The German Page 6

  The note they’d found in a lacquered snuffbox in Harold’s mouth turned out to be something of a puzzle. Rex suggested they have Brett Fletcher translate the thing, since Brett spoke a little German, but was not part of their community. He’d been trained in the language to work for army intelligence, but had barely been able to put it to use before his Jeep exploded out from under him. Tom agreed with Rex and they’d paid Brett a visit. It took him just under two minutes to decipher the message with the help of a translation dictionary. According to Brett the note read:

  One less gun against the Reich.

  One more pig for the slaughter.

  Did you know he was the third?

  Tom had asked Brett to check his findings, and Brett said that was as close as he could come with his limited knowledge and the dictionary. The last line bothered Tom most of all. The third? The third what?

  For the time being Tom was keeping the contents of the note quiet, only sharing it with his men and Doctor Randolph, who’d suggested based on the final line of the missive that perhaps the killer had struck before. This possibility needled at the sheriff. Harold Ashton wasn’t the only person to disappear from Barnard in the last few months. Dewey Smith’s parents had reported him as a runaway just after the start of the new year, and Karen Perry – Gilbert’s cousin – had also disappeared, though it was highly suspected she’d eloped with a boy she’d met at a church in Austin. The girl had a history of family troubles, so no one was surprised when she didn’t call or write to explain her whereabouts. Still, no word on either of those two kids in months, and those were just the two that immediately sprang to Tom’s mind. People of that age often ran off, whether it was to chase love, escape the family, or seek out their dreams in a bigger city. Except for the families, hardly anyone batted an eye.

  It had been hard as hell breaking the news to Harold’s parents, seeing the collapse of Chuck Ashton’s face as his wife fell against his chest, but to have them storm into his office an hour later, infuriated that Tom hadn’t revealed his evidence – the German’s note – had been impossible. He let them scream and accuse, and he had said nothing until they’d worn themselves out. He calmly explained that the note didn’t actually tell them much. The German population of Barnard was enormous: five hundred new residents in the last two years alone, and more than a thousand in the ten years since Hitler had taken power of their homeland. Then there were the second-generation families and third-generation families, many of whom retained a functional knowledge of the language – certainly enough to get through the Lutheran Christmas Mass out to St. David’s. Any other foreign language would have whittled down the suspect list considerably, even Spanish, but a note written in German could have come from any one of two thousand different people.

  Chuck Ashton demanded that he be kept informed of every scrap of evidence Tom found. Tom declined politely, apologized a third time for the man’s loss, and then asked Gilbert to see the Ashtons out of the sheriff’s office.

  Since their departure, Tom had sat at his desk, reading a short list of names – names of people he knew quite well – and wondered if any of them was capable of the violence he’d seen done to Harold. He didn’t think so, but it was his job to check them out.

  Doc Randolph knocked on his office door just after sunset, and Tom asked him in. The doctor was a short and narrow man, reed thin from shoulders to toes. He wore a neatly cropped fringe above his ears, which stood only a few steps off pure white, and a pencil-thin mustache cut a line above his all but imperceptible lips. The doctor sat in the wooden chair across from Tom, his face twisted with questions, but he didn’t say anything for a very long time. Finally, Tom asked, “Something on your mind?”

  “Too many things, I’m afraid.”

  “I know the feeling,” Tom said. “Want to take them one by one?”

  “Where was Harold all that time?” the doctor asked in a burst of frustration. “Gone for weeks but he hasn’t been dead for more than a day, maybe two. Did he leave and get accosted on his way back into town? Was someone holding him prisoner all that time?”

  Logical questions, Tom thought. He’d asked himself those very things a number of times, and his conclusion was, “He didn’t run off. If he was going anywhere, then it was to enlist, and we all know if he’d succeeded he wouldn’t be back, and if he didn’t succeed he’d have been back a whole lot sooner. So I’d have to guess that he was kidnapped and the murder came later.”

  “But there was no ransom demand, was there?”

  “No, there wasn’t,” Tom confirmed. “I think we can trust Chuck and Ruth to have let us in on something like that.”

  “I would rather not consider why someone would hold a boy for that length of time, expecting no external gratification.”

  Tom didn’t understand the comment and he said so.

  “Well, this monster must have wanted something, and if it wasn’t a ransom or some other stimulus from outside the situation, then he must have been hoping to get something from Harold himself.”

  “Get something?” Tom asked. “Such as?”

  “I don’t know,” Doc Randolph said. “To the best of my observation I saw no signs of sexual interference, but who can say? So much of the boy is gone.”

  “Sexual interference?” Tom said, feeling a flush of heat in his cheeks. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m trying to help you find a motive, and the motive may be a pronounced mental illness. If your theory is correct, Harold didn’t just stumble into a bad situation to get his throat cut and have his body discarded. There was planning to this, and there was a purpose. I’m suggesting that the killer may be compelled by certain stimuli – and that could be sexual – and if that’s the case, then it’s likely this will happen again.”

  “Look, Doc, I know the note said Harold was the third, but we don’t have the slightest idea what that means.”

  “The note is only part of it.”

  “Then where is all of this coming from?”

  “Jack the Ripper,” Doc Randolph said. “Albert Fish.”

  Tom knew about Jack the Ripper, he’d read about the killer in pulp novels and even seen a movie based on his crimes, but he wasn’t connecting a murderer of London prostitutes with the death of a local boy. He knew nothing about the other man Doc Randolph had mentioned.

  “Fish was a child molester, murderer and cannibal,” he said.

  “Oh for the love of God,” Tom interjected.

  “Hear me out,” the doctor said. “They executed Fish in New York a few years back. He is known to have killed three children but may have killed many more. The thing is, there are similarities between those cases and this business with Harold Ashton. The most obvious are the mutilations of the bodies and the pieces missing from those bodies, and the killer’s need to communicate what he’d done. In this case, the note you found in Harold’s mouth.”

  “How do you know about these cases?” Tom asked, feeling the doctor had more than one-upped him.

  “Psychiatric magazines,” the doctor said. “I don’t buy into a lot of the mumbo jumbo they throw around, but there are some interesting articles on deviant behaviors, and I remember reading about Fish in one of those journals right after he was executed.”

  “So did the article tell you how we catch this guy?”

  “No,” the doctor said, “I mean if we knew anything at all about Jack the Ripper, who he was, why he did what he did, or if we knew of other such cases we might be able to make some comparisons, but this Fish character was uniquely insane. For example, he shoved needles in his privates and beat himself with nails.”

  “Why in the name of God would he do that?”

  “He found pain sexually gratifying.”

  “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “It’s not uncommon. Masochism is a well-documented sexual perversion, like pedophilia, homosexuality, bestiality, and necrophilia. Generally it is believed that childhood factors play into the formation of these illnesses
, and there are numerous people suffering them, but of course, the taboo nature of the diseases means the afflicted don’t go around talking about them.”

  Tom got the impression Doc Randolph was quoting from one of those magazines he’d mentioned. It sure felt like a classroom lecture to him. Further, he didn’t know what good the information would do them. He knew nothing about the diseases the doctor had listed, but a man sick enough to carve up a boy like Harold would have to stand out.

  Doc Randolph pulled his pipe and a pouch from the hip pocket of his jacket. He wore a stern expression, like a parent waiting for a child to explain himself. His expression didn’t change as he tamped the tobacco into the bowl.

  “What else are you thinking?” Tom asked, knowing the doctor wasn’t finished showing off.

  “You said there was no sign of the boy’s organs and no blood.”

  “None that we could see.”

  “So you’ve already guessed the boy was murdered elsewhere and left in that particular place.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why in Blevins’s woods? Furthermore, why on a trail the killer had to know was frequented?”

  “He wanted us to find him. He wanted us to find the note.”

  “Exactly,” Doc Randolph said, striking a match and setting it to his pipe. “He’s got more on his mind than just killing. He wants you to know he’s doing this for Germany. After all, the note did say, ‘One less gun against the Reich.’ He can’t – for whatever reason – fight for his country in his country, so he’s decided to do it in ours.”

  “So I just look around for a swastika or a guy with jack boots and a little mustache, and we’re all set.”

  Doc Randolph shook his head as if frustrated with an obstinate child.

  “I see where you’re going, Doc, but these people weren’t kicked out of Germany; they fled the damn place.”

  “But when did they flee? And why?” the doctor persisted. “I can think of at least one of our residents who’s been with us for a good long time. In fact, he left Germany just about the time the first wave of socialism was crushed. At that point, leaving made a lot more sense than staying. He couldn’t know Hitler would emerge from jail a hero – a man of the people.”

  “Who are you talking about?” Tom asked.

  “Gerhardt Weigle,” Doc Randolph said before puffing on his pipe and filling the air with a smoky-sweet scent.

  “The butcher?” Tom asked.

  “Precisely,” Doc Randolph said. “Gerhardt Weigle, the butcher. And I’m sure there are a number of others as well.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Tom sat at the window of his bedroom, gazing south where the sky shone a pale purple from the lights of Barnard. He couldn’t see the lights themselves as a ridge obscured the city from his view, but he saw the radiance cast by the lamps and homes miles in the distance covering the town like an ominous dome. The list of suspects – all German names – sat on the table beside him. He knew every man named on it, had drank with several of them and had spoken to them all at one time or another, and he couldn’t bring himself to believe that any one of them had murdered the Ashton boy. Even Gerhardt Weigle, who was a difficult man on the best of days, struck Tom as unlikely. Tomorrow, Rex would head up a crew to comb through Blevins’s property, looking for signs of a transient’s camp, anything to offer hope that Harold Ashton’s killer was not a regular at Ormand’s Mercantile, or Milton’s Barber Shop, or Carl’s Bakery. Tom would make calls to Dallas and Austin and the sheriff’s departments in between to see if they’d had any recent violence. If it weren’t for that damn note he might just have been able to convince himself that Harold’s death had been an isolated tragedy, but like the dome of light covering Barnard, Tom felt engulfed in something immense and inescapable.

  More than ever he wished Glynis was still with him. His wife had always listened to him talk about the troubles in Barnard, and unlike Doc Randolph, who treated Tom like a babbling infant, Glynis comforted him and allowed him to work through the mysteries. She’d questioned things, had given him new perspectives and even if their talks didn’t produce an ironclad solution, she had been there to laugh at his bad jokes and whisper encouragement in his ear. He wondered what she’d make of a case like this one.

  The whole thing left a heavy rotten lump in his stomach. He’d seen his share of death, both accidental and planned down to the second – gunshot wounds, knife wounds, poisonings, even a young woman who’d met the angry side of an axe – but this business with Harold Ashton was unlike anything he’d witnessed. Doc Randolph had gone a good ways towards undermining Tom’s confidence by spouting off about that Fish character, acting like some small city Sherlock Holmes and treating Tom with no more respect than he’d show a dense ward. And what good did the information do him? Was he supposed to strip every German down to the skin and see if he’d been jabbing his privates with pins?

  Gazing through the window, Tom shook his head. Where did monsters like that come from? Was it really just a sickness or something more sinister?

  Over the years, he’d watched the power lines go up all over Barnard and as a boy he’d marveled at the endless, steady light the electric bulbs cast through living-room windows. He’d seen the dirt tracks leading in and out of town fall beneath smooth bands of concrete as great veins of road began to spread through the state, and soon after he’d witnessed the laying of the sidewalks which kept his pant cuffs from getting muddy, but scuffed his shoes if he wasn’t careful with the curb, and cars replaced horses, and refrigerators replaced iceboxes. Telephones in every home. Radios sending him the beautiful voice of a woman in New York, singing with an orchestra. He’d seen so many things change, and he couldn’t help but wonder if man was changing, too.

  A board creaked behind him and Tom turned away from the window. Estella stood in the doorway, chin against her chest, peering at Tom through her eyelashes. He waved her into the room and turned out the lamp.

  Six: Tim Randall

  All I knew of the war came from newsreels, movies and radio broadcasts, but the scope of the conflict never really struck me. I knew my daddy was in Europe. All spring, letters had been coming in, and Ma let me keep the stamps along with the small notes Daddy sent along, specifically for me. If he wrote about the war, he did so in the letters Ma kept, and she almost never read me passages from those notes. She’d tell me where Daddy was currently stationed and that he was just fine. His notes to me were always the same. I kept them in a metal box on my dresser. In late June Ma received a letter, the longest one yet, but the scrap of paper – Daddy’s note to me – like a piece of fat ticker tape, was no different than a dozen others:

  We’re giving them a good run, Timmy. Be sure to behave yourself and mind your mother. Your father, Fred Randall.

  I imagined when he returned he’d have a thousand stories to tell, and he’d share them while we fished in the lake or went hunting for wild pigs up north. Before his leaving, these had been quiet excursions with little said between father and son, but he wouldn’t keep the war to himself. I felt certain of that.

  Seven: The German

  July 1, 1944 – Translated from the German

  The anniversary.

  My face looks no older, but perhaps the fault lies in the mirror. Age is a slow infection working on skin and muscle imperceptibly until one is irrevocably stricken, and the mirror is an easily misread instrument. If I had a photograph of myself from all of those years ago, then perhaps I could refute this strange conviction, but I have no such picture and no one familiar to whom I might pose such a bizarre question. All I have is the mirror and it shows me the same face another did in Bad Wiessee, only the day before the passing.

  I have nothing of my previous life but the scars and memories: not entirely trustworthy.

  Once the coffee is on the boil, I walk to the front door and pull it open to retrieve my milk and the morning paper. My neighbor Tim stands outside, and his face lights up when he see me, and he lifts his hand to wave, and we bo
th say “good morning,” though only his greeting is sincere, and he tries to speak to me, not knowing that this is a miserable anniversary. Lately he has been eager for my company. I am pleasant but impatient to end this morning’s conversation, though he does not seem to see this. He chatters about his mother and the lake and about going fishing, and I feel that his every word is another coat of varnish, cutting off oxygen from my lungs and affixing my limbs beneath heavy layers of stain. A clamp tightens at the base of my skull, and I want to ask him if my face has changed at all in the years we have been neighbors, except I know he will not understand the question. He keeps me on the porch as long as he can, but finally he runs out of trifling topics, and he wishes me a good day, and I thank him before escaping back into the house.

  The boy’s manner is familiar to me, and it concerns me. Men under my command and men in my bed have exhibited similar eagerness for my sanction, and though I recognized the need I similarly felt wholly unqualified to fulfill it. The boy’s father is in battle, far away from home, and it is natural for him to seek a male figure to exalt in replacement, except I am no one’s father. I have no lesson that could benefit this boy. Soldiers mistook my leadership for paternal guidance; lovers confused dominant affection for some deficit in their childhoods, and these were weaknesses I exploited to fashion better soldiers and better lovers. What do I know of fathers and sons? My own father was nothing but a vile shadow on the walls of my childhood home, a threatening shape that was void of light, darkly insubstantial.