The Cruelest Cut (6 page)

As Jack was getting into his personal vehicle to go home, Liddell stopped him.

“How in the world can a kid be murdered and there is no one to claim him? No one to mourn him.” Liddell shook his head sadly.

Jack could see the sadness in his partner's eyes. “He's got us,” Jack said.

The neighborhood had seen better days, but the residents were rallying, trying their best to create a quaint atmosphere that would attract family buyers and keep the slumlords at bay. What they didn't want were more rental properties. They weren't being snobbish. It was logical that renters would have less money to put into landscaping and/or other eye-pleasing decor.

Even though Elaine Lamar was an outsider—not really a homeowner—she had been asked to join the Homeowners Association. She had gone to one meeting, and that was enough for her. Between finger sandwiches and tiny cups of punch, she had been told by at least ten different people that they would “be happy to help her come up with some ideas for giving her house a face-lift.” What they didn't offer was the money to do this with.

Elaine leaned against her ten-year-old Toyota Camry and looked up at the peeling paint and warped wood of the two-bedroom home she was renting from a friend. The grass needed cutting, and weeds grew in the gravel driveway. She couldn't remember the last time she'd given the inside of the house a decent cleaning. She inwardly groaned and thought,
There's just not enough time in the day
.

She looked at her watch. It was only noon, but she was dead on her feet and two hours late getting home on a Saturday that she wasn't supposed to be working. Not to mention that her children had been left home with orders to stay inside on an absolutely beautiful day, when they should have been outside playing or riding their bicycles, or doing something with their mother.

Working a full-time job and taking care of three kids with no help or financial support was killing her, but it wasn't like she had any choice. When her husband left her and their three children behind for a younger woman, she had been angry at first, and then the shock set in. She had almost had a nervous breakdown from worrying how she could support them or put them in a good school. Then a friend had found her the rental house, and another friend got her on at a realty firm as office manager.

The job had been an answer to her prayers, and though she loved her work with the realty company, sometimes the hours she had to put in did not seem worth the money when she considered how much of her children's lives she was missing.

The thought of how Carl had treated his children would normally infuriate her, but tonight she was just too tired to care. She was so tired, in fact, that she didn't notice that the front door was standing wide open until she reached to put the key in the door.

Jenny left the front door unlocked. What was that girl thinking?
Jenny was her oldest. Ten years old going on twenty, and the only girl. Elaine knew it had been hard on her daughter to be strapped with caring for two younger brothers when Jenny was a mere child herself. But, if it hadn't been for Jenny's maturity, Elaine would have given up long ago and lived on the welfare system. The little girl's positive and uncomplaining attitude had been the one thing that had given Elaine the courage to keep working a full-time job and taking night classes until she got her Realtor's license.

Elaine walked into the living room and called out, “Jenny? Jeremy? Ricky?” No answer. She smiled when she thought about how the two younger boys, ages three and four, still called each other “Icky” and “Germy” instead of Ricky and Jeremy. And how Jenny would patiently correct them, telling them both that they were special and shouldn't make fun of their names.

Are they hiding from me?
she wondered.
Is that why the door was left unlocked?

“Okay, you guys, game's over. Come on out.” She walked into the kitchen expecting them to leap out at her and try to scare her, but the house was quiet. A short hallway led to the two bedrooms. The bedroom on the left was Elaine's. The bedroom on the right had been the master bedroom, but because it was bigger, her three children were sharing it. If she could just keep up these hours a little longer, she would have the money to move them into a real house where they could all have their own rooms.

She stopped at the door to her bedroom and found it closed, as it should have been. When you share a small space with three children, you value all the privacy you can get. But the door to the kids' room was also closed, and that was never the case. One or the other of them was continually running in and out of that room.

So this is where they're hiding,
she thought. She grabbed the door handle, intending to rush into the room growling to play into their little game. But when she tried the handle, it wouldn't turn—the door was locked. When she'd first moved in she had thought it strange that all of the bedrooms had doorknobs that allowed the door to be locked from the inside. But it had been explained to her that because the house had been a rental property, that some of the renters had installed locking knobs on their rooms for privacy. She'd meant to put regular bedroom doorknobs on at least the children's room, but when was there time for things like that? And, she'd never imagined a scenario where the children would lock her out.

“Come on. It's not nice to lock the door on Mommy,” she said, teasingly at first, and then she began to get a bad feeling.

“Jenny. Open the door, honey. You're scaring Mommy.”

There was no response, and she started to panic, but then remembered that the door lock could be defeated by inserting a slender pushpin in a hole on the outside of the knob. She rummaged in her purse and found a paper clip. She straightened one end and plunged it into the hole in the center knob and heard the inside button pop open.

Anxious, and a little scared, she pushed the door open.

 

Susan Summers was a vision of beauty with her tanned and fit body and long, strawberry-blond hair as she walked from her car to the side door of the Indiana State Parole building.

“I could eat her up,” Eddie said, and grinned at his brother. But Bobby was looking pale and nervous. “What's the matter, bro?” Eddie asked. “No one's going to see us here.” Bobby didn't answer. He didn't seem himself lately. He hardly spoke, and when he did it was negative.

“You worried they got warrants out on us?” Eddie asked. They had violated parole many times before, and Eddie had missed the last four or five appointments with them. But Bobby was acting funny, and if Eddie didn't know that Bobby was incapable of fear he would swear his brother was scared.

“What the fuck, Bobby? So we get busted sittin' out here. They don't have nothing, so we go in front of a judge for violatin' parole, get a slap on the wrist, and back out the fuckin' door.”

Instead of speaking, Bobby pointed to the Mother Goose book. Eddie reached in the glove box and pulled out the only thing left from his childhood, a tattered copy of
Mother Goose Rhymes
. This was the same book Bobby had read to him when they were kids. He opened it to the page his brother had marked and read the passage out loud:

 

“Little Nancy Etticoat,

In a white petticoat,

And a red nose;

The longer she stands,

The shorter she grows.”

 

This was one of his favorite riddles. It had been a game he and Bobby had played when he was little, and Eddie was always good at guessing the answers. The answer to this one was “a candle.” Nancy Etticoat was a tall white candle, and the red nose was the flame. The longer the candle burns, the shorter the candle gets. This would be the next riddle, because the candle was burning for Murphy, and time was running out.
Too bad Murphy's too stupid to figure it out,
he thought.

Murphy was supposed to have caught on when they killed the kid along the river by Murphy's cabin, but Murphy hadn't reacted like they thought he would. Eddie had watched from a distance as Murphy and that big partner of his walked around the body, giving orders and looking all smug, with not one tear or look of anger or anything. Murphy hadn't even seemed to notice that the kid was cut up just like Bobby had done to him a while back.
Damn near cut Murphy's head off
, Eddie thought.
Too bad Murphy didn't die when Bobby cut him.

So it was Murphy's fault that three more kids had died, Murphy's fault he had to up the ante. If Murphy had paid attention to the notes, maybe they wouldn't have killed the kids. But he had to admit, “The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe” was the perfect rhyme for the three brats he'd killed that late afternoon.
She had so many kids she didn't know what to do,
Eddie thought.
Well, I knew what to do. Now she won't have to worry no more.

In a way, Eddie was sorry the mother wasn't home when they'd done the kids. His own mother had run off and left him and Bobby when he was too little to know what was going on. Everything the preacher had done to him and Bobby was her fault. Yeah, he would have done the mom with the kids if she'd been home. But, what the hell, maybe they'd be back for her later. Right now he had things to do. Someone else was about to have a very bad day. Too bad it wouldn't be Susan Summers. She would have to wait.

So many children

There will be more

 

The words were scrawled on the wall over one of the twin beds; the blood, still wet, was an obscene mockery of the innocent lives it had been taken from.

“What does it mean?” Jack asked in a whisper, not really expecting an answer.

The two detectives stood just inside the doorway of what would have been a typical kid's bedroom, with brightly colored clothing, tattered jeans, and scuffed tennis shoes scattered around the floor along with a mishmash of comic books, schoolbooks, and toys. But this room had been transformed by sprays of dark blood clinging to the walls, the curtains, the well-worn carpet, and what they saw was right out of a horror movie.

There were two twin beds in the little room. Jack guessed that one bed belonged to the little girl and the other was shared by the boys. The three little bodies lay side by side on one bed, posed in death by the killer, as if they were laid out for a wake. Little arms were crossed over unmoving chests, skinny legs straightened with toes pointed skyward, and each head brutally removed. The heads had been carefully arranged on one pillow at the foot of the bed, the faces wiped clean of blood so that the expression of fear and pain was clearly visible in their features. A blanket had been pulled up over the bodies when the mother had found them, and according to the crime scene guys, she had pulled this off in her panic. It lay on the floor beside the bed now, waiting to be methodically documented, photographed, and collected.

“Christ almighty,” Liddell muttered, and covering his mouth, he fled from the room.

Jack surveyed the room. It was a bloody mess. Curtains, carpeting, mattress, pillows, ceiling, and walls all stained with sprays of blood. It was as if these children had been put through a shredder. He didn't have the stomach to look closely at all of their wounds, but the on-scene deputy coroner said they all were killed by repeated cuts and stab wounds from something sharp and heavy and long, like a sword or a machete. Jack could see the little girl—Jenny was her name—had cuts on the soles of her feet. Her brothers had been luckier or had died first, leaving the killer to vent his rage on the remaining victim.

He imagined how they had been rounded up in the living room by the intruder and carried or dragged to the bedroom.
They tried to run,
he thought, looking at the different locations of blood spatters in the room. Their young ages would have precluded them from putting up much of a defense.
They were killed in this room.
There was almost no sign of a struggle in the other rooms. Apart from an overturned end table and a general disarray of couch pillows and rugs, there was almost no sign of a struggle in the rest of the house. And the absence of blood in the other rooms meant they were most likely killed in this room.

Jack looked one more time at the words on the wall.
So many children. There will be more.
There was no mistaking that the killer intended to kill again, and maybe the words meant he would kill more children. But why? Why kids? What did these children have to do with Timmy Ryan? And what did any of this have to do with Anne and Don Lewis? Did Anne Lewis or her husband have anything to do with the killer? Maybe he, or she, lost their children because of the Lewises? He didn't know. All he had were questions, no answers. And even the questions didn't make sense yet. He had never felt this helpless in his life. Children were dying, and he couldn't do a damn thing to stop it.

The mother was such a wreck at the scene that the responding emergency medical crew had sedated her and had taken her to the hospital before the detectives had arrived. The first officers on the scene said she had been “ranting” and didn't seem to understand anything. Jack and Liddell would stop at the hospital later, and Jack hoped she would be able to answer a couple of questions.

He left the bedroom and found Liddell in the kitchen. No surprise there.

“Crime scene's done in here.” Liddell was sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of water. He offered one to Jack, and then took out his notebook and rattled off the report given to him by the officers that had canvassed the neighborhood.

“Mother—Elaine Lamar—age twenty-nine. Divorced from Carl Lamar. Works for Need-a-Home Realty and puts in a long week according to the neighbors.” Liddell gave Jack a glance, and said, “Carl's an asshole, but I don't figure him for this.” He continued. “The neighbors say she leaves the kids by themselves at times, but never for a long period of time, and it doesn't happen often. The kids are Ricky, Jeremy, and Jenny, ages three, four, and ten. The neighbors also say she is a great mother and that the children are so well behaved that it never occurred to anyone to report them being left alone.”

“The little bungalow over there”—Liddell pointed over Jack's shoulder—“is occupied by Missus Geraldine Truitt, age eighty-three and a widow. She heard the children screaming a few hours earlier, but she thought they were playing. In fact, she said the kids are so quiet normally, that she had been pleased at hearing them being loud for once. She couldn't be sure of the time, but she takes her heart meds around noon, and it was somewhere around then.”

Jack had sat quietly through Liddell's report, but he now got up and checked the refrigerator.

“Already looked,” Liddell said. “There's plenty of food. One beer. Part of a bottle of wine, nothing stronger. She's clean, Jack.”

Jack knew his partner was right. When he checked with the Department of Public Welfare, they would tell him they had no record of Elaine Lamar or the children, meaning there had never been complaints of child neglect or abuse.

“Any boyfriends? Visitors?” Jack asked.

“Mother Teresa, I'm telling you, pod'na.” But Jack wasn't listening. “Jack, you okay?”

Jack started, and realized that he had been fingering the scar along his neck. The burning pain that had finally disappeared weeks ago was back with a vengeance. But the discomfort was nothing compared to the rage that gripped him. The pure hatred for the killer felt so natural, so welcoming, that it freed him for a moment from the worry of the investigation. He let the rage wash over him, giving him the confidence that he'd catch the person responsible for this. And when he did, he'd wallow in their bloody carcass like a dog rolling in a pile of manure.

“I'm going to find him,” Jack said. “Then I'm going to shit in his skull.”

Liddell's features hardened. “I'm with you, pod'na.”

 

Chief Marlin Pope's secretary was a mousy young woman with sharp, bookish features and oversized clothes that hung on her thin frame, making her look anorexic. Her face seldom showed any expression other than boredom, but as she entered the chief's inner sanctum she was almost out of breath with excitement.

“Chief!” she said.

“What is it, Jennifer?” Pope said without looking up.

“Maddy Brooks and an attorney for Channel Six are in the waiting room.”

“I'm busy, Jennifer,” Chief Pope said, motioning to the pile of paperwork on top of his desk. “If they want information, they have to go through our public information officer like everyone else.” He was surprised at her barging in like she had. She never cared much for the media before.

“I think you had better talk to them, Chief,” Jennifer Mangold said in a conspiratorial whisper. “She says they've been in touch with the killer.”

“Get Murphy and Blanchard in here,” Pope said. “And call Captain Franklin.”

“Do you want me to call the deputy chief, too?” she asked.

“Let's not bother the deputy chief yet,” Pope answered. “Tell Maddy Brooks to wait a few minutes.” She nodded and left the office.

Pope looked at the stack of paperwork that had to be sorted. “The city attorney will just have to wait,” he said to himself and cleared the top of his desk.

 

Tisha Carter crossed the parking lot, glad to be through with her morning shift as a physical therapist for St. Mary's Hospital. It was a late September afternoon, and the heat index was in the triple digits, but inside the hospital it was as cold as the inside of an igloo. She shrugged out of the sweater she had been wearing and wondered why the hospital was always so cold. But she wasn't going to let anything spoil her mood today. She was off work, it was Friday, and she had a date tonight with that nurse she'd been admiring.

Thinking about Janet made her smile. Tisha had discovered in high school that she preferred women and was very comfortable with her life choice. But Janet was an emotional wreck about her sexuality, and so their first date was comically laid out. Tisha had to drive to a neighboring city, get a place to stay under an assumed name, and then call Janet at a telephone booth to tell her that it was okay to come over. She had opted for renting a cabin near Patoka Lake. It was over an hour drive from Evansville, secluded, and they would be totally alone.

In a way, Janet's suggestion was very romantic. But women were much better at romance than men. To men, sex and romance were the same. She could feel her heart beating faster as she got behind the wheel of her car and drove out of the parking garage. She was so engrossed in her thoughts that she didn't notice the older, white van pull out of a parking space and follow her.