The Butcher's Theater

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “Thank you, Lieutenant Brooker.”

  “Onward: Number two occurred over two years later, July of ’73, in New Orleans. Another prostitute, named Angelique Breau, drugged out—this time with Demerol—and cut identically to Shehadeh. Traces of soap and shampoo: Dial and Prell—he’s not strict about his brands. The body was killed somewhere else, but found in a crypt in the St. Louis cemetery—which is kind of cavelike, wouldn’t you say? And she and Shehadeh fit your genital destruction-removal sequence—Shehadeh’s vaginal vault was cut up; Breau’s ovaries were removed. She’s listed as a female Cauc, black and brown, nineteen years old, but New Orleans is famous for race-mixing. If you put Caucasian on your driver’s license application, no one’s going to argue with you. Name like Breau she could be lily-white Parisian, swamp-rat Cajun, Creole mulatto, or any mixture thereof.”

  “Dark. Mediterranean-looking,” said Daniel.

  “Good chance of it.”

  “She could have been an Arab, too, Gene. Some of them—Moroccans, Algerians—have French names.”

  “Hmm. Maybe. But the next two are definitely not Arab, so it appears the killer’s going after a certain look, not nationality.”

  Dark women, thought Daniel. The streets of any Levantine, Mediterranean, or Latin American city were teeming with them. Yet the killer—if it was the same killer—had come to Jerusalem.

  It had to be more than a look that he was after. . . .

  “The third one took place April of ’75, twenty-one months after Breau,” said Gene. “Northeast Arizona, desert area outside of Phoenix. Victim’s name: Shawnee Scoggins, female Native American—Indian. Eighteen years, black and brown. Ovaries and kidneys removed. Murdered somewhere else, but the body was found off the highway near one of the Indian reservations. Reservation police handled the case. Girl had a history of delinquency, drug problems. Fresh needle marks in her arm, heroin OD, no fiber traces, no mention of soap. But this is the one that doesn’t list multiple weapons either, so we could be talking about a failure on the part of the locals to report all the facts, poor investigatory procedure, or a slipshod autopsy. Everything else fits. I’d suggest you include her.”

  “All right.”

  “After Scoggins there’s a thirty-two-month lapse until December of ’77. Back in California again, but up north near San Francisco. This one I remember: nude dancer named Maria Mendoza, twenty-one, black and brown, history of prostitution and narcotics convictions. What was left of her was discovered near a cave up in Mount Tamalpais.”

  “Not in the cave?”

  “I asked McGuire about that. Printout said near—didn’t say how near. Hard to understand why they put some data in, leave other stuff out.”

  “Was she killed up there?”

  “No. Somewhere else, site unidentified. This one was very messy, Danny. All the internal organs were removed—she was literally skin and bones. San Francisco police had been dealing with a bunch of unsolved homicides attributed to some crazy who wrote letters to the papers calling himself Zodiac. The last suspected Zodiac killing was in October of ’75, farther east, in Sacramento. San Francisco thought he’d come back to haunt them. Reason I remember the case is that one of the primary Zodiac suspects moved down to L.A. shortly after Mendoza’s body was found, and we were alerted. We watched him—it came to nothing.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Karl Witik. Weirdo biology student. White guy but rented a house in Watts, had squirrels and mice running wild inside the place. But don’t worry—he’s not your man. He blew his brains out in early ’78. Two more possible Zodiacs went down in ’79 and ’81, so he probably wasn’t San Francisco’s man either.”

  “Eight,” said Daniel, looking at his notes. “Four more.”

  “Four more,” said Gene. “And they keep getting nastier. Mendoza’s the last intact body on the list. The rest are all dismemberments: August 1978 in Miami, Florida; July 1980, Sun Valley, Idaho; March ’82, Crater Lake, Oregon; January ’84, Hana, Hawaii. Young, dark women, no fiber or prints, soap traces, heroin residue in the tissue, bone rills indicating multiple knives, body parts tossed in wooded or desert areas. Three of the victims have never been identified, including one whose head was never recovered. The one from Crater Lake was ID’d as Sherry Blumenthal, seventeen-year-old runaway from Seattle. Same old song: drug history, prostitution busts. ‘Remains found in state of advanced decomposition on the north bank of the lake.’ ”

  Gene paused. “Sounds like your guy, doesn’t it?”

  “The modus is identical,” said Daniel. His sweaty hands made wet marks on the desk. “A traveling killer.”

  “Beast of the highway,” said Gene. “The more we coordinate our interstate records, the more we keep turning up. Looks like this one traveled far.”

  Daniel scanned his notes again. “Two murders took place in California. Perhaps that’s his home base.”

  “Same state, but L.A. and San Francisco are four hundred miles apart,” said Gene. “Maybe he just likes the weather.”

  Daniel examined the list of murder sites again. “All these places have good weather, don’t they?”

  “Hmm, let me see: Oregon, Louisiana—you get your rain and chill there, but yes, generally they’re mild.”

  “Places to visit on holiday?”

  “I suppose so. Why?”

  “The time lapse between the murders averages almost two years,” said Daniel. “Perhaps the killer lives normally for a while, goes out on holiday to murder.”

  “Let me take a look at the dates,” said Gene. He grew silent for several moments, then: “No, I don’t think so. January in Hawaii is the off-season, cloudy and rainy. New Orleans and Miami are hot and sticky in July—folks fly down there in the winter. Anyway, there are plenty of guys who don’t need a vacation to travel: drifters, truckers—anyone with a job that puts him on the road. And don’t depend too much on the time lapse. He may have killed plenty of others in between—FBI estimates six undiscovered victims for every one in the file.”

  Five hundred eighty-seven by six. “Over three thousand undiscovered murders,” said Daniel. “How can that be?”

  “Runaways, throwaways, orphans, missing persons who remain missing. Big country, big mess—it’s not like over here, Danny.”

  Daniel put the numbers out of his head, returned to his notes. “The first murder was fourteen years ago, which tells us something about his age. The youngest he could have been at the time would be, what—fourteen?”

  “I’ve heard of sex murders committed by kids,” said Gene, “but they’re usually a lot more impulsive-looking. Sloppy. From the care taken on these—cleaning up the evidence, using dope to knock them out—my guess is they were committed by an adult. Eighteen, nineteen at the youngest, probably early twenties.”

  “Okay, let’s be cautious and say sixteen,” said Daniel. “That would make him at least thirty today, most likely older.”

  “If Shehadeh was his first.”

  “If she wasn’t, he could be much older. But not much younger.”

  “I can buy that,” said Gene.

  “Thirties or older”—Daniel thought out loud—“an American, or one who travels to America frequently.” Thinking to himself: If he’s not an American, all those trips to the U.S. will show up on his passport.

  “Hundred to one, he’s American,” said Gene. “He knew the terrain, knew where to kill, where to dump. Some of those dump spots are out of the way. Americans are suspicious of foreigners. If one was lurking around, you’d expect it to surface in at least some of the investigations. Unless,” he added, “you’ve got Interpol suggesting otherwise.”

  “No, I’m still waiting for Interpol. A question, Gene: In America, he’s a traveling killer, goes from city to city. Here, he stays in Jerusalem. Why didn’t he murder one girl in Jerusalem, another in Tel Aviv, move on to Haifa?”

  “Maybe Jerusalem’s got some special meaning for him. Defiling the holiness or something.”

  �
��Maybe,” said Daniel. But his mind was racing:

  Defiling the holiness of three faiths. Defiling women. Dark women. Arabs. A Mexican stripper. An Indian girl. Maybe a Louisiana mixed-blood. Maybe a Jew—the Blumenthal girl from Oregon could be Jewish.

  Every identified victim a member of a racial or ethnic minority.

  But here, only Arabs. The main ethnic minority.

  A racist killer?

  A Jewish killer? Kaganism justified by the Bible and carried to bloody extreme?

  Or blood libel, as Shmeltzer insisted. Someone blaming it on the Jews?

  Whoever had sent that note to Wilbur had defiled the Bible, too. Cutting the text out and pasting it up like some ransom note. What observant Jew would do that, when the sentences could just as easily be copied?

  Unless you didn’t know Hebrew.

  Addressing the envelope in English block letters.

  He didn’t know Hebrew. A foreigner.

  An outsider.

  Fomenting hatred, setting Jew against Arab? Semite against Semite?

  A genuine anti-Semite.

  A racist American maniac. Amira Nasser’s story about the crazy-eyed foreigner was sounding better and better: crazy eyes, strange smile . . . Dammit, where were the Mossad hotshots when you needed them?

  “. . . still only general, we need specifics,” Gene was saying. “Best thing is to take a look at the original police files, or at least get the important details over the phone. I can help you with San Francisco and New Orleans. The rest I’ve got no personal contacts with but they may cooperate, one American cop to another.”

  “You’ve done more than enough, my friend. I’ll call them myself. Do you have the addresses and phone numbers?”

  Gene dictated them, then said, “It’s no problem my calling them, Danny. It’ll go faster, believe me.”

  “You’ve only got three days left in Jerusalem, Gene. I don’t want to take up the remainder of your holiday.”

  The line went silent.

  “Listen,” said Gene, “if you need me, I can postpone leaving.”

  “Gene, Rome is a beautiful—”

  “Danny, Rome is more churches. Bigger ones. Shrines and murals. Murals on ceilings always give me a stiff neck.”

  Daniel laughed.

  “However,” said the black man, “I think there’re still a few holy places around here that Lu hasn’t seen. Just this morning she was complaining about missing a lecture series on ancient pottery whosits or something. So there’s a chance I can persuade her to modify our itinerary if you need me. Have to know soon, though, or we run into problems with changing the tickets.”

  “I need you, Gene.”

  “Nice to hear. You can tell me again at dinner tonight. Meantime, let me get going on those calls. Bye.”

  Daniel put the phone down, thought more about the traveling killer.

  America to Israel.

  Europe in between?

  He phoned Friedman in Bonn, knowing it was barely morning in Germany and not caring if the Interpol man got yanked out of sweet dreams.

  The same detached secretary’s voice came on the line. Reciting a recorded message.

  He slammed the phone down, studied his notes, let his mind run with the facts, expand them. Kept returning to one thought:

  A racist killer.

  Calculating. Careful.

  Manipulative.

  He remembered the phrase that had come to him while reading the books and monographs on psychopathic killers:

  Street-corner Mengeles.

  He thought, again, of the disgusting paperbacks in Ben David’s office. The Black Book of Fascist Horror.

  Read the chapter on “Murder for Profit,” the psychologist had said. The surgical experiments.

  I found myself thinking about them in Nazi terms . . .

  You see, you don’t need me. Your unconscious is guiding you in the right direction.

  His unconscious. It had been languishing, sick with frustration, withering from disuse. But the data on the FBI list—the link—had breathed new life into it. Now, an image of the killer had been sculpted in his mind—a soft sculpture, to be sure, a wax outline, gross features melting in the glare of uncertainty. But an image nonetheless.

  He was certain he was right.

  The killer was no Jew, no Arab.

  An American with strange eyes, a diseased mind, and a racist scheme. A beast of the highway stalking the herd.

  Americans, thousands of them living and visiting here, but the only ones under surveillance were Roselli and Wilbur. Not very promising: The reporter was unethical, but no killer; the monk’s big secret was that he wanted to be a Jew.

  Which made him intriguing, but no suspect.

  Unless he had more than one big secret.

  From what Daoud had overheard, the monk knew he was under suspicion. Was the move to the yeshiva a means of covering something up?

  Daniel had instructed Daoud to stay on Roselli. The Arab’s “Yes, Pakad” had been reflexive but strained. Poor guy was probably cross-eyed with boredom by now. If nothing came up soon, Daniel resolved to put his talents to better use. Any further observation of Roselli could be carried out by one of Harel’s Latam boys, wrapped in robes and kaffiyah.

  He thought about Roselli again. From monk to yeshiva student.

  A spiritual quest? Or just another impulsive shift for an unbalanced mind?

  Another crazy American. With crazy eyes?

  Thousands of Americans walking the streets of Jerusalem—find the one with the crazy eyes. Like sifting granules of gold for a single speck of dross.

  Big mess, but small country. An outsider couldn’t submerge himself indefinitely.

  He took pen in hand, outlined his plan.

  Airline cross-checks, page-by-page reviews of tens of thousands of uncomputerized passport records—the tedium the Chinaman had dreaded out loud but which was the surest way to fine-carve the sculpture. Canvasses of hotels, pensiones, hostels, dormitories, housing agents and automobile rental firms, travel and tour companies, kibbutzim and moshavim that took on foreign volunteers.

  The evil bastard couldn’t hide deep enough. He’d root him out, put an end to the defilement.

  For the first time in a long time he felt lightened with hope. The mastery of the hunter.

  His thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door.

  “Yes?”

  The door opened a crack and a uniform stuck his head in. Young, gawky, with a peach-fuzz face, he had to be barely out of the training course. He blinked rapidly, bobbed his head, looking everywhere but at Daniel.

  “Pakad Sharavi?”

  “Yes? Come in.”

  The patrolman’s body remained in the corridor; only his head bobbed around inside the office, jumpy and vigilant, like a chicken watching out for the shohet’s knife.

  “What is it?”

  The uniform bit his lip and chewed air. When he finally got the words moving, they tumbled out in a rush:

  “Pakad, a dead body, they said to call you, you’d know all about it. In Talpiyot, along the industrial stretch. Not far from the lot where we tow the parking violators.”

  BOOK THREE

  CHAPTER

  55

  Dr. Levi’s promptness was commendable. Within hours of the removal of the body to Abu Kabir, the necropsy findings were phoned to Daniel.

  But the pathologist might just as well have taken his time. The wounds on number three were identical to Fatma’s and Juliet’s, save for one bit of information that Daniel had anticipated: The killer had removed Shahin Barakat’s ovaries and her kidneys.

  Just as he’d done, ten years ago, to his third American victim. The Indian girl, Shawnee Scoggins.

  Shahin’s body had been found, dumped like garbage in a stand of eucalyptus, reeking of encroaching decay and menthol. Only meters from the police tow yard.

  Thumbing his nose at us.

  Shahin. Another pretty face preserved intact above the gaping neck wo
und. Nineteen years old, black hair lustrous, thick, and wavy. Dainty pierced ears, the earrings missing.

  But, unlike the others, married. The husband had been hanging around the Kishle substation for days, dogging the uniforms, begging them to find his wife.

  “Ex-wife.” Patrolman Mustafa Habiba had been quick to clarify, the moment Daniel entered the substation, telling his side of the story, then rushing off to fetch the Pakad an unrequested cup of Turkish coffee and a piece of baklava wrapped in wax paper. The Arab policeman was a leftover from the days of Jordanian occupation, unschooled, nearing sixty, and waiting for his pension from the Jews. Allowed to remain on the force because of his familiarity with the back alleys and their denizens, the desire by the brass to maintain the illusion of continuity.

  “He kicks her out, gives her three times talaq, then changes his mind and wants us to be the marriage counselors. How were we to know, Pakad?”

  Habiba needed a shave. His grizzled face twitched with fear; his uniform needed ironing. Daniel had brought him back to Headquarters and he looked out of place in the sterile emptiness of the interrogation room. An antiquity.

  Forty years of pocketing petty baksheesh and dishing out bureaucratic indifference, thought Daniel, and now he’s terrified that indifference is going to be twisted into something cruel.

  “There was no way to know,” Habiba repeated, whining.

  “No, there wasn’t,” said Daniel. The man’s anxiety was starting to wear on him.

  “What difference would it have made had we looked for her?” insisted Habiba. “When this Butcher wants someone, he gets her.”

  There was awe in the old policeman’s voice when he spoke of the killer. Awe undercoated with contempt for his own police force.