by Blake Banner
“Well, I don’t know yet, sweetheart, do I? Let’s find out.” To us he said, “Will you have some coffee?”
We said we would, and he sent his wife to make coffee while he sat us down. “Has there been some development, Detective Stone?”
“We periodically review cold cases, Mr. Smith. Sometimes a fresh perspective, a new set of eyes, can make a difference. I know it was twelve years ago, and I know you went over it all with the detectives at the time, but I was hoping you could talk me through exactly what happened that weekend.”
He spread his hands and kind of shrugged with his face, like he thought we were wasting his time and ours, but he had to be polite.
“I can spare you ten minutes, Detectives, but I have work to do.”
Dehan smiled sweetly and said, “We appreciate any time you can spare us, Mr. Smith.”
He sighed and seemed to gather his thoughts. Outside, the trees swayed, and a sudden squall threw a handful of rain at the window.
“I’d been away the week before. I got back on the Friday. I was pretty tired and spent the weekend relaxing, doing some shopping…” He smiled. It was almost reproachful, like we had somehow been responsible for what happened. He said, “The kind of thing you wouldn’t normally remember twelve years later, unless you found a couple of severed arms in your lockup!”
From the kitchen, Jenny said, “Oh, Bob!”
He turned to stare at her with a rigid face, but he didn’t say anything. She came and sat next to Dehan with a tray of coffee.
“It was horrible,” she said. “We’d had such a nice weekend. It was lovely to have him back…”
She smiled at him. He didn’t smile back.
“Do you want to take over, honey? You want to tell the story?” Her cheeks colored, and she handed Dehan a cup. As she handed me mine, he continued talking. “Sunday we did things in the house, started getting Christmas decorations out. I was going away again on the Wednesday, so we had to get everything ready for when I got back. Jenny can’t do that kind of thing on her own.”
I glanced at Dehan. I could see her jaw muscle pumping. Peter spread his hands.
“Nothing else happened Sunday. Monday morning, I went to the lockup to get a box of baubles and paper chains, lights, that kind of stuff. And there, on top of the boxes…” His eyes seemed to glaze, and he shook his head. “At first I thought they were part of a manikin, and I was wondering how the hell a manikin had got into my lockup. Then I looked closer and it dawned on me, they were real. I actually fell down.”
He stared at me. I could imagine him in a counseling session, looking at his therapist in the same way.
“I ran. I vomited at the end of the alley. Poor Jenny had to come and clean it up.”
She simpered at us.
He ignored her. “Naturally, I immediately called the police.” He shrugged. “I’m sorry. That is really all I can tell you.”
Dehan cleared her throat. She had a notebook on her knee, where she had been scribbling things. She was looking at it now. “You said you were away the week before… What work did you do at the time, and how long were you away?”
He seemed to grow, like he was about to tell us he was a special advisor to the White House.
“I represent the CAC Corporation—Canadian American Chemicals. Back then I was a representative, and I had to do a great deal of traveling…”
Dehan smiled. “You mean you were a sales rep? Were you traveling by car or by plane, Mr. Smith?”
His face hardened. “Is it relevant?”
“We don’t know.”
“I started out as a sales representative, that is correct. All my traveling was by car, and very exhausting it was, too. I put in my hours and was rapidly promoted to area sales manager, and now I work mostly from home. Which reminds me…” He glanced at his watch.
Dehan was still smiling. “So how long were you away on that occasion?”
“I seem to recall it was a week.”
“Where had you been?”
He thought for a moment, looking up at the ceiling. “Michigan.”
“And you were off again the following Wednesday, to…?”
“Ohio and Indiana. Now, if there is nothing else…”
I said, “Yes, there is. I would like to see the lockup.”
“Now?”
“No. If it’s not a problem, I would like to borrow a key and come back later to have a look at it. I don’t need you to be there. If you have no objection, of course.”
He looked put out but got up and went to find the key. He pulled it from a drawer and handed it to me. “I don’t know what you hope to find there after twelve years, Detective.”
“Neither do I, Mr. Smith. But you’ll be the first to know when I find it.”
The door closed behind us, and we stood on his porch. Dehan zipped up her jacket, and I looked across the road. The drizzle had turned to steady rain. Bob was watching us and raised a hand to wave. I didn’t wave back. I hunched my shoulders and ran to the car.
We sat for a moment, listening to the hollow drumming on the roof.
“Impressions?”
“Why do women put up with guys like that?”
“That may, or may not, be relevant, little grasshopper.”
She sighed. “I know.” She gazed out at the rain making ever expanding rings in the puddles. I watched her with the dull light on her face. “I’d like to believe he got home, chopped somebody’s arms off, stuck them in his lockup, and then called the cops. But I have to admit it’s highly improbable. Plus, I feel he was telling the truth.”
I turned the key in the ignition and pulled away into the road. “Feelings are notoriously unreliable. Even women’s feelings. Whatever our mythology may say about your intuition, it is highly fallible. That may be exactly what he did. You want to know what I saw?”
She looked at me. “You didn’t feel, you saw. You are such a guy.”
“I saw him go rigid every time his wife spoke. I also saw her cowering every time he addressed her. And I saw that he only ever addressed her to put her down.”
I turned into Lafayette. She was nodding, like I didn’t “get” her. “See?” she said. “That, all that, is what I felt.”
“Quit making excuses. You want to be a psychic, feel. You want to be a cop, translate those feelings into analysis. That means pictures and words.”
“You are so harsh.”
“Your Honor, I just kinda felt like he was a bad guy. Call it a woman’s in-choo-ishun.”
“Take a hike.”
TWO
We spent most of the day doing background research. I wanted to know about the CAC Corporation and Peter’s role in it over the last twelve years, and I had Dehan looking into who owned the other lockups in the alley.
At lunch I went to get some beef sandwiches from the deli, and we sat in the gray light from the window and chewed in silence for a bit.
“I went to see the new captain, John Newman,” I said after a bit. She glanced at me but kept chewing. “Nice guy. I asked him what he wanted to do with the cold cases. If he wanted us to keep going or return to regular cases.”
“What did he say?”
I made a smile that was rueful. “He said we made such an awesome success of the Nelson case, he wants us to keep going for now.” She rolled her eyes but didn’t look too upset. After a bit I added, “I told him, you know, I’m a dinosaur, but you, you’re young, you’re smart, you want to be building a career.” She gave me the dead eye and bit into her sandwich. “But he said it would look good on your CV and he’d review it in six months.”
She said, “What? I’m no good as a partner? You want to get rid of me?”
“Don’t be stupid, Dehan. I’m looking out for you.”
“Like my dad?”
“No… Well, kind of, but no. Like your partner. You could thank me.”
“Thanks. But don’t. I want a transfer, I’ll ask for one.”
We returned to our research. I glanced
at her. She seemed to be smiling. I said, “Gets dark about six. We’ll head over to view the lockup at a quarter to.”
“You want to view it in the dark?”
“Yup.”
“Don’t tell me why. I can figure it out.”
“Good.”
It had stopped raining by six, but the air was cold and the occasional icy drip brushed your face or made small ripples in the puddles. We left the car on Barkley Avenue and entered the alleyway on foot. It formed a dogleg to the left, where one tall lamppost cast a dispirited, yellow light on the blacktop. It was quiet, and our footsteps echoed loud in the dark stillness.
We came around the corner, and I stopped. On either side of the alley there were red brick walls to a height of maybe eight feet. Fairly dense evergreens topped the walls most of the way along. There were eight units either side, with roll-down metal doors. The lighting here was not much better. Three lamps were bolted to the facades and cast a dead, yellow light that made the shadows seem deeper.
I retraced my steps and took a look back at the road. It was brightly lit and busy. I said to Dehan, “How busy do you figure it is on the weekend?”
She walked back to join me. “Saturday, busy. Sunday it’s probably pretty quiet, especially at night.”
I nodded. “So, I’m trying to figure out what happened here. What have I done? I’ve brought the arms in the trunk of my car. I’ve parked down there on Barkley Avenue, what, fifty yards from the cop shop? I’ve taken the arms out of my trunk, or from the back seat of my car, and I have brought them into this alley.”
Dehan was staring, like she could see the car parked, down there, by the road. “Have you got them in a big garbage bag? Or in a duffel bag? Or are they just bare?”
I nodded, chewing my lip. “Right. And what has made me choose this alley, so close to the station house?”
“It’s dark. It’s lonely. Maybe you’ve driven past a few times and spotted it. Either way, for some reason, you know it.”
“Okay. So I park my car. I grab the arms, and I bring them up here. I get to this bend, and I see, if I didn’t know already, that there are sixteen units. All locked. What would you do?”
Unconsciously, she curled her arms like she was holding a heavy bundle. She stared down the alley. The far end, maybe a hundred yards away, was in deep shadow. “It depends what my objective is. If I just want to get rid of them, I’d take them to the end and dump them in the shadows.”
“Right, and for now we are assuming that that is what this guy wants to do. So let’s stay with that idea for the moment. Instead of doing the obvious thing…” I stopped and sighed, and topped it off with a shake of my head. “Dehan, when you use a public toilet, if you walk in and find all the cubicles unoccupied, which one do you automatically choose?”
“The one at the far end by the wall.”
“More than eighty percent of people do that, because somehow it feels more private.”
“But this guy chooses a cubicle just past the middle, in the full glow of a lamp.”
We walked up to the unit. I bent down and unlocked the padlock. I went on, “I dump the arms on the ground, and I take the time to pick the lock. I push up the roller blind…” I stood and heaved the blind up. It made a loud, clattering noise. “And either I risk switching the light on, or I have a flashlight.” I turned and pointed at her. “If I have the arms in a bag, I take the trouble to remove them and place them on a pile of boxes, just here.”
I indicated a spot halfway down on the left.
Dehan said, “If it’s a plastic refuse sack, maybe you’re worried about fingerprints. In fact, most bags will have some place where you might find a print.”
“So, he’s not panicking. He is acting deliberately. I think the whole pattern of behavior involved—from coming to this particular alley, selecting and opening this particular unit, and placing the arms on the boxes—tells us that the whole thing was deliberate and not opportunistic.”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“So that leads us irresistibly to a conclusion…”
“Either Peter put the arms here himself, or somebody chose to put them in Peter’s very lockup, for a particular reason. Maybe a warning, an attempt to frame him…”
I scratched my chin. “So far I haven’t found a single thing in Peter Smith’s past that suggests he has any enemies, or is in any way involved in gambling or crime.”
“So if somebody isn’t trying to frame or incriminate him, why choose his lockup?”
“What is it about his lockup that would make somebody with two severed arms choose to leave them here?” I stepped out into the damp darkness. The pools of orange light made the shadows black. I looked at the silent, dead roller blinds. “Take me through who owns them, Carmen.”
“That whole side opposite was bought up about fifteen years ago by GCS, a local export company that specializes in IT products. This one here on the left of Peter’s belongs to a supermarket on the avenue, but twelve years ago it belonged to Hank Junkers. At the time, he was a member of the Hell’s Angels, and he used it to store his spare parts, tools, yadda yadda. He lived not far from here with his girlfriend, Lynda Holly. He has a history of violence and assault, some against women. Three on that side belong to a large pharmacy and a whole-food shop. And the three on this side belong to a bar and the local newspaper. An initial survey of employees doesn’t throw up any flags.”
“You like the Hell’s Angel.”
“He kind of sticks out.” She walked away from me and stood in the glow of one of the lamps. It made her into a desolate silhouette and cast a twisted shadow at her feet. She was staring back down the alley, the way we’d come. Her voice sounded strange, too loud. “They have a row. Maybe he’s drunk, high or both. He knocks her about and kills her. Now what the hell is he going to do with her? So he cuts her up into manageable portions and distributes her around town. He’s not going to put her in his own lockup. So he puts her in the one next door.” She shrugged. “Picking locks is the kind of skill he might have.”
“December 2005, January 2006, there were no dismembered bodies found in the New York area. What did he do with the rest of her?”
“He’s got a few big rivers to choose from.”
“Where they will never be found. Especially if he loads her down with a few engine parts.”
“Exactly.”
“So what made him put the arms in Peter’s lockup, instead of dumping them with the rest of her? If he put her legs in the river, why not her arms?” I stuffed my hands in my pockets and took a couple of steps toward her. I couldn’t see her eyes. “No, whoever put those arms there made a deliberate choice about the location. That leads to one irresistible conclusion. He was not hiding them—he wanted them to be found. He would do that for only one of two reasons. To throw a scare into Peter, which suggests a threat or a criminal connection, or because he knew that Peter would be going into his lockup within days rather than weeks.”
“He wanted them to be found…?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense. So we have to ask ourselves, what makes a killer hide a whole body so well that it is never found, but put the arms in a place where it is guaranteed that they will be found within a day or two?”
She stood staring at me with invisible eyes. The rain started to patter again, not heavy but enough to make you wet. After a moment she returned to the black mouth of the unit. I joined her and saw her shudder.
“I can’t think of a single reason you would do that, unless you were trying to intimidate somebody. And we have already established that was not the case. So…?”
“So you’re thinking like Carmen Dehan. If you ever killed somebody, it would be for a practical purpose, and you’d either call the cops as soon as you’d done it, or you’d make damn sure the body was never found. But one thing is for sure. Unless it was a real bad case of revenge, you would not enjoy it. You would never feel the desire to boast about it.”
The rain started coming dow
n harder, hammering on the steel roof and hissing in the trees.
“A murder for pleasure? Placing the arms as a tease?” She turned to look at me, and now her eyes were luminous in the darkness. “You’re talking about a serial killer. You think that’s what this was?”
I stared a long time at the puddles without answering. Was it? I watched their ever expanding and interlocking ripples and the complex interference patterns they made with each other. Above them the trees bowed and danced and whispered wet whispers, and the cold air crept in around our feet and clenched damp fingers around my ankles. Then, just as suddenly as it had started, the rain eased and paused, and I said, “Come on. There’s an Italian restaurant up the road. It’ll be warm, dry, and quiet. Let’s have a pizza and a couple of beers.”
THREE
The bell chimed as we stepped in and stamped the rain from our boots, stripping off our coats. The place was empty except for a waiter who was walking toward us, beaming. An open fire was burning over on the left, and as the waiter approached, I smiled at him and said, “We’d like a table by the fire.”
His face lit up, and he spread his hands like I’d said the very thing he’d been waiting all year to hear. “Ma certo! Certo che puoi!”
He led us to a table for two, held Dehan’s chair for her, and looked inquiringly at me. I asked him for two beers, and he took our coats away to a coat rack near the door. Then he went to get the beers. Dehan was staring at the fire, and I could see the light from the flames playing in her eyes.
“Don’t get me wrong, Stone. I follow your logic, and I see where you’re coming from. But it just seems a hell of a conclusion from very little evidence.” She paused. “Some might say no evidence at all.”
“Is that a feeling or a thought?”
“Come on. Give me a break. You’re basing a theory that the arms belong to the victim of a serial killer on what? The fact that they were found in a lockup?”
The waiter arrived with two frothing beers, and I asked him for two sirloin steaks with plenty of french fries, easy on the salad. I glanced at Dehan. “That okay with you?”