The Lesson of Her Death (33 page)

“I told you somebody put the kibosh on the school
side of the case? The order came from Ribbon and Hammerback. But you know where
they
got the word?”

“Sure, yeah, I know.” Corde grimaced. “Dean Larraby.”

“Nope,” Ebbans said. “It was a friend of yours. Randy Sayles.”

Corde considered this. “Well, well, well. That’s nice to know.… But you didn’t hear me say that.”

Ebbans touched his ear. “Deaf as a mounted trout.”

As he walked out of the vending room Bill Corde stepped right into the broad form of Wynton Kresge. “Oh, sorry,” Corde said pleasantly, and smiled before he remembered he was mad at the security chief.

Kresge blinked and started to smile before he recalled
he
too was mad. He ignored Corde and turned back to where he’d been, standing in Jim Slocum’s doorway, holding a book open and pointing to a passage.

“Yessir, Chief,” Slocum was saying to Kresge. “We’ve pretty much got it under control. But I appreciate your concern.”

“What I’m saying is, you ought to read this.…” Kresge sounded like he was arguing with a belligerent waitress.

Slocum said formally, “We’ve got ourselves a pretty demanding situation, Chief, as you can well imagine.…”

Corde left the office. He got into his squad car and started the engine. Wynton Kresge came out and walked toward his Olds, which was parked two empty spaces from Corde’s cruiser. Kresge’s was nice-looking, new. Everybody seemed to have a new car but Corde. Kresge flung the book into the front seat then opened the door. He got in and started the engine. The two men sat twenty feet apart in their cars, staring straight ahead as their engines idled.

A very strained Bill Corde shut off the engine,
paused a moment then walked over to Kresge. “Talk to you?”

Kresge shut off his engine and got out. He stood up, taller than Corde, many pounds heavier. Corde said, “About last week … What I want to say is I’m sorry. At first I didn’t think you were right and I’ll tell you it didn’t have anything to do with you being who you are or anything like that but maybe I was the way you said and if I was I apologize.”

There was a moment of fierce silence and Corde couldn’t think of anything to do but stick out his hand. Kresge looked down and seemed boxed into a corner. He took the hand and shook it firmly then released it. “I’m bad-tempered sometimes.”

“I get kind of caught up in these cases. They can be frustrating.”

“I understand that.” He nodded with a grimace toward the Sheriff’s Department.

“What were you doing there?”

Kresge fished the book out of the front seat. “Finished this today. I’m not saying I’m an expert but I think you’re looking for the wrong guy.”

Corde looked at the spine.
Psychotic Functioning Individuals: Volume Three. Criminal Behavior
.

“Listen up.” Kresge opened the book, found an underlined paragraph, and read: “‘In a study of psychopathic and sociopathic (here used synonymously) homicides in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland conducted from 1956 through 1971, we (Irvine & Harrington 1972) concluded that the number of homicides that are in fact astrologically or astronomically driven are exceedingly rare. Of the eighty-nine psychopathic murderers convicted of their crimes, only one was in fact motivated to commit murder on the night of the full moon. In extensive interviews and examinations of records in the man’s hometown of Manchester, it was learned that he had been killing animals and human victims indiscriminately, as often as five times a year for the past fifteen years, always on the night of the full moon.
He had no sexual contact with his victims and indeed found such thoughts abhorrent. On the other hand, Scotland Yard reported that for the years 1961 through the present, the only years for which such data are available, as many as ten murders per year are committed on the nights of full moons, under the guise of psychopathic episodes when the criminal’s true motives for the killing are revenge, robbery, rape and organized-crime expediency.’”

“You just read them that?” Corde nodded toward the office.

“Tried. They weren’t interested.”

“You mind if I borrow it? Make a copy of some of it? It’s kind of a jawful and I’d like to read it slow.”

“It’ll be overdue day after tomorrow.”

“I’ll do it myself. Tonight.” After a moment Corde asked, “If you don’t think it’s a psycho, who would you be looking for?”

“Nobody’s been much interested in my opinion.”

“Tell me. Just for the hell of it.”

Kresge said, “At first I was pretty sure it was the girl’s lover. A professor or a student. You should see all of what goes on here on campus. Young people on their own. Doing whatever they want. Fair game for the professors—men
and
women, I ought to tell you. So that was my original thought. But that was before …” Kresge’s hand rose in a straight-arm salute then closed into a fist. He looked at Corde expectantly.

“I’m sorry?”

Kresge said, “You know, the knife. So now I figure it was a kid, maybe some punk.”

“Uh-huh.” Corde nodded absently then said, “What knife?”

“‘I come in peace.’” Kresge’s hand rose and closed again. “‘From a land that is here and yet not here.’”

“Uh-huh. What are you talking about?”

“Didn’t you see
The Lost Dimension?”

Corde said he hadn’t.

“The movie. It was at the Duplex a couple months ago.”

“I don’t remember.” Corde was thinking of some film with creatures that had red eyes. “Oh, wait, was that the one with these snake things?”

“Yeah. The Honons. They were battling the Naryans in the Lost Dimension.”

“But what’s …” He lifted his hand and closed his fist.

“It’s the Naryan salute.” Kresge snorted a baritone laugh. “Don’t you remember?”

“Nup.”

“You mean you guys don’t know? … About the knife? Back there in that bag.”

The cult knife.

“I saw it on the deputy’s desk.…” Kresge pointed.

“That symbol on the knife? It’s from the
movie?”

“You really didn’t know, did you?”

Corde lifted his fingers to his eyes. “I don’t believe it!” He turned toward the department. “Hell, I gotta tell ’em.”

But he stopped abruptly. Staring at the ancient Town Hall he sucked on the inside of his cheek for a moment. “Wynton, you want to go for a ride?”

“I guess. Can we go in the squad car?”

“Sure. Only I can’t use the siren.”

“That’s okay.”

T
hey arrived at the toy store just as it was closing. Together the two large men strode to the door. Kresge stood awkwardly with his hands on his hips while Corde knocked. After a moment the owner appeared.

“Can you open up, Owen? Important.”

“I’m closed, Bill. It’s suppertime.”

“Open her up. We gotta talk to you. Business.”

“Couldn’t you call me—”

“Official, Owen.”

The heavyset, mustachioed man in a plaid shirt and blue jeans opened the door. The store was dim. Costumes and helmets and monster masks lining the wall made the place seem as eerie as a wax museum at night. Some toy at the far end of the store gave off red dots of
Owen. He stared at thirty stilettos just like the one found under Jennie Gebben.

“What are these?”

“What do you think they are?” As if Corde had asked who was George Washington.

“Owen.”

He said, “They’re Naryan Lost Dimension survival knives.”

“What’s that symbol?”

Owen sighed. “That’s the insignia of the Naryan Empire.” He extended his hand the way Kresge had done. “‘I come in peace, from—’”

Corde said, “Yeah, yeah, I know. The movie company makes ’em?”

“They license somebody in China or Korea to make them. They sell all kinds of things. Helmets, xaser guns, Dimensional cloaks, scarves … All that stuff in the movie.”

Kresge said, “He doesn’t remember the movie.”

“He doesn’t?” Owen asked. “Like Ninja Turtles a few years ago. T-shirts. Toys. Tie-ins they’re called.”

“How many of these knives you sold?”

“They’re a best-seller.”

Corde glanced at Kresge and said, “I somehow figured they might be. How many?”

Owen said, “That’s I think my third merch rack. Why?”

“Has to do with an investigation.”

“Oh.”

Corde pulled out a pen and handed it and a stack of blank three-by-five cards to Owen. He asked, “Could you give me the names of everybody you’ve sold one of those knives to?”

“You’re kidding.” Owen laughed, then looked at Kresge. “He’s kidding.”

Kresge said, “No, I don’t think he’s kidding.”

Owen’s smile faded. “Practically every kid in New Lebanon bought one. It’d take me an hour to remember half of them.”

“Then you better get started.”

“Aw, Bill. It’s suppertime.”

“The sooner you write the sooner you eat, Owen.”

Bill Corde parked the squad car in the lot next to the five-foot-high logo of the Fredericksberg
Register
—the name in the elaborate hundred-year-old typeface as it appeared on the paper’s masthead. He and Wynton Kresge got out of the car and walked into the advertising office. The girl behind the counter snapped her gum once and hid it somewhere in her mouth. “Hi, gentlemen. Help you?”

Corde said, “Last week I called about running an ad as part of an investigation down in New Lebanon.”

“Oh, that girl that was killed. I heard there was another one too.”

“Did I talk to you?”

“No, that’d be my boss, Juliette Frink. She’s left for the day. But I can take the order. How long you want it run?”

“A week, I think.”

“What size?”

Corde looked at samples of ads under a faded Plexiglas sheet covering the counter. “What do you think, Wynton?”

Kresge said, “May as well go pretty big, wouldn’t you think?”

Corde pointed to one. “I guess that size.”

She looked. “That’s two columns by seventy-five agates.” She wrote it down. “What section of the paper would you like?”

“Oh. I hadn’t thought. Front page?”

“We don’t have ads on the front page.”

“Well, I don’t know. What’s the best-read section?”

“Comics first then sports.”

Corde said, “I don’t think we can run an ad like this on the comic pages.”

Kresge said, “But sports, you might lose women, you know.”

The clerk said, “I read the sports page.”

“How about the same page as the movie ads?” Kresge said.

“That sounds good,” Corde said.

She wrote it up. “Juliette said you get a public-service discount. That’ll be four hundred eighty-four dollars and seventy cents. Then you want us to typeset it for you that’ll be another twenty-five dollars. You have cuts?”

“Cuts?” Corde blinked. He was thinking of the thin slash the rope had made on Jennifer Gebben’s throat, the fishhook embedded in Emily Rossiter.

“Pictures, I mean.”

“Oh. No. Just words.” He wrote out copy for the ad. Corde pulled out his wallet and handed her his Visa card. She took it and stepped away to approve the charge.

“What is it,” Kresge asked. “You pay then get reimbursed?”

Corde snickered. “I guess you oughta know, I was just relieved of duty.”

Kresge frowned severe creases into his wide face. “Man, they fired you?”

“Suspended.”

“Why?”

“They claim I took some letters out of Jennie’s room.”

“Did you?” Kresge asked, but so innocently that Corde laughed.

“No,” he said.

“Hardly seems fair,” he said. Then: “You mean, you’re paying for this ad yourself?”

“Yup.”

He wasn’t though, it turned out. The clerk, embarrassed, returned. “Sorry, Officer.… They kind of said you’re over your limit. They wouldn’t approve it.” She handed the card back to him.

Corde felt the immediate need to explain. But that would involve telling her a long story about two children—one with primary reading retardation—and a psychiatrist and a new Frigidaire and roll after roll of Owens-Corning attic insulation and a boy coming up on college in a few years. “Uh …” He looked for a solution in the back of the cluttered Advertising Department.

Kresge said, “Miss, Auden has an account here, right?”

“The university? Yessir. The student affairs office. Ads for plays and sports. I was to the homecoming game last fall. That third quarter! I’ll remember that all my life.”

“Yes’m, that was a game and a half,” Kresge said. “Can you put these on the school account?”

“You work for the school?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Kresge said. “I do.” He pulled out his identification card. “I’ll authorize it. This’s official school business.”

She rummaged under the counter and pulled out a form. “Just sign this requisition here. Fourth and twelve on the Ohio State forty. Did Ladowski punt? No sir. And it wasn’t even a bomb but a hand-off to Flemming. Ran all the way, zippity-zip.”

“While I’m about it,” Kresge said, “run that ad for
two
weeks and put a border around it like that one there.”

“You got it.”

“That’s real good of you, Wynton,” Corde said. “I do appreciate it.”

“People keep forgetting,” Kresge said quietly, “they were my girls too.”