“Police are also looking for Cam Nguyen, a missing George Washington University student, in connection with the murder of Mad Man Francones at a notorious District massage parlor earlier this week.”
That interested Sunday, and he kept listening as he got an envelope, addressed it, and stuffed the letter inside. He wet the glue and the stamp with a sponge and decided to mail it straightaway.
But it was raining outside, and before he could get his coat on, he heard keys in the lock. The front door swung open.
Acadia came in all wired, like she’d been up all night partying on speed or cocaine. She carried a flashlight and a stout cut branch. When she saw Sunday, her nostrils flared and she kicked shut the door with the heel of her shoe.
She tossed the length of wood and the flashlight on the sofa and came at him, feverishly unbuttoning her blouse. He smelled her as she attacked him and knew all too well that particular odor oozing from her pores.
Acadia had killed again.
He knew it as surely as if he’d done the deed himself.
Part Three
APRIL IS THE CRUELEST MONTH
CHAPTER 46
I left work around six that Tuesday evening with little to show for ten hours of work. It was as if we’d come to a standstill on every case on our desk. At least there had been no new murders in DC that day, and I gave weary thanks for that as I got into my car to head home.
My cell rang halfway down Pennsylvania Avenue. A miracle. Damon was calling in for the second day in a row.
“Dad?” Damon said in an agitated voice.
“Hey, kiddo. What’s up?”
“One of the school security guards, Dad, he got killed out in the woods behind my dorm last night.”
“Killed?” I said, shocked. The Kraft School was an idyllic place in the middle of nowhere. It was part of why we’d sent him to school there, far away from the street influences that can take a boy down before he’s even started. “How?”
“I don’t know,” Damon said. “Some of the cross-country kids found his body. They said his head was, like, bashed in.”
“Police there?”
“All sorts of them. They’re talking to everyone in the dorm, you know, asking did we hear or see anything.”
“Did you?”
There was a pause before he replied, “Not really. I mean, I thought I heard, like, someone yelling ‘Hey, D-top,’ but I thought it was in my dreams.”
“Hey, D-top?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Damon said, sounding miserable.
“Male? Female?”
He thought about that. “Male, I guess. I just woke up for a bit.”
A murder on the Kraft campus and my son might or might not have heard a male yell “Hey, D-top.” My initial impulse was to go straight there, but I couldn’t. I had no jurisdiction, and my own murder caseload was overwhelming.
I said, “You want me to put in a call to the police up there?”
“No. It’s not like that or anything. It’s just that …”
“What, son?”
“I dunno, Dad, I guess I’m not that used to people dying around me, like you are.”
I sighed, said, “I’m sorry it happened. You knew the guard?”
“Carter. Everyone knew him. Carter was a good guy.”
“That makes it worse,” I said sympathetically, and despite my concern, or maybe because of it, tried to change the subject. “How’d the calculus test go?”
“It was physics, and it went fine,” he said, distracted now. “Listen, I gotta go. Dinnertime.”
“Looking forward to seeing you next week.”
“I am, too, Dad,” he said, and hung up.
I drove the rest of the way home in silence, feeling my skin prickle with worry, wondering why in God’s name someone would want to bash in the head of a security guard at my son’s school.
And what the hell did “Hey, D-top” mean?
CHAPTER 47
The following day, a Wednesday, I was drinking coffee and scanning the newspapers when Sampson tossed an envelope on the desk that looked like a lunatic had written it.
Postmarked the day before, addressed to me, no return address, and the fonts on the envelope were random, the letters multicolored. The same was true of the letter inside, which made the words hard to decipher at first sweeping glance. The margins were covered in strange and troubling cartoonish doodles.
One lurid caricature appeared to depict me holding a magnifying glass to my eye like Sherlock Holmes, and possessing an enormous penis on which birds were perched. Feeling rightfully disturbed by that, I was about to toss the letter and chalk it up to being in the public view from time to time and therefore a target of ridicule by the mentally ill. But there was something about it. Forcing myself to deal with the strange font sizes, styles, and colors, I read the letter.
Dear Dr. Bungler Cross,
You have no clue, no vision, and you are barking up the wrong tree.
In my considered opinion, the killings at the Superior Spa had nothing to do with Mad Man Francones. He just happened to be a sex addict who got in the way. The media jumped all over it because of his celebrity. So you, a man of little imagination, jumped all over it because of Francones’s celebrity.
Dog wanna bone?
If you’d done your homework, you’d have discovered that there have been other incidents like the killings at the Superior Spa. Look in Tampa, two years ago. Look in Albuquerque, four years ago. It will penetrate your thick skull eventually, and you’ll see what you’ve really got on your hands.
No regards,
Thierry Mulch
I read it twice more, seeing things like that phrase: “In my considered opinion …” That’s the kind of language an expert testifying at a murder trial might use in response to an attorney’s question. So Mr. Mulch was smart, well educated, and — if the stuff about similar mass killings proved true — an amateur sleuth who knew what he was doing.
But why the crazy typefaces? Why draw me like that?
Was Mulch the killer? I’d had serial murderers taunt me over the years, but in those cases the killer was up-front, making it a game of him against me. In this case, however, Mr. Mulch was calling me an idiot from the sidelines.
Or was he? There was clearly something way off about the guy, as if he had a chip on his shoulder, calling me Bungler and talking about my thick skull. And the penis?
Who are you, Mr. Mulch?
Turning to my computer, I ran the name Thierry Mulch through Google. I got fifteen hits.
The first lived in Santa Clara, California, and appeared to be some kind of social media entrepreneur. Another Thierry Mulch was a regional sales manager for Kirby vacuums based in Nebraska. A third was involved in the feed, seed, and fertilizer business in southern Kentucky. The closest any of them got to Washington, DC, was Thierry Mulch of Covington, West Virginia, but according to a brief obituary in the local paper, he’d died in a car crash sixteen years ago at the age of eighteen.
The others were spread from Maine to Arizona, a cross-section of men who did not stand out and scream “smart crazy bastard” in any way whatsoever. I ran the name through Facebook and found much the same list. There didn’t seem to be that many Thierry Mulches in the world.
I put on latex gloves, got an evidence sleeve, and slid in the letter and the envelope. My fingerprints were on the letter, but maybe Mr. Mulch’s prints were there as well. It was certainly worth a shot, anyway.
Sampson returned from the cafeteria with two cups of coffee. I showed him the letter. He scanned it, looked at me, and said, “That supposed to be you with the big, uh, physicality?”
“Evidently.”
“So he understand something about you I don’t?” Sampson said, laughing.
“Read the letter, wise guy,” I said, turned away, and started searching for killings in massage parlors in Tampa and Albuquerque.
It didn’t take long to find them.
CHAPTER 48
Two Aprils before, a hooded killer had attacked Sensu Massage in Tampa, killing two Korean women, a male customer, and the guy working security at the front desk. All were shot at relatively close range. Bullet placement — head and chest — had in all cases ensured a quick but violent death.
I soon reached Steven Hall, one of the Tampa detectives charged with investigating the slayings. Hall said that the killer in Tampa had left little if any evidence, though he’d neglected to take the security tapes with him.
“You never see his face,” Hall said. “Very smart about it. But you see him taking the third girl.”
“Third girl?”
“Esmeralda Felix, twenty-year-old Cuban-American coed at Florida State, working her way through school.”
“This sounds like the same guy,” I replied. “We’ve got a missing Vietnamese female from George Washington University who worked in the spa.”
“Hope she doesn’t turn out like Esmeralda,” the Tampa detective said before explaining that the student’s body had turned up on a remote beach south of Naples, Florida, sixteen days after the massage parlor killings in Tampa. “She’d been dead for three days, strangled with a strip of green terry cloth. Before the sicko throttled her he cut off her nipples with pinking shears.”
I tasted something foul at the back of my mouth, asked Hall to e-mail the file to me in the morning, and told him we’d be in touch if we got any significant leads.
Arlene Lavitt, the detective overseeing the massage parlor killing in Albuquerque, was less forthcoming when I reached her at her desk. Then I told her I used to work FBI behavioral science with Gabriel Rodriguez, the current chief of the Albuquerque police department.
“I’m sorry,” Detective Lavitt said. “We’re just swamped here.”
“You haven’t heard about the murder rate in DC?” I asked.
She sighed. “I can’t even imagine.”
“Just tell me what I need to know and I’ll be out of your hair.”
Detective Lavitt was all business then, and shared the following with me: Four Aprils prior, a hooded male opened fire in the Empress Spa on a desolate stretch of Highway 85 south of Albuquerque. A Korean girl working there was shot in the head. So was an older woman at the front desk. A third female was shot in the chest in the locker room. A fourth was kidnapped.
“Let me guess,” I said. “She turned up dead, mutilated?”
“Strangled but not mutilated,” the detective replied. “Fifteen days after she disappeared, a hiker found her body up on US Forest Service land east of the city. She’d been dead two days.”
“Pick up any terry-cloth fibers on the body?”
“As a matter of fact. Green terry cloth.”
I considered the two cases. “Some of his ritual appears set and some of it is evolving, Detective.”
“You’re saying you think he’s a serial killer?”
“A mass serial killer. Albuquerque might have been his first go. Certainly the first one we know of, anyway. I’ll have the Tampa files sent to you.”
She promised to send me a copy of the file on her case as well. I hung up and told Sampson everything I’d learned.
The big man looked sober, sipped his coffee, but then shook his head slowly as if swallowing a bitter pill. “He’s evolving. He doesn’t torture the girl in Albuquerque before strangling her. But two years later he mutilates the student in Tampa before he takes her out. Hate to say it, but makes me wonder what sick new ritual he’s got planned for Cam if we don’t find her first.”
My stomach soured completely, and I put my coffee down. Nodding grimly, I picked up the bizarre letter that had begun my day. “But somehow I keep coming back to Thierry Mulch. Who is this guy?”
CHAPTER 49
The following morning, Marcus Sunday smiled at the woman at the front desk at Sojourner Truth School on Franklin Street. But she was looking suspiciously at his flaming-red Abe Lincoln beard, white pants, white shirt, purple shoes, and violet suspenders.
“Thierry Mulch, here to see the principal,” he said, handing her a flawless forgery of a California driver’s license that featured a photo from Preston Elliot’s school ID doctored up with a red wig, red eyebrows, and the Lincoln beard.
The woman took the fake ID and ran it under a lamp to check the blue-light watermark, which was right where it was supposed to be. She handed it to him without any change in expression and gestured over his shoulder, saying, “Ms. Dawson’s waiting for you down the hall there. First double doors on your right.”
“Love it,” he said, winking at her. “And thank you.”
Sunday turned and strolled down the hallway, enjoying the reflections of himself he caught in the glass cases that lined one wall. With this getup, he was one step shy of a cartoon character. Just about perfect for his intended audience.
The writer sniffed. What was that smell? Burgers frying in the school lunchroom? Had to be. Was there anything more elementary school than that?
He neared the double doors and heard the excited chatter of children. A tall African American woman dressed in a blue business suit came out. She beamed at him, said, “Mr. Mulch?”
Sunday reacted as if overjoyed. “Principal Dawson?”
She grabbed his hand, pumped it, said, “You don’t know how much your offer to come speak to our children means to me.”
“Giving back,” Sunday said modestly. “It’s the least I can do.”
“Well, I know they’ll appreciate it.”
“Not as much as I will.”
She opened the door and let him pass inside.
The auditorium was packed with second and third graders, who erupted into cheers and laughter when Sunday started grinning and waving with wild exaggeration, as if he were some escapee from Ringling Brothers.
The writer responded to their amusement by punching at the sky and skipping sideways up onto the stage, where he stopped and looked about brightly, searching for someone in particular.
The principal followed uncertainly and went to a podium. Waving her hands to calm the churning crowd of seven- and eight-year-olds, Ms. Dawson called into the microphone, “Quiet down, now. As fun as Mr. Mulch seems to be, I hope you listen closely to what he has to say.”
She paused, waiting for the last goofballs and whisperers to stop their squirming antics and fall silent.
“Thank you,” she said. “Mr. Mulch is the founder of a website like Facebook that is going live later in the year and is dedicated to kids your age. He’d like to tell you a little about himself, his life, and the site. Mr. Mulch?”
Sunday didn’t respond at first. Amid the clapping children, he’d spotted the one he was looking for, over there, third row, at the end on the right.
“Mr. Mulch?” the principal said again.
The writer cocked his head, shifting his focus off his quarry and smiling at the principal. “Glad to be here, Ms. Dawson.”
Sunday stepped to the podium, let his eyes roam over the kids looking up at him with the sort of immediate attention given to a man well over six feet tall with a shock of flaming-red hair.
“You’ll hear this again in your lives,” he began. “But Mr. Mulch is here to tell you that you can do anything you want, be anybody you want to be. When I was a little boy about your age, I lived on a pig farm. And now look at me.”
CHAPTER 50
Sunday twisted his face until he had the boys laughing, and most of the girls, except for a few who were crinkling their noses and whispering, “Eeeuuw, like a real pig farm?”
Perfect, he thought, glancing at the one he’d come to see, sitting forward, watching, waiting.
“We lived in central Appalachia, up a holler in West Virginia,” the writer went on, laying on a little southern charm. “I tell you, children, we were as poor as poor can be. Raising pigs was the only way my mama and daddy knew to make money, so it’s what they did.”
Sunday paused, seeing he still had most of them but determined to have all of them. “My house stank,”
he said, doing his best to look revolted. “My yard smelled worse, especially in the summer when it was hot. Them pigs would poop everywhere and lay in it and just grunt and grunt. All happy and such.”
The children started to giggle and clap their hands over their mouths. He’d known they would, and glanced over at Ms. Dawson, who was frowning.
“I had to feed the pigs,” the writer went on. “Sometimes I had to wash them and shovel out their sty.”
That simultaneously grossed out the children and glued their attention on him. “I hated it,” Sunday continued. “Just hated it.”
He paused dramatically before adding, “I used that hate to drive myself at school so I wouldn’t have to live on that pig farm anymore.”
Sunday went on in this vein, now telling a largely fabricated story about studying until late at night so he could win a scholarship to college, where he majored in computer engineering and learned to write code.
He told them how he’d worked for a computer game company for a while before he’d come up with the idea of a website for elementary school kids.
“When I was growing up, I didn’t have friends,” Sunday said. “There wasn’t a girl that would give me the time of day. I mean, would you be friends with a kid who smelled like pig poop?”
He waited until their laughter died, continued, “So I came up with this website idea so kids like you could have friends far away from home. Like all around the world. Doesn’t that sound cool?”
Kids clapped. Others shouted, “Yes!”
Sunday pointed at his head, said, “I’ll tell you more about the site in a second, but it’s important that you know that I did all this by being positive. As a kid, I used to hate that pig farm, but now I kind of like the fact that I grew up there. Makes my story even more interesting, don’t you think?”
Sunday saw that the one he was interested in was nodding, and he smiled right at the child, said, “I used to hate my parents, but now I actually like the fact that they were pig farmers.”
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