Regina's Song (22 page)

All this particular nutcase got out of his performance was a couple of weeks in the psychiatric ward of a Seattle hospital for observation. Sylvia told us that he probably belonged in a bughouse, but since he wasn’t really dangerous, he’d probably end up back out on the street again before very long.

I got up early on Thursday morning and spent an hour with Faulkner’s
The Sound and the Fury
before I went downstairs in the hope that Erika’s coffee would unscramble my head.

Charlie and Erika were glued to that little TV set when I went into the kitchen. “The Slasher’s coming home to roost,” Charlie told me. “He nailed a guy in Montlake Park last night, and that’s only about two miles from here.”

“Hot spit,” I replied sourly. “That guy’s starting to make me tired.” I actually made it to the coffeepot before Erika could intercept me. She gave me a hard look. “Don’t get antsy, Erika,” I said. “See? I really
do
know how to pour myself a cup of coffee.” I filled my cup. “Notice that I didn’t even spill much on the floor.”

“Smart-ass,” she said.

“Sorry.” I sat down. “Where the hell
is
Montlake Park?” I asked Charlie.

“In the Montlake district, naturally. It’s just across Portage Bay from the campus—right in our own backyard.”

“Another junior hoodling?” I asked.

“Pretty much, yeah. He was a crack-cocaine addict, and he’d been busted for that and some other low crimes and misdemeanors over the past few years. Our cut-up seems to be getting careless. The cops
are
patrolling all the parks here in north Seattle, and a couple of them came pretty damn close to catching our boy right in the act.”

I hit the library that morning, then I stopped by Dr. Conrad’s office—just to stay in touch.

“How’s that little screwball friend of yours doing, Mr. Austin?” he asked me.

“Who can say, boss?” I replied. “She’s auditing classes in psychology and philosophy this quarter, and she’s still having some serious problems that probably don’t have anything to do with the courses she’s sitting in on.”

“You’re going to fool around and let her get away from us if you don’t tighten her leash,” he warned me.

“Not my fault, boss—my roomies sort of appropriated her. But don’t worry—she’s got ’em spooked already. She’s asking some questions they can’t answer.”

“That’s our girl,” he said fondly.

It was almost noon when I got back to the boardinghouse, and there was one of those yellow stick-up notes pasted to the door of my room. “I need to see you—James.” I set my briefcase inside my room and went down the hall to tap on James’s door. He opened it almost immediately.

“What’s up?” I asked him.

“Renata was behaving peculiarly in class today, Mark,” he told me.

“What else is new?”

“No, I mean
very
peculiarly. When class first started, she was talking a mile a minute, and she didn’t make any sense at all. Then she stopped right in midbabble and looked around as if she suddenly didn’t know where she was. Then she grabbed up her books and left the room, practically running!”

“That doesn’t match anything she’s done before.”

“I know,” he agreed. “If I’ve been following what’s been happening correctly, this is something entirely new. I think you’d better track her down, Mark. This might be serious.”

“I’ll get right on it.” And I did—I drove straight over to Mary’s place, and tapped on the kitchen door, but nobody answered. Then I went around to look through the window of Twink’s room, but the shades were drawn. “Damn!” I muttered. I didn’t have any choice at that point. I went to the front door and rang the bell. Mary probably wouldn’t like it, but I
had
to find out where Twink was.

I rang the doorbell again, and after a few minutes Mary opened the door in her robe, rubbing sleep out of her eyes.

“I didn’t want to wake you,” I apologized, “but I’ve got to find Renata.”

“She went to class, Mark,” she told me. “You know that.”

“She might have gone, Mary, but she didn’t stay. James told me that she was behaving very strangely, and then she just jumped up and ran out of the classroom. Could you check and see if she came home?”

“Come on in,” she said, opening the door wider. Then she went back to Twink’s door and rapped. There was no answer, so she opened the door. “She isn’t here, Mark,” she called to me.

“Damn!” I swore. “Now what the hell are we going to do? If James is right, she may have flipped out completely.”

“Is there anyplace on campus where she usually hangs out?”

“The sorority house, maybe. She’s not a member yet, but she spends a lot of time there.”

“Why don’t you give them a call while I get dressed?”

“I have to look up the number. Have you got a phonebook?”

Just then the back door opened. “What the hell are you doing, Mark?” Twink demanded from the kitchen. “You know we don’t wake Aunt Mary up in the daytime.”

“Where have
you
been?” I said. “James told me that you went bonkers during his class and ran out like a scalded dog.”

“
When
are you people going to back off?” she said crossly. “Every time I so much as sneeze, you all come unglued. I ate something that didn’t sit right, and now I’ve got the trots. I had to find a ladies’ room in a hurry.”

“Oh.” I felt pretty foolish at that point. “James must have misunderstood. He said that you were talking very strangely, then you just jumped up and ran.”

She rolled her eyes upward. “We’re reading Plato right now, Mark,” she told me with exaggerated patience. “You
have
heard of Plato, haven’t you? Anyway, I think I caught the old boy off base, and I wanted to tell James about it
before
I had to make another run to the ladies’ room. It was probably just a little garbled because nature was calling me in a very loud voice.” She stopped abruptly. “Oops!” she said. “Here we go again.” She turned and went quickly to the bathroom.

“Does that solve your problem, Mark?” Mary asked in an amused sort of way.

“It looks like I goofed, Mary,” I apologized. “My panic switch seems to be a little loose here lately.”

“I noticed that,” she agreed with a yawn.

“Sorry I woke you up,” I said. “I’ll go home and hide for a while.”

“Do that,” she said.

It was about one-thirty when I got back to the boardinghouse, and everybody was in the kitchen locked on to the little TV set. “What’s happening?” I asked.

“You’d better get a grip on something solid, old buddy,” Charlie told me. “The whole city of Seattle just got turned upside down.”

“Would somebody translate that for me?” I asked the rest of the crew.

“The word hit the television news about a half an hour ago, Mark,” Trish told me. “Evidently, the police found a footprint at the scene of the Montlake Park murder. There was a puddle right beside the body—a puddle that was part mud and part blood. The Slasher left a footprint there, and one of the cops was sharp enough to take a plaster impression before the print dissolved into a muddy blur.”

“I’m not sure that a footprint’s going to be a major breakthrough, is it?”

“
This
one is,” Erika disagreed. “It appears that our local celebrity wears a pair of those fancy athletic shoes that rather conveniently has the shoe size imprinted on the sole.”

“Big deal,” I scoffed.

“It is this time, Mark,” Trish told me. “The shoe was a size eight.”

“So?”

“It was about an inch and a half shorter than a men’s size eight,” Charlie said. “That footprint was made by a woman’s shoe. Evidently, the Seattle Slasher is a woman.”

“You’re not serious!”

“The cops are, and the TV reporters are absolutely ecstatic about it.” He grinned at me. “Brace yourself, Mark. Some lady reporter with a flair for the dramatic came up with an alternative to ‘Seattle Slasher.’ How does ‘Joan the Ripper’ grab you?”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

James, Charlie, and I took off for the Green Lantern right after supper that evening, after a brief but fairly intense argument with the ladies. They definitely wanted to come along. Charlie had to talk fast to persuade them that his brother would almost certainly clam up if three strangers joined us in the booth. There was some discontented muttering about that, and the term “male chauvinist pigs” cropped up a few times.

Bob West was seriously pissed off when we joined him in our usual back booth. “I think it’s just about time to take that goddamn Burpee to a veterinary hospital and have him put to sleep,” Bob growled. “If he doesn’t learn to keep his goddamn mouth shut, we’re
never
going to get this killer off the streets!”

“Are you saying that it was Burpee who leaked the bit about that footprint in Montlake Park?” Charlie asked.

“I can’t prove it,” Bob replied, “but it sure
smells
like a Burpee foul-up. Anytime a reporter gets to within a half block of Burpee, that klutz spills his guts all over the sidewalk.”

“Have they come up with a name for the guy who got cut up yet?” I asked.

“Kowalski,” Bob replied. “Roger Kowalski. He was pretty well loaded up on crack cocaine, but there was definitely curare in there as well.”

“A mix like that could do some real strange things to a guy, couldn’t it?” Charlie asked.

“Yeah, strange—particularly if some lady happens to be slicing off these, those, and thems while you’re flying high.”

“If the cops were that close, how did the killer manage to get away?” I asked.

“Near as they could tell, she swam away before they even found Kowalski.”

“
Swam?
In
January
?”

“Getting away
is
sort of important, Mark.”

“Is it possible that the footprint could be a ruse?” James asked Bob. “A small man
could
jam his feet into a pair of women’s shoes, couldn’t he?”

“It doesn’t float, James,” Bob told him. “There were a few things that Burpee didn’t know about, so he couldn’t—thank heaven—leak them to the reporters. I’ve talked with those two cops, and they told me that whoever was butchering Kowalski was
singing
, for God’s sake!”

“Singing?” James asked incredulously.

“I didn’t believe it right at first either, but both cops swore up and down that they heard it. They said that it wasn’t exactly a song—more like some kind of moaning—but it was definitely a woman’s voice.”

The guys probably thought that I’d gone a little spacey after Bob unloaded
that
on us. Some things had clicked into place, and my conclusions had made me go cold all over. I didn’t trust myself to say anything at all.

“Are you OK, Mark?” Charlie asked me after Bob had left. “You’re acting like you’re not even in there anymore.”

“Sorry,” I said. “This came out of left field, and I’m trying to readjust my thinking, is all.”

“It puts a whole new twist on things, that’s for sure,” Charlie agreed. “I’ve got a hunch that the media folks are going to flounder around with this for a while before they get their act together. Let’s hit the bricks, guys. I’ve got work waiting for me at home.”

“That’s assuming the ladies don’t tie you to a chair as soon as we get there,” James said. “I doubt they’re going to be satisfied with a brief summary of what your brother just told us.”

James was right on
that
one. The girls wanted all the details when we got home. I let James and Charlie do most of the talking, though. I wanted time to think my way through some disturbing possibilities.

We sat in the kitchen hashing things out until almost midnight. The concept of a female serial killer took some getting used to, that much was certain. I was surprised that Sylvia hadn’t made some of the connections that were bothering me so much. That might come later, but I was glad she’d missed it for right now.

We finally hung it up and went to bed. I was sure I wouldn’t sleep very much.

The discovery that the Seattle Slasher was a woman had brought me face-to-face with a distressing possibility. There were quite a few “what-ifs” involved, and the biggest one was “what if Renata was the Slasher?” Since most—if not all—of the victims had a record of assorted sexual offenses and a rapist had murdered Regina, God knows that Renata had a motive. And the fact that Mary worked the graveyard shift at the cop shop gave Twinkie plenty of opportunity.

Our assumption that Twinkie’s nightmares were a rerun of the night when Regina’d been raped and murdered was fairly logical, I suppose, but there
was
a possibility that they’d been something entirely different. What if those nightmares hadn’t been dreams, but reality instead? What if Twink
wasn’t
getting wiped out by something that’d happened back in the spring of ’95, but by something that was only a couple of hours old?

The thing that’d triggered my growing suspicion had been Bob’s almost offhand revelation that the Slasher’d made good her escape by taking to the water and swimming away in the dark. That might have been just a spur-of-the-moment means of escape from a couple of cops who’d been almost on top of her, but what if it’d just been a standard operating procedure? Cutting somebody to pieces while he’s still alive is likely to be a very messy business. And since there’d been a lake, or a river, or Puget Sound right there after every slaying, a quick dunk would be the fastest way to clean off the blood—
and
it’d explain why Twink was always moaning about cold water when she went bonkers.

That, of course, would mean that those “bad days” would always follow a murder. There’d been several, of course, that’d popped up when there
hadn’t
been any reports of murders, but all that probably meant was that the cops hadn’t found the body yet. If I was anywhere close to right about this, when Twink had a bad day, there was a dead guy somewhere in the general vicinity.

That brought me up short. There’d been a killing last night, and Twink had been anything
but
bonkers in the morning. She’d gone to James’s class just like a normie, and except for that bout of diarrhea she hadn’t had anything wrong at all.

Clearly, I was going to have to do some digging here. What I
really
wanted was some clear proof that Twinkie
hadn’t
committed those murders, and trying to prove a negative is damn near impossible. My best bet would be to pinpoint a murder that Twink couldn’t possibly have committed. One that’d happened on a night when Mary hadn’t gone to work would be the best—or maybe one that’d come along when Twink hadn’t been in town.

“Oh, hell,” I said then as I suddenly remembered something. Twink couldn’t possibly be the Slasher; she didn’t have a car. It was quite a ways to Woodinville and even farther to Des Moines. Twink had that silly bike, but twenty or thirty miles out and twenty or thirty back put
those
murders way out of range, and the notion that she might have taken a bus was absolutely ridiculous.

So Twinkie was in the clear . . . So why were my insides still roiling?

I knew that this whole idea would bug me until I’d plowed my way through the entire series of events, matching bad days with murders—and hoping to high heaven that they wouldn’t match after all. The first step—dating the killings—wouldn’t be any problem. The university library had copies of the
Seattle Times
dating back to the early twentieth century, so pinpointing murder dates would be a piece of cake.

Dating those bad days when Twink had gone bonkers might be a little tougher, though. Unless Mary kept a diary, she probably couldn’t be very precise. If anybody would have those dates, it’d be Sylvia. Her case history might not go all the way back to the time of that first murder, but anything since early November was almost certain to be in her notes.

My next problem would be finding some way to ask Sylvia for those dates without alerting her to what I was doing and why.
That
might turn out to be tougher than I thought. . . .

After my seminars on Friday, I managed to catch Sylvia before she left to take Twink to Lake Stevens.

“Have you got a minute, babe?” I asked her.

“Sure, Mark,” she replied. “What’s up?”

“Mary’s got me a little worried,” I lied. “This notion of hers that Twinkie’s on the fast track back to Fallon’s bughouse is starting to tighten up my jaws. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but it seems to me that these days when Twink flips out are getting more frequent. I was wondering if you’ve been pinpointing them in your case history.”

“Of course I have, Mark. Dates are very important in a case history.”

“Then you can probably fill me in on every one of them that’s popped up since early in November, can’t you?”

“I can go back even further if you want me to. Renata checks in with Dr. Fallon every Friday, remember? He questioned her closely during her visits last fall when she kept lapsing into the fugue state, and he spotted the blank days almost immediately. I don’t think Renata’s fully aware of it, but she’s had quite a few six-day weeks since she moved to Seattle. I knew that he’d be keeping close tabs on those dates, and I wheedled them out of him. I’ve got the list, you’ve got a copy machine—so you can have a list of your very own in just a few minutes.” She went across the hall to her room and came back a moment or so later with a sheet of paper. “Here you go,” she said, handing the paper to me. “Don’t lose it.”

“I’ll copy it now,” I said, “and bring it right back.”

“There’s no real rush, Mark.”

“Let’s play it safe,” I told her. “I’ve got stacks of paper on every flat surface in my room, and your list might slip off into a black hole if I don’t keep my hands on it.” I pounded upstairs, got my little copier running, and ran off a copy of her list. Then I hurried back downstairs and handed it to her. “I owe you, Sylvia,” I panted.

“Don’t worry,” she replied with an impish little grin. “Someday I might need a favor from you, and I’ll remind you about this one.”

“I sort of expected that.”

“It’s an Italian tradition, Mark,” she told me. “We
always
collect these debts.” She glanced at her watch. “I’d better get moving. Dr. Fallon’s a stickler for punctuality.”

I stowed my copy of Sylvia’s list in my briefcase, then headed for the library, fervently hoping that the dates wouldn’t match.

The Muñoz killing had hit the front page, largely because he’d been a minor celebrity as a dope lord. The similarities between
that
murder and a couple of the later ones got
those
killings onto page one as well. That had been back when the reporters were all riding Burpee’s “gang killing” horse. I was actually grateful for Burpee’s obsession with Cheetah at that point. Andrews and Garrison were such small-timers that normally they would have rated only a paragraph or two on page thirty-seven. The possibility of some connections between their murders and the killing of Muñoz had elevated them to the limelight.

Once the media had come up with that “Seattle Slasher” designation, though, the assorted nonentities who’d gotten themselves butchered became front-page news, and it didn’t take long to get all the dates and places.

I had a sick feeling by the time I got into the December newspapers. I had two lists now, and they matched almost perfectly. Twinkie
had
suffered three or four bad days when there hadn’t been an “official” murder, but that didn’t brighten my day very much. There were several “unofficial” murders as well as the ones that’d made the headlines—Woodinville, Auburn, and so on—so I couldn’t really wiggle out of it. Much as I hated the idea, my off-the-wall theory seemed to be growing increasingly valid. There appeared to be a definite connection between the killings and Twinkie’s psychotic episodes.

I was muttering quite a few obscenities when I finished up and left the library.

The newspapers had latched onto that “Joan the Ripper” tag, and it was an immediate smash hit. It was grossly overdramatic, of course, but the parallels were fairly obvious, and the news media
love
to be obvious. The cloth-heads who breathlessly hang on to anything lurid and spectacular that hits the TV screen aren’t too bright to begin with, so it doesn’t take much to wind them up. People who rely on newspapers are a little more intelligent . . . but not very much. The public in Seattle was treated to a lurid rerun of the Jack the Ripper story every time they turned around. The attempts to compare late-nineteenth-century London with late-twentieth-century Seattle didn’t come off too well, and several lady reporters were obviously taking a gender-specific approach to the story. The victims
were
sexual predators of one stripe or another, after all, and the more militant lady reporters were slanting their stories in the general direction of justifiable homicide. I’m fairly sure that wouldn’t come off very well in a court of law, but it
did
sell a lot of newspapers.

Under different circumstances, I might have been amused by this applause for vigilante justice, but I’m sure you can understand why I wasn’t laughing this time.

I stewed about my growing suspicion over the weekend, and I couldn’t concentrate on much of anything else. Every time I sat down to read Hemingway or Faulkner, I’d find myself staring at the wall and trying to find some kind of hole in my theory. I tried my best to keep it under wraps, but I’m fairly sure that the boardinghouse gang knew that I was having a problem of some kind.

After supper on Monday, James suggested to Charlie and me that maybe we should make a quick run to the Green Lantern. “There’s something I’d like to check out with Bob,” he told us.

“Oh?” Charlie said. “What’s that?”

James smiled faintly. “I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you,” he replied.

“What do you think, Mark?” Charlie asked me. “Should we humor him?”

“We might as well,” I said grimly. “I’ll get my coat.”

Bob was sitting at the bar when we got there, and the four of us adjourned to a back booth. “What’s up?” Bob asked us.

“James has a question for you,” Charlie replied.