Lark (13 page)

“Any of my radio audience, Dirty?”

“All of them, Johnny. Tell them to leave the lights on and the shades up.”

Lark braked the pickup so vehemently that the rear wheels locked and the truck fishtailed across the road. He fought to control the vehicle and turned off onto the shoulder. “Did you hear him?”

The patrolman nodded. “It's the same voice as on the tape.”

“Tell them to wear their best black lingerie, Johnny,” the dirty old man continued.

A heavy metal rock song was playing on the radio as Lark and Horse entered the shopping mall. They could see Johnny Gross through the plate-glass window sitting at the console, his hands laced behind his head. He was sticking his tongue out at two pubescent girls pressed against the glass at the outside of the station.

There wasn't anyone else in the broadcasting booth.

“Damn! We missed him,” Lark said as he burst into the reception area. He stormed past the secretary and entered the studio.

Johnny Gross glared. “I'm back on the air in twenty-two seconds, Lark baby.”

“Put another record on the turntable, Maurice.”

“No way, man. Johnny doesn't play two back to back.”

“Then I'll do it for you.” Lark reached for a cassette.

“Hey, that's a commercial.”

“Play it or I break your face.”

“Okay, okay.” Gross turned back to the microphone. “All right, kiddies, and here's another goldie from that terrific new group, the Zombies.” He threw a lever on the console and turned to face Lark. “You're going to be walking a beat on the river when my lawyers get through with you.”

“Where is he?”

“Where is who?”

“The guy who was playing the dirty old man on your show.”

“What are you talking about?” The glint and energy that possessed Johnny Gross on the air began to fade as the personality of Maurice Grossman gradually emerged. “I'm confused.”

“I heard your show on my car radio, and I know the voice of that guy.”

“The dirty-old-man voice?”

“I'm giving you three seconds to tell me where he is.”

Maurice Grossman reached into a slot in the console and took out a cassette. “He's right here,” he said as he handed the tape to Lark.

“Okay, funny man, let's go.”

“No, really, it's me on the tape. I do some of my bits before airtime, particularly when I'm doing a couple of voices.”

“You were both voices, Johnny Gross and the old man?”

A look of comprehension swept over Grossman as his features sagged. “Good God, you think that voice is the same as on the tape with—with the dead girl.”

“Sure sounded like it,” Horse said as he stepped in the studio.

“I—I'm a natural mimic. I must have unconsciously copied the voice from the tape. I didn't even realize it.”

Lark pocketed the cassette and walked for the door. “Don't plan any trips, Maurice,” he said without breaking stride.

They sat on high stools before a workbench in a physics lab at the University of Middleburg. Horse escorted the lab tech who had set the equipment up for them out the door and returned to sit next to Lark. “What now?”

“We play sound games,” Lark replied. “I'm going to run the door slam on the second tape through the first oscilloscope, while you run our recorded doors through the second scope. We'll compare the light patterns on the scopes until we find two that most nearly match.”

“And then we do the same with the airplanes' sounds and the dirty-old-man voice.”

“You've got it,” Lark said as he began the first run.

It was tedious and agonizing work, requiring nearly perfect synchronization between the machines. On most first runs they were not in perfect sync and had to rerun both tapes until they emitted their signals simultaneously onto the two screens.

“That's it,” Horse said when they ran one of the later door slams. “We'll do it again,” Lark said as he consulted their list. “My outside trailer door on three … one, two, three.”

Both men pressed their recorder buttons simultaneously and the screens in front of them jounced with dancing light patterns.

“Almost, but not quite,” Horse said.

“It's the closest we have so far,” Lark said. “The difference in make, interior furnishings, and force could account for the variance in the two doors.”

“Then he's using a house trailer for the killings.”

“Or a recreational camper like a Winnebago.”

“Son of a bitch.”

They ran the tapes on the killer's voice as compared to the Johnny Gross imitation and found the similarities striking, but not conclusive. Next were the airplane sounds.

They discovered that the two planes on the tape were identical aircraft. The dual sound could have been the same plane that might have made a tight turn and flown back over the murder scene, or two similar planes that passed within seconds of each other. The plane engines that matched were those taken from the two-engine planes they had recorded.

In a small office off the lab, Lark found a phone and dialed the Middleburg airport. The phone rang several times until he received a recorded message that announced that the airport was closed. He mumbled a few obscenities to the recording, as he always did when machines answered telephones.

“Good God!” Horse yelled from the lab.

“What is it?” He rushed back to the workbench to find Horse staring at his watch in astonishment.

“I've worked overtime!”

“I've checked our log for the past four weeks, Lieutenant,” the manager of the airport told Lark over the phone the next morning. “And at no time during that period were both of our twin engines in the air at the same time.”

“If it were only one plane, how long would it take for a turn that would bring it back almost directly over a given spot?”

“At normal cruising speed, for that type of aircraft I would estimate a little over a minute.”

“I see,” Lark replied. The time sequence would not work for one turning plane; it had to be two separate craft. “Is there anyone in the state that uses two-engine planes on a regular basis?”

“There's an outfit in Hartford called Hartair. They run a commuter service to New. York on a regular basis.”

“You've been a big help, thanks.” He hung up and turned to face Horse. “Get the big map. We're going to Hartford.”

Garry Miles wore a greasy fifty-mission cap and a leather flying jacket. He was an aging pilot who had a faintly adolescent air about him. Lark expected that any moment now he would use extended palms to diagram some long-ago dogfight.

Hartair operated out of Brainard Field, located outside of the Hartford city limits. Since the advent of jet flying and the construction of the new airport in Windsor Locks, the field was primarily used for private flights. Hartair seemed to consist of one sales clerk, Garry Miles, and a fleet of three twin-engine De Havillands. The commuter line was so small that the pilots loaded luggage.

Miles pushed his cap back on his head and smiled. “Sure, Lieutenant, I see the problem.” He glanced over at the short arrival and departure board behind the solitary clerk. “If it's our planes you're talking about, it could only happen when the three-fifteen from Hartford passed the two-forty from Kennedy.”

Unbidden, Horse unrolled the large map over the desk in front of Miles. “Have you flown the route yourself?”

“Hell, yes. A thousand times. I could do it blindfolded.”

Lark looked at his notes, which included a detailed time chart of the sequences on the murder tape. “I need to know the exact location of the planes when they were four seconds apart.”

The pilot laughed. “You got to be kidding?”

Lark frowned and the laugh died. “I couldn't be more serious.”

“Hey, listen. There's a bunch of factors involved here. What I mean is, a plane flies in a three-dimensional medium and there's drift, airspeed, and wind currents to be considered. You're asking for one hell of a lot of calculations.”

“If I were you,” Horse said, “I'd start calculating.”

“Come on, fellows.”

“Don't you always fly the same route at approximately the same airspeed and altitude?” Lark pressed.

“Well, yes.”

“If two planes heading in opposite directions pass within seconds of each other, wouldn't that be a fixed point?”

“Sure.”

“Let's work with the map,” Lark said.

Horse shook his head as he looked at the map on his knees. The two dark lines the chief pilot of Hartair had drawn intersected at a point near the Connecticut River directly over the Nahug State Forest.

“You think she's there?” Horse asked.

“I know she is.”

“You know, Lieutenant, this is the second, and that means there could be more. We've got a real nut on our hands, one who's going to keep doing this.”

Lark didn't answer.

10

An early-morning ground fog swirled around tree trunks and shrouded brush in the Nahug State Forest. A line of state troopers and local town police left their squad cars on a rutted logging road and formed a ragged line at the edge of the forest.

Lark suffered from a hangover, and the dull headache that enveloped him gave the area a more surrealistic aura than the fog warranted. He had ignored his exercise schedule the night before, and that only increased his depression. Following close behind him, Horse mumbled something about the department not providing proper footwear for this type of activity.

“Knock it off,” Lark snapped over his shoulder at his partner. He received a grouchy glare in return.

A trooper approached them and gave a casual two-fingered salute to his wide-brimmed hat. “Okay to move out from here, Lieutenant?”

As far as Lark was presently concerned, they could move into the jaws of hell, but he considered it diplomatic to make a taciturn reply. “I guess.”

The trooper looked unhappy. “The captain said you knew where the body was. There's a couple of thousand acres in here and we'd need an army to search it properly.”

Lark leaned against the hood of the pickup. Darts were thrown against the rear of his eyeballs, and little men were removing pavement from the top of his brain casing. He felt awful. He was getting too old to drink himself insensible two nights in a row. “Well, I'll tell ya,” he was finally able to mouth. “The girl was brought in here in some sort of large vehicle, either a trailer or camper. Said vehicle pulled off the main roads, and that would mean some sort of clearing or wide trail. Her body is not too far from a spot like that.”

The trooper looked at him with doubt in his eyes, but he had his orders. “All right, we'll break into teams and go through looking for spots like you describe.”

“Let's do that.” Lark's mood was not enhanced when he remembered that he hadn' restocked the beer cooler in the bed of the pickup. “Come on.” He gestured to Horse. “Let's look. You drive and I will suffer.”

Horse climbed behind the wheel of the truck and waited patiently for Lark to pass the keys. “You had a snootfull last night, huh?”

“And the night before. And that is a pastime for younger men. Drive.”

The line of squad cars moved slowly up the rutted road through the knee-high fog. At road branches and clearings, one car after another peeled off to begin its individual search.

“We're not going to find anything in this fog,” Horse said.

“It'll burn off when the sun's high and if we're really lucky, somebody else will find her before we do.”

A twin-engine plane began to cross the forest at an altitude of 2,500 feet. It was a Hartair flight and Lark knew from his examination of the map that it was cutting across the edge of the forest. He unrolled the map, squinted at its features, and pointed to a road near a small lake. “We search up there,” he told Horse.

The fog began to eddy in wispy tendrils as the rising sun broke through the leaf canopy and burned it away. Spots on the ground were now bare, but clefts and hollows were still enshrouded.

Horse found her. He grunted for Lark's attention and pointed to a spot a dozen feet to their front.

A hand rose through the fog. It stretched from the ground as its fingers curled limply over a fallen sapling.

“I don't think I like this kind of work,” Horse said.

Lark found a boulder to sit on that was in a direct line with the seemingly detached hand. He knew what lay hidden by the fog. “Notify the others. Tell them to radio for a lab truck, photographer, and the medical examiner.”

“Right.”

From his perch atop the boulder, Lark watched the fog gradually begin to dissipate. Slowly, as if a white shroud were peeled away, the body attached to the hand appeared.

She was as young as the first one and dressed in nearly identical fashion: walking boots, blue jeans, and a blouse. The back of her head was matted around what he assumed was the bullet's entrance wound. This one differed from the first in that the area around her groin was blood-soaked as if she had hemorrhaged.

Curious troopers began to wander toward the spot as they parked their cars behind Lark's truck. Lark jerked to his feet and waved at the approaching cops. “Get back! You'll contaminate the area.”

A state-police captain seemed to materialize out of nowhere, and Lark realized that he had been informed by radio. Outranked, he retreated to his pickup as the captain took charge and organized an area search.

Lark walked over to a group of troopers when they discovered recent tire tracks. Later, when the lab arrived, molds would be poured into the impressions and specific tire identification could be made. Lark squatted to examine the tracks. They were deep in the soft loam and had been made by a heavy vehicle when it pulled off the road into this clearing.

He walked over to the body and looked down at the dead girl. Her face was screwed into a grimace of terror and pain.