Die For Me

by Jack Lynch

  We walked on, up to the north end of the parking lot.

  “Had you ever done that sort of thing before?” she asked. “Talking people down like that?”

  “Not really. I’d written a story on teenage suicides once. I learned a couple of things from that. Then I told her I’d known an inordinate number of people who had taken their own lives. I just opened up and let things spill out. Like I said, she came to trust me.”

  And then came the part I didn’t like. When I didn’t continue right away Goodwin looked up at me with a little squint.

  “Maybe I’m turning into a little old lady,” I said finally. “But it occurred to me, back a few minutes ago talking on the phone with her. If all this body business she sensed should lead her into another deep depression…Well, it really wouldn’t matter whether her life was in jeopardy from an outside source or from within herself. The result might be the same. At least that’s how I see it.”

  Goodwin nodded, her eyes downcast again. Then she looked up and touched my arm. “I appreciate your telling me all this. It might be important down the road. I don’t think too many people would have leveled with me this way. Not men anyhow.”

  I shrugged. “We live among fools. You’re a detective assigned to the case. My knowledge is your knowledge, so long as that in itself doesn’t pose a threat to my client. I just happen to feel Maribeth needs all the help she can get right now. There might come a time when you’re the one who could give it to her.”

  We were making our way back down the narrow trail that led to the unpaved road curving past the burial ground. Detective Goodwin was in the lead, and my eyes took in the curve of her buttocks. She had a nice looking behind on her, the detective did. It didn’t jut out in provocative fashion, the way young Bobbie’s did in her tight jeans. It was just curvy. It was something a man would like to be able to reach out and rest his hand on, if he were a good enough friend and the girl wasn’t wearing a revolver with a six-inch barrel in a holster on her waist or inside a bag strapped over one shoulder.

  She stopped so abruptly I almost banged into that curvy behind. She held up a warning hand. She was standing straight now, all cop again. I followed her line of vision, off the trail to our right, and couldn’t believe my eyes. But then I thought about the years I’d been in the news-gathering business, and yes, I could believe my eyes. A man was standing still a few yards away with a raised television mini-camera that had a big close-up lens attached to it. He was at an angle where he could shoot through the thin spread of trees in front of him and record activity at the burial site.

  Detective Goodwin called out to him. “Hey, Welch? You buckin’ for a little time in county jail tonight?”

  I don’t suppose the feet of the man with the camera really left the ground, but it seemed that way. He looked as if he might have been trying to launch himself on a standing high jump. But he made a fast recovery and turned with a sheepish grin on his face.

  “Hi, Deputy. Smith, isn’t it?” he asked in a voice with a soft twang to it.

  “Goodwin. Let’s see some current credentials.”

  “Goodwin, right.” The man trudged back out to the trail, lowered his camera and reached into a pocket for his wallet. He was a gangly looking fellow appearing to be in his middle to late thirties. “I just wanted to get a little edge on the competition, Deputy.”

  I looked over Goodwin’ shoulder at a press card that had been issued by the San Francisco Police Department. There was another issued by the Highway Patrol and a business card that announced, Clifford Welch News Film.

  “I’m freelance,” he said. “Sell film and tape to various TV news outfits that aren’t able to staff something themselves. Only when I heard the rumors about what might be going on up here, I figured every station for a couple hundred miles around would be staffing this one. That’s why I wanted a little different angle from the others. Come up with a product I still could maybe sell them.”

  “I know all that,” Goodwin told him. “I just wanted to know if SFPD still authorizes you to hang out at this sort of scene.” She handed back the press ID with a shake of her head. “How did you get down here?”

  “Came in from the parking lot, on the trail you did.”

  “Well now, you just get back up it the same way you came in. Then go in from the other end of the lot and restrict yourself to the press area. Or I swear, freelance, I will put you into county jail.”

  Welch nodded, awkwardly jammed his wallet back into a rear pocket, patted both it and his other rear pocket then lifted his camera. “Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry I upset you so. And I really wasn’t trying to be in the way or anything. It’s just that I always have to try to get a little edge or I don’t eat at the end of the month. But I won’t try again. Not here. I appreciate your kindness.”

  “Will you just shut up and get out of here?” Goodwin asked him.

  Welch was wearing an old-fashioned golf cap with a snap on the brim like movie news cameramen used to wear about 60 years earlier. He doffed it and started back up the trail toward the parking lot. We watched him until he was out of sight, then continued on down to the road.

  “Where do you know him from?” I asked.

  “He’s usually around when we have something of interest working. I remembered his name because a fellow from one of the TV stations told me he’d had some family problems a while back.”

  When we reached the road we could see the gang of press people gathered up by the old London cottage. I paused to stare at them. “I’m surprised how quickly the word got around. We weren’t nearly that fast when I was in the business.”

  “Probably some hotshot in our own office tipped them,” Goodwin told me. “Somebody who’d like to get their face on the news or their name in the paper someday. They figure playing tipster improves their chances.”

  We continued down the road, toward where men toiled in the little hollow beneath the piggery ridge. “Do you have many people like that in the department?” I asked her.

  “Not really. They’re a good bunch, all in all. But then there are always a few jerks in any outfit. At least it seems that way.”

  She was walking with that little shoulder slouch again, her head down. I fell back a step or two to watch her. Goodwin was a bit of a complicated one. Or maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she was just plugging along as best she could, trying to be a good cop despite carrying around a few more headaches than male cops do.

  “Hey, Goodwin?” I had stopped to stare out at the rows of low grape vines marching up the ridge. The detective turned and came back a pace or two.

  “What is it?” She stared up the ridge.

  “Nothing out there,” I told her. “I just wanted to say a couple of things before we joined the others. I can imagine what it must be like for you at times, in the department. You said it was your turn today to take whatever came up, but when this came up they sent Thurber as well, and I notice he seems to have taken charge out here. And then with the jerks and all. It still seems to go on in every department. I guess the reason you bridled back there at the museum over the joke I tried to make was because some of the jerks have made inferences to do with your haircut and your wanting to be a cop and all. Some of the jerks probably refer to you behind your back as some sort of les’. You shouldn’t let it get you down. Because whatever else you are or aren’t…” I turned to stare at her. “You are one attractive woman.”

  She opened her mouth but didn’t speak.

  “I’m probably out of my mind to say this,” I continued, “but I’ve been watching you now and again when you wouldn’t notice. You’ve got a good face. You have a fine figure. You have the sort of butt on you that appeals to some men. I’m one of them. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think you’re a neat looking lady, and I’d probably be the last man on earth to make any sort of gender remark about you, cop or no cop.”

  She stood staring at me a moment with the look of somebody whose car had just been lightly tapped from behind. Then she
turned and started back down the road. I fell in beside her.

  “Seems to me you took an awful chance saying something like that,” she told me.

  “I guess I did. But we might end up having to work together some more in the course of this thing. I just felt that particular piece of nonsense should be put to rest.”

  She glanced at me, then gave a little nod. “Call me Rachel, why don’t you?”

  SIX

  “I’d like to get your psychic friend up to Jack London park. See if she can tell us anything more.”

  Detective Sergeant Barry Smith was staring across his desk at me a little grimly. It was noon Monday. So far they had recovered five bodies from the shallow burial site at the park. I was glad that detective Rachel Goodwin and I had made the trip to the museum for our phone calls the day before. During our absence the deputies had unearthed the body of a twelve-year-old boy named Donald McGuire, the son of a Santa Rosa fireman. I was really glad I hadn’t been there when the boy’s body had been brought up.

  The two other victims had been identified as Doris Hadley, a thirty-two-year-old travel agency employee from Mill Valley, down in neighboring Marin County, and one Lionel Mapes, twenty-nine, a waiter from San Francisco. Maribeth Robbins hadn’t recognized the names of any of them, and although it was very early in the investigation, Smith already had a half dozen staffers working the phones and putting in the miles questioning those who knew the victims. So far no connection had been made among any of them.

  “You see what it’s beginning to look like,” Smith said. “It’s beginning to look like a serial killer. It’s going to be a ball breaker. I need more help. I want your psychic to go over the ground. I want to see if it’ll trigger any kind of idea.”

  I leaned back and shook my head. “I wish you wouldn’t force that just yet. She’s in pretty bad shape. She might go all to pieces on you if she had to go up there now.”

  Smith closed his eyes and massaged the bridge of his nose with his two index fingers, as if to rub away the soreness left by the bad fit of a pair of eyeglasses, but the sergeant didn’t wear eyeglasses.

  “I don’t know how much you know about the mechanics of a homicide investigation, Bragg.”

  “I know the rudiments, is about all.”

  “Then you might have learned that with an ordinary homicide, if there is such a thing, it’s still pretty likely that the victim and killer know each other. It’s not always the case, but most killings still work that way. A husband kills his wife, or she kills him. Neighbor kills neighbor. Known enemy kills known enemy. One doper kills another. In all these cases there’s a crime scene. There’s a motive, and there might even be a witness. Within twenty-four to forty-eight hours your suspect or suspects become pretty obvious. There’s a certain containment to that sort of homicide. One detective usually can handle it.

  “But with a serial killer the sky’s the limit. The only known witnesses are the killer and victim themselves. There is no crime scene we know about that we can go over, there’s just the dumping site. And there isn’t just one victim. In this case we now have five, and we know there are more of them up there. We can try to link the victims in some way. Down in the Los Angeles area, and up near Seattle, serial killers have gone after prostitutes. That at least gives the investigator a starting ground, but in this case we don’t even have that.”

  He got up and began prowling behind his desk. “We have a nurse. A CPA. A young boy. We’ll be going off in a dozen directions with this one. The information we generate, checking the backgrounds and activities of all these victims, is just going to balloon. It’s the sort of thing that buries the investigator. And I have people out there gathering more information with every tick of the clock.”

  He turned toward me and leaned with his hands on the back of his chair. “How do you filter through all that data and force the important leads to the top?”

  I shook my head.

  “Another thing,” Smith said, starting to pace again. “In the case of a normal homicide—that term again—the patrolman who first responds protects the crime scene until the detective gets there. In most cases that’s the patrol officer’s only piece of work with a given homicide. But one thing we see happening more and more in serial killings is that often it’s a patrolman, or his sergeant, doing good police work and with enough knowledge of the case, who picks out something important and is apt to bring a good suspect to the attention of the investigating detective.

  “So in localized serial cases the detectives try to visit the precincts to keep the troops, the patrolmen, up to date. But in this case, who knows how many precincts are involved? How many jurisdictions? Harvey says it doesn’t look as if any of the bodies unearthed so far was murdered at the burial site. We have a nurse and a waiter both from San Francisco. We’ve learned the waiter was a homosexual. We’re checking to see if he might have had AIDS symptoms, if he could have sought treatment or diagnosis at San Francisco General, where the nurse victim worked. But even if we made a connection between those two, what would it have to do with a twelve-year-old boy living here in Santa Rosa? And the boy is the only victim so far from here in Sonoma County. He might be the only one of the victims who was slain in my own jurisdiction. How in God’s name do I keep the patrolmen in Redwood City and the eighteen-hundred-man San Francisco department, and Mill Valley cops and Marin County sheriff’s deputies—how do I keep them current with what we’re learning when my own investigators can’t keep on top of it?”

  He sat back at his desk and leaned across it. It wasn’t a threatening gesture, just that of a frustrated cop. “Maybe you could tell her, your psychic friend, about some of this. Tell her what we’re up against. Tell her that as soon as she feels up to it, we’d really like her to poke around the park some. See if she couldn’t perceive something more in her own special way. Maybe give us a clue as to how somebody got all those bodies in there. Maybe tell us if there were more than one person involved in all this.” He leaned back in his chair and stared at me.

  I got to my feet. “I’ll explain it to her just the way you told me, Sergeant.”

  I would explain it, but I doubted if that would get Maribeth out of San Francisco and up to Sonoma County. The day before I had hung around the edge of things while Thurber and Rachel and Harvey, along with others, continued their grisly work. Harvey and I had gotten a ride back out to Sonoma County Airport at a little past seven o’clock. Max Bolero flew up to get us and I was home in Sausalito an hour later. I’d been dog tired and emotionally bruised by what I’d seen that day, but after wolfing down a sandwich I drove over to Maribeth’s apartment on Green Street. She and Bobbie and I had sat around for another couple of hours trying to come up with an explanation that might link Maribeth to the victims, or to think of a reason why somebody might want to harm Maribeth herself.

  It was all wasted effort. Maribeth led a pretty gentle life. We talked about the psychic work she had done for other police agencies, but none of that had involved homicides, just missing persons: a child lost on an outing; a dazed old man who had wandered off into the fields by himself and died of a stroke. Nothing that would trigger an urge for revenge. Nothing to suggest somebody might want to take out the Robbins woman.

  And the more we talked the more upset Maribeth became, until finally I had to get out of there. And I doubted that things would have improved overnight enough for her to feel like trotting on up to Jack London State Park. On one of the late evening newscasts I saw that the freelance cameraman Rachel had flushed out apparently peddled some of his footage to one of the stations. With the close-up lens he’d been able to get a nice tight shot of one of the victims being placed on a body bag. They didn’t show much of it. No more than a second or so, but it was pretty grim.

  After the morning meeting with Detective Sergeant Smith in Santa Rosa I drove back down to San Francisco, left the car in a parking garage and walked up to the suite of offices on Market Street that I shared with a pair of attorneys named Sloe and M
orrisey, plus various law associates who came and went from the firm.

  Sharon Rapler was the name of the woman who kept the place humming for all of us these days. She was an African-American woman whose father had been a Superior Court judge for Alameda County years before. She had studied law herself but had never taken the bar exam. Still, she probably knew as much law as either of the partners. Certainly she was smarter than either of them. When I got to the office she had some checks for me to endorse and some correspondence to sign. She kept abreast of everything the counselors and I were up to at any given time. She knew about Maribeth Robbins and the search for bodies up in Sonoma, but she didn’t ask me about any of that. She could tell when things were troubling me and she kept her smart tongue to herself.

  I’d been in the office about a half-hour when Morrisey rapped on the door and entered in his shirt sleeves. He was a normally cheery, round little man, but today he was a bit somber.

  “Good God, Peter, what is this business you’ve gotten yourself into up in Sonoma?”

  “I wish I knew. The cops don’t know. My psychic friend doesn’t know. We’re all getting a little dopey over it. No link has been established between any of the victims. They all led pretty humdrum lives.”

  “Not all of them,” Morrisey told me, settling on the edge of the desk. “A friend in the D.A.’s office phoned a few minutes ago to tell me about the latest body they’ve dug up.”

  “I haven’t heard.”

  “Diogenes Holmes,” he told me.

  “Doesn’t ring any bells.”

  “They call him Dizzy Holmes. He’s done time in the federal lockup for cocaine dealing. He has a string, or rather had a string of porno theaters the cops think he operated just to launder money for some of his friends. He’s been indicted for extortion and loan sharking, but those never went anywhere. He thought of himself as somewhat of a lady’s man.”