The Man From Primrose Lane Part 15

"And why would you want to do that?"

"Well, by then, based on the files in Brune's box and the grand jury testimony I had uncovered, I had become convinced that Trimble was at least an accomplice in the abduction and murder of Sarah Creston. Unlike Brune, though, Trimble was free to continue killing. I went to his place to see if I could catch him stalking young girls."

"And what did you see?"

"I saw..." David clapped a hand over his mouth as a giggle bubbled up and out. He was quick to cover it with a cough. No one noticed except Elizabeth, who stared back at him with a look of concern he'd never seen on her face before. He tried to think of something sad. He thought of the autopsy pictures he'd seen of Sarah, the way the blood in her body had pooled on her back, painting it forever the color of a ripened eggplant, in sharp contrast to her alabaster face. That did it. He began again. "I saw ...

... a company truck for a heating and air-conditioning business parked outside Trimble's garage.

An advertis.e.m.e.nt on the side promised HVAC SPECIALS! HEAT OR COOL YOUR HOME FOR LESS! He had hoped to find Trimble working in some butcher shop or shaping steel in a factory by the river. He hadn't expected this. He had never considered the man he suspected of being the real child killer might have secured a job giving him easy access to thousands of homes. He felt sick.

This is too big, he thought. I should turn this over to another reporter. Someone who's been doing this for longer than a couple months.

Problem was, n.o.body believed him. And it wasn't a tidy mystery. Too hard to explain. A man had already been executed for the crime. Physical evidence was found on Sarah Creston that matched samples taken from Brune's home and van. And now, after Brune is long dead, a rookie reporter thinks it was actually one of his scouts who was the serial killer? It was a tough sell.

In for a penny, he thought, and sat back in his seat, eyeing the house across the street from the shadows.

It's difficult to keep track of long stretches of time when nothing happens to separate one moment from the next. How long had he been sitting there? Two hours? Five? He didn't want to turn the car on to find out, didn't want to risk Trimble seeing the dash lights from his home, where the flickering glow of a television set danced in a dark room beyond a picture window. He could have checked his cell phone but he was in the boonies of southern Ohio, a cellular black hole, and all the roaming had drained its battery. Minutes began to feel like seconds, hours like minutes, speeding up just to get to something, anything, until he noticed the TV was off.

It was one of those country nights utterly devoid of light. A cloudy sky under a new moon, far from any city of note. He had to concentrate to pick up the faintest shadows across the street. He saw the outline of Trimble's house, the tree in the front yard, the truck in the driveway. And something else, something nearer the door ...

David felt the wind suck out of him as if a ghost had punched him in the gut.

Trimble was standing there, staring back at him, fifty feet away.

Ever so slowly, Trimble was shuffling his feet toward the car, in a straight line, without lowering his shoulders, creating the effect of a man hovering in the air, floating to David rather than walking.

If I move, will he come after me? wondered David. Or will he run away?

h.e.l.l with it. He wasn't going to let him get close enough to pounce. David reached over to the pa.s.senger's seat where he had set the keys. In his haste, his fingers knocked the keys to the floor with a loud jingling. He bent down, fis.h.i.+ng around the floor amid cans of soda and rolled-up McDonald's bags.

When he sat up, Trimble was at the window, staring back at him, his ruddy mouth open, his dark tongue lolling around inside like sentient cancer. He lifted a hand, shaped in a gaping circle, and moved it up and down like a piston. David's head was so awash in numbing terror that it took a moment for him to realize Trimble was pantomiming a hand job.

"Want me to touch you?" asked Trimble in a low voice. "Do you want me to suck your d.i.c.k? What do you want? Do you want to watch me jerk off?" Trimble lifted his s.h.i.+rt and David saw that the man was not wearing any pants. A narrow, long, and erect p.e.n.i.s rubbed a soapy trail of pre-c.u.m against the window of his car.

"Mr. Trimble," David said, through the window, as loudly as he could. "Mr. Trimble, please stop that."

Trimble's p.e.n.i.s disappeared under the s.h.i.+rt in an instant. Trimble stared back at him, a look of anger at David's supposed trickery. "Who the f.u.c.k are you and how do you know me?"

"I came down to talk to you about your old scoutmaster. About Ronil Brune."

"Why the h.e.l.l you outside my house at two in the morning?"

David didn't know how to answer that. He hadn't prepared for this. His mind was a dark void. And still he hadn't managed to start the car. The door wasn't even locked, he realized.

"Are you stalking me?" asked Trimble. "What the h.e.l.l do you want?"

"Do ... do you think Ronil Brune really killed Sarah Creston and those other two girls?" he asked.

"What?" he crinkled his nose at David as if he smelled sewage. "You a f.u.c.king reporter? Get the f.u.c.k out of here." Trimble turned toward the house and started walking away.

David rolled down his window. "I don't think he killed anyone."

Trimble stopped but didn't turn.

"Obviously, Brune raped those women. But he wasn't a murderer. All those women he let go, even when he was supposedly killing these children. That's not how it works. Serial killers don't suddenly start not killing their victims. Their violence escalates."

Trimble looked back at him. "I know he didn't do it," he said. "I tried telling the prosecutor. But he was so sure. Said he had cat hair or something that showed Creston was at his house."

"But when Creston was abducted, you lived there, too. And a day after she was found, you moved back here, to Steubenville, to be with your parents. What made you leave so quickly?"

"I got a bad case of s.h.i.+ngles," he said.

"That's what you told your boss at work?"

"Yeah."

"If I track him down, is that going to jibe with what he remembers? What was the name of your doctor?"

"I didn't see no doctor."

"Well ... that doesn't make much sense," said David. "How do you know it was s.h.i.+ngles if you didn't see a doctor?"

"You're confusing me," he said, and he was turning now, walking back toward the car. "I remember now. Yes. I saw a doctor, yes. Company's doctor or something. The f.u.c.k is it to you, anyway, Encyclopedia Brown?"

"Did you kill Sarah Creston?" There. It was out. Like dice thrown from a cup.

Trimble smiled. "C'mere," he said. "Get out of the car."

David rolled the window up quickly and started the car. Something hit the window, a loud THUMP. He looked over. It was Trimble's d.i.c.k, still hard and dripping. Had the talk of murder turned him on more? David thought so. Trimble started pumping his body against the car.

Finally, David clicked it into drive. The moment the car lurched forward, Trimble shot his load, trailing s.e.m.e.n along the side of the reporter's car like a racing stripe from h.e.l.l. David found an all-night wash in the next suburb and spent a half hour disinfecting his car, trying not to puke.

David returned to the apartment in Cuyahoga Falls just as the sun peeked over the horizon. Elizabeth was in the shower, preparing for another day of teaching. The dining room smelled strange. Like liquor or some musk, like a strap of leather lying in the suns.h.i.+ne. He couldn't place it. He a.s.sumed she had read one of those thick, glossy mags the night before, the kind with the pull-tab cologne samples.

His notes were spread over the table, arranged into piles labeled by Post-it-note tombstones: Sarah Creston, Donna Doyle, Jennifer Poole. There was a new stack, too, pages of new reports on the unsolved abduction and murder of a girl from Steubenville that had occurred two years after Brune was already in prison. She had lived two blocks from Trimble's house.

How many more girls should there be? he wondered often. How many am I missing?

He thought, again, of Elizabeth's sister. It was tempting to let the pull of his obsession take him there, to believe Trimble may have abducted Elaine as well. He understood the allure of trying to lump every little girl abduction to one bogeyman. Sometimes even good detectives did that. Better to think one man was responsible for all the horror. But there was no sign that Trimble had even scouted the region north of Akron. And he would have stood out like a transient in the ritzy section of Lakewood where Elizabeth had lived.

David spent his spare time searching for some bit of circ.u.mstantial evidence to connect Trimble to Donna and Jennifer. Though Sarah's was the only murder for which Brune was convicted, David had spoken to the detectives in charge of Donna and Jennifer's cases and had been told their files had been closed, their deaths long ago attributed to Brune due to the fact that those animal hairs were found on Jennifer's body, hairs identical to those that had come off the carpet in Brune's house and van, and Donna had been wrapped in a plastic bag that had been traced back to the bedspread in Brune's master bedroom. "You can't kill a man twice," one detective told him.

How long do you look for something that doesn't exist before it becomes a delusion? Before it becomes an obsession?

"You're home," she said from the doorway of the bathroom, naked but for a terry-cloth towel wrapped around her hair, diamond drops of water on her small b.r.e.a.s.t.s reflecting the light from the window.

"Sorry about last night."

"You need to sleep."

"I need to go to work."

"But you haven't slept. You look like c.r.a.p."

"I'll be fine. I'll grab some coffee."

"It's dangerous to drive like that. Why don't you lie down for a half hour?"

G.o.d, her voice was grating sometimes, wasn't it? It bit into his head with sharp teeth. He could feel the headache growing behind his eyes. "Can't," he said. "I have an article due today."

"Then why did you drive to Steubenville?" This was the tone she used with him all the time now. Why couldn't she see how important this was?

"I had to meet him. I had to see Trimble."

"What's the hurry? The girl was murdered over twenty-five years ago."

He shook his head. "We're talking in circles," he said.

"You're being stupid about this."

"Do you think I want to spend all night on the road?" Shut up, he thought. Shut up. Shut up. Shut your pie-hole before you give me a migraine.

"So stop."

His field of vision collapsed into a gray dot. Motes of light danced at the edges. "G.o.dd.a.m.n it, I can't."

She walked into the bedroom and slammed the door.

David returned to his notes, tall sheets full of his longhand, summaries of Brune's files. He never heard her leave, even though she must have walked right by.

Two hours later he still sat at the dining room table. He had gone through Jennifer's file again and found nothing he could use to place Trimble in her path the day of her death. But a few pages into Donna's paperwork, he caught his breath at the sight of one word: Hap's. He set that report aside from the others. Then he rooted into the box for a detective's interview with Trimble he'd found in Medina. Hap's. There it was again.

Hap's was a meat processing plant in Marshallville. In 1982, the year Sarah Creston was murdered, Trimble had worked as a butcher there. And in 1980, the year Donna was murdered, the man who had discovered her body had written, under occupation, Meat Cutter, Hap's on the statement he gave to the detective.

The man's name was Burt Wrenn and David found him still listed in the white pages.

"'Lo?" said a frail voice on the other end of the line.

"Hi, Mr. Wrenn? I'm a reporter who is researching the Donna Doyle case."

"Yeah? They catch him?"

"Well, the police executed Brune four years ago and-"

"Not Brune. The fella that lived with him. The guy that worked next to me. Girlish name."

"Riley?"

"Yessir. Riley Trimble. He ...

... done it,' he told me," said David.

"Objection, Your Honor!" yelled Synenberger, standing. "Hearsay."

"Mr. Wrenn is unfortunately dead and cannot be subpoenaed to testify for this jury," said Russo.

"Your Honor, please," said Synenberger. "This is ridiculous."

"In 1980, Mr. Wrenn reported his suspicions about Trimble to the police," said Russo.

"No such doc.u.ment has been entered into record," countered Synenberger.

"Because none exists, Your Honor. We believe it was purposefully 'misplaced' by the Medina County prosecutor in order to deflect doubt during Brune's trial."

"Your Honor, now this man is impugning the integrity of a respected county prosecutor in order to squeeze this hearsay into record," said Synenberger. "Can we draw the line here, please?"

"State of Ohio would like to enter into record a video deposition of Mr. Wrenn, conducted shortly before his death earlier this year."

"Objection, Your Honor. The defendant, at that time, had just been charged and had yet to obtain legal counsel."

"That is incorrect," said Russo. "Trimble was afforded a public defender, who was present for the deposition. It clearly satisfies the requirements set by Crawford v. Was.h.i.+ngton."

"Objection overruled," said Siegel. A young woman wheeled a TV stand in front of the jury.

"Mr. Wrenn's deposition," said Russo, "taken in the presence of the public defender, two weeks prior to Wrenn's death due to lung cancer."

The screen crackled to life. Members of the gallery craned their necks to get a better look. On the television, the body of a weathered old man sitting on a hospital bed came into focus. Burt Wrenn's nose was obscured by some breathing apparatus that gave his voice an off-putting nasal whine. He spoke at the camera, appearing to address the jury directly. "I, Burt Wrenn, being of sound mind, do offer the following testimony and swear that it is the whole truth, under G.o.d.

"In 1980, I worked beside Riley Trimble at Hap's in Marshallville. He and I separated out the different cuts of meats from the body of a cow. Or pig. Deer in the fall. We spent a lot of time in close quarters, talking about family and where we were from. On several occasions I know I talked to him about the spread of land I have in Marshallville. There's nothing on it except an oil well and an access drive. I told him how I would go there in the fall to hunt and I told him how it was the perfect place to get deer because it was on a road that wasn't much used, and out of sight of any house. There's a field of bluegra.s.s there that the deer like to congregate on around dusk. Couldn't have been three weeks after we talked about it that they found that girl, Donna Doyle, lying on the gra.s.s by that access road.

"I was suspicious of him, right away. He was always sort of shady. Too smart to be working at the meat market, for example. And he pretended to be stupid. A couple times he'd accidentally say a word that was way over everyone's head and he'd blush and say he'd heard it on the news and the other guys would rib him about it for days. It just creeped me out, though. I remember one word-verisimilitude. Who uses a word like that in conversation? I had to look it up.

"When the cops questioned me after they found the girl on my property, I told them about Riley. But I never heard from them again.

"And then I saw on the news that his roommate was arrested for raping all those women and my first thought was, I bet they did this together. I bet they killed Donna together. I'd never met Brune. But Riley knew all about my field. After David Neff told me that Riley was living at Brune's house back then and had moved back to Steubenville the day Sarah Creston was found, I was sure of it. I just don't see how Riley couldn't have been a part of these girls' murders. He certainly knew how to cut his meat."

The video ended.

Synenberger shot out of his seat. "Your Honor, is this a deposition or a testimonial? I didn't hear a single question posed."

"Defense council didn't ask any," said Russo. "But they were present. They had their chance."