Mark of Murder - Dell Shannon (26 page)

What Sheriff Jay Hampton had to tell them was that
there'd been two murders in a little place called Georgetown, about
three months back. Quite a surprise to Georgetown, which had a
population of about eight hundred--Mendoza found on consulting an
atlas--and probably hadn't had a murder since the frontier was
officially closed in 1890, You could read between the lines of
Sheriff Hampton's terse statement. The first victim had been Betty
Riley, a local girl well known and liked. Engaged to the son of the
town's bank president; her father was one of two doctors in town. A
pretty girl, popular and virtuous. She had been to see a girl friend,
Martha Glenn, a block away from her own home, on the night of April
thirtieth. Had left there about nine o'clock to walk home, and next
turned up dead on her own front lawn, at ten-forty. Found by her
father as he came home. She had been stabbed and slashed to death,
and mutilated afterward. The sheriff had called in the state boys,
the B.C.I. from Sacramento, and their crime lab had said that the
knife used had a partly serrated edge. Absolutely no clue had turned
up; it looked like the random killing of a lunatic. She had not been
raped, and evidently hadn't had time to scream.

"¿Y pues qué?" said Mendoza irritably.

The second victim, found next day in a field outside
of town, had been one Giorgiono Cabezza, an itinerant agricuItural
laborer who'd just been fired from his job on a local ranch. Here
they turned up something more definite. Cabezza had been seen in
several bars the night before; he'd been talking about leaving town,
finding another job farther south. Toward the end of the evening,
around midnight, he'd been seen with another man, a transient just
passing through--nobody in town knew him--possibly a hobo. Nobody in
Georgetown had ever seen him before, and nobody had heard his name.
But the surgeon said Cabezza had been killed about 2 AM., and the
transient was the man last seen in his company. They had a good
description of him: a man about forty, very thin, hollow-cheeked,
middle height, and he had a very noticeable scar from an old burn
across the center of his face. No evidence actually pointed to him as
the murderer, but he had not been seen anywhere around since, and
Georgetown had had no more knifings.

"What the hell does that tell us?" demanded
Mendoza. "For God's sake!" He'd been hoping that if the
Slasher had killed before, especially in a small town, something more
definite might have been got on him. This was just nothing but
continnation of what they knew. And he should have known it wouldn't
be anything more; if any other force had got anything definite on the
man there'd have been flyers sent out.

And the papers yelling their heads off about
inefficient police. Mostly. Spare a moment to be grateful to the
Times, which had run a thoughtful editorial pointing out all the
difficulties of the hunt for the random killer. He put the teletype
down and dialed the Hollenbeck station. "Well, I was just about
to call you, Lieutenant," said the sergeant he'd talked to
before.

"Anything?"

"It seems your Ballistics man gave you a false
alarm. Our boys just got back from checking. I looked up the record
on that break-in--TV store on Soto Street--and it didn't close until
eight-thirty so the break-in was after that. This Behrens, the
pawnbroker, naturally didn't know from nothing about those three
juveniles, never laid eyes on them, never bought anything off
them--but he hadn't expected any check, of course, and there were
four transistor radios and a portable TV in his back room, and the
owner of the TV store could identify them by the serial numbers. From
his place, all right. Well, you said your chiropractor was getting
himself shot between eight and midnight. Kind of tight times, when
you think--and not very likely the kids would pull two in one night,
so close together. They probably broke in that store between nine and
nine-thirty, or a bit later. The pawnbroker's not talking, but they
say they were in his place about ten-thirty. Well, they'd probably--"

"¡
Basta ya!
"
said Mendoza. "I know. Go out on a little spree with the cash
from the pawnbroker, with or without girls. Not go looking for
another likely place to break in. So the fancy story about finding
the gun is probably--definitely--true. Thanks very much."

"Sometimes you get a tough one," said the
sergeant sympathetically. . .

Mendoza stared intently at the desk lighter. So it
was back to the private thing. Was it? Not those juveniles, but maybe
an older pro? Entirely too coincidental that those juveniles should
end up with the gun. No, it had been the private kill, on Nestor.
 
Well, what about Elger for it? A gun
used, and then that canny, cautious plan to get rid of the gun . . .
Not in character?

Andrea Nestor, now . . .

Some other jealous husband?

Look thoroughly at everybody in Nestor's address
book. That Clay had sounded quite level, but there might be . . .
Palliser came in. He said, "I don't know what anybody else may
have turned up, but I've drawn blank on your button."

"More good news," said Mendoza. "Sit
down and tell me who you've eliminated."
 

SEVENTEEN

The man who wanted to kill was seething with hate and
anger, where he lay hidden in the place he had found for himself. He
had thought of killing, more killing, to pay them all back, but his
slow mind had told him that they would come hunting him, they would
hunt him out--a place like that room. He needed a secret, safe place
to be when they came hunting. So he had come here.

But for the rest of it, it had all gone wrong. He had
only caught one of them to use the knife on, make the blood come. A
man more than half drunk, who came lurching up the street toward him
in the dark, and was easily pulled into that alley.

And people looked at him queerly, even more than
usual, almost as if they knew what was in his mind. That woman at the
place he'd bought food, last night . . .

He'd gone into a bar and heard some men talking. They
were talking about him--him, the big important one, the Slasher, and
what they said did not fill him with panic but with rage. How they
knew what he looked like now, there'd been an artist's drawing in the
paper, they said, and how they were telling everyone not to go
walking alone at night, to be careful.

There hadn't been people out, near as many as usual
--he'd noticed that. He'd drifted, a dark shadow, in the shelter of
buildings around many streets, and when they came past him it was in
groups, two or three together and walking fast. On account of him.
Dim pride rose in his mind; but it was no good, it spoiled
everything, if it stopped him killing any more of them. He wanted in
sudden furious rage to kill and kill--pay them back. They mustn't
hunt him down, to stop him.

He had almost reached out for the nearest of those
two women who had come along, hurrying, not talking--he could take
her, let the other one scream and run, he could be gone before . . .
But he was some way off from his safe, secret place, and he didn't.

Instead, he had taken out his knife and looked at it:
not really looked, there in the dark, but felt it. He liked to use it
to make the blood come, and it came quiet and easy. But you had to be
near, to kill with the knife ....

He'd had a gun of his own, once. Back the first place
he'd worked after the orphanage, old man Haskell's farm outside of
Younker, back in Georgia. You went out shooting birds, come fall,
everybody did, and he got to be a pretty good shot on an old gun
Haskell let him use, and he saved up and bought himself a new gun. It
was a .zz rifle, and he'd been pretty good with it. That was a long
time back. He didn't remember how long, he'd been a lot of places
since, and he didn't remember what had happened to that rifle.

You could kill from a ways oft with a gun. With guns.
It wouldn't be as good, there wouldn't be as much blood, but you
could kill more of them and still keep safe .... He'd laughed and
laughed excitedly, thinking about it, how it would be, do it like
that. Slip out at night, and he could be maybe half a block away, and
get them maybe two, three at a time, and then while they were running
around like a flock of scared chickens, hunting him, all the time
he'd be back in his secret place--waiting for the dark and to go out
again. It would be like that.

And he knew where he could get the guns. There was a
place not far away, guns in the window.

Vague memory stirred in his mind, about guns ....
He'd been a lot of places, but mostly country places, because he
couldn't do many city jobs. Country places, where people hunted
things. Rabbits and birds. Going out rabbit hunting, a man would say,
passing along the fence by where you were. That's a nice stand of
corn--and you with a day's work ahead .... Going out people hunting,
he thought to himself, and shook with laughter again. So he'd started
up through his secret place, to go there and get the guns. This was a
big, dark, strange place, with him the only one in it. He came out
from where he'd made a kind of bed from an old  broken-down sofa
left there, and he was in a vast empty underground room
cement-floored and walled. There were shapes against the walls, a big
square furnace, pipes disconnected and rusty, a row of ancient refuse
barrels, and empty shelves all along one wall. At the far end of the
big room were stairs.

He'd drifted up them silently, though he knew there
was none to hear anywhere around. At the top he was on a little
square landing and there was a door, but it was half off its hinges,
hung drunkenly open so he could see beyond. He stepped past the door,
onto bare dusty flooring, to an irregularly shaped wide corridor.
There was another door to the right there: it had something painted
on it but a couple of letters were partly worn away and he didn't
know what it meant--it said L D ES. Down at the middle of the
corridor it widened out and there was something like a bar standing
there.

He didn't go that way. He turned to the left and went
through an open arch into another vast dark place: but he knew the
way. He felt along carefully by the wall, until his feet told him he
was nearing the door. The door was very heavy and had an iron bar
across it inside; he pushed against that hard, and reluctantly the
door creaked open and he came out into the night.

There was no moon, but he knew where he was. He was
standing at the side, almost at the very end, of a big brick
building, and ahead of him was a steep cement ramp leading to the
street. He went up it.

It was late; he'd lain a long while thinking about
all this, before deciding. There wasn't anybody around at all,
streets dark and empty, and he walked quickly. After he'd got the
stuff, he thought, he'd like to do one tonight, but it was too
late--nobody around, nobody at all ....

And he'd had a little job, to get it all back to the
safe place. Because he was going to kill, and kill, and kill . . .

They'd never find him, and he'd need lots to kill so
many. . . . But he had it all there at last, and he was satisfied.
Only, too late to go out and hunt any of them tonight. Have to wait
for the dark again ....

All day he had lain here, waiting for the dark. Now
he was hungry, and what he'd got at that store last night was gone.
He sat up, thinking about that slowly. For the dozenth time he picked
up the newspaper and carried it to a place under the ventilation
grill in the ceiling where light came in. He'd spelled out the words
under the picture.
Artist's sketch of the
Slasher from his description. Have you seen this man?

It didn't look an awful lot like him, he thought.
Except there was the mark--the terrible red mark--right across the
face .... They'd laughed at him, they'd called him -- And there had
been a pretty girl named Ellen, who had screamed and run. In sudden
red fury, he crumpled up the paper and flung it away into a corner.

It wasn't dark yet. It wouldn't be dark for a while.
But he was hungry. But they mustn't hunt him down. He was going to-

After hesitation, he started up through the dark, for
his door to the outside. He had his hat pulled low over his eyes, and
he thought he could pretend to have a cold, keep his handkerchief up.

There was a hamburger joint a block up where you
could take it away with you, didn't have to eat there. He walked up
to it fast. There were some other people there, eating or waiting for
their hamburgers. He asked for two; when they were shoved across the
counter at him he put down a silver dollar.

"Buck an' ten cents, mister."

He found the extra dime. He walked back quickly,
carrying the food. Down in his safe place he ate slowly, enjoying the
greasy hot flavor of beef and onions and pickle .... Now he was lying
here hungry for something else. For the dark. For the dark to come
down, so he would know it was time. The right time to go out and
start his night's hunting.

He held a gun on his lap, and now and then he touched
it almost lovingly. The knife was good, but the gun would be good
too. Better, now. Better for him. I'm a people hunter, he thought,
and laughed. Most important guy in the whole Goddamned town. In all
the papers. Everybody talking about him. The Slasher. Be the hell of
a lot more important before he was done ....