Fresno microfiche on the Ardullo slayings. Nothing that hadn’t been covered down in
L.A.
In the Modesto Bee I found an obituary for Terri Mclntyre Ardullo. Her death was described as “untimely,” no mention of homicide. The bio was brief: Girl Scout, volunteer for the Red Cross, honor student at Modesto High, member of the Spanish
Club and the Shakespeare Society, B.A. from UC Davis.
She’d been survived by her parents, Wayne and Felice Mclntyre, and sisters Barbara
Mclntyre and Lynn Blount. A Wayne Mclntyre was listed in Modesto. Feeling like a creep, I dialed and told the elderly woman who answered that I was conducting a search for relatives of the Argent family of Pennsylvania, in anticipation of the first Argent reunion, to be held in Scranton.
“Argent?” she said. “Then why us?”
“Your name came up on our computer list.”
“Did it? Well, I’m afraid your computer got it wrong. We’re not related to any
Argents. Sorry.”
No anger, no defensiveness.
No idea what had interested Claire about Peake.
I pictured him in his room, grimacing, twitching, rocking autistically. Nerve endings firing randomly as Lord knew what impulses coalesced and scrambled among the folds of beclouded frontal lobes.
The door opens, a woman enters, smiling, eager to help. A new doctor. The first person to show any interest in him in sixteen years.
She kneels down beside him, talks soothingly. Wanting to help him… help he doesn’t want. Help that makes him angry.
Put her in a box. Bad eyes.
I went searching in Miami newspapers for items about the Crimminses. Obituaries were the daily special: the Herald informed me that Carson and Sybil Crimmins had died together twelve years ago, in a yacht explosion off the coast of south Florida. An unnamed crew member had perished as well. Carson was listed as a “real estate developer,” Sybil as a “former entertainer.” No pictures.
Next came a Las Vegas Sun reference to Carson Crimmins, Jr.’s, death in a motocross accident, two years later, near Pimm, Nevada. Nothing on the younger brother,
Derrick. Too bad; he’d talked on record once. Maybe he’d be willing to reminisce, if
I found him.
Former Intelligencer publisher Orton Hatzler was memorialized in a back-page
paragraph of the Santa Monica Evening Outlook. He’d died in that beach town of
“natural causes” at the age of eighty-seven. Just a few miles from my house.
Memorial services at the Seaside Presbyterian Church, donations to the American
Heart Association, in lieu of flowers. The surviving widow: Wanda Hatzler.
Maybe she still lived in Santa Monica. But if I found her, what would I ask about?
I’d uncovered a financial battle between the Ardullo and Crimmins clans, had played
Sherlock with a single photograph that suggested another type of competition. But nothing suggested that the slaughter of the Ardullos had resulted from anything other than one madman’s blood feast.
I thought of the suddenness of the attack. Asian cultures had a word for that kind of unprovoked savagery: “amok.”
Something about Peake’s amok had caught Claire Argent’s interest, and now she was dead. Along with three other men… and Peake had predicted the murders of two of them.
Prophet of doom in a locked cell. There had to be a common thread.
I abandoned the periodicals indexes and searched computer databases for Wanda
Hatzler and Derrick Crimmins. Find-A-Person coughed up a single approximation: Derek
Albert Crimmins on West 154th Street in New York City. I used a library pay phone, called, and participated in a confused ninety-second conversation with a man who sounded very old, very gentle, and, from his patois, probably black.
W. Hatzler was listed in Santa Monica, no address. The woman’s voice on the tape machine was also elderly, but hearty. I gave her machine the same spiel I’d offered
Jacob Haas, told her I’d stop by later today.
Before I left Bakersfield, I phoned Milo. He was away from his desk and not answering his cell phone. Route 5 clogged up just past Newhall. An accident had closed the northbound lanes and caused rubberneck spillover in the opposite direction. A dozen flashing red lights, cop cars from several jurisdictions and ambulances parked diagonally across the freeway, news copters whirring overhead. An overturned truck blocked the mouth of the nearest on-ramp. Inches from its front wheels was a snarled mass of red and chrome.