Spree

by Michael Morley

  From a small grocery store he bought eggs, juice, milk, sugar and bread; then he cycled round the block before he was satisfied no one would see him reenter his sanctuary.

  On a two-burner picnic stove, powered by a cartridge of Sterno, he cooked French toast. He ate it straight from the pan while drinking OJ from the carton and reading the papers cover to cover.

  Once he was done he washed up. He spent extra time on the Financial Times. The rest of the papers he took to the room with the handmade sign on the door that said Death Row. He’d thought long and hard about what to call the dark heart of his hideaway.

  Shooter pushed open the door and stared at the faces on the corkboard. “Well hello there, Gina, Zach and little Amy. I’ve brought you some friends to play with.”

  33

  SKU Offices, LA

  Jake’s day had gone from bad to worse.

  After chasing off the photographer, he got hauled into Crawford Dixon’s office. Not only did he get told to go and pose for the head shots the young snapper had wanted, but he also got his ass kicked for trying to get Angie involved in the investigation.

  “I didn’t!” he protested. “We haven’t even discussed the case.”

  “Then why was Sandra McDonald doing a war dance in her office while she had me on the phone?”

  “I’ve no idea.” Jake looked exasperated. “She and Angie have history. Maybe the AD’s trying to cause trouble for her.”

  Dixon shook his head in dismay. Office romances were always problematic. “Danielle Goodman was at this morning’s briefing. She’s our unit psychiatrist; you want profiling help, use her.”

  “I am using her. Ruis is with her now. Matter of fact, as soon as I walk out of here I’m joining them to see what she’s come up with.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  Jake saw his boss weighing him up. “Honestly, I never discussed the case with Angie. We don’t speak work as a rule—that is unless you count bitching about our bosses.”

  Dixon laughed. “I don’t. Now get outta here and conjure up a way of keeping that bastard Rawlings off my back.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Jake took the stairs back to his floor. He phoned Angie en route but it went straight to voice mail. He didn’t leave a message. Best voice his concern in person.

  Down the corridor he found Danielle’s room. He hated this place. She’d had it painted cornflower blue and lit by special lights that she claimed mimicked natural sunlight. The woman herself was an oversized version of an off-diet Oprah and so proud of her extremely large presence that she always dressed in the brightest of primary colors. Today, the forty-year-old was wearing a poppy red jacket over a midlength blue dress and red heels longer than some hunting knives Jake had used.

  She and Ruis were gathered around a TV monitor. A freeze frame of the mall killer hovered between them.

  “Danny’s got some interesting thoughts,” said Costas as he saw his boss.

  She smiled pearly whites at him. “How are you, Special Agent Mottram?”

  “I’m good, Danny, what’ve you got?”

  She floated a hand to a chair. “Please take a seat and I’ll recap.” Danielle tapped a red-painted nail on the monitor. “This is a very dangerous young man. His body language shows exceptional self-control and his actions display enormous violence. The combination is not a good one.”

  Jake creaked back on his chair. “I could have told you that, Danny.”

  She ignored his tone and continued. “He has remarkable confidence and dedication of purpose. Agent Costas says you both believe he is not military or police trained, which makes his use of a concealed weapon in an open space all the more astonishing.” She stared at them both. “Tell me, gentlemen, how do you currently categorize a Spree?”

  Ruis was first to speak. “The definition changes every few months.”

  “Which is why I stressed the word ‘currently.’ ”

  He shot Jake a look that said, What a ballbreaker, then gave the classic FBI terminology. “A Spree is someone who commits two or more homicides without a cooling-off period between the killings.”

  Jake could tell what she was driving at. “I’m guessing you’re intrigued by why the UNSUB ran away and how long his cooling-off period might be.”

  “Indeed I am.” She got up from her chair and waddled to a cornflower blue filing cabinet at the far end of her room.

  Ruis caught Jake’s eye and simulated holding Danielle’s wide hips while taking her from behind.

  She turned around with a file in her hands and almost caught him. “You guys need to read this. It’s a case from the 1950s and fits your UNSUB to a T.”

  She pushed the file into Jake’s hand. “Enjoy.”

  He looked down and stared at the name. “Christ, Danny, you’re not serious, are you?”

  “More than. The guy in there is the world’s most notorious spree killer. His string of homicides lasted two months and his debut kill started small—a storekeeper and a petty row over a stuffed animal.”

  Jake held up the file so Ruis could see. “Lincoln, Nebraska, 1958. You think we have another Charles Starkweather on our hands?”

  “Read it,” insisted Danielle, “then call me. It’s a story about a punk transformed into a monster. How a kid with a grudge and a gun brought fear to most of America.”

  34

  The mugshot of Charles Raymond Starkweather stared at Jake from his desk. Pretty much every cop in the world knew the story of how the teenager with a speech impediment and a chip on his shoulder grew balls the size of Mars once he got a gun in his hand. It had been immortalized in films such as Natural Born Killers.

  Starkweather was born in Nebraska, the third of seven children. His mom and pop had been poor as dirt but they’d also been decent, hardworking folk. Young Charles struggled at school and other kids bullied him. He was academically useless and dropped out early. His love life was just as bad and he struggled to connect with girls his own age.

  By eighteen he was unemployed, homeless and centering his affection on a besotted fourteen-year-old girl. Then one day, Fate took a truckload of manure and threw it into the face of a hurricane. Starkweather snapped. Out shopping for a furry animal, he settled an argument with a storekeeper by shooting him. Nonentity Charles was suddenly somebody. The emasculated had been empowered.

  Starkweather was on a roll. All fired up, he then went round to his young girlfriend’s house and killed her disapproving parents and baby sister. When she came home from school, they set off together on a road trip to hell that saw them shoot, stab and strangle everything from a dog to a baby.

  Jake hoped to God that wasn’t what he was up against. He grabbed the phone and dialed the unit psychologist.

  Danielle Goodman answered with a laugh in her voice. “Agent Mottram, I’ve already got a date tonight, so don’t you come pestering me with flowers an’ all your sweet talk.”

  Jake realized she’d seen his extension number on her display. “I promise not to. Danny, listen. I just finished the Starkweather file and I’m praying his ghost hasn’t blown into LA. Can you tell me exactly how you think our UNSUB is like him?”

  “You mean aside from the cruelty, the meanness, the sociopathic explosion of violence, the disregard for young and old, the killing of kids and seniors, plus the fact that he fled the scene and we both know he’s just brewing on where to strike again?”

  “Yes.” He half laughed. “Apart from all that.”

  “Well, I would expect our UNSUB feels he’s been the subject of a huge injustice. It’s probably something you or I would see as inconsequential, but it’s fired him up and triggered his rage. He may have some physical affliction like Charles Starkweather, maybe problems with his eyesight, and it could well be that a store assistant in the optician’s previously mocked him. Or perhaps he’s been wrongly accused of shoplifting at that particular outlet. Something set him off and now he’s going to run and kill.”

  “Any thoughts where?”<
br />
  “Your guess is as good as mine. I think he’ll run far. Once he got through those LAPD roadblocks I reckon he just kept going until he felt it was safe to hole up and destress.”

  Jake’s memory stirred. “Isn’t Starkweather’s ex still alive? Didn’t I read something about her being in a bad car accident?”

  “Yeah, over in Michigan. I’ll have to check.”

  “If she’s okay, see if you can talk to her. Get some insight.”

  “I’ll try.”

  Ruis burst through the door. “We’ve got something.”

  “Sorry, Danny, I need to go.” He dropped the call and looked to his number two.

  “There’s intel on a Hells Angel—well, to be precise a wannabe Angel. He got knocked back by the Santa Monica charter. They saw him as bad blood and he’s been hiding out and acting wild ever since.”

  “Too wild for the Angels?”

  “Yeah, hard to imagine. Apparently they like their craziness controlled these days. They’re trying to shake off the organized crime label and they have this motto, When we do right, nobody remembers; when we do wrong, nobody forgets.”

  “My, how public minded of them.” Jake flipped open a notepad. “Who’s saying what about this dirtbag?”

  “Contact in Anti-Gangs has a CI working the charter. He says a snot-nosed kid named Wayne Harris started bragging about killing people with his machine pistol. One of the charter acquaintances called him a bullshitter. Wayne pulled a MAC-10, shot him in both feet, then rode out of town.”

  Jake got interested. “Where and when did this go down?”

  “Charter bar, out on the coast, about three hours ago.”

  “What do we know of Wayne?” Jake underlined the name in his book.

  “We’re still learning. He’s twenty-one and has a juvie rap sheet for assault, DUI and drug use. Broken home, no siblings, a girlfriend named Emma-Louise Bakker—she’s sixteen and has been with him for a year or so.”

  “Shit.” Jake put down his pen. “Danielle must have some crystal ball; this is Starkweather all over again. Do we know where Wayne is?”

  “Holed up in a shack in Rustic Canyon with the girl.”

  “Okay, get some people over to her family. Set up phone traces on our man and this Emma-Louise. I’ll give a heads-up to Pryce and the local cops, sheriff’s office, et cetera; we don’t want to be falling over each other on this. Meanwhile, you get one of your best surveillance teams to find and scope out the shack while we put a plan together.”

  “I’m on it.” Ruis headed off.

  Jake picked up the phone and called Angie. “Hi. Sorry about this; we’ve got what might be a break on the mall shootings. I’m gonna be late, probably very.”

  “That’s good news—the break I mean, not you being late. You want to run the suspect by me for an opinion?”

  He hesitated before answering. “Best not to. Dixon chewed my ass because of something you said to McDonald.”

  She winced. “Sorry about that. I wouldn’t normally stick my nose in. It’s just that I’ve got bad feelings about this particular offender and I think I could help.”

  He tensed up. “Thanks, but Danny Goodman’s already all over it.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Hmm? What does that mean?”

  “Danielle relies too much on case studies and not enough on original thought.”

  “Me-ow!”

  “Hey, I’m not being catty, Jake. Please be real careful about this guy. He’s a grade A sociopath.”

  “That’s what Danielle said.”

  “She also say he’s not a Spree?”

  “Shoots like a Spree. Runs like a Spree.”

  “I know, but I don’t think he is. His level of planning and execution is more Serial than—”

  He cut her off. “He’s a Spree, Angie. Believe me. Danny thinks he’s as much a Spree as Charles Starkweather was.”

  Alarm bells sounded in her head. “Let me send you some thoughts.”

  “No.” His tone was harsher than he’d wished. “Please don’t. Dixon read me the riot act. Let me run this with Danny and we’ll talk later.”

  “O-kay.” Her tone was flat.

  He could tell she was pissed with him. “This weekend—how about we take a boat out from Marina del Ray, go down and spend the night at Redondo? Forget work and find the time to talk about all our stuff?”

  The gesture was enough to make her feel better. “I’d like that. Just make sure you take good care between now and then.”

  “I will. See you later.”

  35

  FBI Field Office, LA

  Notes from O’Brien pinged into Angie’s mailbox. Most of the time she ignored them while she studied the footage of the mall that Chips had “acquired.”

  Danielle Goodman was wrong.

  She was sure of it.

  The perp she watched on camera was a fledgling serial killer. He’d planned his strike meticulously, carried it out with the coolness of an assassin and then vanished like an escapologist. This wasn’t a dumbass venting rage. This was someone perfecting his craft.

  One particular thing intrigued her.

  It was the methodical way he walked around the store and finished off victims he’d already shot. She could see his lips moving as he passed among the corpses. At first she thought he was cursing them. Then she realized he was counting. Angie wondered if it was a compulsion. Some people had to repeat certain phrases over and over again when they encountered moments of stress. Or maybe he was literally just counting—making sure he’d killed the exact number that he’d planned to—that he’d fantasized about.

  She wasn’t yet confident enough to finalize her notes. But when she was, then she’d send them to Jake, whether he wanted them or not.

  Finally, she looked at the latest missives O’Brien had mailed her on the rape-homicide.

  She’d been right.

  There had been an attack in Lawndale.

  Ten days after the Lynwood assault, the fourth in the series, seventy-year-old Eva Hart had been knocked to the ground in the side passageway of her house. She’d been attacked from behind and her clothing pulled up over her head. Next door’s car alarm had accidentally gone off and frightened the assailant away. Miss Hart had reported the incident as an attempted robbery and housebreaking, but as she’d lost nothing, the crime report didn’t find many interested eyes.

  Angie checked her calendar. Four days later, the rapist had struck in Compton and killed Lindsey Knapp. The thwarted attempt would explain his surge in violence. He’d needed release and this time he had used too much aggression.

  She pulled out her notebook and looked again at the sketch she’d made for O’Brien.

  The double Z formed by her red pen showed a clear habit of moving west to east and north to south. It indicated such a fluid repetition of behavior that she doubted he would abandon or significantly alter it. In her mind, he’d do one of two things to claim his next victim. Either he’d cross the 110 again and strike in an area up to five miles south of Lawndale, or he’d go back to Lawndale and find another victim there.

  Angie pulled up a Google map. Torrance lay four miles south of Lawndale and, like every other place the UNSUB had struck, was within easy reach of the 110. But the more she thought about it, the more she favored Lawndale.

  Lawndale represented failure to him.

  Failure was something she was sure had triggered his offending.

  Something he could no longer live with.

  36

  Rustic Canyon Park, 22:00 hours

  The intel on Wayne Harris had been good enough for Jake to send his best teams out into the bush and dust.

  From what he and Ruis could piece together, after the shooting at the bar, the punk had scored several ounces of angel dust and run for the hills. Harris had broken into a ramshackle workmen’s hut and parked his Harley round the back.

  The couple had hung there for a few hours, no doubt blowing the drugs and fooling around; then they
’d gotten bored and decided it’d be fun to ride out to Sullivan Fire Road and shoot squirrels and birds out of the trees. Now they’d moved on. They’d ridden the motorcycle into the grounds of a derelict power station. A building with a rap sheet even worse than Harris’s.

  Murphy’s Ranch was the unassuming name given to the fifty-acre site that during the 1930s was being developed as the base for a self-sustaining Nazi community. The multimillionaires behind the scheme had hoped it would become the headquarters of American fascism. Like Hitler’s Aryan dream, it now lay in ruins.

  Jake and his teams had already started an approach from all four sides. They had parked their ops vehicles way back and hiked the mountain trails up to the site.

  High in the starlit night sky, an FBI helicopter hovered out of earshot, ready to provide extra surveillance should the target start a high-speed chase across the arid California landscape.

  Harris and Bakker had a fire going in the concrete-walled old station. It crackled loudly and spat reds and oranges through busted windows. SKU were watching and listening to everything. The two runaways were laughing so loudly and talking such crap it was clear they were either still high or had been hitting the booze as well as angel dust.

  Jake gave the order for all four units to close in. They’d been set at angles to ensure they didn’t catch each other’s cross fire, and only one of the four would actually enter the building.

  As boots moved across dried earth, the light from the fire suddenly went out.

  There was silence.

  Then the roar of a motorcycle engine.

  The Harley burst out of the compound, spitting grit.

  Its headlights were off. Automatic gunfire sprayed out of the blackness toward Jake.