The End of the Night

by John D. MacDonald

  EIGHT

  By ten o’clock on Sunday morning, July 26, the provisional headquarters of the FBI team assigned to the Wolf Pack case had been transferred from Nashville to Monroe. The FBI had come into the case as a result of the previous kidnap-murder near Nashville. Several agents remained in the Nashville area locking up the details of that investigation. The Special Agent in Charge was Herbert Dunnigan, a tidy, tailored, rather nondescript-looking man with graying auburn hair and a very slight stammer. He arrived by plane at the Monroe airport along with four agents just twenty minutes before the three more agents he had requested arrived from Washington headquarters.

  He took over three offices on the third floor of the Monroe National Bank Building, adjacent to the offices occupied by the small FBI staff resident in Monroe. He called in city, county and state law enforcement officials and made it quietly clear to them that he was in charge of the case. He requested their co-operation, and stated that any information released to the press would be released through him.

  Herbert Dunnigan, as a roving specialist in kidnap cases, was the first to admit that this case was far outside the usual pattern of such crimes. No one was taking a cold risk for fat profit. This was like trying to shoot mad dogs.

  And, in talking to the local officials, he had felt considerably less brisk and confident than he had sounded. Of late he had begun to feel that his public personality was like one of those movie sets where only the fronts of the buildings are erected. But the two-dimensional fronts were tilting and sagging in a high wind, and Herbert Dunnigan was racing back and forth, out of sight of the camera, strengthening the braces, tightening the guy wires.

  He had gone into the bureau right from law school, back when it had seemed a bold and satisfying adventure. But over the years he had tired of both bureaucracy and violence. The criminals were always the same—vicious, stupid, subhuman. The victims were uniformly hysterical, or irreparably dead. The newspaper people were tiresome and repetitious. Violence had so little meaning. It was a little area of decay in the great soft body of society, a buildup of pressure, and then a gaseous belch.

  By the time he had begun to question the wisdom of what he was doing with his life, there were Ann and the kids and the house in Falls Church and the increasing comfort of seniority, and the prospect of retirement. So he had accepted the nagging feeling of waste and boredom as a part of his life. When he was not on a field assignment, when he was working civil service hours in the Statistical Analysis Division, Domestic Crime Section, he had the time to make fine reproductions of Early American furniture in the tidy workshop in the basement of the brick house in Falls Church. Sometimes, as he worked, he thought of the other life he could have lived. In that life he was a lawyer in a small Southern city, working on civil cases and estate work, serving on boards and committees, taking an active interest in local politics.

  He asked Sheriff Gustaf Kurby to wait in his temporary office while he made certain that his people were establishing the proper routines, setting up the communications net, analyzing the obsolete roadblocks, evaluating the police work already accomplished.

  He went back and closed his office door and sat at his desk and looked at Sheriff Kurby. Another showboat sheriff, with the displaced ranch hat and the inlaid ivory grips on the inevitable .38 Special, and the big, bland, meaty, political face.

  Dunnigan tapped the Sunday paper on his desk and said, “You took the ball and ran with it, Sheriff.”

  “Murder day,” the sheriff rumbled. “Gus Kurby day.”

  The big man looked indolent, smug, content. Dunnigan felt a sharp twinge of annoyance. “Are you as stupid as you’ve acted, Sheriff?”

  Kurby shifted in his chair to face Dunnigan more directly. “Let’s have your professional opinion, mister.”

  “Let’s assume these people can read. We haven’t made them yet. Now they read that a pair of hot-pants country kids can pick them out of a lineup, and those kids have given a detailed description. Let’s assume they have a little sense left. What do they do, Sheriff?”

  “Kill the girl and bury her deep. Ditch the car. Split up and run.”

  “You surprise me, Sheriff. Will you surprise me some more by admitting you’ve made a mistake?”

  “No,” Kurby said. His eyes were unexpectedly shrewd and aware. “You come in with your slide rule and see one side of it, Dunnigan. It’s a good safe bet the girl was dead before the papers were on the street this morning. It would fit the pattern. Agreed?”

  “I’ll go along with that.”

  “A little over three months from now a hell of a lot of people in Meeker County are going to go behind the green curtains and pull the little levers. Kurby is a name they should remember, but you have to keep reminding them. They’ve got short memories. This will put me in for four more years, Dunnigan.”

  “And if it’s at the girl’s expense?”

  “Don’t look as if you tasted something bad. This will be a fifth term. I’m not a politician who happened to get to be sheriff. I’m a law man who has to mess with politics. This is a big county, Mr. Dunnigan. I’ve fought like an animal for a big budget. There isn’t a dime of it goes to waste. You won’t find a cleaner county in the state. Monroe has exploded way beyond the city limits. Satellite communities all over hell and gone. It’s all my baby, and I mean to keep on taking care of it, keeping the sharpshooters out, keeping the lid on. So I had to get to be a legend, sort of. Hell, that’s why that Craft kid called me. He feels he knows me. If some hungry boy beats me at the polls, the organization will be shot. He won’t know law work. I do. I’ve built up the finest lab this side of the state capital. This is one murder, Mr. Dunnigan. One stolen girl. There’s almost exactly a million people in Meeker County. So don’t use hard words unless you know the whole picture.”

  “My job is to …”

  “Hold it one minute. We aren’t so far apart in age. Let’s you hold it one minute and give a little thought to how you’d handle things if every four years you had to get voted back into your job by a lot of people who pay your budget out of taxes. Would that change the way you handle your job?”

  Dunnigan looked at Kurby’s knowing grin and found himself liking the man, liking him very much. He grinned back. “Okay, Sheriff. It just shouldn’t be an elective office.”

  “I could do a better job if it wasn’t. Now it’s your baby. I got in there, front and center, while I had the chance. Now anything you want, we’ll do our damnedest to do it for you, and do it right.”

  Under Dunnigan’s direction, the investigation proceeded swiftly and logically. It was poor country for effective roadblocks. There were too many secondary and tertiary roads. It could be assumed that, through luck or cleverness, the Buick had slipped through one of the holes in the net. The possibility that they had holed up inside the roadblock area was not entirely discounted, but the chance was considered sufficiently remote to permit disbanding the roadblocks.

  Scores of tips came in. The Buick, containing people matching the description, had been seen in forty different places, heading in every possible direction. These tips were reassigned to appropriate agencies to be checked out. As it seemed logical that the criminals might travel by night and hole up by day, state police in three states ran a motel and cabin check.

  The autopsy on Crown was completed, showing that either the knife wounds or brain injuries were in themselves of sufficient gravity to cause death. Measurement of the abdominal wounds showed that a rather small-bladed knife had been used, a blade about four inches long and a half inch wide, with one sharp edge, possibly a switchblade.

  Howard Craft and Ruth Meckler were brought in and questioned again by Dunnigan and his people. They had told their story so many times that the facts had begun to be obscured by fantasy. Through adroit questioning the known facts were isolated. Additional fragments of description were pried out of the memories of the young pair. A commercial artist, following the pair’s corrections and changes, tried to come up with pic
tures that would satisfy them. They were quite satisfied with the rendition of the husky one, and a little less satisfied with the drawing of the balding one with glasses. The other two would not come through. The two usable drawings were sent by wire transmission to thirty cities in the Southwest, with an urgent request for help in identification.

  Of the dozens of photographs of Helen Wister available, Dunnigan selected the one he thought most satisfactory. The pictures were spread out on his desk.

  “She is a beautiful girl,” Dunnigan said.

  “A one-time queen of the Dartmouth Winter Carnival, I understand,” the agent standing at his elbow said. “A blond doll. With the faintly chilly look. A lady.”

  “A lady in bad company. Use this one,” Dunnigan said. “Ask the wire services to use this one exclusively. Feature it. Get TV coverage. I don’t think anybody will ever see the lady alive again, but there is a ten thousand-to-one chance.”

  When the Buick had braked hard, one tire had stubbed and chattered on the road, leaving, in black rubber, the distinctive tread pattern of a Goodyear Double Eagle, sharp enough to indicate low wear. It was not a tire that would come on the car, so either the owner had had the tires installed before taking delivery, or he had worn out the original set and replaced them. In any case, it was a potentially valuable clue.

  In mid-afternoon the car was identified, almost beyond doubt. It had been stolen on Friday evening in Glasgow, Kentucky, from a bowling alley parking lot. It was a dark-blue ’59 Buick with low mileage, owned by a plumbing contractor. He had Goodyear tires installed before delivery. The car had been left unlocked, with the keys behind the sun visor. The plate number was put on the teletype circuits immediately, plus the more positive description of the vehicle.

  Acting on emergency instructions, the Glasgow police made a street by street search of the area adjacent to the bowling alley, expanding the area until they found an abandoned red-and-white Chevrolet with Arkansas plates, the car which matched the description of the one involved in the Nashville killing.

  Specialists went over the car with great care. The steering wheel and door handles had evidently been hastily wiped clean. The car had been driven hard and far and fast, with the oil at too low a level. The bearing surfaces were badly scored, the car sluggish and noisy. There was half a fresh thumbprint on the rear-vision mirror. In the rear ash tray were several cigarette butts clotted with a heavy, dark-red lipstick. There was an empty tequila bottle under the front seat with many prints smeared and overlapping, and a few relatively distinct ones. A small smear of lipstick on the neck of the bottle matched the lipstick on the cigarette butts. Wedged in the front ash tray was an empty folder of book matches from a motel in Tupelo, Mississippi. An agent was sent immediately to Tupelo.

  By eight o’clock on Sunday night, Herbert Dunnigan went to the Grill Room of the Hotel Riggs for dinner, accompanied by a young agent named Graybo.

  Dunnigan felt weary but reasonably content. “It’s beginning to unravel,” he said.

  “There’s still no identification.”

  “There will be. We’ll find out where the Arkansas Chev was stolen, and we’ll find the Ford wagon they took from that tile salesman, and that’ll give us a little more, just like the Chev did. And the motel in Tupelo will give us a little more, I hope. And when we make one of them, we’ll get a lead to the others, and then we’ll know all of them.”

  “Do you think they’ve split up, sir?”

  “Perhaps. But I don’t think it will make any difference in the long run. Somehow I don’t think they have.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’ve taken crazy chances. They think they’re invulnerable. Maybe one will get nervous and drop off. I think we’ll take them in a package.”

  “It’s all so … pointless.”

  “It’s all for kicks, Graybo. Four misfits. Unbalanced people, full of hostility. Something tipped the lid off. Maybe an accident. Maybe the tile salesman was an accident. And that set them off. From then on, what could they lose?”

  “That was back last Tuesday, sir. And they’re still out there. It’s funny to think of them out there tonight. I wonder what they’re like. I wonder what they’re saying to each other. Unless we can get them—they’ll do something else.”

  “Probably.”

  “So that means there’s somebody walking around not knowing he’s going to run into those four.”

  “You’ve got an active imagination, Graybo.”

  The young agent colored. “I was just thinking out loud.”

  “Don’t apologize. Imagination can be valuable. Police work can take you only so far. Then a good guess can be worth all the rest of it.”

  “Sir, are you going to be able to talk to Kemp?”

  “Who? Oh, the boy friend.”

  “He’s been hanging around all day.”

  “It won’t do any good. I … I guess I can spare the time.”

  An agent named Stark came swiftly toward the table. Both men looked alertly at him as he sat down. “Bert, I think we’ve made the burly boy. Phoenix came through. We’ve got a good correlation on two print classifications, but it’ll take visual comparison to check it out. They’re wiring a mug shot we can check with the kids. He’s small-time. Ninety days last year for assault. Robert Hernandez. Unskilled laborer. The only thing that doesn’t seem to match up is the age. He’s only twenty, but Phoenix says he looks older. No address of record. No record of other convictions.”

  “It sounds good enough so I think we should go ahead right now and check it out with the regional Social Security office and get …”

  “I started that ball rolling, Bert.”

  “Good enough!”

  An hour passed before Dunnigan remembered Dallas Kemp. He checked and found out that Kemp was still waiting, so he had him brought in.

  When Dallas Kemp finally met Herbert Dunnigan, he felt a sharp sense of disappointment which he hoped was not apparent to Dunnigan. Kemp was shrewd enough to realize that—perhaps through the conditioning of television and its all-wise, all-powerful heroes—he had expected to meet some sort of father image, some idealized, personalized version of law and order radiating supreme confidence.

  But this was a rather clerical-looking man, not large, obviously weary, obviously troubled. He had an indoor pallor, nicotine stains on his fingers. The slight suggestion of a stammer contributed to the impression of ineffectualness.

  “Sit down, Mr. Kemp. I c-can’t give you much time. I suppose you want reassurance. About the only assurance I can give you is that we’ll take them. Sooner or later. I don’t know what that’s worth to you.”

  Dallas Kemp sat in the chair beside the desk. He sat down slowly. Ever since it had happened he was aware of performing all physical acts slowly and carefully. He felt as though any hasty movement would destroy his control, and he would fly into small pieces, or begin yelling and be unable to stop.

  “You see,” he said, “we quarreled. The last time I saw her, we were scrapping.” He paused. “That isn’t what I meant to say to you.”

  “I can see how that makes it worse for you.”

  Kemp felt grateful to the man. He hoped the tears would not flood his eyes again. They were always there, a slight stinging sensation—always in readiness.

  “I’m an architect.”

  “I know. A good one, I’ve been told.”

  “I like form and order. Grace and dignity.” He looked at his large hands, flexing the long fingers. “I can’t fit what’s happened into any frame of reference—into anything I know, Mr. Dunnigan. I guess I wanted to see you because I want to be told everything is going to be all right. I guess you can’t tell me that.”

  “I could, but what would it mean?”

  “I want to do something. It’s been twenty-four hours. I can’t just wait and wait. I want to be given something to do. Something that will help.”

  “This isn’t a movie, Kemp. No chance for the hero to outwit the bad guys and rescue the girl.
You have to wait. We all have to wait.”

  “Do you know anything at all? Is there anything you know that you can tell me?”

  Dunnigan hesitated, then handed Kemp a picture. It was on unusual paper, limp, glossy, yellowish.

  “This is one of them,” Dunnigan said. “The two kids made a positive identification.”

  The photograph was composed of tiny lines, as on a television screen. Some of the fines had not printed properly, but the face was clear enough, two shots, full face and profile.

  It was a beast face, empty, unreachable, merciless.

  Kemp tasted the sickness in his throat as he swallowed. “This—is one of them?”

  “They beat and kicked and stabbed a stranger to death, Kemp. For no reason. What would you expect one of them to look like?”

  “I—don’t know. Like this, I guess.” He handed the picture back. He smiled. It was a grimace of tension, not a smile. “There isn’t much Helen … or anybody could say to that kind of a person. She’s so outgoing. I’d thought that … if she had a chance to talk to them … but …”

  “Get hold of yourself!”

  “I … thanks.”

  “It’s been twenty-four hours, Kemp. There’s no point in trying to kid you. Pray she’s alive. Pray they’ve kept her alive. They might do that. But if we get her back alive, she won’t be in good shape. Face that at least.”

  “All right. But … damn it, it’s such a jungle thing. It’s out of the dark ages. A thing like that shouldn’t happen to her.”

  “In this day and age? Because we’ve got plastics and television and tailfins and charity drives? Human nature doesn’t change, Mr. Kemp. There’ll always be animals around, walking on their hind legs, looking just like you and me. You could have gone your whole life understanding that. But now you’ve had your nose rubbed in it.”

  The phone rang. Dunningan picked it up and put his palm over the mouthpiece. “All we can do is wait,” he said. “Try to get some sleep.”