The Program (Jack Carpenter series)

by James Swain

  Until now.

  He couldn’t talk his way out of the web of lies he’d spun. They’d started the day he’d entered Starke, and had continued until a few short minutes ago, the facade of him being a soft-spoken Milquetoast easy for the other inmates to digest. But now the other inmates had been given a taste of the real him, and that was unacceptable even to their lowly standards. It was only a matter of time before they retaliated.

  He was going to die.

  The other inmates would gang up, and figure out the best way to kill him. They’d recruit another inmate who had nothing to lose, and give him the job. It would be like a badge of honor.

  He scurried around the yard, looking for a place to hide. He tried to join several groups of inmates standing in tight circles, but was rebuffed each time.

  “Get the hell away from us,” an inmate swore.

  “Yeah — fuck off,” another warned.

  He came to the basketball courts. A pick-up game was going on between a team of black inmates, and a team of white inmates. The white team couldn’t play worth a damn, but that didn’t stop them from throwing elbows and putting up a fight.

  A crowd of white inmates stood beside the court, shouting encouragement to the white players. They were muscle heads, and spent their free time in the weight room, pumping iron. Crutch stood behind their broad bodies, and pretended to watch the game. For a few minutes, everything was good. Then, one of the white inmates spotted him.

  “Look who’s here,” the inmate said.

  The inmate was a bank robber out of Pensacola named Justin Hainz. Hainz had a nasty side that even the black inmates respected. Hainz grabbed Crutch, and put him in a headlock.

  “Cut it out,” Crutch said.

  “You’ve been a bad boy,” Hainz said.

  “Haven’t we all?”

  “Ha, ha.”

  “Come on, let me go.”

  “Hey guys, look who came for a visit,” Hainz said to the others.

  The others formed a tight circle around the two, no longer interested in the violence taking place around the hoops. Crutch struggled to free himself.

  “Let me go!”

  Hainz threw him to the ground. Crutch landed on his back, and spent a moment trying to regain his senses. He looked up into a sea of hatred.

  “Who wants him first?” Hainz asked the group.

  “I do.” One of the blacks penetrated the group, and pointed at him. “Motherfucker ruined my business. Without my cell phone, I can’t talk to my runners no more.”

  It was his neighbor, Leon.

  “Come on, Leon, I didn’t mean to screw you up,” Crutch said.

  “Doesn’t matter what you meant,” Leon said.

  Leon raised his leg. Once Leon started kicking him, the others would join in. This happened often in the yard, the inmates pent-up rage turning into a feeding frenzy of violence. They would kick in his teeth and break his ribs and puncture his stomach and he’d go to the infirmary and never be the same. He wouldn’t die, but he’d wished he had.

  Kill him, the voice inside his head said.

  Crutch hesitated. So many times during his prison stay, the voice inside his head had told him to kill another inmate, or a guard. Just as many times, he’d refused to listen. It had been hard, but he had no other choice.

  But the game had changed. Now, it was about survival. Killing so that he might continue to live.

  Do it, the voice said.

  Crutch sprang to his feet and threw himself onto Leon, wrapping his arms and legs around the black inmate’s body. He did hundreds of push-ups every day in his cell, and was stronger than people thought.

  Leon tried to shake him off. When that didn’t work, he brought a fist up, and clocked Crutch in the back of the head.

  “Let go, motherfucker,” Leon said.

  The other inmates were slapping their sides with laughter. They did not see the threat, just as Leon did not see the threat.

  Bite him, the voice commanded.

  Crutch sunk his teeth into Leon’s neck and tore away at the flesh until he’d found the jugular vein. Warm blood splashed onto Crutch’s face and streamed down his neck. He brought his face away, and watched the blood geyser out of Leon’s body.

  Leon screamed and did a pirouette with Crutch still hanging on. Then he fell backwards, his body making a terrific Whumph! as it landed on the grass. The other inmates stepped back, their laughter gone.

  Crutch stayed on top of Leon, and drank his blood. He knew the perils of this, the inmates rife with AIDs and other fatally transmitted diseases, but he did not care. He had missed the erotic ecstasy of tasting a person’s blood as the life seeped from their body. It was like dying and going to heaven.

  It was love.

  Finally the guards pulled him off Leon’s lifeless body, and hauled him away.

  Chapter 38

  “I think we’re going about this wrong,” DuCharme said.

  Food was fuel during an investigation. They were eating chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant called Pepe’s in North Miami. Vick had not spoken ten words to the detective since he’d weaseled his way into her apartment a few hours ago. She still wanted to rip his head off for what he’d done to her.

  “How so?” she replied, upping the word count.

  “Son of Sam’s crimes are somehow similar to Mr. Clean’s crimes, right?”

  Vick wiped her chin with a paper napkin and nodded.

  “If we can figure out the similarity, it will lead us to figuring out what Mr. Clean does for a living, right?”

  DuCharme’s tone was nothing but condescending. Like the investigation was his, and she was just palling along for the ride.

  “Get to the point,” she said.

  “We’ve just wasted two hours reading up on Son of Sam, and haven’t found the similarity. Maybe we should be reexamining the files on Mr. Clean instead. You never know — something might jump out at us.”

  Vick stopped eating. DuCharme was as thick as a brick when it came to police work, yet this was a good idea. Even blind pigs got acorns, she supposed.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Vick said. “Instead of looking at files, why don’t we go and look at one of the crime scenes? It will give us a better feel for him.”

  “You mean where he dumped one of his victims?” DuCharme asked.

  “Yes. I did that when I was writing my thesis on Son of Sam. I flew to New York, and went to several locations in Queens where Son of Sam shot his victims while they were sitting in their cars. It helped me get a feel for the guy’s psyche.”

  “Any victim of Mr. Clean’s in particular?”

  “Barrie Reedy, the boy Mr. Clean abducted before Wayne Ladd. Reedy’s body was found two weeks ago in West Broward. The scene will be the freshest.”

  DuCharme flashed a toothy grin. There was a sparkle in his eye that said he thought there was still hope for them. Vick was going to make sure that sparkle was gone when the case was over. Until then, she would just have to suffer.

  Taking Vick’s Audi, they drove north on I-95 into Broward, then headed west on Sunrise Boulevard to the overgrown field near the Sawgrass Mills Mall where Reedy’s body had been found. Vick parked on the shoulder, and they both got out.

  The afternoon air was moist and still. In the west, black storm clouds filled the horizon, their march toward the city slow and ominous. By early evening, some area of the county would be punished by their fury.

  Vick trudged through the tall grass with DuCharme kicking at her heels. Reedy’s body had been found in the middle of the field next to the shopping mall, approximately a hundred yards from the service road. If she remembered correctly, the body had been fresh, and had not started to decompose.

  She came to the crime scene and stopped. It was a flat area with knee high grass. A No Dumping sign was posted on a nearby tree, covered in lewd graffiti. Pieces of yellow police tape still lay on the ground, the weeds flattened from the CSI people looking for clues. She rose on her tip-toes a
nd did a slow three-sixty spin, staring.

  “What are you looking for?” DuCharme asked.

  “The reason Reedy’s body was dumped here,” she replied.

  “What do you mean?”

  Vick lowered her heels and turned to face him. “Rule one of finding a body. Why was it dumped here? There’s always a reason. Most of the time, it’s the most convenient spot for the killer to use. That’s not the case here. Mr. Clean had to park on the service road, and carry Reedy’s body from his vehicle to this spot. Why did he do that?”

  A cigarette had appeared in DuCharme’s mouth, a lit match in his hand. He took a deep drag and shrugged.

  “We need to find out,” Vick said. “Let’s start walking the field.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “The thing which attracted Mr. Clean to this area.”

  Vick took a Kleenex from her purse and wiped the sweat off her brow. Then she put on a pair of shades and started her hunt. DuCharme took off in the opposite direction.

  She took fifteen steps and came to a small clearing with soda cans littering the ground. The spot looked like a teenage hangout. Kneeling, she ran her fingers through the grass, and found several cigarette butts and gum wrappers.

  She stood up and walked around the clearing. She came to a well-worn trail which led directly back to the Sawgrass Mall on the other side of the field. She guessed this was where teenage workers at the mall came on their break to drink sodas and smoke.

  She spent another twenty minutes searching the field, but eventually came back to the hangout spot. It was the only place on the field where there was any sign of human activity. DuCharme soon joined her, his forehead glistening with perspiration.

  “Find anything?” he asked.

  “You’re standing in it,” Vick replied.

  He looked around. “What am I missing?”

  “Mr. Clean dumped Reedy’s body near a spot where teenagers hang out. Why did he do that, instead of dumping it someplace else?”

  DuCharme had to think for a second.

  “He wanted it to be found?” the detective asked.

  “Yes. And he got his wish. Reedy was found right away. The question is, was this the first time Mr. Clean did this, or have we found a pattern?”

  Back in the car, they poured through the case files of Mr. Clean’s killings of prostitutes. Vick immediately found a number of similarities that had not popped out at her before. The bodies of his victims had been found near well-used areas in Broward County, including several public parks, the Holiday Tennis Center, a half-dozen shopping malls, and several golf courses. Each body had been found in a relatively fresh state, allowing the police to clearly identify what had been done to it. In every case, the body had been discovered by someone who regularly frequented the area.

  So what did it all mean? Vick didn’t know. She shut her eyes and basked in the car’s AC, trying to figure it out. Mr. Clean had hidden his victim’s bodies well enough to avoid immediate detection, yet in spots where he knew the bodies would be eventually found, usually within twenty-four hours of having been dumped.

  She glanced at DuCharme. He was reading a file, his lips moving silently.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  The detective kept reading for a few seconds more, then shut the file.

  “Something’s bothering me,” DuCharme said.

  “What?”

  “Mr. Clean wanted the police to find his victims, yet he never contacted the police to take responsibility for the killings. That’s not normal, is it?”

  Vick blinked. DuCharme was right. Serial killers who killed their victims in public places generally contacted the police or the media and took responsibility. It was how they satisfied their cravings for recognition.

  But that wasn’t Mr. Clean’s profile. He’d been killing women for a quarter century, and not once contacted the police, or the media. He was an invisible man.

  Vick was wide awake now. There was something else going on here, some other reason why Mr. Clean had dumped the bodies to be found. She turned down the AC and gave DuCharme her best southern smile.

  “Good call,” she said. “Now what does it mean?”

  DuCharme reached into the backseat and retrieved her thesis on Son of Sam. He opened the report to the section which detailed Son of Sam’s killings, and slapped the pages with his fingers.

  “It’s in here, right?” he asked.

  “Right,” she said.

  “Why don’t you drive, and I’ll read it to you. Maybe you’ll see it.”

  “Why should I drive?”

  “It was an old trick my partner used to use. When a case was bothering him, he’d drive around town and have me read the case file to him,” DuCharme explained. “There was something about the concentration that it took to drive the car that cleared his head.”

  “It worked?”

  “Most of the time, yeah.”

  Vick was willing to try just about anything at this point. She started the engine and drove down the shoulder of Sunrise Boulevard and merged into traffic. The roads were jammed, and she drove with her eyes glued to the sea of cars.

  “Start reading,” she said.

  “Okay. Son of Sam’s first tried to kill his victims with a knife. On three different occasions, he stabbed a woman on the streets of New York and ran away. When he saw no mention of the crimes in the newspapers, he assumed the women had survived, and decided to start using a gun.

  “He drove to Texas and purchased a Charter Arms .44 pistol and some bullets. He was afraid to buy ammunition in New York because he was afraid the police would somehow track down the shell casings to his residence.

  “His first victim was a nineteen-year-old named Donna Lauria. Lauria was sitting in her car with a friend named Jody Valente in front of Lauria’s home at one o’clock in the morning on July 21, 1976. Valentne started to exit the car when Son of Sam approached holding a brown paper bag. He drew a gun from the bag and fired five shots, wounding Valente and killing Lauria. Then he ran away.

  “Son of Sam later admitted to the police that killing Lauria and wounding her friend had sexually excited him. For several days after this, he read the newspaper articles in his home while masturbating. It satisfied a need which so far had gone unfulfilled.”

  Dark clouds were directly ahead. In her hurry, Vick had driven directly into the storm. It was the last place she wanted to be.

  She hit her indicator and tried to get into a turn lane. Heavy drops of rain pelted her windshield. A split-second later, the clouds opened up, and the downpour began.

  “Say that last line again,” she said.

  DuCharme ran his finger down the page. “It satisfied a need which so far had gone unfulfilled.”

  “That’s it.”

  Vick hit her horn and started cutting across the lanes of traffic. She came to the intersection and did an illegal U-turn and headed back the way they’d come. DuCharme said nothing, his mouth agape as he watched her drive.

  She punched the gas, hoping to outrace the storm. But it was too late; the darkness and rain had already enveloped them. At the next light, she threw her Audi into park.

  “Mr. Clean is dropping the bodies in these locations because it satisfies a need,” she explained. “He’s done it with every one of his victims. It’s part of his signature.”

  “Is that what links him to Son of Sam?”

  “Yes. Now we have to figure out what that need is.”

  The light changed. Vick’s car skidded on the wet road as she hit the gas.

  “Keep reading,” she told DuCharme.

  Chapter 39

  Dusk was settling as the Southwest Airlines jet touched down on the runway at Pittsburgh International Airport and the cabin of people broke into applause. The flight had been as rocky as a roller-coaster, and everyone was happy for the safe landing.

  Linderman pulled his overnight bag out of the overhead bin. He was one of the few onboard who hadn’t been bo
thered by the rough conditions. Flying in an airplane was safer than riding in a car, not that you could convince most people of that. The things that people should have been truly frightened of, they rarely were.

  Soon he was sitting in a rental on the Avis lot. He’d rented a GPS system, into which he keyed the address of the Crutchfield house. He did not know Pittsburgh, and was going to rely on the GPS to keep him from getting lost.