Dreams in the Key of Blue (23 page)

“You’ve got an answer for everything. What about Harper Dorman?”

“That was personal.”

Jasper strode to the table and pushed her face close to mine. “I can’t think of a better way to obstruct an investigation,” she hissed.

“Serial killers are rare animals,” Jaworski said. “A woman?”

“I put my trust in accepted facts,” Jasper snapped, and slammed her palm on the table.

I stared at the detective and swallowed an urge to slug her. “Do you remember your Lombroso from criminology classes?” I asked.

Jasper’s eyes shifted as she made the cognitive adjustment. “The bumps-on-the-head guy,” she said as she backed away from the table and continued to glare.

Cesare Lombroso was a nineteenth-century Italian criminologist who postulated that the criminal population could be identified by their unique physical characteristics, including their skull terrain.

“Lombroso believed that biology was at the root of all
female criminal behavior,” I said. “He thought women to be about as morally sophisticated as two-year-olds, and not terribly intelligent. He figured that if they weren’t kept pregnant and in the kitchen, they should damn well be in church or there’d be unholy hell to pay.”

Jasper turned away. “This is crap.”

“Lombroso believed that a woman was a born criminal. When she acted, she became an absolute fiend. Nature was everything. Nurture didn’t figure into it. You’re right. It
is
crap. Women commit violent crimes, and we know that their histories are similar to their male counterparts’. We insist that the primary gender difference is the manner in which males and females process life events, how defensively equipped they happen to be. Men explode. Women implode. Bullshit. We need a new theory. Wuornos shot and killed six men. Homolka helped to kill her own sister. Tucker took a pickax to her victim and experienced orgasm while she hammered him full of holes.”

Jaworski raised his arms in the air. “Enough. What the hell are we dealing with here?”

“Fiction,” Jasper shouted. “Pure fabrication.”

“We all have a bit of the beast in us, Jasper,” I said, fixing my eyes on hers. “You too.”

She was silent. I considered her lack of response an acknowledgment that she would never speak.

“I have to go back to Portland,” I told Jaworski. “Then I should be able to tell you what we’re dealing with.”

“You’re not letting him go, Chief,” Jasper said.

“You don’t have enough to hold me,” I told her, eerily certain that she would soon have exactly what she wanted.

“Technically he’s a suspect. He had the weapon. He was standing where the caller said he’d be. Chief, he hasn’t explained a damn thing. He’s obstructing.”

I watched the standoff. Jasper looked at Jaworski; the chief studied me.

“I want to know what you’re doing,” Jaworski finally said, and Jasper turned away and grunted in disgust and frustration. The chief continued, “You call me and tell me what you find. I want to know where you are.”

“Agreed,” I said.

I TOSSED IN BED MOST OF THE NIGHT. KAREN JASPER,
Amanda Squires, Stanley Markham, and Lily Dorman waged war for control of my sleep.

They won.

Markham was male, a savage killer whose most remarkable traits were feminine. Dorman was female, possibly a killer whose mimicry of male murderers was nearly perfect. Squires knew Beckerman and had initiated classroom speculation about a hybrid killer eerily similar to the one I now imagined. Karen Jasper was an unbridled pain in the ass whose theory of the crimes fingered Markham, ignored Dorman, and sought to suck me in as an obstructionist and, therefore, a co-conspirator. And she bugged me.

I sipped coffee and spaced out while staring at crime scene photos.

There is no evidence of compulsion.

The previous Sunday morning, I had stood between two beds on Crescent Street and noted the balance of the room, the symmetry of the killer’s actions. Jaworski had asked me what it meant.

“I don’t know what it means, Chief,” I told him. “Something.”

You arrive prepared to kill and to leave no evidence. You have a linear agenda for the women in the double room: eliminate them.

Two shots.

Jaycie stumbles groggily from her room. One shot.

You proceed with your script, and you remain receptive to environmental influence. You also remain in tune with your rage.

You have all the time in the world.

Jaycie Waylon was the primary target, I thought, but not of a sexual predator. There were no defensive wounds, none of the bruising or tearing that results when a victim is confronted by the type of killer who prefers to attack with a knife, a length of rope, a club, his hands.

You seethed with the desire to cut off her head.

I grabbed a crime scene photograph and examined the blood pool adjacent to Jaycie’s head, the light blood flow across her abdomen, and the smaller stains beside her right hip.

You yank yourself back, contain your fury.

Cut off and fold the nightgown. Position the body, then do your artwork with the knife and sponge. Why target Jaycie Waylon?

I remembered Norma Jacobs’s words over lunch in Portland. Her Martin International informant had been “a young gal” who made deposits and withdrawals for dummy client corporations.

“She was set to meet with us, but we never heard from her.”

“Not enough,” I muttered. And no connection if our killer was Lily Dorman.

Jaycie wanted to discuss something over lunch. Gilman’s presence stopped her.

As I pondered possible connections, someone pounded on my door.

Herb Jaworski stood on the porch in the morning sun. He gripped his knit cap and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. The chief displayed the same tentative quality, like a man contrite about having intruded, that I had observed the day we met. It was a safe bet that he was not there to arrest me.

“Just in time for coffee,” I said.

He stepped inside. “I’ve got a thermos. Been drinking the same brand since 1947.”

I poured a cup of the steaming black brew that I favored.

“I thought some last night,” Jaworski said, as if reporting an unusual occurrence. “I brought you into this case. Keeping me up to date on what you’re doing ain’t your strong suit, but I expected that from when I checked on your background. I decided that we’d best work this one more closely together.”

I prefer to work alone, but my respect for the veteran cop had grown steadily. If frequent reporting to Jaworski was to be the price of my freedom to pursue the case, I was ready to yank out my wallet.

“You plan to keep an eye on me?” I asked.

He watched his fingers explore the dark cap, then his eyes snapped up and met mine. “The rattler convinced me.”

“I could have arranged that.”

“Not with the expression you had on your face when I showed up with my rifle. Besides. I read your book.”

The crack about the book was Jaworski’s dry sense of humor. He was not smiling. He had a state police detective who wanted my ass in a cell on any technicality she could conjure, and nearly enough to justify putting me there.

He pulled a small tape recorder from his pocket and
switched it on. I listened to a young woman give Jasper instructions similar to those the caller had given me. There were two differences. In addition to the bag of evidence, the cops would find a new victim, and their killer.

“It’s the same voice,” I said, “but I can’t tell you who she is.”

“What about this Amanda Squires, the one you saw with Beckerman?”

I shrugged. “It could be.”

Jaworski lowered himself into a chair. “Where do we go from here?”

“You’ve got Jasper’s federal friends on the way,” I said.

“Just make life more cluttered for a couple of weeks. Whoever that is on the tape, we want her. She led us to the gun, and she led us to Beckerman. She also put your ass in a sling. Angie Duvall worked late at the store last night. She heard the shots, went to the back window, and saw you.”

I sat opposite Jaworski. “Of course she saw me. I was there, for the same reason that most of your department was there. That woman called me, Herb.”

“Angie didn’t mention the bag. She said you had a gun in your hand and there was smoke.”

“The smoke was from a discarded cigarette.”

“We got that. The lab is running tests on it. Won’t amount to anything. Beckerman had a pack of the same brand in his pocket.”

Jaworski sighed. “How do you figure a woman for the killer? You didn’t talk about that in your book.”

“We’ve ignored the female serial killer. We’ve made her a footnote, an obscure subcategory of crime. Our chauvinism or chivalry, depending on how we define the male privilege of granting the presumption of innocence to females, might kill us all in the end. When a woman forms
a homicidal duo with a male psychopath, he is the aggressor, she is labeled one of his victims. With a female pair, we look for the dominant or ‘masculine’ partner. If she operates alone, we look for duress.”

I shrugged. “We haven’t given credit where credit is due.”

“Is it possible that we’ve got more than one person involved here?”

Images of Harper Dorman’s savaged body flashed through my mind. “That was one of my thoughts when we visited Mellen Street in Portland. There was a case I was trying to remember. Amanda Squires reminded me of it. Sydny Clanton.”

“I don’t know that one,” Jaworski said.

“Charlie Manson and his family held the headlines that year. The media put a drug spin on the Clanton case… the wages of teenage rebellion, defiance of authority, that kind of thing. Drugs figured in the case, but no substance creates complex chains of behavior. Clanton killed both her parents and did a carving job on her father. Her next five murders were clean executions. With each one, she was careful, left very little for investigators who were convinced they were looking for a man.”

“I can understand why.”

“Outside San Francisco, she encountered the Gleid family. She killed all four of them, but mutilated only Mr. Gleid.”

“How do you account for it?”

“Part of the picture is developmental. She claimed to be a victim of sexual abuse at her father’s hands. No one could determine whether her claims were true. We know that she was dissociative.”

“I know the term,” Jaworski said, unwrapping a stick of cinnamon gum. “She left her body, went somewhere else in her head.”

I nodded. “One effect of the hallucinogenic drugs she was taking was cross-sensing, or synesthesia. Anything was enough to trigger murder. Clanton enjoyed killing. Add a father or father figure to the mix and suddenly she was smelling the voices on TV, hearing the colors, tasting the pain that she claimed her father inflicted on her.”

“She was crazy.”

“Not according to the law. Clanton knew that what she was doing was wrong. She had the capacity to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law. She was scheduled to be executed, then the state commuted the sentence when the Supreme Court knocked down capital punishment.”

“Same thing happened with Manson,” Jaworski said.

“Clanton’s prison psychiatrist determined that for Clanton, each color had a specific, fixed, auditory association. Rare, but not unheard of. Her father’s nickname was Red. Dr. Paynter reconstructed what happened at the Gleids’ home. Clanton broke in, found some money, ate something, then watched a newscast about her parents’ deaths. There was some broadcast glitch and the screen went completely blue for a matter of seconds. She couldn’t pull herself away from the TV. When the telecast resumed, there were pictures of a California wildfire—red trucks, streaks of red in the flames—just as Mr. Gleid walked into the house with his family. But she didn’t ‘see’ the red. She heard it—her father’s name.”

“You think we’ve got someone like her running around here?”

“More likely that scenario than Stanley Markham.”

“Jasper insists that it’s Markham.”

“I don’t see it.”

“The Markham sightings stopped. We haven’t heard a thing for the last couple of days. It’s like he went underground.”

“He’s probably holed up,” I agreed. “When he thinks he can make it, he’ll go to his sister’s.”

“No male killer ever switched back and forth like Clanton did?”

“There’s always variation in the kills,” I said. “The concept of a rigid, repeating M.O. is more a law enforcement wish than a reality. Ted Bundy is the best example. He killed during home intrusions. He wore a fake cast on his arm and acted as if he needed help. He impersonated a cop. At different times he beat his victims to death, stabbed them, strangled them. This may sound like a fine distinction, but his variations weren’t extreme, nothing like what we have here. It’s not a radical stretch to look at the orange and see Markham’s touch at the Crescent Street scene, but on close examination, it doesn’t hold up. The scene is mixed… methodical execution, and reactivity to stimuli in the apartment. Harper Dorman was savaged, Beckerman and Weld executed.”

“What about your orange?”

“Stanley Markham would remember my name, and perhaps that I had something to do with the police arresting him. Beyond that, he couldn’t care less. He had his fantasies; he wanted his freedom.”