“You bet there is. Howard Desmond’s his name. And his place is over in Warwick.” A small town twenty minutes from the sites of both of the Greenville Strangler’s attacks.
The detective told his assistant to pull together as much information on Desmond as he could. He snapped the phone shut and, grinning, announced, “We’ve found him. We’ve got our copycat.”
But, as it turned out, they didn’t have him at all.
At least not the flesh-and-blood suspect.
Single, forty-two-year-old Howard Desmond, a veterinary technician, had skipped town six months before, leaving in a huge hurry. One day he’d called his landlord and announced that he was moving. He’d left virtually overnight, abandoning everything in the apartment but his valuables. There was no forwarding address. Altman had hoped to go through whatever he’d left behind but the landlord explained that he’d sold everything to make up for the lost rent. What didn’t sell he’d thrown out. The detective called the state public records departments to see if they had any information about him.
Altman spoke to the vet in whose clinic Desmond had worked and the doctor’s report was similar to the landlord’s. In April Desmond had called and quit his job, effective immediately, saying only that he was moving to Oregon to take care of his elderly grandmother. He’d never called back with a forwarding address for his last check, as he said he would.
The vet described Desmond as quiet and affectionate to the animals in his care but with little patience for people.
Altman contacted the authorities in Oregon and found no record of any Howard Desmonds in the DMV files or on the property or income tax rolls. A bit more digging revealed that all of Desmond’s grandparents — his parents too — had died years before; the story about the move to Oregon was apparently a complete lie.
The few relatives the detective could track down confirmed that he’d just disappeared and they didn’t know where he might be. They echoed his boss’s assessment, describing the man as intelligent but a recluse, one who — significantly — loved to read and often lost himself in novels, appropriate for a killer who took his homicidal inspiration from a book.
“What’d his letter to Andy say?” Wallace asked.
With an okaying nod from Altman, Randall handed it to the reporter, who then summarized out loud. “He asks how Mr. Carter did the research for his book. What were the sources he used? How did he learn about the most efficient way a murderer would kill someone? And he’s curious about the mental makeup of a killer. Why did some people find it easy to kill while others couldn’t possibly hurt anyone?”
Altman shook his head. “No clue as to where he might’ve gone. We’ll get his name into NCIC and VICAP but, hell, he could be anywhere. South America, Europe, Singapore…”
Since Bob Fletcher’s Robbery Division would’ve handled the vandalism at the Greenville Library’s Three Pines branch, which they now knew Desmond was responsible for, Altman sent Randall to ask the sergeant if he’d found any leads as part of the investigation that would be helpful.
The other men found themselves staring at Desmond’s fan letter as if it were a corpse at a wake, silence surrounding them.
Altman’s phone rang and he took the call. It was the county clerk, who explained that Desmond owned a small vacation home about sixty miles from Greenville, on the shores of Lake Muskegon, tucked into the backwater, piney wilderness.
“You think he’s hiding out there?” Wallace asked.
“I say we go find out. Even if he’s hightailed it out of the state, though, there could be some leads there as to where he did go. Maybe airline receipts or something, notes, phone message on an answering machine.”
Wallace grabbed his jacket and his reporter’s notebook. “Let’s go.”
“No, no, no,” Quentin Altman said firmly. “You get an exclusive. You don’t get to go into the line of fire.”
“Nice of you to think of me,” Wallace said sourly.
“Basically I just don’t want to get sued by your newspaper if Desmond decides to use you for target practice.”
The reporter gave a scowl and dropped down into an officer chair.
Josh Randall returned to report that Sergeant Bob Fletcher had no helpful information in the library vandalism case.
But Altman said, “Doesn’t matter. We’ve got a better lead. Suit up, Josh.”
“Where’re we going?”
“For a ride in the country. What else on a nice fall day like this?”
Lake Muskegon is a large but shallow body of water bordered by willow, tall grass and ugly pine. Altman didn’t know the place well. He’d brought his family here for a couple of picnics over the years and he and Bob Fletcher had come to the lake once on a halfhearted fishing expedition, of which Altman had only vague memories: gray, drizzly weather and a nearly empty creel at the end of the day.
As he and Randall drove north through the increasingly deserted landscape he briefed the young man. “Now, I’m ninety-nine percent sure Desmond’s not here. But what we’re going to do first is clear the house — I mean closet by closet — and then I want you stationed in the front to keep an eye out while I look for evidence. Okay?”
“Sure, boss.”
They passed Desmond’s overgrown driveway and pulled off the road then eased into a stand of thick forsythia.
Together, the men cautiously made their way down the weedy drive toward the “vacation house,” a dignified term for the tiny, shabby cottage sitting in a three-foot-high sea of grass and brush. A path had been beaten through the foliage — somebody had been here recently — but it might not have been Desmond; Altman had been a teenager once himself and knew that nothing attracts adolescent attention like a deserted house.
They drew their weapons and Altman pounded on the door, calling, “Police. Open up.”
Silence.
He hesitated a moment, adjusted the grip on his gun and kicked the door in.
Filled with cheap, dust-covered furniture, buzzing with stuporous fall flies, the place appeared deserted. They checked the four small rooms carefully and found no sign of Desmond. Outside, they glanced in the window of the garage and saw that it was empty. Then Altman sent Randall to the front of the driveway to hide in the bushes and report anybody’s approach.
He then returned to the house and began to search, wondering just how hot the cold case was about to become.
Two hundred yards from the driveway that led to Howard Desmond’s cottage a battered, ten-year-old Toyota pulled onto the shoulder of Route 207 and then eased into the woods, out of sight of any drivers along the road.
A man got out and, satisfied that his car was well hidden, squinted into the forest, getting his bearings. He noticed the line of the brown lake to his left and figured the vacation house was in the ten-o’clock position ahead of him. Through dense underbrush like this it would take him about fifteen minutes to get to the place, he estimated.
That’d make the time pretty tight. He’d have to move as quickly as he could and still keep the noise to a minimum.
The man started forward but then stopped suddenly and patted his pocket. He’d been in such a hurry to get to the house he couldn’t remember if he’d taken what he wanted from the glove compartment. But, yes, he had it with him.
Hunched over and picking his way carefully to avoid stepping on noisy branches, Gordon Wallace continued on toward the cabin where, he hoped, Detective Altman was lost in police work and would be utterly oblivious to his furtive approach.
The search of the house revealed virtually nothing that would indicate that Desmond had been here recently — or where the man might now be. Quentin Altman found some bills and cancelled checks. But the address on
