The Devil's Menagerie (27 page)

“What’s wrong, honey?” Dave’s voice, calling her back from the abyss.

“I … I don’t know. Something … My God, Dave, what’s happening to us? What did we do wrong?”

T
HE HARASSMENT COMPLAINT
made by the Lindstroms on Monday was still on Linda Perez’s desk Friday morning. It didn’t have a very high priority. After all, the woman’s ex hadn’t actually done anything illegal or harmful, and there had been no further complaints during the week. Glenda Lindstrom hadn’t acted like your typical hysterical woman, Linda thought, but it wouldn’t be the first time in her experience that a complainant conjured up some high drama to grab attention. Maybe the present husband was straying. Who knew?

Meanwhile, since Monday, Linda had had two new cases of spousal battery, supported by trips to Our Little Company of Mary Hospital, that she had to follow up on. Thank God the district attorney’s office wasn’t brushing these cases aside the way they used to.

Linda managed to complete a report later that morning on the Lindstrom complaint. A waste of time, another contribution to the mountain of paperwork that was part of the Job, but what else was new?

She had just dropped it into the Outgoing bin on the right corner of her desk when the FBI woman entered the squad room, who nodded pleasantly at Linda as she passed by, heading for Braden’s corner.

Braden was on his feet. For Chrissake, was he going to hold her chair? No, Linda observed, but from her point of view what happened next was just as bad. Braden glanced at Captain Hummel’s office, saw that it was empty, and led the Feeb into the office, closing the door behind them.

Linda Perez tried to observe them without staring. What was going on with those two? she wondered.

All work and no play?

“I
READ YOUR
report on Lindstrom,” Karen Younger said.

“And?”

“Interesting.”

“So did you run him through the Bureau’s computers?”

“Of course I ran him. And got just what I expected. Nothing. He was never in Germany or the service, just as he told you. As far as I could learn, he’s never even had a speeding ticket.”

Braden stared out of the captain’s fishbowl. He saw Linda Perez glance toward him, then look away quickly. He said, “It’s Friday. Our guy’s been out hunting the last two Fridays. Do you suppose he has a thing about the end of the week?”

“Maybe it has something to do with his normal schedule—his work schedule, for instance.”

“Instead of getting drunk Friday night, he rapes and kills a woman. Was the German girl killed on a Friday?”

Karen frowned, her gaze suddenly distant. “No, it was a Saturday night. I remember, because I was called out Sunday morning after the girl was found.”

Braden didn’t know whether to be relieved or concerned. If Friday was significant, and the killer struck again, the media frenzy would make the last two weeks seem like a pep rally. “You talk to your bosses back in D.C.?” he asked.

The FBI agent hesitated briefly. “I talked to Buddy Cochrane—my boss—about what your captain said about bringing in an FBI task force. They want to help, Braden. They’re not trying to ace you out.”

“Uh-huh. You working for them or for us now?”

“I’m assigned here as a consultant for you and your people. If special agents ask me anything, I’ll tell them. We’re not competing, Detective—we’re all after the same thing.”

Braden turned away from the glass wall, putting his back to the squad room. The agent looked a little flustered, he thought, as if she herself realized that her assertion the FBI wasn’t trying to take over the case was weak.

“What’s your worst possible scenario?” he asked.

“The worst possible?” She considered the question seriously. “The worst is … he doesn’t hit again. Not here. He moves on and disappears.”

“And?”

“Six months from now, a year, three years, who knows? He’s in St. Louis or Miami … he starts again.”

They both brooded on this possibility, which Braden knew was not put out casually. The FBI had studied hundreds of serial killers. Karen Younger would know that some of them did exactly what she had suggested.

After a moment Braden said, “I don’t think he’s going anywhere. And I don’t think he’s the same guy you have in your files from eight years ago.”

“You said that before. Where’s it taking us now?”

“To David Lindstrom.” When she started to shake her head in denial Braden pressed ahead, using his thumb to tick off his reasons against the tips of his fingers. “Sheri Kuttner pointed us at him—you did a good job getting her to open up. He wasn’t in Germany, but he’s the first real link between the two San Carlos victims. Both were his students. Sheri thought Edie was having a fling with Lindstrom. Maybe Natalie was next in line. Maybe he’s one of those professors who has a new favorite each semester.”

“So why does he suddenly start killing them?”

Braden shrugged. “Edie pushed too hard. We don’t really have to know why or how. She didn’t like being dumped for the new girl? Or it could have been the other way around, and she was brushing
him
off. Either way, they quarreled, he lost his temper and hit her. Then it got out of hand.”

“He was packing weights in his fist when he hit her,” Karen pointed out. “Does that sound like a crime of passion to you, or something premeditated?”

“We’re just guessing why he did it,” Braden admitted. “But if she had threatened him in some way, that would explain it. He was vulnerable, a professor breaking the rules. Also, he’s a married man, kids … he panicked.”

“And Rothleder?”

“She knew about Foster,” Braden said slowly, liking the sound of it.

Karen Younger shook her head emphatically. “You’ve got nothing but guesses, Detective. And Lindstrom doesn’t fit the profile.”

“The profile—”

“—isn’t all bullshit. It’s fact, Braden. From what I’ve learned, David Lindstrom is easygoing, affable, decent, well-liked. Nothing in his background points toward instability. Also, he’s not physical enough.”

“He’s in good shape,” Braden argued. “Jogs regularly. Fights fires in his spare time.”

“The man we’re looking for grew up a bully and he’s still a bully. He’s seething inside. He could never play a mild-mannered professor for as long as Lindstrom has.”

“I’m not finished,” Braden said stubbornly. “Lindstrom is a volunteer firefighter. He was on duty on the fire lines the Friday night Edie Foster was kidnapped, but he and his crew were given a few hours off to go home, grab a hot meal and a few hours sleep. They were supposed to be back on duty at midnight. Trouble is, there was so much confusion on the lines that night nobody can remember whether all the volunteers came back or what time.”

Braden paused, reading the skepticism in the FBI agent’s eyes. Trying not to stare too obviously at the way her teal green cashmere sweater molded her breasts. It seemed to him that Younger’s edges had visibly softened since she had arrived in San Carlos, reflected in the way she dressed. Maybe it was getting away from Quantico, he thought, all those starched shirts and ties inside, all those Marines drilling outside …

“The absence of someone like Lindstrom could easily have gone unnoticed. He could’ve grabbed Edie, kept her until it was getting light, then dumped her and showed up back on the fire lines, with no one able to say for sure he wasn’t there all along.”

“Someone would know. He mentioned a crew boss.”

“Yeah. Supposedly he worked with this Navajo Indian all night. Trouble is, the Indian can’t be found. He’s from the reservation over there in Arizona. He took off last week for the back country, some religious thing. No one knows where he is or when he’ll be back.”

“All you have is speculation, Braden. Our killer is more careful than the man you just described. He also had to be in a position to follow Foster that night after she left the coffee shop.”

“Unless he gave her a call, said honey I’m free, meet me at the regular place by the Alpha Beta.”

“If this is all you’ve got …”

“There’s more. The night Natalie Rothleder was killed, Lindstrom had an evening class, seven to nine. It let out a little early … about a quarter to nine.” Braden offered her a thin smile. “Time and opportunity.”

Karen Younger didn’t hesitate. “He’s your suspect, Braden. Not mine.”

“You’re pretty damned sure of yourself,” Braden said testily. “What do you need us ordinary cops for?”

“Because I’m gonna catch the son of a bitch, Detective. And when I do, I don’t want to be alone.”

3
RD
A
NNUAL
S
AN
C
ARLOS
Powwow
, the poster read.
Fri
. 7–9
PM
,
Sat. & Sun. 11–8. Native American Dancers, Gifts & Crafts
.

Staring at the poster taped to the coffee shop window, Ralph Beringer felt the hand of fate like a warm, caressing touch, guiding him unerringly. Not like a mother’s hand—not for him. For Beringer that had been a thin, bony hand, one moment hot and demanding, the next cracking across his face or biting into the flesh of his arm with fingers like claws, always accompanied by the lacerating voice that peeled away his feeble child’s defenses and left him exposed, trembling with fear.

He didn’t know exactly what a powwow was, but it wasn’t hard to figure. There would be Indian dances, booths hawking beads and turquoise jewelry and T-shirts, other vendors selling squaw bread, hot dogs and hamburgers. And there would be lots of students coming and going, or milling around in the darkness away from the action …

Including Nancy Showalter, with that healthy spill of dark red hair and the long legs and the big wet mouth …

Her boyfriend, too, but Beringer wasn’t worried about him.

After learning the girl’s name, he had discovered that Nancy lived in one of the on-campus dormitories. While that put her, for the moment, out of his reach, buffered by student patrols and a heightened security officer presence, the Friday night powwow on campus did not merely open a crack in that security, it threw the door wide open. Nancy would be there, and no one would question Beringer’s presence. He would be invisible, just one of the crowd.

He could feel the drumbeat in his blood, like distant Indian drums the night before a battle, filling the air with promise.

T
HAT SAME
F
RIDAY
morning, after dropping Elli off at school and driving to the bookstore where she worked part-time, Glenda Lindstrom had asked Richard Alvarez, the store manager, if she could leave an hour early. Since she was always on time for work and accomplished as much on her short shift as many of his full-time employees managed in a day, Alvarez readily agreed. “Is everything okay?” he asked.

“Sure, fine … why?”

“Well, you’ve been looking … I don’t know … worried.”

Her smile was too bright. “When did you meet a mother who wasn’t a worrier?”

Normally she worked from nine to twelve, coming in an hour before the store opened and leaving in time to pick Elli up at school at twelve-thirty. The three hours gave Glenda time to complete her daily bookkeeping and to update a running stock inventory—a task she had volunteered for when she saw the need.

She left the store at five minutes past eleven. After the previous incident at the school, under no circumstances would she be late, but she had more than an hour to spare.

Full Bore, the gun store whose newspaper ads she had often seen, was on the west side of town. She had always disapproved of gun stores in general. There were far too many weapons on the streets without encouraging the sale of more. The National Rifle Association’s strident arguments about the right to own automatic assault weapons to shoot ducks or defend their homes against Communist hordes had always offended her with their blatant hypocrisy.

Who’s being hypocritical now? she asked herself as she parked the station wagon outside the shop. She glanced around with a vague feeling of guilt, thinking of Dave. He felt even more strongly about guns than she did. She knew what he would have said if she had told him she wanted a gun to protect Elli and Richie.
“You can’t really believe he means them any harm.”

Well-meaning people like Dave didn’t want to believe there were real monsters in enlightened America at the end of the twentieth century. In the movies he watched, Dave readily accepted Freddy Krueger and Frankenstein’s monster, wolfmen, vampires, even a Hannibal Lector, but offscreen he preferred not to recognize the existence of parents who dumped children in trash cans, men who brutalized their wives out of plain meanness, monsters who drank human blood and cannibalized their victims. Like this serial killer in San Carlos, she thought, though the police were cautiously refusing to label him as such.

A bell over the door rang when she stepped inside. She was immediately struck by the strong smells of oil and metal and leather. Everywhere she looked were guns, knives, holsters and accessories, bows and arrows. Racks of rifles and shotguns filled one whole end of the store. Handguns were displayed in glass cases under the long main counter. The salesman, a man in his sixties with thinning white hair combed straight back over a pink scalp pocked with incipient skin cancers, beamed at her. “Mornin’, ma’am, what can I do for you?”

He reminded her of her grandfather. They would have had a lot to talk about, she supposed. Her grandfather, who had lived near Rhinelander, Wisconsin, had hunted pheasant and ducks and deer in their seasons. In Wisconsin, hunting was a way of life.

Her father had taught each of his girls to shoot, using a 9mm Beretta automatic. When she asked to see a similar weapon, the black handgun the salesman produced felt heavier than she remembered. It was also larger. How could she carry such a gun around without being obvious?

“It’s a fine choice,” the grandfatherly salesman assured her. “If you can handle it, that is. The slide mechanism needs a firm, hard pull. Some women have trouble with it, but you look to me like you got strong hands.”