Free Labyrinth (The Nameless Detective) by Bill Pronzini

wrong.”
    “I suppose so.” I lowered myself into the chair again. “First Christine Webster, then Victor Carding. And Jerry Carding is missing. You think he could have been a target too?”
    “You mean murdered like the others? Some nut with a grudge wasting not only what’s left of the Carding family but also the kid’s girlfriend? Come on.”
    “Hell, crazier things have happened,” I said. “It could be a psycho deal.”
    “I doubt it. Not that kind.”
    “So maybe not. But there’s another kind I can think of.”
    “I’ll bet I know what it is. The kid himself is a psycho; he went berserk and murdered both his girl and his old man. Right?”
    “Right. That would pretty much explain everything, including his disappearance.”
    “Sure it would,” Eberhardt said. “It’s the best theory we’ve got so far. But it’s also got too many holes and loose ends to suit me.”
    “Such as?”
    “The kid’s character profile, for one thing. Friendly, serious-minded, well-adjusted; wants to be a journalist. No quirks, no apparent hangups. Pacifist on political and ideological issues. Everybody Logan and Klein talked to said he’s got strong feelings against violence of any kind.”
    “People aren’t always what they seem to be, Eb. Things can happen inside them—pressures, compulsions, psychological shifts.”
    “You think I don’t know that? But there are usually indications, small attitude changes of one kind or another. And according to the people who know him, Jerry Carding’s the same kid he always was.
    “Then why did he vanish all of a sudden?”
    “Yeah—why? I sent a man up to Bodega Bay today, but he hasn’t been able to dig up any answers so far.” Eberhardt got out a pipe and a pouch of tobacco, began loading one from the other. “Anyhow,” he said then, “another thing is the time element. The kid dropped out of sight on Sunday, Christine was killed on Tuesday, and Victor Carding was murdered today. If somebody goes berserk, it doesn’t take him two days to commit his first homicide and two more days to commit his second.”
    He was right, of course. But for the sake of argument I said, “So maybe he didn’t go berserk. Maybe he just went insane—the cunning kind of psychosis. He plans his murders, carries them out at two-day intervals.”
    “Nuts,” Eberhardt said. “And that’s not a pun. Cunning lunatics don’t go after friends and members of their own families; they pick random victims. They also operate in a set pattern, the same kind of MO in each case. There’s no pattern here. Take the weapons, for instance.”
    “Weapons? Plural?”
    “Plural. Webster and Carding weren’t shot with the same gun. The girl was killed with a .32 caliber weapon—and there was no sign of it near her body. Carding was killed with the .38 you found in Talbot’s hand. Like I said: no pattern, but plenty of holes and loose ends.”
    “You figure two different murderers, then?”
    “Not necessarily. But it looks that way.”
    I did a little brooding. “Has Donleavy been able to trace the .38?”
    “No. It doesn’t seem to be registered anywhere. Probably an outlaw weapon.”
    “But it could have belonged to Victor Carding.”
    “It could have.”
    “And so could the missing .32.”
    “I suppose so.”
    “Was Carding upset about Christine’s death?”
    “Klein said he was, yeah.”
    “What did he have to say about his son’s relationship with her?”
    “Not much. Why?”
    “Did he seem to approve of it?”
    “Yes. What are you leading up to?”
    “A possible answer, maybe.”
    “Which is?”
    “Suppose Carding hated Christine for some reason,” I said. “Suppose he was responsible for those threatening calls and letters. And suppose he was the one who killed her—lured her out to Lake Merced on some sort of pretext; she knew him well enough to have gone there to meet him after dark. Then suppose Jerry found out about it, confronted his father today, lost his head