Dreams in the Key of Blue

by John Philpin

  Death did not frighten the killer who cracked the silent night on Crescent Street.

  It was conceivable that Markham had changed his M.O., that he would use a gun now because it was expedient, because he knew that police would catch him or kill him anyway. But he could not alter his fear of the dead; it was a characterological fixture.

  As I pushed myself from the sofa, I realized that my mind was not working only Markham and the murders. Karen Jasper had sliced her way under my skin.

  Subconsciously, I sought an incontrovertible argument against Stanley Markham having any status as a suspect. I was inclined to label my need to prove her wrong as “professional competitiveness.”

  That was not all that nipped at nerves. Jasper had dismissed me as an artifact.

  “Face it,” I told myself. “Growing old pisses you off.”

  I sipped coffee and examined one of the new reports that Jaworski had given me—lists of vehicles seen on or near Crescent Street on the night of the killings. Investigators had identified most of the cars, interviewed the owners, and appended their statements to the reports.

  As I leafed through the sheets, a corner light in the living room switched on, startling me. My first night in the house, I thought the bulb had blown when it extinguished itself at eleven P.M. I glanced at the clock. It was eight-thirty P.M. More technology of dubious value, I thought, and returned to my reports.

  Jaworski had placed a red check at the top of one field-interview form. Luther Peterson, a local resident, had observed an old, dented, light-colored Volvo with Maine license plates parked across from his house when he got up at three A.M. to stoke his woodstove. The reason he paid any attention at all, he said, was that his neighbor, Brenda Noddy, worked eleven P.M. to seven A.M. at the regional hospital and always parked in the space occupied by the Volvo. She was usually tired when she got home, and he worried that she would have trouble finding another place to leave her car.

  As Brenda’s friend returned to bed thirty minutes later—“That’s how long it takes me to do the stove”—he saw a slightly built young man, a “student-type” wearing a flannel shirt, jeans, and backward ball cap, and carrying a knapsack. He walked to the Volvo “from the vicinity of 42 Crescent,” made a U-turn, and drove downtown.

  Why did that sound so familiar?

  Then I remembered—the car that had passed the house as I sat on the porch.

  Gray, battered, and a Volvo.

  “Wonder if he makes snake deliveries,” I muttered.

  MONDAY MORNING I STOOD OUTSIDE THE OLD CHAPEL as students and a few local residents filed to the memorial service for the slain young women. I estimated the crowd at two hundred inside, another fifty outside.

  Stu Gilman, doing a Richard Nixon imitation, lurked near the end of the queue. He wore an expression intended to convey sorrow. It looked more like a scowl with a five-o’clock shadow. The man was facially challenged, and doomed to live life looking like a presidential crook.

  Steve Weld nodded as he walked past. I watched him avoid Gilman.

  I recognized most of my students. Dawn Kramer and Amy Clay walked together. Sara Brenner stood behind Gilman. Amanda Squires held a young man’s arm.

  Jaworski’s officers videotaped faces and license plates. Other cops, armed with Stanley Markham’s mug shots, surveyed the crowd.

  The ceremony inside the chapel was for the living, in remembrance of the dead. The photographs viewed by those in attendance were of three smiling young adults. They were the focus of the memories, the sad thoughts, the prayers.

  The women in the photographs that I studied wore no smiles.

  Jaworski spotted me and approached from the parking area. “I was looking for you,” he said.

  “You getting it on tape?”

  “Not that it will do much good.”

  He felt no guilt. When he had exhausted his rage, he felt nothing.

  “He’s here,” I said, watching the faces move slowly by.

  Some internal conflict… what was it? It was not a startling experience to feel nothing.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  You created a design for murder, prepared the kit, slipped into the apartment. You controlled the scene, but you reacted to it.

  “He’s here because he knows we can’t see him. We can capture his image on tape, but we can’t know him.”

  “It ain’t one of these things where he’s here to get himself absolved, is it?”

  “He doesn’t need absolution. He feels justified in what he’s done.”

  Jaworski stared at me. “Don’t imagine he’d stand out in that crowd.”

  Stragglers shuffled into the chapel. “He belongs here. He fits right in.”

  I looked at Jaworski. “You have his picture now.”

  He had not left much of himself at Crescent Street, but he had left enough. The crime scene’s nuances, the killer’s behaviors, even some of his thoughts, had sunk their roots in my mind. I did not know how many times I had invited a killer in, but I knew the torrent of images and dreams and dialogue that was coming.

  You want me to believe that you’re Stanley Markham.

  “This why you quit?” Jaworski asked, nodding at the chapel.

  “No.”

  In twenty years as a crime shrink, I had worked nearly two hundred homicides. I remembered victims’ names, faces, funerals, family members, and their horror. They did not haunt me. With few exceptions, I maintained the clinical distance necessary to complete my work and move on. I quit because tossing out a red carpet for killers, welcoming them into my mind and looking at their worlds through their eyes, drove me to the precipice too often.

  “I reached a space where there was no room for me,” I told Jaworski. “I didn’t like that feeling. Anything new at your end?”

  He removed his cap and ran his hand through his hair. “Jesus. I nearly forgot. We got a ballistics match on the gun.”

  “Oh?”

  “Looks like our boy used the same twenty-two to kill a man in Portland. The P.D. down there ran a comparison check same time we did. Pure luck they matched up, but they did.”

  “What have you got on the case?”

  Jaworski shrugged. “He was killed in his apartment, like our three. That’s all I know. I figured I’d drive down there in the morning. You want to make the trip?”

  “Definitely,” I said.

  I STOOD ON THE HILL, A GUN IN MY HAND. I WATCHED mourners march to their chapel and debated whether to use the gun.

  The experience was like bad TV reception—black and white with multiple shadows, static, no focus, little contrast. The principal players did not help the reception. They wore baggy faces filled with sadness, masks donned for the occasion, and they walked like images on a screen just before the film snaps.

  To kill now would be satisfying but self-defeating.

  Sensation must lift us higher, then divide—shatter into sonic distortions, screams of color, superheated flares of foul odors—experiences so intense they define madness.

  Then the identical phenomena might become one, suddenly narrow to a laserlike intensity with a single focal point.

  Did you know that? These experiences are not overwhelming. They are intensely pleasant.

  In Portland, I forget how many nights ago, I soared from my body in an ecstasy that exists only with murder.

  Imagine a single, long crescendo—Ravel’s Bolero—tedious at first, always familiar, repetitive, harmonic. Then thin horns and bent strings, hints of cacophony, then a bit louder with variations in the theme.

  Ravel’s work is not a long fuck; it is the anticipation of a kill.

  I heard Bolero inside my head, despite the crushing roar of sounds crashing among the apartment building’s halls.

  When I reached the basement, I slipped my key into the lock, kicked open the door, and stepped into the darkened room.

  The old man, slumped over a stinking cot, mumbled about sitting in his mother’s house. He sat at her c
herry table, and gnats suddenly flew and landed everywhere. I watched him swat his hallucinated bugs.

  A small white dog sat politely in a corner, its head cocked to one side.

  The room reeked of his nightmares, his whiskey, his sweat. I walked to the bed and stood beside him.

  “The gnats,” he said.

  Then his visions became mine.

  Swarms of nearly invisible flying insects filled the room. I couldn’t squash them fast enough. More kept rising from the floor. I sniffed my fingertips where I had pressed the little buggers to death. My hands reeked of damp earth.

  I mashed gnats, but more kept coming, and the smell grew stronger—the odd, musty stench of dirt dug from a grave.

  Each time I pushed against a gnat, I heard its dying shriek, I heard the earth shift, I heard the old man groan—“Mama, Mama, Mama”—and then I heard the gun fire eight times and the metallic clicks when it was empty and I did not want it to be.

  Bolero thundered to its ending inside my head, and there was silence.

  No gnats. No rancid stink of the earth, no solvent smell of the old man’s bottle.

  Nothing.

  I pocketed the gun and slipped a hunting knife from its sheath, pruning shears from my pocket.

  It was time to go to work.

  Now I left the marchers to their prayers and descended the hill to Main Street.

  A woman carrying a microphone approached me. “Did you attend the service?” she asked.

  I shoved her aside and walked away.

  THE STUDENTS IN MY SEMINAR HAD JUST ATTENDED A service for three murdered friends. Now they sat in a classroom where the topic was the predatory aggression that had taken their classmates. A note in my mailbox that morning informed me that two of my class members had gone home and would not return to campus until police arrested the killer.

  A radiator clanked at random intervals. Two students engaged in short bursts of whispered conversation. Otherwise, the room was silent. One young woman gazed at the ocean.

  “We’re going to spend the next several months investigating gender and serial violence,” I said, handing out copies of a few papers and a bibliography of recommended reading. “Perhaps the best use of our time today is to decide how to conduct our inquiry.”

  Someone muttered. A few heads shook. One pale student stared at the ceiling and dabbed at tears with a tissue. Sara Brenner sat behind her hair, just as Jaycie Waylon had described on the night they visited my house.

  Finally, Dawn Kramer spoke up. “Dr. Frank, nobody seems to know what’s going on. The police don’t say anything. The deans can’t answer our questions. The TV news reported that the murders were sex crimes. There hasn’t been any kind of murder in this town for nearly ten years. Now three women have been raped and cut down by a man.”

  The rumor mill was working overtime, much as it had in Gainesville, Florida, in 1990 when the media reported erroneous crime scene information. The reality was repugnant enough and did not require distortion or embellishment.

  “Reporters keep saying that crimes like these are serial,” Kramer continued. “None of the women in this room, on this campus, or in this town can feel safe. Not even in our own homes. Not if we have roommates.”

  A few class members murmured their agreement.

  “This kind of violence…no one understands it,” Kramer said. “We need answers.”

  “Anyone else?” I asked.

  Amanda Squires arrived late. “Is this about the murders?” she asked as she walked to her seat. “Are we talking about what happened to Susan, Kelly, and Jaycie?”

  “We don’t know,” Kramer said. “We need a focus, someplace to start, but…we’re too close to this.”

  The young woman who had been softly weeping grabbed her books. “I can’t stay,” she said, and left the room.

  At the University of Florida in 1990, a teacher had assigned Pete Dexter’s Paris Trout, a well-crafted, terrifying tale of a man whose smoldering rage explodes in multiple murder. The instructor withdrew the book from her reading list following Danny Rolling’s Gainesville rampage. I was not dealing with the issue of a single book, rather an entire class devoted to homicidal violence.

  Betsy Travis sat away from the group, reading the Ragged Harbor Review. Travis was the youngest member of the seminar, a sophomore from Long Island who had not yet chosen a field of concentration. She wore black, her usual attire, and her ears were festooned with a gaggle of silver earrings.

  “They shouldn’t have lived off campus,” Travis said, folding her newspaper. “Something like this could happen in a dorm at a city university, but not here on the hill.”

  “Campus security checks the dorms twentyfour hours a day,” Jen Neilson agreed. Neilson planned a career in criminal justice. “The town cops write parking tickets. On weeknights there’s one officer on duty from one-thirty to five-thirty A.M., and he doesn’t leave the station unless one of the locals drives a pickup into the mudflats.”

  “There are guys living upstairs in that apartment building,” Kramer said. “The killer didn’t bother them.”

  “Still,” Travis said, “it wouldn’t have happened if they were up here.”

  Travis was distancing herself from the victims. She was safe, she believed, because she lived on campus. Her thought process was a variation on the blame-the-victim theme: if the three young women had been good, if they had done the right thing, if they had lived where everyone else lived, they would be alive.

  Neilson sought a scapegoat. If she could assign responsibility, she had no need to understand murder. The local police had fucked up; case closed.

  Kramer’s agenda covered the murders and a myriad of other sins; all men were assholes. “You can pick up any newspaper,” she said, “whether it’s New York City or some little town in Nebraska, and read about abductions and rapes and murders. These are crimes committed by men against women.”

  “Age is a factor, too,” Neilson said. “I read an FBI publication about how killers choose victims. They go after children because it’s easy to control them. Same with elderly people.”

  “The FBI looks at behavior,” Kramer said. “What did the killer do before, during, and after the crime? They don’t pay any attention to human development. No man was born a killer. How did he get that way?”

  In my experience, federal agencies were little more than incestuous, bureaucratic impediments to inquiry. I hoped that I would not feel provoked to share that opinion.

  “I think it’s also important to know how people perceive events in their lives,” I said. “Each of us writes our life story with a heavy editorial hand.”

  “There are genetic factors, too,” Amy Clay, a student in biology and physiology, contributed. “Also, most human predators are men, but an increasing number are women.”

  “If you mean that woman in Florida,” Kramer said, “the experts agreed that she was unusual.”

  “As long as we’re gonna do this, why don’t we compare male and female killers?” Neilson asked.

  “Can we include method as one of the concepts?” Kramer asked. “According to most of the studies I’ve read, women prefer to kill with poison. To administer something like arsenic, especially in small doses over time, you have to be close to your victims. Poisoned Blood, Philip Ginsburg’s book about Marie Hilley, is a good example of that.”

  “Arsenic is easily detected,” Amy Clay said.

  Clay was a tall young woman with long auburn hair who planned to attend medical school.

  “How many doctors consider symptoms like high fever, intense pain, and vomiting and conclude arsenic poisoning?” Neilson asked. “I think appendicitis is a more common diagnosis.”

  “After the fact,” Clay persisted.

  “Meaning death?” Squires asked rhetorically. “Why subject the deceased’s family to the ordeal of an autopsy when there’s no reason to suspect foul play? In the Hilley case, prosecutors exhumed victims. You are right, though, Amy. I’d use something like succin
ylcholine. It’s much harder to detect. The body doesn’t retain it the way it does arsenic. Killers who were nurses preferred it because it has a legitimate medical use as an anesthetic.”

  “One mistake that I don’t want to make,” Kramer said, “is subscribing to a history of women written by men. Women who behave violently have been treated as biological oddities, victims of menstrual syndromes or hormones run amok.”

  So it went.

  At Kramer’s request, Jen Neilson agreed to include Stanley Markham as one of her topics for study.

  “He’s all over TV now,” Kramer said. “It’s scary to think that they catch these people, convict them, lock them away, but they can’t hold them. The police think Markham was here. He’s their main suspect.”

  “Dorothea Puente, the woman in Sacramento who killed her boarders, she vanished while police were digging up bodies in her yard,” Travis said. “They found her in a restaurant. Women are just as lethal and elusive as men.”

  The room sounded as if it were filled with kids swapping baseball cards, but the names were not Ken Griffey, Jr., Sammy Sosa, or Mark McGwire. My students were trading the likes of Albert DeSalvo, Velma Barfield, Ted Bundy, Gary Lee Schaefer, Marie Hilley, Aileen Wuornos, Stanley Markham, and others in their select and dubious set.

  Most of the students were standing, ready to move on to their next class, when Sara Brenner, still seated, brushed her hair from her face and said, “Dr. Frank, what are you going to do?”

  I knew what she meant. “Whatever I can,” I said.

  “Did Stanley Markham kill Jaycie and her roommates?”

  “I don’t know, Sara.”

  “Are you working with the police? I mean, you’re here. You catch killers. You should be helping the police.”

  That night at my house, Sara had wanted to know how I made the leap from a theory of personality to a specific person. Jaycie had answered her.