Eleven Days (13 page)

“Well,” said Hal, “we have to be going. If either one of you thinks of anything that could help us, we’d appreciate you getting ahold of us. The sheriff’s office in Maitland will know where to find us.”

“We’ll do that,” said Helen. Fred just grunted noncommittally.

Hal and I went directly back to the office, and I called Sue immediately.

“Hi, look, I’ll be just a little late for supper.”

“Well, I’m going to fix myself something—you’ll have to fend for yourself.”

“That’s all right.”

“You should be here—you’re not ready to work yet.”

“Okay. See you when I get home.”

Lamar was still there, so the three of us sat down and discussed the interview. Took about twenty minutes to fill him in. When he was finished, Hal said:

“What do you think about old Fred?”

“What do you want to know?” asked Lamar.

“I want to know if he could be our suspect. His wife said that he hated the group.”

“I don’t think so,” said Lamar, “but I guess we can’t rule him out yet.”

Hal nodded. “And this Darkness character?”

“I don’t have any idea at all who he could be,” said Lamar.

“Me either,” I added.

“We’ll find out,” said Hal. “It is a damned shame he came back yesterday and we didn’t know what the hell was going on.”

“He sounds to me,” I said, “like the leader of our little group.”

“Yes, he does, doesn’t he?”

“Aren’t they supposed to have thirteen members?”

“I think you’re right, Carl,” said Hal. “We have a request in to San Francisco PD, they have a Satanic expert, and he should be calling here tomorrow. Also one in to New York PD. Same reason.”

“Think they’ll want to look at the scene or anything?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Hal. “Any problem there?”

“Just that I’m glad you called them.”

“We thought it would be a good idea.”

“No, not that. I mean, if they came at your request, you foot the bill.”

“Oh.”

“When do you want Helen in to listen to the tape? Tomorrow?”

“The sooner, the better.”

“Carl?”

“Yes, boss.”

“You’re on sick leave.”

“Yeah, but Helen talks to me.”

Lamar glanced at Hal.

“That’s right, Lamar. She does. I’d like to have Carl up here when she comes in, if that’s okay.”

“If it doesn’t take too long.”

“Sure.”

“Boss, I just can’t drive or anything. I can talk all right.”

“You can always talk.”

“Well, yeah.”

“And eat, too. Tell me the truth … did Helen feed you out there?”

“You gotta advise me of my rights first.”

“I thought so.”

Lamar had to go, and so did I. After he left, I talked with Hal for a minute. About Helen, and hiding her testimony from her husband. I wasn’t too uncomfortable about it, and neither was Hal, except I didn’t want to have Fred get on Helen about it, and have her dry up as a source. We’d have to be careful.

Hal dropped me off at home. My in-laws were there, checking on my health. My mother-in-law had brought some of her chocolate cookies, and some leftover beef roast, for my lunches when Sue was in school. All right!

About seven or so, I sat down at my computer and began doing the photo labels. God, there were a lot of them. I made a generic label, with as much on it as I could cram and fake without having to actually look at the pictures and negatives. I wanted to wait at least another day to do that. I wouldn’t be able to wait much longer, though, because Hester was going to want the photos back.

What I really wanted was the videotape Hester had made of both scenes.

Anyway, Sue didn’t get too upset, because the computer did most of the work. While it was grinding out labels, we talked about Helen.

“What do you know about her?”

“Oh, her kid was a little bothered. She graduated about a year ago, I think. When Tammy was in eighth grade, I remember Helen and Fred coming in for a parent-teacher’s conference. He didn’t seem like he really wanted to be there.”

“Anything remarkable about Tammy?”

“Withdrawn, I guess. Sort of a quiet child. Bright, I think, but never gave much indication of it.”

“I didn’t even really remember her. Or Fred.”

“Fred was in my class.” That would have been a year ahead of me. “Is she involved in this murder business?”

“What … no, I don’t think so. Just knew some of the victims.”

“Pretty horrible, wasn’t it?”

“Well, it was. Yeah.”

“I thought so, you’ve been pretty withdrawn since.”

“Well, it was kind of a heavy day, with the two crime scenes, one on top of the other like that.”

“Let me look at your head.”

She stood on my right, parted what’s left of my hair, and looked closely at the wound.

“It’s still all bruised, but it’s not red or anything.”

“Good.”

“When do you get the stitches out?”

“Tomorrow, I think.”

“That’ll probably help.”

“Yeah. That’s the side I sleep on.”

“Speaking of that, have you been getting much sleep lately?”

“No, not enough. Maybe five hours a day, or so.”

“And you’re smoking more, and drinking too much coffee.”

I grinned. “Well, at least I don’t go out and hang around with the boys.”

“The hell you don’t. That’s what you’ve been doing all day.”

Well, sort of. She did have a point. Sort of.

Fell asleep in the chair, watching TV. Woke up about three-thirty, took a bath, and went to bed. Feeling not so much tired, as just kind of washed-out. And muddle-headed.

Wonderful. I was going to be going back to work in a day or two, and I was now waking up at the time I normally went to bed. Damn. Fifteen years of nights, you get into a routine. And when you break it like that, you get into trouble. Like sleeping on the road. Or missing something important. Or getting nailed by somebody because you’re not alert. Although, come to think of it, I had been alert on Wednesday, when I’d gotten my head thwacked. Oh, well.

I puttered around the kitchen for a while and was finishing my second cup of coffee when Sue’s alarm went off, and I could hear her stirring around upstairs. I didn’t want to tell her that I was going to the office today. I wanted her to think that I was being good and staying home, recuperating. She would worry a lot less.

I got out the crime scene photos, the sheets of computer labels, my pocket tape recorder, the copy of Hester’s notes on the scene, and spread it all over the dining room table. Took about five minutes to find a felt-tipped
pen. Set out a couple of place mats for the coffeepot and a cup, and was ready to go to work.

Labeling crime scene photos is a chore. There were more than two hundred of them. A label for this kind of case would have to be real accurate, and look something like this:

Two hundred would be a chore all by themselves, but you also have to go over the negatives to make certain of the frame numbers, because you frequently don’t start with #1 on a roll. Then you have to examine the photos themselves very carefully, because you often have several showing almost the same thing, and you can’t get the frame numbers mixed up or they will make a rather large deal out of it in court. It takes some pretty bright light, and occasional intense concentration. I usually like to do it, because carefully examining the photos will sometimes reveal little details you miss at the scene. But in this case, since the lab crew had done about the same thing after I did, it did seem a little redundant.

Sue passed through on the way to the kitchen, to make her breakfast. “You been up all night?”

“Nope, only about an hour.”

“Labeling pictures again?”

“Yep.”

I could hear her in the kitchen, rattling around as she got her bowl of cereal. She always ate while she moved around, in the morning. Lining up school papers and things, making an occasional phone call, locating books for students. I wanted to be able to do that someday, but I
would have left a trail of food all around the house. Sue never spilled a drop.

She came back through, on some errand, with her cereal bowl in her hand.

“Looks like you should be home today …”

“Yeah, this should take a while.”

“Good.”

“Hey, you seen the magnifying glass?”

There was a mumbled “ungmmm” from the living room, and she came back a moment later, her mouth full of Cheerios. She pointed with a spoon as she passed, indicating the buffet.

“Thanks.”

I got the magnifying glass out, and was in the bathroom, wiping our little niece’s fingerprints off the lens, when she came in to put on her makeup. Still with the bowl of Cheerios.

“Say, does that light board I gave you for Christmas last year still work?”

“Of course. It’s in the closet in our room. Behind the boxes of the summer clothes.”

“Thanks. Mind if I use it?”

“Nope.”

I went upstairs, rummaged through the closet, and brought it down. It would be perfect to backlight the negatives. I normally would just hold them up to a light, but there were so many of them this time.

I had to get out a couple of more mats, so the board wouldn’t scratch the table, causing me to rearrange the whole conglomeration. By the time I was ready to go, so was Sue.

“Carl, do you get your stitches out today?”

“Yep.”

“What time?”

“No specific time. I’ll just drop up when I get some time.”

“All right, dear. Just don’t forget.”

“I won’t.”

“And, if you get a chance, maybe you could empty the dishwasher and fill it up again?”

I nodded.

“There’s some of that lasagna in the refrigerator, for lunch.” The front door shut, and she was gone.

I opened the photo package and started to place as many of the negatives as I could on the board. Negatives and prints should be in the same general sequence, as long as somebody hadn’t messed them up too much when they looked at them.

It took about thirty minutes to stick the labels on the back of all the prints, and then I was ready to go to work.

Most of the shots had come out rather well, if I did say so myself. Not like the time I did up a burglary scene and found it easier to focus without my glasses on. If you ever want a record of your astigmatism, try that. All blurred, the extent depending on the distance of the focus. These were much, much better.

There’s nothing quite like matching the negative to the print, especially when there are multiple shots of the same subject, same point of view, slightly different magnification with a zoom lens; it forces you to examine the detail of each shot. I was sort of hoping that something would pop out at me from one of the prints, something that would give me an indication or a suggestion regarding the perpetrator. Anything.

When I got to the sequence of Phyllis Herkaman’s body in the basement, I carefully laid six prints out that I had taken in an attempt at a panoramic view of the scene. They matched quite well, and I found myself looking at the whole north side of the basement. I sat back a little and just let the scene sink in.

I was getting a sense of horrible despair from the montage, a feeling of almost pathetic fear and suffering. Especially as I remembered talking with Helen, and her saying that Phyllis wasn’t pushy about Satanism, but believed in
it sincerely as a philosophy. It didn’t make much difference if somebody got hurt by your actions, because if they could be hurt, they didn’t really deserve your consideration … or something like that. I wondered how far her philosophy had sustained her in the last few hours of her life. Through Helen, I had gotten to know Phyllis just a little bit. Making it much more difficult to dispassionately view what had happened to her.

When I had originally been at the crime scene, I had been able to pull myself back and view everything like it wasn’t quite real. Not really people involved, just objects. You learn to do that after a while. A survival technique. But having become acquainted with Phyllis, so to speak, I was beginning to lose that necessary objectivity. Not necessary so much because it would keep me objective in investigating the case, but necessary because it would keep my head from filling with the horror of what had happened and what I had seen. So it wouldn’t bother me for months to come.

I quickly picked up my coffee cup and went into the living room, leaving the prints on the table behind me. I took a deep breath and lit a cigarette. Whoa, boy. Take a break.

I checked the time on the VCR: 11:10. Well, let’s go get the stitches out. That ought to be a distraction, and there’ll be people there.

I left everything in place and took special care to lock the house up tight. I didn’t want the in-laws coming down and seeing the pictures.

When I got to the clinic, there were two people there ahead of me. Henry’s nurse ushered me into an exam room, took my temperature and blood pressure, and left me sitting there. Thinking about Phyllis. Not what I wanted, exactly, but it was better than sitting there looking at her body and wondering how that would feel.

Henry came in eventually, his usual exuberant, solid self.

“Well, how’s the old noggin today!”

“Okay, I guess. No pain.”

“Probably because there’s nothing in there to hurt.”

He looked the stitches over, decided that it would be all right if they came out. Stuck his head out the door and called for his nurse. Checked my pupils with that damned little light.

“I was right,” he said. “Empty.”

“Thanks, Henry.”

“Just a professional opinion. Any nausea?”

“Nope.”

“Good. Headaches?”

“Oh, sort of. When I get tired.”

“Good. If you’d said no, I’d know you were lying.”

The nurse came in with a little stainless-steel pan. I hate those, too.