Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 112, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 684 & 685, September/October 1998

Not Enough Monkeys by Benjamin M. Schutz

©1998 by Benjamin M. Schutz

Author of the Leo Haggerty private-eye series, which has brought him both the Edgar Allan Poe and Shamus awards, Benjamin M. Schutz is, by day, a clinical and forensic psychologist. In his new crime story, he gives us a look at his tantalizing and creative profession — a career that appears to inspire muck of his fiction-writing.

“Dr. Triplett, Dr. Ransom Triplett?”

I looked up from my exam-covered desk. A young woman hugging a fat file stood in the doorway. I guess just looking up was enough for her, because she entered arm outstretched, hand aimed at the middle of my chest, and said, “I’m Monica Chao, I have a project I’d like to interest you in.”

I rose from my chair, intercepted her hand mid-desk, and nodded to the empty chair on her right.

“I’ve just come from the state penitentiary. I’ve been talking with some of the staff there and we believe that a terrible miscarriage of justice is going to happen.” She hoisted the file onto the desk, where it landed with a thud and lay still as a corpse.

“Actually, the miscarriage is ongoing. Dr. Triplett, they have an innocent man on death row there. He is going to be executed the first of next month.”

“And?” I asked.

“And I want you, no, I hope you’ll be willing to help me prove this. They’re going to execute an innocent man.”

“Excuse me, Miss Chao, how old are you?”

“I beg your pardon.” She stiffened in her seat.

“What are you, twenty-four, twenty-five — twenty-six at the most? Am I correct?”

“I fail to see the relevance of my age.”

“Humor me. Am I correct?”

She thought about it for a minute. “Close enough. Let’s just leave it at that.”

“First time to the penitentiary, yes?”

She nodded.

“And lo and behold, you found an innocent man there. Ms. Chao, the prisons are full of innocent men; in fact, they are filled with nothing but innocent men. I have been practicing forensic psychology for almost twenty years; I have yet to meet a man in prison who did the crime. One million innocent men behind bars. Amazing. No wonder crime is on the rise. All the villains are still on the streets. Please, Ms. Chao, no innocent-men stories. I don’t know what brought you to the prison, but the innocent-man story gets the inmate an hour, maybe two, alone with a lawyer. An attractive woman like yourself, they probably had a raffle to see who’d get to look up your skirt.”

She slid one hand down from her lap to smooth her hem across her thigh. Satisfied that I was merely rude, she was about to fire a response.

I put up my hands in surrender. “Please, Ms. Chao. I get calls or visits like this all the time. If you want to interest me in a project, bring me something truly rare, a culpable convict, a man who says he did it, or better yet, the rarest of all — a remorseful man, a man tortured by guilt over the horrors he inflicted on other people. For that you have my undivided time and attention.”

I looked down at the exam I had been grading. Her chair didn’t move.

“I don’t know what else you have going on in your life, Dr. Triplett, that could be more important than saving an innocent man’s life, but I’m not going to let you run me off with your cynicism.” She pushed the file toward me. “Don’t read it. It’s on your head. If they execute an innocent man how will you explain that you didn’t have time even to look at the file?” Her jaw was determined but her eyes glistened with oncoming defeat.

“I’m going to do everything I can for my client. He is not going to die because I didn’t turn over every rock or look into every corner.”

“And what rock am I under, Ms. Chao? Who sent you to me?”

“Mr. Talaverde did.”

“Paul Talaverde? My old friend?” I smiled at the memory.

“Yes. I work in the pro bono section of the firm.”

“What did he say?”

“I’d really rather Mr. Talaverde talk to you. It was his idea.”

“No, no, no. You’re going to do whatever it takes for your client, remember? This is what it takes; if you want me to read this file you tell me what Paul Talaverde said.”

She smiled at me. “And if I do, you’ll agree to read the file?”

I shook my head sadly. “No, you have no leverage here. I’m mildly curious, you’re desperate.” I pushed the file back at her.

“Okay, you asked for it. He said you used to be the best forensic psychologist around, but that you were burned out now. Actually, he said you pretended to be burned out, but that you could still be seduced if the case was interesting enough. He said that if that didn’t work, I should try to shame you into it. You had always been vulnerable to that, and probably still were.”

“Anything else?”

She looked away and pursed her mouth in distaste. “He said I should start with you because your contract at the university forbids you from doing private-practice work for a fee. So, if you took the case...”

“The price was right. Paul say anything else?”

“No, that was it.”

“Then we’re still friends. Tell him he was right on two counts. Now, I have a couple of questions for you, Ms. Chao.”

She brushed an eave of lustrous black hair out of her face and clasped her hands around her knee, a perfect impression of the earnest student eager to please.

“Who did you talk to at the prison? You said ‘we’ believe there is a terrible miscarriage? Truth or seduction, Ms. Chao?”

“Truth, Dr. Triplett. Our firm got a call from Otis Weems, he was original counsel on this case, saying that one of the doctors at the prison had called him very concerned about Earl, that’s Earl Munsey, the defendant.” She pointed to the case file.

“Mr. Weems didn’t want to get into it, you know the ineffective-counsel issues, so it was assigned to me. I went up to the prison to talk to the doctor. Then I talked to Earl Munsey. Obviously you think I’m a naive fool, but I’m convinced that Earl Munsey didn’t do it and they are going to execute an innocent man.”

“What did the doctor say?”

“He said Earl was deteriorating as the execution date approached.”

“Deteriorating how?”

“You name it. He paced his cell at all hours. He wouldn’t leave for exercise. He was convinced that they would move up the date and take him right off the yard. He stopped eating. Then last week he started crying all the time, calling for his mother. He started banging his head against the walls of his cell, he tore off his fingernails digging at the brick.”

“You’ve never been on death row, have you?”

“No. Don’t ever want to, either.”

“It’s ugly, very ugly. It’s cases like this that make people question what we’re doing. We destroy another human being’s sense of dignity, reduce them to a gibbering gobbet of fear. Why? Then you remember what they did to some other human being and it gets real complicated. At least it does for me.”

“Are you in favor of the death penalty?”

“I think in some cases it’s just. There are some people who do things for which they should forfeit their lives. But then I don’t believe in the sanctity of life. Suicide makes sense to me, so does abortion. What I think is neither here nor there. What you are describing happens all the time. The law prohibits the execution of a mentally ill person. But then, who wouldn’t be mentally ill at the prospect of death by electrocution? The prison hospitals routinely medicate prisoners to near-comas as their dates approach so they won’t act in such a way as to appear mentally ill and avoid execution. It’s a hell of a choice for the doctors. Do nothing and watch your patients shit themselves like crazed rats and then get executed anyway, or trank them to the eyeballs so they’re easier to kill. So far you haven’t told me anything unusual to warrant looking into this case. It’s interesting that the doctor called his attorney, most of the time they wouldn’t bother. What’s got you so convinced this guy is innocent, not just terrified?”

“When I got there to see him he was curled up on the floor, rocking back and forth, crying for his mother, saying, ‘I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it,’ over and over again. I just watched him through the window of his cell. When I went in he didn’t even know I was in the room. Nothing changed. I told him who I was. Nothing. No new evidence, no claims that someone else did it or he was framed. He didn’t ask me to represent him. Just rocking and crying.”

“Did he know you were coming?”

“No. It was on the spur of the moment. The prison doctor had called his attorney, who called us. Mr. Talaverde asked me to go up right away. I didn’t tell the doctor I was coming, neither did Mr. Talaverde. We didn’t even agree to look into it, so his attomey couldn’t have told him anything. I checked with the doctor. Weems hadn’t gotten back to him.”

“All right. Leave me the file. I’ll read it tonight and call you tomorrow.” She was right, I didn’t have anything more important to do.

“Here’s my home number,” she said as she wrote on the back of a business card. “My son’s been sick. I may not be in the office tomorrow.” She slid the card over to me. I put it in the file.

I finished my workout, showered, changed, made a pitcher of gin and tonic, and set it on the patio table next to the file. I put a fresh, clean legal pad and pen on the other side. I poured a drink, sat down, and opened the Earl Munsey file.

Earl Munsey had been nineteen when he was arrested for the murders of Joleen Pennybacker, Martha Dombrowski, and Eleanor Gelman. Pennybacker was found in a model home by a real-estate agent, Dombrowski in an empty house by the residents when they returned from a trip, and Gelman in a rental condo, by the next occupants. At first the three women appeared to have been murdered where they were found, with the murder weapons at the scene: Pennybacker’s skull crushed by a blood-covered wooden stick; Dombrowski shot in the head by the .32 caliber gun found next to her body; and Gelman bludgeoned by the fifteen-pound dumbbell near her.

Medical examination revealed that these were postmortem wounds and that each woman had been strangled by a soft ligature, perhaps rubber tubing. They had all been sexually assaulted before death, with bruising of the genital area but no penetration. There were no hair samples or bodily fluids at the scene of the crime. In addition, each victim had been bled, probably by syringe, and splashes of their blood were found at the next crime scene. They had been murdered elsewhere and placed at the scenes.

I picked up the crime-scene psychological profile. The profiler had been Warren Schuster, trained at Quantico, now a consultant in private practice.

All three crime scenes had a number of similarities. The women were partially clothed and appeared to have been killed by surprise, in the middle of an activity: Pennybacker sitting in front of a makeup mirror; Dombrowski in the kitchen, in front of an open refrigerator; and Gelman in the foyer with money in her hand, perhaps making change for a delivery. The reality of the murders was quite the opposite. All three endured multiple, near-death strangulations along with repeated, unsuccessful attempts at penetration both anal and vaginal.

Schuster concluded that the crimes represented two levels of reality. One, the final scenes of partially clad women, surprised and quickly killed, was based on an actual event, probably from the killer’s adolescence. The killer had been, perhaps, a peeping Tom who had been caught by a woman, maybe even reported to the police, hence the undress, the surprise, their being in the middle of ordinary activities. The postmortem wounds were the revenge of the discovered voyeur for her reporting him to the authorities, or laughing at him when she discovered him. The actual murders were the enactments of his fantasies. What he wanted to do to the women as he watched them. What he hadn’t done the first time.

Schuster suggested they look for a white male, early twenties, with a history of sexual offenses such as obscene phone calls, exposing himself, peeping into houses. He would have an extensive collection of pornography, probably emphasizing sadomasochistic themes, and have at least one camera with telephoto lenses. I’d have said the same thing.

The police put that together with the commonalities of the locations and began to look at delivery men, cable installers, cleaning services, utility repairmen, mailmen. They were linking the profile to those who had the opportunity to get into the locations with the bodies. They also videotaped the crowds that showed up at each crime scene.

There at the intersection of history, opportunity, and obsession stood Earl Munsey, a vocational-school work-study employee of Beauty Kleen Restorations, Inc., a cleaning service with contracts that included all three locations. At fifteen, Earl had been arrested on a charge that he had spied on a neighbor going from her bedroom to her shower. That charge brought forth three other complainants. He was convicted and given a suspended sentence and placed in a residential facility for a year. He continued with outpatient counseling and community-service hours cleaning the bathrooms at the city park. That led to his employment with Beauty Kleen. A search warrant of his parents’ home turned up dozens of bondage magazines and videos, but no cameras. He also had a file about all the crimes sealed in a plastic bag and suspended from the floor vent in his bedroom into the ductwork. Earl had keys to all the locations, and although he was not assigned to the crews that were cleaning them, he could have easily gained access with the bodies. He was in the videotapes of the crowds at all three crime scenes. The neighbors all described Earl as a “strange duck,” a “lurker,” not a stalker, but always in the background, watching women, then scurrying off when their eyes met his.

I flipped over to the counseling notes from the residential facility. Psychological testing showed that Earl had an IQ of 82, was dyslexic, learning disabled by a sequential processing disorder, and attention deficit disordered. He had poor impulse controls, was often flooded by his feelings, used fantasy to excess to relieve chronic feelings of depression and emptiness. He was passive, easily suggestible, quite concrete in his thinking and rigid in his judgments. The therapist noted that Earl was unable to articulate why he had been watching the women and denied doing it even though there had been numerous witnesses. Therapy was eventually terminated as unproductive, and he was recommended for a job that was structured and did not involve contact with the public. That was the last anyone heard of Earl Munsey for three years.

The police had all they needed for an arrest. Earl was Mirandized and waived having an attorney present. Prosecutors would later argue that his psychological evaluation was not known to them at the time and that the standard error of the measure of an IQ of 82 could place it in the average range and his consent should have been considered competent. He was questioned by Detectives Ermentraut and Bigelow for almost forty-eight straight hours. At the end of which Earl Munsey signed a confession to the three murders.

I read the confession. There was no mention of how Earl Munsey lured the women into his van, which was presumed to be where the killings took place, or managed to keep from leaving a single piece of forensic evidence tying him to the crime. Earl claimed to have been in a fog and that it “wasn’t him” who had picked up the women. The murders, however, were described in gruesome detail.

The prosecution charged Earl with capital murder while committing felony sexual assault, attempted rape, and sodomy and asked for the death penalty. Without too much protest from Otis Weems, they got it.

Clipped to the back of the file was a bag of photographs from the crime scenes. I looked at the backs and arranged them in order. There was no identification of who took the photos, Ermentraut or Bigelow.

First was Joleen Pennybacker on the floor in front of a makeup mirror. Perfumes and potpourri were spilled on the floor. She was nude except for a pair of fur wraps around her neck. Next to her was a bloody wooden stick matted with her hair and brains.

Martha Dombrowski lay on the kitchen floor clad only in a college T-shirt. Food from the open refrigerator lay around her, a can, ground meat, donuts, and a .32-caliber pistol that had left her with a small round hole in the middle of her forehead.

Eleanor Gelman was in the entrance foyer, also clad only in a college T-shirt. She had a twenty-dollar bill in her right hand, and there were some coins around her left hand. Next to her was a bloody, crusted dumbbell with five-pound plates.

I closed the file. Monica Chao had things to work with, especially the confession, but I didn’t see how I could help her. The profile and crime-scene analysis made sense to me. I could see Earl Munsey doing this crime. Maybe the confession was coerced and there were gaps in it. Maybe they shouldn’t have convicted him. Maybe she could parlay that into a new trial. That didn’t mean he didn’t do it. Not in the post-O. J. world.

I called Monica Chao and told her I had no ideas and that I would return the file to her. She asked if I could come by tonight. She had some more information that she had received by court order and she didn’t want to waste time. I got directions to her place and drove over.

She opened the door and motioned me inside. Monica wore running shoes, jean skirt, and a cream-colored blouse knotted at the midriff. Her hair was pulled back into a glossy ponytail. A young boy, perhaps five, stood in the center of the living room.

“This is my son, Justin. Justin, say hello to Dr. Triplett.” Justin approached with his hand out but a somber look on his face. We shook hands and he turned back to his game on the floor.

“Listen, I just wanted to drop this off. I’ll let you get back to whatever...”

She ushered me into the kitchen. “Justin’s upset right now. His father and I separated a couple of months ago. He keeps hoping we’ll get back together again. Whenever somebody comes over, he’s hoping it’s his dad. When it’s not, he’s disappointed.”

“Listen, I don’t have anything to tell you. Not from a psychological point of view. You have the confession to work with...”

“No, I don’t. Weems argued that on the first appeal. That and the consent. He lost. I don’t have anything. Before you give up on this, look at what I got today at the office. It’s the photos from Ermentraut and Bigelow. Along with their notes. The photos you saw were from the first officers on the scene, the patrolmen.”

“Okay, I’ll look at them,” I said resentfully, ready to be out from under one of her rocks. “How late are you going to be up tonight? I’ll drop them back when I’m done.”

“You can do it here. I’ve got an office set up next to the living room. Justin and I were about to eat. Why don’t you look at the stuff, stay for dinner, and tell me what you think. I’m making hot-and-sour soup and Dan Dan noodles, it’s Justin’s favorite.”

“What’s Dan Dan noodles?”

“It’s a spicy chili peanut sauce over noodles. Very good.”

“Okay. Where are the photos?” The sooner I started, the sooner I was done.

“In my office, on the desk. I’ll let you know when we’re ready to eat.”

I walked out of the kitchen and across the living room. Justin was on his elbows and knees, staring down at a board on the floor before him. His chin rested in the cup of his palms.

I turned into the first door on the left, sat down at Monica’s desk, and put the file next to her printer. I picked up the photographs. They were larger than the ones the patrolmen had taken. I propped them up side by side in front of the computer screen. I flipped up Ermentraut’s notebook and read his notes.

Joleen Pennybacker: four bloodstains on floor; furs not part of house decor; potpourri?: lab says it’s dried thyme leaves; perfumes: Escada and Opium, from the house; wooden stick: solid maple — look at local cabinetmakers, furniture repair shops.

I looked at Joleen Pennybacker: young, slim, ghostly pale in the harsh flash light. The pool of blood under her head black, not red. Lying on her back, eyes wide, hands up, fingers spread as if startled by someone standing in front of her. Had she been sitting? Why no chair? The two furs draped over her shoulder and around her neck. Trying them on before she got dressed? A gift? The sensuous feel of fur on skin? The potpourri and perfume spilled on the floor. As if she’d pulled them over in a struggle or standing up to flee. Someone she’d seen in the mirror. The bloody stick that stopped her.

I picked up Martha Dombrowski’s picture. I tilted it under the light then reached over and turned on Monica’s desk lamp. In the corners, four dark stains. Just like the first scene. Repetition becomes ritual. Another indicator that these tableaux had symbolic meaning to the killer. He was putting order on his chaos. Shaping it to give him release from his hungers. For the moment.

Martha was older, softer. Again on her back. Nude except for the T-shirt. A college. I brought the photo closer: University of California. She, too, had her hands up as if startled and a pool of black blood under her head. There was food strewn around her and the refrigerator door was open. The dropped gun. She hears someone, has food in her hands, a midnight snack perhaps, turns, sees the killer. Only he is not a killer yet. She sees him watching her. She’s going to report him, like the first one did. He can’t let that happen. He shoots her. He drops the gun and runs. Ritual reenactments of his trauma, his shame, only he’s rewritten the end. They don’t tell, they die. He escapes to watch them again. Better yet, he does what he only dreamed of the first time. But he can’t. Even with them subdued, restrained, he can’t get it up, can’t put it in. A level of inhibition even this degree of control and power can’t conquer. Twisted religious upbringing? What did Munsey’s parents do to him?

Thank God they caught this guy. He’d have kept doing this until he was able to penetrate his victims. And then he’d have kept on anyway, just hyphenating his career: serial killer-rapist.

I looked at the notes. Food: can of baked beans, open with lid; package of ground meat; box of donuts. The food belonged to the owners of the house. T-shirt: University of California. Neither the victim nor the residents attended the school. Boyfriend? Killer? Blood not the victim’s. Match for #1. The gun was a .32-caliber H & R. No serial number. A later note said ballistics couldn’t match it with any other killings and they hadn’t been able to trace its owner.

The last picture was Eleanor Gelman. Again the four bloodstains. Again the body nude except for a college T-shirt. This time it’s the University of Richmond. Was Munsey’s first victim, the one who reported him, a college student? She’s on her back in the foyer. This time her hands have money in them. Coins all around the left one, dropped when she’s startled, a twenty in her right. For whom? Where’s her purse? I scanned the corners of the photo to see if it was on the floor or hanging from a doorknob. Why get it out to give to someone? She’s only half dressed. So many questions but the answer is always the same — silence. Her head sits in a pool of blood. Satan’s halo, viscous, sickly sweet, the light shining off bits of bone and brain. I looked at the dumbbell. There was a difference with this one. Her ankles were tied. With what?

I looked at Ermentraut’s notes. Bloodstains not the victim’s. Same as victim #2. T-shirt — victim did not go to University of Richmond. Her son? Money: 7 cents — all pennies. Ankles: rubber tubing. Chemistry supplies? M.E. says consistent with ligatures on all three victims.

I stared at all three pictures. A triptych from Earl Munsey’s unconscious. The same scene over and over again, unchanging forever. That’s one definition of hell.

“Are you staying for dinner?”

I looked down. Justin stood there just as somber as before. Dark eyes peering up from under his bowl-cut black hair.

“I was going to. Your mom offered since I’m helping her with her work. Is that okay with you?”

Justin put his hand on my arm. “Do you know my dad?”

“No, I don’t,” I said gently.

“Oh.” He turned away, then back. “Can you play with me? Just until Mom calls me to eat?”

I looked at the photos. Nothing there. I might as well play with the little guy. His dad would if he were here.

“Sure. Just until your mom calls.”

I pushed away from the console and followed him into the living room. A sliding-glass door and surrounding windows let plenty of light into the room and it bounced off the dark parquet floor. A large-screen TV sat in the center of the far wall surrounded by a built-in bookcase. I scanned the books: cookbooks, exercise books, books on divorce and child-rearing, romances, mysteries, arts and crafts, everything but law books. A low, cream-colored leather sofa and chair set encircled a wood and glass coffee table. A free-form cypress base with bronze claws gripping a palette-shaped glass top.

Justin sat down in between the table and the sofa and picked up a plastic frame. I thought about squeezing in next to him but chose an adjoining side of the table. His mother poked her head around the corner.

“We’ll eat in just a couple of minutes.” Then she lifted her head up towards me.

“Anything?”

“Where do you stand on feeding the messenger?”

“We feed them in these parts. Good news or bad.”

“I still don’t see anything.”

“Okay.”

Justin scooted over towards me and handed me the frame. It was covered with numbered plastic shingles.

“How do you play, Justin?”

“It’s a memory game. You have to remember where the matching pictures are. When they match you take them off the board.”

“Show me. We’ll do this one for practice. It won’t count, okay?”

“Okay. See, here is a pony, and this one is a pony. So I take them off.” He lifted two numbered shingles, revealing the ponies. Off they came, revealing another layer underneath.

“What’s this, Justin?” I asked, noticing that he was sitting right up next to my leg and starting to list to starboard. I hoped that he wouldn’t climb into my lap, so I called out for help.

“How’s dinner coming?”

“Couple more minutes, that’s all.” And so the Titanic was lost.

“This is the next part,” he said, now looking up at me from the space between the board and my chest.

“Once you uncover the board, you have to guess the puzzle. That’s hard. I have a good memory, but my mom gets the puzzles right. That’s how she wins. She’s really smart. She’s a lawyer.”

“I’m sure she is, Justin. Since this is just practice, I’m going to look at the puzzle. Maybe I can show you some tricks. Help you beat your mom.”

“Cool,” he said and clapped his hands.

I pulled the backing up and looked at it. “You know, Justin, if your memory is good, you might try to uncover the corners first. That puts a frame on the puzzle. It’s a lot easier to figure out from the edges in instead of the middle out.”

A chill went down my back and out my arms as the picture in my head disappeared and a great white shape rushed to breach into recognition on the vast empty sea of my mind.

I stood up, handed Justin the board, and hurried back to the office. Sliding into the chair, I pulled an empty legal pad in front of me and stared at the pictures.

“Aren’t we going to play anymore?” Justin asked forlornly, from the doorway.

I looked over my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Justin. This is very important. I’ll play with you when I’m done. I promise. Okay?”

“You promise?”

“Yes. I promise, Justin.”

He stood there trying to decide the worth of my word, weighing it against the collection of promises he already held. He turned and walked away. I heard the shingles spill onto the wooden floor.

His mother appeared in the doorway. “What happened? He just ran into his room. Dinner’s on.”

“I’m sorry. I was playing with him when I got this idea about Munsey and the murders. I bolted over here to try it out and I told him I couldn’t play with him now. I’ll just scoop this stuff up and take it back to my place. Let you and him get on with dinner.”

She came towards me. “Do you have something?”

“No, no. I have an idea. I need to try it out. It’s probably nothing. I really need to get on it while it’s fresh, before I lose it.” I started to take the pictures down.

“No, no,” she said, palms up in retreat. “Stay here. I’ll close the door. We’ll be quiet. Do what you have to. We don’t have any time to spare. If you’ve got an idea, run with it. Do you want any food?”

“No, thank you. How about a cup of coffee? You might want to put on a pot. This could take awhile.”

“Sure. Coming right up.” She shook her fists in excitement and disappeared.

I wondered if this scene had been played out before, with her husband. The disappointed child, the abandoned dinner, work demands taking priority. Eventually sliding from a separation that was impromptu and random to one that was formalized and permanent.

I didn’t need food. I was burning up excitement as fuel, the same excitement I felt every time I had panned golden nuggets of meaning out of the onrushing blur of life. So far, that had turned out to be the one enduring passion of my life.

I drew diagrams and schematics, scribbled translations and made lists and erased them all. The hours wore on. The refills of coffee told me so. The trash can filled, then overflowed. I kept drawing and writing. Eventually, the tide of erasures receded and I was left with a single page of work. The clock said two a.m. when Monica knocked on the doorframe.

“How’s it going?”

“Gone as far as I can. I’m done.”

“Want something to eat?”

“No, thanks. I’m caffeinated to the eyeballs. I can’t eat when I’m wired like this.”

She slid down along the wall until she sat cross-legged on the floor. She sipped from a steamy mug. “So?” she said, dipping her head in anticipation, her eyes as somber as her son’s had been.

I took off my glasses, rubbed my eyes for a minute, put the glasses back on, and turned to the pictures.

“I was playing that game with Justin and telling him how frames help solve puzzles, when it occurred to me. There were frames on these murder scenes. See here.” I pointed to the bloodstains around each body. “They aren’t from the victims. Ermentraut’s notes say that, or I think they do. They’re unnecessary to the scene. There’s plenty of blood all over the place from the head injuries. Why the frame? What does a frame do?”

Monica shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never actually been at a crime scene.”

“A frame tells you what the field of information is. What’s inside is important, what’s outside is not. Serial killers don’t frame their work. They know what’s important. They arrange it just so. They remove what’s irrelevant. When it’s just right, when it’s satisfying, they stop. That’s the ‘art,’ if you want, in the composition.

“If Schuster’s right, then this is Earl Munsey’s ritual reenactment of his shame, changed to include his fantasized torture and rape and revenge. Very satisfying. This is a scene by Earl for Earl. There’s no need for a frame. Suppose, just suppose, this isn’t a construction for the killer’s own use, own pleasure. Who is it for? It’s a construction. There’s no question about that. He brought the bodies, the weapons, the blood, the props. Who’s going to see this? The police. It’s a message to them. They need a frame. They have ignorant eyes. They don’t know what to attend to, what to ignore. He’s helping us poor dumb bastards along. He’s jumping up and down, waving his arms, saying Here I am, here I am.”

“Did you figure out the messages?” A tentative, hopeful smile emerged across her narrow oval face.

“I think so.”

“What do they say?”

“Bear with me. I have to explain this step by step. The logic seemed inescapable to me when I was doing it. But delusions can be quite logical, too. You have to understand it and believe it. If I can’t convince you, you can’t convince anyone else.”

“The typical way of interpreting a crime scene for clues to the killer’s personality is actuarial and symbolic. What do most serial killers have in common? What are the significant correlates? What needs do certain acts satisfy? For example, why mutilate the face? Why take souvenirs? And so on. We’re talking about translating their hidden, obscure inner language because they’re talking to themselves, not us.

“Suppose this guy is talking to us. He speaks our language. How do we read? Left to right. Top to bottom. So I looked at what was inside the frames. Here is Joleen Pennybacker.”

I picked up the photo and used my hands to frame her body. “Left to right: furs, body, potpourri. Top to bottom: perfume, bloody stick. Gibberish, right? That’s what I’ve been doing all night. Trying every different category that might describe each element, trying to make sentences out of them.”

“Have you?”

“Yes.”

“What do they say?”

“First, there are rules to the messages. All languages have grammar and syntax. Ignore the bodies. They’re irrelevant, zeros, place-holders. Without them there is no crime scene. No crime. He killed these women as bait. To draw us in as an audience. That’s why there’s no penetration. His driving need isn’t sexual, it’s narcissism. He demonstrates his power by leaving an abundance of clues that nobody gets. He’s diddling us, not them. He’s been laughing at us for two years now.”

“Those poor women. You’re saying he killed them just to show us how smart he is, that he could get away with it. This is incredible.” She shuddered.

“Don’t say that. It has to be credible. Otherwise Earl Munsey fries for this. His eyes explode, his blood boils, his hair bursts into flame. And this bastard laughs all the way to hell.

“This is Joleen Pennybacker. Furs; thyme, not potpourri. It was all dried thyme; scents, not perfumes. The murder weapon, a blood-covered stick, a red stick. Furs, thyme, scents, red stick. First time since Redstick. He’s announcing his appearance. He’s telling us where he came from. I did this one and I said, Triplett, you’re crazy. You’ve tortured the data beyond recognition. You’re the infinite number of monkeys. Voila! Random hammering on the keys and we get Hamlet. Once, perhaps. What if they’re all meaningful and related? God couldn’t make enough monkeys to pull that off.”

I picked up the next picture. “This is Martha Dombrowski. Remember, ignore her body. Left to right: can, not food, not beans; look at the T-shirt: University of California, U C is visible, the rest needs a magnifying glass; and meat. Then: a donut and a gun. Can U C meat. Donut a gun. Can you see me? Done it again. Again. Number two. It only makes sense as the second of a series. They either both make sense or neither of them does.”

I exchanged photos. “Here’s Eleanor Gelman. These coins, I counted them. All pennies. Copper. Coppers. The shirt: University of Richmond, same maker. UR, then a dumbbell. The twenty, that stumped me. Money, greenbacks, dollars, currency, a bill, Bill, his name? It’s Jackson’s face on the bill. See how her thumb is pressed over it. Then her ankles. Tied? Knot? Tube? Hose? Bound.” I stopped to see if she was convinced. She looked like she was trying to suppress a grimace. Her plum-colored lips darkened.

“Cops, you are dumbbells, Jackson bound.” He’s going to Jackson. That’s where his next victims will be found. Some town named Jackson.”

I leaned back. Monica looked into her cup. No help there.

“I know: A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Perhaps, but I know one thing for certain. A demonstrable scientific fact.”

“What’s that?”

“If I’m right, Earl Munsey couldn’t have killed those women.”

“Why?”

“He’s dyslexic, and he has a sequencing disorder. He reverses letters and words. He couldn’t put a rebus together.”

“A rebus?”

“That’s what I think they are. It’s a kind of puzzle where images stand for the syllables of words.”

“We’re halfway home. If I’m right, then Earl Munsey is indeed innocent. Now we have to prove that I’m right. But that’s for tomorrow,” I looked at the clock, “or later, whichever comes first.”

“You can crash here if you want. I made up the bed in the guest room.”

“No, I don’t think so. Besides, wouldn’t that get you in hot water with your ex? Most custody orders forbid overnight guests of the opposite sex.”

“Yeah, well, John isn’t in any position to dictate terms to me. Not with him out every night being true to his new gay identity. I may have been just a treatment plan for John when we were married, but I’m a whole lot more trouble now.” She nodded, agreeing with herself.

I remembered why I quit doing custody work and switched to criminal. Too much violence in the custody work.

“I just think it’d be confusing for Justin to find me here when he wakes up. Tell him I haven’t forgotten my promise. I’ll play with him next time I’m over.” I wondered if she’d remember to do that. If not, I’d call him myself. If you couldn’t keep your word to a child your priorities were in serious disarray.

I put my work in the file, took my mug to the kitchen pass-through, and wished Monica good night.

“Thank you for everything. Even if you can’t prove your theory, I appreciate how hard you’ve worked, and I’ll tell Earl you did all you could. But I have faith in you. If it’s there, you’ll find it, that’s what Paul Talaverde said about you.”

“Yeah, well, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. I’ll call you when I know something.” I waved and turned down the steps.

“Good night, Dr. Triplett. And good luck.”

She was still outlined in the doorway, her head resting against the frame, when I drove away.

The first thing I did the next day was call Ermentraut. He was in court, so I left a message. Then I tried Bigelow.

“Homicide, Detective Bigelow.”

“Detective, this is Dr. Ransom Triplett. I wonder if I could have a couple of minutes of your time.”

“Couple of minutes, sure. What about?”

“Earl Munsey.”

“Oh Christ. Are you one of those bleeding hearts that thinks we shouldn’t execute this bastard? Let me tell you something. I was there. At the scene. At the morgue. I saw what he did. I’ll sleep like a baby the day they serve him up the juice of justice. Goodbye...”

“Whoa, whoa, just a second, please. This is not about whether he should be executed. I’ve been going over the file as a consultant to his attorney. Personally, I think you guys have the right man.”

“Damn straight we do. And another thing, that confession was pristine. Clean all through. We never touched him. We read him his rights. What were we supposed to do? Talk him out of it? Oh no, Mr. Munsey, that would be unwise, here, let us call a lawyer for you. Why don’t we just stop trying to catch anybody? He freaking confessed. What do these people want?”

“Well, detective, I just want to ask you a couple of small questions, so I can explain them to his attorney. It just might put this whole thing to rest.”

“Okay, what is it?”

“The things that were around the body. That Munsey planted at the scene...”

“You mean like the gun, the tubing, that stuff?”

“Yeah. Did any of that lead anywhere?”

“No. The stuff at the first scene came from the model home. Except the herbs that he spilled. We took his picture to local groceries. Nothing. The food was from the owners. The gun was a Saturday-night special, cold, no serial numbers. We hit all the gun shops, the known dealers. No one could ID Munsey. Same thing for the tubing, the dumb-bell. He could have gotten them anywhere. Yard sales — hell, he could have stolen them out of a garage. None of that stuff went anywhere.”

“Last question. The blood spatters on the floor. Detective Ermentraut’s notes aren’t clear. The blood spatters at the scenes aren’t the victims’. Whose were they?”

“Uh, let me remember. I think it was victim number one’s blood at the second scene and number two’s at the next one. Yeah, that’s right.”

“Could you tell me the victims’ blood types?”

“Yeah, hold on. We pulled that jacket on account of people like you. This one is not gonna get away.”

I doodled on my pad. Zeros, large ones, small ones. Then I linked them. All the little naughts going nowhere. Earl Munsey was moving slowly, inexorably towards eternity.

“Okay. Here’s the lab report. You want the DNA markers and everything, or just the type?”

“Blood type is fine.”

“Girl number one was O positive. Girl number two was AB. Girl number three was B positive. No, that’s the stains. The girls were AB, B positive, and A.”

“You ever find the third girl’s blood?”

“No. He must have stashed it somewhere. We figure he’d have used it at the next scene. But then there wasn’t a next scene.”

“Thanks, detective.”

“No problem. Six days and it won’t matter anymore.”

“Yeah,” I said and hung up. Unless you’re wrong. Then six days from now it’ll matter forever.

I spent the next two days pursuing my theory without any success, although my geographical knowledge was enormously enriched. I learned that there were eighteen Jacksons in the United States, strung from California to New Jersey and from Minnesota to Louisiana. Almost all were small towns with few homicides and not one that looked at all like my rebus killer.

Then I tried Red Stick. Make no mistake about it. There is not one Redstick, U.S.A. There are six Red Oaks and five Redwoods and I called them all. No murders at all like mine.

I sat on the porch, watching one of Earl Munsey’s last four sunsets. A gin and tonic slowly diluted on the table next to me. I had nothing. A theory that tortured me with its plausibility, that I refused to accept as a statistical chimera, a product of just enough monkeys scribbling associations to three pictures. Maybe it was data rape, me forcing myself all over the pictures. They yielded up a facsimile of meaning, enough to get me to roll off, grunting in satisfaction, while they lay there, mute in the darkness, their secrets still unknown.

Well, it hadn’t been good for me, either. We were running out of time and I had no ideas, bright or otherwise. The phone rang.

“Dr. Triplett. This is Monica Chao. I was wondering how you were doing. We’re running out of time.”

“I know. How am I doing? Not well at all. I’ve called every Jackson, every Redwood, every Red Oak in the country. Nothing. I don’t know what else to do. Maybe it’s all a mirage, an illusion. They aren’t rebuses at all. The fact that I’ve created these sentences is a monument to human inventiveness in the face of complexity and ambiguity. Or I’m right. They are rebuses and I’m just not good enough to translate them correctly. Maybe we need more monkeys. I don’t know. Whoever the killer is, he and I don’t seem to speak the same language.”

I forgot all about Monica. I felt an avalanche slowing, turning on itself, turning into a kaleidoscope, slowing further, settling, stopping, halted. The pattern blazed through my mind. I began to laugh, a cleansing cackle of satisfaction. Had I seen the truth or only applied even finer filigree to my delusion? One call would tell all. I heard someone calling my name in the distance.

“Monica, I have to go. I’ll call you right back. I think I’ve solved it. I hope I have.”

I dialed the operator, got the area code I wanted, and then dialed information for the police department’s central phone number. I was shuttled through departments toward Homicide.

A voice answered, “Thibault.”

“Baton Rouge Homicide?” I said, savoring each syllable.

“Yeah. Who is this?”

I gave my name. “Detective Thibault, I’m working on a case here in Virginia. A man’s going to be executed in four days for a series of murders up here. Some last-minute evidence has emerged that may link him to murders elsewhere. Baton Rouge in particular. If so, they would have been at least three years ago. Were you in Homicide then?”

“Doctor, I investigated Cain. I’ve been twenty-seven years in Homicide in this city. There ain’t hardly a murder here I don’t know something about, but they’re also startin’ to run together. I’m due to retire end of the year. I hope this one had a flourish, or four days won’t do it.”

“Our killer,” I said, glad to relinquish ownership, “had an unusual MO. He only killed women and then he placed the bodies in conspicuous locations, where they were sure to be found.”

“Got to do better than that, Doc. That’s half of our murders. How’d he do ’em?”

“He strangled them after an attempted sexual assault. But at the crime scenes there were weapons found, or rather planted, so that it looked like the victims had been killed where they were found. Clubs, guns, that sort of thing.”

“That doesn’t ring any bells. Anything else?”

“He took some blood from each victim and he’d spatter it around the next crime scene.”

Thibault was silent for a minute. When he spoke his voice was strangely hoarse. “Your boy’s gonna go when, four days, you said?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Let me ask you a question. Your first victim, what kind of blood type?”

“AB, but—”

We finished the sentence in harmony. “The bloodstains were O positive.”

“Yes,” I said, flooded with elation. “When did these killings occur?”

“They started five years ago. There were four of them over the course of a year. Then they stopped.”

“That’s great. Do you have the lab work on these stains?”

“Yeah. They’re in the file. I’d have to go dig it out, but I could fax it to you. Take an hour or so.”

“If the blood’s a match, our guy couldn’t have done it. He was in a residential facility that whole year. This is great. Listen, I don’t want to be rude, but I’ve got to call the lawyer with this news.”

Thibault’s voice was thick and weary when he spoke.

“As soon as you know, Doc, call me right back. You see, if your boy didn’t do it, and that’s our blood at the scene, then I’ve got a call to make. ’Cause our guy didn’t do it, either. And his next of kin aren’t going to like that one little bit.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I would like to thank the following people for their help with this story: noted defense attorney Peter Greenspun; Dr. Jane Greenstein; Constance Knott; Officer Adam K. Schutz; Dr. Mark E. Schutz; and my son, Jakob Lindenberger-Schutz, who solved it in a flash.