Lust Killer Page 11

  "Can you describe the car?"

  "Not really. I'm really bad on cars. It was so dirty, and it was night, so I can't even tell you the color. It was a station wagon, and I think it had Oregon plates."

  "Tell me again what he looked like. Describe him as if I had to pick him out from a crowd of people on the street. "

  "Okay. He was tall, close to six feet. And heavy. Not fat … but soft around the middle. His hair was blondish-red, and like I said, it was thinning on top—he kind of combed it forward. Let me see … His eyes slanted down at the corners. Bad dresser. Oh, and his complexion was pale and he had freckles."

  "That's very good," Daugherty complimented her. "That helps. Have you seen him again?"

  She shook her head. "He said he would be back in two days, but he never called. I didn't really care. A lot of guys will say they're going to call you. It's just something to say, and I wasn't interested in him anyway."

  "I want you to do something for me, if you will," Daugherty said. " If he calls again, tell him you'll see him. "

  "Oh … " The young woman looked alarmed. "I … "

  "No, you won't have to meet him alone. Make a date, but give him some excuse why you can't see him right away. Then call this number." He handed her a card with the number of the Corvallis police on it. "They'll be alerted. They'll be here before he gets here. Under no circumstances go anyplace with him. Say you'll meet him in the lounge. Okay?"

  "Okay. But he might never call again. I think he could tell I wasn't that crazy about him."

  "Maybe he will. Maybe he won't. Just be sure you delay him if he does, and call the police."

  Freckles. That part of the description rang a bell in Jim Stovall's carefully compartmentalized brain when he heard the coed's description. There weren't that many men who had freckles, especially in the spring before the sunburn season. Salem detectives had been going through all complaints that had come into their department since the first of the year, looking for something that might resemble the Karen Sprinker case. Among other incidents, they had pulled the attempted-kidnaping complaint made by fifteen-year-old Liane Brumley. Stovall had reread it, and now he remembered "freckles." He checked the file. Liane Brumley had been terribly frightened by the man who loomed up in front of her as she hurried along the railroad tracks, saved, possibly, by her decision to scream and run for help.

  April 22. Ten-thirty A.M. That was only one day before Linda Salee had disappeared from Lloyd Center in Portland. The suspect had said, "I won't rape you. I wouldn't do that." Stovall figured the man was protesting too much: with a gun and his orders to the Brumley girl to get into his car, what had he planned to do with her? Neither Linda Salee nor Karen Sprinker had been shot, but a gun would have been a strong convincer to force a girl to go with the killer without screaming. Stovall was grateful that Liane Brumley had screamed; it could well have saved her life.

  He ran his finger under the physical description. "Tall, over six feet." That difference was negligible—witnesses are off on height estimation more than any other factor in identification. "Sandy hair. Freckles."

  For a moment, he felt exhilaration. Was it possible that all the days spent interviewing and going through car graveyards and driving between one police department and another—all those hundreds of man-hours worked by himself and dozens of others—would come down to something as simple as freckles?

  There they were. Two incidents. Both in Salem—but with a connection, however tenuous, in Corvallis now.

  Could this really be a break, or was it only wishful thinking?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It was nearing the end of the third full week in May, a time bracket that made Jim Stovall and Gene Daugherty nervous. If the killer operated under the stress of a pseudo-menstrual cycle as Stovall suspected, his prowling time had rolled around again. Somewhere—in Salem, or Corvallis, or Portland, or maybe some other city in Oregon—the killer would be getting restless. He had taken Karen on March 27, Linda on April 23. His compulsion to stalk and seize a woman might well be at fever pitch, and there was no way in hell they could warn every pretty young woman in the state to be on guard.

  It was possible that the discovery of the bodies in the Long Tom and the resultant publicity had made the faceless man cautious—but they doubted it. On the contrary, all the press coverage might have honed his appetite, appealed to some need for fame—or, in his case, infamy. He might feel that a gauntlet had been flung down. He might just want to prove that he was smarter than the cops.

  It was Sunday night, May 25. In Callahan Hall, the young woman who had promised to call the police if she ever heard from her scruffy admirer again sat in her room studying. She was a little tense, but not much; it had been eleven days since she'd had her Coke date with a stranger, and she hadn't heard anything more from him.

  And then the buzzer next to her door blurted its steady tone, and she jumped. She moved quickly to press down on it to show that she had heard and would go down the hall to the phone. On her way, she told herself it could be anyone—her mother, or a girlfriend, or one of the men she dated casually.

  But when she picked up the phone, she recognized the slightly hesitant voice of the big freckled man. And she fought to keep her voice calm.

  "How about a Coke and some conversation?"

  "I … I thought I wouldn't hear from you again. This is kind of short notice."

  "Sorry. I've been busy. But I could be over there in, say, fifteen minutes."

  "Oh … " she delayed, "I'd like to see you, but I can't go anywhere until I wash my hair. It's a mess."

  "That doesn't matter."

  "Well, it does to me. I could be ready in about forty-five minutes—maybe an hour. If that's okay, why don't I meet you downstairs then?"

  She held her breath while he argued that she didn't have to bother getting fixed up, and then she heard him agree to the delay.

  As soon as she heard the line go dead, she dialed the Corvallis Police Department. "He called. I managed to stall him by telling him I have to wash my hair. He'll be downstairs in the lounge in about forty-five minutes."

  "We'll be there. We'll be waiting when he walks in."

  B. J. Miller and Frenchie De Lamere, in plain clothes, sat in the lounge out of the line of vision of anyone coming in the door. They waited. Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Several young men came in, obviously college boys waiting to pick up dates. Ten more minutes. And then they saw him, a big, hulking man who seemed out of place. He wore a T-shirt and wrinkled "high-water" slacks, topped by a Pendleton jacket of a somewhat garish plaid. He was no kid. He had to be thirty, maybe older. The big man looked around the lounge, failed to see his date, and sat on a couch where he could watch the stairs.

  De Lamere and Miller moved over to him and showed their badges. He looked up, hardly startled, and smiled slightly.

  "We'd like to ask you a few questions, sir—if you don't mind."

  "No, not at all. What can I do for you?"

  "We'd like to have your name. "

  "It's Brudos. Jerry Brudos."

  "You live here in Corvallis?"

  He shook his head. "No. I live in Salem. I used to live here, but I just came over to mow a friend 's lawn and check out his place. He's on vacation."

  The answers came quite smoothly, and neither officer could detect any signs of stress in Brudos. No perspiration. No fidgeting. He gave his Center Street address. He said that he was an electrician by trade, and admitted a little sheepishly that he was married and had two young children. He gave the name and address of the friend's property where he'd been working.

  There was no legal reason to arrest Jerry Brudos or even to hold him for questioning. The officers thanked him, and he left the lounge. They noted that he drove a beat-up greenish-blue station wagon that was not a General Motors product. They jotted down the license number and returned to headquarters to begin a check that might verify what Brudos had told them.

  Jerry Brudos' story of doing yard work for a
friend was verified. He did know the occupant of the house whose address he'd given, and the man was on vacation. Neighbors said Brudos often worked there, and had during the daylight hours of Sunday, May 25.

  On the surface, he seemed to pass muster.

  But that was only on the surface. Jerry Brudos' name was in the hopper and the investigative process had begun. Jim Stovall and Gene Daugherty received the information gleaned by the Corvallis officers, and used it as the bare bones of a dossier on the man—Jerome Henry Brudos.

  Brudos' record of commitment to the Oregon State Hospital indicated that he had shown evidence of sexual violence as far back as his teens. There were, however, no recent records of treatment. Either he had gotten well or he had managed to avoid treatment.

  He had no arrest record as an adult. That might mean they were focusing on the wrong man—or it might only mean he was clever.

  As Stovall and Daugherty worked rapidly to backtrack on Brudos, they found too many "coincidences" to be explained away. In January 1968 Jerry Brudos had lived in the same neighborhood worked by the young encyclopedia salesgirl—the missing Linda Slawson. Brudos had indicated that he'd moved to Salem in August or September 1968 and gone to work in Lebanon, Oregon—hard by the I-5 freeway where Jan Whitney had vanished in November. His current job was in Halsey—only six miles from the body sites in the Long Tom. And, of course, when Karen Sprinker disappeared from Meier and Frank on March 27, Brudos had lived only blocks away. …

  And he was an electrician.

  The investigative team in Salem was anxious to get a look at this Jerry Brudos. Jerry Frazier made the first contact, a casual conversation outside the little house on Center Street. Frazier and Jerry Brudos talked in in the old garage Jerry used for his shop and darkroom. The detective was fascinated with the place, and made a note to tell Stovall about the profusion of ropes, knots, and the hook in the ceiling. He couldn't say just why the paraphernalia made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up—but it did.

  Jerry Brudos talked obscurely about "problems"—that some problems didn't need to be cured, that some made him feel that he was dipping his hand in a cookie jar and how "You're afraid of getting caught."

  But when Frazier pressed him about "problems," Brudos just said he had jobs where he couldn't get along with his fellow workers—that he lived in a world full of people but he was always alone.

  When he returned to Salem police headquarters and reported to Stovall, he said, "It looks good. He seems calm enough about being contacted, but I'd like for you and Ginther to go back with me and see what you think. "

  "Any special reason?" Stovall asked.

  "Just a feeling. … "

  Stovall, Frazier, and Greg Ginther, another member of the team, drove out to Center Street to talk again with Jerry Brudos. Until now, Stovall had had no image to focus on, nothing more than the Corvallis coed's description of her suitor and a black-and-white picture in the files.

  The man they saw did not look overtly dangerous; he looked, instead, somewhat like an overgrown Pillsbury Doughboy. They had expected a huge muscular man, and this man betrayed no evidence of exceptional strength. His lidded eyes sloped at the outer corners and his chin and cheeks were blurred with flesh.

  He looked like a loser. The kind of guy who sits at the end of the bar nursing his beer, always a little bloated, with no confidence to start up a conversation. He had to have been the sort of kid who got picked last in sandlot ball. He was clearly no ladies' man, at least not in the accepted sense of the term.

  Stovall studied Brudos' speech patterns, his mannerisms, the way he moved and walked. He intended to show Liane Brumley the picture he had of Brudos, and he wanted to be able to "listen" to her recollections of her near-abduction with a solid memory of the man who was Jerry Brudos.

  He saw Brudos' old station wagon parked nearby; that didn't seem to match Liane's description of the vehicle her would-be kidnapper had driven. She had said it was a small sports car.

  "This your only car?" Stovall asked.

  "Yeah."

  "You ever drive anything else?"

  "My friend's sometimes—it's a Karmann Ghia."

  That fit closer. Stovall let it pass without comment.

  The investigators asked if they could have another look around the garage. It looked like anybody's garage, divided by some plywood into smaller rooms, except that Frazier and Stovall noted the weights were still hanging from rope there. There was something about the knots that looked familiar—instantly reminiscent of the knots that had bound the auto parts to the dead girls' bodies. The rope was a quarter-inch, and there was some nylon cord that looked to be about three-sixteenths of an inch. Both the right size, the right material.

  Brudos half-smiled as he said to Frazier, "You seem to be interested in that knot. Go ahead and take it if you want to."

  Frazier moved quickly, cutting two short lengths, and being sure to include the distinctive knot. The rope and cord was common enough stuff; the lab could only give a "very probable" on something so widely distributed—but the knot was special.

  Brudos did not ask if they would be back; he remained quite calm.

  If the probe into the girls' murders and disappearances had seemed to lag before, now it accelerated to a frenzied pace. Stovall obtained the old black-and-white photo of Jerry Brudos and included it in a "laydown"-—a montage of mug shots. He took that lay-down to Liane Brumley and asked her if she recognized any of the men. She studied the photos carefully and then tapped the picture of Jerry Brudos.

  "That looks like him—but the man who grabbed me had freckles. This man doesn't."

  But he did. They just didn't show up in the photograph.

  In fiction, it would be enough—all the pieces falling cleverly into place. In truth, it was only a beginning. To arrest a man, and then to take him before a jury, the state has to be armed with physical evidence—something twelve of his peers can see and touch and feel, or something a criminalist can tell them he has seen under a scanning electron microscope. The old axiom that a criminal always leaves something of himself at the scenes of his crimes, and always takes something of the scene away with him—no matter how minute—is truer than it ever was.

  That was what Stovall and Daugherty and Frazier and the rest of the team had to find. What they knew now was that circumstantial evidence was piling up, that probably Jerome Brudos had been the man who tried to abduct Liane Brumley. The rest they only suspected. They needed all the bits and pieces of physical evidence that waited—somewhere—to be found. Something they could slip into plastic bags with their own initials added, something they could haul into a courtroom when the time was right.

  Despite his placid exterior, Jerry Brudos had begun to feel a little uneasy. He sensed he was being tailed by the police. They hadn't gotten into his workshop, had only glanced at the locked door beyond the garage, but he figured they might come back. As far as he knew, there was nothing in there that would do them any good anyway, but the thought of them pussyfooting around his shop and darkroom was unsettling. Worse, he could not bear to have his movements hampered—and the police were hampering him by following him wherever he went.

  He called Salem attorney Dale Drake and asked for an appointment the following day—May 27. When he faced Drake in his office, Jerry Brudos said, "I'm having some problems with the police. I'd like you to investigate and find out. I'll pay you for checking into it."

  Drake refused the retainer, telling Brudos not to worry about money for the moment. He would stand by to represent him if, indeed, Brudos did have "police trouble."

  The police were having a bit of trouble of their own, or, rather, were walking a very delicate path to be sure that they did not blow a case that was not yet fully formed. They did not yet have their damning physical evidence. They could not arrest Brudos for murder and hope to win a conviction. They wanted no pegs a defense team could hang their hats on. Rather, they wanted to give Brudos enough rope to hang himself, and that meant it
was prudent to let him stay free where they could watch his movements. But there was danger there; if he should panic and bolt, they might lose him. They had an ace in the hole: the Liane Brumley case. If an arrest seemed essential, they could get a warrant on that case.

  And so, when Brudos pulled out to head down the I-5 freeway to his job in Halsey south of Corvallis, a sneaker car was behind him. When he returned home, he was followed. For the next few days there was not a moment when Jerry Brudos was free of surveillance—subtle, but always there.

  Beyond the fear that he might cut and run, there was the possibility that he might harm still another girl; the dangerous time period between the twenty-second and the end of the month was only at the halfway point. If they had the right man, and if they let him slip away from their observation, more tragedy might result.

  But Jerry Brudos appeared to be following ordinary everyday patterns. He went to work. He came home, and he seemed to stay home in the evenings. On occasion, the family car pulled out and they saw that it was driven by a small dark-haired woman—Brudos' wife. She seemed unaware that something cataclysmic was happening in her world.

  On Wednesday, May 28, at ten minutes to eight, a search warrant was served on the two vehicles available to Jerry Brudos. Brudos signed a Miranda Rights Card with a bland expression on his face. If he was getting more and more nervous, he didn't show it. His green station wagon proved to be spotless. It had been thoroughly washed both inside and out. In fact, it was damp inside.

  Brudos smiled and said, "I took it through a fifty-cent car wash, and my little boy accidentally rolled down a window."

  Jerry Frazier found Jerry Brudos almost too calm.

  Later, Brudos would confide in Frazier, "I don't think you got anything out of the car. There's something, but I can't put my finger on it. There is kind of a link missing, having to do with the car. But I wasn't worried about it. I just felt like I wasn't involved. There was no doubt in my mind, until you compared the ropes. If I knew you were going to do that, I would have gotten rid of the rope." (But would he? Hadn't he so much as offered the knot to Jerry Frazier, almost begged him to take it into evidence?)