Dreams in the Key of Blue (9 page)

“She’ll be off the phone in a minute. I told you about Karen Jasper. She’s in investigations with the state, went to that FBI school. Sort of stuff you do, I guess.”

“I doubt it,” I muttered.

“What’s that?”

“Like to meet her,” I said, gazing beyond Jaworski at a silent TV that offered a view of the media crews loitering at the building’s front door.

“Wish I’d been here to see me drive by,” I said.

Jaworski glanced at the screen, then back at me. “Our mirror on the world is aimed at us.”

“We’d best be careful. Those autopsy photos come in yet, Herb?”

Jaworski handed me a manila envelope. “Came in an hour ago. I haven’t had a chance to look at them. We’ve got two sets, so you can take your time getting that package back. They’ll probably tell you more than they will me anyhow. You’ve got another set of reports in there, too. Don’t ask me which ones. I copied them and stuck them in the envelope.”

Karen Jasper put down her phone, swung around in her swivel chair, and said, “I’ve checked NCIC, VICAP,
and our own computers. Our focus is Stanley Markham. This is the work of a traveling pro, and we have no other pros on the road in the Northeast right now. We had a hit in southern California, but that guy is taking kids under twelve. Who the hell are you?”

She directed her rapid-fire report at Jaworski. The final remark was for me.

“Karen Jasper, I’d like you to meet Dr. Lucas Frank,” Jaworski sputtered.

Jasper glared at me.

I had showered, and had changed my socks and underwear, so I could not imagine why she was firing such a pissy expression my way. Perhaps she had heard of my disdain for all bureaucratic hacks.

Trying to make nice, I stuck out my hand. She ignored my gesture.

“I’m recommending that you request federal assistance,” Jasper said to the chief.

See what I mean? I never enjoy my meetings with people like Karen Jasper. I usually go away feeling that I’ve met someone who has missed her or his calling—you know, inventory management, or maybe even pyramid sales.

Jasper planned to fill her plate: a main course of Markham, with a side order of pale people in suits wandering around with copies of
The Wall Street Journal
tucked under their arms looking for a private place to take a shit. Not that they’re not perfectly nice people.

“Karen, I mentioned Lucas to you. He’s the one—”

“I’m familiar with your work,” she said through her continuing glare. “We spent an entire class on the early contributors to the field. All that history is interesting, but has little contemporary relevance.”

Ouch. If I were sensitive about my age, “early contributors,” however accurate, would have stung.

In the late sixties and early seventies, the few people in the U.S. who examined crime scenes for the leavings of a personality were trained and educated broadly in criminology, psychology, and sociology. They probed their own minds, then plunged into the streets with the cops. They knew they had to acquire a feel for the setting of slaughter and for the mind of the veteran homicide detective whose intuitive leaps were the inspiration for investigative shrinks.

Too many from my generation remained in university offices and played with statistics. Some wrote scholarly, theoretical treatises. Others had established lucrative private practices consulting on issues related to violence that they read about in their brothers’ and sisters’ articles. Most of their advice was common sense, but they saw it as a chance to turn a profit on fear. They also shaped a national belief that pure science could explain the vagaries of human violence.

Art and intuition were out; math and science were in. The new generation, of which Karen Jasper was surely a member, followed their household gods to the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. A few independent thinkers ventured to Europe and found that even more quantifiable work was under way. The governments and universities that funded research wanted cleanly calculated accountability. They loved bar graphs and pie charts.

Jasper was crisp, pure business. All she needed was an infomercial and a bar code to slap on her product, whatever it was.

I thought of James Brussel, the New York psychiatrist who was responsible for the existence of “the field.” “Surely Dr. Brussel merited—”

“Same class,” she snapped, cutting me off. “Brussel was an urban myth. He wrote his own book, then the folk tales took over. I don’t have time for this.”

She swung back to the table and flipped open her laptop.

Jaworski glanced at me with an expression of helplessness.

I grinned at him. Maybe this was going to get fun. “Ms. Jasper, if Brussel’s analysis of George Metesky, New York’s ‘Mad Bomber,’ was a myth, why did your federal colleagues rely on it when they did their profile of the Unabomber?”

“I don’t believe that’s so, Dr. Frank,” she answered, slapping her palm on the table. “Look, we have three dead women here, and—”

“I have doubts about Stanley Markham,” I said.

She swiveled around. “I see. You have some
psychic
insight about Markham.”

“He worked the Markham case,” Herb said with a look of desperation that told me he did not have a clue about what was happening in his office. “He knows Markham.”

“I also know that Quantico won’t work a case if you recruit your own ‘mind hunter,’ Herb,” I said. “Why don’t I bow out? You’ll have the pros coming, and I have a class to teach.”

The pros. Shit.

Through two decades, I had watched the pros grow increasingly political. They learned and applied the marketing techniques necessary to justify and sustain funding. They knew their target audience and quickly reacted to the public’s perception of crime. A de facto hierarchy of atrocity evolved. Serial murder topped the list, but included its own gradations of outrageousness. Multiple killings of prostitutes or the homeless did not approach the monstrousness of child murders. The slaughter of three female college students was near the top of the list.

Jaworski followed me through the station to the parking lot. “What the hell was that all about?” he asked.

“I guess we old farts don’t know much.”

“I’m sorry, Lucas. I had no idea she was going to be so, well… hostile. This is my case, and I need your help with it. When I want the feds around, I’ll ask them.”

I stopped at the door, turned, and faced the veteran cop. “I meant what I said. If the FBI Support Services people know you have someone private working the case, they won’t come in.”

“We’ll manage.”

I hesitated only a moment, then nodded my agreement. “I ran into Steve Weld this morning,” I said.

“He tell you about seeing Gilman’s car at the motel?”

I nodded. “He’s got no use for Gilman.”

“Weld is a funny guy. Dresses like a hippie, but he’s sharp. I called the motel after I talked to him. Gilman was there with two guests. All of them checked out Sunday morning.”

“Why is he lying?”

“I don’t know, but I’m keeping that information to myself for now.”

I asked Jaworski what two-year-old “incident” Weld had referred to.

“We didn’t have much to do with that,” the chief said. “One of MI’s foreign visitors got drunk and disappeared from the campus. Gilman filed the missing-persons report the next morning. The fear took over after that. The body… well, what was left of it… washed up on the beach two weeks later. Fish did a thorough job on him. The medical examiner never determined a cause of death. Why do you ask?”

I shrugged. “Weld implied that there was something to it. I don’t know.”

“I’m gonna go have a talk with Karen. You take a look at the autopsy material.”

I watched the chief disappear into the building.

A murder investigation usually reveals unrelated misdeeds and the myriad foibles of the cast of characters.

Two years earlier, an intoxicated foreign visitor had become a meal for the fish.

Steve Weld hinted that Stu Gilman was a fountain of knowledge. The head-bobbing Gilman was wired like an inner spring and lied about his whereabouts on the night of the murders.

A human killing machine disguised himself as dirty laundry, broke out of his cage, and had ample time to play fall tourist in Maine.

The state investigator assigned to the murders behaved like a snappish stockbroker unable to see beyond Markham & Markham, her favorite NASDAQ big mover.

Karen Jasper was right about the bottom line. We had three dead students. We also shared the single objective of removing a killer from the streets.

TEN MINUTES AFTER LEAVING JAWORSKI TO DEAL WITH
Karen Jasper, I walked into my borrowed Cape, slammed the door, and dropped the most recent package of photos and reports on the sofa. I had been away from the nuts and bolts of criminal investigation for nearly seven years. Maybe Jasper was right, and I was nothing more than a curiosity from a bygone era.

“Bullshit,” I muttered. “I refuse to go quietly into the investigative night.”

The crime scene photo display remained on my kitchen table. I popped the cap off a bottle of Shipyard and stared at the top photo, a kid barely out of her teens who could be sleeping. A cop’s latex-gloved hand pointed at a small black circle on her right temple. Susan Hamilton was in college, learning and having a good time, until someone walked in and put a bullet through her head.

I looked down at my clenched fists, whitened knuckles. Tumult churned inside, a rumbling flood of anger that was essential if I were to absorb a killer’s mental circuitry into my own and prowl the world like a methodical hunter of humans.

“Stanley Markham couldn’t find his way to Maine,” I
snarled at no one, shoving myself from the table and pacing the room. “She’s barking up the wrong tree.”

Markham was a short, slender man, wiry, pale-complexioned, with soft-skinned hands that he babied. He washed his hands often, treated himself to an occasional manicure, and always wore leather gloves when he killed. My first impression of the man had been one of softness, gentleness. I wondered how he would cope with the sexual politics of prison.

I remembered a cop’s comment after one of Markham’s preliminary court hearings: “Slap a wig and some lipstick on that guy and you’ve got a handsome woman. He’s bound for hard time.”

As Jaworski observed, Markham was the right size for this crime. The height of the blood streaks on the wall beside the two beds, and the distance between the impressions left by two knuckles when the killer’s hand slipped, suggested a small man.

When he had terrorized New England, Markham had required a strict set of stimuli before going into action. His behavior before, during, and after his excursions into the wild was well documented.

The initial, discrete behavior was what his wife called “restlessness.” He would come home from his job as a desk clerk at a local motel and not be able to sit still. Markham said he was depressed.

He always drank a couple of beers when he got home, and when he grew restless, he drank more. Sometimes he passed out. Other times he sat up all night staring at TV. When his wife asked about his behavior, he pleaded trouble at work or said he was annoyed with one of their neighbors.

“We always had money problems,” Markham told me.

Their money was tight, as it was for most young couples, even with both partners working, but the Markhams were not headed for bankruptcy.

Dorothy Markham would tolerate her husband’s behavior for two or three days, then announce that she was going to her sister’s for the weekend. Stanley Markham would drop her there, but he never went inside. He hated Dorothy’s sister.

“I’d take Dorothy over there on a Saturday morning,” Markham told me, “pick her up late Sunday. That gave me all the time I needed. No questions asked. I look back on it now, I got so calm, so relaxed. I’d bring Dorothy flowers when I went to get her. I even played with the baby.”

Markham described what went on in his head; like most of his ilk, he never told all of it. He made a stab at a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. His lawyer eventually talked him out of the NGRI, a nearly unwinnable defense in Massachusetts, but our early conversations were dominated by talk of noises in his head, blackouts, tales of how one victim resembled an old girlfriend who had rejected him. As he drifted toward trial time, Markham claimed that he needed help, treatment. The act was transparent. On the morning that jury selection was to begin, Markham folded his bluff hand, entered a guilty plea, and walked away with life without parole. After a brief stint in a penitentiary, the corrections department moved him to a mental health facility for the criminally insane, proving yet again that state systems are vulnerable to the psychopath’s machinations.

“To be the most powerful man in the world,” Stanley Markham told me, “is more important than anything else.”

He always knew what was coming, he said. He never tried to stop it.

“I wanted it to hurry up and happen. I wandered through the house, thinking. I took inventory. I kept the
knife and clothesline behind the seat in my van. I had plenty of rags, a change of clothes, a gallon of water, cleaning solvent for the van. After I dropped Dorothy at her sister’s, I drove around.”