Spree

by Michael Morley

  “Better than good. They were excellent. When you’ve finished your food, can you pull together a list of everyone in all four areas who has been involved in hate crimes over the past two years?”

  “Hate crimes?” He turned his computer on and rummaged in the muffin bag for his Triple Choc Daystarter.

  “Please. And break them down by sex, age, ethnicity and religion. I don’t think we’re looking for your ‘normal’ sexual offender. I think our UNSUB comes from the violent, angry end of the spectrum rather than the sexual power or sadistic end.”

  “I’ll get on it as soon as this old steam box is up and running and me and this sweet chocolate floozy have had our moment.” He bit into the glazed top of the muffin.

  “That’s disgusting,” she said jokingly. “And petty theft. Go back five to seven on that one.”

  He nodded full-mouthed, his lips peppered with black crumbs.

  Angie’s desk phone rang. She picked it up and grabbed a pen to make notes. “Doctor Holmes.”

  “Hi, this is Cal O’Brien. I’m the officer in charge on the Serial we sent you. Do you have time to talk?”

  “We’re still working the profile.” She gestured to Chips to hurry up. “I should have a preliminary for you in a couple of hours.”

  “Any chance you could drop whatever you’re doing and meet me at a crime scene in Compton?”

  Angie glanced at the map on the wall next to the evidence board. “We don’t have a crime scene in Compton.”

  “We do now. An old woman, a widow living alone, was attacked in the early hours of this morning. Violated the same way as the others, so we’re sure it’s our guy.”

  The profiler resisted lecturing him on the dangers of being “sure” so early. She scribbled with her pen to get the ink flowing. “I’ll come straightaway. What’s the address?”

  “She lives on East Kay, but meet me at the corner of Long Beach and I’ll sign you through the cordon. Could you be there in half an hour?”

  “Not unless I fly. Traffic’s bad all down to the I-10 at the moment. Make it forty-five. How’s the victim?”

  “Not good. She’s in ICU. Cracked ribs, broken nose and lost three pints of blood. Given she’s eighty in two days’ time, that’s a big list of injuries to get over.”

  “Poor woman. You said broken nose—was that from a fall?”

  “No. The UNSUB hit her in the face with the baton he uses for the violations. I know what you’re thinking—he normally only comes at them from behind.”

  “Yep, that’s what I’m thinking.”

  “When you get here I’ll tell you more. His MO is similar but different. Our sicko has a new prop. One that opens up a whole extra dimension to his offending behavior.”

  16

  SKU Offices, LA

  Jake had hoped to sneak into work. Get his paperwork done. Scoot over to Angie’s unit and begin some serious bridge building.

  It wasn’t to be.

  His entry was greeted with embarrassing applause. It spread from the gunned-up hard-asses in Kevlar tuxes to the short-skirted secretaries who gave him doe-eyed looks as he passed by.

  Ruis Costas, Jake’s number two, was just back from holiday. Freshly tanned and full of energy, he couldn’t wait to give his boss a viselike handshake and hero hug. “I saw the news footage at the airport. Man, that Corrie Chandler’s one lucky fucker.”

  “Come into my palace and let’s catch up.” Jake gestured to a tiny glass booth that housed a single desk and an old filing cabinet. Once they were alone, he opened up. “The cops so nearly blew it.” He wrapped his jacket round the back of his chair and sat. “Do you know a guy named Connor Pryce?”

  Costas took the seat opposite. And shut the door. “Yeah, I do. Friend on the force said he worked Fraud with him. Said he was a proper hotshot. Great brain but by all accounts an ambitious sonofabitch. Smart money is on him making chief within five.”

  “Only place he’ll make is the ER if he ever screws me over again.”

  “What did he do?”

  “What didn’t he do? Mr. Future Chief let a news copter fly into the restricted space when I was walking up to the Observatory. Then, when I’m inside with Chandler and have just talked him down to a puppy whimper, Pryce comes banging down the corridor in his combats like a Hummer running on busted rims.”

  Costas laughed.

  “Not funny. I had to knife Chandler to stop him from spraying me with a Remington.”

  “That’ll explain why Dixon was down here just before you came in.”

  “Tell me you’re jerking my string?”

  “Afraid not.”

  Jake pictured the section chief getting all hot under the collar and not understanding how everything could have been so much worse. “I better go up and get my ass kicked, then.” He got to his feet and almost turned the tiny desk over in the process. “If I don’t come back, then all this is yours.” He gestured to the cramped surroundings.

  “Gee, thanks, boss, it’s so much more than I deserve.”

  They squeezed out of the office and went their separate ways.

  Jake took two corridors to Crawford Dixon’s corner office, a slab of real estate five times the size of his box, with rubber plants standing on either side of his door. The chief’s secretary was on the phone at her desk and mouthed for him to go on through.

  He knocked, opened the door and stuck his head inside. “Morning. I’m told you were looking for me.”

  Dixon was hunched over a stack of paperwork, pounding an oversized calculator. Bespectacled, midfifties, silver-haired and trim, he was dressed in white shirtsleeves and a tight black tie. “Come right in.” He didn’t look up. “I’m just arm wrestling the budget and need to total this mother.”

  “Rather you than me, sir.”

  He totaled a column and looked up with a smile. “One day, Jake, as you ascend the greasy pole of further promotion, you’ll have to do more than just stick in your figures for SKU and complain about the raw deal you get back.”

  “I’m praying that’s some way off, sir.”

  Dixon took off his glasses. “I just wanted to congratulate you on yesterday. I had the mayor on the phone first thing. He’d been expecting a bloodbath out at the Observatory and was relieved it ended without any further body bags being paraded on the news.”

  “We got lucky.”

  “No, you handled it well. I received a note from Chief Rawlings at the LAPD. He said Pryce had written you up as a star. Also went on record to say he would most probably have had to kill Chandler if you hadn’t dropped him with the knife.”

  Jake bit back the lines of criticism that came to mind.

  Dixon knew what he’d been thinking. “Let it go. Pryce knows he fucked up, rushing in there, Jake. This is his way of making good. It keeps the saints from Internal Affairs off your back.”

  “I understand. I’ll call him.”

  The section chief rose from behind his desk and extended his hand.

  Jake took it and Dixon shook hard. “What you did yesterday made me proud to be your boss. It took courage. The American people feel better—safer—when guys like you do things like that. Just be careful that those big balls of yours don’t block your eyesight and you make the wrong call.”

  Jake smiled and reclaimed his hand. “I’ll try to keep my balls out the way, sir.”

  17

  Compton, LA

  Angie swung her Toyota off North Long Beach Boulevard onto East Kay and spotted a worried-looking man pacing the sidewalk some twenty yards ahead on her right.

  She’d never met Callum O’Brien, but everything about him said he was a cop working a difficult case: the crinkled brow, the cigarette he was lighting from the one he hadn’t yet finished, the crumpled suit and thatch of hair he’d forgotten to comb. They were all indicators of a rape investigator lost in the puzzles and horrors of his work.

  She parked the Camry and called as she walked back. “Lieutenant?”

  “That’s me.” He ex
tinguished the cigarette with a rub of his fingers and slid it into his jacket pocket.

  “Angie Holmes,” she said up close.

  “Thanks for coming.” He pointed across and down the road. “The victim is a Mrs. Lindsey Knapp. Her house is on that side, about a quarter mile away. You want to ride or walk?”

  “Walk’s good. I’d like to get a feel for the area.”

  He set off at a casual pace and took out his smartphone. “Hang on and I’ll pull up a Google map so you can see approach roads as we talk.” His nicotine-stained fingers stubbed the device and Angie smelled years of tobacco on the blue wool of his jacket as she leaned close to see the display.

  “This is us; we’re heading toward Van Ness. As you can see, the UNSUB could’ve come south down Long Beach like you did and turned onto Kay, or caught an earlier right onto East Peck and then worked his way through the back streets on foot.”

  Angie ran a manicured nail over his screen. “Or driven down to Van Ness, dropped his wheels there and come back.”

  “Guess so.” O’Brien added another option. “Could also have parked up on Rosecrans and walked through.”

  Angie lifted her eyes from the phone and took in the roughness of the street. “No disrespect to our lady, but she’s not a celebrity and this ain’t Bel Air.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, our UNSUB had to know this hood. He knew Mrs. Knapp lived alone. Knew where to park and walk from.”

  “You’re figuring premeditated victim selection?”

  “I think so. And given all that knowledge, it would mean he’d be relaxed and blend in. The steps we’re making now are in his comfort zone. So if the UNSUB had wheels, he left them somewhere nearby that he was sure he’d be safe walking back to.”

  The cop thrust the phone at her again. “Okay, look at this on satellite feed. East Kay is bottom of frame; the gray building to the right is a big thrift store. He could easily have parked there and walked through an alley.”

  Angie shrugged. “It’s possible, but unlikely. Those kinda stores have more surveillance cameras than the CIA. Local guy would know that. Kid brought up on the streets would be totally aware of where each and every security lens was.”

  He put the phone away. “Sometimes you get lucky. I’ll still check it out.”

  “You do that.” She didn’t think it’d pay off and O’Brien didn’t look like the type of guy who got lucky very often.

  They walked in silence and Angie mulled things over. For sure, they were in the run-down end of a better part of the hood. Two parallel lines of cheap and neat detached homes were set back behind metal fences and rubbed-out patches of fried grass. Some folks had painted and fixed up; others had just let run-down slide irretrievably toward broken down. The one thing they had in common was barred windows. There wasn’t a glint of glass without antiburglary bars. A certain sign that fear came with the darkness.

  Behind the visible housing were dozens of other identical boxes, stacked in as tight and deep as developers had been allowed. Litter clogged storm drains and a heap of broken windshield glass sparkled in the gutter like someone had dropped a sack of diamonds.

  Angie saw crime scene tape fluttering up ahead and got the heightened sensation she was walking exactly the same route the attacker had.

  She glanced back across the blacktop. There was no street lighting here. The homes immediately opposite appeared to be unoccupied. Trees on the sidewalk obscured the views from those farther up and down the block. She imagined herself as the offender. If she tucked in closer to the garden fences, she’d be invisible once the sun had gone down.

  O’Brien badged a uniform standing duty by the gate and signed his access log. He held up the tape for Angie to duck under but she wasn’t ready. She was still taking in the victim’s small detached home.

  It was made from clapboard that had, once upon a long time ago, been painted a cute light blue and maybe looked something close to welcoming. Hot summers had bleached away the color and exposed the board. The roof looked short of a tile or two. A postage-stamp lawn was dominated by a big old beech. It had sucked the life out of the ground around it and stretched up high and proud above the little house. Right now, the tree was dripping a big pool of shade, but late at night it would provide a black wall of solid cover for any scumbag wanting to steal his way to the house. A low-level, rusted metal front fence was interrupted by an unlocked gate that might as well not have been there. Angie guessed that the best it had ever managed was to stop kids running across the lawn. There were no burglar alarms, sensors or cameras on the property. Anyone living here was a sitting duck for the criminally minded.

  She dipped beneath the tape and followed O’Brien down a concrete path broken by weeds and the tree roots.

  He held the door and she walked inside.

  It smelled of cats and dust. Dirty kitty litter and an overflowing kitchen wastebasket regurgitating leftovers. Years of wet laundry had caused black damp to climb a wall by the back door.

  Away from the stench Angie picked up the scents of Mrs. Knapp’s life. A cheap perfume that no doubt she’d been making last as long as possible because she couldn’t afford a fresh bottle. Old potpourri, displayed in a dish on a small replica table by the gas fire, most likely where she sat and watched TV with a blanket over her knees in winter. It was way past its prime but still gave off hits of jasmine and cedar. Angie envisioned Mrs. Knapp being loath to throw it away. She seemed to have a love for nature. A vase by the window contained withered flowers and water gone green. The blooms had never been anything special, just carnations; they came cheap and lasted a long time.

  Angie bit back the sadness and asked O’Brien the big question: “How did the attack go down?”

  He picked a photo frame off an old sideboard. “This is Lindsey Knapp.” He handed it over. “The guy in the shot with her is her late husband, Gerry; he died five years back. It was taken at Disney in Anaheim. He had cancer and wanted to go there once more before he died.”

  She looked at the shot. It was one of the auto prints you get when you go on a ride. By the startled looks on their faces, it had been snapped halfway through a run on a scary roller coaster. Gerry had chemo baldness and his face was already skeletal thin. Lindsey had white, cotton-candy hair, young blue eyes and a happy mouth. Angie saw no signs of lipstick or makeup.

  O’Brien got around to the unsentimental part of his story. “Mrs. K had been watching the tube and dozed off. Something woke her. Maybe the UNSUB breaking in, maybe noise on the TV.”

  Angie looked around. “How’d he break in?”

  “Bedroom window had warped last summer. She’d never got it fixed. He could’ve come through there. Or he simply could’ve opened the back door—she hadn’t locked it.”

  Angie shook her head. It was a practice more common among the elderly who lost keys or simply liked to wander in and out of the yard and have a breeze brighten up their homes.

  “Anyway,” continued the cop, “she opens her eyes and there he is—stood bold as brass right in front of her.”

  She remembered his comment on the phone about the frontal attack. “Wait a minute. In front of her? This doesn’t sound like our guy.”

  “He was masked.” O’Brien took a beat. “Scumbag was wearing a black ski mask but he wanted her to see what was on it.”

  “Which was?”

  “RAPIST. Across the front of it in big, white capitals.”

  18

  SKU Offices, LA

  Ruis Costas had that look on his face.

  The kind that told Jake he wasn’t going to get the time to sneak off and make his peace with Angie.

  The big slab of Hispanic muscle squeezed into his boss’s tiny office. “We’ve got a really bad one. SWAT is on the way to Strawberry Fields, a family fruit farm out at Moorpark. A shooter’s been picking off a class of ten-year-old kids out in the crop fields. Just learning how many are injured or dead.”

  The rest of the briefing came as they headed
for the garage.

  The location was almost an hour away and the FBI helicopter was already in use.

  They climbed into a Fed Ford, a 4×4, with roof lights, gun kit and medipacks in the back. Ruis was still talking as he started her up. “Ventura County Sheriff’s Office and the Highway Patrol are both based in the same building, just a spit from the crime scene, but they have no specialist marksmen and there are none at Thousand Oaks.”

  “What about Simi Valley?”

  “Same story. They’ve got Patrol, Traffic and Dispatch, not much else.”

  Jake pulled out his cellphone and dialed the number Pryce had given him yesterday.

  The LAPD man picked up instantly. “H’lo?”

  “Connor, it’s Jake Mottram—you on your way to Moorpark?”

  “Five minutes off. I just got coptered to a nearby field; we’re grid searching for the UNSUB.”

  “D’you already know how things went down out there?”

  “Not in detail. There’s still a cloud of panic over the place.” He sounded close to breathless as he hurried away from the chopper. “Two teachers and one kid dead. Another teacher and two more children wounded. No one’s seen the shooter, just who he hit.”

  Jake had lots of questions but they’d have to wait. “Catch you at the scene. Hey, before I forget, thanks for the report you filed. My boss says you’ve kept Internal Affairs off my back.”

  “You’re welcome. Thanks for the slack you cut me. It’s appreciated.”

  Jake dropped the call.

  Ruis gave him a knowing look. “He cover your ass on his screwup?”

  “Yeah, he did.”

  “Smart move.”

  A silver Merc slid out slowly in front of them.

  Ruis flicked on the lights and sirens. The driver in front swerved out of shock, then pulled to one side and let them pass.

  The road stayed a maze of stopped and crawling vehicles, all the way down to the I-405; then they got to open up the Explorer’s three-and-a-half-liter engine for almost thirty miles.

  Fast road ran out as they exited Ronald Reagan Freeway and turned onto Los Angeles Avenue. “We’ve only about a mile to go.” Ruis wished he hadn’t spoken as they hit a crawl.