The Devil's Menagerie (5 page)

Edie stopped short, maybe a little wary but not alarmed as she took in the appearance of the tall, tanned, well-built man facing her. Beringer smiled easily and backed against the Taurus, offering her room to open her driver’s side door. The courteous gesture calmed any concern she might have had. With a faint smile touching her red lips she moved forward, unlocking her car door with a touch of a remote button on her key chain, ready to slip into the bucket seat.

Beringer said, “Hi, Edie.”

Her eyes leaped toward his, startled. “What? Who—?”

He hit her once, hard, in the stomach. The air exploded from her lungs in one whoosh and she sagged like a pile of rags. Beringer caught her easily, levered the door of the Taurus open behind him and swung her onto the passenger seat. He folded the long, lovely legs into the car, dropped her plastic bag of groceries at her feet and closed the door with the door lock already set. Edie’s face was pale behind the window, her mouth open and struggling to suck air like a fish in the bottom of a boat.

Walking quickly around the front of the Taurus, Beringer scanned the parking lot. The woman in the station wagon was driving away. No one was looking his way, only a few stragglers in sight intent on their own small errands. Into the Ford, all doors locked, the wide package tape ready in its holder, slap it around her wrists, taping them together in her lap. Tape around her ankles too; good, no trouble now. Tape her mouth as well? She was coming out of it a little, panic leaping into her eyes when she realized her hands and feet were tied. He didn’t really want to tape that pretty mouth, he had better plans for it, so he hit her on the side of the face, holding the roll of steel balls, and saw her lights go out.

Driving slowly, the excitement singing in his blood, Beringer left the shopping center and drove south, following the coastal route on the ocean side of the burning hills.

B
IKE TRAILS HAD
been laid out just off the coastal highway south of San Carlos, where the road traversed some protected wetlands, a sanctuary for migrating birds. The trails were popular with weekend bicyclists. There was the ocean off to the west, beyond the highway, and a quarter mile of sand dunes, and inland there were some twenty thousand acres of relatively untouched nature teeming with ducks and cranes, occasional Canadian geese and a variety of smaller birds.

Harry Malkowski, a reed-thin chemistry student in his third year at San Carlos College, tried to get in a full fifty-mile bicycle run every weekend, following the trails south from San Carlos along the coastline. He liked to get out early, before the trails were packed with other cyclists or the joggers who never seemed to get the idea that the bike trails were for people on bikes, not on foot.

This Saturday he was out early as usual, a thermos of coffee strapped to the carrier behind the seat of his Yamaha ten-speed, the sun not yet up when he hit the trail shortly after five o’clock. The hoped-for onshore flow of air had moved in late Friday night, bringing early morning coastal clouds and the cooler temperatures that meant relief for the firefighters in the hills. Unlike many beachgoers who loved the dry, warm Santa Ana winds and hated the usual coastal clouds and damp fog, Harry enjoyed these misty mornings. They muffled the beat of city noise behind him, leaving him alone with the distant crashing of the surf, invisible beyond the dunes, and the tranquil beauty of the wetlands as far as he could see. This morning veils of mist curled over the marshes like the fire smoke that blanketed the San Carlos hills. Through the mist Harry glimpsed a family of ducks swimming along one of the estuaries, a white crane standing one-legged in shallow water as still as a post, a colony of mudhens, and there, by God, yes, two honkers drifting on the water, must have flown in during the night.

Where the highway spanned one of the many creeks that threaded through the wetlands and the bike trail ran parallel to the road over its own wooden bridge, Harry saw the body. Shock pelted through him. He veered to the right, nearly colliding with the railing of the overpass. He stared down at the foot of the highway bridge, his heart pounding. A young woman, naked, lay facedown in the mud on the bank of the creek. For Harry, whose nights were often filled with fantasy images of naked women, there was nothing titillating about the sight of this one at all. She looked pathetic rather than sexy lying there. She looked dead.

Harry Malkowski didn’t want to stop riding. He didn’t want to give up his Saturday outing, he didn’t want to get involved. For a long moment he sat motionless on his bike, sweat drying under his fleece pullover and pants, a chill beginning to penetrate—and not only from the damp, cool air and drying perspiration.

He couldn’t leave her there like that, eating mud, dumped like a bag of garbage below the road. He just couldn’t.

There was a telephone next to a roadside cafe, the Bright Spot, about a mile back. Harry made it in record time on the ten-speed.

D
ETECTIVE
/F
IRST
C
LASS
Timothy Braden of the San Carlos Police Department’s Investigations Unit got the call at 6:08
A.M.
that Saturday morning. He had had one of those nights where he went to sleep around midnight, woke up at two-thirty in the morning, the air heavy and the sheets clammy, and was still awake at four, watching the end of a 1940s
film noir
in which Dick Powell acted like a tough guy and the cops acted like surly jerks. Pretty much the way cops still acted, Braden mused.

Bleary-eyed and unshaven, he made it out of his apartment in ten minutes and pushed his unmarked car hard through the empty streets.

Mist swirled over the highway as he pulled up behind the flashing red and blue lights on a pair of black-and-whites. Two uniforms were waving curious drivers along. There wasn’t much vehicular traffic, but even at this hour—Braden logged in at the scene at 6:39—there were gawkers on the highway and along a bike trail on the inland side of the road. Braden immediately sensed the potential for a jurisdictional problem. The uniforms were sheriff’s deputies. Braden was San Carlos PD, and he wasn’t exactly sure if this wetland strip was within San Carlos city limits or was county land. More likely, it was U.S. government property.

Braden parked a short distance down the road on the apron and walked back to the bridge. The highway crossed a shallow creek, its bed about ten feet below the road. There was another bridge about thirty feet or so in from the highway, a wooden structure about five feet wide. It was here that most of the gawkers were clustered—morning joggers and bicyclists in their designer exercise outfits and Nikes. Braden had given up wondering what drew people to gape at scenes of blood and mayhem.

Braden nodded at two deputies who stood at one end of the bridge. He knew the older one, Al Borland, a beefy man with close-cropped gray hair, the mottled complexion of a heavy drinker and the generally skeptical view of humanity that cops acquired after twenty years on the job. Braden, whose own disposition was often questioned, got along with him fine.

“Morning, Al,” he said, nodding also at the younger deputy, whom he didn’t know. “What have you got?”

Borland stepped aside, giving Braden his first glimpse of the green plastic sheet at the edge of the muddy creek below them. “An ugly one,” he said.

Braden suspected he wasn’t talking about the victim.

“We haven’t touched her, just covered her up. We’re waitin’ on the techs.”

“You see enough to fill me in while we’re waiting?”

“Yeah, sure. She’s a young woman, maybe twenty. Caucasian, no ID. Not a stitch on her—that’s why the deputy used the tarp. Those footsteps on the bank, those are Deputy Reardon’s. He’s the one covered her.” Borland caught Braden’s glance and said, “Shit, Braden, you can’t blame him. There was already a crowd building up on that path over there. Some of those ghouls even have cameras, for Chrissakes. They’ll be peddling pictures all over the college campus by this afternoon. This is … she was a good-looking woman. Talk about sickos … these gawkers are almost as bad as the perp.”

“How was she done?”

“There’s a little blood, not much. She wasn’t done here. That’s why Reardon figured he wasn’t messin’ up a murder scene goin’ down there. There were no tracks. That’s soft mud and sand on the creek bottom, and the bank’s soft too. She wasn’t carried down. She was just dumped from this bridge.”

Both sides of the creek between the highway and the pedestrian bridge had been sealed off with yellow crime scene tape, but at least a dozen onlookers hung over the railing along the bike path, staring down and whispering to each other, the way people do in the presence of the dead, as if loud voices might disturb the departed spirit.

Borland followed Braden’s gaze. “I know,” he said. “Time I got here it was too late to secure that part of the scene, the gawkers were ahead of me. Anyways, she had to be dumped from this side.”

“Maybe he had trouble lifting her over the side,” Braden said, more to himself than to Borland. “There might be something.”

The parapet for the highway bridge was cement. Like the paved highway, it offered little promise for trace evidence but would have to be thoroughly checked out.

“I want to have a look at her.”

“No problem,” the deputy sheriff said.

Braden went down to the creek twenty feet east of where the victim lay under her green plastic cover. He approached the body slowly along the edge of the creek bed. Water sloshed into his shoes. Ignoring the stares of the curious bystanders on the bike path above and behind him, he squatted and lifted a corner of the sheet.

The girl lay facedown in the mud. A small amount of blood had seeped into the moist earth, looking black in the gray morning light. Under other conditions the victim would have been beautiful, Braden saw. A slender, shapely figure with nice long legs. Dirt smeared her buttocks and thighs. He wondered what time the tide had gone out and whether she had rolled at all. No, he decided, examining the creek bank. She had been dropped right here, a ten-foot drop from the road, more like twelve from the top of the parapet, and the impact had created the depression in the sand she lay in. There were no visible cuts or bruises on her back or on the backs of her legs. She lay facedown, and gravity was already pulling the blood downward. He could see signs of lividity that would be more obvious when she was turned over.

Braden carefully lifted her wrist. It remained flexible and there was little resistance. He touched her hair with the tip of his forefinger, gently moving the strands aside. A blue eye stared up at him.

Unnerved, Braden let the plastic sheet drop over her.

He climbed to the top of the bank and stood there quietly, thinking about the young woman under her shroud. There was a good chance she was a San Carlos College student, given her age. All of her dreams and aspirations, the hopes and fears of her parents, all of it ended before her life had really begun to find its shape and purpose.

He wondered when the medical examiner and crime scene technicians would get there. Everything at a scene waited for them. Maybe there was nothing for them to find other than the victim herself. Borland was right, this wasn’t the murder scene. But everything was on hold all the same.

The damp morning chill penetrated his jacket, causing him to hunch his shoulders. He was suddenly aware of being stared at, whispered about, though he did not turn his head toward the bike path. He was used to the stares and whispers, but that didn’t make them any easier to ignore.
That’s him. How could they let him near her?

Borland coughed, standing beside him. Braden shook himself. “Who found her?” he asked.

“We got a 911 call at …” Borland consulted a small spiral notepad. “… 5:42. Kid said he was out biking, came over that wooden bridge behind you. He saw the body.”

“That early in the morning?”

“It’s a popular trail. Some of those bikers, joggers too, they’re out while it’s still dark. They have the path to themselves then, I guess. Anyway, he pedaled back to that coffee shop just off the highway, the Bright Spot? About a mile back? He called in from a public phone there. The call’s on tape.”

“You talk to him yet?”

Borland shook his head. “Only got here five minutes before you did. Kid’s name is Harry Malkowski. College student. He’s back there at the Bright Spot havin’ coffee. I got a deputy baby-sittin’ him, Officer Pritkin.”

Braden had received his own call from the watch officer at the San Carlos Police Department at 6:08, which was only twenty-six minutes from the time the 911 call was clocked at the sheriff’s station. Pretty fast work, he thought. He wondered what that meant.

“You want this one, Braden,” Borland said, as if answering Braden’s unspoken question, “we got no beef. Thing is, I don’t have one homicide detective isn’t up to his ass in alligators. We don’t need this one. Might be yours, anyway, if she’s from the college and got picked up in town. This isn’t where he did it to her.”

Borland was making the same assumption Braden had: the dead girl’s killer was male. Not much of a reach, he thought.

He was relieved to hear there wouldn’t be a jurisdictional quarrel over the case. The sheriff’s department was predictably swamped in violent criminal investigations. By comparison San Carlos was an enclave of peace and tranquility. Braden had been there a year. This case, if it fell into his lap, would be his first murder investigation since leaving the LAPD’s Homicide Division.

“I’ll be glad to take it.”

“Uh … might be one problem.”

“What’s that?”

“These wetlands are U.S. government property. The feds might want to get in on it.”

Braden groaned aloud. “Not the FBI.”

Borland shifted his feet. He was a heavy man, with a cop’s big feet in heavy black leather shoes. Braden knew the deputy sheriff was glad to get the case off his hands—it had the look and smell of something that wasn’t going to go away—but something was bothering Borland. Before he could speculate further Borland answered the question.