Better Off Dead (7 page)

Fanny scurried after me as I dragged her by
the arm toward the living room. She held a massive pocketbook in
her free hand. As Hugo seized his chance to escape, she
inadvertently whacked the poor guy in the head with it when he
dashed past her and slipped out the front door.

"Oh, my," Fanny cried, thoroughly confused.
She turned to see who had just blown past her. "Did I just hit
someone in the head?" She was mystified. Hugo had disappeared. No
one answered.

Bobby was furious with me. He muttered
threats in my ear. I ignored him.

"Oh." Fanny stopped short in the doorway. "I
didn't realize so many people were here."

Helen Pugh looked up blankly. Her mother was
busy fishing a pack of cigarettes out of a pocket and didn't even
bother to acknowledge Fanny's presence.

"This is Helen Pugh," I said loudly. My
client took the hint. She stood, extending a hand, smiling thinly.
"And this is Bobby's girlfriend, Fanny Whitehurst." I gave Helen's
mother a rather triumphant glance. She acknowledged my salvo with a
discreet sneer.

"Delighted to meet you," Fanny cried with an
enthusiasm that was already tainted with desperation. Not a good
sign.

There was a silence in the room, broken only
by the sharp click of Miranda's cigarette lighter.

Helen remembered her manners. "This is my
mother, Miranda de Plessé," she said mechanically. "But if you grew
up in the area, you may have known her as Martha Crumpler. She's
from Raleigh, actually. Quite nearby."

It was the automatic family-history
introduction any decent hostess might give, but the effect on Fanny
was unexpected.

"Martha Crumpler!" Fanny cried. She took a
step forward and eyed the old lady's bowed head, getting a face
full of rising cigarette smoke for her trouble.

"It's me, Martha," Fanny said. "The former
Fanny Byrd. Don't you remember? We went to Peace College together.
I was president of our junior class?"

Miranda looked up for the first time. Fanny
flinched when she caught sight of the old lady's scalpel-ravaged
face. But she was too polite to react beyond that. Fanny lived in a
less self-centered world and probably assumed her old friend had
been in a catastrophic car wreck. Who would voluntarily choose a
face that looked like that?

Miranda had no such scruples. "I have no
idea who you are," she said in her best Bette Davis voice. "I'm
sure you have mistaken me for someone else."

"We took drama class together, remember?"
Fanny insisted. "Of course, that was a long time ago. Not that you
look it or anything," she added hastily. Fanny patted her own gray
curls nervously and smoothed her dress over her plump figure. Her
face fell slightly. She had been a triumph at her girls' college
and delighted in remembering those heady times. "Don't you remember
me?" she finally asked outright.

Helen's mother blew smoke out of her
nostrils, a lady dragon in full flame. "I can't be expected to
remember everyone I meet," she snapped. "I've met thousands of
admirers over the course of my dramatic career."

That was more than enough for Fanny. She was
well-bred, but no one's doormat. "Well, I certainly remember you,"
Fanny retorted in a sweet voice. "If I recall, you were expelled
for having sex with the gardener. Or was it the art teacher? No,
wait, it was the German teacher, a funny little man with a stiff
mustache like Hitler. Or perhaps it was all three? Yes, that was
the scandal, wasn't it? You were sleeping with all of them. Rather
amusing to have made such a fuss about it. Promiscuity is so much
more acceptable these days."

Fanny smiled beatifically at her foe. Martha
stared back at her, frozen in mid-puff, her carefully studied
mannerisms thrown off by Fanny's unexpected volley.

Touché.

As the two older women eyed one another,
Bobby cleared his throat and looked to me for help. We both knew
what had happened.

The gauntlet had been thrown—just when we
thought it couldn't get any worse.

I fled to the sanity of my apartment in
downtown Durham as soon as I could, leaving behind an incipient
soap opera. There was no way Fanny was leaving Bobby to the sole
attentions of Miranda, and so she had insisted on bringing her
suitcases inside the house for "a little visit" as well. Helen
Pugh's home—once a silent prison—was fast approaching bawdy
whorehouse status.

Marcus and the case files arrived at my
place promptly at seven o'clock. He clutched a large shopping bag
in his arms.

"I knew you'd keep your word," I told him,
dragging him inside before his fidgeting made one of my neighbors
suspicious. "Will you relax? You're making me nervous."

"I can't relax. The task force is a go." He
collapsed on my sofa and fanned his face with a file folder from
the shopping bag. "By tomorrow, these files will be hotter than two
foxes fornicating in a forest fire. I only hope they don't form the
task force tonight and throw me in the hoosegaw." He sounded mildly
hopeful about the possibility.

"Relax," I told him again. "I am sure the
powers that be are way too busy making phone calls and covering
their asses over that girl's murder."

I unpacked the shopping bag. There were over
a dozen files inside. Marcus watched me with proprietary
disapproval.

"If you're hungry, order pizza," I told him.
"I'll pay." I knew Marcus had not been kidding when he had sworn to
stay beside those files. He took his responsibilities very
seriously, a most annoying habit in a snitch. I was stuck with him
for the whole night.

While Marcus went about making himself at
home—which meant checking out my lingerie, rifling through my video
collection and inspecting my medicine chest for new prescriptions—I
organized the case files. As requested, Marcus had culled out any
rapes involving known acquaintances.

"You know those date rape cases?" I asked
him, just to make sure I'd covered all the bases. "Were any of them
exceptionally violent?"

"All rape is violent," Marcus chided me
primly. He was holding up a see-through black body suit. "May
I?"

"No, you may not," I said emphatically. "You
may not try on anything of mine that has a crotch. Sharing has its
limits."

"Spoilsport." He hung it back up in the
closet and kept browsing.

"Would you answer my question about the date
rapes?" I complained. "I'm not interested in being politically
correct."

"Well, I think we all know that already," he
answered, one eyebrow raised.

"What I mean is, did any of the date rapes
seem related to these?" I tapped the stack of folders in front of
me. "Maybe the guy started with someone he knew?"

Marcus shook his head. "You have all the
worst ones in front of you. If the woman was beaten, tortured,
attacked, ritualized in some way, I included it. I think I flagged
them all. I have been doing this for fifteen years, my dear."

"And these are all unsolved?"

"Unfortunately, yes. Except for the ones you
helped solve," he said, flashing a satisfied smile.

Sure enough, I was able to cull out six rape
case files that I had previously helped the Durham Police
Department solve. It was nice to know my work had made a
difference. Of course, the files were still open since the rapist
was currently whooping it up in Paris, but I'd get him one day. I
always—but always—get my man. One way or another. I put those
folders aside and concentrated on the remaining incidents.

Before long, I was lost in the details of
life-shattering events, the horror of what the women must have felt
sanitized in a series of observations by people who had seen it

all too many times before. Helen Pugh's file
was the thickest. Her statement was also the most thorough. But she
had not claimed to have recognized the rapist's voice as belonging
to David Brookhouse until more than a week after the incident. That
had probably hurt her in court.

I made careful notes of the victims' names,
workplaces and addresses. I wondered how many of the women still
lived the same lives they had led before their rapes. I know I
would have started over somewhere else. I noted the details of each
attack, searching for similarities. Because three of the violent
rapes had taken place near a shopping center in North Durham, far
from the campus, and had stopped abruptly when the main suspect was
jailed on an unrelated charge, I set those aside to concentrate on
the rapes that had occurred on or near the Duke campus.

Marcus had been right. There were no
similarities between the campus attacks whatsoever. Besides being
amazed at the creative brutality of man, I was dismayed that there
were no apparent connections. Helen had been bound and gagged while
walking. Another woman had been carjacked and raped in a parking
lot, still another knocked out while reading on a bench in broad
daylight, and a fourth had been overpowered in a hospital elevator
at the Duke Medical Center in the middle of the night, then dragged
outside for the finale. The next victim had apparently been drugged
while attending a campus reception. She could remember nothing of
leaving the event or what happened afterward. Only severe bruising,
a few murky flashbacks and internal injuries bore witness to the
reality of her experience. Jesus, I thought, these women had all
done everything right from a personal safety standpoint, yet all
had been brutally attacked. Was it really as random as it
seemed?

For a moment, I thought I had found a
connection: three of the women, including Helen, either worked in
the building that housed the psychopathology department's offices
and labs, or they took classes in the department. But two of the
women did not fit that profile. They were taking classes nearby the
same building, but that was little help. Of course they would all
link to classes in the area; they had apparently been stalked
precisely because of that.

"They do any decoying?" I asked Marcus.

He nodded. "Nothing happened except some of
our lady officers got hit on by some hunky college men."

"Really?" I asked hopefully. "They need any
more volunteers?"

Marcus looked at me from over a tabloid he
had discovered under my couch. I didn't have the heart to tell him
it was over a year old. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. The
stories were all the same.

"What?" I asked defensively.

"The men of Duke campus are not ready for
you, my dear," he said cryptically, then went back to gathering
gossip.

Smug bastard. I kept reading, hoping for
enlightenment. It didn't look good. None of the women could
describe their attacker physically, other than three of them being
sure he was white and taller than average. Two believed their
rapist had been of average height and indeterminate race. The lack
of detail was not surprising given the premeditated, ritualistic
nature of the attacks. Some of the women had lost consciousness,
others claimed the man wore a mask or other disguise. One woman
believed there had been a second man present, though she had seen
or heard nothing to back up this feeling. Still another insisted
during her initial hospital interview that she had been raped by
Ronald Reagan. Later, a rubber Halloween mask with the former
President's face on it had been found in a campus trash can,
proving she had not been as out of it as was first thought.

Still, nothing substantive among the cases
matched. I spent over three hours searching and came up with
zippo.

"I don't get it," I mumbled. "There's not a
single distinguishing factor to link these." I thought of
something. "What about the professor, David Brookhouse?" I asked
Marcus. "Did they look into his whereabouts during the times of all
the rapes, or just the one of Helen Mclnnes?"

Marcus sounded offended. "Of course they
did. He's not considered a suspect. There was no evidence to
suggest he was involved. And with the details of the other rapes
being so different compared to the Mclnnes attack he was
cleared."

"How convenient," I muttered. "Do you think
he was guilty of raping Helen Mclnnes?" I valued Marcus's opinions;
he had been working in the police department for a long time.

He shrugged. "All I know for sure right now
is that I am mighty glad that I am a man." He paused, trying to
decide how much to tell me. Our friendship won out over
departmental discretion. "I do have one teensy observation to
make," Marcus admitted. By then, he was lounging on my sofa sipping
Diet Pepsi and nibbling the edge of a pizza crust. It typically
took Marcus two hours to eat two slices of pizza. I could eat a
whole pie in a quarter of that time.

"What?"

"Nothing concrete. But consider this: there
really are no elements in common between the attacks," he
explained. “Trust me on this one, I ran the computer program that
tried to match them and produced the report."

"The report you wouldn't let me see, so I
had to duplicate it all by hand?" I complained.

He arched his eyebrows at me. "When I say it
is too dangerous for me to access a computer file, I mean it.
They're tracking every hit on those files, no matter what."

"Why?" I asked.

He looked away, refusing to answer.

"Marcus," I warned him. When he still
wouldn't answer, I continued. "What's so odd about none of the
crime elements matching? Except for the elements you'd expect to
find in just about any violent, stalking rape of course."

"Well, do you notice anything odd about all
of the differences between them?" he asked seriously. "Think about
it." This was a new Marcus to me, the Marcus-on-the-job, a clerk so
competent that even the most homophobic of redneck cops on the
force asked to have him assigned to their cases.

I stared at the files, searching for the
answer, comparing my columns of carefully noted details. It took me
a moment, but I finally got it. "They're too different," I said.
"It is impossible that this many violent rapists would be working
in the same area over the course of two years, and that every
single one of the five would have a completely different M.O."