Beside him Maddox stirred. A woman in a man’s world, thought Powell. She hadn’t cursed to shock. It was the way she talked. ‘He was supposed to be driving a rig? Working?’
The woman allowed herself a tight smile. ‘Drivers get rest breaks. It doesn’t take long to get laid.’
Powell wondered how she knew. He got the impression she was a willing spinster, as least as far as the opposite sex was concerned. ‘Joe Hickley says Gene always stopped by on a westerly run?’
‘I don’t know why but he did. I think it’s a pretty shitty place, but he liked it.’
‘Everyone know he always stopped?’
She shrugged. ‘I guess. It wasn’t any secret.’
‘You ever lost a rig? Had it hijacked? Or had a cargo stolen?’
‘Never,’ said Barbara, the pride obvious. ‘All our drivers have CB, as well as mobile phones. Some carry weapons. Gene did.’
Jesus! thought Powell. He hadn’t heard anything about a weapon. Or a mobile phone. ‘What sort of weapon?’
‘Colt Python. Big bastard. Three fifty-seven Magnum. He was good with it. He liked guns. Had several but the Python was the one he always travelled with.’
The right of every American to bear arms, thought Powell, bitterly, paraphrasing the creed that the Rifle Association always misquoted. ‘He carry it on his person? Or keep it in the cab?’
The woman regarded him warily, nervous of state line firearm infringements. ‘He had a holding clip fitted, in the glovebox. Carried it there. Locked, of course. And he had a licence, for all of them.’
‘What about the phone and the CB, when he stopped? He take the phone with him or call in and say he’d be out of touch for a while?’
‘Sometimes. Not always.’
‘What about the 15th?’
‘He didn’t call in after leaving that day.’
‘You hear anything from anyone here – or get the impression yourself – that you were being watched?’
The woman shook her head. ‘Nothing. And we’re careful. Our cargoes are valuable.’
Powell said, ‘I’d like to get some family history, Gene’s most of all. If Budd could call by your place, at your convenience, and go through things when you’ve had the chance to think about it?’
She shrugged again. ‘Not sure how I can help you. We didn’t go in for that family history, early settler shit. From what I know Dad’s family was originally Scandinavian. Lived first in Galveston, before the flood. After that they moved up here. Grandparents died before Gene and I were born. Dad served in the Second World War but not Korea. Went overseas, in some military police unit: there’s pictures of him in uniform, in Germany, places like that. He set the trucking business up around 1957.’
‘That’s the sort of stuff I want,’ encouraged Powell.
Gene Johnson’s desk was a hamster’s nest of paper scraps and telephone notes without name-identified numbers, all of which they bagged, each to be contacted. There was an address book with names against numbers in a top right-hand drawer which they added to the collection. Another drawer held a selection of Hustler magazines, as well as other pornography, in addition to Soldier magazines. There was a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam in a bottom drawer, with four unwashed glasses, and in another an almost full box of .38 shells.
The state of the dead man’s office desk was scant rehearsal an hour later for the condition of the dead man’s apartment, the door to which was still blocked by criss-crossed police No Entry tape secured by the sheriff’s seal, which Powell broke to Maddox’s protest that Lindropp wasn’t going to like it and Powell’s insistence that he couldn’t give a fuck.
The outside surroundings were an exquisitely preserved example of Spanish and adobe architecture and the inside was a refuse tip. It stank, of stale air. The dishwasher gaped open like an over-filled mouth with dirty crockery and glasses that overflowed into the kitchen sink. There were more unwashed plates on the kitchen table and several glasses, empty beer bottles and another half-empty bottle of Jim Beam in the main room in which clothes, shirts and shorts, were discarded over sagged although comparatively new furniture. The bed was unmade. There was a .45 Smith and Wesson automatic, with a full clip of 9mm shells, in the bedside drawer, alongside a pack of coloured condoms. There were two membership cards and some match packs which the local FBI man identified to be from topless bars and massage parlours. There were a lot more Hustler magazines and four pornographic videos beneath the bedroom VCR machine. One was Debbie Does Dallas. There were two different female voices on the answering machine, both asking Johnson to call them back, and Maddox made a note to get the incoming numbers from the telephone company. There was an unlocked gun safe in a bedroom closet, containing a pump action shotgun and a .44 Magnum Colt Anaconda pistol, both loaded. In a bureau drawer there was $350 in a money clip and an expired membership card of the National Rifle Association. Scrawled on a cocktail napkin from the Red Rattler lounge was ‘Annie. $150.’
After half an hour Powell said, ‘We’re wasting our time. There’s nothing here that’s going to help.’ Was he doing just that, wasting his time on established routine? Serial killings usually had patterns, but in the killings themselves, not a routine that identified the perpetrators. Which made what he was doing now largely pointless. But after so many mistakes, one after the other, he couldn’t afford not to do it, he told himself. And his intuition, an antenna upon which he frequently although privately relied, was telling him these were different serial murders. The distance between Texas and Alabama was the most obvious: multiple slayings were usually in a tightly limited radius, which the killer knew and in which he felt safe.
‘Let’s hope Sam Cummings will help.’
‘Let’s hope something will,’ agreed Powell.
Cummings was a thin, leering-faced man of thirty whose halitosis challenged his body odour. Being involved in an FBI investigation into an horrific double murder was obviously the biggest event in his stunted life and he entered the San Antonio office clearly well rehearsed, in demeanour and attitude. Powell wished the trucker had bathed as thoroughly. He patiently endured a near-gynaecological lecture on Billie Jean Kesby’s attributes to get to the trucker’s rejecting encounter, demanding at once, ‘What did she say to you?’
‘“I’m OK. I’m waiting.”’
‘They the actual words?’
‘The very ones.’
‘Did she mention Gene Johnson by name?’
‘No. But from how she moved when he came in it was obviously him.’
‘You knew him, before then?’
‘No.’
‘How close were you when you hit on her? As close as you and I are?’ Powell was facing the man across Maddox’s desk, about five feet between them, and was getting both the bad breath and the sweat.
‘Much closer. Put my foot up on the chair that she had hers on and kinda leaned forward, nice and personal.’
‘It was coming up to noon, the hottest part of the day. She’d just walked in from the desert. So how did she smell? Hot? What?’
‘Sweeter than a rose in June.’
‘You mean of perfume? Or that she didn’t smell of sweat?’
‘Perfume. Heavy. Nice.’
‘No sweat at all?’
‘Absolutely not.’
So there had to have been a car, somewhere. ‘You saw her walk in?’
‘You bet your life I did.’
‘You see how she arrived outside? A vehicle?’
‘Nope.’
‘So how’d she get there?’
‘Another trucker maybe? I don’t know.’
‘When Gene came in and saw her did he give any sign of recognition? Or did he just look because she was hardly dressed?’
‘I don’t think he knew her.’
‘How long after they left did you leave?’
The sly smile was immediate. ‘Maybe half an hour.’
‘You see any cars leave from outside, in between the time they left and you left?’
<
br /> ‘No.’
‘You expect to see the two of them again?’
‘Nope. I just drove along thinking what a lucky bastard he was. I settled down, got the air cool, tuned the radio. Not really thinking about anything. Then after about fifteen minutes I see the flash. Don’t understand it at first and then I realize it’s the sun, off a stainless steel rig …’ The leer came. ‘Thought they were doing the business.’
‘Which was their business. Why’d you stop?’
The smirk stayed. ‘You didn’t see this bunny. There was more than enough to go round, believe me.’
‘You didn’t think either would object?’
‘Rule of the road, as far as a trucker’s concerned.’
‘So what did you find?’
For the first time the macho slipped and Cummings became completely serious. ‘Couldn’t see anything at first. They should have heard me coming, but I gave the horn a little toot, just in case. Still nothing. So I stopped, waited. Didn’t want to spoil a guy’s fun. Then I saw it …’ The man stopped, swallowing, all swagger gone. ‘… I thought it was rocks, from the outcrop. Then I saw it was fucking heads, two of them, with his dick in her mouth. Without any eyes. Then I leaned across the cab and saw the bodies, spread out like they were …’
‘You’re still in the cab?’
‘You bet your fucking life I’m still in the cab and the first thing I do is that I lock it. Then I get out my gun – I carry a .38 ACP Colt – and after that I get on the phone to every 911 and emergency number I can think of ringing …’
‘You didn’t at any time get out of the cab?’
‘Are you kidding! There’s the heads of a guy and a girl I’ve seen drinking and cosying up less than an hour ago staring up at me from the desert, except they haven’t got eyes any more. And you’re asking me if I got out to take a look! Come on!’
‘How long before the police – sheriff’s people and the Highway Patrol – arrived?’
‘Longest fucking time of my life! Forty-five minutes at least.’
‘So for forty-five minutes you sat in your cab, looking at what was in front of you?’
‘And almost shitting myself.’ Cummings actually shuddered.
‘While you were sitting there you never saw anyone – anything – apart from the bodies?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Could you see around Johnson’s rig, further up the track?’
‘Kind of.’
‘Did you look along it?’
‘Sure I did. I didn’t know from which way they might come at me, did I?’
‘Did you see any track marks, in the sand, beyond Johnson’s truck? Going on up over the rise?’
Cummings thought for several moments. ‘No.’
‘No tyre treads?’
‘No.’
‘Or footprints?’
‘No.’
‘Do you think you would have?’
There was another hesitation. ‘I think so. I mean I was really looking!’
‘You see any tyre marks or footprints leading away from Johnson’s rig, back towards the highway?’
‘No.’
‘What about buzzards? Prairie animals? Anything come around the bodies?’
‘No.’
‘You got out when the police arrived?’
‘Highway Patrol first. Yeah, then I got out.’
‘Did you see any tyre marks or footprints then?’
‘The sheriff’s men arrived almost immediately after. A lot of guys walking about. And I wasn’t looking any more. I knew I was safe.’
No-one else was looking, either, thought Powell: not properly. ‘Did you see anyone go up to the top of the rise, to see what was on the other side?’
‘Someone may have done. I didn’t see. You seen what they did to Gene?’
‘Yes.’
‘Jesus. Fucking maniac.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Powell. ‘Whoever did it is certainly that.’
Lucille Hooper didn’t finish her autopsies until the afternoon and declared her findings, knowing their importance, even before sitting down.
‘Billie Jean had sex. But not with Gene!’
Powell said, ‘How can you be sure? You can’t get a DNA match between the bodies that quickly.’
‘We got all the time in the world,’ said the medical examiner. ‘And all the vaginal semen, too. The penis isn’t reliable for semen residue after intercourse. The urethra is the place. It was clean. We need a DNA comparison, of course. But I think our killer banged a willing Billie Jean while Gene had to look on, with handcuffs not just around his wrists but around his ankles, too. He was naked then – there are sand burns on his knees and there was sand beneath his finger and toenails. And not just his shoulders and back were sunburned but the soles of his feet, too, where he’d been forced to kneel. The way I see it, he got completely undressed, let himself be cuffed for something kinky she was suggesting, then got himself forced down into a squatted, kneeling position with both sets of cuffs tied together somehow …’
‘Billie Jean was part of it?’
‘The lure, certainly. To get Gene out into the country. Her usefulness ended there.’
It fitted the picture he was building, Powell decided, as she continued. In both Johnson and the girl there was evidence of long term gonorrhoea which did not appear to have been treated and Powell thought: so much for Jamieson’s insistence that neither had suffered any medical condition. Jamieson hadn’t mentioned the abortion indications that Lucille found in Billie Jean, either. Although the one eye that had been recovered had burst, under intensive magnifications she’d discovered the injuries had been inflicted by an elliptically shaped hard object, not a finger the nail of which, at such force, would have cut as well as indented the globe. An instrument had been used to remove the right eyes, around the sockets of which there was extensive leverage damage. The forehead crosses had definitely been incised, not scratched. She’d subjected the minuscule chest wounds to the same degree of ultra-magnification that she’d used upon the left eyes and detected perfectly rounded discolorations to the skin around the wound, consistent with the murder weapon being driven in to its hilt. That made the shaft of the murder weapon a quarter of an inch at its widest diameter and exactly four inches long, measured from where the tip stopped in the heart.
Lucille was sure both had been dead before the heads, penis and breasts had been removed. The entry wound went from right to left, establishing the killer as left handed, and in a downwards direction, which meant the killer was either taller or had stood over them. She had experimented by putting the heads back onto the torsos and was satisfied that to remove them the killer had stood behind the corpse, which had been propped in an upright position and further straightened by the head being held by the hair or chin for the cutting instrument to be drawn backwards, starting at the front right – also showing the killer to be left handed – and going through to the back. This had resulted in saw-like injuries, although the edge of the weapon had not been serrated. The relative jaggedness of the amputation had been caused by the awkwardness with which the bodies had to be held. The heads had been amputated by the cutting instrument passing cleanly between the third and fourth cervical vertebra and facet joints. The cuts that had removed the penis and the breasts had been extremely clean, like that into the forehead. The ultra-magnification had detected sand adhering to the knees and buttocks and there was also sand in the hair at the back of the girl’s head, although both heads had been found upright, with the necks embedded in the sand and supported by twigs broken from desert driftwood. There were injuries to the scalps, at the back, where pieces of wood had been forced into them to provide support, as well as a substantial amount of sand in coagulated blood at the necks, at the point where they had been severed. There were no marks on the wrists or ankles of the woman to indicate that she had been tied or restrained.
Powell nodded. ‘So the sequence was that they were killed by the wound directly into the heart, stri
pped, propped up and then mutilated, in that order?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about the amount of blood? The ground is heavily stained.’
Lucille smiled. ‘Careful. They were dead before the heads came off. The heart – the pump – had stopped. There wouldn’t have been a gush. There’d have been a lot, certainly. The ground staining was after they were laid out, in that star shape.’
‘How close would the killer have been, behind Johnson?’
‘Touching. Probably the support, to keep the body upright.’
‘So he’d be bloodstained?’
‘Oh yes,’ Lucille quickly agreed. ‘And heavily, that close. He’d have been pulling the blood in upon himself. And I see where you’re coming from. How does a bloodstained person get away from a murder scene that exposed without being seen? One answer would be totally to strip off.’ She paused. ‘And don’t forget it was the killer, not Gene, who had sex with the girl. He’d have reason to be undressed.’
‘We can positively identify him from his semen DNA when we get him?’
‘Absolutely.’
Powell smiled. ‘You’ve done brilliantly.’
‘That’s my job,’ she said, smiling back.
He stayed smiling. ‘How did you get on with Dr Jamieson?’
She regarded him seriously. ‘You know what the son-of-a-bitch called me?’
‘What?’
‘Girl!’
‘What did you call him?’
‘Boy. He didn’t seem to like it,’
The day went progressively downhill after Powell’s meeting with Lucille Hooper. A heat-exhausted, sun-reddened Barry Westmore returned from the desert to announce that after so long they were wasting their time and would have to rely on whatever Powell managed to get from the sheriff. They’d virtually dismantled the abandoned, collapsing shack and collected as much of its interior as they thought might produce something, for shipment back to Washington. They’d stripped the seating and lining from the cab of Johnson’s rig, also to go back to their specialized laboratories. Westmore openly and irrationally challenged Powell’s insistence that they forensically sweep Johnson’s apartment, and flushed with angry embarrassment when Powell mildly pointed out that if they managed a DNA match of anything identifiable as Billie Jean’s from the rig with anything in the apartment it would establish a prior association between Johnson and the girl.
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