Murder Among the Angels (25 page)

“Is it the Mileski girl?” the grounds supervisor asked.

Jerry nodded and squatted down to look at the extension cord.

“She was garroted with the extension cord?” Charlotte asked.

Jerry nodded. “The shoelaces are just to make it longer, and to allow the killer to get a better grip.” He looked up at Charlotte. “Now we have the ‘where’ and we have the ‘how.’”

“Why would he have left the extension cord behind?” she asked. “As a clue to his identity, out of a subconscious wish to get caught?”

“That’s a myth,” Jerry said. “I’ve yet to meet the criminal who wanted to get caught. At least, while he was committing the act. I’ve known criminals who’ve felt remorseful afterward, but that’s different. Usually, they leave stuff behind because they’re so caught up in the moment.”

“You mean, they’re too busy concentrating on what they’re doing?” she asked, with a shiver of horror.

“Exactly,” he said as he stood back up. “You’d be amazed at the number of times we’ve found the perpetrator’s wallet at the scene of the crime.” He looked over at Sullivan. “How did you know she was Doreen Mileski?”

“Dr. Louria had made special arrangements for her to walk here. He’s a member of the club. Ordinarily, we don’t allow nonmembers on the premises, but we made an exception for her. He said she was a patient who needed to get her exercise in before catching the train into the city for special treatments.”

Jerry nodded. “He told us about the arrangements he made with you when we questioned him.” He turned to Charlotte. “He didn’t want the girls going out. But the first one complained so vociferously about being cooped up that he allowed her to walk on the golf course, as long as she did so before seven.”

“I remember her,” Sullivan said. “She used to come here last summer. The paper gave her name as Kimberly Ferguson. She was a pretty girl, straight blond hair. Both of them used to have their faces bandaged up sometimes.”

“When was the last time you saw Doreen?” Jerry asked.

Sullivan thought for a moment, and then said: “It must have been a couple of weeks ago. She came every morning at six. She always took the same route around the course. When I read in the paper that she was one of the victims, I thought about those walks …” His voice trailed off. “Then I saw this.”

“Why didn’t Dr. Louria say anything about this when we talked with him the first time?” Charlotte asked.

“I guess he didn’t want to implicate himself further, for which I can’t really blame him,” Jerry replied. “But when we brought him in yesterday, he speculated that Kimberly and Doreen might have been abducted on one of their early morning walks.”

“Also, Doreen’s neighbor said she had last seen her when she was setting out for a walk on the golf course,” Charlotte said.

Jerry nodded, and then turned back to Sullivan. “I was about to come over here to make some inquiries when you called.”

“Two girls killed on our course,” Sullivan lamented in his melodious Irish brogue. “Sweet mother of Jesus.”

“What about Liliana?” asked Charlotte.

“Dr. Louria said she had no interest in taking walks,” Jerry replied. “She only liked to watch television. I have no idea where she might have been killed.” He turned back to Sullivan again. “How did they get here?”

“They drove,” he replied. “They parked out in back of the clubhouse.”

“I wonder how the murderer got the cars back?” Jerry said.

“I think I know the answer to that question,” Sullivan said. “I remember seeing the first girl’s car being towed by a tow truck one morning. It was on Labor Day weekend, which I believe is about the time she disappeared.”

It would have been simple, Charlotte thought. The murderer could have identified himself on the telephone as Dr. Louria. After describing the car, he could have asked the towing company to tow the car to Corinth, and send the bill to him.

Jerry nodded. “Do you remember the name of the towing company?”

Sullivan gave him the name of a local company, and he wrote it down.

“Did you ever see anyone following her?” Jerry asked. “Or did you ever see anyone else out walking at that hour?”

Sullivan shook his head. “Never,” he said. “If we had, we would have stopped them and asked them what they were doing here. Once in a while, we get a dog walker, but that’s about it.”

Jerry turned to nod at the dirt track that led through the middle of the dump area and into the woods on the other side. “Where does that road lead?” he asked.

“It comes out on the old Quarry Road,” Sullivan said. “That’s how we truck our waste out of here. Tires, white goods, old lumber—whatever our regular garbage contractor won’t take.”

“Bodies too, I suspect,” Jerry added.

For the next half an hour, they searched the area between the scene of the murder and the Quarry Road for footprints, tire tracks, and other clues. But the heavy rain of the past two days had obliterated any evidence that might once have existed. Their search was accompanied by the deafening roar of bird song; it was the first really warm day of spring, and the birds were exultant. Although Charlotte’s good shoes were ruined as a result of traipsing through the mud, she thoroughly enjoyed being out in the woods on a fine spring morning. And if their search didn’t yield any clues, it did produce a picture of the murderer’s likely modus operandi. They concluded that he had probably parked his car on the Quarry Road, walked in to the dump area, and concealed himself behind the stockade fence with his extension cord. When his victim had come by, he had jumped out, garroted her from behind, and then carried her body back to his car. The Quarry Road was an ideal site for carrying out such an activity unobserved, Jerry noted. A deeply rutted dirt track, it ran from the Zion Hill Road through the woods that blanketed the hillside behind the church to the old quarry pit that had been the source of the granite that was used for the exterior of the church, and for the exteriors of many of Zion Hill’s other buildings. Along this road, teams of horses had hauled the rough-hewn stone to the site of the church, where it had been cut and set into place by stonemasons such as Jerry’s grandfather. The road ended at an old church retreat house, and the only regular traffic came from local people who used the old quarry pit as a swimming hole during the summer months.

After their exploration of the area, they returned to the clubhouse parking lot with Sullivan, where Jerry radioed headquarters and asked the dispatcher to send the county crime scene unit over to take photographs.

“Wait till the police beat reporters pick up that on their scanners,” Jerry said, and proceeded to give Sullivan some pointers for dealing with the press, which was becoming more and more intrusive.

They were headed back to the police station when, struck by a sudden idea, Charlotte asked Jerry to turn the police car around.

Ten minutes later, they arrived at the church. Finding no one around, they tried the door to the tower and found it unlocked, as they did the door to the belfry stairs. So much for what Peter had said about keeping the tower doors locked, Charlotte thought, as they started up the stairs. Round and round they went, like a snail in its shell, the narrow spiral staircase leading them ever farther upward. Charlotte was getting dizzy, and her calves were beginning to ache when they finally came to the door at the top, and opened it onto the open belfry. Walking under the big iron bells with their bell ropes hanging down, they crossed over to the parapet. Below, the church lawn stretched down to the fairways of the golf course, where the eager beavers were already out in their golf carts, tiny motorized ants on a carpet of green. From this height, the course took on the appearance of a garish modern fabric design, in which the chartreuse discs of the putting greens, the beige, amoeba-like shapes of the sand traps, and the pink crowns of the flowering cherry trees that dotted the fairways were the major motifs. At the foot of the hill, the clubhouse lay nestled in its wreath of greening trees.

Charlotte had wanted to climb the tower for a reason, and she wasn’t disappointed in her purpose: from here, they had a bird’s-eye view of the blacktop road that encircled the golf course like a necklace of gray pearls, with the clubhouse as its clasp. There was only one place where the road was hidden from view for any distance—cut off by an encroachment of the adjoining woods—and that place was the skeet range.

“He could have watched her from here,” Charlotte said. “Until he got a sense of the pattern: what time she arrived, what time she reached the skeet-shooting range.” She paused, and then said: “Watched and waited.”

Jerry nodded. “Sullivan said she always arrived at the same time, and followed the same route.”

As he spoke, the wavy ranks of Canada geese appeared over the woods to the southeast, their long, slender, black necks extended in flight. They were returning from their morning idyll at the quarry pit.

As Sullivan had predicted, they alighted at the water hazard at what Charlotte presumed was the tenth hole, and settled down to preen their feathers. “Creatures of habit,” she said.

12

It was late morning when they arrived back at the police station. Charlotte had asked to look at the crime scene photographs, and Jerry was getting them out for her. Though Peter was now at the top of their suspects list, she still felt that the key to the murderer’s identity lay with his crime scene “signature.” A police detective had once given her his formula for solving a crime. It was “What happened plus why it happened equals who did it.” They were making progress on both the “what” and the “why,” but she felt she might learn something new about the “what” from the crime scene photographs. Jerry had described the circumstances in which the first two skulls had been found to her, but she had never actually seen the photographs.

Jerry had just placed the stack of photographs in her hand when he was interrupted by a knock at the door. “Yeah,” he said. “What is it?”

The dispatcher stuck her head around the door. “Mrs. Snyder is downstairs, Chief. She’s the lady who found the skull at the Zion Hill Cemetery. She says she’s got something else for you to look at.”

“Send her up,” he said.

The red-faced, overweight woman entered Jerry’s office a few minutes later. She held a leash in one hand, to which a small black and white dog was attached, and a brown paper bag in the other. She held the latter out at arm’s length, as if it contained a vicious animal that was about to strike out at her through the bag. Crossing the room, she deposited the paper bag on Jerry’s desk. “My name is Doris Snyder,” she announced. “I’m the one who discovered the skull in the Zion Hill Cemetery.” She looked down at the dog, who sat quietly, his white vest seemingly puffed out with pride. “Or rather, my dog, Homer, did,” she added.

Jerry sat behind his desk, wearing an expression that fell somewhere between boredom and exasperation.

“Now Homer’s found something else that you may find of interest,” she said. Then she added: “I think you ought to consider deputizing my dog.”

“We’ll see about that, Mrs. Snyder,” Jerry said as he stood up.

“I didn’t touch it, and I wouldn’t advise you to either,” said the formidable Mrs. Snyder as Jerry moved to open the bag.

“Thank you for the advice,” he replied. “But I’m well aware of police procedure.” Opening the bag, he peered inside. Then he went to the door and shouted to the captain in the adjacent office. “Harry,” he said. “Can you get me some newspapers, please?”

The captain appeared with the newspapers a few minutes later, and spread them out on Jerry’s desk. Donning a rubber glove, Jerry reached into the bag and pulled out a bloodstained meat cleaver, which he set down on the newspapers. “Where did you find it?” he asked.

“I didn’t find it,” she said. “Homer found it.”

“Gramps is in the well?” Jerry said.

The woman nodded.

At Charlotte’s perplexed expression, Jerry explained: “Those are the terms in which Mrs. Snyder described her dog’s behavior to me when he found the skull. He raced back to her and circled her several times to let her know that something was wrong. Like on the show
Lassie.
”

Charlotte remembered the show from the early days of television. “Gramps fell in the well, and he’s got to be saved.” she said.

“You’ve got it,” Jerry said. “Let me rephrase my question, Mrs. Snyder,” he said. “Would you like to tell us where
Homer
found the meat cleaver?”

“At the foot of the railroad embankment,” she said. “About fifty feet south of the summer house where the bodies were chopped up.”

She’d obviously been reading the newspapers.

“We searched that area thoroughly,” Jerry said, baffled. “We even went over it with a metal detector. I wonder how we missed it.”

“I think I know the answer to that question,” Mrs. Snyder said. “Homer likes to play hide-and-seek. He’ll find an object that he likes, and he’ll toss it into the air, or pick it up in his mouth and drop it again. He’ll play with it for a while, and then he’ll hide it.”

“But he’ll remember where it is,” Jerry said. “I used to have a dog that did that,” he replied in answer to her inquiring look.

“A few days might elapse, a few weeks,” Mrs. Snyder continued. “But when he’s in the area again, he’ll go back to where he hid the object, and start to play with it again.”

“In other words, your dog hid the meat cleaver. I don’t think we should deputize him.” He looked down at Homer, who wagged his white-tipped tail. “I think we should arrest him for tampering with the evidence.”

Mrs. Snyder gave her dog a look of mock sympathy.

“Would you be able to find the place again?” Jerry asked.

She nodded. “It was right in front of an old canoe by the side of the tracks. I think he probably hid it under the canoe.”

Jerry turned to the captain. “I want you to go down there with Mrs. Snyder, Crosby. Search the area again, take some pictures.”

The captain nodded.

Then Jerry thanked Mrs. Snyder, and she and Homer left with the captain. Once they were gone, Jerry said: “It’s a meat cleaver from the restaurant.”

“What restaurant?” Charlotte asked. She was looking through the crime scene photographs. Skipping the ones of the body parts, which she had no desire to see again, she studied the photo of the skull that had been placed on the headstone in the Zion Hill Cemetery.