“When was the last time you saw Doreen?” Jerry asked.
Sullivan thought for a moment, and then said: “It must have been a couple of weeks ago. She came every morning at six. She always took the same route around the course. When I read in the paper that she was one of the victims, I thought about those walks …” His voice trailed off. “Then I saw this.”
“Why didn’t Dr. Louria say anything about this when we talked with him the first time?” Charlotte asked.
“I guess he didn’t want to implicate himself further, for which I can’t really blame him,” Jerry replied. “But when we brought him in yesterday, he speculated that Kimberly and Doreen might have been abducted on one of their early morning walks.”
“Also, Doreen’s neighbor said she had last seen her when she was setting out for a walk on the golf course,” Charlotte said.
Jerry nodded, and then turned back to Sullivan. “I was about to come over here to make some inquiries when you called.”
“Two girls killed on our course,” Sullivan lamented in his melodious Irish brogue. “Sweet mother of Jesus.”
“What about Liliana?” asked Charlotte.
“Dr. Louria said she had no interest in taking walks,” Jerry replied. “She only liked to watch television. I have no idea where she might have been killed.” He turned back to Sullivan again. “How did they get here?”
“They drove,” he replied. “They parked out in back of the clubhouse.”
“I wonder how the murderer got the cars back?” Jerry said.
“I think I know the answer to that question,” Sullivan said. “I remember seeing the first girl’s car being towed by a tow truck one morning. It was on Labor Day weekend, which I believe is about the time she disappeared.”
It would have been simple, Charlotte thought. The murderer could have identified himself on the telephone as Dr. Louria. After describing the car, he could have asked the towing company to tow the car to Corinth, and send the bill to him.
Jerry nodded. “Do you remember the name of the towing company?”
Sullivan gave him the name of a local company, and he wrote it down.
“Did you ever see anyone following her?” Jerry asked. “Or did you ever see anyone else out walking at that hour?”
Sullivan shook his head. “Never,” he said. “If we had, we would have stopped them and asked them what they were doing here. Once in a while, we get a dog walker, but that’s about it.”
Jerry turned to nod at the dirt track that led through the middle of the dump area and into the woods on the other side. “Where does that road lead?” he asked.
“It comes out on the old Quarry Road,” Sullivan said. “That’s how we truck our waste out of here. Tires, white goods, old lumber—whatever our regular garbage contractor won’t take.”
“Bodies too, I suspect,” Jerry added.
For the next half an hour, they searched the area between the scene of the murder and the Quarry Road for footprints, tire tracks, and other clues. But the heavy rain of the past two days had obliterated any evidence that might once have existed. Their search was accompanied by the deafening roar of bird song; it was the first really warm day of spring, and the birds were exultant. Although Charlotte’s good shoes were ruined as a result of traipsing through the mud, she thoroughly enjoyed being out in the woods on a fine spring morning. And if their search didn’t yield any clues, it did produce a picture of the murderer’s likely modus operandi. They concluded that he had probably parked his car on the Quarry Road, walked in to the dump area, and concealed himself behind the stockade fence with his extension cord. When his victim had come by, he had jumped out, garroted her from behind, and then carried her body back to his car. The Quarry Road was an ideal site for carrying out such an activity unobserved, Jerry noted. A deeply rutted dirt track, it ran from the Zion Hill Road through the woods that blanketed the hillside behind the church to the old quarry pit that had been the source of the granite that was used for the exterior of the church, and for the exteriors of many of Zion Hill’s other buildings. Along this road, teams of horses had hauled the rough-hewn stone to the site of the church, where it had been cut and set into place by stonemasons such as Jerry’s grandfather. The road ended at an old church retreat house, and the only regular traffic came from local people who used the old quarry pit as a swimming hole during the summer months.
After their exploration of the area, they returned to the clubhouse parking lot with Sullivan, where Jerry radioed headquarters and asked the dispatcher to send the county crime scene unit over to take photographs.
“Wait till the police beat reporters pick up that on their scanners,” Jerry said, and proceeded to give Sullivan some pointers for dealing with the press, which was becoming more and more intrusive.
They were headed back to the police station when, struck by a sudden idea, Charlotte asked Jerry to turn the police car around.
Ten minutes later, they arrived at the church. Finding no one around, they tried the door to the tower and found it unlocked, as they did the door to the belfry stairs. So much for what Peter had said about keeping the tower doors locked, Charlotte thought, as they started up the stairs. Round and round they went, like a snail in its shell, the narrow spiral staircase leading them ever farther upward. Charlotte was getting dizzy, and her calves were beginning to ache when they finally came to the door at the top, and opened it onto the open belfry. Walking under the big iron bells with their bell ropes hanging down, they crossed over to the parapet. Below, the church lawn stretched down to the fairways of the golf course, where the eager beavers were already out in their golf carts, tiny motorized ants on a carpet of green. From this height, the course took on the appearance of a garish modern fabric design, in which the chartreuse discs of the putting greens, the beige, amoeba-like shapes of the sand traps, and the pink crowns of the flowering cherry trees that dotted the fairways were the major motifs. At the foot of the hill, the clubhouse lay nestled in its wreath of greening trees.
Charlotte had wanted to climb the tower for a reason, and she wasn’t disappointed in her purpose: from here, they had a bird’s-eye view of the blacktop road that encircled the golf course like a necklace of gray pearls, with the clubhouse as its clasp. There was only one place where the road was hidden from view for any distance—cut off by an encroachment of the adjoining woods—and that place was the skeet range.
“He could have watched her from here,” Charlotte said. “Until he got a sense of the pattern: what time she arrived, what time she reached the skeet-shooting range.” She paused, and then said: “Watched and waited.”
Jerry nodded. “Sullivan said she always arrived at the same time, and followed the same route.”
As he spoke, the wavy ranks of Canada geese appeared over the woods to the southeast, their long, slender, black necks extended in flight. They were returning from their morning idyll at the quarry pit.
As Sullivan had predicted, they alighted at the water hazard at what Charlotte presumed was the tenth hole, and settled down to preen their feathers. “Creatures of habit,” she said.
12
It was late morning when they arrived back at the police station. Charlotte had asked to look at the crime scene photographs, and Jerry was getting them out for her. Though Peter was now at the top of their suspects list, she still felt that the key to the murderer’s identity lay with his crime scene “signature.” A police detective had once given her his formula for solving a crime. It was “What happened plus why it happened equals who did it.” They were making progress on both the “what” and the “why,” but she felt she might learn something new about the “what” from the crime scene photographs. Jerry had described the circumstances in which the first two skulls had been found to her, but she had never actually seen the photographs.
Jerry had just placed the stack of photographs in her hand when he was interrupted by a knock at the door. “Yeah,” he said. “What is it?”
The dispatche
r stuck her head around the door. “Mrs. Snyder is downstairs, Chief. She’s the lady who found the skull at the Zion Hill Cemetery. She says she’s got something else for you to look at.”
“Send her up,” he said.
The red-faced, overweight woman entered Jerry’s office a few minutes later. She held a leash in one hand, to which a small black and white dog was attached, and a brown paper bag in the other. She held the latter out at arm’s length, as if it contained a vicious animal that was about to strike out at her through the bag. Crossing the room, she deposited the paper bag on Jerry’s desk. “My name is Doris Snyder,” she announced. “I’m the one who discovered the skull in the Zion Hill Cemetery.” She looked down at the dog, who sat quietly, his white vest seemingly puffed out with pride. “Or rather, my dog, Homer, did,” she added.
Jerry sat behind his desk, wearing an expression that fell somewhere between boredom and exasperation.
“Now Homer’s found something else that you may find of interest,” she said. Then she added: “I think you ought to consider deputizing my dog.”
“We’ll see about that, Mrs. Snyder,” Jerry said as he stood up.
“I didn’t touch it, and I wouldn’t advise you to either,” said the formidable Mrs. Snyder as Jerry moved to open the bag.
“Thank you for the advice,” he replied. “But I’m well aware of police procedure.” Opening the bag, he peered inside. Then he went to the door and shouted to the captain in the adjacent office. “Harry,” he said. “Can you get me some newspapers, please?”
The captain appeared with the newspapers a few minutes later, and spread them out on Jerry’s desk. Donning a rubber glove, Jerry reached into the bag and pulled out a bloodstained meat cleaver, which he set down on the newspapers. “Where did you find it?” he asked.
“I didn’t find it,” she said. “Homer found it.”
“Gramps is in the well?” Jerry said.
The woman nodded.
At Charlotte’s perplexed expression, Jerry explained: “Those are the terms in which Mrs. Snyder described her dog’s behavior to me when he found the skull. He raced back to her and circled her several times to let her know that something was wrong. Like on the show Lassie.”
Charlotte remembered the show from the early days of television. “Gramps fell in the well, and he’s got to be saved.” she said.
“You’ve got it,” Jerry said. “Let me rephrase my question, Mrs. Snyder,” he said. “Would you like to tell us where Homer found the meat cleaver?”
“At the foot of the railroad embankment,” she said. “About fifty feet south of the summer house where the bodies were chopped up.”
She’d obviously been reading the newspapers.
“We searched that area thoroughly,” Jerry said, baffled. “We even went over it with a metal detector. I wonder how we missed it.”
“I think I know the answer to that question,” Mrs. Snyder said. “Homer likes to play hide-and-seek. He’ll find an object that he likes, and he’ll toss it into the air, or pick it up in his mouth and drop it again. He’ll play with it for a while, and then he’ll hide it.”
“But he’ll remember where it is,” Jerry said. “I used to have a dog that did that,” he replied in answer to her inquiring look.
“A few days might elapse, a few weeks,” Mrs. Snyder continued. “But when he’s in the area again, he’ll go back to where he hid the object, and start to play with it again.”
“In other words, your dog hid the meat cleaver. I don’t think we should deputize him.” He looked down at Homer, who wagged his white-tipped tail. “I think we should arrest him for tampering with the evidence.”
Mrs. Snyder gave her dog a look of mock sympathy.
“Would you be able to find the place again?” Jerry asked.
She nodded. “It was right in front of an old canoe by the side of the tracks. I think he probably hid it under the canoe.”
Jerry turned to the captain. “I want you to go down there with Mrs. Snyder, Crosby. Search the area again, take some pictures.”
The captain nodded.
Then Jerry thanked Mrs. Snyder, and she and Homer left with the captain. Once they were gone, Jerry said: “It’s a meat cleaver from the restaurant.”
“What restaurant?” Charlotte asked. She was looking through the crime scene photographs. Skipping the ones of the body parts, which she had no desire to see again, she studied the photo of the skull that had been placed on the headstone in the Zion Hill Cemetery.
“Sebastian’s,” he said. “I’ve used it a dozen times to chop the vegetables for stir-frying. It’s a Sabatier,” he added, naming the well-known brand. “It’s also my favorite chopping implement. I love the heft of it.” Picking it up again, he tested its weight.
Charlotte looked up. If the cleaver was from Sebastian’s, that meant that the killer might have been Sebastian himself. “Do you know for sure that it’s from Sebastian’s? I mean, does it have some identifying feature? Or are you saying that it’s similar to a cleaver that you’ve used at Sebastian’s?”
“No,” he snapped. “I don’t know for sure that it’s from Sebastian’s. The name of the restaurant is not engraved on the blade. But I can check to see if their cleaver is missing. If it is, I believe it to be a reasonable conclusion that they are one and the same.”
Charlotte ignored the tone of his voice. “Did you know that Peter was a frequent visitor to the restaurant?” she asked, and proceeded to tell him about seeing him there.
“I’ve seen him there too,” he said.
“Jerry!” she said. “I’ve just thought of something else.”
“What?” he asked.
“The key to the undercroft. Peter would have had access to the key cabinet. He also would have known where the diagram was. But why wouldn’t he have used his own keys?” she asked, remembering the ring of keys that had hung from his belt loop.
Jerry shrugged. “To divert suspicion from himself.” He gave her one of his disarming smiles. “We might have been led to suspect him if the door to the undercroft was unlocked and he was the only one with access to the keys. Don’t you think?” he asked.
“Touché,” she said, and returned her attention to the photograph. The bouquet looked to contain about two dozen lilies of the valley, which was the number that had been ordered in Dr. Louria’s name. “Have the fingerprint results come back?” she asked.
He nodded. “The only fingerprints on the key cabinet were Peter’s,” he said. “Which is exactly what you would expect: he was the only one with legitimate access to it. The same goes for the door to the undercroft. There were no fingerprints on the votive candles, or on the skull.”
Charlotte was now looking at the photograph of the first victim’s skull. Something about the gravestone on which the skull rested looked familiar, and she strained to read the inscription. Then she realized that it was the gravestone on the cover of the pastor’s pamphlet.
Getting up, she passed the photograph across the desk to Jerry. “Take a look at this,” she said. “Do you know whose gravestone that is?”
Jerry looked at the photograph and shook his head.
“It’s the grave of Jules Bourglay, the Leatherman.”
Jerry held the photograph up to the light in order to read the inscription: “‘Final Resting Place of Jules Bourglay of Lyons, France. The Leatherman.’” A big smile broke out on his face. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said as he passed the photograph back to Charlotte.
“Who was it who recently said that a criminal never deliberately leaves any clues at the scene of the crime?” she asked.
As he had predicted, Jerry’s summons of the county crime scene unit to the country club had alerted the press to a new development, and the dispatcher informed them that several reporters were now waiting downstairs to talk with Jerry. At Charlotte’s suggestion (she was an old hand at diversionary techniques), Jerry asked one of his sergeants to turn on the siren and the lights of his police car. While
the reporters were thus distracted, Charlotte and Jerry slipped out the back. After picking up some sandwiches, they headed out to the Octagon House to pick up the “before” and “after” reconstructions of Doreen Mileski’s face, which Lister had finished a day sooner than he had said he would. They drove in silence, eating their sandwiches and enjoying the ride. It was a beautiful afternoon, and the sun glistened like gold dust on the river. After hovering tentatively over the Hudson River Valley for so long, spring had finally arrived in full force, and the air was warm and sweet with the smell of the damp earth. In her youth, Charlotte had preferred autumn to the other seasons, but as she had grown older, spring had replaced autumn in her affections. She supposed it was because the waning of the year had come to be linked in her mind with the waning of her life, and she always preferred to think in terms of new beginnings.
As they came to the end of River Road, Jerry finally spoke: “There’s still one aspect of the Peter theory I find puzzling,” he said.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“The skull business. I can understand why he would kill his victims. I can understand why he would dismember them. I can even understand why he would want to keep the skulls as a kind of trophy. I mean, I don’t understand, really. But if I were a murderer …”
“Which we understand that you’re not,” Charlotte said. “So what don’t you understand?” she asked.
“I don’t know why he would put the skulls in the cemeteries. According to what I know of criminal psychology, he would have hoarded them. A murderer likes to keep something like that around as a souvenir.”
“Like the beachcomber keeps a piece of driftwood.”
“More like the hunter who looks at the head of a moose hanging on the wall, and takes pleasure in reliving the memory of having killed it.”
“He probably wanted to show off,” she speculated. “Wasn’t that the point of leaving the skull on the Leatherman’s grave?”
“A point that we would have missed if it wasn’t for you.”
“You wouldn’t have missed it,” said Charlotte. “You probably would have noticed it eventually—like after the case was closed.” She loved to tease Jerry. “I see it as almost a taunt.”
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