Kolchak: The Night Stalker: A Black and Evil Truth (13 page)

“If Skorzeny is not the ‘vampire’ of Mr. Kolchak’s theory, he is at the very least a likely suspect of multiple homicides extending back at least thirty years. According to the picture built up in these reports, he combines the bloodlust of Dusseldorf’s Peter Kurten with the subtlety and discretion of Paris’ Landru and the infamous Dr. Cream.

“Like Kurten, he seems to have been very active for some years, and may well have killed over one hundred people if his activities in Las Vegas are any indication. I believe that Kurten is credited with about thirty murders. While he has the money and ability to move from place to place at will, I think that time is running out for this ‘gentleman.’ There are just too many police officials, and communications and interagency cooperation too instantaneous for him to remain on the loose forever.”

“He seems to have done pretty well, so far,” I piped up.

Lane looked at me and then at Bernie. He was getting impatient even though he should have been glad to get this information. It supported what I’d been saying all along (to some extent, at least) and maybe that’s what set his teeth on edge.

“Have you got anything else, Bernie?”

“Well, I’d just like you all to reconsider the possibilities we have here. A man of extreme wealth and cunning, burning with some strange compulsion for blood and apparently, from his work here, having no scruples about how he obtains it. A man capable of buying ‘paid assistants’ whenever and wherever needed. A man who has used forgery successfully. A man who has used bribery repeatedly. A man who has used the potential embarrassment of various police agencies to his advantage. You know, there has never been a manhunt for him, that he’s never even been brought in for questioning once?

“Through all of this he appears to have moved through the past fifty years like some kind of phantom. Several people have claimed to have known him yet not one of these ‘knew’ him well enough to join him for dinner. None have ever visited any of his residences. Most didn’t even know where he lived.”

I interrupted Bernie at this point, fingering my report nervously.

“Bernie, you seem to be running this show. Can I have just five minutes to say something?”

He looked around the room and then at me. “Make it short, Kolchak.”

I hauled out my papers and gave a brief run-down to the assembled law officials on what I’d managed to dig up. When I concluded what was a very brief summation of all that reading I added a final plea.

“I know that everyone in this room, Bernie Fain included, thinks I’m some kind of a nut with my so-called fixation on this vampire thing. OK, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he only thinks he is. But there are things here that can’t be explained away by so-called common sense. Not even Bernie’s report can explain some of them.

“I was at the hospital yesterday.” I looked directly at Butcher. “Your own people fired maybe fifty or sixty rounds at him, some at point-blank range. How come this man never even slowed down? How come a man seventy years old can outrun police cars for more than fifteen blocks? How come when he gets clubbed on the head he doesn’t bleed like other people? Look at these photos! There’s a gash on his forehead… and whatever is trickling down from the cut is clear… it isn’t blood.

“How come three great, big, burly hospital orderlies weighing an estimated total of nearly 750 pounds couldn’t bring one, skinny 160 pound man to his knees? How come an ex-boxer, a light-heavyweight not long out of the ring, couldn’t even faze him with his best punch, a right hook that should have broken his jaw?

“Face it. Whether its science, witchcraft or black magic, this character has got something going for him you don’t know anything about. He doesn’t seem to feel pain. Or get winded. And he doesn’t seem to be very frightened by guns, or discouraged by your efforts to trap him.

“Look at these photos! Look at that face! That isn’t fear there. It’s hate. Pure hate! This man is evil incarnate. He is insane and he may be something even worse although you’d laugh at me because I have no scientific documentation to back me up. Hell, even Regenhaus and Mokurji have all but confirmed that he sucks blood.

“Whatever he is, he’s been around a long time and this seems to be the closest any police force has come to putting the finger on him. If you want to go on operating the way you’ve been doing by treating him like an ordinary man, go ahead. But, I’ll bet you any amount of money you come up empty handed again. If you try to catch him at night he’ll get away just like he did last night. He’ll…”

“Jesus Christ!” bellowed Butcher. “This son of a bitch has diarrhea of the mouth. Can’t one of you people shut him up? Bernie! For Chri…”

Paine cut him off. “No, I think we should let him talk. Let him hang himself with his own words. Then we’ll finally be rid of him.”

“I agree,” added Sheriff Lane. Then he turned to me.

“Kolchak, for most of your time here in Las Vegas you’ve been a pretty regular guy. You’ve reported things straight, and even when you found things that made us look a little silly, you’ve never pulled any cute moves. How come all of a sudden you’ve got this bug up your tail about this one particular guy? Why is it that you think you’re the only one who knows how to handle this thing?”

“Maybe it’s because I’m not afraid to consider the possibilities beyond the normal range of police experience. My God. Think of the things that have been believed impossible that proved otherwise. Man couldn’t fly. Couldn’t leave the earth. Couldn’t be revived after death. Hell, in the field of organ transplants alone doctors are doing what Mary Shelley wrote about a hundred and fifty years ago in Frankenstein, they’re giving people new kidneys, new eyes, new hearts. There are lower animals that regenerate broken and lost pieces of their bodies. Scientists don’t know how.

“On a large scale we’ve harnessed the power of the sun… and created an almost limitless source of energy. A few decades ago, that was thought impossible. On a man to man basis… uh… well, take unarmed combat for instance. Any fool knows a brick is harder than a man’s hand. Well, practitioners of Karate have proved that wrong. Your parents never heard of Judo. When you were young, if someone’d told you you could bust bricks with your hands you’d have through he was nuts. Today, any ten-year-old kid knows this is true.

“So how come you don’t admit you’re up against something that doesn’t conform to all your precious rules and concepts? Or is it that you’re already beginning to believe I’m right? That maybe there is such a thing as a vampire? Is that why you’re all so scared that the public might find out about how those people died? Are you so afraid of looking stupid that you’d ignore a possible way of nailing this guy?

“You guys muffed it yesterday and the whole story is in the papers today. Your time is running out and you’d better get this Skorzeny fella pretty soon or someone’s going to start screaming for a grand jury investigation. You can’t stop the rumors. They’re all over the place.

“I wasn’t even in on the first killing but one little guy at County General talked about the lack of blood. That led me to the Willows and the fang marks. Dr. Mokurji’s report made the rumor a fact.

“This guy drinks human blood!”

D.A. Paine finally held up his hand in a “stop” motion and I ran out of breath long enough for him to cut me off.

“We have kept this thing from the public because we want to avoid a panic.”

“Bull,” I muttered.

“And, because we don’t want to look any more ineffectual than we already do.”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” I told him.

“What’s more, we like to handle our own affairs. Where crime syndicates are involved we are very happy to cooperate with the federal authorities as Bernie here can testify. Everyone here knows where I stand on crime.”

I was sure he was about to launch into another campaign speech, but he surprised me.

“But,” he went on, “if the public ever thinks we can’t handle our own local problems… commonplace stuff like murder and robbery…”

I could see he had ignored everything that had been said.

“Commonplace!” I was becoming slightly hysterical now. “Commonplace! You call these murders commonplace? You call a bulletproof man who can outrun an automobile at low speeds commonplace? You call what you’ve been doing handling the situation?”

He let me rant until I finally ran down and fell silent. I knew they were all sure I was crazy, now. Paine opened his big mouth, sucked in air loudly, and jumped right in.

“I repeat, if the public, which is already divided on whether or not police are the ‘good guys’ or club-wielding ‘pigs,’ if they ever lose confidence in our ability to handle this thing… and their finding out how these girls died might just supply the final ingredient for that… There’d be so goddamn many of them running around half-cocked and packing all kinds of weapons for ‘self-defense’ that our job of tracking this man down would be impossible, let alone attempting to prosecute him, they’d… they’d panic for sure. We might even get into such a fix we’d have to call for federal troops.”

And I thought I was hysterical. Federal troops, yet!

“And,” he droned on, “in all this confusion, this guy could give us the slip with no trouble at all.”

“Sure,” I told him. “That’s what Hitler said back in Munich in ’32. Law and order. Tell the people what’s good for them. So tell me, Mr. Paine, what lever are you using on my boss to get this story killed?”

Paine glowered at me.

“No, I don’t think I will explain that, as it is irrelevant. All you have to know is that we have and if we could have killed those stories altogether, we would have done so. Especially after we had those coroner’s reports. But, then, this is a free country [he didn’t sound exactly overjoyed that that prospect] and you can’t entirely muzzle the press.”

“You’ve done pretty well so far,” I told him.

“And we will continue to do so with voluntary cooperation from all parties until we get this man behind bars or until he is dead. After we get him you can write anything your little heart desires, Kolchak. But until then, the blackout stands. Now, if you have nothing further to offer, I will repeat for the final time: Keep your mouth shut, take notes and do your job or you will be thrown out permanently and replaced with some other representative of the Daily News.

“By God, Kolchak, if I have to, I will have your police press pass pulled and get Jake Herman to reassign you to covering the meetings of the Citizens for Decent Literature and the Humane Society. Do you read me?”

“Five by five, mein fuhrer. You have my word. I’ll be a good little boy. Just remember who’s got the answers when you blow it again. Oh…” and I gave him the V-sign, “peace.”

Lane stretched his legs and sighed. “Bernie, what are the 1969 averages for violent crimes in America?”

Bernie ticked them off by rote: “One violent crime every forty-eight seconds. One aggravated assault every two minutes. One theft every two minutes. One rape every fourteen minutes. And one murder every thirty-six minutes.”

“And the FBI contends that in many of the categories Las Vegas is significantly higher?”

“Correct.”
“For years,” Lane went on, “the federal government has been itching to close this town up, maintaining that the gambling causes a greater influx of criminal types into this area and implying we can’t handle our jobs. No disrespect intended, Bernie, or any lack of appreciation for what your people are now doing, but surely you can see how vital it is to this town and to each of us here personally to get this job done with a minimum of fuss and public interference.”

“Well, I can see,” answered Bernie, “that this Janos Skorzeny is creating his own set of statistics and that they’re staggering. He’s committed at least ten aggravated assaults, five murders, two thefts, and God knows what else in the past twenty-six days.”

“Ah, yes. Thank you, Bernie.” Lane looked around the room. “I don’t have to remind all of you that it is nearing election time. Tom Paine here and I are both up for re-election. If we botch this thing we could end up on the street. And,” he looked at Butcher, “so could you, Paul. Yours is an appointed office. You could be canned overnight. So let’s get on with business and turn this session over to Captain Masterson who is the operational head of the combined force. Let’s see what we’ve got so far and what changes have to be made.”

Masterson lugged a bunch of charts and maps to an easel being set up by a deputy in the front of the room. “Our two departments have a combined total of six hundred and fifty men and thirty-seven reservists on full-time duty plus another twenty-six trainees who could, in a pinch, man the desks to free that many more for field work. We’ve got the helicopter going from dusk to dawn, as many men as possible in patrol cars and we’ve beefed up our beat patrolmen on foot. All leaves have been cancelled, all personnel including the women field operators are on twelve-hour call. Most of the top people in both departments are putting in nearly sixteen hours a day.

“Today, we took the chopper to Nellis Air Force Base and it was fitted out with a Homans infrared multispex camera and a special, experimental radar unit they’re testing which can focus on an object one square foot in size up to a distance of almost ten miles. With this equipment, and continued night patrols, we can spot our suspect and if he tries to run, locate and lock onto him. If he takes to hiding in a building or goes underground we simply log the location and move in with ground units.