Where are you, Shifter?
I’ve directed a team of Denver agents to go to Aspen and turn the place upside down until they find out who called in the Shifter info, and a team out of the Philly office is going to Sharon tomorrow to do backup interviews. On Doc’s advice, I’ve requested information on unsolved homicides in California immediately before the first Shifter probable in 12/74. If Aspen doesn’t yield a name within a week or so, I’ll go there myself. You want your huge ego rubbed, Shifter? Turn yourself in to Uncle Tom, he’ll make you a star.
Doc’s been doing the bulk of the theorizing on Shifter, but I’ve been doing my own share on the link-links I now call “Blond-Brunette.” It’s heavily suppositional, theoretical and circumstantial, but I trust the overall feel.
One, I now buy a policeman killer for all seven victims. Checking through the case files, I saw that all of the blond four had been recently arrested for prostitution, making them particularly easy marks for police or pseudo-police intimidation, which would account for why such streetwise ladies let strange men into their apartments. Two, I don’t buy Saul Malvin as the Brunette Killer. I buy him as a suicide (the report filed by the officer who found his car and later his body was a model of cop smarts and clarity, if a little overboard on his own theorizing) — but O+ blood is very common, and I made some discreet calls to the Chicago S.A.C., who learned that Malvin had a thing going with a friend of his wife, and the friend was demanding a commitment. Suicide territory for a certain kind of man.
Three, a big jump, and a mind-boggling one that really feels right: the Wisconsin State Police and the two municipal P.D.’s aiding them in the brunette-killing investigations cannot find their files on the three homicides, which is one of the most incredible things I have heard in my twenty-two years as an invest gator Nine recent case files — vanished.
I think we’ve got a Wisconsin-based policeman-killer as the perpetrator of all seven blond-brunette homicides, and I think he destroyed the three brunette files to avoid a connection being made, most likely one based on identical physical evidence. And with physical evidence links destroyed from a legal standpoint (some Wisconsin M.E. or pathologist probably remembers blade specifications, etc., which wouldn’t hold up in court), all I’ve got left is opportunity.
So, any Southern Wisconsin cop missing from his assignment solely on the dates of the four blond homicides is my killer. I’ve already put in sub rosa queries with the Internal Affairs Department of the Wisconsin State Police, and the Milwaukee S.A.C. is doing the same with the personnel directors of the Janesville and Beloit P.D.’s. All I can do now is wait. Jack Mulhearn thinks my theory sucks — he thinks some cop sold the files to the media or a crime writer. We’ve got a hundred-dollar bet riding on the outcome of my queries. I can’t afford to lose — Mark and Susan’s fall tuition kick-out is coming up, but I feel solid on this one. It’s 11:23. Where are you, Carol?
23
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Dusk, September 7, 1983. Clock noise was in my head, and a bag holding #9 pancake and theatrical putty was in my hands when I returned home from the golf course and shopping in Bronxville. Opening the door, I was anxious to begin my nightly transformation and almost missed the scrapbook pages spread out on my bed.
Feeling what must have happened, I gasped and looked at my bathroom and closet doors — the only places where he could be waiting. With tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick out-decibeled by adrenaline hitting my heart, I somehow managed not to run to either of them, knowing that betraying my eagerness would be an affront to the Shroud Shifter me. About to burst on all sensory levels, I forced myself to read the reunion message.
It was a newspaper article dated February 19, 1979, and it detailed the brilliant machinations that Ross Anderson had undertaken to safeguard the two of us from exposure of our latest murders. Reading and rereading the account in rapid succession, a Technicolor vision of the key points swallowed me whole, and I grabbed the bed for support.
Ross locating the dead man’s car, seeing the O+ donor card and going “Eureka!”;
Ross driving back to Huyserville for a K-9 team, even though he already knew where the body was;
Ross putting his own money in the dead man’s wallet and my old .357, sans silencer, in his hand;
Ross desecrating the man’s chest so that pathologists couldn’t tell that two shots had been the cause of his death.
My burst level decelerating, I reran the mental film; reversed the action; ran it in slow motion. In all versions, it played as pure genius — and something else.
“And you thought I was just another pretty face. Ross the Boss, what a guy.”
I warmed all over, and the spreading heat gave me poise. I got up from the bed, turned around and smiled. “Bravo, Sergeant.”
Ross smoothed his mustache and stroked the alligator emblem on his blue polo shirt. Civilian clothes, four and a half years and a thousand miles had not changed him at all; every bit of the man had stepped intact out of the time warp. “It’s Lieutenant,” he said, “but thanks.”
Made cool by his cool, I held back my barrage of questions and said, “Congratulations.”
Ross shut the bathroom door and said, “Thanks. I’m the youngest lieutenant in the history of the Wisconsin State Police, by the way. Turn those scrapbook pages over: there’s some stuff you’ll like on the back.”
I did it. More newspaper accounts were taped to the reverse sides, accompanied by faded Polaroid snapshots of butchered blond girls. While my eyes scanned the type and my brain played a film of Ross traveling and risking and killing for me, the man himself spoke slowly, his words wafting as background music.
“You were easy to track, sweetie. I am a world-class abuser of police power and an even better skip-tracer. The .38 I gave you was my tracker. I gouged the inside of the barrel, test-fired it into a ballistics tank, then kept the spents. Very distinctive lands and grooves, not even the silencer I figured you’d get could alter the striations. Soooo, all I had to do was make statewide queries on Dead Body Reports filed under ‘Gunshot,’ check the ballistics bulletins and see where my old buddy Martin was hanging out. It took a lot of phoning, but I’m the persistent type. I made you for the retard in Illinois and the tag in Nebraska — you come out of the closet yet, sweetie? They were both big dark-haired guys about your age, and I thought, ‘Uh, oh, Martin wants some new ID because he knows Ross the Boss has got his number.’ Then you offed the old kraut in Michigan, almost two years had passed; I figured if you snuffed an old guy like that, maybe you already got your ID from a stiff you didn’t shoot or the cops never found. I also had a hunch you were getting hinky and cautious, that you must have snuffed Pops for a reason. So I wangled a Xerox of the case file from the Kalamazoo cops.
“And damned if I don’t make you for e pretty good forger. Twelve K in checks to credit-card companies? The dumbfuck Kalamazoo cops don’t even bother to check with the companies, but I do. Future credit-card transactions? Sweetie, you have got a pair of platinum balls, and I’ve been following those balls cross-country, courtesy of Telecredit. There’s Martin in Ohio, maybe doing some cutting in Sharon, P.A. Follow up on that Rohrsfield dead-body report, call the rental-listing hotline the cops have access to keep track of parole absconders, damned if I don’t get a William Rohrsfield right down the road from this family reunion that I thought would be too boring to attend. Good work on Rohrsfield, Martin, but you shouldn’t have buried him under the site of a future 7-11. Sweetie, you want to put those pictures down and look at me?”