The Dead Zone (39 page)

Johnny stopped suddenly and stiffened like a dog on point. “Here,” he muttered. “He did it right here.”

Images and textures and sensations flooded in. The copper taste of excitement, the possibility of being seen adding to it. The girl was squirming, trying to scream. He had covered her mouth with one gloved hand. Awful excitement. Never catch me, I'm the Invisible Man, is it dirty enough for you now, momma?

Johnny began to moan, shaking his head back and forth.

Sound of clothes ripping. Warmth. Something flowing. Blood? Semen? Urine?

He began to shudder all over. His hair hung in his face. His face. His smiling, open face caught inside the circular border of the raincoat's hood as his (my) hands close around the neck at the moment of orgasm and squeeze . . . and squeeze . . . and squeeze.

The strength left his arms as the images began to fade. He slipped forward, now lying on the stage full-length, sobbing. When Bannerman touched his shoulder he cried out and tried to scramble away, his face crazy with fear. Then, little by little, it loosened. He put his head back against the waist-high bandstand railing and closed his eyes. Shudders raced through his body like whippets. His pants and coat were sugared with snow.

“I know who it is,” he said.

Fifteen minutes later Johnny sat in Bannerman's inner office again, stripped to his shorts and sitting as close as he could to a portable electric heater. He still looked cold and miserable, but he had stopped shaking.

“Sure you don't want some coffee?”

Johnny shook his head. “I can't abide the stuff.”

“Johnny . . .” Bannerman sat down. “Do you really know something?”

“I know who killed them. You would have gotten him eventually. You were just too close to it. You've even seen him in his raincoat, that shiny all-over raincoat. Because he crosses the kids in the morning. He has a stop sign on a stick and he crosses the kids in the morning.”

Bannerman looked at him, thunderstruck. “Are you talking about Frank? Frank
Dodd?
You're nuts!”

“Frank Dodd killed them,” Johnny said. “Frank Dodd killed them all.”

Bannerman looked as though he didn't know whether to laugh at Johnny or deal him a good swift kick. “That's the craziest goddam thing I've ever heard,” he said finally. “Frank Dodd's a fine officer and a fine man. He's crossing over next November to run for municipal chief of police, and he'll do it with my blessing.” Now his expression was one of amusement mixed with tired contempt. “Frank's twenty-five. That means he would have had to have started this crazy shit when he was just nineteen. He lives at home very quietly with his mother, who isn't very well—hypertension, thyroid, and a semidiabetic condition. Johnny, you put your foot in the bucket. Frank Dodd is no murderer. I'd stake my life on that.”

“The murders stopped for two years,” Johnny said. “Where was Frank Dodd then? Was he in town?”

Bannerman turned toward him, and now the tired amusement had left his face and he only looked hard. Hard and angry. “I don't want to hear any more about this. You were right the first time—you're nothing but a fake. Well, you got your press coverage, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to you malign a good officer, a man I . . .”

“A man you think of as your son,” Johnny said quietly.

Bannerman's lips thinned, and a lot of the color that had risen in his cheeks during their time outside now faded out of his face. He looked like a man who has been punched low. Then it passed and his face was expressionless.

“Get out of here,” he said. “Get one of your reporter friends to give you a ride home. You can hold a press conference on your way. But I swear to God, I swear to
holy God
that if you mention Frank Dodd's name, I'll come for you and I'll break your back. Understood?”

“Sure, my buddies from the press!” Johnny shouted at him suddenly. “That's right! Didn't you see me answering all their questions? Posing for their pictures and making sure they got my good side? Making sure they spelled my name right?”

Bannerman looked startled, then hard again. “Lower your voice.”

“No, I'll be goddamned if I will!” Johnny said, and his voice rose even higher in pitch and volume. “I think you
forgot who called who! I'll refresh your recollection for you. It was
you,
calling
me.
That's how eager I was to get over here!”

“That doesn't mean you're . . .”

Johnny walked over to Bannerman, pointing his index finger like a pistol. He was several inches shorter and probably eighty pounds lighter, but Bannerman backed up a step—as he had done on the common. Johnny's cheeks had flushed a dull red. His lips were drawn back slightly from his teeth.

“No, you're right, you calling me doesn't mean shit in a tin bucket,” he said. “But you don't
want
it to be Dodd, do you? It can be somebody else, then we'll at least look into it, but it can't be good old Frank Dodd. Because Frank's upstanding, Frank takes care of his mother, Frank looks up to good old Sheriff George Bannerman, oh, Frank's bloody Christ down from the cross except when he's raping and strangling old ladies and little girls, and it could have been your
daughter,
Bannerman, don't you understand it could have been your
own dau . . .”

Bannerman hit him. At the last moment he pulled the punch, but it was still hard enough to knock Johnny backward; he stumbled over the leg of a chair and then sprawled on the floor. Blood trickled from his cheek where Bannerman's Police Academy ring had grazed him.

“You had that coming,” Bannerman said, but there was no real conviction in his voice. It occurred to him that for the first time in his life he had hit a cripple—or the next thing to a cripple.

Johnny's head felt light and full of bells. His voice seemed to belong to someone else, a radio announcer or a B-movie actor. “You ought to get down on your knees and thank God that he really didn't leave any clues, because you would have overlooked them, feeling like you do about Dodd. And then you could have held yourself responsible in Mary Kate Hendrasen's death, as an accessory.”

“That is nothing but a damnable lie,” Bannerman said slowly and clearly. “I'd arrest my own brother if he was the guy doing this. Get up off the floor. I'm sorry I hit you.”

He helped Johnny to his feet and looked at the scrape on his cheek.

“I'll get the first-aid kit and put some iodine on that.”

“Forget it,” Johnny said. The anger had left his voice. “I guess I kind of sprang it on you, didn't I?”

“I'm telling you, it can't be Frank. You're not a publicity
hound, okay. I was wrong about that. Heat of the moment, okay? But your vibes or your astral plane or whatever it is sure gave you a bum steer this time.”

“Then check,” Johnny said. He caught Bannerman's eyes with his own and held them.
“Check it out.
Show me I got it wrong.” He swallowed. “Check the times and dates against Frank's work schedule. Can you do that?”

Grudgingly, Bannerman said, “The time cards in the back closet there go back fourteen or fifteen years. I guess I could check it.”

“Then do it.”

“Mister . . .” He paused. “Johnny, if you
knew
Frank, you'd laugh at yourself. I mean it. It's not just me, you ask anybody . . .”

“If I'm wrong, I'll be glad to admit it.”

“This is crazy,” Bannerman muttered, but he went to the storage closet where the old time cards were kept and opened the door.

Two hours passed. It was now nearly one o'clock in the morning. Johnny had called his father and told him he would find a place to sleep in Castle Rock; the storm had leveled off at a single furious pitch, and driving back would be next to impossible.

“What's going on over there?” Herb asked. “Can you tell me?”

“I better not over the phone, Dad.”

“All right, Johnny. Don't exhaust yourself.”

“No.”

But he
was
exhausted. He was more tired than he could remember being since those early days in physical therapy with Eileen Magown. A nice woman, he thought randomly. A nice
friendly
woman, at least until I told her that her house was burning down. After that she had become distant and awkward. She had thanked him, sure, but—had she ever touched him after that? Actually touched him? Johnny didn't think so. And it would be the same with Bannerman when this thing was over. Too bad. Like Eileen, he was a fine man. But people get very nervous around people who can just touch things and know all about them.

“It doesn't prove a thing,” Bannerman was saying now. There was a sulky, little-boy rebelliousness in his voice that rattled. But he was too tired.

They were looking down at a rough chart Johnny had made on the back of a circular for used state police interceptors. Stacked untidily by Bannerman's desk were seven or eight cartons of old time cards, and sitting in the top half of Bannerman's in/out basket were Frank Dodd's cards, going back to 1971, when he had joined the sheriff's department. The chart looked like this:

All times are “estimated time of death” figures supplied by State Medical Examiner

“No, it doesn't prove anything,” Johnny agreed, rubbing his temples. “But it doesn't exactly rule him out, either.”

Bannerman tapped the chart. “When Miss Ringgold was killed, he was on duty.”

“Yeah, if she really was killed on the twenty-ninth of October. But it might have been the twenty-eighth, or the twenty-seventh. And even if he was on duty, who suspects a cop?”

Bannerman was looking at the little chart very carefully.

“What about the gap?” Johnny said. “The two-year gap?”

Bannerman thumbed the time cards. “Frank was right here on duty all during 1973 and 1974. You saw that.”

“So maybe the urge didn't come on him that year. At least, so far as we know.”

“So far as we know, we don't know anything,” Bannerman contradicted quickly.

“But what about 1972? Late 1972 and early 1973? There are no time cards for that period. Was he on vacation?”

“No,” Bannerman said. “Frank and a guy named Tom Harrison took a semester course in Rural Law Enforcement at a branch of the University of Colorado in Pueblo. It's the only place in the country where they offer a deal like that. It's an eight-week course. Frank and Tom were out there from October 15 until just about Christmas. The state pays part, the county pays part, and the U.S. government pays part under the Law Enforcement Act of 1971. I picked Harrison—he's chief of police over in Gates Falls now—and Frank. Frank almost didn't go, because he was worried about his mother being alone. To tell you the truth, I think she tried to persuade him to stay home. I talked him into it. He wants to be a career officer, and something like the Rural Law Enforcement course looks damn good on your record. I remember that when he and Tom got back in December, Frank had a low-grade virus and he looked terrible. He'd lost twenty pounds. Claimed no one out there in cow country could cook like his mom.”

Bannerman fell silent. Something in what he had just said seemed to disturb him.

“He took a week's sick leave around the holidays and then he was okay,” Bannerman resumed, almost defensively. “He was back by the fifteenth of January at the latest. Check the time cards for yourself.”

“I don't have to. Any more than I have to tell you what your next step is.”

“No,” Bannerman said. He looked at his hands. “I told you that you had a head for this stuff. Maybe I was righter than I knew. Or wanted to be.”

He picked up the telephone and pulled out a thick directory with a plain blue cover from the bottom drawer of his desk. Paging through it without looking up, he told Johnny, “This is courtesy of that same Law Enforcement Act. Every sheriff's
office in every county of the United States.” He found the number he wanted and made his call.

Johnny shifted in his seat.

“Hello,” Bannerman said. “Am I talking to the Pueblo sheriff's office? . . . All right. My name is George Bannerman, I'm the county sheriff of Castle County, in western Maine . . . yes, that's what I said. State of Maine. Who am I talking to, please? . . . All right, Officer Taylor, this is the situation. We've had a series of murders out here, rape-stranglings, six of them in the past five years. All of them have taken place in the late fall or early winter. We have a . . .” He looked up at Johnny for a moment, his eyes hurt and helpless. Then he looked down at the home phone again. “We have a suspect who was in Pueblo from October 15 of 1972 until . . . uh, December 17, I think. What I'd like to know is if you have an unsolved homicide on your books during that period, victim female, no particular age, raped, cause of death, strangulation. Further, I would like to know the perpetrator's sperm type if you have had such a crime and a sperm sample was obtained. What? . . . Yes, okay. Thanks . . . I'll be right here, waiting. Good-bye, Officer Taylor.”