“Those bastards held Brian Mazer for a week,” Joe said, pacing the hallway. “Jesus. That guy will need more than surgery. I’m thinking sessions twice a week with a shrink. We saw what Hoffman did to Price and Jacobson, and he had them for only a day.”
“The best thing we can do for Mazer is find Hoffman,” Gil said.
“Yep,” Joe said. “So I ran down Mazer’s car, thinking that was what Hoffman was driving, since when we saw him he sure as hell wasn’t in no Honda Civic.”
“Let me guess, it’s a dark SUV,” Gil said.
“Yup. A black Lexus RX, and I am embarrassed as hell that I couldn’t remember that. You’d think a Lexus would stick in my mind more.”
“We saw it for only a second.”
Joe continued, “I called the officer we put in front of the house, but he says no one has come in or out. We should send an unmarked unit over to replace him. If Hoffman happens to drive by, I don’t want him to get spooked by a police car.”
“Good idea,” Gil said. “But we really need to know if Hoffman is there or long gone.”
“I say we activate SWAT and let them figure out if he’s there or not,” Joe said as he stopped pacing for the moment.
“Is the Lexus in the driveway?” Kristen said, speaking up for the first time. “Or the Civic?”
“Uh … I’m not sure. Good question,” Joe said. “Let me call the officer who’s been in front of the house.” A minute later, Joe hung up, saying, “Okay, the thing is, the officer can’t see the house from the road. It’s another one of those long driveways like at Price and Jacobson’s house.”
“So, he’s really just watching the front of the property,” Kristen said. She turned to Gil. “We don’t know what’s going on up at the house. I can take my car and go relieve the guy out front. Then I can just go take a walk to go see if the Lexus is even there.”
Joe muttered, “That’s not going to happen.”
She ignored him. “We have to know if Hoffman is in there before SWAT goes in. If they go in and he’s not home we’ve just blown our chance to get him.” SWAT, by necessity, was not known for their stealth. They made a lot of noise when they went into a house, and they left behind a lot of boot prints, broken doors, tire tracks, and shell casings when they cleared out. Hoffman would take off as soon as he saw someone had been there.
“We can just send the officer in front of the house—” Joe started to say, but Kristen interrupted.
“He’s in uniform. If Hoffman sees him, he’ll run. I’m already in street clothes. If Hoffman sees me, I’ll wave and pretend to be a neighbor.” She turned to look at Gil. “I know exactly what kind of suspect we are dealing with.”
He knew why she was stressing her last point. When a police officer got shot on the job, a department would spend countless hours determining if there was a precipitating event or one avoidable reason it happened. In the majority of cases, it came down to one simple thing: officers get shot when they don’t know what they are walking into. Gil could prep the officer sitting in front of the house, telling him about Hoffman and giving him a rundown of the crimes Hoffman had committed, but the truth was Kristen knew better than anyone—better than Gil himself—what Hoffman was capable of. She had seen it as the first arriving officer at the Martin house.
Gil thought for another second before saying, “Our priority has to be finding Hoffman, so Kristen, you can go over there. But you will wear a vest at all times and take every precaution, do you understand?” She nodded. Gil said, “Grab some paper and a pen and come with me.”
Kristen followed Gil into the interview room.
“George,” Gil said. “Officer Valdez here has some paper, and she’ll help you draw a map of the outside of the house in Tesuque. Show her where there are any outside buildings or trees. Then draw a floor plan of the house.” The floor plan would be for SWAT, while the map of the outside would be for Kristen. And they’d print out another map for her, from Google Earth, for comparison, just to be safe.
Gil went back out to where Joe was waiting, looking annoyed.
“Listen,” Gil said to him. “I know you want to be the one going out there and gathering intel. You hate waiting here, but we have to figure out the other two names on that list Mazer gave Hoffman, because if Hoffman isn’t at the house…”
“… He might be at someone else’s house duct-taping them to a chair,” Joe said. “I get it.” There had been seventeen employees in the Primary Structural Biosystems department before Hoffman started his spree. Minus his four victims so far, that made thirteen employees who could possibly be the last two names on the list Mazer had given Hoffman. Joe and Gil had asked patrol cars from the various county and city districts to their keep an eye on those thirteen people, but there was no guarantee how that had panned out. Hoffman might be outside his next victim’s house right now.
Gil looked at his watch. “Mazer will be out of surgery in a few more hours. We can ask him then who else was on the list he gave Hoffman.”
“And when we get into Mazer’s house, we can check his print job history and reprint it,” Joe said.
“That’s good,” Gil said. “It will most likely take Kristen half an hour or so to go over to the house and check about the car. Then we call SWAT.”
“It’ll be at least an hour or hour and a half until we can get in there,” Joe said. He started to pace. They had to find Hoffman.
“What if we call Natalie Martin?” Gil said. “Maybe she can tell us why, out of seventeen co-workers, Mazer put her name on that list.”
* * *
Natalie Martin’s phone went to voice mail, so Gil left a message. He was starting to catch Joe’s nervous energy while they waited for Kristen’s call. He left Joe to his pacing in the hallway and went back into the interview room with Gonzales.
“We need to talk about the blood on your shirt,” Gil said. “So what happened?”
“I dunno, I just finally decided to get out of there.”
“What made you decide that?”
“Ty had let Lupe go home to see her family, but he wouldn’t let me leave,” he said. “That made me nervous, like maybe he’s not letting me leave because he wants to kill me. I just made a plan to get to the front door, open it, and get the hell out.”
“What went wrong?”
“The guy from the chair started screaming.”
“He wanted you to take him with you?”
“No, he starts screaming at the top of his lungs for Ty to come.”
“He was yelling for Ty to come and stop you?”
“Yeah,” Gonzales said. “I went for the front door, but Ty came running out with the baseball bat, so I tried to get to the back door, and the guy in the chair, he tackled me.”
“He wasn’t tied to the chair?”
“No. Ty had let him go a while before. He grabbed at me, and he had the gun in his hand and we fought for it.”
“He had the gun? Not Ty?”
“No, he had it. I grabbed it from him, and Ty swung the bat at me, and I took a shot, but I must have missed and hit the guy instead. I didn’t see what happened. I got to the back door and I just hauled ass. Even when I hit the snow, I just kept going.”
“The blood on your shirt was from when you shot the man who’d been tied to the chair?”
“It must have been, yeah.”
* * *
Back out in the hallway, Joe was pacing again. “What the hell?” he said to Gil the second he closed the interview room door behind him. “Mazer tried to help Hoffman? What is that about?”
“Maybe Mazer had Stockholm syndrome,” Gil said. “He was kept there for nearly a week, and Hoffman was probably beating him and threatening to kill him. Maybe the only way for him to survive was to convince Hoffman he was on his side. Maybe he bought into his act too much.”
“Maybe,” Joe said. “But no matter how you slice it, that is fucked up. But that isn’t the only thing.”
“What do you mean?”
&nbs
p; “I started thinking about how EMS just happened to show up at Mazer’s house,” Joe said. “We never did find out who called them.”
“Maybe Mazer did before he went unconscious.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Joe said. “I also was thinking that maybe Mazer told the nine-one-one operator who shot him or something. So I called Dispatch. They’re sending me the audio file of the call.”
A few minutes later, Joe was at his office computer downloading the file. “It looks like the call came from the house phone, so it was probably Mazer. Good. Give me a second.” A moment later, Joe hit the SPACE bar on his computer to play the recording.
The operator’s voice said, “This is nine-one-one. What is the nature of your emergency?”
A young male voice said quickly, “He’s having a heart attack.”
“Okay, can you tell me your address?”
“He’s not looking very good. He’s calling me … I have to go.”
Then the line went dead.
* * *
Kristen crouched in the snow, her jeans getting wet and cold. She had parked her car down the street from Mazer’s house and gone through the piñon and juniper forest on foot. The nearest neighbor was two acres away, so she was able to skirt easily around the Mazer house and then behind it. The house, like all the neighboring houses, had no landscaping or cultivated yard. Instead, it was just stuck in the middle of the forest, which made for easy cover.
She moved slightly to the north, hoping to get a better glimpse of the driveway, but a small rise and a thick tree stand meant she’d have to get closer. The shining sun made a bright white patchwork mosaic in the snow. Kristen kept out of the light and stayed with the shadow of the trees. She heard a door open somewhere nearby and froze. The deep snow both muffled and deepened the sound, making it hard to determine where it was coming from. She stayed crouched where she was for another few minutes, then carefully made her way up the hill to the driveway, which curved around the back of the house. There was no garage or shed. But in the driveway was a Honda Civic and a dark Lexus SUV. Hoffman was home. Kristen stayed where she was, surveying the one-story house for another few minutes before retracing her steps back down the hill.
* * *
After Joe listened to the 911 call, his pacing only got worse. “Was that Hoffman?” he asked. “That sounded like Hoffman.” Gil let Joe keep talking. Interrupting him to point out that they’d met Hoffman only once and that neither of them could remember what his voice sounded like would have been useless. Besides, Gil agreed with Joe: it seemed likely that the voice was Hoffman’s. “Why would Tyler James Hoffman call an ambulance for Mazer?” Joe asked. “Hoffman’s killed, what, a half dozen people, yet he calls the ambulance? For Mazer? What the fuck.”
“He’s a sociopath,” Gil said.
But Joe kept talking. “Does Stockholm syndrome go both ways? Could Hoffman have been feeling all soft and fuzzy for the guy?”
“The only reason he’d have called an ambulance for anyone is if he was going to get something out of it,” Gil said.
But Joe wasn’t done. “Maybe Hoffman is feeling some goodwill-toward-man Christmas crap.”
Gil’s phone rang. It was Natalie Martin calling him back.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said. “How’s your husband doing?”
“He squeezed my hand when he got out of surgery,” she said. “The doctors said that was a good sign.”
“That’s great news,” Gil said. “I know you probably want to get back to him, but I have a few quick questions for you.”
“Okay.”
“We think that Hoffman got the list of you and your co-workers from Dr. Brian Mazer,” Gil said.
“Brian?” she said, surprised. “We’ve worked together for years. He’s one of the few people who everyone liked.”
“Did he have any problems with you, Dr. Price, or Dr. Ivanov?”
“I’m not sure about Dr. Price,” she said. “But Brian and Dr. Ivanov were friends. They carpooled every day before Dr. Ivanov retired.”
“So Dr. Mazer knew where Dr. Ivanov lived?” Gil asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Actually, come to think of it, there was one little thing between Brian and Dr. Ivanov. Brian wanted to move into Dr. Ivanov’s lab when he retired, but his request was denied. Brian said Dr. Ivanov was the one responsible. They had both been working on the same demethylation protein code sequence for years, and I guess Dr. Ivanov didn’t want Brian to break the code when he hadn’t been able to. At least that’s what Brian said. They weren’t really friends after that. I’d heard that Dr. Price moved into Dr. Ivanov’s lab instead.”
“How was your relationship with Dr. Mazer?”
“Brian was the only person from work who came to my baby shower.”
“And your baby shower, was it held at your house?” Gil asked.
Natalie Martin hesitated, then said, “Yes.”
“So he knew where you lived?”
“Yes,” she said slowly. “And Nick showed him the Tempest. They went out to the shed together…” Her voice trailed off.
“Mrs. Martin what else—” Gil started to say, but she interrupted him.
“Brian was the only person who knew I was pregnant,” she said in the same urgent voice of realization. “I didn’t tell anyone else at work, because we didn’t share those kinds of things, but Brian…”
“Mrs. Martin?”
“He was the only one who knew I had cleaned out all my chemicals.” She stopped, but Gil waited for her to continue. When she spoke again, her voice was high. “He put the ethidium bromide in the gel. Why would he have done that? Why would he have tried to hurt my babies?”
“Mrs. Martin, I am so sorry.”
“I just saw him three days ago. How could he—and he smiled and he asked about the boys…”
“You saw him three days ago?” Gil asked. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, it was the day before the attack,” she said. “I bumped into him at Whole Foods.”
“He was shopping?”
“Yes,” she said. “He said he had family over, and he asked me about my Christmas plans.”
“How did he look? Did he act nervous?”
“He seemed fine,” she said. “He had a couple of bruises, but he said that was from slipping on some ice.”
“What time of the day was this?”
“Um, it must have been close to dinnertime. I remember the kids were acting crazy because they were starving. He told me about the Christmas party they’d had that day at work and said he was there buying food for a relative he had staying with him.”
“He’d been at work that day?” Gil asked.
“He must have been,” Natalie said.
CHAPTER TWENTY
December 24
Gil and Joe both sat in the conference room. Gil stared at the white board while Joe rubbed his eyes.
After hanging up with Natalie Martin, Gil had gone back into the room with Gonzales, who mapped out as best he could Mazer’s whereabouts for the past week. After a few minutes, it became clear that Mazer was tied up only on the first day. And Gonzales saw Hoffman hit and cut Mazer only a little, in the beginning. After that, the knife and fists stayed out of it. Gonzales saw Mazer a few more times, and each time he was untied, walking about the house. Gonzales never thought to ask Hoffman why their hostage was being allowed to walk free.
“Gonzales is lying,” Joe said. “He has to be lying.”
“Why would he lie about it?” Gil asked. They were waiting for a call back from Chip Davis at the lab. He was checking to see if any surveillance equipment had caught Mazer at work that day.
“Maybe Mrs. Martin is wrong about the date,” Joe said.
“She seemed pretty sure,” Gil said.
“Maybe Mazer cut a deal with the devil,” Joe said. “He would give Hoffman the names if Hoffman didn’t kill him.”
“That makes the most sense,” Gil said as his phone rang. It was Davis. Gil
put the phone on speaker, knowing Joe would just breathe heavily at his ear trying to hear the conversation if he didn’t.
“Dr. Mazer was at work all week,” Davis said. “He left early for the past few days, but it’s almost Christmas, so most people aren’t even at their desks.”
“No one mentioned anything strange about him or saw his bruises?”
“No,” Davis said. “But they all have separate labs and offices. He could easily have come and gone without seeing anyone.”
“You don’t happen to have his personnel file handy, do you?” Gil asked. “The least we can do is tell his relatives that he has been hurt.” The real reason Gil wanted the name of a family member was to ask them about Mazer’s state of mind. But there was something else, something in the back of Gil’s mind. Something he couldn’t quite get at.
“Hang on,” Davis said. Gil heard him typing into a computer. Davis came back on the line. “I don’t really have much. He’s divorced, but it looks like they had a child a while back.”
“Do you have a name?”
“Sorry,” he said. “Whoever compiled this information did it before my time. They didn’t follow the same procedures when filling out the forms that we do now. It’s hard to tell. I’ll keep looking though this, but all I can really tell you is that Dr. Mazer hasn’t had any contact with his child or his ex-wife for a long time, otherwise they’d be on our radar.”
“Do you have anything about the ex-wife? Did she remarry? Is there a stepdad in the picture?”
“Hold on … hold on. Yeah, it looks like she remarried. His name is Philip Hoffman.”
* * *
As the investigating officers, Gil and Joe needed to be there when Hoffman was arrested. But Hoffman was armed and dangerous. That meant there also needed to be a coordinated assault on the house, which was a SWAT specialty. SWAT would handle the entry and timing of the mission. The schedule had the team arriving at Mazer’s house in twenty-five minutes, since they wanted to make entry before it started to get dark and sunset was in forty-five minutes. It would take Gil and Joe fifteen minutes to get to Mazer’s house in Tesuque from the hospital in order to meet them before the raid. That left exactly ten minutes for Gil and Joe to question Dr. Mazer, who had just gotten out of surgery.
When the Devil Doesn't Show: A Mystery Page 21
