The Last Blue Plate Special (7 page)

“It’s Rathbone,” I said, gesturing for her to pick up the phone in the living room.

“What’s happened?” I heard her ask him seconds later.

“Listen to this,” was all he said. There was the click and whir of a tape being played, then a voice I recognized immediately.
A voice all Americans associate with the phrase, “What’s up, Doc?” Bugs Bunny’s voice. Only it wasn’t Bugs Bunny.

“I destroyed Ruby Emerald because she was an abomination,” it said. “I am the Sword of Heaven and she was an abomination to
the law. The Sword of Heaven cast her down and killed her and will kill again.”

After that there was another click as the tape was stopped.

“This thing came in to the local CBS affiliate shortly after the story about Emerald’s illness aired on the six o’clock news,”
Rathbone explained. “It’s illegal to tape phone calls without notifying the caller, but the woman at the desk where the call
got shunted has a hearing impairment, so they let her tape calls as a backup in case she misses a name or phone number. We
got lucky with this one. Not that it tells us much.”

“What happened to Emerald?” Rox asked.

“Nothing,” Rathbone answered. “That’s what’s strange. After the TV station called us with this tape, we called the hospital.
She’s fine, everything’s normal. Her doctor says there’s no reason she can’t preach at this revival tomorrow. Her p.r. people
are putting it out that she had a mild case of food poisoning. The doc says it wasn’t food poisoning but declines to say what
it was. Apparently our ‘Sword of Heaven’ thought she was a goner when the story hit at six, and called the station to take
credit.”

“Bugs Bunny called the station,” I reminded him.

“That’s a voice modification device you can buy all over, mostly from mail-order catalogues. They come prepackaged. Darth
Vader, Homer Simpson, the president. You speak in your normal voice into a mike that funnels the sound through a distortion
program. You come out saying whatever you said, but sounding like the program you picked. This one was Bugs.”

Wes Rathbone was not amused.

“We’ve got a serious problem here,” he went on. “CBS didn’t keep this under wraps. The story will be on TV news tomorrow and
in the papers on Monday. We’re going to be under a lot of pressure. How soon can you get us that profile?”

“Tomorrow afternoon,” Rox told him. “And we’ll need a fax of the text from the tape right away. Send it here.”

“Done,” Rathbone said, and hung up.

Rox and I stood around watching the fax come in, saying nothing, thinking.

“Need to review the FBI profiling protocol for serial killers and then review all the data that says the FBI profiling protocol
is a pile of crap,” she muttered. “I’ll need to be in my office by seven at least. This is going to take some time.”

“I want to run vocabulary analyses of both the letter and the tape, but especially the letter,” I replied. “There may be some
clues in the language of the headlines selected to glue all over the page.”

We were working, talking to ourselves, not to each other.

“Better get some sleep,” Roxie said.

“You still didn’t tell me about BB and the preacher,” I reminded her.

“Oh, the guy sounds okay. He called BB after BB called here, told him he did a chaplaincy at Sing-Sing for five years and
knows everybody who makes a mistake isn’t necessarily toxic. Then he and BB went for an eight-mile run around Mission Bay,
after which they had lattes and made plans to attend a gospel concert tomorrow afternoon. The run calmed our boy down. Right
now he’s in an agony of indecision over what to wear to a gospel concert. When we hung up he was leaning toward a Stokely
Carmichael look. Black suit, narrow tie, you know.”

We were doing okay, I thought as I felt Rox stretch and relax into sleep beside me in my queen-size bed. Everybody in my little
world was doing okay. But somebody out there wasn’t. Somebody out there was either killing or wanting to be seen as a killer.
Somebody out there wanted to
be
a sword. The thought of that warped personality brought a bitter taste to the back of my throat. Just knowing it was out
there made me happy about the Smith and Wesson now tucked snugly in my waist pack. You never know. You just really don’t.

R
oxie was up at five, an hour I rarely acknowledge, much less see. For the record, in the Anza-Borrego Desert in late October,
five
A.M.
smells like aluminum and seems to be deeply absorbed in a game that would turn out to be chess if you could see it. I sat
up in bed feeling the clean desert chill and told myself a killer might strike again if I didn’t get up. Then I curled under
the comforter and began a delicious drift back into sleep. Brontë, stretched across the foot of the bed, was snoring softly.

“You and that dog were not raised on a farm,” Rox noted as she applied makeup in the bathroom.

“Neither were you.” I yawned from beneath the comforter.

“You and that dog do not understand the work ethic.”

“Dogs do not have a work ethic,” I muttered, well aware that some dogs do. Border collies, for example.

“I’ll need your analysis of the clippings that were glued to the letter by ten-thirty, Blue. That will give me a couple of
hours to mesh your findings with whatever I can come up with and get the profile over to Rathbone by one. We don’t have much
time.”

“What are you going to give them?” I asked, opening my eyes in that way you know means you’re going to get up. “FBI stuff
on serial killers?”

Rox was bustling around my bedroom dramatically, moving the air in guilt-inducing patterns.

“Some,” she said tersely. “Some of the Holmes serial killer typology, probably. More on the medical aspect.
If
somebody’s manipulating blood pressure to murder people, then that person has had some medical training. Doctor, nurse, maybe
pharmacist. Or anybody in a tech support position that involves knowledge of blood chemistry and systems. We’re not looking
for a dietician or an X-ray tech. We’re looking for a medical professional familiar with the circulatory system who’s cracking
up. Probably not a true antisocial personality disorder, or the aberrant behavior would have shown up before or during medical
training. This one’s been repressing a big rage for years. But now something’s triggered it.”

“What about somebody who just learned about blood pressure by having it?” I offered.

Roxie laughed as she scrounged for a shoe under the bed.

“Blue, anybody who doesn’t have blood pressure is dead.”

“I meant high blood pressure,” I said. I have never understood people who can use words correctly before coffee.

“Nah,” she answered. “This is somebody who’s learned how to push blood pressure dangerously, even fatally high in perfectly
healthy people. That’s not something you pick up from a pamphlet your doctor gives you as she tells you to exercise and cut
down on fat.”

I had managed to stand up and pull on a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt. My bare feet demanded more complicated behaviors.
Finding socks, tying shoes. Feet are not something I easily deal with at five
A.M.
I ignored them and went into the kitchen to make coffee. Brontë followed me, clearly wondering how to feign alertness. She
drank some water from her red ceramic bowl and then sat beside the refrigerator with the attitude of a dog on a mission.

“That’s good,” I told her. “Guard the refrigerator.”

I noticed that her eyelids kept slipping downward, but she didn’t go back to bed.

“I’m outta here,” Rox said, taking a lidded car-cup of coffee with her. “You’ll have your stuff to me by ten-thirty?”

“No problem.”

The second Roxie’s car started, Brontë stood and trotted straight back to bed. I wished I could, too.

Three hours later I still wished I could. Entering the texts of fifty-three newspaper article headers into my computer had
given me a headache. But it had to be done manually since the little clips had been pasted all over the page in every direction
and the computer program wouldn’t be able to read the words from a scanned image.

What I found was nothing.

Sword of Heaven had no preference for any particular word or phrase in the article headers pasted on the letter. Certain verbs
did show up forty-eight percent more often than would occur in the normal speech of a native American-English speaker with
a high school education. But these were the “elocutionary” verbs journalists use to describe the speech of politicians. In
newspapers public servants never “say” anything, but rather urge, call, issue, demand, and weigh. In dicey situations they
may also answer, evade, dodge, or deny. I had just spent hours proving the existence of a linguistic usage pattern everybody
knows and accepts without thinking about it. Only its absence would get attention. Something like, “Republican Leaders Clutch
Funding Opportunity.” Everybody knows the right word is “seize.”

Sword, it seemed, had just cut out article headers randomly and stuck them on a page. Except, as every social psychologist
will tell you, the behavior of an individual cannot be random. Never. Randomness is a mathematical concept, not a human one.
People are programmed by species evolution and their own experiences to perform every act as a result of acts which have gone
before it. Put simply, if there is no causal history to a behavior, if we haven’t inherited it or learned how it’s done, we
can’t perform the behavior because we can’t think it. If we perform a behavior, it has an evolutionary or acquired cause.
It is the result of something and is therefore not random.

After feeding Brontë I successfully negotiated the sock-and-shoe sequence and then took her out for a run. The desert was
in morning neutral, nothing much going on. Instead of heading toward Coyote Creek I went south through Henderson Canyon toward
the Los Coyotes Indian Reservation. The terrain in that direction is monotonous, just an expanse of snakeweed and creosote
bushes. I didn’t want to be distracted.

“The choices of clippings made by the author of this letter cannot be random,” I lectured Brontë, who was watching a quail
as it dashed between two rocks. “They
look
random, but they’re not. What is it that I’m missing?”

The quail reappeared above the second rock and said, “Chicago,” which is the only thing California quails say. There’s another
species, the scaled quail, that lives in states east of here and says “Pecos.” I wondered why the calls of both species of
quail should seem to replicate American place names. I don’t believe in coincidence. Neither do I believe in attaching too
much significance to these things.

“Chicago!” called the quail again, its black-feather topknot looking oddly Mayan against the pale blue sky.

I wondered what possible evolutionary function was served by quails’ topknots. They seemed merely decorative, like plumes
on hats Dorothy Parker might have worn to lunch at the Algonquin in 1926. That’s when it hit me.

“Mary Harriet Grossinger and Dixie Ross were women!” I yelled to Brontë. “Come on, we’re going back!”

It was the quail’s topknot and the notion of hats, of fashion, that did it. Women politicians are subject to a type of scrutiny
by the media that would be ludicrous if applied to their male counterparts. Imagine an article headed, “Port Commissioner
Brad Thompson Opts for Black Velvet Cummerbund at Gala.”

Back at my computer I went to the
San Diego Union-Tribune
archives, which are complete for the previous year. The analysis had to be e-mailed to Rox in two hours. I had no time to
read all hundred and seventy-three article headers referencing Mary Harriet Grossinger or Dixie Ross. This is where the concept
of statistical randomness becomes useful. A random sampling of data makes it possible to draw conclusions about that data
based on a very small number. I wanted to know about the article headers Sword
hadn’t
selected to paste on the letter, and about the likelihood of those chosen being chosen by chance rather than design.

In the back of Blalock’s
Social Statistics
are tables of random numbers. I picked a set of twenty-five and assigned them to the hundred and seventy-three articles,
got twenty-five randomly, then fed the data into the same word-frequency program I’d used earlier. In minutes I knew that
roughly fourteen percent of the articles printed last year about these two women politicians referenced clothing, hairstyles,
and personal domestic routines. My favorite was “Senator Grossinger Changes Diaper on Road,” an article about Grossinger having
taken a grandchild with her on a trip to inspect irrigation ditches.

If Sword were choosing headers randomly from all available articles, then fourteen percent would involve references to traditional
female interests because fourteen percent of all the articles did so. Fashion, cooking, cleaning, babies. Another analysis
of the letter revealed no such references. None. This could not happen by chance, so I assumed the traditional female stuff
had been excluded deliberately. Sword had told us that these women had to die because they were trying to be like men, and
then pasted examples of their authoritarian pronouncements all over the letter in case somebody missed the point. Changing
diapers was okay. Women were supposed to do that. But heading land use committees wasn’t. Women who did that had to die.

I was running out of time, and had yet to address the big question. Was Sword more likely to be male or female? I was leaning
toward male, but a mistake at this juncture would mislead the whole investigation. Sword might be a rotten speller, but he
or she wasn’t stupid. If things were as bad as they seemed to be, Sword had already managed to kill two people and endanger
a third without leaving a trace. If the killing were to stop now, the odds against apprehension would be very high. But Sword
wasn’t going to stop now. I didn’t need a computer program to tell me that.

“Women are more likely to poison than men,” I told Brontë. “But men are much more likely than women to demand acknowledgment
for their accomplishments, including murder.”