A Dish Served Cold Page 6

  Altman lifted an impressed eyebrow at the moving sales pitch. Wallace fell silent and, glancing at the detective, shrugged. He held the receiver to his ear for a moment, listening. Finally he nodded and glanced at Altman. "He wants to talk to you." Altman took the phone. "Yessir?"

  "What exactly would you want me to do?" came the tentative voice through the phone.

  "All I need is for you to look through your fan mail. See if you can find anything suspicious. Any fans who might've written something about these passages in the book." He told Carter which ones had been circled and then added, "And look for any letters from people who asked about how you researched the murders. Particularly from people within, say, a hundred miles or so of Greenville."

  Carter protested, "I've got thousands of letters. It'd take a couple of days to go through them all."

  "That's fine. We'll follow up on other leads as best we can… But I have one more request, sir."

  "What's that?"

  "Can we get those letters in person?"

  "You want me to come to Greenville?"

  "Yessir, I do." Silence.

  The detective persisted. "Depending on what we find, it could be real helpful to have you here. The city'll pay for the mileage and a room if you stay overnight."

  "Sir," Carter said slowly, "there's not enough money in the universe to get me to come to Greenville." Altman took a breath to set out his argument, though before he could speak the man continued, "but I'll come anyway."

  Altman started to tell the author how much he appreciated the help, but after a moment he realized that the man had hung up and he was listening to dead air.

  Andy Clark turned out not to resemble either a sinister artist or a glitzy celebrity but rather any one of the hundreds of white, middle-aged businessmen that populated this region of the Northeast. Thick, graying hair, neatly trimmed. A slight paunch (much slighter than Altman's own, thanks to the cop's fondness for his wife's casseroles). His outfit wasn't an arm-patch sports jacket or any other authorial garb, but an L.L. Bean windbreaker, polo shirt, and corduroy slacks.

  It had been two days since Altman had spoken to Carter. The man now stood uneasily in the detective's office, taking the coffee that Josh Randall offered and nodding greetings to the cops and to Gordon Wallace. He slipped off his windbreaker, tossing it on an unoccupied chair. The man's only moment of consternation in this initial meeting was when he glanced at the top of Altman's desk and blinked as he saw the case file that was headed, Banning, Kimberly – Homicide #13- 01. A brief look of dismay filled his face. Altman was grateful that he'd had the foresight to slip the crime-scene photos of the victim's body to the bottom of the folder.

  They made small talk for a minute or two and then Altman nodded at a large white envelope in the author's hand. "You find something helpful?"

  "Helpful?" Carter asked, rubbing his red eyes. "I don't know. You'll have to decide that." He handed the envelope to the detective. "Oh, I wore gloves when I handled them. Not fancy ones like yours. Playtex. My wife's from the kitchen."

  "Good thinking." Altman opened the envelope and, donning his own gloves, pulled out what must've been about fifty or so sheets.

  "I looked through the e-mails from fans, too," Carter said. "But I didn't find anything that seemed suspicious."

  E-mails wouldn't help them anyway; Altman was after a handwriting comparison.

  "The ones on top," Carter continued, nodding at the correspondence, "seemed to be from the most… how do I put it?… the most intense fans."

  The detective led the men into the department conference room and spread the letters out on the table. Randall joined them.

  Some of them were typed or printed out from a computer, some were written in cursive, some in block letters. They were on many different types and sizes of paper and in many colors of ink or pencil. Crayons, too.

  For half an hour they looked over the letters. Altman finally divided them into two piles. One, he explained, was of letters from fans who were, as Carter had said, "intense." These notes were eerie, nonsensical, angry, or disturbingly personal ("Come to see us in Sioux City if your in town and the wife and me will treat you to our special full body massage out side on the deck behind our trailer.")

  "Ick," said Josh Randall.

  Yep, definitely icky, Altman thought, but he set that pile aside and explained that they were the discards. "Those're your typical wackos and I don't think they're half dangerous. It's the other ones I'm worried about." He nodded at the second pile. "They're reasonable and calm and cautious… just like the strangler. See, he's an organized offender. Calculating and smart. He's not going to give anything away by ranting. If he has any questions, he's going to ask them politely and carefully – he'll want some detail but not too much; that'd arouse suspicion."

  Altman gathered up this stack – about ten letters – placed them in an evidence envelope, and handed them to the young detective. "Over to the county lab, stat."

  A man stuck his head in the door. Bob Fletcher. The even-keeled sergeant introduced himself to Carter. "We never met, but I spoke to you on the phone last year about the case."

  "I remember." They shook hands.

  Fletcher nodded at Altman, smiling ruefully. "He's a better cop than me. I never thought that the killer might've tried to write you."

  The sergeant, it turned out, had contacted Carter not about fan mail but to ask if the author had based the story on any previous true crimes, thinking there might be a connection between them and the strangler murders. It had been a good thought, but Carter had explained that the plot for Two Deaths was a product of his imagination.

  The sergeant's eyes took in the stack of letters. "Any luck?" he asked.

  "We'll have to see what the lab finds." Altman then nodded toward the author. "But I have to say that Mr. Carter here's been a huge help. We'd be stymied for sure, it wasn't for him."

  Appraising Carter carefully, Fletcher said, "I have to admit I never got a chance to read your book, but I always wanted to meet you. An honest-to-God famous author. Don't think I've ever shook one's hand before."

  Carter gave an embarrassed laugh. "Not very famous, to look at my sales figures."

  "Well, all I know is my girlfriend read your book and she said it was the best thriller she'd read in years."

  Carter said, "I appreciate that. Is she around town? I could autograph her copy."

  "Oh," Fletcher said. "Well, we're not going out anymore. She left the area. But thanks for the offer." He headed back to Robbery.

  There was now nothing to do but wait for the lab results to come back, so Wallace suggested coffee at Starbucks. The men wandered down the street, ordered, and sat sipping the drinks as Wallace pumped Carter for information about breaking into fiction writing, and Altman simply enjoyed the feel of the hot sun on his face.

  The men's recess ended abruptly, though, fifteen minutes later when Altman's phone rang.

  "Detective," came the enthusiastic voice of his youthful assistant, "we've got a match! The handwriting in one of Mr. Carter's fan letters matches the notes in the book. The ink's the same, too; there were markers in it."

  The detective said, "Please tell me there's a name and address on the letter."

  "You bet there is. Howard Desmond's his name. And his place is over in Warwick." A small town fifteen minutes from the sites of both of the Greenville Strangler's attacks.

  The detective told his assistant to pull together as much information on Desmond as he could. He snapped the phone shut and, grinning, announced, "We've found him. We've got our copycat."

  But, as it turned out, they didn't have him at all.

  Single, forty-two-year-old Howard Desmond, a veterinary technician, had skipped town six months before, leaving in a huge hurry. One day in April he'd called his landlord and announced that he was moving. He'd left virtually overnight, abandoning everything in the apartment but his valuables. There was no forwarding address. Altman had hoped to go through whatever he'd left beh
ind, but the landlord explained that he'd sold everything to make up for the lost rent. What didn't sell, he'd thrown out.

  Altman spoke to the vet in whose clinic Desmond had worked, and the doctor's report was similar to the landlord's. In April, Desmond had called and quit his job, effective immediately, saying only that he was moving to Oregon to take care of his elderly grandmother. He never called back with a forwarding address for his last check, as he said he would.

  The vet described Desmond as quiet, and affectionate to the animals in his care, but with little patience for people.

  Altman contacted the authorities in Oregon and found no record of any Howard Desmond in the DMV files or on the property or income-tax rolls. A bit more digging revealed that all of Desmond's grandparents – his parents, too – had died years before; the story about the move to Oregon was apparently a complete lie.

  The few relatives the detective could track down confirmed that he'd just disappeared, and they didn't know where he might be. They echoed his boss's assessment, describing the man as intelligent but a recluse, one who – significantly – loved to read and often lost himself in novels, appropriately for a killer who took his homicidal inspiration from a book.

  "What'd his letter to Andy say?" Wallace asked.

  With an okaying nod from Altman, Randall handed it to the reporter, who then summarized out loud. "He asks how Mr. Carter did the research for his book. What were the sources he used? How did he learn about the most efficient way a murderer would kill someone? And he's curious about the mental makeup of a killer. Why did some people find it easy to kill while others couldn't possibly hurt anyone?"

  Altman shook his head. "No clue as to where he might've gone. We'll get his name into NCIC and ViCAP but, hell, he could be anywhere. South America, Europe, Singapore…"

  Since Bob Fletcher's Robbery division would've handled the vandalism at the Greenville library's Three Pines branch, which they now knew Desmond was responsible for, Altman sent Randall to ask the sergeant if he'd found any leads that would be helpful.

  The other men found themselves staring at Desmond's fan letter as if it were a corpse at a wake, silence surrounding them, trying to guess where the killer might've gone.

  Altman glanced up and noticed that Andy Carter was frowning as he gazed at a large map of Greenville County up on the wall. The author nodded to himself slowly and then said, "Had a thought"

  "Go on."

  "Desmond rented his place, right?"

  "Yep."

  "Well, he had a decent job, he wasn't a youngster, and he was single. He had to've had some money. Why would he rent? Houses aren't that expensive in Greenville."

  Altman shrugged. "I don't know. What do you make of that?"

  "My wife and I used to go up to the Adirondacks in the summer. We looked into buying a place awhile ago but we couldn't afford to own two houses. So we ended up renting."

  The detective nodded. "So you're thinking that one reason a man would rent his main residence was if he owned a house somewhere else. A summer house or something."

  "Just a thought."

  "But you checked the county registrar; he didn't own any property," Wallace pointed out to Altman.

  "But we didn't check other counties," the detective replied. "A vacation place might not be nearby." He grabbed his phone.

  And in less than five minutes they had their answer.

  Howard Desmond did indeed own a house elsewhere – on the shore of Lake Muskegon, sixty miles from Greenville, tucked away into the backwater, piney wilderness.

  "Good thought," the detective said to Carter. "Thanks."

  "You think he's hiding out there?" Wallace asked.

  "Doubt it," Altman said. "He's not stupid. I were him, I'd vanish for a couple of years, till everybody'd forgotten about the case and I thought it was safe to come back to the area. But there could be some leads there to where he did go. Maybe airline receipts or something."

  Josh Randall returned to report that Sergeant Bob Fletcher had no helpful information in the library vandalism case.

  But Altman said, "Doesn't matter. We've got a better lead. Suit up, Josh."

  "What're we doing?"

  "We're going for a ride in the country. What else on a nice fall day like this?"

  Lake Muskegon is a large but shallow body of water bordered by willow, tall grass, and ugly pine. Altman didn't know the place well. He'd brought his family here for a couple of picnics over the years, and he and Bob Fletcher had come to the lake once on a halfhearted fishing expedition, of which Altman had only vague memories: gray, drizzly weather and a nearly empty creel at the end of the day.

  As he and Randall drove north through the increasingly deserted landscape he briefed the young man. "Now, I'm ninety-nine percent sure Desmond's not here. But what we're going to do first is clear the house – I mean closet by closet – and then I want you stationed in the front to keep an eye out while I look for evidence. Okay?"

  "Sure, boss."

  They passed Desmond's overgrown driveway and pulled off the road, then eased into a stand of thick forsythia.

  Together, the men cautiously made their way down the weedy drive toward the "vacation house," a dignified term for the tiny, shabby cottage sitting in a three-foot-high sea of grass and brush. A path had been beaten through the foliage – somebody had been here recently – but it might not have been Desmond; Altman had been a teenager once himself and knew that nothing attracts adolescent attention like a deserted house.

  They drew their weapons and Altman pounded on the door, calling, "Police. Open up."

  Silence.

  He hesitated a moment, adjusted the grip on his gun, and kicked the door in.

  Filled with cheap, dust-covered furniture, buzzing with stuporous fall flies, the place appeared completely deserted. They checked the four small rooms carefully and found no sign of Desmond. Outside, they glanced in the window of the garage and saw that it was empty. Then Altman sent Randall to the front of the driveway to hide in the bushes and report anybody's approach.

  He then returned to the house and began to search, wondering just how hot the cold case was about to become.

  Two hundred yards before the driveway that led to Howard Desmond's cottage, a battered, ten-year-old Toyota pulled onto the shoulder of Route 207 and then into the woods, out of sight of any drivers along the road.

  A man got out and, satisfied that his car was well hidden, squinted into the forest, getting his bearings. He noticed the line of the brown lake to his left and figured the vacation house was in the ten-o'clock position ahead of him. Through dense underbrush like this, it would take him about fifteen minutes to get to the place, he estimated.

  That'd make the time pretty tight. He'd have to move as quickly as he could and still keep the noise to a minimum.

  The man started forward, but then stopped suddenly and patted his pocket. He'd been in such a hurry to get to the house he couldn't remember if he'd taken what he wanted from the glove compartment. But yes, he had it with him.

  Hunched over and picking his way carefully to avoid stepping on noisy branches, Gordon Wallace continued on toward the cabin where, he hoped, Detective Altman was lost in police work and would be utterly oblivious to his furtive approach.

  The search of the house revealed virtually nothing that would indicate that Desmond had been here recently – or where the man might now be. Altman found some bills and canceled checks, but the address on them was Desmond's apartment in Warwick.

  He decided to check the garage, thinking he might come across something helpful that the killer had tossed out of the car and forgotten about – directions or a map, maybe.

  He found something far more interesting in the decrepit building, though. Howard Desmond himself.

  That is to say, his corpse.

  The moment Altman opened the old-fashioned double doors of the garage he detected the smell of decaying flesh. He knew where it had to be coming from: a large coal bin in the back. Steeli
ng himself, he flipped up the lid.

  Inside were the mostly skeletal remains of a man about six feet tall, lying on his back, fully clothed. He'd been dead about six months – just around the time Desmond disappeared, Altman recalled.

  DNA would tell for certain if this was the killer, but Altman discovered the man's wallet in his hip pocket and, sure enough, the driver's license inside was Desmond's. There wasn't enough face left to be sure, but the thatch of hair on the corpse's skull and the man's height were the same as indicated on the license.

  He looked briefly through the bin again and found nothing else that would identify the body or who'd killed him, though he did find the apparent murder weapon – a stained, old-fashioned military bayonet. Lifting it out with a Kleenex, he set the weapon on a workbench.

  So what the hell was going on?

  Somebody had murdered the strangler. Who? And why?

  But then Altman did one of the things he did best – let his mind run free. Too many detectives get an idea into their heads and can't see past their initial conclusions. Altman, though, always fought against this tendency and he now asked himself: But what if Desmond wasn't the strangler?

  They knew for certain that he was the one who'd underlined the passages in the library's copy of Two Deaths in a Small Town. But what if he'd done so after the killings? The letter Desmond had written to Carter was undated. Maybe – like Gordon Wallace – he'd read the book after the murders and been struck by the similarity. He'd started to investigate the crime himself and the strangler had found out and murdered him.

  But then who was the killer?

  Like Gordon Wallace…

  Altman felt another little tap in his far-ranging mind, as fragments of facts lined up for him to consider – facts that all had to do with the reporter. For instance, Wallace was physically imposing, abrasive, temperamental. At times he could be threatening, scary. He was obsessed with crime, and he knew police and forensic procedures better than most cops, which also meant that he knew how to anticipate investigators' moves. (He'd sure blustered his way right into the middle of the reopened case just the other day, Altman reflected.) Wallace owned a Motorola police scanner and would've been able to listen in on calls about the victims. His apartment was a few blocks from the college where the first victim was killed.