Eleven Days Page 9

  Two of the burglaries had occurred in Maitland, and Dan was still up, working those.

  That meant that one or two burglars had taken just about the whole local homicide team off the case for at least a day, maybe longer, leaving DCI to do the work. With Hester still in Iowa City, that meant that Agent Hal Greeley was the only one left in our county to do any interviews, and probably meant that the search for Rachel was going to be his main project, and he didn’t know anybody in the county. That was crucial, because many of our citizens will be somewhat less than candid with any cop, but with a state agent by himself … not good.

  I got Hal on the phone and offered to help interview. He was going to the Bockman house first. I had another cup of coffee, some peanut butter toast, and I was ready to go.

  Or so I thought. I realized that I didn’t remember Bockman’s first name. Or her maiden name. I hated to do it, but I called the school and asked for Sue. She had to be called away from class, so she would have to call me back. She did in about two minutes.

  “Carl, are you all right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Oh, you scared me to death!”

  Uh-oh. I should have thought of that. I was home on sick leave with a head injury, right? What would be the first thing she would think? Dummy.

  “I’m sorry, dear, no, I’m just fine. Look, what I need is Mrs. Bockman’s first name.”

  “Who?”

  “You remember, was in my class in high school—a year behind you. Hefty gal, about five ten, was in extracurricular speech with us one year, then went to school in Iowa City for about one semester … then quit? Married that Bockman who lives north of town about three or four miles?”

  “Oh, that would be Tammy Bockman’s mother. Her first name is Helen. She was a Floyd, wasn’t she?”

  “Sure! Okay, thanks a lot.”

  “Did you have to call me out of class for that?”

  “Yeah, it was important. Look, I’ll tell you tonight, okay?”

  “All right. I love you.”

  “I love you, too. See you around suppertime.”

  “You’re going someplace?”

  “Just a ride with one of the state officers, no big deal.”

  “Should you be going out?”

  “Hey, I feel fine.”

  “I think it’s stupid. Let somebody else do it. You’re on sick pay, stay home and be sick.”

  “I’ll be okay, and there’s nobody else available.”

  “There never is, is there?”

  “Look, I’ll be all right. Nothing dangerous or anything like that. Just an interview I don’t want to miss.”

  “An interview for a better job?”

  I forced a laugh. “No, afraid not.”

  “All right,” she said, sounding resigned. “I’ll see you for supper, or whenever you get home.”

  “Okay, bye.”

  Now I was ready to go. Helen. Yes, good old Helen. Now that I thought about it, she had to leave the U of Iowa because her mother had a stroke, and her dad needed her at the farm. Her sister had been through law school by that time and had left the area for good. I remembered hearing that Helen was pretty bitter and resentful about that … probably with reason, because Helen probably could have done very well in school.

  Hal picked me up, and I filled him in on Helen on the way out to her place. We got there about 13:25.

  Helen lived about three-fourths of a mile from Herkaman’s place, off the main road and west, or behind, the Herkaman house. The closest farm to Herkaman’s, as a matter of fact.

  Helen came out onto the porch to meet us. She looked like she had aged more than I would like to think I have, but still didn’t look too bad. She invited us in, and I introduced Hal. It looked like Helen remembered me, which made me feel a little embarrassed for not remembering her name. She was very congenial, and offered us coffee and cookies, while we sat at a modern kitchen table. I looked around briefly and was impressed. The house was quite clean and tidy, and most of the interior appeared to have been remodeled, with the furniture being nearly new. Helen was doing well for herself. Then I remembered that her dad had died about three or four years back. She must have inherited a bit of money.

  I was kind of surprised that Hal and Theo hadn’t talked to Helen before this, but Hal took care of that for me by saying that they had started with the northeast neighbors and had let interview lead to interview. He was explaining to Helen just what he was doing there and why he wanted to talk to her. He went into how horrible it all was and what a terrible thing had happened at the Herkaman house. How we really wanted the people who had done such a thing and how they should be put away for a long time. He was talking down to her, and I hoped he wouldn’t make her mad.

  He explained a little about the murders, just enough to let her know that we didn’t have a suspect, but left out the Satanic overtones. Then he asked her to tell us what she knew about Phyllis Herkaman and her guests.

  “Well, not a lot,” said Helen.

  She then proceeded to tell us a lot about Phyllis Herkaman, her son, and some of the strange guests at the house.

  Helen had known Phyllis Herkaman for about two years, it turned out. She thought Phyllis pretty friendly but sort of melancholy. Thought that there must have been some pretty tragic circumstances in her life, even more than the death of Phyllis’s husband, which she knew about. She and Phyllis had coffee in the mornings about once a week, and Phyllis had said some pretty disturbing things.

  “Like what, Helen?”

  She looked at me with kind of a funny expression. “Well, Carl, she was pretty quiet, like I told you. But she was always saying things about freedom to be yourself. Not like your typical liberal, understand. Not at all. Much more freedom than that. She would tell me that it was all right to do virtually anything, as long as it benefited you. That it was all right if it hurt somebody else, because if they could be hurt by it, they didn’t deserve to be protected in the first place. That sort of thing. Very determined. Not forceful, you know? But deep down convinced, and unshakable.”

  “Was this political,” asked Hal, “or was it more like a creed, or a religion, or something like that?”

  Helen smiled. “She was a Satanist, if that’s what you mean,” she said matter-of-factly. “Care for another cookie?”

  It turned out that Helen and Phyllis had discussed Satanism on several occasions. Phyllis had apparently had a considerable amount of respect for Helen, telling her that she admired her intelligence and could understand all about the tragedies in Helen’s background. Phyllis had railed against “fate” and the fact that women were constantly being taken advantage of. By men, and by society as a whole.

  Helen told us that Phyllis had taken the death of her husband pretty hard, because she was intending to leave him in a year or two anyway, and that she felt guilty about that. She had tried to find somebody in her hometown to talk to who would understand. No luck. She had gone back to school in Iowa City and had come across some people there who not only provided sympathy but told her that she had no business feeling guilty about anything. They had introduced her to Satanism, a little at a time, until she finally began to accept it as her religion.

  “Did she try to, uh, persuade you to adopt Satanism, too?” I asked.

  “Oh,” said Helen, “sort of. In her own way. She wasn’t pushy, or anything like that. Just trying to share what she thought was a good philosophy.”

  There was a short pause, with the unasked question hanging in the air.

  “No, Carl.” She reached over and poured more coffee into my cup. “She didn’t convert me.”

  “Well, good.”

  “But I have to admit, she made me think.”

  “I suppose she did.”

  She gestured with the pot toward Hal’s cup, and he shook his head. “You said on the phone yesterday, after I asked you what had happened to Rachel, that you didn’t know anything about her. Is that true?”

  “Yes,” said Hal.


  “I find that a little hard to believe.”

  I grinned. “So do we, Helen, but there it is.”

  She looked at me with that funny look again. “What do you want to know about her? I worry about her, she is pretty dependent, you know, and I hope nothing has happened to her.”

  “Well, we’d like to start off with her last name, if you know it.”

  “Certainly. Rachel Larsen.”

  Things were definitely looking up.

  It turned out that Rachel had started coming to the Herkaman farm about a year to a year and a half ago. She was a student in Iowa City, originally from Minnesota. Majored in speech pathology. About twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, had been married, but was divorced by the time she was twenty-three. He apparently beat her. She was a part-time student and worked at the bookstore at the student union. She was pretty shy and withdrawn, and was bisexual, her female lover having been Peggy Keller. She also slept with Phyllis on occasion.

  Hal and I exchanged glances. Wonderful. All I could think was, that if this case ever got to a jury, we were going to have a little trouble keeping their minds on something as mundane as a murder or four. And with the lifestyle and religious preferences of this group, a jury just might feel they had gotten their just deserts.

  “Does that bother you?” asked Helen.

  “No,” I said. “It doesn’t bother me, but if we ever get the suspect to trial, it might bother a jury.”

  She seemed to collect her thoughts for a moment. But something was bothering her.

  We asked her if she knew Sirken, and she said only slightly, but that he was something of a jerk, tried to be very dominant, but only came across as a pain in the ass. He worked at a hospital, that was all she knew. Except that:

  “He was a janitor, and took about three hours a year toward his psych major. But he tried to tell strangers that he was a psychologist, sometimes a psychiatrist. Didn’t know anything! Only a fool would have bought his phony act.”

  “But he and Peggy and Rachel were all into Satanism?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know about Francis McGuire’s connection with these people? I mean, how did he fit in?”

  Helen snorted. “He provided some support, like with money. He was always trying to impress them with his devotion to Satan, but he didn’t really understand the true philosophy behind it.” She shook her head. “But all three of the girls screwed him, if you’ll pardon my language. Just to keep him around.”

  “Oh.”

  “They told me that they thought he was sort of nice, and that they could do that for him. But they always laughed at him and called him the whore.”

  “They called him,” asked Hal, “the whore?”

  “Sure. After his surgery, he had to be on the bottom every time. You know what they say … a whore spends most of her time on her back?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s why they called him that.”

  She paused, and seemed to be trying to resolve a conflict. She looked at me again.

  “Carl, would you answer a question for me?”

  “I will if I can.”

  Her lip started to tremble. “Did you find the baby?” And she started to cry.

  11

  Thursday, April 25

  14:10 hours

  Well, Hal and I just about crapped.

  Turned out that Rachel had a baby a short time ago and that Helen thought we had some information about it and were withholding it from her. It took her a few minutes to compose herself, and Hal and I just sort of sat there stunned.

  Helen went into the bathroom eventually.

  “Jesus Christ, Hal. This is just getting to be like a freakin’ soap opera!”

  “You got that right.”

  “You don’t suppose we have a dead baby over there, do you?”

  “I don’t see how. She probably took it with her.”

  “I didn’t see any baby stuff in the house, Hal. Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “That doesn’t mean much. She lived in Iowa City.”

  “Yeah, but if she is the one who called, she sure didn’t seem like somebody who had the time to pack up the kid and all its stuff.”

  “Maybe. Listen, let’s take Helen to the office and have her listen to the tape of the original call. She ought to be able to tell if it’s Rachel on the phone.”

  I nodded.

  “In the meantime, let me call Iowa City and see if we can locate Rachel down there.”

  Helen returned to the table. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” said Hal. “Nothing to be sorry about at all. Could I trouble you to use your phone? It’ll be long-distance, but I’ll use my state credit card.”

  “No, go ahead. That’s fine.”

  “Thank you.”

  Hal went to call, leaving Helen and me at the table.

  “Carl, I’m sorry I got so upset. It’s just that I thought you knew and weren’t telling me.”

  “That’s okay. Really. Happens a lot. People think we’re deliberately withholding information that we don’t actually have. Happens a lot. They always think we know more than we do. Sort of flattering, in a way.”

  “I just am so worried about the baby.”

  “So am I, Helen, so am I.”

  We could hear Hal in the other room, talking on the phone to Hester. He was telling her where Rachel worked, and to get down there and find her.

  “I didn’t see the baby, or any baby gear, in the house, Helen.”

  “Oh, I suppose not.”

  “You suppose not?”

  “I haven’t seen the baby for quite a while.”

  “Then why do you think something happened to it?”

  “Because I’ve seen Rachel.”

  “Without the baby?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  Her lip started to quiver again. “And I’m afraid something happened to her. That they did something to her.”

  Get in here, Hal. Please, get in here.

  “Who’s they, Helen?”

  “That damned Sirken and the one they call Darkness.”

  “Who the hell is Darkness?”

  “I don’t know. Just that that’s what they call him.”

  “Hey, Hal!”

  He stuck his head around the corner, the phone to his right ear, and held up his hand for me to hold on for a moment, then disappeared around the doorway again.

  “Helen, Hal should hear this.”

  She nodded. “The baby’s name was Cynthia …” and started to cry again. “Excuse me,” she sobbed, and headed back to the bathroom.

  Hal came back to the table as she was disappearing down the hall.

  “She crying again?”

  “Yeah, listen, she thinks something happened to the baby a few months ago, and there is a guy named Darkness who is also in the group, and she thinks that he did something to it, along with Sirken.”

  Hal just stood there for a second. “Jesus Christ, I was only gone a minute!”

  I lit my fifth cigarette of the interview and just closed my eyes for a second. My head was starting to ache again. Damn.

  “Well, I sent Hester to find Rachel. She’s going to call back as soon as she locates her. She’ll call your office first, and if we’re still here, I gave her this number. This is getting a little too complicated.”

  “Yeah, but it’s good information.”

  He asked me, in a lowered voice, if I thought that Helen was involved more than she was letting on. I said that I didn’t know.

  “How reliable is she?”

  “Pretty reliable, I think.”

  Helen returned to the table, apologizing again.

  “That’s all right, Helen,” said Hal. “Just take your time, there’s no rush here.”

  Hal led the conversation slowly back to Darkness and the infant, starting by telling Helen that Hester was looking into the whereabouts of Rachel in Iowa City, and that he was sure that she would find her. He also said th
at he thought the baby might have just been left in Iowa City with a sitter, that that was common practice, and that Helen might be worried for no reason.

  She didn’t agree. She’d talked with Rachel several times while she was pregnant, and twice after the baby had been born.

  “She just thought of it as a sort of job she had to do. Like it was a burden that she had to bear. I asked her a couple of times if she was going to adopt it out, because it was pretty obvious she didn’t really want it.”

  “What did she say about that?”

  “She said that she couldn’t.”

  “Couldn’t, or wouldn’t?”

  “Couldn’t.”

  “Why was that, you think?”

  “I don’t know. But she was just sort of, well, dull, if you know what I mean. Dull, no luster, no excitement about the child.”

  I was busy taking notes and had just written one to remind myself to check with hospitals to get the birth record of the child. Helen apparently could read at an angle.

  “She wasn’t born in the hospital, Carl.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t check hospitals, it won’t help. She was born at Phyllis’s house.”

  “When was that?” asked Hal.

  “Just a minute, let me check my calendar. Sometime in late November.”

  She went to a kitchen drawer and came back with a calendar. Most of the date boxes had penciled-in notations, the ones I could see having things to do with the farm—veterinary appointments, farm supply dealers, etc.

  “Here it is … November 24th. ‘Rachel-baby.’ ”

  Hal looked at the calendar.

  “Now, Helen,” he said, “what about this Darkness individual?”

  Helen visibly composed herself. “I hate him. So did Phyllis.”

  “Why?”

  She began to explain, slowly at first, and gaining speed as she went.

  “He was behind it all, I think. The leader of everything. He made them do everything. He made the decisions for them, all of them. And they did what he wanted.”

  “Can you give us an example?”

  “I can give hundreds.” She thought for a moment. “He was the one who told Phyllis to come here in the first place.”

  “He did?”

  “Yes. He told her to get a job in a rural area, anyway. Not to be employed in the city. It was hard for her, because there aren’t as many jobs out here, you know. It took her a while, but that’s what she did.”