Season of the Assassin (24 page)

The Chicago Police Department was not exactly an example of optimum security. We couldn’t trust anyone with information about Ms. Rojas. Not the captain. No one. We were going to make a lot of enemies once people around here found out we’d been sitting on a witness like our girl. There would be men who would want to take credit for nailing Anglin, but I didn’t give a shit about ruffling those assholes’ feathers.

I was going to keep Theresa alive. I was going to be sitting there when she placed the noose over his head. I was going to watch something like justice happen in a Chicago court of law. All these miracles would come to pass if I could keep Theresa in one piece for the next few weeks while her doctors finished her therapy.

Theresa was coming out into the open. Back into the world. She smiled and talked to people. She’d finally been able to free herself, and she’d crawled out from underneath that bloody, thirty-one-year-old dormitory mattress.

[July 1999]

The Major’s fingerprints belonged to a man who’d died years ago. We went to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for an explanation. We received nothing for a response. They simply didn’t know. It was a mystery.

And Special Agent Mason was nowhere to be found. He had been reassigned — and his new whereabouts were classified, John Rush, the FBI guy who talked to us, explained. Rush was an old-timer. He had no use for clandestine splinter groups and spooks, he said, and I believed him. There was disgust on his middle-aged face as he had to deliver this perfunctory rap. He was just doing his job, he apologized.

We told him this was a murder investigation. He replied that killing the Major — whoever he was — had been simple self-defense on my part. No murder there, he stated. I explained that the Major was linked to Anglin and that it was Anglin who was the murder case. Special Agent Rush shrugged his shoulders. He had nothing else to give us. The Major was gone. I imagined the Feds had secured the remains, and his carcass would now belong to the apparatus of ‘National Security’. The mills of government were already grinding up his bones. The story of the gunfight in the street was relegated to a few sentences in both of the major Chicago newspapers. Just another shooting in a big city, according to the media. And their source of information was not the Chicago Police Department. The government itself had given them the story on this incident.

So, as quickly as he’d popped up in front of me, the Major had disappeared on the night he’d blown a hole in Doc’s Fibbie girlfriend. I thought my partner was still in mourning over her loss.

‘The world has too few truly beautiful women, Jimmy. I know what we think of her profession, but that’s no reason to be prejudiced toward such a miracle of genetics,’ Doc lamented after the ambulance had taken Joyce Carlson’s dead body away. We’d finally found out who she was after the Major had slotted her.

There would be no more talk of conspiracies, of Presidential assassinations. Doc and I had come to the end of the line. Everywhere there was an opening, there was a dead end to match it. No wonder the Warren Commission people came up with a report as quickly as they did.

No one wanted to know who did it. I was convinced that we were through with what had happened almost forty years ago in Dallas. A few movies and books, a few half-cracked theorists on the talk shows. We just wanted it to be finished.

As far as Doc and I were concerned, it was done. We were focusing on Anglin. If he wanted to share something with the world after we locked his ass up for no less than ten murders, that was his business.

Carl Anglin might have wanted to let his pent-up dogs of vengeance loose when he went down, but that was not going to stop his prosecution this time. The race was on to get him to trial before the remnants of Tactical Five, if there were any, got to him to shut him up.

We had surveillance people on the ex-Navy killer round the clock. Our captain was very interested to know why we had the heat on high, but we kept him at arm’s length about where we were. It was between Doc and me. That was the only way to keep Theresa Rojas’s status secret.

She was getting stronger all the time. All we told our superior was that Anglin’s arrest was imminent. He was the only law enforcement person we shared that information with, but we needed to move quickly before other people became involved, as inevitably they would.

We were about to take Theresa’s deposition. On the next Tuesday. This was Friday. We were waiting to see if she had any ‘episodes’. To this point she hadn’t had the flashbacks that might have occurred, her therapist warned us. That was the LSD factor in MRS 127. But the doctor in Indiana had never dealt with a victim of this synthetic, so everything was new to him too.

Renny Charles was another person we’d have liked to bring in as a witness against Anglin. Not that Charles could put Anglin on scene, whether back in 1968 or in the other three cases. But he could help a jury understand what kind of creature it was who was on trial.

I tried to put the Kennedy killing out of my mind — and off my conscience. I was too young to have voted for the man. I didn’t much like any of his relatives or their offspring, and I was never much taken with his aristocratic wife. His sex life didn’t concern me, although I couldn’t fully respect a man who couldn’t keep his word or his vows. But that was his private life.

It was like being privy to a secret. The more you had to keep it to yourself, the more you wanted to shout it to the crowd. Human nature at its worst, I supposed.

With the death of the Marlboro Man, alias the Major, we’d have to leave the conspiracy behind John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s demise to other people. We had a job to do. We had to bring the murderer of ten young women to justice. It was about time, for them and for their families.

*

We had a stenographer and we would be running a tape. Theresa was a natural beauty. The passing years hadn’t stripped her of what God had originally endowed her with. There was a natural grace, a femininity about her. When she stood, you wanted to touch her shoulders. They were fragile and elegant. She stood straight, no stoop in her posture. There was no sense that nature was aging her. She looked almost like the file photographs that showed her as a nursing student at the end of the 1960s.

‘Theresa, we’d like to begin. If you’re all set,’ Doc told her.

I sat next to her. I reached out and touched the back of her hand. She looked over at me and smiled gently. She resembled the Madonna, I thought. At least, all the pictures and other renderings I’d seen of the Virgin Mary. Her smile made the room warmer, more comfortable. It was almost scary, supernatural. She was the other side of the Anglin coin.

‘Go ahead and tell us what happened on that night in 1968,’ Doc prompted.

‘It was a Saturday night.’

Theresa took hold of my hand and held on firmly.

‘I didn’t know what was happening to the other girls. I only found out what he did to the last two, because they were in the same room as I was…I was in the bathroom when he came into our suite. The door was shut. I heard them struggling with him, and then he must have tied the two of them up because I didn’t hear any more struggling. I was going to try and hide in the bathroom, but I thought he’d surely check there when he came back. I came out of the toilet and I was going to try and look for a knife or a scissors or something to cut them loose. Then I heard him turning the handle of the door, and I fell to the floor and I crawled under the bed.

‘He had his back to me at first. But when he turned I saw his face. My head was at the edge of the box spring, and I could see him as he watched my two roommates. One of them was on the bed I was underneath, and one was on the bottom bunk of the bunk beds across the room. After I got a good look at him, I inched my way further beneath the bed.’

‘Why did you chance it by taking a look at him, Theresa?’ I asked.

She gripped my hand even tighter.

‘Because I knew he was going to kill them. I knew he would kill me too if he found me. I had to see him…Maybe he wouldn’t find me, I thought, and then he wouldn’t get away with what I knew he was going to do.’

‘What kind of weapon did he use?’ Doc asked.

‘I saw a straight razor in his hand. I don’t know what else he used…He went to the bunk bed and hit her. She was tied up like a pig. She couldn’t move. I saw him beating her when I crawled back to the edge of the box spring. I wanted to scream, I wanted to cry out. But I knew he would do the same things to me if I made a sound.

‘He beat her and beat her…and then he raped her. Twice, I think. Once when she was lying on her back and the other time…’

She squeezed my hand again.

‘He sodomized her. Her name was Carolina. He attacked her as if she were not even human. It was like watching an animal in the barnyard…Then he turned her back over and cut her throat with the straight razor. Carolina couldn’t make a sound because of the gag he used on both of them. She bled badly. Spurts of blood. I almost got sick, and I inched my way back under the center of the bed.

‘I didn’t see him kill Marita. She was on top of the mattress above me. I saw the bedding come down at me as his weight went on top of her. He must have raped her twice or three times. I can’t be sure. But I heard her groan when he killed her. I knew he had killed because the blood ran down the wall next to me and began to pool beside me. Then there was less weight on the bed. I saw him walk across the room. I moved myself closer to the edge where I could see.

‘He took the razor and cut Carolina from her breasts to her privates. He opened her up like a cow. I could see her insides…’

Theresa halted. I asked her if she needed a break or if she wanted some water.

‘No. Let me finish this…He slaughtered her like a steer or a pig, and then he came back to the other bed and cut Marita. Again I knew what he did because more blood came dripping down the wall next to me, and the smell was…was unbelievable.’

She stopped there.

‘What did he do then?’ Doc asked.

‘He left. He wiped his straight razor on Carolinas sheets, and he left.’

‘And what did you do then?’ I asked her.

‘I waited. I waited for hours. I wet my own nightgown because I was afraid to get up…But I did get out from under the bed, and when I saw what that man had done…I blacked out, I think, because the next thing I knew I was at Elgin.’

‘How do you know Carl Anglin was the man you saw in that dormitory room?’ Doc asked.

‘From the pictures of him that you showed me.’

‘You are positive the man who murdered 

Carolina and Marita was Carl Anglin?’ Doc asked again.

‘It was Carl Anglin. I’m sure.’

‘With all the drugs that have been put into your body, you’re certain the killer was — ’

‘What I saw was the truth. Nothing I saw that night was a hallucination. My hallucinations came
after
the murders. Someone drugged me for thirty years, Detective Gibron. Someone stole my life, or at least thirty years of it, with a drug, but that night he killed all those girls…There was no drug in my body that night. I did not hallucinate what he did. Carl Anglin killed Marita and Carolina and I know he killed the others as well.’

We stopped the tape.

‘Have you had any visions? You know, flashbacks?’ Doc asked.

‘No. Not yet, anyway.’

‘We need the jury to know you’re lucid, Theresa. They mustn’t be distracted by thinking you’re having visions or episodes,’ I explained.

‘I understand…No. My head is free of that drug now. I know it. I know what I remember. I saw Carl Anglin butcher my two friends. No one should have witnessed what I saw, but it is God’s truth, what I’m telling you.’

I held her hand firmly. Then I released her.

‘Do you need any more?’ she asked.

I wanted to embrace her. To hug those frail shoulders. But I couldn’t. 

‘You’ll have to tell the prosecutor — he’s called Mr Field — the same story Theresa. Then you’ll have to say it again to a jury. And to a defense attorney who’ll most likely want people to believe you’ve had a bad acid trip,’ Doc warned her.

‘I know what I’ve told you is the truth.’

‘I believe you. We both do,’ I said. ‘But we’ve got to make sure that the jury buys your version. Anglin’s attorney will do anything and everything to make you look like a lunatic. I want you to know what you’re going up against,’ I told her.

‘I don’t care what they think. I have to say what I know.’

I nodded and took her hand again.

‘Take it easy. We’re both on your side, here.’

*

We had the shrink’s word Theresa could be ready to leave Indiana in two weeks. Then, he said, they’d be sure that she was free of the threat of any possible ‘episodes’.

Our first stop was with Henry Field, the prosecutor.

His jaw almost literally dropped when he heard about the return of Theresa Rojas to the real world.

‘Christ! How long have you two been sitting on her?’ 

‘About a month,’ I admitted.

‘And you didn’t see fit to — ’

‘Would you have liked to have a semi-comatose star witness?’ Doc said. ‘We had to be certain she was back. And she
is
back.’

‘I ought to be very pissed off…Did you take a deposition?’

I nodded.

‘Did she ID Anglin?’

‘Yes,’ Doc told him.

‘How?’ Field wanted to know.

‘From the photos…She saw him do one of the roommates from her position under the bed. But she actually witnessed a killing with her own eyes.’

‘They’ll try to make it look like she’s tripping her way through the past. They’ll make her look like a drugged-out — ’

‘When you hear her, you’ll believe her,’ I interrupted. ‘So will the jury. Henry, it’s like listening to Mother Teresa. Our Theresa, like her namesake, has a very high believability rating, I’d say.’

‘She’d better have. She’s all we’ve got.’

‘She’s all we need, Henry,’ Doc said firmly. ‘She’ll help those twelve honest souls on the jury to shove that lethal-injection syringe all the way up Anglin’s skinny ass.’