Show of Evil

Five

Harvey St Claire was on to something.

Vail could tell the minute he and Parver got off the lift. The heavyset man was sitting on the edge of a chair beside the main computer, leaning forward with his forearms on his thighs. And his left leg was jiggling. That was the tipoff, that nervous leg.

Sitting beside St Claire was Ben Meyer, who was as tall and lean as St Claire was short and stubby. Meyer had a long, intense face and a shock of black hair, and he was dressed, as was his custom, in a pinstriped suit, white shirt, and sombre tie. St Claire, as was his custom, wore a blue and yellow flannel shirt, red suspenders, sloppy blue jeans, heavy shoes, and a White Sox windbreaker.

Meyer, at thirty-two, was the resident computer expert and had designed the elabourate system that hooked the DA's office with HITS, the Homicide Investigation and Tracking System that linked police departments all over the country. St Claire, who was fifty-two, had, during his twenty-eight years in law enforcement, tracked moonshiners in Georgia and Tennessee, wetbacks along the Texican border, illegal gun smugglers out of Canada, illegal aliens in the barrios of Los Angeles and San Diego, and some of the meanest wanted crooks in the country when he was with the US Marshal's Service.

Meyer was a specialist in fraud. It was Meyer who had first detected discrepancies that had brought down two city councilmen for misappropriating funds and accepting kickbacks. Later, in his dramatic closing argument, Meyer had won the case with an impassioned plea for the rights of the taxpayers. St Claire was a hunch player, a man who had a natural instinct for link analysis - putting together seemingly disparate facts and projecting them into a single conclusion. Most criminal investigators plotted the links on paper and in computers, connecting bits and pieces of information until they began to form patterns or relationships. St Claire did it in his head, as if he could close his eyes and see the entire graph plotted out on the backs of his eyelids. He also had a phenomenal memory for crime facts. Once he heard, read, or saw a crime item he never forgot it.

When Meyer and St Claire got together, it meant trouble. Vail ignored Naomi, who was motioning for him to come to his office, and stood behind Meyer and St Claire.

'Here's what I got in mind,' St Claire said. 'I wanna cross-match missing people and unsolved homicides, then see if we have any overlap in dates. Can we do that?'

'State level?'

'Yeah, to start with. Exclude this county for the time being.'

'Nothing to it,' Meyer said, his fingers clicking on the computer keyboard.

'What the hell're you two up to?' Vail asked.

Hunch,' St Claire said, still watching the screen. His blue eyes glittered behind wire-rimmed glasses that kept sliding down to the end of his nose.

'Everybody's got a hunch. I had to listen to Abel's hunches all the way through breakfast. A hunch about what?'

'About this new thing,' St Claire said.

'What new thing?'

St Claire's upper lip bulged with a wad of snuff. Without taking his eyes off the big screen of the computer, he spat delicately into a silver baby cup he carried at all times for just that purpose.

'The landfill murders,' he said. 'We're trying to get a leg up on it.'

'Well, Eckling's got seven days before we officially enter the case.'

'Cold trail by then.'

'Let's wait until Okimoto tells us something,' Vail said.

'That could be a couple days,' St Claire said. 'I just wanna run some ideas through the computer network. No big thing.'

'Who says they were murdered, anyway?' Meyer said.

'Hell,' said St Claire, dropping another dollop of snuff into his baby cup and smiling, 'it's too good not to be murder.'

'What's your caseload, Ben?' asked Vail.

'Four.'

'And you're playing with this thing?'

'I don't know how to run this gadget,' St Claire complained.

Vail decided to humour him. 'You can have the whiz kid here until after lunch,' he said. 'Then Meyer's back on his cases.'

'Can't do much in three hours,' St Claire groaned.

'Then you better hurry.'

Naomi finally walked across the office and grabbed Vail by the arm. She pointed across the room to Yancey's office.

'He called ten minutes ago. I told him…'

'No. N-o,' Vail said, entering his office. He stopped short inside the door. Hanging on the coat tree behind the door were his dark blue suit and his tuxedo.

'What's this?'

'I had your stuff picked up for you. Didn't think you'd have time to get home and change.'

'Change for what?' he growled.

'You have to accompany Yancey to the opening luncheon of the State Lawyers Convention. He's the keynote speaker. High noon -'

'Oh, for Christ sake!'

'And the opening-night cocktail party is at the Marina Convention Center at six.'

'Goddamn it! Why didn't you tell me earlier?'

'I may as well give you all the bad news. Yancey wants to see you in his office. He wanted me to go down and get you.'

'Out of interrogation?'

'I explained that to him - again.'

'Tell him I'm tied up until lunchtime.'

'I don't think he'll buy it. Raymond Firestone's in there with him. Came in unannounced.'

Vail looked at her with a sickened expression. 'Saved the worst until last, huh? Just stood there and sandbagged me.'

'No, no, I'm not taking the rap for this one. You agreed to both the lunch and the cocktail party last summer.'

'And you're just reminding me now?'

'What did you want me to do, Marty, give you daily time ticks? Three days to go until the lawyers convention, two days, eighteen hours. Call you at home and wake you up. Nine hours to go!'

'Wake me up? I haven't been to bed!'

'I did not drag you out to the city dump. Parver set up the interrogation with Darby, not me. And I had nothing to do with Councilman Firestone's visit.'

Vail stared angrily across the broad expanse of the office at DA Jack Yancey's door. He knew what to expect before he walked into Yancey's office. Raymond Firestone had arrived in the city twenty years earlier with a battered suitcase, eighty dollars in his pocket, and a slick tongue. Walking door to door selling funeral insurance to the poor, he had parlayed the nickel-dime policy game into the beginnings of an insurance empire that now had offices all over the state. A bellicose and unsophisticated bully, he had, during seven years as a city councilman, perfected perfidity and patronage to a dubious art. As Abel Stenner had once observed, 'Firestone's unscrupulous enough to be twins.'

Firestone, who was supported openly by Eckling and the police union, had let it be known soon after his first election that he was going to 'put Vail in his place'. It was a shallow threat but a constant annoyance.

Firestone was seated opposite Yancey with his back to the office door and he looked back over his shoulder as Vail entered, staring at him through narrowed dubious eyes that seemed frozen in a perpetual squint. Firestone was a man of average stature with lacklustre brown hair, which he combed forward to hide a receding hairline, a small, thin-lipped mouth that was slow to smile, and the ruby, mottled complexion of a heavy drinker.

'Hello, Raymond,' Vail said, and, ignoring the chair beside Firestone, sat down in an easy chair against the wall several feet from the desk.

Firestone merely nodded.

Yancey sat behind his desk. He was a chubby, unctuous, smooth-talking con man with wavy white hair and a perpetual smile. A dark-horse candidate for DA years before, Yancey had turned out to be the ultimate bureaucrat, capitalizing on his oily charm and a natural talent for mediation and compromise, surrounding himself with bright young lawyers to do the dirty work since he had no stomach for the vigour of courtroom battles.

'We seem to have a little problem here,' Yancey started off. 'But I see no reason why we can't work it out amicably.'

Vail didn't say a word.

Like Jane Venable before him, Vail had little respect for Yancey as a litigator but liked him personally. Abandoned ten years earlier by Venable, Yancey had eagerly accepted Vail - his deadliest opponent in court - as his chief prosecutor. Their deal was simple. Yancey handled politics. Vail handled business.

'It's about this thing between you and Chief Eckling,' Yancey continued.

Vail stared at him pleasantly. The 'thing' between Vail and Eckling had been going on since long before Vail had become a prosecutor.

'It's time to bury the goddamn hatchet,' Firestone interjected.

'Oh? In whose back?' Vail asked quietly, breaking his silence.

Firestone glared at Yancey, who sighed and smiled and leaned back in his chair, making a little steeple of his fingertips and staring at the ceiling.

'That's what we want to avoid, Martin,' he said.

'Uh-huh.'

'What we're suggesting is that you back off a little bit,' Firestone said.

'That's a compromise?'

'I thought it had been agreed that the DA's office would keep out of the chief's hair for seven days after a crime. That's the deal, he gets the week. Am I right? Did we agree to that?' Firestone looked at Yancey when he said it.

'Uh-huh,' Vail answered.

Firestone turned on him and snapped, 'Then why don't you do it?'

'We do,' Vail said flatly.

'Bullshit! You and your people show up every time a felon farts in this town,' Firestone growled.

'Now, now, Raymond,' Yancey said, 'it's not uncommon for the DA to go to the scene of a crime. Usually the police appreciate the help.'

'He ain't the goddamn DA.'

'No, but he is my chief prosecutor. It's well within his jurisdiction.'

'We're talking about cooperation here,' snapped Firestone, his face turning crimson.

'Why don't I go back to my office?' Vail suggested with a smile. 'You guys are talking like I'm not even in the room. I feel like I'm eavesdropping.'

Firestone whirled on him. 'You go out of your way to make Eckling look bad,' he said, his voice beginning to rise.

'I don't have to,' Vail said. 'He does that all by himself.'

'See what I mean!' Firestone said to Yancey. 'How can Eric do his job with this smartass needling him all the time?'

'You'll excuse me,' Vail said calmly, and stood up.

'Take it easy, Marty, take it easy,' Yancey said, waving him back to his seat.

'You got a beef with me, tell me, not him,' Vail said to Firestone, his voice still calm and controlled.

'He's your boss, that's why.'

'Not in this area,' Vail said. He knew the best way to get to Firestone was to stay calm. The hint of a smile toyed with his lips. 'You know, frankly, I don't give a damn whether it pleases you or not, Raymond. You're a city boy. The county runs this office. You don't have any more clout over here than the janitor, so why don't you mind your own business and stay out of ours?'

'Jesus, Marty…' Yancey stammered.

'C'mon, Jack, I'm not going to listen to this windbag yell insults at me.'

'Goddamn it, I told you this was a waste of time, Jack,' Firestone said angrily. 'Vail isn't capable of cooperating with anybody.'

'Did you say that, Jack? Did you say I'd cooperate with them?'

'What I said was, maybe everybody could kind of stand back and cool off. What I mean is, try a little cooperation between your two departments.'

'I'm quite cool,' Vail said. 'And as far as cooperating goes, I wouldn't share my dirty socks with Eckling. He's incompetent, he's on the take, and he wouldn't know a clue if it was sitting on the end of his nose.'

'Listen here - '

'No, you listen, Councilman. I'm an officer of the court. I'm charged with the responsibility of prosecuting the cases that come before me to the best of my ability. I can't do that if I rely on Eric Eckling. Two years ago he was ready to drop the case against your two buddies on the council. We took it away from him and they're both doing hard time in Rock Island for malfeasance.' Vail stopped for a moment, then added, 'Maybe that's the problem. Maybe you're just getting jumpy, Raymond.'

Firestone began to shake with anger. His face now turned bright vermilion. He started to speak, but the words stuck in his throat.

'Tell you what,' Vail went on. 'You throw Eckling out on his ass where he belongs and put a police chief instead of a pimp in the job and you won't have a problem.'

'Goddamn you!' Firestone screamed, and stomped out of the office.

Yancey watched him leave. He blew a breath out. A line of sweat formed on his forehead. 'Jesus, Marty, you gotta be such a hard-ass?' he said.

'You and I have a deal, Jack. I run the prosecutor's office and you do the politicking. I don't ask for your help, don't ask for mine, okay?'

'He throws a lot of weight in the party.' Yancey had, within his grasp, the thing he had yearned for all his life, an appointment to the bench. But he needed the support of every Democrat in the county, so at this moment his chief concern was keeping peace in the family. Vail knew the scenario.

'So throw just as much weight round as Firestone does. Stop acting like the Pillsbury Doughboy and kick his ass back.'

'I didn't mean for you to—'

'Sure you did. We've been through this song and dance before. You don't need Firestone anyway, his whole district's union and blue collar. Solid Democrats. They wouldn't go Republican if Jimmy Hoffa rose up from the dead and ran on the GOP ticket.'

'I just hate to look for trouble.'

'You know, the trouble with you, Jack, is you want everybody to love you. Life ain't like that, as Huckleberry Finn would say. Hell, when you're a judge you can piss everybody off and they'll smile and thank you.'

Vail started out the door.

'Marty?'

'Yeah?'

'Uh… are you gonna wear that suit to the luncheon?'

'Sweet Jesus,' Vail said, and left the office.

St Claire and Meyer were scatter-shooting, feeding information into the computer and looking for links, bits of information that St Claire eventually would try to connect together into patterns. Meyer was caught up in the game. It was like Dungeons and Dragons, where the players are lured through a maze of puzzles to the eventual solution.

Some of the unsolved homicides that HITS turned up were interesting, but nothing seemed to relate to the city landfill case and Meyer was getting tired. He and St Claire had been at this cross-matching game for three hours and his stomach was telling him it was lunchtime. The office was empty except for the two of them. They had developed a list of seventy-six missing persons and nineteen unsolved homicides throughout the state, but neither of the figures appeared to correlate.

'What're you after, Harvey?' Meyer asked. 'None of these cases could possibly relate to the landfill.'

'The three bodies have to be connected in some way. They were almost side by side, so they had to have been dumped at the same time, don't you agree?'

'That makes sense.'

'Well, think about it. Three people show up in the same area of the city landfill. If they were dropped at the same time, in all probability they knew each other. They had something in common.'

'Yeah, they're all dead,' Meyer said.

'Also they've been in there awhile. What I'm gettin' at, son, is that if the three of them knew each other and were involved with each other in some way, and they all disappeared at the same time, don't you think somebody would have reported that? First thing I did this morning, I called Missing Persons and asked them one question. "You looking for three people who knew each other and were reported missing at the same time?" The answer was no.'

'Maybe - '

'Folks who are missing friends or relatives will come forward to see if they can identify these bodies. Hell, if your kid was missing, and you picked up the paper and read that three unidentified bodies were found in the city landfill, wouldn't you be curious to see if he might be one of those three? There's a lotta missing persons out there, cowboy. And at least one person looking for every one that's missing.'

'What the hell's your point, Harve?'

'Let's say we don't get an ID on these people - at least for a while. Doesn't that raise the possibility that maybe they're from someplace else?'

Meyer looked away from the screen for a moment. 'You think they're out-of-towners?'

'Maybe tourists. Conventioneers. Or assume for a minute that they were killed out of town and brought here.'

'You're reaching on this one, Harve.'

'Humour me, son. I know it's a long shot. What if they ain't local? Think about it. What if they were involved in something outside the city? A bank heist, a dope deal, some cult thing. And suppose it went sour and these John and Jane Does were killed because of this deal and they got dropped in the dump. Hell, somebody dumped those people out there, they didn't fall out of the sky.'

'It's a wild-goose chase.'

'Maybe,' the old-timer said, throwing his empty coffee cup into a wastebasket. He leaned back in his chair, tucked a fresh pinch of snuff in his cheek, and interlocked his pudgy fingers over his stomach. 'I'm remembering a time five, six years ago. The Seattle police turned up two white males in a common grave just outside the city. They couldn't ID the victims. Six months go by, they've about written the case off, and one day they get a call from a police chief in Arizona. A thousand miles away! Turns out the Arizona cops nabbed a guy for passing a hot fifty-dollar bill that was lifted six months before in a bank heist. The guy breaks down and not only confesses to the bank job, he says there were three of them involved and they drove up to Seattle to hide out and started squabbling and he takes them both down and buries them out in the woods and drifts back down to Phoenix. The story checks out. The Seattle police solves its case. The Arizona PD solves its bank robbery.'

'And everybody's smilin' but the guy that did the trick,' said Meyer.

'Right. The last place the Seattle PD would've expected to get a line on their John Does was in Arizona. So you never know. We're looking to see if anything strikes our fancy, okay?'

Meyer was back staring at the big computer screen, watching it scroll through case descriptions. Suddenly he stopped it.

'How about Satanism, Harve? Does that strike your fancy?'

'Satanism?'

'Here's a little town called Gideon down in the southern corner of the state, probably hasn't had a major homicide in twenty years. The local PD thinks Satanists killed a housewife down there.'

'Gideon? There's a nice biblical name,' St Claire said. 'Seems an unlikely place for Satanists to rear their ugly heads.'

The chief of police refused to supply any crime reports. Didn't even call in the state forensics lab - which is required by law in a case like this. According to the cover sheet, it's a small, religious community. They think it involves Satanism and they don't want any publicity about it.'

He ripped a computer printout of the cover report from the printer and read it aloud:

'UNREPORTED HOMICIDE, 7/12/93: Murder of Gideon Housewife. Gideon is a religious community of Mormons. The population is approximately 2,000. Al Braselton, an agent with the state Bureau of Investigation, learned of the event while on an an unrelated investigation in Shelby, 12 miles north of Gideon. The Gideon police chief, Hiram Young, reluctantly turned over to Agent Braselton some photographs and the sketchy homicide report. This is all the information the Bureau has on this crime at this time. According to Chief Young, the town didn't want a lot of outsiders coming there…'

Meyer exclaimed, 'And this in quotes, Harve, ' "Because of the Satanism angle"! The homicide is still unresolved.'

'There's an angle I never thought about,' said St Claire. 'Satanism.' He laughed at the thought. 'My God, look at these photos,' Meyer said. Six photographs had popped up on the computer monitor. Like all graphic police studies of violence, they depicted the stark climate of the crime without art or composition. Pornographic in detail, they appeared on the fifty-inch TV screen in two rows, three photos in each row. The three on the top were full, medium, and close-up shots of a once pleasant-looking, slightly overweight woman in her mid to late twenties. She had been stabbed and cut dozens of times. The long, establishing shot captured the nauseating milieu of the crime scene. The victim lay in a corner of the room, her head cocked crazily against the wall. Her mouth bulged open. Her eyes were frozen in a horrified stare. Blood had splattered the walls, the TV set, the floors, everything.

The medium shot was even more graphic. The woman's nipples had been cut off and her throat was slit to the bone.

But the close-up of her head was the most chilling of all.

The woman's nipples were stuffed in her mouth.

'Good lord,' St Claire said with revulsion.

'I'm glad we haven't had lunch yet,' Meyer said, swallowing hard.

The lower row of photographs were from the same perspective but were shots of her back, where the butchery had been just as vicious.

'I can see why the police chief thinks Satanists were involved,' Meyer said. 'This is obscene.'

St Claire leaned over Meyer's shoulder and together they read the homicide report filed by Chief Hiram Young:

On October 27, 1993, at approximately 8 A.M, I answered a call to the home of George Balfour, local, which was called in by a neighbour, Mrs Miriam Peronne, who resides next door. I found a white female, which I personally identified as Linda Balfour, 26, wife of George, on the floor of the living room. Mrs Balfour was DOA. The coroner, Bert Fields, attributes death to multiple stab wounds. Her son, age 1, was five feet away and unharmed. Her husband was several miles from town when the crime occurred. There are no suspects.

Meyer turned to St Claire. 'Not much there,' he said.

But St Claire did not answer. He stood up and walked close to the screen. He was looking at the close-up of the back of the woman's head. 'What's that?' he asked. 'What?'

'There, on the back of her head.' St Claire pointed to what appeared to be markings under the woman's hair. 'I'll zoom in,' Meyer said.

He isolated the photograph, then blew it up four times before it began to fall apart. Beneath the blood-mottled hair on the back of her head were what appeared to be a row of marks, but the blown-up photo was too fuzzy to define them.

'Maybe just scratches,' Meyer suggested. 'Can you clear it up any?' St Claire asked. Meyer digitally enhanced the picture several times, the photo blinking and becoming a little more distinct each time he hit the key combinations.

'That's as far as I can take it,' Meyer said. 'Looks like numbers,' St Claire said, adjusting his glasses and squinting at the image. 'Numbers and a letter…'

'Looks like it was written with her blood,' Meyer said with disgust.

A familiar worm nibbled at St Claire's gut. Nothing he could put his finger on, but it was nibbling nevertheless. 'Ben, let's give this Chief Young a call. He's got to know more about this case than the network's got.'

'Harvey, I've got four cases on my desk…'

'I got a nudge on this, Ben. Don't argue with me.'

'A nudge? What's a nudge?'

'It's when your gut nudges your brain,' the old-timer answered.