The Program (Jack Carpenter series)

by James Swain

  Wayne speared a piece of sausage on his fork. It looked as appetizing as road kill. The day he’d pulled the knife out of his mother’s boyfriend’s heart, he’d known his life would be changed, but he’d never expected anything like this.

  “Yeah, he deserved it,” the teenager said.

  “Would you bring him back, if you could?”

  “No. Never.”

  “I didn’t think so,” his captor said.

  Wayne forced the food down. He had only one option, and that was to play along with Renny, and hope for the best. Otherwise, he’d end up in the refrigerator next to the cream cheese. It would have been funny, if it hadn’t been so sick.

  When they were finished eating, he and Renny sat on the couch in the living room, and watched a porno movie on the big screen TV. This one was sicker than the others, and showed a three-hundred pound farmer beating up his two daughters while having sex with them. Not your usual family picture, Wayne thought.

  Halfway through the film, Renny put his arm behind Wayne, and rested his hand on Wayne’s shoulder. The teenager wanted to scream, but sucked up his fear instead. He thought of the Big Brother he’d had growing up. The guy had been a dork, but he’d still taken Wayne to ball games and the movies. He found himself missing those times.

  The film ended. There were no credits, just a blank screen.

  “Did you like that one?” Renny asked.

  “The cinematography was outstanding,” Wayne said.

  His captor laughed. Then, he slapped Wayne on the leg.

  “I think you are ready for the next phase of the Program,” Renny said.

  Wayne didn’t like the sounds of that. He turned sideways on the couch.

  “What are you talking about” the teenager asked.

  “I am going to find you a woman tonight. One you can call your very own.”

  Oh, no, Wayne thought.

  Chapter 34

  The FBI’s new building in Jacksonville reeked of fresh paint and new carpet. Like so much of Florida, the surrounding industrial park was also new, and housed dozens of national companies whose names were instantly familiar.

  Linderman sat in an empty office flooded with mid-afternoon sunlight. He’d called Vaughn Wood an hour before, and asked for help. Wood had pulled through, and was now assembling his best field agents in the conference room a few doors down.

  The coffee he’d bought from the vending machine in the employee cafeteria tasted bitter. It was his fifth cup of the day, and he felt sharp and alert. His mind had stopped playing tricks on him, which he told himself was a good sign.

  His cell phone vibrated. Muriel calling.

  “Hi,” he answered.

  “I was starting to worry about you,” his wife said.

  They had a simple pact. When he was on the road, he called his wife twice a day. He hadn’t done that since coming to Jacksonville. He was slipping in more than one area.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Is everything all right? You sound tired and out of sorts.”

  “It’s been a long couple of days.”

  “You should have called. I was afraid something had happened.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again, hearing the agitation in his voice.

  “When are you coming home? Or don’t you know.”

  “Soon. A few days at most.”

  The door to the office opened halfway, and Wood stuck his head in.

  “Ready when you are,” Wood said.

  Linderman cupped his hand over his cell phone. “I’ll be right there.”

  “Take your time.”

  Wood shut the door. Linderman took his hand away from the phone. He was going to have to eventually tell Muriel what he’d learned. In person was always better, but waiting was never good. She was his partner, and needed to know what he knew.

  “I need to tell you something,” he said. “This morning, I had a conversation with an inmate at Starke prison who knows what happened to our daughter.”

  “Oh, God, Ken. What did he tell you?”

  “He said that Danni was sold into slavery a few weeks after she went missing. He knew information about Danni’s abduction that indicated he was telling the truth.”

  “Slavery?” His wife started to cry.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “Danni worked her way into her abductor’s heart. She convinced him not to kill her, so he sold her instead. Our daughter knew what she was doing.”

  “What are you saying? That I should be happy?”

  “Danni made a choice that saved her life. It was her choice. Be thankful for that. Now I have to find the man that owns her.”

  He listened to his wife blow her nose.

  “Do you think she’s still alive?” she asked.

  Linderman had asked himself the same question a dozen times since speaking to Crutch. There was no absolute way to know. But then he’d reminded himself of something. If Danni could survive the likes of Simon Skell, she could survive anything.

  “Yes, I do,” he said.

  “You’re not just saying that, are you?”

  “No, Muriel. I think our daughter is alive.”

  His wife breathed heavily into the phone. Her heart was racing, just like his own, the sound the only punctuation in a world filled with awful silence. It was a sound the parent of every missing child knew. Of a distant heartbeat, waiting to be found.

  He rose from his chair. “I’ll call you tonight. Promise.”

  “I love you,” his wife said.

  Linderman entered the conference room and apologized for holding everyone up. Five clean-cut agents sat at an oval table with bottled waters in front of their laptops. Each agent acknowledged him with a slight dip of the head.

  Wood stood at the head of the table with his jacket off, waiting to start. “Good afternoon. I’d like to introduce Ken Linderman, supervisory agent of the CARD unit in the FBI’s North Miami office. Ken is an old friend and trusted colleague. Ken has asked for our help in dealing with an unusual situation. Please give him your undivided attention.”

  The five agents shifted their attention to Linderman. Two were Asian, two African-American, one Latino. The FBI had changed a lot since Linderman had joined. Back then, ninety-nine percent of the agents were white, and most gatherings had resembled a sitting for a Norman Rockwell painting.

  “This morning I met with an inmate at Starke Prison named Jason Crutchfield, also known as Crutch,” Linderman said. “For the past year, Crutch has been communicating with a serial killer in Fort Lauderdale named Killer X. Mr. Clean has been abducting violent teenage boys, and attempting to groom them into becoming serial killers. Crutch has been helping him.

  “During our meeting, Crutch attempted to broker a deal with me. He gave me some scant information regarding Mr. Clean’s occupation. He also offered to give me information about my daughter, who was abducted six years ago by another serial killer named Simon Skell.”

  The coffee cup was in Linderman’s hand. Crushing it, he tossed the cup into a plastic pail. Everyone in the room was watching him.

  “In exchange for this information, Crutch wants me to leave him alone, and not talk to the parole board next year when his sentence is reviewed,” Linderman went on. “Crutch has good reason for wanting me to stay out of his hair. Since being incarcerated, he’s been linked to twenty-four killings in different parts of the country.

  “I want to put the screws to Crutch, and scare him into telling me what Mr. Clean does for a living, and also what happened to my daughter. That’s where you come in.

  “The twenty-four killings are over a decade old. At the time, the police didn’t know they were linked, or that a serial killer was involved. I’m guessing that a lot of DNA evidence has been lost since those crimes were committed. We’re going to need to dig deep to find what we’re looking for. Any questions?”

  The five agents at the table exchanged glances. Something was obviously bothering them. The Latino agent raised her hand. She looked
about thirty, with curly dark hair and a round, almost sweet face.

  “Yes,” Linderman said.

  “Special Agent Amanda Cruz,” she said. “Do you think you should excuse yourself from the investigation, considering the circumstances? I mean, it is your daughter.”

  It was an honest question, deserving of a thoughtful response. Being too close to an investigation led to poor decision making, and lapses in judgement. Cruz had every right to ask Linderman if he was up to the task.

  Linderman picked his words carefully. He wanted to tell Cruz not to worry, that he could handle it, only something was preventing him from doing so.

  Rage.

  The feeling was strange. Like he was flying down the highway at a hundred miles an hour. Fearful of losing control, yet not caring if he did.

  His rage began to boil over. He felt the overwhelming desire to curse out Cruz, and call her ugly names. Bitch, whore, wetback, came to mind. He imagined Cruz talking back to him, and the angry response it would incur.

  He bit his tongue to stop the words from rushing out of his mouth. He’d never cursed a woman in his life. The amount of times he’d raised his voice to Muriel he could count on one hand. This wasn’t him.

  So who the hell was it?

  He didn’t know. He counted silently to five, and the rage slipped away.

  “I probably should excuse myself,” he admitted. “Only we have a ticking clock. A teenage boy in Fort Lauderdale has been abducted. We need to move fast.”

  The answer seemed to satisfy Cruz, and she nodded thoughtfully.

  “Any more questions?” Linderman asked.

  The other four agents at the table shook their heads.

  “Good. Let’s get to work,” Linderman said.

  Chapter 35

  Linkage analysis.

  The words had become a catchphrase within the FBI during the past decade, and had helped track down and capture more serial killers than any single piece of forensic science.

  The concept behind linkage analysis was simple. By examining behavior that was contained in three distinct components of a crime, law enforcement would be able to draw a more complete picture of a killer, and as a result, bring him to justice.

  Standing at a white drawing board in the front of the conference room, Linderman used a magic marker to write the three components of linkage analysis.

  Modus Operandi (MO)

  Ritual

  Signature

  The five agents from the Jacksonville office stared at their laptops. Each agent had read Bob Kessler’s report about Crutch. Also on their laptops were the homicide reports from the six cities where Crutch’s twenty-four victims had been discovered. The police departments in those cities had emailed Linderman the information which they’d collected on those killings, hoping to get the cases off their books.

  “Let’s start with Crutch’s MO,” Linderman said. “Anyone want to take a stab?”

  The line brought grins from the group. Cruz went first.

  “It’s identical in each killing,” she said. “The victims are raped and killed and left in a wooded area that’s frequented by picnickers and nature lovers. Their bodies are naked, and have been bitten around the face and neck. In each city, three of the victims were severely beaten with a blunt instrument, while a fourth victim was not. According to the autopsy reports, each victim died from massive blood loss.”

  Linderman wrote each item in bold letters next to MO on the board. Then he turned around to face Cruz. “Do the victims share any similarities?” he asked.

  Cruz scrolled through the homicide reports. “The victims who weren’t beaten were all young, and small in stature.”

  “How young?”

  “Late teens.”

  “How old were the other victims?”

  “In each city, there was one victim in her late forties, while the other two were in their mid-twenties.”

  “Should we assume he’s profiling his victims before he kills them?”

  “It would appear so.”

  Linderman wrote these items next to Ritual on the board.

  “Who wants to go next?” he asked.

  Waller, one of the two African-American agents, spoke up. Tall and broad-shouldered, Waller carried himself like an athlete, his hands animated as he spoke.

  “Each of these crime scenes is identical,” Waller pointed out. “The bodies were dumped in the woods near each other. The autopsy reports say the victims died at different times, yet they all ended up in the same place. Crutch brought them to the woods and did something to them, then left them.”

  “At the same time?” Linderman asked.

  “Yes, at the same time,” Waller said.

  “How can you be certain?” Linderman pressed him. “For all we know, Crutch could have dumped the victims at different times.”

  The conference room fell silent. Waller needed more facts to bolster his argument. The agent glanced at his laptop while gathering his thoughts.

  “I don’t think so. Here’s why,” Waller said. “In each of the cities, hikers discovered the bodies. If Crutch had been dumping the bodies at different times, the bodies would have been discovered individually. That didn’t happen. In each city, the bodies were discovered together.”

  Linderman liked where Waller was headed, but still wanted more proof.

  “Why didn’t the police in these cities see this?” Linderman asked.

  “They didn’t have the luxury of looking at six crime scenes,” Waller replied. “Since the autopsy reports indicated the victims died at different times, the police in each city assumed the bodies were dumped at different times. I think the police were wrong.”

  “How can you be sure without evidence?” Linderman asked.

  “The similarities in the crime scenes is our evidence,” Waller explained. “Serial killers are driven by ritualistic fantasies. These fantasies express the killer’s primary motivation for committing the crime. Crutch was killing his victims, then bringing their bodies to the woods to perform the ritual, then leaving the bodies once the ritual was finished. That’s why the crime scenes in the six cities are identical.”

  Linderman added the points to the board next to the word Ritual.

  Four female victims in each city

  One middle age female (45-50)

  Two young females (20-30)

  One teenager female (15-18)

  Bodies brought to woods to perform ritual

  He examined what he’d written. They were getting closer to learning Crutch’s motivation, always a watershed moment when dealing with serial killers. His attention shifted back to the group.

  “So what’s the ritual?” he asked.

  Cruz again answered. “Crutch purposely chose wooded areas to dump his victims’ bodies. Those areas were all near hiking paths, and were well used by the public. There might be another connection here that we’re missing.”

  “In the sites themselves,” Linderman said.

  “Exactly,” Cruz said. “The police assumed the bodies were dumped in the woods because that’s where most killers dump bodies. But that may not be our killer’s motivation. The woods may have held some other significance to him.”

  The door to the conference room opened. Wood entered holding two cardboard pizza boxes and a six pack of Coke dangling from his fingertips.

  “Break time,” Wood announced.

  Soon everyone was eating. Linderman had asked Wood to order the food, wanting to repay the group for their time in some small way.

  “How’s it going?” Wood asked, biting into a slice of pepperoni.

  “We’re making progress,” Linderman replied.

  After break, the group studied the crime scene photos.

  A plasma TV was wheeled into the room, and the police crime scene photos taken in the six cities were displayed. The majority showed the corpses after they’d been dug up from shallow graves. The sameness of the dead women was striking — the older victims were tall and thin, the youngest
short and heavyset.

  Looking at the dead was never easy, and the Jacksonville team viewed the bodies in silence, the only sound coming from their writing instruments as they jotted down notes.

  “Who wants to go first?” Linderman asked.

  Waller lifted a finger into the air. “The victims were all props,” he said.