The Devil's Menagerie

by Louis Charbonneau

  The boy had trouble keeping his eyes off Iris. She smiled whenever she went by carrying platters of food or the coffee carafe. Once, after pouring Beringer more coffee, she reached out and playfully ruffled Richie’s hair.

  “She’s nice,” Richie said afterward in the car.

  “Yeah,” his father replied thoughtfully. “Real nice. Which don’t mean you can trust her around the corner,” he added with a chuckle. “She’s a woman, right?”

  Unlike his mood the previous evening, Beringer had been relaxed all morning. That afternoon, however, back at the apartment, his edginess returned. They watched a football game on TV—Nebraska against Oklahoma—but once, late in the game when Richie happened to glanced at his father, he was startled by what he saw. Beringer was sweating and there was a strange glitter in his eyes. He didn’t seem to be focused on the game at all. Richie started to ask if anything was wrong. A sense of caution stopped him—he wasn’t sure why.

  For dinner Beringer sent out to Pizza Hut, ordering a large with everything—Richie’s choice. While they waited Beringer turned on the evening news, watching intently. When Richie tried to talk his father told him to shut up.

  It was the first time Beringer had spoken harshly since their encounter on the patio Friday night.

  Richie thought the news was boring. Nothing really exciting was happening, and he was glad when the Pizza Hut delivery arrived. While they ate, his father became jovial once more, laughing loudly and often. He had been drinking steadily all afternoon, and he had two more beers with the pizza. Richie had the impression that Beringer wasn’t having that good a time, that the laughter and joking around were forced. It made him uncomfortable.

  Like most youngsters, Richie was more sensitive to nuances than adults realized. He knew how adults acted around kids when they didn’t really like them. The euphoria he had felt starting out this first full day in his father’s company trickled away, leaving an emptiness in his stomach that the pizza couldn’t fill.

  He thought of his mother. Of Dad—Dave, that is. He wondered what they were doing and if they were worried about him. He even wondered about Elli. Would his little sister be asking about him, curious because he hadn’t come home?

  Beringer was staring at him. “What are you thinkin’ about, kid?”

  I’m Richie, he thought. But he didn’t say that, of course. Instead he said, “I was thinking about my sister Elli. She’s just a kid, but …”

  “You miss her?”

  “Well, uh … yeah, I guess.”

  “You’re too soft. That’s somethin’ you gotta learn. You start feeling soft for other people—it don’t matter who they are—you know what’s gonna happen? They’ll walk all over you. You’re old enough you got to start thinkin’ about yourself.”

  Richie decided he wouldn’t ask if he could call home. Without asking, he knew what would happen. There would be this shift in his father’s eyes, as if someone else were peering out. It was really weird …

  An uneasy silence fell between them. The noise from the TV set—a sitcom Richie never watched—filled the vacuum. The wail of a fire engine pierced the night and faded away, causing Richie to think again of his stepfather in his fire-retardant clothes, blackened with soot.

  He broke the silence. “I was wondering, uh … maybe we could go to a movie. The mall is just down the street, they’ve got these six theaters—”

  “Shit, you expect to be entertained all the time, is that it? Is that the way it is at home? Everybody’s jumpin’ all over themselves to keep Richie entertained?”

  “No. I … I didn’t mean …”

  Tears stung his eyes. Ralph Beringer turned away in disgust. “Shit,” he muttered again as he went to the kitchen for another beer. The snap of the top on the can made Richie jump slightly in his chair.

  Returning to the living room, Beringer stared down at him. Finally he said, “I know just what you need, kid. And so does your old man.”

  He went down the hall to the bedroom. When he returned several minutes later he was carrying a stack of videos. “You’re old enough to start your real education, kid, and tonight’s as good a time as any.”

  Richie sat erect, his tears forgotten, watching curiously as his father began to set up the VCR.

  STANDING ON THE balcony outside her room at the Red Roof Inn, after watching the sun set in another gorgeous flameout, Karen Younger reflected that murder and mayhem seemed more terrible in this bright, sunny place, as if the very acts were more suited to cold and darkness, to chilling rain and crashing thunder. You seldom heard thunder in Southern California, she had been told. Only if a Southern Pacific storm strayed this far north, a product of El Niño, whatever that was. Murder preferred the shadows. It seemed more bizarre where there was so much color and light.

  Where, in mid-October, she had been too warm in her jogging sweats even at six in the evening. It was seductive, no question about that, but she wasn’t sure if she could deal with life as well in so beguiling a climate. Once needed reminders of nature’s harshness. You were going to face it sooner or later. Best if it didn’t come as a total shock.

  She smiled at her thoughts. After a while the air became cool enough to drive her back into her room. She took a quick shower, changed into sweater and slacks and went out to a solitary dinner at a nearby Coco’s, an upscale coffee shop. She returned reluctantly to her room, whose bland contemporary decor had, like her solitary meals, become overly familiar in the past ten days. With a wry smile she wondered which she feared most about going into the field as a profiler—the monsters she had come to find, or the rooms in which she would have to wait for them.

  Propped up on the bed with a couple of pillows behind her, she thought about her parents, who had moved from Philadelphia to a retirement community near Reading, Pennsylvania. This weekend they would probably go for a drive, delighting in the autumn foliage, maybe take in a fall craft festival or drive in to Reading to shop at the big outlets—her father hated them but her mother loved browsing and he could never refuse to indulge her. Poor family conditioning, Karen thought, for what she would find in her work.

  She glanced at the telephone across the room, wanting to call them, to hear their familiar voices, answer the familiar questions. She was fine. No, no one new in her life. Yes, she knew it was getting late, her biological clock was ticking …

  For a number of reasons, she never called when she was in the field. Someone in the Bureau was sure to complain of a potential security lapse. Someone in accounting would scream about unauthorized long-distance calls on the motel bill. Karen herself—the real reason—would feel that she was making herself vulnerable, exposing too much of herself to the monsters she hunted. In the field she built a wall between her personal life and her job. She couldn’t let it be breeched.

  She thought of Tim Braden and her mother’s query about someone new. Yes, Mom, I’ve met someone interesting. Unfortunately, he’s a cop.

  Suddenly restless, she drew her briefcase onto the bed beside her and pulled out her case notes. Something there was teasing her, but it had stayed just around a corner out of sight. She scanned the accumulating copies of reports she had obtained from Braden, the coroner and the FBI’s lab relating to both Edith Foster and Natalie Rothleder. Nothing jumped out at her. Factoring Lisl Moeller into the mix didn’t help. Still nothing.

  Her thoughts strayed back to Detective Braden. Not exactly what she had expected, but then her record on reading men was not something to hang from the rafters. Braden was stubborn, dogged, honest; what you see is what you get, she thought. She believed she understood what had happened to him that night he earned his fifteen minutes of celebrity. His reaction to the woman striking at him with a corkscrew had been a cop’s reflex. You swing an arm at me and I’m going to grab it. Not tentatively, but quick and hard, and ask questions later. That way I’ll keep all my teeth, and stay alive. The media had made it something else.

  Braden had brooded in this quiet backwater for a year, Karen
reflected, until the Foster–Rothleder killings galvanized him. He felt like a cop again. She wondered how much sleep he had had these past two weeks.

  Stubborn, she thought again. He was unwilling to accept the fact—self-evident to her—that the San Carlos killer was the same one whose work Karen had encountered eight years ago in Germany. He—

  The telephone startled her. She glanced at the digital bedside clock: 11:14 P.M. at Quantico, and Buddy Cochrane was still at work. She wondered when he was going to slow down.

  “You’re working late on a Saturday,” she observed.

  “I just got back from testifying before the grand jury in Tuscaloosa. We’re getting an indictment there.”

  “The serial killings?”

  “Seventeen bodies uncovered so far. I suspect there may be more, but he’s had a change of heart and stopped talking. For a while, once he knew we had him, he was trying to save his soul, and he gave us some places to dig. Then he got scared, I guess.”

  “He’s that rational?”

  “He knew what he was doing,” Cochrane said after a brief pause. “How about your case? I hear you have another missing girl.”

  “Yes … she disappeared from a Native American Indian festival at the local college last night … what they call a powow.“

  “Friday again.”

  “I know.”

  “Our lab been any help? Franken in Hairs and Fibers said something about a match on the gloves your killer wears.”

  “Yes, we have a make on the gloves. He left traces of leather between two of Natalie Rothleder’s teeth. They’re unusual—fine goatskin gloves, usually sold to gardeners. But they’re expensive. You can get them from Smith & Hawken, for example.”

  “Then there shouldn’t be too many places to check,” Cochrane suggested hopefully.

  “There’s a problem. The gloves are made in England, and they’re sold there and in Europe. The killer could have acquired them there—especially if, as I believe, he first started killing in Europe.”

  Cochrane digested this in silence for a moment. Then he said, “What about the evidence he’s deliberately given you?”

  “What would that be?”

  “The initials.”

  Karen was silent a moment. “I’ve played with them, tried to find a name or an acronym. LEN is a man’s name. Or NEL, for Nell. Do you think he could be spelling out a name?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s possible.”

  “What’s the missing girl’s name?”

  “Nancy Showalter. That doesn’t help. We’d have LENN, or any combination of those letters. But we don’t know yet—” She stopped, struck by something. She glanced toward the pile of reports, but before she could pursue the errant thought Cochrane said, “His ego is a potential weakness. He’s trying to say something without giving himself away, and thinks he’s clever enough to do it. Have you talked to the local authorities about going public with the initials? Someone might recognize what he’s up to.”

  “Detective Braden wants to release it. So far the police chief and the sheriff are against it. They’re afraid of a citywide panic.”

  “If you find another body, you’ll have the panic anyway.”

  “I know.”

  There was a brief silence. In it she felt the concern for her, and the passionate concern for the case she was working on, that defined Buddy Cochrane for her as a man and an FBI agent. “Take care of yourself,” he said softly. “He’s a monster. Don’t get in his way.”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  After another beat he said, “We’ve been holding back on sending in a full-scale FBI task force. If he does strike again, we’ll have to come out there in force.”

  “That won’t make Braden happy.”

  “Is that important?”

  “It might be,” she said quietly.

  RICHIE COULD NOT take his eyes off the television screen.

  He paid little attention to the sound. Aside from moaning and crying out, the men and women depicted in the videos had little to say to each other, and what they did say sounded artificial even to Richie’s ear. But the images were as graphic as a kick in the stomach.

  He felt himself getting hot and excited. His heart pounded, his ears burned, and sometimes he felt dizzy. He couldn’t bring himself to look at his father reclining nearby in the La-Z-Boy armchair, drinking beer and chuckling.

  Some of the scenes were disturbing in ways other than sexual. The people involved—men and women, and sometimes, to Richie’s surprise, women together—did not seem to like each other much in spite of their frenzied coupling. In the last video the naked woman had screamed and tried to get away, but the man, who had burst into her room at night, apparently surprising her, just laughed while he threw her down on the bed.

  Richie had heard of such movies, of course—he could hardly miss seeing the Adults Only section at the local video store—but he had never actually seen one. He felt shame and embarrassment along with the excitement, but he couldn’t stop looking.

  The man on the screen slapped the woman, hard, and she suddenly stopped screaming. Her wide eyes stared up at the naked, hairy-chested man. Then she reached for him …

  Richie heard his father’s chuckle.

  He felt himself getting hot again. He squirmed in his chair. His heart thumped so heavily he thought it was about to stop.

  Ralph Beringer took another swig of beer and laughed aloud. “Time to grow up, Richie. Time to grow up.”

  KAREN SAT BOLT upright in bed. She felt clammy with perspiration. She peeled off the sweaty T-shirt she had worn for sleeping and padded into the bathroom. Toweling off, she tried to recall what had awakened her. Not a sound, not a nightmare this time, but—

  She moved quickly back into her room. Her briefcase was still open, file folders stacked against it. She snatched one of the folders and thumbed rapidly through the reports it contained.

  She stopped at one, staring.

  That was what had prodded her awake: a name.

  She could be all wrong, especially if the missing coed, Nancy Showalter, turned up as another victim.

  It was 2:21 A.M. Buddy Cochrane had had a long day and night, probably hadn’t got home before midnight; 5:21 A.M. there now.

  She hesitated, sighed, then punched in a number. After four rings Cochrane’s recorded voice said, “No one is available to answer your call just now. If you will leave your name and number, and the purpose of your call—”

  He interrupted himself, cutting off the recorded message. “Cochrane.”

  “This is Special Agent Younger,” she said quickly. “I’m sorry to do this to you, sir, but—”

  “Don’t apologize. It must be important.”

  “I think it might be,” she said.

  She explained how she wanted the parameters of the San Carlos name search to be extended through military and other records. She also added one new name to be run against all available lists.

  “Care to tell me why?” Cochrane asked when she had finished.

  When she explained, he was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “I’ll get on it now.”

  The fact that it was still dark on a Sunday morning didn’t matter.

  Thirty-Two

  SUNDAY WAS THE worst day for Glenda Lindstrom. With each passing hour her fear increased. Why hadn’t they heard from Ralph? Where was Richie now?

  In church that morning she found herself unable to pray. She went through the motions of the service numbly, sitting or standing or kneeling, aware of Elli beside her mimicking each move, of Dave silent and withdrawn.

  Despair was the unforgivable sin—she couldn’t give in to it. At the same time she felt hypocritical on her knees, staring up at the altar, her purse on the bench seat beside her holding not a prayer book but a small automatic pistol.

  Finally some words came. She prayed for forgiveness for what she might do. The words seemed hollow.

  She would not let Ralph destroy h
er family. Would Christ condemn a mother who fought for her children, her husband, herself—against a monster?

  At the end of the service, emerging into the bright sunshine of an unusually warm autumn day, she fought off a black cloud of despair.

  “Are you okay?” Dave asked, worried.

  “Let’s go home,” she said.

  “SURPRISE,” RALPH BERINGER said.

  Richie stared at his father, then past him in astonishment at the woman behind him, smiling broadly.

  “Hi, Richie,” Iris Whatley said.

  It was early Sunday evening. Beringer had gone out an hour earlier, telling Richie to stay inside and warning him not to go near the phone. He had promised something unexpected when he came back. Richie had even speculated that Beringer might be going to see his parents. The temptation to pick up the phone and call home was overwhelming, but he was nervous about his parents’ reaction. He knew he shouldn’t have gone off without telling them what he was up to. He wished …

  He was no longer sure what he wished.

  The day had gone badly. During breakfast at a mall coffee shop Beringer had been surly and uncommunicative, responding to Richie’s questions and comments curtly if at all, finally asking if Richie thought he could maybe keep his mouth shut for five minutes, just to see what it was like. When tears brimmed in Richie’s eyes, all he could read in his father’s stare was contempt. “You act like a goddam girl,” Beringer said.

  Things had been no better through the afternoon. Richie had been grateful for the pro football game that sporadically kept his father’s attention. Even so, there had been periods when Beringer prowled the apartment like a lion in a cage at the zoo.