“ You come alone, or not at all,” insisted the stutterer.
“ All right. What is the address?”
The voice said, “5234 Oak Grove. If anyone is with you, I swear, I don't talk.”
“ Are you sure of what you've seen?”
“ Yes.”
“ What is the man's name you suspect.”
“ No, not until you come; otherwise, you won't come.”
“ But sir, if we had the name, we could run some checks.”
“ No! Just come. I'll show you. I see from my win-dow-dow some of the queer things he does. He… he's got all kinds of weird-looking sur-sur-gical stuff. Catheters, tubes, hypos, you-you name it.”
It was clearly a long shot, and yet something strained and pitiful in the voice made her wonder along with the mention of medical supplies and the van, not to mention tubes and catheters.
“ All right, all right. I'll be there as soon as I can be.”
“ I r-read the late pa-pers. Saw what you-you people said. Awful-just awful. What he did to those poor women.”
“ And men,” she added. “He's killed at least two men, and we have good reason to suspect that there have been others,” she added, to see what kind of response she would get.
“ Men? The pa-per-pers didn't say anything 'bout men he's done? I al-always knew it-down deep. Such a filthy man.”
“ I'm coming,” she said, and hung up.
Jessica knew it was regulation to get backup on a net, and she fully intended to, but this wasn't a net, and she didn't have enough evidence to prove it so; she didn't have enough for a bench warrant, much less a search warrant.
Besides, she didn't believe the stutterer to be the self-assured, methodical killer she had been tracking now for so long. And going to meet with the man only constituted “further investigation.” Under that light, she knew she was on her own.
If only Otto had not had to fly back to D.C. Her only other choice was Brewer, a man she felt uncomfortable around.
She wasn't a complete fool to go to the address alone without some idea of what she was getting herself into. She again telephoned the field office only to find Joe Brewer still unavailable. She spoke to another agent who did some checking and who found the location of the address she wanted on a precinct map. She was given the number of the police precinct that had somehow gotten her number and had passed it along to the caller. “If you get in touch with
Joe, tell him I'm investigating a lead that's taken me to this address.”
The agent seemed bored with the entire idea. Like Brewer and everyone else, he was convinced that the Chicago-to-Wekosha vampire was Maurice Lowenthal, and that the killer was quite dead. The fact that no more bloodless bodies had been found had lulled them all into inactivity where her case was concerned. Even Otto and the P.P. team back at Quantico had wanted to believe it ended with Lowenthal. She alone could not accept this fact.
“ Sure, sure, I'll see he gets the message,” the agent told her.
She then telephoned Precinct 13 to ask questions of the desk sergeant. She asked him if any complaint calls had come to them from the address in question.
“ Ever?”
“ Past year, two?”
“ That might take time.”
“ I'll call back in an hour?”
“ Give me your number, and I'll get back to you.”
“ I need to know within the hour, Sergeant.”
“ Things're pretty slow here for the moment, so I think I can oblige you there, Doctor.”
“ Thank you, Sergeant.”
She took the hour to dress, but in less than a half hour, the desk sergeant at 13 called back.
“ Yes, there've been quite a few complaints from this man.”
“ What's the name?”
“ Gamble.”
“ Appropriate,” she muttered.
“ What?”
“ Never mind.”
“ Hillary Gamble's the full name. Something of a nutcase.”
Appropriate again, she thought, but kept mum. “The name of the person he's made complaints against? “Practically the entire neighborhood. He's a real nuisance, this one. Goes about causing problems, it looks like.”
The record check revealed a number of complaints that ranged from Peeping Toms disturbing the man's peace to a bloody nose at the hand of one neighbor. “A real pain-in-the-ass crazy, what we call in the department an asshole's asshole, if you'll pardon my language, Dr. Coran.”
“ What was the nature of his last complaint?”
“ Claimed his neighbor had body parts in his house, that his neighbor was a murderer.”
“ Checks?”
“ Visual turned up negative.”
“ Search of the interior?”
“ None warranted by the visiting officers.”
“ How often they visit this location. Sergeant?”
“ Three times since January!”
“ Never searched the location?” She thought of the awful Jeffrey Dahmer case in Milwaukee, almost two years before.
“ Lady, the complainant was arrested.”
“ On what charge?”
“ Exposing himself to a female officer, ma'am… ahh. Doctor.”
She inwardly moaned before hanging up.
# # #
Otto Boutine and Joe Brewer kept tripping over one name, a salesman at Balue-Stork whose route had taken him to every key location in the investigation of the Tort 9 killings, Matthew Matisak. But there were holes in the records, some showing visits of only once over a seven-month period which the personnel lady could not account for. She said they would have to talk to Matisak's immediate supervisor, a man named Sarafian.
It was past eleven, and Sarafian had to be disturbed at home and escorted in by police sent to his home to pick him up. The entire Lowenthal affair had turned the company into something of a morgue, no one wishing to be sucked into the investigation. The entire time the FBI men were thrashing through the records they requested, the Balue-Stork public relations man, a V.P. and a board member had assembled to quell the disturbances as best they could, but Otto Boutine was having none of it.
When Sarafian was brought in in an overcoat covering his pajamas, the man was outraged, shouting that he was prepared to sue the bastards responsible.
Otto Boutine interrupted him and faced him down, saying, “I'm the bastard you'll be suing, then. I'm Inspector Otto Boutine, FBI Division Chief.”
Sarafian was visibly taken aback. “Well… FBI. Has to do with that poor bastard Lowenthal, then.”
“ Yes, it does. But we'd also like to talk to you about a man named Matisak.”
Sarafian's eyes, a distant, dark brown, shone with a shimmery, water-and-light quality that indicated to the experienced FBI men that they had struck a chord. “Can you explain why some of his travel records and expense reports are missing from his file?”
“ Backlog, maybe. We're always short of capable filing clerks. Get the worst in here from a service, and things are lost. But why're you interested in Matisak? I thought you people decided Lowenthal was the… the
