Dead Man Running

by Steve Hamilton

Five minutes in the house and he had already decided what needed to be done. Even if he knew it wouldn’t be popular.

  “Everybody out!” he said, moving to the doorway so that anyone else in the house could hear him. “Now.”

  “I understand if you need to take over the crime scene,” Millens said, “but the ME’s on his way right now and—”

  “No,” Halliday said. “We’re not moving the body.”

  Millens took a moment to process what he was hearing. He looked back and forth between Halliday and Cook.

  “You’re not serious,” he said.

  “He’ll come back again tonight,” Halliday said. “She needs to be here. One more night.”

  He didn’t feel like giving the detective a crash course on how a certain kind of “organized” serial killer works, the kind of killer who returns to the body several times after death for his further sexual gratification.

  Like Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer.

  Like Ted Bundy.

  “You’re not leaving her here,” Millens said. “You don’t have to. Think about it, Agent Halliday. If he comes back, you can still catch him.”

  “You don’t understand,” Halliday said. “He’ll know if the body is gone. He won’t come anywhere near this place.”

  “I’m not leaving her here,” Millens said, nodding toward the body under the sheet. “It’s that simple.”

  “Not your call to make,” Cook said, standing next to his partner.

  “Get all of your men out of here,” Halliday said. “Make everything look exactly like it did. I mean everything, right down to those footprints in the hallway. Which never should have happened, Detective. Find a rake, a brush, whatever it takes. In thirty minutes, I want this place to look untouched.”

  Millens just stood there, looking back and forth between the agents.

  “The sheet over the body,” Halliday said, knowing this would be the hardest part. “I assume you did that.”

  “No way,” Millens said. “No . . . fucking . . . way.”

  “I’ll do it. After you’ve left.”

  “When they find out you didn’t let us take her away—”

  “We can’t help her now,” Halliday said. “What we can do is stop this guy before he kills ten more.”

  Millens shook his head and left the room without saying another word. Halliday looked at his partner.

  “Go,” Halliday said.

  “You really think he’d know if the body was gone?”

  “You heard the man. The curtains were open.”

  “And the light was off,” Cook said. “Even if he was on that road back there—”

  Halliday put up his hand to stop him. He’d been taught long ago to trust his own instincts, the same instincts that went all the way back to the brief time in his career when he’d worked with the agents who had invented a new way to track serial killers. These agents studied them; they interviewed them; they took them through every case, going over every detail. They got inside their heads, even if that was the last place you’d ever want to be.

  Thirty years later, Agent Halliday knew that the curtains had been left open for a reason. And that, lights on or off, the man they were looking for would never return to an empty house.

  Cook knew his partner well enough not to press it any further. When he turned and left the room, Halliday was left alone with the body.

  He had just talked to his daughter that morning. She was getting ready to come home from the hospital. If he had taken that retirement package, he’d be home right now with his wife, waiting to hold his first grandson.

  But here he was. Two and a half hours after that phone call, standing in this bedroom.

  He looked down at the still form on the bed. Then he lifted the sheet.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS ALMOST TWO A.M. They’d been waiting in the van for five hours. Halliday, Cook, Detective Millens, and another agent, named Pfeiffer, from the regional SWAT team. All four men were wearing tactical vests. Halliday’s stomach burned from his third cup of coffee.

  “The suspect was here around midnight last night,” Millens said. “Don’t these guys stick to a routine?”

  These guys.

  “Yes,” Halliday said. “Maybe all that commotion around the house today . . .”

  Millens gave him a look, like Don’t even try to pin this on me or my police department.

  Halliday was already starting to regret his decision to let Millens sit in on the surveillance. The FBI had quickly installed its own cameras all over the house, and had patched those into its own secure video feed, all relayed to a series of monitors here inside the van, which was parked in the courtyard behind one of the neighbors’ houses. They were smart enough not to park it on the street. Smart enough to make sure everything looked exactly the same. Everything.

  Millens was sitting next to Halliday, rocking back and forth with nervous energy. On the feed from the bedroom, the two men could see the body lying in the center of the bed, unnaturally still, the exposed skin glowing in the infrared light.

  “I see something,” Cook said. He was on the other side of the van, watching another monitor, with the feed from the external camera they’d mounted a mile away in the Sonoran Preserve parking lot. Halliday turned to look, but Cook’s eyes were thirty years younger, so it took a few seconds for Halliday’s to catch up.

  Then he saw it.

  The vague figure of a man, walking away from a vehicle, toward the camera they’d mounted on a light pole. As he passed under the light, his face was obscured by the baseball cap on his head. He was moving quickly. With purpose. Leaving the parking lot and entering the trail.

  Heading toward the house.

  There were two agents waiting in the closed-up rangers’ building. They contacted Halliday now over the radio to let him know what he had just seen with his own eyes.

  He’s coming your way.

  Another decision Halliday had made. Let the man get to the house before we move. Let him come through the door. Don’t try to pick him up in the parking lot. It was a decision he now had twelve long minutes to wonder if he’d regret as he watched the next monitor with the video feed from the rooftop camera.

  The man should be on the street by now, he thought. Even walking in the dark, it’s less than a mile.

  He got spooked. Now he’s running. We’ll never see him again.

  But then Cook pointed to the monitor. “There.”

  Another movement on the screen. The same figure, growing larger.

  Halliday could feel the adrenaline pumping through his body. He could sense the same in the other three men in the van. The SWAT agent was on his feet, ready to open the back door.

  Halliday keyed the mic on his radio.

  “Nobody moves until he enters the house.”

  “Why are we waiting?” Millens said.

  “He won’t touch her again,” Halliday said to him. “I promise. But I want him in that house.”

  They watched the figure as he came close to the front door, moving quickly but without rushing. Like a man with no doubts, no worries.

  Then he stopped. He seemed to be looking right at the rooftop camera. Looking right at Halliday with the blurred face of a pale yellow ghost.

  Halliday keyed the mic again.

  “Everyone hold,” he said.

  Halliday watched the still figure, holding his breath.

  Open the door, God damn it.

  Open the fucking door.

  The figure disappeared from the rooftop camera’s view. Halliday quickly looked to the other monitor, saw him stepping into the living room and turning on the light.

  “Take him!”

  The back door of the van was thrown open. Halliday was last out of the vehicle, his partner already halfway to the house. He s
aw the other agents converging—from a darkened house on the other side of the street, from another house on the property behind. Three directions, twelve men in total, all armed, including eight more members of the regional SWAT team. Halliday tried to catch up to them, hoping the lead men would stop the UNSUB in time.

  He wanted to keep his promise to Millens.

  When Halliday made it to the front door, he had to take a moment, half doubled over, to catch his breath.

  There was a man on the floor, his hands cuffed behind his back. Halliday bent down to see his face, pulling off the man’s black baseball cap. Late forties maybe, long light brown hair, fair skin. He was wearing black jeans, black hiking shoes, and a black dress shirt that looked freshly ironed. Just in those two seconds, Halliday was already seeing a man who was smart, who was careful, who was so neat he made sure his shirt wasn’t wrinkled when he broke into a house to visit a corpse.

  The man looked back at him with something like a smile. No surprise. No anger. He was about to say something, but Halliday didn’t want to hear it. Not yet. He left him there and went to the bedroom, thinking, At least he didn’t make it this far. He didn’t even get a chance to turn on the light and see her again.

  Halliday stood in the doorway. In the dim glow from the window, he saw the woman’s body on the bed. He opened the closet door and found the white sheet he had taken away from her earlier that same day. With great care, he unfolded it and placed it over her body.

  “Thank you,” he said to her.

  He stood over her for a while, listening to the men in the other room, knowing exactly what they were feeling—how you wait and wait for hours and then in the course of a few seconds you’re in motion, everything a blur. Even after you take your man down, your heart is still beating fast. The adrenaline has nowhere else to go. These men would be up for the rest of the night, pacing back and forth in their bedrooms, or sitting with open bottles at their kitchen tables.

  We did it. We took down a serial killer.

  For Halliday, the night would go differently. He’d go home for a couple of hours, just long enough to catch his breath, get up and make some coffee, put on some new clothes. Then come right back to the office. Years ago, he wouldn’t have left the suspect, would have stayed up forty-eight hours in a row if he had to. But he knew he’d be back before anything important happened, and that his young partner would handle things in the meantime.

  Besides, Halliday needed to be with his wife on a night like this, even if it was just slipping into the bed next to her for a few minutes. She’d wake up and ask him if everyone had made it home alive. After thirty years married to an agent, she knew that was the most important question to ask.

  Yes, he’d say.

  Did you catch him?

  Yes.

  Good. Just like that.

  Then, while he stared at the ceiling, he would listen to her breathing as she went back to sleep.

  * * *

  —

  BY THE TIME Halliday walked back into the FBI field office on Deer Valley Road, the UNSUB had a name: Martin T. Livermore. He was a robotics engineer—at least when he wasn’t abducting women, killing them, and then violating their dead bodies for days at a time.

  There were five open cases on Halliday’s desk: two in California, one in Utah, one in Nevada, and one other case in Arizona, besides the one they’d just nailed him on. In all of the cases, it had been a woman between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. Three of those five women had been killed in their homes, two abducted and killed in nearby motels. In all of the cases, there were trace amounts of blood and semen found at the scene. And one other thing: rope fibers.

  In all five cases, the women had been tied up. Here in the sixth case, where they finally had a body to examine, they could see the ligature marks crisscrossing her body, looped across her mouth like a gag, looped across her throat. The medical examiner’s report on this woman would list asphyxiation as the official cause of death. There was evidence of sexual penetration, both before and after death.

  She had been alive for six to eight hours after being captured.

  Six to eight hours of torture before the ropes finally strangled her.

  In each of the previous cases, the body had been moved to a second location, which had apparently been chosen with great care. Abandoned buildings, or houses that were unoccupied for weeks on end. In every case, this second location had been found eventually, by someone. If it was a house, the owners would finally come home and discover that someone had been sleeping in their bed—a perverse retelling of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, only this time with the evidence left behind by a killer. If it was an abandoned building, it would take longer, but eventually the location would be found. In one case, it had been a contractor visiting a long-vacant house, preparing an estimate for a renovation. He had found the victim’s bloody clothing neatly folded next to the bathtub. In another case, a local police officer had gone into an old warehouse looking for a vagrant who’d broken in to steal copper wire. The officer had found a blanket neatly spread out on the second floor, near a window overlooking the street. Once again, there was bloody clothing nearby, neatly folded.

  From each of these second locations, the FBI had gathered trace evidence and had matched that with the evidence from the kill site. A map was constructed for all five known victims, showing the progression from one to the next, moving from the first two victims in California to the single victim in Utah, then to Nevada, then Arizona. The second location would range from as little as twelve miles away from the kill site to over a hundred.

  And then the bodies were never seen again.

  When they reconstructed Livermore’s movements through California, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona, they corresponded exactly with the dates and locations of the crime scenes. His DNA matched the samples taken from each location, in all five of the open cases.

  Carolyn Kline, victim number six, had been killed in her own home on the north side of Phoenix four days before, had died on the floor of her living room before Livermore had brought her to the Thompsons’ house in Scottsdale, the house he had returned to on the second night, at which point he was observed on the security video. If he hadn’t been captured, he would have presumably followed the same protocol as the other five: after approximately one week of sexual contact with the dead body at the second location, the body would have been removed, taken to wherever he took them when he was done with them.

  We’ve never come close to catching him before.

  That video recorder. He should have seen it.

  To Halliday, it didn’t make sense.

  That’s why he was so eager to talk to Livermore. So he could ask the man himself.

  * * *

  —

  THE INTERVIEW TOOK PLACE on the top floor of the Maricopa County Fourth Avenue Jail. Livermore was being kept here while they figured out which federal detention center could best hold him. Fine with Halliday, because he knew this was the most secure jail in the state of Arizona. Maybe in the entire country. Halliday rode up in the elevator alone, getting his mind into the right place.

  Been a while since I sat across the table from someone like this, he said to himself. I even let myself believe I’d be out of here before we caught another one.

  That thought was followed by another, the same thought he’d been revisiting ever since he’d gotten the call about the body found in Scottsdale.

  There is no good reason to keep doing this to yourself. You’ve given this job enough.

  The elevator door opened. Halliday walked down the hall. Two guards were waiting for him, and they nodded to him without saying a word. When they let him into the intermediate room, he had a moment to look through the small window in the door, set at eye level. He saw Livermore sitting at the interview table. His hair was pulled back and tied neatly behind his head. He’s just spent his first night i
n a jail cell, Halliday thought, but he doesn’t look rattled. Even from here, the man’s eyes are clear and focused. Like he can’t wait for this interview to begin.

  Halliday thought back to the years he’d spent studying the work of Robert Ressler, the FBI agent who had essentially invented profiling. Then later John Douglas, who’d turned profiling into an art form. When Halliday had been invited to join the Behavioral Analysis Unit permanently, he’d told them he didn’t want to move his family to Quantico. That had been the official excuse, anyway. The truth was he just didn’t want to spend his career working with serial killers. He still kept in touch with BAU, and they had offered to send a man out here to talk to Livermore.

  Maybe Halliday should have taken them up on the offer.

  “This is what they do,” his partner had said to him. “Why take this one yourself?”

  Halliday hadn’t given him an answer. Maybe he hadn’t even known. Not really. Not until this moment, as he stood at the door and looked at Livermore through the little window.

  There’s one reason I’m here, he said to himself.

  Carolyn Kline.

  She was twenty-six years old, an optometrist’s assistant, still taking classes at Arizona State University when she wasn’t working. She was a daughter to two parents, a granddaughter to three surviving grandparents. A girlfriend to one boyfriend. But to Halliday she would always be the woman who helped him catch Livermore.

  The second door was automatically unlocked with a loud buzzing sound. He took a breath and pushed it open. Livermore looked up at him with that same enigmatic smile he’d given him when he was first handcuffed at the crime scene. Now he was wearing the same orange jumpsuit every suspect was issued at intake, his hands not only cuffed but also attached to the chain that ran around his waist. His ankles were shackled with leg irons, with a ten-inch length of chain between them.

  Halliday took a moment to gather his impressions of the man. To study him at close range, now that he had the opportunity. He saw a man who’d spent most of his life indoors. Fair skin. No sun damage. Not a surprise, given his job, but there was little else about the man to suggest an engineer. He didn’t wear glasses. He wasn’t soft around the edges. In fact, he looked like a man who took care of himself. A man most women would call handsome. Maybe even striking. Not musclebound, but lean and athletic. He could imagine this man doing an hour of light weightlifting, and then spending another hour on the treadmill. And then maybe one more hour looking at himself in the mirror.