Lark (9 page)

“Right, sir,” Horse answered.

Lark twisted the knob on the signaler to its first position. It emitted a series of four beeps that were barely audible to anyone standing near the machine. Lark pressed the transmitter button on the radio. “Hear it?”

“Negative,” Horse replied.

Lark turned the signal to its second position. The beep was louder and the reading higher. He spoke to Horse again. “That time?”

“No, sir.”

Lark turned the device to its third position. “How about that one?”

“Affirmative. I heard four beeps.”

Lark made a note on his pad. “We'll take a few more readings from the cellar and then a few from other parts of the house.”

Lark propped his feet on the radiator in his office and stared at the pad with his notations of sound levels. “I think that if anyone screamed in the house, it would have been heard over the whole block.”

“She could have been gagged,” Horse said.

“The ME didn't think she was.”

The phone rang. “Sergeant Soho here, Lark. We ran a match on those threads found at the murder scene. They match the same dye lot as the jeans the victim was wearing.”

“How positive is that?”

“To the exclusion of all other dye lots.”

“Thanks,” Lark said. “Give it to me in writing when you can.” He hung up. “The threads you found in the woods match the victim's clothing, and we haven't any decent sound levels in the house.”

“Which means that she was killed somewhere else, carried from the Interstate, and left in the clearing.”

“We're back to square one. A body, no suspects, and no identification.”

“You want we should bury the file and leave it open like forever?”

Lark thought a moment. The screams on the tape would haunt him. There would be no burying this file. He shook his head. “We have to find out who she was. That's our key. It's my guess that eighty percent of homicide victims know their killer.”

“How about an ID on her dentalwork?”

“It won't work. Hell, the kid could have come from anywhere in the country. Forensic dental identification only works when you have a finite group to work with. In an airline disaster you have a flight manifest and can circulate dental X rays to all the dentists involved. Then, they can pull out their own work and make a positive ID.”

“And there are a couple of hundred thousand dentists in the country,” Horse added.

“Even if we could circulate to all of them, she only had one filling.”

“Good teeth.”

“The ME said there was decay. Neglect would be a better description.”

“If she needed dentalwork and didn't get it, that gives us a clue to her parents' economic pattern.”

“That's not going to give us a make.” Lark swiveled his chair to look out the window. The glass needed washing and he wondered how long it had been since it was washed.

Horse leafed through the slender case file. “The clothing was routine discount-house stuff, but we might get something on the shoes. I remember noticing that they didn't seem that old or worn.”

“Can you imagine how many of that make shoe L.L. Bean sells in a year?”

“Not in that size, Lieutenant.”

Lark's feet plunked to the floor as he turned to face Horse. “What do you mean?”

“Six quad A is damn rare. Hell, I got a kid with double A and we have one hell of a time finding her shoes. Not that we can afford L.L. Bean.”

“As far as I can recall they have only the one retail outlet, and that's in Freeport, Maine. Most of their stuff is sold through the mail.”

“Which means they're on computer.” Horse placed the call to Maine. His request was transferred several times until he was put in contact with an executive of the company. He identified himself and outlined their problem. The executive asked for the headquarters' phone number in order to make a return call to verify their identity.

Lark picked up the phone on the return call. “Lark here.”

“This is Miller of the L.L. Bean Company. Someone called here a few minutes ago and wanted us to run a shoe size through our computer.” The voice was skeptical.

“That's right,” Lark said. “We have an unidentified body who was wearing a pair of your Gumshoes size six quad A. Her other clothing was cheap stuff, but the shoes appear new and we conjecture that she would have worn them as soon as they arrived. We'd like a record of all your sales of that particular shoe in that size for the past year.”

“We do keep a record of article and size for inventory control, and we do have our customers listed … but it's a tall order.”

“Can your computer pull out how many of those shoes you sold and to whom?” Lark drummed his fingers on the desk. Horse leaned forward with interest.

A pause on the phone. “I'm not sure.”

Lark gritted his teeth and wanted to swear at the bland voice on the other end of the line. “It's all we have to go on.”

“I can appreciate your problem, Lieutenant. I'm trying to consider the problem in terms of our systems.” Another pause. “Yes, I think we can do it. I'll get a printout of names and addresses and mail it to you.”

Lark gave him their address. “Do you have any idea of what we're talking about in numbers?”

“Lieutenant, I don't know if we're talking a dozen or a thousand.”

“It's important to us,” Lark said, and hung up.

Chief Frank Pemperton stood in the doorway. “Two secretaries have gone home sick.”

“I didn't realize I had been made personnel manager, Frank.”

“It's that damn tape! They start transcribing and they go on sick call.”

“Have you listened to it?”

Pemperton turned away. “I'll read the transcript.”

“You miss the nuances that way,” Lark said bitterly to an empty doorway.

7

The printout of names and addresses arrived in the mail on the following morning. Lark wondered what sort of massive clout the L.L. Bean Company had with the post-office department. It took him two days to get a letter from Middleburg to Hartford.

The list contained 214 names.

Horse shook his head. “What in the hell are we going to do with this mess?”

“The only thing we can do,” Lark replied. “We call every damn name on that list and ask if anyone in the household is missing, and if so, try to see if she fits the description of our victim.”

“You're talking one hell of a lot of calls.”

“We'll work the New England names first. That would seem to cut the list down.” He gave half of the names to Horse and pulled the battered upright typewriter on its stand to the side of his desk. “I'll type out a rough cover story for the calls.”

“I wasn't going to ask them if they knew their kid had just been knocked off.”

“Your creative effort I don't need,” Lark said as he rapidly typed out a short paragraph and handed the sheet to Horse. “Keep to this unless you have a bite.” He found his partner an empty desk in the squad room, gathered an armful of phone directories, and made his way back to his office. He took a deep breath and reached for the phone.

The routine didn't change. “Hello, I'm Lieutenant Lark of the Middleburg Police Department. We have a young woman unconscious in a local hospital and she doesn't seem to have any identification. Is anyone from your household missing?”

If he got an affirmative reply, he would go deeper.

It was routine work of profound drudgery. There was no way to computerize the calls, and no extra help could be called in to aid them in the long boring task of dialing number after number, call after call, that often resulted in a busy signal or no answer at all. He would have to stay on after the shift ended to pick up calls he had missed.

He didn't have the energy necessary to fight with Horse over overtime. He continued dialing and using the identical lead-in that he had long ago memorized.

He wasn't sure what number call it was, they had all begun to merge together, but he did know it was one of the last he would make that night. He had gotten as far as “… is anyone missing …” when he detected a marked gasp. He paused and waited for a reply.

“My daughter has been gone a couple of days,” the feminine voice on the phone said. “But she could be with friends,” was the parental cover-up.

Lark described the victim and her clothing, including the L.L. Bean shoes. There was another pause on the line.

“That could be Vicky,” she continued. “Where did you say you were?”

“Middleburg.”

“I'll try to get a friend to drive me down there tomorrow night.”

“I can come up with some photographs,” Lark said. He suspected that the woman knew this was more serious than an injured daughter. “I can be there first thing in the morning.”

“I got to be at work by ten.”

“I'll be there by nine. Tell me how to find your place?” As he jotted directions, he began to make plans. He'd take the best-looking morgue pictures and have Horse take a separate car. It was about an hour-and-a-half drive from Middleburg to the small town of Warren near the stateline where Mrs. Stanton lived.

He prayed that this wasn't a masking clue, one of the things all detectives dreaded because of the time it consumed. A masking clue was a set of similar circumstances that had to be checked and rechecked until finally discounted. But then, the odds of two missing young women both wearing that size boot was an infinitesimal possibility.

Warren, Connecticut, had died two decades earlier, but didn't have the good sense to recognize the fact. Years ago, the town had spread like a fungus and grown up along the steep hills that enclosed a narrow valley through which a fast-running river ran. The rushing water, a century ago, had provided an attractive source of power for prosperous textile mills, but the quick hands of nonunionized southern labor had ultimately proven seductive. The matching company homes dotting the hills were now privately held, but their owners worked in distant parts.

Lark reached the Stanton home first, but in the truck's rearview mirror he could see Horse's Honda Civic toiling up the road behind him. He searched his pockets for nonexistent cigarettes as he waited for his partner to park. He wondered if giving up smoking actually made you live longer, or did it just seem that way?

The Civic parked behind the pickup and Horse's bulky frame seemed to sprout from the car as he unwound from the tiny vehicle. The mufticlad patrolman leaned in Lark's window. “Do I get mileage for this trip?”

“Yeah, and with the gas that thing uses, you'll clear thirty-two cents.” Lark started up the steep walk to the small frame dwelling.

“I don't see why we had to come in two cars,” Horse grumbled.

“You'll find out,” Lark said as he mounted the steps of the house, which was identical to a dozen others on the street. He couldn't find a door bell, so he opened the pocked screen and knocked twice on the door's inner windowpane. It was instantly opened, as if the house's occupant had been standing in wait on the far side.

“Can you jump me?” she said.

Lark patted his pockets again for cigarettes as he attempted to phrase an answer to the non sequitur. The woman before him could be on the sunny side of forty, but it was difficult to tell. Her face was deeply lined and her eyes had been tired for years. Once-blond hair was faded and pulled tight over fat, wormlike curlers that were partially covered by a head scarf. She wore a tight white shirt that revealed pointy breasts, and faded blue jeans stretched tautly over a flat stomach and thin legs. Once she had been attractive in a sexual way, now she was aging.

“Can you jump me?” she asked again impatiently.

“I got battery cables in my car,” Horse said from behind Lark.

“Thanks.” She pushed past them and hurried down the walk toward a ten-year-old Chevy parked up the street. Rust streaks scarred the body. She slid into the driver's seat, jammed a key impatiently into the ignition, and tried to start the engine. The starter motor clicked twice and died. “See! See!” she cried as she slammed the car door and fought with a recalcitrant hood. “Damn thing never starts. That's the story of my life, you know? Nothing ever works.” The hood flew open and rocked back and forth in the air.

Horse backed the Civic around to the Chevy's nose and began to attach jumper cables.

“Are you Mrs. Stanton?” Lark asked.

“No, I'm Princess Diana and I want to get this heap started so I can go to the changing of the guard.” She stared into the engine well with contempt as Horse adjusted the cables. “Story of my life. Fucking thing never starts.”

“The battery connections are corroded,” Horse said as he attached a negative cable lead to a positive connection and created a zapping spark. “Damn!” He made the right connection. “Try it now.”

“Goddamn thing!” She slid into the driver's seat and started the engine. She left the car and strode back to the house. “Let it run. If it doesn't run out of gas first, it might recharge.”

“I'm here about your daughter, Mrs. Stanton.”

She stopped with her hand on the doorknob and turned to stare blankly at Lark. “Listen, cop, don't bullshit me about Vicky being in any hospital. You busted her, right? You got her on some damn foolish thing she did. It's not the first time, you know.”

“I need a positive identification,” Lark said.

“Yeah, sure,” she said tiredly as she entered the house. “Come on in,” she called back over her shoulder as an afterthought.

The front parlor of the mill house was as small as the living-room area in Lark's trailer. Mrs. Stanton sat on a plastic-covered maple couch that ran along a complete wall. Her knees were pressed tightly together and she was hunched over as if weary.

Lark handed her the most lifelike head shots from the pictures snapped at the medical examiner's office. “Is that your daughter?”