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INVESTIGATORS HAVE NO LEADS IN BRUTAL GALVESTON MURDER

(AP) GALVESTON July 6, 2010 – Officials here say they have no leads in the brutal murder of Allison Clayborn, and are asking anyone with information to come forward. The July 4 slaying shocked the community. “She was a beautiful girl,” said neighbor Mary Kelsey, of Clayborn who had just turned 30. “Vibrant, redheaded, full of life. Everybody loved her—and this whole thing is just terrifying.”

Ms. Clayborn’s boyfriend, Ben Sullivan, 38, found Clayborn’s body in her Harbor Street condominium in the early hours of July 5. Police have not released specific details of the crime scene. A written statement on the department’s website asked witnesses to come forward and said the murder was the most violent attack in Galveston’s history. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, an official close to the investigation said Clayborn was sexually assaulted and tortured, and her body was mutilated.

The same source said the mutilation involved “elements of cannibalism”.

The official release on the department website said investigators did not recover the attacker’s fingerprints or DNA. The only prints inside the condominium belonged to Clayborn and Sullivan. Police ruled out Sullivan as a suspect yesterday.
 

Sullivan was unavailable for comment for this article and has voluntarily checked into an undisclosed inpatient psychiatric clinic, according to a statement by his attorney, James Caldwell.

Clayborn was the sixteenth murder victim so far this year in Galveston County. The incident is the only this year in which the police department was unable to make an arrest within twenty-four hours.

Chris finished the article, and the earlier ones from the fifth of July, and lowered the laptop screen.

“There’s no picture?”

“I haven’t found one yet.”

“See if you can. Pull some strings with the Galveston police if you have to. I’ll cover the expense.”

He nodded. “You got a feeling on this one?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s never been longer than eight months between.”

“No,” Chris said, rubbing at the back of his neck with the cold beer bottle. “I thought there’d probably be one this month.”

The wind was picking up, whistling in the rigging. Chris could hear the rain hitting the decks. The articles from July fifth said Allison had been out with friends on Strand Street and had walked home alone around ten at night. She was supposed to meet Ben Sullivan the next morning to go on a trip to New Orleans. None of her girlfriends thought she was seeing anyone besides Ben. She wouldn’t have stopped in a bar by herself—she was shy unless she was in a knot of friends. The bar and restaurant where she’d eaten was no more than three well-lit blocks from her own front door. Her telephone call to Ben started at 10:27 and ended at 10:30. She called from the phone beside her bed; it was found dangling off its blood-specked cradle.

The only audible words on the recorded message to Ben were, “It’s me, just calling to…hey, are you here?”

Then there was a
clunk
, the phone hitting the floor, probably. The last two minutes and forty-five seconds were nothing but Allison’s screams.

But Ben didn’t get that message until much later, because after he finished his night’s work at Intel, he got into his Acura and drove directly to Galveston to pick up Allison. They were planning to stay at the Columns Hotel on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, and had reservations that night at Commander’s Palace.

Not all of this was in the newspapers. Mike found a personal blog kept by one of the
Houston Chronicle
reporters assigned to the story. What few records the Galveston police made available, Mike had already gotten.

“Was there anything else you wanted?” he asked.

Chris shook his head. “I’ll wait and see the picture before I book a trip out there.”

He printed the contents of Mike’s drive, using the little ink jet on a shelf under the navigation table. He had a drawer in the master cabin where he collected these. He didn’t like to keep them in the house. When they finished printing he left Mike at the table and went to file the stories. Without anything else to go on, there wasn’t much to say.

Chris spent the rest of the night thinking about Allison Clayborn, and the project. He wondered about the story Mike brought. What elements of cannibalism did the Galveston Police Department suspect? If he showed them the photographs he kept, would they throw them down in shock? Was he the only one who could see the pattern?

He watched the sun come up while sitting at the bow, then rowed the dingy back to the dock and locked it alongside the kayak. In the kitchen, he made a pot of coffee and drank the first cup, walking around the house and looking into each empty room. He went to the loft above the bedroom and sat at his desk, which faced the bay. The wind had shifted and
Sailfish
had swung on her mooring to point east.

He turned on his computer and searched the Internet, finding stories about Allison. It didn’t take long to find a picture. She was leaning against a bicycle in the driveway of a house, Ben Sullivan’s perhaps. The photograph must have been taken this past autumn. Allison wore a black windbreaker. Leaves lay strewn across the lawn. It was windy, too: there was a leaf caught in the spokes of her front bicycle tire, and Allison’s red hair lifted off to the side. She was laughing. She had a beautiful, delicate face, and her eyes were the color of a summer river: green and deep and warm.

He went down the wooden stairs to the kitchen and poured another cup of coffee, then drank it looking out the window at the ginger blossoms tapping against the glass in the wind. It was going to rain again. He went to the phone on the wall by the refrigerator, dialed Mike on speaker, and went back to the window.

“How’s it, Chris?”

“I found her picture in today’s
Houston Chronicle
.”

“So did I. I just printed it out for you.”

“Don’t worry about it. I just need to decide what I’m going to do.”

“Okay.”

They didn’t talk for about a minute. There were dogs barking outside of Mike’s house, children’s voices.

“You still there, Chris?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Keep your cell on. I’ll call you if I need anything.”

“You got it.”

He went to the phone and hung it up. Then he went back to his study and booked the first flight to Houston.

Chapter Four

He waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness inside Allison’s apartment.

After he closed the door, the first thing he noticed was the sharp chemical smell from the forensic team. That would be print-developing chemicals applied to the walls and door knobs and probably every sharp or hard object in Allison’s apartment. A good team could lift a print from a glass that had gone through a dishwasher. With the right tinctures and tests, a careful lab technician could tell the print of a smoker or heavy coffee drinker by the chemical traces deposited with the rest of the oils in the print; a single print could yield a DNA sample. But the strength of the chemical smell told him what he also already knew: the forensic team had gone wall to wall and floor to ceiling and had not found a single print that could not be ruled out as belonging to Allison or Ben.

He crouched low, shining his dim flashlight at his feet. The floorboards in Allison’s apartment were either refurbished originals from the condominium’s days as a cotton warehouse, or had been salvaged from an old barn by an interior decorator. They were aged a deep brown and dented with the wear of years, but the new stains were easy enough to see. A rivulet of dried blood ran out of the living room into the foyer. He stepped to the side and played the light across the floor until it reached the red brick wall of the living room. He crept across that space, mindful the flashlight beam stayed low and well clear of the three tall windows on the far side of the room. Now, in addition to the smell of the forensic team’s chemicals, he could smell something far less clinical. Blood was rotting in the grain of the wood. The entire living room reeked of it. Combined with the antiseptic bite of the print-developing chemicals, the room was close and thick with a smell like bandages peeled off an infected wound. And it was painfully hot. The police left the air conditioning off, and the living room’s west-facing windows let in the sun all afternoon.

Breathing shallowly, he went to the bedroom.

It started here.

He risked letting the light shine up the wall behind the bed, then let it roam upwards. Fine blood droplets misted the ceiling; the spray was thicker as it came down the wall towards the bedframe. The mattress and box spring were both missing. The forensic team would have bagged them both and carried them to a lab, for trace analysis. A spill of semen, a single hair. He could see the things Allison stored under her bed: a Prada shoebox, a giant Tupperware container of folded sweaters, a low cardboard box of photo albums. Dust bunnies were strewn around, motionless in the breezeless air.

The blood trail started by the bedframe, crossed the floor between his feet, snaked through the living room, and ended in the kitchen. He imagined Allison being dragged by an ankle or by her soft red hair, off the bed and through the apartment. He followed the trail into the kitchen, knowing before he got there what he would find, knowing that this time he was early enough but not too late.
 
The apartment hadn’t been cleaned yet, so what he was looking for would still be here.

He knew very little about his quarry, but there was one thing about which he was absolutely certain: sometimes he came back.

It might be two days after, or even as long as five, depending on how long it took for the girl to be missed, the police to be called, and the forensic team to finish its work. Then, sometimes, but not always, he would come back to finish what he’d begun. This was the first thing Chris had learned, the primary fact that governed all of his trips.

Sometimes the killer came back to finish feeding.

Chris stepped into the kitchen and turned off the flashlight. He could see well enough by the streetlight outside the kitchen window and the green glow from the clock on the microwave oven. There was a deep cast iron frying pan on the stove. The pan and stovetop were spattered in grease. A fork lay on the countertop. Its tines were filmed in oil and flecked with blood. Next, he put the light into the frying pan.

Left-over scraps of meat had blackened to crisps as the pan had cooled.

He had no doubt these were all that remained of Allison’s breasts. There was no way the police would have missed this. They didn’t see it because it wasn’t there during the investigation. The killer had stayed close enough to watch them, to know when it was safe for him to come back and cook what was left of the pieces he’d hidden.

He turned to the refrigerator, knowing. A lidless, empty ice cream carton lay on its side on the floor in front of the freezer. He knelt and aimed his flashlight. The white cardboard inside the container was smeared with blood. He snapped off the light and closed his eyes. His ears were ringing and his head was spinning, rolling back and back and getting nowhere, as if he’d swallowed half a bottle of whiskey on an empty stomach. He breathed the rank air and counted backwards in his mind, still kneeling on the floor. Finally, he stood. He put the fork in a wax paper evidence bag and pocketed it.

He walked with his hands in his pockets until he got back to the street, then stripped off his latex gloves. It was a humid and hot night, but compared to the apartment, it felt cool and wonderful. The air smelled of oak bark and saltwater. He took three steps in the direction of his motel, then stopped.

The street was empty except for a beat-up blue van parked illegally in front of a fire hydrant. Its sliding door was open. A dirty blanket hung off the seat and dangled over the gutter; food wrappers were littered across its dashboard.

He saw a shadow rushing up behind him and turned, grabbing uselessly for his holstered pistol. The man was wearing a black ski mask and was already reaching out to him with an object the size of an electric razor.

“Good night, asshole.”

He heard this gravelly voice at the same time the stun gun crashed into his chest and the two sharpened electrodes punched through his sweatshirt. The current was like a shotgun blast, but before Chris collapsed to the sidewalk, the man had him under the arms and dragged him five more steps to the waiting van and muscled him inside. The man crawled in after him and slammed the door.

Chris was face up on the wool blanket and the man in the ski mask was kneeling next to him. Chris jerked when he felt the needle go into his neck. He fought to sit up but the man had the stun gun’s electrodes pressed into his throat. His arms were pinned somehow. He felt the needle probe deeper, then gasped at the stinging heat when the man pressed the syringe’s plunger. The effect was almost instantaneous. His jaw went slack and his mouth fell open. His neck felt like molten wax and his head collapsed back into the blanket. The man in the mask was pushing on his chest but let up after about fifteen seconds.

Then the man’s hand was over Chris’s mouth and nose, pushing down hard enough that he felt the cartilage in his nose buckle as it bent sideways. He saw purple flashes behind his closed eyelids. His arms and legs might as well have been an amputee’s fantasy. He couldn’t move them at all.