But Dr. Ballard had said “a man who fits into the community.” Not Lattimer. It was a man you wouldn’t suspect.
So it could be anybody … anybody … anybody …
No, impossible. It couldn’t be just anybody. It couldn’t
be—anyone close to her. She would know. How could she not know?
But someone must know. She was back to that. Someone would be close enough—if it wasn’t Lattimer. Someone knew and was lying. Protecting the killer.
She glanced at Sheila. At the other people around her. She tried to imagine how it would feel—knowing.
She heard someone scream, “No more handguns!” and looked up. D’Amico was talking again. He nodded in response to the comment but his reply was drowned in more shouting. A woman in a middle row jumped to her feet.
“What are you police doing here, anyway? Why aren’t you out there catching that maniac?”
There were cries of agreement from the audience. Joyce felt stifled, pressed in by the heat and the rustling and stirring of the crowd.
Foster Farand stood up. “Let’s not forget, people…”
The noise continued. D’Amico thundered into the microphone, “Quiet, please.” In the startled lull that followed, Foster began again.
“Let’s not forget, people, that this meeting was called by the community. The police and Dr. Ballard came as our invited guests. Chief D’Amico has given us sound advice based on his expertise, and I think we ought to respect that. We ought to respect the fact that the police have been running themselves ragged trying to solve the crimes. Have we been helping? We’ve got to remember it’s a community problem, not just a police problem.”
The same woman shouted, “Call the F.B.I.”
Joyce whispered to Sheila, “I think I need some air. I’ll be right outside. Don’t worry about me, I’ll wait by the car.”
She felt as though everyone must be turning to stare as she slid out of her row and walked quickly up the aisle.
When she looked back, they were paying no attention to her. The clamor rose. Someone called, “Get Lattimer!”
She walked faster. They were turning ugly. That was the trouble with bringing them all together. Their own impotence made them frustrated.
For a moment, as she stepped outside, a warm breeze blew, and then it was still again. Still and hot. With all the humidity, it scarcely cooled off at night. She looked toward the auditorium windows. The noise seemed to have died down. She could hear a single voice speaking.
She paced slowly on the sidewalk in front of the door. A locust tree cast a soft powdery shadow across the harsh lights of the parking lot. How silly of her to be out here alone. Mightn’t the killer come around, just to watch the effect of the uproar he had caused?
But he couldn’t do anything here. He would have to get her away, and she would not go. Even if he pointed a gun—
She jumped as a small door near what she supposed was the stage suddenly opened. A figure loomed in the dim light, and as the door closed behind it, sorted itself into Chief D’Amico.
He nodded briefly and started to walk on.
She ran after him. “Mr. D’Amico!”
He turned around so quickly she almost expected him to reach for a gun.
“How are you, ma’am? What are you doing out here?”
“I—it got too hot inside.”
“Aren’t you nervous being out here alone? It seems to me people aren’t as afraid as they should be. Would you believe girls are still hitchhiking?”
“Yes. No, I mean, I wouldn’t believe it. But it did occur to me that he might be hanging around. I was careful.”
She felt reprimanded, like a small child, and hoped the light was too poor for him to see her discomfort.
“Mr. D’Amico, I wanted to tell you, I hope you didn’t mind the way they were talking. It’s just hysterical. I think people really know you can’t pull a murderer out of a hat. You’re doing a great job, and it isn’t easy, especially when you don’t even know where to begin.”
She had babbled too much, in her uncertainty as to whether she was saying it right. She wanted to say more, to keep him with her, and ask his help. But she did not know quite how, or for what.
Instead she held out her hand. He took it, gave it a squeeze, and did not immediately let go. The moment seemed to stretch. All the while she felt something almost ready to put itself into words, but finally it eluded her. It must have been the intensity of her in those moments that made him hold tightly to her hand.
“Are you here alone?” he asked as he released her.
“No, I came with friends. It was so stuffy in there, I felt faint.”
“I was going to warn you, always check your car before you get in alone, especially at night.”
“I don’t have my car here, but thanks.”
“In that case, maybe I’d better give you a lift home.”
“Oh, it’s way out of your way. And my friends will be looking for me.”
“Then I’d suggest you go back inside. They’re going to be in there a while. They’re talking about forming some civilian patrol groups.”
She saw a few other people leaving, but not the Farands. They would be in the thick of it. They must have helped to organize the meeting itself.
“I don’t particularly want to go back,” she said. “I just didn’t like the atmosphere. It got so ugly. And stuffy.”
He threw back his head, but the laugh that emerged was only a low chuckle.
“Don’t mind them,” he said. “People get that way. A lot of the shouting is pure egotism. I’m going for a bite to eat. Haven’t eaten all day, and the civilian patrol stuff is none of my business. Do you want a lift? I could take you home first, or you can come and have a hamburger with me on the way.”
She hesitated, wanting to get back to her children. But this might be the quickest way yet, and she did want to talk to him, if only to find out what he knew.
She left a note on the Farands’ windshield and drove with D’Amico to the lower part of the village near the railroad tracks. He found Ralph’s Pizzeria still open and ordered a whole large pie with sausages and mushrooms, and coffee for both of them.
“If you haven’t eaten all day,” she pointed out, “this isn’t really going to give you your basic nutrients.”
“No, but it keeps me going. On a job like this, when you gotta keep working twenty-four hours, you substitute food for sleep. And if you don’t get a chance to eat, either, you find yourself blacking out.”
“Good heavens, I hope those people back there at the meeting appreciate what you’re doing for them. But doesn’t your wife mind you inviting strange women for dinner, instead of going home?”
“She might if I had a wife,” he answered without looking at her. “I’d level with her. But I haven’t had a wife in fifteen years.”
“Oh.”
“That’s why it’s good to have company sometimes. What about your husband? I guess he wouldn’t make a big deal over this, would he? Or you wouldn’t have come.”
“He isn’t going to know,” she said. “I really don’t know whether he’d make a big deal. He’s—kind of odd sometimes.”
“Odd? In what way?”
She could hardly tell him about her sex life. “Oh, I don’t
know. He just—Well, he’s moody. Sometimes he seems very distant.”
“Yeah?”
She really had no right to be discussing Carl with this man. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what got into me, talking like that.”
He was silent, absently spinning the pepper shaker with his fingers.
“Your husband’s staying with the kids tonight?” he finally asked. “How many kids do you have?”
“Three at the moment.” She explained about Adam and Gail, and Mary Ellen visiting. “So we have his, hers, and ours. We were both married before. He was divorced and I was widowed.”
“You, too?”
“My husband was killed by a mugger two years ago
.”
“Rough.” He twirled the pepper shaker again. “You’re probably up to here with murder. So am I. That must be hard on your kid, too. She’d be old enough to remember. Does she know what happened?”
“Yes, but not all the details. Of course she asked what happened to him, and I had to tell her.”
“How old was she then? About seven, right?” His computerlike mind amazed her. How could he remember Gail so well? “That’s just the age when they’re beginning to understand that death is forever.”
“Do you have children?”
“No,” he said. “Didn’t have time. We were only married a few months.”
“And?” she asked softly.
He shrugged. “Cancer.”
“She must have been very young.”
“Just twenty.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Yeah, it was. But no worse than what’s going on now.
And maybe even a little easier to accept. At least it’s an act of God, even if you can’t help wondering why God would do a thing like that.”
He really must have wondered, she thought. He must have been very bitter, never to have married again.
“So it’s over and done with,” he said as their pizza arrived, “for you and me both. You were lucky to find another good man.”
She was silent, and discovered she was not particularly hungry as she delicately nibbled on a crust.
“What do you think of that civilian patrol idea?” she asked, scooping up a dripping rope of mozzarella cheese. “Is it a good thing, or do they just get in the way?”
“I don’t know, in a place like this. In a basically rural situation, it’s hard for the police to cover the whole area. You don’t know when or where he’s going to strike. The best part about it, though, is citizen involvement. You’ve got them watching, you’ve got them alert, the girls will be more careful, we hope, and we might even come up with a lead this way. It could act as some kind of deterrent, too.”
“Did you find where the murders took place?” she asked. “Carl, my husband, said that’s what you were looking for.”
“The first two. We had the place under surveillance, and then the third one happened.”
“In a different place?”
“Yup.”
“Where—You aren’t going to tell me, are you? Was it near there? In the woods? It can’t have been Mr. Lattimer. You’d have arrested him by now.”
His face was unreadable as he reached for another slice of pizza.
“You don’t arrest somebody,” he said, “just because a murder took place on his property.” “It did?”
“We found pieces of clothing, and we found a place where the body might have been kept before it was put out there in the woods.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Doesn’t matter now. We thought we could get him to come back there, but somehow he must have known. That’s why we kept it from the press.”
“Where is the place?”
“You know the Lattimer property? He’s got a lot of little outbuildings. There’s a sort of stone shed where the brook comes up. It’s built around the spring, very cool inside. They must have used it for refrigeration.”
They. The Lattimers. For one exultant moment she thought they had found the killer. But they couldn’t have. Another murder had happened under their noses.
“Are you watching anybody in particular?” she asked.
“Anybody and everybody. Now I told you this as a friend,” he added, “because, like I say, it doesn’t matter anymore about the killer, he knew we’d stumbled on the place. But I’d appreciate not having the general public all over.”
“I won’t say a word.” She was still amazed that he had mentioned it to her at all.
“Mr. D’Amico—”
“Frank,” he said. “If we’re eating together, we should skip the formalities. Unless you don’t want to.”
“You’re right. I’m Joyce.”
“I have a cousin named Joyce.”
“Really?”
“No, come to think of it, it’s Joy. I’ve got about fifty cousins. Hard to keep track.”
“Frank—what sort of person do you think it is?”
He set down his coffee cup. “You heard what the shrink said. That’s all I can tell you.”
“I want to know what you think. I want to know how there can be a person like that, with the people around him,
his family, if he has one, the people who see him every day, not realizing it. Wouldn’t there be something about him? Wouldn’t he—Do you think they’re protecting him, maybe? His family? And what about the blood? Wouldn’t he get blood on himself sometimes?”
Frank picked up the coffee cup again, drank from it, stared at it for a moment, then set it down.
“There could be a lot of things,” he said. “There are a lot of people walking around who are kind of flaky. Would you necessarily think they’re homicidal? Especially if it’s someone you know well, you probably wouldn’t think so. There was a woman who worked right next to Son of Sam at the post office, talked to him every day, even talked about the murders, and never guessed he was the guy.”
She nodded. He took another slice of pizza, chewed a bite and swallowed it.
“Then a lot of times,” he went on, “these people disassociate themselves. They commit a homicide, and afterward they honestly have this feeling that it was somebody else that did it. There was a guy in Chicago back in the forties. He blamed it all on a person named George. He really believed George existed, even had letters from him, but in fact, George was only a part of himself.”
“How weird.”
“Sometimes they try that sort of thing to cop an insanity plea, but usually these random killers are bananas to begin with, or they wouldn’t be doing what they do. Right?”
“Do you think he wrote that letter to the newspaper?”
“I think so. I think it was probably genuine. I think he was trying to copy Jack the Ripper. He wrote letters, you know.”
“It sounded like somebody who’s not too well educated.”
“Joyce, anybody who’s educated can write like someone who’s not. It’s the other way around they can’t do it.”
“Then you think he—he disguised himself—that way?”
“That’s what I think. What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know. It just bothers me. I don’t know why.”
“You think an educated person wouldn’t commit that sort of murder?”
“No, I don’t mean that. Educated people can be crazy, too. It’s just—I don’t know.”
She picked up a piece of mushroom that had been left on the plate. It was cold. She dropped it.
“What about the blood?” she asked. “How can he do it without getting blood on himself, and why doesn’t somebody see it?”
“Who knows? But look, he kills by strangulation, right? After the body’s dead, there’s no pulse, so the blood doesn’t spurt like it does from a living artery. Hey, am I making you sick?”
She sighed. “No, I just wasn’t all that hungry to begin with.” She saw the newspaper pictures in a row, the three smiling faces, then saw them contort as their necks were squeezed, saw the corpses sliced open.
“Look, Joyce, I’m sorry.” Unconsciously, it seemed, his hand reached out and closed over hers. “You probably think I get used to these things. I never do. It’s always a human being. But this is my daily work. I get so I can talk about it, but it’s not very nice at the dinner table, is it? And I sort of forgot you weren’t a colleague.”
“I suppose that’s a tribute.” She smiled weakly.
“Right, it is. But after what you went through with your first husband killed, I sure wish you didn’t have to have this now.”
He took his hand away from hers, and as much as a solid man like D’Amico could, seemed flustered to have found it there.
He demolished the last of the pizza, then drove her home, insisting it was no
t out of the way at all.
“Thanks for coming with me,” he said as she left the car. “I enjoyed your company.” In the dark, she thought his eyes searched her face.
“I enjoyed it, too,” she said. “And I hope you get that break real soon.”
She turned to go into the house, and saw Carl in the darkened kitchen doorway.
“Who was that?” Carl asked. “That wasn’t the Farands’ car.”
“Oh … no… I left early. It got so hot in there I couldn’t breathe, and the Farands were staying forever. Somebody else gave me a ride.”
“Who?”
“Oh—a policeman.”
Carl’s mouth opened to ask another question, but no sound came out. What he wanted was an explanation, she was sure. Why couldn’t he ask?
“He was coming up here anyway,” she said, and brilliantly added, “I guess they’re keeping an eye on Mr. Lattimer. And naturally they’re terrified when they see a woman going around by herself. They don’t want any more bodies.”
As she spoke, her mind was far away, for it had suddenly occurred to her that Mr. Lattimer could not possibly be the killer. None of the murdered girls had lived around there, none would have had any reason to be there, especially Toni Lemich, coming home from work on the train and living not far from the station.
The killer would have had to have a car.
The police, of course, already knew that, and therefore all their talk about forcing girls into a car at gunpoint.
She slipped off her shoes and started toward the stairs, giving wide berth to the naked, black picture window, which seemed to be an eye staring in from outside.
Carl followed her. “So you just got into a car with a strange man—”
“He’s hardly a strange man,” she replied. “You met him
yourself, he’s the chief of police. He was only doing his job of protecting the women in this town. Otherwise you might have a murdered wife by now.”
She did not like this jealousy. She did not like anything about him at the moment that seemed exaggerated or abnormal.
She even began to wonder if she still loved him. But her mind balked at that question. She was not ready to face it—or anything else.
(2001) The Girls Are Missing Page 11