Blood Ties

by Nicholas Guild

  Which led inevitably to the conclusion that he was not Walter Rayne, that Walter Rayne was just another invention and that whoever he really was had disappeared a long time ago. His life before his son’s memories of him was therefore probably unrecoverable.

  Unless, of course, they caught him. It would be interesting in that case to run his fingerprints and find out if anyone, anywhere, had a match.

  And if not, he would remain forever an enigma, a man who had conjured himself out of thin air.

  The file on his work habits was much more rewarding. His son was right—the man seemed to know how to do everything.

  Tregear’s personal recollections attested to the father’s knowledge of the building trades. Walter Rayne had worked as a carpenter, electrician, roofer, plumber, tile layer, plasterer and painter. He knew heating and air-conditioning, security systems, sprinkler systems, telephone systems and insulation. He knew explosives.

  His patterns of employment were a matter of inference and conjecture. There was a ten-year blank following the twelve-year-old Stephen’s flight from Mound City, Arkansas, but from the age of twenty-two, from his vantage in the Navy, Tregear had been tracking his father.

  The material on the thumb drive was extensively cross-referenced. The work history file contained pointers to a list of homicides committed over the last twelve years. There were hundreds of them, from all over the country. All of the victims were women. Each entry included the victim’s name, her date of death and the location. Many of them contained pointers to case histories and all of them were color coded: black for “confirmed not,” yellow for “possible,” blue for “probable” and red for “highly probable.”

  The case histories contained detailed summaries, in which Tregear began to emerge as a critic and connoisseur of the homicidal arts. He discussed motive and psychology—interestingly, as separate categories—method, patterns of victim selection and refinement of cruelty. He even tried to articulate an impression of victim response, discussing them as the first audience of their murderer’s performance.

  With each succeeding year, the black and yellow cases became fewer and fewer and the blue and red cases increased. This resulted, no doubt, from Tregear’s accumulated understanding of his father’s patterns.

  A close study of the “probable” killings revealed that both father and son were rapidly sharpening their skills.

  * * *

  At six-thirty Ellen remembered that she had a ferret and a college roommate to feed and reluctantly shut down her computer. It was time to go home and be something else besides a cop.

  From the beginning, from the discovery of Rita Blandish in a hotel bathtub, this case had ceased to engage her merely as a homicide detective. And now it had acquired yet another dimension. It was no longer about just another sociopath who went around murdering women who were no more real to him than the bad guys in a video game. It was that, but it was also about his son’s obsessive quest to find and stop him. Now, for Ellen, once she had heard his story and had sifted through even a small fraction of the data he had so painstakingly accumulated, it was as much about Stephen Tregear as it was about Walter.

  Ellen, a homicide detective and the daughter of a psychiatrist, knew that violent criminals were frequently the abused children of violent parents, and that the degree of inheritability was higher in men than in women. She kept reminding herself that, beyond the obvious, she knew very little about Stephen Tregear. He was intellectually brilliant and personally charming, but so had been Gilles de Rais and Ted Bundy.

  Do you hate him? Sam had asked.

  No. But I’m afraid of him, so it comes to much the same thing.

  But did it? Ellen suspected the truth couldn’t be captured in so neat an equation.

  Did some part of him still love his father? Or was he enough like his father that he was incapable of love?

  Ellen didn’t believe that, but she also recognized that she didn’t want to believe it.

  I’ve often wondered if the police might have believed me back in Arkansas.… In a sense, perhaps my grandparents’ blood—and all the blood since—is on my head because all I could think to do was run away and save my own life.

  You were twelve years old.

  There is that.

  But Tregear wasn’t making any excuses for himself. In his crushing sense of responsibility, and his acceptance of it, there was something tragic—in the sense Aeschylus had understood such things.

  Monsters knew nothing of remorse.

  Gwendolyn was still asleep in her hammock and Mindy was either still at work or in the arms of her new boyfriend when Ellen opened her apartment door and let herself in. She put a Lean Cuisine in the microwave and poured herself a glass of wine, sitting down at the kitchen table to drink it. After Tregear’s Santa Margherita it tasted like nail polish remover.

  The microwave, which emitted four beeps when the cooking time was over and then one a minute thereafter until the door was opened, was a long time rousing Ellen from her fit of abstraction. At first she couldn’t remember what the sound meant, then she smiled and shook her head as if coming out of a trance.

  She had been thinking about Tregear, or perhaps less thinking about him than simply conjuring him up in her imagination. She was remembering the expression of his eyes while he talked about his frightful childhood. If she tried, she could screen out the sound of his voice and concentrate on his face alone.

  In the years since achieving the rank of inspector, Ellen had interviewed hundreds of criminal suspects, and one of the things she had learned was to watch people’s faces. The con artists, the narcissistic wheeler-dealers who looked down on the rest of the human race with amused contempt and thought they had refined lying into an art form, were all ham actors who could be counted on to overplay their parts. Their faces betrayed them, and especially their eyes.

  Tregear hadn’t been playing a part. If there had been anything of a performance it had consisted of an attempt to distance himself from the things he was describing.

  He was on the level—either that or he was the Laurence Olivier of psychopaths. He was probably intelligent enough for that. It might just be that all the blunted career criminals and child rapists and drug-crazed, abusive parents of her experience hadn’t prepared her for an instrument as sharply honed as Stephen Tregear’s mind. There was always that possibility.

  But again, it was not something she could take seriously. Tregear was not a suspect in this case. There was no evidence he had ever harmed anyone.

  So she decided there was no harm in allowing herself the pleasure of recalling his face.

  * * *

  All the next day, from 7:30 A.M. on, apart from occasional trips to the ladies’ room and the departmental coffeepot, Ellen hardly left her desk. And gradually her intensity of focus had its effect on the other occupants of the duty room. Everyone knew that their Ellie was working the Wilkes case and, from her level of concentration and the quantities of paper she was running through the printer, they began to form the impression that she was on to something. The noise level fell away almost to a whisper, and people kept glancing in her direction, as if expecting a miracle.

  Finally, around two in the afternoon, Barney Phelps, a ten-year homicide man, approached her from behind and leaned cautiously over her shoulder. He picked up her paper coffee cup, checked to confirm that it was empty, then set it back down.

  “Ellie, come on—you can’t live on that sludge. You’re gonna get yourself really wired. Take half an hour and find yourself some real food.”

  “No time” was the answer. Ellen never took her eyes from the computer screen.

  “Well then, if I went around the corner to the diner and got you a nice bottle of iced tea and some chicken salad on a bagel, would you eat it?’

  “Sure.”

  The bagel sandwich and the iced tea sat on her desk for twenty minutes before she even noticed that they were there.

  At a quarter to six, Ellen turned off her compute
r. She raised her arms and stretched like a cat.

  “Well?”

  Barney spoke for the whole room. Ellen turned to him and smiled, like a bride on her father’s arm.

  “I know how we’re going to catch him,” she said sweetly.

  16

  The next morning, at eight o’clock when Sam returned from his day off, there was a stack of reports on his desk approximately the length of War and Peace.

  Ellen was working. She only noticed his presence when he sat down, noisily, on his chair. Then she looked up and greeted him with a cheery “Howdy.”

  Sam scowled at her and placed his right hand on the stack of papers, as if he were about to take his oath on them.

  “What in God’s name is all this?”

  “It’s what’ll put our killer on death row,” she answered brightly. “And I figured it out all by myself. Well, with a little help from Steve.”

  “Steve?” Sam peered into her face. He seemed to be trying to remember who she was. “Steve?”

  “Tregear.”

  “I see. We’re on a first-name basis now?”

  “Sort of.”

  With a shrug that suggested it might not be the oddest thing he had heard in his long career, Sam turned his attention back to the pile on his desk.

  “I’m supposed to read all this?” he asked. “You couldn’t give me the Reader’s Digest version?”

  For the next three hours, Ellen took him on a guided tour. After the first fifteen minutes Sam reached into his breast pocket and took out his reading glasses, which was a good sign.

  She concentrated on the red murders, leading him through the summaries and explaining the analyses. She drew his attention to the system of cross-references and tried to do justice to Tregear’s intricate patterns of inference.

  “And you buy this horseshit?” he asked at one point—his use of the term did not necessarily imply dismissal.

  At that precise moment, 9:47 A.M., the phone on Sam’s desk rang. He picked up the receiver, made a few grunting sounds as he listened, then said, to whoever was on the other end, “Well, that’s interesting.” Thereupon, he hung up.

  “Tregear isn’t our killer,” he said blandly. “But our killer is a close male relative. Don’t look so smug.

  “Now, to get back to my original question: And you buy this horseshit?”

  Ellen decided that the tactful thing to do was to avoid gloating and just answer the question.

  “Sam, I looked up a paper Tregear wrote when he was fifteen. It was published under his grandparents’ last name, Stephen Dabney, which is why we missed it. I could only understand about every fifth word, but from the frequency with which it’s cited in the math journals it must be pretty good. It’s on probability theory. This guy knows how to weigh the odds.”

  Sam merely nodded, and they went back to the case histories.

  When the performance was over, Sam threw himself back in his chair, which emitted a shuddering groan.

  “Tregear’s a smart son of a bitch, I’ll give him that.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment and looked almost as if he were about to fall asleep. But then he opened them again, and their expression suggested nothing so much as suspicion.

  “The question is, how does all this get us any closer to finding the guy?”

  Ellen raised her hands, palms up, and smiled.

  “By using Tregear’s criteria of selection,” she announced triumphantly. “Aside from method, how does he establish that a group of murders are all being committed by a single perpetrator? What clinches it for him? He looks at the work orders.”

  Sam shook his head. “I don’t follow you.”

  Ellen spread three red case histories out on the desk. These women had all died in St. Louis, Missouri, over a four-month period six years ago. On the last page of each report there was a heading labeled “Work History,” which listed the service calls made to the victim’s residence in the final three months of their lives. In each list, one item was highlighted in red: “Al’s Roofing.”

  “We follow in Tregear’s footsteps,” Ellen explained, almost fiercely, “We go to the victims’ records and we find out who paid a visit to all three.”

  Sam put his left hand behind his neck and began scratching in the meditative way that meant he was thinking.

  “We’re on the verge, Ellie,” he said at last. “You’ve done really good work. But before we jump I think we should talk to Tregear again, just to see what he thinks.”

  “I agree.”

  * * *

  When Ellen phoned, Tregear invited them to lunch.

  “You can have a choice between sliced brisket of beef and lasagna. Plus, of course, salad and Pinot Grigio.”

  “Do you have any beer? Sam only drinks beer.”

  “There’s a liquor store with a huge refrigerator just two blocks from me. What does he favor?”

  “He likes India pale ale.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” And then, after a short pause, “How about dinner tonight? I mean, just the two of us.”

  Sam was at his desk, staring at her quizzically, and Tregear was asking for a date. It was a moment of more than usual awkwardness.

  It was also time for a make-or-break decision. Tregear, she sensed, was basically a shy man and too well mannered ever to keep inflicting his attentions on a woman who had already turned him down once. And she could think of a dozen reasons why encouraging a personal relationship with Tregear would probably be unprofessional and a mistake. She didn’t care if it was unprofessional, and she was prepared to risk a mistake.

  “That sounds good,” she answered.

  “We’re having lunch there,” she said, as soon as she set the phone down.

  “I see.” Sam’s face didn’t register any reaction, and then he smiled. It could have meant anything. “Okay.”

  They drove to Fisherman’s Wharf in silence, but when the car was parked in front of Tregear’s apartment, Ellen turned to her partner and touched his arm, almost pleadingly.

  “Sam, be a little nice. Please? Try to forget you ever thought he killed anybody.”

  Sam merely grunted.

  As they were walking across the street, Tregear’s door opened and there he was. He had a smile on his face appropriate to a visit from a favorite aunt. The first person he actually spoke to was Sam.

  “I have Harpoon IPA on ice,” he said. “Is that acceptable?”

  “More than acceptable, Mr. Tregear.”

  “Call me Steve. Please.”

  “Okay. Steve.” Then he actually offered his hand. “Ellie here thinks I owe you an apology. What do you think?”

  “For suspecting me of murder? An understandable mistake. Don’t mention it.”

  Tregear laughed, then they all laughed. After that they were fine together.

  “Lunch will be ready in five minutes,” Tregear announced. “It’s all from Trader Joe’s, so it’s heat and serve, but it’s not bad.”

  It was more than not bad. Nobody could decide between the brisket and the lasagna, so everybody had some of each. The salad was not terrible, in spite of the anchovy dressing, and nobody complained about what they were drinking.

  Conversation was at first general, and Ellen was pleased to see Sam making an effort to get to know this highly unusual man with his brilliant mind and his dreadful childhood.

  But eventually, inevitably, the talk turned to Walter. That was what Tregear called him, so for Ellen and Sam too this murderer, their “Boy,” as they had sometimes called him, became simply Walter.

  They outlined to Tregear how they proposed to catch him, and Tregear listened respectfully and in silence. Then Sam asked him what he thought.

  “I think you’ll have exactly one chance,” Tregear answered. “If you muff it, and he gets wind you’re sniffing around after him, he’ll vanish like mist and you’ll never hear from him again. And after a while women will start dying somewhere else.”

  He shook his head slowly and closed hi
s eyes, as if at some painful memory.

  “Don’t make the mistake so many have made, myself included. Don’t underestimate him. He’s very smart, and he’s gotten very good at this.”

  Then he seemed to snap back from his trance.

  “Let’s say you identify the company. What then?”

  “Then we check their records until we find out who made the calls,” Sam answered. He looked at Ellen as if the question made no sense to him.

  “If you send a badge around, you’ll never catch him. Believe me, he’ll go to ground.”

  “How do you figure?”

  Tregear smiled, not very pleasantly.

  “You have to understand something about Walter,” he began. “To women he’s like catnip. He has to be in his fifties now, but there’s no evidence he’s lost his touch. The company you find will probably be small, the sort that’s willing to cut a few corners—that’s his pattern. The office staff is likely to be one woman, probably single, probably in her late thirties to early forties, and Walter will have her licking his hand. She’ll tip him off. She’ll be on the phone to him as soon as you walk out the door.

  “I have a suggestion.”

  It was obvious that Sam wanted to say something, to offer some defense of department procedure, but he was wise enough to wait. He merely nodded. He was listening.

  “Give me the company name. I’ll get inside their system. I’ll give you the work orders. I’ll give you the employee files, with names, addresses and car license plates. I’ll print them out and hand them to you. Then you can just pick him up.”

  “That’s illegal.” Sam raised his hand up to about eye level, letting it wander in aimless little circles. It was an eloquent gesture of futility. “We need either a search warrant, for which we have to have probable cause, or we need their willing cooperation. In either case we can’t just hack into their computers—and we can’t let you do it either. We’re cops, remember?”

  “Once you have his address and current alias, you can put a case together.”

  Sam leaned forward and emitted a single, muffled syllable of laughter.