Cypress Grove Read Online Free Page B

sort we all got used to over the next few months. Little by little the laughter subsided, till finally we sat stone silent through roll call No jokes, no catcalls, none of the endless badgering that marks men thrown together in close quarters and shaky pursuits. We sat, we listened, some of us taking notes, then rose, claimed cars, and went stolidly about our business.
    It had begun long before that, of course, on a Saturday night almost two months before, when a scumbag by the name of Richards found his way into an apartment house off campus of Memphis State where ten students lived. Most of them were out on dates. The three that weren’t, he attacked. Tied them down with lamp wires and went from one to the other, back and forth. He’d come in with his member hard as a rock, one of them said, put it in her, and leave. Then after a while he’d come back. Never climaxed, or seemed to gain much pleasure from it. Lot of blood on it there at the end, one of the young women said. I kept wondering if it was my blood or someone else’s, what he’d done to the others.
    Richards spent his childhood in a series of foster homes, a social worker called in as consultant told us later, often shut into a room and ignored, brought food when they remembered, other times beaten or abused. My heart bled.
    Anyhow, although Richards had been a busy boy, with a string of store robberies, B&Es of various sorts, auto theft and assault, rape was something new for him. But, like a chicken-killing dog, he’d got the taste. And he liked it.
    Over following weeks we got to know that campus well, spent more time there than its students did. Ants at a picnic and just about as inconspicuous. But the next time Richards struck, it was across town, at a dorm next to Samaritan Hospital where nurses in training lived. The hospital put them up free, they attended classes half a day and helped take care of patients the rest, and after a year or so they got certified as LPNs. Women with poor and no prospects came up from all over the South. Richards went in there on a Friday evening about nine o’clock. Of the fifteen residents, eight were on duty, helping cover the evening shift as nurses although legally they weren’t. Five more had gone out together for pizza and a movie. They’re the ones who called it in when they got back home around midnight and found Mary Elizabeth Walker (Mobile, Alabama) and Sue Ann Simmons (Tupelo, Mississippi) strapped to their beds with duct tape. There was so much tape, one of them said, they looked like mummies, or cocoons. Mary Elizabeth stared at the wall and wouldn’t respond when they spoke to her. Blood was running from both vagina and anus. Sue Simmons didn’t respond either. She was dead.
    We got on to Richards the usual way, through an informer. This informer lived in the neighborhood, often wound up in some of the same diners, poolrooms and bars as Richards, and almost certainly carried some grudge against him. Once we had this, still with nothing but hearsay and suspicion to take to market, we bird-dogged Richards in solid shifts, staking out his apartment from unmarked cars. For two days nothing happened. We learned a lot: that he kept unpredictable hours, had no visitors, and thrived exclusively on carry-out hamburgers. On the third day, he disappeared.
    We went in with a judge’s order on the fourth day and everything was just as it had been the times we’d gone in without, clothes scattered about, toiletries in place, bottle or two of prescription drugs in the bathroom, piles of mustard, salt and pepper packets on the kitchenette counter by a pool of loose change. He was gone, purely gone. Evaporated. Vanished. No one ever heard from or of him again.
    That was the first one.
    “A vigilante,” someone said at roll call.
    “The position of this department,” the Captain said, “is that it’s an isolated incident. That is also your position.”
    I’d have to pull records to check, and of course I