Lark (14 page)

“Something's wrong,” he said aloud.

“I know, I see it,” Horse said by his side. “She's dressed all wrong.”

“Yeah, that's it.” Without touching the body, he examined it minutely. The blouse was inside out and the boots were on the wrong feet. “He dressed her after he killed her.”

The state's chief medical examiner came dressed for the occasion. She wore hiking boots and coveralls and carried a small black bag. She smiled at Lark as a trooper directed her to the body. “Have they taken pictures?” she asked.

“All taken care of,” the trooper captain replied.

“Is that the entrance wound at the back of her head?” Lark asked.

“Not quite,” she said without looking up from her examination. “Without a full autopsy it's only a guess, but the bullet probably only stunned her. It hit at an angle and ricocheted around the cranium.”

“Then what killed her?”

“In due time, Lieutenant.” She turned the body over and undid the top button of the jeans and unzipped the fly. Gingerly she worked the blood-soaked pants down the thighs.

“Good God!” Horse turned away and stumbled into the brush, where he leaned over and retched.

Lark turned his head a moment and then faced the medical examiner. “What in the hell did that?”

“You can call me for a report,” she replied. “But it's obvious that the victim suffered traumatic shock and excessive loss of blood. To answer your question, I don't know what did this. I've never seen anything like it before.”

“She's nearly ripped apart,” a trooper behind them said in shocked tones.

An ashen Horse Najankian rejoined the circle surrounding the body.

The medical examiner signaled to two attendants, who approached with a body bag. “Some sort of instrument was inserted and withdrawn with sufficient force and in such a manner as to rip her internally.” She spoke in the same monotone Lark heard when he witnessed the autopsy. She started back to her car. “I think you have another one, Lieutenant. How many more are there going to be?”

How many have there been? Lark questioned himself.

They didn't speak during the ride back to Middleburg. Lark clenched the wheel and stared at the road. The day's color had fled, refracted light was stark white without spectrum. Once in Lark's office they took their usual places. Horse hunched over on his chair, looking uncomfortable, as if he were waiting for a formal reprimand.

“You know what has to be done,” Lark said more as a statement than a question.

“A profile in the computer.”

“Uh huh.” Lark took his pad from the desk and centered it in front of him. He glared down at the paper and laboriously wrote a label across the top of the page. “Victims.” He looked over to Horse. “Well?”

“I think they would all be women between sixteen and twenty-five.”

“If we go by the two we have.” Lark wrote it down.

“Then there's the clothing.”

“They each wore walking boots, jeans, and a blouse.”

“And no underwear. He kills them nude and then dresses them.”

Lark continued with his notes. “The bodies are mutilated in different ways.” The final cause of death might vary. He knew of one serial murderer who made a point of killing each victim differently in order to throw off the possibility of any connection.

“I think of locations as being important,” Horse said. “I believe he usually kills them in his van or trailer and then dumps them in the woods.”

“We found the first one practically in downtown Middleburg,” Lark said.

“Yeah, but he carried her off the highway into the woods. I think he must have done it in the dark and didn't realize how close to a house he really was. Those cult kids were probably having a black mass and had all the lights off.”

Lark made another note. “I'll include a wooded location. Anything else?”

“They both had long hair.”

“That could be coincidental.”

“Why don't you feed in two composites and see what the computer comes up with? Include the hair on one and not on another. By the way,” Horse continued, “I think I know what he used on the last girl. I've got one in my garage.”

“You never cease to amaze me. Could you find it in yourself to tell me what in hell you're talking about?”

The large patrolman stared into the hall as if he were seeking some placid vision he needed to establish his mental equilibrium. “I know what he put in her to do that.”

“Some sort of surgical implement, I would think.”

“A frog gig.”

Lark knew instantly that the suggestion made sense. He would call the medical examiner and suggest the possibility. He wrote the words “frog gig” on his pad and underlined them. For a brief moment he was elated that another piece of the puzzle now fit, and then he looked back at the words he had just written and their implication struck him. He had a quick montage of the young girl in the woods and the blood-soaked clothing that the ME gradually peeled from her body.

“Go home, Horse.”

“You're coming to dinner tonight.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“Nory's expecting you.”

Lark agreed to the inevitable. “I'll get the composites on the computer and then drive over to your house.”

Lark looked over his notes. There were so few clues, so few consistencies in the two murders that his composite might be a futile effort. He was enveloped in an enervating depression that seemed to preclude physical action and rational thought. Is this what his life had become? This piecing together of grisly mutilations of the innocent, was this the sum total of more than two decades of work and effort?

The ringing phone jolted him and he reluctantly reached for the receiver. “Yeah.”

The medical examiner started in midsentence. “Not your jurisdiction on that body in the woods, but thought you'd like a verification on the cause of death. She died of a massive hemorrhage leading to cardiac collapse. No sign of gag marks and she was the victim of an oral sexual assault.”

“How about a frog gig as the instrument?”

A pause. “Yes, that might have done it. I'll pursue that line of thought.”

Lark hung up. Years of investigative routine made him reach for the phone again and dial the crime lab. Soho answered. “Lark here. Anything on those tire marks we found in the state forest?”

“Got it. In checking on the tread pattern, size, and type of tire as contrasted to the depth of the impressions, we've come up with only one type of vehicle—an RV.”

“What's that?”

“A recreational vehicle.”

“Like a self-contained camper?”

“You got it, Lieutenant.”

The final call was to the state-police barracks. They had an ID on the victim and Lark wrote her name and address down in his notes. He was grateful that his office would not have to notify the family. He pulled the typewriter over to the desk and with two fingers began to type his composite. The lack of undergarments along with mutilation would be his prime factors. In addition to the ordinary systems, he would put his composite on line to the FBI computer in Quantico, Virginia. The recently created Federal National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime was said to have listings on all unsolved homicides for the past several years. He had never utilized that system before and had no idea of its worth.

Horse Najankian presided over a leg of lamb, while at the far end of the table his wife, Nory, was surrounded by an attacking flotilla of serving dishes. Najankian children of varying sizes and sexes filled the remainder of the long table and surrounded Lark.

“I do hope you like lamb, Lieutenant,” Nory said. “It's quite a treat for us.”

“Of course I do,” he said as he smiled at her. Lark hated lamb, just as he hated all meat that wasn't hamburger. He would eat and savor it and request seconds. He owed his partner that much.

The dinner swirled about them. Children recounted the day's events and Horse laughed a great deal between bites of the huge meal. Lark felt estranged from the table, as if he were floating above them and silently observing their good humor and mutual love. He was an alien part of it.

“You're going to get busted one day,” Horse told Nory.

Lark snapped back to attentiveness, his fork poised in midair. “How's that?”

“She's stealing from the store where she works. That's what it is when you come right down to it.”

“I prefer to think of it as my personal food-stamp program,” Nory replied.

Lark looked at the leg of lamb. “I don't understand?”

“My wife has this thing about old people,” Horse said. “She wants to upgrade their diet at the expense of the supermarket.”

“Some of those old people live on small pensions and a little social security,” Nory said. “I know they don't have enough money to eat right and I can tell about their diet when I check them out. So I charge them less.”

“Are you allowed to do that?” Lark asked.

“Well, not really. But if a chicken is two-ninety-eight I charge them one-ninety-eight as if I made an error. Some of my customers have gone from dog food—and I know they don't have a dog—to lamb chops.”

Horse shook his head. “One of these days they'll grab you.”

Lark left the Najankian house and drove back to headquarters, where he parked in a deputy commissioner's slot. Depression rolled over him as he gripped the wheel and stared ahead at a blank brick wall. He felt the weight of the Python in its holster. Police officers have the highest incidence of divorce, alcoholism, and suicide of any profession except psychiatrists. He thought the comparison ironical, but sobered with the realization that he qualified in a couple of those areas and was working on the third.

In the computer room a printout was stacked neatly in a pile with a piece of scrap paper clipped on top that contained his name. He picked up the first sheet and glanced at it quickly and then returned to the top of the list and began to read each item carefully.

He was horrified at the number of entries, and wondered why the match hadn't been made months or even a year earlier by another jurisdiction. As he riffled through the sheets, he could see what happened, or more specifically why it hadn't happened. The murders had occurred in a myriad of jurisdictions over five states, in rural areas serviced by small police departments. The victims had died in a number of different ways, and the newness of the Quantico system had precluded anyone from discovering the similarities earlier. The profile they had fed into the computer included two important facts: the victims were fully dressed, but their underwear was missing. Lark felt that had been the key factor.

There were thirty-two young women in New England whose deaths matched his profile.

They had a serial murderer of gigantic proportions on their hands.

11

Lark parked in front of Horse's house and honked. The front door opened and his partner ambled down the walk toward the pickup. He wore regulation shoes, uniform pants, and a checkered sports coat. He looked like a half-dressed cop.

“Are you half in uniform or half out? This is a plain-clothes assignment, you know.”

“Lieutenant, I got one going-to-Sunday-meeting suit, and I been wearing that. Riding around with you, the pants take too much of a beating. So I got my uniform pants on.”

“Any officer assigned to plain clothes can get an authorization to buy a civilian suit or sports outfit at a reasonable cost.”

“Tried. The captain turned me down because this is only a temporary assignment for a couple of more days.”

“Uh huh.” The truck pulled away from the curb as Lark handed Horse the computer printouts. “Take a look at these. After I went through them last night, I ran the composite through the computer again to cover the rest of the country. Nothing else turned up that matches our cases. Our guy is working New England.”

Horse's eyes widened as he flipped through the pages. “There's a couple of dozen of them.”

“Thirty-two, to be exact.”

“Where are we starting?”

“At Middleburg University. I called the Federal National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crimes in Quantico and they told me that one of the people who helped set up their program is a psychology teacher here in Middleburg. Let's see what he has to say.”

Professor Donald Rasmussen didn't look preppy, tweedy, or professorial in any manner. In fact, he was larger than Horse, wore sneakers, blue jeans, and an open red sport shirt. His full beard and mass of half-corrected blue books were the only indications of his profession. As they entered, he waved them to a couple of chairs by the window. He finished grading a blue book and swiveled his chair to face them. “You have killings,” he bluntly stated.

“I called Quantico and they told me you were down there last summer on a research grant to help them set up their system on serial murders.”

“I was,” Rasmussen said. “And we had damn little to work with. You know, of course, there isn't any definitive literature on serial murders. Everything we do is breaking new ground.”

“People have been killing people for a long time,” Lark said. “And often in large lots.”

Rasmussen stripped two sticks of gum and plopped them in his mouth. His jaws worked in massive movements, as if signaling his agreement with Lark. “They sure have, but we're not talking mass murder here, we're talking serial killings.”

Horse looked bewildered. “It seems to be the same thing. Both are killings of large numbers of people.”

“The motivations are entirely different,” Rasmussen said categorically. “The mental constellations are different and the methods they use are different. If some unhappy kid goes up in a tower and blows a couple of dozen people away, that's mass murder. A guy loaded down with a personal arsenal walks into a fast-food outlet and guns down a dozen men, women, and children—that's also a mass murderer. A guy who picks up single victims time after time over weeks, months, and even years, and kills them, that's a serial killer. The only similarities between the two types are that neither killer knows his victim beforehand and they kill in quantity.” He extended a hand toward Lark. “Let's see what you have.”