The next morning found me far less than bright eyed and bushy tailed. I guess a Valium/Schlitz double-header will do that to you. Al joined me for coffee and he still continued to look me up and down like he didn’t know what to make of me. There was no Walter Payton runs through the Blue, no barking like crazy, and no remote teething. He just kept an eye on me.
“I’m fine, now leave me alone,” I heard myself say to the basset hound I shared my life with.
I sat at the kitchen table, drinking a pot of coffee and thinking about what I had learned in the last couple of weeks. I had set out to save Howard, who was letting me know he was being set up only to have him change up in a matter of days and not only confess but threaten me if I continued to try to help him. I found out about this drug, “Blast,” that killed a bunch of inmates years ago when Howard was inside, and a suspicious graduate student that disappeared around that same time. That grad student later became a psychiatrist named Gunner who traveled around the country from job to job, and whatever city he appeared in there were unsolved murders. Then, as of a few years ago, Dr. Gunner fell off the radar screen completely.
So either Howard is the vicious murderer everyone tells me he is and I’m a big sap, or this Gunner guy had something to do with the Blast and the murders and is somehow in Crawford killing people because, well, that’s what he does. The fact that some of the current victims had drugs in their systems may actually fit in with that. Of course, kids having drugs in their systems could mean what it does all over this country-that kids do a lot of drugs.
There was a third alternative. Maybe it wasn’t Howard and it wasn’t Gunner and it had nothing to do with drugs. Maybe it was a group of copycat murderers who had taken their fascination with killing to the next level.
I was doing my best to be as logical and as strategic as absolutely possible. The Schlitz and Valium notwithstanding, it felt good to organize it into arbitrary categories even if all it gave me was the perception of logic. The fact of the matter was that Howard was missing, and even though he periodically contacted me, he never spoke long enough for anyone to trace the call and his cryptic messages gave me no real information, especially lately. The last several messages repeated the same message and tried to warn me off.
That suggested to me that I should do as much research on Dr. Gunner as possible. I knew employment dates and I knew the unsolved murders during his tenure, but I knew little else. I wasn’t clear exactly what I could find out that would be helpful, but it felt like the direction I should head toward. Rudy had tipped me off to a national registry for physicians and their license history, which I ran down in the hospital library. Gunner’s license had no sanctions or censures, and he didn’t have any lawsuits during his time as a doctor.
He kept up with his continuing education credits and there were positive citations or awards. He sounded like your run-of-the-mill psychiatrist. I decided to call his previous employers again just to see what kind of feel I could get for the guy. The place in Seattle refused to disclose any more information than they already had. The Mississippi hospital referred me to administration, and they said they’d have to get back to me. I began to realize that if I continued to go the quasi-legitimate route then I was likely to get no useful information.
I tried a different strategy when I called the place near Milwaukee. I described myself as an old med-school buddy who was getting a reunion trip together and said that I wanted to find my ol’ buddy “Guns.” The HR director thought about it a bit and transferred me to the hospital medical director, who only knew Gunner as an acquaintance but seemed to remember an OR nurse he was friendly with. She now worked in a clinic off-site from the hospital, and I waited while he found me her number.
Leslie Roy worked at a women’s health center, and I called her right around lunchtime.
“Sure, Dr. Gunner and I were… uh… close for a while. I mean we dated and it didn’t work out, but we remained friendly,” she said when I reached her.
“Do you ever hear from him? We’re trying to get the guys together for a cruise. You know, to remember the old days in med school,” I said, trying my best to sound like a carefree, fun-loving doc.
“He left here to care for a friend who was dying. He was a very committed friend once you got to know him.”
“Geez, what happened?”
“There was another doctor who worked here at the same time about the same age as Dr. Gunner. They became close friends when the doctor was diagnosed with an aggressive form of pancreatic cancer. Dr. Gunner left to take care of him.”
“Wow, are they still in the area?”
“I don’t believe so. I think he moved him to Arizona or New Mexico. The other doctor was estranged from his family, so Dr. Gunner was all he had.”
“I don’t know how to ask this but-” She interrupted before I could finish.
“I never did hear if the other doctor died, but it has been a few years now, so I don’t see how he could’ve made it this long.”
“What was the other doctor’s name?”
“God, it’s terrible, but I can’t remember. He was some sort of specialist, so we didn’t see him a lot. I can’t remember.”
“Well, Guns doesn’t show up on any medical registries so it’s really hard to find him. If you think of the other doc’s name that might help a bit. Call me if you think of it, okay, hon?” I said.
She agreed to and I gave her good ol’ Dr. Dombrowski’s home phone number. I’m not sure what all of this told me except that Gunner disappeared and the funky murders where he lived stopped. That, or wherever he was in the interim had a series of unsolved gruesome slayings, but that was impossible to prove or disprove. The only thing that traced him back to this area was grad school, and he fled after suspicious circumstances. It didn’t make sense that he would come back here.
Not that the lifestyles of serial killers ever made any sense.
I flipped on the TV just to try to let my mind think of something-anything-else for a while. The TV turned on to MSNBC, the channel that I was watching last, and they were in the midst of a “Crawford Slaying” report.
“Would you say this is the first break in the investigation?” The pretty brunette with the huge brown eyes was saying to a correspondent next to the Crawford courthouse.
“The police officer had, I believe, a T-shirt believed to be Howard Rheinhart’s with Rheinhart’s blood stained on it. It was in the back of the officer’s personal vehicle with an assault-style knife that would be consistent with the weaponry used in some of the slayings, and at least one source is saying the police officer was at the scene of the latest killing before the 911 tapes show the murder was called in. The police officer’s name is Brendan Mullings and he has been placed on administrative leave.”
“Is there speculation that he is the slayer?” Brown Eyes asked.
“Not yet. It may be that he was just involved in unauthorized activities, but either way the Crawford PD just isn’t saying.”
While the two continued talking, the TV screen was filled with the official cop photo of Mullings.
It was the guy I had been calling Larry Bird.