by L T Vargus
Whatever it was, there wasn’t enough room on the card table for two open boxes. Loshak lifted up Millhouse’s, slid his box underneath, then set hers back down on top. A goodwill gesture. One that could be read as visual reinforcement that he was only there for support, not to take over for her, while also leaving her card visible so that her generosity was on display.
The lights came back on as Loshak made it back to the wall beside Spinks.
“And on that note,” Millhouse was saying, “it’s imperative we make sure nothing falls through the cracks. To keep things flowing as smoothly as possible, remember to stick to your chain of command. If you’re in uniform canvassing and you get a hot tip, you go straight to your captain first, then they’ll get in touch with us. No jumping the line, no matter how important you think it is.”
A few heads nodded at this, probably the captains.
“Next most important,” Millhouse went on, raising a stack of papers, “is the paperwork. No one goes home after a shift without this properly filled out and filed with the task force. Thanks to TV, most civilians think lucky breaks and sudden flashes of inspiration catch criminals. Wrong. It’s dead trees. Each of you should have had a packet on your chair when you came in. Flip through them and familiarize yourself with the different forms. I don’t care what you’re accustomed to using in your home precinct, we’re using these for this investigation.”
Millhouse let her gaze wander around the room, meeting every eye.
“We all want to catch this guy, but we’re not going to compromise the documentation while we’re at it. If you have a problem with that, I can find ten other detectives who’d be happy to take your spot on the task force.”
Loshak leaned against the wall beside Spinks, trying to look as if he was paying attention without letting on that he was dissecting Millhouse’s sudden change in demeanor from Miss Congeniality to hard-nosed Deputy Chief. Paperwork and bureaucracy were strange sticking points. He’d seen it a time or two in past investigations, usually with people in elected positions like sheriff or county coroner, people who were out of their depth. When they couldn’t do the actual investigative work, they overcompensated with the administrative stuff.
“Now,” Millhouse said, tapping the papers in her hand on the podium like she was straightening them, “many of you probably recognize Special Agent Loshak from the Zakarian case in Florida. He’s a profiler with the FBI, an expert in the behavioral sciences. He graciously agreed to lend his expertise to our investigation, and hopefully, help us catch this guy faster. So, if you’ll all give your attention to Agent Loshak, I believe he has prepared a profile on our killer.”
Loshak took Millhouse’s place at the front of the room. One of the younger uniforms clapped but stopped pretty fast when he realized no one else was applauding.
Loshak glanced behind him at the ending image of the file, a drone picture of the carnage on I-90. He turned to Millhouse.
“Chief, could you bring up the security cam still of the shooter waiting in the food court before he opened fire?”
“Of course,” she said, clicking through the slides again and landing on the grainy image of a busy food court. Circled in red was a pair of loafers and tear-away pants sticking out from behind the lower half of a Christmas light-draped potted tree. A plain black laptop bag rested between the feet.
“Thank you.” Loshak flipped through the pages in his file until he landed on one marked up in pen.
On the ride over, while Spinks drove and made snarky remarks about drivers in Chicago, he had scribbled down notes about the killer.
“The mall shooting shows numerous signs of sophisticated planning, starting with the fact that he entered the mall and the food court with his face angled away from the security cameras. I believe he also intentionally chose this particular seat, knowing it was a dead spot in the surveillance. As you can see from the screenshot, he’s pretty well obscured from all of the cameras in the food court. Likewise, he left through an unmonitored staircase and returned to his car, which was parked outside the mall’s exterior camera range. Did canvassing turn up any footage from the shopping center nearby?”
Millhouse shook her head. “Most of the stores don’t have exterior cameras, and a couple that did were pointed the opposite direction.”
“Lucky bastard,” a detective with a thick ’stache muttered.
“It wasn’t luck,” Loshak said. “Our shooter knew what he was doing. To avoid all this surveillance took preparation and cleverness. It could hint at access to the mall security suite — either an employee or a former employee — though with the subsequent highway shooting, I doubt that. It’s probable that someone could have put together the same plan just by taking a few days to case the mall and surrounding area. Even the mall itself was a calculated choice. He picked a dated place in the suburbs with heavy traffic and minimal security, a low-risk target where he could do maximum damage in the shortest amount of time.”
He flipped to the next page in his file.
“Could you go to the shooter just as he was opening fire, Chief Millhouse?”
A couple more clicks splashed the image of the ski-masked man leveling the Uzi at the post-Christmas crowd. In it, panic had yet to break out. Only one person seemed to be looking toward the shooter, though with the overall roughness of the footage, it was hard to tell whether she was actually looking at him or something nearby.
Loshak shoved down the urge to shudder and cleared his throat.
“The shooter is most likely an educated, capable person. From what little we can see of him, beyond the sunglasses and hat, he looks neat, well-cared for.”
“Just because he’s not a slob doesn’t mean he can’t be a blue-collar guy,” a detective near the back said. She crossed her arms. “A day laborer can take care of himself, too.”
“That’s not what I was saying.” He pointed at the image. “You don’t see a lot of day laborers in loafers. And if the shoes were part of some elaborate disguise to throw us all off, they would’ve ended up in the trash with the rest of his outer clothes. Altogether, this suggests we’re looking for someone highly educated who works in a skilled labor field. Probably not a corporate office job. More like a doctor or lawyer. This will be someone with some autonomy in their work. White male, late twenties to mid-thirties would be the most probable, which seems to line up with what we’re able to make out in the security footage.”
“A doctor?” The skeptical question came from the same detective who had challenged him on the blue-collar vs. white-collar issue. “What motive would a doctor have to shoot up a mall?”
“That’s hard to be sure of without more evidence,” Loshak said.
He caught Spinks’ eye for a second, and the fact that they’d come here to find out whether George Whitley was the primary target flashed through his mind.
“The motive in a mass shooting like this is often fuzzy at best. Sometimes the chosen venue gives us a clue. In cases like the massacres at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the PULSE nightclub in Orlando, we can pinpoint at least an underlying thread of bigotry — racism or anti-Semitism or homophobia. It’s not unusual for mass shooters to target specific communities in this way, and the agenda in those cases is often fairly obvious. But with our incident here, I haven’t seen any evidence that suggests our shooter was targeting a particular group. Not yet.”
Just like there was no evidence that George Whitley was anything more than in the wrong place at the wrong time, no matter what Spinks hoped.
“Instead, I think what we’re seeing is an individual lashing out at society in general. Something more akin to the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado. James Holmes, the shooter, wrote in a journal that he’d considered carrying out his attack in an airport. He ultimately decided against it, in part, because he thought an airport shooting would lead people to interpret it as an act of terrorism. And I quote, ‘Terrorism isn’t the message.
The message is there is no message.’”
Loshak glanced back at the grainy image on the wall.
“Whatever his wounds are, they run so deep that instead of pinpointing one victim at a time, like a serial killer might, our shooter is going after general groups — food court patrons, drivers on the interstate. It doesn’t point to discrimination, it points to an attack on society as a whole. There could also be a level of anti-consumerism to it. Attacking a busy shopping center right after the holidays, attacking a road full of gas-guzzling vehicles.”
“So, like the anarchy guys from Fight Club?” the mustached detective asked. He raised a bushy salt and pepper eyebrow toward his thinning hairline. “Seems kinda iffy for a doctor or a lawyer.”
“That’s what makes this unsub all the more dangerous,” Loshak said. “Our profile suggests a capable, educated, intelligent person, someone who can fool us all into thinking he’s got his life and mental health together. Someone who should have the world eating out of the palm of his hand, and in many facets of his life, perhaps he does. Even so, some level of perceived wrong or injury is making him angry, making him want to lash out at civilization as a whole. The violence is his tool for expressing the rage, as if destruction and death are the only way to prove himself powerful, prove himself worthy.
“Violence on this scale is almost always rooted in inadequacy pushed to the breaking point. A deeply seated sense of powerlessness or worthlessness. Despite his intelligence and his accomplishments, he sees himself as a victim. A cornered animal with no other choice but to fight. Unfortunately for us, that means that in addition to dealing with someone very smart, he’s also unpredictable. Desperate. Wild at heart.”
“So is he crazy, or what?” the uniform who had clapped asked.
“It’s possible that mental illness is a factor,” Loshak said. “But there are about ten million people in this country living with severe mental illness, and 99.9% of them aren’t shooting up malls and freeways. So while some kind of psychiatric disorder may be contributing to his current state of mind, that alone is not enough to explain why someone would do something like this. This is a man in the midst of an existential crisis pushed to it’s absolutely extreme. He is angry and desperate and absolutely convinced the world has done him wrong.”
A hand went up near the door.
“Do you think he’ll strike again?”
Loshak nodded.
“He’s gotten away with it twice now. I don’t think he’s going to sit back and wait around for us to find him. If he doesn’t already have his next target cased and ready to go, he’ll have it very soon.”
Loshak gathered up his file and headed back to his spot on the wall by Spinks. Millhouse took to the podium once more.
“Thank you for that enlightening profile, agent,” the deputy chief said, once again without a trace of irony in her voice. “See me after the meeting, and I’ll get you a form for writing it up.”
Spinks smirked and nudged him with a knobby elbow, apparently amused at the notion of Loshak being assigned homework. Millhouse let her hard gaze wander over the crowd.
“OK, next steps. I’ve given your captains specific tasks to divide up among you. We’ll need to check traffic cams and any other surveillance footage available, hopefully find something higher quality than the mall cameras were.”
This sparked something in Loshak’s brain. He raised his hand to get her attention.
“I forgot to mention that whatever car the shooter was driving will more than likely be a dead end. He wouldn’t go to all the trouble avoiding cameras just to drive around in his own vehicle. He’ll have found a way to get something that can’t be so easily traced back to him.”
Millhouse nodded.
“Well, we’ll proceed with that area of the investigation anyway just to bear the theory out. There are also a number of witnesses from each scene to process, all of which have been divvied up between precincts as well. Your captains will inform you if you’re on interview duty.”
She tapped her PowerPoint remote on the podium twice, then squinted out at the room.
“Let’s get out there and stop this guy before he has a chance to kill anyone else.”
The words sounded sincere and spur-of-the-moment, but Loshak got the feeling they were rehearsed, like the stinger in a symphony or the closing of a politician’s speech. It was something in her stance or maybe the stare that made it appear as if she were speaking to each one of them individually while not focusing on anyone at all.
No one else seemed to notice, though. They were all either checking in with their captains for assignments or digging into the donut boxes in the back.
Chapter 8
There was a crescendo of scraping chairs and murmuring voices as the task force meeting broke up. Spinks turned to Loshak.
“So what’s our next move, partner?”
Loshak nodded at where Millhouse was shaking hands with a pair of detectives.
“Offer to help with the interviews and wherever else they might need us, then I want to drive the killer’s route.”
“Oh goody. More traffic.” Spinks grinned and rubbed his hands together. “Maybe I’ll finally get a chance to give another driver the finger.”
“You had plenty of chances on the way here,” Loshak said. “People were cutting us off all over the place.”
Spinks shook his head.
“The moment wasn’t right. If you’re going to use the bird, it has to be organic. Otherwise you’re just another disingenuous douchebag. I want my middle finger to really mean something.” The reporter let his eyes lose focus and softened his voice until it sounded as if he were sincerely thanking someone. “‘No, fuck you.’”
Loshak smirked, but decided it would be better not to encourage Spinks. There would be time for the reporter’s bits later.
They wove through the clusters of people that had formed among the rows of chairs and headed toward Millhouse. While Loshak watched, the task force leader shook hands and greeted a few uniforms, some detectives, and one of the captains. Her body language was open and welcoming throughout even the shortest interactions. Once again, Loshak thought of a politician, this time glad-handing and kissing babies. As far as he knew, Chicago’s Bureau of Detectives didn’t hold an election for deputy chief, but no one climbed that high up the ladder in any organization without being decent at networking.
When he and Spinks made it to her, Millhouse turned the thousand-watt beauty queen smile on them.
“Agent Loshak, thank you again for that wonderful profile,” she said, clasping his hand. “We’re so glad that the Bureau could spare you for a few days.”
“Glad to be here.”
Loshak was about to volunteer to help with the investigation in whatever way they needed, but Millhouse’s attention had already moved on.
She beamed at Spinks and shook his hand.
“And you must be the consultant, Mr. Spanks.”
That startled a laugh out of Loshak, but Spinks didn’t even blink.
“Please, Chief,” he said, patting her hand warmly, “Mr. Spanks was my father. Call me Jevon.”
“Jevon,” Millhouse repeated. “It’s good to meet you.”
“The pleasure is all ours,” Spinks said. He had switched to that patronizing tone he’d used in the car while pretending to be an assistant. “Agent Loshak and I wanted to touch base and see if there’s any part of the investigation we can jump in and help with. Interviews, that kind of thing.”
Millhouse snapped her fingers.
“That form.” She looked around for a moment like someone looking for glasses perched on their head. “I have it somewhere here. Ah, the podium.”
She hustled over, grabbed the paperwork stack she’d been so insistent about, and shuffled through it. When she’d found the one she was looking for, she handed it to Loshak.
“Nothing would be more helpful than getting all that profile down and into the file.”
“Right,” Loshak said.
“I usually email my write-up of the profile to the head of the task force—”
“Perfect,” Millhouse said. “And if you could just get that form filled out and submitted today, it’ll be such a huge help.”
Obviously she wasn’t going to budge on this paperwork thing. But it was better to cooperate with the locals on the smaller issues that wouldn’t affect the overall effectiveness of the investigation, build the trust a little in case he needed to push back later on something bigger.
“Sure, I’ll get it done,” Loshak said. “In terms of helping out, though, we wanted to let you know we’re ready to lend a hand with the grunt work. Wherever you need an extra body, we can fill in. Chicago has a tip hotline set up for criminal investigations, right?”
“Yes, of course,” Millhouse said, her friendly tone slipping a few degrees. Compared to her other mini meet and greets, this conversation must’ve seemed like it was running long.
“Well, if you need someone to help wade through the calls to suss out anything that might be legitimate, let me know. We’ve got a guy at the Bureau that’s been doing some radical things with tip line technology. Artificial intelligence and all that. We used him in Atlanta.”
Millhouse nodded, her eyes roving somewhere just behind Loshak. “That’s very generous. I’ll pass on your offer to the captains. If they come up with anything they need, they’ll let me know, and I’ll be in touch with you.”
“Thanks,” Loshak said, reaching to shake her hand again.
But Millhouse didn’t notice. She had already locked on her next target.
“Thank you, agent,” she said, already turning away.
Behind her back, Spinks widened his eyes a little at Loshak, then jerked his chin at the door.
Loshak nodded.
They headed out into the hall, squeezing past a few of the detectives milling around the door with their donuts — a cream horn, a cinnamon-sugar coated, and a strawberry cake donut, Loshak noted — then through the desk pool to the lobby.
