Lark (15 page)

Lark handed him the computer sheets and the files on the two murdered girls they had discovered. Rasmussen began to flip through the material with astonishing rapidity as he speed-read the facts. “Nice composite you fed into the computer. I'm pleased to see that the system works. Any identification of the girl you found in the state forest?”

“I checked with the state police and found that they ID'd her almost immediately,” Lark said. “They already had a very comprehensive missing-person file open on her, complete with photographs.”

“Any similarity between the victims' backgrounds?” the teacher asked.

“Outside of general age, dress, and a vague physical appearance, they were as different as two young women can be. Victim number one was a burnout who really fucked around; number two was an honor student and active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a Mormon.”

Rasmussen flipped back through the printout. “Each killed in a different manner and yet all sexually mutilated.” He read further. “God! Frog gigs, surgical instruments, wood-burning sets, power tools … This guy's a real sickie. He'll keep this up until you catch him. You know that, don't you?”

“Yes,” Lark replied. “Can you give us any direction? What sort of monster are we looking for?”

“The most difficult kind,” Rasmussen said. “A hidden one.” He gestured at a group of bulging files cluttering a table. “I've done a couple of papers for the journals and law-enforcement publications, but we're only just now scratching the surface of the serial killer.”

“They told me at Quantico that you knew as much as anyone in the country about this kind of killing.”

Rasmussen gave a high brittle laugh that belied his size. “Sure, and once I tell you everything I know you still won't know anything.” He jolted his chair forward and leaned across the desk. “Here are the statistics: there are more than five thousand unsolved homicides each year in this country. The day when we could look to husband, wife, or lover as the killer is past. This means that from a ninety-percent solution rate ten years ago, we now have twenty-six percent of our homicides unsolved. Why? Because people who don't know each other are killing each other.”

“Armed robbery is on the increase. That would account for some.”

“Right!” Rasmussen interjected. “Some, but not all. There's a bunch of guys out there who drive the highways and cross state lines to pick up people and kill them. Because they've been doing it in different locations and with different methods, like your guy, we weren't even aware of their existence until recently.”

“There's always a pattern,” Lark said. “Bad guys who do banks for a living tend to do them the same way job after job.”

“And there's a bank-robber mentality,” the psychologist said.

“Sure there is,” Lark agreed. “Guys who do banks don't do liquor stores. What kind of guy are we looking for, Doc?”

“Okay. This man is a sexual psychopathic sadist, and believe me, that's a lethal combination. To be more exact, characteristically he does it periodically, he hurts the victim in ways that often mutilate, there is concomitant sexual excitement, occasional revisiting the scene of the crime, and worst of all for you, he usually exhibits fairly normal behavior between the crimes.”

“Have you been able to develop the profile further than that?”

Rasmussen picked through one of his file folders and lifted out a single sheet. “Here's all that I'm sure of: the man you are looking for is between the ages of twenty-five to thirty-six, and he probably grew up in a marginal home environment. He tends to select victims of murky background, such as prostitutes, or people he thinks come from this background, such as hitchhikers. He is driven by an obsessive hate of women and is forced to mutilate them, often after a torture session of varying length. Between his episodes, he might easily be married, with a normal-appearing heterosexual relationship. He is often a quiet and well-mannered-appearing individual who gives no outward signs of violence. In almost all instances, he himself is a victim of child abuse and from a broken home.”

“And it's random,” Lark muttered to himself. “How in the hell are we going to catch this bastard unless we catch him in the act?”

“You might try putting his past murder scenes under surveillance,” Rasmussen said. “Often these individuals are endowed with a rich fantasy life. If they can't immediately find a victim when the urge overtakes them, they often revisit one of the past locations where they killed.”

“There's a problem with that, Doc,” Lark said.

“What's that?”

“This guy takes his murder site with him; he kills them in a recreational vehicle.”

On the drive back to police headquarters, Lark stopped at a bookstore and purchased the largest map of New England that he could find. They nailed it across the wall in the small office. He sat at the desk compiling lists from the printout while Horse tacked numbered thumbtacks into the map at each murder location.

“There they are, Lieutenant,” Horse said as he stepped back.

Lark looked at the groupings on the map. They dotted the New England states. The southernmost tack was the body discovered in Middleburg, the case that had begun this investigation. The farthest north were those in mid New Hampshire and Vermont. “What's that one doing in the middle of Boston?”

Horse peered at the tack. “Number twelve. A death in the Roxbury section of Boston.”

Lark flipped through the printout until he came to the case. “Whip marks,” he read aloud. “The victim was partially unclothed and death was due to suffocation, probably due to an excessively tight gag. I don't think that one matches our MO. Take out the Boston victim and you see how all the others are in rural areas.”

“Middleburg wasn't. He practically put the victim in the downtown area.”

“It looks rural, you can't see the houses from the highway. What have we got?”

“Twenty of the victims were left in state or national forests and were usually found in an area not far from a pond or lake. Each of the recreational areas is only a few miles from a major highway,” Horse said.

“The first victim we found in town, the second in the Nahug State Forest, which is only a few miles from here.”

“Three other victims in our ten-mile radius,” Horse said, “but the rest are strewn all over hell and back throughout New England.”

“Not quite.”

Horse took another look at the map. “Well, they are sort of bunched in areas outside Portland, Maine, and Laconia, New Hampshire, but that's not much of a pattern.”

“Let's move on to time sequences,” Lark said. “I'm going to give you a list of those death dates we have that are firm within a day or two.” He began to pick dates from the printout and call them to Horse in a monotone. “It seemed to start in 1983; the first one in April, that's victim number one. Two and three in May of that year, four and five in June, one in July, another in August, two in September, and one more in October of that year. Two more bodies were found that year, but no accurate estimate on the time of death.”

The time sequence extended over a three-year period with the majority of the bodies discovered in two-week intervals, beginning in April and extending through September.

“You know, Lieutenant,” Horse said when they had finished dating the pins. “We started with thirty-two, took one out, and that left us with thirty-one. This guy began three years ago, and from April through September he's killing them on the average of two a month.”

“Slightly more than one every two weeks.”

“If that's the pattern, there should be more bodies. There are victims out there that we haven't turned up yet.”

“Why does he begin in April and stop in September?”

“He's got a camper and he uses state and national parks. He probably doesn't like it outside in wintertime. It fits the fishing season,” Horse said with a laugh.

“What did you say?”

“He likes to fish.” His laugh died. “I was only kidding. You can't work with this stuff for hours on end and not try to make a joke once in a while.”

“You might have a handle on something. The guy has a rec vehicle, uses parks, and often kills near water. Fishing might fit.”

“Sure, and he spends winters in Florida.”

“If he does, he's not killing down there.” Lark turned away from the map to stare out the window. “If they had all gone back to college, they wouldn't have been blown away.”

“What?” Horse was perplexed. “I don't follow you.”

“It wasn't important.”

Horse cleared his throat. “I thought maybe we ought to cross-index the methods of murder, hometowns of the victims, and other factors. What do you think?”

“They can't expect their parents to support them forever.”

“Huh?”

“How many of them were living with men?”

“Do you really think that's important?”

Lark bent over the desk with his fists clenched in anger. “It's goddamn well important!”

“Do you feel all right?”

“Nearly three dozen dead and we know how they felt during their last hours. We know what that pervert did to them. I've seen people die, sometimes in terrible accidents and in pain, but these girls had their last hours in pain. Think of it a moment. They not only died, they had to look into his face and suffer before they died.”

“You know, Lieutenant, this is really too big for us now. We can turn all our files over to the state. The case is too important for two guys working out of a small office in a rinky-dink town.”

Maurice Grossman hovered in the door. His bulk blocked the light from the hall like a perched albatross obscuring the sun. “What do you want?” Lark asked.

“I got another tape, but there's a problem with it.”

“Your tapes are always a problem,” Lark said. “What is it?”

“I played the tape, and when I rewound it, I accidentally erased it.”

“That's interesting,” Lark said mildly. “You erased a tape. You do have a broadcast engineer's license, don't you?”

“Sure, it's required. I'm sorry, Lieutenant. I guess I was nervous.”

“You were nervous and erased it,” Lark repeated. “You bastard!” He lunged across the room and grabbed Grossman's jacket with both hands. His rocking motion jounced the disc jockey's head back and forth against the door. “You idiot! You fucking idiot!”

“I didn't mean to.”

“I'll bet.” Each sway of their bodies banged Grossman's head.

“You're hurting me.”

Horse pulled at Lark. “Stop it!” His large fist clubbed down on Lark's wrist and broke the grip on the radio announcer. He grabbed Lark from behind and lifted him off the floor and carried him across the room. “No more,” he whispered frantically. He pushed him into the desk chair. “Take it easy. You want something, coffee, a beer?”

“I want it all to stop,” Lark said in a barely audible voice.

“I got to go.” Grossman scurried from the room.

Lark stood in the doorway to Frank Pemperton's office. The chief looked up impatiently. “I told my secretary no visitors. I have a budget to finish.”

“I beat up a civilian.”

“You what?”

“You heard me. I'm putting in my papers.” He unbuckled his holster and put it on the desk. His badge followed. “I've had it.”

The chief looked at the pistol and badge and shook his head. “I never thought I'd see this day.”

Lark spun on his heel and went toward the door. “I'll let them know where to send my checks.”

“Wait a minute, Tommy. What in the hell happened?”

“Ask Horse. He was there.”

He drove without thought and was blocks past the turnoff to the machine company and his trailer when he snapped back to reality and slowed for a U turn. It took a few moments for him to realize that he was in the university area near where his daughter lived. He made a right and drove past the three-family dwelling that contained her apartment. Her VW was not parked on the street or in the drive, and then he remembered that Faby had told him Cathy had taken a job at the 7–11 Store on Grove Street.

Over the last several years, Grove had turned into a testament to America's lack of culinary sophistication. The streets between the 700 and 1900 blocks were lined with fast-food emporiums and discount stores interspersed with used-car lots. It was typical of a thousand streets in a thousand towns, each identical to the other, regardless of geographical location, and each as devoid of a sense of place as the others.

He turned into the 7–11 parking lot and stopped in its darkest corner. Through the front window he could see her movement behind the circular counter in the center of the store. She seemed slightly harried as she worked with quick, nervous movements.

He smiled for the first time that day. Perhaps college would be more appealing after a few months behind the counter of a convenience store. He wanted to go to her and hold her while pretending she was ten years old again, but that would be impossible.

A dilapidated Chevy with pocked rust holes in the sides pulled to a stop near the store's entrance. The driver left the engine running when he entered the store.

There was something about the man's movements that bothered Lark. It wasn't the clothing: a leather jacket and jeans were uniforms for many; perhaps it was the fact that the right hand clutched something while the left was jammed into a pocket.

In one lithe movement he opened the pickup's door and unzipped his jacket. He ran across the asphalt to the front entrance while his hand fumbled for the missing Python.

The store was empty of customers except for his daughter, standing wide-eyed behind the counter, and the man in the jacket. Leather Jacket had slipped a ski mask over his head and leveled a pistol at Cathy.