Past Master

by Richard Stockford

  Clipper responded in the expected manner of the law enforcement brotherhood. "I'll do it personally," he said warmly, holding Rojas's gaze and wondering how much of a problem the man was going to be. "And you let me know if you need anything at all while you're in town."

  As Miller and Rojas were leaving, Josh Preston called to tell Clipper that Carol Murphy was asking for him in the lobby.

  When he got downstairs, Clipper was somewhat surprised to see Murphy without her ever-present cameraman, but he escorted her into the small conference room. As soon as she spoke, he understood.

  "Off the record, Clip," Murphy said, "we've got a serial rapist in Bangor, don't we?"

  Clipper shared every cop's wariness of the press, but he was also a realist. "Off the record," he said, "we're got several cases with some definite similarities. We're not ready to say it’s the same perpetrator, but that is one possibility."

  "I heard you've got the same method of attack and the same weapon used in all those cases," Murphy said. "And I know all the victims were attractive young women, all in school, and I also know you have a suspect."

  "Well," Clipper said, "the victims are all female, but we haven't recovered any weapon yet, so we can only say some of the wounds are similar." He hardened his tone. "And you know I'm not going to discuss any suspects."

  "Don't BS me, Clipper. There's a damn big story here, and you need it told right. You know me. Let me in. I can help."

  Clipper sighed. "Look," he said, "you know I can't put you ahead of the other media people. I appreciate your offer, and I'd like to think there will be at least one public voice of sanity if it turns out there is a serial rapist out there, but for now I'm only going to say we've got some similar circumstances. If you report anything beyond that, it'll just be dangerous speculation on your part." He hesitated. "Let us do our job, and if it turns out you're right, I'll see that you get the whole story along with some credit for investigative assistance."

  Murphy held Clipper's gaze for a moment and then stuck out her hand with a smile. "You got a deal," she said. "I'll be in touch."

  "One other thing," Clipper said as she turned to leave. "You don't want to believe everything you hear from people just because they wear a uniform, especially regarding suspects. There's a lot I won't tell you, but anything I do tell you will be accurate."

  He was gratified to see a faint blush color the back of Murphy's neck as she left the room.

  When Clipper got back to his office, Evan Paul was waiting for him. “I talked to Sergeant Jenner over at Troop J. I'm going to meet him tomorrow morning to pull in Gerard Beaudreau. He's got a place just this side of Winterport.”

  Clipper nodded. “Hit him again on where he was on September twenty-first, when Pollack disappeared, too.”

  Chapter Ten

  Janice stopped at Cleo's Diner for coffee and a bagel on her way to her appointment with Doug Holland the next morning. She grabbed an extra black coffee and a blueberry muffin and drove to the address he had given her. She parked her car in front of the small garage that sat at the end of the gravel drive of Holland's rural home; as she exited, she heard the sharp crack of a high-powered rifle from the rear of the house.

  Following a neat footpath around the house, she saw Holland sitting at a sturdy wooden table behind a rifle which was resting on a sandbag and pointed into the field behind the house.

  "Hello," Janice called tentatively. "Mister Holland?"

  Holland turned at her voice, pulling off bulky ear protectors as he rose to greet her. "Sorry," he said. "I guess I let the time get away from me."

  "Are you hunting?"

  "Nope, just doing a little target practice."

  Janice moved to stand behind the rifle and looked into the empty field. "I don't see any target."

  Holland grinned. "You got to look a little father out," he said. “See that wooden frame out there by the tree line?"

  Janice had excellent vision, but squint as she might, she could not see Holland's target.

  Chuckling, Holland pointed to a small tripod mounted telescope sitting on the table. “Try that," he said, peering at the Cleo’s bag.

  Janice absently handed Holland the coffee and muffin bag as she sat at the table and brought her eye to the scope. She found herself looking at a small wooden frame holding a square target with a black bullseye, but when she lifted her head and looked over the spotting scope she could make it out only as a tiny dot against the wooded background. "My God," she gasped. "How far away is that?"

  "That's right at eight hundred yards," Holland said. "Come on, let's go check it out." He led Janice to an old Jeep parked behind the garage and they headed down a rutted track at the side of the field. Holland sipped coffee as they lurched along. "There was a time I'd walk out to check my targets. Guess I'm slowing down a little."

  Janice had been doing the math in her head. "Eight hundred yards is almost half a mile," she said incredulously. "How can you expect to hit anything at that distance?"

  Holland didn't answer right away as they pulled up to the target frame. He pointed instead at the five bullet holes clustered around the eight-inch bullseye. "Sometimes I get lucky," he said.

  Janice stared from the target to her octogenarian companion and back again, completely fascinated. "How did you learn to do this?" she said. "I mean, Tom can do some pretty amazing shooting at fifty feet with his forty-five, but half a mile? That's insane."

  Holland got out of the Jeep and began covering the holes in the target with small adhesive paper patches. "My father taught me how to hunt and shoot," he said, "but the Army was where I learned to do this. I got wounded in the Pacific in ’44 and sent home to recover. After that they sent me to sniper training, and that's pretty much what I did for the next twenty-five years. When I wasn't shooting, I was teaching other young men how to shoot."

  Janice shook her head. "Tom's taken me to the range, and I know how to shoot a pistol and a shotgun," she said. "I came here to ask you to serve as an adviser to our veteran’s memorial project, but now I want to ask if you'll teach me to shoot like this."

  Holland climbed back into the Jeep with a thoughtful look on his face. "Well," he said reaching into the muffin bag, "perhaps I could be persuaded to do both."

  Clipper had just found John Peters to review the prior night's stakeout of Harold Petersen when Nelson Miller called from the hospital. "Sonia Rojas is awake," he said, "but she's got nothing for us. All she remembers is running, and then waking up here."

  Clipper shrugged. "That figures," he said. "We're going to try to debrief all these cases this afternoon at 1500 hours. Can you bring all you've got on Rojas?"

  "Yeah, I can do that. I'm actually off today, running some errands for my wife, but I'll be done by then."

  Clipper hung up and turned back to Peters. "Rojas didn't see a thing." he said. "What's Petersen doing?"

  Peters shook his head. "Wednesday night we picked him up at work at six o'clock. He worked until midnight, then went home and didn't leave. Last night he got off at five, had supper at Cleo's, and then drove around until eleven."

  "Drove around where?"

  "All over the city, but mostly residential neighborhoods. Slow, like he was maybe trying to look into windows. I'm telling you, the bastard's dirty."

  Clipper grunted. "I don't doubt that," he said, "but we need to know where he was before he showed up at work Wednesday night. Maddy Mosier was attacked around four-thirty."

  “Oh yeah, I forgot. Martha Collins started keeping an eye on him. She says his car was in the driveway Wednesday afternoon till about three o’clock.”

  Clipper went into the division conference room and taped four large sheets of poster paper on the white board at the front of the room. He used a marker to write the names Pollack, Amburg, Rojas, and Mosier, and the dates, times and locations of the attacks across the tops of the sheets. Then he added each victim's physical description and noted the apparent weapon used in each case.

  Clipper had invi
ted investigators from the surrounding departments to the brief, as well as Max Trimble and all of his own investigators and the department's crew lieutenants and sergeants. He was just finishing up when they started filtering in, so he grabbed a cup of coffee and waited until everyone had found a seat.

  “As you all know, we've had three attacks or attempted attacks on women in the area in the past week with very similar MOs, as well as one older homicide which may also tie in. The local press is already starting to mutter about serial rapists, and while I'm not entirely convinced of that yet, I do want to get us all on the same page with this thing. I'm going to ask the lead investigators in each of these cases to give us a rundown and see what we can find to tie them together.”

  For the next hour, the investigators described their findings and suspicions, and Clipper sat in the back of the room jotting down his thoughts and impressions. He was about to ask Dave Adams to summarize all of the physical evidence, when Evan Paul slipped into the room and caught his eye.

  “We had an interesting visit with Gerard Beaudreau today,” Paul said, striding to the front of the room. “He appeared cooperative, but he's got no alibi for any of the attacks. He just smiled at us and said 'I don't know, I can't remember' to all our questions. He lives alone in a junkyard just off 1A, a couple miles this side of Winterport. The interesting thing was, I saw a pile of old rebar right by his back door, and his ride's an old Chevy, dark blue with Goodyear 195/70/R14s under it.”

  “Thanks for your time, gentlemen,” Clipper said, getting to his feet. “We'll try to get the gist of all this in a memo for your patrol officers, and we'd appreciate hearing anything that might tie in, but I'd also ask you to remind the troops not to speculate about these cases in public. Someone, one of us, has already talked to Channel Two about a potential serial rapist in the area.”

  As the investigators filed out, Clipper took down the posters and rolled them carefully. He'd take them home and annotate them with his notes over the weekend.

  Back in his office a few minutes later, he was on the phone with Irwin Myer. “Lieutenant,” Myer said, “nobody’d like a second shot at Beaudreau more than me, but you just don't have enough. You can put him in possession of the most common tire and the most common construction material in the world, but that's all you got. His MO has always been sex crimes, but you don't have anything putting him in Bangor at any time. My advice is to get out a description of him and his vehicle or maybe even try a tail on him. In our experience, interrogation doesn't work with him. He just sits through it with that goofy smile on his face. Put him or his vehicle near a crime scene, and I'll get you the warrant.”

  Clipper called Evan Paul into his office and wrote a detailed description of Beaudreau's vehicle, appended his mug shot, and added instructions to follow and advise if located. He left Paul with the job of making copies for the patrol division and area departments before calling it a day.

  Clipper got home to find a strange pickup in the driveway. Inside, Janice and Douglas Holland were huddled over her laptop at the kitchen table.

  “Hi, honey,” said Janice. “Mr. Holland's going to join us for dinner, and tomorrow he's going to help me pick out a rifle.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Sixteen-year-old Buddy French shivered with excitement as he slipped out of bed in the predawn darkness. He dressed hurriedly in the feeble glow of the hall nightlight and padded down to the kitchen carrying his Mossberg 12-gauge pump shotgun. He grabbed the bag of bologna and cheese sandwiches he had made the night before out of the refrigerator and, stuffing one in his mouth for breakfast, sat down on the chair by the door to pull on his boots. Two minutes later, he was out the back door and headed for the woods on the first day of deer season.

  Buddy lived with his parents on outer Essex Street, just a couple hundred yards past one of the NO FIREARMS DISCHARGE signs that ringed Bangor. He had lobbied mightily to hunt alone this year—the first year he qualified for an adult license—and he didn't want to waste a minute of the season, so he left the house in the dark, leaving the shotgun unloaded as he trudged along the left shoulder of the road. If his timing was right, he'd get to the tote road right around six forty-five, the time he could legally start hunting.

  The tote road, the last vestige of an old logging operation, was little more than a pair of deep ruts tunneling through the brush and second-growth timber to the west of Essex Street, kept passable for the first hundred feet by the frequent nocturnal visitations of privacy-seeking teenagers. It provided easy access to some reasonably open high ground behind where there was always plenty of deer sign.

  Buddy paused at the mouth of the old road and loaded four rounds of double-aught buckshot into his shotgun, chambering one and carefully checking that the safety was on before stepping quietly into the shadowy opening. He had taken about thirty steps, walking slowly and concentrating on placing his feet quietly when he glanced up and stopped in bitter disappointment. Another hunter was here ahead of him.

  The blue two-door was parked, nose-in, in a wide spot in the road amid the litter of discarded beer cans, cigarette butts, and fast food containers that marked the spot as a long-time teen hangout. As Buddy got over his initial surprise at seeing the car, he noticed that the driver's door was open and some trash had been dumped on the ground beside it. He had taken several unconscious steps forward in the dim light before the trash resolved itself into the legs and lower torso of the man lying halfway out of the car.

  “M-m-mister?” whispered Buddy, edging closer until he could see into the front seat. His vision grayed, and he felt knees begin to buckle, as his eyes widened to match the dead man's fixed stare—but, despite the raw smell of blood and split intestines, he managed not to vomit until he finally tore his eyes away and saw the other body on the ground in front of the car.

  Chapter Twelve

  “David R. Sterns, age twenty-two, and Cynthia Day, nineteen, both University of Maine students.” John Peters slumped wearily against the cruiser and dropped two evidence bags containing wallets onto the hood. “Looks like they were parking and someone snuck up on them. Doc says maybe midnight or before.”

  Peters was the on-call detective, and had gotten little sleep between the PM shift and Buddy French's panicked call. Knowing that Clipper would have a long day, he had gotten the crime scene work started before calling him at home. Now the two men stood at the edge of the road near the woods road opening.

  “How?” asked Clipper.

  “They were both stabbed. Looks like he got out of the driver's side, was stabbed in the gut, and fell back into the car. I think she got out the other side and tried to run, but she only got a few feet. The M.E.'s going to have his hands full counting the number of times she was stabbed.”

  “Your guys on Petersen last night?”

  Peters grimaced. “We lost the bastard. He worked till eight o'clock and then went to the mall and somehow got away from us. I just sent Ed and Ken to check his house and the store and bring him in.”

  Clipper nodded. “Why don't you head back to the station and give me a call when they get him. I want to get a look at this scene.”

  “Okay. By the way, I called Nelson Miller; he’s going to get us the background on these two.”

  Clipper gingerly made his way to the front of the victims' vehicle, where Doc Church and Dave Adams stood by the woman's body.

  “You got to get on top of this, Clip,” Church said as he walked up. “You got a maniac on your hands here.”

  Adams nodded in agreement. “The guy,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder, “was damn near disemboweled, and this girl must have been stabbed a dozen times.”

  “You get the weapon?”

  “Yeah, the bastard left the knife right beside her.” He bent down and picked up an evidence bag. Inside, a bloody hunting knife with a four-inch blade waited for Clipper's inspection. “His wallet was still in his pocket, and she's wearing a nice ring and a necklace and her purse was in the car, so I think we
can rule out robbery.”

  Church snorted. “Damn right, you can rule out robbery,” he said. “Whoever did this hated these people, pure and simple.”

  Clipper left Adams and his team to the enormous task of sorting potential evidence out of the woods-road litter and drove to the station. Just as he arrived, John Peters called on his cell phone to tell him that Harold Petersen had been located at his store.

  Clipper entered the interview room to find Peters sitting across the table from Petersen and his attorney, an older lawyer named Clement Barstow.

  Clipper sat beside Peters. “Good morning, gentlemen.”

  Petersen glowered silently, but Barstow smiled, “Good morning, Lieutenant. What can we do for you today? I hope you didn't bring my client in here on the weekend just to belabor that poor Amburg girl's death.”

  Clipper smiled back. “Actually, what I need from Mr. Petersen is very simple. This is not about Miss Amburg. I'd just like to know his whereabouts on two occasions. Wednesday afternoon, before he went to work, and last night from, say, eight o'clock on.”

  Petersen straightened in his chair. “You're harassing me,” he sputtered. “You got no—”

  Barstow held up a meaty hand and interrupted. “I assume you have some articulable reason for this request, Lieutenant?”

  “We have two reasons,” growled Peters. “David R. Sterns and Cynthia Day, both young and both slaughtered in Bangor last night.”

  “Please give us a moment, gentlemen,” Barstow said, nodding his head in understanding.

  Outside the interview room, Clipper gave Peters a gentle shove towards the division entrance. “Go home and get some sleep,” he said. “This is going to be a very long weekend.”

  A few minutes later, the door opened and Barstow beckoned Clipper back into the room.