Dreams in the Key of Blue (5 page)

I HATE SUNDAYS.

When I was young, church was mandatory. The minister was a gentle, wise Frenchman who seemed to know something about everything. The building was an architectural dream, a stone mini-cathedral perched on the bank of a river. That my attendance there on Sundays was required was an abomination.

My mother issued the order; my sister enforced it.

“Why do I have to?” I whined.

“Ma says,” my sister said.

“That’s not a reason.”

“Change your pants.”

“If Ma said, ‘Chop off your brother’s head,’ would you do it?”

“Where’s that blue sweater I like?”

Even the light was different on Sunday. It flooded the living room—yellow, dull, dusty.

“It’s holy light,” my sister said.

“The air is putrid,” I muttered.

My sister took my hand. “We’ll be late for the bus.”

Now, years later but with the same Sunday angst, I yanked on my jeans, grabbed a flannel shirt, and shuffled
in my moccasins to the kitchen to make coffee. I gazed through the window at the overcast day and watched as an unmarked police cruiser pulled into the driveway.

Herb Jaworski was a short, two-hundred-pound man whose curly hair remained black, despite his sixty-five years. He arrived at my door attired in coveralls and a red wool jacket. During my few days in Maine, it had become clear to me that this was “the Maine uniform.” It was also the uniform of the Ragged Harbor Police Department. Jaworski had been chief of the small-town police force for thirty-two years.

That morning, he stood on my porch, hat in hand, and said, “I’ve heard of you, Dr. Frank. In fact, I read one of your books,
Crime Reconstruction and Personality Profiling.
”

I assumed it was a social call. “Come in. We can talk over coffee.”

The chief shook his head. “We don’t get too many murders here,” he said as he stood on my porch, fidgeted with his navy watch cap, and shifted his ample weight from one lug-soled boot to another. “When we do, we get good support from our state people. This situation has stretched all of us pretty much to the max. We don’t know what the hell we’re dealing with.”

I raised an eyebrow and waited for him to latch on to a coherent thought. He didn’t.

“Chief, I’m afraid I’m not following you,” I told him.

“It’s been all over the TV.”

Jaworski’s tone and facial expression communicated pure astonishment. How could I not know something that had been defined as reality by the tube? If Tom Brokaw says it is,
it is.

“I don’t watch much TV,” I told him. “There isn’t one here.”

“Well, I talked it over with some folks in Augusta.
They checked you out, said there wouldn’t be any harm done if I could get you to take a look at this.”

The chief’s circumlocution amused me, but I figured it was time to put him out of his misery and get to the point.

“Just what have you got?”

I never should have asked.

I DRAGGED OVER A CHAIR, SAT, AND STARED IN HORROR
at two bloodstained beds.

In every other way, the room resembled any room occupied by college students. The twin beds were separated by a scarred oak desk. A second desk, with bureaus on both sides of it, squatted against the opposite wall. Both desks held computers, stacks of books, papers, and spiral-bound notebooks.

But this room wore rust-colored smears on its walls, and there were coagulated pools of black blood in the bedding. The students, now and forever to be known as victims, had departed in zippered bags.

They left as packaged people,
I thought.

Technicians carried vials and plastic Baggies in and out of the apartment. Uniformed cops measured and sketched.

“Give me the photographs,” I said, reaching behind me, never allowing my eyes to move from the evidence of the carnage that someone committed there.

“Susan Hamilton, twenty years old,” Herb Jaworski said, placing a folder in my hand.

I sat surrounded by the trace evidence of homicide, and examined the crime scene photos.

“The medical examiner says seven perimortem and postmortem stab wounds,” Jaworski said.

“While she was dying and after her death,” I mused. “The gunshot killed her.”

“Twenty-two caliber, copper jacket.”

I looked at the photo of the small hole in the young woman’s temple, then studied each of the remaining photographs in the series. Even gray and dead, Susan Hamilton appeared younger than her twenty years. Her face wore the expression of someone at rest. There was no paroxysm of pain. There was the small black hole, probably an immediate absence of consciousness, then death.

“He pulled back the blanket and the sheet, then did his cutting,” I said.

“That’s the way we figure it. No holes in the bedclothes.”

“Then he pulled up the blankets, threw them over her.”

“Even covered her face.”

Was the killer ashamed? I wondered. Did he attempt to conceal the evidence of his havoc? If he could not see the dead girl, maybe she was not there. Perhaps he did not want Susan staring up at him.

“What about the blood on the wall?” I asked.

“Don’t make any sense.”

I stared at the wall on my left, at the streaks of dingy red that originated three feet above where Susan’s head would have been and descended downward at a sixty-degree angle.

“No prints apparent in the smear,” I said. “Probably wore latex gloves.”

Like somebody playing with watercolors. Picasso gone wild with the sweep of a single-hued rainbow.

“The bed wasn’t moved?”

“Not that we could determine.”

I reached across the bed to the wall and touched the Sheetrock a foot above the blood trail. Then I looked again at the smear.

“There’s a break here,” I said. “It’s as if his hand
twisted or slipped. There’s an imprint that looks like knuckles. Do you have a tape measure?”

Jaworski handed me a six-foot cloth measuring tape.

“It’s an inch and a quarter between the two points,” I said, then measured the distance between the first two joints on the index finger of my left hand. Two inches.

“Probably should photograph these impressions with a crime scene measure,” I suggested.

Jaworski made a note. I looked again at the photos of the dead student and asked if the police had determined what she was doing earlier on the night of her death.

“Susan had a paper due in the morning,” he said. “She logged off her computer a few minutes after midnight. That was late for her.”

Jaworski made a clacking noise with the cinnamon gum he was mawing as he handed me another set of photos. “Kelly Paquette, nineteen,” he said.

I turned to my right and made a cursory examination of the bed and the wall. It was a mirror image of Susan’s side of the room.

There is no interruption in the streak of crimson on the wall.

“Window dressing,” I muttered, staring at the bands of red. “Dead kids don’t smear their own blood.”

“We know she got back from a date around two. The towel on the floor was damp. She showered, then went to bed. Blood alcohol concentration was point-one-three. She was blitzed. The bullet entered behind her right ear. Seven stab wounds.”

Kelly faced the wall, but the intruder covered her anyway. Was this a pathological need to conceal?

I examined the remainder of the photographs, then returned them to Jaworski. “Show me number three.”

I suspected that the murders were Jaworski’s most painful professional experience in all the years that he had
been a cop. He struggled to maintain his poise, and he did a decent job of it, but he hurt.

“I heard somewhere that you guys prefer to go through a crime scene alone, that you need to be able to concentrate or something.”

“You’ve been reading too much bad fiction,” I said, following Jaworski into the living room.

A shelf stereo sat on the fireplace mantel, surrounded by stacks of CDs, everything from the Butthole Surfers to Beethoven. I crouched at the coffee table to examine a rental video’s opaque plastic container.

“Who rented the movie?” I asked.

The chief consulted his notes. “I don’t think we checked that.”

“It’s
Kiss the Girls,”
I said, “an unlikely story about a pair of killers who work in tandem on the two coasts. I’m a Morgan Freeman fan.”

“You watch that stuff?”

“I enjoy catching Hollywood’s psychological inaccuracies,” I said as I glanced at unopened mail, a five-day-old copy of the
Ragged Harbor Review,
and a pile of orange peels. “Films like this one are today’s morality tales. Who ate the orange?”

Again, Jaworski flipped through his notepad. “I don’t have that, either. State folks figured the kids watched the movie, one of them ate an orange.”

“Any of the victims have finger cuts?”

“No,” he said, pleased to give me a definitive answer.

“There’s blood on the orange peels.”

Jaworski was quick. “After he killed these kids, he sat there and ate a fucking orange?”

“Have the blood checked.”

I walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. “No oranges,” I said, distracted by the scent of citrus and a vague notion that it held some significance.

“He brought it with him?”

“That’s one possibility,” I told him, still trying to get a handle on an elusive association to oranges.

I followed Jaworski through the living room and stood at the second bedroom’s doorway. He handed me another stack of photos. The top one showed a once-attractive brunette, nude, splayed on the floor outside her bedroom. I stared at her face, her eyes, the startled expression.

I clenched my teeth and swallowed hard.

“This one’s name was—”

“I know who she is,” I interrupted, tossing the glossy eight-by-tens onto the coffee table, crouching, and touching the carmine blemish with my fingertips.

“I knew her,” I said.

I SAT WITH MY FACE BURIED IN MY HANDS.

“One of your students?” Jaworski asked.

“And a friend,” I said, pushing myself up and pacing the room.

I stared at the neat stack of orange peels.

I had met Jaycie Waylon only days ago. She had wanted me to feel at ease in my new surroundings, introduced me to her friends, invited me to lunch. Now she was dead.

The heat in the apartment was oppressive. I pulled off my jacket and slung it over my shoulder. A persistent scratching noise cracked the room’s silence and yanked my attention from the orange peels to the old plaster wall.

“Mice,” the chief said.

Intruders, I thought, concealed behind a wall creased with fissures from every shift in the old building’s frame.

“I had lunch with Jaycie yesterday,” I said.

“We figure she was his primary target,” the chief said. “State investigators say they think she was in bed when he shot her. Then he dragged her out here. The cutting came after.”

Jaworski’s breathing sounded labored. Sweat beaded
on his forehead. Each time he spoke, he took a half-step back, wiped his forehead with a red bandanna, then stuffed it in his pocket and stepped forward.

“Sexual assault?” I asked him.

“The preliminary report says no.”

“Why is she the suspected target?”

Jaworski shrugged. “He did more cutting. Looks like he wanted to cut off her head. He didn’t cover her.”

“You okay?” I asked, watching what looked to me like a pre-coronary two-step.

“Just quit smokin’.”

I nodded. “Herb, do you think he stalked Jaycie, picked her out ahead of time, followed her?”

“Then waited until the lights were off, let himself in through one of the living room windows. None of them were locked. State folks say he probably went out the same way. Closed the window behind him.”

The display makes this one different. He concealed Susan and Kelly, then hacked at Jaycie and posed her corpse in grotesque sexual mimicry to assault the eyes of anyone who walked through the door.

Jaycie Waylon was the target, but he could have killed her without killing the other two. “This guy has a taste for it,” I said. “What about Jaycie’s movements earlier in the evening?”

“She was here, studying, listening to music. We’ve got four different kids at four different times telling us that.”

“She dropped me off at one-fifteen in the afternoon. She had a one-thirty class.”

Jaworski flipped through a small notebook. “The class ended at three. She and a friend walked to the village. Jaycie bought a lamp and a hairbrush at Cash Mart at three-forty. The time was printed on the sales slip. They ate at Pizza Garden, then Jaycie walked home. She was here from just after five.”

“The friend didn’t notice anyone watching them, following them?” I asked.

Jaworski shook his head. “They ran into a few girls from the college. Waved, said hi, kept on going. Nothing. We checked it out.”

I walked to the living room’s trio of windows. The first one clattered when I opened it, wobbling in its tracks. The second refused to stay up. The third was painted shut. It didn’t seem likely that the killer had made his entry through any of the windows.

Under most other circumstances I would not have shared my thoughts with the chief. Over the years, I learned the hard way to never contradict a seasoned cop, at least not until she or he recognized that even as a civilian, I might have something worthwhile to contribute. This case was different. Jaworski came after me because he and his people were stymied. There was no time to waste on politic niceties.