Dreams in the Key of Blue

by John Philpin

  There was nothing remarkable about the Dorman sketch. The drawing was well done, but it was a man in work clothes. Period.

  The woman in black fascinated me. I studied the pearls, her slender shape in the clinging dress, the ring, her hands, her long, narrow fingers, the black shawl, her arms.

  “Who are you?” I asked the picture, and wondered what she had wanted with Dorman.

  I gazed at the photo array on my kitchen table.

  When I examine a crime scene, the more evidence of excitability that I find, the more encouraged I feel. Impulsive killers leave more evidence than their methodical kin. Norma Jacobs and her technical people should discover trace evidence left by a frenzied killer.

  The most difficult cases are ones in which everything is planned and rehearsed in fantasy, then acted out against strangers. Even the intrusion of an unwanted moment of rage does little to disrupt the performance. A decision has been made, a script opened at act one, and one person knows the stage directions.

  Harper Dorman was savaged, his dog killed and concealed. Dorman was not concealed.

  After the fact, you were conflicted about killing the dog, but not about killing Dorman.

  The building superintendent was a walking dead man with perhaps six months to live. He was very likely inebriated and probably oblivious when the shooter stood beside the cot and blasted away.

  Another unconscious victim.

  Vulnerable, as my students noted in class discussion.

  He represented no threat. Why rain bullets through his head?

  Rage.

  Fear of the victim.

  A single, well-placed shot does the trick. A second might be considered insurance. Without an external cue for the number eight, the possibility of an idiosyncratic association, something inside the killer’s head, remained. If that were the case, I would expect to see greater consistency in the murders.

  It was not there.

  Rage, and the eight-shot capacity of the clip.

  Killing Dorman was personal.

  I imagined myself standing over the building superintendent and firing eight times into his head. There’s no way that he’s coming back to life. He is not a threat.

  How did Dorman hurt you?

  Killing him was not enough.

  Norma Jacobs said that years ago Dorman had lived with a woman, and that police had charged him with abusing the woman’s daughter. Men have been killed for that, but not typically fifteen years after the fact.

  You castrated him, ripped open his chest.

  It is no easy task to tear into the human body.

  You placed his heart on the coffee table near his bottle of bourbon.

  Personal. Debt paid.

  Thirty-six hours after the Portland slaughter…

  … how did you graduate to such meticulous attention to detail?

  You had an orange to eat, a movie to watch.

  I grabbed the most recent case reports. As I suspected, microscopic analysis of Jaycie’s flannel nightgown showed that her killer had cut it with scissors.

  So prepared. You folded the garment over the chair.

  I scanned Luther Peterson’s statement. The young man he saw leaving 42 Crescent carried a knapsack.

  The knapsack held the killing kit.

  Years earlier, Harper Dorman had worked at Harbor College. The three young women were Harbor College students. Dorman managed an apartment building owned by Martin International. Jaycie Waylon was an intern at the company. Steve Weld made no secret of his antipathy to Stu Gilman and MI.

  There was no way to know whether Weld’s killer had had postmortem plans for him. Corporal Dickie Stevens had arrived minutes after the shooting.

  Norma Jacobs had raised the question of two killers, one gun, then immediately dismissed it. Now, as unreasonable as it seemed, that possibility nagged at me.

  “I don’t fucking get it,” I said, and slammed my hand on the table.

  WHEN BOLTON CALLED, HIS VOICE HAD DROPPED AN octave and his customary laid-back demeanor had been replaced with a distinct edginess. “Lucas, this is sensitive,” he began.

  I could remember only a time or two when Bolton felt it necessary to caution me. One notable occasion involved a foreign diplomat and his son’s proclivity for the international transport of regulated substances.

  “I understand,” I told Bolton, thinking that, like the diplomat’s son, whatever he was about to tell me would show up in the New York Post before I had a chance to repeat it.

  “My inquiries about Martin International were red-flagged by a combined federal task force.”

  I shuddered. My experiences with task forces were not good. Combined task forces were worse, and whenever you tossed federal into the mix, it was time for the Three Stooges.

  “FBI and DEA are involved,” Bolton continued. “Alphabet soup,” I muttered. “What about NBC and CBS?”

  Political pressure creates task forces, which usually accomplish two ends: they provide the public with the illusion that something is being done about a problem, and they demonstrate the inability of law enforcement agencies to work together.

  Yes, things were certainly getting complicated.

  “They’ve got somebody undercover up there,” Bolton continued.

  “At Martin International?”

  “At the college.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Money,” Bolton said. “The agent who called me was not happy to find my tracks in the computer.”

  “Fuck ‘em,” I said, happy to play even a tangential role in pissing off the feds.

  He ignored me. “The essence of it is that MI could be the largest broker of illegal cash transactions in the country. The feds have their agent in place. They see no relationship between their investigation and the murders.”

  “Who are their suspects?”

  “When they complete their investigation, we might know that.”

  I would not hold my breath.

  “The ballistics comparison turned up another victim,” I told him, and briefly described the scene at Dorman’s. “This guy is an animal, Lucas.”

  “I’m not finished. We got back into town about the time that our shooter took out an instructor at the college. It isn’t official that he’s connected to the others, but only because no testing has been done yet.”

  “What other serial killer ever did five in one week?” Bolton asked.

  “Danny Rolling in Gainesville, Florida,” I reminded him.

  “Rolling was easy to read compared to your guy.”

  When I hung up the phone, I turned to stare at my dagger and orange. In my analysis of the connections among the homicides and some of the players, I had ignored the most obvious.

  My letter of invitation to teach at Harbor had come from the college’s academic dean. Her note explained that the suggestion to invite me had originated with a board member familiar with my work. I’d glanced at the list of names printed down the left side of the stationery and recognized none of them. I had considered the offer for a day, then faxed my acceptance, thinking that my benefactor would remain anonymous for the moment, and that I owed this person a thank-you for hauling my ass out of Lake Albert when I hit bottom with boredom.

  Now I reconsidered the debt of thanks. What promised to be a pleasant sojourn by the sea had immersed me to the teeth in murder.

  “Am I a target,” I muttered, “or an audience of one?”

  LATE-NIGHT RADIO OFFERED MAHLER, GARTH BROOKS, and Madonna. I opted for silence on the short drive to the police station.

  I made the mistake of entering through the front door. Reporters talked on cell phones, ate lobster rolls, or stood in small groups comparing rumors about the murders. They filled the small waiting area and spilled over onto the stairwell. As I waded through the media trap to the dispatcher’s window, a young man shoved himself from the wall and blocked my way.

  “Dr. Frank, I’m Bailey Lee with the Ragged Harbor Review,” he said.

  “Tide chart
s, fishing forecasts, and the seafood specials at Downtown Grocery,” I said, sensing the loss of my anonymity.

  A TV reporter shoved her microphone at me as a cohort aimed his camera. “What links these murders, Dr. Frank?” she demanded.

  I doubted that Jaworski had said anything about connections among the killings.

  “Is it true that the FBI has entered the case?” Bailey Lee asked.

  “Direct your questions to the chief,” I said as I waved to the dispatcher and caught her attention.

  I grabbed the handle on the security door and waited for the signal that would allow me to enter.

  “Steve Weld was shot with the same gun that killed the students, wasn’t he?” another reporter shouted, jostling his way through the crowd.

  “What about Stanley Markham?” someone yelled as the steel door clicked and I stepped inside, temporarily rescued.

  I found Jaworski in his office preparing for a press conference. “Late for that, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “I had told them I’d hold a briefing this afternoon. Then our shooter hit Weld. Same gun. Looks like two shots to the face. I put the media folks off. They want something for morning.”

  The chief pushed away from his desk and paced the room, tension evident in the lines below his tired eyes. “I have to say something. This town’s coming apart at the seams. Hubble Saymes wants the National Guard down here. Jesus Christ.”

  Karen Jasper stood at one side of the room with her arms folded tightly across her chest.

  “I’m beat,” Jaworski said.

  “Anything more on Weld or Dorman?”

  “Not much. Too soon on Weld. They’re still working at the scene. No fruit, though. We got the name of the woman Dorman lived with in South Portland. Katrina Martin.”

  I stared at Jaworski. “In her fifties.”

  “I didn’t do the math. You look like you’ve seen a ghost. You know the woman?”

  For part of one summer in Provincetown on Cape Cod, I knew a Katrina Martin. It was the mid-sixties.

  How many Katrina Martins could there be? I wondered.

  I worked as a short-order cook in an oceanfront restaurant. Katrina bounced from one relationship to another, always where the drug scene was happening, smoking and swallowing anything available on the beach. She was from Maine. I hadn’t thought about her or that summer in years.

  “Maybe,” I answered.

  I remembered one of the first afternoons I worked the grill that summer. I was preparing to leave for the day when Katrina arrived with the rest of the crew that waited tables during dinner. The others were in uniform; Katrina wore a bikini.

  She looked at me. “You won’t mind,” she said, slipping off the bathing suit.

  I leaned against the dish shelf and watched her perform.

  “Haven’t you ever seen a naked girl?” she asked.

  “Not like you.”

  She dressed. I observed.

  Finally, she looked at me again. “I get off at nine. Come back and we’ll go for a swim.”

  I did go back, but Katrina was gone. I found her on the beach an hour later, stoned and cold and doubled over with peyote cramps. That night established the pattern for many nights to follow.

  Through those few weeks, she told me that her mother was crazy, a frequent flyer at a state psychiatric hospital. I wondered if Katrina was soaring in the same direction. I held her hand and talked her through drug-induced hallucinations, assured her that they were caused by the chemicals and would pass when the drugs ran their course.

  I remembered that her craziness frightened me. For a while, I avoided her.

  She smothered me with notes, greeting cards decorated with pictures of kittens, bunches of wildflowers. She said that she loved me. Then she changed her mind and said that she loved the idea of being in love. I am no longer certain whether Katrina was irresistible or unavoidable.

  “It’s been more than thirty years,” I said to Jaworski. “It is unlikely she’s the Katrina Martin I knew.”

  In July, Katrina had gone home to have a breakdown in the same hospital that her mother favored. She wrote me a disjointed letter about not knowing whether her dreams were dreams or bizarre slices of reality. She’d met a young man, she said. He worked at the hospital, and they were dating.

  “This Katrina Martin has a place in Bayberry Trailer Park in South Portland,” Jaworski said. “Norma Jacobs went out there, tried to talk to her. Martin wouldn’t open the door. A neighbor told Jacobs that Martin’s mentally ill. She sits in her trailer, watches TV, and talks to herself when she isn’t talking to Vanna White.”

  Jaworski handed me a file folder. “Jacobs sent that. She thought you’d be interested. It’s a psychological report on Martin’s kid that was appended to Martin’s petition for a permanent restraining order against Harper Dorman.”

  “I’ll take a look at this,” I said, yanking myself back to the moment.

  “Why the hell would any of this matter?” Jasper demanded shrilly. “I’m sure that some mental case holed up in a trailer, who may or may not be a blast from your past, is just totally fascinating. But let me remind you that we are looking for a killer.”

  Jaworski covered his weary face with his hands, rubbing his eyes. “The weapon connects these cases,” he said. “To some extent, so does Martin International. Dorman was an MI employee, and he was married to a woman named Martin. Lucas doesn’t believe in coincidences. I’m getting pretty skeptical of them, too.”

  “Stanley Markham is our suspect,” Jasper said. “He connects these cases, and he’s at the top of an extremely short list.”

  I looked at Jaworski, then at Jasper. “How the hell does Markham connect the cases? We’ve got a pile of bloody orange peels on Crescent Street. Nothing at Dorman’s; nothing at Weld’s.”

  I did not mention my skewered orange. I had no intention of reinforcing Jasper’s Markham obsession. Jaworski noted my omission by turning away.

  “Probability alone is enough to require that we eliminate him before we start flying off in all directions,” she said.

  “Probability also dictated that Sonny Liston hammer the daylights out of Muhammad Ali. Twice. Once right here in Maine. My memory does get a little furry at times, but I don’t think that’s what happened. Numbers offer only an illusory comfort.”

  “We know that Markham headed this way,” Jasper said.

  “I think he’s going home,” I told her.

  “You can’t know that.”

  I shrugged. “Okay. I don’t know it.”

  “We have to be concerned with Markham’s movements,” she continued. “His most likely destination is Canada. Based on sightings so far, that increases the likelihood that he will travel through this area. We’ve intensified patrols on all the primary routes. New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire are cooperating. We’re saturating the border towns with Markham’s picture.”

  Jaworski looked at me. I breathed deeply, briefly debating whether to respond to Jasper’s steel-fortified rigidity or to keep my thoughts to myself. Never the diplomat, I crashed ahead.

  “I’m not certain of anything,” I said, “but Markham is a creature of habit. When he was killing, he drove during high-traffic times. His was one of thousands of cars on the road. If he needed rest, he pulled off at vacant hunting and fishing camps, ski chalets, or lake cottages, concealed his vehicle, broke in, and slept. He doesn’t like to drive at night. He’s afraid of the dark.”

  “He could be driving north on the interstate right now.”

  “He could be,” I conceded.

  Jasper’s intensity radiated from her darkening eyes. She was angry, unaccustomed to having her judgment questioned.

  “I don’t think he is,” I said.

  “Jesus. You’re insufferable.”

  “Look, Jasper, let’s put our personal differences aside,” I began, but before I could offer the terms of a truce, the detective stormed out the door and slammed it.

  Jaworski leaned back in his
chair and sighed. “Hell of a team I’ve got here.”

  “She’s right,” I said. “I am insufferable.”

  Jaworski made a snorting noise, unwrapped a second stick of cinnamon gum, and said, “What now?”

  “We’ll wait for Detective Jasper. She just needed an excuse to go outside for a smoke. Considerate of her, really. She knows that you recently quit.”

  The chief held his piece of gum poised at his open mouth and stared at me. “You being insufferable again?”

  “Nicotine stains on the index and middle fingers of her left hand. Distinctive odor despite the breath mints she prefers. I smoked off and on for twenty years.”

  He nodded slowly and slipped the gum into his mouth. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t share all that with her.”

  I smiled. “No problem.”

  “She says you’re as bad as her father. Maybe worse. Guess they don’t get along.”

  “Why me? Why not you?”

  “I’m not the insufferable one.”

  “Huh,” I grunted, wondering if I really was insufferable. Cranky, yes. But insufferable? Surely not.

  “Well,” I said, “when we don’t confront the demons in our emotional closets, we do go blindly through life re-creating the past in the present. Jasper needs to work through her anger.”

  That didn’t sound insufferable, did it?

  I wandered to the window and gazed at Main Street, illuminated by intersecting beacons from the competing networks’ klieg lights. The street’s soundtrack was a collage of voices, the hum of diesel generators on grumbling flatbed trucks, and a simmering, black ocean’s hiss in the background. A group of students participated in the college beer-drinking rite and waited to be interviewed about their take on the town’s horror.

  “You know what brings people into psychotherapy?”

  I watched Jaworski’s reflection in the window. He shrugged.

  “If therapists probe deep enough, they will invariably find conflicts related to sex or anger. We’ve been culturally conditioned to not deal well with either.”