The Poet (6 page)

Her abduction was not reported because her roommate and all her friends had already gone home for the holidays. No one knew she was missing. When she didn’t show up for work at the day care center on Thursday morning, the manager thought she had simply gone home to Montana early, not completing the week because she wasn’t due to return to the job after the Christmas break. It would not be the first time a student pulled this kind of stunt, especially once finals were over and the holiday break beckoned. The manager made no inquiry or report to authorities.

Her body was found Friday morning in Washington Park. The investigators traced her last known movements back to noon on Wednesday when she called the mechanic from the day care center-he remembered children’s voices in the background-and he told her the car was ready. She said she would pick it up after work, first stopping at the bank. She did neither. She said good-bye to the day care center manager at noon and went out the door. She was not seen alive again. Except, of course, by her killer.

I only had to look at the photos in the file to realize how the case could have grabbed Sean and put a leash around his heart. They were before-and-after photos. A portrait shot of her, probably for the high school yearbook. A fresh-faced young girl with a whole life ahead of her. She had dark wavy hair and crystal-blue eyes. Each reflected a small star of light, the flash of the camera. There was also a candid of her, in shorts and a tank top. She was smiling, carrying a cardboard box away from a car. The muscles of her slender, tan arms were taut. It looked as though it was a slight strain for her to stand still with the heavy box for the photographer. I turned it over and read in what I guessed was a parent’s scrawl: “Terri’s first day on campus! Denver, Colo.”

The other pictures were taken after. There were more of these and I was struck by the number. Why did the cops need so many? Each one seemed like some kind of a terrible invasion, even though the girl was already dead. Theresa Lofton’s eyes had lost their brilliance in these photographs. They were open but dull, webbed in a milky caul.

The photos showed the victim lying in about two feet of brush and snow on a slight incline. The news stories had been correct. She was in two pieces. A scarf was tightly wrapped around her neck and her eyes were sufficiently wide and bugged to suggest this was how she died. But the killer apparently had more work to do afterward. The body had been hacked apart at the midriff, the bottom half then placed over the top half in a horrific tableau suggesting that she was performing a sex act on herself.

I realized that Wexler was at the other desk watching me as I looked at the gallery of ghastly photos. I tried not to show my disgust. Or my fascination. I knew now what my brother was protecting me from. I had never seen anything so horrible. I finally looked at Wexler.

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

“The stuff the tabs said about it being like the Black Dahlia in L.A., it was close, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. Mac bought a book about it. He called some old horse in the LAPD, too. There were some similarities. The chop job. But that one was fifty years ago.”

“Maybe somebody got the idea from that.”

“Maybe. He thought of that.”

I returned the photos to the envelope and looked back at Wexler.

“Was she a lesbian?”

“No, not as far as we could tell. She had a boyfriend back up in Butte. Good kid. We cleared him. Your brother thought the same thing for a while. Because of what the killer did, you know, with the parts of the body. He thought maybe somebody was getting back at her for being a lezzie. Maybe making some kind of sick statement about something. He never got anywhere with it.”

I nodded.

“You’ve got forty-five minutes left.”

“You know, that’s the first time I’ve heard you call him ‘Mac’ in a long time.”

“Don’t worry about it. Make that forty-four minutes.”

The autopsy report was pretty much anticlimactic after the photos. I noticed that the time of death was set on the first day of Lofton’s disappearance. She had been dead more than forty hours when her body was found.

Most of the summary reports dealt with dead ends. Routine investigations of the victim’s family, boyfriend, friends on campus, coworkers and even parents of children she cared for, turned up nothing. Almost all were cleared through alibis or other investigative means.

The conclusions in the reports were that Theresa Lofton had not known her killer, that her path had somehow intersected with his, that it had simply been bad luck. The unknown killer was always referred to as a male, though there was no positive proof of this. The victim had not been sexually assaulted. But most violent murderers and mutilators of women were men, and it was believed it would have taken a physically strong person to cut through the body’s bone and gristle. No cutting weapon was ever found.

Though the body had nearly completely bled out, there were indications of postmortem lividity, which meant some time had passed between the victim’s death and the mutilation. Possibly, according to the report, as long as two or three hours.

Another peculiarity was the timing of when the body was left in the park. It was discovered approximately forty hours after investigators believed Theresa Lofton had been killed. Yet the park was a popular running and walking spot. It was unlikely that the body could have been in place in the open park field for that long without being noticed, even though an early snow considerably cut down on the number of people who passed through. In fact, the report concluded that the body had been in place no more than three hours when it was spotted after dawn by an early morning jogger.

So where was it all that time? The investigators couldn’t answer that question. But they had a clue.

The fibers analysis report listed numerous foreign hairs and cotton fibers that had been found on the body and combed out of the hair. These would primarily be used to match a suspect to the victim, once a suspect became known. One particular section of the report had been circled. This section dealt with the recovery of a specific fiber-kapok-found on the body in large quantity. Thirty-three kapok seed hairs had been removed from the body. The number suggested direct contact with the source. The report said that while similar to cotton, kapok fibers were uncommon and primarily found in materials requiring buoyancy, such as boat cushions, life vests and some sleeping bags. I wondered why this section had been circled on the report and asked Wexler.

“Sean thought the kapok fibers were the key to where the body had been during the missing hours. You know, if we found a spot where we found that fiber, which isn’t all that common, then we’d have the crime scene. But we never found it.”

Because the reports were in chronological order I could see how theories were considered and discarded. And I could sense a growing desperation in the investigation. It was going nowhere. It was clear that my brother believed Theresa Lofton had crossed paths with a serial killer, the toughest criminal to track. There was a return report from the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime containing a psychological profile of the killer. My brother had also kept a copy in the file of a seventeen-page check-list survey of aspects of the crime he had sent to the bureau’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. But the VICAP computer’s response to the survey was negative. The Lofton killing did not match any other killings across the country in enough details to warrant further attention from the FBI.

The profile the bureau had forwarded was produced by an agent listed on the report as Rachel Walling. It contained a host of generalities that were largely worthless to the investigation because while the characterizations were in depth and possibly even on target, they did not necessarily help the detectives winnow down the millions of men who might qualify as suspects. The profile projected that the killer was most likely a white male, twenty to thirty years old, with unresolved feelings of inadequacy and anger toward women, hence the gross mutilation of the victim’s body. He was probably raised by a domineering mother and his father probably was not present in the household or was absorbed in earning a living and forfeited child rearing and development to the mother. The profile classified the killer as “organized” in his methodology and warned that his seemingly successful completion of the crime and escape from detection could lead him to try further crimes of a similar nature.

The last reports in the first file were investigative summaries of interviews, tips that were checked out and other details from the case that might have meant nothing at the moment they were typed up but could be pivotal later.

Through these reports I could chart Sean’s growing attachment to Theresa Lofton. In the initial pages she was always referred to as the victim, sometimes Lofton. Later on, he began referring to her as Theresa. And in the last reports, those filed in February before his death, he called her Terri, probably having picked up the diminutive name from her family and friends, or maybe from the back of the photo of her first day on campus. The happy day.

With ten minutes left I closed the file and opened the other one. This one was thinner and seemed to be filled with a hodgepodge of investigative loose ends. There were several letters from citizens offering theories on the killing. One letter was from a medium who said Theresa Lofton’s living spirit was circling somewhere above the ozone layer in a high-frequency sound belt. She spoke in a voice so fast that it sounded like a chirp to the untrained ear, but the medium could decipher the chirping and was willing to ask her questions if Sean wanted to. There was no indication from the file that he did.

A supplemental report noted that Theresa’s bank and auto repair shop were within walking distance of the campus. Three times detectives walked the routes between her dorm room, the day care center, the bank and the repair shop but came across no witness who remembered seeing Theresa on the Wednesday after classes ended. Despite this, my brother’s theory-outlined in another supplemental-was that Lofton had been abducted sometime after calling her mechanic from the day care center but before she got to the bank to get money to pay him.

The file also contained a chronological record of the activity of the investigators assigned to the case. Initially, four members of the CAPS squad worked the case full-time. But as little headway was made and more cases came up, the investigative effort was winnowed down to Sean and Wexler. Then just Sean. He wouldn’t let it go.

The last entry in the chronological record was made on the day he died. It was just one line: “Mar 13-RUSHER at Stanley. P/R info on Terri.”

“Time.”

I looked up and Wexler was pointing to his watch. I closed the file without protest.

“What’s P-slash-R mean?”

“Person Reporting. It meant he got a call.”

“Who is Rusher?”

“We don’t know. There’s a couple people in the phone book with that name. We called them, they didn’t know what the fuck we were talking about. I ran something on NCIC but with just a last name didn’t get anything to work with. Bottom line is, we don’t know who it was or is. We don’t even know if it’s a man or woman. We don’t know if Sean actually met anybody or not. We found nobody at the Stanley who saw him.”

“Why would he go to meet this person without telling you or leaving some kind of record about who it was? Why’d he go alone?”

“Who knows? We’ve gotten so many calls on that case, you could spend all day just writing notes. And maybe he didn’t know. Maybe all he knew was that someone wanted to talk to him. Your brother was so caught up on this one, he would have gone to meet anybody who said they knew something. I’ll let you in on a little secret. It’s something that’s not in there because he didn’t want people around here thinking he was loony. But he went to see that psychic-the medium-that’s mentioned in there.”

“What did he get?”

“Nothing. Just some bullshit about the killer being out there wanting to do it again. I mean, it was like-yeah, no kidding, thanks for the tip. Anyway, that’s off the record, the psychic stuff. I don’t want people thinking Mac was a flake.”

I didn’t bother to say anything about the stupidity of what he had just said. My brother had killed himself and yet Wexler was engaged in trying to limit the damage his image might suffer if it was known he had consulted a psychic.

“It doesn’t go past this room,” I said instead. After a few moments of silence I said, “So what’s your theory on what happened that day, Wex? Off the record, I mean.”

“My theory? My theory is he went out there and whoever it was who’d called him didn’t show. It was another dead end for him and it tipped the scale. He drove up to that lake and he did what he did … Are you going to write a story about him?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“Look, I don’t know how to say this but here goes. He was your brother but he was my friend. I might’ve even known him better than you. Leave it alone. Just let it go.”

I told him I would think about it but it was only to placate him. I had already decided. I left then, checking my watch to make sure I had enough time to get out to Estes Park before dark.

6

I didn’t get to the parking lot at Bear Lake until after five. I realized it was just as it had been for my brother, deserted. The lake was frozen and the temperature was dropping quickly. The sky was already purple and going dark. It wasn’t much of a draw for locals or tourists this late in the day.