“No problem. I’ve got plenty time. But there’s one thing about the Baby Ghost Killer I’m sure of now. Whoever is doing this—no matter how he got started in the first place—his primary motivation is to show us how smart he is. That’s the ultimate goal. To humiliate the police and show us his superior mind. He’s taunting us.”
“I think you’re right. Absolutely. But as a clinician, I’ll guarantee you there is something else terribly wrong besides a desire to stick it to the police. When we catch him we’ll find someone who is legally sane. Brilliant, highly organized, but totally crazy from a mental health standpoint.”
My eyes widened. Psychologists weren’t supposed to call people crazy.
She tapped the end of a cigarette against her gold case and paused just long enough to fish her lighter from her purse.
“Another thing that is bothering me is the length between his first crime and the last two. The Ghost Baby at the Elizabeth Polly Park was over ten years ago. Now we are dealing with a Ghost Baby murder at the Garden of Eden and another one in rapid succession at Council Grove. Ten years. That’s a long time between crimes. Was he locked up somewhere?”
Harold looked at her solemnly, his dark eyes sorrowfully mirroring his and Josie’s grief at not being able to make a bit of progress. “It’s a long time, but not unheard of. Look at Dennis Rader, the BTK killer. He waited thirty years before he started again. Or the Unabomber. It’s ominous that the last two Ghost Baby murders—Garden of Eden and then the Madonna of the Trail are close together.”
They were leaving something out. “And the unspeakable torture the Suters are going through,” I reminded them. “It’s easy to overlook that family because the images of little babies are imprinted on our brains. Like the after-burst of a bright light or the blindness from staring at the sun. Aren’t the babies all we can see? That’s true for me. Frozen babies.”
Josie nodded and Harold looked away.
“But in some way the Suters are connected to the Baby Ghost murders. For that poor mother and father there is one child murdered. One missing. What did those poor people do that some maniac would focus on them?”
***
We went to Josie’s townhouse. I didn’t intend to go back to Western Kansas until the next day. Josie rapped lightly at the door and it was opened by a middle-aged Hispanic woman who held Tosca in her arms. The little dog gave a faint yip and she transferred the trembling shih tzu into Josie’s arms.
“She’s had a good day.” She looked intently at Josie and then at me.
“My sister, Lottie,” Josie explained. “We’re twins. Obviously.” She made a face. “Thank you. Will you be available tomorrow if I need you?”
“No, I’ll be sitting with my grandchildren. But I think Tosca will be just fine. There’s nothing really wrong with her,” she said disapprovingly. “Just nerves.”
Josie managed a weak smile.
“Nerves?” I raised an eyebrow.
“Apparently. Her appetite is off so I took her to the vet here when we got home. He examined her thoroughly and said she just needed to be back in her own surroundings for a while. I think being in Western Kansas brought back too many bad memories of past experiences.”
She was serious! I kept a straight face and tried to look concerned but I think Tosca sensed that I thought she should simply straighten up because she took one look at me, sniffed, and snuggled down further into Josie’s arms.
“I need a drink. Would you do the honors, Lottie, while I tend to Tosca who obviously needs some special attention?” She buried her nose in the dog’s fur.
Oh, boy. Gladly. If ever I needed a shot of good scotch. I carried my suitcase into the spare bedroom and then went back into the living room and walked over to her bar. There was a variety of alcohol but, as usual, only one bottle of scotch, a Glenlivet Nadurra Oloroso. I never knew what brand of scotch I would find.
Josie did not drink regularly and was an experimenter when it came to scotch. Only one bottle at a time, never decanted, unless she was entertaining, and I hardly fell into the honored visitor category. She has one of the most beautiful sets of crystal I’ve ever seen and I carefully opened the bottle and poured the amber liquid into thin glass tumblers.
To her credit, when she came to Western Kansas she never said a word about our motley collection of gift bottles, mostly presented by guests during hunting season and selected because the names were cute.
Once a grateful pheasant hunter presented me a bottle of Crown Royal and a quilt she had handmade from purple velvet Crown Royal bags, prominently displaying the gold embroidered label on every block. There was even a special entry class for Crown Royal designs at our county fair. Keith mostly drank his dreadful home brew instead of bourbon so the aging bottle still sat among the casual collection of misfits we referred to as our liquor supply.
I gave Josie a glass and smiled at Tosca nestled in her lap. Classical music came from magnificent speakers that were embedded somewhere. The centerpiece of the room was her antique Steinway concert grand piano. It had been restored, she told me once, and cost over one-hundred-twenty-five-thousand dollars. Although people in Western Kansas are awed by her ability with the violin—fiddle, when she switches styles—she is a stunning pianist and was once faced with the heartbreaking realization that she was too self-protective to reveal the passion necessary to move onto the concert stage.
It was not only a matter of the time she would have to spend practicing. Only in music did Josie let it all hang out. But that was not for other people to see.
I sipped my scotch, lulled by the music and the shifting play of light on the highly polished wood floors. The faint exquisite odor of her Joy perfume scented the room. A couple of hours later, Josie coaxed me from my chair and led me to the bedroom and turned down the white satin spread. A room fit for a queen. There were silk pajamas lying on the pillow. I barely had the energy to undress and put them on before I fell into the bed.
But our talk, I thought dully. Our fun night. This was supposed to be like a sleepover. Instead I had acted like Tosca and ducked my head and squeezed my eyes shut against images of tiny babies and little boys who couldn’t walk right or talk right.
I slept like the dead.
***
Sunlight filtered into the room. I didn’t want to wake up. I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to be a wife, or stepmother, or undersheriff, or regional director, or anything much. I just wanted to go back to bed. I wasn’t groggy from drink but from the consequences of oversleeping. I headed for the bathroom, then called for my sister.
“Josie?” She didn’t answer and I wrapped a terry robe around me, shoved my feet into slippers and padded on out to the kitchen. There was a note by the coffee pot.
“Have a class today. Make yourself at home. Tosca is at day care.”
Finally, all coffeed up and fortified with a couple pieces of toast, I collected my toiletries and started a hot shower to see if I could get some blood flowing.
I was dimly aware of the phone vibrating as I shampooed my hair. I checked it after I toweled off.
There was a text from Keith:
Come home ASAP. All hell is breaking loose.
***
I drove home with a minimum of stops. When I walked inside the house Keith, Sam, and Dorothy were sitting around the kitchen table. And in the great room, pacing in front of the fireplace, was Keith’s oldest daughter, Elizabeth.
“Hello, Lottie,” she said without a trace of warmth.
“Elizabeth,” I acknowledged her and walked past the kitchen crew to put my purse in the closet and hang up my coat. I unwrapped my scarf, removed my heavy knitted cap, squared my shoulders and turned to face the group. I wanted to talk to Keith alone first, but obviously that was not going to be possible.
“What’s going on?” That there was trouble I had understood from Keith’s text. I
n fact, anytime Elizabeth was around there was trouble. If it wasn’t there to begin with she simply brought it with her from Denver. She is a lawyer, “wicked smart” as Obama had once said of Hilary Clinton, and could outthink, outsmart, out-talk practically anyone I knew. Amazonian in height and posture, her blazing blue eyes could ferret out the truth before most people could get their wits together.
She did not like me and hadn’t from the beginning. She was the one who found her mother, reported the death, and helped her siblings get their lives back together. She deeply resented her father’s having married a woman younger than she. No matter what I did or said she would simply never get over me. What we had settled for was a superficially civil relationship that functioned without forcing others in the family to choose sides.
Elizabeth took it on herself to bring me up to date. “An asshole of a psychologist came blazing down here this morning like someone out of an old Western, all puffed up with authority, and stormed into Sam’s office like he owned the place.”
Ah, while I had been lolling around on Josie’s silken sheets. Served me right. Ferguson had obviously made a beeline for Western Kansas and Sam’s office. I recalled the way Ferguson had invaded the Regional Room a short time ago.
“I’m a complete stranger,” Elizabeth raged, “but he didn’t even stop to consider that he might not have any business talking about stuff in front of me. I mean really! Or question what I was doing there or anything else.”
My eyes asked the unspoken question. What was she doing there, anyway?
“I had come home to see Aunt Dorothy,” she said as though she had heard my thoughts. “When I talked to Dad the other day he said she was here. I have a couple of days off so I thought I would buzz down. Besides, I didn’t like the way my father sounded.”
“Oh, God.” Keith gave a disparaging flap of his hand. But she continued talking about him as though he wasn’t present. Naturally if there were something wrong with Keith I was to blame. She would get to that very quickly.
“Anyway, I got home last night. This morning Dad told me that Dorothy had rented a place in town. I called and she was at Sam’s office. I hadn’t been there thirty minutes when your colleague stormed in.”
“He’s not my colleague.”
“Anyway, Commander Asshole started in on Sam right away. With me and Dorothy sitting right there.” She paused. “Which was rude.”
“Rude was the least of my troubles,” Sam mumbled.
“Anyway, he had reports on three members of the team and wanted them to submit to polygraph tests.”
“He doesn’t have the authority to demand that.” I pulled up a chair and joined them at the table, stunned that Ferguson would go this far.
“That’s not the only thing he doesn’t have the authority to do,” Sam said. “He demanded, demanded I tell you, to know what was put in the evidence room. Hell, all I had to do was tell him it was an old notebook that came to us from the historical society and that would probably have been the end of the whole thing. Would have done it, too, if he’d asked nice, but I didn’t have a chance to think before Wonder Woman here,” he gestured toward Elizabeth with his pipe, “jumped right into the fray like she had been involved right along.”
“You’re lucky I was there.” Elizabeth’s hands were on her hips, her legs splayed apart.
“That’s debatable,” Sam retorted. “Anyway, he said ‘and just who in the fuck are you?’ and she said she was Elizabeth Fiene, and that’s when everything went to hell.”
Elizabeth scoffed. “Went bad way before that. Anyway, Commander Asshole said this was unreal—having another Fiene to deal with…wasn’t there ‘anyone in this damn county that wasn’t related?’ He said he was going to hire a lawyer to check into the legitimacy of having one family involved in every level of law enforcement in an area.”
Sam rolled his eyes.
“I told him that if he got a lawyer it had better be a damned good one, because I was the best lawyer this side of the Mississippi and that’s when he stormed off.”
Oh, boy.
“And you, Dorothy? Where were you in all this?”
“Just observing, as usual. Thinking. But I agree with Sam that it wouldn’t have hurt to let him know it was an old notebook. But I wonder how someone as hotheaded as Ferguson got to be a psychologist?”
“My sister says a lot of her colleagues don’t have any business treating people. That they are classic narcissists. But that’s true of any profession. I don’t care what. Teaching, medicine, politics. Ferguson is used to being at the top of a chain of command. Whatever he says gets done. He hasn’t been out of the military that long. He hates being bested by women and, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m way ahead of him at every turn. This has gone wrong for him. He didn’t expect it.”
“What I think has gone wrong is that he is a natural born asshole to begin with.” Elizabeth’s face flushed. She was a prosecutor and specialized in seeking justice for battered women. And she was capable of using other language. She talks real nice in a courtroom.
“Well, where is he now?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care.”
“I think he went back to Topeka,” Sam volunteered.
Then we all fell silent as though when we removed Ferguson from the conversation there was nothing to talk about. How are things going otherwise, Sam?” I said finally. “Anything else to talk about while we are all gathered here together?” It came out sarcastic. But honestly the peace I had hoped to bring with me from Josie’s just vaporized. I had hoped to jump-start my normal routine. Finish my organizational chart for the regional center. Read some more about narcissistic disorders.
“Dorothy has a great idea.”
So that’s how she happened to be his office when Elizabeth came to town. Another great idea. But I couldn’t help but notice that he had progressed from “Miss Mercer” to “Dorothy” and that she dropped by his office an awful lot.
“Dorothy has been thinking about Duck Boy. County business, I know, but I since you are still undersheriff, it’s your business too.”
But this was not Elizabeth’s business. She’s a quick study. “Whoops! I have stuff to do upstairs.”
“No need to leave,” Keith said. “It won’t make any sense to you anyway without knowing the whole story.”
“I need to go for a walk anyway.” She went into the utility room and retrieved her coat and hat.
Sam took the lead. “Dorothy says our first step should be to figure out if he really saw something or is making up stories. Truth or fiction. Tales from a boy who desperately needed to be admired or the outpouring of someone in the midst of a tragic existence? She’s come up with the ideal way.”
I must have looked skeptical.
“No, really, Franklin Slocum obviously made it back to his special tree the next morning just like he said he was going to or we wouldn’t have the book. He figured out a way to bury it even with his limitations, but what became of the handkerchief? Is it there too? Wrapped in plastic? According to his book he intended to bury it. If he managed to do that and it has bloodstains and semen on it, that will be proof of what Franklin claimed he saw.“
Dorothy chimed in. “Not only will we have proof that Franklin is telling the truth, we will have the murderer’s DNA contained in the semen and also blood from the little boy.”
Sam nodded. “We would know his identify and together these would lead to the kind of solid evidence that’s a lead-pipe cinch for a prosecutor to prove his case.”
“Provided he’s in the system.”
“Yes, provided he’s in the system.”
“Won’t the evidence have deteriorated after all these years?”
“In New York,” Dorothy said, “we would put the handkerchief through all kinds of tests. And not assume in advance that the evidence was no longer any good. Tests. Base it all on te
sts.”
I smiled. To her credit, this was the first time she had thrown New York at me. I rose and headed for the kitchen to get a drink of water while I mulled this over. It was a good idea, but with rotten timing. Winter, with the ground frozen solid, was no time to go digging around for a little piece of cloth. But we couldn’t wait until spring thaw.
“Your call, Lottie,” Keith said.
“No, this is county right now. It’s up to Sam.”
“Let’s do it, then. But you’re the best person to call Horn. He brought the book to you.”
“Okay, I’ll call Martin right now. He’ll have to lead us to where he found the book.”
“And I’ll call Oscar Smith and make sure it’s okay to go digging around on his land,” Sam said.
“Tomorrow morning. Bright and early. He’ll meet us here,” I reported when I hung up the phone. “He’s happy to help.
“There’s no need for us all to go.” Keith glanced at his aunt. “Dorothy, why don’t you stay inside here where it’s warm?”
That got him as scornful a look as I had seen in a while.
Chapter Twenty-three
We took two snowmobiles. Keith’s was a real workhorse. Built for utility, in addition to driver and passenger seats, it could carry another person on the cargo platform. Although it was originally designed to transport injured persons in ski areas, on our farm it was most often used to track down cattle. When there is heavy prolonged snowfall, cattle search for shelter and if an electric fence is down, hard telling where they will end up. Owners who don’t have a snowmobile call Keith to help round them up. The worst-case scenario is when the animals stray onto a road and cause an accident.
Several times Keith had rushed to ponds to rescue kids or adults who had misjudged the thickness of ice and needed to get to the emergency room as fast as possible. He always carries coils of rope and solar blankets. Just in case.
Martin’s was a hot little custom job, bright red and made for speed. It was a far cry from a racing snowmobile but he had tricked it out to look like one. He could probably run circles around Keith, although there was no thought of that today. In his early forties, Martin had a shiny broad face and a wide grin. He taught the 4-H woodworking class and, by the number of blue ribbons his students racked up at the county fair every year, I knew a fierce competitive streak lurked beneath his affable exterior. Besides, his Facebook posts indicated that he loved informal rural snowmobile races and went coyote hunting every chance he got.
Fractured Families Page 22