[2017] The Extraction

by Steven F Freeman

  I took a full lap around the corpse, viewing it from every angle.

  I leaned over the garrote. “It’s an unusual material. Have we figured out what this is made of?”

  “Girls’ panties…unused,” replied Okafor. “We found the plastic package it came in under the window.”

  Sure enough, the undergarments had been knotted together end-to-end. Whatever thin cylinder the perp had used to twist the impromptu rope around the victim’s neck had been taken with him.

  “When will forensics finish their work?” I asked.

  Okafor gathered her eyebrows. “It’s a rush, so…give it until end of day tomorrow.”

  “Good. When they’re done, can you e-mail everything to me? Lab results, photos, the works.”

  “Of course.”

  I skipped lunch that day. Back at my desk, my mind couldn’t help but canvass the scene in the reading nook over and over. I resisted the urge to form definite conclusions. Better to wait until I had complete evidence to work with.

  Kyle appeared at my desk. “Detective Okafor just called.”

  I glanced at the e-mail frame open on my monitor. “Funny, she hasn’t sent anything yet.”

  “That’s what she called about. The evidence isn’t what we’d hoped for.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There was no sample inside the vic.”

  “Crap. I guess he used a condom.”

  “Probably. And that’s not all. Forensics didn’t find any foreign hairs on the vic or in the room.”

  “Not any?” I asked. “How’s that even possible—especially if he stayed with her for a day?”

  “Okafor’s thinking the offender might have shaved off his body hair. There’s also a few sheet fibers on the floor around the ottoman, not a place you’d expect bedding. The perp might have laid out a sheet at the beginning as a sort of drop cloth and gathered it up when he was through. And they found a bit of latex residue on the chair, so it looks like he gloved up.”

  “Great. So we’re not just dealing with a complete sociopath. This guy also has mad skills at avoiding leaving evidence behind.”

  “Looks like it.” She paused. “I really need your best on this one.”

  “You got it. Sampson gets back from vacation tomorrow. We’ll work on it together.”

  CHAPTER 34

  The next morning, Sampson and I hovered over my monitor, scanning through the crime-scene photos.

  “If we assume there’ll be more crime scenes that look like this,” I murmured, “what conclusions would we draw?”

  “Premeditated for sure,” she replied. “The dog cone, the new panties, the latex gloves, shaving off his hair…the guy spent a while planning this.”

  “Agreed. And his treatment of the vic. Tying her up and making her wear the cone…degrading her, controlling her, like a master with his dog…the same kind of dehumanizing techniques Japanese guards used during World War II to justify treating their POWs like crap. He got off on being the one in power.”

  “Which suggests he’s on the short end of the stick in the ‘normal’ part of his life,” said Sampson. “Probably a loner. Works an okay job but not a great one.”

  “Yep, and not in management. Otherwise, he’d have an outlet for his need for power. As it is, he has to take crap from his boss, and the pressure builds…”

  “Until this,” finished Sampson, gesturing to the image on my computer screen.

  I sat back and exhaled. “One area that’s a little less certain is victim demographics. The vic’s family was middle class, not as rich as the people who owned the apartment they found her in. It’s hard to say if the perp picked her out because of that or if this was more a random kidnapping.”

  “Yeah, and how did he find that vacant unit in the first place? It’s not like he could go door-to-door with a hog-tied nine year old until he found an empty place.”

  “Not just that, but he knew the owners would be gone for a while,” I said. “Otherwise, he wouldn’t have risked staying there so long. I’ll see if Okafor is checking that angle.” My gut started to tingle, that little feeling I got that usually pointed me in the right direction. “I’m thinking…”

  “Yes?” said Sampson.

  “The perp didn’t bother to dispose of the victim, even though he could have missed some trace evidence he accidentally left behind.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want to be seen carrying a body out of the apartment.”

  “Maybe. But he got her in there without anyone noticing.” I drummed my fingers on my desk. “It makes me wonder if he’s inviting a media response. You know how some of these perps get off on the whole tearful family thing. It’s not just the rape itself that makes this loser feel important. It’s the police helplessness as well. This guy loves the attention. It’s part of his power trip.”

  Sampson nodded. “I think you’re on to something. Do you think he’ll try to contact the police, like the Zodiac killer?”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure if it’ll go that far, but I do think he enjoys feeling like he pulled a fast one on the cops. It’s like a bonus to the crime itself. We should have Okafor alert her mailroom to wear gloves for the next few days, just in a case a letter arrives.”

  Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Even more unfortunately, the offender delivered his message a different way: a typewritten note left next to the body of his second victim.

  The body of an eight-year-old girl was discovered by homeowners the Sunday after Thanksgiving as they returned from a trip to Ohio.

  Sampson and I wasted no time traveling to the crime scene. The owners of the beige house in a middle-class neighborhood had transformed their basement into a “man cave,” a rec room with a pool table, mini-fridge, and flat-screen TV. Different types of chairs were spread out around the room, including the bean bag over which Alyssa Catalán, the victim, had been thrown.

  Like the first victim, she’d been bound hand and foot, fitted with a dog collar, and sexually assaulted before being garroted.

  Sampson spoke in low tones. “A spitting image of the first victim’s MO, just like you predicted.”

  “We predicted,” I corrected. “And it wasn’t too hard to figure out this wacko wasn’t finished—although I would’ve been thrilled to be wrong.”

  I moved around the body slowly, looking for behavior patterns that could help us fill in the pieces of this offender’s personality. Much of what I saw synced up well with the conclusions Sampson and I had drawn the morning after the first murder.

  “She looks Latina,” I mentioned to Kyle, who had beaten me to the location.

  “Yes, parents are working class. She was in an after-school program. She never checked out, and no one saw her leave.”

  I rolled my eyes. Shouldn’t this perp’s luck run out at some point?

  A uniformed officer strode into the room and addressed Kyle. “Detective Okafor wanted me to let you know…neighbor says she saw someone dressed in a Santa Claus suit enter the house with a young girl two nights ago. She didn’t think anything about it at the time…figured it was for some kind of party. But the family left a week ago, so it must have been our perp.”

  “It’s brilliant, really,” I said. “Even if someone spots you, what kind of description are they going to give? ‘He looked like Santa.’ Zero help in tracking down the perp.”

  “Does that mean he’ll stop after Christmas?” asked Kyle.

  “Probably not,” I replied. “He’d just find some other way to blend in.”

  I continued to scan the room. “Is this the note he left?” I asked, pointing to a sheet of plain paper on the pool table.

  “Yep.”

  I leaned over it.

  Roses are red

  Violets are blue

  You’ll never find me

  But I know you

  Fantastic. We had a psychotic Robert Frost on our hands.

  Sampson joined my side and read the verse. “This confirms what we thought on Tuesday. The guy’s
an attention whore.”

  I drummed three fingers on my lips. “Yep. And that worries me.”

  “Why?”

  “Sexual predators seek out the weird things that turn them on, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, this guy is aroused by dominating others. That much is clear from how he ties up his victims like dogs and forces himself on them when they’re helpless. We know that turns him on. The problem with this taunting behavior is that the taunting itself creates an arousal feedback loop. Getting high on the power of fooling the police stimulates him sexually, which in turn motivates him to seek out new victims.”

  “Jesus…”

  “And like any feedback loop, it’ll get worse until some external force stops it.”

  “You mean the killings will get worse.”

  “Yes—more frequent, if I had to guess.”

  “But what about the Santa suit?” said Sampson. “Shouldn’t we alert for that?”

  “Yeah, although I’m afraid the media will latch onto it, make a field day out of it.”

  “Probably, but if it increases the chances of finding this guy…”

  “You’re right.” Said Kyle. “We have to do it.”

  Field day turned out to be an understatement. Bat shit crazy would have been more accurate. “Santa Claws Murderer At Large” screamed headlines across the city. Within hours of the media announcement, we had complaints of “suspicious characters,” all of whom ended up being the usual seasonal Santas plying their trade.

  Santa reports continued to pour in, all to no avail. The genius of this predator’s disguise was maddening. Resources that might have been focused on tracking him down were instead diverted to dozens of false leads.

  On December second, the third victim appeared. The homeowners had spent an extended Thanksgiving holiday at Disney World and returned to the grisly surprise.

  This crime scene played out in a manner depressingly similar to the first two. An African-American child of nine, bound and outfitted in the usual manner. The victim’s decomposing body had lain over the arm of a chair in the home’s living room for several days.

  Only the note was different.

  Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man

  Get me some puss as fast as I can

  Tie it, and cone, and hump it with a “D”

  And see if stupid cops can ever catch me

  Unprofessional images of what I’d do to this guy’s “D” if I ever caught him floated through my mind. But that reaction was what he wanted—us so rattled we couldn’t do our jobs properly.

  Abby Mayfield’s parents had filed a missing-persons report five days earlier. Now their worst fear had materialized in horrific detail.

  Back in the FBI building later that evening, Sampson, Kyle, and I huddled to discuss all three cases.

  “Does Okafor have a theory on how this perp knows when the homeowners are going to be out of town?” I asked.

  “As a matter of fact, she does. She checked with the post office to see if any of the homeowners had filed mail holds. Turns out all three of them did.”

  “So our perp is a postal employee?”

  “No. Here’s where the story gets interesting. A few weeks ago, the post office’s main Atlanta branch reported a security breach in their databases. Any information in there could have been hacked. But since the main data they have is just names and addresses, stuff anyone can get off the internet, nobody thought too much about it. But now…”

  “Now they’re thinking that the thief stole out-of-town notices and is using the empty homes as hiding places to commit his crimes.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So the guy’s an I.T. expert,” concluded Sampson. “A cyber-criminal. That would help narrow the focus for Okafor’s people.”

  “She might want to revisit the break-in to the postal database,” I added. “If they didn’t try too hard to track down the intruder the first time, they’ll have a reason to now.”

  “I’ll let her know,” said Kyle.

  “And have her warn the post office to be on their guard for another attempted breach.”

  “Another one? Why?”

  “People can only file mail holds a month or two in advance, right? Before long, the perp is going to run out of places to take his victims to. He’ll need to get another batch of mail holds with later dates.”

  “Makes sense. I’ll let her know.”

  In bed that evening, the gruesome crime scenes appeared unbidden in my mind’s eye. This perp was hard at work one-upping John Wayne Gacy, the Chicago nut job who killed 33 young men while working part-time as a clown.

  The details of our murderer’s personality floated across my mind. This guy was anal retentive big time. Probably had all his toiletries lined up in the bathroom just so—a place for everything, and everything in its place. He probably even had a stash of dog cones in a neat stack, ready for his next victims. This thought sparked an idea, but before it could catch hold, the flame of inspiration sputtered and died in the folds of sleep.

  CHAPTER 35

  I lay in bed the next morning, trying desperately to recall the idea that had struck me the night before. Anal retentive…sense of order…dog cones.

  Dog cones—that was it! Every criminal has a blind spot, and I may have just found his.

  I hauled ass to the office and met up with Kyle and Sampson as soon as they arrived. We teleconferenced in Detective Okafor.

  “I have an idea,” I told them. “This guy uses a dog cone at every crime, right?”

  My colleagues nodded.

  “He had to get them somewhere. That might be a way to track him down.”

  “I don’t see how,” said Okafor. “There must be hundreds of people buying those things every day.”

  “That’s the beauty of it,” I replied. “Yes, people buy them all the time. But how many people buy more than one? I guarantee you this guy isn’t waiting to round up his supplies at the last minute. He’s accumulated a stock of cones and girls’ panties that he’s slowly burning off. That means he bought a bunch of them at one time.”

  “That’s still a lot of orders to sift through,” said Okafor, uncertainty dripping from her voice.

  “It may not be as bad as it seems. Think about it…where did he get the dog cones? He could buy them in a pet store. But that means the clerk would’ve seen his face. Not only that, but buying them in bulk might be conspicuous, especially once the news of these murders hits the street. No, if I’m the murderer, I’m not going to take that risk. So what does that leave? Buying them online.”

  “That’s probably how every veterinarian buys them, too, though,” said the detective.

  “Yes, but those should be easy to eliminate. Look for anyone buying a bulk order of dog cones who doesn’t work with animals. Start with deliveries to a home address instead of a veterinary hospital. And we’ve already established that the locus of the crime scenes falls somewhere to the northeast of downtown. Odds are, the perp lives somewhere in that part of town. You overlay that geography with the delivery addresses of online purchases of dog cones.”

  “I like it,” said Okafor. For the first time, she sounded encouraged. “I’ll have my team start working on that ASAP.”

  Once the call ended, I wandered up one floor to the cubicle of Bev Williams, our office’s top systems analyst. She had a knack for linking together information from dozens of databases to tease out the right answer.

  I explained the criteria Okafor’s people would be using to search for “Santa Claws.”

  “You wouldn’t have time to run this search yourself, would you?” I asked.

  “Why? Didn’t you just say she’s looking into it?

  “Nobody’s as fast as you. You know that.” The memory of Abby Mayfield’s small body appeared in my mind. “This guy is killing a young girl every few days. And he’s only going to speed up. If we can save even one day…”

  Williams grimaced. “I’m on it. I’ll let you know what
I find out.”

  Williams didn’t pull an all-nighter, but it was close. When I checked the e-mail on my phone first thing the next morning, she had sent a message at 3:30 A.M. Her list contained the names of seven “most likely” suspects and twenty-two “next tier” ones, those to be investigated if none of the first seven proved to be the offender. In addition to the number of dog cones ordered, she had listed each person’s address and job history.

  A quick scan of the list revealed one guy who jumped out: Wyatt Thorne. He lived on the second floor of an apartment building, just the kind of place a criminal couldn’t take his victims since he’d have neighbors on every side. But what really caught my eye was his current employer—the post office. What if the story about a hacker was a ruse? Could Thorne have extracted the mail hold notifications from his own databases after all? If he was a carrier, surely he’d have access to local addresses on the list. I couldn’t say for sure, but it seemed worth checking out.

  I forwarded the e-mail to Okafor and got her on the horn during my drive in to the office. I admitted to the request I’d made to Williams and explained the significance of the information she’d uncovered. “Thorne looks as likely as anyone. My gut says we should check him out first.”

  Okafor didn’t laugh, but her intonation suggested a smile as she spoke. “Sampson told me about your gut. She said it’s usually right.”

  “I hope it is this time, although I am worried about the hacker story.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Would a mail carrier really be able to sell the idea that someone tried to hack into post-office databases? Wouldn’t you need to work in the I.T. department to pull off that kind of scam?”

  “Maybe Thorne does work in I.T. I’ll have my team look into it. And Agent Farr…” She paused. “You’ve contributed invaluable information to this case. If we decide this is our guy, do you want to be in on the arrest?”

  I thought about the three young corpses. “Yeah, I would.”