Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,47

Walter had successfully pushed him off with a firm handshake.

Walter had Spartan needs on a case. An ashtray was essential, and black coffee. Bender offered to make coffee, but Walter snarled, “Not from that stove, my dear boy.” Bender got him takeout, handed him the file of newspaper stories, and went off gallivanting.

It took a few minutes before the psychologist recovered from the decrepit atmosphere of the art studio. It seemed to him that Bender fancied himself a male version of Circe, a sorcerer who turned his visitors into supplicant females and shrunken heads.

Now Walter blocked out the background noise and odors and concentrated on the five murders. He envisioned each in its turn, until the monstrosity was reduced in his mind to cold-blooded calculation. Eighteen years before, List had made his move. Walter saw the slaughter as theatrically staged, an intricately planned performance designed to hide List’s true motive in plain sight and cover his tracks. Now it was Walter’s turn—his chance to unmask the deceit and expose the fugitive’s hiding place. It was just the two of them in a deadly chess game, a battle of mind and will with no boundaries of time or space.

Killers always make mistakes. What mistakes had List made?

The cops always miss something. What had the FBI and the police missed?

Walter had been moonlighting as a consulting detective on the most challenging and depraved murder cases in the world for more than a decade. It was what he did in his “spare hours” while working full-time for the Michigan Department of Corrections.

• CHAPTER 16 •

THE PERFECT MASS MURDER

Early on that November morning, John List stood at his office window on the first floor of Breezy Knoll and watched the milk truck drive away. As usual Herbert Arbast, the milkman, had entered the unlocked back door to the nineteen-room, three-story Victorian and entered the butler’s pantry where Helen taped her handwritten order on the refrigerator: six quarts of milk, butter, and eggs, twice a week. That morning instead was posted a curt note from John instructing the milkman to stop deliveries “until further notice.” The family was going on vacation, the neat, careful handwriting explained. List and his wife, Helen; Patty, the oldest, blond and leggy like her mother and a budding actress; the two young boys, Fred and John Jr.; and John’s eighty-five-year-old mother, Alma, would be gone “for a while.”

At forty-six years of age, John List stood a gangly six foot one, gaunt-faced and straight-backed, with receding dark hair and a long, bony jaw. An accountant, former bank vice president, and Sunday school teacher in the Lutheran Church, he was an exceptionally bright and meticulous man. On his desk lay two beautifully kept handguns, gleaming with oil—a small, .22-caliber automatic Colt that had belonged to his father, and a classic Steyr 1912 automatic John had brought back from World War II. The Steyr was a World War I gun that had been retooled by the Nazis to carry a special nine-millimeter cartridge. Each pistol was loaded with eight rounds.

As the milkman left, empty bottles rattling in his carrier, List stood listening for the routine noises of morning. He heard Helen’s soft footsteps coming downstairs to the kitchen. With the gentle sounds of the flame firing under the kettle as it jangled onto the stove, he waited a few minutes, then picked up the Steyr. His wife was sitting at the breakfast table over toast and coffee, her morning wake-up ritual. She wore a bathrobe and red satin teddy, and looked out the window. She was dreaming her thoughts into the bleak gray sky, and heard nothing until she sensed a shadow two feet behind her and half-turned to look. She never saw her husband or the bullet he fired into the left side of her head from eighteen inches away. The shot knocked Helen to the linoleum floor, a bite of toast jammed into the back of her throat. Walter noted that List fired several aimless shots at the wall, one pinging a radiator, but the children were at school and heard nothing. If any noises escaped the foot-thick walls of Breezy Knoll, they were carried away on the cold November breeze. What police had called for decades the perfectly planned murders had begun to move like clockwork. As his wife lay dying on the kitchen floor, List headed up the back stairs.

His mother’s cozy apartment, where he read the Bible with her most evenings, was on the third floor. Alma, tall