Taker of Lives: A Gripping Crime Thriller

by Leslie Wolfe

  “There’s no time for that now,” Tess blurted. “We’re already behind this guy, racing to catch up with him and failing.”

  “That’s because you forgot the basics, Tess,” Bill said in a gentle, parental tone. “Slow is fast, remember? Your first week of behavioral analysis training?”

  She let her head drop and pressed her lips together to keep words inside, words that were better off left unspoken in Bill’s presence. He was right. As always, damn it, he was right, and she wasn’t ready for the BAU, for Quantico. Not yet. Not by a long shot.

  “Okay,” she said quietly, repressing a long sigh, “let’s start with the basics.”

  “Why did you exclude the unsub’s motivation from your initial profile?” Bill asked.

  “Because I’m still struggling with it,” she replied, after a short hesitation, her words rushed, and her pitch elevated with frustration.

  Fradella looked up from his laptop screen, where he’d been sifting through countless social media profiles.

  “Walk me through it,” Bill said calmly.

  “He’s got the sexual component that accompanies the typical lust rapist, but he doesn’t complete the act. For a mission offender, he lacks the statement; whatever his mission, he’s not advertising. The degree of psychological torture he’s devised for his victims indicates a sadist, while the total absence of violence contradicts that argument.”

  “Please, take a seat,” Bill said, and Tess looked around as if to see whether Bill had video cameras installed somewhere in the conference room. Then she realized he must’ve sensed from her fluctuating voice that she’d been pacing the room, going back and forth between the door and the wall, then over to the TV, then back to the door again.

  She pulled back a chair and let herself drop, instantly feeling the tiredness in her bones.

  “Now close your eyes and think of the unsub,” Bill said, and Fradella looked up from his screen again. “Then think of all the serial killers you know of, dead or alive. If I remember correctly, you studied all the serial killer case files you could get your hands on, correct?”

  “Uh-huh,” she replied, keeping her eyes closed and trying to clear her mind enough to give Bill’s exercise a chance. She understood what he was trying to do: summon her gut, calling on her instincts to lend a hand where logical thought faltered, because this unsub didn’t visibly fit any existing profile type.

  She thought of the unsub, dressed in the black latex suit, just as they’d witnessed him, but then pushed that image aside and tried to think of the unsub as someone ringing her doorbell, inviting her for dinner, spiking her drink without her noticing. Who would she allow to get that close? What would that man look like? She breathed, pushing aside the repulsion she felt unfurling in her gut, and tried to “match” a serial killer face to go with the unknown subject in her imaginary dinner setting. One by one, she saw them all in her mind, like browsing through the pages of a catalog filled with humankind’s most despicable creatures, and none seemed to fit, not until a particularly haunting image came to her memory.

  “Ted Bundy,” she said, opening her eyes. “That’s who I see. He was power motivated though.”

  “But he was a necrophile,” Bill said, “just like you had the instinct to call this unsub in your online comment, right?”

  “Oh… you know about that,” she said, and nervously gulped a swig of cold coffee from her almost empty mug.

  “Yeah, I know about it, and it was the right call to make,” Bill stated. “Scorned, he’ll make a mistake, and we’ll be waiting.”

  “But isn’t his proclivity for famous victims an indication of a mission-based offender?”

  “What is fame, other than power over the masses?” Bill replied. “Think about it.”

  “Speaking of fame,” Fradella said in a hesitant voice, “I hate to interrupt, but I think I have something. An idea.”

  “Shoot,” Tess replied.

  “As you know, I’ve been digging through the social media profiles of the two known victims, looking at how they interact, searching for unusual activities. Stalkers, inappropriate comments, stuff like that. The two profiles have numerous friend or follower accounts in common, but that’s not that unusual. They’re all local, here, in Miami metro. We could investigate all these common accounts, and that would take us weeks at best, or we could, with Donovan’s help, try to quantify fame, put a number to it.”

  “I thought of that,” Donovan replied. “I tried to build working models, then tested them against both victims, but all my models failed.”

  “Oh, then maybe it’s not going to work…” Fradella pulled back, unsure.

  “No, no, just walk me through what you’ve got,” Donovan replied.

  “How did you go about it?” Fradella asked instead.

  “Public relations agencies and advertising firms use software and tools to measure what they call online sentiment for a target person or brand. I used that and artificial intelligence-powered social listening tools, to try to quantify how prevalent the two victims were in online conversations, posts, engagements, comments, videos, tags, and so on. What did you have in mind?”

  “Something much more basic,” Fradella replied. “If we consider fame to be directly correlated with the number of followers—”

  “Yeah, okay,” Donovan interrupted, “but some might favor Facebook, while others favor Twitter.”

  “Correct, that’s why I thought of adding them,” Fradella replied.

  “Adding what?”

  “The number of followers on all the social media channels that represent 90 percent of the market, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn.”

  “Why LinkedIn?” Tess asked. “It’s not where I’d expect celebrities—”

  “Christina used it,” Fradella replied. “That makes it relevant, even if we don’t really understand why. Maybe she used it as a professional tool. Maybe others do too.”

  “I get it,” Tess replied. “What next?”

  “Next, I need Donovan’s help,” Fradella said, sounding a little embarrassed. “That’s as far as I went with this.”

  “We should be pulling numbers from all platforms, compile, compare against known celebrity baselines, and rework the list,” Tess said. “If number of people is what he cares about, then the names of the social media platforms are irrelevant.”

  “This is great,” Donovan replied, typing quickly and loudly on his keyboard. “It’s simple, so simple it might actually work.”

  “I also noticed another thing while digging through all this mess,” Fradella gestured toward his laptop. “Fame doesn’t necessarily mean wealth. Some people are desperate to have a following, the illusion of fame, and they rake in people and do all sorts of stuff to please them, but they’re flat out broke.”

  “Crap,” Donovan muttered, typing crazy fast. “I’m removing the declared revenue filter, and we’re back to two thousand, eight hundred, and twenty-three. Running facial recognition against these records now.”

  “How long do you think?” Tess asked, tapping her foot impatiently. The wall-mounted TV screen had turned dark almost an hour ago.

  “It’s going fast,” Donovan replied. “We’re at twenty-two percent already.”

  Thick silence engulfed the room, while Tess and Fradella stared at the conference phone, waiting, holding their breaths.

  A chime sounded, quiet, yet almost startling in its meaning.

  “We have a positive ID,” Donovan said, and Tess jumped to her feet, ready to storm out the door. “Deanna Harper, twenty-one. Blogger, socialite, fashion trendsetter. The big names paid her just to wear their stuff at parties.” His voice was slow and sad, not conveying the urgency she would’ve expected.

  She felt a chill. “What’s wrong, D? What aren’t you telling us?”

  “She’s the subject of an active homicide investigation,” Donovan said. “Deanna Harper was killed ten days ago.”

  30

  Hell Hath No Fury


  The Mojito Frio was an open-air pub with extra-long hours and its own boating dock extending far into the intracoastal water. Loud Latino music blared, covered at times by roars of laughter and lively chatter, the pub’s patrons many and enthusiastic, despite the late hour.

  Michowsky walked briskly the entire length of the dock, searching for the yellow speedboat mentioned by Lorenzo. He’d said Lucinda came about midnight to get whatever it was that she was getting from that place, probably food and drink, maybe some smokes too. It was almost one-thirty in the morning; probably she’d already come and gone.

  He saw a street bum going methodically through garbage cans, fishing for empty cans he could recycle and collecting his find into a squeaky shopping cart lifted from a nearby grocery store. Michowsky took a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and approached the man, holding it in plain sight.

  The man grinned, but took a step back, putting the shopping cart between himself and Michowsky.

  “You know Lucinda?” Michowsky asked, extending his arm halfway over the cart and holding the bill with two fingers.

  “Yeah, I know that bitch,” the man replied, then spat some chewing tobacco right next to Michowsky’s shoe. “She ain’t kind, that one.”

  “Describe her to me,” he asked, not believing a word the man said.

  “Alta morena puta,” he replied, then spat again. “A tall, dark-haired whore. Comes in a yellow boat.” He reached to grab the twenty from Michowsky’s hand, but Gary withdrew it a few inches.

  “She been here tonight?”

  “Ain’t seen her, no,” the man said, then reached for the twenty again. This time, Michowsky let him have the money. He took it, looked at both sides of the bill, as if checking to see if it was real, then folded it and slid it inside his chest pocket. “For another one of these I’ll—”

  But Michowsky was already gone, trotting quickly toward the parking lot. He climbed inside his car and moved it close to the dock, so he could see the yellow boat if it came in, then called RTCC again.

  “Hey, what do we have on a Pedro Ramon, aka Paco Loco?” he asked as soon as the call was picked up.

  “One moment, Detective,” the analyst replied, then whistled quietly in short bursts, impatient, while searching for information. “He’s got a long rap sheet; I can push it to your phone.”

  “Have we been looking at him recently? Any street intel, any leverage I could use with his missus?”

  The analyst whistled again, then chuckled. “His missus, you’re saying? I bet she’ll be thrilled to see these. Sending them to your inbox.”

  He put the phone on speaker and opened his email. Several photos depicted Ramon, a thirty-something, covered in prison ink and ripped to the extreme, with several young women wrapped around his body like boa constrictors in heat. Another picture showed him and Lucinda walking on that same dock he was now watching. Lorenzo had done an excellent job describing her.

  He hung up and went inside the pub, where he climbed on a tacky barstool and ordered tacos and a cold Dos Equis. He was halfway through his second taco when Lucinda strolled into the place, throwing arrogant glances at any patron who stood in her way or eyed her body for too long. She wore tight, ripped jeans and a short leather top, exposing her midsection and showing off a navel piercing with a sizeable diamond, two carat at least, sending fiery sparkles in the dim light.

  “Hola, Mateo,” she greeted the bartender, who managed an unconvincing smile that quickly went away.

  “The usual?” he asked, putting a cold Bud Light on a coaster in front of Lucinda.

  She gulped a few thirsty swigs, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, not letting go of the bottle. “The usual, primo.”

  Then she took a small packet of white powder out of her jeans pocket and palmed it discreetly. There must have been at least 20 grams; two, maybe three thousand dollars street value if that was heroin. When the bartender brought a paper bag filled with supplies, she reached out and swiftly deposited the packet in his hand with a smooth, well-practiced gesture. He took it without hesitation and quickly made it disappear under his apron, then continued hauling stuff for Lucinda, already packaged in brown paper bags.

  Michowsky moved a few barstools closer to her, apparently focused on the TV above the bartender’s head and sipping his Dos Equis. He kept Lucinda in his peripheral vision, but didn’t look at her directly, not even once. With some effort, he could make out what she was saying to the bartender; it wasn’t anything important; just small talk.

  She finished her beer, then high-fived the bartender before picking up two of the paper bags and heading for the door. Quick on his feet, Michowsky grabbed the third bag, filled with beer and a bottle of tequila, and opened the door for her.

  She glared at him.

  “Allow me,” he said with a smile.

  “Don’t get any ideas, guapo, I’m not interested.”

  She walked ahead of him with her head held high, swinging her hips and bouncing her hair with every step.

  He stopped when she reached her boat. One look at it and Michowsky understood how she managed to come all the way from the sea in the dead of the night. It was a jet-powered speedboat, equipped with radar, proximity sensors, GPS, and everything else invented in navigation electronics. It probably did sixty miles per hour, while she didn’t break a sweat.

  He tapped her shoulder twice with his wallet, open to show his badge.

  “Yes, but I am,” he said, with a smile in his voice, “very interested.”

  She froze and turned, as if she’d seen a snake.

  “I ain’t done nothing wrong, pig,” she said, not bothering to keep her voice low. “Vete a la mierda!”

  “Let’s say I believe you this time,” he replied calmly, then offered her his cell phone with one of the photos displayed, showing Ramon with an almost-naked blonde, barely seventeen. “I bet he has done something wrong though.”

  “Oh, Dio mio,” she replied, dropping the paper bags and grabbing the phone with both hands. “Lo mataré,” she mumbled, then continued cussing while tears pooled in her eyes. “I’ll kill him.”

  “Rumor’s got it you’re getting a little old for the man, if you know what I mean,” he said, putting the paper bag on the dock with a heavy sigh.

  Her eyes shot arrows through a blur of tears. Remembering how Ramon looked in those photos, it was difficult for Michowsky to imagine someone could love him that passionately.

  “You want him dead?” he eventually asked, seeing how Lucinda stood frozen, staring into emptiness and not saying another word.

  She stared at him intently, a million emotions reflected in her blue irises.

  “Y—yes,” she eventually said. “But not fast,” she added, her voice peppered with venom. “If I wanted fast, I could go out there and kill him myself,” she added, gesturing angrily at the water. “No one would ever know.”

  “I didn’t hear you say that, Luci,” Michowsky said in a somber tone. “But I can make him pay, the legal way. The right way.”

  Fear flickered briefly in her eyes, replacing for a short moment the homicidal rage he’d noticed before.

  “What’s going on in two days?” he asked, lowering his voice even more.

  “No,” she whispered, pulling away from him. “They’ll kill me.”

  “They won’t know,” Michowsky said. “I swear they won’t.”

  “And I’m supposed to trust a cop?” she asked, back to being snotty again. “Really? What, do I look like I was born yesterday, cabron?”

  “If I search you, I’ll find heroin on you. I’ve witnessed your little transaction with, what was his name, Mateo, right? That puts your ass in jail for twenty years.” He paused, searching her eyes and finding the rage he was looking for, intact once again, untainted by fear. “Or it could be his ass in jail, and yours in the Bahamas somewhere with all his money, roasting in the sun, and screwing much younger men than him. Your choice.”

  “There’s a shipment coming in on Monda
y,” she eventually said, her voice low to a barely intelligible whisper. “By water.”

  “Where’s it coming from?”

  “Colombia,” she replied, lowering her voice even more.

  “Who’s bringing it?”

  “Pedro, on his boat. He’s going to meet them out at sea tomorrow night and transfer the load onto his boat.”

  “What’s the name of his boat?”

  She bit her lip nervously before replying. “Reina del Mar.”

  “What about, um, Hermosa?”

  “Nah, that’s a small one. The shipment won’t fit on that.”

  “What kind of shipment are we talking about?”

  Lucinda veered her eyes sideways and fell silent. Michowsky grabbed her elbow firmly.

  “Too late to stop now, Luci. He didn’t stop when he had the chance to screw that girl,” he added, showing her the cell phone screen with Pedro’s photo with the young blonde.

  “Twenty-five hundred pounds,” she whispered. “First grade, uncut cocaine.” Then she turned toward Michowsky and grabbed his sleeve. “Promise me you’ll make the bastard pay. Make him suffer.” A flicker of raw, undiluted rage glinted in her eyes.

  “Oh, I promise,” Michowsky said. “Don’t you worry about that. But why does Carrillo need the Hermosa on Memorial Day? How come he’s not helping Pedro?”

  “I don’t know…” she replied, lowering her heated gaze. “I heard them talking about it, and they kept saying the Hermosa is for seguro, for, um, insurance.”

  “In case the Reina breaks down?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head so vigorously her long earrings jingled. “The Hermosa is small, just a thirty-four-foot center console boat. Won’t take that much load.”

  “A thirty-four-foot can take at least ten people,” Michowsky pushed back. “That’s precisely twenty-five hundred pounds.” He baited her, knowing what the issue was, but looking to test her, to see if she was telling the truth.