Bad Signs

by R.J. Ellory

  It was as they left the Webster house that Koenig said something to Nixon that put it all in perspective.

  “You want to find a boy like this, you have to think like him.”

  That was the kicker, the real wrench in the gut.

  Clarence Luckman was a boy, not even a man, and he had done this thing.

  It chilled Garth Nixon to the bone, and he was not a man to be easily unsettled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The details of the white pickup arrived at the Tucson Sheriff’s Department just before eleven that Tuesday morning. Had the call-out on the Parselle girl come a fraction later duty detective John Cassidy would have been in his office to see the report. Perhaps he would have given it some mind, perhaps not. It would only be later that the details of that vehicle and the scene he was to find in Deidre Parselle’s apartment would become connected.

  Cassidy was all of thirty-four, still ardent and purposeful enough to believe that right was right, wrong was wrong, and there was an identifiable division between the two. He had come into the sheriff’s department in June of 1950, just three months after his twentieth birthday. He worked hard, asked questions, studied, paid attention, was sufficiently humble to believe he knew nothing until he knew something, and had been promoted to detective in August of 1962. By that time he had been married to Alice Frankenshaw for four years and three months. They had always said that when he was promoted to detective they would think about starting a family. They did more than think about it, they worked hard at it, and for the first eighteen months it seemed that a family was not something they were destined to possess.

  In the spring of 1964 John drove Alice to a specialist clinic in Phoenix and she was examined and inspected and questioned and probed. They came back and told the Cassidys that there was no identifiable pathological reason that Alice could not bear children. Which begged the question, was there something wrong with John? They kept on trying, and in August of 1964, just at the point where they figured it was time for John to also be examined and inspected and questioned and probed, she caught. Neither of them could have been happier.

  The Cassidys lived in a house on Brawley Street, a house that was bought and paid for in full. After the death of John’s mother three years before he’d sold the house his parents had lived in for the best part of a quarter century. It was the house where he’d spent his teenage years, and though there was a sense of nostalgia and affinity, there was a stronger sense that it was their home, not his. He felt nothing when the family property was bought, nothing but the promise of a new future. He bought the Brawley house for cash, had a little left over to redecorate and modernize the kitchen, and though it was small it would serve him and Alice just fine until they decided to have a second baby. John’s father, Eugene, a brusque and businesslike man even when he was in the best of moods, had passed away from cancer of the liver all of eight years earlier. He had worked for the Midwest Railroad Company for the eleven years since his release from the U.S. army at the end of the war. He had seen action in France and Belgium. That was all he ever said. He had seen action. The expression he wore when he said it made it clear that it was not something he wished to discuss. He had lost a brother out there, a younger brother, and there seemed a sense of hardheaded intolerance toward any non-Americans since that point. His opinion about his only son’s chosen vocation was never voiced. When John graduated the police academy Eugene was there to see him. Afterward, at the small soiree his mother had arranged for close family and friends, Eugene had taken his son aside and looked at him for what seemed like an interminable time. Gripping his shoulders firmly, looking directly into his eyes as if to gauge the very heart and soul of him, he had merely smiled and nodded his head. That was the best acknowledgment his father had ever given him. It was all John could have hoped for and more. You did okay by me, that moment said. You are my son, and I am proud to call you so.

  When Eugene contracted cancer and was diagnosed, he said little if anything. He resigned himself to death as a man resigns himself to going to bed. It was what it was, and it was nothing more complicated. When John’s mother cried, she cried alone. She did not share her grief with her husband, and it stayed that way until the moment he closed his eyes for the very last time. He accepted no remedy save doses of morphine to ease the pain toward the end, and he expressed no wish for treatment. He was not a religious man, but he seemed to believe in the fatalistic nature of things. This was supposed to be, this was the way that had been chosen for him, and who was he to question some higher dictate? He passed away in the early morning of Monday, August 13, 1956.

  The funeral was on the following Friday, the 17th, and Alice went with John as a courtesy. At that time they’d had known each other for little more than six months, and would not be married for the better part of another two years. They sat separately, John with the family, Alice with the family’s friends, but at the wake that followed he stayed by her side and talked to almost no one but her. Perhaps he had already decided that the closeness he felt for her then would be the closeness that defined the remainder of their lives together. He knew there was no question of anyone else. He knew he would marry her. He knew she felt the same way. And once they were married, their relationship continued as if nothing had changed but the element of cohabitation. They fit. It was that simple. And they seemed to fit in all ways possible. Where he was tidy, she was clean. Where he was pragmatic, she was imaginative. Where he was relentlessly hard-working, she taught him to relax, something that he seemed incapable of doing, even at the most appropriate of times.

  As John Cassidy drove out to Dee Parselle’s apartment that late Tuesday morning he was aware of the fact that Alice had passed her first trimester, that all was going well, that there were no adverse indications, and that—if everything continued as predicted—he would be a father in April of the following year.

  The scene he found in Deidre Parselle’s apartment blanched his mind of his parents, of Alice, of the baby, of trimesters and birth classes and choosing colors for a nursery. The scene he found cleared his nostrils, raised the hairs on the back of his neck, broke a sweat beneath his hairline, and caused him to hesitate for a good forty-five seconds before he dared step into the room.

  From eyewitness reports Deidre Parselle had somehow managed to crawl out of her front room and onto the walkway above the rear yard. It was here that she had collapsed, and it was here that she’d been found. An ambulance had been called, the police too, and while Deidre was rushed to the hospital an initial examination of the scene was undertaken to try and determine what nightmare had unfolded there.

  It was this same scene that confronted Cassidy as he hesitated in the doorway of the apartment. The girl had been stabbed three or four times from initial reports, but it could have been more. She would make it, but she was traumatized, sedated, in and out of surgery, and saying nothing of her attacker. She seemed so far beyond rational communication that any clear description was impossible.

  The quantity of blood on the carpet surprised Cassidy. There was also a kitchen knife—heavy, bloodstained and damning. Cassidy got as close to it as he could, used his ballpoint pen to turn it slightly, to tilt it gently against the light. The blade was thick with clots, but there seemed to be no evidence of any clear print. He also noted that the telephone cable had been pulled from the wall, and the telephone itself was on the kitchen floor. The assailant had presumably done this upon entering the apartment as a precautionary measure. He kneeled back on his haunches and stayed immobile for a while. Uniforms were in the doorway, one of them on the walkway outside the front door to ensure that unauthorized persons did not enter and compromise the integrity of the crime scene, and Cassidy took the time to just look, to perceive, to absorb and try to understand what was there in front of him. Psychology fascinated him. Psychology had been afforded no significant place in criminal detection, but the rationale and mentality and perspective of the perpetrator seemed to him all-important. Perhaps one day they
would start to consider such things, but at the moment he was limited to what he could see with his eyes, what he could touch with his hands, the answers he received with his ears. Beyond that it was all suspicion, supposition, and superstition. Oddly enough, it was only Alice who listened to him with interest when he spoke of such things. Alice—all of five two, a hundred and ten pounds, petite and demure and delicate, and yet possessive of a stronger mind and stronger stomach than most of the veteran police officers he knew—believed her husband when he expressed his opinions, that someday soon the method of investigation would shift in a completely different direction, that they would start to spend money at federal level to investigate the motives and methods and viewpoints of hardened criminals. There was a reason for the crimes. There was always a reason. If they could understand and appreciate where that reasoning came from, well, then there might be a way to predict and prevent such things happening.

  But for now it was simply the facts: the probative physical evidence, the fingerprints, the eyewitness statements, the girl in the hospital.

  Cassidy shared a few words with the uniforms who had responded to the call-out.

  The call had come in at 10:31, a call from the girl’s landlady. Rent collection day was always the last Friday of the month, in this case the 27th, but the landlady—Rena Fitzgerald—was planning a few days away with her sister in Prescott, and had called Deidre on the previous Saturday afternoon and arranged to collect the rent that morning. Hence she had come over, and thus she had found the girl on the walkway. Why had the arrangement been made for a Tuesday morning? Wouldn’t Deidre have been at work? A call to the orthodontist’s office verified that Deidre had taken a day off. Did this have anything to do with the time of her attack? Had her assailant been aware of her taking a day off, and had planned the attack in such a way as she would not be missed until the Wednesday morning when she failed to show for work? No one could verify that save the assailant himself, and if that was the case then he must have known her. The first line of investigation would be to question the landlady, determine whether she had touched or moved anything in the apartment. Subsequently he would question Deidre’s colleagues, anyone who might have known her professionally, anyone who might have had access to employee information at her place of work. Next would be her friends, and beyond that he would pursue any line of inquiry regarding social gatherings, recent events she had attended, any clubs, groups, hobby circles or church congregations she belonged to. This was an attempted murder, no question. If the girl died, well, it would be his third homicide investigation. The first had been the strangling of a wife by a jealous husband, only for the husband to find out that the wife had never been unfaithful. The second was a heartbreaker. A young girl, all of eight years old, caught between an abusive father and an alcoholic mother. The mother wanted to leave, the father wanted to prevent her. The mother wanted to take the girl. The father wished to deny her. To solve the problem he killed the child. Shot her dead while she slept. Then he took an overdose of sleeping tablets and drank a fifth of whiskey. He neither took enough pills nor drank enough liquor, and he woke up a day and a half later in a police cell. That had been a year before, and he was up in the penitentiary at Flagstaff awaiting the result of his second appeal against the death penalty. His appeal wouldn’t wash. He would go to the chair. It was just a question of how long he could get the state to prevaricate.

  In Cassidy’s view, the attack upon Deidre Parselle was the most important case of his career to date. His rationale was simple. The first two murders had been murders, of course, but they had been emotional killings, crimes of passion. Jealousy, envy, revenge, whatever the feeling behind the action had been, they had not been planned and premeditated for pleasure. The attack on the Parselle girl, the fact that she had been stabbed, left for dead in her own apartment, indicated something else entirely. This had been for some other reason. There were no signs of rape or sexual molestation, so what possible motive could someone have had? Pleasure perhaps? At least whatever degree of sick pleasure such an attack would engender in the perpetrator. And then there was the stabbing itself. The perpetrator had not cut her throat. He had not stabbed her once through the heart. He had stabbed her in the breasts and the shoulder. Symbolic of womanhood, motherhood, the womb and the breasts. The growth and care of children. Had he stabbed her with the intent to deny her children? Was this a psychological attack as well as physical? There had been rage, but a controlled and channeled rage. There had been anger, but the anger appeared focused and concise. There was a method to his madness, a motivation to it, a reasoning behind why he had done this thing. That, and that alone—once identified—could narrow the number of persons they would be looking for. Cassidy believed this, believed it with conviction, and he made notes while he was there in the apartment so he would not forget his train of thought while present at the scene. The fundamental truth was the Deidre Parselle attack excited him—cerebrally, almost physiologically. There was a rush of excitement in his lower gut, the sense that here he had found something to challenge his preconceptions about the nature of the criminal mind. He would speak of it later with Alice, and though he could never divulge the specific details of the crime scene, though he could never share the results of his interviews and inquiries, he could give her the general gist of the thing, the way it felt, the way it appeared to be going, and she would play devil’s advocate and challenge his assumptions every step of the way. Intuitively, he felt this case was important, and he believed that something important would come of it.

  The Pima County medical examiner arrived shortly before noon. With him came a freelance photographer who was employed on contract to the police department for such work. Fifty-three years old, hardened and cynical and world-weary, he nevertheless visibly paled as Cassidy explained what had happened.

  “Just when you think you’ve seen the very worst, someone comes along and tries a little harder,” he said. His flashgun popped and the scene was caught in a flash of brilliant luminosity. Almost monochrome in its starkness, Cassidy was momentarily startled by the unnaturalness of the scenario. He knew that once the carpet was replaced, once the blood spatter was cleaned up and the walls repainted, it would be no one but Deidre who would remember what had really happened here. And, in time, even those memories would fade. Perhaps.

  Cassidy stood on the walkway for a moment, and then he made his way down to the car. He suspected that the knife would give no prints, that it had been wiped clean, and if it did they would be partial and smudged and inconclusive. This was the way of such things. This was where such investigations began—with too little information, too few facts, and in truth it was where most of such investigations also ended.

  John Cassidy did not hold out a great deal of hope for the identification and arrest of Deidre Parselle’s attacker, but he was going to do his utmost. Not just for her, but for all of the victims who wound up with no one to give a damn.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Elliott Danziger stood before the mirror in the clothing store and looked at himself. Tan-colored chinos, a blue button-down shirt, a leather jacket, brown boots. He looked like a ranch hand with money, a famous rodeo star home for the weekend. The store clerk told him he looked a little like James Dean. Elliott figured the guy for a homo maybe, and he didn’t respond.

  He paid the money and left the store, found a diner on Bayard Street and sat in a booth by the window and looked at girls while he ate his lunch. After leaving the woman’s apartment the night before, he’d found a rough boarding house at the edge of the suburb. He went in, paid for one night, shut himself in the room, and washed the blood off his jeans. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and cried. He didn’t know why he was crying. He did not feel sorry for what he had done. He did not feel guilty. In considering it, he perhaps felt a degree of shame. He wondered what he would say to her if he ever met her again. Would he tell her Sorry? He didn’t think so. He didn’t know what he would say. He thought about what he had done a
nd then he tried to focus on the girl, but his mind drifted toward the knife and the stabbing and the blood, and it was in those moments that he felt most aroused and excited. Afterward he wondered if such thoughts made him a crazy person. He didn’t think so.

  His jeans were still damp when he put them on in the morning, but it didn’t matter. He walked around for a while, had some breakfast, bought himself the new duds, and threw the old clothes away. He still had upwards of six hundred and fifty dollars in cash. Now he needed a car. Buying one was out of the question. A few bucks for some new clothes was acceptable, but a car? Secondly, he had no driver’s license, and it didn’t matter how much money he had, without a license he wasn’t getting a legit car, simple as that.

  There was no hurry. He could enjoy a little of Tucson. The girls sure were pretty enough to start a prison riot, and the thing that had happened the night before had given him a taste for a little excitement.