The Wrong Quarry (21 page)

“A rose by any other name,” he said dryly.

“Right. I stopped them.”

His chin raised just a little, but not a defensive gesture. “Meaning you...killed them?”

“Like you said—by any other name. I’m not going to provide any details. I’ll say this much—one handled surveillance on Vale, the other was here to do the killing. Did you know that was how it worked?”

He shook his head.

“You didn’t hire them directly?”

He shook his head again.

“You approached a middleman, by networking through a mob source...some Chicago connection...dating back to your dog track days.”

His eyes widened briefly and again his chin lifted. This was only the second time I’d really surprised him tonight. “Who
are
you, Mr. Quarry?”

“I told you. An interloper. So the middleman hasn’t called you, today, yesterday? To inform you of the death of one or more of the men he sent?”

“No.”

“You were not aware that this thing had started to go south?” “Absolutely not.”

I believed him.

“Okay, Mr. Stockwell. You almost certainly will be hearing from the individual you dealt with. You may be told that the contract is kaput, or you may be told a replacement team will be sent. I really have no idea which. You might be asked to put up more money, and you would have every right to refuse. You might suspect you’re being taken advantage of, and I would tend to agree, because why would you pay more just because
his
people screwed up?”

“Who the hell are you?”

“Not a reporter. But I
have
been doing some digging. And here’s what I don’t understand. Here’s why you are still alive.”

He tasted his tongue. “You have my attention.”

“Whatever minor association you had, decades ago, with the Chicago Outfit, you are not a criminal. You were born into a wealthy family, a family that had to make adjustments when their wealth-creating business went bust. So you learned to be a businessman, and a damn good one. Were you in the military?”

“No.”

“Doing the math, I figure you were probably too young for the First World War, too old for the second, way too old for Korea.”

His frown mingled irritation and confusion. “Why is that significant?”

“It’s significant because you didn’t go to war and learn to kill people. The kind of attitude toward life and death that you can acquire in war, that’s not an apparent part of who you are.”

“Why do I have the sense, Mr. Quarry, that it
is
part of who you are?”

I smiled. “Because you’re an astute businessman, Mr. Stockwell. You have dealt with a lot of people of a wide variety in your long experience. But my point is—you haven’t routinely been involved in criminal enterprises. For one thing, no need. You own the town.”

“That’s an exaggeration.”

“But not much of one. And, as I say, you are not a killer. Yet you reached back into your family’s one major brush with the mob to arrange not just a killing, but for someone to be tortured to death. That’s extra. Very expensive. And it speaks of a depth of revenge. Of hate.”

His arms were unfolded now, elbows on the armrests. “I loved my granddaughter very much.”

“That part of it, I understand. That I get. That kind of emotion, that’s something almost any of us can wrap our head around. But why are you so sure of yourself in this?”

This frown was strictly confusion. “I don’t follow...”

“You wouldn’t target Roger Vale for torture and death lightly. And I have to tell you, sir, that I have done some due diligence here. I have investigated, in a limited but experienced way. Your granddaughter may not be dead. She could be a runaway.”

“No.”

“I understand why you consider it unlikely, but it’s possible. Or she could have gone off to a big city and met with an unfortunate end before she had a chance to get in touch with her father, and say she was sorry and please Daddy send me a plane ticket. First class, as your son pointed out. No, she was a beautiful, sexually desirable young woman. She could easily meet with a tragic end on her first night in a big bad city.”

“No.”

“But if she
was
murdered—and that murder had been made to look like a disappearance—the possible suspects here in Stockwell are many. I
know
you loved your granddaughter, sir, but...she was sexually promiscuous. I think you know that.”

He grunted something that was not quite a laugh. “It seems to run in the family.”

“Your daughter is another story. I think you probably spoiled her like Candy’s father spoiled his daughter. It led to some unfortunate things in both instances, but Jenny is really a good daughter, sir, and you should appreciate her more, what a smart, unique person she is, whatever her quirks. You might want to shift some of that love for your dead granddaughter your alive daughter’s way, but hey. That’s none of my business.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Candy, for whatever reason, had the sort of low self-esteem that leads a girl to seek approval by giving herself to men. She gave herself to a
lot
of men and boys. And any one of them is a candidate for her murder. Roger Vale is a gay dance instructor, and the notion that he is actually pretending so he can ravage young students, well...it seems absurd on its face. That dumbass Pettibone kid is a likelier suspect. So is her married choir director, or Christ knows how many of her discarded sexual partners.
Why
Roger Vale?”

“Because, Mr. Quarry,” he said, “he killed her. And...and did God knows
what
else to her before that.”

And he began to cry.

Just as his son had, in that insurance office, only harder and longer. He fished a handkerchief from his pocket—he was of an age that still carried those—and covered his face in it, like me covering Farrell’s face with a pillow.

When it subsided, he blew his nose, put the hanky away, and said, “Sorry.”

“That’s okay. Vale. Why are you so sure?”

He was still working at getting his composure back. Then he made a circular gesture with a forefinger toward the desk, and asked: “Could we trade places please?”

I didn’t answer right away.

He said, “There’s no weapon in any of the drawers. But there’s something I want to show you. May I get back there?”

I nodded, rose, and vacated the swivel chair. We swapped places, but I didn’t sit immediately, and neither did he. He was reaching for his other pants pocket but froze his fingers before digging into it.

“There’s a key I need to get,” he said, wanting permission. “I need to unlock a drawer. No weapon, you have my word.”

Anyway, like they said in the old cowboy pictures, I still had the drop on him.

“Go ahead,” I said.

He nodded thanks, then got out keys on a chain, selected a very small one from among maybe a dozen including house keys, and bent over slightly to unlock a desk drawer to his right. I kept the nine mil trained on him, but what he brought back was a stack of manila file folders, four of them, each around an inch thick.

He sat down and said, “You can look at these at your leisure, Mr. Quarry. I have nothing else planned this evening.”

I hadn’t reached for them yet. “Maybe you’d care to give me the gist first.”

He leaned back in the swivel chair, rocking just a little, like an old man on a sunny porch, but there was nothing sunny about his bleak expression.

“As you may know from Jenny...I would imagine you have utilized her as a source for your inquiries...I hired the National Detective Agency to explore the runaway possibility—they’re coast to coast and have the staff and the computer support.”

“That’s the Pinkertons.”

“Yes. But it was a man out of a St. Louis agency who came up with the key piece of information, thanks to a friend on the Missouri state police. Over a period of a year and a half, four teenage girls disappeared who’d made Stockwell Park part of their Spring Break or other vacation plans. None were local— and I’ve since learned that our mayor made sure it didn’t hit the media. Wouldn’t want to discourage tourism, after all.”

No. Not now that buggy whips were out of fashion. If a Great White had been spotted in that sand-bottomed stream, what was the harm?

“With all those hiking trails,” I said, “that park would make a perfect hunting ground for a Ted Bundy.”

“That was my exact thinking. I instructed the Pinkertons to look at other disappearances or murders of young girls in parks or other recreational areas. Almost immediately, someone in their western regional office reported that half a dozen girls, over a period of two years, had gone missing in Burton Creek State Park. Vacationers, kids on spring break.”

“Sounds familiar.”

“All too much so. Burton Creek Park is near Tahoe City, Nevada, so it wasn’t certain any one of the girls had disappeared there, just that the park was one of the places they planned to go—and of course Tahoe is more than a ‘little’ vacationland. These disappearances were over a period of approximately two years, the last Burton Creek incidence just over six years ago.”

“And you can connect Vale to those?”

“Decide for yourself, Mr. Quarry. During that same twoyear period, in a little town near Tahoe called Incline Village, a Calvin Dorn ran the Dorn Dance Studio. He was very helpful in getting local girls prepared for the Miss Teen Nevada beauty pageant.”

“Any pictures of Dorn?”

“He avoided photographers, and when there was publicity in the local press, only pictures of his students appeared. And since it was his own studio, he needed no references, other than materials he self-generated to give to the parents of prospective pupils. He was described as ‘discreetly gay’ by one Incline Village resident, and there are similar descriptions of him in the Burton Creek folder. Physical description matches Vale, although Dorn was blond and not mustached.”

“I’d be less impressed,” I said, “if I didn’t see those three other folders.”

“Yes. Highland Hammocks State Park, four girls disappeared over a year-and-a-half period, near Sebring Florida, where one Corey Ellis ran his Ellis Dance Studio. Then there’s Sparta, Wisconsin. The Elroy-Sparta Bike Trail, Buckhorn State Park, Wildcat Mountain State Park, all are near Sparta, where Louis Dane ran the Dane Dance Studio for just under two years. Helping local girls interested in beauty pageants. Beloved by the parents, and a safely gay man to be working alone with young girls. A total of five girls missing from those state parks. Never local.”

“Candy was local.”

“There was one other local victim. Heather Foster, sixteen. Hillsboro, Ohio, near Rocky Fork State Park. Heather’s body had been dumped in the lake, but it washed up onto the shore—there are before-and-after pictures in the Rocky Fork file. She was a cheerleader, a very popular girl at the local high school. She had been raped, vaginally and anally. Her hands and feet showed signs of severe restraint. Cigarette burns. Small cuts. Finally, death by strangulation—bruising indicated the hands were a male’s, not a terribly big male, either.”

“Jesus,” I said, and I wasn’t even looking in the file yet.

“Perhaps the foulest thing of all is...the murdered girl was thought by the other parents of girls to be one that dance instructor Rick Varney had singled out. She’d been his favorite, became his assistant, really his protégée.”

Like Sally Meadows.

I said, “No pictures of him?”

He dug into one of the folders. “That’s all we have—taken after a recital. This is not the Varney persona, it’s the first one we know of—Calvin Dorn.”

Dorn was in the background, smiling as he talked to a proud mom, whose arm was around her pretty junior-high-age girl, who was in a tutu and looking adoringly at her dance instructor. The central figure in the photo, an older girl posing, was sharp, as in-focus as the background was blurry. And Dorn had blond hair and no mustache.

But that was Vale, all right, right down to the black tights, black t-shirt and Capezios.

“In every instance, the town was small but not tiny,” he said, “maybe ten thousand population, near a vacation area. In every instance, after around two years, he closed down his business pleading financial failure and moved quietly on.”

So Candy’s diary entries had almost certainly been legit.

“Take your time with those,” he said, nodding to the folders.

I gave them a gentle shove back toward him. “No. I believe you. Vale’s a serial killer. That’s what they call them, you know, the FBI. And that’s who this information should go to.”

He shrugged. “I discussed that with the Pinkerton people. They say all this is compelling but extremely circumstantial. Further investigation, if I wanted to fund it, might make a difference, and they will be glad to go to the FBI...when the time was right.”

“Which file is the one with the photo of the dead girl?”

He pushed it over to me. It was right inside on top, actually both pictures were: a junior high school yearbook-type photo of a beautiful blue-eyed freckle-faced redheaded girl. In the other photo, she was just so much human refuse on a muddy, rocky lake shore.

“Okay,” I said. “I get it. This could be what Candy went through. So you wanted him tortured. I can dig it. And what about the girl’s father?”

“My son? What about him?”

“Was he with you in this?”

His head rocked back. “Lawrence? Heavens no. He has no stomach for hard decisions. He may have some vague sense that I might be doing something about Vale that, well, steps over the line. But that’s all.”

We sat in silence for a while.

Then he said, “What now, Mr. Quarry?”

“Why don’t you make a phone call?”

“A phone call?”

“Right from your desk here, or from a booth if that’s the established procedure. Call whoever set this up for you, and tell him you are cancelling the contract. You understand he’s suffered an inconvenience, and intend to pay the full fee. If he mentions that the team he sent to Stockwell has turned up dead, you don’t know anything about it. You’ve just decided to pull the plug.”

“Have
I?”

I sighed. “Understand something, Mr. Stockwell. Nothing against the Pinkertons, but I think you have enough evidence here to easily go to the FBI. You’re a powerful man in this state, and no doubt have political strings you can pull. Pull them.”