Dark Specter

The other woman appeared to consider this offer carefully.

“OK. And you can call me lies.”

“Iles?”

“That was my father’s name for me. My mother always referred to me as Miss Eileen. ‘Well, Miss Eileen, straight As again, huh? Looks like you must have brains, at least. Let’s hope so, child, because that face sure as hell won’t pay your freight.’ She was typical lace-curtain Irish, hypocritical with outsiders, ruthless with her family.”

She passed Kristine a sheaf of neatly typed pages.

“OK, here’s my homework from last night. As you’ll see, our makeshift poll elicited six matches to add to the two we already know about.”

“Make that three. After I called you, I found out about what looks like another one, in Atlanta.”

Eileen McCann lit another cigarette.

“I’d like to hear about that later, Kristine. As I was saying, we came up with six cases which fit the broad parameters you outlined on the phone. In reverse chronological order, they are St. Louis, Los Angeles, Oklahoma, Columbus, Salt Lake City and Houston.”

Kristine scanned the first sheet, which provided brief details of location and timing for each crime. The earliest was four years ago. The rest had occurred at irregular intervals since then, anywhere from a few weeks to several months.

“You sure got a quick response out of the LE As involved,” she said, partly to cover her embarrassment at not having done the same thing herself weeks before.

“They mostly didn’t even have to consult their files,” McCann replied crisply. “The kind of thing we’re talking about here is so unusual it tends to stick in the minds of the investigators however long ago it was. Most of them were able to tell me what I wanted to know then and there, over the phone.”

She consulted a copy of the document she had given Kristine.

“As you can see, Houston is chronologically the first of the presumed series. The victims were three males in their twenties and a prostitute they had brought back from a bar. The men were living in a trailer. They had a dog loose in the yard. A lump of raw steak was wedged in the chainlink. When the dog came to investigate, it was shot with a.22-caliber automatic silenced with the nipple from a baby bottle which was found discarded at the scene. One of the guys comes to the door and is shot between the eyes. One of the others tries to grab a rifle on the wall, doesn’t make it. The other and the hooker are both shot in the head at close range.”

Kristine had been following the typed report.

“They used regular CSA ammo, no handcuffs or gags, and an automatic, not a revolver. Apart from that, the MO fits.”

“You’d expect some variation. They’d refine the details as they gained more experience. For instance, realizing that the benefit of being able to suppress the noise from an automatic was outweighed by the disadvantages of leaving behind identifiable ejected cartridges or wasting time hunting around for them. On the other hand, the similarities may just be superficial. The Houston PD wrote it off as some kind of lowlife feud. The victims all had records going way back. Maybe they’d made one too many enemies.”

Eileen McCann tapped the ash from her cigarette.

“But take a look at the next one. Salt Lake City, a widow living alone with her cat. No criminal connections there, and no hint of a motive. The victim had almost eight hundred bucks in a vase sitting in plain view right there on the mantel, but it was untouched. Plus there’s a second victim who just happened to be there at the time, a neighbor’s kid who came by for piano lessons. He heard the shot and ran, but they caught up with him at the back door, which was locked, and took him down too. Which is maybe why they’ve started using the restraints and the gags by the time we get to Columbus, Ohio. That way they can go through the house and secure all the victims before they start shooting.”

Kristine turned the page. Her heart was pounding with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. If this was a series, it was one of the biggest things in years. The investigation would make or break her career, and not just her career. “It’s theirs to screw up,” Dick Rice had told her. Now it was hers.

“What happened in Columbus?” she murmured.

“A doctor and her teenage son are having dinner when someone comes to the door. A neighbor sees two men on the stoop but pays no attention. She remembers the time, though, because Jeopardy is just beginning. When the woman’s husband gets home shortly afterward, he finds his wife and child shot dead. A patrol car a few blocks away is there within seconds. Not more than ten minutes have elapsed since the shootings, but the killers have disappeared.”

Kristine nodded absently, following the script in front of her.

“And then Oklahoma,” she remarked, just to make it look like she was on the case.

“Right. Two gay guys. It looks like one of the killers posed as a deliveryman that time. The cops found the pizza still in the box on the porch. Bought as a takeout, paid cash, no record. Guy comes to the door, sees the box, relaxes. “There must be some mistake, buddy.” “Isn’t this 3468 Roanoke?” “Sure, but we didn’t order a pizza.” Blam, blam. Los Angeles, an illegal immigrant and three friends playing cards one evening. Nothing new there. St. Louis’s kind of instructive, though. This is a classy high-rise with a security guard, closed-circuit TV, the works. Our guys turn up in overalls and say they’ve got a sofa which Mr. Miller in 308 ordered from the store. Mr. Miller isn’t home, as they’ve no doubt ascertained by phoning a few minutes before. The guys show the guard the sofa they’ve got right there blocking up the lobby. “We just need to stick it inside the door of the guy’s apartment,” they say. “It’ll take two minutes.” So the guard lets them into 308, where they pull guns and cuff and gag him. But-get this- they don’t kill him.”

Kristine Kjarstad looked up with a puzzled expression. She’d lost track of her place in the text, overwhelmed by the other woman’s dominant personality.

“So who did they kill?”

Eileen McCann stubbed out her cigarette and added it to the growing pile.

“Some newlyweds who’d just moved in. They used the guard’s master key to get in. But that’s not significant. The point is, why didn’t they shoot the guard too? The guy was with them for almost ten minutes. He was able to give the police a full description. If these guys are so ruthless they kill kids and babies, why do they spare a witness who could send them both to the gas chamber? They make a big point of not leaving any evidence behind, no prints, no spent cartridges, no traces of any kind, yet they have this guy at their mercy and let him live! Why?”

Kristine Kjarstad shrugged. She felt good again, in charge. By this evening I’ll have the answer to that, she thought.

“Beats me,” she said.

Eileen McCann nodded.

“Are you religious, Kristine?”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

She felt the ground give way beneath her again. Eileen McCann smiled for the first time.

“It’s just that I don’t want to offend anyone’s sensibilities,” she said. “It seems to be so easy to do these days. I myself am a Catholic of the cafeteria variety, and last year I received from an ancient aunt a perfectly hideous calendar featuring photographs of the present pope which I put up on the wall in here, largely to get it out of the house. A coworker who recently converted to Islam objected to this, and the Chief made me take it down. His secretary had taken him to court about a Matisse print he had bought to brighten up his office, on the grounds that the seminude subject was, quote, demeaning to her as a woman and a blatant act of sexual harassment in the workplace which made her feel raped by proxy, unquote. So you have to tread delicately.”

“I’m kind of a go-along, get-along Episcopalian,” Kristine replied.

Eileen McCann nodded.

“That’s sufficient for my purposes.”

“Which are?”

“To remind you, and myself, that the human brain favors connections over disjunctions. In other words, we are programmed to privilege data which appear to generate patterns over data which call patterns into question. Hence the eternal temptation of God, and the corresponding necessity of an organized theology by means of which these temptations can be safely controlled.”

Kristine sat looking at her in amazement. How little we know about anyone, she thought, and how much we presume.