The Lesson of Her Death Read online

  Corde said, "I beg your pardon."

  "We may get sued," she said. "When I talked to her father last night he said he may sue the university. I told him it didn't happen on campus."

  "It didn't," Kresge said. "Happen on campus, I mean."

  Corde waited a respectful time for either of them to make some point then continued, "I'd like a list of all the residents and employees, handymen and so on, in that hall--"

  "It's a very large dorm," the dean said. "That might cause, I don't know, panic."

  "--and also her professors and students in all her classes." Corde noticed Dean Larraby wasn't writing any of this down. He heard rustling next to him. Kresge was jotting notes with a silver pen in a soft leather diary.

  Corde asked, "I'd like to know if she was seeing a therapist or counselor. And I'd like a list of any employees of the school convicted of violent crimes."

  As icily as a deposed prime minister, Dean Larraby said, "I'm sure we don't have any."

  "You'd be surprised," Corde said.

  "I'll find out," Kresge said.

  "I'll guarantee you that we have no criminals on our staff."

  "Probably not," Corde said agreeably. He turned to Kresge. "You're going to be my contact here?"

  "Sure."

  Corde shuffled his index cards. He said to Kresge, "If you could get this info to me ASAP?"

  "No problem, Detective," Kresge said. "And I'd be happy to interview some of the students for you, or the professors. I know a lot of them personally and ..."

  Corde found he'd been ignoring Kresge. He looked up and smiled. "Sorry?"

  When Kresge repeated his offer Corde said, "Not necessary, thanks."

  "I'm just saying if you need a hand."

  Corde turned to the dean. "I'd like a room of some kind."

  Dean Larraby asked, "Room?"

  "For the interviews. We'd prefer to do it on campus."

  Kresge said, "The Student Union's got a lot of activity rooms."

  Corde marked a note on one of his cards. "Book one for me, would you?"

  There was a slight lapse before Kresge said, "Will do."

  "Detective ..." The dean's voice contained an element of desperation. Both men looked at her. She put her hands flat on the desk as if she were about to rise and lecture. Her fingers touched the wood with twin clicks and Corde noticed rings--a thick purple stone on her left hand, an even larger yellow one on her right. Presents to herself, Corde thought. "We have a contradictory problem here," she said. "You read the Register, you must know this school's in the midst of a fiscal crisis. Our enrollment is the lowest it's been in twenty-three years." She smiled humorlessly. "The baby boomers have come and gone."

  Corde did read the Register. He had no idea what shape the finances of Auden University were in.

  "It's of course in our interest to find the man who did this as fast as possible. But we don't want it to appear that we're panicked. I've already gotten a call from one of the school's benefactors. He's quite concerned about what happened." Corde looked at her blankly. "When benefactors get concerned, Detective, I get concerned."

  Kresge said, "We've beefed up security patrols in the evening."

  Corde said that was good.

  The dean continued as if neither had spoken. "We're getting applications now for the fall term and they're running much lower than we'd expected." She caressed her cheek with her little finger and missed an uneven streak of prime minister makeup by a millimeter. "Isn't it most likely, Detective, that it was a drifter or somebody like that? Somebody not related to the school?"

  Kresge said, "We can't assume anything, Dean."

  The dean was ignoring Kresge too. She was his boss and could do a better job of it than Corde.

  Corde said, "We just don't know anything at this point."

  Kresge said, "One thing I wanted to mention. The Biagotti killing."

  The dean clucked. "Wynton, Susan lived off-campus. She was killed in a robbery attempt. Isn't that what happened, Detective?"

  "Susan Biagotti? It seemed to be a robbery, I recall."

  The dean continued, "The school had nothing to do with it. So--"

  "It was never solved, Dean," Kresge's baritone droned. "I was just speculating."

  "--why bring it up?"

  Corde said to both of them, "I don't think there's any connection. But I'll look into it."

  "There was no connection," the dean said sourly.

  "Yes, ma'am. I'm sure that's the case. Now the sooner I get back to work, the sooner we'll catch this fellow. You'll get that information, William?"

  "Wynton."

  "Sorry."

  "Uhn, Detective, I wanted to ask you something. About motives for this type of crime. I--"

  Corde said, "I'm sorry. I'm running pretty late. If you could just get me as much of that information as you can in the next hour or so I'd appreciate it. And the room. Don't forget the room."

  Kresge's spacious unsmiling face nodded slowly. "You'll get it when you want it."

  Diane Corde pressed the phone tight against her ear. She still held a grocery bag in one muscular arm.

  "Oh, no ..." She listened for a moment longer then lifted the phone away from her mouth. She called, "Sarah? Sarah are you home?"

  Silence, broken only by the click and whir of the refrigerator.

  "No. She hasn't come back yet. When she's upset sometimes she hides in the woods."

  Diane cocked her head as she listened to Sarah's teacher explain how concerned they all were. Mrs. Beiderson also added delicately that the girl had been daydreaming all morning before the practice test. "I sympathize, Mrs. Corde, I really do. But she simply must try harder. She's bringing a lot of these problems on herself." Diane nodded at the phone. Finally she said the words that seemed to end so many of these conversations: "We'll talk to her about it. We'll talk to her."

  They hung up.

  Diane Corde wore blue jeans and a burgundy cotton blouse. With her high school graduation cross gold and glistening at her throat she looked like a pretty, born-again country-western singer. Her husband said she had thisaway hair because she wore it moussed up and brushed back. Wide-shouldered and thin-hipped, Diane had a figure that had pretty much withstood two children and forty-three years of gravity. On her forehead was a small scar like a crescent moon, which mimicked by half the end of the iron pipe she'd run hard into when she was four.

  Diane set the groceries on the counter and returned to the back door to get her keys from the lock.

  No keys.

  She tried to recall--she had hurried inside from the car when she heard the phone ringing. She looked on hooks, on counters, at the bottom of her purse, in the freezer (it had happened more than once). On the off chance that she'd left them in the station wagon she walked outside and ducked her head through the open window. They hung from the ignition. She shook her head at her absentmindedness and plucked them out. She started back to the kitchen. She stopped cold, one foot on the doorstep.

  How had she gotten inside without the keys?

  The back door had been open.

  The dead bolt was the only lock on the door and it could be secured only with a key. Diane clearly remembered locking it when she left for the A&P. Somebody had entered the house and left without bothering to relock the door.

  Bill had been a cop for twelve years and had made his share of enemies; he'd instructed the children a thousand times always to lock the door when they left.

  But Sarah of course could ignore a thousand stern warnings.

  The girl had probably returned home to wash up after the incident at school then run outside to hide in her magic woods, forgetting to lock the door. I'll have another talk with her.... But then Diane decided, no, the girl had been through enough. No scoldings today. She returned to the kitchen, dropped the keys into her purse, and began to think about supper.

  She sits in the woods, hugging herself, knees up to her lowered chin, in the circle of magic stones. Sarah Corde is now bre
athing slowly. It has taken hours to calm down. By the time she got here, running the entire two miles from the school, her dress and underpants were dry but still she feels dirty--as if a sorcerer had thrown a potion on her.

  She is no longer crying.

  Sarah lies back in the grass that she pulled out of the nearby field and spread in the circle like a bed. She lifts the hem of her dress up to her waist as if the sunlight will clean the poison completely away and she closes her eyes; Sarah is sleepy. Her head grows heavy as a stone and she feels that she is floating in the moat of an old castle. Beiderbug Castle....

  Sarah looks up at the clouds.

  A huge dog with wings big as the county, a chariot pulled by a flying fish, and there, there--a towering thunderhead--is a god carrying a fierce club. He wears golden sandals, magic shoes that carry him high above this terrible place, the earth....

  As she falls asleep she pictures the god turning into a wizard.

  When she wakes, an hour or more has passed. The chariot is gone, the flying fish is gone, the god with his club is gone.

  But Sarah finds that she has had a visitor.

  She sits up, pulling her skirt down, then reaches forward cautiously and picks up Redford T. Redford the world's smartest bear, who sits beside her, the shaggy face staring at her with humorous, glassy eyes. She left him that morning propped on her bed after she hugged him a tearful good-bye and left for school. How he got here she has no idea. In the ribbon around his collar is a piece of paper. Sarah unfolds it, panicking for a moment as she sees that it contains words she must now read. But then she relaxes and takes one word at a time. After fifteen minutes of agonizing work she manages to read the entire note.

  She is shocked and terrified by its message. Suspicious of words, she decides she must have read it wrong. She tries again and finds that, no, she read it correctly.

  Her first thought is that she could never do what the awkwardly printed letters suggest.

  But as the girl looks around her at the dense woods, where she has hidden so often after fleeing from school, the woods in which she feels more at home than in her own living room, that fear slowly fades.

  And eventually becomes joyous anticipation.

  Sarah rises to her feet, thinking that one part of the note certainly is true. There really is nothing left for her to do.

  The New Lebanon Sheriff's Department was a small place. Four private offices--for the sheriff, for Detectives Corde and Slocum and for Emma, the radio dispatcher/secretary. The central room contained eight gray GI desks for the deputies. To the side was a long corridor that led to the two cells of the lockup. On the wall was a rack containing three shotguns and five black AR-15s. The room was filled with enough unread and unfiled paper to go head to head with any small-town law enforcement office in the country.

  Jim Slocum--fresh back from the pond--looked up from his desk, where he was reclining in a spring-broken chair and reading the Register. Sheriff Steve Ribbon stood above him. Ribbon, solid and sunburnt red as the flesh of a grilled salmon, was slapping his ample thigh with a book. What's the Pocket Fisherman want now? Slocum raised an eyebrow. "Damn mess." He held up the paper like a crossing guard with a portable Stop sign. It was folded to the article on the Gebben murder.

  Ribbon crooked his head to say, yeah, yeah, I read it. "Come on into my den, would you, Jim?"

  Slocum followed the sheriff five feet into his office. Ribbon sat, Slocum stood in the doorway.

  This's right clever, we just reversed positions.

  "Bill here?" Ribbon asked.

  "He flew over to St. Louis this morning to talk to the girl's father--"

  "He did what?"

  "Flew up to St. Louis. To talk to the girl's--"

  Ribbon said, "The girl was killed? That girl? Why'd he do that for? He think we're made of money?"

  Slocum chose not to answer for Bill Corde and said only, "He said he wants us all to meet about the case. At four, I think it was."

  "We gotta watch our pennies, I hope he knows that. Anyway, I wanted to kick something around with you. This killing's got me bothered. I hear it wasn't a robbery."

  "Doesn't seem to be."

  "I was noticing there were some parallels between what happened and a couple other cases I'd read about. It occurred to me that we might have a cult killer problem here."

  "Cult?" Slocum asked carefully.

  The book dropped onto the desk. A paperback, fanned from bathtub or hammock reading. Bloody Rites. On the cover were three black-and-white photos of pretty girls over a color photo of a blood-spattered pack of tarot cards. "Whatsis?" Slocum picked it up.

  "I want you to read it. I want you to think about it. It's about this Satanist down in Arizona a couple years ago. A true story. There are a lot of similarities between what happened here and that fellow."

  Slocum flipped to the pictures of the crime scenes. "You don't think it's the same guy?"

  "Naw, they caught him. He's doing life in Tempe but there are ... similarities." Ribbon stretched out the word. "It's kind of scary."

  "Damn, they were good-looking." Slocum gazed at the page of the book showing the victims' high school graduation pictures.

  Ribbon absently stroked his black polyester tie and said softly, "What I'd like you to do is get yourself up to Higgins. The state police have a psychology division up there. Follow up with them on it."

  "You think?" Slocum read a passage where the writer described what the Arizona killer had done to one co-ed. He reluctantly lowered the book and said, "I'll mention it to Bill."

  "Naw, you don't have to. Just call up the boys in Higgins and get an appointment."

  Slocum grinned. "Okay. I won't fly."

  "What?"

  "I won't fly up there."

  "Why would you?--Oh, yeah, haw." The sheriff added, "We gotta make sure word gets around about this."

  "How's that?"

  Ribbon said, "Well, we should make sure the girls in town are warned about it."

  "Wouldn't that kind of tip our hand?"

  "It's our job to save lives too."

  Slocum flipped through the pictures again. Ribbon leaned forward and tapped the book. "Hang on to that. You'll enjoy it. It's a real, what do they say, page-turner."

  The Incorporated Town of New Lebanon reluctantly owned up to its mouthful of a name. By the time the village was chartered in the 1840s all the good names--the European capitals and harmonious-sounding biblical locales--had been taken. The final debate had pitted the New Lebanonites against New Luxumbergians. Because the former had a respectful ring of Old Testament, the vote was predictable.

  The town was in Harrison County, named after William Henry, not because of his thirty-day term as president but for his tenure as Indiana Territory governor during which he decimated native Indian tribes (Tippecanoe, of campaign-slogan fame) and allowed counties like this his namesake to congeal into what they were today: mostly white, mostly Protestant, mostly rural. New Lebanon's economy floated on milk, corn, and soybeans, though it had a few small factories and one big printing plant that did a lot of work for Chicago and St. Louis and New York publishers (including the ever-scandalous and -anticipated Mon Cher magazine, scrap bin copies of which flooded the town monthly thick as shucked cobs at harvest).

  Also located in New Lebanon was the only four-year college for a hundred miles. Auden University goosed the town population up to fourteen thousand from August to May and gave locals the chance to sit through performances of second-tier orchestras and avant-garde theater companies, which they boasted about being able to attend but rarely did. The NCAA was about the only real contact between Auden and the natives, virtually none of whom could afford the seventeen-thousand-dollar tuition, which bought you, times four, just a liberal arts degree and what the hell good was that?

  The residents had ambivalent feelings toward the students. The school was a bounty, no denying: thousands of young people with nothing to do but eat out, go to movies and redecorate their dorm rooms,
and what's more there was a new brood of them every year just like hogs and veal calves. And some locals even felt a nebulous pride when Auden University Economics Professor Andrew Schoen appeared on Meet the Press or a book by English professor John Stanley Harrod was favorably reviewed in the New York Times, to which a grand total of forty-seven New Lebanonites subscribed.

  On the other hand Auden was a burden. These money-shedding young people got drunk and puked and sneered and teepeed trees with toilet paper and broke plate glass. They shamelessly bought Trojans and Ramses in front of grade-school children. They walked around looking important as bankers. They burned effigies of politicians and occasionally a flag. They were gay and lesbian. They were Jewish and Catholic. They were Eastern.

  Bill Corde was not a product of Auden though he was of New Lebanon. Born and reared here, he'd ventured away only for four years of service (standing guard with his M-16 over missiles in West Germany) and a few years in Missouri as a patrolman then detective in the St. Louis Police Department. He returned to New Lebanon and after six months of feed and grain, teaching Sunday school and thinking about starting a contracting business, he applied for a job at the town Sheriff's Department. His experience made him a godsend to Steve Ribbon, whose closest approximation to police training had been the Air Force (he and his rifle had protected B-52s in Kansas). After a year as the department's oldest rookie Corde was promoted to detective and became the town's chief felony investigator.

  On the neat wall above his neat desk in the hundred-and-four-year-old town building were some framed documents: a diploma from Southwestern State University and certificates from the ICMA's Police Business Administration Institute of Training in Chicago as well as one from the Southern Police Institute in Louisville. The proof was absent but he had also taken various FBI training seminars and courses in law and visual investigation analysis. He had just returned from Sacramento and a weeklong session at the California Department of Justice.

  The certificates he had proudly tacked up were simple vouchers of completion; Corde was a bad student. He collected words that described himself. He was persistent, he was industrious, he had sticktoitiveness. But Bill Corde was born C-plus material and that didn't change whether the subject was one he hated (English, social studies) or loved (criminal psychology or link-analysis-charting techniques). He wrote slowly and produced leaden meat-and-potato reports, and although as detective his official hours were pretty much eight to six he would often stay late into the night muscling through an article in Forensics Today or the Journal of Criminal Justice, or comparing the profiles of suspects in his cases with those in the NASPD's Felony Warrants Outstanding Bulletin.