First Lady

by Michael Malone

  When I slipped into the room, Etham Foster was comparing a blown-up Photostat of the partial shoeprint we’d taken from the shower stall tiles to a computer printout of sample treads on men’s running shoes. “I don’t know,” his assistant Augie Summers told Bunty. “It’s close,” Etham said.

  Seeing me, Rhonda strode forward like she was going to pitch me a fastball; instead, she hugged me. “Hey there, JayJay, how’s it going, buddy?” It was like being embraced by a friendly bear. Rhonda always called me “JayJay” and Cuddy, “Honch”—the latter short, I assumed, for “head honcho.”

  Cuddy held out his wrist to me. “Maybe you ought to get one of these modern doohickeys called a wrist watch.”

  I took off my seersucker suit jacket and rolled up my starched white shirtsleeves. “I was talking to Isaac Rosethorn. He says hello.”

  “What was the old bastard doing, spraying his throat with honey? He’ll cry during his summation today, just wait. He’ll beg that jury to send poor sad tragic widower Tyler Norris home to his lonely old house, which wouldn’t have been so lonely if he hadn’t blown his wife’s head off.”

  “Isaac says Mitch did a ‘fine job’ this morning for the State.”

  Cuddy crumpled the paper he was doodling on. “There’s the kiss of death. Okay, now that J.B. Savile the Fifth has dropped in, back to it, Bunty?”

  Bunty shyly told the pointer she was using, “Hello, Justin.” Dick Cohen the M.E., Etham and Augie from forensics, and Wendy Freiberg, the frazzled overweight State Bureau text analyst, made various, mostly caustic gestures in my direction. There were two other HPD detectives at the 105 conference table, plus Lisa Grecco, a young deputy prosecutor from Mitch Bazemore’s office, whose well-developed body was the subject of all too many conversations in the HPD locker room.

  Any representative from the sheriff’s department was conspicuously absent. Before his falling out with Homer Louge, Cuddy had invited deputies to listen in on HPD brainstorming sessions, saying, “Even bad students will learn something in a good class, if they take it enough times.” But no more.

  This particular class was about Guess Who, how to identify him, how to apprehend him as quickly as possible. The task force had started with a few premises that Cuddy had written out on his blackboard:

  G.W. [Guess Who] killed Cathy Oakes, G.I. Jane, and Lucy Griggs. He thought Lucy was Mavis Mahar.

  We don’t know if Cathy Oakes was his first victim.

  G.W. is playing with HPD. He thinks he can’t be caught. He can.

  Here’s what we need:

  —ID on Jane

  —ID on Lucy Griggs homicide gun (.32, .38, maybe .44?)

  —ID on Guess Who would also be nice.

  There was also a lot of information about the three cases on the walls of this room, but none of it mentioned Governor Andrew Brookside’s being in Bungalow Eight with Mavis Mahar the night of the murder. Nor was there a word about state officials tampering with evidence and faking a suicide on a corpse. I sat down next to Etham; his legs stretched all the way under the table to the other side. “How you doing, Doctor Dunk-It?”

  He grumbled, “Why do you folks keep calling me that?”

  I said, “‘Don’t you like to be reminded that you were a big star?”

  “You short white people like basketball more than I ever did. You and Billy Crystal.” Around the table everyone made razzing noises.

  I said, “Compared to you, Etham, everybody’s short. And I think it’s interesting that you could be so good at something you didn’t even like.”

  Cuddy rapped his pencil on his Pepsi can. “Justin, do you mind if we save your analysis of ability and desire for another time? We’re under a little time pressure here. Mitch Bazemore has already sent in a note telling Lisa to get back to the D.A.’s office—”

  “Fuck him,” said Lisa, and everyone clapped.

  “—So can we go?”

  “Go,” I told him.

  Rhonda took a swallow from her Classic Coke bottle after dropping some peanuts in it. “Hang on, Honch,” she told Cuddy. “Let me catch him up. JayJay, we’re inputting what info we’ve got so we can reconstruct these crime scenes, see if we can put together a sequence, and a repetition, you know. Sketch out some characteristics.”

  Bunty interjected, “Are time and place significant? Why those particular woods for Jane? That culvert for Cathy? Why that particular night for Lucy or Mavis? In fact, is it Lucy or is it Mavis we’re talking about? And can we make deductions about our killer’s physical build, any occupational clues from what we have?”

  Rhonda summed up. “So that’s where we’re at, except for being told we shouldn’t be here.”

  Cuddy said, “I just had a call from the FBI district director questioning whether R&B should join this investigation. I said we hadn’t seen those ladies for weeks. Said they were probably in their Jacuzzi with piña coladas.”

  “Never met Piña in my life,” laughed Rhonda.

  Cuddy said, “So let me say it again, I appreciate y’all’s showing up here, all of you, ’cause this is not the most popular party in town.”

  Wendy waved her arm around the room. “Has anybody noticed there’s nobody in 105 today but women, blacks, and Jews? I mean, except Cuddy and Justin. I just point that out. If they fire us all in the next twenty-four hours, maybe we’ve got a class action suit?”

  Augustine Summers, Foster’s assistant criminologist, raised his hand. “I’m queer, if that helps.”

  Cuddy checked the door to be sure it was closed. Then he said we needed to get something out in the open. “Everybody in this room has heard certain things happened at Bungalow Eight after the murder, things that shouldn’t have happened, like evidence tampering and conspiracy to obstruct justice. The people who did those things not only committed crimes, they’ve made our job harder.”

  “A lot harder,” nodded Etham.

  “Maybe they’ve even cost us a chance at a conviction if we catch the guy. But we’re not going to talk about those things or those people except very specifically about what got moved when and where—like the body. Okay?” He looked slowly around the room until everyone nodded at him.

  Rhonda said, “As long as we really do know those things.”

  Cuddy told her, “Justin’s done a reconstruction of the crime scene the way we figure it would have been if those assholes hadn’t fucked it. You’re each getting a copy of that now.” An officer passed out the stapled material.

  I asked Rhonda how much profiling we were going to do of the victims as opposed to the killer? Bunty answered for her. “Well, we don’t know who the second victim, Jane, even was. And the third one, Lucy, may have been a mistake. That makes it hard profiling them.”

  I wanted to know if she was assuming that the victims were strangers to the killer? Should we throw out the possibility that they might be acquainted with him or that they might even be well known to him? “At the risk of sounding like Carol Cathy Cane,” I said, “are we definitely talking about a sociopath here?”

  Cuddy asked, “As opposed to?”

  “As opposed to some strategic motive for the murders: for money, for vengeance, to protect a reputation.”

  Cuddy yielded the floor to Bunty, who told me that at least for the purposes of our exercises today we were assuming a serial killer, someone who chose his victims not strategically but symbolically. That didn’t mean the choices were random (any more than Ted Bundy’s choice to murder young women with the same hairstyle as that of his ex-girlfriend was a random choice), but the victims weren’t specific individuals. “He goes looking for somebody to kill; if one person gets away from him, he goes to the next one.”

  Rhonda flipped me a handout. “Okay, JayJay, a lot of this you and I already talked about back in March. It’s regular old BSU and CPRP one-size-fits-all stuff.” (She was talking about the FBI’s Behavi
oral Science Unit and the Justice Department’s Criminal Personality Research Project.) “So you know the drill: we’re probably looking for a white male between twenty-five and late thirties. He probably had a frosty kind of mom and a not-there kind of dad. Our boy was a serious loner with a big fantasy life, lot of yanking the wank with nasty porno, setting fires—”

  “Setting fire to the family cat,” threw in Cuddy dryly.

  Dr. Dick Cohen mumbled, “What was the name of that guy that poured kerosene on his two kids while they were sleeping, incinerated them and his wife and a couple of dogs?”

  Nobody seemed to want to join Dick in remembering. He shrugged. “Must have been in Brooklyn,” and sank back in his chair.

  “Good ole Brooklyn,” I sighed.

  Dick hunched his thin shoulders. “At least our drug stores don’t have whole aisles with nothing on the shelves but wart remover, lice egg loosener, and boil ointments. Geez, the South.”

  As Bunty called them out, Cuddy wrote headings on his blackboard.

  GAMESMAN / MISOGYNIST /

  ORGANIZED / ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN

  Rhonda scooted her wide strong hand across the headings, clicking her fingers over each word. “One, our boy’s all about dominance and control. GAMESMAN. He’s manipulating us and gets a kick out of it. Two, MISOGYNIST. Call me crazy, guys, but I think he’s got a problem with women.” We laughed. “Three, ORGANIZED. He’s got his shit together. I mean, he’s not a drooler. Four, ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN. He hates folks in charge even more than he hates women. Way major hate. So let’s recap the bureau’s take on the organized type.”

  Bunty explained to the carpet that, unlike the chaotic, out-of-control “disorganized” serial killer, our murderer was intelligent, socially competent, might even be charming. He probably had a high birth order, was possibly married or with a partner. In other words, he would appear to be a functioning member of society. But at core he was emotionally dysfunctional and incapable of a healthy romantic relationship.

  “No shit,” said Lisa Grecco. She asked if Lucy Griggs had been raped.

  Cuddy said no. Rape did not seem to be a factor in any of the homicides, but as we knew from the mutilations, sexual sadism was. He told us he had made legal arrangements to have the body of Cathy Oakes exhumed and the body of G.I. Jane returned by Haver Medical School (to which the city morgue had donated it). The forensic pathologist Dr. Samuel Chang was willing to examine all three corpses if our medical examiner had no objections. He looked over at Dick Cohen.

  Dick shrugged. “Sure. If Bunty says he’s the best, he’s the best. I’m the next best.” Dick grinned. “But Chang’s got his own cable series.”

  Bunty smiled quietly, her eyes on the blackboard. “So on the profile? We’re going to assume G.W. isn’t transient. Some serial killers are, but the organized types tend to settle for a while. He’s likely to be based somewhere in the Southeast, though maybe not in Hillston or even the Piedmont anymore. We know he has a car.” She used her pointer to tap at a map of Neville, the town fifty miles to the west of Hillston where the prostitute Cathy Oakes had been found with her throat cut. “October. Outskirts of a mid-sized town; secluded but not rural. Public golf course culvert. Don’t know if it’s his first hit.” She moved to a second map. This one was of Haver County; there was a red circle around the wooded incline near Balmoral Heights where we’d found G.I. Jane. “Late January or early February. Outskirts of a mid-sized town. Near a dirt road leading to a subdivision, few hundred yards from the construction company trailers on new building lots. So, isolated but not remote. We’re assuming it’s his second.”

  Rhonda interjected, “We haven’t found any other victims in the data that fit the profile at all.”

  Bunty asked us to think about what had moved Guess Who from dreaming about murder to committing it. “Look for a big pre-crime stressor in early fall. Job loss, break-up, humiliation. Then look again for another big stress, maybe around Christmas or New Year’s.”

  “He must have been at my house,” mumbled Etham, who had four children.

  Bunty made a try at a smile. “To Guess Who, the world’s a hostile place and it would have gotten more hostile just before these killings. But when he kills somebody, you know what? It’s a stress reliever.”

  Dick Cohen groaned. “He couldn’t go hit a bucket of balls, drink a couple of beers?”

  Bunty took his question seriously. “No. You could, but he couldn’t.”

  Rhonda offered us all small Snickers’ bars from a large bag as she picked up the thread. “So once G.W.’s done Jane and put the same T-shirt on her as he used on Cathy, he’s got his nose glued to the TV because they’re talking about him. He goes looking for where there’s press around. He takes the name Guess Who straight from the media. He likes it. It puts him up there with Zodiac and Son of Sam. He hangs out in the Cadmean Building, we know that for sure. He’s real savvy about this place. And savvy about forensics. He knows how to get around your procedures. We’re not finding prints, trace, saliva, nothing. Except for the carpet fibers and one partial shoe print, all we’ve got is what he wanted us to have—the morgue toe tag, the tape, head shot, so on. They’re his little calling cards and they’re all left for the Hillston police.” Bunty went back to the map and twirled the pointer around the Cadmean Building. “This guy’s an expert on HPD. He knows names, he knows habits.”

  “So you think we already know this guy?” I asked.

  Bunty shook her head slowly. “No, I’m not necessarily saying that. I’m saying you’re a focus for him. Mark David Chapman knew John Lennon. John Lennon didn’t know Mark David Chapman. It’s the same with a serial. He may stalk a victim for a long time before moving in. He knows a lot about her, she knows nothing about him.” Bunty’s face whitened and was suddenly spotted with sweat. She put her hand out on the edge of the table to steady herself and then sat down.

  I hurried over to her. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Just tired.”

  “She’s fine.” Rhonda stepped in for her partner. “Not much sleep.” Rhonda helped Bunty sit down. Everyone tried not to look curious. Then Rhonda took over the briefing. She said, “With these psychos, it’s all about the fantasy life. In his own head, he’s real tight with folks that wouldn’t know him from the bagger at Wal-Mart. Which pisses him off.” She handed Bunty a thermos, then walked over to a corkboard, pointed at a blow-up photo of the mailing tag:

  LT. JUSTIN SAVILE V,

  PLEASE DELIVER YOUR FRIEND TO:

  CAPTAIN C.R. MANGUM

  Wendy Freiberg said, “Obviously G.W. knew Justin ran homicide and that Cuddy was police chief, so they’re the ones he’s going to focus on. Plus, he knows they’re friendly with each other—”

  “Well, we were before Cuddy’s promotion,” I joked.

  Bunty had finished whatever was in the thermos. She moved the marker northward on the map to The Fifth Season Resort where there was a third red circle. “So, Cathy was in October. Assuming Jane happened in February, and there’s nobody in between that we haven’t come across, G.W. waits four months between the first two victims and four months between the second and third. Does that interval hold or does it shorten?”

  Rhonda passed out copies of the eight-by-ten, black-and-white headshot of Mavis Mahar with her eyes rubbed out with the red marker. “He scratches out her eyes and autographs it, ‘GUESS WHO,’ and somehow slips it under the police chief’s office door.”

  Wendy Freiberg raised her hand. “I’m 95 percent sure the handwriting on that photo’s a match for the tag on Jane. Check the Ss.” We all looked from the words on the photo to the blow-up of the mailing label. She added, “Meanwhile, even with a clear disguise, this has got to be the most rigid vertical, evenly spaced, uniformly constructed script I’ve ever worked with. Bunty’s right, G.W.’s a neat freak, ritualistic.”

  “OCD?” Cuddy asked about obs
essive-compulsive disorder.

  “Could even be in your league, Mangum.” Wendy’s relation with Cuddy was entirely ironical and I’d long suspected she had a crush on him. She never said anything sarcastic to me.

  Cracks about Cuddy’s “clean it and fix it” compulsions went around the room until Rhonda brought us back in line by whistling through her teeth. “So, first victim, Cathy Oakes, prostitute—no warning that we know of, no direct message to the local police, no follow-up. The signature—Guess T-shirt, a dozen roses thrown over the victim’s body.

  “Second victim, Jane—no warning that we know of, but a direct message, the toe label to Honch and JayJay here. The signature escalates, I mean it’s like overkill—Guess T-shirt, necklace with ring and stone, tattoos, the matches around her head, the tongue, etc., etc., etc.

  “By the third victim, G.W. is waltzing around HPD like it’s home sweet home. This time he warns you ahead of time and he brags about it afterwards. He grabs Jay’s keys off his desk, which means he knows who’s drivin’ what. Skips down to the garage and pops Elvis in the Jag’s tape deck. He knows who’s livin’ where. He busts into the police chief’s private home—pops the star on the slider and rigs the telescope in front of it.”

  Cuddy stopped Rhonda with a hand raised. “Okay, let’s throw it out on the table now. Is Guess Who one of us?”

  “One of us?” Wendy Freiberg looked at him puzzled.

  “A cop, an ex-cop? HPD or County?” Cuddy took a thin folder from his briefcase. “Is this somebody works for the city? Is this maybe somebody with a grudge against me?”

  Wendy said, “Apparently that could be anybody.” We all laughed.

  Cuddy repeated, “I’m serious. Was the clipping of that editorial asking me to resign from him? Do we think there’s any chance it’s somebody in the Cadmean Building?” He opened the folder. “Here’s the name of every current employee of the Hillston police, and any officer who was dismissed, quit, or retired from HPD over the eight years I’ve been Chief. I put a check by the names I think we can exclude.” Slowly he grinned. “Everybody in this room got a check. But the only name I know I can exclude is my own.”