Gray Matter

by Shirley Kennett

Schultz didn’t react.

  “Snap out of it, Detective! I need your skills now. I need your experience to get that killer off the street.”

  “Maybe what you need is somebody else. Somebody competent.”

  There. It was out, PJ thought to herself.

  “I’ve already spoken to Lieutenant Wall,” she said. “I made it clear that I wanted you to stay on this case. On the CHIP team.” She didn’t mention that Wall had pressured her to accept a replacement, and that she had threatened to leave if he pulled Schultz out.

  “What the hell for?”

  PJ hesitated. That was a good question. Would it be better to work with someone else? Where was her relationship with Schultz going? Did she still trust him? She studied his face and held his challenging gaze. She knew from her own experience with the patient who committed suicide that he would be living with his mistake for a long time. She decided that she probably would never forgive him for letting Armor’s life slip through his fingers, but that she could trust him not to do anything like that again. As soon as it was made, the decision settled in and got comfortable.

  “Because I don’t want to break in a new person,” she said. “I’m tired of explaining what virtual reality is.”

  “I guess I can understand that,” Schultz said. His face softened a little, but his eyes were hard with resolve. He cleared his throat. “Did you say something about a break in the case?”

  “Yes. Sheila’s head,” she said with a catch in her voice, “has been recovered. From a fishing pond in”—she glanced down at the notes on her desk—“Busch Wildlife Area. The story I got was that the pond had become shallow, nearly filled with silt. There was a lot of runoff during the spring rains from a parking lot that was being built nearby. So the pond was closed to fishing and scheduled for restoration. The dredging crew made the discovery at seven-thirty this morning. It’s already been matched to Sheila’s dental records.”

  “So it was found while I was still sitting there in my fucking orange car with my thumb up my ass.” He shook his head. “Why would the killer toss the head in a shallow pond?”

  “The pond was posted for restoration, but the sign was small. I guess he missed it in the dark.”

  “Maybe he’s beginning to screw up. They all do.”

  “That’s not what my research shows. I’ve been digging into the literature on serial killers. It’s my impression that the majority are never caught. They’re careful, compulsively so. The ones who make mistakes are the ones who have something driving them to it, making them sloppy. A deeply-buried wish to get caught, to be stopped. The true sociopaths, the ones who have no conscience, no remorse, believe they can kill with impunity, and a lot of the time they get away with it.”

  “Not this creep,” said Schultz, shaking his head. “I don’t give a flying fuck about whether he’s remorseful or not. He’s not getting away. He’s got a little devil sitting on his shoulder, whispering in his ear and getting him to make mistakes. That little devil is me. After all, I’m a real pro at screwing up, myself.”

  “You may not be far wrong, Detective,” PJ said. There was something there, something in what he said. A piece of the puzzle, but where did it fit? Then she noticed the crestfallen look on Schultz’s face, and realized that he thought she was agreeing with his self-criticism about being a pro at screwing up. “Not about messing up. Something else…”

  “Was there anything distinctive about the condition of the head?” Schultz said.

  His question pulled her mind back into a painful track. “Yes, there was. The skull was cracked open and the brain cavity was empty.”

  “Christ,” he said, shaking his head again. “Any chance the little fishies did it?”

  “Not in that amount of time. It was submerged for maybe only eight to ten hours. Not with the way the bones of the skull were cut. The medical examiner doesn’t want to be pinned down just yet, but she thinks it was a chisel.”

  PJ noticed that she had a terrible headache. The desk lamp was angled toward her. She imagined its light stabbing into her eyes, racing over her optic nerve to her brain, casting shadows on its undulating surface. She reached out and tilted the shade away.

  “So the freak took the head with him, cut open the skull, took out the brain, and disposed of the shell.”

  “The meat of the walnut,” PJ said softly.

  “You saying this guy ate the brain?” Schultz rose and began pacing. Evidently he couldn’t take the concept sitting down.

  “Maybe, maybe not. From the remains, there’s no way we can tell exactly what he did with the brain, only that he removed it for some reason. Personally, I think there’s a good chance we’re dealing with anthropophagy. An excellent chance.”

  “English, Doc. In English.”

  “Cannibalism.”

  “Christ. This is new territory for me,” Schultz said.

  “Consider it an opportunity for professional growth.”

  CHAPTER 19

  AT LUNCH SCHULTZ EYED his food with suspicion, as though Millie had plopped a slab of raw human brain on his plate rather than the grilled cheese with bacon he had ordered. He was still having difficulty taking in what PJ had told him. His own theory to account for the missing heads had been that the killer was taking grisly souvenirs. The new information put a different spin on things.

  He waved at Millie, pointed at his coffee cup.

  PJ was sitting at the counter next to him. She had a large bowl of salad in front of her, but she had barely picked at it. Schultz speculated that PJ was the only customer since Millie opened her doors who had ever ordered the Chef’s Special Three-Greens Salad. It came with sliced hard-boiled egg on top. Millie’s trademark flag toothpick, jammed into the white of the egg, presided over the bowl. Schultz wondered what Millie would do if she ever ran out of them.

  “So, Doc, what’s your take?”

  “I just don’t have one yet, Leo. I’ve got a lot of bits and pieces flying around in my head.”

  He decided that being called by his first name wasn’t so bad after all. Millie came over and filled his coffee cup, and he realized that he was falling down on the job in more than one way. He hadn’t needled her since planting his butt on the stool.

  “I don’t think much of your new painting,” he said to Millie, pointing to a framed work on the wall behind the counter. “Hire yourself an interior decorator? Or did some bum off the street sell you that piece of crap?”

  “Smartass,” Millie said. “Dearie, I just don’t know why you hang out with this guy. No class.”

  PJ bobbed her head affirmatively and impaled a piece of egg yolk with her fork.

  “It so happens my new cook painted that,” Millie said. “Brought it in, said he did it in an art class he was taking at night, and asked if he could put it up. First time I’ve seen the guy smile. I’m supposed to say no?” She looked at it, tilted her head, said, “Yeah, I guess I shoulda said no.”

  It was an amateurish watercolor. Millie said it was supposed to represent a crowded baseball stadium, but Schultz couldn’t make out anything but blobs of bright colors.

  Schultz glanced up, saw the cook watching him from the kitchen pass-through. His eyes looked hot, as though he was feverish, but his face was pale, bland, expressionless. “Hey, cook,” Schultz said good-naturedly, “stick to fixing eggs. You got a knack for it. Leave the artwork to the artists.”

  PJ reached over and tapped his arm. “That was rude. Don’t make fun of his efforts. Maybe it’s important to him.”

  Schultz decided maybe he had been a little harsh. “Well, just remember,” he said to the cook, “practice makes perfect.”

  The cook grinned at him, a grin that would have been at home on a jack-o’-lantern, complete with the candle flame fighting the eyes from the scraped and violated interior.

  “Guy’s always taking classes,” Millie said, lowering her voice in a confidential manner. “I think he’s lonely, got nothing else to do at night, if you get my meaning. Last week,
it was dancing class. He was whirling around in the kitchen, broke a stack of dishes and a couple of mugs. I couldn’t bring myself to take it out of his salary, though. Apologized all over the place, swept up all the pieces, like a little kid who broke the cookie jar.”

  Millie went off to wait on another customer, and Schultz and PJ resumed their conversation.

  “So if the freak’s a cannibal, how come he hasn’t taken a couple of bites out of an arm or a leg? Or gotten himself a piece of ass, literally?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been puzzling over that, myself,” she said. “It has to be a ritual of some kind, maybe a human sacrifice kind of thing, like the Aztecs cutting out hearts while they were still beating. Maybe I can do some scenarios on the computer.”

  “That doesn’t fit with the carving of a dog. The guy’s worshipping dogs?”

  “Maybe the dog is a servant to carry the message to the gods. Who knows? We may be going off the deep end here.”

  “If you’re looking for a rational explanation, you’re not going to find one,” Schultz said. “That’s the nature of this beast. Did you hear that the blood under Armor’s fingernails looks like a good match for the sample we got from your cat’s claws?”

  PJ’s face fit up. “No, I hadn’t heard that. Where did you get it?”

  “Wall told me, collared me right before we left for lunch. That’s what he was coming into the men’s room to tell me when you ordered him out.” Schultz chuckled. “Tucked tail and ran.”

  “Why wasn’t he looking for me?”

  “I hate to be the one to break this to you, Doc, but you’re an outsider. You work for the Department, but you’re not a cop.” He saw the indignation flare up in PJ’s eyes. “Don’t get me wrong, you’ve got some good ideas. But you haven’t been through the shit that the rest of us have. You haven’t paid your dues.”

  PJ struggled visibly with her response, apparently considering and discarding several ways to react.

  “You’re right,” she said. “In this field, I haven’t. But I think that my feelings about catching the killer, about stopping what he’s doing, are every bit as strong as yours. In your case,” she looked at him searchingly, “I think that you would step between him and his victim, physically put yourself on the line to save others. I think you’ve probably done it before. Whether I could do that, I don’t know. I’ve never been faced with it.”

  “And I hope you never will be. I’ve killed before,” he said, “and I might get myself into a situation where I’ll have to kill again. Cops know about that, we live with that thought every day, although it’s not at the front of our minds. But let me tell you something. No matter how justified it seems, no matter how right it is that the creep get blown away, it diminishes a person somehow.” Schultz met and held her concerned eyes. “It feels like leaving a piece of yourself behind. A piece of your humanity. You lose too many of those pieces and God knows what you become.”

  They sat together in silence. The next time Schultz glanced at PJ, she seemed lost in thought.

  “What’s the going rate for a shrink’s thoughts?” he said. “Must be a lot more than a penny.”

  She laughed lightly and genuinely. He knew in that moment that she trusted him, in spite of what he had done, regardless of the fact that a friend of hers—that’s what Armor was, even though the two women had just met—lay on a slab in the morgue. He wasn’t sure how he had earned that trust, but he knew for certain he was going to do everything possible not to lose it. Forgiveness was another story. He wasn’t asking for it, and he wasn’t expecting it.

  “I’m just daydreaming,” she said. “Some things that you said—well, I don’t actually have anything yet.”

  Schultz knew that look. He had seen it on his own face in his bathroom mirror a number of times. She was onto something, but the pieces weren’t fitting together yet.

  As Pauley Mac lowered a basket of fries into the bubbling grease, his hands shook with anger even though his face was blank as a notepad. A cannibal! How could they think such a thing? He had been tempted—Dog was tempted—to savor the meat, not just the one organ to be consumed for a higher purpose. But he had resisted! And now to be accused of something so savage, so base. Of course they didn’t understand.

  He wasn’t happy with the news about the blood he had left behind under the woman’s fingernails. He should have taken the fingers with him. But that problem paled next to the insult about being a cannibal.

  The bitch was to blame. She was the source of his problems, she was the one who insulted him. He decided to leave her another warning. If that didn’t work, he would have to kill her, even though that would be risky. The detective wouldn’t like that, he was sweet on her, probably slipping it in, gripping those solid hips with his cop’s hands, thrusting and grunting. No one was watching him, so Pauley Mac let Dog put one hand under the greasy apron he was wearing and stroke the bulge at his groin while the other hand was busy flipping burgers.

  Hasty taste, thigh pie, piece of tail, go to jail.

  CHAPTER 20

  AFTER LUNCH, SCHULTZ WENT back to his office and resolutely phoned Ted Walmacher at the St. Louis office of the FBI. He was kept on hold by a haughty secretary for ten minutes. He used the time to walk to the men’s room, get a handful of damp towels, and carefully wipe the telephone receiver. It smelled like after-shave lotion again. That schmuck from Alabama who called himself a detective must have sneaked in and used Schultz’s desk again.

  “Walmacher here.”

  “Schultz, working the decapitations. I’d like to come over and talk to you about those unsolved cases you researched.”

  “You didn’t think much of them at the time. What changed your mind?”

  “My boss changed my mind. Doc thinks our man’s got a string of corpses behind him.”

  “At least somebody over there’s got some sense.”

  “Yeah, and we’re all hanging on her every word, too.”

  “No need to get snotty. Can you make it at, say…three o’clock? I’m having lunch with the mayor’s secretary. It’s my chance to catch up on the local dirt.”

  “Christ. Better take along a shovel. Make that a front loader. Sure, three’s fine.”

  Ted Walmacher rose from his high-backed leather swivel chair, and stood behind his desk, an expanse of oak that looked like it had cost the lives of a small forest. Schultz thought about his own battered metal desk and squeaky vinyl chair.

  Feds.

  “Nice to see you again, Schultz. Coffee?”

  “None for me, thanks. Let’s just get on with it, OK?”

  Ted sighed. “You know it doesn’t have to be like this, Detective. We’re on the same side, after all.”

  Personally, Schultz thought it was more of a Little Red Riding Hood/Wolf relationship.

  My, what big teeth you have, Grandma.

  Schultz sat for a moment, taking in Ted’s appearance. He seemed little changed from the last time they had worked together more than ten years ago. He had been over forty then, so he must be at least fifty years old now. He was tall and solidly built, the kind of man you might want to have at your back in a tough situation. But the impression was spoiled by a round, almost babylike face which rode his shoulders like a balloon, bobbing frequently and for no apparent reason. The face was unlined, his cheeks were pink and round, and his lips belonged on a pouty nightclub singer—a female one. He was blond and blue-eyed, which added to the babyish appearance of his face. He wore a gray pin-striped suit with a pink shirt, red and gray striped tie, and a red vest. His clothes fit well and didn’t look off-the-rack.

  Ted pointed to three thick stacks of folders on his desk, probably at least sixty of them altogether. “How far back do you want to go?”

  “Back to the beginning, of course,” Schultz said. Obvious questions were a pet peeve of his.

  “Well, you said that you’re working on the assumption that your killer is in his mid-to-late-thirties. That means we should start at least thirty y
ears back.”

  “Thirty? I would have thought maybe twenty.”

  “Nah. Some of those guys make their first kill in grade school. Nine, ten years old.”

  “Christ. Kids that age are supposed to be spray-painting sidewalks or something, not killing people.”

  Ted shuffled through the folders, setting aside a few older ones. “Looks like 1967 is our first case that falls in the right range. April, 1967, Spokane, Washington. Headless corpse floating in a river. Identified as May Brinkwood, a prostitute. Apparent cause of death was strangulation. Little hard to tell, I guess.”

  “I think our man is into some sort of ritual that involves leaving his mark elsewhere on the body. We can probably rule out any cases that don’t have some form of mutilation.”

  “OK,” said Ted. “I’m easy. Let’s sift those out and see what’s left.”

  He pushed one of the stacks toward Schultz. They worked silently for a quarter of an hour. They were left with about thirty folders.

  “Sure you don’t want any coffee?” Ted said.

  “Yeah, I’ll take a cup,” Schultz said. “Looks like I’m going to be here awhile.”

  Schultz put the notebook and pen he had brought on Ted’s desk. He flipped open the first folder while Ted busied himself with the coffeepot on a table in the corner.

  “September, 1976, Fallsburg, Tennessee,” he read aloud to Ted. “Couple murdered, found headless in their home. Donald Lee and Cathy Sue Macmillan. Multiple stab wounds were the cause of death, and they were decapitated afterward. Sheriff’s report indicates robbery as the apparent motive, probably by a transient. ’Course that motive doesn’t explain the fact that the victims were stabbed numerous times, especially in the area of the heart, and that their heads were never found.”

  “A very angry robber, presumably.”

  “Another aspect to it is that Donald Lee and Cathy Sue were not exactly the finest examples of the local citizenry. Both alcoholic, known to be violent, prior arrests for assault and prostitution, respectively.”

  “Sounds like they could have had a lot of enemies,” Ted said. “The Sheriff might be protecting somebody local.”