The Definitive Albert J. Sterne (33 page)

Panic gnawing his stomach, confusion growing. All right, work it backwards and see if a different answer could be reached. He’d been sensible enough to leave Tony until a week after the construction job finished, but he’d formally handed the keys over on September twenty-seventh. And Tony had definitely been the third death, which meant he’d killed all three boys within a matter of four or five weeks, instead of spacing them over eight, which was one of his rules, and he hadn’t even realized he’d broken it until now.

He sat at the desk, breathing hard, eyes wide and unseeing. What the hell was going on in his head? What other rules had he broken, what blunders had he made? Yes, the longer his crimes went unsolved, the less and less likely it became that he’d ever be caught - but what if he’d left evidence behind somewhere, in the house, at the gravesites? It might only be a matter of time before they pieced it together. What if he hadn’t been clever enough about the wreath for Tony? What if  - God, he’d been too scared to have sex for all these weeks and then he hit on this smart guy with an even smarter friend, and he didn’t bother denying anything to them. That Patrice bitch might simmer over this, no matter that his cocksure bluffing and his money had silenced her at the time. And he hadn’t even started setting himself up as the respectable citizen beyond reproach and above suspicion. He was getting lazy, crazy  …

God save him.

Garrett sat at his desk, drenched with sweat despite the cold, gripping the edge of the desk as if it were his sanity.

“You want lunch, Mr Garrett?”

He’d lost his confidence, he’d lost the shit-eating attitude that ensured nothing could go wrong because he was functioning at two-hundred percent, thirty hours a day, and he had every play and every move figured out all the way to the Super Bowl.

“You want me to fetch you some lunch, Mr Garrett?”

Kenny. Midday. And he’d spent the morning sitting here doing nothing but sweat, the front page of the Oregon newspaper still spread before him. “I’m not hungry,” he managed to say through a dry throat.

The man wandered back over to the door. “Must have had a good time last night, some good times,” he murmured, slyly amused.

“Get out of here, Kenny,” Garrett said, with a hint of the banter the man was used to.

“Yes, sir.” And he left, shutting the office door behind him.

He’d lost his confidence. Maybe he should do it, get away with murder once more, satisfy the hunger, feel the return of the control. Just to prove to himself he still could.

Maybe he’d be feeling better now if he’d taken it all the way with Zac. But the kid’s friends would be able to identify the man Zac had left with, so killing him would have been a mistake.

Garrett dropped his head to his hands, growled his frustration and confusion. Everything had been so clear, so obvious before Oregon. But he’d lost the clarity and the ability to plan somewhere along the way, and didn’t even know when. No telling what he’d done, what he might do. What he might risk.

The mistakes had begun so long ago. Even back in Georgia, for God’s sake. Going through with his plans for Philip despite the fact the kid had brought his girlfriend along. Foolish.

Then, moving to Oregon, he’d chosen a house with a cellar, thinking it an ideal way to avoid surrounding suburbia hearing bumps and screams in the night. In reality, the cellar was cold and damp and hardly conducive to perfect satisfaction. After all, it would be a trifle undignified to orchestrate a boy’s death while wearing socks to keep his feet warm. Ridiculous.

But then, of course, he must have suffered the cold cellar at least once, if not twice.

To start with, a boy had lost his blood down there some months before. What had the strong pulse of blood spattering his own naked skin felt like? Garrett shook his head - he still had no memory of it, and his imaginings rang false. And where was the body? Had it already been found and written off as unsolved, or was it lying in wait, ready to tell Garrett’s secrets? Who the hell had it been?

And lying amidst the old blood stains had been a fresh body, a boy he seemed to recognize, who’d only died within the previous couple of days. A complete puzzle - Garrett hadn’t even been able to see how the boy had died. The blood wasn’t his, because there were no corresponding injuries and, as far as Garrett could tell, no blood loss. But there was some vague familiarity, something to do with a high school day dream, lying kissing on the sofa - which made no sense at all. He hadn’t even begun to suspect he was queer back in school.

Two troubling mysteries. Dangerous.

His plans for the three deaths that really counted had seemed full of finesse. In the event, ligature strangulation seemed tame. He’d thought to control the boys by slow deprivation of oxygen, but all he’d ended up with were breathing corpses. He’d revived the first one, used the scarf to gag him instead until he was ready to let the kid die, and he’d followed the same pattern, doggedly, with little joy. Stupid and wasteful.

Except for Tony - he’d been a lively enough victim. So damned good, yet so crazy to have preyed on someone that close to him. It had been all Garrett had ever wanted, this strong young man completely his, and fighting the fact every inch of the way. Even as he’d died, Tony’s eyes had held his, cursing him. Glorious. But insanely misjudged.

So he moved to this passionate, murderous city and lived in fear, continuing to break his rules, only compounding his mistakes.

All right - what to do next? How to get this back on track, how to reach the Super Bowl from this defensive position, so low on the ladder? He couldn’t afford to lose one more game, one more point.

Garrett stood, began pacing the office, five steps from wall to wall, forcing himself to think.

But no matter how he considered the outcomes, weighed the odds, he couldn’t work out whether it would be sensible, or if it would be yet another mindless error, to go back to that alley tonight and charm Zac and Patrice into talking to him alone, and then kill them.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

COLORADO

JANUARY 1985

Fletcher Ash was beginning to feel himself grow old and tired and grim, which wasn’t fair: he was only thirty-two, an age he’d anticipated heralding the prime of his life. Until lately, he’d been an energetic and optimistic person. If he’d lost those qualities, Fletcher asked himself, then why couldn’t he have also lost the darker qualities, like the vulnerability and the doubt? Why couldn’t he lose the drive and the empathy, so he simply wouldn’t care where he was right now?

He knew what it was - this case was ageing him, this man who Albert called his pet serial killer was taking Fletcher’s youth along with the lives of young men across the country.

It was quiet in his apartment, a quiet that previously had seemed like peace but now resembled isolation. Reaching to turn out the lamp on the coffee table, Fletcher added darkness to the quiet, then sat back in his comfortably sagging armchair and gazed through the window to where he knew the mountains to be. It was too overcast a night to be able to see them, though he knew the horizon’s silhouette so well he almost convinced himself he could pick it out.

That was a fairly inefficient distraction from the unmarked folder lying at his feet. Guiltily, he’d collected extra photos of all the killer’s victims they could identify, the school photos and the family snaps; and every now and then he leafed through them. A shot of Drew Harmer dreaming of Prince Charming, taken by his friend, Scott. Mitch Brown, standing slightly apart from his family with his arms crossed, the poet who could have been merely trouble. Philip Rohan and Stacey Dixon, a badly focused shot of them embracing, as if the photographer had seized the chance too quickly. Sam Doherty, looking heartbreakingly young, freshly scrubbed but with his shirt collar askew, in the latest shot from school. Fletch had never let Caroline or Albert know of this collection, only looking through it late at night, alone and unsure.

What he really should be doing was working on the next name on his list of suspects. It was difficult, tracking down and checking out suspects for a crime that had happened over four years ago, but Fletcher didn’t have any jurisdiction in the Georgia or Oregon cases. At least Caroline had let him unofficially keep the case open on the three bodies he’d found here in Colorado, and he had access to the full range of information they’d collected at the time. That was what he should be doing, not sitting here staring at photos of men he’d only known as corpses.

These were attractive boys, in body and heart. Their family and friends, anyone who knew them well, described the young men as full of life, brimming with emotion, young and happy. That only added to the simple tragedy of it because the murderer inevitably chose victims who had a future; ones with talents, plans, promise. So, Fletcher wondered, could his own guilt be partly due to the suspicion that he himself found these boys attractive in the same ways that the killer did? That he would, for instance, find the unsubtle strength of Tony Shields sensually stimulating?

Fletch grimaced and continued to interrogate himself. Could his discomfort be a result of him identifying with some of the boys because, for example, he felt Mitch had the same potential as Fletcher himself did for either creativity or destruction? Or was his guilt simpler than that? Was it because eight young people from Georgia and Oregon would not be dead if only Fletcher had done better here in Colorado?

He sighed, acknowledging to himself there must be something of all three of these questions in the truth and probably more, too.

It should help that the man he was chasing had consistent, if broad, tastes. And that Fletcher shared those tastes to some extent, though he didn’t want to empathize with this murderer, even in his choice of victim, let alone feel the old understanding of what the man did to these boys.

Too often when he was this tired and the files were spread before him with Albert’s clinical descriptions of the results of brutal rape, augmented with glossy black and white photos of torture and decay - too often Fletcher’s imagination ran away with him and built up the story of how all this happened, what it felt like to have a young man’s life in your hands, to choose whether to inflict pain and fear or healing and joy. The killer chose pain and fear every time. Or did he? It was only those results that the police discovered, after all, and the man was controlled enough to wait two years before killing again. What did he do in the meantime?

Fletcher sighed and gazed around his apartment, not wanting to let his imagination run wild again. As usual, the only thing that held any hope of distracting him was the telephone.

Albert never exactly welcomed Fletcher’s calls but the younger man had no other straws to clutch at. And Albert would be there for him whenever Fletcher asked. It helped. Somehow, Albert even at his dourest and most disparaging inevitably cheered Fletch up.

It was eleven o’clock. Fletcher dialed Albert’s home phone number.

“Sterne,” was the blunt greeting after only two rings.

Fletcher laughed under his breath. “You know it’s me. You could just say
Hello
or
Albert
or something.”

Silence.

“Caroline’s got me busy on this money laundering case,” Fletch reported. “Not very exciting. Not exactly why I joined the FBI.”

“The Bureau has traditionally focused on property crime.”

“Yeah, I’d just prefer to deal with violent crime. And I’m  -”

“Obsessed with your pet serial killer.”

“Must you call him that?” Fletch protested, but mildly because he had little hope of changing much about Albert.

“You should have studied psychology and related sciences. Perhaps the Behavioral Science Unit would have offered you placement.”

“But even they think this man exists only in my imagination, they’re worse than the bureaucrats at HQ. So if I worked with them, I  probably wouldn’t have seen the connections, either.”

Another silence stretched, which was something Fletch liked about Albert - he was one of the few people Fletch knew who didn’t mind lengthy pauses in a conversation, or hours spent together without a word exchanged. In fact, he was the only person other than Peter Ash who remained completely comfortable in those situations. Unlike Peter, though, Albert probably preferred them.

“I decided about that boy in Oregon,” Fletcher eventually said.

“The Brooks murder. What did you decide?”

“It wasn’t our man. It doesn’t feel right. The victim was too young, there was no sexual penetration  -”

Albert said, “There wasn’t with Sam Doherty, either.”

“But Sam’s method of disposal was the obvious link there, the forest burial. Brooks had bite marks - our man hasn’t left bite marks before. And the only body he’s thrown in a river was Stacey Dixon, and she’s the exception that proves the rule.”