Over Tumbled Graves (8 page)

I
N
L
OVING
M
EMORY

Theresa Marie Mabry

Born: August 9, 1942
Passed on: April 30, 2001
Beloved Mother and Friend

“Behold, I show you a mystery;

We shall not all sleep,

but we shall all be changed,

In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye…
and the dead shall be raised
incorruptible,
and we shall be changed.”

—I Corinthians 15:51–52

Private graveside service to follow. No reception.

The chair she sat in was a throne of leather and dark-stained oak, more imposing than the person encased by it, a plump, dark-haired white woman who tapped a pen on the frame of her bifocals as she peered at the form Caroline had filled out. At the end of each page Vicki Ewing looked over her glasses, and then back to the next page.

“You left the emergency contact line blank.”

Caroline had stared at that line and thought about her mother. Dupree flashed in her mind too. But she said, “I have a boyfriend. Joel Belanger. Same address.”

Dr. Ewing scribbled in the line and then removed her glasses and looked up at Caroline. “You left this whole section blank, too. Where you were supposed to describe the problem…your anxiety…”

Caroline stood and removed a paperback medical textbook from the bookcase near the door. She checked the worn spine, then held it up. “Looks like you’ve read some of these.”

“Some of them. We were talking about your problem.”

“I don’t think I have one.”

“Oh, good. Makes it an easy day for me, then. But, since we’ve got another forty minutes, why don’t we talk about why you’re here.”

Caroline thought a moment. “I’m here because my sergeant doesn’t think a woman can handle the pressure of being a detective.”

“Can you?”

“I smacked a guy’s face into his fireplace. I guess that was uncalled for.”

“And that was last month? The day your mother died?”

Caroline nodded. “Three weeks ago. What’s with that chair?”

Dr. Ewing turned slightly in the huge leather chair. “My father was excited to have a doctor in the family. I’d get rid of it but I’m always afraid he’ll just drop in.”

Caroline looked down at the textbook in her hand, which was open to a page on kleptomania. She looked around the office and smiled. “Professional services. That’s funny. Anyone ever come in to get their taxes done? Or to get a wart removed?”

Dr. Ewing smiled. “No.”

“So the only service you provide is brain repair. That’s just one service. Shouldn’t it be called professional
service
?”

“I consult with various law enforcement agencies on criminal behavior and victim anxiety…and I repair a brain or two on the side. I think that qualifies as plural. Now, please. Sit down.”

Caroline did, and the session went faster than she would have guessed, the doctor more easygoing and funnier than she expected. They talked about Caroline’s terrible month of April. Thick Jay was becoming a minor pain in the ass, claiming he’d had vision problems and dizziness ever since “the attack.” In the newspaper, the police chief characterized what happened as “a suspect becoming entangled with a detective,” but Jay’s lawyer was talking about filing a claim against the city. The prosecutor was hoping to package a light plea bargain of his drug-dealing charge with the dropping of any potential claim. Thankfully for Caroline, the prosecutor was refusing to deal on the child abuse charge at all, so even if Thick Jay got a deal on the drug case he’d still do time.

Caroline had been suspended for a week—time she used to mourn her mother anyway—and had received a letter of reprimand
in her file indicating she violated the department’s “use of force policy.” She got the sense that if her mother hadn’t died that day, they might simply have fired her. But in all honesty, her mother’s death had nothing to do with her rough treatment of Thick Jay.

“Do you really believe that?” Dr. Ewing asked.

Caroline suddenly felt sleepy. Twenty-one days since her mother’s death and still she had trouble sleeping for more than an hour or two at a time, as if she were still trying to reach out, to catch her mom in the act of dying. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “If it was someone else, I’d assume the two things were related. But all I was thinking about was how that guy hurt that baby. I just wanted to hurt him.”

“Any children yourself?”

“No.”

“You talked about a boyfriend…”

“He’s a little younger than me, but I wouldn’t call him a child.”

Dr. Ewing laughed. “That’s not what I meant…how much younger is he?”

“I don’t see what that has to do with my mental health.”

“Five years younger?”

Caroline shrugged and smiled at the floor.

“Ten years younger?”

“Okay,” Caroline said. “My boyfriend is six. He’s in first grade.”

Dr. Ewing checked her watch and looked up genially. “We’re five minutes over. We’ll talk about your boyfriend next time.”

“We’re having a next time?”

“You don’t want to come back?”

“If they wanna pay me to come in here and girl-talk with you…well, fine. But quite honestly, I don’t know what the point is. I mean, no offense…”

“No. Of course not.”

“…but I don’t need it. I had a tough month at work and my mother died. That’s it. End of story. You want to know if I resent my father for leaving my mom? You bet. Do I worry that I’m getting older and will never get married and have kids? Every day. Am I burned out busting kids with dime bags of pot? Like you can’t believe. But I’d be crazy if I didn’t feel those things. Don’t you think?”

For a long minute, Dr. Ewing stared with a half smile. “You went after a suspect who was handcuffed and lying on the floor. You hit his head against a brick fireplace. That’s not the kind of thing police officers are supposed to do.”

“You’d be surprised.”

They were quiet again and then Dr. Ewing stood. “Be patient, Caroline,” she said. “You know, sometimes it takes two sessions to repair a good brain.”

Figure 450,000 people in the greater Spokane area—counting from the city of Coeur d’Alene in the Idaho panhandle to the college towns of Cheney to the west and Pullman to the south and the town of Deer Park to the north. If roughly half those people are female, that leaves you with 225,000 males, half of whom would be between sixteen and fifty-five—the potential age range for a serial killer.

Dupree spun the notebook to face Pollard and Spivey. “That leaves 112,500 potentially viable suspects,” he said. Pollard looked over Dupree’s figures as if they were the work of a lunatic, but Spivey copied down the numbers in his own notebook. Dupree turned it a little more to accommodate him.

“Let me get this straight,” Pollard said. “You want to interview a hundred thousand guys?”

“No. I’m just sayin’ that in a city this size, it would be feasible.”

“Feasible.”

“Maybe feasible is the wrong word. But the way we’ve been doing it isn’t much better. Three weeks and we’re still chasing
phone tips and going over field interview cards. Screw that. Let’s make a file on everyone. A hundred thousand suspects.”

Pollard looked as if Dupree were speaking French.

“Look,” Dupree said, “a serial killer can’t operate in a city too much smaller than Spokane. When’s the last time you heard of a serial killer in a small town? After the first murder, ol’ Andy’d trudge down to the barbershop, grab that weird Floyd the barber, and haul him off to a cell with Otis, and Aunt Bea would bring him sandwiches. In a big city, your suspect pool might be a million. A hundred thousand guys sounds like a lot, but if we get ten detectives doing ten a day? Shoot, in a hundred days we’d solve every crime in the city.”

Pollard kept searching for the joke; Spivey seemed to be actually thinking about it. When Dupree failed to land a punch line, Pollard threw his coffee back, squeezed the Styrofoam cup, and stood to leave.

“I’m worried about you, buddy,” he said to Dupree. “I gotta go interview the pawnshop guy. Looks like you ain’t gonna win that pot after all.”

Since Dupree had been assigned to head the serial killer task force, Pollard had been given his caseload, including the two Lenny Ryan murders.

Pollard left the cafeteria and Dupree looked over to Spivey, who was staring intently at the numbers he’d copied onto his notebook. “What about transient populations—a truck driver, or someone else from out of town?”

Dupree considered the kid. He had short, dark hair, a little curly patch in the front hanging over his forehead, and big, semicircle eyebrows that heightened his constant look of confusion. Dupree had complained about him to the lieutenant, who defended the kid by saying he had tested out of the park, the highest aptitude of any detective candidate, and had gotten A’s in college. The lieutenant said he was earnest and eager; if Dupree was more patient, he might even learn something from Spivey.

“We’re not gonna interview a hundred thousand guys,” Dupree said. “I was sort of…illustrating how tough it’s gonna be to find this guy.”

Spivey allowed his mouth to curl in a grin. “Oh, a joke.” He winked, as if he’d just help pull one over on poor Pollard.

Dupree stood, peeled off a dollar bill, and draped it over the uneaten half of his Danish. Spivey followed him out of the courthouse and across the small courtyard to the Public Safety Building. Inside, Dupree punched in the short code, the door buzzed, and they were in a hallway connecting the offices of the various detective units.

Behind Major Crimes was another coded door. Dupree entered the number and the door opened into a small conference room that had been turned into a command center for the serial killer investigation. Three sets of desks faced one another, covered with desk calendars, phones, Rolodexes, and in and out boxes. The phones led into a central CID panel, identifying the name and address of anyone who called in tips. There were three computers in the room, and a secretary sat in front taking phone messages: Tips came in at all hours, ever since the city announced a five-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the capture of the “Southbank Strangler.”

The name had been Fleisher’s and so he won the twenty-five dollars. Fleisher’s entry had everything a good serial killer name required: precision, alliteration, and, as the real estate agents say, location, location, location. Other entries had included the Riverbank Killer, the Peaceful Valley Strangler, and Spokane’s Slut Snuffer, which everyone agreed was in poor taste. Dupree had tossed in his five bucks and suggested they name the killer “Brandon”—he’d read that it was the most popular American boy’s name now—but more and more his genius seemed to be going unappreciated. So the newspaper and television editors happily sent their graphic artists into fits of creativity coming up with Southbank Strangler logos and maps, shadowed backdrops for headlines. All we need now, Dupree thought, is a theme song.

Pictures of the three victims were tacked on the wall of the task force office, above a map of the riverbank. The first picture was of Rebecca Bennett, killed almost two months earlier, at the beginning of April. That trail was the coldest, with few people even remembering the woman. The second picture showed the most recent victim, a twenty-nine-year-old prostitute named Sharla McMichael, who’d been dumped in the same clearing where Rebecca Bennett was found. But no one could remember seeing Sharla for days before she was killed, and even though it was more recent, that trail was as cold as the first. The third picture was of a
thirty-one-year-old prostitute from Portland named Jennifer Skaggs, who had last been seen five weeks earlier.

Dupree didn’t think the killer could have found people who would be missed less. He marveled at the lack of discernible effect from the killings: No witnesses. No parents calling police. No friends or family or even pimps to worry about these women. It wasn’t much better at the crime scene: No footprints or tire tracks; nothing of the killer left behind except forty bucks in the victims’ hands. No fingerprints on the money or the girls, all of whom had fingernails torn off and whose hands had been washed with bleach by the killer, just to make sure. And although the attacks seemed sexual, there was no semen, a detail strange in itself. They weren’t even sure how the killer had gotten the bodies there. They were chasing a ghost.

Dupree, Laird, and Spivey were the city detectives assigned to the case. They were joined by a sneaky sheriff’s detective, a state patrol trooper, and, as a consultant, the muscular FBI profiler Jeff McDaniel, who’d stayed for two days and then promised to check in from Quantico—although from Dupree’s vantage point his main talents seemed to be having lunch with the brass and hitting on secretaries. McDaniel promised to return and do a “full-blown profile” on the Southbank Strangler. Dupree promised to hold his breath.

In the days following the discovery of the second and third bodies prostitution nearly stopped along East Sprague, the strip where generations of hookers had worked. Hundreds of tips flooded the police department; the best ones were funneled to the task force office, where every day Dupree and the other detectives came in, grabbed a handful of telephone message slips, made phone calls, and went out to interview the nonexistent friends and relatives of the victims. Most of the tips were patently ridiculous.

“My boyfriend’s weird,” the tip sheet might say, or “My neighbor watches porn.” But each of them had to be checked out, because nothing was more embarrassing to a police department than the interview four months after the arrest in which a neighbor tells a TV reporter that she called the police about the cannibal with the strange movie rentals. But in the weeks since the killings the world had started to get back to normal; now the hookers were starting to venture out on East Sprague again and the tips were dwindling in number. Dupree found himself reaching for the losers, the tip
sheets that contained little chance of adding anything substantive to what he knew.

A stack of twenty or thirty tip sheets filled Dupree’s in box. He grabbed two: a man on probation who had given a cabdriver “the creeps” and a guy’s brother who had been robbed by hookers and still held a grudge. He decided to try the second tip first, tapped out the number, and introduced himself.

“It says here your brother was robbed by a prostitute?”

The guy on the other end cleared his throat. “Yeah. Or a dancer, I’m not sure.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Boy, couple years.”

“He ever display any violence toward women?”

“He beat up his girlfriend. That’s why he’s in jail.”

“He’s in jail now?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You say he’s in jail now?”

“Yeah.”

“How long’s he been in?”

“Couple months.”

Dupree slumped. “You know the most recent murder was three weeks ago?”

“Yeah, I thought maybe you could see if he got a furlough or something.”

“A furlough.”

“Yeah. So, do I have to testify to collect the reward?”

After he hung up, Dupree ran the name of the brother and found out he’d actually been in jail for three years. He printed out the guy’s rap sheet, stapled the pink message sheet to it, and dropped it into the out file.

Next, he tried the cabdriver, but got no answer. He reached for another message from the thick stack in the in box, but his hand just rested on the pile. This process felt more random to him than if they
had
just decided to interview every male in the region. This was the coldest trail he’d ever seen. Most murders, the cops knew who had done it within twenty-four hours of finding the body. There was still the problem of proving it, but the suspect was obvious. Woman gets shot, talk to the husband. Tavern owner gets shot,
talk to his partner. Gangbanger gets shot, find out who he pissed off. If he did the math, Dupree figured he could graph the results of murder investigations based on the amount of time it took to generate a suspect. Find a suspect within the first twenty-four hours, you had a ninety percent chance of getting a conviction. Seventy-two hours? Probably sixty percent. Then the curve fell quickly. And now, three weeks since the last body? Dupree put their chances at about one in twenty of ever getting a suspect strong enough to stand trial. Especially with prostitutes as the victims. All he had to do was read the teletypes and intelligence reports from other cities to realize how long their odds were of ever solving this. Portland had eight active prostitute murder cases; Vancouver, B.C., had more than thirty. Almost every city seemed to have active prostitute murders. And for some reason, it was worse in the Northwest. Even Spokane had other strings of prostitute murders; they’d seen nearly a dozen over the last decade unrelated to this case, most recently a woman named Shelly Nordling, who had her throat slashed and was then tossed from a car. Then, of course, there was the king of them all: the Green River Killer, outside Seattle. Forty-nine women, almost all with a history of prostitution. That case was never solved.

Dupree’s task force was trying other things, of course, looking at paroled sex offenders and men charged with assaulting prostitutes, conducting routine stings of johns and prostitutes, even posting surveillance cameras at a few pickup spots. A handful of women detectives, including Caroline, were out interviewing hookers on the street, compiling lists of rough tricks—johns who scared them. And Special Investigations was setting up a john sting tonight, posting a female officer—probably Caroline—on a corner, then questioning every guy who stopped to talk to her. But such steps were long shots. Hell, maybe one in twenty was too high. One in fifty was more like it, or one in a million. Of course, Dupree knew what would improve the odds. Another body. A new crime scene to sift through. In the meantime, he would just sit here making phone calls so unlikely they might as well be random, and wait for it to happen again.

Dupree took the next tip sheet from the basket. It was from a woman named Amend who lived in the West Central neighborhood, near the river. Her neighbor often left his house at 7
P.M
.
and returned at 2
A.M
. Twice, he had returned to his house with women she described as “slutty.”

“Lucky guy,” Dupree said.

Dupree turned the tip sheet over. That was it? He was about to toss it in the out file when the man’s name caught his attention. Verloc. The name was familiar. Dupree dialed the woman’s number but received no answer. Verloc. He tapped the sheet against his glasses. Next he opened the telephone book and found the listing for “Verloc, Kevin.” That name rattled around in his head and he found himself getting excited. He entered the guy’s name into the NCIC computer, but came up with no criminal record. Still, the name seemed significant. He knew he should wait until he’d talked to the woman, but after three weeks of dead ends his curiosity was too great. He looked at the deep box of worthless tips and knew he couldn’t stomach sitting here all day, inching along. Sometimes, you just had to drop a bomb. He tapped out the number.

A man answered after one ring. “This is Kevin.”

“Mr. Verloc? This is Alan Dupree, with the police department. I’m with the task force investigating the murders of three women who worked as prostitutes and we received a call suggesting we talk to you.”

“Sure. What can I do for you?”

Sure? Dupree was dumbfounded. He expected denial, defensiveness, even confusion. But friendliness, enthusiasm? He was caught off guard and launched into full bluff mode. “Yeah, we’re just looking for anyone who might have some information and, like I said, your name came up.”

“Sure. Well, I do have a crew that works down on East Sprague, at Landers’ Cove, the boat dealership down there. They see their share of hookers during their shifts—always have to run ’em out of the boats, you know? I can hook you up with ’em or I have their log reports, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

“Log reports. Mmm-hmm.”

Kevin Verloc continued. “You know, as far as myself, I work in the dispatch room—kind of half graveyard, half swing shift—so I don’t really see anyone.”

“The dispatch room?” Dupree began to feel uneasy.