The “Command Vans” provided for the P.D.’s use for such situations are three-quarter ton vehicles completely outfitted with communications gear and comfortable accommodations for up to six in a working environment. This particular configuration included a small galley area with ice chest and small sink, cupboards and other storage. One could not stand erect in the interior but those of average height could move freely about.
Under these weather conditions the van was far from ideal for anything other than remaining dry. Under normal conditions, their vantage point from the back of the van would provide an excellent four way view while providing concealment. Of course, these vans had not been designed into a workable mood under the given weather conditions. Visibility was poor, ventilation minimal, and it was a constant task to keep the condensation free of the window areas. Besides which, it was certainly no place to be stuck with an incompatible companion. Not that Charlie was all that hard to accommodate—Rebecca had even discovered that he could be not only pleasant but sometimes charming.
Not so, this night. He had begun complaining from the moment they gained station, finding fault with not only the admittedly impossible visibility and closeness but the entire mission itself. Perhaps he had begun to feel a bit claustrophobic—as, indeed, so had she—but, hell, they were not here to party and the guy should not have come along if he could not “take the heat.”
They had been on station for only about ten minutes when he became terribly restless and almost unpleasant. She suggested, “Lighten up, Charlie. Keep yourself busy. You can work on those windows, at least keep a visible porthole to either side here.”
Her pleasant camaraderie seemed to relax him a bit. He told her, “Guess I’m not cut out for this cop stuff. I’m a journalist, not a warrior.”
She said, “They’re about the same, aren’t they? Your work has certainly been combative enough. Takes a lot of guts to stand in there the way you do. Not that I always agree with you and I guess I could even respect it if I weren’t so biased, myself.”
He gave her a warm smile. “That’s what I like about you, Rebecca. You’re not afraid to call it like you see it. I know I’ve been rough on you but the simple truth is that the public is not terrifically excited about pap. They want controversy. And that is what sells newspapers. Hell, I’m not here to save the world from itself. I’m here to keep the rest of us from dying of boredom.”
She said lightly, “I guess you’ve got something there, pal. You’ve never been guilty of boredom, not in my league. How did you get into this racket, anyway?”
He said, “A very nice man took pity on me once, saw some of my stuff and took me under his wing, felt that he could make a newspaperman out of me.”
“Must have been a good teacher. You are good, Charlie, you’re just a little warped in places. How did you convince Chief Walsh to let you cover our stake-out?”
He shrugged. “Guess he saw the logic of it. I feel that this story should include a good portrait of Robert Martin. What do you think about that?”
“Sounds okay to me. I talked to Martin’s aunt just this morning.”
“His aunt?”
“Why do you sound so shocked? Killers have relatives, like the rest of us.”
“So what did she tell you?”
“Well, it put the killer in a bit better focus for me.”
“How’s that?”
“His mother spent many years in a mental institution and died there about a year ago. I don’t want you to use any of this stuff without clearing it with me first, Charlie, but…it is my theory that this horrible ‘binge’ in San Remo began shortly after Martin learned of his mother’s death.”
He turned toward the window behind him and dabbed at the condensation with a paper towel. “I shouldn’t have come out here. Can’t see a damn thing. Is it getting terribly close in here to you?”
She replied casually, “It’s a bit stuffy. So what do you think of my theory?”
He leaned back onto a small captain’s chair and seemed to be trying to get comfortable as he replied, “As good as any, probably. I’m not much on psychology. The mother is a bitch, though, I can vouch for that.”
She showed him a surprised glance. “What do you know about it?”
Andrews seemed almost angry as he replied, “They’re all bitches, present company excluded, of course. I have always felt that I could really get it on with you, Rebecca.”
“How could you possibly think that?” She was moving toward a bit of levity. “I’m the queen of bitches, didn’t you know that?”
“Maybe that’s why you excite me so.”
She replied uncomfortably, “I wasn’t aware that you find me that exciting.”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. I’ve been sitting here about to bust for the past half hour.”
She did not like the direction of this. Could she have set this up, herself? She said calmly, “You’re out of bounds again. I think I have made it quite clear that I have no romantic interest in you.”
He leaned forward to growl at her, “You all say that, don’t you? Is there such a thing as an honest woman? Why all the cute crap? You want me as bad as I want you.”
She had to somehow diffuse this situation. This was, after all, a highly intimate environment. And maybe she had been sending the wrong signals. He had that gleam in his eye—that “male animal” gleam—and it was making her terribly uncomfortable. He leaned forward and placed both hands on her shoulders, staring into her eyes with a smoldering gaze.
Before she could react, he whispered hoarsely, “Don’t try to kid me. You’ve been wanting this cock all morning, Mommy.”
Her blood ran cold.
Either Andrews had a terribly perverted sense of humor or…oh God!
Chapter Thirty-one
So what kind of cop was she? All the markers had been there from the beginning—right height and weight, general build, antagonism toward woman and the often contradictory behavior.
“Show me your heat, Mommy!”
The transition was remarkable. The Charlie Andrews she had known did not presently exist. She had heard that coldly mechanical voice and experienced those malevolent eyes behind a ski mask at the Webster home. This strange creature was fully Robert James Martin. The transformation was complete. She was once again eye to eye with the killer. Rebecca might make a textbook study of this phenomenon one day if she could survive this moment; for now, all her energies and prowess was presently centered upon the struggle for her very life.
He was a man possessed by the exigencies of his own moment, with the strength of a maniac and totally beyond any attempt to be reasoned with or dissuaded. They were locked in a furious struggle, with Rebecca clawing to both hold him off and reach her pistol, which lay inches away from her grasp. He had pulled her onto the floor on her back while pummeling and trying to beat her into submission. Obviously he was aware and respectful of her police training and realized that she could be a worthy adversary in a hand to hand encounter, careful to give her no quarter whatever. So this was no ordinary struggle between a “defenseless” woman and a superior male. This was a battle for all the “marbles,” and Rebecca knew that life itself was in the balance.
But she was still trying to reach some rational center of him. “Please, Charlie, stop this!” she panted. “Don’t make me kill you!”
He punched her in the belly and growled, “You had your chance, bitch!”
She tried to knee him in the groin but he twisted clear. It was a desperate struggle and she was not totally in possession of her wits but she felt his hand upon her breast as he ripped her blouse clear and began clawing savagely at her pants. The fear was beginning to overwhelm her, the heart thudding and her breath labored.
She was strongly aware of the touch and smell of him, the maniacal frenzy of his determined battle. For an agonizing moment she felt suspended in time and space, an almost animal sense of submission to the certainty of pending death, the acceptance of it. But that
congeal moment was there for one brief second. She woke up to it and moved beyond it, exerting a final determination as her outstretched hand closed on the cold steel of her revolver. She could feel the comforting grip of the gun and this inspired a do-or-die lunge to fully seat the revolver in her outstretched hand.
It was the killer’s turn to feel the cold steel of the revolver and he knew that his moment had come.
He cried, almost childlike, “Mommy!” as the gun exploded and he toppled forward onto her heaving breast.
It was not nearly the satisfaction that she had once expected, but the nightmare for San Remo had finally ended…and that was satisfaction enough.
She struggled to free herself of his inert weight and staggered outside, half naked and bloodied, crumbling instantly to her knees and gasping for breath, her face lifted to the cleansing and cooling rain. She realized that she was hyperventilating under the onslaught of tumbling emotions so tried to will herself to control the breathing and stabilize the surging adrenalin.
She was not yet aware of the scratched and bruised skin; that realization would come later. At the moment she was content to merely be alive and free of that hellish reality inside the van.
She had not achieved any sense of physical or mental stability when her husband arrived on the scene. His vehicle rocked to a halt as he leapt out, gun in hand. “God!” he croaked.
“I’m okay!” she gasped.
“Martin…?”
“Inside. He’s dead. Pete, it’s been Charlie all along.”
Pete fell to both knees beside her and quickly checked her out. She again assured him, “I’m okay,” and melted into the sanctuary of his arms. “Did you hear me? Charlie is Martin.”
“I know, I know. I’ve been crazy. Your radio’s out.”
She was weeping and almost hysterically laughing at the same time. “Charlie must have sabotaged it.”
Another car tore into the drive and Rodriquez bolted forward. Sergeant Storme motioned toward the van and growled, “Call it in.”
Then he devoted full attention to his wife, covering her with his jacket and gently pulling her to her feet. “Sure you’re okay?”
“I think so. That’s Charlie’s blood.” She was already beginning to feel centered again.
He pulled her tight against him. “God, I’ve been crazy, just crazy!”
So had she—and she could not simply shut off the tears. Rebecca buried her face in the warm sheltering curve of his shoulder and surrendered to the tears.
The Woody Heights crisis had ended. The storm had not, but it would. More importantly, the Stormes had weathered it all and now could hope for a bright new beginning of their lives together.
But not right away.
They were cops, after all, and the night’s work had not ended. There were details to piece together, reports to write. As soon as Rebecca regained control her husband asked her, “Okay, now? Ready to go ack to work?”
She sighed and asked him, “Isn’t that what cops do?”
He said, sourly, “Yeah.”
“Can I have a bath and some dry clothes first?”
The Sergeant seemed to be debating the issue. “If you don’t take all day.”
That was the way it always was. So what was new? His tenderness had been masked already. Pete, she feared, would always be Pete. She replied with an air of resignation, “Yes sir, Sergeant sir.”
The whole street corner had come alive with emergency and police vehicles. Soon there would be a time for closure. A sensing of calm and relief was already making itself felt throughout the community but San Remo might never again be the same. Perhaps it should not be. This town had finally, fully, come of age.
Chapter Thirty-two
It had been a tragic and tortured life which had brought so much agony to the quiet city of San Remo and an almost serendipitous quality to the forces driving it. The real Charles Andrews had died in a traffic accident in Tulsa one day prior to Robert Martin’s escape from prison in Oklahoma. Andrews had met Martin while doing a feature story on prison rehabilitation, a subject of keen interest to the journalist. Martin, who had already been writing color stories for the prison newspaper, exhibited a natural flare which the journalist encouraged and later began conducting weekly seminars for other prisoners, hoping to add some luster to these blighted lives.
After several months of this work with prisoners, Andrews accepted a journalist position in California with the San Remo Bulletin. He wrote a letter of regret to Martin, explaining his new job and urging the convict to continue honing his own skills. Andrews died one week before he was to begin his new job on the Bulletin.
Enter “serendipity.”
According to a journal found after Robert Martin’s death, he had not once even considered the possibility of an escape until he learned of the tragedy which befell his mentor. It so happened that he had been slated for an appearance in a Tulsa courtroom as a witness in a prison slaying. Somehow, he simply walked away from the courthouse, burglarized Charles Andrews’ apartment and assumed his identity along with his job in San Remo.
A cousin of the late Andrews, living in Boston, had been following the news accounts of the Sunrise Killer and was shocked to find a syndicated story by Charles Andrews—San Remo Bulletin—several years after his death.
Knowing that his cousin had accepted the San Remo job shortly before his death four years earlier, he was immediately suspicious and alerted the San Remo authorities. It was in response to this phone call that “chilled the neck hairs” on Peter Storme.
Follow-up calls to verify the story, along with a couple of prison articles authored by Martin and discovered in Sergeant Powers’ file, led Storme to the realization that Andrews and Martin were one and the same.
Among the personal papers of the real Andrews, which were later found in Martin’s San Remo apartment, were carbon copies of Andrews’ old letters to Martin in prison as well as a thick scrapbook of his journalistic achievements.
Before Martin’s arrival in San Remo he had tried to closely assimilate not only the other man’s physical characteristics but even his literary manner. He had changed the coloring and style of his hair, adopted contact lenses which matched Andrews’ eyes, and immediately embarked upon a true physical transformation including body building and weight lose. Either he was a devoted and apt student of method-acting or he truly desired to become the person he had replaced. In this sense, then, Rebecca had been uncannily accurate in her psychological profiles of the killer: he was being driving by forces beyond his control which would destroy the very foundations of his new life.
Until that point, it had been a highly effective restructuring of his life and very likely the impersonation would have never been challenged had he otherwise remained clean. That he had not or could not is no doubt closely related to the bizarre and abusive relationship with his mother, and the collapse was directly triggered by his discovery of her death.
Journal entries in his own hand revealed the depths of his profound and growing sense of loss and abandonment. He simply could not handle it. The saga of the Woody Heights slayer began shortly thereafter. It could be noted that his first recorded rape occurred when he was seventeen after suffering what he regarded as “humiliating rejection” by his “first love,” who he felt had subjected him to the same sort of emotional trauma that had been inflicted upon him by his mother.
The gun that shot the Oklahoma detective, Lance Powers, was recovered in Martin’s apartment. A miscellany of knives and other small weapons were also found, as well as a number of telephone modular cords and other “souvenirs” taken from his victims.
Oklahoma Sergeant Lance Powers was released from the hospital a few days after his injury. Rebecca drove him to the airport and saw him off, agreeing to remain in touch and even suggesting that they could “meet somewhere” and discuss that “unfinished story” which was mentioned shortly before his shooting.
He assured her that he would be “in the mood” and
“anxiously awaiting” that opportunity. Rebecca was not so sure about that “ending,” herself, at the moment but she promised to keep him posted.
There were many things that she was not sure about, right now. This case had turned her world upside down and she had begun to think about a lot of things—not just love and marriage. She needed to review her options, other opportunities for growth—and perhaps this was more fearful than anything she had experienced to date.
Whatever, she would never forget these experiences with the Sunrise Killer. Only time would tell if the memories would resolve into a plan for life instead of a blueprint for nightmares.
But she was betting on life.
###
About the Authors
Don Pendleton (1927–1995) was author of more than one hundred novels, including the original Executioner series of thirty-eight novels featuring Mack Bolan; the Joe Copp, Private Eye series; the Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective mystery series. His novels have sold nearly two hundred million copies worldwide and have been translated into more than twenty-five languages.
Don and Linda Pendleton’s first collaboration was the popular nonfiction book, To Dance With Angels. Other nonfiction collaborative works include Whispers From the Soul; The Metaphysics of the Novel: The Inner Workings of a Novel and a Novelist; The Cosmic Breath, Metaphysical Essays of Don Pendleton.
Their fiction collaborations include Roulette and the Comic book adaptation of War Against the Mafia, the first novel in the Executioner series.
Among Linda Pendleton’s nonfiction are Three Principles of Angelic Wisdom; A Walk Through Grief: Crossing the Bridge Between Worlds; A Small Drop of Ink. Her fiction includes the Comic Book adaptation of The Executioner, Death Squad; Shattered Lens: Catherine Winter, Private Investigator; The Dawning; and the historical novel, Corn Silk Days, Iowa, 1862; and The Dawning. She is currently writing a second Catherine Winter novel. She is a member of the Author’s Guild, Inc.
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