Her Last Scream (4 page)

Over the next couple days Harry and I tracked down and busted a guy who’d shot a store clerk dead before grabbing seventy bucks from the register. The arrest – combined with two other nasty folks we’d nailed the preceding week – gave us more hours to put against butterfly Lady, both of us tired of seeing her mutilated, eyeless face in our dreams. I was tapping my pencil on my desk, trying to find an angle into the case when the phone rang. Sally Hargreaves downstairs in Missing Persons.

“How about you and Harry pay me a visit soon?” she said. “Now would be a good time.”

Sal was in her cubicle when we arrived, staring at her monitor and twirling a lock of auburn hair. She was a few years older than me, a liquid mix of tomboy and femininity, tough, but always probing for the best in people. She carried a few extra pounds with grace and had a girl-next-door prettiness that tugged at my heart.

“I’ve got a missing person’s request from the Denver area,” Sal said. “City workers found a woman’s body. Looks late twenties, early thirties, Caucasian.”

“And?” Harry said.

“The woman’s head was bald, her breasts had been beaten …” Sal looked at me to fill in the blank.

“No eyes,” I whispered.

Sal nodded. “Just like here.”

My heart accelerated its cadence. “Where was the corpse found?” I asked. “The city dump?”

“Floating in a sedimentation tank at the Denver Wastewater Treatment Plant. We’re talking about raw sewage.” Sal had printed out the report and handed copies to Harry and me. An unknown person or persons had breached the low fence outside the city’s wastewater facility and thrown the body into the first-phase settling tank.

“I’d sure like to see –”

“Photos from the scene,” Sally completed, pointing to a printer firing out copies about a dozen feet away. “I already talked to the detective in charge – name’s Amica Cruz, and she’s sending what they have.”

“You’re the best, Sal,” Harry said.

“That would be an understatement,” Sally acknowledged.

I grabbed emerging photos as Harry walked over. The Denver photographer had started shooting as he approached. We saw a circular tank forty feet in diameter ringed with a low railing. Then a higher angle, closer, and we saw a steel-mesh catwalk spanning the tank, a dark liquid within. The next shot showed an object in the liquid, a light form against the umber sludge.

For the final shot the photographer had walked out on the catwalk and shot downward. I think Harry and I winced simultaneously at the picture: an eyeless woman’s face poking up through human waste, the sockets angled to the sky as if pleading,
Why me
?

I picked up the phone and dialed Dr Alexandra – Alec – Kavanaugh from memory, the psychologist who consulted as the departmental shrink. She walked in an hour later, her smile warm but tentative. Since Doc K was in jeans, ballet-type slippers and a Decembrists T-shirt, I figured she hadn’t been with a patient. In her early forties, she had long white hair and quietly piercing dark eyes in a slender face. Kavanaugh moved with a fluid grace, as if not fully tethered to the earth, and reminded me of a lady wizard.

Harry showed the Doc to the meeting room. Sal arrived and we studied photos from the two crimes: the body found at the Mobile dump and the body from Boulder, fifteen hundred miles away. Kavanaugh kept returning to the close-ups of the dead women.

“Any thoughts, Doc?” I prodded as she studied the photos.

“I’m pretty sure we’re seeing a symbolic de-feminization. First, their hair was taken away, a major symbol of womanhood in our society. Then the eyes, another symbol of femininity.”

“Like breasts,” Harry said. “If the breasts weren’t exactly removed …”

“They were injured, symbolically rendered inert. Hair and eyes removed, breasts attacked. In the killer’s eyes, he had de-feminized the women. Then he put them out with the garbage.”

“Or sewage,” Harry added. “Displayed as what the killer thinks of them.”

“One glitch in your theory, Doc,” I said. “The primary female sexual symbol is the vagina. There were no injuries to the sex organs in either case. Why didn’t the perp negate the vagina?”

Kavanaugh gave me an even gaze. “Because the organ terrifies him.”

The room went quiet. I considered Kavanaugh’s suppositions. They made sense, given the landscape of a psychopath’s mind. I grabbed for the phone.

Because the Denver water-treatment facility was outside the city limits, the case was being handled by the Colorado State Police. The detective in charge of the proceedings was Amica Cruz, who Sal had spoken with earlier.

“You folks down there have an ID?” she asked, hopeful.

“Nothing, sorry. I’m calling about the port-mortem findings.”

“I’m in the morgue staring at the deceased. The body is about to undergo the postmortem. Our pathologist, Dr Leon Lighthorse, is washing up.”

“Has Dr Lighthorse completed an external exam?”

“I told your Detective Hargreaves about the battered breasts. We’ve got ligature marks on ankles and wrists and a few superficial bruises to forearms. There’s a pair of moles on her left glute and a dime-sized birthmark at the rear hairline. Or where the rear hairline might normally be.”

“How extensively was the body washed?”

I heard the phone covered as Cruz spoke with the pathologist. She lifted her palm. “Very lightly. Enough to remove the, uh, coating.”

“Have the doc check the lower belly for traces of gum or mucilage,” I said. “He might black-light the area.”

“What?”

“Please give it a try, Detective Cruz.”

The phone was set aside and I heard voices in the background. A clank of something moved into place. More voices before the phone was picked up.

“Dr Lighthorse found a sticky substance on the lower abdomen, a three-inch line of gum eight centimeters above the pubic bone. He suspects it’s residue from tape.” A pause. “How in the hell did you know it was there?”

“We’ve got something similar here in the Mobile morgue. I’ll send you everything we have, reports-wise, within the hour. Can I call you later?”

“You damn well better.”

I switched the phone off and turned to my colleagues. Kavanaugh leaned back and tented her long fingers.

“I’ve got a theory on the tape residue.”

“Go for it, Doc.”

“I’m thinking the perpetrator taped something over the vagina – fabric or paper or whatever. Put the sexual organ out of sight.”

“Why?” Harry asked.

“If the vagina couldn’t see him, it couldn’t exercise its power.”

“You mean if he couldn’t see it,” Harry said.

Kavanaugh shook her head. “My statement stands.”

Liza Krupnik gathered a dozen academic theses for The Famous Sociologist, some an inch thick and tucked within plastic binders. A review of titles included “A History of Women’s Servitude”, “Women’s Objectification in 20th-Century Art” and “Women as Objects of Torture in the Victorian Novel”
.
Her denim-upholstered derrière bumped into the table behind her as she stood over her desk, the chair rolled aside to provide room, and Liza grumbled to herself. As a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant in the Sociology department at the University of Colorado, Liza thought it would have been nice to have a few more square feet of floor space. It might even allow enough room to nap comfortably on the floor.

At present napping meant rolling the desk chair into the hall, along with the folding chair for visitors, and pushing one of the three-drawer files to the side. Only then could she roll out her yoga mat and grab a few winks in semi-fetal position. Since the miniscule office was Liza’s world for a minimum dozen hours a day, catching up on sleep was a necessity, grabbing an hour here and there as time allowed.

An oversize calendar centered the wall above Liza’s desk, notes and deadlines scrawled in every daily square. On one side of the calendar was a Rosie the Riveter poster from World War Two, on the other Howard Miller’s artistic rendering of a no-nonsense, we’re-gonna-win-the-war Rosie rolling up her sleeve as the text bubble above proclaimed
We Can Do It!
On the far wall was a blow-up of Norman Rockwell’s heroic
Saturday Evening Post
cover featuring a short-haired, hard-muscled Rosie eating her lunch sandwich atop an I-beam, her clothes and face smeared with the dirt of hard labor and a massive riveting gun across her lap.

A few months back, Liza had brought a date by her office when she’d forgotten to take out the departmental mail. Her date had studied the posters while Liza slid mail into her backpack. “Jeez, Liza,” her date had said, “who’s the big dyke on the pole?”

The date had ended poorly.

The group of reports now assembled for The Famous Sociologist, she grabbed a pencil from the coffee-mug penholder on her desk, the mug emblazoned with the likeness of the proto-feminist Emma Goldman. Liza leaned to the calendar on the board and checked off the task:
Recent theses to attn of D Sinclair.

Dr Thalius Benton Sinclair, The Famous Sociologist, would soon be fed for the day. It was Liza’s final deadline and she could now go home.

Liza locked her office and turned down the long hall of doors, the majority bannered with names of professors in the department, most doors closed and locked, the day nearing dusk. She shot a glance at a door that was now locked all the time, the office of Dr Judith Bramwell, Dean of Gender Studies. Bramwell was less than two weeks into a six-month sabbatical, wandering Europe and writing. When Dr Bramwell had been here, she’d served as a buffer between Liza and Sinclair. Liza had liked her job a lot better back then.

Only one door stood open, the similarly sized workspace of her colleague, Robert Trotman, another struggling sociology TA, his specialty being statistical analysis. Liza poked her head in the door, resisting the urge to wrinkle her nose: her friend’s office always smelled of fast food and the cigarette he snuck every two hours, his body seemingly set to a nicotinic clock.

“S’up, Roberto?”

Trotman’s eyes had been riveted to his computer monitor. He startled so hard that his CU ball cap spun to the floor. He became embarrassed by his fright, a shiver of crimson crossing his freckled white neck.

“Whoa,” Liza said. “Sorry, Rob. Didn’t realize you were in the deep beyond.”

Trotman laughed the moment aside and grabbed his cap from the floor, slapping it back over his head, prematurely balding, the front-sweeping comb-over no longer thick enough to lie. He’d had the same affliction with his beard last year, scruffy tufts of hair that seemed more like dirt from a distance. He’d finally given up and shaved it away, his skin now as clear and stubble-free as the typical adolescent.

“No prob, girl,” Trotman said. “I thought you did your volunteer stuff tonight and I was the only one here.”

“I volunteer tomorrow, I forgot to change the calendar.” Liza nodded down the empty hall. “The drones have flown the coop, Rob. It’s just us worker bees.”

Trotman’s eye flickered toward the end of the corridor. “And, uh, of course …”

Liza nodded. “Yes. His nibs is here. He’s waiting for fresh meat.” Liza tapped the stack of theses in the crook of her arm.

“Why do you think he does it?” Trotman asked. “Reads work from across the country?”

“Because one university doesn’t generate enough for him to hate,” Liza opined.

“Maybe he’s making a study of studies,” Trotman joked.

“I don’t know,” Liza said, smiling wickedly. “Because I’m not the …”

Trotman slapped his hand over his heart and sprang to his feet as Liza did the same. “The Randall Chair in Sociology,” they announced in unison, followed by breaking into laughter. It was their private joke, striking both as a hoot that their feared boss’s name was almost never mentioned without addition of the modifier, one of his many academic achievements.

A deep voice from the doorway. “Is everything all right here?”

The pair spun to the door. Framed in the threshold like an age-darkened Rembrandt oil stood the towering figure of Dr Thalius Benton Sinclair. The man frowned darkly, tugging a black beard running from mid-cheek to the second button on his shirt. Sinclair was above average height, barrel-chested, Falstaffian in presence, but not proportion, a man trim at waist and broad in shoulder. Though in his late forties, Liza thought of him as outside of time, like a vampire.

“I saw hands over your hearts,” Sinclair rumbled. “I assumed you were having some kind of attack.”

The pair stood mute. “Well?” Sinclair prodded, his eyes moving between the pair. “Does anyone here speak the English language?”

“We-uh, were, uh, I mean that, uh …” The hapless Trotman could only babble, his mind collapsing into a black hole of terror. Sinclair’s eyes moved to Liza.
His eyes have no depth of color
, Liza noted, not for the first time, but surprised nonetheless. They were clear water in an aqua-tinted bottle. And yet, somehow, they were the most opaque eyes she’d ever seen.

Liza’s mouth was too dry to speak. She lifted the stack of theses toward Sinclair.
Please don’t eat me,
her mind pleaded.
Take this offering instead.
Sinclair’s eyes dropped to the stack of paper in her clutch. “Another pile of shit ready for composting?”

“Yes, Professor,” Liza managed.

Sinclair tucked the material under his arm, the color-deficient eyes scanning between Liza and Robert. He sighed and turned away, striding toward his spacious corner office, wide windows facing the looming Flatiron Mountains.

“Do you think he heard us making fun of him?” Trotman whispered after Sinclair was far from earshot.

Liza nodded. “He couldn’t help it.”

Trotman made the sound of a leaking balloon valve and buried his face in his hands.

His academic day now over, Dr Thalius Benton Sinclair stepped from the building with his ancient accordion-fold briefcase in hand and walked briskly toward his home on Thirteenth Street, five blocks from Chautauqua Park. He lived on “The Hill”, the University neighborhood, up a modest incline from Boulder’s downtown and in the evening shadow of the Flatirons.

Sinclair zigzagged his journey, adding a few blocks to the trip for exercise. After twenty minutes he came to several blocks dense with shops and restaurants and throngs of students. He recognized two hand-holders from one of his classes, Anita Blevins and Terrence Tomville. Blevins was a tattoo-stained dolt obviously given too free a rein by her parents, but Tomville had a spark of intelligence. It would be crushed soon enough if he kept company with the likes of Blevins, Sinclair reckoned.

The two students saw Sinclair approaching and snapped their eyes away as though he were a Gorgon, pretending to study clothes in a shop window. Sinclair moved on for another block, his colorless eyes scanning from the ranks to a shoe store, paraphernalia store, bike shop and a narrow bar named the Beacon, with dark-shaded windows, the only window sign a red neon scrawl proclaiming
Fifty Beers!

Across the street, tucked behind a pair of trees, sat a small and squat building, a former realtor’s office doing its best to be nondescript, brown paint and shingles, pulled shades. The occupant’s identity was a small sign beside the door:
Women’s Crisis Center of Boulder
.

They’re plotting in there,
Sinclair thought,
the devious ones …

Sinclair turned into the bar. The place was less than half full, students mostly, gathered toward the rear and watching a dart game. He caught the attention of a barkeep, a college-aged woman wearing some ridiculous costume he assumed was current fashion.

“Help you?” the woman asked.

“Two shots of Glenlivet, neat.”

“Neat?”

Sinclair sighed. Civilization was dying before his eyes. “Neat means by itself. No water, no ice, no nothing.”

“I don’t think we have … what did you call it?”

“Yes, you do. It’s on the shelf with the Scotch. Glenlivet.” It took effort to keep from spelling it out.

Drink finally in hand, Sinclair went back toward the door and took a table at the corner of the front window. He positioned himself against the wall, hidden from outside view, but able to observe comings and goings across the street just by leaning forward a little.

An hour later, with no activity noted, Sinclair walked the four blocks to his home, a wood and stone two-story hidden behind a wall of hedge and trees. His self-activating porch lamp had burned out two months back and Sinclair hadn’t replaced the bulb, finding the dark at his door more soothing than the light.

He entered, further soothed by familiar surroundings: burgundy carpet, brass lamps, solid masculine furniture built of wood and brown leather. Though he had converted a former guest room to a library, the overflow filled an entire wall of the room.

He poured an ounce of Scotch into a snifter and added a splash of soda. From a small box on the mantel, teak inlaid with silver and jade, he removed a tin that had formerly held breath mints, spearmint,
A Burst of Fresh in Every Bite!
He opened the tin and produced a spiraling tube of Purple Thai marijuana.

Sinclair climbed the stairs to his second-floor office, boxes and files and rows of books stacked vertically and horizontally on shelves. The disarray sometimes irritated him – he hated disorder – yet could it be called disorder if he knew where everything was?

He slid his laptop from his briefcase and set it on the desk, pushing it to the side as he booted the big-screen iMac into action. He logged on to a regularly visited site, pausing at the jokes section to see if anything new had been added.

Old jokes he’d seen a hundred times. Sinclair sighed. Was it impossible for people to invent new material? Be creative? He tapped a few keys, moving to a link that jumped him to another site, one with a woman in chains as its primary graphic. He moved the cursor down the chain dangling from the woman’s right wrist, counting off the links of chain. He clicked on the fifth link, a hidden link within the link. He’d spent a month online before someone had trusted him enough to provide the entrance link.

A sound of thunder and heavy metal music. A scream. Crackling flames wiped away the graphic to leave only a gray screen and the low lub-dub of heartbeat sound effects. During the day and early evening, there could be a dozen or more people online, but now, at the bottom of the right-hand corner, were the words 1 Member online.

Someone was in the secret chat room, alone, waiting to have a conversation. Sinclair tapped his handle into the white box.

PROMALE

Sinclair poised his finger above the keys, recalling his day of interacting with dolts and cattle as the Scotch and dope buffered his jangled synapses.

I hate women, Sinclair wrote, the text black against white. I want to wipe them off the planet.

Seconds passed as someone that could be as near as the next block or as far as half a world away entered text. Sinclair hoped HPDrifter would be here tonight, but then, Drifter was here most nights, the most ubiquitous presence on the board and its de facto leader; very bright, but cagey, tight with references to himself, controlling the board with a strange mixture of a fierce and sadistic hatred of women, wry humor, and odd moments of obsequiousness.

Sinclair saw Drifter’s handle appear before his words. He slapped his desk in delight: A kindred spirit was in the chat room.