Dreams in the Key of Blue (13 page)

Someone muttered. A few heads shook. One pale student stared at the ceiling and dabbed at tears with a tissue. Sara Brenner sat behind her hair, just as Jaycie Waylon had described on the night they visited my house.

Finally, Dawn Kramer spoke up. “Dr. Frank, nobody
seems to know what’s going on. The police don’t say anything. The deans can’t answer our questions. The TV news reported that the murders were sex crimes. There hasn’t been any kind of murder in this town for nearly ten years. Now three women have been raped and cut down by a man.”

The rumor mill was working overtime, much as it had in Gainesville, Florida, in 1990 when the media reported erroneous crime scene information. The reality was repugnant enough and did not require distortion or embellishment.

“Reporters keep saying that crimes like these are serial,” Kramer continued. “None of the women in this room, on this campus, or in this town can feel safe. Not even in our own homes. Not if we have roommates.”

A few class members murmured their agreement.

“This kind of violence…no one understands it,” Kramer said. “We need answers.”

“Anyone else?” I asked.

Amanda Squires arrived late. “Is this about the murders?” she asked as she walked to her seat. “Are we talking about what happened to Susan, Kelly, and Jaycie?”

“We don’t know,” Kramer said. “We need a focus, someplace to start, but…we’re too close to this.”

The young woman who had been softly weeping grabbed her books. “I can’t stay,” she said, and left the room.

At the University of Florida in 1990, a teacher had assigned Pete Dexter’s
Paris Trout,
a well-crafted, terrifying tale of a man whose smoldering rage explodes in multiple murder. The instructor withdrew the book from her reading list following Danny Rolling’s Gainesville rampage. I was not dealing with the issue of a single book, rather an entire class devoted to homicidal violence.

Betsy Travis sat away from the group, reading the
Ragged Harbor Review.
Travis was the youngest member of the seminar, a sophomore from Long Island who had not yet chosen a field of concentration. She wore black, her usual attire, and her ears were festooned with a gaggle of silver earrings.

“They shouldn’t have lived off campus,” Travis said, folding her newspaper. “Something like this could happen in a dorm at a city university, but not here on the hill.”

“Campus security checks the dorms twentyfour hours a day,” Jen Neilson agreed. Neilson planned a career in criminal justice. “The town cops write parking tickets. On weeknights there’s one officer on duty from one-thirty to five-thirty
A
.
M
., and he doesn’t leave the station unless one of the locals drives a pickup into the mudflats.”

“There are guys living upstairs in that apartment building,” Kramer said. “The killer didn’t bother them.”

“Still,” Travis said, “it wouldn’t have happened if they were up here.”

Travis was distancing herself from the victims. She was safe, she believed, because she lived on campus. Her thought process was a variation on the blame-the-victim theme: if the three young women had been good, if they had done the right thing, if they had lived where everyone else lived, they would be alive.

Neilson sought a scapegoat. If she could assign responsibility, she had no need to understand murder. The local police had fucked up; case closed.

Kramer’s agenda covered the murders and a myriad of other sins; all men were assholes. “You can pick up any newspaper,” she said, “whether it’s New York City or some little town in Nebraska, and read about abductions and rapes and murders. These are crimes committed by men against women.”

“Age is a factor, too,” Neilson said. “I read an FBI
publication about how killers choose victims. They go after children because it’s easy to control them. Same with elderly people.”

“The FBI looks at behavior,” Kramer said. “What did the killer do before, during, and after the crime? They don’t pay any attention to human development. No man was born a killer. How did he get that way?”

In my experience, federal agencies were little more than incestuous, bureaucratic impediments to inquiry. I hoped that I would not feel provoked to share that opinion.

“I think it’s also important to know how people perceive events in their lives,” I said. “Each of us writes our life story with a heavy editorial hand.”

“There are genetic factors, too,” Amy Clay, a student in biology and physiology, contributed. “Also, most human predators are men, but an increasing number are women.”

“If you mean that woman in Florida,” Kramer said, “the experts agreed that she was unusual.”

“As long as we’re gonna do this, why don’t we compare male and female killers?” Neilson asked.

“Can we include method as one of the concepts?” Kramer asked. “According to most of the studies I’ve read, women prefer to kill with poison. To administer something like arsenic, especially in small doses over time, you have to be close to your victims.
Poisoned Blood,
Philip Ginsburg’s book about Marie Hilley, is a good example of that.”

“Arsenic is easily detected,” Amy Clay said.

Clay was a tall young woman with long auburn hair who planned to attend medical school.

“How many doctors consider symptoms like high fever, intense pain, and vomiting and conclude arsenic poisoning?” Neilson asked. “I think appendicitis is a more common diagnosis.”

“After the fact,” Clay persisted.

“Meaning death?” Squires asked rhetorically. “Why
subject the deceased’s family to the ordeal of an autopsy when there’s no reason to suspect foul play? In the Hilley case, prosecutors exhumed victims. You are right, though, Amy. I’d use something like succinylcholine. It’s much harder to detect. The body doesn’t retain it the way it does arsenic. Killers who were nurses preferred it because it has a legitimate medical use as an anesthetic.”

“One mistake that I don’t want to make,” Kramer said, “is subscribing to a history of women written by men. Women who behave violently have been treated as biological oddities, victims of menstrual syndromes or hormones run amok.”

So it went.

At Kramer’s request, Jen Neilson agreed to include Stanley Markham as one of her topics for study.

“He’s all over TV now,” Kramer said. “It’s scary to think that they catch these people, convict them, lock them away, but they can’t hold them. The police think Markham was here. He’s their main suspect.”

“Dorothea Puente, the woman in Sacramento who killed her boarders, she vanished while police were digging up bodies in her yard,” Travis said. “They found her in a restaurant. Women are just as lethal and elusive as men.”

The room sounded as if it were filled with kids swapping baseball cards, but the names were not Ken Griffey, Jr., Sammy Sosa, or Mark McGwire. My students were trading the likes of Albert DeSalvo, Velma Barfield, Ted Bundy, Gary Lee Schaefer, Marie Hilley, Aileen Wuornos, Stanley Markham, and others in their select and dubious set.

Most of the students were standing, ready to move on to their next class, when Sara Brenner, still seated, brushed her hair from her face and said, “Dr. Frank, what are you going to do?”

I knew what she meant. “Whatever I can,” I said.

“Did Stanley Markham kill Jaycie and her roommates?”

“I don’t know, Sara.”

“Are you working with the police? I mean, you’re here. You catch killers. You should be helping the police.”

That night at my house, Sara had wanted to know how I made the leap from a theory of personality to a specific person. Jaycie had answered her.

It has to do with the way he looks at things, and the questions he asks,
Jaycie had said.

“I intend to help,” I said lamely, wanting to avoid discussion of my role in the investigation.

“Jaycie was my friend,” Sara said. “She was your friend, too.”

WHEN I LEFT THE SILO, I EXPECTED TO ENCOUNTER
Steve Weld ready to piss and moan, or Stu Gilman prepared to slip into his Batmobile. One rendezvous or another seemed routine.

The hilltop was deserted. I heard students behind me, and listened to the wind rustle through the fallen leaves as I gazed into the graying afternoon.

I stopped at Downtown Grocery, gathered the ingredients of a meal, and fenced briefly with Angie Duvall. When I stepped onto Main Street, a sense of loss enveloped me like a coastal fog. Jaycie was not there, waiting.

I drove to my house. The moment I stepped inside, I reflexively reached for a weapon that was not there, and nearly dropped my bag of groceries.

Someone had impaled an orange on my kitchen counter with a hunting knife.

I walked to the counter, dropped my parcel, then grabbed a thick piece of limb wood from the carrier near
the fireplace. I prowled through the house expecting someone or something to leap out at me.

The place was empty. Nothing was disturbed.

I returned to the kitchen and stared at the bone-handled knife that had sliced through the orange, then penetrated an inch through the Formica and pressed board. To create the display had required great force.

“Someone is stalking me,” I muttered, gazing uneasily around the room.

HERB JAWORSKI ARRIVED PROMPTLY AT SEVEN A.M.,
and we drove south on I-95 to Portland. I intended to make small talk, pass the time, gab about something other than the murders.

“What do you do when you’re not managing the police department?” I asked.

The question proved to be a mistake.

Jaworski collected Portlands, and he seemed about to dump them on me. He knew the population of Portland, Iowa, and the latitude and longitude of Portland, Ohio. He owned police department patches from all the Portlands big enough to have a full-time force, and he had visited most of them.

“New York’s got two Portlands,” he said. “There’s a little bit of a place not far from Ithaca. Then there’s a more normal-sized place southwest of Buffalo.”

“Normal-sized?”

“For a Portland. The one in Indiana is normal-sized, but it isn’t a port. A lot of them aren’t. Kentucky’s got three. One of them’s a port on a river, one sits near a creek, and the other is the only stop you’ll find on Highway 467 before Knoxville, Kentucky. I think my favorite,
though, other than this one right ahead, is Portland, North Dakota. It’s a small town north of Fargo. Biggest body of water around there is what they call the Goose River, so it sure as hell isn’t a port. I had the best damn meal there. Ever have frittered rabbit?”

“I hope not,” I muttered.

“I stayed an extra day so I could go back to that restaurant.”

I thought I’d weathered the storm as we left the interstate and picked up Forest Avenue. “You’re from Michigan,” Jaworski said.

I knew what he was getting at.

“You got one, too,” he continued.

“One what?” I inquired, just to be contrary.

“A Portland. Not far from Lansing, on the Looking Glass River. I’ve never been there.”

“Neither have I.”

WE DROVE DOWN MELLEN STREET AND PARKED.

“Dorman had the basement apartment,” Jaworski said, leading me up the front steps and through the door. “All the way to the back, turn left, then down. The lead detective, Norma Jacobs, should be waiting for us.”

The building fit in with its neighborhood. It was a turn-of-the-century brownstone, originally a single-family home, that had been renovated and subdivided in the 1970s. I walked through the open basement apartment door and saw a solidly built, fortyish woman on her knees beside a cot. She wore jeans and a Boston Red Sox warm-up jacket.

“Norma?” Jaworski inquired.

“Hey, Chief,” the cop said, turning and pushing herself up from the floor.

If the Portland P.D. had a height requirement, Jacobs
barely passed. She was a shade over five feet in her flat shoes. “Got a triple in Ragged Harbor, huh?” she said. “Husband and I used to drive up there now and then because it’s such a pretty, peaceful town. He likes to take pictures of the ocean. Don’t imagine it’s peaceful today. Hear you got more satellite dishes than lobster pots.”

The two friends shook hands.

“This is Lucas Frank. He’s helping me on this one.” Jacobs nodded. “You were in Boston for a lot of years. Used to see you on TV from time to time.”

“I live in Michigan now.”

“Go Tigers,” she said. “Guy’s name was Harper Dorman. Lived alone here with his dog. He’d been through chemo and radiation for cancer. He was sixty, pretty much waiting to die. The dog was supposed to be therapy for him. Must’ve run off.”

Jacobs hitched up her jeans and pointed at the cot. “That’s where we found most of Dorman. Eight copperjacketed slugs to the head.”

“Stingers,” Jaworski said, referring to the ammunition. “Same as our three.”

“Probably an eight-shot clip,” Jacobs added. “No spent shells. Shooter cleaned up after himself. Well, more or less.”

Jacobs handed Jaworski a set of crime scene photos. I glanced over the chief’s shoulder as he skimmed through them.

“Looks like the other went down on the floor in front of the bed,” she said.

“The other” was the worst carnage that I had seen in years.