Over Tumbled Graves

by Jess Walter

  Pollard kept searching for the joke; Spivey seemed to be actually thinking about it. When Dupree failed to land a punch line, Pollard threw his coffee back, squeezed the Styrofoam cup, and stood to leave.

  “I’m worried about you, buddy,” he said to Dupree. “I gotta go interview the pawnshop guy. Looks like you ain’t gonna win that pot after all.”

  Since Dupree had been assigned to head the serial killer task force, Pollard had been given his caseload, including the two Lenny Ryan murders.

  Pollard left the cafeteria and Dupree looked over to Spivey, who was staring intently at the numbers he’d copied onto his notebook. “What about transient populations—a truck driver, or someone else from out of town?”

  Dupree considered the kid. He had short, dark hair, a little curly patch in the front hanging over his forehead, and big, semicircle eyebrows that heightened his constant look of confusion. Dupree had complained about him to the lieutenant, who defended the kid by saying he had tested out of the park, the highest aptitude of any detective candidate, and had gotten A’s in college. The lieutenant said he was earnest and eager; if Dupree was more patient, he might even learn something from Spivey.

  “We’re not gonna interview a hundred thousand guys,” Dupree said. “I was sort of…illustrating how tough it’s gonna be to find this guy.”

  Spivey allowed his mouth to curl in a grin. “Oh, a joke.” He winked, as if he’d just help pull one over on poor Pollard.

  Dupree stood, peeled off a dollar bill, and draped it over the uneaten half of his Danish. Spivey followed him out of the courthouse and across the small courtyard to the Public Safety Building. Inside, Dupree punched in the short code, the door buzzed, and they were in a hallway connecting the offices of the various detective units.

  Behind Major Crimes was another coded door. Dupree entered the number and the door opened into a small conference room that had been turned into a command center for the serial killer investigation. Three sets of desks faced one another, covered with desk calendars, phones, Rolodexes, and in and out boxes. The phones led into a central CID panel, identifying the name and address of anyone who called in tips. There were three computers in the room, and a secretary sat in front taking phone messages: Tips came in at all hours, ever since the city announced a five-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the capture of the “Southbank Strangler.”

  The name had been Fleisher’s and so he won the twenty-five dollars. Fleisher’s entry had everything a good serial killer name required: precision, alliteration, and, as the real estate agents say, location, location, location. Other entries had included the Riverbank Killer, the Peaceful Valley Strangler, and Spokane’s Slut Snuffer, which everyone agreed was in poor taste. Dupree had tossed in his five bucks and suggested they name the killer “Brandon”—he’d read that it was the most popular American boy’s name now—but more and more his genius seemed to be going unappreciated. So the newspaper and television editors happily sent their graphic artists into fits of creativity coming up with Southbank Strangler logos and maps, shadowed backdrops for headlines. All we need now, Dupree thought, is a theme song.

  Pictures of the three victims were tacked on the wall of the task force office, above a map of the riverbank. The first picture was of Rebecca Bennett, killed almost two months earlier, at the beginning of April. That trail was the coldest, with few people even remembering the woman. The second picture showed the most recent victim, a twenty-nine-year-old prostitute named Sharla McMichael, who’d been dumped in the same clearing where Rebecca Bennett was found. But no one could remember seeing Sharla for days before she was killed, and even though it was more recent, that trail was as cold as the first. The third picture was of a thirty-one-year-old prostitute from Portland named Jennifer Skaggs, who had last been seen five weeks earlier.

  Dupree didn’t think the killer could have found people who would be missed less. He marveled at the lack of discernible effect from the killings: No witnesses. No parents calling police. No friends or family or even pimps to worry about these women. It wasn’t much better at the crime scene: No footprints or tire tracks; nothing of the killer left behind except forty bucks in the victims’ hands. No fingerprints on the money or the girls, all of whom had fingernails torn off and whose hands had been washed with bleach by the killer, just to make sure. And although the attacks seemed sexual, there was no semen, a detail strange in itself. They weren’t even sure how the killer had gotten the bodies there. They were chasing a ghost.

  Dupree, Laird, and Spivey were the city detectives assigned to the case. They were joined by a sneaky sheriff’s detective, a state patrol trooper, and, as a consultant, the muscular FBI profiler Jeff McDaniel, who’d stayed for two days and then promised to check in from Quantico—although from Dupree’s vantage point his main talents seemed to be having lunch with the brass and hitting on secretaries. McDaniel promised to return and do a “full-blown profile” on the Southbank Strangler. Dupree promised to hold his breath.

  In the days following the discovery of the second and third bodies prostitution nearly stopped along East Sprague, the strip where generations of hookers had worked. Hundreds of tips flooded the police department; the best ones were funneled to the task force office, where every day Dupree and the other detectives came in, grabbed a handful of telephone message slips, made phone calls, and went out to interview the nonexistent friends and relatives of the victims. Most of the tips were patently ridiculous.

  “My boyfriend’s weird,” the tip sheet might say, or “My neighbor watches porn.” But each of them had to be checked out, because nothing was more embarrassing to a police department than the interview four months after the arrest in which a neighbor tells a TV reporter that she called the police about the cannibal with the strange movie rentals. But in the weeks since the killings the world had started to get back to normal; now the hookers were starting to venture out on East Sprague again and the tips were dwindling in number. Dupree found himself reaching for the losers, the tip sheets that contained little chance of adding anything substantive to what he knew.

  A stack of twenty or thirty tip sheets filled Dupree’s in box. He grabbed two: a man on probation who had given a cabdriver “the creeps” and a guy’s brother who had been robbed by hookers and still held a grudge. He decided to try the second tip first, tapped out the number, and introduced himself.

  “It says here your brother was robbed by a prostitute?”

  The guy on the other end cleared his throat. “Yeah. Or a dancer, I’m not sure.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Boy, couple years.”

  “He ever display any violence toward women?”

  “He beat up his girlfriend. That’s why he’s in jail.”

  “He’s in jail now?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You say he’s in jail now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How long’s he been in?”

  “Couple months.”

  Dupree slumped. “You know the most recent murder was three weeks ago?”

  “Yeah, I thought maybe you could see if he got a furlough or something.”

  “A furlough.”

  “Yeah. So, do I have to testify to collect the reward?”

  After he hung up, Dupree ran the name of the brother and found out he’d actually been in jail for three years. He printed out the guy’s rap sheet, stapled the pink message sheet to it, and dropped it into the out file.

  Next, he tried the cabdriver, but got no answer. He reached for another message from the thick stack in the in box, but his hand just rested on the pile. This process felt more random to him than if they had just decided to interview every male in the region. This was the coldest trail he’d ever seen. Most murders, the cops knew who had done it within twenty-four hours of finding the body. There was still the problem of proving it, but the suspect was obvious. Woman gets shot, talk to the husband. Tavern owner gets shot, talk to his partner. Gangbanger gets shot,
find out who he pissed off. If he did the math, Dupree figured he could graph the results of murder investigations based on the amount of time it took to generate a suspect. Find a suspect within the first twenty-four hours, you had a ninety percent chance of getting a conviction. Seventy-two hours? Probably sixty percent. Then the curve fell quickly. And now, three weeks since the last body? Dupree put their chances at about one in twenty of ever getting a suspect strong enough to stand trial. Especially with prostitutes as the victims. All he had to do was read the teletypes and intelligence reports from other cities to realize how long their odds were of ever solving this. Portland had eight active prostitute murder cases; Vancouver, B.C., had more than thirty. Almost every city seemed to have active prostitute murders. And for some reason, it was worse in the Northwest. Even Spokane had other strings of prostitute murders; they’d seen nearly a dozen over the last decade unrelated to this case, most recently a woman named Shelly Nordling, who had her throat slashed and was then tossed from a car. Then, of course, there was the king of them all: the Green River Killer, outside Seattle. Forty-nine women, almost all with a history of prostitution. That case was never solved.

  Dupree’s task force was trying other things, of course, looking at paroled sex offenders and men charged with assaulting prostitutes, conducting routine stings of johns and prostitutes, even posting surveillance cameras at a few pickup spots. A handful of women detectives, including Caroline, were out interviewing hookers on the street, compiling lists of rough tricks—johns who scared them. And Special Investigations was setting up a john sting tonight, posting a female officer—probably Caroline—on a corner, then questioning every guy who stopped to talk to her. But such steps were long shots. Hell, maybe one in twenty was too high. One in fifty was more like it, or one in a million. Of course, Dupree knew what would improve the odds. Another body. A new crime scene to sift through. In the meantime, he would just sit here making phone calls so unlikely they might as well be random, and wait for it to happen again.

  Dupree took the next tip sheet from the basket. It was from a woman named Amend who lived in the West Central neighborhood, near the river. Her neighbor often left his house at 7 P.M. and returned at 2 A.M. Twice, he had returned to his house with women she described as “slutty.”

  “Lucky guy,” Dupree said.

  Dupree turned the tip sheet over. That was it? He was about to toss it in the out file when the man’s name caught his attention. Verloc. The name was familiar. Dupree dialed the woman’s number but received no answer. Verloc. He tapped the sheet against his glasses. Next he opened the telephone book and found the listing for “Verloc, Kevin.” That name rattled around in his head and he found himself getting excited. He entered the guy’s name into the NCIC computer, but came up with no criminal record. Still, the name seemed significant. He knew he should wait until he’d talked to the woman, but after three weeks of dead ends his curiosity was too great. He looked at the deep box of worthless tips and knew he couldn’t stomach sitting here all day, inching along. Sometimes, you just had to drop a bomb. He tapped out the number.

  A man answered after one ring. “This is Kevin.”

  “Mr. Verloc? This is Alan Dupree, with the police department. I’m with the task force investigating the murders of three women who worked as prostitutes and we received a call suggesting we talk to you.”

  “Sure. What can I do for you?”

  Sure? Dupree was dumbfounded. He expected denial, defensiveness, even confusion. But friendliness, enthusiasm? He was caught off guard and launched into full bluff mode. “Yeah, we’re just looking for anyone who might have some information and, like I said, your name came up.”

  “Sure. Well, I do have a crew that works down on East Sprague, at Landers’ Cove, the boat dealership down there. They see their share of hookers during their shifts—always have to run ’em out of the boats, you know? I can hook you up with ’em or I have their log reports, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

  “Log reports. Mmm-hmm.”

  Kevin Verloc continued. “You know, as far as myself, I work in the dispatch room—kind of half graveyard, half swing shift—so I don’t really see anyone.”

  “The dispatch room?” Dupree began to feel uneasy.

  “For my security business. That is why you’re calling, right?”

  That’s when it hit him.

  Kevin Verloc was a state patrol trooper who’d been shot in the back, what, eight or nine years earlier during a routine traffic stop. A real inspirational story. He’d gone on to start this security business, providing security guards to patrol neighborhoods where rich and elderly people lived, and also for concerts, schools, and businesses. Dupree felt sick. Kevin Verloc had been a good cop and he’d hired a lot of former badges to be security guards. But that wasn’t why he couldn’t be the killer.

  “Hello?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. I just got a note from the receptionist here.”

  Verloc sounded confused. “So what’s this about?”

  “I’m terribly sorry…” Dupree rubbed his head.

  On the other end Kevin Verloc burst into laughter. “Jesus. I’ll bet Mrs. Amend called you. She thinks I’m a serial killer? That’s hilarious. The woman is insane. I can’t even get the newspaper without her running away from me. That is so funny.”

  “Look, I’m sorry. When I saw your name, it looked familiar, but I didn’t put it together.” Dupree slowly placed the phone tip into the out box. “I just…I’m sorry.”

  “No, you got me. I should’ve known I would get caught.” Kevin Verloc laughed. “I confess. I run over these women with my wheelchair.”

  Since being shot, Kevin Verloc was a paraplegic.

  Dupree’s head fell against his desk as Verloc laughed on the other end.

  “My accomplice is an old blind guy. But he just drives. I do the heavy lifting.”

  Dupree took the ribbing—almost unbearable coming from another cop who’d know how sloppy he had been on this tip. When Verloc finally finished laughing Dupree retreated as gracefully as possible.

  He stared at the stack of remaining tips. Was this how things were going to be? Messages about creepy taxicab drivers and guys in prison and ex-cops in wheelchairs? He swung with the back of his hand and the box fell over, spilling pink message slips across the floor. And the beauty part was, none of the other detectives even looked up.

  14

  She couldn’t be twenty, even though that’s what she claimed. Thin and pale, with short greasy hair, dull eyes, and a ring in her eyebrow, the girl lost her breath wolfing the soup that Caroline had bought her, and when her sourdough roll was gone she reached over and grabbed Caroline’s whole wheat.

  “I told you about the guy who likes to bite?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And the guy who burned me with the lighter?”

  “You thought his name might be Dave or Mike.”

  “Sup’m regular like that, yeah.” Finished with the soup, the young prostitute tore into a package of crackers. “There’s another guy likes to pull hair an’ shit. Whole handfuls. You interested in that?”

  Caroline said yes and pushed her own soup across the table to the girl. After several deep breaths and some pondering outside, she’d finally come up with the name Jacqueline as if she were trying on a hat. Caroline didn’t want to alienate the girl so she let it slide.

  “You don’t want your soup?” Jacqueline asked.

  “I’m not very hungry.”

  Two spoonfuls disappeared into her mouth before she continued. “Yeah, I been with this guy, I don’t know, we’ve had three, four dates. Always wants a lay and a blow job and then yanks the shit out of your hair while you’re doin’ it. I’m like, hey, I’m tryin’ to work here. I oughta charge him extra for the hair.”

  “You know his name?”

  “It’s something regular.”

  Caroline paused over her notebook. “Mike or Dave?”

  “Somethin’ like that.”

 
“He have a last name?”

  “I’m sure he does.” Jacqueline sopped up Caroline’s soup with Caroline’s roll.

  “What’s he drive?”

  “A truck.”

  So far, every bad date seemed to be a white guy in a truck named Dave or Mike. “American truck?” Caroline asked.

  “Guess so.”

  “What year?”

  She shrugged.

  “New? Old?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “What color?”

  “It was dark. I didn’t really see.”

  “Can you give me a description? Is he tall?”

  “Average, I guess.”

  “How old would you say he is?”

  “Oh, he’s old. Thirty or forty or something.”

  “Thirty or forty? Is he bald? Does he wear glasses? Does he wear a suit? Long hair? One leg? Parrot on his shoulder?”

  “No. Nothing like that. He’s just…you know, regular.”

  “Mmm-hmm. How about guys who don’t wanna pay. You ever have dates try to rape you, force themselves onto you?”

  Jacqueline laughed, then stared down at her soup and became serious. “How many pages you got in that notebook?”

  Thirty minutes later, when they were finished, Caroline paid the bill and bought a sandwich for Jacqueline to take with her. She tried to get her real name, but Jacqueline insisted that was her name and said she didn’t have any ID. Caroline pressed a business card into the girl’s hand and told her to be careful, to work with other women and to call if she thought of anything else or was approached by a guy who gave her a bad feeling.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know,” Caroline said. “If a guy gives you the creeps, makes you feel unsafe or scared in some way.”

  Jacqueline looked down at Caroline’s business card and gave a small laugh. “Ma’am, they all give me the creeps.”