The Devil's Menagerie (35 page)

The fourth and most crucial match was to military personnel stationed at Wiesbaden, Germany, eight years ago.

Ralph Beringer had come home, and now three young women in San Carlos were dead.

She tried to reach Detective Braden without success. He was away from his car, the radio dispatcher told her. She left a message for him. She found David Lindstrom’s home telephone number in the case file. She let the phone ring, stopping her count at ten.

They were a family unit, she thought. They had a five-year-old daughter. Where were they at ten in the evening? Out looking for their son Richie?

Feeling uneasy and very much alone, Karen went out to her rented Ford Contour.

The streets of San Carlos were quiet. Sunday night, she thought. Families should be home tonight, watching television, gearing up for the week ahead. A school day tomorrow, young children should be in bed sleeping. Where were the Lindstroms?

She regretted not being able to reach Braden. She remembered telling him that she wanted him there when she came face-to-face with the monster.
“You’re pretty damned sure of yourself. What do you need us ordinary cops for?”
he had demanded. She remembered her answer clearly.
“Because I’m going to catch the son of a bitch, Detective. And when I do, I don’t want to be alone.”

Paranoia, she thought. There was a reasonable explanation for the Lindstroms not answering their phone. If the killer—Ralph Beringer—had actually assaulted a woman at the beach tonight, the last place he would go would be the Lindstroms’ house.

She didn’t want Beringer to be there. She didn’t want to confront him alone. Driving through the night, she felt the presence of the incarcerated killers she had interviewed as part of VICAP’s Criminal Personality Research Project. She remembered their smiles, and their eyes looking at her. They had scared her out of the field, and they had all been confined.

No, she corrected herself. They had unnerved her, but the one who had exposed a weakness, altering her psyche forever, was the man who had brutalized Lisl Moeller under a Rhine River bridge eight years ago.

She knew, with an irrational but unalterable conviction, that she was racing through the night to meet him at last.

No backup. And no turning back.

W
HEN
B
RADEN REPORTED
in on his car radio from the hospital parking lot, the dispatcher told him, “We’ve been trying to reach you, Detective. That FBI Special Agent, Younger? She’s been real anxious.”

“Where is she? Lemme talk to her.”

“She left you a message—said she had a match.”
We’ve got him
! Braden thought reflexively. “Said to tell you she would be at the Lindstrom place.”

Braden’s elation instantly cooled. “Get me David Lindstrom—I don’t have the number but it’s on record and it’s listed.”

“Ten-four.”

Braden started the Chevrolet and made his way toward the exit while he waited for the call to go through. The killer’s run was about over, he thought. They had a victim and an eyewitness to battery; that would hold Beringer long enough for the rest of the evidence to fall into place.

“There’s no answer, Detective.”

Braden swore. For a moment he hesitated at the exit from the parking lot. Which way? Go for the boy at the apartment—or trust Younger’s instincts about the killer?

She had been right about him. Her instincts were good.

He swore again, made a sharp turn in front of traffic and hit the button for the siren.
Don’t do anything stupid, Younger
, he muttered aloud.
Just don’t do anything stupid
.

*    *    *

“H
E’S THERE!
” R
ICHIE
cried.

They were a block from the house. Dave Lindstrom swerved instinctively at his son’s shout but he didn’t want to brake—not now, not this close to home. “What do you mean?”

“His car—that’s his car! The gray Taurus—”

“Beringer? I thought you said he drove a Buick.”

“No—he’s got two cars.” They drove past the Taurus by the side of the road. Richie stared ahead as their house loomed out of the darkness, familiar and welcoming—and suddenly different, as if an ominous shadow had fallen across it. He whispered, “He’s here.”

Dave Lindstrom heard the fear in his son’s voice.

Bands of tension tightened around his chest. He careened into the driveway and jerked to a stop halfway onto the front lawn. He spilled out of the car, shouted at Richie, “Stay back! Go to the Johnsons—call the police!”

Dave ran up the steps to the porch. For an instant Richie hesitated. He looked across the street at the Johnsons’ house. Then, as his father burst through the front door, Richie heard a scream.

He bolted up the steps into the house.

G
LENDA’S PURSE WAS
on one of the kitchen chairs beside the oak dining table, where she often dropped it when she came into the house from shopping. She backed away from Beringer toward the table. He watched her, smiling—but with eyes empty of feeling, the dead eyes she remembered from her nightmares.

“You killed those women,” she whispered.

“Hey, you got my message? Good for you. I was afraid you’d never tumble. You look great, by the way, Lennie, you never let yourself go.”

“All those innocent young women …”

“Innocent? Don’t make me laugh—”

Glenda’s fingers brushed across the top of her purse. She saw a flicker of concern cross Ralph’s face. She was surprised that, after eight years, she could still read him so clearly. As he could read her.

He wouldn’t give her another chance. It was now or never.

She seized the purse. Her hand dug inside, found the hard shape of the gun. Dragging it clear, keys and tissue and lipstick spilling out as her hand came free, she remembered the safety.

Ralph threw Elli across the room. She hit the wall with a small, splintered cry and sank toward the floor. With a scream of rage, Glenda fumbled for the safety—where was it? Why hadn’t she spent more time practicing?
There!

She raised the compact AMT .380. Ralph’s hand closed over hers, forcing it down. Her trigger finger squeezed—

Nothing!

She had forgotten to chamber a bullet with the slide action. She had been afraid to do it ahead of time, heeding a mother’s deep-seated anxiety about loaded weapons around children. She jerked her hand free, wrenched at the stiff-acting slide, felt it clash into place.

Ralph laughed. He caught her wrist again and twisted savagely. The gun spilled to the floor. He kicked it away. In despair she watched it skitter across the tile floor.

They both heard the front door crash inward. Dave shouted. Ralph pushed Glenda aside. The swing of his right arm toward his hip exposed a gun in a leather clip holster at his waist. He seemed to coil like a spring as he turned, dropping into a crouch. Dave blundered through the dining room, banging a hip against a chair, before he filled the kitchen doorway.

Dave’s face had a wildness Glenda had never seen in it before—or expected to see. The expression shifted almost imperceptibly—panic laced with relief—when he saw Glenda braced against the counter where Beringer had shoved her. He took in the scene at a glance—Elli across the room on the floor, Glenda crying out a warning, and, facing him, the broad-shouldered, muscular figure of the man who had terrorized his family.

With an animal snarl Dave hurled himself at Beringer.

*    *    *

H
E MOVED SMOOTHLY
, economically, easily evading Lindstrom’s rush. He pivoted as he stepped aside and drove his right fist flush against Lindstrom’s jaw. The blow straightened Lindstrom up. A second punch, a left hook that started around Beringer’s waist, knocked the professor off his feet. He spilled backward across the kitchen table. The table skidded sideways, a chair crashed to the floor. On his back, Lindstrom looked dazed.

Smiling happily, enveloped in the familiar red haze, Beringer flexed his fists. He was wearing his trademark black goatskin gloves, his only regret that he didn’t have his personal value pack, the leather pouch of steel balls. Watching Lindstrom struggle to his feet, Beringer told himself that he didn’t need the extra weight in his fists, not this time. Nor did he need his gun. He didn’t want this to end too quickly. He had waited too long to enjoy it.…

O
UTSIDE
, K
AREN
Y
OUNGER
saw Lindstrom’s Nissan Sentra parked halfway onto the lawn in front of the two-story house. The driver’s door hung open. Her bowels froze with dread. The front door to the house was open. It gaped like a wound.

Her hands were locked onto the steering wheel. She tore them free. Stumbled out of the car and sucked in air. Fear caught at her throat. She wanted to run. Instead, on quivering legs, she drove herself toward the porch. Once she was moving, her fear acknowledged, training took over. One hand released the flap of her hip holster. She seized the grips of the Smith & Wesson .38 revolver she had never fired away from a shooting range.

She held it before her in both hands as she went up the steps. She moved sideways when she reached the door. Jumped as something crashed inside the house. The empty hallway beckoned, the dark tunnel of her sweat-drenched dreams.

A craven thing in the recesses of her mind screamed,
“Don’t do this!”

Karen ignored it, stepped through the doorway. The coward skittered away like a mouse in the dark, and she felt herself go cold and hard and determined.

R
ICHIE SAW
D
AVE
Lindstrom bounce off the wall and, like a broken doll, slide loose-limbed to the floor. Blood smeared his face, and his nose was mashed like rotten fruit. In a corner of the room Elli sprawled where Beringer had thrown her, one thin arm upraised as if to ward off what she was seeing.

Near his sister’s feet, Richie saw the gun on the floor.

Richie’s mother flew at Beringer, clawing as his eyes. She shrieked in a voice Richie had never heard before. Beringer laughed. Able to fend off Glenda’s blows effortlessly, he seemed content at first merely to avoid being scratched or stabbed in the eye. Then one of her small fists struck through his guard and a fingernail raked his cheek. It trailed a thin red line.

For an instant Beringer’s laughter cut off as if a plug had been pulled. Then it began again, but with a difference. Richie was reminded of the laughter on some television shows, a sound just slightly off kilter that his dad called canned laughter.

Almost casually, Beringer hit Glenda across the side of her face. The blow rocked her back on her heels. Her eyes lost their brightness. Her feet did a rubbery little dance on the tile floor.

“No!” Richie yelled.

He scooped up the small automatic pistol from the floor near Elli’s feet.

Dave had dragged himself to his feet again, using one of the kitchen chairs as a crutch until he was standing. Beringer saw him out of the corner of his eye. The canned laughter stopped. He looked as if he couldn’t believe what he saw. Dave wasn’t supposed to keep getting up again and again. Glenda wasn’t supposed to fight back. The family was not supposed to hold together like this …

Beringer glanced at Richie, saw the gun. “Give it to me, son.”

“No!”

“Don’t play games with me.”

“I … I won’t let you hurt them anymore.”

“Okay, okay, it’s over. Now gimme the gun.”

“Promise me—you’ve got to stop!”

Beringer frowned. He watched Dave Lindstrom while he fended off Glenda and talked to Richie. He was in control. He wasn’t having any trouble with them, it was as easy as he had always known it would be, but the son of a bitch kept getting up off the floor and Beringer was losing patience.

“Okay, I promise. Now gimme the goddamned gun.”

“Richie!” his mother cried. “Don’t believe him—you know you can’t believe him!”

Even without his mother’s plea, Richie knew he couldn’t let his father have the gun. He knew exactly what would happen if he did, as clearly as if Beringer had spelled it out for him. He felt tears like scalding water on his cheeks. Beringer glared at him with an expression of disgust, but Richie could not stop the flow of tears. He couldn’t stop the tears or the way his hand shook holding the gun.

Dave Lindstrom chose that moment to hurl himself at his rival. Richie’s mother screamed. The cry echoed down a corridor of years. At the far end a door in Richie’s memory burst wide open, a barrier that had been sealed against unbearable pain and fear.

At that moment someone behind Richie yelled, “FBI—freeze!”

Incredulous, Beringer spun toward the unexpected voice. In the same smooth motion his hand drew his own weapon, a Walter PPK 9mm double action, already cocked and loaded.

“Don’t—”

Richie felt the gun buck in his hand. There was a roaring in his ears, chaos all around him. He saw Ralph Beringer stagger, an expression of blank surprise replacing the baleful rage in his face. He stumbled backward, falling against the kitchen table. Redness pooled on his shirtfront.

Richie dropped the gun. He clapped both hands to his ears, as if he might block off the sound of his own screams.

S
PECIAL
A
GENT
K
AREN
Younger stayed on a week in San Carlos while the unwieldy machinery of the criminal justice system dealt with the ramifications of an agent shooting resulting in death. On Wednesday of that week she visited Tim Braden’s small unit near the beach.

They lingered on the balcony after dinner—take-out burritos from a small local Mexican restaurant washed down with a bottle of Carta Blanca.

After a while she murmured, “Have you talked to Dr. Nakashimi?”

“Yes. It wasn’t your bullet that killed Beringer. Not that you FBI Special Agents can’t shoot straight …”

“The boy never has to know.”

“No.” Braden paused. “How’s Richie doing?”

“They have him with a child trauma specialist at UCLA. I guess it’ll be a long time before they know how he’s going to come out of this. Having a family like that, though … I think he has a good chance.”