Charisma (18 page)

“This time they’ve got a commitment order and they’re going to lock her up,” the first someone said. “I figure she’ll end up dead in about a year. You know what those people are like.”

“I know better than you do,” the second someone said. “I was actually in one, when I got pregnant. The first time I ever got fucked, it was by my foster father, and he told the frigging social worker I’d been porking half of West Haven, and you know who they believed.”

“Didn’t Jenny McCormick just have a birthday?” a third someone said. “Her pimp gave her a party down in the Congo and I think she was fourteen.”

“Why don’t they like the welfare people?” Susan asked, but nobody answered her. Nobody even heard her. She was not only invisible, but functionally mute. Besides, nobody was really talking to anybody, in the ordinary sense of the phrase. They were simply passing information back and forth, like batons in a relay race.

“Jerry Kevchek’s disappeared again. Tony Buto says he thinks he’s dead because he got picked up by a john one night and then he just wasn’t around anymore.”

“Donna Brendan’s back on the street. She went home to live with her mother but her mother’s a drunk and it didn’t work out.”

“Barney brought in these two little kids last night, look less than five years old, he found them wandering around outside and now he can’t get them to talk. You try to get near them and they just burst into tears and won’t say anything at all.”

“Does Barney know if they can say anything at all? I mean, with little kids, sometimes if their parents are on dope, they don’t learn to talk too good.”

“They learn to talk by the time they’re five, for God’s sake.”

“Don’t bet on it. Steve brought in one a couple of years ago who was nearly eight and he looked four and he couldn’t say a word. I mean, nobody had ever talked to him before.”

After a while, Susan got up, stationed herself at the sink, and started to wash dishes. Marietta got used to the new arrangement in no time at all and started to hand the dishes over, from counters and tabletops and even chairs, wherever they got put down in the mad rush to Susan didn’t know where, or what. It almost didn’t matter. She was moving by then just to keep from vomiting. The conversation was bypassing her brain and going straight to her gut, making it roll. Her eyes were stinging and her vision was blurred and she couldn’t find the spigot when she needed it.

She was just beginning to think she would have to get out of there after all—she would have to do something, because one more of those overheard conversations and she would collapse—when she felt someone standing much too close to her and looked up to see Father Tom Burne, leaning against the sink at her side. He had an odd look on his face, one she didn’t like, but she didn’t have the mental strength to analyze it. She just turned away from him and plunged a dish streaked with grape jelly into the water next to her hand.

A moment later, Father Tom tapped her gently on the shoulder, and she made herself turn. He looked resigned and exasperated, and Susan got the feeling that he had been counting on the reality of this place to drive her away. Now that it hadn’t, he seemed to feel stuck with her.

“Come with me to my office,” he said. “We’ll have a nice long talk about the fact that I am me, Damien House is Damien House, and your brother is that paragon of Catholic laymen, the great Daniel Murphy.”

W
HEN THE CALL CAME
in on Ellen Burnett, early on the morning of December 16, Pat Mallory answered it. He had to, because he’d told everyone from the chief of police to the clerk typist supervisor in Homicide that he wanted to be in at the scene of any crime that looked like it had ties to the murders of Theresa Cavello and Margaret Mary McVann. Giving that kind of direction was always dangerous—you got called out on dozens of things that had nothing to do with anything whatsoever—and Pat felt as if he’d spent too much time burning rubber from one end of the New Haven city limits to the other, screeching to stops in front of brick walls that could have mashed him into hamburger, leaping out of cars onto ice so slick it threatened to toss him even in hob boots, and all for nothing. It was playing cops and robbers, and Pat didn’t like it.

Still, Ellen Burnett was for real, and that made things better—for a while. At least it made Pat feel less like an idiot with an obsession. He wasn’t imagining things. There really was a nut out there, and the nut was good—always a nerve-wrecking sign. In spite of all the true-crime books that cluttered up the bookstore on Chapel Street where he bought his monthly copy of
The Atlantic,
Pat knew psychopaths were not often good at what they did. They were almost never any good at getting away with it. Some of them were schizos, pure and simple. They heard voices in their heads or had visions in their breakfast cereal. Those were the easiest to catch, because they weren’t operating in Real Time. If they managed to rack up a victim or two, it was mostly by accident. If they didn’t get hauled in after their first crime, it was mostly the stranger factor. It was always harder to find a murderer who had no sane connection to his victim than to find one who had—but with the schizos it was a toss-up, really, whether they started by offing innocent bystanders or doing away with their own families. Pat always thought of the schizos as heroes of chance.

As for the others, the minority, they were something else again. Getting out of his car in the alley behind Arlie’s Restaurant, Pat was thinking about them, because the murder of Theresa Cavello had been so damned neat. Schizos had no time to be neat, and junkies had no interest—in the past five years or so, with the coming of crack, they’d had a number of what looked like serial murder cases that turned out to be junkie hits.

He had stuffed his gloves into his pockets when he’d gotten into the car—he hated having to drive with them on—and he got them out. It was bitterly cold and windy, with ice rimming the garbage cans someone had put across the alley access to the diner’s back patch. The problem with the killer of Margaret Mary McVann and Theresa Cavello was that he didn’t add up. The Eucharistic symbol pointed to a schizo. So did the bruises on Margaret Mary’s body. But there were no bruises on Theresa’s body, and the cuts were so damn neat, so precise, so carefully calculated. Sometimes Pat wondered about the weather. Theresa had been left inside, but in a place she had to be quickly found. Margaret Mary had also been left inside, but in a place where she was not likely to be quickly found—had the broken window been accidental or deliberate? There was no way to tell, but Pat kept thinking that if that window had not been open, the cut on Margaret Mary’s forehead would not have survived well enough for them to identify it.

He edged by the garbage cans and into the small open area that led to the diner’s back door, to find Ben Deaver standing beside a tall, thin man in a cashmere coat and a J. Press three-piece suit, looking pained. The tall, thin man looked intolerably smug. Pat got the impression that his coat was open mostly for display. The tall, thin man wanted them all to know he could buy his suits at J. Press; and to see the square black Burberry label every time the wind made the edges of his coat flap. Pat caught Ben Deaver’s eye and raised a single eyebrow. Ben Deaver shrugged.

There were crowds of technical people stuffed into every nook and cranny in the back patch, photographers setting off flashbulbs in quick bursts that looked like machine-gun fire, bag men picking up scraps from the ground with tweezers, even a man with a sterile vacuum. Pat walked over to the body and looked down at it. It had been propped carefully against a garbage can, sitting up, the Eucharistic symbol etched clearly and precisely into its forehead. Since everybody on the New Haven police force, in Homicide or out, knew better than to move the body before Pat got to it, Pat could only assume the killer had left it this way—which was bizarre. The other two had been left where they fell, moved only as much as had been necessary to cut them. Pat had seen the body of Theresa Cavello. He had read the report on Margaret Mary McVann: “victim found on carpet, head up.” He had also seen the pictures.

He stood over the body for a moment, checked out the scene—more garbage pails, cleaner looking, not as often used; pieces of packing crates; wads of filthy frozen fabric that might once have been aprons or tablecloths. The body was not only sitting upright but wedged into all this, so it didn’t look slumped. It was impossible to know if that had been the effect intended.

Pat turned away and walked back across the patch toward Ben Deaver and the tall, thin man. The tall, thin man was looking blue around the lips. Pat stopped next to Ben Deaver and said, “Well?”

Deaver looked at the tall, thin man and said, “This is Dr. James MacLure. He’s a psychologist.”

“Psychiatrist,” Dr. James MacLure said.

“Exactly why,” Pat asked them, “do we have a psychiatrist at the crime scene? Especially a psychiatrist who’s not a police psychiatrist?”

“The police department doesn’t have psychiatrists,” Dr. James MacLure said. “They only have psychologists.”

“It’s an inferior grade of witch doctor,” Ben Deaver said.

Dr. James MacLure had his hands in his pockets. He shoved them even more deeply in and frowned. The blue around his lips was now tinged with red. He was, Pat thought, a man who had a hard time controlling his anger.

“I,” Dr. MacLure said, “am a specialist consultant in violent manias at the Yale New Haven Medical Center. I was dragged down here, out of a perfectly sound sleep, by Daniel Murphy himself—”

“He sent a car,” Ben Deaver said blandly.

“Of course he sent a car,” Dr. MacLure said. “I live in Orange, for God’s sake. Dan was in a hurry. He should have been in a hurry. You’ve got a psychopath on your hands.”

“Sociopath,” Pat said automatically. Then he saw that the man with the sterile vacuum had backed away from the scene and the photographers had gone with him. They were clearing a path for the ambulance men who had been waiting unobtrusively at the far end of the alley. He backed away a little himself and then grabbed Ben Deaver by the arm.

“Come on,” he said.

Dr. James MacLure looked startled and infinitely offended. “I don’t have the time to stand around here in the cold getting nothing done,” he said. “I have a practice. What do you think I do with my time?”

Pat had a hundred answers to that, but not one of them was politic, at least as long as he wasn’t winning. He muttered a perfunctory “Excuse me,” kept his hand on Ben Deaver’s arm, and started moving up the alley to where he’d parked his car.

Once he had Ben Deaver in the car, with the doors closed and the windows up and the motor running so the heat could pump, Pat felt he could relax, at least a little. With the coming of the ambulance men the scene had gone crazy. There was no longer any need for extraordinary caution, and people—professionals and amateurs both—had begun milling around aimlessly, giving in to their need for gossip and their rattling nerves. Pat saw a bag lady materialize out of nowhere and take a seat in a pile of garbage at the very edge of the alley. He wondered what she expected to find when the crowd dispersed.

It wasn’t the kind of thing that bore thinking about. He turned to Ben Deaver and said, “Well? What was all that about?”

Deaver shrugged. “How am I supposed to know? He showed up on his own in a city car. He said he came from Dan. I checked with Dan’s office and they confirmed.”

“What does he want?”

“Publicity, I guess. What do Dan Murphy and his people ever want? He was providing me with a psychological profile of the killer.”

“Right there, on the spot?”

“Right there. Jesus, Pat, it was more bogus than that. All he knows about any of it is that this is the third. He’s exactly one jump ahead of the New Haven
Register
and it’s not a very big jump.”

“Did you listen to him? About his psychological profile?”

“Every time he got started, I told him he’d have to wait for you.”

Pat nodded and looked through the window next to his arm, up the alley again. Dr. James MacLure had collared one of the uniforms and was lecturing. The uniform was either too cowed, or too polite, to object. Pat turned away again.

“Never mind Dr. James MacLure for the moment,” he said. “I can deal with him later. Tell me what’s really been going on over there.”

“Guy who owns the diner found the body this morning,” Ben said. “He came out here to dump some crates and there she was. Our techies say she might have been out there two, three days. She’s damn near frozen solid.”

“What about last night? Didn’t he throw out his garbage?”

“Yeah, he did, but he says it was dark and it was late and it was cold, and all he did was open the back door and toss. They only use that place in the back there for big stuff, crates and junk that has to be carted away special. They’ve got garbage cans back there but they’re just for overflow, if they’re needed. I looked at them. I don’t think they ever have been needed.”

Pat thought about it. “He didn’t see
anything
strange there last night? Or the night before? Or the day before?”

Ben shook his head. “He really couldn’t have, Pat, not if he did what he said. You can’t see that place she was left from the back door. I checked. There’s a big pile of crates blocking the view and there’s a bend in the wall there anyway.”

“A bend?”

“A corner, for God’s sake. But it’s worse than you think, Pat, a lot worse. It’s nuts.”

“Why?”

“Because as far as anybody knows, the last time anyone saw her was last Friday morning, early. That was three days ago.”

Out in the east, the sun was beginning to rise, as much as it was going to. It was threaded with thin dirty streaks of clouds that looked like cotton soaked in mud.

“Look,” Pat said, “let’s start from the beginning. Who was this woman?”

“Ellen Burnett.”

“And who was Ellen Burnett?”

“I don’t have the answer to that the way you want it, not yet. All I’m sure of is that she was a waitress in that diner over there.”

“Her boss doesn’t know anything about her?”