“I’m still not sure. I mean, to most he probably came off as a simpleton, a man apart from the crowd, shunned for being different, lonely, and socially awkward—the kind of person you’d avoid if there was any possibility of doing so. Yet I was convinced that he was a very complex individual, albeit a man whose mind was irreparably damaged, a man with serious issues and concerns, a man who lived in his own aberrant reality.”
God, I’m getting the creeps.
“I guess you didn’t see much of the town on your way in—I mean with it raining like in biblical times and all.”
“No, not much at all. Why?”
“Well, Rehoboth Beach isn’t exactly a glamorous destination. It’s kind of an old-world seaside town; something of a sleepy little hole in the wall. Not exactly a place where folks’ lives come to no good. We were all pretty shocked when Lindsay Harding disappeared.”
“No doubt. What was she like?”
“Lindsay was a pretty girl, well liked—a Yale Law School grad with one last summer to enjoy before beginning a fulltime job working for a D.C. law firm.”
“So she was about twenty-five?”
“Twenty-four.”
“She had everything to live for, didn’t she?” I sighed. “So what happened?”
“Connor Patrick happened.” Benoit pried off his shoes and crossed his ankles. “I first met Connor Patrick at the Rehoboth Beach Police Station shortly after Penny Harding had reported her daughter’s disappearance. Connor had been brought in for questioning, but was not cooperating with the investigating detectives. They had interrogated him for hours, during which time he mumbled and muttered, rocked and stammered, but had not given any intelligent answers to their questions. A small town like Rehoboth Beach can’t afford a fulltime department psychologist, so I consult with them from time to time.”
“So why did they suspect Connor?”
“Like I said, he was a troubled young man. He mowed lawns to make ends meet. He mowed the Hardings’ lawn that summer, and Lindsay’s closest friend told the police that Lindsay felt uncomfortable when he was around. She said that Lindsay and her mom had words over him and that she asked her mom to fire him.”
“I see.”
“I could give you a full personality assessment, but you’d be here long into the fall.” He grinned. “How about I just paint the picture with broad strokes?”
Oh, thank God. “As you see fit.”
“Well, Connor up and disappeared during the investigation, and one place we looked for him was the home of his deceased uncle. The place hadn’t been lived in for years, but there was this old shed, and …” He paused. “I hope you’re ready for this.”
Sounds like this is going to be good. God, I’m ghoulish. “Go for it.”
“I was there when the crime scene boys did their thing. The shed contained a large butcher’s table as well as butcher’s knives and cleavers. There was blood residue in the cuts on the wooden surface. We also saw traces of blood on some of the knives and cleavers where the steel blades joined the wooden handles. They looked as if they had been cleaned but were far from pristine.”
“Sounds suspicious.”
“And then they switched off the lights and did a Luminol test. Practically every surface in the shed glowed with an eerie blue light. It was all covered in blood.”
Cool. I mean, Jesus. “But there’s more, right?”
“A large meat freezer stood in the corner of the shed. The freezer was mostly empty except for neat stacks of small Tupperware containers piled against the inner wall. The freezer was no longer running but the containers were filled with embalming fluid and … each one contained a matched set of human earlobes.”
“Oh my gosh. Earlobes?”
He nodded in a most matter-of-fact way. “Anyway, he was eventually found and confessed to the abduction and murder of Lindsay Harding and a dozen other women. He gave the police the location of Lindsay’s body, just off Route 1 near the Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge. What a nightmare—even with him providing at-site directions, it took a forensics team days to locate Lindsay’s body using a methane probe and dogs.” He sighed. “But she was there, buried in her pj’s, her earlobes missing. He admitted to attacking her in her home and smashing in her head with a bat.”
“Did he say why?”
“The police chalked it up to envy. Apparently Connor enjoyed spending time with Lindsay’s mom and when Lindsay came back from grad school …”
“She messed with their relationship”
He nodded. “It was his confession I found dubious. I didn’t see Connor Patrick as the criminal mastermind type and determinedly argued my position.” He shrugged. “It didn’t matter—the prosecutor had it all, a royal flush of compelling testimony, a confession, the sympathy of the jury, and a display of severed earlobes that made Connor look like the biggest monster since Hannibal Lecter. I’m not saying that he wasn’t guilty of something, but … I’m still not sure how much he was actually responsible for.” He looked me straight in the eye. “Here’s the really unnerving part.”
I can’t take it anymore—just spit it out, would ya?
“As you know, I attended Connor’s execution. Like I said it was a bad night. It was still pouring cats and dogs as I ran back to my car. I jumped in and pulled the door closed. As I sat down I noticed a small Tupperware container resting on the center console.”
A shiver ran down my spine, and I had to take a deep breath before asking, “And inside the container?”
Benoit set his empty mug on the coffee table, sat back, and thatched his fingers. “Do I really have to say?”
“Jesus!”
“Jesus indeed.”
Benoit’s detailed account of Lindsay Harding’s murder investigation answered questions and begged many others. I had no real proof that Phillip Patrick was anything other than a murder victim, but if he was involved in multiple homicides, then we had a pattern—our UNSUB was a vigilante and the Batman nickname he had been given by Glutt took on a second and entirely different meaning. “That’s very revealing—at the very least Connor Patrick had an accomplice, or a copycat.”
“At the very least, but that’s the part of the tale you’ll have to complete, Agent Mather. Reliving the past has made me hungry,” Benoit said. “What about you?”
Almost an hour had passed, yet the storm gave no indication of letting up anytime soon. “If you knew me better, you’d know that’s not even a question.”
“Then let’s be naughty,” Benoit said. “We’ll order in and force some lazy pimple-faced teenager to drive through the storm to deliver exotic delicacies to please our palates.”
“You’re such a ghoul.” My eyes grew wide. “I assume you’re talking pizza?”
“I am indeed. I have a Pizza Hut coupon, two pies and free toppings.”
“Only if I pay—bureau protocol prevents me from accepting gifts during the course of an investigation. I don’t want to be brought up on corruption charges.”
“Then I’m thinking we go for broke and order the Hershey’s Chocolate Dunkers for dessert.”
“Don’t forget the wings—I’m on a lavish per diem. Actually, with the magnitude of the storm outside I may qualify for hazardous duty pay.”
Benoit chuckled. “I’ll go place the order. We’ll be up to our elbows in carbohydrates and oily poultry in thirty minutes or less.”
“Sounds intoxicating.” I yanked out my cell phone. “Okay if I check in?”
“As long as you’re done before the pizza arrives. Cold pizza is about as appetizing as library paste.” Benoit smiled and slid the pocket door closed to give me privacy.
Cabrera’s phone rang ten times before he picked up. “Did I catch you in the can or something?”
“Greetings to you too, Gumdrop,” he said. “Can’t a hardworking civil servant enjoy a good BM?”
I heard someone chuckling in the background. “Who’s there with you?”
He hesitated a long moment before answ
ering, “Glutt.”
It wasn’t like Cabrera to answer with one word. “You having dinner together?”
I heard Glutt comment about something. I recognized her voice in the background.
“Yeah. We had dinner.”
I can’t believe it. “And now I guess you’re what … having dessert? I hope you’re not doing anything that would make Lorraine unhappy.”
Silence.
“Look,” I continued. “I was going to fill you in on my interview, but I guess we’ll do that at another time.”
“Yeah. Can I call you back in a bit?” Cabrera asked.
“Knock yourself out, Dominic.”
Glutt’s witticism regarding her plans to practice marital infidelity came back to me, What the rabbi doesn’t know won’t hurt him … but I hope Lorraine hacks off your newly repaired wiener.
Book II:
Body Parts
Chapter 27
On the road again—I was back in the car, fresh from my trip to Delaware on my way to the Sullivan County coroner’s office, putting on tougher mileage than migrating salmon during an upstream spawning run. As you may have surmised, there were no flights (or pilots crazy enough) to fly out of Rehoboth Beach during the nor’easter, so I took a room for the night and engaged in tawdry phone sex with Liam while I reviewed the files on the three victims. As Benoit had promised, I awoke to crystal clear skies and balmy breezes before my drive to the local airstrip and my flight back to Wurtsboro-Sullivan County Airport.
The contents of Leon Drade’s storage compartment had been analyzed, and some preliminary reports were in from the medical examiner. Cabrera and Glutt the Slut (which was my new pet name for her) were going to meet me at the coroner’s office. Cabrera was a slut too, but his name didn’t rhyme with slut or tart or floozy or tramp or man-whore or any telling derogatory description I could think of. Come to think of it, his name didn’t rhyme with anything. Why is it that if a woman is loose, family and friends ostracize her, but if a man is a playuh, there’s always someone who will jump at the opportunity to buy him a beer?
My journey took me past Grossinger’s again, that rotting carcass of a once-luxurious resort. The old golf course had been purchased after the resort’s demise. It was meticulously groomed and filled with golfers. The juxtaposition of the posh golf course adjacent to the bombed-out hotel really bothered me. To tell the truth, I don’t know why it annoyed me, it just did. I would have asked Benoit about it and what the decaying hotel represented from a psychological perspective, but he talked so slowly … I’d be seventy before he had the mystery sorted out.
Cabrera and his new orthodox squeeze pulled up just behind me. Cabrera looked like the kid who got his hand caught in the cookie jar, and Glutt the Slut, well … she didn’t exhibit guilt in any way, shape, or form. I had trouble making eye contact with either of them. I guess it was the marine in me that disrespected their lack of loyalty to their respective partners.
According to John 8.7: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” That wouldn’t be me with the rock in my hand. I’m far from perfect, but I respect Liam far too much to cheat on him. I had a steamy dream about Ken Morrison the SCUBA dude after meeting him the other day, but I’d never act out on it. Thinking is one thing and doing … well, there’s a big difference in the two. The doing part is what gets us into trouble. It’s what ruins lives and turns ordinary men and women into killers.
The Sullivan County coroner was a woman named Julia Delphy. She was tall and thin with dark hair and a fresh beauty-parlor do. In her white lab coat she looked to be about six feet tall, taller than Cabrera, the slut, or me. She met us in the crime lab, which was all right with me because I had seen more than my share of mortal decomposition over the past few days and didn’t think I could stomach the stench of rotting flesh even one more time.
The four of us sat around a small circular table like the kind you’d expect to see in an office lunchroom. “We only have partial DNA results back but combined with dental records, I can say with complete certainty that the male victim was Leon Drade. Like your John Doe and Phillip Patrick, he did not die from exsanguination or infection, he died of lethal dehydration. I was surprised that the other two medical examiners listed ‘death by starvation’ as the cause of death. Lethal dehydration takes place several days before the body suffers from nutritional deprivation sufficient to cause death.”
Delphy had pretty brown eyes and long eyelashes. She seemed too feminine to deliver such grisly information, but I guess she was doing what she was trained to do, and doing her job with the utmost professionalism. I saw her as one of those women who could compartmentalize her job and keep it separate from her family life—scalpels and microscopes in the lab, and lemonade and freshly baked cookies at home.
She continued, “I used both Christmas Tree stains and the RSID-Semen test to confirm the presence of semen on the two female victims. Both women had anal intercourse with Drade. In addition to finding his semen in their anal cavities, we found coliform bacteria within the opening of his urethra.” She grimaced. “The little bit that was left of it, anyway.”
A visual image came to mind that made me cringe. I looked over at Cabrera. He looked rather pale. “Have we been able to identify the two female victims?” ID of the identical twins, if they were indeed twins, should’ve been as easy to accomplish as shooting fish in a barrel. I mean, let’s face it, twins don’t go missing every day.
“We now have sufficient DNA evidence to confirm that the two women were, in fact, twins,” Delphy said. “As you can imagine, missing monozygotic twins is a rather uncommon occurrence.”
What did I tell you?
She opened a folder and produced a photo of teenage twin sisters. “Eva and Holly Brown were reported missing months ago. Dental records told me all I needed to know. I consulted with a forensic odontologist electronically, and he confirmed my findings.”
“That’s a pretty complete picture, doctor. About the only thing we don’t know is the identity of the UNSUB who targeted and killed Drade. No incriminating DNA to help us find our man?”
“Sorry. No. Your UNSUB was careful not to leave behind any fingerprints or genetic material. Lab studies showed that the guano and urine came from vampire bats, but unless you believe in the myth of Dracula-like vampires, humans morphing into bats and back again, I’m afraid I can’t be of much assistance on that one.”
“I like the Twilight vampires,” Glutt said. “The ones that sparkle in the sunlight.”
Why am I not surprised? Damn Stephenie Meyer and her Twilight Saga—it’s ruined the concept of vampires being minions of the devil and bursting into flame at the first light of day. I stared Glutt down. Who asked you?
She turned away.
Turning back to Delphy, I asked, “Any trace evidence on the parchment award certificate?”
She shook her head and seemed disappointed that she had not been of greater help. “It’s completely clean.”
Our UNSUB was a careful man, a criminal who took painstaking precautions, a person who did not plan on getting caught. What, I wondered, what’s it going to take to get this one to slip up?
Chapter 28
We left Delphy’s morgue and drove back to Park’s morgue, stopping only for a quick lunch break. We ate mostly in silence, which was a shame because I had come to depend on Cabrera for a regular contribution of comic relief. Glutt had severely compromised our group dynamic and, for my money, hadn’t contributed a hill of beans to our investigation. I took the time to fill them in on Wendell Benoit’s account of Lindsay Harding’s murder and the refrigerator filled with earlobes.
“Excuse me,” Glutt said, looking mighty uncomfortable. It looked as if she had finally gotten it and was ashamed of wearing the scarlet letter. “I’ll be right back.” She grabbed her purse and went off, presumably to find the powder room.
I started in on Cabrera the moment she was out of earshot. “How could you?”
�
��I didn’t,” he snapped. “So lighten up.”
“Then why are you acting as if you did?”
“Because I almost did. I wanted to,” he confessed, “but I didn’t.”
“You and Lorraine haven’t been seeing each other a month and you’re already looking at other women? I don’t want to sound shallow, but it’s not as if she’s a buxom temptress with a body like Sofía Vergara. You couldn’t dig down deep enough to say no to a woman who resembles Susan Boyle?”
“Who?”
“The British chanteuse who sings like an angel and looks like a mature Ethel Merman. The one Simon Cowell discovered.”
“Oh, her?” He grimaced. “Look, I feel guilty as hell, Mather, but she made herself very, very available.” He paused and glanced at the restaurant ceiling. “She came to my room and threw herself at me—practically begged. ‘No strings attached,’ she said. ‘Just good guilt-free sex; a one-night stand filled with laughs and sin.’”
“So why do you look like a death row inmate.”
Cabrera picked up a breadstick and nibbled on the end of it. “Because if you weren’t here, I think I might’ve gone through with it—I didn’t want you to know that I shit where I ate.”
I saw Glutt returning from the ladies’ room. “Forget about it, Dom. You were tempted. You kept it in your pants. You get a pass. Just stay strong and think about all the miss-you-sex Lorraine is going to give you when you get home.”
Cabrera winked at me as Glutt sat down. “Anyone want to discuss the case?” he asked. “Any thoughts about this Rules of the Kill business?”
“Let’s connect the dots, shall we?” I unfolded a clean napkin, fished in my pocket for a ballpoint pen, and drew a rough outline of New York State, plotting the kill sites on it: Saranac Lake, Liberty, and Fallsburg, respectively the locations where John Doe, Leon Drade, and Phillip Patrick had been murdered. I indicated each murder with a circle. “Now if we include Claryville, where the bear vault was found …” I marked an X for the added location. “Square miles in between the four points with Saranac Lake as the northernmost point and Fallsburg as the southernmost …” I did some quick calculations based on my recent drives to each location with my iPhone calculator app. “Give or take, I’d say about twenty thousand square miles … But if we cut Saranac Lake out of the equation, the circle shrinks down to about a thousand square miles, and that’s much more manageable coverage wise.”
The Mather Triad: Series Boxed Set (Chloe Mather Thrillers) Page 34