CHAPTER SIXTEEN 3 page

Johnny whistled through his teeth. “Let them follow along, then.”

Bannerman looked at him thoughtfully, for several moments and then nodded. “Okay.”

8.

When they came out of the office, the reporters were up and surrounding them immediately. Johnny was reminded of a rundown kennel over in Durham where a strange old woman kept collies. The dogs would all runout at you when you went past with your fishing pole, yapping and snarling and generally scaring the hell out of you. They would nip but not actually bite.

“Do you know who did it, Johnny?” “Have any ideas at all?”

“Got any brainwaves, Mr. Smith?”

“Sheriff, was calling in a psychic your idea?”

“Do the state police and the A. G. “s office know about this development, Sheriff Bannerman?”

“Do you think you can break the case, Johnny?”

“Sheriff, have you deputized this guy?”

Bannerman pushed his way slowly and solidly through them, zipping his coat. “No comment, no comment. “Johnny said nothing at all.

The reporters clustered in the foyer as Johnny and Bannerman went down the snowy steps. It wasn't until they bypassed the cruiser and began wading across the street that one of them realized they were going to the common. Several of them ran back for their topcoats. Those who had been dressed for outside when Banner-man and Johnny emerged from the office now floundered down the Town Office steps after them, calling like children.

9.

Flashlights bobbing in the snowy dark. The wind howled, blowing snow past them this way and that in errant sheets.

“You're not gonna be able to see a damn thing,” Bannerman said. “You w… holy shit!” He was almost knocked off his feet as a reporter in a bulky overcoat and a bizarre tam o'shanter sprawled into him.

“Sorry, Sheriff,” he said sheepishly. “Slippery. Forgot my galoshes.”

Up ahead a yellow length of nylon rope appeared out of the gloom. Attached to it was a wildly swinging sign reading POLICE INVESTIGATION.

“You forgot your brains, too,” Bannerman said. “Noyou keep back, all of you! Keep right back!”

“Town common's public property, Sheriff!” one of the reporters cried.

“That's right, and this is police business. You stay be-hind this rope here or you'll spend the night in my holding cell.”

With the beam of his flashlight he traced the course of the rope for them and then held it up so Johnny could pass beneath. They walked down the slope toward the snow-mounded shapes of the benches. Behind them the reporters gathered at the rope, pooling their few lights so that Johnny and George Bannerman walked in a dull sort of spotlight,

“Flying blind,” Bannerman said.

“Well, there's nothing to see, anyway,” Johnny said. “Is there?”

“No, not now. I told Frank he could take that rope down anytime. Now I'm glad he didn't get around to it. You want to go over to the bandstand?”

“Not yet. Show me where the cigarette butts were. “They went on a little farther and then Bannerman stopped. “Here,” he said, and shone his light on a bench that was little more than a vague hump poking out of a drift.

Johnny took off his gloves and put them in his coat pockets. Then he knelt and began to brush the snow away from the seat of the bench. Again Bannerman was struck by the haggard pallor of the man's face. On his knees before the bench he looked like a religious penitent, a man in desperate prayer.

Johnny's hands went cold, then mostly numb. Melted now ran off his fingers. He got down to the splintered, weatherbeaten surface of the bench. He seemed to see it very clearly, almost with magnifying power. It had once been green, but now much of the paint had flaked and eroded away. Two rusted steel bolts held the seat to the backrest.

He seized the bench in both hands, and sudden weirdness flooded him he had felt nothing so intense before and would feel something so intense only once ever again.

He stared down at the bench, frowning, gripping it tightly in his hands. It -…

(A summer bench)

How many hundreds of different people had sat here at one time or another, listening to “God Bless America”, to “Stars and Stripes Forever” ('Be hind to your web-footed friends… for a duck may be somebody's moooother… “), to the Castle Rock Cougars” fight song? Green summer leaves, smoky haze of fall like a memory of cornhusks and men with rakes in mellow dusk. The thud of the big snare drum. Mellow gold trumpets and trombones. School band uniforms…

(for a duck… may be… somebody's mother…)

Good summer people sitting here, listening. applauding, holding programs that had been designed and printed in the Castle Rock High School graphic arts shop.

But this morning a killer had been sitting here. Johnny could feel him.

Dark tree branches etched against a gray snow-sky like runes. He(I) am sitting here, smoking, waiting, feeling good, feeling like he(I) could jump right over the roof of the world and land lightly on two feet. Humming a song. Something by the Rolling Stones. Can't get that, but very dearly everything is… is what?

All right. Everything is all right) everything is gray and waiting for snow, and Em…

“Slick,” Johnny muttered. “I'm slick, I'm so slick.”

Bannerman leaned forward, unable to catch the words over the howling wind. “What?”

“Slick,” Johnny repeated. He looked up at Bannerman and the Sheriff involuntarily took a step backward. Johnny's eyes were cool and somehow inhuman. His dark hair blew wildly around his white face, and overhead the winter wind screamed through the black sky. His hands seemed welded to the bench.

“I'm so fucking slick,” he said clearly. A triumphant smile had formed on his lips. His eyes stared through Bannerman. Bannerman believed. No one could be acting this, or putting it on. And the most terrible part of it was… he was “reminded of someone. The…… the tone of voice… Johnny Smith was gone; he seemed to have been replaced by a human blank. And lurking behind the planes of his ordinary features, almost near enough to touch. was another face. The face of the killer.

The face of someone he knew.

“Never catch me because I'm too slick for you. “A little laugh escaped him, confident, lightly taunting. “I put it on every time, and if they scratch… or bite… they don't get a bit of me… because I'm so SLICK!” His voice rose to a triumphant, crazy shriek that competed with the wind, and Bannerman fell back another step, his flesh crawling helplessly, his balls tight and cringing against his guts.

Let it stop, he thought. Let it stop now. Please.

Johnny bent his head over the bench. Melting snow dripped between his bare fingers.

(Snow. Silent snow, secret snow -)

(She put a clothespin on it so I'd know how it felt. How it felt when you got a disease. A disease from one of those nasty-fuckers, they're all nasty. fuckers, and they have to be stopped, yes, stopped, stop them, stop, the stop, the STOP-OH MY GOD THE STOP SIGN -!)

He was little again. Going to school through the silent, secret snow. And there was a man looming out of the shifting whiteness, a terrible man, a terrible black grinning man with eyes as shiny as quarters, and there was a red STOP sign clutched in one gloved hand… him!… him!… him!

(OH MY GOD DON'T… DON'T LET HIM GET ME… MOMMA… DON'T LET HIM GET MEEEEE…)

Johnny screamed and fell away from the bench, his hands suddenly pressed to his cheeks. Bannerman crouched beside him, badly frightened. Behind the rope the reporters stirred and murmured.

“Johnny! Snap out of it! Listen, Johnny…”

“Slick,” Johnny muttered. He looked up at Bannerman with hurt, frightened eyes. In his mind he still saw that black shape with the shiny-quarter eyes looming out of the snow. His crotch throbbed dully from the pain of the clothespin the killer's mother had made him wear. He hadn't been the killer then, oh no, not an animal, not a pusbag or a shitbag or whatever Bannerman had called him, he'd only been a scared little boy with a clothespin on his… his…

“Help me get up,” he muttered.

Bannerman helped him to his feet. “The bandstand now,” Johnny said.

“No, I think we ought to go back, Johnny.”

Johnny pushed past him blindly and began to flounder toward the bandstand, a big circular shadow up ahead. It bulked and loomed in the darkness, the death place. Bannerman ran and caught up to him.

“Johnny, who is it? Do you know who…?”

“You never found any scraps of tissue under their finger. nails because he was wearing a raincoat,” Johnny said, He panted the words out. “A raincoat with a hood. A slick vinyl raincoat. You go back over the reports. You go back over the reports and you'll see. It was raining or snowing every time. They clawed at him, all right. They fought him. Sure they did. But their fingers just slipped and slid over it.”

“Who, Johnny? Who?”

“I don't know. But I'm going to find out.”

He stumbled over the lowest of the six steps leading up to the bandstand, fumbled for his balance, and would have lost it if Bannerman had not gripped his arm. Then they were up on the stage. The snow was thin here, a bare dusting, kept off by the conical roof. Bannerman trained his flashlight beam on the floor and Johnny dropped to his hands and knees and began to crawl slowly across it. His hands were bright red. Bannerman thought they must be like chunks of raw meat by now.

Johnny stopped suddenly and stiffened like a dog on point. “Here,” he muttered. “He did it right here.”

Images and textures and sensations flooded in. The copper taste of excitement, the possibility of being seen adding to it. The girl was squirming, trying to scream. He had covered her mouth with one gloved hand. Awful excitement. Never catch me, I'm the Invisible Man, is it dirty enough for you now, momma?

Johnny began to moan, shaking his head back and forth.

Sound of clothes ripping. Warmth. Something flowing. Blood? Semen? Urine?

He began to shudder all over. His hair hung in his face. His face. His smiling, open face caught inside the circular border of the raincoat's hood as his (my) hands close around the neck at the moment of orgasm and squeeze… and squeeze… and squeeze.

The strength left his arms as the images began to fade. He slipped forward, now lying on the stage full-length, sobbing. When Bannerman touched his shoulder he cried out and tried to scramble away, his face crazy with fear. Then, little by little, it loosened. He put his head back against the waist-high bandstand railing and closed his eyes. Shudders raced through his body like whippets. His pants and coat were sugared with snow.

“I know who it is,” he said.

10.

Fifteen minutes later Johnny sat in Bannerman's inner office again, stripped to his shorts and sitting as close as he could to a portable electric heater. He still looked cold and miserable, but he had stopped shaking.

“Sure you don't want some coffee?”

Johnny shook his head. “I can't abide the stuff.”

Johnny… “Bannerman sat down. “Do you really know something?”

“I know who killed them. You would have gotten him eventually. You were just too close to it. You've even seen him in his raincoat, that shiny all-over raincoat. Because he crosses the kids in the morning. He has a stop sign on a stick and he crosses the kids in the morning.”

Bannerman looked at him, thunderstruck. “Are you talking about Frank? Frank Dodd? You're nuts!”

“Frank Dodd killed them,” Johnny said. “Frank Dodd killed them all.”

Bannerman looked as though he didn't know whether to laugh at Johnny or deal him a good swift kick. “That's the craziest goddam thing I've ever heard,” he said finally. “Frank Dodd's a fine officer and a fine man. He's crossing over next November to run for municipal chief of police, and he'll do it with my blessing. “Now his expression was one of amusement mixed with tired contempt. “Frank's twenty-five. That means he would have had to have started this crazy shit when he was just nineteen. He lives at home very quietly with his mother, who isn't very well hypertension, thyroid, and a semidiabetic condition. Johnny, you put your foot in the bucket. Frank Dodd is no murderer. I'd stake my life on that.”

“The murders stopped for two years,” Johnny said. “Where was Frank Dodd then? Was he in town?”

Bannerman turned toward him, and now the tired amusement had left his face and he only looked hard. Hard and angry. “I don't want to hear any more about this. You were right the first time-you're nothing but a fake. Well, you got your press coverage, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to you malign a good officer, a man

I…

“A man you think of as your son,” Johnny said quietly. Bannerman's lips thinned, and a lot of the color that had risen in his cheeks during their time outside now faded out of his face. He looked like a man who has been punched low. Then it passed and his face was expressionless.

“Get out of here,” he said. “Get one of your reporter friends to give you a ride home. You can hold a press conference on your way. But I swear to God, I swear to holy God that if you mention Frank Dodd's name, I'll come for you and I'll break your back. Understood?”

“Sure, my buddies from the press!” Johnny shouted at him suddenly. “That's right! Didn't you see me answering all their questions? Posing for their pictures and making sure they got my good side?. Making sure they spelled my name right?”

Bannerman looked startled, then hard again. “Lower your voice.”

“No, I'll be goddamned if I will!” Johnny said, and his voice rose even higher in pitch and volume. “I think you forgot who called who! I'll refresh your recollection for you. It was you, calling me. That's how eager I was to get over here!”

“That doesn't mean you…

Johnny walked over to Bannerman, pointing his index finger like a pistol. He was several inches shorter and probably eighty pounds lighter, but Bannerman backed up a step-as he had done on the common. Johnny's cheeks had flushed a dull red. His lips were drawn back slightly from his teeth.

“No, you're right, you calling me doesn't mean shit in a tin bucket,” he said. “But you don't want it to be Dodd, do you? It can be somebody else, then we'll at least look into it, but it can't be good old Frank Dodd. Because Frank's upstanding, Frank takes care of his mother, Frank looks up to good old Sheriff George Bannerman, oh, Frank's bloody Christ down from the cross except when he's raping and strangling old ladies and little girls, and it could have been your daughter, Bannerman, don't you understand it could have been your own

Bannerman hit him. At the last moment he pulled the punch, but it was still hard enough to knock Johnny backward; he stumbled over the leg of a chair and then sprawled on the floor. Blood trickled from his cheek where Bannerman's Police Academy ring had grazed him.

“You had that coming,” Bannerman said, but there was no real conviction in his voice. It occurred to him that for the first time in his life he had hit a cripple-or the next thing to a cripple.

Johnny's head felt light and full of bells. His voice seemed to belong to someone else, a radio announcer or a B-movie actor. “You ought to get down on your knees and thank God that he really didn't leave any clues, because you would have overlooked them, feeling like you do about Dodd. And then you could have held yourself responsible in Mary Kate Hendrasen's death, as an accessory.

“That is nothing but a damnable lie,” Bannerman said slowly and clearly. “I'd arrest my own brother if he was the guy doing this. Get up off the floor. I'm sorry I hit you.

He helped Johnny to his feet and looked at the scrape on his cheek.

“I'll get the first-aid kit and put some iodine on that.”

“Forget it,” Johnny said. The anger had left his voice. “I guess I kind of sprang it on you, didn't I?”

“I'm telling you, it can't be Frank. You're not a publicity hound, okay. I was wrong about that. Heat of the moment, okay? But your vibes or your astral plane or whatever it is sure gave you a bum steer this time.”

“Then check,” Johnny said. He caught Bannerman's eyes with his own and held them. “Check it out. Show me I got it wrong. “He swallowed. “Check the times and dates against Frank's work schedule. Can you do that?”

Grudgingly, Bannerman said, “The time cards in the back closet there go back fourteen or fifteen years. I guess I could check it.”

“Then do it.”

“Mister… “He paused. “Johnny, if you knew Frank, you'd laugh at yourself. I mean it. It's not just me, you ask anybody…”

“If I'm wrong, I'll be glad to admit it.”

“This is crazy,” Bannerman muttered, but he went to the storage closet where the old time cards were kept and opened the door.

11.

Two hours passed. It was now nearly one o'clock in the morning. Johnny had called his father and told him he would find a place to sleep in Castle Rock; the storm had leveled off at a single furious pitch, and driving back would be next to impossible.

“What's going on over there?” Herb asked. “Can you tell me?”

“I better not over the phone, Dad.”

“All right, Johnny. Don't exhaust yourself.”

“No.”

But he was exhausted. He was more tired than he could remember being since those early days in physical therapy with Eileen Magown. A nice woman, he thought randomly. A nice friendly woman, at least until I told her that her house was burning down. After that she had become distant and awkward. She had thanked him, sure, but-had she ever touched him after that? Actually touched him? Johnny didn't think so. And it would be the same with Bannerman when this thing was over. Too bad. Like Eileen, he was a fine man. But people get very nervous around people who can just touch things and know all about them.

“It doesn't prove a thing,” Bannerman was saying now. There was a sulky, little-boy rebelliousness in his voice that made Johnny want to grab him and shake him until he rattled. But he was too tired.

They were looking down at a rough chart Johnny had made on the back of a circular for used state police interceptors. Stacked untidily by Bannerman's desk were seven or eight cartons of old time cards, and sitting in the top half of Bannerman's in/out basket were Frank Dodd's cards, going back to 1971, when he had joined the sheriff's department. The chart looked like this:

THE MURDERS-FRANK DODD

Alma Frechette (waitress) Then working at Main Street

3:00PM, 11/12/70 Gulf Station

Pauline Toothaker Off-duty

10:00AM, 11/17/71

Cheryl Moody U. H. S. student) Off-duty

2:00 PM, 12/16/71

Carol Dunbarger (H. S. student) Two-week vacation period

11/?/74

Etta Ringgold (teacher) Regular duty tours

10/29(?)/75

Mary Kate Hendrasen Off-duty

10:10 AM, 12/17/75

All times are “estimated time of death” figures supplied by State Medical Examiner

“No, it doesn't prove anything,” Johnny agreed, rubbing his temples. “But it doesn't exactly rule him out, either.”

Bannerman tapped the chart. “When Miss Ringgold was killed, he was on duty.”

“Yeah, if she really was killed on the twenty-ninth of October. But it might have been the twenty-eighth, or the twenty-seventh. And even if he was on duty, who suspects a cop?”

Bannerman was looking at the little chart very carefully.

“What about the gap?” Johnny said. “The two-year gap?”

Bannerman thumbed the time cards. “Frank was right here on duty all during 1973 and 1974. You saw that.”

“So maybe the urge didn't come on him that year. At least, so far as we know.”

“So far as we know, we don't know anything,” Banner-man contradicted quickly.

“But what about 1972? Late 1972 and early 1973? There are no time cards for that period. Was he on vacation?”

“No,” Bannerman said. “Frank and a guy named Tom Harrison took a semester course in Rural Law Enforcement at a branch of the University of Colorado in Pueblo. It's the only place in the country where they offer a deal like that. It's an eight-week course. Frank and Tom were out there from October 15 until just about Christmas. The state pays part, the county pays part, and the U. S. government pays part under the Law Enforcement Act of 1971. I picked Harrison-he's chief of police over in Gates Falls now-and Frank. Frank almost didn't go, because he was worried about his mother being alone. To tell you the truth, I think she tried to persuade him to stay home. I talked him into it. He wants to be a career officer, and something like the Rural Law Enforcement course looks damn good on your record. I remember that when he and Tom got back in December, Frank had a low-grade virus and he looked terrible. He'd lost twenty pounds. Claimed no one out there in cow country could cook like his mom.

Bannerman fell silent. Something in what he had just said seemed to disturb him.

“He took a week's sick leave around the holidays and then he was okay,” Bannerman resumed, almost defensively. “He was back by the fifteenth of January at the latest. Check the time cards for yourself.”

“I don't have to. Any more than I have to tell you what your next step is.”

“No,” Bannerman said. He looked at his hands. “I told you that you had a head for this stuff. Maybe I was righter than I knew. Or wanted to be.”

He picked up the telephone and pulled out a thick directory with a plain blue cover from the bottom drawer of his desk. Paging through it without looking up, he told Johnny, “This is courtesy of that same Law Enforcement Act. Every sheriff's office in every county of the United States. “He found the number he wanted and made his call.

Johnny shifted in his seat.

“Hello,” Bannerman said. “Am I talking to the Pueblo sheriff's office?… All right. My name is George Banner-man, I'm the county sheriff of Castle County, in western Maine… yes, that's what I said. State of Maine. Who am I talking to, please?… All right, Officer Taylor, this is the situation. We've had a series of murders out here, rape-stranglings, six of them in the past five years. All of them have taken place in the late fall or early winter. We have a… “He looked up at Johnny for a moment, his eyes hurt and helpless. Then he looked down at the phone again. “We have a suspect who was in Pueblo from October 15 of 1972 until… uh, December 17, I think. What I'd like to know is if you have an unsolved homicide on your books during that period, victim female, no particular age, raped, cause of death, strangulation. Further, I would like to know the perpetrator's sperm type if you have had such a crime and a sperm sample was obtained. What?… Yes, okay. Thanks… I'll be right here, waiting. Good-bye, Officer Taylor.”

He hung up. “He's going to verify my bona fides, then check it through, then call me back. You want a cup of no, you don't drink it, do you?”

“No,” Johnny said. “I'll settle for a glass of water.”

He went over to the big glass cooler and drew a paper cupful of water. Outside the storm howled and pounded.

Behind him, Bannerman said awkwardly: “Yeah, okay. You were right. He's the son I'd've liked to have had. My wife had Katrina by cesarian. She can never have another one, the doctor said it would kill her. She had the Band-Aid operation and I had a vasectomy. Just to be sure.”

Johnny went to the window and looked out on darkness, his cup of water in his hand. There was nothing to see but snow, but if he turned around, Bannerman would break off-you didn't have to be psychic to know that.

“Frank's dad worked on the B amp;M line and died in an accident when Frank was five or so. He was drunk, tried to make a coupling in a state where he probably would have pissed down his own leg and never known it. He got crushed between two flatcars. Frank's had to be the man of the house ever since. Roscoe says he had a girl in high school, but Mrs. Dodd put paid to that in a hurry.”

I bet she did, Johnny thought. A woman who would do that thing… that clothespin thing… to her own son… that sort of woman would stop at nothing. She” must be almost as crazy as he is.

“He came to me when he was sixteen and asked if there was such a thing as a part-time policeman. Said it was the only thing he'd ever really wanted to do or be since he was a kid. I took a shine to him right off. Hired him to work around the place and paid him out of my own pocket. Paid him what I could, you know, he never complained about the wages. He was the Sort of kid who would have worked for free. He put in an application for full-time work the month before he graduated from high school, but at that time we didn't have any vacancies. So he went to work at Donny Haggar's Gulf and took a night course in police work at the university down in Gorham. I guess Mrs. Dodd tried to put paid to that, too-felt she was alone too much of the time, or something-but that time Frank stood up to her… with my encouragement. We took him on in July of 1971 and he's been with the department ever since. Now you tell me this and I think of Katrina being out yesterday morning, walking right past whoever did it… and it's like some dirty kind of incest, almost. Frank's been at our house, he's eaten our food, babysat Katie once or twice… and you tell me…

Johnny turned around. Bannerman had taken off his glasses and was wiping his eyes again.

“If you really can see such things, I pity you. You're a freak of God, no different from a two-headed cow I once saw in the carnival. I'm sorry. That's a shit thing to say, I know.”

“The Bible says God loves all his creatures,” Johnny said. His voice was a bit unsteady.

“Yeah?” Bannerman nodded and rubbed the red places on the sides of his nose where his glasses sat. “Got a funny way of showing it, doesn't he?”

12.

About twenty minutes later the telephone rang and Bannerman answered it smartly. Talked briefly. Listened.

Johnny watched his face get old. He hung up and looked at Johnny for a long time without speaking.

“November 12, 1972,” he said. “A college girl. They found her in a field out by the turnpike. Ann Simons, her name was. Raped and strangled. Twenty-three years old. No semen type obtained. It's still not proof, Johnny.”

“I don't think, in your own mind, you need any more proof,” Johnny said. “And if you confront him with what you have, I think he'll break down.”

“And if he doesn't?”

Johnny remembered the vision on the handstand. It whirled back at him like a crazy, lethal boomerang. The tearing sensation. The pain that was pleasant, the pain that recalled the pain of the clothespin, the pain that reconfirmed everything.

“Get him to drop his pants,” Johnny said. Bannerman looked at him.

13.

The reporters were still out in the lobby. In truth, they probably wouldn't have moved even had they not suspected a break in the case-or at least a bizarre new development. The roads out of town were impassable.

Bannerman and Johnny went out the supply closet window.

“Are you sure this is the way to do it?” Johnny asked, and the storm tried to rip the words out of his mouth. His legs hurt.

“No,” Bannerman said simply, “but I think you should be in on it. Maybe I think he should have the chance to look you in the face, Johnny. Come on. The Dodds are only two blocks from here.”

They set off, hooded and booted, a pair of shadows in the driving snow. Beneath his coat Bannerman was wearing his service pistol. His handcuffs were clipped to his belt. Before they had gone a block through the deep snow Johnny was limping badly, but he kept his mouth grimly shut about it.

But Bannerman noticed. They stopped in the doorway of the Castle Rock Western Auto.

“Son, what's the matter with you?”

“Nothing,” Johnny said. His head was starting to ache again, too.

“It sure is something. You act like you're walking on two broken legs.”

“They had to operate on my legs after I came out of the coma. The muscles had atrophied. Started to melt is how Dr. Brown put it. The joints were decayed. They fixed it up the best they could with synthetics…

“Like the Six Million Dollar Man, huh?”

Johnny thought of the neat piles of hospital hills back home, sitting in the top drawer of the dining room hutch.

“Yes, something like that. When I'm on them too long, they stiffen up. That's all.”

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 554