The May Day Murders (28 page)

Sam felt a chill run down his spine
every time he tried to imagine little Tommy Bradley locked in a
closet all that time after being told by a total stranger that he
had just murdered his mother. Was it any wonder why the kid had
been so traumatized? And was it not more than obvious that Stanley
Jenkins was not only a demented, perverse murderer but a sadistic
son of a bitch as well?

Sam had opted to spare Ann the
unsettling details of the Tommy Bradley interrogation as well as
the tidbit of information one of Roger’s men had managed to gather
after tracking down Stanley Jenkins’ former college roommate. The
man who used to share a room with Stanley during his brief but
illustrious college stint told the police that Stanley had made an
interesting remark one night while he was drunk and tripping on
acid. Stanley told his roomie that he had the hots for some chick
back home and that one day he was going to “track her down and jump
on her bones whether she is a willing participant or not.” The
roommate hadn’t taken Stanley’s remark seriously at the time but he
admitted that the incident was so bizarre that he hadn’t been able
to forget it in all these years.

So some questions were raised as a
result of this tidbit of info: was Marsha Bradley the girl Stanley
had been referring to? Or had it been Sara Hunt? And if it had been
either one or the other, why would he rape and murder them both?
And twenty-some years later, no less?

Again, no rational connection could be
established between the two murders. The only optimistic aspect of
this new information was the remote possibility that perhaps
Stanley Jenkins had murdered all he was going to murder—if indeed
he’d been referring to either Marsha or Sara in his conversation
with his roommate. At least it seemed now that Ann was more or less
safe—Sam knew for a fact that she had never so much as spoken a
word to Stanley Jenkins back in high school or she would certainly
have mentioned it to him by now.

As he reached the outskirts of
Smithtown, Sam had to force himself to get his mind off the murder
investigation and on to something less troubling, like Shelley
Hatcher. He didn’t want to think about Stanley Jenkins or Ann or
anything else negative in his life right now. All he wanted to do
was focus on Shelley and the great time he was going to have with
her once this fucking debate thing was over.

It wasn’t very easy to do.

CHAPTER 18

Six weeks earlier, Stanley Jenkins
stood beside a tree and gazed down at Cindy Fuller’s sprawling
split-level home. The hillside afforded an excellent vantage
point—a virtually unobstructed view of the entire southeast area of
her house including the two-car garage, which was perhaps only
seventy-five yards away from where Stanley was standing now. The
nearest neighbor’s house was dangerously close by—not over fifty
feet to the east—but the house was all but obscured from view by
the dense stand of Douglas fir running along the boundary between
the two homes.

He checked his watch again. It was
8:06. In another ten minutes Cindy would pull into her driveway,
engage the garage door opener and pull inside. Then she would get
out of her car and head for the door that led into her kitchen,
pausing only long enough to press the garage door button mounted on
the wall beside the door before entering her impressive
home.

Once inside, she would head straight
for the kitchen pantry where she kept her copious stock of liquor
and take out a brand new bottle of Johnny Walker Red. (She’d just
finished off the rest of the old bottle the night before.) Then she
would proceed to fix herself her usual drink: two ice cubes, a few
ounces of scotch and a splash of soda water. Next, she would take
the drink along with her into the den, turn on the television and
sit down on the sofa while she nursed her drink, thinking much of
the time of how relieved she was that her mother had taken the kids
for the night. It was Wednesday again, and that meant another romp
in the hay with the mayor, whom she would be meeting at his rented
chateau on Buena Vista Lane in another hour.

Tonight, however, Cindy was going to
miss her appointment with the mayor. And it was a downright
sacrilege that the mayor’s wife would most likely never find out
that he had been having a torrid affair with the city prosecutor
for God only knew how long.

A smug grin came to Stanley’s face as
he stared down at the dimly lit oval-shaped pool in the back of
Cindy’s home. He could still picture her on that hot sticky August
night, swimming laps, naked, and totally unaware that she was being
observed. He remembered thinking to himself how well Cindy’s body
had held up over the last twenty years. Back in college, he’d only
seen her naked once, and that had been one hell of a major
undertaking in itself. He had managed to shimmy up a tree outside
of her dorm in the wee hours of the morning and caught her (by
sheer luck, really) when she’d gotten out of bed to take a piss. He
had a hunch that she always slept in the raw (she just seemed like
the type) and he knew for a fact that she almost always had to get
up some time in the middle of the night to relieve herself. This he
had learned by watching her dorm room for the past week or two and
seeing a light go on for a couple of minutes on any given night and
then go off. Fortunately for Stanley, not only had he been right
about her sleeping in the buff, he’d even had a halfway decent
vantage point at the critical moment and been able to get a pretty
good look at her.

God, had he ever been stiff and sore
after waiting in that awkward position thirty feet above the ground
for nearly three hours! And just to get a glimpse of Cindy Fuller
nude! But it had been well worth it, really, even if it had been
for only a fleeting moment …

He’d come a long way since those days,
in more ways than one. One of his greatest accomplishments had been
the simple realization that people were predictable as hell. They
were all creatures of habit to a degree and had their little
routines that they performed day in and day out. The challenging
part was getting close enough to them without getting caught so
that you could observe those routines. And that took more than mere
stealth, he’d eventually learned. It took brains, too.
Intelligence, patience and careful planning: that was the key to
success. And once you had all of these elements working together
there wasn’t a thing you couldn’t achieve.

Locating Cindy Fuller’s whereabouts had
been a fucking cinch, for example. All he’d needed was a computer,
internet access and knowing all the ropes of using search engines
to the max. The abundance of information one could acquire about
someone was staggering. Hell, you could practically access their
entire life history as long as you knew what to input and where to
input it! In a matter of a few minutes he had learned, among other
things, that Cindy Fuller presently lived in Portnoy, Colorado,
that she was recently divorced from Gregory Martin, was mother to
two kids, made over 95K a year, and was leasing a red Mercedes
coupe.

Stanley shook his head slowly from side
to side, wondering how far he could have possibly gotten in this
life if it weren’t for computers. How else could he have become the
man he was now if it weren’t for those little beige boxes of power?
It was truly mind-blowing!

If only his mother could see him now,
he thought. She would be proud of him. And she would realize that
he had been right all along—that getting good grades and studying
all the time just wasn’t enough to get by in this world. How many
times had he told her that girls don’t want to go out with a
fucking egghead—that they want to be with someone who is fucking
cool—one who wears the right clothes, knows the words to all the
latest hits on the radio and knows all the right things to say at
the right time.

Jesus!
he thought. She wouldn’t
even let him ditch those ugly horn-rimmed glasses that he’d hated
so much! Why couldn’t she ever get it through her thick skull that
it was bad enough to be intelligent and on the straight-A honor
roll all the time but to be ugly in the process made it fucking
impossible to get any chicks! It was almost as if she’d wanted him
to strike out all the time by making him wear those hideous dorky
clothes she kept buying for him, always insisting that he keep his
hair short and neatly parted on the left side by slapping a ton of
Brylcreem on it! And where in the holy horse fuck was the old man
all this time? Why, he was sitting there in his Lazy Boy recliner,
smoking his pipe and reading his fucking newspaper and telling him
to mind his mother—that’s where. Thanks for coming to my defense,
Pop, you pussy-whipped, hen-tied shitfuck!

His parents had never been able to
understand him. That was because they’d been too nearsighted to see
past his 165+ I.Q. Their son was a genius, they figured, so let’s
push him to excel in school so he can leave the rest of the
students in the rear of the class eating his dust. It was all they
had ever cared about: straight A’s and scholarships. They had no
idea what it was like to be walking down the hall and having
everyone laughing at you behind your back. Or to be in class and
have the teacher always calling on you to give him the right answer
to a question that no one else could answer. Or to have all the
guys in gym class flip you on the ass with a wet towel and
facetiously ask how many girls you’d screwed over the past
weekend.

But the girls were the worst by far.
There they were, in their mini skirts hiked up to their crotches
and those skin tight sweaters with their tits screaming to get out
and not a fucking one of the halfway decent ones would even give
him the time of day. They all looked down their noses at him as if
he were a fucking leper or something! How many times did he get
shot down, all tolled, anyway? A hundred? A fucking
thousand?
And how many girls had ever gone out with him in
all the time he’d been in high school? One. One fucking girl, and
he was using the word loosely. Loretta Hodges: the ugliest fucking
hag in the entire school.

And what had happened on his one and
only date with the ugliest girl in school? He’d taken her to a
movie and had dared to put a hand on her breast. And what had she
done? She had fucking decked him, that’s what she’d done. And if
that weren’t enough, she’d started screaming bloody murder in the
theatre as she stormed out, accusing him of being a
pervert!

That had been the last straw. He had
figured from there on out that if he was to ever score with a
chick, it was going to be a fucking beauty next time—none of this
lowering himself to the likes of Loretta Hodges’ abysmal
level.

He had decided to focus on one babe in
particular instead of spreading himself thin. She was to become his
main focus of attention—the one who was finally going to give him
what he wanted. And in the meantime, whenever he was alone in his
bedroom, he would think of her while he was jerking off instead of
pulling out one of those dog-eared
Playboys
from under the
mattress yet again. No more bullshit—she was going to be the one he
ate, drank and slept with in his dreams. He would follow her home
after school, find out all of her likes and dislikes, and basically
view her from afar until he finally felt it was time to make his
move. Then one day, when the time was just right, he would approach
this beauty and tell her how many things he knew about her and she
would be so impressed that he knew all of those intimate details
that she wouldn’t be able to resist letting him take her out on a
date. She would be the one to suddenly realize that Stanley Jenkins
wasn’t the nerd everyone thought him to be but instead a pretty
damn suave and cool guy, after all—sort of like a young James
Bond.

But he had never followed through with
his plan. He’d chosen the beautiful chick, all right, but when he
had finally approached her, he hadn’t had the nerve to tell her
that he’d been following her all over creation for the past several
months or that he knew, for example, that she liked to take long
hot baths and never failed to soak in the tub for a good twenty
minutes before she ever got around to actually washing
herself.

Nope, he had choked instead, in fact.
And had made a complete fool of himself. All because he’d made the
mistake of not being patient instead of letting someone con him
into thinking that he was ready to make the big score. That fucking
bitch had ruined nearly a whole year of
intense
sleuthing!

She was going to pay for it,
though—they both were. Just as Cindy Fuller was going to pay for
being such a total disappointment and getting him shut up in the
nut house.

And once he had Cindy all squared away
he was going to track down the other ones and make them regret that
they had ever made Stanley Jenkins the laughing stock at school.
Then he was at last going to get his second chance in life. He
would finally be free to play it by the book and find out what he’d
been missing out on all his fucking life.

He suddenly saw a car’s headlights out
of the corner of his eye. He turned and peered at Cindy Fuller’s
red Mercedes as it approached the house and pulled into the
driveway. It was too dark to see inside the car but he could
visualize her groping for the garage door opener lying on the
console and pressing the button. Stanley saw the door open as Cindy
slowed down her speed somewhat until she was in the garage. A
moment later, he heard the slam of a car door and in another, the
electric clatter of the garage door closing.