Lust Killer (16 page)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Jerry Brudos, having lied to his wife again, was led back to his cell, past curious prisoners. He was still not particularly worried. He had expected the police would do something like this—but he was secure that they had no way to tie him into whatever they were accusing him of. He considered that they were just using a desperate ploy, hoping that they could keep him in jail.

He did, however, call Dale Drake and ask that he come to the jail. He was smart enough not to go through this without an attorney. Drake stayed the night at the jail. Later, years later, Jerry Brudos would insist that he had no lawyer in attendance. He would relate that other prisoners "beat the living hell out of me." He would also claim that he had been poisoned in jail. He had always seen things in his own way, shaped them until they fit him; he would view his incarceration the same way.

And yet, there was something quite challenging about his arrest. Jerry considered himself brilliant. He mentioned to several officers and to his lawyer that his I.Q. had been tested at 166—well over genius demarcation. (He had actually tested 105 on the Wechsler-Bellevue scale; possibly the lower figure could be attributed to stress.) He did not believe there was a cop in the country who could outsmart him, and he looked forward to the jousting that would take place in the coming interviews, confident that he would win.

Stovall waited downstairs to interview the prisoner. Stovall is one of the best police interrogators in the country, having refined it to an art.

"It's a cat-and-mouse procedure," Stovall explains. "Always,
always
, the investigating team must withhold facts that place the suspect at the scene of the crime. We know something about him, and he knows—or suspects—that, but he doesn't know what. We form a kind of dialogue. The interrogator is never hurried; he deliberately allows the suspect to lead him away from the main points—but never too far. If the suspect says something incriminating, we never pounce on it right away. We let it slide until we're ready, and only then do we come back to it."

Obviously, a great deal had happened between the times the dead and missing girls had disappeared and the time they were found. Only one living person would know those events—and Stovall was quite sure that the big man before him held all those secrets. He could see Brudos taking his measure, and he himself watched the suspect covertly, evaluating his attitude.

The man was cocky, and seemingly at ease. That was good. Cocky suspects are more likely to spill their guts than those more nervous—they yearn to brag and show off, almost heedless of the fact that they let vital bits of information slip out.

This man—Jerry Brudos—quite likely had things to tell that no man really wanted to hear … but not soon, and not without a sound foundation of dialogue.

Stovall would make himself available all weekend; he did not expect to glean much from this first interview. If Brudos should decide he wanted to talk, the interrogator never wanted to be more than five minutes away.

Outside the windowless interview room, one could hear male voices and a few fragments of sound from a small radio, droning out the results of the qualifying laps at the Indianapolis Speedway. Inside, alone with the suspect, Stovall waited out the long silences. Brudos seldom looked directly at Stovall, but the detective could detect no beading of sweat on his forehead, no acceleration of breathing as if the suspect felt panicky.

He almost seemed to be reveling in the attention, anxious for the game of give-and-take to begin.

Stovall asked only the easiest questions. Brudos' full name. His address. Date of birth. Wife's name. Employment history. Vehicles available to him. It might have been an interview given for a new job.

But it wasn't.

"You never divulge," Stovall comments. "You merely suggest, and wait for the suspect to carry it a little further. "

"It's a puzzle," Stovall said quietly. "How something like this—all of this—could have developed. So many women missing.

Brudos nodded slightly.

"It's very complex, shows a lot of planning."

Brudos shrugged.

"Do you have any theories? Any way to make sense of this?"

"My attorney would prefer that I don't go into that."

Stovall pulled back, veering off into a less potent subject. "You ever drive a car, other than your own? Or the Karmann Ghia?"

"I drive my mother's sometime."

There was something there, a flicker of disgust in Brudos' eyes.
This man did not like his mother.

"What kind of a car is that?"

"Rambler, 1964."

"One of those blue jobs? They all seem to look like boats—nautical. "

"No. It's light green."

"Do you want a cigarette? A cup of coffee?"

"I don't smoke. I seldom drink, either. No bad habits." Brudos smiled.

Stovall smiled back.

"I think I'll go back to my cell. Those cops woke me up when they arrested me. I worked hard all day."

Stovall stood obligingly and signaled for a jailer.

The first contact was a draw, and Brudos seemed to think that he had handled it well.

"I'll be around if you want to talk more," Stovall said easily.

He watched the big man shamble down the hall on his way back to jail, and knew he might have to wait hours—days maybe—but that Brudos would be wanting to talk again.

Stovall had a cup of coffee and began to organize what would become voluminous notes. In front of the prisoner, he would take few notes, but when he was alone, he would jot down everything that seemed pertinent, and index the answers. That way, he would have a starting point with each new confrontation.

Hours later, the word came from the jail: "He wants to talk again."

"Bring him up."

They began again. The first tentative innocuous remarks. Brudos did not like his cell. It was a "closet." The only window, by his own measurement, was four inches by ten inches and closed up. The light was turned off too much.

 Stovall commiserated. "Jails aren't built for comfort."

"Do you know where my wife is?"

"She went home hours ago."

Stovall could detect real concern for the prisoner's wife; his attitude when he spoke of her was nothing like the loathing he evinced when he talked about his mother.

"How do you do this business?" Brudos asked. "I mean, how do you know things—if you have no proof?"

"It's a matter of our knowing some things and other people knowing other things—and eventually they usually come together and we get the whole picture."

"So you don't know everything going on, do you?"

"Nobody claims that. As I said, it's a puzzle. You think of somebody doing all of this … and you wonder. You have the pieces of the puzzle, maybe, but you don't have the box with the picture of what it's supposed to look like. You have a thousand-piece puzzle, and all you can do is put the pieces together by color to begin with. We separate the blues from the greens and the browns, for example. So we form the borders, and we keep working toward identifying other pieces—keeping the color scheme of things in mind. Blue. Green. Brown."

Brudos seemed to like that analogy. Stovall didn't fill him in on the rest. The trial and the error and the hard work, and sometimes losing track of the most important piece because it hadn't fit when you first tried it. Gradually the whole picture always does begin to form. The crime-scene evidence, and the interviews, and the countless hours of follow-up reports.

"Without the picture, it sounds impossible to me," Brudos commented. "I guess you get discouraged."

"Not necessarily."

The silence yawned.

"I know you picked me up because you thought I was guilty of something or other … "

"You're charged with assault with a deadly weapon."

"Yeah."

"You're an electrician. Are you pretty skilled at that?"

"I guess you could say that. Electricity … electronics, that stuff."

"Who did you work for when you lived in Portland in 1968?"

"Osborne. … "

"You worked many places around Salem?"

"Over in West Salem, and out in Lebanon, and then in Halsey."

"That's a long commute."

"It's not bad—almost all freeway."

"You had a little trouble when you lived in Corvallis back in the fifties."

"I was a kid. They sent me out to the hospital here. That was a long time ago."

"Yes. You must have been in high school then."

Brudos shifted. "I can't see how you'd know if I did something … with those girls. I can't see how there'd be any way to prove it."

"Do you want to discuss that?"

Brudos shook his head and looked away. "Drake said I didn't have to talk about any of that. He's my attorney, and I think I should do what he says. Did you know I went to high school with him? At least, he says we did—he says he remembered my name because we were in the same homeroom. Small world, huh?"

Stovall nodded. Brudos was avoiding direct questions, and he was adroit at changing the thread of conversation. Stovall wasn't going to push him.

The rest of that interview went the same way. Every time the detective veered too close to something Brudos didn't want to talk about, the conversation switched gears. He saw that Brudos was dying to know what the investigating team had found but that he would not come right out and ask. Nor would the suspect offer any new information.

Again, they had come to an impasse. Brudos was returned to his cell.

They were to continue their abortive discussions for three days, and each new confrontation touched a little closer on the girls' murders. Stovall's notes were becoming more defined. He spent half an hour or more after each session correlating and indexing. Brudos
had
been in the vicinity of every abduction. That was clear. And he'd had the means. The guy was strong; his soft layer of fat hid power. Opportunity. Means. Motive? Motive was becoming more apparent; an underlying madness in a man who clearly detested his mother, and that hatred had ballooned until it included all women—all women except Darcie Brudos.

The mother—Eileen Brudos—seemed to still control her son as if he were only a child. The loan of her car, the frequent loans of money to a man who could not hold a job. Every time the suspect mentioned his mother, there was a concurrent tightening in his jaw in apparent loathing.

Stovall sensed that he himself had passed some kind of test. Brudos seemed to respect him, considered him a fit adversary. The suspect obviously saw himself as a major intellect, and it was essential that he accept his interrogator as someone worthy.

The dialogue had been formed. If it meant that Stovall would have to home in on a kind of madness, he was prepared to do that. And yet he dreaded the denouement of the puzzle almost as much as he sought it. He had to keep reminding himself that the helpless victims were long dead and beyond pain. Even so, whatever had happened would have to be relived in the quiet interview room. …

Shifts changed. First Watch. Second Watch. And then Third Watch, and it began again. Stovall drank too much coffee, grabbed fragmented bits of sleep, and took quick showers. Upstairs in his cell, Brudos slept too.

He did, in fact, sleep well. He had called Darcie and told her what she must do. She had always obeyed him, and he counted on that now.

Darcie Brudos was in a state of shock. She kept trying to work back through her mind to make some sense of what had happened. One minute they had been heading off to Portland for the holiday weekend with friends. She had been happy and relaxed, looking forward to three days with people she liked, to break up the gloom of her relationship with Jerry.

But the next … The police had moved up behind their station wagon so swiftly, their voices disembodied then behind the glare of flashlights in her face. They scared her, and they scared the kids. She was still scared, alone in the house.

She had no idea what Jerry might have done. She knew he had some guns, but as far as she knew, he never carried them around with him; they were for hunting or for trading. She wondered why the police would follow them halfway to Portland and stop them on the freeway for something like possession of a weapon.

She would not let herself imagine what else might be involved; she would not allow other thoughts to creep in. Jerry was strange, and he'd been stranger lately, but that was only because he was so sensitive. That was only because people—herself included-—kept disappointing him. He was the father of their children. He was her husband.

She sat in the darkened living room and stared out at the cars that crawled down Center Street, seeing their headlight beams creep across the far wall.

When the phone rang, she practically jumped out of her skin. It was Jerry, calling from jail. He sounded like himself, a little tense, but in control. He would not wait to listen to her questions; he had something important for her to do.

"Darcie … "

" Yes, I— "

"Just listen. I want you to do something for me. I want you to go out to my workshop. There's a box out there, and it's got some old clothes in it."

"What kind of clothes?"

He paused. "They're women's clothes, just some junk I had out there. I want you to burn them. And there's a box of photographs there too. Destroy both those boxes."

"Jerry …
why
?"

"The police might try to use them against me. They're asking a lot of questions. Just go out there and get them and burn them."

 She could not do it. There were so many things that Jerry wasn't telling her. In the morning she called Dale Drake and asked him what she should do. He told her it would be illegal for her to destroy anything that might be construed as evidence. "If you do, it might tend to incriminate
you
."

She didn't go out to Jerry's workshop at all; she was afraid to, and she was afraid to tell him that she hadn't done what he asked.

Instead, she took a few clothes for herself and the children and drove to Corvallis to stay with her parents. When they asked questions, she couldn't answer. She called Jerry's brother in Texas and told him Jerry was in trouble, but she couldn't answer his questions either.