Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

It was now four years since she’d thrown Eric out, having belatedly realized that he was never going to change his ways. He’d appeared genuinely astonished by her decision, and maybe even more by the fact that she’d finally got around to making one. That had always been his role in the relationship. He’d picked Kristine out at college, where he was majoring in dentistry and she in social science, and dated her assiduously for two years. Once they both graduated, he had proposed and she’d said why not, even though the idea of her marrying a Swede hadn’t gone down too well with her Norwegian family. Looking back at it now, Kristine could see that she had passively bought into his program all along. What she didn’t understand, even now, was why.

Once they were married, Eric had been the one to decide where they should live, who their friends should be, which restaurant or movie to go to, even the most appropriate moment for having a child. Kristine had followed the path of least resistance, standing idly by while he organized every aspect of their life with the same obsession for detail that he lavished on his patients’ dental problems. In a weak, Pollyanna-ish way that now made her shudder, she had kept telling herself that things would soon get better. He would mellow out once they were engaged, once they were married, once they’d settled down, once they started a family. It had taken her eight years to realize that she was living with a control freak. Underneath the masterful exterior which had charmed her at first lay a deeply disturbed individual, weak and anxious, with a compulsion to organize every single aspect of his own life, and that of everyone around him. By the time they finally separated, they were like the impacted branches of trees which have grown too close together, both distorted, both rubbed raw.

But even though Kristine had got him out of the house, she couldn’t get him out of her life. When you have a child, you not only give a hostage to fortune but also to a person you may eventually come to wish you’d never met. With Thomas as a pretext and go-between, Eric could continue to exercise a measure of creepy control over Kristine for the foreseeable future, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.

Sometimes Thomas relayed the messages himself. “Dad says you shouldn’t cook hamburger so often, it’s full of cholesterol.” Sometimes they came by phone. “I see Thomas is only in the ninety-fifth percentile in English. How rigorously do you supervise his homework? He seems to be spending a lot of his time watching TV.” So although Kristine had no particular wish to feed Steve Warren’s fantasies of fame and fortune, she felt a measure of warmth toward him simply for not being Eric, and called him back to explain that she had been out all evening. Steve Warren cut her off.

“As soon as I started watching it I thought, hey, this sounds familiar. The MO was pretty much identical. Two guys and a woman get blown away in a walk-up. Twenty-two to the back of the head, victims bound and gagged, nothing taken, no sex angle, no prints, no clues, no manifest perp. Jesus, you should have seen the homicide dick hamming it up for the cameras. You could tell he was just loving it. Like, ‘Hi, Mom, it’s me!’”

“When did this happen?”

“Couple of months ago. Takes them a while to set it up and do the filming, I guess.”

“Too bad I was out.”

“No prob, I taped it. Got a library of every episode dating back to March of 1989, all except one where my VCR went ape and chewed up the tape. I’ll bring it over tomorrow and we can talk about putting together a package to send them. Someone told me one of the segment directors lives right here, on Mercer Island. We could go over there, pitch it to him direct. Hey, we could be stars! The camera’s gonna love you, babe.”

Kristine Kjarstad viewed the video the following evening. The next morning, she put in a call to the Kansas City Police and after some delay got to speak to Fred Poison, the detective who had handled the case. He insisted on calling her back at the office, just to check that she was who she claimed to be. Once this had been established, Poison was ready enough to talk, but it soon emerged that he was skeptical of the alleged parallels between the two cases and suspicious of his caller’s motives in trying to establish one.

“You’re talking what sounds like a straightforward domestic, Ms. Kjarstad, except you can’t come up with the goods on the guy. This one here’s something completely different. You see the show? Did a great job, huh? Course they had my complete input the whole time, not just the parts where I was on camera. Anyway, what we’ve got is an old man, his daughter who was visiting, and the guy they had in to paint the kitchen. Right? These guys arrive at the door, tie them up, blow them away and then just disappear. I mean it’s like in a different class, you know? Which is why the TV people decided to go for us instead of you guys.”

Kristine frowned.

“Mr. Poison, did you already receive a call from someone in this department?”

“Guy name of Warren? And I told him just the same as I’m-”

“Can I just clarify something? Whatever my coworker may have said or implied, this is my case and I’m not interested in TV exposure. OK? I couldn’t compete anyway. You’re a natural, Mr. Poison, and just let me say that your necktie looked great. We don’t see many bolo ties here in Seattle, not the real classy ones.”

“Hell, that old thing! My wife, Gertrude, gave me that for my birthday, way back in-”

“Here’s what I’m up for,” Kristine continued in her most hokey tone of voice. “You send me the notes on your case and I’ll send you the notes on mine. That way we both get a chance to compare and contrast. You’re probably right, there’s no there there. But just supposing there is some link, or we can make it look that way, you get to go right back on AMW and update the story. I guarantee to stay out of it. And you can have that in writing if you want.”

“Hell, Ms. Kjarstad, you should get a piece of the action too.”

Kristine turned on a mildly flirtatious voice.

“Well, in that case let’s get together and work something out.”

Poison laughed richly.

“Be more than my life’s worth, Ms. Kjarstad. Gertrude is one jealous woman. You got fax machines out there on the coast?”

The report on the Kansas City killings arrived on Kristine Kjarstad’s desk while she was typing up her case notes on an alleged sexual assault at a school in a town called Selleck. The first page was signed by the patrolman who had been called to the scene.

Kansas City Police Department

Case Number:

47-94-0076

Offense:

Homicide

Victim #1: Howard Selby W/M DOB: 03-16-27

Victim #2: Sandra Selby W/F 09-07-49

Victim #3: Unknown B/M unknown

Suspect #1: Unknown W/M

Suspect #2: Unknown W/M

Location: 2930 East 64th Street, #33

Details: Reporting officer arrived at scene at 14.35 hrs., in response to a reported disturbance. Complainant Wanda Neuberger, fifty-seven, resident at 2930 East 64th Street, #35, stated that she had heard cries for help from the neighboring apartment, inhabited by Howard Selby, who was confined to a wheelchair. She went to Selby’s apartment and knocked on the door, which was opened by two young men. One of them was drenched from head to foot in rose pink paint. The men pulled a gun and forced complainant to return with them to her apartment, where they confined her in a windowless bathroom off the kitchen and blocked the door by moving the refrigerator against it. Complainant struggled with the door for some fifteen minutes before succeeding in opening it enough to escape and telephone 911. Having conducted a search for the suspects, R/O proceeded to apt. 33, where he discovered the body of victs. 1 amp; 2 in the living room, and vict. 3 in the kitchen. He called in for assistance and remained at door to secure scene from intruders until arrival of detectives. Case was then turned over to Detective Fred Poison.

The following pages contained Poison’s report:

Kansas City Police Department

Case Number:

47-94-0076

In response to Officer Kimball’s request for detectives to work a reported multiple homicide, I went to 2930 East 64th Street, Apartment 33. Victim #1, identified to me by neighbor Wanda Neuberger as Howard Selby, was in living room sitting in a wheelchair. The chair was facing the north wall, the head slumped forward and the wrists taped to the arms of the chair. Gunshot entry wound visible at back of head. Victim #2, identified to me by same witness as Sandra Selby, daughter of vict. #1, was also in the living room, lying on floor under window in east wall. The body was lying on its right side, facing east, in a fetal crouch. Gunshot entry wound at back of head. Victim #3 was found in kitchen, which was being repainted, lying on back in middle of floor, right arm outstretched above head. Victim was wearing housepainter’s overalls. Three gunshot entry wounds were visible, in the mid-chest, right shoulder and forehead. A large irregular splash of pink paint lay on the floor to the northeast of the body. A series of clear shoe prints in the same paint were visible on the vinyl flooring, and more faintly on the living-room carpet leading to the front door of the apartment. I directed Crime Scene Technician Traci Moore to make a full investigation. I then took a full statement from Wanda Neuberger (see document attached) and put out an urgent call for the two individuals she described to me, including a description of the winter coat and scarf she reported missing from her wardrobe. At that point John Boychuk, the janitor of the apartment block, appeared at the scene and identified victim #3 as Winston Jones, of 4711 East 53rd Street, who did light maintenance work for many tenants in the building.

Kristine Kjarstad read through the neighbor’s statement, which added nothing of any substance to what she had told the patrolman. She then skimmed the lengthy supplemental reports by the CST, the pathologist and the forensic laboratory. Selby and his daughter had been shot at close range, Jones twice from a distance of several feet and once, to the forehead, at close range. The ammunition used was CCI Stinger.22 caliber. Traces of adhesive on the mouths of Howard and Sandra Selby matched that used on the duct tape used to secure Howard’s wrists to the arms of his wheelchair, indicating that they had been gagged. Marks on Sandra Selby’s wrists suggested that she had also been handcuffed.

But the piece of evidence that interested Kristine Kjarstad the most was hidden away in the dry catalog of the CST report. The shoe prints created by the paint on the vinyl flooring of the kitchen were so clear that there had been no problem in matching the make, model and year against the sample books which are supplied to police authorit

ies by leading shoe manufacturers. In this case identification had been simplified still further by the fact that the sole of the Nike model in question featured the silhouetted figure of the basketball star Michael Jordan.

Detective Eileen McCann of the Evanston City Police did not see that particular episode of America’s Most Wanted. For one thing, she had gone into Chicago that evening to watch the Blackhawks fight a losing battle for a playoff spot in the Stanley Cup. For another, she didn’t own a television.

By this time, there had been a number of developments in the Maple Street case. One related to the murder weapon, which had been traced to a gun shop in Portland, Oregon. It had been sold eight years previously to a certain Willard Sumner, resident in the Errol Heights neighborhood of that city. One evening, Sumner returned home from work to find that his house had been burgled. Amongst the inventory of missing items he gave the police-two VCRs, a brand-new fax machine and a “priceless” collection of country and western CDs-was the.22-caliber Smith amp; Wesson Model 34 revolver which Sumner had bought over the counter at Joe’s Guns following a previous break-in at his house.

After that, there was no further trace of the weapon. Evanston Police circulated its ballistic characteristics to law enforcement agencies in the Northwest, hoping that they might match a set held on record in relation to other crimes, but without result. The burglar who stripped Sumner’s house might have kept the revolver for his own use, or sold it privately to one of the many people whose professional activities require the use of firearms but who prefer to avoid the formalities associated with the mandatory five-day waiting period. That purchaser might then have experienced a temporary cash-flow problem and sold the gun to someone else. There was no way of knowing how many hands the gun had passed through before it turned up in Evanston.

But the major breakthrough concerned the identity of the third victim and presumed perpetrator of the killings. By the time it happened, Eileen McCann had almost given up hope of ever being able to tie a name tag to the anonymous cadaver which was stored, like some artwork of dubious provenance, in the basement of the city morgue. An extensive poster and media blitz immediately following the shootings had induced a flurry of claims to recognize the unknown man, but these had always failed to hold up to sustained scrutiny. Then, when all the furor had died down, along came one that stuck.

The informant was a private investigator named Lou Gelen, with an office in Decatur, Illinois. He had been hired three years earlier by a local couple named Watson to find their son. Gelen had managed to trace Dale Watson as far as Boise, Idaho, where the boy had worked briefly in a lumber yard. There the trail ended, until Gelen visited a police station in South Chicago to look up a friend and happened to see one of the posters featuring a tastefully retouched photograph of the unknown individual in the Evanston killings.

Lou Gelen immediately contacted the Watsons, then the Evanston Police. The next day, Eileen McCann drove down to Decatur, bringing with her a portfolio of photographs of the dead man. Joseph Watson returned with McCann to Evanston, where he viewed the body in the morgue and positively identified it as that of his son.

Hopes of a swift breakthrough in the case rapidly faded, however. Bank, medical, telephone, utility, DMV, voter’s registration, IRS, consumer credit and Social Security agency records were all checked, without effect. Dale Watson’s name did not feature on the National Crime Investigation Computer, and there was no record that he had ever been charged with a crime.

By interviewing the parents and following up leads provided by them, the police gradually built up a profile of Dale Watson’s life. He had been born in Shelby County and raised in Decatur, where the family moved in the mid-seventies. He had achieved average grades at school. People remembered him, if at all, as a pleasant, unexceptional young man. The caption to his high school yearbook photograph read: “Noted for his ready smile, Dale participated in Frosh football and Varsity baseball … he belonged to the Baptist Youth group outside of school… he will remember shop class because of Mr. Booker’s inspirational teaching … his secret ambition is to travel throughout the world … Dale plans to attend college next year.”