"The Lesson of Her Death" - читать интересную книгу автора (Deaver Jeffery)

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The New Lebanon Sheriffs Department was a small place. Four private offices – for the sheriff, for Detectives Corde and Slocum and for Emma, the radio dispatcher/secretary. The central room contained eight gray GI desks for the deputies. To the side was a long corridor that led to the two cells of the lockup. On the wall was a rack containing three shotguns and five black AR-15s. The room was filled with enough unread and unfiled paper to go head to head with any small-town law enforcement office in the country.

Jim Slocum – fresh back from the pond – looked up from his desk, where he was reclining in a spring-broken chair and reading the Register. Sheriff Steve Ribbon stood above him. Ribbon, solid and sunburnt red as the flesh of a grilled salmon, was slapping his ample thigh with a book. What's the Pocket Fisherman want now? Slocum raised an eyebrow. "Damn mess." He held up the paper like a crossing guard with a portable Stop sign. It was folded to the article on the Gebben murder.

Ribbon crooked his head to say, yeah, yeah, I read it. "Come on into my den, would you, Jim?"

Slocum followed the sheriff five feet into his office. Ribbon sat, Slocum stood in the doorway.

This's right clever, we just reversed positions.

"Bill here?" Ribbon asked.

"He flew over to St Louis this morning to talk to the girl's father -"

"He did what?"

"Flew up to St Louis. To talk to the girl's -"

Ribbon said, "The girl was killed? That girl? Why'd he do that for? He think we're made of money?"

Slocum chose not to answer for Bill Corde and said only, "He said he wants us all to meet about the case. At four, I think it was."

"We gotta watch our pennies, I hope he knows that. Anyway, I wanted to kick something around with you. This killing's got me bothered. I hear it wasn't a robbery."

"Doesn't seem to be."

"I was noticing there were some parallels between what happened and a couple other cases I'd read about. It occurred to me that we might have a cult killer problem here."

"Cult?" Slocum asked carefully.

The book dropped onto the desk. A paperback, fanned from bathtub or hammock reading. Bloody Rites. On the cover were three black-and-white photos of pretty girls over a color photo of a blood-spattered pack of tarot cards. "Whatsis?" Slocum picked it up.

"I want you to read it. I want you to think about it. It's about this Satanist down in Arizona a couple years ago. A true story. There are a lot of similarities between what happened here and that fellow."

Slocum flipped to the pictures of the crime scenes. "You don't think it's the same guy?"

"Naw, they caught him. He's doing life in Tempe but there are… similarities." Ribbon stretched out the word. "It's kind of scary."

"Damn, they were good-looking." Slocum gazed at the page of the book showing the victims' high school graduation pictures.

Ribbon absently stroked his black polyester tie and said softly, "What I'd like you to do is get yourself up to Higgins. The state police have a psychology division up there. Follow up with them on it."

"You think?" Slocum read a passage where the writer described what the Arizona killer had done to one co-ed. He reluctantly lowered the book and said, "I'll mention it to Bill."

"Naw, you don't have to. Just call up the boys in Higgins and get an appointment."

Slocum grinned. "Okay. I won't fly."

"What?"

"I won't fly up there."

"Why would you? – Oh, yeah, haw." The sheriff added, "We gotta make sure word gets around about this."

"How's that?"

Ribbon said, "Well, we should make sure the girls in town are warned about it."

"Wouldn't that kind of tip our hand?"

"It's our job to save lives too."

Slocum flipped through the pictures again. Ribbon leaned forward and tapped the book. "Hang on to that. You'll enjoy it. It's a real, what do they say, page-turner."

The Incorporated Town of New Lebanon reluctantly owned up to its mouthful of a name. By the time the village was chartered in the 1840s all the good names – the European capitals and harmonious-sounding biblical locales – had been taken. The final debate had pitted the New Lebanonites against New Luxemburgians. Because the former had a respectful ring of Old Testament, the vote was predictable.

The town was in Harrison County, named after William Henry, not because of his thirty-day term as president but for his tenure as Indiana Territory governor during which he decimated native Indian tribes (Tippecanoe, of campaign-slogan fame) and allowed counties like this his namesake to congeal into what they were today: mostly white, mostly Protestant, mostly rural. New Lebanon's economy floated on milk, corn, and soybeans, though it had a few small factories and one big printing plant that did a lot of work for Chicago and St Louis and New York publishers (including the ever-scandalous and – anticipated Mon Cher magazine, scrap bin copies of which flooded the town monthly thick as shucked cobs at harvest).

Also located in New Lebanon was the only four-year college for a hundred miles. Auden University goosed the town population up to fourteen thousand from August to May and gave locals the chance to sit through performances of second-tier orchestras and avant-garde theater companies, which they boasted about being able to attend but rarely did. The NCAA was about the only real contact between Auden and the natives, virtually none of whom could afford the seventeen-thousand-dollar tuition, which bought you, times four, just a liberal arts degree and what the hell good was that?

The residents had ambivalent feelings towards the students. The school was a bounty, no denying: thousands of young people with nothing to do but eat out, go to movies and redecorate their dorm rooms, and what's more there was a new brood of them every year just like hogs and veal calves. And some locals even felt a nebulous pride when Auden University Economics Professor Andrew Schoen appeared on Meet the Press or a book by English professor John Stanley Harrod was favorably reviewed in the New York Times, to which a grand total of forty-seven New Lebanonites subscribed.

On the other hand Auden was a burden. These money-shedding young people got drunk and puked and sneered and teepeed trees with toilet paper and broke plate glass. They shamelessly bought Trojans and Ramses in front of grade-school children. They walked around looking important as bankers. They burned effigies of politicians and occasionally a flag. They were gay and lesbian. They were Jewish and Catholic. They were Eastern.

Bill Corde was not a product of Auden though he was of New Lebanon. Born and reared here, he'd ventured away only for four years of service (standing guard with his M-16 over missiles in West Germany) and a few years in Missouri as a patrolman then detective in the St Louis Police Department. He returned to New Lebanon and after six months of feed and grain, teaching Sunday school and thinking about starting a contracting business, he applied for a job at the town Sheriffs Department. His experience made him a godsend to Steve Ribbon, whose closest approximation to police training had been the Air Force (he and his rifle had protected B-52s in Kansas). After a year as the department's oldest rookie Corde was promoted to detective and became the town's chief felony investigator.

On the neat wall above his neat desk in the hundred-and-four-year-old town building were some framed documents: a diploma from Southwestern State University and certificates from the ICMA's Police Business Administration Institute of Training in Chicago as well as one from the Southern Police Institute in Louisville. The proof was absent but he had also taken various FBI training seminars and courses in law and visual investigation analysis. He had just returned from Sacramento and a week-long session at the California Department of Justice.

The certificates he had proudly tacked up were simple vouchers of completion; Corde was a bad student. He collected words that described himself. He was persistent, he was industrious, he had sticktoitiveness. But Bill Corde was born C-plus material and that didn't change whether the subject was one he hated (English, social studies) or loved (criminal psychology or link-analysis-charting techniques). He wrote slowly and produced leaden meat-and-potato reports, and although as detective his official hours were pretty much eight to six he would often stay late into the night muscling through an article in Forensics Today or the Journal of Criminal Justice, or comparing the profiles of suspects in his cases with those in the NASPD's Felony Warrants Outstanding Bulletin.

Some people in town – that is to say, the people who worked for him – thought Corde took his job too seriously, New Lebanon being a place where the State Penal Code's thousand-dollar threshold between petty and grand larceny was not often crossed, and four of last year's six deaths by gunshot were from failing to open a bolt or breach when climbing over a fallen tree. On the other hand Corde's arrest-per-felony rate was a pleasure to behold – ninety-four percent – and his conviction-to-arrest ratio was 8.7:10. Corde kept these statistics in a thirdhand IBM XT computer, the department's major concession to technology.

He now finished reviewing the coroner's preliminary report on Jennie Gebben and stood up from his desk. He left the sheriffs office and strode across the hall to the lunchroom. As he walked a quarter materialized in his hand and he rolled it over the back of one finger to the next and so on, around and around, smooth as a poolhall hustler. His father had taught him this trick. Corde Senior made the boy practice it with his hand extended over an old well on the back of the family property. If he dropped a coin, plop, that was that. And his father had made him use his own two bits. Corde had seen a lot on TV recently about men's relations with their fathers and he thought there was something significant about the way his father had taught him this skill. He had learned a few other things from his old man: His posture. A loathing of second mortgages. An early love of hunting and fishing and a more recent fear of the mind's wasting before the body. That was about all.

Corde was real good at the coin trick.

He entered the lunchroom, which was the only meeting place in the town building large enough to hold five brawny men sitting – aside from the main meeting room, which was currently occupied by the New Lebanon Sesquicentennial Celebration Committee.

He nodded to the men around the chipped fiberboard table: Jim Slocum, T.T. Ebbans – the lean, ex-Marine felony investigator from the Harrison County Sheriffs Department – and New Lebanon Deputy Lance Miller. At the far end of the table, surrounded by two empty chairs, was Wynton Kresge. Corde thought, Antsy as a tethered retriever on the first day of season.

He dropped the quarter into his pants pocket and stood in front of a row of vending machines. He was about to speak when Steve Ribbon walked in. Corde nodded to him and leaned back against the Coke machine.

"Howdy, Bill. Just want to say a few words to the troops about this case, you don't mind." The sheriffs ruddy face looked out over the men as if he were addressing a crowd of a thousand. Ribbon scrutinized Wynton Kresge who represented two oddities in this office – he was black and he wore a suit.

Kresge took the look for a moment, realized he was being asked a question then said, "I'm from the college."

"Oh. Well." Ribbon's voice enlarged to encompass everyone. "I just want to put my two cents in. You all are the task force on this thing. Now Bill's in charge." He looked at Ebbans. "Which I think is what Sheriff Ellison's agreeable to."

"Yessir," said Ebbans, "I'm just a hired hand here."

"Now between all of you," Ribbon continued, "you got a flatbed full of investigating experience." His burdened gray eyes rose to Corde's. "And I'm busier'n a dog in a fire hydrant factory…"

Corde nodded sympathetically. You're running and there's an election come November.

"So I can't get as involved in the case as I'd like. But keep remembering, people're going to be watching us. They're going to be real curious how we do on this one so I want us to be pretty, you know, aggressive. Now I've been doing some research and I'm pretty bothered by this cult business."

Corde was silent. It was Ebbans who asked, "Cult?"

"What I want you to do is first come up with a profile of our killer."

Jim Slocum said, "In these situations that's what you always have to do."

Wynton Kresge wrote this down.

"Absolutely," Ribbon said. "I know we haven't had any of these kinds of killers here in New Lebanon before but I think it's important for us to get up to speed. What you have to do with cult murderers is peg them. Find out what makes them tick."

Kresge scribbled rapidly. Corde glared at him and he stopped writing.

Ribbon continued, "Now a profile should include two things. The physical description of our man, one, and what's going on in his mind, two. Stuff like is he sexually repressed, does he hate his mother, does he have trouble, you know, getting it up, was he beaten as a child…"

Corde, who had a well-used NCAVC criminal profiling flowchart tacked up on his wall, nodded solemnly and let the embarrassment for his boss trickle off.

"Sounds important," Miller said, and brushed his hand over his excessively short crew cut.

"Absolutely," Ribbon said. "I've been reading up on investigations like this. One thing that's troubling is this moon business. Think about it. She was killed on the night of the quarter moon. That could be lunar fixation for you. And this one's particularly troubling, you know why? Because we've got two quarters and a full and a new. So that's four potential strike windows -"

"What's that?" Wynton Kresge asked the question that Corde had been about to.

Ribbon said patiently, "That's the entire period when our man's likely to kill again. In this case I'd say it's from thirty-six hours in front of the full moon till thirty-six hours after."

Corde and Ebbans, who'd worked together on investigations for four years, got to play the eye-rolling game.

"Ah," Kresge said, and wrote.

Corde and Ebbans played the game again.

"Well, that's my two cents. I'll let you boys be. Do me proud and go catch this sickle." Ribbon left the room.

Corde took center stage. He searched for something politic to say. "All right, I suppose we might be looking at the possibility of a serial killing here but I wouldn't go spreading that around. We don't want to give anybody any ideas." Slocum seemed about to speak but remained silent and Corde continued, "Now I'm going to give us ten days to get a suspect under. And I want an ID within two or three." From his St Louis days Corde remembered the forty-eight/four rule in homicide investigations: If you don't identify the perp within forty-eight hours of a killing, the odds are it will take at least four weeks to find him.

"Also," Slocum said, "the full moon's coming up in seven days or so." He was scanning a Farmer's Almanac.

Corde said delicately, "I think Steve's got a good point. We've got to be aware of this moon business but we don't want to drop other leads because of it. It'll be something to consider, is all." Corde opened the envelope Kresge had brought and pulled out several sheets. "Wynton here was good enough to bring us some dope on the victim and I want to go over it now."

Corde also opened an envelope of his own. He shook out the glossy photograph of Jennie Gebben on the volleyball court. It showed clear eyes, a competitive smile, patches of sweat soaking her T-shirt, more throat than a girl that age would want. He noticed in the photo two metal hoops in each ear. When had the third hold been added? he wondered.

Corde handed the photo around. Miller glanced quickly then passed it on.

"No," Corde said solemnly. "Take a good look. Remember what she looked like."

Miller was flustered for a moment then did what he'd been told.

When the picture had made the rounds Corde said, "I flew over to see her father this morning and he wasn't much help. There were no diaries or letters I could find but he's going to keep looking. He says he doesn't know of anybody who might've wanted to hurt her but I put the bug in his ear and he might not know it but he's going to be looking at people at the funeral, who's there and who isn't. Maybe he'll remember a boyfriend or somebody who had a grudge against her."

Kresge said, "That's why you went this soon to see him? I was wondering why you did that."

"You were?" Corde asked absently. He turned to the files that Kresge had brought. "Jennie Gebben was twenty. She was a junior at Auden. No loans or scholarships, so I guess Daddy paid for most of it. She was an English lit major. GPA two point nine seven. Say, I'd like you to take notes on this." Slocum and Miller picked up pens. Corde continued, Treasurer of the Folklore Club. Meals on Wheels volunteer once a week early in the semester but she gave that up after a couple months. Worked three days a week in the office of the dean of financial aid.

"Her classes this semester were French Reading III. Her professor was Dominique LeFevre. The Civil War to the Centennial taught by Randolph Sayles. Contemporary Literary Criticism, by Elaine Adler-Blum. Chaucer, by Robert… Ostopowiscz. Well, that's a mouthful. And here's another one: The Relation Between Psychology and Literature: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Her teacher there, I mean, her professor was Leon Gilchrist. And a seminar group of that same class taught by Brian Okun. Finally The Roots of Naturalism, Charles Gorney."

Corde wondered momentarily what the courses were about. Corde had graduated in the top half of his class because his school had plenty of engineering courses. He shuffled through the file Kresge had brought him then stapled the class roster sheets together. He set them aside.

Kresge said, "Excuse me."

Corde glanced up. "Yes?"

"Just wanted to tell you, I checked with the clinic. She wasn't seeing a therapist and had only one visit this year. It was to get antibiotics for bronchitis."

"No therapist," Corde repeated. The fact was recorded neatly on a three-by-five card. He did not notice Slocum and Miller play a round of eye rolling.

"Also," the security chief added, "Personnel has a policy of never hiring ex-felons. So if there are any on staff they lied about it on their résumés."

Ebbans asked, "Was she ever up before the UDB?"

University Disciplinary Board. Kresge said she wasn't.

"Now," Corde said, jotting down these facts, "as for the murder: At around ten o'clock on Tuesday night she was raped and strangled, possibly by someone she knew."

"How could you tell that?" Kresge asked and Corde glanced at him with irritation.

"Look -" Corde began.

Ebbans answered Kresge. "Because she didn't run and because he got close enough to subdue her before she fought back."

"How do you know that?"

"If she'd fought there'd be tissue under her nails."

"Kleenex?"

Slocum laughed. Ebbans said, "Skin. The man's skin."

"Oh." Kresge added, "But then if she knew him, he probably wasn't a, you know, cult killer."

Slocum lectured, "Not so, Chief. A good percentage of sacrifice killers know their victims."

"Oh. I didn't know that."

The meeting was meandering away from Corde. He said emphatically, "We have a lot of unknowns here. Maybe robbery wasn't a motive. But maybe it was. Maybe he got scared before he could take her valuables."

Slocum laughed. "Bill, she had a diamond necklace. When he was through doing it to her he could've snatched it, just like that." He illustrated ripping a chain off his own neck. "Wouldn't take more than two seconds."

Ebbans said, "What's the coroner say about COD?"

"Just what it looked like. Traumatic asphyxiation. Pinpoint hemorrhages in the eyes. Fractured hyoid. Our man used his hands at first then he finished with a wire or rope. We didn't find any weapons. The coroner said the man was a foot or so taller than her. He wasn't so strong. He had to rearrange his grip on her neck several times. He did it from the front. Oh and the coroner guessed he wasn't married. Or he had a bad sex life with his wife."

"Why's that?" Miller asked.

"Quantity of the semen. Probably hadn't had sex for four, five weeks."

Jim Slocum said, "Then you mean he had a good sex life with his wife." Miller laughed out loud; the others except Corde snickered.

Corde looked at his cards, fanned some out. "Now what I want to do is focus on four areas. First, on the mall and on drivers along 302. I'd like you to handle that, Jim. It's a tall order. But that's a real busy road and we probably had some people coming home from the mall around ten that night," Corde jotted a note on an index card. "Oh, and check out if anybody picked up any hitchhikers."

"Now, second, T.T., I was thinking maybe you could hit the houses around the pond."

Ebbans nodded and Corde said, "Third, Lance and I'll set up shop at the school and start talking to students and employees."

"Yessir." Even sitting, Miller seemed to be at attention. He reminded Corde of a color guard Marine. "What exactly -"

"We'll go over it later. I also want you to talk to the phone company and find out what calls went out from the phones in the dorm from last Saturday through Tuesday night."

Miller whistled softly. "Must be a lot of students making a lot of calls, wouldn't you think?"

"You would," Corde said. "And we need a warrant for the dorm room. It'll be pro forma but you've gotta do the paperwork."

"Right."

"And finally I want all the prints on everything we found at the scene matched against known sex offenders in the county. T.T., if you could coordinate that with your office?"

"Will do. I'll order the printout."

"Wynton, I don't suppose you folk fingerprint students and professors?"

"Been my dream and desire but no we don't."

Corde referred to his notes again and started to say something to Kresge then paused. He scanned everyone's face. "One thing Steve said is right. The Register and WRAL are going to be looking at this thing real close. No talking to reporters. Refer everyone to me or Steve or Sheriff Ellison."

Echoes of "yup" or "uh-huh" filled the room.

Corde turned back to the security chief. "You get us a room, William? Uh, Wynton, I mean."

"In the Student Union. Off the cafeteria. Room 121. You got it all week, next too if you let me know by Friday."

"Predate it."

Kresge cleared his large throat with a snapping sound. "One thing I thought I should mention. I was driving past the pond on my way to work this morning. I just took a stroll around."

"What time?" Corde noticed something challenging in his own voice. He wished he'd used more of it.

"Six-thirty. I left about seven."

"You see anybody there?"

"Yessir," Kresge said enthusiastically. "A Con Ed tent up the road forty yards past the dam. You know, the kind they use for emergency repairs and -"

Corde said, "They weren't there last night. They set up at five a.m. Branch took down a line. I already checked."

"Oh," Kresge said with disappointment.

"You see anybody else?"

"No." He consulted his supple leather notebook. "There's a whole 'nother thing I wanted to bring up. What you and I and the dean were talking about. Susan Biagotti."

Corde and Ebbans exchanged looks but this time there was no eye rolling.

"Who's that?" Miller asked. "Rings a bell."

"Auden student killed last year."

"Ah, right."

Corde had been away on a joint county-state task force in Fredericksberg for a month. The case had landed in Ribbon's lap and by the time Corde returned to New Lebanon, many leads had gone cold. They had never even ID'd a suspect, let alone made a case.

"It's my intention to look into it," Corde said abruptly. "Like I told the dean."

"I've got my own file on the case," Kresge said. "You want, you can have a copy of it."

Corde smiled in a meaningless way. "I'll let you know if we need it."

As he rearranged his papers the plastic bag containing the clipping he had found that morning at the pond fell to the floor. He stooped and picked it up. He stood. His knee didn't pop. Thirty-nine years of knee, five of it popping. He wondered if he'd gone and cured himself. He passed the clipping around the table. "This is another thing we have to consider."

The deputies frowned with suitable concern as they read.

"I'm sending it up to Higgins for analysis today. Unless we find prints though or the rest of the paper it came from in somebody's back pocket I don't think it'll help. But you might want to keep an eye on yourselves and your families. You know most threats like this are just cranks but you never can tell."

"Most threats?" Kresge asked. "You mean this happens a lot?"

Corde hesitate then said, "Actually it's never happened."

Ebbans looked up from the note then slid it back to Corde. "I know something else about this guy," he announced.

"What's that?" Jim Slocum asked.

"Well, you could nearly see the girl from the road even if you weren't looking. Why didn't he drag her behind the truck at least? Then he came back in the morning to leave that note? It was like he didn't care if anybody saw him. That says to me he's a real gutsy fellow."

Corde lifted the plastic bag away from Miller. "Gutsy," he said. "Or crazy. Either way's a problem."