The Devil's Menagerie

by Louis Charbonneau

  Which explained why she was not living in one of the dormitories or sorority houses but in a boardinghouse a block from the edge of the campus, in one of the old Victorian houses on Cypress Street that had been converted into rooms for students.

  It also explained why she was studying alone on a Friday evening at the library, and why she planned on walking home alone. Because of the recent murder of a coed, Edith Foster, there had been a fluttering of unease among female students on campus. Many were reluctant to go out alone, especially after dark. Natalie was scornful. No perverted sex maniac was going to manipulate her life. Just let him try something with her.

  Natalie had taken a course in self-defense at the local YWCA, in which she had been counseled, in the event she were ever attacked, to do two things: fight back as hard as she could, and scream as loud as she could. She also carried a can of pepper spray in her purse, and she wouldn’t hesitate to use it.

  Natalie suspected that her independence was one of the reasons she didn’t have a date that weekend—or any weekend since the fall semester had started. That and her brains. That’s what her mother told her. “You scare boys off, Nat. It’s not always smart to be too smart.”

  “If a woman having any intelligence scares them off, that’s their problem,” Natalie had retorted. “Let them find a bimbo.”

  It wasn’t that she was ugly. She wasn’t really what you would call pretty, she knew, but she was arresting. Interesting-looking, she thought. “You could be exotic if you’d make half an effort,” her mother said. “Men play up to fairy tale princesses, but they like exotic better. You listen to your mother. I know.”

  Her mother thought she was exotic.

  Natalie was five feet four, a hundred and twenty. She had lustrous black hair that fell halfway down her back when she let it out, though she usually wore it in a ponytail tied with a ribbon or piled up high in back. She had rather full black eyebrows she didn’t much care for but refused to pluck, huge brown eyes, a Streisand nose and a wide, generous mouth her mother said was just like Julia Roberts’s mouth. Her mother had also tentatively suggested that Natalie’s father was willing to pay for having her nose fixed. “Just a little. It would make those exotic eyes of yours even more exotic, and your lips would look fuller.”

  “My mouth is already big enough,” Natalie had said. “So is Julia Roberts’s.”

  She also liked her nose the way it was, like Barbra’s nose.

  At nine o’clock she set aside the reference books she had been consulting. The librarians insisted that you leave them on the table rather than returning them to the stacks yourself, as if any dodo couldn’t figure out the decimal system and put books back in the right place. Natalie was considering majoring in Library Science. She gathered up her Romantic Poets textbook and her notebook, dropped them into the canvas Bookstar tote, and walked toward the exit, looking exotic in snug-fitting jeans, dirty Reeboks and a Sierra Club wildlife sweatshirt with a dramatic sketch of an eagle on the front, hook-nosed and fierce.

  “Good night, Natalie,” one of the assistant librarians called out. Connie Osborne was a senior, a Library Science major, neither pretty nor exotic.

  “G’night.”

  Out of the corner of her eye Natalie saw the tall, sandy-haired man rising from a nearby table piled with periodicals. She had noticed him earlier, covertly glancing his way when he was absorbed in a magazine. Good-looking WASP had flashed through her mind. Though she passed him on the way to the exit, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of looking directly at him. Too old to be a student, she thought, unless he was one of those semipermanent grad students living off dad’s allowance. Hair a little too long, allowed to grow over his ears and collar, but clean. A professor? Maybe in the engineering school. Outdoorsy look, with a deep tan and muscles under his polo shirt. Maybe he built bridges.

  She was outside on the wide library steps, a little annoyed with herself and her schoolgirl speculations, when she heard the scrape of a footstep behind her. A quiet, pleasant male voice said, “Excuse me, Natalie … would you like some company?”

  Her large brown eyes challenged him boldly. “I beg your pardon?”

  He smiled, completely at ease with her icy challenge, not like the dweebs who occasionally found the nerve to ask her for a date. And up close he was overpoweringly a male animal. She felt a catch in her throat and a fluttering in her stomach.

  “All I meant was, there’s been some concern on campus this week about girls walking alone, especially after dark. I’d be glad to tag along—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, I don’t need an escort.”

  “Do you live in one of the dorms?” His glance flicked out across the darkness of the campus. “It’s no trouble …”

  “I’m not a girl, and I’m not scared to be out after dark,” Natalie said disdainfully, tossing her long ponytail and starting down the steps. “I don’t live in a dorm, but my place is only a block off campus.”

  Why did she have to add that? He had flustered her. She found herself wishing that she hadn’t come on so strong. So what if he was a WASP? He was a hunk. Like one of those models in the Barely Buns calendar one of the women at the boardinghouse had put up on the bulletin board in the hallway …

  “Well, just be careful, Brown Eyes,” the stranger called after her.

  By the time she permitted herself a single glance over her shoulder the library steps were empty. He was gone. She felt a surprisingly keen disappointment. Probably if she had had the nose job he would’ve followed her.

  He called you Brown Eyes.

  Huh!

  She straightened her shoulders and strode off briskly. Sniffed in scorn at the notion of allowing a tennis pro or ski instructor or whatever he was to pick her up at the library, which was reputed to be among the top three pickup places on campus. He had probably been reading a stack of Sports Illustrated magazines, not Engineering Digest.

  Something flickered at the edge of her consciousness, like her mother’s voice warning her to be careful. But Mr. Golf Pro wasn’t one of those creepy losers who needed to prey on helpless women to get his rocks off. He could sell tickets. He could walk into any of her classes and hand out tickets. Take a number, get in line, wait your turn.

  Called her Brown Eyes.

  Natalie sniffed again, less convincingly, tossing her ponytail in an unconscious gesture of dismissal.

  The path she followed went past a couple of administration buildings and down another short flight of steps, where it came to a fork. Natalie turned left. Her route carried her past the Science Building to a circle surrounding a modern sculpture, one of those oversize creations, welded together out of pieces of scrap metal, that pointed toward the sky and was therefore considered to be an optimistic statement about the Human Condition.

  Natalie sniffed at it, swinging her ponytail.

  Some students were gathered along another wide flight of steps lit on either side by the gas lamps that were intended to integrate the college with the character of the surrounding Victorian neighborhood. She wondered what school of design taught that ploy.

  Now the path led toward the southwest corner of the campus where it intersected with the corner of Cypress and Princeton streets. North and south streets in the area were named after trees—Oak, Cypress, Cedar, Pine—while east and west streets were named after Ivy League universities. Apparently no one taught city planners or developers a course in Street Names.

  With an abruptness that was unexpectedly unnerving, Natalie found herself walking in semidarkness. The curving path was crowded on the left by bushes and on the right by a grove of eucalyptus trees, the latter fragrant in the night air, a lemon scent. The gaslights infrequently spaced along the path were atmospheric, but the streetlights on Cypress, glimpsed through the trees, were much brighter. The gas lamps flickered in the shadows, their light seeping outward only a short distance rather than casting a bright glow along the walkway.

  Natalie’s footsteps quickened. She listened to
the squeak of her Reeboks on the cement. A rustling in the brush to her left caused her stomach to clench. In spite of her earlier bravado she walked faster, her heart racing ahead of her steps. There was another sound like leaves crackling, and her gaze darted into the shadows of the eucalyptus grove.

  She passed under one of the gas lamps, momentarily relieved by the security of its feeble glow, then plunged into another patch of darkness. She could hear the wind now, the wind that explained the rustling in the bushes and the stirring of the leaves on the ground and the sighing high overhead in the eucalyptus branches.

  She was nearly to the street intersection, close enough to begin to feel foolish over her nervousness. They really ought to change the damned lights. What would it be like at the end of the month when the clocks had to be set back an hour and it started getting dark on campus at five o’clock? Talk about hearts aflutter—

  Her own heart seemed to stop.

  A figure stepped onto the path in front of her, just this side of the street corner, blocking her way. She hadn’t noticed before how the tall trees cut off the light from the street lamp on the north side of the intersection, leaving her and the intruder standing in a pool of shadows. She started to wheeze, gasping for breath, like her sister Ruth having one of her asthma attacks.

  Then a chuckle reached her out of the darkness, “Hey, Brown Eyes … just wanted to make sure you got home safely.”

  Her reaction left her weak, her knees quivering. A giggle born of anxiety and relief escaped her open mouth, and her cheeks flamed at the sound.

  He took a step toward her and she was struck by how he moved, flowing like an athlete. In the same moment, as she tried to find her tongue to say something witty or intelligent, wary questions lit her brain. How did he know which way she was going when she left the library? She hadn’t said what street her boardinghouse was on. And how had he got here ahead of her? She had practically been running part of the way.

  “I really wanted to see you again, Natalie. Do you know why?”

  His voice was disarming, pleasant, but now she felt an unspoken menace charging the night air with an electricity she had not felt before.

  “It was your name,” he said mysteriously.

  Natalie bolted. Galvanized by fear of that mesmerizing voice, she leaped toward the screen of trees to her right. The man was quicker. She spun away from him, ducking under a branch. Her foot slipped on a pile of leaves.

  She felt his hand on her shoulder, plucking her up as if she were lint on a sweater, turning and lifting her. She was close enough to see his eyes glint behind the lenses of his glasses. She opened her mouth to scream and he hit her in the chest.

  She had never known such hard and massive pain. Her mouth was open but no scream came. She couldn’t breathe. Her lungs were on fire. He clubbed her on the back of the head and she collapsed at his feet, dazed, helpless, only semiconscious as he lifted her easily into his arms.

  From a long way off she heard him say, “We’re going to have fun, Natalie,” before she drifted off.

  She had never had a chance to knee him in the groin. She had been unable to scream. And she had completely forgotten the pepper spray in her purse.

  Twenty

  SORTLY AFTER MIDNIGHT the San Carlos police dispatcher awakened Karen at her motel. She met Braden near the edge of the San Carlos College campus. Yellow crime scene tape stretched around a paved area centered on a large Dumpster set against a ten-foot high concrete block wall. One of the classroom buildings loomed to the right. The secluded area behind the building was accessed by a service road running along the southwest perimeter of the campus off Princeton Street.

  The coroner’s technician, Ted Nakashimi, was already there along with a half-dozen uniformed San Carlos police. Clusters of students hovered in the background. The presence of a number of police and official cars, their red and blue lights flashing, gave the late-night scene the aspect of a miniature circus with its center ring, spotlights and hushed spectators.

  Karen followed a string of trouble lights to the Dumpster. The ME squatted on his heels inside the large metal container. Apparently the Dumpster had recently been emptied because there was only a small pile of paper trash in one corner. The only other object in the container was the body of a young woman. She was naked except for torn panties tangled around her right ankle, short white socks and Reebocks. Karen saw long black hair in a ponytail, a dark triangle of pubic hair, bloody wounds …

  “Trash,” she murmured. “That’s how he thought of her.”

  “What?” Braden was scowling. There was an intensity about him she hadn’t observed before. “Oh, yeah … her name’s Natalie Rothleder. Was.”

  The victim had been battered ruthlessly around the face and chest. One blow had nearly ripped the nipple from her left breast. Her face was unrecognizable, and Karen wondered how she had been identified so quickly. The familiar crudely slashed initial mutilated her belly. Karen craned her neck to peer past Nakashimi’s shoulder. Two vertical lines were connected by a slash from top to bottom. N, she thought.

  N for Natalie.

  “How did you identify her?”

  “Some students coming back from a late movie saw a bloody white sweatshirt in the brush off one of the footpaths. It had her name tag sewn inside. Campus security was able to track her for us through school records.”

  “What was she doing out alone?” Karen felt a kind of despair as she asked the question.

  “She lived in a boardinghouse on Cypress, about a block from the campus. She was at the library up until about nine o’clock, then left. Presumably walking back to her room. They’ve started a buddy system on campus since the Foster thing, but Rothleder didn’t take advantage of it.”

  “How was she found?”

  “The students took the sweatshirt to the security office. That set up a search of the campus by the security officers and some student volunteers. A security guy—that’s him over there with his head between his knees, Walker’s his name—remembered hearing a car in this area around eleven, so he checked it out. There’s a possibility he just missed the killer. When he searched this area he spotted blood on the ground there, and some more on the Dumpster.”

  “She was killed somewhere else.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Yeah, same pattern as before. I figure the killer grabbed her on the path she took from the library to get to her boardinghouse. Some of it’s fairly dark and isolated. He dragged her to his car or someplace safe. He raped her in every opening he could find, beat her to death, did his number with the knife, then drove around looking for a place to dump the body. Or he had this place already picked out.”

  “She wasn’t gagged or tied up?”

  “Not unless the ME FINDS something I missed. I figure she was knocked cold. Nobody heard any screams.”

  Ted Nakashimi climbed out of the dumpster, dropping lightly to his feet on the pavement. He signaled for two ambulance attendants waiting with a body bag to transport the body to the county morgue. He nodded at Braden and the FBI agent.

  “How long has she been dead?” Karen asked.

  “About two hours, give or take. Rigor’s just starting, and the body temp has cooled only a few degrees from normal. I’d guess she died between ten and eleven, somewhere in there.”

  “Any defense wounds?”

  “Nothing obvious. I’ll have to examine her on the table,” the ME said cautiously.

  No one asked him the cause of death, although the question was technically open.

  When Nakashimi moved off, Braden and Karen stood alone for a long minute in silence, watching the activity around the Dumpster. Finally Karen said, “He took more risks this time.”

  “It was quick and dirty,” Braden agreed. “So maybe he missed something, made a mistake. We’ll search the campus as soon as it’s light—maybe we can find out exactly where he grabbed her.”

  “Why did he pick her? Just because she was alone and vulnerable?”

 
“Maybe.” He paused as the attendants walked by carrying the body bag by its wide straps. Beyond the paved area, at the fringe of the light, there was a whisper of sound, like a collective gasp, from the audience of students. “She made herself a target.”

  “Are you saying—”

  “I’m only saying she gave him the opportunity. I doubt we’ll have any more women walking this campus at night alone anytime soon.”

  Karen shivered, suddenly aware of the cold. She hadn’t expected Southern California nights to be this chilly in early October, and she had rushed out wearing only a light jacket.

  After a moment’s brooding Braden said, “My captain has been on the horn making noises about a special joint task force with the sheriff and the FBI. You know anything about that?”

  “It’s news to me.” Buddy Cochrane wouldn’t necessarily brief her ahead of time, she thought.

  “We’ll have people tripping over each other. And the media won’t be long putting one and one together to make two, so from here on out it’s gonna be like living inside Hard Copy. We have to catch this bastard.”

  Karen frowned, wishing as usual that there was some way to reconcile the rights of a free press that had abandoned all the rules with the needs of a murder investigation.

  “What I’m saying is, we don’t have time to waste. You awake enough to talk about that profile of yours?”

  Karen nodded, surprised, thinking that it was an extraordinary concession for Braden to make, and confirming to herself that there was a new edge to the detective. A second murder on his doorstep would do it, she thought.

  “I wouldn’t be able to sleep now if I tried,” she said.

  TO HER SURPRISE, Braden picked a bar rather than an all-night coffee shop or his corner of the squad room at the police station. The place was dark and smelled of beer and stale smoke. He nodded at a couple of men sitting at the mahogany bar as he led Karen to a booth in the back of the room. The men at the bar watched them with cops’ eyes.