The Lesson of Her Death

“Damn mess.” He held upthe paper like a crossing guard with a portable Stop sign. It was folded to the article on the Gebben murder.
    Ribbon crooked his head to say, yeah, yeah, I read it. “Come on into my den, would you, Jim?”
    Slocum followed the sheriff five feet into his office. Ribbon sat, Slocum stood in the doorway.
    This’s right clever, we just reversed positions
.
    “Bill here?” Ribbon asked.
    “He flew over to St. Louis this morning to talk to the girl’s father—”
    “He did
what?”
    “Flew up to St. Louis. To talk to the girl’s—”
    Ribbon said, “The girl was killed? That girl? Why’d he do that for? He think we’re made of money?”
    Slocum chose not to answer for Bill Corde and said only, “He said he wants us all to meet about the case. At four, I think it was.”
    “We gotta watch our pennies, I hope he knows that. Anyway, I wanted to kick something around with you. This killing’s got me bothered. I hear it wasn’t a robbery.”
    “Doesn’t seem to be.”
    “I was noticing there were some parallels between what happened and a couple other cases I’d read about. It occurred to me that we might have a cult killer problem here.”
    “Cult?” Slocum asked carefully.
    The book dropped onto the desk. A paperback, fanned from bathtub or hammock reading.
Bloody Rites
. On the cover were three black-and-white photos of pretty girls over a color photo of a blood-spattered pack of tarot cards. “Whatsis?” Slocum picked it up.
    “I want you to read it. I want you to think about it. It’s about this Satanist down in Arizona a couple years ago. A true story. There are a lot of similarities between what happened here and that fellow.”
    Slocum flipped to the pictures of the crime scenes. “You don’t think it’s the same guy?”
    “Naw, they caught him. He’s doing life in Tempebut there are … similarities.” Ribbon stretched out the word. “It’s kind of scary.”
    “Damn, they were good-looking.” Slocum gazed at the page of the book showing the victims’ high school graduation pictures.
    Ribbon absently stroked his black polyester tie and said softly, “What I’d like you to do is get yourself up to Higgins. The state police have a psychology division up there. Follow up with them on it.”
    “You think?” Slocum read a passage where the writer described what the Arizona killer had done to one co-ed. He reluctantly lowered the book and said, “I’ll mention it to Bill.”
    “Naw, you don’t have to. Just call up the boys in Higgins and get an appointment.”
    Slocum grinned. “Okay. I won’t fly.”
    “What?”
    “I won’t fly up there.”
    “Why would you?—Oh, yeah, haw.” The sheriff added, “We gotta make sure word gets around about this.”
    “How’s that?”
    Ribbon said, “Well, we should make sure the girls in town are warned about it.”
    “Wouldn’t that kind of tip our hand?”
    “It’s our job to
save
lives too.”
    Slocum flipped through the pictures again. Ribbon leaned forward and tapped the book. “Hang on to that. You’ll enjoy it. It’s a real, what do they say, page-turner.”
    The Incorporated Town of New Lebanon reluctantly owned up to its mouthful of a name. By the time the village was chartered in the 1840s all the good names—the European capitals and harmonious-sounding biblical locales—had been taken. The final debate had pitted the New Lebanonites against New Luxumbergians. Becausethe former had a respectful ring of Old Testament, the vote was predictable.
    The town was in Harrison County, named after William Henry, not because of his thirty-day term as president but for his tenure as Indiana Territory governor during which he decimated native Indian tribes (Tippecanoe, of campaign-slogan fame) and allowed counties like this his namesake to congeal into what they were today: mostly white, mostly Protestant, mostly rural. New Lebanon’s economy floated on milk, corn, and soybeans, though it had a few small factories and one big printing plant that did a lot of work for Chicago and St. Louis and New York publishers (including the ever-scandalous and -anticipated
Mon Cher
magazine, scrap bin copies of which flooded the town monthly thick as shucked cobs at harvest).
    Also located in New Lebanon was the only four-year college for a hundred miles. Auden University goosed the town population up to fourteen thousand from August to May and gave locals the chance to sit through performances of second-tier