Jeffery Deaver - The Lesson of Her Death

They saw however that not all the oil drums were green and white.

One was black.

"Fire?" Corde asked now as he walked up to the drum.

"Pranks." The guard rubbed his great crosshatched nose and muttered, "That the way they be. Think they own the world, the students, you know what I'm saying? Be spoiling stuff for everybody."

Corde peered into the drum.

"Let's get it over. But slow."

Together they eased the heavy drum to the ground. A small avalanche of ash puffed up gray cloud. Corde and Ebbans went onto their knees and probed carefully, trying not to shatter the thin pieces of ash. There were two blackened wire spirals that had been the spines of notebooks. The rest was a mostly unrecognizable mound of ash and wads of melted plastic.

Corde found several fragments of unburnt white paper. There was no writing on them. He eased them aside. He then found half a scrap of green accounting printout paper filled with numbers.

"What's this?"

Ebbans shrugged. "I don't do brainy crimes."

Corde put the scrap in a plastic bag.

Ebbans plucked a small pair of tweezers from the butt of a Swiss Army knife and reached forward. He gently lifted a bit of crinkly purple paper. All that remained was the upper lefthand corner.

March 14, 1

Jennie Ge

McReyn

Aude New

"Her letters," Ebbans said. There was triumph in his voice. "There you go, Bill."

"A pile of ash is all they are."

Ebbans often worked like a dog on scent. "Maybe, maybe not. Let's keep going and see what we can find."

Together the men crouched down and began their search again. When they finished, an hour later, they had nothing to show for their effort but the scraps of paper they had found right off, and two uniforms filthied, it seemed, beyond saving.

Even from the distance he sees fear in their eyes, in their posture, in their cautious gait.

Driving along Cress Street, a shortcut to the Sheriffs Department, Bill Corde watches people on the sidewalks of New Lebanon. Shades are drawn. More than the usual number of stores had not yet opened this morning although it is a glorious spring day in a town that has wakened early for a hundred and fifty years.

The people are skittish. Like cattle in thunder. Corde drums the steering wheel and wishes he hadn't compared his good citizens to fed-out slaughter animals.

Ace Hardware, Lamston's, Long's Variety, Webb's Lingerie and Foundations… Stores or the descendants of stores identical to them that have been here forever. Stores he has walked past for years, stores he has shopped in and answered 911 calls at, stores whose owners he sees at PTA meetings. But today, as he cruises slowly in and out of elongated morning shadows, Corde hardly recognizes the street and its occupants. He feels what a soldier feels in an occupied foreign city. He thinks of his own time in uniform – when he once got lost in an old quarter of Berlin.

Corde stops his cruiser at the Main Street light.

A sudden crack on the window makes him jump.

Gail Lynn Holcomb – a high school class mate of his – knocks again with red knuckles. He cranks the glass down and looks up at her frowning overly powdered face.

"Bill, how's this thing going?" There is no need to be more specific. She continues, "Should I keep Courtney out of school? I'm thinking I ought to."

He smiles to reassure her and says she doesn't have to worry.

But he sees that the words are pointless. She is worried. Oh, she's terrified.

And as he tells her that he thinks the Gebben killing is an isolated incident he observes something else too. He sees that she resents him.

Corde has been a small-town deputy for nine years, which is about eight years longer than it takes to understand the ambiguous status of cops in towns like New Lebanon. People here respect him because they've been taught to, and what small-town people are taught when young stays with them forever. People knock on his windows with fat, nervous hands and ask his advice and invite him to Rotary Club lunches and buy peanuts from him at the PTA fall fund-raiser. They josh and nod and shake his hand and cry against his solid shoulder.

But there's a distance that's real and it's big and it never shrinks. Because if Bill Corde stands for anything it's that the long arm of malice can reach into the center of this safe little town, where it ought not to be; New Lebanon doesn't deserve the same fate as East St Louis or the South Side of Chicago or the Bronx, and Bill Corde is uniformed proof that its fate is different in degree only, not kind.

What Corde sees now in this agitated blond bundle of Gail Lynn, gone heavy on potato chips and cola and cello-wrapped cookies, unskilled with the makeup brush, but a good mother and a good wife, is this very rancor.

Oh, how she resents him!

Because she now must fight daily, amid the noise of soap operas and sitcoms, with her husband and daughter about locking doors and latching windows and chaperoning dates and which routes to take to and from jobs and shopping centers and schools…

Because tomorrow morning Courtney with her thick wrists and bright blue eye shadow might walk uncautiously into a Middle School girls' room, where a man waits in a stall, holding a narrow wire destined for a young girl's throat…

Because life for Gail Lynn Holcomb is already a relentless series of burdens, and she surely doesn't need this one too: this murmur of utter fear that grows louder and louder each day that Bill Corde, sitting calmly in his safe and secure black-and-white Dodge, fails to catch this lunatic.

"We're doing everything we can," Corde concludes.

The light changes.

"Don't you worry now," he adds, and pulls into the intersection. She does not respond beyond pressing her flecked lips together and staring at the car as it turns onto Main Street.

Special to the Register - Investigators from the New Lebanon and Harrison County Sheriffs Departments have developed a profile of the so-called "Moon Killer," who raped and murdered a 20-year-old Auden University co-ed on April 20, the Register has learned.

Criminal behavior experts have reported that the man, whose motive may have been to sacrifice the victim as part of a cult ritual, is probably in his late teens or early twenties and white, and he lives within ten miles of the murder site.

The man might be obsessed with occult literature, much of which will be pornographic in nature. He may have a history of sexual problems and may himself have been abused as a young child.

He may come from a broken home, and at least one parent was a hostile disciplinarian. He is a loner.

There is no known religion or cult in which human sacrifice to the moon is or was practiced. This means that the "Moon Killer" might have created his own "religion," as did Charles Manson or Jim Jones. The moon may be significant because in mythology and certain religions it represents the female. It is women that the killer fears and hates.

Investigators are considering the possibility that the recent murder is related to the beating to death last year of another Auden co-ed, Susan Biagotti, 21, a resident of Indianapolis.

It is believed that the killer may act again on the night of the next full moon, Wednesday, April 28. Deputies and Auden campus security police have intensified patrol efforts and are urging young women to avoid going outside alone.

Corde dropped the Register on Jim Slocum's desk and said, "How'd this happen?"

Slocum rubbed his cheek. "You got me. Steve had an idea to have me go up to Higgins and talk to the state boys. Just a spur-of-the-moment thing."