“They’re closer to real cops than the Sidon crowd, or our bunch here in Wilcox either. But it was months ago, and they weren’t able to run anything down.”
“Months ago when?”
“The strangled girl was early last fall, right after the season ended. You probably remember from the papers that the girls strung up in the barn were found on the other side of Wilcox. Just outside town but within the city limits.”
“Making it a Wilcox PD matter.”
“Yeah. Why, is that significant?”
I shrugged, blew a smoke ring and watched it dissipate. “Maybe. If you have a sex fiend at large, you may just have a smart one. For the sake of argument, say he did kill the Wesley dame, too. That means in a fairly small area, he has managed to spread the killings out among three different jurisdictions-two small-town police forces and the sheriff’s department.”
“Can a maniac be that organized?”
“They never caught Jack the Ripper, did they? Look, what makes you tie it in? You’re not a cop, anymore. This has nothing to do with guarding a brick-making factory on the Island.”
Those hard pale blue eyes stared into my own and a grimace touched his mouth. “Because once you’re a cop, Mike, you never stop. Do I have to tell you? And I can smell it. These murders are connected.”
“Smells don’t hold up in court,” I said.
“But they sure can lead you to the rotten source though, can’t they?”
I chuckled dryly and had another drag on the Lucky. “I came to listen, Dave, and I’m almost interested. Make it fit. I don’t know the details.”
“They were women, they were young, they were pretty, now they’re dead. There’s a sex angle to each of them.”
“Sharron Wesley wasn’t all that young-she was in her late thirties. And she wasn’t molested.” Doc Moody’s autopsy had said as much.
“ None of these victims were molested, and that’s a telling link. Stripping them and killing them, that’s the sex angle.”
Which meant it didn’t have to be a “he”-they made killers in both male and female models.
“There’s one difference,” I reminded him. I thumped the crime-scene photo on his desk. “These kids were tortured to death.”
Dave Miles grinned at me, a hard, nasty grin. “I’m disappointed in you, Mike. Don’t you see the similarity in the crime scenes?”
“Are you kidding? A barn? The beach? A body found draped on a stone horse in a park, a week after the killing? There’s no similarity at all.”
“Sure there is. Maybe you just haven’t rubbed the sleep out of your eyes.”
I had another look at the photo.
And it came to me: the murderer had arranged each crime scene with a dramatic flair designed to turn his victims into a sort of grotesque tableau.
“Those crime scenes,” Dave said, “are staged for effect. For maximum impact. Like they were posed for a shot in a sleazy true-crime magazine.”
I tossed the photo back on the desk. “Okay. You have a point. But this isn’t New York, Dave. Who did the autopsies on the Wilcox barn girls?”
“We have a competent coroner in Wilcox. He says the girls were slowly slashed to death. Death by a thousand cuts. Hung up for slaughter, with their ankles bound above them and the wrists roped, and the fiend took his sweet time. The dirt floor was caked with blood an inch thick.”
He was trying to get me going. Pushing every button he could. Why?
I stayed professional. “The two strangulations make a similar modus operandi, but this torture kill, it’s different. You’re throwing me a curve, buddy. What did the Wilcox police have to say?”
His grin seemed to tighten down. “That’s the kicker, Mike. We don’t really have any. The city force has nine men who are only employees and don’t do much more than tag cars or arrest an occasional drunk. Yes, there’s this factory here, but otherwise we’re as much a tourist town as Sidon.”
“So who makes up this lackluster force?”
“They’re all local men who get hired when there’s an opening, given a briefing, then issued a uniform, badge and gun and assigned a beat. Most of them are military returnees using it as a between-jobs bridge. Out here we have an elected constabulary system with three men patrolling for speeders.”
Could a thrill killer have selected this little part of the world to take advantage of the kind of half-assed policing that Sidon and Wilcox had to offer? If so, that was damn shrewd-here we were, in Manhattan’s backyard, but well away from the jurisdiction of the kind of trained scientific professionals represented by Captain Pat Chambers.
I muttered, “Big fish in a little pond…”
“What, Mike?”
I stabbed out the spent Lucky and got another one going. “How about the Suffolk sheriff’s office?”
“That’s the other kicker. Last November John Harris didn’t run for re-election. He was a damn good man… made Deputy Chief Inspector in New York before he came up here, but he was diabetic and couldn’t take it after two terms in office.”
“Yeah, I know John. You’re right. Good man.”
Dave shrugged. “Maybe he could have taken care of this thing, but he died a month back.”
“Hell. I hadn’t heard.”
“His deputy was the only other trained person around, but when Harris quit, so did the deputy-took a job someplace out west.”
“So who’s in now?”
“Oh, Fred Jackson, a nice enough guy, all right, real nice guy. He was elected by popular acclaim just because he was a real nice guy.”
“Great,” I said. “Just fine.”
“He was born here, went to college upstate, taught six-graders for a year, got drafted and picked up some shrapnel in the Pacific, became something of a local hero and inherited his old man’s dairy farm. Now he’s sheriff.”
“No good, huh?”
“A nice guy, but no cop, Mike. No cop at all.”
“And you smell something.”
“That’s right. The county sheriff’s office is right here in Wilcox. You could talk to Sheriff Jackson, if you think it’ll do any good.”
“So could you. You’re still around.”
“That’s about the extent of it,” he told me. “ Around. Nothing more. Every so often they take off another hunk of my leg to try and stop happening whatever’s happening to it. Pretty soon there won’t be much left to take off. I can make it back and forth to the office, do my job well enough to hold it down, because I can still yell loud enough to scare people. And I have a few guys at the plant here back me up.”
A scowl pulled at my eyes. “What do they need security for in a place that digs up clay and makes bricks out of it?”
“Because our big contract is with the government. There’s a rare element in this ground that makes our bricks ideal for use in government facilities attached to atomic testing.”
“So you’re keeping the Commies away.”
He grinned. “No Ruskies have made it past Staten Island on my watch.”
I laughed at that, but I was getting itchy to get back to Sidon and my real case.
I said, “Listen, Dave, I can see why you think the Sharron Wesley killing might tie in to these others. It strikes me as kind of thin frankly, but… I can see it. What you don’t know is she was likely killed because of that casino she ran outside of Sidon. She appears to have stashed substantial cash on the grounds, just begging for a treasure hunt, and she has ties to big-time gambling in the city. Unless syndicate guys have suddenly started hiring kill-happy lunatics to carry out contract work, I can’t see how this ties in.”
