“I marked a place we ought to listen to, unless you really want to hear what kind of training a runner does, which to me is all bullshit,” Ollie said. “Can I run it ahead a bit?”
Without waiting for an answer, Ollie put the recorder on Fast Forward. He stopped the tape a bit past the mark and then fiddled with the controls, jockeying the tape back and forth until he found what he wanted.
“Yeah, here it is,” he said. “Listen.”
MCINTYRE: Well, I can’t thank you enough, Darcy. That was just the kind of material I was looking for.
DARCY: I hope so, anyway.
MCINTYRE: It was, believe me. Would you like more coffee?
DARCY: No, I’d better get moving. What time is it, anyway?
MCINTYRE: A quarter to ten.
“Gives us a time,” Ollie said. “Very nice of him.”
DARCY: ...realize it was so late. I have to look over that Psych material again.
MCINTYRE: I can give you a lift back to school, if you like.
“Here it comes,” Ollie said.
DARCY: No, that’s okay...
MCINTYRE: My car’s parked right around the corner, near Jefferson. We can walk over to the garage, if you like...
DARCY: Well, gee, that’s very nice of you.
MCINTYRE: Let me get the check.
“He turns off the machine here,” Ollie said.
“Is that it?”
“There’s more. But the guy just located the garage for us, so it should be pretty easy to find it, don’t you think? Right around the corner, near Jefferson. How many garages...?”
“We’ve already hit a dozen of them,” Hawes said.
“Well, this should make it easier. You checked the phone books for Corey McIntyres?”
“None in the city,” Carella said.
“So he was just usin’ that guy’s name out West, huh?”
“Looks that way.”
“He won’t be usin’ it no more,” Ollie said.
“What do you mean?”
“Listen,” he said, and pointed to the recorder. “He musta turned it on again just before he killed her. Wanted a permanent record, huh? The guy must be nuts.”
The detectives listened.
“There’s the click,” Ollie said. “Here it comes.”
DARCY: Will we be able to see this statue? It looks dark in there.
MCINTYRE: Oh, there are lights.
DARCY: Should have brought a flashlight.
MCINTYRE: Vandals. But there’s a lamppost just a little ways in.
“Where you suppose they are?” Ollie asked.
“Shhh,” Meyer said.
DARCY: Who’s this a statue of, anyway?
MCINTYRE: Jesse Owens.
DARCY: Really? Here? I thought he was from Cleveland.
MCINTYRE: You know the name, do you?
DARCY: Well, sure. He ran the socks off everybody in the world... When was it?
MCINTYRE: 1936. The Berlin Olympics.
DARCY: Made a fool of Hitler and all his Aryan theories.
MCINTYRE: Ten-six for the hundred meter. Broke the world record at twenty point seven for the two-hundred, and also won the four-hundred meter relay.
DARCY: Not to mention the broad jump.
MCINTYRE: You do know him then.
DARCY: Of course I know him, I’m a runner. Hey!
“Here it comes,” Ollie said.
The sounds of scuffling, heavy breathing, rasping, a thud, a gasp for breath, and another thud, and yet another, and now more gasping, fitful, frenzied.
“He’s beating the shit out of her,” Ollie said. “You should see how she looked when we found her...”
And then, suddenly, a sharp click.
“What’s that?” Meyer asked. “Did he turn off the recorder?”
“No, sir,” Ollie said.
“I thought I heard...”
“You did. That’s the girl’s neck breaking.”
Silence on the tape now. Ten seconds, twenty seconds. Then the sound of footsteps moving quickly. Other footsteps, fading. A car door slamming. Another car door. The sound of an automobile engine starting. Then, over the purr of the engine, McIntyre’s voice.
MCINTYRE: Hello, boys, it’s me again. This won’t be the last one. But it’s the last you’ll hear of Corey McIntyre. ’Bye now.
Silence.
The detectives looked at each other.
“That’s it?” Hawes asked.
“That’s all she wrote,” Ollie said.
“Wants to get caught, doesn’t he?” Meyer said.
“Looks that way to me,” Ollie said. “Otherwise why leave us a tape zeroing in on the garage and giving us a voice print we can later match up we get a good suspect? First thing we got to do...”
“We?” Carella said.
“Why, sure,” Ollie said. “I don’t like young girls getting their necks broke by no fuckin’ idiot. I’m gonna be workin’ this one with you.”
The detectives looked at him.
“We’ll have a good time,” Ollie said.
Which they found less than reassuring.
9
The first edition of the city’s afternoon tabloid hit the stands at 11:30 that morning. The headline blared:
Below the headline was a photograph of Darcy Welles hanging from a lamppost in the Eighty-third Precinct. The brief text under the photograph read:
Nineteen-year-old Darcy Welles, freshman track star at Converse University, became the third victim early this morning of the Road Runner Killer. Story page 4.
It was not unusual for this particular newspaper to label killers in a manner that would appeal to the popular imagination; its parentage was in London, where such sensationalism was commonplace. The police would have wished otherwise. Handy labels never helped in the apprehension of a murderer; if anything they made matters more difficult because they encouraged either phone calls or letters from cranks claiming to be “the Nursemaid Murderer,” or “the Mad Slasher,” or “the .32-Caliber Killer,” or whoever else the newspapers had dreamed up. Their killer had now been named: the Road Runner Killer. Terrific. Except that it made their job harder. The story on page four read like a paperback mystery written by a hack:
In the cold early light of this morning’s dawn, detectives of the 83rd Precinct in Isola’s Diamondback area came upon the third victim in a now indisputably linked series of murders. In each instance, the victim has been a young woman. In each instance, the young woman was a college track star. In each instance, the victim’s neck was broken, and she was found hanging from a lamppost in different deserted areas of the city. The Road Runner Killer is loose in the city, and not even the police can guess when and where he will strike next.
The story went on to relate in detail the circumstances surrounding the previous deaths of Marcia Schaffer and Nancy Annunziato, and then advised the reader to turn to page 6 for a profile on Darcy Welles and an interview with her parents in Columbus, Ohio. The profile on Darcy seemed to have been pilfered from the files at Converse University. It sketched in her educational background, tracing her years through elementary, junior high, and high school, and then went on to list all the track competitions she had entered, giving the results of each. The profile was accompanied by a photograph of Darcy in high school graduation cap and gown. A line of text under the photograph identified Darcy simply as Victim Number Three: Darcy Welles.
The interview with her parents had been conducted via the telephone at night o’clock that morning, presumably immediately after a stringer sitting police calls in Diamondback had phoned in with news of the girl hanging from the lamppost. The reporter who spoke to both Robert Welles and his wife Jessica wrote in his interview that he had been the one to break the news of their daughter’s murder, and that for the first five minutes of his conversation with them, they had been “sobbing uncontrollably” and “scarcely coherent.” He had plunged ahead regardless, and had elicited from them a description of Darcy that showed her to be a good, hardworking girl, dedicated to running but nonetheless maintaining a solid B-average in high school and “now in college.” When their just-spoken words “now in college” registered on them, both parents had broken into tears again “with the realization that their daughter was no longer in fact a college student, their daughter was now a third grisly victim of the Road Runner Killer.”