ABSOLUTION (A Frank Renzi novel) (35 page)

The Tongue Killer needed to dominate and control his victims.

Frank opened a folder and reviewed the autopsy protocols. Except for Kitty, the COD in each case was suffocation, up close and personal, but not bloody. He could have stabbed them with whatever he used to cut the tongues, but he was careful. Suffocation caused no blood spatter. And except for Dawn Andrews, he had left his signature—a mutilated tongue and a posed corpse—acts that went beyond the action necessary to commit the murder. Mere killing didn’t satisfy this killer. He feared and loathed women, needed to control and degrade them. Each kill was a ritual, inspired by his sick fantasies. The tongue trophy allowed him to relive the murders later.

He pushed the folders aside. The only concrete evidence they had was the DNA from the matter under Patti Cole’s fingernails, but the sample had yielded no matches from the national DNA database. Their only hope was to get the killer’s DNA to match the sample.

He went to the window and stared at the moon, a pale yellow crescent in a blue-black sky. His rumbling stomach reminded him he hadn’t eaten since noon, but nailing Krauthammer was more important. Someone had sent Rona a threatening note and a dead bird. When she repeated her demand that every white priest give a DNA sample, someone firebombed her house. A witness had seen a priest leaving Patti Cole’s apartment, but this didn’t prove that the killer was a priest. Maybe he only posed as a priest. Maybe Rona’s killer-priest theory made him angry because he feared it would make women leery of priests and hinder him in gaining his next victim’s trust.

Try some Grecian Formula, Detective Renzi. No need to let yourself look old.

A personal taunt, made by a man troubled by his own sexuality.

Krauthammer hid his depraved sexual appetites behind a boyish face and a charming smile. The priest knew how to make vulnerable young women feel good about themselves. Krauthammer was the killer, dammit. All he had to do was prove it. He opened McGuire’s FedEx and began to read.

_____

At seven o’clock the sinner entered The Cockpit, stood by the door and scanned the room. Marie wasn’t there, but he didn’t allow himself to be disappointed. That would be foolish.

Stupid
, said the voice.
Why did you come here? She has too many problems.

Deep down he was glad she wasn’t there, the healthiest emotion he’d felt in years, maybe ever. He’d resisted the urge to come here, knowing he shouldn’t, not after the interview with Renzi. Not after Rona Jefferson’s latest diatribe. This morning he had barely concealed his rage when the Monsignor showed him her column. There lay another problem. At breakfast he’d seen the suspicious glances Monsignor Goretti cast his way. He knew that look. After Brother Henry, he’d caught his father watching him like that, eyes filled with disgust, imagining them in bed together, no doubt.

He took the same barstool as before, the one farthest from the door beside a square post, distancing himself from the other three men at the bar. The barmaid in the yellow T-shirt smiled in recognition and approached him.

Not good. He should leave right now.

“
You look sad tonight,” she said, her dark eyes full of sympathy.

How perceptive. Too perceptive
. “Could I have some ice water?”

She raised an eyebrow but brought him the ice water and left him alone. He gulped some water, recalling how Renzi had baited him. He had plenty of experience there, too. Whenever Nanny would stand with her hands on her hips, nostrils flared, eyes glittering, he made himself walk by as if nothing had happened, not flinching as he passed her. If he flinched, she owned him.

He looked at the television above the bar. No game show tonight, just Dr. Phil wagging a finger at his guests: a homely woman with thick glasses, an Asian man with glossy black hair, an overweight man with a big nose and thin lips. When Dr. Phil shook his finger at an anorexic-looking girl with dark hair, she burst into tears.

“
To every thing there is a season, a time to every purpose under the heaven,” said a soft voice.

Startled, he turned. Marie smiled and continued the quote, though a bit self-consciously: “A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.”

“
My goodness,” he said, “you’ve been studying.”

She slipped onto the adjacent barstool and sang in a soft voice: “You made me love you, I didn’t wanna do it. I didn’t wanna do it.”

Her voice surprised him, light and sweet and right on pitch, but the words repulsed him. “
Please,
” he said with unconcealed disgust.

“
Don’t be mean. You were waiting for me. Admit it.”

He wanted to slap her, had to wait for the instant of rage to pass. He wasn’t mean, he was a killer and he knew it. Marie didn’t, of course. Not yet.

The barmaid looked over and smiled. Without waiting for them to order, she brought them two Bloody Marys. After she walked away, Marie whispered, “She’s been watching us. I hate that.”

“
She has?” He didn’t like it, either.

“
Yes, haven’t you noticed?”

He hadn’t, but he would from now on. In fact, he wasn’t sure he’d stay. This was dangerous. Marie sucked at her drink and gave him a shy smile. He studied her face, seeing it clearly for the first time. Her mud-brown eyes were ringed with dark eyeliner and her lips were painted some horrible color, almost black. “You look different tonight,” he said.

She touched her hair. “I got a haircut and it’s awful. It makes me look like Dora the Explorer.”

No, you look like those sluts on TV, flaunting their bodies, begging for sex.

“
The bartender likes you,” Marie said.

He stared at her. “What do you mean?”

She giggled. “You’re cute when you get embarrassed. One of those girls went home with that guy last night, the camo-shirt guy with the muscles?”

Was that all she saw in a man? Muscles?

“
Maybe she didn’t have a car. Maybe he just dropped her off.”

Marie sipped her drink, not looking at him. “Maybe he looked better to her than going home to an empty room. Maybe she was lonely.”

Taken aback, he stared at her. “Why did you come here tonight?”

“
Why do you think? I was hoping you’d be here.”

Unsettled, he gestured at the television screen. “Dr. Phil is on.”

She made a “Tsk” with her tongue, sulking. After a grudging glance at the TV, she turned to him and said, “Did you ever feel like killing someone?”

Definitely
. Rona Jefferson, Sean Daily, and most of all, Detective Renzi, who had tried to make him confess by showing him those pictures.

“
Yes,” he said, and sucked up some Bloody Mary through the straw.

“
How about your father? Did you ever feel like killing your father?”

He felt a stir in his groin.
Father? Often. And Nanny? Countless times.

“
Do you think men are smarter than women?” Marie asked.

“
Not at all,” he said, easing into his patter, knowing he was doing it, knowing that he didn’t love Marie after all, knowing Marie was going to die.

“
Women are every bit as smart as men,” he said.

“
Right,” she said, smiling at him now, “but sometimes they need a knight-in-shining-armor to help them.” She sucked up some of her Bloody Mary. “Are you scared of cops?”

“
I’m scared of lots of things,” he said. “But I don’t let that stop me.”

_____

The nude body of a woman sprawled on a bed, one arm outstretched, the other beneath her. Blood spatter dripping down the walls and puddled the floor. Blood-stained sheets and blankets and pillows.

Frank studied the photographs, taken from different angles to document the carnage and the hapless victim, another woman whose life had been snuffed out too soon. He would know this young college coed only through these crime scene photos, the autopsy protocols and the facts the D.C. homicide team had gathered about her.

By now it was nine o’clock and he was working on his second beer. Beside the thick binder that held the D.C. case file, half of a ham and cheese sandwich sat on a paper plate. He’d eaten one half before studying the twenty photographs strewn over his desk, including the hideous close-ups. The rest of the sandwich would go in the garbage.

He got on the phone and called McGuire.

“
I just read the case file, and I got questions. You busy?”

“
Nah, just watching a ballgame on TV. Hold on, lemme get the file.”

Moments later McGuire was back. Frank heard him light a cigarette before he picked up the phone. “Okay, Frank, shoot. I’m all ears.”

“
Judging from the crime scene photos, he had to have gotten blood on himself and his clothes. Any evidence that he cleaned up at the scene?”

“
No. That was my thought, too, but when I asked the lead detective, he said the criminalists checked the tub drain and the kitchen and bathroom sinks, got nothing.”

Frank studied the photos of the victim’s face, eyes scrunched shut, lips drawn back in a grimace. One shot was a close-up of the mouth. “The tongue was only partially severed. He stopped when he saw all the blood.”

“
Yeah, the creepy son of a bitch. Why does he do it?”

“
I’m not sure, but it’s part of his ritual. In your case he didn’t pose the body. Down here, he did. And he cuts the tongues post-mortem.”

“
To eliminate the bleeding,” McGuire grunted. “The creep is smart.”

“
Right, but I think your case is related. There are a lot of similarities. She might have been his first. Maybe he learned from his mistake and refined his technique. The COD was manual strangulation?”

“
Correct. The pathologist found the usual indications: petechial hemorrhaging in the eyes, heavy bruising on her neck. Not enough to lift any prints, though. I figure she screamed, the guy panicked and strangled her.”

“
This was her apartment?”

“
Right. She lived by herself. No evidence of forced entry. The homicide team asked if she had any boyfriends, didn’t come up with any.”

“
What about her parents? According to the interview reports, they didn’t say much.”

“
They were real shook up. She was their only child. The lead detective said he had to wait a couple of days to interview them. Nice people, he said, and financially well off. Trinity College is expensive. It’s a small Catholic women’s college, a thousand students or so.”

“
Gloria Smith,” Frank said. He hated talking about the woman as if she were a statistic. The photographs depersonalized her enough.

McGuire chuckled. “Yeah, Smith, can you believe it? She grew up in a ritzy area of Wilmington, Delaware. Her mother’s a housewife. Her father works at a bank, executive type.”

“
Why was she back in D.C. on the sixth of January? Trinity must take a semester break.”

“
Her mother said she went back early to get a head start on one course. A math course, I think. Gloria was worried about it, she said.”

“
Her mother didn’t mention any boyfriends.”

“
No. She said Gloria was the shy type, didn’t date much in high school. Devout Catholic too, went to Mass every Sunday. It’s not obvious in the crime scene photos, but her left arm was deformed and she had only two fingers on that hand. It was a birth defect.”

Another victim with a physical flaw, a shy girl who didn’t date much.

“
Seems like they didn’t get much from her girlfriends, either.”

“
The lead detective said they claimed they didn’t know her that well. She kept to herself a lot, I guess, didn’t confide in them.”

“
Maybe Gloria had a secret boyfriend and didn’t want to tell them. Or Mom and Pop.”

“
Yeah, well, everything’s hearsay when the victim can’t talk.”

“
Any letters or emails?”

“
She didn’t have a computer. Lots of people didn’t, back then. No letters, either, and no diary. Pretty much a cipher, it seems like.”

“
Any messages on her answering machine?”

“
She didn’t have one. This girl was a real technophobe, like me.” McGuire’s chuckle turned into a hacking cough. “I hate answering machines, and voice mail? Fucking forget it! I like the Caller-ID, though. Let’s you screen out calls you don’t want.”

“
I hear you on that one.” He hesitated, reluctant to ask McGuire for another favor. “The guy I’m looking at attended Georgetown University. Timothy Krauthammer. I’d like to get hold of his college file, but that might be tricky. You know anybody over there?”

“
I’ll check around, tap my contacts. You think he’s your killer?”

“
Let’s just say this is an odd coincidence, and I don’t believe in coincidences.”

“
Me neither,” McGuire said. “I’ll get back to you soon as I can.”

Frank hung up and scratched his jaw. Two things about the Smith case stood out: no forced entry and no evidence of sexual assault. The lead detective’s theory: Gloria was the victim of a random attack by a deranged killer. A naïve young woman had opened her door to the wrong stranger.