Signature Kill (11 page)

It was a misty morning in the fields near Elwood, home of the Cross Creek Conservation and Gun Club, the location where Gary Breslau had texted Behr to meet. The thermometer said forty degrees, but a moist, bone-chilling breeze made it feel at least twenty degrees colder than that as Behr stepped out of his car. Barks of “Pull!” and the popping of skeet guns filled the air.

Behr asked for Breslau in the small clubhouse and was told what field he was on and given a set of earplugs. Rolling the bits of foam into cylinders, Behr stuffed them into his ears as he walked past a man holding the leashes on a pair of young springer spaniels getting trained to the gun. He continued on toward the end of the skeet range, where he arrived in time to see Breslau, dressed like something out of the Upland Hunting page in a Cabela’s catalog, finish off a clean double.

“Nice,” Behr said, as Breslau turned and broke his gun, sending the spent shell casings flying over his shoulder in a curling cloud of gun smoke. An old-timer in a blaze orange hat and vest who was holding the skeet release switch drifted off a ways for a cigarette.

“Seventeen for twenty. I’m pulling off my follow-through,” Breslau said and shrugged, not particularly pleased or displeased with the effort. “What do you want?”

“A password.”

“To what?”

“Your bank account,” Behr said. “To the department’s criminal index, what do you think?”

“Why?” Breslau asked.

“For my Gibbons case.”

“We don’t give civilians access to that. Liability reasons.”

“C’mon, I need it.”

“Yeah? I need things too. Like back rubs and blow jobs. Should we get out our lists?”

“How about I’ll shoot you for it?”

Breslau gave Behr a look. “One time around?”

“That’s right. I top your last round, you give me a password.”

Breslau weighed the offer for a moment, an amused half smile on his lips. “You don’t top it, you get out of my face,” Breslau said.

“Fair enough,” Behr answered. “Do I go rent a gun?”

“Use mine,” Breslau said, passing over the still-warm Browning Citori 20-gauge over-and-under with perfectly polished stock and gleaming barrels. Behr recognized it as a $2,500 firearm. It practically floated in his hands.

He dug in his coat for a pair of sunglasses, and Breslau handed him a box of shells, which he dumped in his pocket before stepping to the line. The old-timer drifted back, ready to operate the thrower.

“Pull,” Behr said, after sighting up on the high house, and commenced shooting at a pair of clay pigeons that flew by at crossed angles. He promptly missed the first, but corrected and picked up the second, eliciting an intrigued snort from Breslau. Behr rotated counterclockwise through the stations, powdering some of the disks, while others he just nicked and cracked. He finished his round, having missed numbers one and twelve, broke the smoking Browning, and handed it back to a sour-faced Breslau.

“Eighteen for twenty,” Breslau said. “Goddamnit, Behr, don’t you know it’s bad form to outshoot your host?”

Behr shrugged. “Blame it on the well-balanced gun.”

“All right,” Breslau said and indicated a picnic table behind them where his gun case rested. They went and sat down. “What have you found out that you need this?” Breslau asked.

“That it involves a signature killer,” Behr said. His words sounded stark and half ridiculous in the bucolic sporting environment. But Breslau didn’t react to what Behr had said like it was crazy. In fact, he didn’t seem surprised at all, he just sat there, and that told Behr plenty.

“You already know,” Behr uttered. The “you” implied the department, not just Breslau.

“Know that it’s a bad time to be a Northeastside prostie? Yeah, well
we’re
not gonna take out a billboard announcing it,” Breslau said.

“That’s why you’re helping me on this …” Behr said, the realization settling on him. He’d been used by the department before, at times without his knowledge, other times more willingly. At least this time there might be something tangible in it for him.

“Tell me what you have,” Breslau said.

“Looking at everything you gave me, it goes back years, and based on the dates, the killer’s cycle is accelerating.”

“Crap.” Breslau spat on the cold ground. “You sound like you’ve been studying up.”

“I
have
been studying up.”

“What else do you know?”

“This killer would be classified as organized, with elements of a disorganized profile. And the combination of the two is the most difficult to recognize, much less apprehend. I’m guessing it’s why this hasn’t been picked up in the press.”

“Right,” Breslau said.

“He’s in the sadistic-lust category. And the guy is what’s known as a picquerist. He uses knives and bladed instruments as a stand-in for his cock. Killing is sexual for him.”

“Like Jack the Ripper,” Breslau said.

“Yeah. In some ways. The only reason these guys stop is if they’re caught or die. Once in a while they just burn out and cease their activities, and then they get away with it.”

“You’re ruining my Saturday, Behr,” Breslau said.

“Believe me, it’s ruined more than that for me,” Behr said.

“Use
my
ID and password,” Breslau said, writing it down on the
cardboard flap of a shell box. “That way I can keep track of where you’ve been in the system. Don’t do anything over the line or you’ll be on the other side of a firewall—and I’m not just talking about the database.”

“Got it,” Behr said.

“And don’t
you
go to the press with this,” Breslau cautioned.

“I won’t,” Behr answered, “and I think you know that.” Behr got up and dusted off his pants. “But Breslau, whether I say anything or not, you know it’s only a matter of time until this story comes out.”

“I know.” Breslau sighed. After a moment he put his earphones back on, took his spot at the first station, and loaded the Browning.

Behr heard “Pull!” and then the double pop of Breslau’s gun as he walked back toward his car.

Names. A swirling sea of them. Hundreds. Aliases. Criminal records. Warrants. Not a sea, a bottomless pool. A suspect pool, and Behr deep-dove it. Using Breslau’s password, he had worked all through the weekend and into the following week and was able to search and cross-reference offenders with assaults against women, attacks on prostitutes, rapists, murderers, and all types of other delights. Toward the end of the week, Susan had gone out of town with Trevor for a long weekend to visit her folks in the suburbs of Chicago, something they did every month or so. She’d floated a halfhearted invitation to him. Behr had been up there a few times. It was one thing sitting in a La-Z-Boy next to her father, not much to say, during the summer while a Sox game was on every afternoon and her mother was cooing at the baby. But it wasn’t baseball season and he was busy, so he stayed home printing reams of information and combing over name after name. He didn’t let anything rule out a suspect other than death or lengthy incarceration during the period of the crimes. By the time he was done with his initial pass, the pile of paper stacked next to his desk reached from the floor to his thigh. He didn’t wait. He jumped in. He pounded coffee and started making two piles: a “who knows?” and a “no way.” The “no ways” got taller, but there were still a ton of candidates in the “maybe” stack. He worked through Thursday night, Friday, slept three hours Friday night, and kept pounding until Saturday afternoon, plagued by the thought that maybe this killer wasn’t among
the records he was searching, or maybe had no arrest record at all, when he finally passed out again.

Waking up in the dark, Behr didn’t know what time, or even day, it was for a moment. He shook his head and looked at the clock and saw it was 8:30 Saturday night. He brewed himself a double-strength pot of coffee that smacked him in the face and sat down to his desk, where his “suspects” now awaited him. There were several dozen of them—representing days, if not weeks, of background checks and other investigative work to winnow them down—but one name jumped out from all the rest: Jerold Allen Prilo. It wasn’t by some advanced investigative technique or intuitive genius that Behr got to this idea. It was much simpler. Jerold Allen Prilo was already a convicted murderer.

Behr remembered the case. Five years earlier a twenty-one-year-old girl named Mary Beth Watney, who was not retarded but was borderline incompetent based on her low IQ, had become a fixture in her local bar—a place called the Wishing Well that had a pool table along with some old video game machines and a dartboard in the back. Behr had been there, and besides being on the other side of town, it wasn’t very different from the Trough, Gene Sasso’s place.

One spring afternoon a long-haul trucker who lived in the area stopped in and was seen playing a game of pool with young Mary Beth Watney. He left first but stayed in the parking lot, according to surveillance cams that showed her leave the bar next to, converse with, and walk out of frame with a waiting Prilo.

Apparently the two had gone back to the house where Prilo was living with his girlfriend, who was also a long-haul driver, away on a run at the time. They had drunk whiskey and had sex and that’s where the story broke down. Prilo had said it was consensual and rough by request, and that though it had gotten out of hand and she might have been injured, the girl had left on foot afterward and it was the last he’d seen of her. Watney’s body, cut to pieces, wasn’t found until weeks later, down south, in an escarpment below Weed Patch Hill in the Knobs. By then Prilo was in Arizona dropping off a load of pipe before picking up a consignment of sheet metal,
which he hauled to Washington State and dropped off, before picking up a load of lumber, which he drove back to Indiana. The police were waiting for him when he arrived.

The prosecutor’s version of events included plying a mentally disabled girl with alcohol, rape, and a vicious beating with fists and foreign objects that left the walls and ceiling in need of repainting, which Prilo had done, before the calm disposal of the body. The problem was there was no
proof
that Prilo’s version wasn’t true. The body was found among large rocks. A fall amidst them could have caused some of the initial damage. There was further degradation of the corpse due to weather and animal activity. As for the dismemberment, the specifics of that came to light only later. The prosecutor was concerned about putting the case in front of a jury that might acquit the man outright.

Authorities scrambled to match assaults and murders along Prilo’s trucking routes with the dates he’d driven them. There were missing-persons reports and concerned eyewitness accounts of young truck-stop hookers seen in Prilo’s company and then never seen again. But once more, there was no concrete proof. The only thing law enforcement could agree on was that Prilo should be off the streets and locked away for the good of everyone.

Finally, with the help of a savvy defense lawyer, Prilo pleaded to sexual assault and no contest on manslaughter, not murder, and cut a deal. He fleshed out his version of consensual bondage and rough sex with the details that something had gone wrong with a “choking game” they’d been playing and that he had panicked when the girl stopped breathing. He said he’d cut her up and tried to dispose of her body out of simple fear. When it came to suspicions over other seemingly related murders, authorities were unable to bring charges. Due to the condition of the body, prosecutors were frightened of a successful insanity defense with a short stay at a mental facility. So they made a deal under which Prilo instead got a seven- to nine-year term in maximum security, with consideration for the time and expense saved on a trial. The sex charge bought law enforcement the bonus of Prilo having to register as a sex offender for life. It was cold comfort to the family of the victim, and the general public. But
the outcry simmered down after a few weeks had passed. There was nothing for the prosecutor to do about it, and by the time Prilo served three and a half years of his sentence and was kicked to a halfway house on the Near Westside of Indianapolis due to prison overcrowding, the case had been largely forgotten.

Until now
, Behr thought.

Behr noticed, though, that there were a few vexing aspects in regard to Prilo as a suspect. Namely, two of the murders had occurred while Prilo was in jail. But they happened to be murders that were on the far edges of the pattern. Perhaps those killings were unrelated. He wasn’t sure, but he knew someone who might be. He saw it was already 10:15, but he picked up his phone anyway.

“Hi, it’s Frank Behr, not too late to call, I hope,” he said.