by Art Bourgeau
She looked at herself in the mirror, her blue eyes red-rimmed.
"You look a mess, like you've been on a three-day drunk/' she said aloud to her image. She went back to her desk, the sights and sounds of the newsroom all around her but far away. Up to the moment she asked Sloan to show her the body, her interest in the missing girls had been professional. A chance for a good story. Afterward it became personal. She felt the pain, the fear of death. It wasn't difficult for her; if anything it was too easy. The breast cancer and the operation had seen to that. She knew, she understood . . . She and the girl, she felt they were drawn together by common secrets. She shook her head, trying to clear away the thought. Be careful, she told herself. You won't do anybody any good getting morbid about this. The girl is dead, you survived. Remember that little detail . . .
The jangle of her phone brought her back to the press of the immediate. She looked at her watch. Realistically she couldn't expect to hear from Sloan for some time yet . . . who knew how many details had to be worked out before he was ready to talk to the press. Until then, there was her bargain with Will Stuart—first deliver the piece on Felix Ducroit; then go for the Terri story.
She made some calls—first to Justin and Lois Fortier at Lagniappe, and to Carl Laredo, the artist. Talking with them, she was reminded of the evening they'd spent together, about how Felix Ducroit with his grace and graciousness had saved the day, or night, by taking a raving Missy Wakefield off their hands. No doubt Felix had his own reasons for doing it . . . whatever variety of bitch Missy Wakefield might be, she fairly poured sex appeal. Damn her . . .
As it turned out, Carl wasn't able to help much. Neither was Lois, except to remind her that Cynthia Ducroit, owner of the Pine Street Charcuterie, was his ex-wife. Justin was a different story. He and Felix had been boyhood friends, went back as far as either could remember. Tales of playing cowboys and Indians and how Felix always wore a black hat and he always wore a red one and of a wooden horse Felix's father had made for them from a sawhorse and a barrel were charming but not much help. Still, she was personally taken by the image of these two very adult and handsome men as children, Felix so dark, Justin so blond.
All Justin's tales were about a carefree Felix, a quality hardly evident at Lagniappe the night they'd met. He had been so quiet, apparently deep in thought. She found herself speculating on what was on his mind, what was bothering him. More than that, his preoccupied air attracted her. No surprise . . . brooding men often affected her that way. "Too much Wuthering Heights as a child," she would tell those who noticed and asked about it. After she finished talking with the Fortiers she called Cynthia and made a lunch date. The two were casual friends, had been ever since Laura had done a piece on female-owned businesses in Philadelphia—which was when she had originally heard the
name Felix Ducroit . . .
When Sloan finally called, she had just finished talking to a fellow reporter from the New Orleans Times—Picayune who assured her that she would send on anything they had on Felix Ducroit. Sloan was calling from police headquarters, the "Roundhouse," as it was called, and told her to meet him at the Liberty Bell in twenty minutes. She grabbed her coat and was on her way.
She parked in the underground garage on Fifth Street across from KYW television and the Bourse shopping complex, then proceeded across Independence Mall in the chilly drizzle. The Liberty Bell was housed in a small brick, metal and glass building shaped like a paper airplane. She went inside and while she waited for Sloan, half-listened as a park ranger explained to a high-school class that the crack in the bell was not what was important. Pay attention, he said, to the words about liberty engraved near the top and think about what they meant to all the different groups in America throughout its history. The kids were in good spirits, and neither the drizzle outside nor the lecture inside had dampened their real enthusiasm—it was a day off from school. Watching them, so full of youthful piss and vinegar, she couldn't help think about one of the missing—a young girl whose body had been moldering in an old depot in South Philly.
Her thoughts must have shown in her face, because the first thing Sloan said when he arrived was, "What's wrong?"
"Nothing. I was just thinking about the girl . . . Terri DiFranco, wasn't it?"
"Come on, let's walk," he said, taking her arm. Then as an afterthought, "You don't mind, do you? I mean with the drizzle and all."
"I don't mind. You're the one with the flu."
Outside he stopped long enough to turn up the collar of his single-breasted London Fog, but Laura noted he was still hatless, rather unusual for a man with so little hair.
Sloan didn't seem in a hurry to talk about the murder. Instead, as they strolled among the rows of park benches still at least half-filled with people, he said, "It takes more than a little rain to drive them out of this park. You know, if you come here anytime, day or night, unless there's two feet of snow, you'll nearly always find people here. I've never been able to figure out what makes this park different from the others in Center City." When Laura didn't reply he chattered on, "Once, too damn many years ago, I met a girl at closing time at Doc Watson's and convinced her to go to one of the Greek places around the corner for breakfast. Afterward we came down here, you know, to be alone, and at four in the morning there wasn't a single empty bench in the whole park."
Laura kept staring out toward Independence Hall, the tower hazy in the mist and drizzle.
"Anyway . . . getting to what you're waiting to hear, we've pretty well wrapped up the first stage of the work on the girl."
He hesitated for a moment, then said, "The parents just left before I called you. The ID's positive. It's Terri DiFranco."
"My God, the shape her body's in. How could you put them through that?"
"We didn't. We first took the clothes around and her mother recognized them. Then we got the name of the family dentist from her, borrowed the kid's records and ID'd from them. But when we went back to the parents—she'd called the husband and he'd come home from work by then—they insisted on seeing the body. I tried to talk them out of it. It was no-go. They insisted."
”How did they take it?" Stupid question, she realized, as soon as it was out of her mouth.
"Bad. So if you can do your story without seeing them, at least for a couple of days . . ."
"What were they like?"
"What were they like—parents, what else?" A touch of anger was in his voice, and she realized with some force that she wasn't alone in the way that day had affected her, that even someone in Sloan's business needed to compartmentalize, to get at arm's length from something like this or he couldn't function, either.
He began again. "She—Terri—was the oldest, with a younger brother. Her parents are South Philly born and bred. They live on Second and Morris. The father's a longshoreman, the mother works as a checkout clerk a couple of days a week at the Pathmark on Oregon Avenue. They're in their thirties, I'd say, Catholics who no doubt go to mass every Sunday at Sacred Heart. The mother is pretty: very Italian-looking but still trim with dark hair cut short. The father's got dark hair, too, except it's like mine, about all gone."
He paused, then: "You don't have any kids, do you?"
"No, I'm not married." What had made him ask that?
"Me neither . . . I guess to really understand this, what they're going through, you have to be a parent."
They walked for a few minutes in silence. The drizzle now turned to light rain, but the park benches, as Sloan had said, remained at least half full. The only ones going for shelter seemed to be the tourists.
Finally Laura broke the silence. "What did you tell them happened to her?"
"The truth, that the autopsy showed she died from strangulation, and that she'd been raped."
"Considering the condition of her body . . . I mean, how could you tell for sure about the rape?"
"There were still traces of sperm."
Sperm, such an antiseptic word, Laura thought. It conveyed nothing of the violen
ce that was done to her.
"Also, for whatever it's worth, mostly to the parents, I guess, she was a virgin."
"That's so damn sad, whether you're a parent or not. Maybe you have to be a woman to understand . . . What about fingerprints?"
"Only the victim's."
"So you still have no leads to the killer—"
"I didn't say that." Defensively.
"Well, what do you have?"
Sloan pulled his coat tighter around him. He'd already told her more than he probably should have, but she seemed a straight lady; he liked her . . . oh, he didn't have any illusions about anything happening between them (or did he?) . . . and sometimes it helped to have somebody besides the folks at the shop to bounce things off of. He didn't have anybody like that, no wife, no kids, so the hell with it, he was only human . . .
"Okay, Laura, it goes like this, and I have your word you won't print anything unless I give you the go-ahead. What we have here is sort of the normal procedure in reverse. I mean, in a case like this the two things that help get a conviction are sperm and pubic hair. I said 'get a conviction,' not catch the suspect. Once we have a suspect in custody sperm and pubic hair can yield important pieces of evidence. In this case we have some evidence from them but no damn suspect. But hey, you take what you get and hope to match it up with the guy when we nail him."
"So what have you got?"
"Well, first of all we checked the sperm for V.D. and found none. Our boy is clean—"
"How nice for him."
"Yeah . . . well, you asked for what we had and I'm trying to tell you. I can always spare you the boring details—"
"I'm sorry, Sloan, please . . ."
"Yes, well, the next thing we did was check for blood type. The ABH factors in the blood determine blood type——A, B, O, AB, positive or negative. Mine's A positive." He felt sort of foolish telling her that. Was that the best he could do to make a connection?
"Mine's O." She even smiled. Things were really heating up.
"That's the most common," Sloan said. "Now it gets a little more complicated. In about eighty percent of the population these ABH factors are water soluble. That means they turn up in every other body fluid as well as in blood. So we can get blood type from sperm, urine, saliva, even tears. People with watersoluble ABH are the 'secretors.' In the other twenty percent the ABH factors aren't water soluble and can only be found in actual blood, which is the only fluid that yields up the blood type. People in that twenty percent are 'non-secretors.' The lab tested the sperm found in Terri for ABH factors and first found out whether our boy was a secretor or a non-secretor, whether he was in the eighty or the twenty percent."
"And . . . ?"
"Off the record, your absolute word on it?"
"Come on, Sloan, I already gave you that. But if you need it again, absolutely off the record until you give the word."
"He's a secretor."
Laura thrust her hands deeper into her trenchcoat pockets.
"So he's one of your eighty percent. That's a lot of territory. I guess you'd have preferred he be a non—secretor."
"At first when I got the results I reacted that way. But it's a mixed deal. Sure, if he'd been one of the twenty percent it would have theoretically narrowed the field by plenty. But we would also have had to stop the testing right there. We'd have needed his blood to get the blood type. The semen wouldn't have told us anything. As it was, we could test for the type and get it. So we've got two pieces of important information—he's a secretor and we know his blood type from the semen. Any suspect we bring in, the first thing we do is give him a saliva test, easier than the sperm and just as good. We're testing similar liquids. He's got to match up with the finding from the sperm in Terri. If he does, it's a strong—not conclusive, but strong—piece of evidence against him. Probably more important, if he doesn't match up, he's scientifically eliminated and in the clear. It can help to know who isn't guilty, too."
"I feel like I just had a session in the crime lab. Please, there I go again, sounding smart-ass. It's helpful, very helpful to me. But what's the killer's blood type? You didn't say."
"That I won't tell you."
They were crossing Chestnut Street, where horse-drawn carriages were pulled up, and continued on toward Independence Hall.
"You mentioned pubic hair. What can you tell from that?" Laura asked.
"Theoretically a lot. Aside from hair color, sometimes you can tell sex and race from it, but it's not always reliable." He was warming up. "Take for instance the jeffrey MacDonald case—you remember, the Green Beret captain convicted of killing his family. The prosecution identified a strand of hair taken from MacDonald's sweatshirt as belonging to him. Later it was proved that it wasn't from him at all but from their pony.
"Sure doesn't sound too reliable, but the way you mentioned it earlier I get the feeling you were putting some importance on it."
"Well, there's an interesting angle to it here."
"Tell me."
"Still off the record . . . we didn't find any. Not one damn pubic hair."
"And that's unusual?"
"Very. It's almost impossible to have sex without leaving a few around. And a rape creates even more action, almost sure to dislodge at least a few hairs."
"Maybe the killer shaves himself."
Sloan stopped, took out a handkerchief and wiped his face.
"Maybe this walk wasn't such a good idea after all. I'm starting to feel a little worse. Mind if we head back toward Race Street?"
"Sure, fine." Obviously he'd given her as much as he felt he could. Don't push too hard, she told herself. As they turned and began to retrace their steps, Laura said, "What about the crime scene, and that awful stuff he used . . . the chain around her neck, and the handcuffs?"
"A sticky area."
"Meaning?"
"Look, Laura, I can't stop you from writing about the handcuffs and the punk necklaces, but if you do, you bring up images, perverted and weirdly romantic images that in a town this size would almost certainly provoke copycat attacks, something none of us needs.
"I understand that's a possibility, but maybe you better spell it out."
"Simple. I'd like you to use real discretion in your article. Except for the two kids who found the body you're the only person outside of the cops who was at the scene, saw these things. It's okay to say she was bound and strangled, but please don't turn it into a fashion show. It could wreck an important part of our case as well as put others at risk."
"From copycats."
"Right."
"Okay, no handcuffs or necklaces. But have you been able to turn up anything on them?"
"We're checking shops around town to see if anyone remembers anybody buying them but we aren't holding our breath . . . they're common enough items. The parents didn't recognize the necklace, and of course they didn't know anything about the cuffs. We're assuming the killer had them with him. He probably gave the necklace to her as a present. That way he got it around her neck in advance."
"That sounds like you've decided she knew him," said Laura.
"Well, when we went over the place we didn't find the killer's fingerprints, which didn't surprise us, but we found hers all over the place—the walls, the doors, everywhere—so we had her parents look at the radio. It belonged to Terri."
This was a three-sixty turnabout.
"Wait a minute, I'm not following you . . ."
"I'm saying it looks like the place was Terri's idea, along with the lovenest and the candles. Not the killer's. And that may explain why the body turned up this time."
"This time? Then you do think it's connected to the other disappearances, not just a case of a boyfriend, uncle or neighbor," she said, quoting from an earlier lecture from Will Stuart.
"Right now we're looking for a dark-haired man with a beard who wears tinted glasses and answers to the name of Peter. As you know, he was reportedly Terri's boyfriend. He was also reportedly the boyfriend of at least two of the ot
her missing girls. Of course, the beard and the glasses could be a disguise. He could be a blond, or he could be clean shaven. We don't know yet. But we are going on what we have until we know different."
"It is a serial killer," said Laura, remembering he'd said this Peter had posed as a boyfriend to several other girls.
"It would seem so. And he doesn't follow the usual pattern. He's not spontaneous. He calculates. First he dates the girls for a while, then—"
"Is this on or off the record?"
"On," he said.
"Boy, that wasn't how you felt when we were at the depot."
"That was before I had the facts I now have. Based on them, I can say, I have to say, there's a killer at work here, and the people have got to know that. We owe it to them. Just handle it with care . . ."
CHAPTER 7
MISSY TOOK the winding curves of boathouse row on East River Drive like a five-time winner at Le Mans. Normally the drive up the Parkway, decorated with its flags of all nations, past the majesty of the art museum and onto the tree-lined drive along the river relaxed her. But not tonight. Tonight all she wanted was to get to Chestnut Hill and her mother as quickly as possible, have it out with her and get out.
Trees and shrubs carefully tended by an array of gardeners concealed the large stone house from the view of nosy passersby. Which was standard for houses in Chestnut Hill, all very large and all very private.
The family had lived in this house for as long as Missy could remember. She had learned to swim in the pool in the back near the croquet court and to ride at the nearby Hillsgate Stables, where she still kept a horse.
As she pulled into the driveway, her lights illuminated the shape of the house with its two stories of stone, shutters and carved masonry. It seemed, as always, a somber house. She parked and walked to the kitchen entrance at the back. With its six bedrooms and servants' quarters the place was really too large for the three of them, plus Edgar, her father's major domo, who, as the lone live-in servant functioned with the hats of butler, cook, and valet. The only light in the kitchen was the small fluorescent one over the stove. As she passed through the kitchen and into the hallway that led to the dining room on one side and the living room and her father's study on the other, she encountered Edgar. Edgar Kirby, tall, thin, white-haired, who had been with the family almost as long as they'd been in this house. Missy had no love for him, though at one time she had called him "uncle." "Your mother's in the living room; she's expecting you," was all this ex-"uncle" had to say.