Murder Among the Angels (33 page)

“Follow the path?” Charlotte asked.

“Yes. It goes around behind the house to a clearing overlooking the hillside. It’s about a five-minute walk.” She paused for a moment and then said: “I heard through the grapevine that the police think there might be a fourth victim. Do you think …?” she asked tentatively.

“I don’t know yet,” Charlotte replied.

Charlotte wasn’t such a fool as to go there alone. She rode over in the police car with Jerry, whom she met in the parking lot of the church; Jerry, and Captain Crosby, who sat in the backseat. They were reasonably sure this time—unlike with Dr. Louria and with Peter—and they didn’t want to take any chances. After checking to see if Cornwall was at home, which he wasn’t, they continued on to the Retreat, stopping about a hundred yards before the end of the road. Then they walked quietly in. As they approached, they could see a blue sedan parked in the turnaround. It was the same blue sedan that Charlotte had noticed in the driveway on her earlier visits to the Manse, and that she presumed to be Cornwall’s. Though they were still some distance away, Charlotte could see that the cottage was built of the same warm-colored granite as the church. Like many of the other buildings in Zion Hill, it was elegant in its simplicity: a rectangle with a front door crowned by a simple pediment, two large windows in the front, and a stone fireplace on the side facing them. It backed up to the wooded hillside, and overlooked a pasture and apple orchards. When they were about fifty feet from the house, Jerry directed them to hide in the woods at the side of the road.

They didn’t have to wait long. After about five minutes, Cornwall came out the front door. He was wearing a light blue windbreaker over his clerical shirt, and he carried a plastic shopping bag in one hand and a small bouquet of flowers wrapped in paper in the other. As they watched, he came around the house, ascended the stone steps that Lothian had described, and headed off into the woods. Once he had disappeared from sight, they emerged from their hiding places and followed him.

The setting of the Retreat was just as Lothian had described it, though she had only hinted at its beauty. As they came closer, they could see that the flagstone patio at the front looked out over a perennial garden which in turn overlooked a pond in which clusters of blue flag were already in bloom. Beyond the pond lay a long sweep of pasture and apple orchard. The orchard was in full flower: a sea of pale pink cotton candy under a cloudless blue sky. The air was redolent with the fragrance of the blossoms, whose petals drifted toward them like snowflakes in the gentle breezes off the river. The roof of the barn Lothian had mentioned could just be seen off to one side of the orchard.

Following the route Cornwall had taken, Charlotte and Jerry mounted the stone steps leading to the path. Crosby was right behind them, his hand on his holster. After about five minutes, they emerged at a clearing. There, resting on top of one of the boulders that marked the graves of the deceased members of the Archibald family, was Melinda Myer’s bleached skull. Cornwall sat with his back to them on a semicircular stone bench facing the boulder on which the skull rested. His dark head was bowed, and his hands were clasped in prayer. Though he must have heard their approach, he made no acknowledgment of their presence. He was giving Lily’s look-alike a good Christian burial. The empty shopping bag and the bouquet of flowers that he had ordered in Dr. Louria’s name lay on the bench beside him. After a moment, he picked up the bouquet and carefully removed it from its paper wrapping. Then he stood up and gently laid the bouquet on the boulder, next to the skull. Stepping back a few feet, he stood with his head bowed and his hands clasped in front of him. Then he slowly turned around to face them.

At Jerry’s direction, Crosby proceeded to read him his rights. Then the captain handcuffed him and led him away.

The pastor sat quietly in the backseat of the police car next to Crosby, his long legs pressed up against the back of the front seat, and the wrist of his right hand handcuffed to the door handle. With his other hand, he nervously fingered the braided watch chain that hung across his narrow midsection. He didn’t say anything at first. Then he quietly began to speak: “How did you figure out it was me?” he asked. They were headed back along the Quarry Road to the church parking lot, where Charlotte’s car was parked.

“From the meat cleaver,” Jerry said. “The meat cleaver threw us. We thought it came from Sebastian’s, at first. They use that kind of meat cleaver there. But then Miss Graham remembered seeing Tina using a meat cleaver to chop vegetables at the soup kitchen.” He corrected himself: “I mean meals program.”

“Aha,” Cornwall said, nodding.

“Is that where you macerated the skulls?” Jerry asked. “On the stove in the Parish House kitchen?”

“Yes. I did it on Tuesdays, which is the only day we don’t serve meals. But don’t bother to look in the kitchen for evidence. You won’t find any: I cleaned up after myself. Tina gets mad if her kitchen isn’t left spick-and-span. I cut up Kimberly’s body there too. But it was too much cleaning up. Which is why I switched to the summer house.”

“Where did you cut up Melinda’s body?” Jerry asked.

“In the Parish House kitchen, again. I couldn’t go back to the summer house. Also, I’d left the meat cleaver in the summer house, so I had to go back to the kitchen to get another meat cleaver anyway.

“She was Lilith, you see,” Cornwall continued after a moment. “The succubus. The seductress who comes in the night to men who sleep alone in the form of a beautiful young maiden with hair ‘long and red like the rose.’” He laughed bitterly. “With wings, like an angel. And honeyed lips.” He laughed again. “The medieval monks knew about her. ‘Out, Lilith,’ they would cry. ‘Blood sucker, alien woman, harlot of hell.’ They wore amulets in the shape of knives to keep her away. I would have done that—done anything. But instead, I was turned into a swine. I didn’t know she was a demon. Until afterward. Afterward, she revealed herself for the she-demon she was. A demon who kills her victims, and sucks their blood. Such was her power that her victims laughed with pleasure in their deaths at her hands. That’s what I did as I condemned my soul to eternal damnation: I laughed with pleasure.”

For a few minutes, there was silence in the car as they bounced over the rutted dirt road through the newly green woods.

Finally, he resumed, his long, pale fingers still stroking his braided watch chain: “But if she was a succubus, I became her match. I became an incubus. She was the devil’s dam, so I became the devil. The angel who falls from grace because of his carnal desires. The fallen angel who can only achieve corporeal form by preying on the flesh of women.”

They waited for him to go on—to tell them how he had stalked four innocent young women whose only crime was the desire to be more beautiful, and whose misfortune, in the case of three of them, was to be transformed by Dr. Louria into beautiful young maidens with hair “long and red like the rose.” They waited for him to tell them how he had stalked them, and brutally murdered them. But he didn’t.

His voice had diminished to a whisper: “Instead of two halves of the same angel, we were two halves of the same devil. We were perfectly matched, you see. We were soul mates.”

The next day, Charlotte and Jerry were back at the Manse with a search warrant. Though Cornwall had confessed, they needed the kind of hard evidence that would make the district attorney’s case unassailable. What they were looking for were photographs, diaries, scrapbooks, or the trophies of the kill that were typical of murderers who preyed on women: locks of hair or items of jewelry or clothing that would link him unquestionably to the victims. Their plan was to search the Manse first, and then the Retreat. Charlotte was assigned to search the closets on the ground floor. She started with the coat closet in the entrance hall where Cornwall had hung up his vestments on the day she had visited him. The vestments were still there: the outer robe, which symbolized a man’s superficial nature, and the inner robe, which symbolized a man’s inward nature. How ironic that symbolism seemed now, she thought. Outwardly, Cornwall was a quiet man, a man who aspired to be a man of letters, a man with a taste for antique furniture and Victorian needlework who enjoyed sipping sherry with visitors in his study; inwardly, he was a monster who had murdered and hacked up four innocent young women. Charlotte remembered what Jerry had said about murderers of his type being able to compartmentalize: to keep their criminal nature separate from their day-to-day activities. He had kept them as separate as the two vestments that hung side by side on separate hangers in the coat closet.

She found nothing in the coat closet, and was about to move on to a closet in the living room when she noticed a book resting on a nearby table; it was
My Story
by Charlotte Graham. Going over to the table, she picked it up, and tore out the title page, with her autographed inscription. She didn’t want any evidence lying around of her once having offered a multiple murderer her “best wishes.” She was tossing the autographed page in a wastebasket when Jerry, who had been searching the antique mahogany secretary in the study, announced that he’d struck pay dirt in the form of a diary. Charlotte joined him, and together they went through the leather-bound diary, in which the routes Kimberly and Doreen had taken on their daily walks were recorded, along with the times they had reached certain landmarks, like the twelfth hole, for instance, or the dump by the skeet-shooting range. It was clear from the diary that after a week or so during which they had familiarized themselves with the course layout, each of the victims had established a routine that had varied little from day to day. On some days they had abbreviated their walks, and on some days they had eliminated them altogether, but by and large there was remarkable consistency. Like the Canada geese, they were creatures of habit.

While Jerry continued with his search, Charlotte sat down on the pale green silk damask cushions of the sofa to study the diary. In Doreen’s case, the diary showed that she had passed the dump between 6:20 and 6:30 every day for the two and a half weeks preceding her murder. Cornwall could easily have driven to the site, hidden behind the stockade fence, strangled her with the extension cord, and carried her body back to his car all within the space of less than twenty minutes. Given the regularity of his victims’ schedules, the risk of being caught was minimal. Then he would simply have driven back to the Manse with the body in his trunk … Aha! she thought. That’s how Peter had known that Cornwall was the murderer! He must have seen Cornwall traveling back and forth on the Quarry Road, and wondered what he was up to. When it came out that one of the victims had been killed on the golf course, he must have put two and two together. Her mind skipped ahead. Then again, maybe he had seen Cornwall picking up the bouquets at the florist’s shop or macerating the heads in the Parish House kitchen. Or, maybe the spirits really
had
told him that Cornwall was the murderer. It didn’t matter. In any case, the pastor had then driven down to the train station at his convenience, and hauled the bodies to the summer house to be dismembered, or in the case of the bodies that had been dismembered at the Parish House, to be dumped in the river.

The diary showed that the second victim, Liliana Doyle, had also been a creature of habit, though a habit of a different kind. She had driven to a local convenience store every evening between eight-thirty and nine for cigarettes. Since Dr. Louria had described her as a television addict, Charlotte presumed that the timing was linked to the program schedule: that she went to the store for the cigarettes just before a favorite show. Probably, it was also a chance to get out of the apartment. She wasn’t supposed to go out, but, she would have thought, who would notice a quick trip to the convenience store under the cover of darkness? Presumably, Cornwall had nabbed her during this daily outing. The diary showed that the last victim, Melinda Myer, whose face had been disfigured as the result of an automobile accident, was fond of long, solitary walks on the hiking paths of the state park in nearby Pocantico Hills. Though Melinda hadn’t followed any regular schedule, the fact that Cornwall had recorded the dates and times of these walks led Charlotte to the conclusion that the state park was where he had murdered her.

Though the rest of their search proved fruitless, the diary was sufficient to demonstrate Cornwall’s intention of murdering his victims, and they decided to call it a day. Charlotte was waiting for Jerry in the hall when one of the samplers hanging on the wall caught her eye. It hung above a lovely half-moon shaped antique table that held a crystal vase with a beautiful arrangement of roses. It was good-sized for a sampler—about two feet wide by a foot high—elegantly matted, and set in a gilded frame. The last couplet of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94 (the source was given at the bottom) was embroidered above a floral motif of lilies of the valley. The words read:

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

The reference was now abundantly clear, Charlotte thought. “Lilies that fester” was a reference to Lilith, the beautiful young maiden who turns into an evil destroyer of men. But if it was the words of the sampler that caught her attention, it was the execution that she found herself scrutinizing more closely. Donning her reading glasses, she leaned forward to get a better look. Then she removed the sampler from the wall and carried it over to the window by the door, where she could look at it in the light. The inscription was delicately embroidered on a ground of ivory-colored silk with fine embroidery thread the color of burnished copper. “
Point tresse,
” Cornwall had called it. The reference had gone right over her head before, but now she made the connection: the translation was “hair embroidery.”

He had given up the
point tresse
, he had said, in favor of Victorian hand braiding. Charlotte looked again at the other examples of Cornwall’s handiwork that lined the cheerful yellow walls. There were seven in all: another
point tresse
sampler, with a highly apropos quotation from Psalm One: “For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked is doomed,” and five examples of Victorian braid work. The braids, in various patterns and widths, had been molded, twisted, and knotted into elaborate designs, mostly of flowers and wreaths, and then set in deep frames. All the threads were the same dark red in color. Charlotte now remembered the ring and the watch chain that Cornwall had showed her on her visit to the Manse. She also remembered how he had nervously stroked the watch chain in the police car. It was a rope made of three separate braids, each woven out of many of the delicate copper-colored strands. She had thought it quite quaint: a suitable accessory for a pastor with a passion for Victoriana. She also remembered him working at his braiding stand, and his reply to her question about how long he’d been working on that particular braid. He’d said two weeks, which was the length of time that had then elapsed since Doreen Mileski’s disappearance.