Her Last Scream Read online

  Liza nodded. “Yes. His nibs is here. He’s waiting for fresh meat.” Liza tapped the stack of theses in the crook of her arm.

  “Why do you think he does it?” Trotman asked. “Reads work from across the country?”

  “Because one university doesn’t generate enough for him to hate,” Liza opined.

  “Maybe he’s making a study of studies,” Trotman joked.

  “I don’t know,” Liza said, smiling wickedly. “Because I’m not the …”

  Trotman slapped his hand over his heart and sprang to his feet as Liza did the same. “The Randall Chair in Sociology,” they announced in unison, followed by breaking into laughter. It was their private joke, striking both as a hoot that their feared boss’s name was almost never mentioned without addition of the modifier, one of his many academic achievements.

  A deep voice from the doorway. “Is everything all right here?”

  The pair spun to the door. Framed in the threshold like an age-darkened Rembrandt oil stood the towering figure of Dr Thalius Benton Sinclair. The man frowned darkly, tugging a black beard running from mid-cheek to the second button on his shirt. Sinclair was above average height, barrel-chested, Falstaffian in presence, but not proportion, a man trim at waist and broad in shoulder. Though in his late forties, Liza thought of him as outside of time, like a vampire.

  “I saw hands over your hearts,” Sinclair rumbled. “I assumed you were having some kind of attack.”

  The pair stood mute. “Well?” Sinclair prodded, his eyes moving between the pair. “Does anyone here speak the English language?”

  “We-uh, were, uh, I mean that, uh …” The hapless Trotman could only babble, his mind collapsing into a black hole of terror. Sinclair’s eyes moved to Liza. His eyes have no depth of color, Liza noted, not for the first time, but surprised nonetheless. They were clear water in an aqua-tinted bottle. And yet, somehow, they were the most opaque eyes she’d ever seen.

  Liza’s mouth was too dry to speak. She lifted the stack of theses toward Sinclair. Please don’t eat me, her mind pleaded. Take this offering instead. Sinclair’s eyes dropped to the stack of paper in her clutch. “Another pile of shit ready for composting?”

  “Yes, Professor,” Liza managed.

  Sinclair tucked the material under his arm, the color-deficient eyes scanning between Liza and Robert. He sighed and turned away, striding toward his spacious corner office, wide windows facing the looming Flatiron Mountains.

  “Do you think he heard us making fun of him?” Trotman whispered after Sinclair was far from earshot.

  Liza nodded. “He couldn’t help it.”

  Trotman made the sound of a leaking balloon valve and buried his face in his hands.

  His academic day now over, Dr Thalius Benton Sinclair stepped from the building with his ancient accordion-fold briefcase in hand and walked briskly toward his home on Thirteenth Street, five blocks from Chautauqua Park. He lived on “The Hill”, the University neighborhood, up a modest incline from Boulder’s downtown and in the evening shadow of the Flatirons.

  Sinclair zigzagged his journey, adding a few blocks to the trip for exercise. After twenty minutes he came to several blocks dense with shops and restaurants and throngs of students. He recognized two hand-holders from one of his classes, Anita Blevins and Terrence Tomville. Blevins was a tattoo-stained dolt obviously given too free a rein by her parents, but Tomville had a spark of intelligence. It would be crushed soon enough if he kept company with the likes of Blevins, Sinclair reckoned.

  The two students saw Sinclair approaching and snapped their eyes away as though he were a Gorgon, pretending to study clothes in a shop window. Sinclair moved on for another block, his colorless eyes scanning from the ranks to a shoe store, paraphernalia store, bike shop and a narrow bar named the Beacon, with dark-shaded windows, the only window sign a red neon scrawl proclaiming Fifty Beers!

  Across the street, tucked behind a pair of trees, sat a small and squat building, a former realtor’s office doing its best to be nondescript, brown paint and shingles, pulled shades. The occupant’s identity was a small sign beside the door: Women’s Crisis Center of Boulder.

  They’re plotting in there, Sinclair thought, the devious ones …

  Sinclair turned into the bar. The place was less than half full, students mostly, gathered toward the rear and watching a dart game. He caught the attention of a barkeep, a college-aged woman wearing some ridiculous costume he assumed was current fashion.

  “Help you?” the woman asked.

  “Two shots of Glenlivet, neat.”

  “Neat?”

  Sinclair sighed. Civilization was dying before his eyes. “Neat means by itself. No water, no ice, no nothing.”

  “I don’t think we have … what did you call it?”

  “Yes, you do. It’s on the shelf with the Scotch. Glenlivet.” It took effort to keep from spelling it out.

  Drink finally in hand, Sinclair went back toward the door and took a table at the corner of the front window. He positioned himself against the wall, hidden from outside view, but able to observe comings and goings across the street just by leaning forward a little.

  An hour later, with no activity noted, Sinclair walked the four blocks to his home, a wood and stone two-story hidden behind a wall of hedge and trees. His self-activating porch lamp had burned out two months back and Sinclair hadn’t replaced the bulb, finding the dark at his door more soothing than the light.

  He entered, further soothed by familiar surroundings: burgundy carpet, brass lamps, solid masculine furniture built of wood and brown leather. Though he had converted a former guest room to a library, the overflow filled an entire wall of the room.

  He poured an ounce of Scotch into a snifter and added a splash of soda. From a small box on the mantel, teak inlaid with silver and jade, he removed a tin that had formerly held breath mints, spearmint, A Burst of Fresh in Every Bite! He opened the tin and produced a spiraling tube of Purple Thai marijuana.

  Sinclair climbed the stairs to his second-floor office, boxes and files and rows of books stacked vertically and horizontally on shelves. The disarray sometimes irritated him – he hated disorder – yet could it be called disorder if he knew where everything was?

  He slid his laptop from his briefcase and set it on the desk, pushing it to the side as he booted the big-screen iMac into action. He logged on to a regularly visited site, pausing at the jokes section to see if anything new had been added.

  Q: What do you tell a woman with two black eyes?

  A: Nothing. Somebody already told her twice.

  Q: What do you call a woman with pigtails?

  A: A blowjob with handlebars.

  Q: What is the difference between a woman and a catfish?

  A: One is a bottom-feeding scum-sucker and the other is a fish.

  Old jokes he’d seen a hundred times. Sinclair sighed. Was it impossible for people to invent new material? Be creative? He tapped a few keys, moving to a link that jumped him to another site, one with a woman in chains as its primary graphic. He moved the cursor down the chain dangling from the woman’s right wrist, counting off the links of chain. He clicked on the fifth link, a hidden link within the link. He’d spent a month online before someone had trusted him enough to provide the entrance link.

  A sound of thunder and heavy metal music. A scream. Crackling flames wiped away the graphic to leave only a gray screen and the low lub-dub of heartbeat sound effects. During the day and early evening, there could be a dozen or more people online, but now, at the bottom of the right-hand corner, were the words 1 Member online.

  Someone was in the secret chat room, alone, waiting to have a conversation. Sinclair tapped his handle into the white box.

  PROMALE

  Sinclair poised his finger above the keys, recalling his day of interacting with dolts and cattle as the Scotch and dope buffered his jangled synapses.

  I hate women, Sinclair wrote, the text black against white. I want to wipe them off
the planet.

  Seconds passed as someone that could be as near as the next block or as far as half a world away entered text. Sinclair hoped HPDrifter would be here tonight, but then, Drifter was here most nights, the most ubiquitous presence on the board and its de facto leader; very bright, but cagey, tight with references to himself, controlling the board with a strange mixture of a fierce and sadistic hatred of women, wry humor, and odd moments of obsequiousness.

  Sinclair saw Drifter’s handle appear before his words. He slapped his desk in delight: A kindred spirit was in the chat room.

  HPDRIFTER: Explain, PROMALE. Tell me about your hate.

  PROMALE: Earlier today a woman under my control told me a lie as if I was too stupid to tell the difference. She and another had been mocking me. I have to live with it every day.

  HPDRIFTER: Bitch, slut. I’d drag the whore out to the middle of the street and do the doggy on it. And, of course, make her pay me for the attention.

  PROMALE: That’s funny, Drifter. But I’m being crushed under the lies.

  HPDRIFTER: Lies are all the whores know. The more “educated” they are, the more they lie.

  PROMALE: Right on, Drifter. In this situation the taliban have the right idea: keep the X-chromes out of school. It just fucks up their thinking.

  Another entity entered the chat room, RAISEHELL.

  3 Members online

  RAISEHELL: Hey guys, what’s going on?

  HPDRIFTER: A filthy bitch has shit on brother Promale’s day, Raisehell. I’m trying to cheer him up.

  RAISEHELL: 2 bad for U Promale. What’s X-chrome?

  HPDRIFTER: Our brother Promale is noting that men have an X and Y chromosome, women only Xs. It’s why men are Y-ser ;)

  RAISEHELL: LOL! U R 2 smart for me, Promale and Drifter. Your always saying things like that. Promale. What kind of work do U do?

  HPDRIFTER: !!! Remember the rules for the room, Raise. No questions about identities.

  RAISEHELL: I Forgot … my bad. Sorry.

  HPDRIFTER: There are those who would use knowledge of our identities against us … to take our jobs, our livelihoods. We must be ever vigilant.

  PROMALE: The FemiNazis hate us for wishing to regain our destinies.

  HPDRIFTER: Well said, brother.

  4 Members online

  The member named MAVERICK entered the conversation. Like HPDRIFTER, MAVERICK was a regular.

  MAVERICK: It will take more than talk to get our manhood back.

  HPDRIFTER: Excellent point, Maverick. But there are those who work tirelessly on our behalf. Look to the west for the dawn.

  PROMALE: ??

  RAISEHELL: Yes … what do you mean, Drifter?

  HPDRIFTER: That’s enough for now. But we should all be ready to band together.

  PROMALE: I am sick of what the X-chromes have done to my country. It’s time they were stopped. I am ready …

  Chapter 10

  I entered the Homicide department at eight a.m., a convenience-store cup of coffee in one hand and a half-eaten apple in the other. My hand had first reached for a glazed pastry the size of a catcher’s mitt, but I’d reluctantly snagged the fruit. Across the wide room I saw Harry and Sal in our cubicle. They looked excited.

  “You’ve got something,” I said, walking up.

  “The Colorado cops ID’d their Jane Doe,” Sal said. “Name’s Lainie Devon Krebbs. They found out early this morning, got the ID from an arrest seven years back – the lady was caught trying to sneak a few joints into a Jimmy Buffet concert.”

  “Any ties to the Mobile area?”

  Sal flicked the page with a scarlet fingernail. “She lived her whole life here.”

  If the kick I’d gotten from the discovery of a body paralleling our crime was a three on a scale of one to ten, the identification rang up a six.

  I said, “Was she –”

  “Married?” Sal answered, always a step ahead. “Why yes, Carson. Her hubby is one Lawrence Krebbs of west Mobile. And before you ask, the missus filed charges against the mister. One count of abuse filed eight months back, later dropped. Three police calls to the residence, domestic beefs, the lady throwing things, the neighbors calling the cops at two a.m. when they saw Mrs Krebbs run out of the house, get tackled and pulled back into the house by her hair. Krebbs went to jail for assault, made bail in an hour, beat the charge on condition of anger-management classes.”

  “Probably promised to go and sin no more,” Harry snorted. “The abuse continued, of course.”

  “Three months back the lady got a restraining order on Krebbs, saying he was threatening her life. Krebbs violated by banging on the door at midnight, screaming. The wife said he had a knife, but it was never located.”

  “He go to jail?”

  “He got a warning. The jail was probably full that night. It happened again and he did a week in the slammer. Took mandated anger-control classes. You can read between the lines as well as me, Carson: he abuses her, she leaves, finds she can’t make it on her own, comes back when he promises to be a good boy …”

  “And it all starts anew. Anything else?”

  “Yeah, a few similar charges, but spread out over years. Filed by Mrs Krebbses, but all with different first names.”

  “A serial matrimonialist,” Harry snorted. “They always love the ladies, don’t they?”

  “Sometimes to death,” Sal added.

  Lawrence Krebbs lived in a small house, the lawn so manicured it looked like baize on a billiard table. The hedges were geometric forms, not a sprig out of place. The crepe myrtles were tamed to resemble outsize bonsai. I rang the doorbell, two muted bell-sounds from within.

  A curtain shifted in the window to my right, the fabric diaphanous enough to display a prominent forehead. The face disappeared.

  “Someone’s home,” I said.

  Harry knocked again, harder. Thirty seconds passed and the door opened to reveal a powerful-looking man in his mid forties dressed in a red tee and multi-pocketed hiker shorts. He was slender at the waist, big in the shoulders, bespectacled, the former expanse of pink head flesh now hidden under brown. The guy had needed to slap on a hairpiece to answer the door, which said something about his ego. The toupee was decent. There are no good ones.

  Harry held up the badge. “You’re Lawrence Krebbs?”

  The gray eyes studied us. “That’s the name.” He made no effort to open the door further.

  “It’s hot out here, Mr Krebbs,” Harry said. “How about we come inside so we don’t let all your fine air conditioning out into the street?”

  The man looked at our feet. “Take off your shoes. I don’t want shit tracked on my floor.”

  “You’re wearing shoes,” I noted.

  “They don’t have shit on them.”

  I slipped off my suede desert boots, Harry toed off his burgundy loafers, and we stepped on to a white carpet. The interior showed all the personality of a clam, jammed with furniture sold as “American Tradition” or “The Heritage Collection”, copywriter’s gloss for style-deficient crap with fake carving and dark stain masking the green grain of poplar. The AC was bottomed out and the place reeked of pine air freshener, like Krebbs was trying to simulate a vacation on Hudson’s Bay.

  “So what can I do for you?” Krebbs asked, closing the door.

  “We’re here about your wife, Mr Krebbs,” Harry said as I gave an eyeshot to Krebbs’s physique: shoulder-heavy with thick biceps and triceps. But his legs were soft and the tightly belted shorts showed a couple inches of love-handle slopping over the gunnels, a guy who built the showpiece muscles, slacked on ones he could cover with clothing.

  “Which wife?” Krebbs said, inching toward us, his toes edging our comfort zone, broad arms crossed to further fatten the guns, showing us it was his home and he was Alpha Dog.

  “Lainie D. Krebbs,” Harry said quietly, sliding his six-four, two-thirty body two inches closer to Krebbs’s chest. Krebbs stepped back a foot, like needing room to think. “That bitch ran o
ff two months back. Nine weeks to be exact. And two days.”

  “By bitch, I take it you mean your wife?”

  “If you take wife to mean a person who cooks decent meals and keeps a house clean, I’ve never been married.”

  “Let’s use a legal definition, then,” Harry said. “You were married to the former Lainie Place for three years.”

  “I guess. It felt a lot longer.”

  “You seem fuzzy on wives, sir,” I asked. “I take it you were married before?”

  “I’ve been married four times. And don’t give me that look. I’m either a sucker or an optimist. I probably should have my head examined.”

  I left that one alone, said, “You didn’t report Mrs Krebbs as missing?”

  “You’re not hearing me, officer. She wasn’t missing, she ran off. The woman broke her vows.”

  “You weren’t interested in Lainie coming back?” I asked.

  “You can tell her or her shyster lawyer that she signed a pre-nup. She’s not eligible for a red nickel.”

  I looked into his eyes. “We don’t serve documents for lawyers, Mr Krebbs. We’re here to tell you Lainie was found in Denver yesterday. Dead. She’d had her eyes cut out, her breasts wounded, and her body dumped into a tank of sewage at the water-treatment plant.”

  I’d hit him with a bat, expecting shock. Instead, Krebbs put his hands in his pockets and jingled his change, wandering to the front window. “Shouldn’t you be looking for her pimp?” he asked after a few seconds of reflection.

  “You think Lainie turned to prostitution?” I said.

  Krebbs sighed. “A woman like that runs off, a failure with no brains and no education, how else is she going to live? She’s got one natural talent … Not that she was any good at that, either.”

  Somehow I managed to keep from ripping the man’s pathetic hairpiece from his head and shooting it. “You don’t seem sad, Mr Krebbs,” I said instead, “at the death of someone you lived with and, presumably, loved.”