Lust Killer (9 page)

The parking garage was empty of shoppers now, and while they worked, their own voices echoed as they bounced off the gray walls, making what had been a normal, secure place seem somehow eerie.

"You know," one of the detectives said slowly, "as close as these stairs are to the store entrance, they could be a lonely spot if a young woman happened to be the only one at a given moment who was leaving the parking area. That door into the store is heavy—it would take a little muscle, a little concentration to open it. For those few moments, a woman would be terribly vulnerable."

"Yeah," another responded. "It wouldn't do much good to scream. The traffic noises below, and the hubbub of the store inside—nobody could hear through the door, and nobody could hear on the street. If there wasn't anyone else on the roof to help …"

Their musings produced terrible pictures in their minds—remembering the photograph of the slender, smiling girl.

Karen Sprinker's disappearance became the prime case for Jim Stovall and his fellow detectives. Stovall's own daughter was only two years older than Karen, and he knew too well what her family was going through.

The Salem
Capital Journal
and the Salem
Statesman
carried Karen Sprinker's picture with the question "Have you seen this girl?" under it, and the public responded. There were the usual crank letters and the usual informants who really knew nothing but wanted to espouse theories that sounded good to them. Most of the tips were totally useless, but all leads had to be followed, because one of them might have been vital.

One early lead seemed promising. A Southern Pacific Railroad ticket agent called Salem police to say that he'd seen a girl who looked "just like Karen Sprinker" leave Salem by train for San Francisco. "There were two men with her, and she didn't act like she was afraid of them, but you never can tell. She might have been afraid to ask for help."

The Salem papers printed the information the agent had called in, and almost immediately a Mount Angel man called police to say that the girl on the train had been
his
daughter, who was also a brunette with pretty brown eyes. "She's okay. She's safe in California, and she was traveling with family friends."

A service-station owner who had lived on the Oregon coast contacted Stovall's office to say he was sure he'd sold gas to Karen Sprinker. "She gave me a credit card to pay for the gas, and I'm almost positive the name was Sprinker.

Stovall and Lieutenant "Hap" Hewett left at once for the Oregon coast, but when they got to the station, the owner said he had sent the credit-card slip routinely into the company's home office in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He had mailed it off before he'd read about Karen Sprinker in the newspaper.

The detectives contacted the home office of the oil company, and the personnel there were most cooperative. They went through thousands of credit slips, looking for the one allegedly signed by Karen Sprinker in Oregon. "They finally found one from that station," Stovall recalls. "But the name was Spiker, not Sprinker."

A motorcyclist notified Hewett and Stovall that he had picked up a hitchhiker near Tigard, Oregon, and . given her a ride on his Harley. "She had long black hair, and she said she was from Salem."

"Where'd you take her?" Stovall asked.

"She wanted to go to some hippie place in Portland—that commune out by Portland State U. So I took her."

Stovall pulled out a picture of Karen Sprinker. "Is this the girl?"

The biker studied the photograph, and then handed it back with a shrug. "Maybe … maybe not. It looks kinda like the chick I picked up. I meet a lotta chicks, and it's kind of hard to tell, you know?"

That Karen Sprinker would have been hitchhiking or that she had any aspirations toward living in a hippie commune seemed unfathomable—but then, the fact that she was still missing was just as hard to understand. Anything was possible.

Karen's boyfriend was anxious to pursue any avenue that might help him find the young woman. He went to Portland, dressed in jeans and a batik shirt, his beard deliberately unshaven. He wanted to look like a hippie, and he succeeded. For several days he loitered around hippie hangouts, blending into the rough crowd until people there got used to him. He asked carefully casual questions, and mentioned he was looking for his "old lady who split on me."

Sitting in dark rooms that smelled of marijuana, eating sprouts and brown rice, and listening to babies cry in counterpoint to rock music, Karen's friend knew she wouldn't be comfortable in this counterculture, but he wanted so badly to find her and take her home safe to her family.

In the end, he gave it up. Karen was gone, and no one knew where—or, if someone knew, no one was telling.

Salem detectives gave the young college student credit for trying and empathized with his frustration: their own efforts weren't producing any solid leads either.

One story reached the Salem Police Department circuitously, and was so bizarre that it might have been dismissed … and yet …

Two high-school girls in Salem went to a woman they trusted and described a peculiar person they had seen while they were shopping at Meier and Frank a few weeks before Karen Sprinker vanished.

"There was a person in the parking garage," one girl began.

"A
person
?" the woman asked.

"Well, it looked like a woman. I mean, we thought it was a woman at first, but … "

"But what?"

"We saw this tall, heavy person. All dressed up with high heels and a dress. 'She' was just standing there in the garage, as if she was waiting for someone. She was tugging at her girdle and fixing her nylons."

"But you don't think it was a woman at all—is that it?"

"Yes!" the other girl said. "The person looked so strange that we drove on up the ramp and came around again. And now we're sure it wasn't a woman at all. It was a man dressed up like a woman!"

The housewife who listened to the girls' story urged them to go to the police.

Men in drag are not terribly unusual; it is sometimes a harmless aberration, but given the circumstances surrounding Karen Sprinker's disappearance, the presence of a huge man in women's clothing in the Meier and Frank parking garage in early March signaled a possible connection.

"Suppose there was a man there, dressed up like a woman," one investigator offered. "Suppose he pretended to be ill, or even called Karen over to ask her a question? She wouldn't be as cautious if she thought it was a woman. She would have walked up to him, never expecting trouble. She was the kind of young woman who would have been eager to help."

"And he could have grabbed her?"

"Yes. "

Perhaps that was the way it had happened. Perhaps not. The transvestite incident could have been a random thing, some alumnus of one of the state institutions in Marion County, some frightened and completely nonviolent man who acted out his kinkiness by waltzing around Meier and Frank in a dress and spike heels. Store employees did not remember ever seeing such a creature.

Whatever had happened, Karen Sprinker never came home. Good Friday passed, and then Easter, and classes began again at Oregon State University, but Karen wasn't there to join her friends. Sadly her family cleared out her room in Callahan Hall in Corvallis. Everything Karen had owned—her books, records, treasured photos, clothes—everything had been left behind except for the green skirt and sweater she'd worn on March 27, and her purse.

By the third week in April, there was so little to hope for. Karen's body had not been found, so there was still the faintest of chances that she might have suffered an injury or illness that had brought on amnesia. Not knowing was the worst of all; there was the possibility that she was being held captive somewhere, unable to call home.

Karen Sprinker's picture was tacked over Jim Stovall's desk—a reminder in front of him always that she waited, somewhere, for someone to come and find her. He had never known Karen, but it almost seemed that he had; he had learned so much about her, admired all the accomplishments and ambitions in a girl so young, that she was far more to him than a picture on a wall.

It is always that way with good detectives. They come to know the victims of the crimes they investigate as well as their own families. And knowing, they are driven to avenge them.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Darcie Brudos read about the disappearance of Karen Sprinker; there was no way to avoid it unless you didn't read the papers and never watched television. She found it quite frightening, and she discussed it with her women friends. She didn't worry about herself so much, but she was concerned about Megan, and she watched her little girl carefully while she played in the yard. She took her to school and picked her up each day. Meier and Frank's store was less than a mile from their house, just west down Center Street several blocks and then a few blocks north.

The papers were hinting that there was a maniac loose, suggesting that whatever had happened to Karen Sprinker might happen to someone else if the person wasn't caught. Darcie wouldn't go out at night by herself any longer, and she kept the doors and windows tightly locked when Jerry was gone.

He was gone a lot. Working in Lebanon during the day, except for when his headaches were too bad. And then he had so many errands to run, and auto parts to buy—the ones he found by rummaging through junkyards in Portland and Salem. Sometimes he went to Corvallis; he occasionally did yard work for a friend over there. She had no idea where Jerry went most of the time, and it annoyed him when she asked.

He was getting even more obsessed with privacy in his workshop. If she rapped on the door to try to get in to check what was in the freezer, it seemed to make him angrier than ever. He always said he would get what she wanted, but that was inconvenient because she wasn't always sure what food was left. Sometimes she just wanted to have the chance to stand there and see what was in the freezer and hope it would give her an idea for supper.

Jerry had been upset when she'd found the door to his darkroom open one day and walked in after checking to be sure the light was on. She'd gone out to the garage to do the laundry and thought she'd just peek in at Jerry and say "Hi."

There were trays of developing solution on the counter, and she looked idly at the pictures he was printing. And then she gasped with surprise when she saw that the pictures were of women. Nude women.

"Jerry? What are these?" she blurted.

He smiled and moved quickly in front of the counter so that her view was blocked. "Those? Nothing. Just some film a kid from the college asked me to develop for him. I didn't know what they were until they turned out. Just kid stuff. I'll tell him not to bring that kind of pictures around anymore."

She didn't know whether to believe him or not, but then she thought about the way Jerry was. He was pretty bashful around any woman but herself, and she couldn't imagine him taking nude pictures himself—not of anyone but her.

"Okay. But don't let Megan see those pictures. Get them back to the guy."

Jerry promised that he would, and she promised that she wouldn't barge into his workshop again. "Use the intercom, Darcie. That's easier. Just tell me what you want, and I'll get it for you."

Darcie sighed. It was easier not to argue with him. He had always been different, a little out of step with the rest of the people she knew—but all her friends had complaints about their husbands too. It seemed to be a matter of accepting the things you didn't like about your mate and trying to work around them. She knew he was unhappy with her own growing independence. Independence. She had to smile at that. She had so little freedom, really. With the kids to look after, and having to report to Jerry all the time, every minute of her days and nights was accounted for.

There were other things that Darcie Brudos tried not to think about. She hadn't seen Jerry in women's clothing since he'd put on the bra and girdle, but she'd found some pictures that upset her. Jerry had left them lying around—either carelessly or deliberately.

She recognized that it was Jerry in the pictures, but it was the Jerry who liked to dress up in women's underclothes. In one he lay on his back on their bed, holding a pillow over his face in a clumsy attempt to hide his features. He wore a white bra—it had to be a 48 C at least—and a long-line panty girdle, also white, stockings, and those same black high heels. Where on earth could he have found them? He wore size 13 shoes.

Another picture was almost the same, only Jerry was lying flat on his stomach, with his left arm draped over the edge of the bed, his right arm tucked beneath his "breasts," and his head turned to the right. Then there was one where he wore a black slip, trimmed with black lace, and those same shoes. She wondered who might have taken them, and then realized that he'd probably photographed himself. He had a thirty-five-millimeter camera that had a remote-control attachment. Once, when they were traveling, he had posed all four of them in front of a sign that said: "You Are Now Leaving the State of California" and clicked the shutter in his hand. That picture had turned out just fine, so she knew he had the equipment to take pictures that way.

She had shoved the pictures away someplace; she sure didn't want anyone else to see them. He was still always after her for sex, even when she let him know she wasn't interested. If he was a homosexual, she was sure he wouldn't want intercourse with a woman. Men were either gay or they weren't, according to what she knew. It wasn't something she could discuss with her girlfriends; that would be a betrayal of Jerry, and anyway, it made her ashamed.

Whenever Darcie managed to put her worries out of her mind, it seemed that something else happened to bring them all back. Sometime after she'd found the pictures, she found a "thing"—she couldn't quite figure out what it was. It was round and heavy, a few inches in diameter, and it seemed to be made of some kind of plastic. She had held it and turned it over, and then realized that it looked just like a woman's breast—not as large, but almost a perfect replica.