The Devil's Menagerie

by Louis Charbonneau

  “How long?” someone asked quietly.

  “He waited a week between Foster and Rothleder. I doubt very much he’ll be able to wait longer than that.”

  “Shit,” an officer muttered.

  “This week,” Karen said with conviction. “He’ll strike again before the week is out.”

  * * *

  WINDING UP THE meeting, Captain Hummel’s words were harsh and emphatic. “The official line is, we got two murders, okay? The German connection so far is a theory. Maybe it’s a good one and it’ll help us catch this bastard. But officially, and I want every one of you to hear me good, we have two women who’ve been beaten and stabbed. That’s all. Nothin’ goes out about Germany, and nothin’ about carvin’ their initials on the victims’ bodies. We’re holding onto that as long as we can. If it gets out, I’ll know it was one of you and I’ll find out who. Do I have to repeat that? Nothin’ gets out that we don’t want released.”

  Nobody laughed.

  Twenty-Four

  “ELLI?”

  The man who called out her name was smiling. The little girl wasn’t worried or concerned, because the man had a pleasing manner and appearance, and he knew her name.

  “That’s your name, isn’t it? Ellen Lindstrom, but they call you Elli, right?”

  She nodded, unaccountably shy. Normally she talked a mile a minute, or at least that was what her daddy said, but there was something insistent in the man’s tone that made her uncomfortable. Instinctively she took a step backward.

  “I bet your mom told you not to talk to strangers, am I right? That’s good, Elli, your mom is right. I’ll bet Mrs. Drummond has told you the same thing, hasn’t she?”

  Elli nodded, relaxing a little. A bad stranger wouldn’t talk to her about her mother and Mrs. Drummond, her teacher. Nevertheless, she glanced over her shoulder toward the swing she had vacated a moment earlier. Another girl had grabbed the swing. Behind her, a group of boys and girls were climbing over a large pink dinosaur with crawl holes in the middle and a small slide for a tail.

  “I saw you on the swing. You were going pretty good there, Elli, all by yourself.”

  “I can swing by myself.”

  “I bet you can. I know you can.”

  “I can climb the dinosaur, too. I did it yesterday but I fell down and skinned my knee. See there? It bled, too, but I didn’t cry, except for a minute. It’s better now, but Mom says I’ll have a scab and I mustn’t pick at it or I’ll have a scar.”

  “You listen to your mom.”

  “Do you know Mommy? Do you know Daddy, too?”

  But the stranger was no longer listening to her. He was staring across the playground toward the school building, where Mrs. Drummond had just come out and was looking around. The teacher looked straight at them.

  “I know your mommy. You tell her you saw me today, okay? And I’ll see you again, Elli. Real soon.”

  Mrs. Drummond was hurrying toward them across the yard, walking very fast, but the stranger turned away, not waiting for the teacher. Mrs. Drummond kept staring after him as she hurried toward Elli. Maybe Mrs. Drummond liked him, the girl thought. Maybe she also thought he was a nice man.

  “I WAS ONLY out of the yard for a minute, Mrs. Lindstrom … not even that long. I went inside the school with one of the girls who was upset—not all of the girls are as well adjusted socially as Elli is.”

  “I didn’t send her to this school so she could be adjusted to strange men!” Glenda heard the edge of panic in her voice. Her heart was still racing from her reaction when Helen Drummond told her about the man she had seen talking to Elli.

  “I’m really sorry. As soon as I saw him with her, I hurried over. But he was already leaving. It was the same man I saw last week, I’m sure. He drove off in that same car.”

  “A blue Buick?”

  “Yes, I think so. Those cars, they all look so much alike.”

  Glenda tried to curb her anger. Drummond knew better, for God’s sake, but haranguing her wasn’t going to help the situation. “Can you … can you tell me what he looked like?”

  “Well, he … that’s sort of funny, Mrs. Lindstrom, but he’s hard to describe. I mean, he was presentable, not at all rough-looking, but there was nothing really distinctive about him to make you notice. Except maybe … yes, he was wearing tinted glasses. Not sunglasses, not as dark as that, but I know they were tinted.”

  Ralph!

  Glenda was gripping Elli’s hand as she talked to the teacher, and she squeezed so tightly that the girl looked up at her, suddenly anxious. Glenda tried to smile reassuringly.

  “Do you know him, Mrs. Lindstrom?” Helen Drummond asked. She was also anxious.

  “I don’t want him near Elli,” Glenda said. “If you see him near her, call me. And call the police at once.”

  The teacher paled visibly. “Oh, dear,” she said.

  IN THE CAR Elli watched her mother. She was sensitive enough to the angry tension in her mother that she was close to crying. “Did I do something wrong?” she asked, her voice small and tremulous.

  “No, honey,” Glenda whispered. Then she corrected herself. “Well, you know what I’ve told you about talking to strangers.”

  “He didn’t act like a stranger,” Elli said, her lower lip trembling.

  They never do, Glenda thought.

  “I know, it’s not your fault. It’s just that … if you see him again, I want you to go straight inside the school, or straight to Mrs. Drummond if she’s outside with you. Okay?”

  “Okay.” The girl was silent a moment. The car’s tires made thumping noises as they went over cracks in the pavement. She remembered the funny shy feeling she had had when the strange man first spoke to her. “Is he a bad man, Mommy?”

  Her mother looked at her quickly, then away. How much could she tell her daughter without sowing seeds of fear and anxiety that would ripen when Elli was older? Bad men don’t always look like bad men, she wanted to say; sometimes they look and act and talk like nice men.

  She forced a smile. “Let’s forget about him for now, okay?”

  Elli nodded, relieved. After a moment she said, “You hurt my hand.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry. You mean when I squeezed it? That was like a little hug. You know how it is when we hug sometimes really hard? So hard it almost hurts? Well, that was a hand hug.”

  Elli grinned happily at this explanation. “I wish my hand was bigger.”

  “So you could squeeze back?”

  “I’d give Richie a hand hug!”

  ONLY WHEN SHE reached home and Elli had gone cheerfully off to watch television did Glenda’s icy calm begin to shatter. She felt as if she were breaking up into slivers, that at any moment she would fly apart. She began to tremble, a quaking from within like the earth’s own tremors that had become so familiar since she’d been living in California.

  An earthquake was the result of a deep, invisible fault line. She saw herself that way—flawed, concealing a massive fault beneath a calm, ordinary facade.

  She heard Elli’s piping laughter from the den, and the sound pierced her heart like shards of glass.

  I won’t let him do it … not to her.

  She knew what Ralph was attempting. He wanted to terrorize her, to turn her back into the frightened, demoralized rabbit he had used and abused more than eight years ago, finding her weak and contemptible. She wouldn’t—she couldn’t—go back to that. She would not be that woman again, reduced to begging, pleading not for herself but for her child … that haunted, pitful creature with the darkly shadowed eyes and purple-yellow bruises, hiding in her own house. Literally jumping when she heard his voice. Where have you been? What took you so long? You think I don’t know what you’re up to? How long does it take to buy a jar of spaghetti sauce?

  Forever, she thought. Staring at the different jars and labels, so many of them, each so expensive. What if she picked the wrong one?

  Why did you buy that? Do you expect us to eat that crap? What did you
do with the rest of the money? Do you think I’m made of money, for Chrissakes? Is that why you married me?

  Glenda put her hands to her head as if to shut off the torrent of questions. She didn’t know how long she stood there, paralyzed. When she came out of a kind of trance she found herself standing in the kitchen, aftershocks still sending quivers through her body.

  “I won’t go back to that,” she whispered.

  “Mommy?” Elli was standing in the kitchen doorway, holding her favorite doll, a soft, pug-nosed country doll with yellow braids and a blue gingham dress. “Is something wrong?”

  “No, no, honey …” Glenda squatted on her heels to bring herself to eye level with the little girl. She held out her arms as Elli came to her, uncharacteristically tentative.

  “Why are you crying?”

  Glenda wiped at her cheeks with the heel of her palm, astonished to find them wet. “I was just remembering something sad, that’s all … something from a long time ago.”

  “I don’t want you to be sad.”

  The five-year-old sounded so grave that Glenda suppressed an absurd impulse to giggle. She swept Elli closer, hugging her tightly. “Tell me if I hug you too hard,” she whispered. “Like that hand hug I gave you, okay?”

  “It doesn’t hurt,” Elli said, hugging her back.

  Elli was being affected already, Glenda thought. Both Elli and Richie.

  Ralph wanted each of them to suffer.

  He wouldn’t stop until he had destroyed them all.

  THE INCIDENT IN the schoolyard with Glenda’s daughter had put Beringer in good spirits. After leaving Elli and her worried schoolteacher behind, Ralph drove south across town toward the San Carlos College campus, humming to himself while listening to SportsTalk on his car radio.

  He didn’t plan on venturing onto the campus again. His presence there, without a logical explanation to account for it, would be not merely reckless but stupid. Police and campus security officers were on the lookout for the mad-dog killer (no reporter had come up with a suitable name for him as yet, something catchy like Son of Sam or the Midnight Stalker). Almost certainly he would be stopped, and he couldn’t afford close scrutiny.

  He had decided it was safe enough, however, to have Eggs McMuffin for breakfast at the McDonald’s across from the northwest corner of the campus, which he had done earlier that morning, or lunch at one of the other student hangouts in the immediate area. He had been doing that each day, drinking enough coffee to keep the Titanic afloat and his brain on red alert. These stops had enabled him to pick up talk about the beefed-up security on campus, the escort and “buddy” programs and other measures, none of them very original or intimidating to someone as resourceful as Ralph.

  Today for lunch he chose a Mexican restaurant popular with students, less than a block from the edge of the campus. Rosie’s specialized in tacos and burritos and inexpensive platters. Beringer sat at one of the small tables surrounded by chattering students. He ordered a beef enchilada platter and a Carta Blanca, a light Mexican beer.

  He was halfway through his lunch when he spotted the girl.

  She had just come into the cafe and was standing poised at the entrance, as if she were looking for someone. She was tall and lanky, nearly as tall as Beringer himself. Five-ten, he guessed. Short skirt, legs from here to Hawaii. Auburn hair cascading down her back like a waterfall. A big, wide, generous mouth, like a model’s. Beringer felt his blood quicken. He had to force himself not to stare.

  He had seen her before. He was sure of it.

  With a crowd of students earlier that week, leaving one of David Lindstrom’s classes.

  The girl’s immediate sexual appeal and the link to Lindstrom were not enough, of course. Another student sealed the girl’s fate when he called out to her. “Hey, Nan! Nancy! Over here!”

  Hunched over his table, Beringer felt the shot of adrenalin as if he had been punched. He took a swig of beer to cover his reaction. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Nancy slide into a booth to join three other students, two boys and a girl. (Beringer thought of them as pretty children, not adults.) He noticed that the group automatically paired off into two couples. Nancy joined the student who had called out.

  Beringer pushed his half-eaten platter away, no longer hungry. Reining in the wild excitement was like trying to control an unruly horse.

  He ordered another beer, not wanting to leave while Nancy was there. The group talked animatedly, not holding their voices down, and Beringer was able to pick up some of the conversation about the two recent killings. The students exchanged ghoulish speculations and nervous jokes about locking their doors and looking under the beds at night. Nancy said she wasn’t going anywhere without Mark, especially at night. Mark grinned.

  Beringer wondered where she lived. On campus or off? Did she have a car? Was Mark, the long-haired jerk sitting with her, the girl’s one-and-only? Where did she go after classes? Any of the answers to these questions might put the girl safely out of Beringer’s reach, forcing him to search elsewhere.

  But he didn’t believe it. He had a hunch about Nancy. He felt the same immediate kinship with her that he had felt for Edie and Natalie, and still felt for Iris. Like the others, Nancy had been presented to him with minimal effort on his part, as if the gods themselves were conspiring to make everything possible for him, exactly as he had fantasized it for the past eight years.

  The quartet of students left the Mexican restaurant together a half hour later. At the edge of the campus they separated, Nancy and her boyfriend returning to afternoon classes, the other couple going off on their own. From across the street Beringer studied pictures of listings in a real-estate agent’s window, suppressing his frustration. He couldn’t follow Nancy onto the campus. How was he going to find her again?

  Then he heard the girl’s voice raised. It had a light, school-girlish sound that Beringer found enormously attractive, though it seemed much younger than her ripe woman’s body. “We’ll see you at the powwow!” Nancy called after the departing couple.

  Beringer stared after her. The long hair was evidently a proud feature. Loose and wavy, the color of dark red Washington apples, spilling halfway down her back. She kept tossing it as she walked away with her boyfriend, unconsciously reaching back to let the heavy mane cascade through her fingers.

  Beringer felt the familiar heat. She was the one.

  What the hell was a powwow?

  Twenty-Five

  RICHIE LINDSTROM MISSED the bus after school.

  The miss was intentional. After his last class of the day he slipped into the locker room and waited until the room emptied out. Some older kids were playing basketball in the adjoining gym, the thump-thump of a dribbling basketball keeping pace with Richie’s heartbeat.

  When he finally came outside the bus was gone.

  The day was warm for October, the temperature in the mid-seventies under a partly cloudy sky. It was also smog season, and the prevailing yellow haze was visible to the north over the Los Angeles basin. Another Santa Ana was brewing, and even higher temperatures were forecast for the weekend ahead. Richie wasn’t sure exactly what a Santa Ana wind was, although he had heard the term at least a thousand million times on TV. He had a vague notion it had something to do with the city of Santa Ana. The only thing he knew for certain was that it meant hot desert winds and cool dry nights. Great beach weather.

  Richie wondered if his real father liked going to the beach. He wondered if Sergeant Ralph Beringer had felt the hot desert winds of the Middle East during the Gulf War. He was a soldier, he must have been there. Richie actually knew very little about his father.

  He thought about these things as he walked, following the route the school bus had taken without him. Richie didn’t mind walking, and he figured it was less than two miles to San Anselmo Drive where it crossed Washington Boulevard. From there he had enough change saved from his lunch allowance to catch a city bus that stopped only three blocks from his house.

  The
sun felt good as he walked, but the closer he came to San Anselmo the more jittery he began to feel. Mixed with his excitement and anticipation was another emotion, one that caused his scalp to tingle and his throat to go dry. He cut across the huge parking surface of the San Carlos Mall with its Penney’s, Sears, Robinson’s-May and about a thousand other stores. Just beyond the parking lot he could see the tops of the old date palms along the center divider that defined San Anselmo Drive.

  For the four blocks extending north of the shopping mall toward the foothills the street was a wide boulevard. Once older estate homes on huge properties had faced each other across the boulevard; now only a few of these three-story Victorian piles remained, converted to law offices and insurance offices. The rest had been torn down to make room for apartment houses and condominium complexes—Mediterranean style buildings in pink stucco with tile roofs, sleek modern structures of glass and steel, imitation Cape Cod designs painted in gray or blue and white, a few older apartment houses with tropical motifs and plantings. Walking slowly up the street, Richie realized with dismay that these large buildings contained hundreds of apartments and condominiums. By the time he reached the last of the four long blocks with the palm tree center islands, Richie’s excitement had faded. At the end of the last block the street narrowed to two lanes where it climbed into the hills. On these curving hillside streets San Carlos’s wealthier citizens had built secluded estates when they fled the mall-dominated flats below.

  Richie guessed that his father wasn’t living in the hills. He had come to San Carlos only recently. It made more sense that he might be staying in one of the many apartments along the boulevard, but how was Richie to find him? Maybe he didn’t even live on this street. Maybe he had only turned this way on the day Richie spotted him because he was going to the mall.