7

Killer Claims Second Victim

Yesterday, police found the night clerk at the Chartres House hotel murdered in the hotel parking lot on Madison, where, based on the estimated time of death, he had gone around 2:00 A.M. Monday morning to move a guest’s car. The victim, Danny Racine, 20, was killed by a single knife wound in the heart, exactly as another New Orleans man was killed early Saturday morning near Jackson Square. The presence of Scrabble letters on the bodies of both men have caused authorities to label the perpetrator the Scrabble Letter Killer. There were four letters on the first victim and three on the second, leading to speculation there will be another two victims. Visitors and residents of the French Quarter are therefore urged to travel in groups or remain indoors after midnight. Though there are presently no firm leads to the killer’s identity, useful information has been obtained from hairs left at both murder scenes. Dr. Leo Fleming, head of the human identification laboratory in Raleigh, NC, here for the American Academy of Forensic Sciences meeting, has been called in as a consultant. Authorities have not disclosed what they hope to learn from Dr. Fleming.

KIT THREW THE PAPER down in disgust. The Scrabble Letter Killer . . . She hadn’t heard anyone call him that. Nick Lawson was really playing this for all it was worth. At least he didn’t know what Fleming had found—not yet, anyway. But by tomorrow, who knows?

She rinsed her coffee cup in the sink and put the Pop-Tarts back in the cupboard. She wiped the kitchen table and went to the pantry for Lucky’s leash.

Ah Lucky . . . He wasn’t there. He was still at the vet’s. Surely he was well enough to come home today.

She went to the phone and called the animal hospital.

“Good morning, this is Kit Franklyn. You have my dog, Lucky. When can I pick him up?”

Instead of answering, the girl on the line asked her to hold for the vet. Kit’s heart fell and she prepared for the worst. If Lucky had died . . . This was so terrible to consider she pushed the thought from her mind and tried not to let it creep back in.

They kept her waiting a thoughtlessly long time, then she heard the vet’s voice. “Dr. Franklyn, I’m afraid Lucky . . .”

Oh no . . . He did die. Her eyes blurred.

“. . . has had a small relapse. It’s nothing to be concerned about; we just need to keep him a while longer.”

“Of course. I understand,” Kit said, her heart settling. “You’ll call the minute he can come home, won’t you? You have both my numbers?”

The vet turned her over to the girl, who correctly recited both Kit’s home and office phone numbers and also expressed optimism over Lucky’s recovery.

Reluctantly, Kit hung up and sat for a moment, pulling herself together. That little dog had certainly given her some bad moments over the last few days. Her thoughts were interrupted by the doorbell. When she opened the door, she saw a UPS driver heading back to his truck at the curb. On the porch was a package from Happy Pastimes. For a few seconds, she did not understand what this could be. Then she remembered—the Scrabble game she’d had to buy to find out the value of K and J.

Having no use for it now, she took the package inside and put it on the hall table. She looked at herself in the mirror over the table, reset one of the tortoiseshell combs that kept her long hair from her face, and inspected her lip gloss. Satisfied that she was presentable, she got her purse from the bedroom, along with the umbrella she planned to keep in the office, and left the house.

With her key still in the lock, she hesitated, the package inside reminding her that she’d never looked at actual tiles comprising the riddle sequence since Teddy had pointed out they had numbers on them as well as letters. And the riddle had yet to be solved. This caused her to go back inside, where she picked up the package and carried it to the kitchen.

Even as a child, she’d always been neat, so the brown paper around the package went directly into the wastebasket. There was, of course, no plastic wrapper around the box, the clerk having already taken that off at her request.

She removed the lid and lifted out the game board. Under it were four plastic tile holders and a pouch of tiles, whose contents she poured onto the table. Since there were many O’s and E’s, she found these quickly. Because there was only one J and one K, they took longer.

She located the J and lined up what she had so far:

OJE

Just when she was beginning to think the clerk had lost the K, she found it and placed it in sequence.

KOJE

Her eyes widened. The K was worth five points, not six, as the idiot clerk had told her. She remembered now how a customer had been riding him for taking so long on the phone. He had apparently gotten flustered and told her the wrong number.

All the ideas she’d had about the riddle swam before her. With the mix-up in value for the K, none, except for the map of Japan, had been properly checked. License plates . . . airline flights . . . No. She had evolved beyond those theories. The newspapers . . .

May first, 1981. Not June first. She’d looked at the wrong microfilm.

But was it worth going back? She recalled how she’d felt looking at the film—at loose ends, not knowing what to concentrate on. But maybe that was because it was the wrong film. If it had been the right one, the answer might have been obvious. And if it was worth doing once, it was worth doing correctly. She hurried from the kitchen, leaving the Scrabble set littering the table and forgetting her umbrella.

Thirty minutes later, she was at the microfilm reader in the library. She had not seen the old lady this time and had reported her to the library staff so they could be on the lookout, but she still sat with her purse firmly between her feet.

Black pages . . . black pages . . . page one.

The first interesting fact she noticed was that May first, 1981, had been a Friday—just like the paper that had been left with the Scrabble tiles. But back in 1981, the paper was called the Times-Picayune—The States Item.

SOVIETS SCOFF AT U.S. PLEAS ON MIDEAST . . . Well, they won’t be doing that anymore, at least not as Soviets, Kit thought, looking further.

HOUSE BEGINS DEBATE ON BUDGET . . . How unusual.

Schwegman’s had sirloin for $1.85 a pound; an irate citizen had written the editor complaining about the litter at city hall; new asphalt walks were going to keep this year’s jazz fest attendees dry; Winn Dixie was opening a new store in Algiers. DEAD JUDGE LAUDED FOR SERVICE . . . Real sensitive phrasing there.

She leaned back and gave her eyes a rest. This issue of the paper was as useless and dull as the other one she’d checked. It was tough going, but there couldn’t be too many more pages. She pushed on.

The next page was the Vivant section, which was largely devoted to coverage of a lot of kids celebrating their sixteenth birthday. Whoopee.

She cranked along to the Lifestyle section and suddenly grew much more interested. A picture at the top of the page had a hand-drawn circle around it. Drawn on the original newspaper or on the film? To find out, she lowered the film gate and slid the film out of the reader. By tilting it and holding it up to the overhead lights, she saw that the circle was drawn on the shiny side of the film.

She reloaded the film and studied the picture, which was of a small dance band consisting of three men and a woman. One man was posed with a guitar, another with his hands on the keyboard of one of those abbreviated pianos, and the third was at a set of drums. The girl, a pretty blonde, also with a guitar, was standing in front singing into a microphone.

According to the accompanying article, they were a group called the Heartbeats. All four worked at the same hospital; the drummer as a cardiology resident, the piano player as a respiratory therapist, the male guitarist as a lab tech, and the girl as an EKG tech. The article went on to describe how they’d met and how they managed their double lives.

Was this what she was meant to find? Was one of the Heartbeats the killer? Then she saw the connection . . . hearts again.

This had to be it. The killer was one of the members of this band. Probably not the girl; most likely, one of the other three.

Shouldering her bag, she went to the copy machine and made three copies of the picture and the article, then returned the film to the cabinet where she’d found it.

The copies of the newspaper photograph were not very good. Therefore, when she reached the office, she pulled out the phone book and looked up the Times-Picayune.

There were many numbers listed but none for the paper’s library, where Terry Yardley had been transferred a few months earlier from the news photo desk, so she dialed Terry’s old number and got them to transfer the call.

“Terry, this is Kit Franklyn.”

“Why, honey, I thought you married that alligator farmer and moved away, it’s been so long since I’ve heard from you.”

“I know. It’s terrible how friends can live so close and still lose touch. Have I forfeited any chance of a favor?”

“You want me to take that man off your hands?”

“Actually, I was hoping you might be able to get me some prints of a photograph that appeared in an old issue of the paper.”

“Pooh. I’d rather have the man, but I’ll see what I can do about the other. What issue we talking about?”

“May first, 1981. It was a photograph of a small dance band that appeared in the Lifestyle section.”

“It’ll take a few minutes for me to see if we have the negative. Give me your number and I’ll call you right back.”

While waiting for Terry’s call, Kit reread the article accompanying the picture, her finger twirling a lock of her hair. When the call came, she snatched up the receiver.

“I’ve got the negative,” Terry said. “And Photography says they can have some prints by three o’clock.”

“Terry, you’re terrific.”

“How many prints and what size?”

“Three, and—how big can I get them and still have everything be sharp and clear?”

“I don’t think I’d go eight-by-ten. They might be a little grainy. Let’s say five-by-seven. What’s up?”

“It’s kind of a long story.”

“Oh good. Is there sex in it?”

“Not that I see at the moment.”

“Gossip?”

“Not really.”

“Gee, Kit, you used to be more fun. When you get here, come up to the newsroom on the third floor. I’m way in back.”

Kit had barely hung up when the phone rang again. It was Edna Gervais, at the Forensic meeting, telling her that someone had misplaced the restaurant guides and the ones on hand were going fast. Therefore, she put all other plans on hold and left for the tourist commission to get more.

BROUSSARD CLICKED THE PROJECTOR control and a slide appeared, showing him in shorts, at the top of a ladder, getting a kitten out of an oak tree in his yard. A ripple of laughter spread through the audience.

Not only had he not put the slide in there; he’d never even seen it before. Then he remembered. . . . It was last spring, the day Charlie Franks, the deputy medical examiner, had come over to return the rice cooker he’d let Franks’s wife try before she bought one. Franks must have had a camera with him.

“Believe me,” Broussard said, embarrassed that his concern for a helpless animal should be displayed so publicly, “I wasn’t the one who put this slide in. But since it is in, you should know that I wasn’t gettin’ the cat down; I was puttin’ him up there.”

It was exactly the right thing to say and the crowd warmed to him even more than they had before. Near the back of the room, Franks shook his head in admiration of Broussard’s ability to improvise under pressure. Sitting next to him, Kit, too, was impressed. Considering how slow and dull-witted he’d felt all morning, Broussard had even amazed himself.

Usually, he was so well prepared and so suited to this sort of thing, he could shift into automatic and glide through even an hour talk without a hitch. But today, he felt seconds away from total disaster, his mind sending out warnings of imminent shutdown. When he left one slide and proceeded to the next, he was sorely afraid he might not remember what he intended to say.

All because of those hairs . . . Something there wasn’t right. Or maybe he wasn’t right. God knows, this talk was going rotten. Somehow, he got to the end, his brain so numb, he barely remembered the trip. Surprisingly, there was much applause. His talk was the last one before the afternoon break and he headed directly for the foyer, wanting to be out of the room.

“Great save, Andy,” Franks said, following him into the foyer.

Broussard turned and wagged a finger in Franks’s grinning mug. “Charlie, I’m gonna get you for this.”

“Apparently, you’re forgetting that letter inviting me to give the plenary lecture at the international Forensic congress in Rio last year.”

“I stopped you before you ordered your plane ticket.”

“Now we’re even.”

“I don’t think so. That letter was just between you and me. You pulled your shenanigan in public. And I was already barely keepin’ my head above water. You nearly sank me.”

“Didn’t see you in any trouble from where I sat,” Franks said.

“Me, neither,” Kit echoed. “It was a great talk.”

“Unprincipled, if you ask me,” a voice said from behind Broussard.

He turned to confront a hefty fellow in horn-rimmed glasses who had a narrow mustache that he wore low on his lip, except where it rose in a small central triangle to meet his nose. He was dressed in a dark blue suit and vest laced with pinstripes and having lapels so wide, he looked like a Mafia lawyer from the forties. Actually, it was someone far worse: Jason Harvey—accompanied by Zin Fanelli.

“Unprincipled,” Broussard said coldly. “In what way?”

“Getting sympathy by using that kitten as a prop. Oh, you’re clever, I’ll give you that. Pretending you had nothing to do with the slide and then putting that reverse spin on it. Clever but, as I said, unprincipled.”

Charlie Franks stepped forward. “For your information, I—”

He was interrupted by Broussard’s raised hand. “Guess I should give that some thought,” Broussard said, “comin’ as it does from such an expert on lack of principles.”

Harvey let him have that one and shifted to another front. “I hear you’re not having much success catching that killer. How many is it now . . . two? Soon to be three, according to the paper. I hope when that third one occurs, you don’t have any trouble sleeping at night. Maybe if you didn’t spend so much time thinking about ways to ingratiate yourself with the membership, you’d have learned something from the bodies the police could use. Unless, of course, you’re in over your head, which I suppose is the case, since you had to call in Fleming for help. Fanelli here says you never were very good with knife wounds.”

Fanelli’s eyes widened and he began to shake his head in disavowal of Harvey’s remark, but he had to stop when Harvey looked at him.

“I’ll be interested in your paper Thursday,” Harvey said. “I hope it can stand close scrutiny.”

Harvey turned and walked away, leaving Franks with his fists clenched. “Where does a forensic whore like that get off criticizing anybody?” Franks said.

Broussard put his hand on Franks’s shoulder. “It’s okay, Charlie. We’ll just consider the source and forget it. Now I’m goin’ back inside and hear the next talk. You two comin’?”

Franks nodded, but Kit said, “Can’t. I’ve got an appointment at the newspaper.”

“We’re gettin’ up a group for dinner,” Broussard said. “You should come.”

“Where and when?”

“Lobby, by the escalator, at ten to six. Better be on time, ’cause we’re gonna take the hotel shuttle and it won’t wait.”