UNSUB

by Meg Gardiner

  Hendrix and his partner, Detective Ellis Saunders, responded. They instructed cemetery employees not to approach the driver or vehicle.

  When the detectives reached the cemetery, they didn’t approach either.

  Instead, they parked at a distance to surveil the suspect through binoculars. They saw him walk to the door of the mausoleum, stop, and speak to somebody inside, seemingly in a conversational tone. They held back, hoping to catch him in overtly incriminating behavior.

  What neither the detectives nor cemetery employees knew was that inside the mausoleum was a young couple the Prophet had kidnapped. Newlyweds Tammy and Tim Moulitsas were bound, gagged, and drenched in gasoline.

  By the time the suspect lit a match and threw it inside, it was too late.

  Caitlin leaned heavily against the conference table.

  Hendrix and Saunders pursued the suspect, first via car and then on foot. The killer—young, white, and fast—scaled a fence and dashed onto the freeway. He managed to dart between cars, as did Detective Saunders. Mack Hendrix was sideswiped by a pickup truck. Badly battered, he climbed to his feet and limped across lanes of traffic to follow his partner into an abandoned warehouse.

  There he found Ellis Saunders shot multiple times, choking to death on his own blood.

  Hours later, Mack Hendrix drove his car off a bridge. He was pulled from the water, raving that he heard ghosts.

  The Prophet vanished.

  So, for all purposes, did Mack Hendrix’s life.

  He spent the next six months in a psychiatric ward. Doctors spoke of bipolar tendencies and a schizoid break. The department forced him to take medical retirement. His wife left him.

  Today he lingers on the fringes, prone, sources say, to tremors, delusions, and violent outbursts. It falls on his daughter, still wet behind the ears, to succeed where he failed.

  A buzz filled Caitlin’s head. Then a dark suit loomed in front of her. Guthrie grabbed the paper from her hands.

  “Ignore this.”

  “Right.”

  She may have said it with too much snark and not enough can-do attitude.

  Guthrie rolled the paper into a tight cylinder. “Don’t get sucked into this. I need you focused on the case.”

  “Got it.”

  The cemetery was a public, historic tragedy. And at least the article didn’t mention her father’s hallucinations, or the bugs he was convinced crawled under his skin. But how the hell had Bart Fletcher learned about Mack’s psychiatric diagnosis? Had Fletcher bought off a file clerk at the hospital? Had a neighbor or relative talked to him?

  “Hendrix?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Calm down. Stories got out. This was inevitable.

  “Fletcher’s a washed-up drunk. Forget about him.” Guthrie turned to go. “If you need to punch a wall, do it outside.”

  “Yes, sir. On the side of the building away from where the news vans are parked.”

  His shoulders moved. Maybe a laugh.

  “Keep working.” He slapped the paper against the edge of the table and walked away.

  * * *

  Caitlin sat down at her desk and opened a new file: COMMUNICATIONS FROM THE PROPHET.

  She started with the most recent. The letter mailed to the television station read: KDPX NEWS DESK. OAKLAND, CA. RUSH TO NEWS EDITOR. It was a white business-size envelope.

  Inside was a single sheet of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch paper folded in thirds. It was medium-weight printer paper without a watermark. On the page was a single line of type, in twelve-point Courier font, printed on what the lab thought was a Hewlett-Packard Officejet 4620 e-All-in-One printer. Which were cheap and ubiquitous, sold at Best Buy and Fry’s and maybe the McDonald’s drive-through. Homeless Gladys, who slept under the freeway overpass, probably had one in her shopping cart.

  The single line on the piece of paper was a URL. A link to a webpage.

  KDPX would not relinquish the envelope or note without a subpoena. But its news director and the station’s attorney had brought the note to the criminalistics lab and permitted detectives to examine it and the techs to run tests. The lab ran a biohazard scan. It took high-resolution photos, front and back, under normal and UV light. It checked the flap of the envelope for DNA. There was none. No surprise—the Prophet wasn’t sloppy enough to lick an envelope.

  The lab found several latent fingerprints on the envelope. It was working to exclude postal service personnel and the intern at KDPX who carried the letter to the news editor. The note was clean.

  What caught Caitlin’s eye first was the postmark. The letter had been franked at 12:07 A.M. the previous morning. It had been dropped in a drive-up mailbox outside a major USPS sorting center in Fremont. That allowed it to get whisked through the system and delivered the same day.

  The mailbox was emptied every two hours. The earliest the killer could have dropped it there was ten the previous night.

  He had come straight from the crime scene to deliver his message. He’d had the note prepared well in advance. He was moving like a machine. Hungry, relentless, eager for attention.

  What she didn’t understand was why he had mailed the note at all. He could have simply contacted the station online. Why take the risk that a stray fiber or hair would drop into the envelope and give forensics the chance to nail him? Why take the chance that a business near the post office would catch him on CCTV?

  Then she lined up all the Prophet’s messages from the nineties, in chronological order, and she saw. The first letter the Prophet ever sent, to the East Bay Herald, was mailed at the Fremont Processing Center.

  A tiny needle seemed to jab her between the eyes. He was telling them, It’s really me.

  This wasn’t an echo. It was a shout.

  She typed the URL into her desktop computer. As she expected, a Jolly Roger popped up, jaw hinging up and down, laughing, and a red NO ENTRY sign flashed on-screen.

  The Prophet’s message had been uploaded via anonymizing software to a page designed to be accessed once, then to self-destruct. She hit EXIT and blew away the smirking skull. Then turned to the screen grab of the message itself.

  Twenty years back, the Prophet sent the cops VHS tapes. Now he’d sent an electronic video message stripped of identifying data.

  He was tech savvy and highly literate. He used standard grammar and had perfect spelling. He had money, and access to a compound crossbow and a reliable vehicle. She doubted he had spent the last twenty years in prison.

  She leaned back. Where had he been? In the military, deployed overseas? In a monastery? Hibernating? Why did he stop killing?

  Why did he start again?

  Look for patterns.

  Caitlin spread the Prophet’s messages across her desktop in a wide fan.

  Stunningly, there were twenty-seven communications from the killer, going back to the first murder. Two to the Santa Clara County sheriff. Five to the San Francisco Police Department. Three to the San Francisco Chronicle, two to the East Bay Herald. Two specifically addressed to the Herald’s pit bull reporter, Bart Fletcher. Interesting.

  Three messages had been written in graffiti at crime scenes. Two were written in ink on victims’ bodies. And eight had been sent to the Alameda County sheriff. One to Detective Ellis Saunders. Seven to Detective Mack Hendrix.

  Or, as the killer styled it on the envelopes, DET. MACK HENDRIX. PERSONAL.

  Oh, so personal.

  One read, How do you like my gift to you? If you pay attention, you’ll get the meaning. Followed by the Mercury sign.

  Caitlin’s heart was beating too fast. Memories swam up. The day the newlyweds and Detective Saunders died. Riding her bike home from school to find a patrol car parked at the curb, and even at age nine she knew what it meant when a black-and-white came to an officer’s house. Something happened. She ditched the bike and po
unded inside. Something happened something happened. In the kitchen, two uniformed officers stood with their hands clasped. When the sun comes up he’s going to kill again. Her mom was leaning against the counter in yellow light, a hand over her face.

  “Dad. Where’s Dad?” The cuts the cuts. Devilman.

  Sandy dropped her hand, and heartbreaking compassion came over her. Pity. Anger. She swept Caitlin into a hug.

  “Dad’s okay,” Sandy said, and though that was a lie, it was what Caitlin needed to hear to keep from disintegrating. “He had a car accident. He’s going to be fine.”

  Trembling, Caitlin buried her face in her mom’s chest. “Truth?”

  “Truth.”

  Of course it was anything but. Sandy held Caitlin and choked back tears, refusing to cry. Cop’s wife. Standing tall. And Caitlin’s world fell apart anyhow. She didn’t see her father for six months.

  Now she stood and walked down the hall to the vending machine, wanting to clear her head. While her coffee cup filled, she paced.

  The messages. What did they mean? What did they reveal about the killer?

  Caitlin could still recite the Prophet’s profile from memory, almost word for word. Organized killer. Regards the murders as his mission. Extrovert. Has social skills and may be regarded as charming and outgoing. Incredible anger at women. He will show the dark tetrad of personality traits: Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism. Posing of victims’ bodies and use of mercury are manifestations of a paraphilic fetish rooted in fantasy.

  But how did that help solve the hidden meanings in his new messages?

  Their creepy tone seemed increasingly religious. They chilled her more than she wanted to admit. And the messages rubbed her wrong. She suspected they contained a code, but it eluded her.

  Patterns.

  Guthrie thought she could tease them from the Prophet’s notes. She’d tried, reading them word by word, syllable by syllable. Searching for the clue behind each reference and metaphor.

  But what she saw were breaks in the pattern. New evidence didn’t add up. Footprints didn’t match; the timbre of the killer’s voice varied. Only one victim was shot by arrows, not two.

  Granted, by mailing a letter from the Fremont Processing Center, the killer was hollering that he was the Prophet. Maybe too loudly.

  Beneath his shouts, in the recesses of her mind, something whispered, Watch out. He’s playing with you.

  9

  In the morning, a storm blew in. Caitlin jogged from her SUV to the station door, splashing through puddles under a blustering gray sky. Inside, she found Guthrie in his office, file folders stacked a foot high, Post-it notes stuck on a dozen surfaces—including a photo of Guthrie holding two Jack Russell terriers. Today he was crisply dressed in a suit and tie. But he had sooty circles beneath his eyes. She knocked.

  He glanced at her. “Yes, Detective?”

  “Sergeant. Things aren’t adding up.”

  She had learned to state her premise clearly, right up front. Not to ask permission, not to hem and haw. Do that, and she’d be regarded as ladylike. And as a pushover, a voice to ignore.

  “In what way?” Guthrie picked up his coffee cup.

  She approached his desk. “You asked me to look for echoes between the cold cases and the new murders. For patterns.”

  “And you’re not finding them?”

  “Some, yes. The extravagant staging of the crime scenes. Grand Guignol, almost. And the sterility of the scenes. No DNA, no fingerprints, almost no trace. He’s the same ghost he’s always been. But.”

  Guthrie drank, looking at her over the rim of the cup.

  “There’s a bunch that doesn’t line up.” She gestured at the wall in the war room. “The partial shoe print from the cornfield. It’s a different size than the boot print found in 1993. And the voiceprint analysis of the new phone recording—Computer Forensics say they can’t exclude the caller as the same voice from the cold cases, but it’s far from conclusive. The timbre of his voice is different.”

  She raised a hand, forestalling the objections she sensed Guthrie might raise.

  “I know the original cassettes are in poor condition, and the new recording was made through several layers of phones. They’re still analyzing the caller’s vocabulary, diction, and accent. But the register of the voice sounds lower. And yes, I know voices change over the course of decades. Smoking, drinking, aging. But.”

  “You keep saying that. Your point is?”

  “Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s design. Maybe the killer is merely toying with us. Or maybe not,” she said. “Could this actually be a copycat?”

  Guthrie put down his coffee cup. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  She paused, surprised. “The Prophet has devotees. There are dozens of true-crime books about him. TV movies. And these online forums where amateur sleuths try to solve the case.”

  “Them. They’ve been on us like bees pouring out of a hive.”

  “It’s like a cult. Church of the Prophet. Maybe somebody decided to replicate his crimes.”

  Guthrie rubbed his chin. “I know.”

  “Now I sense a ‘but.’”

  “It’s been twenty-five years since the Prophet’s first known murder.”

  A sick feeling rolled through her at first known.

  “He has a fantasy, yes. A core need that drives him—that will never change. But his MO has likely evolved over the years.”

  “I know he’s killed in half a dozen different ways, but . . .”

  “Killers learn, Hendrix. They gain experience. This guy is a twisted fuck, but he’s a smart, twisted fuck. Don’t assume that because things don’t line up, it’s another guy.”

  She deflated. Nodded.

  “But you were right to bring this to me. I want my team to tell me everything. Don’t hold back. You might discard the clue we need.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  She turned to go. Guthrie said, “And I understand your point about the forums.”

  She should have sensed it coming. Shit rolls downhill. But she was an eager puppy this morning. She turned back.

  “One of these online people is swamping us with tips. Crazypants, and she knows how to find me.”

  He turned to his computer and hit a few keys. “I’d ignore her, but she’d probably show up here and run straight into the window like a disoriented bird.” He pointed at Caitlin’s computer. “Put out the fire. Listen to her but tamp her down. With a pillow over the face if you have to.” He looked up. “I don’t mean that.”

  “I keep my pillows at home.”

  “Good.”

  She turned to go, and he said, “And talk to your dad again.”

  Her shoulders rose.

  “Hendrix.” Guthrie’s voice softened. “We have to pull on every thread. You’re the only person who can tease this one out.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As she left the office, she called her father from her cell. Mack didn’t answer. Relieved, she left a voice-mail message, vague and harmless and sure to set off his perimeter defenses. She sat down at her desk and looked at the information on the online person Guthrie wanted her to smother.

  She was about to ride into a three-ring circus.

  * * *

  “Deralynn Hobbs, please. This is Detective Hendrix from the Alameda Sheriff’s Office.”

  “This is Deralynn.” The exclamation mark was implied. “Detective Hendrix? His daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, my goodness.”

  Her voice was bright and bouncy. Caitlin’s computer screen showed Deralynn’s driver’s license photo. Caucasian, thirty-one, a full-moon face with a smile that must have burned out the camera at the DMV. Through the phone came the noise of traffic, sounded like the freeway. Kids’ voices. Cartoon music.

 
Caitlin said, “You contacted Sergeant Guthrie. I’m following up.”

  “Did he tell you about the missing pendant?”

  Deralynn had sent a dozen e-mails in the last two days. Plus links to the site she ran, FindtheProphet.com. Caitlin scrolled through the messages to Guthrie.

  Re: Barbara Gertz Pendant.

  “I have your e-mail. We’ll review it.”

  “Victim number three. March 1995. Next of kin, Barbara’s husband, told the medical examiner that when he identified her, her necklace was missing. Made a stink—”

  “Yes.” Caitlin opened the message. She didn’t know about the stink.

  “He accused the morgue staff of stealing his wife’s jewelry? Before the police realized the killer must have taken it?”

  She skimmed the e-mail. Unique gold & opal hummingbird pendant on Barbara’s necklace. “I’ll make a note in the file, Ms. Hobbs.”

  “Deralynn.” Over the phone, the woman’s voice went muffled. “Boys, stop. That’s for lunch. Well, you should have finished your breakfast. No—Weston, I said . . . don’t open that in the car; yogurt will . . .”

  From the backseat came shouting.

  Caitlin pinched the bridge of her nose.

  “Get a towel from your gym bag,” Deralynn said. Then, to Caitlin, “You there?”

  “Why don’t we talk when it’s a better time.”

  “No better time.”

  In the back of Deralynn’s vehicle, which Caitlin was picturing as a minivan with a Dexter bobblehead on the dash, a child said, “Mom, the towel just spreads it everywhere.”

  Deralynn said, “Lick it off.”

  Caitlin wanted to drop her head to the desk.

  Deralynn said, “I found the pendant on eBay.”

  Caitlin straightened. “You think the victim’s missing necklace is for sale on eBay?”

  “It was. Four years ago. I got outbid. I contacted the police but never heard back. This week when everything blew up again, I e-mailed Sergeant Guthrie so he could contact the buyer and trace the provenance of the pendant. Find the seller, connect it to the victim.”

  “Back up and tell me everything from the start.”