Lust Killer by Ann Rule

Author:Ann Rule
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Planet Ann Rule, LLC.
Published: 2014-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

Stovall had a cup of coffee and began to organize what would become voluminous notes. In front of the prisoner, he would take few notes, but when he was alone, he would jot down everything that seemed pertinent, and index the answers. That way, he would have a starting point with each new confrontation.

Hours later, the word came from the jail: "He wants to talk again."

"Bring him up."

They began again. The first tentative innocuous remarks. Brudos did not like his cell. It was a "closet." The only window, by his own measurement, was four inches by ten inches and closed up. The light was turned off too much.

Stovall commiserated. "Jails aren't built for comfort."

"Do you know where my wife is?"

"She went home hours ago."

Stovall could detect real concern for the prisoner's wife; his attitude when he spoke of her was nothing like the loathing he evinced when he talked about his mother.

"How do you do this business?" Brudos asked. "I mean, how do you know things—if you have no proof?"

"It's a matter of our knowing some things and other people knowing other things—and eventually they usually come together and we get the whole picture."

"So you don't know everything going on, do you?"

"Nobody claims that. As I said, it's a puzzle. You think of somebody doing all of this … and you wonder. You have the pieces of the puzzle, maybe, but you don't have the box with the picture of what it's supposed to look like. You have a thousand-piece puzzle, and all you can do is put the pieces together by color to begin with. We separate the blues from the greens and the browns, for example. So we form the borders, and we keep working toward identifying other pieces—keeping the color scheme of things in mind. Blue. Green. Brown."

Brudos seemed to like that analogy. Stovall didn't fill him in on the rest. The trial and the error and the hard work, and sometimes losing track of the most important piece because it hadn't fit when you first tried it. Gradually the whole picture always does begin to form. The crime-scene evidence, and the interviews, and the countless hours of follow-up reports.

"Without the picture, it sounds impossible to me," Brudos commented. "I guess you get discouraged."

"Not necessarily."

The silence yawned.

"I know you picked me up because you thought I was guilty of something or other … "

"You're charged with assault with a deadly weapon."

"Yeah."

"You're an electrician. Are you pretty skilled at that?"

"I guess you could say that. Electricity … electronics, that stuff."

"Who did you work for when you lived in Portland in 1968?"

"Osborne. … "

"You worked many places around Salem?"

"Over in West Salem, and out in Lebanon, and then in Halsey."

"That's a long commute."

"It's not bad—almost all freeway."

"You had a little trouble when you lived in Corvallis back in the fifties."

"I was a kid. They sent me out to the hospital here. That was a long time ago."

"Yes. You must have been in high school then."

Brudos shifted. "I can't see how you'd know if I did something … with those girls.

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