It added something new. The FBI’s computer had matched the details of the Edith Foster killing with a similar murder committed eight years ago—in Germany.
“Shit,” Braden muttered. “The Bureau thinks this wasn’t a onetime shot? That we have an international killer? How the hell could they get onto something like that so fast?”
“Maybe you should ask the lady,” Hummel said. “Isn’t that what VICAP’s supposed to be all about? That is, you can ask her if you get another chance. Is any of this getting through to you, Braden?”
“I’m supposed to cooperate.”
“You’ve got it.”
“I’m open to new ideas. I don’t roll my eyes anytime a Fed comes into the room.”
“Better and better.”
“She looks like Barbie on steroids, for Chrissake. Is there a Barbie FBI Agent doll with muscles?”
“I don’t know. You look like Boris Karloff this morning, what do you care? You got somethin’ against good-lookin’ women? Is there somethin’ you been wantin’ to tell me, Detective?”
“Only that I have a homicide to look into. That’s bad enough without a serial killer circus.”
Hummel regarded him steadily. His eyes were small in a beefy red face. Braden had never been able to read the captain’s eyes. They were so small and hard they gave Hummel an edge, Braden thought, if anyone had the balls to go eye-to-eye with him. “Let’s pray to God it’s just one homicide.”
“Yeah.”
As Braden turned to go, Hummel’s voice stopped him with his hand on the doorknob. “And when Barb comes back, treat her with respect. Is that understood, Detective?”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“Good. You might even learn somethin’. Her name’s Karen, by the way, not Barbie.”
“Am I supposed to care?”
“You never know, Detective.”
Sixteen
FBI SPECIAL AGENT Karen Younger was staying at a Red Roof Inn on the outskirts of San Carlos, just off the freeway on the east side. Braden dialed the motel’s number from his car. When her room phone wasn’t answered, he drove around aimlessly for a short time, feeling generally pissed off.
Then he had a hunch.
From the civic center he drove south through Old Town, past the San Carlos College campus and past the Alpha Beta shopping center where Edith Foster’s 280Z had been found abandoned. A few minutes later he was out of the city, cruising between long, flat dunes on his right and the protected wetlands on the inland side of the highway.
He found Agent Younger where he had expected her to be: at the crime scene.
Braden parked behind the agent’s rented Ford Contour and walked to the bridge where Younger leaned on the railing. She didn’t look up as Braden stopped beside her. Her expression was as somber as the day, which remained overcast and cool. The offshore breeze blowing uninterrupted across the dunes had a cutting edge.
“Was any trace evidence found on this railing?” she asked after a moment.
Braden shook his head. “He was careful. Right about where you’re standing the techs found scrapings from a plastic sheet she was wrapped in. This is where he dropped her over.”
Little evidence of the crime scene was left, other than some yellow police tape flapping in the breeze where one end had pulled loose and, over beside the bike path, the remains of some candles and wilted flowers that had briefly memorialized the murdered girl.
Braden understood why Karen Younger had needed to visit the crime scene herself. Reading a report was no substitute for being there. Staring down at the creek bed, was she mentally sorting through the police photographs showing Edith Foster’s body facedown in the mud? At the same time was she trying to fit inside the skin of the killer? Most investigators tried it, one time or another, with varying success. He wondered if Younger was good at it and that was why the Bureau had sent her. Irrelevantly he decided that her eyes were more gray than blue, as if they reflected the sky. He wondered if they would appear more blue than gray on a warm, sunny day.
“Where you from, Younger? That accent … New York?”
“I grew up in Philadelphia.”
“Is that where you picked up that chip on your shoulder?”
“Part of that’s inherited. My mom was the same way. Nobody gave her any lip.”
“I suppose that means, if you hadn’t met some kindly benefactor who steered you along the right path, instead of being an upright FBI agent you could’ve ended up on the other side.”
“A hit woman for the Mob,” she agreed. “Or maybe a Philadelphia waitress.”
Another silence fell between them, but the tension had gone out of it.
“So what do your friends call you, Detective?”
“My really good friends call me Braden. Everyone else calls me Detective Braden.”
“Cool,” she said. “I’ll bet your mother still calls you Timothy.”
“Yeah, and my ex-wife called me Tim. You’ll notice I said ex.”
“You work hard at getting people to dislike you, don’t you, Braden?”
“Hell, it ain’t hard.”
She studied him thoughtfully. Then she looked back down toward the creek. “Washing the body, wrapping her in plastic, dumping her out here … he’s a very organized killer, Detective. And he’s had a long time to plan this.”
“You seem to know more than I do. How about we go somewhere out of the wind and talk?”
“Why the change of heart?”
“My captain and I had a little heart-to-heart. There’s a diner back up the road. You want to follow my car?”
SHE FOLLOWED HIM along the highway to the Bright Spot. Walking toward the entrance, Braden pointed out the telephone from which Harry Malkowski had made his 911 call after discovering Edith Foster’s body. The diner was nearly deserted. They sat at a window booth facing each other, with a view across the highway over the empty dunes.
Braden listened to the record on the jukebox. Otis Redding, “Dock of the Bay,” he thought, pleased with himself. Karen Younger studied the collection of vintage car photographs on the walls. Iris, the leggy, frizzy-haired blond waitress who had been on duty when Braden interviewed Harry Malkowski, approached the booth, eyeing the FBI agent with curiosity. She took their orders for coffee, then said, “Catfish is good today. It’s farm-raised.”
The menu featured such old-fashioned comfort foods as hot beef and hot turkey sandwiches, macaroni and cheese, hamburgers and milk shakes. “I’ll have coffee and the Philly Cheesesteak sandwich,” Braden said.
“I’ll have the same,” the FBI agent said.
When they were alone they studied each other warily across the formica table. Braden had seen the admiration in the waitress’s eyes when she looked Younger up and down. He decided the word Iris would have used was classy.
“If we’re going to work together, Braden, there’s something I have to know.”
He stiffened, guessing what was coming. “If you have something to ask, ask it.”
“That woman on the video, why’d you hit her?”
“To control her.”
“Oh, come on, Braden, you were on camera, she—”
“The camera lied.”
“Cameras don’t lie, Detective.”
“They do if what they show is selective. What you saw on that film—what the whole damned country thinks it saw—was a lie.”
The scene flashed through his mind for perhaps the thousandth time. Filmed by the supposed victim’s neighbor in blurry black-and-white, under poor light conditions, the video recorded what looked like a classic case of police brutality. There was Braden stepping through a doorway. Then a young black woman flying out the door, screaming at him. Braden turning away, the woman grabbing him, getting in his face, Braden pushing her off. The woman rushing after him again, but now Braden’s body hid her partially from the camera’s lens, and the world never saw what Braden did—the bottle opener with a spiral metal corkscrew in the woman’s han
ds. She jabbed it at Braden’s eyes. All the camera recorded was an image of this skinny black woman struggling with a much bigger, stronger white man, twisting free of his grip, appearing to try to slap him … and Braden either shoving or slapping her, sending her sprawling through the doorway. Then Braden, in a move that looked very bad on film, charged through the door after her. The camera stared at the empty doorway while the woman’s screams rose higher, becoming a shrill plea for help.
Younger’s eyes were noncommittal. Reserving judgment, Braden thought. She said, “What was it all about, anyway? The news stories glossed that over.”
“It started as a typical domestic triangle—the woman, her husband and her lover. The husband had a knife but the lover had a gun, so guess who won? When we got there the husband was already down—he was DOA at the hospital. We were trying to arrest the second man and the soon-to-be-rich widow became hysterical, out of control. When she flew at me I tried to give her some space. I stepped outside but she came after me.”
“With a corkscrew.”
“Yeah.”
“Which was never found.”
“That’s right,” Braden said in a flat tone. “Somebody took it … someone who wanted to create problems for the police. It happens. Listen, if you knew all this, why did you ask?”
“I wanted to hear what you had to say. Hey, Detective, you have to admit it looked bad on video.”
Braden himself had been shocked when he first saw the film footage. Rehashing it now, he felt the burden of the past year bearing down on him. The curiosity in the FBI agent’s eyes was nothing new. When the corkscrew couldn’t be found, Internal Affairs investigators were openly skeptical about Braden’s story. The tabloid news media had a field day. In the eyes of a national television audience Braden was instantly proven guilty. Open and shut. The Corkscrew Cop, one reporter called him, and the name stuck. Even David Letterman joked on The Late Show about the difference between a cop being screwed and being bent.
Pending the departmental investigation of the incident, Braden was suspended. The widowed woman’s lawyer quickly brought suit against Braden, the police department, the police chief and the city. Eventually the internal investigation cleared Braden. His partner at the scene and other witnesses supported his story about the woman going berserk and striking at Braden’s face with some kind of weapon. The partner confirmed that Braden had followed procedure in doing everything possible to defuse the situation, walking away from the woman and ultimately slapping her only when she became violent.
In the end none of that mattered. Braden was reassigned to a desk in Parker Center, out of public view. The city, seeking to avoid the expense and notoriety of an inflammatory trial, settled with the bereaved widow out of court. An agreement with the police officers’ union allowed Braden to transfer out of the LAPD to the San Carlos Police Department, a comparative backwater agency that had been trying to hire a qualified criminal investigator for more than six months.
The Incident followed Braden to San Carlos. Initially there were organized protests by students and some faculty members enraged over his hiring. The conservative mayor and city council, elected on law-and-order campaign platforms, refused to back down. Protesters were reminded that there had been a rising incidence of rape and assault on campus. Timothy Braden had a distinguished record, he had been cleared by his department, he was a valuable asset for the SCPD, the college and the community.
Although there were cries of whitewash, the demonstrations died away, especially when local TV stations lost interest; but the memory of the Incident lingered on—even that insufferable nickname surfaced once in a while.
When Braden stopped talking there was a long silence. He thought he detected a change in the FBI agent’s attitude when she spoke again. “Fair enough, Detective. I don’t suppose that was easy—”
“Cut the bullshit,” Braden snapped back. “What are you, a shrink?”
Karen Younger smiled. “As a matter of fact, Braden, I am.”
The waitress had brought their Philly Cheesesteak sandwiches while Braden talked, and the agent examined hers dubiously.
“Anything wrong?” Braden asked.
“They never saw this in Philadelphia.”
“This is a Philly Cheesesteak sandwich California style. That’s probably watercress there, see?”
“I don’t want to know.”
They munched on their sandwiches quietly, Braden with more enthusiasm than someone who had grown up eating real Philadelphia Cheesesteak sandwiches. When they had finished Iris brought more coffee and whisked away their plates.
“Okay, Agent Younger, if this Feel-Good Hour is over, what say we get back to why you’re here.”
“Tell me what you’ve learned so far, Detective. Besides what’s in the preliminary autopsy and the incident reports you faxed to us.”
“Edith Foster went out to meet someone Friday night—probably her latest boyfriend. She was seen between ten and eleven at The Pelican, a coffeehouse downtown. At midnight she made some purchases at a supermarket on the south side of town—you went by it driving out here. Her car was found parked in the market’s lot Monday morning. It was parked around the side, but the assistant manager remembers seeing it when he came to work on Sunday and again when he left that night. He thought it might have been there Saturday, too. He was gonna report it, he says, but he hadn’t got around to it. Too busy.”
“So you think she was abducted from the parking lot after midnight.”
“Either that or she went off willingly in her boyfriend’s car and never came back.”
“Why did you call him her latest boyfriend before?”
“She was a popular girl. Between the lines, maybe she slept around a little more than was good for her.”
“Mm.”
“Whatever that means. The thing is … her latest is a mystery man. According to her roommate, Foster liked older men—including some of her professors. Supposedly, she had a crush on one of them last year. Then they broke up or something, or summer vacation got in the way, but the roomie thinks Foster was seeing him again. At any rate, she was seeing someone for the last four or five weeks and was very closemouthed about it.”
“One of her teachers?”
“That’d be a good guess. There’s some kind of rule against faculty and students doing their thing together.”
“Delicately put.”
“I thought so.” Braden paused in his summary. “So you see, Younger, there’s good reason to think we should be looking for our killer right here in San Carlos, not at something that happened in Germany eight years ago.”
“The two don’t necessarily rule each other out.”
“Be easy to check, though. Get a list of the faculty, eliminate women and those who are too old or too young, and run the others, see if they were in Germany at the right time.”
“That’s worth doing, Detective. That’s something I can do.”
Braden nodded. It was the kind of thing the FBI was good at.
“This roommate … do you think she knows more than she’s told you?”
“Sheri Kuttner? Yeah, she knows more, or thinks she does. I get the feeling she was a little jealous of Foster … or maybe she resented this guy coming between them. She and Edie were best friends.”
“If he was an older, married man, Sheri would probably have disapproved. She might have believed Edie was being used.”
“I don’t know about Sheri disapproving of what Edie was doing—I don’t get the impression these kids are very judgmental—but you’re right, she didn’t like what the professor was doing. Some of them do take advantage. I remember when I went to college, one of my professors had this regular revolving door for coeds, at least one every semester.”
“I was thinking more of Sheri Kuttner’s reliability.”
“I know what you were saying. You want to know what this professor of mine taught?”
The FBI agent eyed him speculatively. “Psychology.”
&n
bsp; Braden grinned at her. “You’ve got it.”
“I’d like to talk to Sheri. Maybe she’ll open up more with a woman.”
“Be my guest.” Braden waved the attentive Iris off. “So what’s this German angle? Where does a serial killer fit in … from the Bureau’s point of view, that is.”
“We don’t have an ax to grind, Braden … and I wish to hell I didn’t believe what I do. Eight years ago a similar murder occurred near Wiesbaden in what was then West Germany. That’s near a major U.S. air base. The crime was never solved. The details were entered into VICAP’s database several years ago as a control. The entry was never supposed to turn up a match in this country, but now it has.”
Braden regarded her with a cop’s flat, skeptical gaze. “Eight years ago?”
“That’s right. The case was investigated by the FBI and the German polizei. There was a suspicion that the murderer might have been an American, but it was never proved. The girl was with another soldier the night she was killed.”
“Another soldier?”
The agent’s gray eyes looked past Braden’s shoulder at some distant point. She described the bridge and the service platform where the girl’s body was found. “The theory was that the girl and her soldier went down to the service platform for a little privacy, and the killer caught them there.”
“Both of them?”
“The river deposited the boyfriend’s body downstream two days later. He had some contusions about the face, suggesting he’d been hit, but he died from drowning.”
Braden stared at her for a moment, then shook his head. “That’s different from my case. I have only one body. Anyway, eight years is a lifetime between murders, and it’s a long way from Wiesbaden to San Carlos.”
“Not far enough, apparently.”
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