Spree

by Michael Morley

  “Wishes he was. He’s whiter than white but talks like a rapper.”

  She shook her head.

  O’Brien smiled. “You said not to discount suspects just because they don’t tick all your boxes.”

  “I did say that; you’re right. Have you got his sheet?”

  “Better. I just had word that we’ve got him. At least we will have in a few minutes’ time. You want to sit in on the interview?”

  “Not really.”

  “Will you?”

  She gave a slight nod. “I have to make a call.” She went for the cellphone in her purse and stepped outside. There was no way she was going to make coffee with Jake at two-thirty.

  She got his voice mail and left a message. “Hey, I’m sorry, I can’t get back from the LAPD for the time we said. They’ve got a suspect on the way to the station and I want to sit in on the interview. Listen, I’m not stiffing you on purpose. I really want us to try to talk again. How about we go for sushi after work? Or pizza, if you prefer?” She hated pizza but would eat glass and hot coals if it could fix things between them.

  O’Brien appeared as she was talking: “Bensimon’s being brought in downstairs. They’re gonna take him through to an interview room.”

  She finished up her call and hoped to hell that this interview didn’t take all day.

  6

  SKU Offices, LA

  Jake took Corrie Chandler’s war story back to his boss.

  Crawford Dixon sat in his big leather chair in his big corner office and wished this shit wasn’t being brought to him. It was the kind of crap that stuck and stunk for the rest of your career. He listened intently to the account, then asked, “Do you believe him?”

  Jake’s reply came without hesitation. “I do.”

  His boss gave him grounds for doubt. “He could just be roasting the old chestnut of post-traumatic stress, preparing the ground for an insanity plea.”

  “I thought of that. And by the way, I think he might well have good grounds for an insanity plea.”

  “Hey, don’t go all bleeding heart liberal on me.”

  “Moral lines get blurred on the battlefield, sir. Right and wrong wear identical camouflage. The only thing for sure is that guilt over a kill is your worst enemy. It brutalizes you by day and stays so close it bunks with you at night.”

  “I know. I served, remember?”

  “No disrespect meant.”

  “None taken. We all have ghosts of guilt chasing us. Every cop that’s shot a gangbanger in an alley or a stickup guy in a 7-Eleven has night sweats; it goes with the territory.”

  “I was just trying to say, I—”

  “Then don’t. Don’t say it. Because this statement of Chandler’s is a clusterfuck of a bomb and you’ve just pulled the pin.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you? Do you really? Let me tell you something. Everyone’s going to catch shrapnel from this—State Department, Defense, White House, Army and probably us.” He made it personal. “You in particular.” Dixon took off his glasses and put them on his desk. He rubbed tired eyes and replaced the spectacles. “I’m sorry, Jake. You’ve done the right thing. You bring your cross to me. I carry it to the director’s desk and eventually the press finds someone to nail to it.”

  “Chandler will name the sergeant if we want. He opened up to me because we shared that moment at Griffith.”

  “How lovely for you both. I’m gonna take this upstairs and then I’ll get back to you.”

  Jake got to his feet. “I’ll send you a write-up this afternoon.” He headed for the door.

  “Make it vague.”

  He turned. “How so?”

  “Don’t be too specific. Prison log will show you went to see Chandler, so we can’t say this never happened. At this stage, it’s best if your report to me just says that he intimated there might have been a military atrocity that he took part in under instruction from a senior officer. Nothing more.”

  “I’m not comfortable with that, sir.”

  “Then get comfortable with it. And if you can’t, then forget the whole damned thing.”

  There was no point arguing. Jake nodded and left.

  The ass-covering had already started.

  One thing for sure, there was too much detail in Chandler’s account for it just to be a shot at a lighter sentence.

  Partway back to his office he turned his cellphone off silent and saw Angie’s missed call. He picked up the voice mail and swore.

  7

  LAPD HQ, LA

  Trent Bensimon was all attitude.

  He was dressed top-to-toe in baggy blacks, a hoodie pulled over his shaved head and oversized shades. Cheap gold chains dangled from a neck tattooed with a dotted line and the invitation: CUT HERE.

  Bensimon rocked on the back legs of his chair and chewed gum loudly. O’Brien and a female cop named Vanessa Gutierrez threw questions at him.

  “I tol’ ya twice, I was wit’ ma bitch. You do ya job an’ check her, dog. I ’ang out dat pussy all nite.”

  Angie watched from behind mirrored glass and felt for the young female detective.

  “We are checking.” O’Brien leaned across the table. “This lady you say you were with, Nina Mahoney, how old is she?”

  He laughed. Let all four legs of the chair come back to rest on the floor and matched the cop’s lean. “You knows ma type, dog. I likes pussy bin around sum, pussy wot holds me like a velvet hand.” He squeezed his fingers sleazily and nodded to the female cop. “Not like ya skinny young bitch here.”

  “Watch your mouth,” said O’Brien.

  The kid smiled wide and rocked back on his chair again. “Nina’s fifty. The big Five O. I gived her somethin’ special for her birthday las’ week. You know what I mean, dog?”

  The cop didn’t respond, except to bore a hole in his face with his eyes.

  Bensimon realized he was on thin ice. “Lissen, this a-nony-mouse call you got. I say it’s from a bitch named Tracy Durrell. Me and hers had a beef. You follow?”

  “About what?” asked Gutierrez.

  He ignored her.

  “Explain,” snapped O’Brien.

  “She’s fuckin’ bizzo, dog.” He jabbed a finger to his temple. “She’s jealous ’bout Nina. Bitch wants me hanging out wit’ her instead. Said she’s gonna split us up. Dog, she’s always shakin’ her big ass at me”—he grabbed his crotch—“jus’ beggin’ for bone.”

  Angie had seen enough. She called O’Brien’s cell. Watched him through the glass as it buzzed in his pocket and he reached for it.

  “I need to step out of the room and check on your alibi, Trent.”

  “Take your time, dog.”

  “And I need to step outside and vomit.” Gutierrez got up and followed her boss. No way was she going to trust herself alone with that animal. Another word and she’d kill him.

  Angie met them both in the corridor and gave them the bad news. “His alibi will check out. Even if it doesn’t, he’s not your man.” She could see they needed an explanation. “He’s attracted to older women because he doesn’t fear that they’ll make him feel sexually inadequate. He’s either a psychologically damaged premature ejaculator or, more likely, has an exceptionally small penis. Single older women understand his inadequacies. They will tolerate them because of the ego-lifting benefits that come from being with a young man.”

  “He’s no man,” said Gutierrez.

  “Agreed, but he’s no rapist either.”

  The female cop looked disappointed. Nothing would have delighted her more than locking him up. “How can you be so sure?”

  Angie didn’t mention that she was becoming convinced the offender was black. “He’s mouthing off all the time. Sex and talking about sex turns him on. That’s not our UNSUB. Our scum isn’t triggered by sexual urges; he’s set off by hate, by rage and resentment. That waste of skin and words in there couldn’t beat an egg let alone a human being.”

  Almost on cue, a chubby detective appeared in the corrid
or. He was breathless from a run downstairs. Sweat stained his blue shirt and a sheet of paper fluttered in his fist. “She vouches for him, boss. Nina Mahoney says he’s been staying at her house every night for the past month, never missed an hour between nightfall and sunrise.”

  “Fuck.” O’Brien looked like he wanted to punch a hole in the wall. “Get corroboration. She might be lying.”

  “She’s not,” said Angie. “I’ve gotta leave.” She turned to Gutierrez. “While you’re giving the boy in there the news that he’s free to go, hold your little finger up like this and waggle it in his face. He’ll know that you’re on to his secret. Believe me, you’ll ruin his fun for at least a few months.”

  8

  California

  The Strawberry Fields Massacre, as everyone was already calling it, was trending on Twitter. It was the most talked about subject on radio shows coast to coast and the lead story in all the national newspapers.

  To Shooter, fame was sweet. He sucked up whatever he could find about himself.

  A large selection of print coverage was laid out on his floor, including a detailed selection of head and shoulder photographs of the dead and injured.

  He sat with his scissors and meticulously cut out the pictures. First those of Mrs. Gina Page: “A teacher of English and charity worker.” He put her photos in one pile and then snipped out those of Mr. Zachary Borowitz, a teacher of mathematics and PE. Shooter had hated both subjects. Math was for the soulless, PE for the brainless.

  The victim who had gotten the most coverage was Amy Cassidy: “Just ten years old and all her life before her.” Shooter caught himself saying, “Boo hoo hoo,” and then he clipped the shots of her. Amy with her dog Zippy. Amy in her school uniform. Amy winning a beauty pageant. There was no end of shots of Amy. He couldn’t wait to see all the crybabies at her funeral.

  He sat for a moment and played Happy Families by putting pictures of Zach, Gina and Amy together. Maybe they really were together in the afterworld, and the bizarre thought made him wonder if their families would like that idea or hate it.

  He looked at a photograph of the teacher’s husband, Andy; he was a truck driver and ten years older than her. Andy was a bull of a man, with rounded shoulders from leaning over a wheel and a barreled stomach filled with too many fried dinners. He’d hate the notion of Gina being with Zach. You could just tell he would.

  The papers showed Zach was married to a pretty blonde named Ellen who ran an animal shelter. They’d only tied the knot a year ago, and from the wedding picture Shooter was looking at, he figured she was the freethinking kind of woman who wouldn’t begrudge her dead husband a little afterlife hanky-panky.

  He took the photos and pinned them in the very top corner of a huge corkboard that covered an entire wall of a room he’d christened Death Row. The name seemed apposite for a lot of reasons. This was the place where he could see his community gather and grow. Kill by kill it would get larger and more meaningful.

  Before he left the room, he looked at a side wall and a single picture he’d placed in the middle of it. To Shooter, it said more than the proverbial thousand words. It made sense of it all.

  Of the murders that had happened.

  Of the ones still to be committed.

  9

  SKU Offices, LA

  Back in the office, Jake and Ruis rang Pryce on a conference line to compare notes on yesterday’s incident.

  The SWAT leader kicked off. “We did a fingertip search of the woods and you were right—that’s where our gunman had set himself up. By the way, I’m here with Bobby Mankoff, my new number two; he’s going to fill you in.”

  “Hi, Bobby.” Jake knew him of old. A stocky New Yorker with a heavyweight’s build. He guessed Pryce had decided to have him promoted so he could keep people in line. “Missed you at the Observatory. Where were you hiding?”

  “Other side of the freakin’ country with the in-laws, that’s where.”

  “Tough luck, Bobby. What you got for us?”

  “A whole bunch of photographs taken out at the strawberry scene—I’ll email them to you shortly. You’ll see flattened grass on high ground about a hundred yards from the kill zone and only a few yards back into the woods. The space the UNSUB had gotten himself into had no trees blocking his line of fire, just firs to the right and left giving him shade and cover.”

  Ruis jumped in. “Are there lots of clearings like that, or would he have had to know those woods to find that spot?”

  “We asked ourselves the same question,” answered Mankoff. “From what I saw, there were three or four areas along the tree line that would have given you as good a sight of the field. In fact, two would have been better.”

  Jake threw in the obvious question. “Bobby, any idea why’d he pick that spot?”

  Pryce was the one to reply. “We think it’s because of the exit route. Being higher up the hill gave him a more covered and quicker escape through the copse. Seems the back of the woods gets used for dirt bikes. We found a lot of tire tracks down there and that got us to thinking the perp made his shots, ran to a bike and then was outta there before we even got a copter up.”

  “It figures,” said Jake. “I was wondering why the thermal cameras might have missed him if he’d been hiding out. Looks like we got the answer.”

  Pryce added some bad news. “Before you ask, there are no traffic cameras around the link roads near the strawberry fields.”

  “ ’Course not. Why would we get so lucky.”

  “Good news is there are plenty on the interstate heading into LA. We’ve got traffic cops pulling footage from anything with a lens to see if we can spot our Spree.”

  “We’re not holding our breath on that one,” said Mankoff dryly. “Good news is that Forensics did some great work out at the scene.”

  Pryce filled in the details. “Check this: from where the perp had laid out, they located the depressions he’d left in the earth with his elbows, knees and the tips of his toes. Then they ran thermal scans over that precise area and from that heat map they were able to plot the outline of his body.”

  “Impressive,” said Jake. “How’d he measure up?”

  “Not so tall. They set him between five nine and five eleven. The margin of error is down to what kind of soles he might have had on his boots.”

  “Depressions give a clue to his weight?”

  “The ground was too hard for them to stick their necks out on that.”

  Aside from height, it didn’t seem to Jake that they had a lot to go on. “Connor, did you get someone to clip grass and take soil samples in case he’d taken a leak or anything?”

  “Yeah, we did. Sheriff’s Department swept up every bit of surrounding litter, too, just in case the UNSUB snacked while waiting out there. I’ll let you know when the DNA profiles get run through databases.” Pryce had something on his mind that he wanted an opinion on before they all hung up. “From a SWAT point of view, we’re done now. But I’m real uncomfortable just leaving this with deputies out in the sticks. What’s your reading, guys? You think this worm is going to come out of his hole in the wood anytime soon?”

  “Bet your ass on it,” said Jake. “If he was a Serial, then we’d be in trouble. Sprees are predictable but Serials are tricky fucks and can keep you waiting for months or years. Not the good old Spree, though. Mark my words, he’ll be right back at it before the end of the week.”

  10

  FBI Field Office, LA

  Angie spent the afternoon working her profile and imagining how the rapist might develop.

  She knew that from a perp’s point of view a rape scene was a classroom. It’s where he got to learn. Where he experimented and developed his techniques and confidence.

  What scared the hell out of her was that she was sure he now realized he could spend much longer with his victims than he had.

  And, even worse, he could kill and get away with it.

  Angie was acutely aware that the UNSUB was preying on the most vulner
able group in society. Aside from their physical frailty, women in their seventies and eighties tended to live alone and go long periods without any contact from friends, neighbors or relatives. Certainly no one checked on them from bedtime to breakfast, and none of the victims had money to protect their homes with security systems and panic buttons.

  For now, her psych profile was the best thing the cops had to guide them. The UNSUB had never spoken to the victims and only Lindsey Knapp had seen him. Her deathbed description had been of a man of average height and build with a ski mask over his face and black leather gloves on his hands.

  It was next to useless.

  After the first assault, he’d bound and gagged his first victim with heavy-duty tape. Two attacks in, he’d gotten inventive and used strands of tape like a sticky brush postassault to pat the women down and make sure he hadn’t left any fibers or skin cells stuck to their clothing. Angie took this as a sign that he was becoming not only more forensically aware, but also aware that he might have made mistakes in the first attack. The tape had been manufactured by Scotch, not Duck, and was their most common silver-gray brand, with millions of units sold worldwide. Analysts were working on tracing the batches of powdered aluminum pigment used in manufacture, in the hope that it might lead them to sales distribution outlets. At best it would give them a haystack, not a needle.

  Her desk phone rang.

  “Angie Holmes.”

  “Hi, it’s Suzie Janner. I’m in the building. You got time for a coffee?”

  She did but wasn’t sure she wanted to have the conversation that Suzie would inevitably initiate.

  “No worries if you’re busy,” added the doctor intuitively. “I just wanted to check you were okay.”

  “I’m fine, thanks.” Angie gave in. “Come on up. I could do with a break.” She put the phone down and shifted a pile of files off the spare seat at her desk. The room wasn’t big enough for any soft seating. With Chips’s expansive workstation and burgeoning computer equipment, it was getting to the stage where she couldn’t swing a mouse, let alone a cat.