Undercurrents

by Ridley Pearson

  “Fibers?”

  “I.D. vacuumed the shit out of that place. Trace evidence is already at the crime lab. You’re interested in the red fibers, I take it?”

  “That’s right.” Several years back, in the name of efficiency, the police lab had been dismantled in favor of a state-budgeted crime lab. Its services were used jointly by the FBI, Police, and Fire—charges billed separately to each. The result was an often overworked, occasionally inefficient laboratory that analyzed evidence gleaned by SPD’s I.D. technicians or the detectives themselves.

  “If there were any we’ve got ’em. We took six separate bags, front and back doors inside and out, stairway, and several in the bedroom.”

  “Good.”

  “Oh, there’s one other thing,” Kramer said, flipping back through the pages. Boldt looked over at him. Kramer had freckles and light green eyes and golden rust hair. He looked like something out of a Walt Disney movie. “LaMoia noticed a strange smell in the air. Medicinal. It was familiar to him but he couldn’t place it. The bag boys Doc Dixon used mentioned the same thing. No one could place it.”

  “Medicinal?”

  “That’s what they said.”

  Boldt nodded. “I’m going to walk around for a few minutes. Then I’m going inside. You have the key?” Kramer handed it to him. “I’ll call when I’m through.”

  “Back door. We all used the back door. It was dead-bolted. Front door was on a night latch. We assume he used the front door.” He added, “I can hang around and wait for you.”

  “Don’t know how long I’ll be,” Boldt said delicately.

  “Doesn’t matter. I’ll wait. If they need me they’ll radio.”

  “Suit yourself.” Boldt watched as Kramer fished the morning newspaper out from under the front seat and turned to the sports pages. Kramer knew everything there was to know about professional sports.

  “May I?” Boldt asked.

  “Right,” Kramer said, as he peered over the pair of glasses he had put on. He handed Boldt the clipboard and a manila envelope thick with photographs.

  “Jesus,” Boldt said, commenting on the weight of the manila envelope.

  “I told you we got a lot of shots.”

  Boldt shut the car door and turned to face the house.

  ***

  He searched the clipboard and located the photocopy of the floor plan that LaMoia had sketched. The bedroom was at the back of the house on the second story, down a hall accessed by the front, and only, stairway. Boldt examined the exterior of the house. Two of the curtains were partially opened. He wondered if they gave any kind of interior view from out here. He wouldn’t be able to tell for sure until he returned tonight when the lighting would be the same as it had been for the killer. In the months since April twenty-ninth, eight women had been killed in the Green Lake area. Cheryl Croy made it nine. All had been killed in the evening. He’d been over the local patrol reports several times: no nuisance offenders reported in the Green Lake area—no voyeurism, indecent exposure, exhibitionism, kleptomania, or fetishism. He knew well enough that an obsessive-compulsive behavior often led to a more violent crime. Voyeurs made good candidates. None so far.

  Boldt walked entirely around the block stopping at each house and looking back toward Croy’s. It began to mist heavily again, but he took no notice, except to tug his coat collar up against his thick neck. Not even qualifying as a drizzle, this mist was typical fall weather. The overhead power lines grew shiny. Water collected there and fell to the street in heavy drops. Boldt climbed the hill, his left hip and right knee complaining of high-school football injuries. When he turned around he lost sight of her house completely.

  The walk around the block consumed about fifteen minutes. By the time he reached Croy’s house again his coat was damp, his hair dark and stringy. He caught himself whistling “Blue Monk.” He searched the extreme perimeter of the small lot first, walking alongside a low fence, eyes trained downward. The ground was not yet damp enough to leave foot impressions—something he would avoid at all costs. He found nothing. He reduced his loop by a few feet and began the pattern again. He stopped twice, using his pen to overturn a bottle cap and then a Popsicle stick. Both appeared faded and old. Probably of little use to him, but not useless. Nothing found at a crime scene was useless. He paused by some dog excrement and made note of it on LaMoia’s map, which had become wrinkled from the mist. He scribbled a note at the bottom of the page: PET?

  These loops took him another fifteen minutes. Not once did he look up to see what Kramer was doing. Boldt uncovered an empty pack of Marlboro cigarettes pressed into the damp earth. It too showed evidence of age and weathering. Nonetheless he made note of it on the wet page and marked its location on the map. His note read: WHO SMOKED? In addition he found a mud-stained broken shoelace, a garden trowel, two cotton swabs with what appeared to be blue nail polish, and five cigarette butts, all Marlboros. None of what he discovered appeared new enough to have a bearing on the killing, but he duly marked each on the map and made several notes. He underlined WHO SMOKED? five times.

  He had tucked the manila envelope containing the photographs in the waist of his pants, shielded from the mist by his buttoned jacket. He withdrew it now as he slid the key smoothly into the lock of the kitchen door. He swung the door open on noisy hinges and hesitated before stepping inside. He made note of the sound from the door. He looked into the house: such a normal kitchen, in a normal house, in a normal neighborhood. But something hideous had happened here. He had been here.

  Lou Boldt could not put himself into the mind of the killer. He wished he could. But he was not a psychologist, he was a cop. The only way he knew something tragic and grotesque had happened here was by the color photographs inside this envelope and the fact that the key fit the door.

  He had yet to look at the photographs. He hated the photographs, and what the photographs did to him. He hated this animal who had been here before him. (He couldn’t bring himself to think of the killer as anything but, despite Daphne’s arguments.) In many ways he hated this job.

  ***

  At the core of his uneasiness with the job was the uncovering of people’s private lives. Murder has a way, he thought, of unwrapping the package and leaving exposed all those private nuances and secrets people spend a lifetime hiding. With no time to bury these secrets, a murder victim is left unmasked, horribly vulnerable, and all too human. Would Cheryl Croy have wanted anyone to know about the vibrator in her end table? Unlikely. Did the grass hidden in her living room make her any less a human being?

  Boldt kept a supply of brown-paper evidence bags in the left pocket of his sports coat, disposable surgical gloves in the right. He slipped on a pair of gloves so he wouldn’t leave any prints. It was believed the killer wore similar gloves, and it made Boldt think of him as he turned the doorknob.

  He stepped into the kitchen. He was invading her privacy now. He had the photographs. He had the reports. He shut the door and looked around.

  The kitchen appeared clean and tidy. He made a note at the discovery of several bread crumbs in the stainless-steel sink. The refrigerator handle still retained the shaded mask of black powder used to dust for prints. Boldt opened the refrigerator and studied its few contents. Vegetables, yogurt, real butter, skim milk, cheeses, mayonnaise, mustard, a half bottle of a high-priced California Chardonnay, pickle relish, catsup, fresh pasta, grapefruit in the bottom drawer. No meat. The freezer held Häagen-Dazs bars, a bag of French Roast beans, and several frozen diet dinners. No meat here either. Ice tray half empty and frosted. He wrote down the expiration dates of the dairy products and closed both doors. The dates would give him an idea of when she last shopped. Maybe find a receipt in a shopping bag if she saved them.

  The cabinets were neatly ordered and clean. She ate unsweetened breakfast cereals, rice, and Almost Home chocolate chip cookies, and obviously didn’t like canned foods. She had an espresso maker, a microwave, a coffee grinder, and a two-slice toaster. He made a note
to have the disposal checked; he couldn’t fit his hand inside.

  He noted that the kitchen window above the sink lacked curtains. He peered outside, into the constantly shifting mist, to see which houses had a view of the window. Several possibilities. He made a note on LaMoia’s hand-drawn map.

  The downstairs window that had been found open by Cray’s co-workers was part of a half bath that was tucked under the stairs and that backed up to the kitchen. Under the sink he found some feminine napkins, an assortment of cleansers, and a toilet brush. Nail clippers, aspirin, and dental floss in the medicine cabinet. Two drops of urine and a pubic hair on the rim of the toilet, indicating use by a man. Boldt made a note and circled it.

  He assumed he knew whom he was looking for: the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, Virginia, had created a psychological profile of the killer following the discovery of the second victim, Jan Reddick, back in May. Despite the uncanny success record and accuracy of the BSU profiles, many of Boldt’s co-workers placed little faith in what amounted to professional guesswork. Nonetheless, Lou Boldt believed them useful. The murderer was white, between twenty-five and thirty, emaciated, lived alone or with a single parent, was a firstborn or only child, lived within a three-mile radius of Green Lake, was an insomniac, used recreational drugs, and wore blue jeans and basketball sneakers. The difficulty with this profile was the three-mile radius of Green Lake. It created too large an area. In the last six weeks two detectives had thoroughly covered four search sectors. They had twenty-seven to go.

  Now, with the discovery of the urine, perhaps Boldt had something. Perhaps not.

  He reached the front door and stopped. The report favored the front door as the entrance. Same as the other sites. It bothered Boldt. What was the man’s entry? How did he convince her to open the door? Did she know him? Did he pretend to be injured? His car broken down? Was he dressed as a woman? (This last thought resulted from the discovery at other sites of starched red silk fibers that the lab believed to be from a woman’s bonnet. The victim had owned no such bonnet. The fibers had been found on the pad of a chair at the death scene, as if the hat had been placed there, or the killer had undressed.) Was that his entry? Was he a transvestite?

  From the perspective of a homicide detective there were two key elements to any serial killer’s ritual: the selection of victims and the way the killer gained entrance. Beyond these elements the ritual served the interest of investigators only in that it helped to further define the subject’s psychological profile. Boldt still had no clue to either.

  He stepped onto the first step and tried to put himself inside the head of the killer. It wasn’t easy. He had no real idea what it was like to be inside a psychotic mind. He closed his eyes. He wanted to feel wild and driven to kill. Out of control. Frantic. Lou Boldt opened his eyes and began to climb the stairs. Indigestion, maybe. Out of control, frantic? No.

  The fifth stair from the bottom creaked beneath his weight. Did the killer sneak in, or did she admit him? Would she have heard this stair creak from up in her bedroom? The stairway seemed to grow more narrow as he approached the top, the illusion brought on by his increased anxiety. With every step now he moved closer to her most private sanctuary; with every step he moved closer to the confrontation; with every step he moved closer to her final moment. He walked slowly but steadily down the now-pulsating hallway, blood drumming ferociously in his ears, eyes stinging. He briefly felt her fear. It began in the center of his chest as something like a tiny bubble and ballooned out of all proportion as he stepped up to her bedroom door. He didn’t need LaMoia’s map to know which room it was.

  He was familiar with the stories of cops who could “become” the perpetrator; who could wander the death scene and interpret the events from the killer’s perspective. For Lou Boldt it was quite the opposite: he experienced the overwhelming fright of the victim, the ultimate horror of being someone’s victim—and though this rarely helped him to glean any facts, it greatly motivated him. It drove him up to and beyond the points where other cops might stop.

  He swung open the door to her room.

  As he caught sight of the dried blood he actually heard her shrill cry, only to realize it was a jay outside her window. He mopped his forehead with his handkerchief and stuffed it carelessly back into his rear pocket. He quickly loosened his tie and unbuttoned the collar button. The room was indeed well preserved. A yellow chalk line had been sketched onto the soiled sheets indicating her final position. Without stepping any further into the room, he carefully inspected the mauve walls, the matching curtains. He faced the double bed with its wicker headboard, the oak end table, the white carpet now flecked in that awful shade of brown. To his left, in the corner, was a dresser littered with framed family photographs, and along this near wall a bureau holding a television set and VCR. He dropped to one knee and continued his examination, finally placing his cheek onto the carpet and looking from this angle as well. He spotted a paperback under the bed, spine out. Judith Krantz.

  Boldt withdrew the first photograph and turned it over. Croy was naked, bloody, lying on her back staring toward the door. Toward Boldt. Don’t look at me, he demanded. But it was he who looked away. As with the other victims, the killer had taped Croy’s eyes open using silver duct tape, stretching and distorting her face, leaving her grotesque, oversized eyes swimming in pink empty sockets. Around both ankles and wrists, the telltale lengths of nylon rope were tied securely, although the other ends, wrinkled from having been knotted previously, were untied and hanging off the mattress. A torn piece of her missing nightgown remained around her neck. Except for this odd bloodstained necklace, she was unclothed, her chest riddled with stab wounds, the symbol of the cross severing her breasts and running from throat to navel. His trademark. The newspapers had dubbed him “The Cross Killer.”

  Boldt leafed through the photographs. Close-ups of her face, of the wounds, of the knotted strips of bed sheeting—on and on they went, taken from different angles with different lenses. In color. Frame by frame, they seared an image in Boldt’s memory, taking their place alongside those of the others. Cheryl Croy’s murder was now a part of him. It would linger inside him, stagnant and fetid.

  If I had done my job, he thought, you would still be alive.

  In his seven years on Homicide, he had never experienced the all-consuming weight that this case put upon him. Most homicide cases did not involve repetition. It was the repetition that beat him down—his prior knowledge of what he would see before even entering the death scene. He felt as if the killer was intentionally forcing him to relive this same disgusting sight time and again, punishing Boldt for his failure to solve the case. Was this killer conscious enough to want to be stopped—as some serial killers were—or was he dazed and disoriented, wandering aimlessly out there somewhere ready to be trapped by his own psyche and “forced” into another killing?

  Nothing about this case was predictable. Even the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit had warned Boldt that the killer did not fit easily into a single profile description. Certain parts of the killing ritual pointed to a psychotic: a spontaneous, dysfunctional individual, often responding to imaginary voices and commands. Other aspects indicated a psychopath: a calculating, asocial, criminal mind. Boldt had been told he had a combination personality on his hands, and for this reason the BSU profile could be well off the mark.

  He retrieved the paperback from under the bed. Unlike other items in the room, it showed no signs of fingerprint dust. They had missed it. He opened to the bookmark, which turned out to be a cash-register receipt dated the previous Saturday. Had she intentionally hidden the book under the bed, the receipt some kind of clue? Had Croy recognized her killer from the store where she had purchased the paperback and then had the foresight to slide the book under the bed? He examined the receipt but avoided touching it. He knew a receipt like this had to be torn from a register, leaving open the possibility I.D. could pull a good thumb or index print. He slid it into the manila enve
lope atop the photographs. As he opened the envelope, Cheryl Croy stared out at him, the thick pieces of silver tape stuck to her face.

  Boldt walked to the other side of the room and reconstructed the kill like a film director preparing to shoot a scene. He has something—a handkerchief perhaps—around her neck. She’s losing consciousness. He won’t let her go off completely. Boldt had been told that would ruin it for him. Instead, he brings her right to the edge of unconsciousness and then releases his tourniquet just in time for her to return. Boldt now watches as the man binds her ankles and wrists, as he ties her to the bed—facedown at first, they now believe—as he excitedly tapes her eyes. But why? What was the point of the tape? What was it she was to watch? They knew his ritual involved a performance, but what performance? There was no evidence of masturbation. Why the eyes? Was he disfigured?

  While she is still facedown the killer continues to choke the life from her, and only then does he turn her over and finish the ritual with a kitchen knife, this despite the fact she is most likely already dead. For each of the victims the medical examiner had labeled the stab wounds perimortem—at or about the time of death. No way to be absolutely certain. Why this brutal conclusion to his ritual? What significance did it hold for him?

  Boldt backed into the corner of the room, drained. In his imagination the monster was still at work. He now positions the head so she is looking toward the door. Every victim the same. He collects himself, most certainly covering himself up in a coat—or a dress—and then calmly leaves by the front door, the same way by which he entered. Does he walk down the street, rejoining the society he feels no part of, or does he steal through the shadows at the back of the houses, stealthily covering his retreat?