Stone Maidens (25 page)

At midnight, the express bus from Chicago pulled up to the Greyhound terminal in downtown Indianapolis. Henrietta Curry descended its steps gratefully, exhausted at the late hour and
relieved to be able to stretch her stiff legs at last. Muggy air laced with diesel fumes wafted into the waiting room as she entered through the automatic doors, carrying her suitcase and a cookie tin wedged beneath her arm. She’d missed the five o’clock bus and had had to take the nine o’clock one instead, getting her into Indianapolis at a time she was normally asleep in bed. But she’d promised her daughter that she’d be available for three days of babysitting starting first thing in the morning, and she didn’t want to let her down. Being a working single mother was hard enough without having to worry about child care at the last minute.

An accidental bump into someone staring up at a large television monitor in the cavernous room caused Mrs. Curry to look up, too, just in time to see a report on the arrest of Claremont earlier that day for the murder of an Indiana schoolgirl. The old woman’s suitcase thudded to the floor. The face of the arrested man on the screen was unmistakable. That very man had sat next to her on the bus from Chicago.

He’s escaped!

Mrs. Curry hurried forward to see if she could spot the man who had turned down her homemade cookies without even a polite word. Her best recipe, too. She peered through the tops of her trifocals, trying to connect the face on the news with the man who’d brushed ahead of the women and children getting off the bus. It was him. She was absolutely certain. She pressed her way through a crowd of arriving passengers, completely forgetting her suitcase in the process. But there was no sign of the stranger in the baseball cap and brown farm coat.

“Hey, lady.” A redcap tapped Mrs. Curry’s shoulder, making her jump. “This your bag?” The uniformed black man had silvery sideburns and wore a red captain’s hat. He held the suitcase forward.

“Why, yes.” She closed her eyes for a second. “I must be losing my head.” She felt in her purse and handed him a dollar bill. “Thank you.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” The redcap tipped the glossy brim of his hat. As he turned to leave, Mrs. Curry tugged at his sleeve.

“Listen.” She stepped closer. “I think that man wanted for killing all those girls has escaped. He was riding next to me on the bus from Chicago.” She pointed through the waiting-room window at the TV screen, which still displayed Claremont’s face.

Mrs. Curry pulled a crisp twenty out of her purse and pinched it between her fingers. “He got off the bus not five minutes ago. He couldn’t have gone far. Help me find him. Check the street. Come back when you spot him. I’ll keep my eyes open in here.” She flashed the money. “Spot him and this is yours.”

The redcap smiled, looking confused. He squinted at the monitor to get a clearer view just as Claremont’s face faded and a young punk squirting cola down his throat appeared. The redcap glanced back at the twenty still clutched in the woman’s hand, then bolted outdoors and went to work, shading one hand over his eyes, scanning up and down the street. Ten minutes later he found Mrs. Curry in the waiting room and reported that unfortunately the man seemed to have disappeared.

Mrs. Curry thanked him and handed him the cookie tin. “Here, take this for your trouble. It’s my best recipe. I’m going to call the police. I know what I saw.”

She lugged her suitcase over to a row of phone booths against one wall and called her daughter. It was nearly twelve thirty when she finally got through to Indianapolis Police Headquarters. Obstinacy with a dash of well-placed kindness eventually got her patched through to a local FBI representative. Mrs. Curry’s description of her seatmate’s features was detailed and thorough, as was her account of how he had refused her cookies so rudely. She was certain he was the same person she’d seen on TV.

She gave the agent her name and her daughter’s home telephone number. And she didn’t leave out the detail about the sweet girl sitting across the aisle and one row back. At one point Mrs.
Curry had looked up in time to catch the man next to her turned around in his seat, eyes locked on the child. One mean stare—ten seconds’ worth of pernicious concentration—had made that poor young thing gag.

Christine shifted in her seat. The air-conditioning in the small interview room was barely functioning, and she was sweating before they’d even started. She had discussed with Bruce Howard the merits of her conducting the interview rather than Bruce. They had learned from talking with the suspect’s parents that he had a more difficult relationship with his mother. Christine thought there may be an opportunity to possibly provoke a confession out of Claremont if she interviewed the man. Howard agreed.

Claremont’s eyes were deep set, as Joey Templeton had reported. She noted the zygomatic arch—the bone running from the lower eye socket and cheek prominence back to the temple—was more pronounced than normal. His browridge overhung the apex of the oculus, making it difficult to see the man’s eye movements and producing an uncomfortable sensation in Prusik.

She met Claremont’s gaze and gave him a brief nod. No time like the present. “I’m a physical anthropologist by training. Do you know what that is, David?”

“You study bones, right?”

“Very good. The two hundred and six bones that compose the human anatomy, to be precise.”

Claremont nodded.

“As a forensic anthropologist I examine victims of violent crimes. You say you’re innocent. Would you consent to a blood test?”

“What’s my blood got to do with it?” He looked her straight in the eye without flinching. “I told you already. I’ve done nothing.” Said believably enough, but a calculating mind would practice until perfecting the look of innocence. A psychopath, on the other hand, could lie convincingly the very first try without as much as a flinch.

“Then you’ve got nothing to hide, have you? A DNA test would clear you of all suspicion.” Assuming they were lucky enough to find some of the killer’s DNA on a victim or at a crime scene to cross-match against, she thought. “Isn’t that what you want? To be exonerated? With a clean blood test you’d be free to go.” She searched his face. “Wouldn’t you like to go home, David? Clear your name? Put all this behind you?”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” He wrung his hands under the table.

“Fair question. We’re after the killer. If your DNA clears you, it means the real killer is still out there and will go on killing.” Prusik looked for any sign of hostile movement, observing nothing more than the expected wariness. “We’re not looking to pin something on you that you didn’t do.”

Claremont lowered his right hand to the tabletop. She removed a small puncture blade from its antiseptic seal and extended her hand toward his.

“A skin prick and two drops of blood on this special cardboard and we’ll be all set.”

Prusik firmly gripped the suspect’s index finger, harpooned the tip, and touched the deep-red bubble twice to the rectangular test pad. Claremont withdrew his hand.

“Would you like a Band-Aid?”

He shook his head. The man’s face muscles tightened around the bony protrusions of his browridges. If sculpted from stone, Claremont’s visage would have represented midstage in the carving, needing many more refining rubs to smooth out its exaggerated appearance.

Prusik noticed some adhesive tape covering the outside of his left palm. “Hurt yourself?” She nodded toward his hand.

Claremont slipped it beneath the table and shot her a steely look. “Not what you’re thinking.” The tendons in his forearms tensed, pressing against the table’s edge.

“What am I supposed to be thinking?”

“I’ve done nothing wrong!” he said. “This is all a mistake.”

Prusik nodded. “That’s what we’re hoping the DNA will show. Now show me your hand, David.”

He slowly pulled back the tape, wincing, and revealed a nasty human bite mark—unmistakable and recent. Prusik swallowed hard. Her rational mind could frame the question, but deep inside, a voice was shouting for her to get out of the room.

“How’d that happen?”

“I...I don’t know exactly.” Claremont’s voice faltered. His agitation seemed genuine enough.

“I would like your permission to take a bite impression of your teeth.”

He obliged her without having to be asked a second time. She unzipped the forensic pouch around her waist and removed stainless-steel calipers, thinking how Brian Eisen would compare Claremont’s uppers and lowers with the digital postmortem photographs of the teeth marks on Betsy Ryan’s shoulder, close-ups he’d enhanced using the Lucis software.

Prusik went to Claremont’s side of the table and asked him to display his teeth. His hot exhalations against the back of her hand triggered another uncomfortable wave of anxiety. She couldn’t stop the pulsation emanating from deep within her amygdala—the primitive seed in her brain, the animal part she couldn’t control, and the problem area researchers had successfully isolated as the main source of debilitating fear and panic reactions. She rested her hand on the table edge and waited for the moment to pass.

“Sorry,” she said. Regaining her composure, she said, “Let’s try that again. Open wide, like you do when the dentist cleans
your teeth.” She measured the gap between his eyeteeth on the upper jaw, then applied the calipers between the lower canines. She then measured the clear eyetooth punctures on his hand—it was a perfect match, meaning the wound had been self-inflicted.

Prusik removed some blue molding adhesive from its airtight package and pressed it firmly against his uppers, carefully repeating the procedure for the lower dentition. She would compare the impression with the Ryan victim bite mark.

“Why’d you bite yourself?”

“I...I can’t remember.”

Prusik didn’t press the point. She removed a yellow legal pad from her briefcase. “Let’s talk about your daily routines, shall we?” Abruptly changing gears was a questioning strategy she preferred, believing it prevented a suspect from having time enough to fabricate answers. “Give me a sense of your workweek, how you spend the hours of each day. How much time do you spend on the farm?”

“Most days, I guess.” He shrugged. “On and around the property.”

“Dawn-to-dusk hard work?”

“Here and there, running errands mostly.” He studied the top of the table.

“According to your father, the bottomland is leased out to a neighbor who works it. He says you hardly do any chores at all on the place other than hang out in the barn a lot.”

David’s upper lip was beginning to shine. “Not true. I stained the neighbor’s barn. I did the whole thing myself.”

Christine flashed on the paint fragment evidence. “What sort of errands do you run?”

“In town, up to the farmers’ co-op, getting more stain, groceries, things like that.”

“The farmers’ co-op. I heard about some trouble you had there recently, attacking some woman in the parking lot?”

“No! I didn’t attack her. I carried a roll of wire out to her car for her. It was heavy, and I...I...”

“You thought she owed you something for your trouble?”

“No! I was helping her. She...she didn’t press charges. She knew I didn’t mean her any harm. She knew. I don’t even remember exactly what happened,” he concluded softly, defeated somehow.

Prusik nodded and switched directions again abruptly. “Your mother said this spring and summer you took a bus to Chicago twice without saying a word about where you were going.” She took out a large gray file from her forensic case. Dr. Irwin Walstein had dropped it off at the police station at her request.

Claremont’s leg began to wiggle.

“That’s a pretty strange thing to do. Chicago’s a long way off. What were you doing there? Did you meet anyone?”

“Getting hobby supplies mostly.”

“What sort of hobby is that?”

“Carving. I like to carve things.”

Christine swallowed hard and looked down, pretending to consult her notes. She let a moment pass, then looked up again. “How come you didn’t tell your parents you were going? Your mother was very upset about it, David.”

“Don’t know. I just didn’t.”

“So when did you take the bus to Chicago?”

“I’m not sure. I think it was in March.”

“And the second time, when was that?”

He shrugged, looked down at his lap. “Might have been two weeks or so ago, I’m not sure.” The dull slapping thud of his knees increased.

Perhaps he had stashed a vehicle in the Chicago area; keeping it away from home would have been smart planning. But not telling his parents and being gone for nearly twelve hours on each occasion was plain stupid. Surely they’d worry. They might even have called the police, searching for him. Unless, of course, they hadn’t, to cover for him, to protect him, assuming they knew something far worse. Yet when Prusik had briefly met with Claremont’s parents before the interview, neither had impressed her as being
capable of the kind of behavior necessary to protect a lawbreaking son, nor did they seem like the kind of people who would be able and willing to conceal evidence of horrifying crimes.

Prusik had confirmed with the Weaversville police what both David’s parents had said—he did spend most days, including weekends, around the farm, keeping to himself. He was kind of a homebody. And he didn’t usually venture by himself much farther than the farmers’ co-op. Except for these secret adventures to Chicago.

One thing that surprised Prusik was the quality of Claremont’s responses. His short denials belied the impression she’d gotten from Dr. Walstein—that David behaved fearfully. The doctor’s file notes disclosed that he frequently displayed a helpless attitude toward his disabling visionary attacks—hardly befitting the profile of a confident and efficient killer.

“Tell me what you like to carve, David.”

“Animals, figures, anything that comes to mind.” He rubbed a hand over his short-cropped hair. “They’re at home. You’ll see them, if you haven’t already.”

“By any chance, did you visit our fine natural history museum while you were on one of your jaunts to Chicago? The Museum of Natural History?”