The Devil's Menagerie (11 page)

Abruptly she turned and ran to the door.

“Miss Kuttner—Sheri! Wait!”

But the student fled into the corridor. Dave started after her, then stopped. He couldn’t chase her down the hallway. Not today of all days, with the whole campus on edge.

Sheri Kuttner was overwrought. The trauma of having to identify her friend’s dead body must have been almost too much to bear. She wasn’t thinking clearly.

Roommates, Dave thought. Girls of that age would have been very close. Close enough for long, whispered confidences in the small hours of the morning. Edie Foster revealing her feelings for someone, talking out her fantasies. But surely she hadn’t actually named
him
! Why would she do that?

Dave flashed again to the sometimes provocative approaches the coed had made to him. Her open invitations took on more significance. Such situations were not uncommon for many college instructors, and Dave thought he had always handled them as well as possible, principally by acting as if nothing were wrong, as if long slim legs and vibrant bosoms were outside the range of his tunnel vision, and sexual invitations from girls scarcely out of their teens were incomprehensible to him. You couldn’t respond to what you didn’t see. No one’s feelings had to be hurt.

He had acted that way with Edith Foster.

Dave stopped in his tracks in the corridor.

Had he angered the girl? Had his seeming indifference been translated in her mind into rejection, turning her hostile? He could no longer remember whether the girl’s demeanor had changed toward the end of the spring semester, and since she had not signed up for any of his classes this fall, he couldn’t recall even seeing her.

But what had she told Sheri Kuttner?

P
REOCCUPIED
, D
AVE
L
INDSTROM
stopped briefly at his office to leave his notes and gather up some student papers that had to be graded. Rarely did a teacher’s work end with the last class of the day, and today was no exception. He usually took home a couple hours work or more, not counting the reading and research that were part of his ongoing absorption in the subject of films and their impact on twentieth-century society. Even going to a movie—a passion since early childhood—was both business and pleasure. “Like Siskel and Ebert,” he would joke with Glenda, “only they get paid more.”

He walked to his car in the faculty parking lot behind the Liberal Arts building, thinking about Sheri Kuttner and the implications of her brief visit. Could he also expect a visit from Shed’s detective? The possibility was both intriguing and a little intimidating.

He unlocked the driver’s door of the Nissan Sentra, tossed his armload of books and papers onto the passenger seat and paused, not immediately knowing why. Something in his peripheral vision … but the parking lot was empty except for a few cars. No one else nearby. In the distance, students strolled across the campus, absorbed in animated discussions. About St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle? Wordsworth and Shelley? Radio isotopes? Girls and boys? The Raiders and the 49ers next Sunday? Or was everyone talking about Edie Foster, wondering, speculating?

Nothing out there to alert him. It was something he had seen when he opened the car, then. No, he suddenly realized. Something he
didn’t
see.

His yellow fireproof slicker. He had been assaulted that morning by the strong smell of stale smoke and ashes permeating the interior of the Sentra. Had he tossed the offending gear into the trunk? No, he would have remembered. But just to make sure, Dave opened the trunk to look. He found the spare tire, tools in a greasy pouch, his Ping Pal 2 putter and some golf balls. No fire equipment or clothing.

Walking back around the vehicle, frowning, he spotted deep scratches beside the lock on the passenger side door. The metal was actually indented slightly where someone had pried at the door.

Popped it open, Dave thought angrily. Stole his Nomex coat.

He drove straight to the campus security office, where he railed to Ed Willhite, the white-haired chief of security, about the stupidity of breaking into a car to steal something the thief couldn’t possible have any use for. “Hell, if he wants to fight fires, all he has to do is volunteer and the fire department will give him his own gear.”

“Prob’ly figured there might be somethin’ else more valuable when he broke in,” Whillhite said. He was a big, slow-moving man, a retired LAPD cop, with a garland of white hair surrounding a pink scalp. This afternoon, less than twenty-four hours after discovering that a girl from the college was the subject of a murder investigation, Willhite found it hard to get excited about a stolen slicker.

“And right in the faculty lot—in broad daylight!” Dave fumed. “What the hell are we coming to?”

“Tell me about it,” the security man said as he filled in the complaint form. “You sure nothin’ else was stolen?”

“There was nothing there to steal.”

“Prob’ly vandals. They’ll just dump the coat somewheres. If it turns up I’ll let you know. You wanta sign this right here by the X?”

Walking back to his car, Dave looked out across the campus, which appeared tranquil and peaceful in the long shadows of the late autumn afternoon. It was beautiful, he thought, but no longer as innocent as he had always viewed it. Strange how the loss of the coat, the invasion of his privacy, affected him so strongly, although the incident seemed trivial in comparison to the murder of one of his former students. Glenda thought him naive, always reluctant to see the worst side of things. Maybe she was right.

We’re not immune, he thought. None of us are.

Not anymore.

L
EONARD
“B
UDDY
” C
OCHRANE
was a legend in the FBI, one of the pioneers of the Behavioral Science Unit in the 1970s and 80s, of the growing art-cum-science of criminal profiling, of VICAP, the Bureau’s Violent Crime Analysis Program, and of its parent National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. In large part through Cochrane’s efforts VICAP’s capability of matching data from one violent crime to another, in order to establish links or patterns at the earliest stage, was now on-line to police agencies in a majority of the fifty states.

Cochrane was past the Bureau’s fifty-five-year retirement age but had been retained at the NVAVC simply because his superiors at Quantico were reluctant to let him go. He was a handsome man with patrician features, piercing blue eyes, a full head of pure white hair and, at sixty, the body of a forty-year-old aerobics instructor. This Tuesday morning, however, after a long weekend consulting on a particularly gruesome series of mutilation killings in the vicinity of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, he wondered if it wasn’t time to go fishing. He was drained, physically and emotionally. His ulcer was acting up again, and a weekend falling off the coffee wagon hadn’t helped. He felt old and worn out. Retirement had the glow not of sunset but of a beacon.

A knock on the solid mahogany door of his office dissipated the glow. The office was at the end of a long, carpeted corridor in the basement complex housing the offices and laboratories of the BSU and its logical offshoot, the Investigative Support Unit. Special Agent Karen Younger peered around the door.

“Come in,” Cochrane growled, his tone hiding the pleasure he invariably felt upon seeing her.

“Good morning, sir. You wanted to see me?”

Cochrane grunted, waving her toward a chair beside his desk. He didn’t like to talk across the desk or across the room to agents or visitors. Up close and personal was his style. It was also his way of penetrating a visitor’s defenses. With Special Agent Younger the habit carried a bonus, he thought, detecting a faint trace of White Shoulders perfume. Identifying scents was one of his arcane specialties. He had a dog’s nose, he said, and at least one famous serial murder case had turned on Buddy Cochrane’s recognition of a particular men’s cologne on a victim’s clothing.

Karen Younger was pretty enough, with even features, a wide mouth, intelligent gray eyes with flecks of blue in them and hair the color of autumn leaves turned dark gold. But what struck Cochrane about her was the sense of bedrock honesty and integrity she projected. She walked straight, sat straight, looked you straight in the eye. There was never any dissembling or posing. She wore little makeup, but a flawless complexion made it seem unnecessary. Special Agent Younger, according to her personnel jacket, was actually thirty-two, with degrees in business law and psychology. She was five feet seven and weighed a hundred and twenty-seven pounds. A nice armful, Cochrane thought, who sniffed at the notion that undernourished meant beautiful. At sixty, with a wife, three children and seven grandchildren, and an impeccable reputation for propriety, he was not immune.

A hint of color in her cheeks, Agent Younger said, “Is it about the Tuscaloosa killings?”

“No … no, we’ve got the killer, I have no doubt of it. It’s in the prosecutor’s hands now. But something else has come up—something I want you to look at.”

He tapped a file on his desk, fingering a corner absently as he watched the interest flare in her eyes. “Read that,” he said without preamble, pushing the folder toward her. “See if you see what I do. Would you like some coffee?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, I would, but I can’t have it, of course.”

He buzzed his secretary and asked for a glass of milk. When she brought it Cochrane tipped his leather swivel chair back and sipped the cold milk slowly, watching Karen Younger as she read, searching for any reaction. He wondered, again, if he was making a mistake. No, dammit! Her instincts were too good to remain cooped up in a basement cubicle for the next twenty years.

He had groomed her for fieldwork in the VICAP program, but an extensive part of her experience had been with the Criminal Personality Research Project, or CPRP, interviewing and profiling convicted violent criminals. Although she was a trained psychologist with special emphasis on criminology, and, in spite of her relative youth, had had field experience both in the U.S. and Germany, the face-to-face interviews with a series of the most monstrous criminals in the national’s penal institutions had proved devastating. Severe stress reactions among investigators in the program were commonplace. They suffered such symptoms as rapid weight loss, heart attacks, ulcers, severe anxiety attacks simulating heart problems, gastrointestinal disorders, insomnia and nightmares. Karen Younger had developed an ulcer at the age of twenty-nine. She lost weight, going down to a hundred and ten pounds. She experienced chronic sleeplessness. Finally she came to Cochrane, her boss, and told him she had to leave the CPRP program, even if it meant resigning from the Bureau.

Cochrane wouldn’t have it, of course. She was a fine profiler, in part because she connected so fiercely with the criminals she worked with. What was destroying her was the same sensitivity to evil that made her invaluable. Cochrane brought her out of the cold, assigned her to the ISU’s internal staff, where her insightful analyses were everything he could have asked for … but less than he wanted from her. With the expansion of VICAP’s liaison program with law enforcement agencies throughout the country, Special Agent Younger, in her boss’s view, belonged in the field.

When she finished reading, Karen Younger closed the file and placed it carefully on Cochrane’s desk, as if it burned her fingers. Cochrane read her reaction in her body language as well as the tighter set of her mouth and a bleakness in her eyes.

“It’s not possible,” she whispered. “It’s been …”

“Eight years,” said Cochrane.

“It’s coincidence.”

The file had come in late on Monday, shortly after Cochrane’s return flight from Alabama. He had taken it home with him along with an armful of other files to read.

VICAP had made an immediate linkage between a new case report from California and an eight-year-old murder that took place not in the United States but in Germany. Karen Younger, a fledgling agent on her first field assignment, had been stationed at Wiesbaden, Germany, as liaison between the large U.S. Air Force base near Wiesbaden and German police agencies. The murder, the first Younger had been involved with, had left a profound mark. It had encouraged the interest in criminal psychosis that led her eventually to the ISU. It had also given her nightmares that resurfaced years later when she became involved with the criminal profiling program.

The new case file had originated in San Carlos, California, a small college town outside of Los Angeles. The murder victim in the case was a nineteen-year-old college student, attractive, blond, apparently sexually active. She had been kidnapped and repeatedly raped both before and possibly after she was beaten to death. The killer then carved her first initial on her abdomen, using a relatively dull knife.

“She was even dumped under a bridge,” Cochrane pointed out—an unusual detail calling to mind the circumstances of the incident in Germany.

Younger shook her head as if to deny the similarities. “This man, according to the report, wore smooth gloves and possibly brass knuckles.”

“Or he was holding weights in his right hand when he hit her. And your man in Germany didn’t. He used his bare fists and left skin and blood samples. But eight years ago he may have acted on impulse. Presumably that was his first. This time he was more prepared.”

“Why?” Karen Younger cried with a kind of desperation. “Why now, after eight years? It makes no sense!”

“In one respect it makes a great deal of sense. You always suspected the murderer was a soldier stationed in Germany. He may have been there all this time. That wouldn’t be unusual for a career soldier. And now …”

Cochrane knew that what he was suggesting was Karen Younger’s worst nightmare.

“He’s come home,” she whispered.

“I think so. It’s your case, Karen.”

“No … no, sir.” She could not remember Cochrane ever calling her by her surname before. Her eyes darted around the windowless office, not meeting his, as if she were a trapped animal. “I can’t.”

“I believe you can. Sooner or later you have to find out. There’s no question this is the time. You’ve been close to this man once. No one else has. And since then you’ve had a great deal of experience getting inside minds like this one. You’re our best chance to get to him before he strikes again.”