First Lady (23 page)

“So you think we already know this guy?” I asked.

Bunty shook her head slowly. “No, I'm not necessarily saying that. I'm saying you're a focus for him. Mark David Chapman knew John Lennon. John Lennon didn't know Mark David Chapman. It's the same with a serial. He may stalk a victim for a long time before moving in. He knows a lot about her, she knows nothing about him.” Bunty's face whitened and was suddenly spotted with sweat. She put her hand out on the edge of the table to steady herself and then sat down.

I hurried over to her. “Are you all right?”

“I'm fine. Just tired.”

“She's fine.” Rhonda stepped in for her partner. “Not much sleep.” Rhonda helped Bunty sit down. Everyone tried not to look curious. Then Rhonda took over the briefing. She said, “With these psychos, it's all about the fantasy life. In his own head, he's real tight with folks that wouldn't know him from the bagger at Wal-Mart. Which pisses him off.” She handed Bunty a thermos, then walked over to a corkboard, pointed at a blow-up photo of the mailing tag:

LT. JUSTIN SAVILE V,

PLEASE DELIVER YOUR FRIEND TO:

CAPTAIN C.R. MANGUM

Wendy Freiberg said, “Obviously G.W. knew Justin ran homicide and that Cuddy was police chief, so they're the ones he's going to focus on. Plus, he knows they're friendly with each other—”

“Well, we were before Cuddy's promotion,” I joked.

Bunty had finished whatever was in the thermos. She moved the marker northward on the map to The Fifth Season Resort where there was a third red circle. “So, Cathy was in October. Assuming Jane happened in February, and there's nobody in between that we haven't come across, G.W. waits four months between the first two victims and four months between the second and third. Does that interval hold or does it shorten?”

Rhonda passed out copies of the eight-by-ten, black-and-white headshot of Mavis Mahar with her eyes rubbed out with the red marker. “He scratches out her eyes and autographs it, ‘GUESS WHO,' and somehow slips it under the police chief's office door.”

Wendy Freiberg raised her hand. “I'm 95 percent sure the handwriting on that photo's a match for the tag on Jane. Check the Ss.” We all looked from the words on the photo to the blow-up of the mailing label. She added, “Meanwhile, even with a clear disguise, this has got to be the most rigid vertical, evenly spaced, uniformly constructed script I've ever worked with. Bunty's right, G.W.'s a neat freak, ritualistic.”

“OCD?” Cuddy asked about obsessive-compulsive disorder.

“Could even be in your league, Mangum.” Wendy's relation with Cuddy was entirely ironical and I'd long suspected she had a crush on him. She never said anything sarcastic to me.

Cracks about Cuddy's “clean it and fix it” compulsions went around the room until Rhonda brought us back in line by whistling through her teeth. “So, first victim, Cathy Oakes, prostitute—no warning that we know of, no direct message to the local police, no follow-up. The signature—Guess T-shirt, a dozen roses thrown over the victim's body.

“Second victim, Jane—no warning that we know of, but a direct message, the toe label to Honch and JayJay here. The signature escalates, I mean it's like overkill—Guess T-shirt, necklace with ring and stone, tattoos, the matches around her head, the tongue, etc., etc., etc.

“By the third victim, G.W. is waltzing around HPD like it's home sweet home. This time he warns you ahead of time and he brags about it afterwards. He grabs Jay's keys off his desk, which means he knows who's drivin' what. Skips down to the garage and pops Elvis in the Jag's tape deck. He knows who's livin' where. He busts into the police chief's private home—pops the star on the slider and rigs the telescope in front of it.”

Cuddy stopped Rhonda with a hand raised. “Okay, let's throw it out on the table now. Is Guess Who one of us?”

“One of us?” Wendy Freiberg looked at him puzzled.

“A cop, an ex-cop? HPD or County?” Cuddy took a thin folder from his briefcase. “Is this somebody works for the city? Is this maybe somebody with a grudge against me?”

Wendy said, “Apparently that could be anybody.” We all laughed.

Cuddy repeated, “I'm serious. Was the clipping of that editorial asking me to resign from him? Do we think there's any chance it's somebody in the Cadmean Building?” He opened the folder. “Here's the name of every current employee of the Hillston police, and any officer who was dismissed, quit, or retired from HPD over the eight years I've been Chief. I put a check by the names I think we can exclude.” Slowly he grinned. “Everybody in this room got a check. But the only name I
know
I can exclude is my own.”

Everyone was quiet while we thought this over. Then Bunty said, “We haven't worked out what we
do
know yet, Cuddy. I figure we oughta stay there for now. Hold off on this list.”

Cuddy yanked at his hair. “I know you're right, Bunty, I just want to get where we're going faster.”

“We'll get there,” she told him in her unhurried drawl.

Lisa Grecco interrupted to say that she had pulled a jacket on an unsolved homicide down in Wilmington, N.C.—a young white female's decomposed naked body had been discovered by hunters in a marsh near a highway rest stop; she was naked, covered with silt. There were twenty-eight stab wounds on her body. Her labia and nipples had been mutilated. She had ligature abrasions on her wrists and there was rope left at the scene. Could this be an intermediate killing for Guess Who?

Bunty gazed out the window. “It's awful messy for G.W. He's real precise.” She said it with a kind of detached respect. “If he left something at the scene, it's because he wanted us to see it. Interpret it. Everything he sends you is a key to the code. Random stab wounds don't fit. Rope doesn't fit. He didn't need to tie these women up. She's got long hair.”

Rhonda interjected. “Remember, the significant part of the code repeats. So what repeats? On victims one and two, a Guess T-shirt. On victims two and three, cutting out body parts—the tongue, the eyes. On all three, buzz cuts.”

The voices of Isaac and Mavis suddenly ran together in my head: “Until you find the pattern, how can you find your way to the pattern maker…. Always lighting the candles to these bloody martyred saints of hers.”

“Light,” I said.

“What, JayJay?”

“Light. The burnt matches around Jane's head and the candles on Lucy's hat.”

Thoughtful, Bunty nodded at me.

Just then someone came in the room to tell Cuddy he had to take a phone call and the meeting momentarily broke up into small conversations. I leaned over to Wendy Freiberg. “Tell Cuddy I had to go to church.”

• • •

In the lobby, reporters milled around the doors to Courtroom A. Latecomers, they hadn't been allowed inside to hear Isaac Rosethorn's summation in the Tyler Norris murder trial because the people crowded into Superior Court had already reached the maximum number allowed by the fire laws. Two of these reporters scurried over to me, eager to know if it was true that Cuddy had quit as police chief. Was it because he was beaten down by the negative press? Was it because Carl Yarborough was resigning as mayor to run for lieutenant governor? Had he been fired by Carl Yarborough because of the negative press? I said that as far I was aware, Chief Mangum had neither quit nor been fired. If he ever did quit, it wouldn't be because of the press, who shouldn't blame themselves because they weren't as powerful as they seemed to worry they were.

“Sticks and stones, Savile,” smiled a young columnist from Greensboro. “So how's homicide? Looks like you just can't get your corpses straightened out these days. We hear you guys ID'ed a dead waitress as Mavis Mahar. How'd
that
happen?”

I had no comment and they hurried back across the lobby to see who was coming out of the big courtroom doors. They were disappointed that it was just Miss Bee Turner, carrying an empty cut-glass decanter in front of her like the holy grail. She was probably filling it for Isaac Rosethorn, who was probably pretending to have some kind of attack in the middle of his summation and in need of water to take some kind of life-saving pill.

Nearby, leaning his tall thick frame against the lobby display case that Nancy and Zeke had arranged of old weapons, Sheriff Homer Louge grinned at me. He had his thumbs tucked into his belt buckle like he was going to start a number from
Oklahoma.
“They giving you a rough time, Lieutenant Savile? Times change, don't they? Used to be, Mangum's boys could do no wrong. The rest of us had to just sit off to the side and watch him prancing around in the sun, TV and
Newsweek
kissing his fanny. Times change.”

“Homer, you had a heart attack. Shouldn't you be at home?”

He scrubbed at his bristly gray crewcut as he watched me walk toward him. “You're the one might as well be home. Those FBI Lesbionics took over your case is what I hear.”

“Not sure what you mean by ‘Lesbionic,' because both Rhonda Weavis and Bunty Crabtree are American citizens.”

“Well, they wouldn't be if I was running this good Christian country.”

“Don't you like them? Why, they're always saying you're the most maladroit troglodyte they've ever met.”

He frowned. “You're a little prick, Savile. You think your family makes you better than me?”

“Not at all. I think you have an inalienable right to be as good as I am. You just don't exercise it.”

He flushed. “Laugh while you can. You and your smart-ass boss.”

“I try. See you, Homer, I'm off to church.”

“I bet.”

Hurrying past the sanitation and cleaning service strikers, I made my way to my car and drove to Trinity Episcopal, the “smells and bells” Victorian Gothic church where Cuddy's friend Father Paul Madison was something of an authority on the subject I wanted to talk with him about.

Outside, Trinity looked like a mistake, like Exeter Cathedral dropped incongruously into a block of glass and concrete commerce. But inside, it was a huge, dark, vaulted, medieval sanctuary against the world around it, so large, so quiet that modernity was vanquished. My footsteps echoed on the stone floor as I passed the rows of empty varnished pews, the worn marble baptismal font, the red flickering candles, the photographs of a parish trip to rebuild a coastal town hit by last year's hurricane. Near the altar rail I found Paul crawling about on his hands and knees, tacking down loose carpeting in the choir stall.

The Reverend Doctor Paul Madison was single, small, and blond, and was often taken for a Catholic priest because of the collars and cassocks he wore. But as a matter of fact, he was divorced and always asking us to find him someone to date, since he was prohibited from dating most of the women he met because they were parishioners. Paul had a graduate degree in early church history and complained that he never had a chance to use it. I was going to give him the opportunity. I told him so after we'd chatted about the events of the past days. While entirely lacking in aggression himself (a problem for the rest of us on the Fuzz Five basketball team), Paul had the armchair detective's avid interest in violent crime and it was only by assuring him that my “theological question” was related to the Guess Who homicides that I was able to stop him from grilling me about the shooting at The Fifth Season. Taking a seat in the ornately carved stall, I asked him to listen to my description of the victim and then tell me if it made him think of anything.

He scrunched up his bizarrely youthful face, made the more cherubic by his blond curls. “My hands are sweating. It's like my Ph.D. orals.”

“Just listen. And Paul, this is confidential.”

He pointed at the old dark confessional in the corner. “Right, like that's a problem for me.”

“Okay. Think of a young woman. A ring of candles around her head, she's shot through the neck, she's naked, and her eyes are cut out.”

Paul just stared at me, horrified. “Oh my god, the poor woman.”

“Yes…. So we're looking for any significance to the mutilation. Does it make you think of anything?”

He closed his eyes, then opened them wide. “You mean besides it's like the one you can't identify, the G.I. Jane one with her tongue cut out?”

I looked at him and slowly nodded. “Exactly…. Yes, besides that it's like that one. The ring of candles, the missing eyes.”

He searched my eyes carefully. “Lucy. Didn't they say in the news today that this woman's name was Lucy?”

“Yes, Lucy Griggs.”

He looked at me hopefully. “Are you asking me about Saint Lucy?”

I took a breath. “There's a saint named Lucy?”

He grabbed the altar rail as if there were information he could shake out of it. “Yes, Saint Lucy. She was blinded.”

“Damn it! Of course. Luce. Light. I knew it was about light.”

“Yeah, where was the old prep school Latin when you needed it?”

“Hey, a college major, too.
Lux et veritas
. How soon we forget.”

When I asked him if religious painters ever depicted haloes as a ring of lighted candles around a saint's head, he said he couldn't think of a particular instance but agreed that the candles in the hat did resemble a halo. “Sometimes in the paintings, she holds a lamp or a candle.”

“So what made Lucy a saint?”

Happy to be of help, Paul motioned for me to follow him into his office off the vestry room. “Like most of the virgin martyrs, her problem was she turned Christian before it got popular. It's always a risk to jump on a bandwagon before anybody else has identified it as a bandwagon. Just ask Otto Lillienthal.”

“A saint?”

“A nineteenth-century German aviator. Flew over two thousand flights before he died in his glider and the Wright Brothers read all about him. Aviation's my hobby.” In his dusty book-crammed study, Paul stood on a chair to reach down two volumes. “They tried everything to make Lucy give up her faith. They made her a prostitute, but Christ fixed it so nobody could get an erection around her and that way she stayed a virgin.”

“Sounds like Christ had a sense of humor.”

“Oh, a great sense of humor.” Paul was searching through one of the books. “Then I think a judge gouged out Lucy's eyes. The problem is, all these virgin martyr stories get mushed together. They're all set on fire, raped, stabbed, fed to wild animals, decapitated. But with Lucy, it's definitely the eyes. Here, look at this.” He showed me a painting of a slender blind woman in a white robe. She had a bleeding hole in her throat and stood placidly holding a large shell with two eyeballs in it.

“Are those her own eyes she's holding there?”

“Right.” He was reading. “A sword through her throat, that's it.”

I could feel my heart thudding. “Through her throat?” I pointed my finger under my jaw, in the trajectory through which the still unrecovered bullet had entered Lucy Griggs's neck.

Paul rubbed at his clerical collar. “Right. That's why Lucy's the saint of sore throats. And the saint of blindness. I could lend you these books.” He flipped through the pages, pausing at an illustration of Saint Joan. Joan of Arc at her execution, her head shaved.

I startled the rector by hugging him. “God bless you, Father Paul.”

He grinned, pleased. “Is that the answer? Saint Lucy?”

I told him it could be one of the answers. “Now find me a virgin martyr who had her tongue cut out.”

• • •

An hour later, I slipped back into Room 105 without comment, except for a scowl from Cuddy. Etham Foster was asking Rhonda about the little stone that had been threaded through the shoelaces around G.I. Jane's neck. He'd thought it was some totemic amulet, but none of the many New Age stores in the area had been able to identify it. He wondered, could it possibly have been a clue already set back in February to lead us to Mavis. Rock? Rock star? Like the Elvis tape was to signal rock star.

Rhonda nodded. “It's an idea.” She went back to reading out the items she'd written beneath the heading, “G.I. JANE.”

—Victim WF, probably mid-twenties.

—Victim unknown; ID removed.

—No pre-crime warning or we missed it?

—Body moved (gray car carpet fiber) and hidden in shallow grave: wants it found but not right away.

—Probable no sexual assault but victim stripped of clothing, genitals left exposed.

—Weapon:

–Probably hunting knife in the Colt Tactical Combat model category. Three stab wounds to neck, severed trachea, jugular, cracked vertebra.

—Postmortem mutilation:

–Pierced eyebrow ring sliced from face.

–Tongue cut out and removed. (Missing. Animals?)

–Hair shaved.

–Six postmortem burns to arms and torso.

—Evidence at scene:

–Nine kitchen matches arranged around head.

–Gray T-shirt with Guess logo, new, size Large.

–Kenneth Cole sunglasses.

–Nike white shoelaces tied together, strung with the eyebrow ring and small round gray stone.

–Toe label addressed to Savile/Mangum.

Bunty turned to us. “We miss something?”

I said, “The snake tattoos.”

Rhonda added the tattoos. “Right, on her ankles; looks like he drew them with the same red marker he used for the morgue label.”

Then, on the right side of the board, Bunty pointed to another list she'd made under the words MAVIS MAHAR. “Okay, number three. Let's say G.W. got away with Cathy and then with Jane.”

Cuddy spun his pencil through his fingers. “That's sure what every paper in the state's saying.”

Bunty came over and silently patted him on the shoulder, an extraordinary gesture of intimacy from her. Then she walked back to the safety of the wallboard. “G.W.'s scared but he's also aroused. Murder's a high for him. He likes it. He remembers the feeling, he watches, he waits. My bet is, he goes back to the G.I. Jane scene between the murder and when you found her. Checks her out, fiddles with things, ‘improves' them. He's a perfectionist, like Wendy says about the handwriting, a neat freak. Maybe the mutilation even happens days after the murder.”

The way I was now thinking, Bunty's idea made sense.

“Weeks go by; months.” Rhonda picked up the story. “G.W. gets cocky. ‘Hey, I could do this again and again, they'll never catch me. And next time I'll do it even better.' Now if Bunt and I are right, and this is about showing off and showing up the authorities, then G.W.'s thinking he won the first two games hands-down. But big whup, where's the satisfaction? Cathy Oakes was a low-class prostitute, not a single relative comes to claim her. G.I. Jane was some other nobody he ran into. Maybe another prostitute. You guys at HPD can't even put a name to her. And obviously she doesn't matter much to anybody because nobody's missing her.”

Bunty said, “What we're suggesting is, he's thinking, if you want to stick it to the alpha males, take their women. The valuable ones. The ones they put a premium on. How 'bout a superstar? How 'bout Mavis Mahar? That ought to up the stakes.”

I raised my hand. “What if he didn't think it was Mavis? What if he knew it was Lucy?”

Rhonda waved me off like a catcher's call. “No way, JayJay. It was set up for Mavis. Otherwise what do you do with his warnings? First he tells you he's back, he's the one that killed Jane—that's the Elvis tape. ‘Wear My Ring Around Your Neck.' Like Etham said, Elvis is a rock star, so it's a pointer. Then he sets up the telescope and the cardboard star. ‘Watch the star.' Then he kills the rock star. And just so you know he's the one who did it, he slips you her headshot photo with the eyes gone. He shoots her through the head. Head shot. Autographed, ‘Guess Who.' He went after Mavis Mahar, screwed up, and killed the wrong girl.”

“I don't think so,” I said. “I think he knew her name was Lucy.”

Cuddy leaned toward me. “Justin, will you please let them finish laying it out for us, okay? Then you can raise objections.”

“Hang on one sec, okay, JayJay.” Rhonda quickly read down the list under “MAVIS MAHAR”:

—Victim WF, late-twenties.

—Victim known, famous.

—Pre-crime warnings—Elvis tape,
Hillston
Star
clipping, glitter cardboard star & telescope.

—Body left on display; indoors, no attempt to hide it.

—No sexual assault but victim naked.

—Head shaved.

—Weapon:

–Gun, (make unknown) missing from the scene. Single shot trajectory through lower mandible into cranial cavity.

—Postmortem mutilation:

–Both eyes removed.

—Evidence deliberately left at scene.

–Straw hat with four candles.

—Post-crime:

–Headshot of Mavis with “Guess Who” autograph delivered to Mangum.

“Okay, now, what's your problem, Justin?” Cuddy asked. But before I could answer, the door to 105 burst open so loudly we all jumped. It was Nancy Caleb-White, not in uniform, but jeans and a sleeveless white blouse. As soon as she spotted Cuddy and me, she ran at us.

Cuddy asked, “Is the jury out? Is it over?”

“What? Oh, I don't know,” she said distracted. “Listen, Chief—”

“Nancy, we're in a meeting. You ever hear of knocking? And why are you out of uniform?”

“It's my day off!” Nancy was nodding so energetically her long black braid swung wildly behind her. “I know who she is! This is her!” She held up a commercial photograph of a young woman's face. It was stamped “Shear Inspirations” and appeared to be one of those pictures that are taped up in the windows of beauty salons to show examples of haircuts. This young woman had a buzz cut. Looking closely, I saw what Nancy meant. Despite the differences in the way this woman looked smiling and made-up in a photographer's studio and the way she had looked after having her throat cut and lying dead in the wet earth, it was still possible to see they were the same person. The hair and ears, the wide cheeks, the mole on the side of the strong straight nose, the earring looped through the right eyebrow. It was the girl we called G.I. Jane.

Nancy beamed as Cuddy snatched the picture away and stared at it and then at me. I said, “She's right. It's Jane.”

Cuddy swung Nancy off the ground. “Where'd you get this!”

“Justin told me to check hair salons—”

“It was her idea,” I said. “Nancy had the idea Jane got the buzz cut
before
she was killed and Guess Who just hacked at it.”

As the picture was passed around the room, Nancy eagerly went on. “So I've been checking places, asking them to go back in their records—which they mostly didn't even have, including this place called Shear Inspirations near Haver campus. But I'm there, kind of looking around and I flip through this stack of discard photos and there she is!” Her face fell. “But, Chief, they didn't know where they got the picture from. They say they get stacks of them in the mail. And they don't know her name.”

I said, “I bet her name's Christine.”