John Lutz - Serial

“Sensed how?”

“Oh, you know… She seemed to be less involved in what I was saying, sometimes looking past me and obviously thinking of something else. She just… seemed not to care about us anymore.” He looked from one of them to the other. “I suppose I’m supplying you with a motive, but you’re going to find out everything anyway. I don’t see that I have much choice other than to tell the truth.”

“So you’d lie to us if you could?” Mishkin said.

Drubb flashed an uneasy smile. “Only if I absolutely positively knew I could get away with it and no one else would be hurt.”

Mishkin looked over at Vitali. “That seems like an honest answer, Sal.”

“I don’t figure I have a very strong motive,” Drubb said. “It’s not as if Nora would leave me, and I’d get jealous and kill her after more than a year.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” Mishkin said. “On a percentage basis-”

“We need to ask you some personal questions,” Vitali said hastily, cutting off Mishkin and keeping the interview on track.

Drubb shrugged. “It’s been a long enough time that questions about Nora and me won’t seem personal. Besides, she’s dead. I’d like to help nail the bastard who killed her.”

“When the affair was on the front burner,” Vitali said, “did it involve anything the unenlightened would regard as kinky?”

Drubb gave a short laugh that was almost a snort. “Kinky sex with Nora? Not a chance, Detective. Everything was as straight as if she’d learned it by reading a church manual. Not that she was undersexed. She was a good Catholic girl.”

“Like Mary?”

Drubb knew what Sal meant. “No, she wasn’t a virgin. And I don’t mean to give the impression she was deeply religious. It was more like

… well, as artistic as she was with her fashion designs, her imagination wasn’t all that inventive when it came to lovemaking.”

Sal made a mental note of that word. Lovemaking. It wasn’t the way a man would describe sex with a woman he’d killed.

Mishkin must have been thinking along the same lines. “Are you still in love with her?” he asked.

“No,” Drubb said. “We both knew it was over. I’m in another relationship now.”

“Is this one more imaginative?” Mishkin asked.

“Considerably.”

“I’m assuming you met some of Nora’s friends. Were any of them rumored to be kinky?”

“God, yes! They were all fashion people. Nora was the different one.”

Sal said, “Did Nora give any indication that she’d ever been forced against her will into any sort of kinky sex?”

“Definitely not,” Drubb said. “All Nora seemed to think about was woof and warp.”

Mishkin seemed to consider that, as if it might refer to some sort of sexual practice of which he was unaware.

“That’s the two different directions threads run in material,” Drubb said, seeing his confusion.

“Woof and warp,” Mishkin said, as if digesting the information. “You must know a lot about materials like the ones in Nora Noon’s apartment.”

“Well, I do.”

Vitali sighed and stood up from his uncomfortable little chair. “We’d like you to give us a list of names, Mr. Drubb. The people you remember as Nora’s acquaintances.”

“I’ll do the best I can.”

Drubb stood up and went over to a small desk that appeared to have been beaten with chains to make it look like an antique. It looked like a cheap desk that had been beaten with chains. He moved various detritus out of the way, then opened a drawer and got out an address book and pen and paper. “I’ll give you addresses and phone numbers, too, if I have them.”

“We’d be grateful,” Vitali said.

Drubb set to work while they watched.

“We might need you later as a material witness,” Mishkin said.

Vitali looked at him, wondering.

Jefferson City, Missouri, 1991

Vincent Salas’s appointed attorney, Jack Murray, had never before defended a rapist. Alleged rapist. The wily old prosecutor, Maurice Givens, was having fun with the young attorney.

Murray, an affable fellow and not without persuasive powers, had been able to get a change of venue on the grounds that everyone in Hogart and the surrounding county wanted to torture and kill Salas. The jury not only might have been biased, they might have been hard to hold back.

Even with the Jefferson City jury, the trial was going poorly for Murray-and of course for his client, Vincent Salas.

Not that Salas was helping his cause. He’d refused to get a haircut and shave off his beard, and Murray couldn’t talk him into wearing a coat and tie. For some reason Salas had rejected the simple strategy of looking unlike a motorcycle thug who would rape a young housewife.

Salas wore a blue work shirt, a clean pair of Levi’s, and his black engineer’s boots. He’d at least shined the boots. Murray was a little bit proud of having talked him into that.

“Of course,” said Givens in his smooth southern Missouri glide, “the defendant’s real problem is that aaall the evidence points to his guilt.”

Murray was a skinny young blond man with untamable short hair. He leaped to his feet to protest. He seemed to leap when he did everything. Even before his objection, he got a weary “Sustained” from the judge, but the jury had heard. And Murray had to admit, Givens was right about the evidence being a mountain under which Vincent Salas was all but buried.

Now Givens got to the point. He turned to Beth Brannigan, who was dressed in an ankle-length pleated skirt and high-necked white blouse with ruffled trim.

“My dear Mrs. Brannigan,” he said at slightly higher volume, “is the man who raped you present today in this courtroom?”

Beth was so nervous she had to consciously force the words from where they’d stuck in her throat. “Yes, sir. He is.”

“And would you point to him, please.”

Beth’s arm snapped up even though her hand and the finger that pointed were trembling. She was pointing at Vincent Salas, who stared back at her with the mock deadpan expression of a man who knew the deck was stacked, and that he’d had a losing hand even before the cards were dealt.

“Let the record show…” Givens was intoning.

Jack Murray had known from the beginning that the case was hopeless. There had been his client, sleeping and drunk, a few miles from where the victim had been raped, and a few feet from empty beer cans of the brand that had been stolen from her when he’d fled the scene. There was his motorcycle parked nearby, a Harley-Davidson, just as the witness who’d seen him flee had described. There was Murray’s client, dressed as his victim had described. There were scratches on his face, and his victim had described how she’d scratched him.

Now there he was in court, with his dark hair and dark beard, as his victim had described. And the prosecution’s expert witness had already testified how Salas’s blood type was the same as that found at the scene of the rape. From the scratches on his face, no doubt. The ones Salas claimed had been made by a feral cat.

“Ah, the feral-cat defense,” Givens had muttered, barely loud enough for the jury to overhear.

Salas had even figured out a way to make things worse for him. He’d run from the law.

Not just from the law, but from Sheriff Wayne Westerley, who was a hero in the county and had won reelection to his office by a landslide two years ago. Murray had crossexamined Westerley yesterday. The sheriff, a handsome man to begin with, appeared in court wearing his tailored uniform, looking like a movie star, making Murray feel like the paparazzi. Westerley had sat there calmly while the flustered Murray leaped around as if electrified. The contrast wasn’t lost on the jury. When Murray had sneaked a peek at them, he had the distinct impression they thought he was needlessly badgering Westerley, who was merely stating the facts.