Well, there it was. The homicide investigator’s nightmare. All the cops were sitting around stunned. And Joe VanNort’s cynical blackjack mouth was hanging open, about to lose his eighty-first Marlboro of the day.
Jack Holtz was beating his snuff to death and spitting juice into a Coke bottle at a rate of forty globs per minute. He was also pressing the nose piece on his glasses, which is a laugh because he was so cautious and controlled you could heave him off a cliff in Acapulco and he’d come up with his Timex and those glasses digging into his cheeks like surgical implants.
Every cop in the room had a nightmare vision of eighteen FBI agents strutting in long enough to have lunch. Then in forty-eight hours they’d load the real Susan Reinert and her kids on a London Concorde heading for JFK and a press conference where Joe VanNort and Jack Holtz and all the others wouldn’t be heard over the thunder of cackles, snorts and guffaws. The horror of it all was professional humiliation.
A telephone call was made. The latent-prints specialist verified that the fingerprints on the corpse matched the lifts found all over the bedroom and bathroom of Susan G. Reinert of Ardmore.
The cops all looked at each other with shit-I-knew-it-all-the-time grins.
And that’s how a cop’s mind works.
17
As FBI agents go, the state cops could have done far worse. In the first place, the special agent in charge, Don Redden, was almost as young as Jack Holtz, and younger than several of the agents he was supervising. And he wasn’t one of those FBI agents whose secondary mission in life is to look preppier than George Bush.
Don Redden was more of a Harrisburg kind of guy. In fact, he’d worked in the Harrisburg office and knew Jack Holtz. He was a Kentuckian and sounded like chicken-fried-steak, and looked as though he’d be right at home dipping snuff with Holtz or tramping around on VanNort’s mountain with a twelve gauge.
But it was tough for Special Agent Don Redden or any of them to get chummy with Joe VanNort. Every other day he was having a faceoff with somebody.
Once he grabbed three feds and said, “I hear somebody in this group was reinterviewin’ witnesses and said the statie’s done a piss-poor job!”
And of course the agents denied it, and maybe they hadn’t said it, but Joe VanNort went to Don Redden and said, “We’re gettin’ it together here. I want everybody to know who’s in charge of this investigation. Me. That’s who’s in charge.”
Don Redden knew Joe VanNort was a daddy cop from the old school and he understood the resentment and jealousy that goes with these cases, and he didn’t say too much when VanNort braced his agents with embarrassing questions.
“Any a you people ever investigated a murder?” Joe VanNort challenged. “I mean, even one little murder?”
Of course VanNort knew that the FBI rarely had the opportunity, but he even accused the “goddamn schoolteachers” of never having seen a dead body in all their lives.
You had to be careful with Joe VanNort because you couldn’t be certain which group of goddamn schoolteachers he was talking about. Bill Bradfield, et al., or the feds.
When any of the special agents wanted to go to the Reinert house, VanNort demanded that a trooper be present. When the agents wanted to bring Ken Reinert or Pat Gallagher into the house for any reason, Joe VanNort would get so hot he could set off sprinklers because those two still hadn’t been officially cleared as far as he was concerned.
The feds weren’t around a week before he turned to Jack Holtz and said, “When this case is over I ain’t never workin’ with the FBI again. No matter who orders me.”
The FBI agents immediately liked the blue comb lead and the other Jay Smith connections. Despite Joe VanNort, they began working in that direction.
As far as VanNort was concerned, Bill Bradfield was a hugger-mugger, acting alone. The kind that picks on plain or homely women, turns on the charm and gives them some cuddles while he picks their purses.
There was something else that Joe VanNort maintained from his first encounter with Bill Bradfield and from everything he’d learned.
“I can get that guy,” he promised, “because he’s got a mouth he can’t control. And he’ll never be able to control it. He’ll talk his way right into the joint.”
While Stephanie Smith lay dying of cancer, a former coworker at the dry cleaner’s released Stephanie’s diary to a local newspaper. And it was full of lurid fact and fantasy.
The newspaper accounts in August were enough in themselves to keep a task force busy.
One headline said: SEX RING LINKED TO MURDER. SWINGER’S GROUP PROBED.
State police have uncovered explosive new evidence in the Susan Reinert murder case linking the Upper Merion teacher to a bizarre sex ring. Officials have categorically refused to disclose any details publicly about the group. But sources said yesterday that Mrs. Reinert’s knowledge of the love cult may have been a motive in the slaying.
The individuals contacted by reporters have said that as many as 20 to 30 men and women regularly participated in “swinging sessions” that included homosexual and sado-masochistic acts. However, it could not be determined whether Mrs. Reinert actually participated in any of the orgies.
One police source said that Mrs. Reinert may have been killed because she was about to expose the existence of the group and its members, most of whom are “professionals.”
A Sunday edition of a Philadelphia paper printed an interesting story that caught Jay Smith’s attention in his cell at Dallas prison.
The headline read: SATAN CULT DEATH?
Teacher may have been sexually assaulted, tortured, before she was slain, probers say. The murderers of Upper Merion High School teacher Susan Reinert may have been members or associates of a Satan worship cult, investigators have told reporters. Mrs. Reinert may have been stripped, tortured and sexually assaulted as she lay on a makeshift sacrifice altar during a black Mass devil worship ceremony on the weekend of her murder last June. Federal and state investigators have found evidence of the existence of the cult in the Upper Merion area.
Cult members were described by one investigator as “intellectual professionals.” They did not balk at using animals in sex exhibition and encounters, the investigators said. Investigators said they were not sure if Susan Reinert was actually a member of the cult or whether she attended the black Mass rituals and other ceremonies out of curiosity, but they said they were certain Mrs. Reinert knew about the cult and the identity of many of its members.
Satanism or devil worship is as old as Christianity itself. Its members traditionally dress in dark hooded robes and gather at a narrow altar to witness Satan, usually a cult ringleader in Satan garb, perform a sexual sacrifice on an unclothed maiden, Literature about the cult attests that in modern times the ceremony has included the use of sexual stimulation devices. Satan performs sado-masochistic acts on his victim who is tied up and heavily drugged while other cult members hold lighted candles and chant ancient prayers of Satanic worship.
Some of Smiths papers, letters, and diaries that were made public last week in a copyrighted story in a Montgomery County newspaper, indicated that Smith engaged in sexual activities while wearing such costumes as military fatigues and a Satan outfit.
With school soon to resume, Upper Merion Township was taking a lot of shots.
A front-page headline read: THE ABC’S OF A SCHOOL GONE BAD.
At least four teachers are currently under investigation for criminal offenses according to a police source. And as many as a dozen more are suspected of involvement with, or knowledge of, a love cult.
There were pictures on the front page of the harried school-board president and the school superintendent facing an irate mob of parents who wanted William Bradfield and his intimates fired.