Her Last Scream (27 page)

We figured Bromley and Trotman were in league, having met over the net or via one of Bromley’s trips to the law firm’s Colorado escape in Aspen. Trotman had wormed into the university job and taken up residence above the bar. His spying provided the password to the center’s computer. Then Bromley put Bemis on the job and they gained all the access they needed.

When a woman boarded the train, Trotman positioned himself to intercept her. We figured he was probably watching as Lainie Krebbs emerged into the Boulder night, hoping she was free. He followed her, found out where she was living, passed the word to Bromley, who discovered the woman’s husband was a fellow Mobilian. He reeled the ridiculous Krebbs into his net like a panfish.

I relayed the bizarre story to the center’s people. Sinclair pulled me aside. “You don’t think my piece, my false work in any way helped them …”

“This madness started before you put out your bait, Dr Sinclair,” I said. “You did nothing but draw interest.”

“How long have they been killing?”

“We’re uncertain. One woman from Mobile was found in Denver. A woman found in Utah. They abducted a woman in Florida and held her until her boyfriend could come from Boise to kill her. Plus we have butterfly Lady: a woman found in the Mobile dump who’s never been identified.”

Sinclair frowned. “butterfly?”

“She had a tiny tattoo on her back, a butterfly.”

I saw Sinclair waver as if about to faint. I grabbed his arm.

“What’s wrong, Professor?”

“Dr Bramwell, our head of Gender Studies, has a tattoo like that.”

“Is she Hispanic, athletic?”

He nodded. “Her father’s from the US, but her mother’s from Ecuador. She’s a bicycle fanatic and a skier.”

I guided Sinclair to a bench outside the Beacon where he sat with his head in his hands. traffic whizzed by, oblivious to the drama a dozen feet away.

“Trotman begged Dr Bramwell to let him into the department,” he said softly. “She took pity on the guy because he seemed so lost. She had him doing statistical analyses of women’s salary histories in various fields. She was getting suspicious of his conclusions, thought him a bit sloppy.” Sinclair looked at me. “Jesus, Detective, what if she confronted him about it?”

I looked into the stream of cars and bicyclists moving past, considering the ease with which Trotman could have waylaid the woman. No eavesdropping, no computer passwords, simply arrive shortly before Bramwell was due to leave the country. Trotman had likely taken her to some offsite lair, kept her for a week or so, and called his buddy Nathaniel Bromley.

“
Can you run up to a place in Missouri, brother? I’ll have a package for you.
”

We thought butterfly Lady a runner in the system, but in all likelihood she was a woman who had performed a kindness for Robert Trotman, paying the ultimate price for her compassion.

The day had been long and wearing, a mix of luck and coincidence, despair and hope. The next step was finding Robert Trotman, which would take manpower and a blizzard of
Be On the LookOut
s. Cruz’s people worked while we grabbed snippets of sleep, starting afresh in the morning. It turned out that Robert Trotman had grown up in a tiny desert community between Boulder and Denver. The local cops had been canvassing the old digs, and we headed over there, finding a rough outskirts neighborhood of desolate trailer courts and tight streets with bungalows falling into rotting disrepair. Everything seemed the color of desperation.

The sun still low in the desert-wide eastern sky, Cruz conferred with a young guy in uniform, nodded, walked back to the car. “We’ve got something,” she said, pulling from the curb. “Miz Emily Adams, school nurse at Bellville Elementary School. Been there twenty-one years. She became agitated when asked about Robert Trotman.”

The principal led us to the office of the school nurse, walls dressed with colorful children’s drawings. Nurse Adams was a small and round woman in her fifties, brown hair going gray, her eyes dark and piercing over the tops of her half-glasses.

“I recall little Bobby from the fifth and sixth grades. Some children stay with you, but so do nightmares.”

“Nightmares?” Cruz said.

“It was a dysfunctional family. Abuse. As bad as I’ve ever seen.”

“You met them, then?”

“I went to the house to talk to the mother once. Robert had head lice and I wanted to explain treatment and prevention.”

“The father wouldn’t let you in?” I said.

“The mother. She was a big woman, drunk. Unwashed. She bellowed at me to get off her property and never come back. Her breath was the worst thing I ever smelled, and I’m a nurse.”

I looked to Cruz. “Doesn’t sound like the kind of woman who’d take much abuse.”

“Not the mother,” Adams said. “She ruled that house like the Queen of Crazy.”

“Mother was the abuser?” Cruz said.

“The husband was handicapped, a leg gone up high, one arm missing at the elbow. I heard from another teacher she’d push over his wheelchair on the porch, kick him around, call him every name in the book while he tried to crawl back to his wheels. If that was in public, I can’t imagine behind closed doors.” Adams’s face wrinkled as if smelling Trotman’s mother’s breath. “There was no morality in that house. Nothing was normal.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

Adams lowered her voice. “The school psychologist told me. She wanted me to understand why Robert was put in foster care later that year.”

We thanked Nurse Adams for her help and were walking out the door when she spoke. “Detectives?”

We turned. Nurse Adams swallowed hard. “When I was checking Robert for the lice, he had a foul odor coming from him. I asked him what that smell was.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“He said it was Mommy.”

“We’ve got a hit, Harry,” Sally Hargreaves said from the chair on Nautilus’s front porch, calling over her shoulder and into the house. “A patrol car just made the ID.”

The door opened. “Bromley?”

“He’s back. His big bright car is parked a half-block down the street from the women’s center.”

“Then lawyer-boy still doesn’t know Krebbs is at the Prosecutor’s office singing his lungs out.”

Hargreaves grinned as she stood. “Sometimes staying incommunicado can be a bitch.”

“Tell the cops to detain Bromley if he tries to leave the area, Sally, but otherwise they’re to stay out of sight.”

Hargreaves relayed the message as they strapped on their weapons and moved the operation to the cruiser in Nautilus’s drive.

We stood outside the school as Cruz checked with her people, busily tearing apart the box Robert Trotman had placed around his life. “No one’s found a single friend,” Cruz said as we turned toward the car. “What Trotman does have is permits for four weapons, and those are probably just the ones on the books.”

“Gimme the news.”

“A Ruger Bearcat .22 revolver, a Colt .45 six-shooter with a ten-inch barrel, a 30-30 Winchester Model 1894 …”

“Cowboy-style guns,” I said.

Cruz laughed without mirth. “You haven’t heard the best. Trotman has a Henry .45 magnum lever-action rifle. Guess what the model is called.”

I shrugged. “The Ranger?”

“The Big Boy.”

“Jesus,” I said. “HP Drifter has his Big Boy loaded.”

We climbed into the cruiser. Cruz said, “Seems the only real people this loser ever associated with were in the department. They were as close as he ever came to human interaction, and he killed one of them.”

We went to the Sociology department of the university. Sinclair’s office was relatively spacious, the walls taken up with books stacked on end, on sides, on tops of one another. “I’ve been reading every online communication with Trotman–Drifter,” he said. “Trying to see into him.”

“Trotman couldn’t have given away much,” Cruz said. “He spent fifteen hours a week down the hall and you never noticed.”

“But now that I know, places and actions make more sense.” Sinclair said. “Drifter mentions hiking from Stegosaurus ridge toward the notch.”

Cruz thought for a second. “From the Flatiron Mountains to Saddle Rock.”

Sinclair nodded and turned back to his printouts. Cruz and I went down the hall to Liza Krupnik. She was curled in a chair. Her eyes were red from crying.

“He really killed Dr Bramwell?”

“I’m sorry, but it doesn’t look good,” Cruz said.

Krupnik suppressed a shiver. “There were times we were alone together.”

“He was probably happily using you. He knew you worked at the women’s center?”

“Of course. He always seemed interested in what we did. Now I know why.”

“Did you tell him when you had meetings and such?”

Krupnik nodded to her wall. “All he had to do was check my calendar. It’s all there.”

I studied the wall. Another mystery solved. Trotman knew whenever the center folks gathered to discuss business, changes in procedures, passwords and so forth. He’d be a few feet above with his ear to the floor. Trotman may have been subject to several pathologies, but he was a hell of a planner. Obsession can do that.

“Trotman was your friend?” Cruz asked Krupnik.

“I felt sorry for him because he seemed so afraid. Especially of Dr Sinclair. Robert practically ran when he saw the professor coming.”

“Odd,” Cruz said.

“Not really,” I said. “Sinclair is big, strong and outdoorsy. Assertive. Unabashedly masculine. Sinclair’s everything Trotman wishes to be, consciously or subconsciously. It’s probably less fear of Sinclair than awe.”

We heard the big voice of Sinclair boom down the hall.

“DETECTIVES! Come here!”

We jogged back to find Sinclair waving a page of print. “A sentence from a month back. I asked, or rather, Promale asked, ‘Where is your favorite place to escape the whores, Drifter? Where do you go when it all gets too much?’ He replies, ‘Neverland.’ Another online character asks, ‘Like Peter Pan? LOL’. Drifter says, ‘My Neverland is a world of its own. I am king of Neverland, the Guy whose day is about to come.’ I thought it seemed odd at the time, but Drifter had flights of weirdness. I never made a connection until thinking regionally.”

“I’m not getting it,” I said.

“I sure as hell am,” Cruz said. “Nederland.”

“What?”

“Nederland is a small town fifteen miles west of here, famous for Frozen Dead Guy Days – a festival where there’s actually a frozen dead man on display.”

“Trotman’s making word play?” I said. “The live guy in Neverland?”

“Or the dead man about to be awakened,” Sinclair suggested. “There are metaphors aplenty.”

Cruz said, “I’ll get the Trotster’s pic sent to the local constabulary.”

We waited for two hours, Sinclair continuing to pore over his messages, finding other allusions: “
There are no bleeding whores in Neverland.
” “
When I am in Neverland I am at True Home
.” Sinclair read passages from the Trotman/Drifter chat rooms. Sometimes Drifter sounded like a commando on steroids, sometimes a whiney child.

Cruz’s phone rang, one of her colleagues who had been in Nederland for ninety minutes, checking computer records. She spoke, looked at me with a thumbs-up, rang off.

“Robert Trotman owns eight acres of land southwest of Mud Lake. Purchased eleven months back. His piece of Neverland.”

“Where the Lost Boys never grow up,” Sinclair said, recalling the Barrie tale about Peter Pan.

Harry Nautilus and Sally Hargreaves were one hundred feet behind the bumper of Nathaniel Bromley’s Benz, bent low in the seats and watching. Bromley had exited the car, strutting down the block twenty paces before returning, his eyes always on the building, as if measuring something.

“Ready?” Nautilus said.

Hargreaves nodded. They pulled past the lawyer, who didn’t notice. The pair exited the car, walking quietly to the man’s back. “Getting ready for the big show, Mr Bromley?” Nautilus asked. “Figuring out the camera angles?”

Bromley spun, frowned. “Our stalwart detectives. Are you following me? Do I have to call your chief?”

“I was simply checking on the center, Mr Bromley,” Hargreaves said. “I have friends there.”

The man’s frown turned to a grin. “No doubt. You seem the type.”

“What type is that, sir?”

Bromley grinned and ignored the question, turning to the center and giving the detectives his back. He bounced on his heels, a contented man. “You mentioned camera angles, Detective. I’m thinking the TV people could grab an establishing shot of the logo, pan to me for a close-up. Sound good?”

“When do the fire trucks come in?” Hargreaves asked.

“Fire trucks?”

“You’re about to burn down a crucial service that women’s centers offer.”

“Just the ones that engage in brainwashing. It’s been going on far too long.”

Nautilus stepped into Bromley’s view. “How about your buddy Larry Krebbs? He gonna be part of things?”

“Larry’s our plaintiff. He has a story to tell.”

“
Our
plaintiff? You’re representing some kind of group? Like a class-action suit?”

Bromley paused. “A figure of speech.
The
plaintiff.”

“Playing the part of the man who lost his wife to the women’s underground railroad?” Hargreaves said, stepping forward. “That sisterhood of death?”

“Come watch the show, hon,” Bromley winked. “Or stay home. It’ll be on all the channels.”

“How about your wife, Nate?” Nautilus asked. “Will she be here to balance the story?” He watched as Bromley’s smile flickered. It was less than a microbeat before the teeth returned. The man did a credible perplexed, Nautilus thought.

“I’m not married. What do you mean, balance?”

“The woman who escaped her scumbucket abuser and made it to safety,” Hargreaves said. “I hear she’s a happy woman these days.”

“Who the hell are you talking about?”

“Your wife, Nate,” Nautilus said. “You and Larry sure are forgetful about women.”

“I just told you, I’m not –”

“How about the company party?” Hargreaves interrupted. “Dribbling your date’s head on the desk like a basketball? That still in the ol’ memory box?”

Bromley spun to Hargreaves. “There are laws against slander, girly. You better be damn ready to prove what you say. And it sounds to me like you’ve got nothing more than a big leaky pail of hearsay.”

Nautilus crowded closer. “We know about the woman in Pensacola, Nate. And Utah. We know about Boulder and Trotman.”

Bromley cocked his head, seemingly amused. “Is there a reason you’re reciting a list of names and locales that have no meaning to me? I’ve already said I’m a frequent visitor to Colorado. I’ve met dozens, no hundreds, of folks up there. In bars, restaurants, on the ski slopes. So many I can’t begin to remember them all, much less what we may or may not have talked about. Are you trying to gin up some kind of circumstantial evidence? Good luck. I eat that kind of thing for breakfast.”

“Your buddy Trotman’s holding a woman,” Nautilus said, tiring of the game. “We need you to tell us where to find him.”

“What is a Trotman?” Bromley sneered. “Does it have to do with horses?”

“Trotman’s the guy who brought you and Larry Krebbs a woman in Missouri, remember? Wrapped in a tarp. Her name was Judith Bramwell, a professor at the University of Colorado. She died in your trunk in Vicksburg while you and Larry were having lunch.”

“Tarps? Vicksburg? Lunch? What are you babbling about?”

“Your good brother Larry confessed to everything, Nate,” Nautilus said quietly. “It seems he’s having
you
for lunch.”

Bromley froze for a millisecond, then shook his head and flicked a piece of lint from his lapel. Nautilus knew the lawyer’s mind was moving at warp speed, weighing the angles. “Larry Krebbs is a loser’s loser and a congenital liar, Detective. Whatever he’s lying about has nothing to do with me. The man’s sick in the head.”

Hargreaves looked up the street and waved her hand in the air. A block distant a big Jerr-Dan car carrier roared from the curb toward the center, stopping in front of a gleaming black Mercedes.

“What’s that for?” Bromley demanded.

“We’re gonna haul your pretty car to our forensics bureau, Nate,” Nautilus said. “Go through your trunk with a microscope.”

Hargreaves stepped to Bromley, false concern dripping in her voice. “Did you clean the trunk real good after you got rid of Dr Bramwell, Nate? Or did you do a half-ass job, thinking a day like this could never come?”

She winked. Beads of sweat formed on the lawyer’s brow as the carrier operator flipped a switch and the Mercedes rolled on to the transport platform.

“You better talk to me now, Nate,” Nautilus said, pulling out the cuffs. “Otherwise it won’t mean a thing.”

“I … might have heard of a Bob Trotman,” Bromley said, his voice a dry rasp. “I think he works at the University of Colorado.”

“We know that,” Nautilus said. “Where is Trotman right now?”

The lawyer could only shake his head,
No idea.