Dreams in the Key of Blue (17 page)

Things were beginning to get very complicated. Tests on the bullets that had slammed into Weld’s face would take a couple of days, but I was already certain that we were dealing with a busy killer.

“What set you in motion?” I whispered to no one in particular.

Jaworski moved slowly across the plank flooring above as backup arrived: two Ragged Harbor auxiliary officers and Karen Jasper, all with guns drawn. The four of us waited in silence until Jaworski descended the stairs.

“Everybody out on the porch,” he said. “I don’t want this place tramped over. The crime scene techs and the medical examiner get first crack at it. You get Dickie tended to?”

One of the temporary cops said that paramedics were with Stevens.

“Lucas?”

“It’s Steve Weld,” I said. “He hasn’t been dead long.”

Jaworski nodded his head once, then ushered all of us onto the porch.

Karen Jasper snapped on latex gloves.

“What are you doing?” Jaworski asked her.

“I’m going to take a look at the body,” she said.

“No you aren’t. You help secure this scene and make sure nobody goes in there.”

The color disappeared from Jasper’s face. She placed her hands firmly on her hips and said nothing.

“Who’s at the barricade?” Jaworski asked.

“I was,” the temp said. “Dispatch said you needed me down here.”

More reporters gathered at the end of Crescent. Three of them advanced forty yards onto the street.

“Cooper, get your ass back to that fuckin’ roadblock and herd those assholes off this street.”

The young man ran toward Crescent’s intersection with the village’s main street.

“Jesus,” Jaworski grumbled.

He turned his attention to the second temp. “Batson, get the roll of crime scene tape out of the trunk of my cruiser. You and Jasper tie off this place.”

Jaworski walked toward the seawall. “Maybe the sonofabitch didn’t get off the peninsula yet. If he went out the back, he might be down in the rocks near the lobster pound. I’m going to walk out that way.”

I was ready to follow the chief when the squeal of tires distracted me. I turned and saw Jasper and Batson run to the side of the road and draw their weapons as a gray Volvo roared by, picking up speed. The three reporters propelled themselves over a roadside barrier. Both cops yelled after the car’s driver, who paid no attention. The car was hitting
fifty when it crashed through the roadblock, slamming Cooper against the side of the Tradewind restaurant on the corner.

The battered gray car was the same one that I had seen pass my house and, I was willing to wager, the same one spotted on Crescent Street the night of the murders.

Jaworski ran back across the rocks behind me yelling, “Jasper, radio for a roadblock at the end of the flats. Tell them what we’ve got here. Lucas, you get a look at that bastard?”

“It was quick,” I told him. “Dark-colored baseball cap. Blue vest. The car has a Maine plate. I didn’t get the number.”

Jaworski breathed heavily. “Look like anyone you saw at the memorial service?”

“I couldn’t tell.”

“That’s got to be the same car Luther Peterson told us about.”

“It’s also been on my hill,” I said. “First day I was at the house. He had the cap on backward, and he waved to me. Nearly forced Jaycie and her friends off the road.”

“Wonder if he likes snakes,” Jaworski muttered.

I returned the chief’s nine-millimeter; there was no point bothering with the lobster pound. “You’ll have your hands full here for a while. I can hike to my place.”

Jaworski took the gun, then pointed a finger at Batson. “We ain’t had shit for evidence. Put somebody out back and don’t let air get in that fuckin’ house until Jasper gets the mobile crime lab down here.”

AS I WALKED TO MAIN STREET, I PICTURED STEVE
Weld sprawled in a pool of blood. I inched through the press contingent standing in the debris that had been a
barricade. Their eyes were fixed to the action on Crescent Street. Two reporters glanced at me, then turned away.

There were five dead and, I believed, one fast-moving killer with more than a passing interest in me.

Why the hell did I ever come out of retirement?

I WALKED THROUGH THE HOUSE, ALERT FOR SNAKES OR
other uninvited guests. When I felt confident that I was alone, I turned my attention to the phone.

The answering machine blinked at me, its rhythmic succession of three red winks hinting that three messages awaited me. I was well on my way to mastering the technological age.

I put on my reading glasses and studied the buttons, pondering which to push first.

I pushed the one labeled Save in case I screwed up anything when I pressed another button. The flat, tan box beeped four times; the light continued to blink.

When I pushed Play, nothing happened.

I poked one button marked <<<, heard a whirring noise, then a click, then nothing. Shit.

I hit Play again.

The first message was from my daughter Lane in New York. “Hi, Pop. If you can figure out how to operate your answering gizmo, then you can punch the numbered buttons on the phone and give me a call. Talk to you soon.”

I chuckled.

The second was from Ray Bolton. “Lucas, this is Ray. Call me as soon as possible.”

Bolton was gone from his office for the day, so I called his home number and left a message on his answering gizmo.

I propped Gretchen Nash’s sketches of Dorman and Crandall, and her painting of the headless woman, against the dining room wall. Then I wandered back to the photos and files, grabbed a legal pad and a felt-tipped pen, and doodled when I didn’t have a thought, scribbled notes when I did.

The caricature of the over-chubby Mr. Crandall squatted like a headless troll against the wall. Put a head on that full-figured dude, I thought, and you have a Gilman ready to prowl backyards and peer in windows.

I was not about to lose sleep over MI’s failure to file IRS Form blah-blah-blah. The feds had an army of raincoat-clad cops who packed adding machines and specialized in tracking numbers. Let them get the glory.

Gilman bothered me because he lied, his face and most of his body were in permanent jitterbug mode, he had had an early career in voyeurism, his name had surfaced in the Markham investigation, and Steve Weld had pointed a finger at Gilman as an information source.

There was nothing remarkable about the Dorman sketch. The drawing was well done, but it was a man in work clothes. Period.

The woman in black fascinated me. I studied the pearls, her slender shape in the clinging dress, the ring, her hands, her long, narrow fingers, the black shawl, her arms.

“Who are you?” I asked the picture, and wondered what she had wanted with Dorman.

I gazed at the photo array on my kitchen table.

When I examine a crime scene, the more evidence of
excitability that I find, the more encouraged I feel. Impulsive killers leave more evidence than their methodical kin. Norma Jacobs and her technical people should discover trace evidence left by a frenzied killer.

The most difficult cases are ones in which everything is planned and rehearsed in fantasy, then acted out against strangers. Even the intrusion of an unwanted moment of rage does little to disrupt the performance. A decision has been made, a script opened at act one, and one person knows the stage directions.

Harper Dorman was savaged, his dog killed and concealed. Dorman was not concealed.

After the fact, you were conflicted about killing the dog, but not about killing Dorman.

The building superintendent was a walking dead man with perhaps six months to live. He was very likely inebriated and probably oblivious when the shooter stood beside the cot and blasted away.

Another unconscious victim.

Vulnerable, as my students noted in class discussion.

He represented no threat. Why rain bullets through his head?

Rage.

Fear of the victim.

A single, well-placed shot does the trick. A second might be considered insurance. Without an external cue for the number eight, the possibility of an idiosyncratic association, something inside the killer’s head, remained. If that were the case, I would expect to see greater consistency in the murders.

It was not there.

Rage, and the eight-shot capacity of the clip.

Killing Dorman was personal.

I imagined myself standing over the building superintendent and firing eight times into his head. There’s no way that he’s coming back to life. He is not a threat.

How did Dorman hurt you?

Killing him was not enough.

Norma Jacobs said that years ago Dorman had lived with a woman, and that police had charged him with abusing the woman’s daughter. Men have been killed for that, but not typically fifteen years after the fact.

You castrated him, ripped open his chest.

It is no easy task to tear into the human body.

You placed his heart on the coffee table near his bottle of bourbon.

Personal. Debt paid.

Thirty-six hours after the Portland slaughter…

…
how did you graduate to such meticulous attention to detail?

You had an orange to eat, a movie to watch.

I grabbed the most recent case reports. As I suspected, microscopic analysis of Jaycie’s flannel nightgown showed that her killer had cut it with scissors.

So prepared. You folded the garment over the chair.

I scanned Luther Peterson’s statement. The young man he saw leaving 42 Crescent carried a knapsack.

The knapsack held the killing kit.

Years earlier, Harper Dorman had worked at Harbor College. The three young women were Harbor College students. Dorman managed an apartment building owned by Martin International. Jaycie Waylon was an intern at the company. Steve Weld made no secret of his antipathy to Stu Gilman and MI.

There was no way to know whether Weld’s killer had had postmortem plans for him. Corporal Dickie Stevens had arrived minutes after the shooting.

Norma Jacobs had raised the question of two killers,
one gun, then immediately dismissed it. Now, as unreasonable as it seemed, that possibility nagged at me.

“I don’t fucking get it,” I said, and slammed my hand on the table.

WHEN BOLTON CALLED, HIS VOICE HAD DROPPED AN
octave and his customary laid-back demeanor had been replaced with a distinct edginess. “Lucas, this is sensitive,” he began.

I could remember only a time or two when Bolton felt it necessary to caution me. One notable occasion involved a foreign diplomat and his son’s proclivity for the international transport of regulated substances.

“I understand,” I told Bolton, thinking that, like the diplomat’s son, whatever he was about to tell me would show up in the
New York Post
before I had a chance to repeat it.

“My inquiries about Martin International were red-flagged by a combined federal task force.”

I shuddered. My experiences with task forces were not good. Combined task forces were worse, and whenever you tossed federal into the mix, it was time for the Three Stooges.

“FBI and DEA are involved,” Bolton continued. “Alphabet soup,” I muttered. “What about NBC and CBS?”

Political pressure creates task forces, which usually accomplish two ends: they provide the public with the illusion that something is being done about a problem, and they demonstrate the inability of law enforcement agencies to work together.

Yes, things were certainly getting complicated.

“They’ve got somebody undercover up there,” Bolton continued.

“At Martin International?”

“At the college.”

“Drugs?”

“Money,” Bolton said. “The agent who called me was not happy to find my tracks in the computer.”

“Fuck ‘em,” I said, happy to play even a tangential role in pissing off the feds.

He ignored me. “The essence of it is that MI could be the largest broker of illegal cash transactions in the country. The feds have their agent in place. They see no relationship between their investigation and the murders.”

“Who are their suspects?”

“When they complete their investigation, we might know that.”

I would not hold my breath.

“The ballistics comparison turned up another victim,” I told him, and briefly described the scene at Dorman’s. “This guy is an animal, Lucas.”

“I’m not finished. We got back into town about the time that our shooter took out an instructor at the college. It isn’t official that he’s connected to the others, but only because no testing has been done yet.”

“What other serial killer ever did five in one week?” Bolton asked.

“Danny Rolling in Gainesville, Florida,” I reminded him.

“Rolling was easy to read compared to your guy.”

When I hung up the phone, I turned to stare at my dagger and orange. In my analysis of the connections among the homicides and some of the players, I had ignored the most obvious.

My letter of invitation to teach at Harbor had come from the college’s academic dean. Her note explained that the suggestion to invite me had originated with a board member familiar with my work. I’d glanced at the list of
names printed down the left side of the stationery and recognized none of them. I had considered the offer for a day, then faxed my acceptance, thinking that my benefactor would remain anonymous for the moment, and that I owed this person a thank-you for hauling my ass out of Lake Albert when I hit bottom with boredom.