City of Dark Corners by Jon Talton (easy novels to read .TXT) 📕

up, exposing pert breasts, parted fair legs, a ginger bush, and a pool of semen on the white sheet. I ran the gawking uniforms out of the bedroom, instructing one to sit with her parents—her mother had found her and her father had called headquarters and then ran a block to busier Van Buren, where he was fortunate enough to find the police car cruising.

Captain McGrath arrived with a beautiful, raven-haired female photographer. She had no hesitation in bossing me around as she took shots of the crime scene. It was the first time I met Victoria. Don and Turk Muldoon came soon after. I briefed them and, as the youngest member of the Hat Squad, prepared to step aside when Turk put a hand on my shoulder.

“You were here first, lad,” he said in his rich brogue. “You’re the primary.”

At the exact same moment, I felt a thrill—and a terrible responsibility fall upon me.

After they left, I shut the door and surveyed the scene, making detailed notes and sketches.

Entry was obvious. The killer came in through an unlocked window facing the backyard and caught the girl sleeping. Her brothers and parents were also asleep but separated from Edna’s room by the bathroom. A sock stuffed in the girl’s mouth took care of any screaming as he prepared to go about his work. But she must have fought. Her nails were bloody and flakes of the attacker’s skin were underneath them. In return, he punched her in the left eye. He must have been straddling her. Afterward, he exited the same window, leaving it fully open.

Through the door, the mother was wailing, and the father was angrily demanding a doctor. But Edna’s body was cold.

We didn’t realize it at the time, but this was the first victim of the killer who the press would call the University Park Strangler.

The postmortem confirmed the obvious: Death by strangulation, genital bruising, penetration. She fought hard enough to break one fingernail. The killer would have received a nasty gash on his face. But he was very strong. Edna’s windpipe was collapsed, as was the cricoid cartilage surrounding it. The pathologist said it took forty-five pounds of pressure to produce such damage. He also speculated that the killer had been in no hurry, slowly strangling her.

With the sock stuffed in the girl’s mouth, I assumed the rape preceded the strangulation. But the doc, who had worked at the coroner’s office in Los Angeles and seen such cases before, said it was possible that the murderer was raping Edna while he was slowly crushing her windpipe. “It’s part of the excitement for him.”

He turned her to show me a small cross carved into the exact middle of the small of her back. It looked as if it was done with a penknife rather than resulting from some accident, and it was fresh.

“He marked her,” the doc said. “Mutilation is part of the M.O. of a lust murder.”

I had never heard the term before, I told him.

“It was first used by the Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing in the 1880s,” he said. “The killer receives intense sexual gratification from killing someone.”

“A nice pair of nylons always does the trick for me.”

“You cops and your black humor. Lust murderers can be much worse that this. Genital mutilation. Cannibalism. Inserting objects into the victim’s orifices. Necrophilia. This killer is only strangling with great force and cutting the victim, but you should be prepared for worse.”

I left him with the body, but the cross stuck with me. It wasn’t like a typical one found in Christian churches. With the two arms meeting in the middle, it reminded me of the simplified iron cross the Germans were using by 1918. The balkenkreuz, or beam cross. Were we looking for a war vet or a German immigrant?

Edna was a straight-A student at Phoenix Union High School, popular, a cheerleader. She was the oldest of three children. Captain McGrath assigned three of my Hat Squad colleagues to interview her friends, teachers, and steady boyfriend. He was the son of Chauncey McKellips, president of the First National Bank of Arizona and had an alibi for Thursday night. The detectives also started rounding up suspects with morals offenses and transients. Migrant farmworkers were mostly gone for now, the lettuce harvest complete and more than four thousand carloads shipped by rail.

A crime such as this had never happened before in Phoenix, much less in a pleasant Anglo middle-class neighborhood only a few blocks from the state capitol.

On Monday afternoon, with two hours of sleep and fueled by the sludge that passed for coffee at headquarters, I went back to the house on Twelfth Avenue and interviewed her parents in more detail. They were shattered, sleep-deprived, but cooperative. Edna’s father worked in insurance and her mother was a housewife. Neither had sensed anything unusual about their daughter, no indication she was afraid, no enemies, no strange men following her. They always closed the blinds and curtains at night. But on cool nights, Edna liked to open her bedroom window slightly and sleep under a thick comforter.

I took a careful inventory of her bedroom. It was untouched since the attack, her parents complying with my request to leave it alone. With the sun streaming in, the room became clearer. The bedclothes had been thrown off Edna and folded on the floor. With the body removed, I noted the bloodstain dried on the middle of the sheet; this was a hellish way to lose her virginity. I went through her closet and drawers, her mother trailing me. “Tell me if you see anything out of place or missing,” I said.

“I don’t see her knickers,” she said. “Edna always slept in them. She was a modest girl.” Then the tears came. “Who could do this to her?”

It took time for her to focus again. “Wait, where is Theodore?”

“Theodore?” I was thinking of a cat or a dog.

“It’s a Teddy bear she’s had since she was a little girl. He was