Dark Specter

7

One Saturday evening in May Kristine Kjarstad got back from dinner at Ray’s Boathouse with a couple of gay friends and a woman called Betty whose sister had just had an operation for cancer, and who needed cheering up, to find a message on her voice mail.

“Hi, Kirsty, it’s Steve. Listen, if you’re around, tune in to Channel 13 right away. America’s Most Wanted is doing a scene that’s just like that Sullivan case, and I figure if the Kansas City cops can get air time, then why not us? Give me a call when you get in, I want to see the rest of it.”

Kristine gave a sigh of relief. Steve Warren’s burning ambition to get on television was one of the many features of her partner which failed to endear him to her, but her first thought had been that the message was from her ex-husband. Thomas was spending the night at his house, which gave Kristine a chance to go out. The price she paid in return was giving Eric the chance to nag her about some detail of the way she was bringing up their son.

It was now four years since she’d thrown Eric out, having belatedly realized that he was never going to change his ways. He’d appeared genuinely astonished by her decision, and maybe even more by the fact that she’d finally got around to making one. That had always been his role in the relationship. He’d picked Kristine out at college, where he was majoring in dentistry and she in social science, and dated her assiduously for two years. Once they both graduated, he had proposed and she’d said why not, even though the idea of her marrying a Swede hadn’t gone down too well with her Norwegian family. Looking back at it now, Kristine could see that she had passively bought into his program all along. What she didn’t understand, even now, was why.

Once they were married, Eric had been the one to decide where they should live, who their friends should be, which restaurant or movie to go to, even the most appropriate moment for having a child. Kristine had followed the path of least resistance, standing idly by while he organized every aspect of their life with the same obsession for detail that he lavished on his patients’ dental problems. In a weak, Pollyanna-ish way that now made her shudder, she had kept telling herself that things would soon get better. He would mellow out once they were engaged, once they were married, once they’d settled down, once they started a family. It had taken her eight years to realize that she was living with a control freak. Underneath the masterful exterior which had charmed her at first lay a deeply disturbed individual, weak and anxious, with a compulsion to organize every single aspect of his own life, and that of everyone around him. By the time they finally separated, they were like the impacted branches of trees which have grown too close together, both distorted, both rubbed raw.

But even though Kristine had got him out of the house, she couldn’t get him out of her life. When you have a child, you not only give a hostage to fortune but also to a person you may eventually come to wish you’d never met. With Thomas as a pretext and go-between, Eric could continue to exercise a measure of creepy control over Kristine for the foreseeable future, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.

Sometimes Thomas relayed the messages himself. “Dad says you shouldn’t cook hamburger so often, it’s full of cholesterol.” Sometimes they came by phone. “I see Thomas is only in the ninety-fifth percentile in English. How rigorously do you supervise his homework? He seems to be spending a lot of his time watching TV.” So although Kristine had no particular wish to feed Steve Warren’s fantasies of fame and fortune, she felt a measure of warmth toward him simply for not being Eric, and called him back to explain that she had been out all evening. Steve Warren cut her off.

“As soon as I started watching it I thought, hey, this sounds familiar. The MO was pretty much identical. Two guys and a woman get blown away in a walk-up. Twenty-two to the back of the head, victims bound and gagged, nothing taken, no sex angle, no prints, no clues, no manifest perp. Jesus, you should have seen the homicide dick hamming it up for the cameras. You could tell he was just loving it. Like, ‘Hi, Mom, it’s me!’”

“When did this happen?”

“Couple of months ago. Takes them a while to set it up and do the filming, I guess.”

“Too bad I was out.”

“No prob, I taped it. Got a library of every episode dating back to March of 1989, all except one where my VCR went ape and chewed up the tape. I’ll bring it over tomorrow and we can talk about putting together a package to send them. Someone told me one of the segment directors lives right here, on Mercer Island. We could go over there, pitch it to him direct. Hey, we could be stars! The camera’s gonna love you, babe.”

Kristine Kjarstad viewed the video the following evening. The next morning, she put in a call to the Kansas City Police and after some delay got to speak to Fred Poison, the detective who had handled the case. He insisted on calling her back at the office, just to check that she was who she claimed to be. Once this had been established, Poison was ready enough to talk, but it soon emerged that he was skeptical of the alleged parallels between the two cases and suspicious of his caller’s motives in trying to establish one.

“You’re talking what sounds like a straightforward domestic, Ms. Kjarstad, except you can’t come up with the goods on the guy. This one here’s something completely different. You see the show? Did a great job, huh? Course they had my complete input the whole time, not just the parts where I was on camera. Anyway, what we’ve got is an old man, his daughter who was visiting, and the guy they had in to paint the kitchen. Right? These guys arrive at the door, tie them up, blow them away and then just disappear. I mean it’s like in a different class, you know? Which is why the TV people decided to go for us instead of you guys.”

Kristine frowned.

“Mr. Poison, did you already receive a call from someone in this department?”

“Guy name of Warren? And I told him just the same as I’m-”

“Can I just clarify something? Whatever my coworker may have said or implied, this is my case and I’m not interested in TV exposure. OK? I couldn’t compete anyway. You’re a natural, Mr. Poison, and just let me say that your necktie looked great. We don’t see many bolo ties here in Seattle, not the real classy ones.”

“Hell, that old thing! My wife, Gertrude, gave me that for my birthday, way back in-”

“Here’s what I’m up for,” Kristine continued in her most hokey tone of voice. “You send me the notes on your case and I’ll send you the notes on mine. That way we both get a chance to compare and contrast. You’re probably right, there’s no there there. But just supposing there is some link, or we can make it look that way, you get to go right back on AMW and update the story. I guarantee to stay out of it. And you can have that in writing if you want.”

“Hell, Ms. Kjarstad, you should get a piece of the action too.”

Kristine turned on a mildly flirtatious voice.

“Well, in that case let’s get together and work something out.”

Poison laughed richly.

“Be more than my life’s worth, Ms. Kjarstad. Gertrude is one jealous woman. You got fax machines out there on the coast?”

The report on the Kansas City killings arrived on Kristine Kjarstad’s desk while she was typing up her case notes on an alleged sexual assault at a school in a town called Selleck. The first page was signed by the patrolman who had been called to the scene.

Kansas City Police Department

Case Number:

47-94-0076

Offense:

Homicide

Victim #1: Howard Selby W/M DOB: 03-16-27

Victim #2: Sandra Selby W/F 09-07-49

Victim #3: Unknown B/M unknown

Suspect #1: Unknown W/M

Suspect #2: Unknown W/M

Location: 2930 East 64th Street, #33

Details: Reporting officer arrived at scene at 14.35 hrs., in response to a reported disturbance. Complainant Wanda Neuberger, fifty-seven, resident at 2930 East 64th Street, #35, stated that she had heard cries for help from the neighboring apartment, inhabited by Howard Selby, who was confined to a wheelchair. She went to Selby’s apartment and knocked on the door, which was opened by two young men. One of them was drenched from head to foot in rose pink paint. The men pulled a gun and forced complainant to return with them to her apartment, where they confined her in a windowless bathroom off the kitchen and blocked the door by moving the refrigerator against it. Complainant struggled with the door for some fifteen minutes before succeeding in opening it enough to escape and telephone 911. Having conducted a search for the suspects, R/O proceeded to apt. 33, where he discovered the body of victs. 1 amp; 2 in the living room, and vict. 3 in the kitchen. He called in for assistance and remained at door to secure scene from intruders until arrival of detectives. Case was then turned over to Detective Fred Poison.

The following pages contained Poison’s report:

Kansas City Police Department

Case Number:

47-94-0076

In response to Officer Kimball’s request for detectives to work a reported multiple homicide, I went to 2930 East 64th Street, Apartment 33. Victim #1, identified to me by neighbor Wanda Neuberger as Howard Selby, was in living room sitting in a wheelchair. The chair was facing the north wall, the head slumped forward and the wrists taped to the arms of the chair. Gunshot entry wound visible at back of head. Victim #2, identified to me by same witness as Sandra Selby, daughter of vict. #1, was also in the living room, lying on floor under window in east wall. The body was lying on its right side, facing east, in a fetal crouch. Gunshot entry wound at back of head. Victim #3 was found in kitchen, which was being repainted, lying on back in middle of floor, right arm outstretched above head. Victim was wearing housepainter’s overalls. Three gunshot entry wounds were visible, in the mid-chest, right shoulder and forehead. A large irregular splash of pink paint lay on the floor to the northeast of the body. A series of clear shoe prints in the same paint were visible on the vinyl flooring, and more faintly on the living-room carpet leading to the front door of the apartment. I directed Crime Scene Technician Traci Moore to make a full investigation. I then took a full statement from Wanda Neuberger (see document attached) and put out an urgent call for the two individuals she described to me, including a description of the winter coat and scarf she reported missing from her wardrobe. At that point John Boychuk, the janitor of the apartment block, appeared at the scene and identified victim #3 as Winston Jones, of 4711 East 53rd Street, who did light maintenance work for many tenants in the building.

Kristine Kjarstad read through the neighbor’s statement, which added nothing of any substance to what she had told the patrolman. She then skimmed the lengthy supplemental reports by the CST, the pathologist and the forensic laboratory. Selby and his daughter had been shot at close range, Jones twice from a distance of several feet and once, to the forehead, at close range. The ammunition used was CCI Stinger.22 caliber. Traces of adhesive on the mouths of Howard and Sandra Selby matched that used on the duct tape used to secure Howard’s wrists to the arms of his wheelchair, indicating that they had been gagged. Marks on Sandra Selby’s wrists suggested that she had also been handcuffed.

But the piece of evidence that interested Kristine Kjarstad the most was hidden away in the dry catalog of the CST report. The shoe prints created by the paint on the vinyl flooring of the kitchen were so clear that there had been no problem in matching the make, model and year against the sample books which are supplied to police authorit

ies by leading shoe manufacturers. In this case identification had been simplified still further by the fact that the sole of the Nike model in question featured the silhouetted figure of the basketball star Michael Jordan.

Detective Eileen McCann of the Evanston City Police did not see that particular episode of America’s Most Wanted. For one thing, she had gone into Chicago that evening to watch the Blackhawks fight a losing battle for a playoff spot in the Stanley Cup. For another, she didn’t own a television.

By this time, there had been a number of developments in the Maple Street case. One related to the murder weapon, which had been traced to a gun shop in Portland, Oregon. It had been sold eight years previously to a certain Willard Sumner, resident in the Errol Heights neighborhood of that city. One evening, Sumner returned home from work to find that his house had been burgled. Amongst the inventory of missing items he gave the police-two VCRs, a brand-new fax machine and a “priceless” collection of country and western CDs-was the.22-caliber Smith amp; Wesson Model 34 revolver which Sumner had bought over the counter at Joe’s Guns following a previous break-in at his house.

After that, there was no further trace of the weapon. Evanston Police circulated its ballistic characteristics to law enforcement agencies in the Northwest, hoping that they might match a set held on record in relation to other crimes, but without result. The burglar who stripped Sumner’s house might have kept the revolver for his own use, or sold it privately to one of the many people whose professional activities require the use of firearms but who prefer to avoid the formalities associated with the mandatory five-day waiting period. That purchaser might then have experienced a temporary cash-flow problem and sold the gun to someone else. There was no way of knowing how many hands the gun had passed through before it turned up in Evanston.

But the major breakthrough concerned the identity of the third victim and presumed perpetrator of the killings. By the time it happened, Eileen McCann had almost given up hope of ever being able to tie a name tag to the anonymous cadaver which was stored, like some artwork of dubious provenance, in the basement of the city morgue. An extensive poster and media blitz immediately following the shootings had induced a flurry of claims to recognize the unknown man, but these had always failed to hold up to sustained scrutiny. Then, when all the furor had died down, along came one that stuck.

The informant was a private investigator named Lou Gelen, with an office in Decatur, Illinois. He had been hired three years earlier by a local couple named Watson to find their son. Gelen had managed to trace Dale Watson as far as Boise, Idaho, where the boy had worked briefly in a lumber yard. There the trail ended, until Gelen visited a police station in South Chicago to look up a friend and happened to see one of the posters featuring a tastefully retouched photograph of the unknown individual in the Evanston killings.

Lou Gelen immediately contacted the Watsons, then the Evanston Police. The next day, Eileen McCann drove down to Decatur, bringing with her a portfolio of photographs of the dead man. Joseph Watson returned with McCann to Evanston, where he viewed the body in the morgue and positively identified it as that of his son.

Hopes of a swift breakthrough in the case rapidly faded, however. Bank, medical, telephone, utility, DMV, voter’s registration, IRS, consumer credit and Social Security agency records were all checked, without effect. Dale Watson’s name did not feature on the National Crime Investigation Computer, and there was no record that he had ever been charged with a crime.

By interviewing the parents and following up leads provided by them, the police gradually built up a profile of Dale Watson’s life. He had been born in Shelby County and raised in Decatur, where the family moved in the mid-seventies. He had achieved average grades at school. People remembered him, if at all, as a pleasant, unexceptional young man. The caption to his high school yearbook photograph read: “Noted for his ready smile, Dale participated in Frosh football and Varsity baseball … he belonged to the Baptist Youth group outside of school… he will remember shop class because of Mr. Booker’s inspirational teaching … his secret ambition is to travel throughout the world … Dale plans to attend college next year.”

But he hadn’t. Instead he’d gone to Chicago, where he’d worked at a variety of low-paid jobs from pumping gas to delivering pizzas. If his parents were worried by his lack of ambition, they didn’t make a big deal of it. Joseph and Olive Watson were plain folks-he ran a garage, she took care of the house-and made a clear distinction between “doing well for yourself” and “getting above yourself.” Going to college wasn’t needful for the former, the way they saw it, and could all too easily lead to the latter, if not to worse things. As long as Dale continued to fear the Lord, it wouldn’t do him any harm to have a taste of big city life, get it out of his system. Then he could come home to Decatur, find some nice girl and settle down to a steady job.

The first sign that this modest scenario might not work out was when the Watsons received a letter postmarked Omaha, Nebraska:

Dear Mom and Dad,

Well, as you see I’ve moved out West for a while, I guess I just got the travel bug. I got work at a garage, nothing fancy, but I can do lube jobs and replace shocks like you showed me, Dad. Once I get a few bucks together I might head on a little farther, try and see something of this great country of ours. Hope you’re well. Say hi to Trish and Howie. Did Ronda have her baby yet? I guess she must.

Love, Dale

For the next eighteen months, similar letters arrived irregularly from towns and cities all over the western states. On special occasions-Christmas, his parents’ birthdays-Dale would telephone, but his calls were as brief and vague as his letters. He never left a forwarding address or phone number where his parents could contact him, explaining that he would soon be moving on.

One of the letters had been sent from Portland, Oregon, and for a moment Eileen McCann thought she might be on to something. But it was dated six months before the burglary at Willard Sumner’s house, by which time Dale Watson had once again “moved on,” and she reluctantly conceded that this was a mere coincidence.

Mr. and Mrs. Watson had not been too happy about Dale’s continuing and indefinite absence, and still less with his nomadic way of life, but they had other problems to contend with, notably Olive’s health-a kidney infection-and the marriage of Dale’s sister Patricia, which was well on its way to becoming Topic A in the community.

Just over a year earlier, they had received yet another of Dale’s letters, this one from Los Angeles. It mentioned that he intended to “head south for a while, maybe go to Mexico.” There was nothing else remarkable about it, certainly nothing to suggest that this was the last contact they would ever have with their son. But there the series ended. When two months went by without any more letters or phone calls, the Watsons-alarmed more than anything else by that word “Mexico”-notified the police.

About a million Americans are reported missing each year, and the numerous city, county, state and federal agencies whose job it is to locate them are understaffed and underfunded. As the months went by without any news, the Watsons reluctantly decided to employ a private investigator. Lou Gelen did not find their son, but he discovered a tragic and possibly significant secret which Dale Watson had been keeping from his parents.

As one of his routine search procedures, Gelen contacted the Illinois Drivers Services Section in Springfield, hoping that Dale might have registered a change of address which would give him a starting point to work from. He drew a blank there, but Dale’s accident history showed that he had been involved in a traffic-related fatality in Idaho the previous year. Gelen applied to the Motor Vehicle Division of the Idaho Department of Law Enforcement, enclosing the search fee of five dollars, and ten days later received a copy of the accident report.

One summer night, just before two in the morning, Dale Watson had been driving a car which was struck by an eighteen-wheeler tractor-trailer rig which had crossed the median on Interstate 84 near Nampa. Watson was taken to the hospital suffering from shock and minor injuries. His passenger-Starr Costello, seventeen, of Boise, whose parents were the registered owners of the car-was killed. The trucker was charged with reckless driving. No charges were brought against Dale Watson.

Using the Haines Tele-A-Key locator service, Lou Gelen obtained the phone number corresponding to the street address in Boise where Dale Watson had told police he was living at the time. The person who answered his call said he’d only been there a couple of months and had never heard of any Dale Watson. The Watsons weren’t prepared to pay Gelen’s expenses to go out there in person, so there the matter rested until the police got involved.

After a flurry of faxes and phone calls from Eileen McCann and the Idaho State Patrol, the Boise Police dug out their files on the accident. According to Dale Watson’s statement, he had been at a party given by some people he’d met in a bar. He’d got a ride to the party, which was in a town called Caldwell, but the people he’d come with had left early and he’d had no way of getting back to Boise. Then a girl called Starr Costello offered him and another couple a ride in her parents’ car, which she’d borrowed. At the last moment the couple had got a ride with someone else, and Dale and Starr had set off together. She’d asked him to drive because she was feeling “unwell.” Watson had agreed to take a breath test, which showed a level of alcohol slightly over the legal limit, but since the accident was clearly not his fault, and he was “severely traumatized” by what had happened, the police decided not to press charges.

At Eileen McCann’s request, the Boise Police interviewed a number of people who had attended the party in Caldwell, and eventually traced three who had known Dale Watson. One of them had since moved out of the area, but she was able to contact the other two by phone.

The first, Kathy Lawson, twenty-two, sounded like a female equivalent of Dale himself, a rootless migrant moving from state to state according to whim or weather. She was from South Dakota originally, but had moved around quite a lot since then, and had a record of convictions for drug possession. Despite this, she was perfectly prepared to talk to Detective McCann all day-or even longer, Eileen suspected, given half a chance.

“Dale was like a nice guy, you know? Someone you could trust? Like I know he kinda had a thing for me, but he never hit on me or anything. You get guys hitting on you the whole time, but Dale was different. He was like gentle. I mean you could talk to him. He was real intelligent too, read books and everything. But like he never came on like heavy. It was like he was really interested in you, what you were thinking, your personality.

“That thing that happened, with the truck? It just… I don’t know what to tell you. It was like it destroyed him. I was there that night, and we kinda had a little thing going for a while there. He like started to come on to me, you know, and then this other guy, a real asshole name of Arnold, he came over and got me to dance and Dale kinda drifted away. He wasn’t like real flexible, you know?

“It’s like with the accident. I mean it wasn’t his fault, the other guy was going too fast and just lost control. And the girl who died wasn’t even a friend. It was just some mall rat who offered him a ride home, for Christ’s sake. It wasn’t like it was someone he really knew and cared about. But he took it really hard. I went to see him in the hospital, they thought he had maybe a cracked rib or something? And he was going on about how it was all like just a total chance, what happened. And I thought, right, so what’s your problem? But Dale, well, you know he had a kinda strict religious upbringing, that Bible Belt stuff, and I guess that makes it tougher to go with the flow. Like if you grow up thinking there’s like a reason for everything, and then something like that happens, and there’s no reason …

“Last I heard of, he was talking about moving to Seattle. He said he wanted to go all the way to the edge and then fall off. That’s what he told me, or it might have been someone else he said that to. I was kind of out of circulation just then, with this … Well, I won’t bore you with the details. A medical thing. And when I felt like seeing people again, Dale wasn’t around anymore. It’s too bad. If the kid had been his, I would’ve maybe thought about having it. I kinda wish I’d told him that. Maybe it would have like made him feel better, you know?”

The other witness, Eugene Vandestraat, twenty-eight, worked as a bouncer at a club described by police as “frequented mainly by younger individuals.” Eileen McCann asked him if he’d ever had any professional encounters with Dale Watson.

“You mean like trouble? Hell, no. Dale … Listen, I called him the Philosopher. That was something I got called at school, on account of I was so dumb. Some jerk in the honors program started it off and the thing stuck. But Dale, well, he wasn’t no philosopher, I guess, but he was a guy who lived in his mind, you know? Like you’d look at him, and you could almost hear his brain working, kinda like a dishwasher.

“Dale never gave anyone any trouble, far as I know. Just the opposite. You were in trouble, he’d come and fix it. Not the way I would, but there’s kinds of trouble you can’t just walk in and say ‘OK folks, you’re outta here,’ right? Like I recall one time there was this guy, his woman’d left him, he was a big drunk, we all kinda felt she’d done the right thing there, but he just couldn’t take it. Used to come in and sink a few, next thing you know he’d be going up to the other tables, people he’d never even met before, and telling them how this bitch’d dumped him after all he’d done for her.

“What you going to do? You can’t throw the guy out, he ain’t getting violent or abusive, plus he’s one of our best customers. But folks didn’t want to know. Maybe they had problems too. They’d gone out to forget that shit, and here was Clark-that was his name-wouldn’t shut up about it. But Dale, Dale was a genius. He went over to the guy and sat down at his table, said ‘Tell me about it.’ Clark didn’t know what the fuck to do. He’d made a career outta breaking people’s balls about his problems and here was some guy asking him to talk about it.

“So anyway he starts into the whole story, same as usual. After a minute or two Dale looks at him-I heard all about this from a guy at the next table-Dale looks at him and says, ‘You supporting this woman?’ Clark kinda frowns, what the hell’s this? ‘Hell, no,’ he says, ‘we weren’t even married.’ ‘Yes, you are,’ says Dale, real quick. ‘You’re carrying her around on your shoulders like a monkey.’ And you know? After that, we didn’t hear one goddamn word from Clark about it ever again.”

Vandestraat hadn’t seen Dale Watson after the accident on the highway, but he said he’d been talking about going home. “Said he was tired of drifting around from place to place, wanted somewhere to lay down his head.”

Eileen McCann reviewed the progress she had made with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the breakthrough she had initially hoped for had not happened. She had learned nothing which would enable her to close the file on the Evanston killings. On the other hand, she now had a clear image of who Dale Watson had been, a small-town “philosopher” who had never had a chance to test his ideas against a coherent system of thought. He probably wouldn’t have got very far if he had, but at least some formal education might have helped him deal better with the demons that menaced him, with his sense of being different from everyone and everything around him, and his need to grapple firsthand with the big questions which his parents had conveniently packed up and shelved away in a box marked Religion.

Those demons had always been there, she guessed, nagging away at his peace of mind, continually pushing him to “move on.” When the truck had smashed through the traffic barrier and killed Starr Costello, they had emerged in force, precipitating the crisis which he had managed to stave off for so long. As soon as he got out of the hospital, he had no doubt headed out to the coast, as Kathy Lawson had said, all the way to the edge of the continent, hoping to “fall off.”

She contacted the Seattle Police, but they had no record of a Dale Watson. But somewhere out there, Eileen McCann was sure, he had crossed paths with Willard Sumner’s stolen revolver. After that, the other idea in Dale’s shocked, guilt-ridden mind had taken over, the one he had mentioned to Eugene Vandestraat about going home. “He was tired of drifting around from place to place, wanted somewhere to lay down his head.”

But where was home? Not Decatur, where parents and relatives and friends who had never understood the way he saw things, even in the good times, would expect explanations and a “normal,” easygoing, brain-dead mentality which Dale knew he couldn’t fake any more. No, he would go to Chicago, where he had first tasted the joys of independence, a city he knew and where he no doubt still had friends (but who were they, and why hadn’t they come forward when he died?).

That much McCann was fairly sure of. The rest, which was everything she needed to close the case, remained obscure. She could understand that Dale Watson might have come to believe that the only place he could finally “lay down his head” was in death. But if suicide was his aim, why kill two total strangers too? And why choose a deserted house in Evanston to do it?

Maybe the question was the answer. Maybe Watson had deliberately set out to create an insoluble mystery which would enlighten others as he had been enlightened, an action as random and meaningless as the passion he had suffered, and which had made his life unlivable.

Maybe. Maybe not. As Eileen McCann tidied her papers away and prepared to turn her attention to other matters, the one thing she felt reasonably certain of was that no one would ever know.