Night Mask (11 page)

“I wonder what she's calling me?” Lani asked.

“She said she hopes you get the clap and your tits rot off,” Leo said matter-of-factly.

Lani blinked a couple of times. “Well ... the nerve of that bitch! I didn't know you spoke French, Leo.”

Leo smiled. “I don't.”

They found the basement of the house exactly as the girl had described it. The rope was dangling from a rafter. Ginny's tennis shoes were still there, as were her bra and panties. Then the lab people shooed them out while they went to work.

Lani and Brenda were staring at a complicated-looking strap-on dildo. “Be sure and get some pictures of this ... thing,” Brenda said, disgust very plain behind her words.

Outside, they stepped over the body of the coach. The press was on the scene and making a nuisance of themselves. A line of city and county police were holding them behind a CRIME SCENE—DO NOT ENTER tape.

“Which one of you killed the coach?” a reporter yelled.

“We did have a good chance of winning state this year,” a maggot-brain said. “But we can forget it now. Thanks to the cops.” That statement even shocked some of the press present.

This time it was Lani who grabbed Leo. “Come on, Leo. It's not worth it. You know the mentality of some people.”

Sheriff Brownwood walked up. “Settle down, Leo,” he said.

“I hope the cameras got his face,” Leo said darkly. “And the Ripper is watching.”

“And I hope nobody else heard you say that,” Brownie said.

“How can people get so worked up over a goddamn stupid game, that they lose all perspective of right and wrong and moral values?” Leo muttered.

“Get him in the car and out of here, Lani,” Brownie said. “Please.”

* * *

A few members of the press asked their usual stupid questions at the press conference later on that evening. “Why did the police have to kill him? Couldn't they have just shot him in the leg, or something?” And so on and so forth.

Luckily, Leo was not in attendance at the press conference. Leo, Lani, Brenda, and Ted were sweating the French teacher, and sweating her hard.

When she broke, she opened a spillgate of sexual perversion and told her tale of horrors. She and the coach had been sexually active with selected students for about a decade. But this was the first time they had ever kidnapped one. They had used coercion before; threats of grade failure and other methods. But never kidnapping. Until this time.

But she and the dead coach were not the team called the Ripper.

“What am I facing?” the French teacher asked.

“You'll be presented a list of all charges,” Leo told her.

“I don't want to go to prison,” she said. “They do terrible things to women in prison, and I'm not really a bad person. Really, I'm not.”

Lani and Leo walked out of the interrogation room after hearing that.

* * *

“The problem is,” Leo said, after building his third bourbon and water and knocking back half of it, “we're trying to deal with these characters logically and rationally. The killers do not have logical or rational minds.”

“So what are you suggesting?” Ted asked.

“I don't know. I'm getting tight, I know that. And I know that we're missing something. It's right there in front of us, but we can't get a handle on it. And it's frustrating the hell out of me.”

“You think you're alone in that?” Lani questioned. “Twin brothers, identical twins, with access to enormous wealth, just do not drop out of sight. We've plastered the entire West with pictures of how they probably look at age thirty-three, and we've had zip response. Nothing.”

“We know they've left a trail of bodies all across this country,” Leo picked it up. “Yet they've managed to elude the police for years. How?”

“We're closer than we've ever been,” Ted tried to turn the conversation upbeat. “So far, the technicians have discovered ten doctored tapes at KSIN. Radio and TV. Those songs and commercials are played at the same time, every day or night. But so far no names of actual people have showed up. Just suggestions. ‘Drink your morning coffee. Take your bath. I'm your friend. I won't hurt you. Trust me. Listen to KSIN.' But all the employees check out. They are who they say they are. Birth records, employment records, service records. Shit!” he concluded.

“And we can't tip our hand just yet,” Brenda said. “You can't hold someone just because they flunk a polygraph. If we started that, the party, or parties, would just run again.”

“And how much longer can we sit on what we're doing?” Lani questioned. “It's going to leak. Bet on that.”

Leo hummed “Mary Had A Little Lamb,” then frowned. “And what the hell does that mean?”

“Nothing,” Lani said. “I've read the whole poem ten dozen times. I've memorized the damn thing. Nothing connects. But why, then, would he put the notes on his bedroom wall?”

Leo reached over and turned on the radio. KSIN. When the announcer came on between records, Leo straightened up, his drink forgotten. “That's not BJ the DJ.”

Lani waited until another record was playing and dialed the studio number. “Where's Jarry?” she asked.

“Sick,” the DJ told her. “They called me in at the last minute.”

Thirty seconds later, the four cops had left the house and were running for their cars.

No one answered the knock on Bill Jarry's apartment door. Leo took several pieces of wire from his wallet and went to work on the lock.

“I'm not seeing this,” Ted said. “I can't believe you're doing this, Leo! This is against the law. Any evidence we might find won't be admissible in court.”

“Doing what?” Leo asked, pushing open the door. “Did you see me do anything, Brenda? Lani?”

“Not a thing,” Brenda said. “The door was unlocked. We're just checking out an anonymous cons-plaint that was called in.”

Ted shook his head and muttered under his breath.

“No one here,” Lani said, as the cops once more gathered in the hall. “Let's check the hospitals.”

Bill Jarry had not checked into nor visited any of the area's hospitals.

“Stake it out,” Leo told two uniforms outside the apartment complex. “When Jarry shows up, bring him in and call me.”

“No matter the time?”

“No matter the time.”

Shortly after ten that evening, the uniforms brought in a very angry Bill Jarry and set him down in a chair at Leo's desk.

“You don't look very sick to me,” Leo told him. “Where have you been?”

“None of your goddamn business,” BJ the DJ said. “If I want to lie to the boss to get a night off, that's between me and the boss.”

Since there had been no reports of missing people that evening, and the cops had no evidence of any wrongdoing on Jarry's part, they could not hold him. But Bill would not tell them where he'd been that evening, or why he called in sick when he was not.

“I know what this is all about,” Jarry said. “But you can check the logs and the engineers and other personnel at the station. I was on the air at the time the Kress woman was killed. I was right there in the station when Cal got bopped on the head. Hey, I read the papers. Some of what you two did back East has leaked out. Well, I've never even been in Indiana, much less in Fort Wayne. I've never been in Akron, Ohio. And I damn sure have never been in Buffalo, New York. Check it out.”

“We have,” Leo told him.

“And?” Jarry looked at him.

“You can go.”

After the door to the interrogation room had closed, Leo and Lani and Brenda and Ted sat at the scarred table and looked at each other. Lani broke the silence.

“We've pretty well established that the Ripper either works at KSIN, or is a good friend of someone who does. That's firm. There is no other way they could gain access to so many of the commercials. We know for a fact that the Ripper is actually two people. We know for a fact that it is a man and a woman. All right. Try this: could one of the Longwood boys have had a sex-change operation?”

Leo blinked at that. Brenda's eyes widened. Ted said, “My word!”

“And they're living together as man and wife,” Leo spoke the words slowly. “Yeah. It's possible. What did that ex-priest say? Both boys were effeminate-looking.”

“That's right,” Lani picked it up. “And we know for a fact that both of them are twisted sexually. It fits, people.”

“This case is beginning to make me physically ill,” Ted said with a grimace.

“All right,” Leo said wearily. “Tomorrow we start checking out the DJs' spouses and/or girlfriends.”

“It doesn't have to be a DJ,” Brenda said. “It could be someone who works in a different capacity; not necessarily an on-air person.”

“Not a word of this to anybody,” Brenda said.

“Right,” Leo agreed. “And we check out Stacy Ryan's sweetheart, Carla Upton. All the way back. If this is part of a killing club, with more than two people involved, or four—counting the half brother and sister of the Longwood boys—there will be a weak link in the chain. All we have to do is find it, and break it.”

“Before they kill again,” Ted added.

“I wish,” Lani said softly.

* * *

The four cops quickly hit a dead end on the DJs and their spouses and girlfriends. Everybody checked out to the letter.

“Shit!” Lani said.

The foursome began the painstaking task of running everybody who worked at the TV/FM/AM complex. They found where Ed Jones, one of the engineers, had a warrant for his arrest back in North Dakota... five unpaid traffic tickets.

“Pay your damn tickets, Ed,” Leo told the clearly embarrassed man.

Linda Price, a copywriter, had written a series of hot checks down in Tampa, Florida. But the statute of limitations had run out, and she was squeaky clean in California. They never mentioned it to her.

Jim Barrows, a reporter, had served time in South Carolina as a boy. He had gone joy-riding with some others in a stolen car. He had been released when it was proven that he did not know the car was stolen.

“Dozens of employees, and they all check out,” Ted said. “We're right back to square one.”

“Carla Upton is from an old California family,” Leo said. “No evidence that she is a part of that group of weirdos swapping partners—which does include Dick Hale's estranged wife, June.”

“And some other rather prominent citizens of La Barca,” Lani added.

“What they're doing is bizarre,” Leo said. “But not against the law.”

“Just kinky,” Brenda said.

“We have turned over some rocks and uncovered some dark secrets,” Lani summed up. “But nothing that brings us any closer to the Rippers.”

“Well, at least the Rippers haven't added anyone else to the list,” Brenda said.

Wrong.

* * *

Mrs. Abigail Minniweather, president of the Hancock County Committee for Unified Nonexistence of Trash (no one in the group of well-intentioned ladies had yet to figure out that spelled CUNT), noticed a rather ugly lump of something that some cretinous individual had dumped in her backyard, right in the middle of her carefully tended and prize-winning flower garden.

“Come, Ulysses,” she said to her poodle. Abigail marched right out there, back straight and jaw set in anger, Ulysses bouncing right along beside her. Abigail came to an abrupt halt about fifteen feet from the blob. So did Ulysses. Both stared. Abigail let out a squawk and snatched up Ulysses. She ran back to the house, making little mewing sounds as she heaved her bulk along. She managed to call the sheriff's department before she passed out cold on the recently mopped and waxed kitchen floor. It sounded like a walrus doing a double half-gainer off the high board. Luckily for Ulysses, she did not land on him. The poodle fainted, too.

“Jesus Christ!” Lani said.

Ted walked over to the bushes and puked.

Leo managed to keep his breakfast down.

Brenda fought back hot bile that threatened to explode from her throat.

Brownie looked at the half-eaten doughnut he carried in a napkin and gave it to Ulysses. Ulysses buried it among Abigail's begonias.

The blob was Dick Hale, Jr. He had been skinned. All but his face. From the expression on his face, frozen forever, the skinning had been done while he was alive and conscious.

Brownie wiped his sweaty face with a handkerchief. “I'll go tell Dick.” He turned to a uniform. “For god's sake, keep the press out of here.”

Lani knelt down in front of the hideously tortured remains of the young man. She noticed his privates had been removed; pointed that out to Leo.

“Yeah,” the older man said. “I see. Lani? Dick is going to blow his stack over this. I'll bet you he's going to get on the air and offer a reward ... probably a very substantial reward. Brownie doesn't realize it, but there is no way—no
way
—we are going to keep this from the press.”

“Citizens arming themselves and taking to the streets?” she questioned.

“Yeah. But would you blame them?”

She shook her head.

Detective Bill Bourne of the La Barca city police walked up and took a long look at the body. He turned a tad green around the mouth and fought the sickness back. He pointed to the body. “That's—” He couldn't finish it. He turned away and headed for the bushes, returning in a moment, his face pale and sweaty. “Dick Hale's kid,” Bill said.

“Yeah,” Leo said, standing up. “What's left of him. I didn't know you knew the kid.”

“Vice had picked him up a couple of times for... well, you know.”

“No,” Lani said, a weary note to her voice. She stood up and faced the city cop. “Was he hanging with the rough trade?”