Dirty Harry 05 - Family Skeletons (20 page)

The hair actually stood up on the back of Harry’s neck. A long row of test tubes filled with fluid were marked with the initials “C.S.” A shorter row was labeled “S.D.” The shortest of all had “J.B.” There were other initials Harry didn’t recognize. It hardly made a difference. Harry turned toward the files with his mouth open.

He walked over like a zombie. He vaguely recalled what Shanna had said when he had walked her here the first time. “Everybody at Emerson has one.” Everybody? Including Christine Sherman, Jeff Browne, Tom Morrisson, and Judy Halliwell?

Harry tore through the entire office like a man possessed. He found all the records. Everyone involved with the Orenda investigation had been scheduled for counseling sessions with Gerrold. Harry took some of the vials, wrapped them in Kleenex from a handy box, and put them in his pocket. He’d be very interested to see the chemical breakdown in the police lab.

In fact, Harry found everything to make a case except one thing. Morrisson’s hunting knife. The knife Harry was now sure had killed Halliwell, Monahan, Morrisson, and Bryant.

Callahan’s head snapped up as he heard the key go into the furthermost door. The bolt opened, and the door swung in again, framing a slight, mustached, blond-haired man in the doorway. As soon as he saw the ransacked office, he turned to run. Harry shot him in the back. He was sure this time.

Richard Gerrold dove headfirst into the hallway wall. He managed not to fall down the steps by holding onto the banister. He slid face down the wall, leaving blood streaks and saliva marks in his wake. He turned so he could sit on his haunches. He blinked, opened and closed his mouth, and tried to adjust to the pain. Unbelievably he did not lose consciousness.

When Harry walked up, Gerrold looked at him and started laughing. Harry shrugged the files up farther under his arm and tightened his grip on the Magnum butt. He saw that the doctor’s shoulder was almost completely shattered, yet the man remained conscious and laughing.

Callahan sat on the top step next to Gerrold. “What’s so funny?” he asked lifelessly.

“Nothing,” the slight, blond man chuckled, then winced from the pain. “It’s just that I knew I’d never get away with it. I’m surprised it went on this long.”

“So am I,” Harry quietly admitted. “But you seem to have covered yourself very well.”

“Ah, the human brain, Inspector,” the blond man intoned. “It’s such a delicate thing. Any, almost any, time the student’s treatment could break down, and they would remember everything.”

“Such as?” Harry prompted, looking down the long stairway.

“Oh, the rapes,” Gerrold said lightly. “I took every single one of them on the couch in there. They don’t even remember it. That’s how I started. Rapes.”

Gerrold had been a counselor at a campus in the Midwest. There, utilizing hypnosis and booster drugs, he had perfected a method of indulging his sexual appetite without risking rejection.

He was satisfied with that . . . at first.

“It got boring,” Gerrold said wistfully. “I became fascinated with how far I could go. Just how much power I could hold over these girls. There’s no such thing as hypnotism, you know. It’s just a word we use to describe the combination of suggestion and the subject’s imagination. The Amazing Kreskin has been saying that for years on television. And I’ve proven him right. Television has shaped an entire generation’s imagination. Nothing is outside the realm of possibility now.

“You know the saying ‘a hypnotized person will never do anything against their will?’ It’s true, but
nothing is against their will any longer.
Teenagers today have been inundated with so many news shows that package reality as fantasy,
they really don’t care about the difference.
They’ll watch the six o’clock news or
Magnum, P. I.,
they don’t care.

“So if I tell them to go out and kill, they’ll do it. They
did
it. They can’t distinguish between real life and fiction.”

The best subjects, Harry learned, were the already creative kids; the actors especially. They were used to taking on another character’s traits and motivations. So when it came time to murder, their subconsciouses were telling them it was all part of a movie. Just like
Just Before Dawn.

Harry let the man ramble on. It hardly made a difference now. The damage had already been done. He was only sorry they hadn’t gotten to him sooner. If only Collins hadn’t been so hot for a promotion and Shanna’s body, the police might have put the connection together long before.

Gerrold was a power-mad, egocentric, perverted madman who was dangerous because he was so capable. He was the ultimate cult leader—a person who had discovered precise control over the most attractive subjects possible.

“It’s a matter of selection,” Gerrold mused, trying to stem the flow of blood from his mangled shoulder. “Both in the subject and in the timing. You can’t control any one person all the time. You have to eliminate the hard cases and pick just the right moment to follow through on the initial treatments. This college position helped enormously.”

“How did you get it?” Harry wanted to know.

“I had the credentials,” Gerrold said pompously. “That’s what I mean about timing. The majority of my career has been spent diagnosing real problems. Only when that special subject appears do I take advantage of the situation.”

Callahan stood up. “All right, that’s enough. Let’s go.”

Gerrold looked up innocently. “Where to?”

“You can tell the rest of the story at Police Headquarters.”

Gerrold laughed anew. “But my dear man,” he chortled. “You attacked me. You ransacked my office, then shot me in cold blood.”

Harry ignored the line as wishful thinking. “Come on, no more games.”

“You don’t seem to understand, Inspector,” the blond man explained patiently. “I’ve told you all this because I had to tell someone. But those chemicals and those files aren’t enough in themselves to make an airtight case. You need corroborating witnesses. You need the victims to give evidence. And there are none. They’re all dead.”

Callahan’s face and manner became very still. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t you understand?
I
didn’t do anything. All the girls that I raped don’t remember it, and there’s no way they’ll be able to say for sure that it happened. And they were far from being virgins . . .”

“What about Halliwell?” Callahan asked quickly, wanting to know but dreading to hear.

“I’m telling you, Inspector. I didn’t do anything.”

“Then who did?” Harry exploded. “Morrisson? Browne? Monahan?”

“None of them.” Gerrold confessed. “Monahan just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He witnessed Halliwell’s murder, but he was not an active part of it. Browne was hard to control. If he hadn’t been weakened by your shooting him, I would not have been able to arrange that little Indian ceremonial scene on Beacon Hill.”

No wonder the man had been shaking and sweating, Harry recalled. He had been fighting something—fighting a predirected order. He had wanted to defend himself, but he couldn’t shoot. Gerrold needed him dead. “And Morrisson?”

“Tom was impossible to control. He had to be killed immediately. He was the only one who seemed able to get through to Christine.”

Callahan could have shot him then. But he needed to know more. “Christine,” he breathed, dumbfounded.

“Yes,” said Gerrold, “beautiful Christine. The prize of the bunch. She loved men. Any man. She felt other women were competition. She was willing, with the proper encouragement, to do anything. To anyone.”

“Where is she?” Harry shouted in Gerrold’s face.

“Not at home,” the doctor said roguishly.

Harry ground his fist against the doctor’s mashed shoulder. “Where is she?” he repeated.

Gerrold gasped in pain, and tears rolled out of his tightly closed eyes. “That’s all right,” he managed to grunt between clenched teeth. “I don’t mind.”

“Where is Christine?” Harry demanded, grinding the bone even harder.

“Use . . . your . . . head!” the slight man screamed. Callahan eased up immediately. “Where would she be? I told you that there will be no one left to testify against me. Think about it.”

Harry did. He grabbed Gerrold under his arms and dragged him down the stairs. When they got to the bottom, Harry slammed him against the door and went through his pockets. He found the car keys on the second try. He recognized the shape of the key and the emblem on the key chain immediately.

“A BMW,” Harry cursed. “Naturally you would drive a fucking BMW.” He carried Gerrold out the door to the only BMW at the curb. He pushed the doctor against the roof of the car while he unlocked the door. “What in hell did you come back to the office for?”

Gerrold giggled grimly again. “I left a yogurt I wanted for dessert in the office fridge.”

Harry couldn’t help laughing himself this time, but it was a desperate laugh pushed out of his chest cavity by disbelieving pain. He practically threw Gerrold onto the seat. He slid over the hood and got in on the driver’s side.

He jammed the car into gear, twisted the engine into life and burned rubber. Where would Linda bring Shanna for safety, Harry asked himself furiously. The only place he could think of was back at the condominium. Maybe in Mrs. O’Neill’s apartment. Harry began to retrace his earlier drive to Linda’s but at even greater speeds.

The rest of the story came out along the way. Every time Gerrold weakened and blacked out, Harry woke him. The doctor just couldn’t seem to stop talking about it once he had started. Halliwell had been a thrill kill. He had asked Christine who she most wanted to stick it to. Under the treatment, she had said Judy.

“It made her sick, she said,” Gerrold elaborated. “Judy was a beautiful girl, but she didn’t do anything about it. That drove Christine crazier than if she had been a tease. She couldn’t stand Judy’s oblivious, unconcerned sexuality.”

So Gerrold had sent Christine after her. Monahan had just happened by and had to die as a witness. Then the first problems began to arise. Morrisson had begun to break through the defenses Gerrold had set up in Christine’s mind.

“That first day,” the doctor said. “When you appeared? Thomas was trying to take the knife away from her, not stab her with it. In his agitated state, when he saw you barreling toward him, he ran. He couldn’t believe his girl was a killer so he kept silent until it was too late.”

“You followed me,” Harry realized. “You gave Christine my number!”

“It wasn’t easy. We had to check every police station in town. But we finally lucked out, and there you were. Detective Collins was kind enough to drop you off in the neighborhood, so shadowing you from then on was child’s play.”

“And you were the one who knocked me out in the Emerson building.”

“That was the one thing I did do.”

But not before more trouble cropped up. Killing Morrisson had been a major trauma for the girl, treatment or no treatment. Gerrold couldn’t get her to attack Harry, so he had to knock her out and do the dirty work himself.

“After that I kept her at my house until she was needed,” Gerrold elaborated. “It was wonderful!” he said with conviction. “You don’t know real power, Inspector, until you have a beautiful woman mewling and struggling at your feet in complete helplessness.”

Collins had done all the rest. When Gerrold saw the “blood cult” pattern emerging, it fit right in with his victims and plans. When he needed another “sacrifice” to frame Browne in his apartment, he delved into Christine’s subconscious again. The Sherman girl had only visited that Brookline bar once, but she didn’t like the waitress because her blonde hair had stood out more in the dark bar interior. That was the reason Cathy had died in such shock. She could not comprehend that another woman was raping her.

“With Shanna gone, it will all be over,” Gerrold said sadly. “The circle will be complete. No victims left. All gone.”

“What about Christine?” Callahan interjected, speeding into Southie.

“But that’s what makes it perfect, don’t you see? She won’t remember. And even if someone is able to break through the intense blocks I created while she was captive, it is she who conceived and executed the murders. She picked the victims, and she killed them!” Gerrold looked slyly up at Harry. “You know Peter Sellers’ last great movie,
Being There?
It was about a man who essentially became someone else. His name was Chauncey Gardner, and he was right. It is more fun to watch.”

Harry turned the corner onto the street where the Donovans lived. The entire road was crawling with police cars. By the time Harry rammed through the roadblock, it was too late to stop. Cops on all sides started pouring into the street, pulling out their weapons as they came. Harry swerved the responsive Bavarian-made sports car up onto the left sidewalk, near the beach wall.

If he could just turn onto the lawn and drive through the entrance, he might be able to get under cover before the police blasted him.

It was wishful thinking. He saw the gun flashes. He heard the bullets careen across the car body. He was just about to duck under the dashboard when two side tires blew.

The BMW was a great car and Harry was an experienced chase driver, but no one could have controlled it in that situation. Harry felt the vehicle slam against the sea wall sideways at high speed. He saw a wave of sparks sear off from the door next to him. He heard the grinding, rending tear of metal being ripped off the driver’s side of the body.

He wrenched the wheel back and forth while slamming the brakes to the floor. The car began to slew sideways. Harry released the brake and spun the wheel. The one good front tire held on and the car turned all the way around. He slammed the accelerator down again. The rubber sent up gouts of smoke as the four-wheel drive tried to counter-effect the backward momentum. Harry’s action was the only thing that saved both men’s lives when the car crashed into a bend in the stone sea wall.

The headrests saved them from whiplash or a broken neck. The car was going slow enough so they weren’t killed on impact and fast enough to propel the car up and lazily over the stone wall onto the beach. It crashed down on its side and then sluggishly turned upright again.