said, “the full moon’s coming up in seven days or so.” He was scanning a
Farmer’s Almanac
.

Corde said delicately, “I think Steve’s got a good point. We’ve got to be aware of this moon business but we don’t want to drop other leads because of it. It’ll be something to consider, is all.” Corde opened the envelope Kresge had brought and pulled out several sheets. “Wynton here was good enough to bring us some dope on the victim and I want to go over it now.”

Corde also opened an envelope of his own. He shook out the glossy photograph of Jennie Gebben on the volleyball court. It showed clear eyes, a competitive smile, patches of sweat soaking her T-shirt, more throat
than a girl that age would want. He noticed in the photo two metal hoops in each ear. When had the third hole been added? he wondered.