The Last Blue Plate Special

by Abigail Padgett

  “His name is John Harrington, and he’s probably used to being called ‘Mr. Ashe,’” Rox explained. “Old Southern family, lots of class but no money. He married Betsy Ashe fifteen years ago, and while it looks like a marriage of convenience, Rathbone says they’re crazy about each other. But she’s the Ashe, not he, and she’s worth millions.”

  “Rox, there’s something about deli trays. It may be nothing, but both Ruby Emerald and Kate received deli trays from which the card had apparently been lost. Nice stuff—caviar, pricey cheeses, designer chocolates. Kate’s can’t have been poisoned, though, because I ate quite a bit of it and didn’t get sick. Still, I think Bettina Ashe should be warned.”

  “The police will take care of that,” Rox said. “The husband, Harrington, has hired extra security around Betsy and is putting major pressure on the police to beef up the investigation. The Ashe Foundation supports a number of police charities, especially a scholarship fund for children and wives of officers killed in the line of duty. You can imagine the response down at headquarters. Politicians and preachers are one thing, but Betsy Ashe is another. You’re going to be working on this around the clock, Blue. Sorry I can’t do much, but I have a job.”

  “Rox, these interviews Rathbone wants done. They’re really your sort of thing, not mine. I’m not feeling comfortable with this. I’m not a clinical psychologist. And you’re the psychiatrist.”

  “Don’t worry,” she told me. “Dr. Bouchie’s crash course in interviewing serial killers is all you need. Plus I’m sending BB with you.”

  “BB?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got a plan,” she said, chuckling. “Don’t worry, Blue. Crunch a few numbers in your computer and get some sleep. You’ll have to get up at four-thirty to get to Rathbone’s house by six-thirty. G’night.”

  “Night, Rox,” I said.

  But I didn’t crunch numbers and go to bed. What I did was take Brontë for a long walk in the chilly autumn night, through shadows of ocotillo cactus and rocks so old they’d known the footfalls of prehistoric camels eighteen feet tall. Now these rocks knew the lesser, scritching footsteps of lizards. I thought about the chuckwalla Brontë had found two nights ago. A strange lizard that inflates one side of its body in order to compress the other side into rocky cracks and fissures. Sword seemed like a chuckwalla, I thought. The righteous biblical language of the letters was the inflated part, but what part was being compressed into hidden places behind it?

  When we returned over an hour later there was something on the front step, something wedged against my Dutch door. It gleamed oddly in the waxing moonlight. Something pale and round. I didn’t think much of it until I was right on top of it. Stuff blows around in the desert. Tumbleweeds. Trash left by occasional picnickers. I suppose I thought it was going to be a foam container that had once held a Big Mac and fries, blown two miles across the desert from the road. But it wasn’t.

  By the time I was fifteen feet from it I knew what it was. A shining white plate with a blue design. A fence, a pagoda, three little figures running over a bridge, a boat, a willow tree, and two birds hovering above.

  “Oh, my God,” I said as I pulled the Smith and Wesson from my hip pack and released the safety. But there was nobody there. Nothing but desert wind and the sound of my own heartbeat.

  12

  Chocolate Chips at Dawn

  I picked up the plate with the cuff of my sweatshirt, not that I really thought there would be fingerprints on it. Then I dropped it in a plastic freezer bag, zipped shut the top, and looked at it. A cheap import, brand-new. Not an antique English plate or even one of the mass-produced American restaurant blue willows. Sword wasn’t wasting the good china on me, a fact I found oddly insulting.

  Also creepy. I don’t keep my blinds closed at night. Why should I? There’s no one beyond my windows to watch me grating cheese. The paved road is two miles away and the dirt track to my place is guarded by a locked gate. There’s nothing out there but rocky hills crumbling under the weight of time. Desert plants, seemingly dead now in the dry season but capable of blooming overnight after a deep rain. Lizards, jackrab-bits, coyotes, snakes. From outside, the light from my office spills in a hazy yellow pool through only a few feet of darkness. Beyond that, there’s nothing human. Usually.

  The little Smith and Wesson .38 Special revolver I bought after my Glock nine-millimeter became a necessary loss during September’s Muffin Crandall case is a lot lighter than the Glock. Only fifteen ounces in the aluminum alloy and carbon steel model I chose. The barrel’s just an inch and seven-eighths long. Not a gun for shooting things at a distance. But distance wasn’t what I was worried about. What I was worried about was what might still be out there, watching. What might decide to come in.

  I took the gun into my bedroom and checked the cylinder. Rounds in all five chambers. Then I curled up to sleep with the weapon’s reassuring blue-black presence inches from my hand on the nightstand. Brontë would bark if there was the slightest unusual sound anywhere in or near the motel, and I would grab the .38 and shoot anybody who happened to be standing around in my living room doing something strange with china. The thought was comforting. Most women are uneasy around guns. But the way I look at it, women are usually the people who need them.

  I had no need of mine that night, although I couldn’t have known it when I went to bed. As a result I didn’t sleep very well and had no problem getting up at four to run Brontë and then drive over the mountains and down into San Diego for breakfast at Wes and Annie Rathbone’s house. Annie was making chocolate chip pancakes when I got there, and the aroma obliterated everything else from my consciousness.

  “Blue, why are you carrying a plate in a plastic bag?” Roxie inquired from one side of the Rathbones’ pine-plank kitchen table. It was apparent that somebody had knocked out a wall to create this room, because Southern California tract houses do not boast kitchens in which you could moor a tugboat. A fireplace in the rear wall was the clue. A “family room” had been sacrificed for the expansion of the kitchen into a usable space. Wes poured coffee into a bright yellow mug for me and glanced meaningfully at the worn vinyl floor.

  “Um, Sword paid me a visit last night,” I said. “Left a calling card. By the way, Annie, Wes tells me you’re thinking about Pergo for the floor. I’ve got it. and I really like—”

  Roxie, dressed for work in a cork-colored business suit that would’ve made her look dead except for a brick red blouse and gold hoop earrings I could put my foot through, raised her eyebrows and leaned forward across a yellow raffia placemat.

  “Blue,” she said, “don’t talk about the floor. What do you mean, he paid you a visit? When? What happened? Did you see him. What?”

  “I didn’t see anybody, Rox. I was out running Brontë for over an hour, maybe until eleven or so. When I got back this plate was propped against my door.”

  To Rathbone I added, “I didn’t touch it.”

  Annie, still in a sky-blue chenille bathrobe and house slippers, put a stack of steaming pancakes in front of me and then sat down to eat her own as Wes made another batch for himself.

  “I don’t understand why this creep is harassing you and not Roxie or Wes,” she said. “And what’s with the plate?”

  “There’s a connection to blue willow plates,” I answered. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Oh, it makes sense,” Rox interjected. “Not everyday sense, but a particular, personal kind of sense. Sword attaches great significance to the plates or the pattern or something else about them. To him this significance is simple, obvious. He’s using the image to draw us to him, and is probably a bit frustrated by now that we haven’t figured it out. He thinks we’re stupid.”

  “So he wants to get caught?” Rathbone asked from the stove-top where he was expertly flipping pancakes.

  “He wants to play for a while,” Rox said. “My concern about Sword is that he’s nothing typical. Certainly not the typical serial murderer, if there really is such a thing.” />
  “What do you mean?” Rathbone demanded. “Of course there’s such a thing. Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Berkowitz, Dahmer, for God’s sake.”

  “Um, a number of people in my field would argue that there have always been people who killed over and over,” I jumped in. “But they were either just seen as ‘murderers’ with no special title, or not seen at all, as in the case of military or law-enforcement workers whose ‘serial killing’ is perceived as okay as long as we don’t call it serial killing. The concept is that in creating the term ‘serial killer,’ society has literally created a bogeyman, a powerful myth on which to project all our own dark and unacceptable impulses. It’s a very new cultural myth, exclusively American and less than twenty years old. When we were all kids, there was no such thing.”

  “That’s true,” Annie Rathbone said, relishing her pancakes. “But maybe that’s because the police and FBI have computers now and can track all the different things—the m.o. and where the murderer leaves the body and all that. They can track all these little details all over the country now, where before it might seem like something that just happened one time in Iowa, for example. And the killer goes to prison in Iowa, and that’s that.”

  “The serial killer phenomenon can also be seen as a way of avoiding certain unpleasant truths psychiatry turns up,” Roxie said. “People need to believe that such killers are utterly unlike themselves, that a Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, was an alien being beyond all human comprehension, like a god of pure evil. Psychiatry steps in and says, ‘No, this is just a guy like you and me in whom a combination of brain function and life experience produced some pretty disgusting behavior.’ For example, recent studies have shown a stupendously high incidence of childhood brain injury in the medical histories of men imprisoned for violent crimes. Coupled with poverty and illiteracy, it looks like brain injuries contribute to violent behavior, but nobody wants to hear it.”

  “Why not?” Annie asked.

  “Because then it could happen to anybody,” Rox explained. “No more comforting bogeyman. Plus, parents might be reluctant to let their boys play violent sports in which head injuries are a risk. And there goes the American way of life. Where would we be without football?”

  Wes Rathbone was rolling his eyes. “All very interesting, but it doesn’t help me catch this guy.”

  “Okay,” Roxie went on, “so far all we have is a series of threats and two dead people who might have died from natural causes even though that’s statistically impossible. But if he haskilled, then I think he doesn’t ‘want’ to be captured as much as he believes nothing else can happen. To him punishment for wrongdoing is swift and certain. It’s inevitable. That he hasn’t been captured yet is probably confusing to him.”

  “How can there be a ‘typical’ serial killer?” Annie asked, pushing butter and a jug of real maple syrup toward her husband.

  “FBI has done some profiles,” Wes began. “Things about disorganized crime scenes and dump sites, who dismembers the body and who doesn’t, souvenirs, that sort of thing. It was a way of getting a handle on these guys, putting their behaviors in words cops can understand rather than a bunch of psychiatric mumbo-jumbo. No offense, Rox. But any cop, FBI or otherwise, will tell you every one of these weirdo killings is different from every other one. The profiles don’t help much. The only way to get two steps ahead is to get into the killer’s mind, figure out what he’s thinking. This guy thinks he’s God’s own vengeance and has a fetish for plates. Now he’s threatened one of the wealthiest women in the region. None of this is fitting together for me, I have to tell you.”

  I’d finished my pancakes and was feeling useless. Profiles are the kind of thing I do, the way I think, and Wes had just said they didn’t help. Getting into Sword’s mind wasn’t something I could do.

  “Before we scrap the FBI profiling system completely,” I began, “let’s look at the salient features. Maybe there are a couple of things we need to be looking for.”

  “Salient would, in my opinion, concern the killer’s need for validation,” Rox answered. “According to the FBI that means dump sites and souvenirs, mostly. A lot of male killers will return to the site where they dumped the body, over and over. The theory is that reliving the kill is pleasant, even sexually arousing to them. But whether that’s true or not, what’s absolutely true is that the actual, physical existence of the site validates the reality of the kill and therefore validates the killer. He goes there to feel real.

  “Also typical among male serials, according to the FBI, is the keeping of souvenirs. Articles of the victim’s clothing, body parts, scrapbooks of newspaper clippings about the crime. Again, these may be sexually arousing or not, but they are always a source of instant validation. He will cherish these and need to see or touch them often because they are the trophies that prove he has a function in the world, that he’s important.

  “And while there are a few females who kill more than one person in sequence, their motivations are entirely different. They don’t return to dump sites and have no need for souvenirs. Am I right, Blue?”

  “Women serial murderers are usually ‘black widow’ wives who kill their husbands or boyfriends, or Munchausen moms who sequentially kill their own children in order to be seen as heroic in the face of illness and death,” I explained to Wes and a fascinated Annie. “The female killer chooses people close to her as victims, people who are extremely vulnerable to her. A sleeping husband, children. The other typical profile is the woman who takes in orphans, the elderly, or the sick for pay, and then kills them for their Social Security payments, insurance, or pension benefits. These victims are also in vulnerable positions relative to her. In both cases the killers show disinterest in their crimes, as if the crimes had been committed by someone else. These women killers would recoil from souvenirs or visiting dump sites. They get no sense of power from the kill and in fact don’t think about it at all. What they get is either financial gain, to which the female ‘serial killer’ often feels entitled, or the praise of others, in the case of the Munchausen moms, for their seeming courage and fortitude.

  “Which leads me to make this point,” I went on. “Rox, you and Wes have concluded that Sword is a man. But notice … these killings have no dump sites to visit. The killer isn’t present when death occurs, so there can be no taking of souvenirs from the kill. Neither of these profiled male behaviors is possible in this case. But what is possible is the female profile—disinterest, distance.”

  “Okay,” Roxie agreed, “except for the attention-getting behavior. Sword is advertising himself everywhere—to the victims, the police, and the media. He has to have attention, and that’s the gender marker. It’s a male. And he’ll do something to approximate visiting dump sites and collecting souvenirs. This is where you come in, Blue.”

  “I do?”

  Rathbone turned his chair around and straddled it, his version of a down-to-business posture.

  “Rox and I worked this out yesterday on the phone after I went to the Rainer Clinic,” he explained. “It was pretty much the way she said. Everybody was polite and aloof, nobody knew anything. I couldn’t spare a detective from the border-agent case, so I had to go alone. Insufficient cause to haul anybody down to headquarters for questioning, so I was on their turf. About all I found out was that the old guy, Jennings Rainer, thought his daughter would take over the clinic when he retired, but apparently it’s not gonna happen. She was out to lunch when I was there, so I didn’t talk to her.”

  “She had lunch with her husband, Chris, who looks like Smokey Bear with an Indian braid down his back,” I said, not looking in Roxie’s direction. “He ordered a Reuben and is worried that their son, Josh, may be traumatized by not being allowed to take a camera on a school field trip. I’d ducked into the clinic for a minute on a ruse, overheard Megan say she was meeting somebody at Samson’s. So I checked it out.”

  Rox studied her coffee cup as if it were an archaeological find when Rathbone said, “Good work, Mc
Carron! You’ve got the heart of a cop. So what else did you learn?”

  “Not much. Except they have some sort of agreement, something Megan has to do for a couple more years because that’s the agreement. Apparently she doesn’t want to do it, but he’s encouraging her to go on.”

  “Megan is the daughter, right?” Annie said thoughtfully. “Plastic surgeon daughter of plastic surgeon father. Father wants her to take over the business but she’s not interested. Wes, how did the old guy seem to you when he said that? Sad? Bitter? Hopeful?”

  “I dunno. None of those, I guess. I thought it was just a way to get the questioning off track. He kept gesturing around, like the place meant something to him. It’s like his little kingdom, all fancied up with art and fish tanks. But he didn’t answer—”

  “Wes,” I had to interrupt, “did you look at the fish?”

  “No,” he answered, glancing at his watch. “What about ’em?”

  “They’re metal. Flat metal fish shapes that follow a magnet through the water. They’re not real, but they look like they are.”

  “In the right lighting,” Annie said with a grin.

  “And with the right accessories,” Rox added. Similar grin.

  Three women understanding precisely what they’re talking about.

  “Huh?” said Wes Rathbone.

  “Never mind, sweetie, it’s a girl thing,” Annie cooed across the table. “Has to do with illusion, what used to be called ‘glamour’ when witches were burned at the stake for it. Looks like you walked right into its den and didn’t see it, which is the point, isn’t it?”

  Roxie had rolled her head back and was saying, “Girl,” in a way indicating deep appreciation as she shook her braids back and forth, laughing. Rathbone still didn’t get it.

  “So, the plan we came up with,” he began, ignoring us, “will use Blue for in-depth interviews with all five of the Rainer medical staff.”