The Devil's Menagerie (16 page)

Although there were cries of whitewash, the demonstrations died away, especially when local TV stations lost interest; but the memory of the Incident lingered on—even that insufferable nickname surfaced once in a while.

When Braden stopped talking there was a long silence. He thought he detected a change in the FBI agent’s attitude when she spoke again. “Fair enough, Detective. I don’t suppose that was easy—”

“Cut the bullshit,” Braden snapped back. “What are you, a shrink?”

Karen Younger smiled. “As a matter of fact, Braden, I am.”

The waitress had brought their Philly Cheesesteak sandwiches while Braden talked, and the agent examined hers dubiously.

“Anything wrong?” Braden asked.

“They never saw this in Philadelphia.”

“This is a Philly Cheesesteak sandwich California style. That’s probably watercress there, see?”

“I don’t want to know.”

They munched on their sandwiches quietly, Braden with more enthusiasm than someone who had grown up eating real Philadelphia Cheesesteak sandwiches. When they had finished Iris brought more coffee and whisked away their plates.

“Okay, Agent Younger, if this Feel-Good Hour is over, what say we get back to why you’re here.”

“Tell me what you’ve learned so far, Detective. Besides what’s in the preliminary autopsy and the incident reports you faxed to us.”

“Edith Foster went out to meet someone Friday night—probably her latest boyfriend. She was seen between ten and eleven at The Pelican, a coffeehouse downtown. At midnight she made some purchases at a supermarket on the south side of town—you went by it driving out here. Her car was found parked in the market’s lot Monday morning. It was parked around the side, but the assistant manager remembers seeing it when he came to work on Sunday and again when he left that night. He thought it might have been there Saturday, too. He was gonna report it, he says, but he hadn’t got around to it. Too busy.”

“So you think she was abducted from the parking lot after midnight.”

“Either that or she went off willingly in her boyfriend’s car and never came back.”

“Why did you call him her latest boyfriend before?”

“She was a popular girl. Between the lines, maybe she slept around a little more than was good for her.”

“Mm.”

“Whatever that means. The thing is … her latest is a mystery man. According to her roommate, Foster liked older men—including some of her professors. Supposedly, she had a crush on one of them last year. Then they broke up or something, or summer vacation got in the way, but the roomie thinks Foster was seeing him again. At any rate, she was seeing someone for the last four or five weeks and was very closemouthed about it.”

“One of her teachers?”

“That’d be a good guess. There’s some kind of rule against faculty and students doing their thing together.”

“Delicately put.”

“I thought so.” Braden paused in his summary. “So you see, Younger, there’s good reason to think we should be looking for our killer right here in San Carlos, not at something that happened in Germany eight years ago.”

“The two don’t necessarily rule each other out.”

“Be easy to check, though. Get a list of the faculty, eliminate women and those who are too old or too young, and run the others, see if they were in Germany at the right time.”

“That’s worth doing, Detective. That’s something I can do.”

Braden nodded. It was the kind of thing the FBI was good at.

“This roommate … do you think she knows more than she’s told you?”

“Sheri Kuttner? Yeah, she knows more, or thinks she does. I get the feeling she was a little jealous of Foster … or maybe she resented this guy coming between them. She and Edie were best friends.”

“If he was an older, married man, Sheri would probably have disapproved. She might have believed Edie was being used.”

“I don’t know about Sheri disapproving of what Edie was doing—I don’t get the impression these kids are very judgmental—but you’re right, she didn’t like what the professor was doing. Some of them do take advantage. I remember when I went to college, one of my professors had this regular revolving door for coeds, at least one every semester.”

“I was thinking more of Sheri Kuttner’s reliability.”

“I know what you were saying. You want to know what this professor of mine taught?”

The FBI agent eyed him speculatively. “Psychology.”

Braden grinned at her. “You’ve got it.”

“I’d like to talk to Sheri. Maybe she’ll open up more with a woman.”

“Be my guest.” Braden waved the attentive Iris off. “So what’s this German angle? Where does a serial killer fit in … from the Bureau’s point of view, that is.”

“We don’t have an ax to grind, Braden … and I wish to hell I didn’t believe what I do. Eight years ago a similar murder occurred near Wiesbaden in what was then West Germany. That’s near a major U.S. air base. The crime was never solved. The details were entered into VICAP’s database several years ago as a control. The entry was never supposed to turn up a match in this country, but now it has.”

Braden regarded her with a cop’s flat, skeptical gaze. “Eight years ago?”

“That’s right. The case was investigated by the FBI and the German
polizei
. There was a suspicion that the murderer might have been an American, but it was never proved. The girl was with another soldier the night she was killed.”

“Another soldier?”

The agent’s gray eyes looked past Braden’s shoulder at some distant point. She described the bridge and the service platform where the girl’s body was found. “The theory was that the girl and her soldier went down to the service platform for a little privacy, and the killer caught them there.”

“Both of them?”

“The river deposited the boyfriend’s body downstream two days later. He had some contusions about the face, suggesting he’d been hit, but he died from drowning.”

Braden stared at her for a moment, then shook his head. “That’s different from my case. I have only one body. Anyway, eight years is a lifetime between murders, and it’s a long way from Wiesbaden to San Carlos.”

“Not far enough, apparently.”

“You seem pretty sure.”

“If I weren’t, I wouldn’t be here. Believe me, Braden, you have a serial killer on the loose here.”

“Why’d they send you?”

“Because I was there when this guy got his start. I was in Germany. It was my first year out of the FBI Academy, acting as a liaison with German authorities.”

“You don’t look old enough.”

She didn’t, he thought. When she first walked into the police station that morning he had thought someone’s daughter was visiting. Now, in the fluorescent glare of the diner, she appeared definitely older, but still no more than thirty. There was also something in her face he hadn’t seen at first, a toughness she neither affected nor tried to hide. Her gaze was direct, unflinching. She wouldn’t give away anything to Captain Hummel in a staring contest, Braden thought.

“I still think it’s a reach. What’s the connection? Where’s the link? Just because two women were beaten to death in similar ways, and a knife was used on each of them—”

“Do you really think I’d be here if that was all there was? Come on, Braden.”

He felt heat at the back of his neck, irritated by the scolding tone. “Okay, spell it out for me. This better be good.”

“Both women were beaten to death. In the first case the victim, Lisl Moeller, was cut up badly because he used his bare fists and he wears a wedding ring. He’s had time to think about blood matching and tissue samples since then, so he wore gloves when he killed Edith Foster. But if the coroner is right, this time he had something hard under his gloves.”

“Could’ve been holding a roll of quarters,” Braden said.

“Whatever. He doesn’t care what kind of damage he does. When he gets going he’s a very angry man—also very strong. He handled these women easily, along with Moeller’s soldier boyfriend. There were no defensive wounds in either case, and no blood or tissue under the women’s fingernails to indicate they were able to scratch or hit back.”

“He hits ’em like Foreman hit Moorer,” Braden said thoughtfully. “One punch, the fight’s over.”

“I expect so, Detective.”

“These defensive wounds—”

“Bruising or abrasions where she might have tried to ward off an attack. As you know, they usually show on the hands or arms. Lisl Moeller’s wrists showed circular bruising, indicating he might have grabbed her wrists while she struggled, before he hit her. Edith Foster didn’t even have that much of a chance.”

“Go on.”

“He rapes his women, probably both before and after. In Germany he left semen. Here in San Carlos he practiced safe sex—and denied us any blood or semen to match.” Karen Younger’s tone had become detached, clinical. “He uses a knife with a short, fairly dull blade, probably a pocketknife or Swiss Army knife. He probably carries it all the time. At least we can hope so.”

“Our
ME
didn’t specify a pocketknife—”

“He described a short, straight, dull-edged blade. The killer doesn’t use it like a surgeon because it tears as much as it cuts. Moeller’s cuts were postmortem; Foster’s either perimortem or later. She might have been alive. He likes to hurt women, Braden. He’s getting even.”

Braden was beginning to feel uneasy as the index of similarities in the two murders lengthened. But the FBI agent’s theory was still too farfetched, the incidents too far removed from each other in time and place, for him to give it credence.

“He cuts the woman’s initial across her abdomen,” Younger continued in the same remote tone. “A single large letter—block, not script, because that kind of lettering is easier with a dull knife. Cutting into flesh isn’t as easy as some people think.” She paused again briefly. “He’s right-handed. The horizontal strokes for the letters are made from left to right, which is natural for a right-hander.”

In spite of himself Braden was listening closely now, not wanting to believe what he was hearing. Christ, eight years! Was it possible? If the agent was right, what would the creep have been doing for the past eight years? And why would his anger erupt again at this time? Why San Carlos?

“Then the killer has left a final message for us, in case we had any doubt. In each case he used the knife to make one more cut, extending an opening. She’s only a cunt, he’s telling us.”

Braden stared in silence out of the streaked window of the Bright Spot. The day had turned bleaker. Why didn’t it rain? At least that would lessen the fire hazard in the hills. After several moments he said, “Shit.”

“He’s here, Braden. The same man. He’s starting again.”

“Even supposing you’re right, what set him off again? What brought him into my backyard?”

“I guess that’s what we have to find out.”

I
T WAS
W
EDNESDAY
before Glenda found the courage to talk to Dave at length about Ralph Beringer. By then he had given her even more reason.

Dave had come home that evening in a foul mood. For the second time in three days his car had been vandalized in the faculty parking lot. Monday the Nomex coat had been stolen from the back seat; today someone had slashed one of his tires. Senseless vandalism annoyed the hell out of him, he complained, and he couldn’t imagine how young men or women, on the verge of adulthood, could think there was anything clever or amusing about slashing someone’s tires.

Glenda had felt a chill, listening to him.

Dave had grumbled irritably through half their delayed meal before he realized that she was hardly paying attention. He waited until they were alone in the den after dinner before asking what was troubling her.

“He called again today.”

“You talked to him? What did he—?”

“He hung up on me.”

She knew instantly what Dave was thinking, that it was a wrong number. But the pinched frustration and anger in Glenda’s face stopped him from saying it.

“That’s the third call since last Friday. He’s also been following me, spying on me and the kids.”

“How do you know that?”

“One of Elli’s teachers called me this afternoon. She wanted to know if we knew anyone with a large, dark blue sedan. It was parked near the school, and one of the children said the driver of the car was asking her questions about Elli.”

The shock in Dave’s eyes pleased her irrationally.

“Hey, I’ve seen that car.” Richie stood in the doorway of the den. Glenda wondered how long he had been listening. “It’s cool … a 1993 Buick LeSabre.”

“You’ve seen it? Where?”

“It was parked up the street yesterday when I got off the bus.” The boy’s eyes were openly curious.

“You’re sure about that?” Dave asked sharply.

Richie was not above dramatizing things. But the boy was crazy about cars. When he was younger he had built up a vast collection of small plastic copies of just about every make and model automobile. He still had most of them in a box in his closet. If he had seen the car, Glenda knew, and he said it was a ‘93 LeSabre, that’s what it was.

“Sure I’m sure. I saw it again this morning. I think it was following my bus.”

When Dave sent Richie up to his room to finish his homework, Glenda retreated into silence.

“Let’s not jump to conclusions, honey,” Dave said. “We don’t know for sure—”

“It’s him,” she said bitterly. “He’s doing it openly. He
wants
us to know. Why else would he ask that other girl about Elli? Why would he park where Richie was able to see his car?”

“Okay, but—”

“And who do you think stole your coat? Or slashed your tire?”

“Student pranksters—”

“When was the last time student pranksters sneaked into the faculty lot and slashed a faculty member’s tires? They could get tossed out of school.”

“But that’s such a childish thing for Beringer to do, so …” He fumbled for an explanation that would be less bizarre than hers.

“Malicious,” Glenda said shortly.

“I can hardly believe he’d waste his time that way.”

“Later, Dave.” Glenda cocked her head, alerted to a small sound in the hallway.