Her Last Scream (7 page)

The next morning Harry and I figured we’d find who Krebbs had selected as his first wife and match her to the body in the morgue. We were waiting for the records department in City Hall to open and give us the case-breaking news. At five to nine the intercom on our desk was buzzed by Lieutenant Tom Mason, our supervisor, amigo, protector, and saint without portfolio. Tom stayed out of our way and let us work, the supreme compliment.

“You’ve got a visitor downstairs, guys,” Tom said in a country drawl as slow and rich as sorghum molasses. “T. Nathaniel Bromley in the flesh, asking if you were in. I’m bringing him up. You boys working on some kind of corporate acquisition, maybe merging with Goldman-Sachs?”

“Bromley’s repping a guy in the Krebbs case – the husband.”

A surprised pause. “Didn’t you say the suspect was an accountant at a factory? How the hell did a guy like Krebbs get Bromley as his lawyer?”

“I dunno, but it wasn’t charm.”

We flicked off the phone. Tom hadn’t said anything about the Chief being contacted, so Bromley must have had second thoughts after we’d left. I was surprised, actually; people like Bromley enjoy throwing their weight around.

Harry looked at me. “What do you suppose has brought such a potent force in lawyerism to our humble digs?”

I grinned. “I do believe Mister Bromley wants to kick-start a plea bargain for his guilty-as-sin client.”

Tom walked Bromley up to the department. We led the lawyer to a conference room, drawing glances as we crossed the detectives’ office space with one of Mobile’s legal elite. Bromley wore full attorney regalia: a black suit with pinstripes, pink shirt, rep tie. He was carrying a sleek briefcase made of gray animal hide, seal maybe, or vulture. He studied the gray metal chair before he sat, like he hadn’t seen anything so quaint since his DA’s-office days.

“We got off on the wrong foot yesterday, Mr Bromley,” I said, making nice since Bromley was about to raise the white flag. “We were just trying to rattle your client. You know how it goes.”

Bromley nodded. “Back in the day I used to push cops to get anything they could on a suspect. We were both doing our jobs, Detective Ryder. Speaking of which …” He dug in his briefcase and pulled out a sheaf of papers, setting them in front of Harry and me.

“A confession?” I asked.

Bromley’s face was noncommittal. “Mrs Krebbs was murdered sometime between the fifteenth and twentieth of last month, right?”

“How do you know the time of death, sir?” I asked. Last I’d heard, the date was still being considered by the Denver forensics types.

A quiet smile. “My former firm keeps a condo in Aspen. I’ve met people in Colorado law enforcement over the years, skiing with the governor now and then. The folks in forensics up there were happy to provide the most recent discoveries in the case.”

I’d not received that information, but then I didn’t schuss with the governor of Colorado. I picked up the papers Bromley had brought, seeing credit-card receipts, phone records, bills of sale, a grab-bag of numbers and dates.

“What is all this?” I asked.

The lawyer’s eyes began to sparkle. “During the entire period encompassing Lainie Krebbs’s estimated time of death Lawrence T. Krebbs was working from a cottage on Cudjoe Key in the Florida Keys. You’re holding receipts from local restaurants and grocery stores, bait shops, a fishing-charter service, barber shop, moped rental … and, of course, phone records of calls from Mr Krebbs that originated in the Keys.”

I looked at the big pile of alibi while hearing a low hissing in the back of my head: the sound of a case slipping from my fingertips.

Bromley said, “Larry may not suit your standards for matrimonial conduct, Detective, but he had nothing to do with the woman’s death. You can now turn your attention – and taxpayer dollars – to a more fruitful avenue of investigation.”

“Not yet, Nate,” I said, staring him in the eye. “There’s the little matter of his missing first wife. I think your client –”

Bromley chuckled openly, shaking his head like he was talking to a child. “You’re talking about Angie? She lives in Vermont. I’ll email you her particulars. She won’t have a lot of good to say about my client, but that’s what divorces do to relationships.”

Harry clapped his palms to keep me from commenting on Krebbs’s wife-collection abilities. We stood, Harry putting his hand behind my neck so I couldn’t retreat to my desk, making me walk Bromley to the door like we were all buddies.

“I thought you retired from law, Mr Bromley,” Harry said as we crossed the floor.

“I retired from working seventy hours a week, Detective Nautilus. Now I pick and choose my clients and work a few hours a week. It’s closer to a hobby than a job.”

“Couldn’t you have arranged to work a day or two at BC&B? It seems they’d do anything to have your expertise, Mr Bromley, even if only for –”

“I’m done with them,” Bromley said curtly. “And a helluva lot happier for it.”

He nodded a brisk farewell and was gone.

“Looks like we mark Krebbs off our suspect list,” Harry sighed as we shambled back to our cubicle. “A pity. I loved the term ‘bookend killings’.”

My reply wasn’t polite, conjoining Krebbs and Bromley in a position that would have done the Kama Sutra proud.

A throat cleared behind us and we turned to Sally Hargreaves. Sal wore a pink blouse, knee-high green skirt and dark stockings. Her shoes were blue running models over anklet athletic socks, a good choice since she rarely sat but paced the perimeter of the second floor like a track, thinking about cases, darting into her cube only when she needed to make a note or check her computer. I figured Sally completed a marathon about every two weeks.

Sally said, “I was at my meeting last night.”

“Meeting?” I smiled. “So that’s what you’re calling a date these days?”

“How about we retreat to the conference room?” she said.

Once inside, Sal glanced through the windows into the department, jumped up to close the door, like she was worried about eavesdropping. She sat for a three-count, then bounced up to close the blinds.

“Should I activate the cone of silence?” I said.

Sal ignored me, re-sitting and leaning across the table so her whisper would reach Harry’s and my ears. “I know how Lainie Krebbs got to Denver, guys. It’ll probably never be verified. At least, I hope not in the press.”

“Cryptic, Sal,” I said. “How’d she make the escape?”

“Lainie Krebbs took a train.”

“We checked trains, Sal,” I said. “There aren’t any routes between Mobile and Denver.”

“I’m not talking about a railroad you can see, guys. I’m talking about one you can’t.”

Harry looked at me, I looked at him. Then we both stared at Sal, waiting for her to make sense.

“An underground railroad?” Harry said, after Sal’s brief overview. “You mean like Harriet Tubman created? A secret network of safe houses to help slaves escape their owners?”

“A updated version, Harry. A system that helps women like Lainie Krebbs escape abusive relationships.”

I frowned. “This network is reached through the Mobile Women’s Services Center?”

“Most women’s centers offer safety, temporary shelter, education, counseling, even legal services. A select few go further, becoming nodes in a secret transportation system.”

“Spiriting women away for ever?”

“When a woman’s life is in immediate and extreme danger. When there’s no other choice.”

“Calling the cops?” Harry said. “Is that a choice?”

“For a woman in this situation, a call to the cops can be like stepping on to her own personal death row, except the executioner will be the man in her life.”

Sal had hit on a major problem in law enforcement: a woman reports her significant other is threatening or hurting her. He says she’s lying. Even if the cops slap the asshole in jail, he gets out ravenous for revenge. It’s a Catch-22 situation: the only way to protect a woman is to put her abuser away for years. The only way to do that is if he injures or kills her.

“
We can’t help you right now, ma’am … come back when you’re dead.
”

Harry said, “It seems a tough task, Sal, making someone gone for good.”

“Think of an amateur-run Witness Protection Program, Harry. Secrecy, safe houses, transfers at night … A woman escapes a step at a time, a hundred miles here, two hundred there. Until she’s where she needs to be.”

“Who determines the destination?” I asked, fascinated.

“Sometimes the woman will have a friend or relative in an area, someone unknown to the abuser. Often the area is chosen just because it’s far away. When the escaping woman arrives, a support system helps with a legal name change – the first step in identity re-creation. Employment is next. And so forth, until the woman has a new life.”

“What about children? Seems like a lot of room for legal problems. A woman leaving with a babe in arms … the product of her and hubby?”

Sal shook her head. “The folks at the centers work hard to mediate such situations. To keep the union together without violence. Sometimes it works, sometimes it goes horribly awry.”

We didn’t have to look far for an example. Last fall a Mobile’s man’s wife had filed for divorce. Distraught and angry, he barricaded himself in his house with wife and four kids, murdering them before committing suicide. Then there was the man living with his girlfriend and baby in Dothan, Alabama. When she decided to get her GED, he set fire to the house with girlfriend and baby inside.

Some people don’t take to mediation.

Harry pushed his chair away from the table. “Let’s have a tête-à-tête with the folks at the center. You explained we’d be around, right, Sal?”

Sal cleared her throat. “No one wants to talk to the cops, Harry. They’re afraid of what might happen.”

“There’s a possibility someone in the system was killed,” I said. “They have to open up.”

“Lemme give you a look inside before you jump,” Sally interrupted. “The folks at the center gave me the name of someone who went through the system, coming here from Boise, Idaho, two months back. Let’s call her Gail for our purposes. Gail’s agreed to tell her story if we commit to total silence. It’ll be as close to seeing inside as there is.”

“Who would we tell?” Harry asked.

“Not the point,” Sal said. “Everyone in and around the system is conditioned to secrecy.”

“Harry and I won’t put anything in the reports,” I promised. “We’ll classify ‘Gail’ as a Confidential Informant. That cool?”

Sal nodded. “That should work. I’ll let everyone concerned know.”

Harry and I traded glances. We’d still have to speak with people at the center. But listening to Gail would give us better questions to ask.

Sal said, “I set the interview up for tonight at Doc Kavanaugh’s place, the Doc talking to Gail, the rest of us watching on monitor. I spoke to Gail and promised she’d be safe.”

“Safe?” Harry said, looking puzzled. “Then why not meet here, in a cop shop?”

Sal gave Harry a sad smile. “Cop shops enforce the restraining orders against angry boyfriends and husbands, right? How’s that been working out?”

At five p.m. we drove together to Kavanaugh’s home in Daphne, on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay. Her office was attached to the architectural anomaly of her single-story house, a modernist brick and wood creation à la Wright. Tucked back in the pines and oaks, it looked like part of the natural plan, “organic” being the term du jour. Our petite Merlin had conjured curried chicken salad on fresh-baked baguettes, a tomato-basil-linguine salad and, of course, beer and wine choices.

“Gail” arrived at six and Kavanaugh went to escort her to the office. No one else would meet Gail. Kavanaugh had traded her usual contact lenses for glasses, freed her white hair to fall to the middle of her back, and wore a black tee over faded blue jeans and battered sandals. She looked like someone you could trust with your story.

The camera in the office was piped to Kavanaugh’s living-room television, a flat-screen the size of my dining-room table. Sal, Harry and I turned our chairs to the screen, ready to watch the show. We found ourselves speaking in whispers, though Gail was fifty feet and two walls away.

On the television Gail cautiously entered the room and took a padded, comfortable chair. She was dark-haired, medium height and weight, pretty in a vague, non-sophisticated way. She wore a white ruffled blouse tucked into black Levis cinched with a wide Concho belt with a silver and turquoise buckle. Black middies heels. She was a smoker and Kavanaugh had provided a crystal ashtray and lighter. Gail lit up as soon as she sat. The image on the monitor was so realistic I could smell the smoke.

Kavanaugh went to a small bar in the corner. “I’m gonna have a glass of white wine, Gail. Want one?”

“I’d love it.”

Kavanaugh held high a bottle from one of those new California wineries expressing hipness via wine names like Blind Toad Hill, Red Chicken, Velvet Moon and so forth. Kavanaugh’s selection was named Crazy Ladies
.
When Gail saw the label she broke out laughing.
You go, girl
, my mind whispered to Kavanaugh. Her little gag had broken the ice with Gail in five seconds. I figured the Doc had checked every label in the wine shop to find the perfect one.

Kavanaugh poured with a heavy hand. They tapped glasses. “To crazy ladies everywhere,” Kavanaugh said, adding, “Thank you for talking about your experiences, Gail.”

“officer Hargreaves said it might help find a killer. If I was dead I’d want someone to do the same for me.”

“Let’s start with what brought you to the women’s center.”

“I went there five times,” Gail said, her voice a husky contralto. “The first two times for short stays until my boyfriend, James, cooled down. Then, as my boyfriend went from yelling to physical abuse, longer stays.”

“Did he know you were being sheltered by the center?”

“James thought I was with friends. It got pretty bad because he terrorized them all looking for me.”

“But you went back to him,” Kavanaugh said quietly, nonjudgmental. “Several times.”

Gail nodded as if it was something she’d considered a lot. “I didn’t have a high school diploma. Or a real friend. My family only gave a shit about me when I was working some crummy job and they could borrow money I never saw again. I was fat and pimply and nearly puked when I saw myself in a mirror.”

When Gail paused to light another smoke, Sal turned to Harry and me.

“Self-esteem issues. Gail was probably a typical-looking girl, but could only see her life and appearance and prospects as failure in every direction. Women who allow themselves to be abused often think they deserve it, giving subconscious assent to the treatment.”

“Things got worse between you and James,” Kavanaugh said, pulling our eyes back to the television.

Gail downed a healthy tot of Crazy Lady. “After he knocked out two of my teeth I went to the center in Boise. They helped me see my relationship wasn’t normal, that James had a sickness. When he started threatening my life, I got a restraining order.”

“How long did it take James to violate the order?”

Not
did he
, but
how long
, I noted.

“Two days. James said the order was just a piece of paper and did I believe a piece of paper could stop a knife from slicing my throat? He had been getting worse and worse, but taking out the legal order turned him crazy. He started driving past my apartment and screaming, calling my phone every two minutes. That’s when I knew I had to get away, to become another person. The people at the center almost got mean.”

“Mean how?”

“Saying I’d be with James forever. That I’d never change. That I wanted to commit suicide by boyfriend …”

I looked to Sal to protest treatment seeming cruel, or at least tasteless, but she held up a hand and nodded to the television,
Wait and listen.

Gail said, “I broke down and started crying. ‘You’re WRONG!’ I started yelling ‘YOU’RE WRONG, YOU’RE WRONG. I WANT TO LIVE. I’LL DO ANYTHING TO LIVE!’”

Kavanaugh nodded calmly. “That’s when you were accepted for the underground railroad.”

“I had to pass a test at the center. To make sure I wouldn’t run back to James and tell him everything. He would have thrown gasoline into the center and burned it to the ground.”

Kavanaugh stood to refill the glasses. Harry figured it out: “The abused woman has to show total commitment to the idea of No Turning Back. To make the decision that will change her life for ever.”

Sal nodded. “It helps protect the center from violence. If the woman is gone, the only thing left for the abuser to attack is the system itself. More than a few men would see the system as a thief … personify it as a being that stole from them.”

“Women stealing women from men,” I said. “The misogynist’s worse nightmare.”

Harry nodded at the television, the interview set to resume. The Doc leaned toward Gail, her voice low. “Tell me what it was like in the system, Gail. Your experiences.”

“I felt like a package, but a very important package. The first night I was picked up in an alley. A woman who called herself Alicia drove to Boise from Jackson, Wyoming, to get me. I’m not sure that was her real name – some people use fake ones. I stayed at Alicia’s place – slept on the couch – two nights before being picked up by –”

“Excuse me, Gail, picked up how?”

“Alicia left me at a bridge. It was midnight. We stopped on the bridge and way up ahead we saw headlights blink. I got out and Alicia drove away. It was my first transfer and I was standing there with my suitcase – you get one that you can carry – scared to death. A minute later a van picked me up. A woman, Kate, drove for two hours until we came to a house. The highways signs said we were near Fort Collins, Colorado.”

“Who owned the home?”

“Two women lived there, Bert and Lolly. They were careful about giving me space, but talking when I wanted to. Lolly always had a phone in her pocket. It rang one night and a half-hour later I’m in the back seat of a car under a blanket. We drove for hours. When I sat up I was in a park, told to go behind some trees and wait for a horn to honk three times. It was a truck with a woman at the wheel. Kathy took me to a tiny apartment above a garage. I had no idea where I was until, looking out the window, I saw a couple of service trucks with Omaha as the address of the company. I stayed there three days.”

“You saw no one?”

“Only Kathy. She lived with her husband.”

The first man had entered the story. “Husband?” Kavanaugh asked. “You’re sure?”

“Kathy had a wedding ring.”

“Did you have any interaction with the husband?”

“I only saw him the one time. He was mowing the lawn.”

“From there …?”

“The same thing eight times. Then I was in a house in Daphne, my final destination. I stayed a week while we made plans to get me a new identity, find a job.” Gail rapped her knuckles on the wood trim on the chair. “So far I’ve been safe.”

“Were you around any men besides the husband in Omaha?”

“The fourth hand-over was to a man named Rick. I stayed in a room in his house, out in the country. He said I didn’t have to talk if I didn’t feel like it, I could stay in the room and read or watch television. The room had its own bathroom to the side and I could live in there.”

“Tell me about Rick.”

“The first couple of nights I stayed in the room with the door locked tight.” She managed a self-deprecating smile. “I was pretty freaked by everything that was going on. The third night, I just wanted to be around someone, to talk about the weather and normal things. I came out of the room and Rick was on the couch laughing at
Will and Grace
re-runs. He seemed so … harmless. Like a puppy.”

“Rick didn’t frighten you?”

“I think he was gay and when I figured he wouldn’t be attracted to me in … in that way, I relaxed. He was funny and a great cook, vegetarian things. He kept telling me I had beautiful eyes. He took pictures of them.”

I shot Harry a glance. We both leaned closer to the screen.

“Your eyes?” Kavanaugh said.

“It wasn’t weird or anything. Just a few pictures.”

“Rick say anything while taking pictures?”

“The usual stuff … smile, don’t blink, say cheese. It wasn’t a big deal and it wasn’t my face or anything.”

“You’re sure?”

“He showed me the pictures on the camera. Just a dozen pictures of my eyes.”

Gail turned away to blow her nose. Sal shot us a glance.
Eyes
. Gail turned back and the Doc continued her gentle probing.

“How long were you there, Gail? Rick’s place.”

“That was the longest stay. It was a week.”

“Why so long?”

“He said we had to wait for someone to make time to take me, that summer was toughest because of vacations. One afternoon he told me to pack my suitcase because it was time. We drove to a truck stop in the middle of nowhere. Another car was waiting, tucked between trailers. Rick said my life would be beautiful one day and he hoped I’d keep him in my heart forever. He kissed my forehead and I walked to the other car. When I turned around he was gone.”