1st to Die

by James Patterson

  It had been a sweet evening. Took the heat off from the case. It even got my mind off Negli’s.

  What scared me a little was the tremor inside that it could be something more. I had caught myself staring at him Friday night, while he helped out with the dishes, thinking, If times were different…

  Raleigh ran into me, carrying coffee and a paper. “Hey.” He smiled. “Nice vest.”

  “Chin’s got a live one in four,” I said, grabbing his arm. “Claims to have a physical sighting. You want to come along?”

  In my haste, I was already by him, not even giving him a second of recognition. He put down his paper on our civilian clerk’s desk and caught up on the stairs.

  In the cramped interrogation room sat a nicely dressed, attractive woman of about fifty. Chin introduced her to me as Laurie Birnbaum. She seemed tight, nervous.

  Chin sat down next to her. “Ms. Birnbaum, why don’t you tell Inspector Boxer what you just told me.”

  She was frightened. “It was the beard that made me remember. I didn’t even think of it until now. It was so horrible.”

  “You were at the Brandts’ wedding?” I asked her.

  “Yes, as guests of the bride’s family,” she replied. “My husband works with Chancellor Weil at the university.” She took a nervous sip from a cup of coffee. “It was just a brief thing. But he gave me the chills.”

  Chin pushed down the record button of a portable recorder.

  “Please, go ahead,” I told her soothingly. Once again, I felt close to him — the bastard with the red beard.

  “I stood next to him. He had this graying red beard. Like a goatee. The kind they wear in Los Angeles. He looked older, maybe forty-five, fifty, but there was something about him. I’m not saying this right, am I?”

  “You spoke to him?” I asked, trying to communicate that even though she didn’t do this every day, I did. Even the male detectives admitted that I was the best at Q and A on the floor. They joked that it was “a girl thing.”

  “I had just come in from the dance floor,” she said. “I looked up, and there he was. I said something like, ‘Nice affair…bride or groom?’ For a moment, I thought he looked kind of appealing. Then he just sort of glared at me. I took him for one of those arrogant investment-banker types from the Brandt side.”

  “What did he say to you?” I said.

  She massaged her brow, straining to recall. “He said, in the weirdest way, that they were lucky.”

  “Who was lucky?”

  “Melanie and David. I may have said, ‘Aren’t they lucky?’ Meaning the two of them. They were so stunning. And he replied, ‘Oh, they’re lucky.’”

  She looked up with a confused expression on her face. “He called them something else… chosen.”

  “Chosen?”

  “Yes. He said, ‘Oh, they’re lucky…. You could even say they were chosen.’”

  “You say he had a goatee?”

  “That’s what was so strange. The beard made him seem older, but the rest of him was young.”

  “The rest of him? What do you mean?”

  “His face. His voice. I know this must sound strange, but it was only for a moment, as I came off the dance floor.”

  We got as much as we could from her. Height, hair color. What he was wearing. Everything confirmed the sparse details that we already had. The killer was a man with a short, reddish beard. He had been wearing a tux — the tux jacket he had left behind in the Mandarin Suite.

  A fire was building inside me. I felt sure that Laurie Birnbaum was credible. The beard. The tux. We were piecing together his appearance. “Is there anything more, anything at all that stands out to you? Some physical characteristic? A mannerism?”

  She shook her head. “It happened so quickly. It was only when I saw the drawing of him in the Chronicle…”

  I looked at Chin, conveying that it was time to call down an artist to firm up the details. I thanked her, made my way back to my desk. We’d get a sketch from her to use along with the one from Maryanne Perkins at Saks.

  The murder investigation had entered a new phase. It was very hot. We had a stakeout operational outside the Bridal Boutique at Saks. One by one, we were contacting the names on the store’s list, anyone who had ordered a wedding dress in the past several months.

  My heart was pounding. The face I had imagined, my dream of the red-bearded man, was starting to fill in. I felt we had him contained.

  My phone rang. “Boxer,” I answered, still shuffling through the names in the Saks wedding folder.

  “My name’s McBride,” a deep, urgent voice said. “I’m a homicide detective. In Cleveland.”

  Chapter 53

  “I GOT A HOMICIDE HERE that fits the pattern of what you’ve been dealing with,” McBride explained.

  “GSWs,” McBride continued, “both of them. Gunshot wounds right between the eyes.” He described the quick but grotesque deaths of Kathy and James Voskuhl, killed at their wedding at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This time the killer hadn’t even waited for the wedding to end.

  “What kind of weapon your guy use in Napa?” McBride asked.

  “Nine millimeter,” I told him.

  “Same.”

  I was reeling a little bit. Cleveland?

  A voice pounded inside me. What the hell was Red Beard doing in Ohio? We had just made the breakthrough, found out where he was casing his victims. Did he know that? If so — how?

  Cleveland was either a copycat killing, which was entirely possible, or this case had just broken wide open and could lead anywhere.

  “You have crime-scene photos there, McBride?” I asked.

  McBride grunted, “Yeah. Got them right in front of me. Nasty. Sexually explicit.”

  “Can you get me a close-up of their hands?”

  “Okay, but why the hands?”

  “What were they wearing, McBride?”

  I heard him shuffling through photos. “You mean rings?”

  “Good guess, Detective. Yeah.”

  I was praying that it wasn’t our guy. Cleveland… it would shatter everything that made me feel we were close to him. Was Red Beard taking his killing act across the country?

  A minute later, McBride confirmed exactly the thing I didn’t want to hear. “There are no wedding bands.”

  The bastard was on the move. We had a stakeout going where we thought he might show up, and he was two thousand miles away. He’d just murdered a couple at their reception in Ohio. Shit, shit, shit.

  “You said the bodies were found in a sexually explicit position?” I asked McBride with dismay.

  The Cleveland cop hesitated. He finally said, “The groom was shot sitting on the john. We found him there. Sitting up, legs open. The bride was shot in the stall, too, as she was coming in. There was enough of her brains on the inside of the door to confirm it. But when we found her, she was facedown. Uh, her face was stuffed between his legs.”

  I was silent, forming the image in my mind, hating this cruel, inhuman bastard more every day.

  “You know… fellatio style,” McBride finally managed. “There’s a few things my investigators want to ask you.”

  “Ask me yourself. I’m gonna be there tomorrow.”

  Chapter 54

  SIX-THIRTY THE NEXT MORNING, Raleigh and I were on our way to Cleveland, of all places. McBride met us at the plane. He wasn’t how I had imagined him. He wasn’t flabby, middle-aged, Irish Catholic. He was was intense, sharp boned, maybe thirty-eight, and black.

  “You’re younger than I thought.” He smiled at me.

  I smiled back. “And you’re definitely less Irish.”

  On the way into town, he brought us up to speed. “Groom’s from Seattle. Had something to do with the music business. Worked with rock bands. Producer… marketing guy. Bride grew up here in Ohio. Shaker Heights. Father’s a corporate attorney. Girl was cute, redhead, freckles, glasses.”

  He pulled a manila envelope off the dashboard and tossed it over to me in the
passenger seat. Inside were a series of glossy eight-by-elevens of the crime scene: stark, graphic, somewhat resembling old photos of gangland rubouts. The groom was sitting in the stall with a surprised expression and the top of his head blown off. The bride was slumped over his lap, curled in a pool of blood, hers and his.

  The sight of the couple filled me with a cold dread. As long as the killer was in northern California, I felt we had him contained. Now he was on the loose.

  We grilled McBride about the venue — how the victims might have ended up in the men’s room and what security was like at the Hall of Fame.

  Each answer I heard convinced me even more that it was our guy. What the hell was he doing here?

  We pulled off the highway at Lake Shore Boulevard. A modern skyline rose all around us. “There she is,” McBride announced.

  From a distance, I saw the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame glinting up ahead like a jaggedly cut jewel. A twisted killer had struck in the city’s most celebrated venue. By now, he might already be back in San Francisco. Or Chicago? New York? Topeka? Planning another gruesome double murder. Or maybe he was in a hotel room across the square, watching us arrive.

  Red Beard could be anywhere.

  Chapter 55

  IT WAS THE THIRD TIME in two weeks I had to go over a harrowing double-murder scene.

  McBride walked us up to the second floor and through an eerie, empty atrium devoid of pedestrian traffic to a men’s room blocked off by crisscrossing yellow crime tape and cops.

  “Public bathroom,” Raleigh said to me. “He’s getting nastier each time.”

  This time there were no bodies, no horrifying discoveries. The victims had long been transferred to the morgue. In their place were grim outlines of tape and chalk; gut-wrenching black-and-white crime photos were taped to the walls.

  I could see what had happened. How the groom had been killed first, his blood smeared on the wall behind the toilet. How Red Beard had waited, surprised the bride as she came in, then moved Kathy Voskuhl into the provocative position between her husband’s legs. Defiled her.

  “How did they both end up here in the middle of their wedding?” Raleigh asked.

  McBride pointed to a crime-scene photo on the wall. “We found a smoked-down joint next to James Voskuhl. Figured he came here to cop a buzz. My guess is the bride came in to join him.”

  “No one saw anything, though? They didn’t leave the reception with anyone?”

  McBride shook his head.

  I felt the same smoldering anger I had felt twice before. I hated this killer. This savager of dreams. With each act I hated him more. The bastard was taunting us. Each murder scene was a statement. Each one more degrading.

  “What was security like that night?” I asked.

  McBride shrugged. “All exits except the main one were closed down. There was a guard at the front desk. Everyone from the wedding arrived at the same time. A couple of half-assed guards floating, but generally at these affairs they like to keep a low profile.”

  “I saw cameras all around,” Raleigh pressed. “They must have some film.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping,” said McBride. “I’ll introduce you to Sharp, head of security. We can go over that now.”

  Andrew Sharp was a trim, wiry man with a square chin and narrow, colorless lips. He looked scared. A day ago he had a fairly cushy job, but now the police and the FBI were all over him.

  Having to explain things to two outside cops from San Francisco didn’t help matters. He brought us into his office, popped a Marlboro Light out of a pack, and looked at Raleigh.

  “I got a meeting with the executive director in about eight minutes.”

  We didn’t even bother to sit down. I asked, “Did your guards notice anyone unusual?”

  “Three hundred guests, madam detective. Everyone congregated in the entrance atrium. My staff doesn’t usually get involved in a whole lot except to make sure no one with too much to drink gets too close to the exhibits.”

  “What about how he got out, then?”

  Sharp wheeled around in his chair, pointing to a blowup of the museum layout. “Either the main entrance, here, where you came in, or one we left open off the back verandah. It leads down to the Lake Walk. There’s a café there during the summer. Mostly it’s blocked off, but the families wanted it open.”

  “Two shots fired,” I said. “No one heard anything?”

  “It was supposed to be a high-class crowd. You think they want my guards milling around? We keep two, three guys to make sure overzealous guests don’t wander into restricted areas. I should have guards patrolling the corridors down by the rest rooms? What ya gonna take, toilet paper?”

  “Security cameras?” Raleigh asked.

  Sharp sighed. “We’ve got the exhibition halls covered, of course. The main exits…a remote sweep of the Main Hall. But nothing on the corridor where the shooting took place. Nothing in the crapper. Anyway, the police are scanning tape with members of each family as we speak. It would make it a helluva lot easier if we knew who the hell we’re looking for.”

  I reached into my briefcase and took out a copy of a bare-bones artist’s sketch. It showed a thin face with a jutting chin, hair combed back, and a lightly shaded goatee.

  “Why don’t we start with him.”

  Chapter 56

  MCBRIDE HAD TO BE BACK in the office for a press briefing on the investigation. I needed to figure out why the killer had come to Cleveland, and what, if any, connections there were to our murders back in San Francisco. The next step was to talk to the parents of the bride.

  Shaker Heights was a posh, upper-end suburb in the height of midsummer bloom. On every street, green lawns led up to graceful, tree-sheltered homes. One of McBride’s men drove me out while Raleigh went back to the Lakefront Hilton to meet with the family of the groom.

  The Koguts’ home was a warm redbrick Normandy under a canopy of tall oaks. I was met at the door by the older sister of the bride, who introduced herself as Hillary Bloom. She sat me down in a comfy, picture-filled den: books, large-screen TV, pictures of the two of them as kids, weddings. “Kathy was always the rebellious one,” Hillary explained. “A free spirit. It took her a while to find herself, but she was just settling down. She had a good job — a publicist for a firm in Seattle. Where she met James. She was just coming around.”

  “Coming around from what?” I asked.

  “Like I said — she was a free spirit. That was Kathy.”

  Her parents, Hugh and Christine Kogut, came into the room. I witnessed the glazed, bewildered shock of people whose lives had been shattered.

  “She was always in and out of relationships,” her mother eventually admitted. “But she also had a passion for life.”

  “She was just young,” her father said. “Maybe we spoiled her too much. She always had an urge to experience things.”

  In her pictures — the wispy red hair and dare-me eyes — I could see the same joy for life the killer had obviously seen in his first two victims. It made me feel sad, weary.

  “Do you know why I’m here?” I finally asked.

  The father nodded. “To determine if there was any connection to those other horrible crimes out west.”

  “So, can you tell me, did Kathy have any connection to San Francisco?”

  I could see a cast of grim recognition creep its way onto their faces.

  “After college, for a few years, she did live there,” her mother said.

  “She went to UCLA,” her father said. “For a year or so she stayed in Los Angeles. Tried to catch on with one of the studios. She started out with a temp job at Fox. Then she got this publicity job in San Francisco, covering music. It was a very fast life. Parties, promotions, no doubt a lot worse. We weren’t happy, but for Kathy, she thought it was her big break.”

  She lived in San Francisco. I asked if they had ever heard of Melanie Weil or Rebecca Passeneau.

  They shook their heads.

  “What about any relat
ionships that might’ve ended badly? Someone, who out of jealousy or obsession, might’ve wanted to do her harm?”

  “Recklessness always seemed like a basis for Kathy’s relationships,” Hillary said with an edge.

  “I did warn her.” Her mother shook her head. “She always wanted to do things on her terms.”

  “Did she ever mention anyone special from the time she lived in San Francisco?”

  Everyone looked at Hillary. “No. No one special.”

  “No one stands out? She lived there for a while. She didn’t keep up with anyone after she left?”

  “I seem to remember her saying she still went down there every once in a while,” her father said. “On business.”

  “Old habits are hard to crack.” Hillary smirked, with a tightening of her lips.

  There had to be some connection. Some contact from the years she had spent there. Someone came all the way here to see her dead.

  “What about anyone from San Francisco invited to the wedding?” I asked.

  “There was one girlfriend,” her father said.

  “Merrill,” said her mother. “Merrill Cole. Shortley, now. I think she’s at the Hilton, if she’s still here.”

  I pulled out the artist’s sketch we had of the killer’s possible appearance. “I know it’s rough, but do you know this man? Someone who knew Kathy? Did you see anyone like this at the wedding?”

  One by one, the Koguts shook their heads.

  I got up to go. I told them if anything came to mind, regardless of how small or insignificant, to get in touch with me. Hillary walked me to the door.

  “There is one more thing,” I said. I knew it was a long shot. “By any chance, did Kathy buy her wedding dress in San Francisco?”

  Hillary looked at me blankly and shook her head. “No, from a vintage shop. In Seattle.”

  At first, the answer deflated me. But then, in a flash, I saw that this was really a connection I was looking for. The first two murders had been committed by someone stalking his victims from afar. That’s why he found them in the way he did. Tracked them.