Dell Shannon - Mark of Murder

A forlorn hope. He could ask.

He ate a flavorless sandwich at a drugstore and went back to the office. Sergeant Lake was leaning back reading a teletype.

"Here's our boy," he said, handing it over. "Not that it helps us much on catching him."

Mendoza read the teletype standing. It was from the sheriff of El Dorado County up north of Sacramento. The inquiries on any known knifings with the same M.O. as the Slasher's had been out for nearly three days; this was the first response.

What Sheriff Jay Hampton had to tell them was that there'd been two murders in a little place called Georgetown, about three months back. Quite a surprise to Georgetown, which had a population of about eight hundred-Mendoza found on consulting an atlas-and probably hadn't had a murder since the frontier was officially closed in 1890, You could read between the lines of Sheriff Hampton's terse statement. The first victim had been Betty Riley, a local girl well known and liked. Engaged to the son of the town's bank president; her father was one of two doctors in town. A pretty girl, popular and virtuous. She had been to see a girl friend, Martha Glenn, a block away from her own home, on the night of April thirtieth. Had left there about nine o'clock to walk home, and next turned up dead on her own front lawn, at ten-forty. Found by her father as he came home. She had been stabbed and slashed to death, and mutilated afterward. The sheriff had called in the state boys, the B.C.I. from Sacramento, and their crime lab had said that the knife used had a partly serrated edge. Absolutely no clue had turned up; it looked like the random killing of a lunatic. She had not been raped, and evidently hadn't had time to scream.

"?Y pues que?" said Mendoza irritably.

The second victim, found next day in a field outside of town, had been one Giorgiono Cabezza, an itinerant agricuItural laborer who'd just been fired from his job on a local ranch. Here they turned up something more definite. Cabezza had been seen in several bars the night before; he'd been talking about leaving town, finding another job farther south. Toward the end of the evening, around midnight, he'd been seen with another man, a transient just passing through-nobody in town knew him-possibly a hobo. Nobody in Georgetown had ever seen him before, and nobody had heard his name. But the surgeon said Cabezza had been killed about 2 AM., and the transient was the man last seen in his company. They had a good description of him: a man about forty, very thin, hollow-cheeked, middle height, and he had a very noticeable scar from an old burn across the center of his face. No evidence actually pointed to him as the murderer, but he had not been seen anywhere around since, and Georgetown had had no more knifings.

"What the hell does that tell us?" demanded Mendoza. "For God's sake!" He'd been hoping that if the Slasher had killed before, especially in a small town, something more definite might have been got on him. This was just nothing but continnation of what they knew. And he should have known it wouldn't be anything more; if any other force had got anything definite on the man there'd have been flyers sent out.

And the papers yelling their heads off about inefficient police. Mostly. Spare a moment to be grateful to the Times, which had run a thoughtful editorial pointing out all the difficulties of the hunt for the random killer. He put the teletype down and dialed the Hollenbeck station. "Well, I was just about to call you, Lieutenant," said the sergeant he'd talked to before.

"Anything?"

"It seems your Ballistics man gave you a false alarm. Our boys just got back from checking. I looked up the record on that break-in-TV store on Soto Street-and it didn't close until eight-thirty so the break-in was after that. This Behrens, the pawnbroker, naturally didn't know from nothing about those three juveniles, never laid eyes on them, never bought anything off them-but he hadn't expected any check, of course, and there were four transistor radios and a portable TV in his back room, and the owner of the TV store could identify them by the serial numbers. From his place, all right. Well, you said your chiropractor was getting himself shot between eight and midnight. Kind of tight times, when you think-and not very likely the kids would pull two in one night, so close together. They probably broke in that store between nine and nine-thirty, or a bit later. The pawnbroker's not talking, but they say they were in his place about ten-thirty. Well, they'd probably-"

"? Basta ya! " said Mendoza. "I know. Go out on a little spree with the cash from the pawnbroker, with or without girls. Not go looking for another likely place to break in. So the fancy story about finding the gun is probably-definitely-true. Thanks very much."

"Sometimes you get a tough one," said the sergeant sympathetically…

Mendoza stared intently at the desk lighter. So it was back to the private thing. Was it? Not those juveniles, but maybe an older pro? Entirely too coincidental that those juveniles should end up with the gun. No, it had been the private kill, on Nestor.

Well, what about Elger for it? A gun used, and then that canny, cautious plan to get rid of the gun… Not in character?

Andrea Nestor, now…

Some other jealous husband?

Look thoroughly at everybody in Nestor's address book. That Clay had sounded quite level, but there might be… Palliser came in. He said, "I don't know what anybody else may have turned up, but I've drawn blank on your button."

"More good news," said Mendoza. "Sit down and tell me who you've eliminated."

The man who wanted to kill was seething with hate and anger, where he lay hidden in the place he had found for himself. He had thought of killing, more killing, to pay them all back, but his slow mind had told him that they would come hunting him, they would hunt him out-a place like that room. He needed a secret, safe place to be when they came hunting. So he had come here.

But for the rest of it, it had all gone wrong. He had only caught one of them to use the knife on, make the blood come. A man more than half drunk, who came lurching up the street toward him in the dark, and was easily pulled into that alley.

And people looked at him queerly, even more than usual, almost as if they knew what was in his mind. That woman at the place he'd bought food, last night…

He'd gone into a bar and heard some men talking. They were talking about him-him, the big important one, the Slasher, and what they said did not fill him with panic but with rage. How they knew what he looked like now, there'd been an artist's drawing in the paper, they said, and how they were telling everyone not to go walking alone at night, to be careful.

There hadn't been people out, near as many as usual -he'd noticed that. He'd drifted, a dark shadow, in the shelter of buildings around many streets, and when they came past him it was in groups, two or three together and walking fast. On account of him. Dim pride rose in his mind; but it was no good, it spoiled everything, if it stopped him killing any more of them. He wanted in sudden furious rage to kill and kill-pay them back. They mustn't hunt him down, to stop him.

He had almost reached out for the nearest of those two women who had come along, hurrying, not talking-he could take her, let the other one scream and run, he could be gone before… But he was some way off from his safe, secret place, and he didn't.

Instead, he had taken out his knife and looked at it: not really looked, there in the dark, but felt it. He liked to use it to make the blood come, and it came quiet and easy. But you had to be near, to kill with the knife…

He'd had a gun of his own, once. Back the first place he'd worked after the orphanage, old man Haskell's farm outside of Younker, back in Georgia. You went out shooting birds, come fall, everybody did, and he got to be a pretty good shot on an old gun Haskell let him use, and he saved up and bought himself a new gun. It was a. zz rifle, and he'd been pretty good with it. That was a long time back. He didn't remember how long, he'd been a lot of places since, and he didn't remember what had happened to that rifle.