The Way You Look Tonight (14 page)
Read The Way You Look Tonight Online
Authors: Richard Madeley
She began to read:
VICTIM ONE – HESTER WAINWRIGHT,
b. 06/13/1942
Hester Wainwright was last seen alive by her parents three weeks ago as she left the family home on Sawgrass Blvd for night college at Homestead. She never arrived. Her
car, a white Chevy Convertible, was later found with a shredded tire neatly parked on the central grass verge of Overseas Highway, less than two miles from the Wainwright residence.
Of Miss Wainwright there was no sign, until the following morning when her body was discovered by a fishing party in mangrove swamps south of the soon-to-open John Pennekamp State Underwater
Park in upper Key Largo. As with all the killer’s subsequent victims, she had bled to death from multiple stab wounds and cuts to all parts of her body.
Miss Wainwright was a trainee hotel manager and mid-way through a business studies course at night school. She was intending to marry next summer and her distraught fiancé, who was
arrested and questioned by police hours after the body was discovered, has been cleared of any knowledge of or involvement in the slaying.
VICTIM TWO – JENNIFER ALSTON,
b. 04/23/1940
Kmart checkout attendant Jennifer Alston was born Jennifer Davies in Southampton, England, but was almost immediately evacuated to the United States at the start of WW2.
Her parents were killed during a German air raid in 1941 and Miss Alston was adopted shortly afterwards by Harold and Becky Alston, her US sponsors here in Key Largo.
She became a naturalised US citizen while still at High School and was saving much of her Kmart salary to finance a one-year full-time course in make-up and beauty treatments, after which
her adoptive parents say she had hoped to open her own salon.
Miss Alston disappeared on her drive home from work and her car was later found abandoned, one front tire heavily punctured. Like all the Killer’s victims thus far, Miss Alston’s
body was discovered floating in mangroves well out of sight or sound of any dwellings or business premises. Initial examinations indicate that she died of blood loss, shock, or a combination of
the two.
VICTIM THREE – LUCY TWAIN,
b. 03/03/1938
Lucy Twain was an experienced scuba diver and part of the advance team preparing the world’s first underwater national park, John Pennekamp, for its grand opening on
Key Largo next year.
Born and brought up in the Keys, Miss Twain, in an interview with this newspaper last year, declared that Pennekamp would attract visitors from all over the United States and beyond.
Miss Twain was driving to her home from a planning meeting at Pennekamp when she was abducted. But as she lived alone in a one-bedroomed apartment in Homestead, no one reported her
missing.
Police eventually found her abandoned red Ford pickup two miles north of Pennekamp on a deserted gas station forecourt. But this was after a coastguard vessel on routine patrol checking for
boat-wash erosion to mangrove channels near Buttonwood Sound had discovered Miss Twain’s body there. At twenty-four, she is the oldest woman to die at the Killer’s hands.
VICTIM FOUR – BECKY HOOPER,
b. 06/30/1943
It was with the discovery of the Killer’s youngest victim earlier this week that signs of a bizarre sub-pattern may have begun to emerge.
Becky Hooper was the 19-year-old only child of married Key Largo general practitioners Stephen and Samantha Hooper, who have been practicing in the Upper Keys since they arrived here from
New York in 1955.
Like Wainwright, Alston and Twain, Miss Hooper was young, slim and considered to be pretty. But was her hair color of significance too? The first victim was dark-haired; the second fair; the
third a brunette, and Miss Hooper a strawberry blonde. Dark, fair, dark, fair. Will the Killer’s next target prove to be dark-haired?
Stella snorted. Silly, speculative nonsense. It was far too soon to read any significance into the question of hair colour. Irritated, she bent over the paper to read the final
paragraph.
Miss Hooper’s mutilated body was discovered by a canoeing party close to the Islamorada Bridge, the furthest south of any such gruesome discoveries to date. As with
all the Killer’s victims, she had suffered multiple stab wounds, severe blood loss, and the knife used to inflict the fatal injuries was left deeply embedded in the left eye-socket.
‘It’s his signature,’ a source close to the investigation told the
Courier
last night. ‘He’s telling us: “Make no mistake, it’s me again.
I’m back.” He’s proud of his work. This here’s one very, very sick guy.’
Stella left the newspaper on the table behind her and slid back the restaurant’s plate-glass exit to the beach, pushed open the sprung screen door that fitted snugly
behind it, and stepped outside. It was barely nine-thirty but the sun was already high, though not yet burning with the intensity it had on her arrival in Miami the afternoon before.
As she walked across the sand back to her cabin, a young man in a crumpled linen suit materialised beside her.
‘Stella Arnold?’
She stopped and turned towards him. ‘Yes, I am she. Who are—’
He smiled engagingly at her. ‘I’m to give you this.’ He handed her a long-stemmed red rose.
Stella looked down at it with a puzzled smile.
‘But who is it from?’ She raised her head again. She was staring into the blank lens of a camera.
‘Compliments of the
Courier,
Miss Arnold,’ the young man said, snapping off three or four quick frames. ‘Welcome to the Florida Keys.’ He turned on his heel and
walked swiftly away.
‘
Shit.
Sorry, Stella. But this could be a damn nuisance.’
Lee Foster and Stella were sitting on high stools at the hotel’s beach bar. She hadn’t noticed this place the evening before; it was tucked behind the little dock where she’d
observed the motor boat tying up.
He had called her in her room when he returned from the police briefing; they’d arranged to meet here and she had told him straight away about her encounter with the
Courier
.
‘Why would they want to take my picture? And how did they know my name, and that I’m staying here? I’m baffled.’
‘I wish I was,’ he said, taking a swig straight from the neck of his bottle of Coca-Cola. ‘There must have been a leak, I’m afraid. Someone in the administration –
or in Bryant’s office – has been talking to the
Courier
about you.’
‘Why would they do that?’
He shrugged. ‘You’re currency. All stories are currency. I can just see tomorrow’s headline – “JFK Drafts Beautiful English Killer-Catcher To Help Nail Keys
Slayer”.’
‘But I’ve never caught a murderer in my life,’ Stella protested.
‘No matter, Stella, that’s how they’ll run it. It’s a good story. It reflects well on Washington and Bryant – makes them look focused on cracking the case. They
want folks down here to think they’re on the ball.’
She toyed with her orange juice and shook her head in genuine bemusement. ‘It never even crossed my mind that this would happen. Isn’t there anything we can do to stop
them?’
He finished his Coke. ‘Nope. Not a damn thing. We have a free press in this country, Stella, and in their book you
are
a killer-catcher. You’re an expert on psychopaths,
aren’t you?’ He scratched his chin reflectively. ‘Hell, apart from some temporary embarrassment to the Bureau – Hoover will
not
have wanted this story to break
– I can’t see there being much harm done, now I really think about it. A few stupid headlines won’t make any difference to the investigation, or your contribution to
it.’
He stood up. ‘C’mon. Let’s forget about it. I’ve requisitioned the hotel’s one and only suite as our office while we’re down here. They should’ve
finished installing the extra phone lines and teleprinter by now. Let’s go get settled in and I can tell you everything I know about this case. You can start by reading the files.’ He
tapped a thick manila envelope under his arm and grinned at her. ‘And then you can tell me who our man is; I’ll arrest him; and you and me can go fishing for a day or so before they
wise up and send us both home.’
He signed the bar bill and handed her his ballpoint. ‘Better keep this pen handy. When the
Courier
comes out tomorrow with your picture all over page one you might find yourself
having to sign autographs.’
When the two of them reached their converted suite, Foster explained to Stella how things were going to work.
‘The State Police are doing their thing; the local FBI are doing theirs, and I’m meant to be Mr Go-Between, co-ordinating everything. But I can’t take you with me when I go to
combined headquarters – that’d go down like a bag of cold sick, trust me. They’re funny about women down here. No one on the force will admit it, but they operate an informal
“keep women out” policy, a bit like the colour bar in some of the states down here.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘Nope. I know, I know, this is 1962 but you’re in the southland here, Stella. The sight of you walking in by my side would be marginally less welcome than Castro coming ashore on
Miami Beach waving the red flag. It’s just how it is. And as for your being English as well as a woman . . .’ He shrugged expressively.
‘Do your colleagues even know I’m here?’
He shook his head.
‘So what happens when I’m all over tomorrow’s
Courier
?’
‘I’ll handle it. I’m senior case officer. They’ll think what I tell them to think. Let’s just not rub their noses in it.’
He handed her the manila envelope. ‘C’mon, we need to get going. You should start with these.’
Stella shook out four separate files, each with one of the dead girl’s names printed on the front cover. She carried them across to an office bureau by the window and sat down in a
creaking chair mounted on castors. She flipped open the first file.
As the minutes passed, it became clear to her that in every case the killer’s
modus operandi
was the same – or very nearly. The victims’ hands and feet were bound with
the kind of medium-gauge hemp rope sold in any hardware store. There was no trace of any gag or other attempt to silence them, but skin tests around the mouths and noses of the victims all revealed
identical chemical traces. Two of the girls – the ones whose bodies had been discovered soonest after they were killed – gave off a faint but distinctive odour of solvent or cleaning
fluid.
Tests showed this to be chloroform, just as Bobby Kennedy had indicated to her. Stella knew it to be a heavy, volatile liquid once widely used as an inhalation anaesthetic, particularly in
dentistry. Detectives believed it had been used specifically to incapacitate the victims for capture and transport, and that they were allowed to regain consciousness once they had been securely
bound and transferred to the location chosen for slaughter.
In each case, the left eye-socket had been punctured by a blade at least five inches long, which had been buried in the skull. The knives were high-quality brands and of the same design –
narrow-bladed stilettoes. Quantities of eye-fluid had spread out across the victims’ faces, but the absence of any significant blood flow from the socket suggested that the trademark wounds
were inflicted
post-mortem.
The main theatre of death was, it was abundantly clear, performed on the girls’ torsos, legs and arms, and genitalia. Once again, the wounds were strikingly similar in every case. There
were at least fifty to sixty puncture marks, none of them deep enough to be fatal on their own. Many cuts were more like elongated runnels, stretching in neat parallel lines down all four limbs.
There was clear sexual mutilation, with both breasts deeply and repeatedly punctured, and beneath them the abdomen and vulva were cross-hatched with a dozen or more curving, scimitar-shaped
slashes. The
coup de grâce
was always a stab to the heart.
There was only one exception to the uniformity of the mutilation, and Stella immediately grasped its significance.
The first victim’s wounds were noticeably deeper than the following three: it was plain she must have bled to death quite quickly, probably within ten minutes.
But the cuts and puncture wounds on the other girls were shallower. This, the report suggested, would have resulted in a more lingering death, possibly lasting up to half an hour.
‘He’s a fast learner,’ Stella said aloud.
Foster looked up from his own desk opposite.
‘How’s that, Stella?’
She gestured to the files. ‘He’s deliberately refining his technique so he takes as long as possible to kill the girls. You don’t just have to look at the depth of the knife
wounds – the first victim; what was her name?’ Stella flipped back through the original file – ‘Yes, Hester Wainwright, poor girl. The ropes binding her wrists and ankles
left some pretty bad burn marks where she strained and twisted against them while he went to work.’
She pushed the file away and picked up the next in the sequence.
‘But see what happens when he gets his hands on Jennifer Alston? These aren’t just friction burns, Lee. One of her wrist bones is exposed and her right Achilles tendon is almost
severed. It’s even worse with the next two.’
Foster shot her a narrow look. He had been browsing through a stack of scene-of-crime photographs, but now he tossed them back onto the table and leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands
behind his head. ‘You OK, Stella? These here pictures are bad enough but I always think the cold-blooded descriptions are worse. You look a bit pale to me.’
She shook her head impatiently. ‘Nonsense. I’m fine. But this case is, well, it’s
exceptional
, isn’t it?’
He nodded, and walked over to a coffee percolator he’d had installed for them. ‘
Oh
yeah. This guy makes the Marquis de Sade look like jolly old Saint Nick.’ He poured
out two mugs. ‘Cream? Sugar?’
