Dirty Harry 05 - Family Skeletons

  FOR “DIRTY HARRY” IT’S

  A HOMECOMING IN HELL

  AS HE BLAZES THROUGH

  BOSTON’S COMBAT ZONE!

  “Dirty Harry” Callahan stalks a mass murderer through Boston’s infamous underworld where crooked cops are usually looking the other way. Once it was the Boston Strangler—now the killer’s got a knife and is carving up college girls. Dirty Harry will slice through the slime to find him.

  JUDY HALLIWELL

  WASN’T DEAD YET.

  She was very cold, on her back, her hands lying useless at her side, her mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water with the rain beating down on her. Then, she felt hands on her breasts stroking in a circular motion, a slight pressure at her waist; then she heard her zipper being pulled down. She felt hands tugging at her waistband, wrestling down the wet denim around her hips, taking her underwear with it.

  She couldn’t talk, but she could still think. She couldn’t believe it—

  SHE WAS GOING TO BE

  RAPED WHILE SHE DIED!

  Books by Dane Hartman

  Dirty Harry #1: Duel For Cannons

  Dirty Harry #2: Death on the Docks

  Dirty Harry #3: The Long Death

  Dirty Harry #4: The Mexico Kill

  Dirty Harry #5: Family Skeletons

  Dirty Harry #6: City of Blood

  Dirty Harry #7: Massacre at Russian River

  Dirty Harry #8: Hatchet Men

  Dirty Harry #9: The Killing Connection

  Dirty Harry #10: The Blood of Strangers

  Dirty Harry #11: Death in the Air

  Dirty Harry #12: The Dealer of Death

  Published by

  WARNER BOOKS

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1982 by Warner Books, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc., 75 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, N.Y. 10019

  A Warner Communications Company

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 0-446-90857-6

  First Printing: April, 1982

  DEDICATION

  For John Fullmer, who likes nothing better than slipping a .357 among the .38 rounds. May your Magnum never buck.

  DIRTY HARRY #5

  FAMILY

  SKELETONS

  C H A P T E R

  O n e

  Judy’s parents had always thought it would be Arlene who got into trouble. If it had to be either of their daughters, Mr. and Mrs. Halliwell of Carlisle, Massachusetts, were afraid it would be the older one that they would get a police call about late one night.

  Judy had always been the good girl. As often happens with the second-born of two children, Judy had always been the angelic one. Even when Arlene had sat on her and hit her about the head because she didn’t want to share her toys, Judy had always borne out the blows in stoic consideration.

  Even then, the younger child honestly seemed to understand what was fueling her sister’s jealousy and sibling rivalry. As Judy got older, it got worse—or better, depending on one’s point of view. All the area boys thought Arlene was getting better. The Halliwell parents thought Judy was getting better.

  Somehow the younger daughter found equal time for athletic and scholastic pursuits. Her marks were always near the top of the class, and her folks never had to ask where at least one of their children were. While Arlene was out chasing and getting chased, Judy was always upstairs poring over her books. Her rewards were high school honors, and a pair of round wire-rim glasses.

  The spectacles did nothing to diminish Judy’s petite attractiveness, however. At sixteen she had developed as well as her sister in every dimension except height. But the boys did not clamor at her feet. Judy was not interested, and therefore was unapproachable. She made it clear that she found the whole high school mating ritual ridiculous. Arlene more than made up for Judy in that department.

  While the elder girl pursued her peer-pressure obligations, Judy pursued other interests. While Arlene became a baton twirler and a cheerleader, Judy learned the flute and spent all her spare time doing volunteer charity work. She participated with the Pilgrim Fellowship at the family’s church, and that is where she discovered her first true love. Only instead of a boy, it was the concepts of Unitarianism.

  Judy loved the idea of a religion that used the whole realm of science, literature, art, and life as the field for its thought and inspiration. Arlene loved almost anything in a tight pair of Levis.

  Judy worked selflessly in the name of the church: sending out brochures to interested citizens, contributing at the social events, candy-striping at the retirement home, and appearing to worship, come rain or shine, every Sunday. Arlene couldn’t be bothered. She played pinball, went to movies, ate a lot of pizza, and made out.

  When high school graduation led to college, Judy had plenty of options. Her final grades had been outstanding, and her parents were wealthy enough to send her any place she wanted to go. Rather than heading for the Midwest or California, Judy chose a university near her two major loves, her home and her church. She chose Emerson College in Boston, a liberal arts facility that concentrated on communication studies. Better than that, it was located on Beacon Street, right across from the Boston Common, and best of all, right down the street from the National Headquarters of the Unitarian Church.

  Arlene didn’t have much of a choice. She wanted to go to NYU or UCLA, but neither would accept her. She wound up having to go to the one East Coast school that would admit her: the University of Bridgeport in the armpit of Connecticut.

  For her freshman and sophomore years Judy maintained her high scholastic average in a speech major while spending every free minute inside the church offices on the outskirts of Beacon Hill. The years only enhanced the girl’s growing beauty. She was extremely attractive in a perky way. She was still a bit short in comparison to other girls her age, but she was also nicely smooth and tightly shaped.

  But no matter how good she looked, her social attitude did not change. Even the most patient of Unitarian reverends was disturbed by her increasingly intense devotion. But try as everyone might to arrange and send her out on dates, her main idea of a good time was her studies, her school, and her good Samaritanism.

  Arlene more than made up for Judy socially, so their parents considered themselves blessed to have one daughter who was so popular and another who was so successful. As a reward for all her work, they moved Judy from the crowded, cramped Emerson dorm to a fourth-floor apartment of her very own on Beacon Hill’s Mount Vernon Street—right around the corner from the Unitarian HQ. It was a pleasant one-bedroom apartment, made more pleasant by the many plants Judy hung around the bay window that looked out onto the narrow, lamp-lit, cobblestone street.

  Whenever Judy wasn’t at classes or the church, she was there, reading or cooking among her fauna, throw rugs, art prints, macramé, and cats. The big, bad city known as Beantown hadn’t changed Judy in the slightest. She was still the same kind, unassuming, and infuriatingly sweet girl she had been all her life.

  “For God’s sake,” Arlene had said to her during the summer vacation, “ease up. Give everybody a break. Live a little! What are you afraid of? That God’ll get you for having a little fun?” Then the older girl sang snatches of “Good Girls Don’t,” and “Only the Good Die Young,” on her way out the door to visit a friend in the Big Apple.

  Mr. and Mrs. Halliwell were worried. Arlene was living a little too fast. They had seen some horror movies on their pay-TV system and had seen the ads in the papers for all the others. And in each one, a wise-cracking, free-living, good-looking young woman just like their Arlene was stalked by a knife-wielding maniac. It scared the
m.

  Subconsciously using the same guidelines for Judy didn’t bother them as much. Judy was a good girl. She didn’t smoke or drink or have sex. She was the solid, upstanding girl the movie murderers all missed. She was the one saved at the last minute.

  In real life, things were different. They weren’t so well scripted, and they could get a lot uglier. Mr. and Mrs. Halliwell learned that the hard way on a rainy Boston night at the beginning of Judy’s third year at Emerson. It started with the scratching.

  Judy, alone as usual except for her tank of tropical fish and her various pets, was reading a Doris Miles Disney novel while waiting for her homemade bread to rise in the oven. The rain hitting the bay windows was the only sound from outside until she became aware of a scratching noise rising above the sound of the bubbling of her aquarium.

  It had to be a cat, she thought. It must’ve been one of her poor felines who accidentally got trapped on her apartment house rooftop. Judy closed the book and hurriedly counted the furry animals walking and resting around her living room. Ellery was missing. She had named him not for Ellery Queen, the great American detective hero, but for William Ellery Channing, the great Unitarian preacher and liberal reformer.

  “Ellery,” Judy called. She got up and walked into her bedroom. The cat wasn’t there. “Ellery,” she called, poking her head into the bathroom. The last place she looked was at the food bowls in the kitchen. Sure enough, Ellery was missing.

  Judy shook her head in amusement. She found it cute, the mischief her pets managed to get in. Resigning herself to the fact that she had to go out on this chilly, wet night to rescue her cat, Judy went into the bedroom to change.

  She took off her floral-printed kimono, finding a pair of jeans and a blue velour, V-necked pullover to go with it. She slipped them over her rounded frame and pulled on her cork-bottomed shoes. She went back and stood in the living room for a moment to get her bearings. She heard the scratching sound from above continue.

  Insistent and persistent little devil, she thought. It must be the rain. The moisture must be driving the cat crazy. Shrugging, she pushed her keys into the pocket of her tight denims and went to the door.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” she told her other pets. “I’ll be right back.”

  She walked out into the hallway, closing the door behind her. She considered locking it. Naw, she thought, I’ll only be gone a couple of seconds. Just to be on the safe side though, she looked downstairs over the banister. She could see no one. Just the comforting yellow lights of the hall and the deep rich brown of the wooden stairs and expensively papered walls. All she could hear was the scratching, growing no feebler. If anything, it was a little louder in the hall.

  She followed the sound to the metal stairway that led to the door to the roof. The scratching was even clearer there.

  “All right, Ellery, all right,” she soothed, moving slowly up the steps. “Don’t worry, I’m coming.”

  Judy placed one hand on the metal door latch and the other palm flat against the door. She twisted the latch and pushed the door open onto the blue-gray rain-streaked night.

  Ellery had not done the scratching. The cat was incapable of doing anything in its condition except dying. It was lying in a drain by the edge of the roof, its stomach cut open, blood pumping down the rain pipe.

  How Judy reacted marked all the differences between she and her sister. Arlene had seen all those crummy horror movies. She had sat in the theaters with her boyfriends’ arms around her shoulders, jumping at all the right moments. But in the back of her mind, the older girl had been thinking how dumb all those screen heroines were. She wouldn’t be so stupid as to run back into the house or hide in a closet or answer the door.

  Her sister Judy didn’t see movies much. She hadn’t mentally prepared herself for possible horror. All she saw was one of her cats horribly wounded on the wet rooftop. It didn’t dawn on her that he was too far from the door to have scratched it until she was already halfway to it.

  The door closed behind her. She didn’t hear the killer approach. Just as she neared Ellery’s torn form, she felt the hand on her breast.

  She looked down. A dark glove was squeezing on one side of her chest. Hard. She straightened in shock, throwing back her head to scream. The hand jerked up to clamp over her mouth. Her yell mingled into the howling wind as a low moan. She felt herself being pulled back—away from Ellery’s body and the roof’s edge. She raised her arms to slap away the hand crushing the lower part of her face. She couldn’t reach it. Another arm was in the way.

  She felt hot, panting breath on the back of her neck. She looked up at the sky, the stars blurred from the rain that splattered across her glasses. She sensed the other arm being pulled out of the way as she suddenly felt a tearing pain at her throat.

  Then she was free. The attacker had released her. She stumbled forward, her hands moving up instinctively. She felt the moisture at her neck. She opened her mouth to cry as loudly as she could. All she heard was her own strangled gurgling. She brought her hands away from her throat, and they came away covered in red. Her eyes bulged. She saw the rain wash the blood from her hands as she felt her legs giving out from under her.

  John Monahan was walking home from a movie at the Charles Street Theater complex. It was another lousy horror flick, Just Before Dawn. Another heart-warming saga of some young people being stalked and murdered by a raving lunatic with a big blade. Monahan, an Emerson sophmore majoring in film, shook his head in amazement. It was the post-summer slump, he realized. All the major studios had already released all their big summer hopefuls. The ones that stunk faded away. The ones that hit stayed to great box-office returns. As usual, there were more stinkers than hits.

  So come fall, the theater owners were desperate to schedule any movie that was a sure money-maker. And these cheap little bloody numbers always made back their investment—usually because they were made for a dollar and a quarter in someone’s backyard. Monahan marveled at it all. Why did he keep going back to movie after movie? They all had the same plots, the same shocks, and the same gore. What a waste of time. Monahan promised himself that Just Before Dawn would be the last horror film he would see.

  He walked up the steep incline of Anderson Street into the heart of Beacon Hill. He loved the atmosphere of the place. It was straight out of a Sherlock Holmes or Jack the Ripper movie. All the narrow, winding, cobblestone streets, sumptuous brownstones, quaint shops. Boston was a great place to be for the imaginative student or artist.

  Monahan didn’t even mind the rain. In fact, he loved it. It added even more to the atmosphere. He could just imagine the special-effects technicians lining the tops of the sets with long watering pipes to create such an effect. Boston was so damn visual Monahan wondered why more films weren’t made there.

  The student peered out from under the rim of his rain hat to get a better look at the architecture. He turned left at Mount Vernon Street. He could go straight down there, recross Charles, cross the Arthur Fiedler bridge over the highway, and go right in the back way at 130 Beacon Street. On the way he could think about what sort of horror movie he would make if they gave him the money.

  Monahan decided that his would be realistic. He wouldn’t stick a bunch of kids out in the wilderness. He’d set the scene in any major metropolitan city. At the same time, his would be stylistic. He’d make impressionistic scenes of violence, ones that would shock as well as, impress his audience.

  Then he saw the blood congealing around his shoes.

  John Monahan stopped dead on the sidewalk of Mount Vernon Street. He stared in wonder at the red liquid passing between his legs, carried along by a greater torrent of flowing water.

  He blinked, thinking his imagination had maybe gotten the better of him. The blood was still there when he looked again. Monahan turned and followed the crimson trail back to its source. The red stuff was alternately dripping and coursing out the bottom of a drainpipe.

  Monhan looked up. The pipe traveled uninter
rupted all the way up to the four-story brownstone’s roof. For a second, Monahan didn’t know what to do. But then his imagination and curiosity got to be too much for him. He created all sorts of scenarios to explain the red liquid, some of them quite perverted and violent, but he didn’t really believe any of them could actually happen. Not in real life.

  Monahan was at the opposite end of the spectrum from Arlene Halliwell. She acknowledged the movies she saw as fiction but secretly felt they could be fact. Monahan was so wrapped up in the world of image-making that nothing was real anymore. Every person he met was a character. Every place he went was a set. And he couldn’t leave Mount Vernon Street without checking out the possible drama at the top of the brownstone.

  John Monahan trotted into the alley between the apartment houses toward the fire escape.

  Judy Halliwell wasn’t dead yet. She was very cold. She was on her back, her hands lying useless at her side, her mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. The rain beat down on her as her life drooled out. She felt the hands back on her chest. They were rubbing in a circular motion. Then they were lifted and she felt a slight pressure at her waist. She heard her belt buckle being undone. She heard her zipper get pulled down. She felt the hands tugging at her waistband, trying to get the wet denim down her hips. The jeans were so tight they were taking her underwear with it.

  She couldn’t talk, but she could still think. She couldn’t believe it. She was going to be raped while she died.

  She realized it then. She was dying. She was really dying. Someone was killing her. Her head rolled to the side, some last tears mingling with the rain water on the roof.

  Through her misting vision, she saw a figure appear. A man was looking at her from over the side of the building. He just seemed to be floating there, his head and shoulders above the roof line. His face held an expression of abject horror.