The Devil's Menagerie (33 page)

His breathing became labored, but Iris continued to run freely, not slowing. He had hardly gained on her at all. When he put on a burst of speed, designed to close the gap between them in a rush before she realized what was happening, Iris suddenly veered off the parking lot onto the soft sand, which was still warm from the day’s heat.

Her toe stubbed on something buried in the sand. She stumbled. Beringer dove after her. His fingers closed on her trailing foot.

For a moment, exulting, he thought he had her. Then she kicked off her sandal, leaving it in his hand. As she leaped away she shed the other sandal and ran barefoot across the beach.

Stumbling after her, Beringer realized he couldn’t take the time to remove his thick-soled Nikes. While he struggled, the soft sand dragging at his shoes, she seemed to fly across the sand, widening her lead.

Iris shouted, “Help! Help me, please!”

“Fat chance,” Beringer raged aloud.

But even as he spoke he saw the cluster of people farther down the beach stop, alerted by the outcry. Several heads turned. “Help!” Iris screamed.

Beringer pulled up. A stitch caught at his side. He bent over, wheezing, hands on his knees. He could never reach her in time. Some of the people on the strand had already started forward to meet the running woman.

A sudden realization of his own danger chilled Beringer’s rage, shocking him to his senses. He turned at once and trotted back in the direction of the Buick, veering onto the asphalt parking strip for easier footing. As he broke into a run he calculated distances, the reaction times of strangers confronting a hysterical woman, the uncertainties that would initially beset Iris’s rescuers.

The Buick loomed out of the darkness. No way anyone could intercept him before he reached the highway, or follow him afterward. What were the risks, then? Iris could describe but not identify him—he had never given her his real name. But she knew Richie’s first name, she could identify the Buick—and she knew where the apartment was.

He hadn’t lost the game, Beringer thought as he reached the Buick, jabbed the key into the ignition and spun the car around. The timetable had moved up, that was all.

Damn the bitch! But he had to forget about her. Use the boy now, as he had planned, but do it tonight. It would be some time before Iris was able to tell a coherent story to the police. Plenty of time for Beringer to clear out of the apartment, take the boy with him in the Taurus. Iris had seen him only in the Buick.

Time for the last act. He hadn’t needed I for Iris, anyway. Lennie would still get the message.

He wouldn’t have to look far for an E.

A
T THE CRIME
scene in the park Tim Braden berated himself for the latest death. He had not done enough to warn the young women of San Carlos and the college, he fumed. The reluctance of his superiors and the FBI to cause widespread panic or to give away too much information about the killings had silenced him. Not any longer, he said.

“The media vultures want something. I’m gonna give them the story.”

“Wait a minute, Braden, the sheriff and your chief—”

“That girl might be alive if I’d scared her badly enough.”

Karen’s protest dried up. She knew he was right. She also understood that there was only so long the full story of the killer and his bizarre trademarks could be contained. In fact, she was surprised that no one from the San Carlos PD or the sheriff’s department had leaked the story before now. In New York or Philly, she thought, it would have made page-one headlines a week or more ago.

Braden walked toward the press corps, barricaded behind crime scene tape. Lights and cameras swung toward him. Reporters began to shout, their words trampling over each other.

Braden held up both hands, flat palms gesturing for silence. “Okay, okay, listen up! You’ll get your story.” He paused, waiting for the hubub to die down, ignoring shouted questions until some of the reporters, realizing Braden was not going to talk until he could be heard, took charge. Gradually a silence fell.

“I’m only going to say this once, so listen carefully,” he said. “No questions, no nothing. I’m just going to tell this once and then I’m going back to doing my job while you do yours.” He blew out a long breath. “We have a serial killer here in San Carlos, and he’s left his mark on each of his victims …”

When he had finished Karen watched him fight free of the reporters and, at a deputy’s signal, march over to his car to take a radio call. Five minutes later, ignoring the pandemonium he had ignited, Braden grabbed Karen Younger’s arm and hustled her toward his car. “This is the way it’s gonna be from now on,” he growled. “A goddam circus.”

“Maybe not,” Karen said, although she no longer felt as confident about her earlier intuition.

Braden looked at her sharply.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said.

P
ERIODICALLY
R
ICHIE
L
INDSTROM
turned off the vent fan in the bathroom to listen. But from the moment the silence in the apartment first told him he was alone, he had been working on the lock of the bathroom door.

He was sweating. The small, enclosed room was warm. The fan hardly seemed to stir the air.

It had taken a long time for his heart to stop hammering wildly. He kept thinking about Iris in the bedroom, taking off her blouse with nothing underneath it, stroking his cheek and murmuring, “Don’t be scared, honey … it’s all right.” As he remembered the hot gush of sensation his cheeks burned with shame, guilt, humiliation. “It’s okay, honey,” Iris had said, but he recalled her stiff, angry gestures when she pulled her blouse closed over her breasts and smoothed her skirt over her thighs with the palms of her hands.

“I’m sorry,” Richie had whispered, not sure what he had done wrong.

“Oh, you poor kid.” Iris had pulled him to her, hugged him fiercely for a long moment, before she leaped up and threw the door wide, shouting at Beringer, “You sick bastard!”

Richie pawed through the drawers of the bathroom counter, searching for something else to try on the door lock. He was mechanically inclined, always asking how things worked, and he had seen actors on television or in movies a thousand times using a credit card or similar piece of plastic to work open a simple door lock. So far he had tried strips of stiff cardboard, a thin comb, a piece of plastic he had cut from the front of a package containing a pair of toothbrushes. Nothing had worked. The sweat ran down from his forehead into his eyes. He wondered how long his father had been gone and when he would return—and in spite of the warmth and the sweat, he shivered.

Nothing had gone the way he had expected. Discovering his missing father had been exciting at first, but events had chilled his enthusiasm. At various times Richie had seen hostility, contempt, cold appraisal in Ralph Beringer’s eyes—never warmth or affection. Sometimes Beringer had simply looked at him as if he were a bug on a slide. In such moments Richie had experienced a visceral fear; he quivered inside, stomach churning, without knowing exactly why.

In a side drawer of the cabinet he came across a package of stiff, narrow, gritty sticks. Emery boards, he recalled. His mother used them. Taking one of the strips, he slid it between the door and the jamb, pushing against the latch of the lock.

He felt it give.

His heart began to race. He pushed carefully at the latch but the emery board slipped off it. He started over. The sweat poured down his face. His vision swam, and he had trouble breathing, as if the enclosed bathroom were running out of oxygen.

Click!

Richie froze in place. For a moment he dared not move. Then, still holding the plastic strip in place, he slowly reached for the doorknob and turned it cautiously to the left.

The door sprang free.

Richie rushed out into the cool of the apartment. He remembered where the phone was in the living room—Beringer had used it to call Pizza Hut. Richie ran to the phone and picked it up in a shaking hand. For an instant his mind went blank, he couldn’t remember his own telephone number. He told himself to calm down, he
knew
the number! Then it popped into his head.

As Richie jabbed at the buttons, the door into the apartment opened. Caught with the phone in his hand, Richie stared at Ralph Beringer.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Beringer said.

The angry voice seemed to come from the distant past, harsh and frightful. Trembling, Richie dropped the phone and backed away.

I
N THE CAR
Richie sat as far away from his father as he could. He sensed the fury consuming the man, and behind it a darkness as cold and empty as a black hole in space.

Beringer had gone through the apartment like a tornado ripping through a mobile home park. Ignoring Richie, cursing savagely to himself, he had thrown clothes, shoes and shaving gear into a single large duffel bag, which already held most of his clothes and personal effects, as if he had always been prepared to leave quickly. He had dragged Richie with him down a back stairway to the garage, where they got into the gray Taurus.

Now, sneaking furtive glances at Beringer, Richie noticed details magnified by his fear. A deep scratch on his father’s cheek. The smooth leather gloves on his hands that Richie had seen him wear once before—and also glimpsed under the folds of a towel on the floor of the shower stall, as if they had just been cleaned. The bulge at his waist under his jacket. Richie had had a glimpse of it when Beringer got into the car and the jacket pulled up. It was a gun.

Suddenly the Taurus swung off the road into a gas station. Beringer pulled past the pumps over to the side of the station, where there were two telephone booths. He turned in the seat to glare at Richie without pity or concern. “Beat it,” he said.

“What? I don’t—”

“You wanted to make a phone call, right? So go ahead—give Mommy a call. You got twenty cents?”

“Uh … yes …”

Richie could hardly believe this was happening. His hands shook with excitement as he fumbled in his side pocket for his change, “Will I … I mean, are you gonna …?”

“Be around?” Beringer laughed, a sound no more pleasant than a saw ripping through a knot. “Hey, count on it. We’ll be seeing each other soon. That’s a promise.”

“Uh … is Iris … did she say anything?”

“Forget Iris. She’s just another cunt, that’s all. Didn’t you even learn that much?”

D
AVE, WHO HAD
picked up the phone, said, “Stay where you are, Richie. You hear me? Stay right there—I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Glenda was on her feet. “Thank God—I’ll come with you. We can—”

“No,” Dave said sharply. “If Beringer is the kind of man you think he is, this could be some kind of trick to get at you. You stay here with Elli.” He spoke again into the phone. “Are you alone, Richie? Can you talk?” He listened for a moment. “Good. Just stay put. I’m on my way—wait a minute, your mom wants to talk to you.”

He handed Glenda the phone. The joy and relief in his face caused her heart to twist.

“Richie? This is Mom. Are you okay?”

Richie began to cry, unable to speak. Through choking sobs he mumbled something about a woman, and a word that sounded like the name of a flower—iris.

Dave was already on his way out the door.

D
RIVING BACK TOWARD
San Carlos from the regional park, Karen Younger felt Braden’s contained anger pervading the car like a radiant force. She thought of the burdensome television image he carried on his back, the image of a cop who was a loose cannon, and realized how out of character the picture really was.

“It’s not Lindstrom,” she said after a moment.

“What did you mean back there?”

“I know you liked Lindstrom as the killer, but—”

“Yeah, I did, but it’s all too damned pat. Wrapping this last girl in Lindstrom’s coat, that’s too much.” He paused. “Besides … that call I got back there, couple minutes ago? The Navajo Tribal Police over in Arizona heard from Jim Roget. He says Lindstrom was with him that Friday night from midnight till maybe six in the morning.”

Karen felt something click into place in her brain.

Braden said, “Someone is jerking my chain.”

“The real killer.”

“Yeah.” He was silent a moment. The planes of his face were sharp-edged in the intermittent flicker of streetlights. “My problem still is, Lindstrom is connected somehow, and he’s all I’ve got.”

“I’ve thought the same thing. And there’s a wild card there we haven’t been looking at.”

“I’ve been hoping you’d get around to telling me.”

She had wondered how he would react to her holding something back. Not that she had deliberately kept anything from him; she simply hadn’t been sure enough. She still had doubts; Nancy Showalter’s name didn’t fit the pattern she had perceived.

“All along I’ve had misgivings about this killer,” she said. “In some ways he acts exactly like a hundred other serial killers—the seemingly random choice of victims, the acting out of sexual fantasies, the escalating violence—but in other ways he’s very different. He’s like two different people.”

“I don’t buy that,” Braden objected.

“Neither do I, not this time. It’s one man, but it’s like he has two agendas. Or to put it another way, he has one agenda, and the killings are only incidental to it. Which, if anything, is even more horrifying.”

“You’re saying we’ve been concentrating too much on the killings themselves, not what’s behind them.”

“Yes. And he’s spelling out this real agenda in the names of his victims.” Karen paused. “Did you happen to note David Lindstrom’s wife’s name?”

“Well, uh, it’s …”

“Glenda.”

It took a moment for Braden to react. “You were looking at the LEN cuttings.” He scowled. “Nancy doesn’t fit there.”

“I know, and I can’t explain that. But I think Glenda’s the connection, not David Lindstrom. The wild card is her ex-husband, Ralph Beringer, the one who has their son. Last night, when I reread the file on the Lindstroms and her name jumped at me—that was before Nancy became a definite part of the picture—I finally asked myself, where’s this ex of hers been—and where did he come from? So I called Quantico and asked for some expanded lists of military records, including deserters and soldiers who went AWOL, pushing the time frame all the way back to Lisl Moeller’s murder, and I added Beringer’s name to those we’re screening against the lists.”