Lark

by Forrest, Richard;

  “Good. I’d just like to know where to find him until the lab checks things out.”

  “Right. I’ll radio for a constable to come out here and take lover boy for his free room and board.”

  Lark drove back to Middleburg at a moderate rate of speed. He cradled a can of beer in his right hand while his left casually gripped the pickup’s wheel. It was time to think.

  The bulk of the investigation was now out of his jurisdiction. The state lab would check out the barn. Black Jack would prepare and have executed the proper search-and-seizure warrant for any of Vicky’s possessions the clubhouse might yield, and Lawton would remain in custody for an indefinite period of time. Bail would be set high, and it would be weeks before his trial on the attempted-murder charges.

  It all added up to a neat spiral of conjecture, and yet the sum seemed less than the parts. Vital pieces were missing. The cycle clubhouse was a logical, isolated spot for the torture murder of Vicky, and yet somehow the dispassionate treatment of the victim by the man on the tape didn’t seem to match the erratic, nearly psychotic behavior of Mike Lawton.

  Nor did the man’s voice on the tape match the postadolescent whine of Mike Lawton.

  Or was more than one killer involved? Was there a cabal—perhaps an older man who used Lawton to entice victims to the isolated barn?

  Lark knew from experience that exhaustive investigative work would answer many of the questions, but in this case, as in so many, there would be missing pieces that would never be fitted in.

  He stopped at a phone booth at the outskirts of Middleburg and called Horse at home. A very young voice answered, and after several relays Horse was finally on the phone.

  “How did the identification go?” Lark asked.

  “Firm. It’s the Stanton girl.”

  “We have a suspect. I’ll fill you in tomorrow.” Lark hung up and realized that he was bone-tired. It had been a long and uncomfortable day, and now it was time to go home and sleep.

  There was a single light on in the trailer behind the machine shop. He cut his headlights and engine and let the truck drift in the drive and gradually slow to a stop before the trailer. He slipped from the pickup and made an oblique approach to the rear window.

  His daughter was asleep on the divan.

  He entered quietly and walked across the living-room area and stood looking down at her sleeping form. She was curled up with her denim-clad legs pulled toward her chest, her hands under her chin. She could have been ten years old.

  A deep, hungry part of him reached toward her with an invisible gesture. He did love her, and she was all that he had. He stood watching for a few moments before he softly called her name. “Cathy.”

  She moaned in her sleep.

  He called again. “Cathy.”

  Her eyes flicked open and she looked up at him with the gaze of a small child. “Daddy?”

  “Yes, honey.” He sat gingerly on the edge of the divan near her feet. She had returned.

  She sat up quickly and swung her feet to the floor. She was now wide awake. “Daddy, you have to help me.”

  He wanted to touch her, but he didn’t. “What can I do?”

  “Craig’s in big trouble.”

  It took him a moment to reorient himself and mentally sift through a cluttered mind catalog of names before he realized that Craig was the one who had stood in the bedroom doorway. “Craig?”

  “They busted him with an intent to sell. He’s in jail, Daddy. He won’t be able to stand it in there.”

  Lark moved quickly into the kitchen area and snaked a beer from the refrigerator. He snapped the top before turning to face her. “We wouldn’t want his sensitive soul disturbed.”

  Her eyes clouded and the child within fled. “Will you help?”

  “I’m surprised they bothered with a kid selling a couple of ounces of pot.”

  “It was a bunch of coke. He found a dealer and planned to do it just once so I wouldn’t have to work at the store.”

  “How magnanimous of him. I’m sure the judge will take that into consideration.”

  “No irony, please, Daddy. Are you going to help?”

  He turned away. “No.”

  “I haven’t asked you for anything in a long time, but I am now. You know who to contact. You could get him the right lawyer, maybe even talk to the prosecutor. They’d take your word … they’d do what you asked of them.”

  “Probably.”

  She pulled at his shoulders, forcing him to turn. “Are you going to do it? Are you going to help us?”

  “No.”

  Flecks of color spun in her eyes. “You did this, didn’t you? You had him set up. You’ve probably had him watched for days, just waiting for him to make a move.”

  “No, I didn’t do that. I evidently didn’t have to.”

  “God, I hate you.” She said it quietly, almost without feeling, and then turned and left the trailer.

  9

  At eight A.M. Lark stopped at the watch commander’s office and waited for Lt. Horn to look up from his examination of a duty roster. The large black officer glared at the numbers before him as if his frightening visage would somehow change the net result. He finally grumped and looked up at Lark.

  “I hear you got a bust on the killing, Lark. Nice going.”

  “A lot of pieces to put together yet, but it’s looking good. What do you have on a kid called Craig who took a fall for dealing?”

  “Craig who?”

  Lark realized that he didn’t even know the last name of the man his daughter was living with. “Lives on Garden Street.”

  “Uh huh. Craig Wellborn. Couldn’t make bail so we’ve still got him. Is he one of your talkers? You want we should forget about him?”

  “No, I was just curious. Do they have a good case on him?”

  “The best. Repeated sales to an undercover officer, marked bills, no entrapment. He’ll do time.”

  Lark nodded and turned away from the watch office. He joined the crowd gathered around the elevator. It would be so simple. All that he had to do was put out the word that Craig was an informer, one of Lark’s own, and the case would be dropped. So simple, and yet so difficult. He forced the quandary from his mind and boarded the elevator.

  He dialed Frank Pemperton’s extension from his office. Frank would be at his desk and had probably been in the office since seven—that was how straight arrows operated.

  “Pemperton here.”

  “About the girl we found on Mark Street,” Lark announced without preamble. “We got a firm ID from her mother and a bust on her boyfriend. State police lab’s checking out a social club for evidence. It looks like he killed the girl in Warren and trucked her down here.”

  “Any evidence in the vehicle?”

  “We haven’t found it yet. The perp drives a bike, but the resident trooper in Warren is checking his friends and family for access to a van-type vehicle.”

  “Got enough to go for a warrant?”

  Maurice Grossman stood diffidently in the doorway. His face was chalk-white and he clenched the frame with his right hand. Lark glanced at him, raised an eyebrow, and then spoke into the phone. “We got her boyfriend on an assault charge and that’ll hold him until we build the rest of the case.” Lark hung up without waiting for the chief’s reply. “What’s up, Grossman?”

  “I got another one.”

  “Another what?” Lark snapped, although he was afraid he already knew the answer.

  Horse brushed past Grossman and leaned over Lark’s desk. “You don’t need me on the case anymore. I’m reporting to traffic as soon as I get in uniform.”

  “Sit down,” Lark commanded, and gestured for Grossman to come into the office.

  Maurice Grossman slouched across the small room and gingerly reached into his pocket. He placed the small cassette on the center of Lark’s desk. The three men looked at it a moment without speaking.

  “How’d it come?” Lark asked.

  “Like the first one, in the
mail this morning.”

  Lark reached into his desk drawer and placed the recorder next to the cassette. “Where’s the wrapping paper?”

  “I threw it away.”

  “I’ll send a man down to the radio station to get it from your wastebasket.”

  “I threw it out the car window. I don’t know where it is.”

  “You what? That was evidence.”

  “I didn’t know,” he whined.

  Horse’s chair creaked as he levered himself to his feet. “I’m going for coffee.”

  “Sit down.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “I said sit down, and that’s a direct order.”

  Horse reluctantly returned to his seat. “Do you always throw envelopes out your car window?” he asked Grossman mildly.

  “Just this once. If you guys don’t need me, I have a show to put together.”

  Lark waved and Grossman left the office. The cassette was placed in the recorder. Horse closed the door as Lark depressed the PLAY button and turned away from the small machine to stare out the window.

  It began.

  “I got another song for you, Johnny. Listen carefully and pick out all the nice little tunes.” It was the same distinctive voice as on the first tape.

  She had obviously been screaming before the tape began, as her voice was hoarse and cracked. Although expecting it, the two officers winced at the sound.

  “Didn’t you like what I did to you? I can do it again.”

  “Please don’t hurt me anymore.” It was a pleading young woman’s voice filled with horror and pain.

  Again a scream.

  Lark snapped off the recorder. He glanced at his watch. He had jotted down the time the recording had begun and now six minutes had elapsed. He had tuned out. He hadn’t heard a sound after the initial scream. His mind had simply refused to accept the constant repetition of inflicted pain.

  Horse held up a hand. “Wait.”

  Lark glanced at him in annoyance. “I’m not ready for it again, okay? What’s with you? Getting to like this sort of thing?”

  The bulky patrolman looked at him a long moment before answering. “I don’t need that from you, Lieutenant. If you weren’t so damn irritable, you’d a heard something important at the end of that tape.”

  “Where’s the body?” Lark said. “Where’s the goddamn body?”

  “Play it again. I’m sure I heard something toward the end.”

  Lark mashed the REWIND button. “We’ll hear the whole damn thing.” He pulled out a legal pad and snapped a pen from his pocket.

  The tape started again. “I got another song for you, Johnny. Listen carefully and pick out all the nice little tunes.”

  Lark clenched the pen as the screams started. He noticed that Horse had leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

  It was toward the end of the tape, as Horse had predicted. They both leaned forward to catch the words and sounds.

  “Do me,” the man said. “Do me again and it won’t hurt so much … That’s right … that’s right … bitchin’ whore!”

  It was the man’s turn to scream, a howl of pain and surprise. “You slut! I’ll kill you for that. I’ll rip your insides out. God, that hurts.”

  The girl’s breathing was labored, and then there were other muted sounds.

  “Turn it up,” Horse snapped. “More volume.”

  Lark quickly turned the dial to its highest point, but they still had to strain to hear the background noise. There was a pistol shot in the distance, a time elapse of several seconds, and then footsteps and the tape abruptly ended.

  “Play the last couple of minutes again. I didn’t quite get it all,” Horse said.

  Lark needed no urging. He rewound the tape to where the man first said, “Do me.”

  Both officers concentrated on the sounds as they listened to the final sequence of events culminating in the shot.

  “Again,” Horse said, and Lark rewound the tape for the third time.

  They played it four more times until they were both satisfied that they had heard all that could be heard. “He untied her hands,” Lark said. “She started to work on him and then gave him some of his own treatment.”

  “I figure she bit him,” Horse said in a low voice.

  “Something like that. Then I hear steps and a door slamming. He ran after her, left the door open, and there’s a shot in the distance.”

  “There seems to be some echo, like it was fired outdoors.”

  “That’s the way I hear it,” Lark said “She got away from him and he had to go after her.”

  “I heard something else in the distance when they were outside,” Horse said. “I think it was the sound of distant airplane engines. I heard it twice, two different planes.”

  Lark added that comment to his notes. “I’ll go along with that.”

  “What do we do now?”

  Lark drew a double line under his notes on the legal pad and read them aloud. “We make ourselves a group of recordings of doors and airplanes.”

  “Then we compare their sounds to what we have on the tape.”

  “And see what we find.”

  They spent the remainder of the day recording door closings. They systematized their experimentation, and after calculating the time from the man’s first cry of pain to the door slam, they hypothetized that an injured but agile person could have moved from six feet to not more than fifteen feet. They restricted their individual recordings of each door to five, ten, twelve, and fifteen feet.

  They began with Lark’s office door and included a metal door from the station’s locker room, a heavy fire-exit door, and the massive front door leading into headquarters.

  They left the station and recorded the slam of Lark’s pickup and Horse’s Honda, and then drove to the Najankian house. At Horse’s they recorded the garage, front, and bedroom doors. At Lark’s trailer they recorded the slam of the entrance door and the slide of the thin partitions inside. In total they recorded thirty-two doors, each at four different distances for a total of 128 recordings.

  “Tomorrow we work on airplanes,” Lark said.

  “There were two different planes, and if we can pin them down to make and height, we might have something.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  Lark smiled across the faculty office. “How about dinner?”

  Faby Winn put down the blue book she had been marking and peered at him over the rim of her reading glasses. “I have a date.”

  “I thought you might like a lobster.”

  “I have a lot of papers to grade.” She took off her glasses and looked at him levelly. “I really do have a date.”

  “Someone new?”

  “Not really. He teaches here at Middleburg and we’ve known each other for a while.”

  “I gather you didn’t care for my actions the other night.”

  “That would be an understatement. What would happen if we were living together and I didn’t want to make love one night? Would you handcuff me to the bedpost?”

  “There aren’t any bedposts in a trailer.”

  “That’s either funny or sad. I don’t think you know what in the hell I’m talking about. If the tape upset you so much, why didn’t you tell me before we had the fight? Why can’t we discuss these things without violence? What have they done to you, Lark?”

  “They gave me a job and neglected to tell me about the fringe benefits.” He left her and walked down the hall. He didn’t want to return to the trailer, and there weren’t many other places to go. He only hoped the bar he chose didn’t contain off-duty cops or guys he had busted.

  He couldn’t face that tonight.

  They held Styrofoam cups of coffee as they sat in Lark’s truck in the parking lot of the Middleburg airport. It was a small field, and the commercial traffic consisted of two twin-engine planes that flew businessmen to other airports for connector flights. The majority of the craft on the field were single-engine planes used
by weekend pilots.

  “I think we can rule out most commercial flights,” Lark said. “The sounds on the tape were smaller prop jobs.”

  “We’re too close to the runway, Lieutenant. The planes on the tape were already in the air, and I don’t think they were near a takeoff or landing.”

  Lark dropped his empty cup into the litter on the floor of the truck. “I want to check the wind to see which way they’re taking off, and then we’ll move you a mile or so in that direction. I’ll log all the flights in and out so that we can match them to the recordings you do.”

  “It’s going to be as dull as traffic,” Horse said.

  “Look at it this way,” Lark said as he stepped from the truck and flipped the keys to his partner. “You’re out in the country and not inhaling those dirty exhaust fumes.”

  “And I have a feeling I’m not going to have lunch either.”

  Lark laughed as he started for the small operations office. “It’s going to be good for you.”

  It was a long day. The traffic in and out of the small airport was minimal, and by three in the afternoon they had only a dozen recordings. Lark flipped through a flying magazine for the fourth time, dropped it back on the table in the tiny waiting room, and for the umpteenth time paced the room to the large map on the far wall. What were they trying to prove? Connecticut was one of the smallest states in the union, but the killing could have occurred in Massachusetts or Rhode Island, both of which were only a short drive away. They were located directly on the northeast corridor, which meant that there was a great deal of air traffic of all sorts between New York and Boston, which didn’t include intermediate cities such as Hartford or Providence.

  At four, Horse parked the pickup in front of the building and, with the recorder slung over his shoulder, came in to get Lark. “We got enough?”

  “Yeah, let’s go.” He gave a wave of thanks to the airport manager and followed Horse outside. He switched on the car radio as they drove toward the highway that led back to the center of town.

  “Okay, boys and girls, I now bring you my latest Gross Out, the dirtiest old man in town. Hello there, Dirty, what’s new in terms of filth?”