The Way You Look Tonight

by Richard Madeley

  She began to read:

  VICTIM ONE – HESTER WAINWRIGHT,

  b. 06/13/1942

  Hester Wainwright was last seen alive by her parents three weeks ago as she left the family home on Sawgrass Blvd for night college at Homestead. She never arrived. Her car, a white Chevy Convertible, was later found with a shredded tire neatly parked on the central grass verge of Overseas Highway, less than two miles from the Wainwright residence.

  Of Miss Wainwright there was no sign, until the following morning when her body was discovered by a fishing party in mangrove swamps south of the soon-to-open John Pennekamp State Underwater Park in upper Key Largo. As with all the killer’s subsequent victims, she had bled to death from multiple stab wounds and cuts to all parts of her body.

  Miss Wainwright was a trainee hotel manager and mid-way through a business studies course at night school. She was intending to marry next summer and her distraught fiancé, who was arrested and questioned by police hours after the body was discovered, has been cleared of any knowledge of or involvement in the slaying.

  VICTIM TWO – JENNIFER ALSTON,

  b. 04/23/1940

  Kmart checkout attendant Jennifer Alston was born Jennifer Davies in Southampton, England, but was almost immediately evacuated to the United States at the start of WW2. Her parents were killed during a German air raid in 1941 and Miss Alston was adopted shortly afterwards by Harold and Becky Alston, her US sponsors here in Key Largo.

  She became a naturalised US citizen while still at High School and was saving much of her Kmart salary to finance a one-year full-time course in make-up and beauty treatments, after which her adoptive parents say she had hoped to open her own salon.

  Miss Alston disappeared on her drive home from work and her car was later found abandoned, one front tire heavily punctured. Like all the Killer’s victims thus far, Miss Alston’s body was discovered floating in mangroves well out of sight or sound of any dwellings or business premises. Initial examinations indicate that she died of blood loss, shock, or a combination of the two.

  VICTIM THREE – LUCY TWAIN,

  b. 03/03/1938

  Lucy Twain was an experienced scuba diver and part of the advance team preparing the world’s first underwater national park, John Pennekamp, for its grand opening on Key Largo next year.

  Born and brought up in the Keys, Miss Twain, in an interview with this newspaper last year, declared that Pennekamp would attract visitors from all over the United States and beyond.

  Miss Twain was driving to her home from a planning meeting at Pennekamp when she was abducted. But as she lived alone in a one-bedroomed apartment in Homestead, no one reported her missing.

  Police eventually found her abandoned red Ford pickup two miles north of Pennekamp on a deserted gas station forecourt. But this was after a coastguard vessel on routine patrol checking for boat-wash erosion to mangrove channels near Buttonwood Sound had discovered Miss Twain’s body there. At twenty-four, she is the oldest woman to die at the Killer’s hands.

  VICTIM FOUR – BECKY HOOPER,

  b. 06/30/1943

  It was with the discovery of the Killer’s youngest victim earlier this week that signs of a bizarre sub-pattern may have begun to emerge.

  Becky Hooper was the 19-year-old only child of married Key Largo general practitioners Stephen and Samantha Hooper, who have been practicing in the Upper Keys since they arrived here from New York in 1955.

  Like Wainwright, Alston and Twain, Miss Hooper was young, slim and considered to be pretty. But was her hair color of significance too? The first victim was dark-haired; the second fair; the third a brunette, and Miss Hooper a strawberry blonde. Dark, fair, dark, fair. Will the Killer’s next target prove to be dark-haired?

  Stella snorted. Silly, speculative nonsense. It was far too soon to read any significance into the question of hair colour. Irritated, she bent over the paper to read the final paragraph.

  Miss Hooper’s mutilated body was discovered by a canoeing party close to the Islamorada Bridge, the furthest south of any such gruesome discoveries to date. As with all the Killer’s victims, she had suffered multiple stab wounds, severe blood loss, and the knife used to inflict the fatal injuries was left deeply embedded in the left eye-socket.

  ‘It’s his signature,’ a source close to the investigation told the Courier last night. ‘He’s telling us: “Make no mistake, it’s me again. I’m back.” He’s proud of his work. This here’s one very, very sick guy.’

  Stella left the newspaper on the table behind her and slid back the restaurant’s plate-glass exit to the beach, pushed open the sprung screen door that fitted snugly behind it, and stepped outside. It was barely nine-thirty but the sun was already high, though not yet burning with the intensity it had on her arrival in Miami the afternoon before.

  As she walked across the sand back to her cabin, a young man in a crumpled linen suit materialised beside her.

  ‘Stella Arnold?’

  She stopped and turned towards him. ‘Yes, I am she. Who are—’

  He smiled engagingly at her. ‘I’m to give you this.’ He handed her a long-stemmed red rose.

  Stella looked down at it with a puzzled smile.

  ‘But who is it from?’ She raised her head again. She was staring into the blank lens of a camera.

  ‘Compliments of the Courier, Miss Arnold,’ the young man said, snapping off three or four quick frames. ‘Welcome to the Florida Keys.’ He turned on his heel and walked swiftly away.

  27

  ‘Shit. Sorry, Stella. But this could be a damn nuisance.’

  Lee Foster and Stella were sitting on high stools at the hotel’s beach bar. She hadn’t noticed this place the evening before; it was tucked behind the little dock where she’d observed the motor boat tying up.

  He had called her in her room when he returned from the police briefing; they’d arranged to meet here and she had told him straight away about her encounter with the Courier.

  ‘Why would they want to take my picture? And how did they know my name, and that I’m staying here? I’m baffled.’

  ‘I wish I was,’ he said, taking a swig straight from the neck of his bottle of Coca-Cola. ‘There must have been a leak, I’m afraid. Someone in the administration – or in Bryant’s office – has been talking to the Courier about you.’

  ‘Why would they do that?’

  He shrugged. ‘You’re currency. All stories are currency. I can just see tomorrow’s headline – “JFK Drafts Beautiful English Killer-Catcher To Help Nail Keys Slayer”.’

  ‘But I’ve never caught a murderer in my life,’ Stella protested.

  ‘No matter, Stella, that’s how they’ll run it. It’s a good story. It reflects well on Washington and Bryant – makes them look focused on cracking the case. They want folks down here to think they’re on the ball.’

  She toyed with her orange juice and shook her head in genuine bemusement. ‘It never even crossed my mind that this would happen. Isn’t there anything we can do to stop them?’

  He finished his Coke. ‘Nope. Not a damn thing. We have a free press in this country, Stella, and in their book you are a killer-catcher. You’re an expert on psychopaths, aren’t you?’ He scratched his chin reflectively. ‘Hell, apart from some temporary embarrassment to the Bureau – Hoover will not have wanted this story to break – I can’t see there being much harm done, now I really think about it. A few stupid headlines won’t make any difference to the investigation, or your contribution to it.’

  He stood up. ‘C’mon. Let’s forget about it. I’ve requisitioned the hotel’s one and only suite as our office while we’re down here. They should’ve finished installing the extra phone lines and teleprinter by now. Let’s go get settled in and I can tell you everything I know about this case. You can start by reading the files.’ He tapped a thick manila envelope under his arm and grinned at her. ‘And then you can tell me who our man is; I’ll arrest him; and you and me can go fishing for a day or so before they w
ise up and send us both home.’

  He signed the bar bill and handed her his ballpoint. ‘Better keep this pen handy. When the Courier comes out tomorrow with your picture all over page one you might find yourself having to sign autographs.’

  When the two of them reached their converted suite, Foster explained to Stella how things were going to work.

  ‘The State Police are doing their thing; the local FBI are doing theirs, and I’m meant to be Mr Go-Between, co-ordinating everything. But I can’t take you with me when I go to combined headquarters – that’d go down like a bag of cold sick, trust me. They’re funny about women down here. No one on the force will admit it, but they operate an informal “keep women out” policy, a bit like the colour bar in some of the states down here.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘Nope. I know, I know, this is 1962 but you’re in the southland here, Stella. The sight of you walking in by my side would be marginally less welcome than Castro coming ashore on Miami Beach waving the red flag. It’s just how it is. And as for your being English as well as a woman . . .’ He shrugged expressively.

  ‘Do your colleagues even know I’m here?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘So what happens when I’m all over tomorrow’s Courier?’

  ‘I’ll handle it. I’m senior case officer. They’ll think what I tell them to think. Let’s just not rub their noses in it.’

  He handed her the manila envelope. ‘C’mon, we need to get going. You should start with these.’

  Stella shook out four separate files, each with one of the dead girl’s names printed on the front cover. She carried them across to an office bureau by the window and sat down in a creaking chair mounted on castors. She flipped open the first file.

  As the minutes passed, it became clear to her that in every case the killer’s modus operandi was the same – or very nearly. The victims’ hands and feet were bound with the kind of medium-gauge hemp rope sold in any hardware store. There was no trace of any gag or other attempt to silence them, but skin tests around the mouths and noses of the victims all revealed identical chemical traces. Two of the girls – the ones whose bodies had been discovered soonest after they were killed – gave off a faint but distinctive odour of solvent or cleaning fluid.

  Tests showed this to be chloroform, just as Bobby Kennedy had indicated to her. Stella knew it to be a heavy, volatile liquid once widely used as an inhalation anaesthetic, particularly in dentistry. Detectives believed it had been used specifically to incapacitate the victims for capture and transport, and that they were allowed to regain consciousness once they had been securely bound and transferred to the location chosen for slaughter.

  In each case, the left eye-socket had been punctured by a blade at least five inches long, which had been buried in the skull. The knives were high-quality brands and of the same design – narrow-bladed stilettoes. Quantities of eye-fluid had spread out across the victims’ faces, but the absence of any significant blood flow from the socket suggested that the trademark wounds were inflicted post-mortem.

  The main theatre of death was, it was abundantly clear, performed on the girls’ torsos, legs and arms, and genitalia. Once again, the wounds were strikingly similar in every case. There were at least fifty to sixty puncture marks, none of them deep enough to be fatal on their own. Many cuts were more like elongated runnels, stretching in neat parallel lines down all four limbs. There was clear sexual mutilation, with both breasts deeply and repeatedly punctured, and beneath them the abdomen and vulva were cross-hatched with a dozen or more curving, scimitar-shaped slashes. The coup de grâce was always a stab to the heart.

  There was only one exception to the uniformity of the mutilation, and Stella immediately grasped its significance.

  The first victim’s wounds were noticeably deeper than the following three: it was plain she must have bled to death quite quickly, probably within ten minutes.

  But the cuts and puncture wounds on the other girls were shallower. This, the report suggested, would have resulted in a more lingering death, possibly lasting up to half an hour.

  ‘He’s a fast learner,’ Stella said aloud.

  Foster looked up from his own desk opposite.

  ‘How’s that, Stella?’

  She gestured to the files. ‘He’s deliberately refining his technique so he takes as long as possible to kill the girls. You don’t just have to look at the depth of the knife wounds – the first victim; what was her name?’ Stella flipped back through the original file – ‘Yes, Hester Wainwright, poor girl. The ropes binding her wrists and ankles left some pretty bad burn marks where she strained and twisted against them while he went to work.’

  She pushed the file away and picked up the next in the sequence.

  ‘But see what happens when he gets his hands on Jennifer Alston? These aren’t just friction burns, Lee. One of her wrist bones is exposed and her right Achilles tendon is almost severed. It’s even worse with the next two.’

  Foster shot her a narrow look. He had been browsing through a stack of scene-of-crime photographs, but now he tossed them back onto the table and leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands behind his head. ‘You OK, Stella? These here pictures are bad enough but I always think the cold-blooded descriptions are worse. You look a bit pale to me.’

  She shook her head impatiently. ‘Nonsense. I’m fine. But this case is, well, it’s exceptional, isn’t it?’

  He nodded, and walked over to a coffee percolator he’d had installed for them. ‘Oh yeah. This guy makes the Marquis de Sade look like jolly old Saint Nick.’ He poured out two mugs. ‘Cream? Sugar?’

  ‘Both, please.’ Stella pushed the files a little further away. ‘I’ve studied a lot of historical psychopathic killer cases,’ she said slowly. ‘Most have had elements of sadism, often sexual sadism, but this . . . be honest, Lee, have you come across one as bad as this before?’

  He shook his head. ‘If I’m honest, no. Most of the crazies I’ve chased down, or read about, are more jazzed up about the actual killing part, you know? But like you say, our man here seemingly puts it off for as long as he can manage. For him, it’s all about the pain, and inflicting it for as long as possible. I think their deaths are almost an annoying inconvenience to him. Obviously the dagger to the eye isn’t meant to kill; they’re already dead. It’s his flourish. Have you got to the part about the fingerprints yet?’

  ‘No, but I already know he doesn’t use gloves or make any attempt to wipe his prints from the scene.’ Stella reached for the file again.

  ‘Don’t bother; I’ll spare you the trouble. His dabs are all over the knives – well, their handles, anyway; they’re automatically wiped off the blades when he stabs the girls. He just doesn’t care.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit odd?’

  ‘Yup. Even with crimes of passion you usually find some attempt to wipe prints afterwards. But these aren’t crimes of passion, are they? They’re more like surgical procedures, meticulously planned from start to finish. Yet this fingerprint business is unbelievably sloppy and careless. I can’t begin to work out what the guy’s playing at.’

  Stella looked thoughtful. She absent-mindedly tapped out a cigarette from the pack on the table beside her and lit it. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Lee,’ she said suddenly, ‘I didn’t offer you one.’

  He waved the pack away. ‘Not right now, thanks. But I’m glad you’ve started calling me Lee.’

  ‘What? Oh . . . yes, of course . . . now, these prints. Presumably no one’s found a match for them yet.’

  ‘Not in police records down here in the Keys, Miami, or Southern Florida, no. Obviously we’re spreading the search.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Stella blew out smoke, shaking her head as she did so. ‘I’ll bet you won’t find anything, however much further afield you look.’

  Foster raised an eyebrow. ‘You sound very sure.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I think it’s rather obvious. Leaving prints like this is so completely out of
kilter with all the rest of it, isn’t it? I propose that we assume our killer has never been in any kind of trouble with the law, and therefore he’s confident his fingerprints aren’t held on records anywhere. He knows he can’t be tracked down that way.’

  ‘Sure! But when we catch him through other means we’ll get a match in about ten seconds and straight to Old Sparky he goes.’

  ‘If you catch him, you mean. He doesn’t believe you will. That’s the explanation for this, Lee. Like a lot of psychopaths, he’ll be a complete, raging narcissist. He’s getting a huge kick out of taunting you by deliberately leaving his fingerprints behind. It’s classic catch-me-if-you-can behaviour.’

  Foster looked distinctly put out. ‘Well, that’s no good to me, is it? If you’re right, these prints won’t be the slightest use in catching him until we’ve . . . well, caught him, if you get me.’

  She shook her head. ‘Nil desperandum, and all that. The fact that he’s arrogant and over-confident enough to play such a reckless game means, in itself, that he’s vulnerable. That’s what I was referring to last night when I mentioned his Achilles heel. I need to do some thinking on this but we may have identified his chief weak point: hubris. We should be able to play on it. Give me time.’

  The FBI man stared at her.

  ‘You certainly think differently, I’ll give you that,’ he said at last. ‘But when we do get the cuffs on him, surely he’ll be sorry about the prints then?’

  For the first time in the conversation, Stella laughed. ‘Good God no!’ she replied. ‘Once he’s got over the shock of being arrested, he’ll want full credit for what he’s done. I guarantee you he’ll plead guilty. He’s so proud of himself; of his ingenuity, his cunning.’

  The FBI detective scratched his chin.

  ‘OK. So what does that make him? Crazy-clever, or crazy-stupid?’

  Stella didn’t hesitate. ‘Oh, despite flawed behaviour and thinking resulting from excessive self-adoration I think he’s a very, very bright individual. I know you use the terms blue-collar and white-collar worker over here.’