Spree

by Michael Morley

  Her car squealed to a halt yards before the LAPD cordon thrown around the restaurant. As she got out, she saw that the crime scene was virtually in the shadows of the HQ of the California Department of Justice. The anagram they’d found at the Sun Western Mall saying “Judge and Jury” suddenly had extra resonance.

  A young cop wandered toward her. She was without her badge and any authority to be there, so she had to wing it. “I’m Doctor Holmes from the FBI.” She pressed keys into his hand. “Please get my car off the street and lock up for me.” Angie didn’t wait for an answer. She strode away just as two paramedics passed, carrying stretchers laden with the wounded. One was an old man hit in the hand, the other a teenage boy shot in both legs.

  Just outside the restaurant entrance she saw Crawford and Ruis. Before she walked over she took out her smartphone and snapped several photographs and mailed them to Chips. He’d know what to do with them.

  “It’s him,” Angie said as she headed over to the two FBI men. “This is the same UNSUB as hit the mall; you know that, don’t you?”

  Ruis looked shocked to see her. “What the hell, Angie? You shouldn’t be here.” He put his hands on her shoulders and tried to turn her around.

  She pushed him off and looked to his boss. “Crawford, don’t make another public mistake. Believe me, this is your guy. Let me inside. Let me see where he shot first, where he came from. You know you need me on this.”

  The section chief looked her over, his face full of doubts. “Ruis is right, Angie, you shouldn’t be here. But you are. And you’re right; your insight might help. I’m gonna give you ten minutes. Less if I think you’re not coping professionally, or if you’re getting in the way of the team.”

  “Thanks.” She walked toward the restaurant’s entrance and felt the enormity of the case rush at her like a howling gray ghost. Hundreds of droplets of blood had hit the inside of JZ’s large front window and run down in vertical streams.

  Ruis tagged her and added what he knew. “We’ve got eyewitness accounts from a waitress named Kay Podboj and three customers.”

  “Are they still here?”

  “In our ops van.” He held back for a second. “Danielle is talking to them.”

  “Let’s hope she doesn’t screw that up. What story are the eyewitnesses telling?”

  “Customers were hazy, but waitress Kay says she saw a masked man dressed in a white Lone Ranger suit shout ‘Hi-ho, Silver’; then he fired on a party table in the corner. At first everyone thought it was part of the show. There are pretend guns going off all the time. Kay says after the initial shots, he turned and pretty much shot out the whole restaurant.”

  “Lone Ranger as in full Disney drag, or just kind of that style?”

  “As in the recent Johnny Depp turkey.”

  She looked around. “And the UNSUB portrays the masked battler for justice, right here outside the Department of Justice. This mother sure wants to rub our noses in it.” She opened the door and walked inside.

  There were bodies and blood everywhere.

  The ME hadn’t yet arrived and paramedics were still separating the dead from the unconscious. Angie presumed that, as usual, there’d been an agonizing delay before law enforcement officers had given the all clear for the helpers to go in.

  The place had been wrecked. The long mirror at the back of the bar was busted into centuries of bad luck, the rich dark wood veneer splintered into a winter’s worth of kindling.

  Angie glanced right. A number of dead women and children were slumped like blood-spattered rag dolls over a long table. It was covered in popped birthday balloons and a stomach-turning mush of spilled drink, slopped foods and bodily fluids. Corpse flies had already found their way to the table and crawled over hands and faces. The sad combination of moms and kids pinched a maternal nerve.

  Ruis drifted a hand across the carnage. “That’s where the first shots were fired.”

  She cleared her head and took in the scene. There were two doors barely twenty feet away. One was a flap-hinged entry to the kitchen, so waitresses could bump it open with their shoulders or butts. The other led to the washrooms.

  He followed her eyes. “A waitress said the gunman came out of the restroom with a big shoulder bag. He dropped it, shouted his lines and opened fire. CSIs are already working the stalls and basins.”

  “The bag will have contained his normal clothes. Any CCTV in here?”

  Ruis looked to his left. “Just at the registers and over the bar—in case of staff fraud.”

  “And out on the street?”

  “Plenty, but they’re high and wide. LAPD has got a detail grabbing tapes and searching. There’s a surveillance camera on the building opposite, but the sun was burning straight into it.”

  She shook her head in dismay. “Is this guy one lucky sonofabitch or what?”

  “Luck runs out,” said Ruis optimistically.

  Angie’s eyes flicked across the room and took in the spatter on the walls, the pooling on the floor, the splintered furniture, smashed glass, burst balloons and bloody corpses. Her training rearranged it into a logical order. “It looks to me like the UNSUB was focused on this one table.” She pointed at the corner where six dead boys lay close to six dead moms. “There’s more concentrated, close-up violence here than anywhere else.” Neither she nor Ruis spoke as they mentally blotted the scene. Seeing murdered children was always emotionally painful, but this scene tugged at Angie more painfully than any others had done.

  “You okay?” Ruis touched her shoulder.

  She didn’t say anything. Her mind was spinning violently. It was a centrifuge, separating personal and professional thoughts.

  “Twelve.”

  He frowned. “Twelve what?”

  “Just like at the optician’s in the mall. There are twelve dead.”

  Ruis counted. “Twelve here but there are other fatalities across the room.”

  “It’s twelve,” insisted Angie. “The others didn’t matter. He just had to clear a way out for himself. He wouldn’t have cared if they’d lived.”

  Ruis was still looking at the moms and boys. “It could be coincidence that there are twelve.”

  She turned to him. “Serials don’t do coincidences—they do patterns.” She remembered that Jake had all but laughed at her when she’d pointed out how the number twelve kept coming up in the Sun Western slayings. He’d so convincingly knocked down her theory that she’d begun to doubt herself. Not anymore. She let her eyes roam once more over the murdered moms and their precious kids. “Ruis, I need to know exactly what these poor people were celebrating. Whose birthday was it? Who booked it? When did they book it? I want all their names, ages, addresses and everything you can find out about them. Don’t leave out any scrap of information that you find.”

  A thought hit Angie.

  Scrap of information.

  “The bastard’s been going through their trash.”

  “What?”

  “It fits with the scene you and Chips went to this morning. That horrendous effigy of Tanya Murison had been made out of her castoffs.”

  “We don’t know that for sure.”

  “Believe me, you can bank on it. The UNSUB had gone through the old lady’s trash, picked out her nails, her lipstick and makeup. That’s how he knew she’d be at the optician’s that day. Tanya would have gotten a letter through the post, or been given a card. She’d have marked it on her calendar, then thrown it away.” Angie’s eyes lit up. “It hadn’t been random. He’d known the exact moment she’d be there.”

  Ruis could see the sense in her assumption. “And what about here? You think he found something in someone’s trash saying the party was happening at this joint?”

  “Something like that. Maybe an invite, or home-printed cards that hadn’t come out as neat as someone wanted and had been tossed.” She knew she was clutching at straws. “We have to find out if there’s a link between one of those moms and Tanya Murison.”

  Ruis touched her
arm again. “Are you sure you want to get swallowed up in all this, Angie?”

  She touched him back. “I have to, Ruis. I’ll fall apart if I don’t.”

  9

  Skid Row, LA

  Shooter stood in the shower and ran through his mental checklist. As far as he could make out, there’d been no mistakes.

  Street cameras would have captured images of a young black man in jeans and hooded sweatshirt going into the restaurant carrying a canvas bag. Closer shots might highlight his smart designer stubble and a head of tight curls cut shoulder length.

  Surveillance footage in JZ’s would show a black masked “cowboy” in white shirt and pants draw two Glocks from a holster and turn party time into murder time.

  There had been no street cams covering the giant billboard where he’d left his bicycle, but to be safe, after torching his cowboy disguise he’d emerged from behind the board on the southern side of East Third in decorator’s garb. He’d then cycled less than a mile east to the Little Tokyo/Arts District station and left his bike padlocked there. From the station he walked south into Skid Row and had been back inside his sanctuary in less than twenty-five minutes.

  He was sure the cops would find the burned clothes but doubted they’d pick up on the bicycle. If they did, then he was comfortable that they’d be thrown by the circumlocutions he’d made on foot after chaining it up, and no way were they going to link his three different physical appearances.

  Shooter’s only worry was on the forensic side. He’d worn transparent gloves going into the restaurant and hadn’t taken them off until he’d stripped to get into the shower. But he feared strands of fake hair he’d glued to his normally shaved head could have come off when he’d changed. His DNA was not on record, but instinctively he knew leaving any form of trace was bad practice.

  He toweled dry, dressed in baggy black pants and matching short-sleeved shirt. He put the painter’s overalls and sneakers in the canvas bag and then squashed everything into a backpack. On the way into work, he’d dispose of the lot.

  Shooter poured a glass of Sunny D and ate granola straight from a box as he watched the TV news. The killings were the lead story. He flipped from channel to channel. They were all working the same basic information—a single birthday party of twelve dead, plus the owner of the restaurant and two others.

  He went online and found the shootings were already trending. A blog said he was the hottest social media crime story since the Bling Ring, the Hollywood teenagers who’d burgled the homes of stars like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton.

  Next, he read the FBI and LAPD Twitter feeds. They’d been appealing for witnesses and were already inundated with bogus sightings. One woman said she’d seen a cowboy boarding an alien spaceship in Beverly Hills. Another libeled several individuals in Compton, Culver City and Santa Monica as “certain killers.” No one came remotely close to fingering a guy on his own in an old factory in Skid Row.

  Shooter Googled “JZ,” “JZ Slayings” and “JZ Massacre.” He found a food review of the restaurant that gave it three stars. A lead article on Huffington Post was titled “Lone Ranger Kills Kids at Birthday Party”—it didn’t have much detail, just hazy eye-in-the-sky video from a news copter that showed nothing. Then there was a link to a Facebook page that had quite a good amateur shot of blood on the restaurant window. Below it, a caption in gory red font declared: LAPD 0—LONE RANGER 15. It made him smile. The same pic was doing the rounds on Twitter. A contribution there read: THINK BOUT THE VIKTIMS FAMLIES B4 U RETWEET YOU SIK FUCKS!!!! Shooter scrolled down and watched the vitriol roll in. Whoever had taken the picture and posted it had certainly invited a torrent of abuse.

  Judgelysia was the name that he found, beneath a female silhouette.

  There were links to her other social media outlets—Blogger, Mashable and Boing Boing. Shooter laughed. Man, she was a crazy-tongued bitch. Her rants were pure napalm and were all over The Daily Beast, Smashing and Fail Blog.

  The Judge said she considered herself a hacktivist. She actively supported disruption by groups like Anonymous and called for people to crush and kill injustice before it crushed and killed them.

  Shooter grew bored and was about to click away when he came across a day-old picture of Jake Mottram, posted by the FBI as part of an appeal for witnesses to his murder. Judgelysia had painted bullet holes in his head. In her trademark red font she’d written: HERO to ZERO!

  10

  Downtown, LA

  Angie came out of the restaurant exhausted but still in the zone. She took long, slow breaths to clear her lungs of the smell of death, then scanned the street and tried to work out which way the UNSUB would have come and gone.

  Crawford caught her eye and walked over. “So what do you think?”

  “I think it’s our mall guy, I really do. CSI just found several short head hairs in a cubicle in the men’s room.”

  “I do believe men with heads and hair go into those stalls.”

  Another day she might have laughed at his attempt to lighten the mood but not today. “What’s interesting,” she continued, “is that they were not on the cistern or over the back of the toilet seat; they were found up near the door.”

  Crawford got the significance. “UNSUB put his bag of cowboy gear on the toilet lid and stood with his back to the door while he got changed.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking. This guy is a freaking master of disguise. Whatever we get on camera is only what he wants us to have.”

  Ruis joined them. “One of the uniforms followed up reports of a fire behind a big billboard less than a block away. Someone torched the hell out of something.”

  “Clothes,” guessed Angie. “It’ll be his Lone Ranger gear. He did a fast change so he was free to mingle with the crowds.” She looked around. “Makes me wonder if he’s still close—even watching us.”

  Ruis shook his head. “He’s gone in the wind. I can feel it.” He pointed to the river of traffic running twenty yards away. “I’m betting he had a vehicle parked on a lot around the corner from that billboard. He simply got in and vanished. It’s the obvious thing to do.”

  “This guy doesn’t do the obvious,” replied Angie.

  Crawford chipped in, “Wearing a Lone Ranger outfit in front of the Department of Justice isn’t obvious?”

  “Well, we didn’t see it coming, did we?” She looked in her shoulder bag for a bottle of water and took a long drink. Her phone was in there and it reminded her to ask Ruis about Jake’s official FBI device. She recapped the bottle and turned to him. “Do you think I can have Jake’s cellphone back? I guess you’ve downloaded what you want and checked his messages.”

  He eyed her suspiciously and then looked to Crawford.

  “She can have it,” said the section chief. “Angie, while you were in the restaurant I spoke to Sandra and she says I can have you work the case, but it’s my risk. So if you play on my team, there are some rules. And they start with you not burning yourself out and not holding back on us. Understood?”

  She nodded.

  “You shout, you come clean if things are getting too much.”

  “I get it.”

  “Okay. Give her the phone, Ruis.” He looked toward her again. “You find something on there, you let us know straightaway, not after you’ve checked it out.”

  11

  FBI Field Office, LA

  The beep caught Chips’s attention. “I have to go, lover. I’ll call you back.” He hung up and typed in the code to clear the screen lock on his computer.

  Judgelysia had been getting a steady flow of tweets since he’d posted the photo Angie had sent him and the Hero to Zero comments they’d agreed to put out.

  But the new one was different.

  It wasn’t abusive. It was smart. And intriguingly, it came from someone called JudgeMinos.

  Chips knew that Minos, along with Rhadamanthus and Aeacus, were the three mythological judges of the Underworld, ruled over by the god Hades.

  The
message left on Twitter said: ONLYU&IRFIT2JUDGE.

  He felt a rush of excitement.

  Instantly, he tried to trace the sender.

  The Twitter account was linked to a dummy email address. Chips “pinged” it—a way of sending a signal to the URL like a sonar signal.

  Nothing bounced back.

  No telltale IP address.

  “Man, that’s weird.”

  He repeated the process to see if he had made a mistake.

  He hadn’t.

  Chips opened a command console and ran an advanced “IP-lookup” search. “Come to Daddy. Come on, my little beauties.”

  A series of numbers should have come up but didn’t.

  He sensed he was facing someone with computer skills at least as good as his own. “So, my tricky friend, what are you hiding behind?”

  He guessed the sender was using an advanced form of anonymity package.

  “Let’s see if you can beat this.” He ran a search program devised by the FBI’s cyber crime specialists. It quickly shuttered through the tweet’s coding.

  Nothing.

  “Now, that’s smart.” He smiled in curious admiration at his imaginary enemy. He thought for a few minutes and guessed the sender was using a type of TOR package and somehow mirroring the Twitter feed. TOR stood for “The Onion Router” and was a multilayered encryption tool designed to protect the anonymity of a computer user. Chips had first come across it as a student. It continuously and randomly bounced an IP address across a volunteer network of thousands of servers all over the world. Tracking the origin of the bounce was impossible unless you had months and unlimited manpower.

  Chips cracked his fingers impatiently and watched the screen. “Come on, honey, where are my magical digits?” Usually a series of different numbers such as 12.34256.789 would show up, but he was only getting zeroes: 00.00000.000.