by Thomas Perry
“What do you mean?”
“They came in waves. They broke windows and kicked in doors and stormed houses. The ones who had taken guns from the prison armory shot householders, but even the ones who hadn’t gotten guns found things to use. Every kitchen had kitchen knives. Many of the houses had guns in them. But anything would do—there were claw hammers, monkey wrenches, hatchets, and axes.”
“How many?”
“Three hundred and seventy-six houses. Ninety-seven murders—sometimes everybody in a house, and sometimes none. Sometimes the people on a street heard a commotion and abandoned their houses to avoid the escapees. When the escapees killed somebody in a house, sometimes they would set the place on fire to destroy evidence. After the first gunshots, we got calls and we went to work. Firefighters deployed to fight the fires, but they were shot at right away and had to retreat while we fought the escapees.”
“Did you lose any officers?”
“Eight. That’s twenty percent. We concentrated on stopping them on the east side of Main Street, because none of them had made it to the west side yet. We killed seventy-eight of them there and wounded a hundred more, but we held. Fortunately, the average violent offender isn’t as good at violence as he might be. We were far better shots. In the end, the sun came up, and it was over. It was like a horror movie, where the zombies just turn to dust in the sun. The last ones who could get cars to move did it then. The state troopers and the FBI were on their way here, and they caught most of them at roadblocks. The ones still on foot we rounded up and locked in the school gym with armed guards at the doors and on the baseball field. We drove them back to the prison in trucks starting around noon.”
“That’s a terrible story.”
“It sure is,” she said. “They murdered Weldonville. People started packing up, locking their houses, and driving away before we had even taken all the escapees back to prison.”
“Jesus.”
“That night didn’t help His popularity. Some people came back for the funerals, or stayed for them. Since then the churches have been practically empty on Sundays. The congregations are mostly gone.”
“What’s being done now?”
“Right now, we’re doing basic police work. It’s a federal prison, so the FBI is the lead agency. The state police are working on it, and we’re working on it.”
“What does ‘working on it’ mean?”
“I’m the senior officer of the Weldonville Police Department right now, since Chief Roberts was killed. But the department doesn’t need much administration, and I’m a homicide cop. What I’m doing right now is investigating and collecting evidence. Most of the crime scene stuff is secondhand from the FBI labs, which are about the best. I want to connect every bit of DNA from each of the victims to the DNA of whatever prisoner raped or killed them. I want to know which prisoners burned a house, stole a car, or picked up a gun. And I want to know which of the guns were fired, by whom and at whom. And I’m compiling a collection of all the records any police agency anywhere has on each of the twelve men who were the real escapees.”
Bill Halvorsen stared at the desk for a few seconds and nodded. He pointed at the pen and pad she had on the desk by her phone, and she nodded. He said, “I’m writing down my cell phone number, my mailing address, and my email. If the FBI and the others get tired of looking and give up, and you’re ready to go after the men who killed Nick, I’ll be available.”
“You’re not a cop, Bill.”
He looked at her, his sharp brown eyes unmoving. “No,” he said. “But I’m not offering to arrest anybody.” He set the folded paper on her desk. “Thanks for telling me the truth, Hawk. I knew you would. Don’t lose my information.” He gave a sad smile. “Or maybe it doesn’t matter. I’m sure you’re good enough to find me without it if the time comes.” He walked out the door.
She had seen him around town a number of times over the next two years. They had talked, but she had never called his number or told him what she had decided she would do if the twelve men weren’t caught in two years.
Before she’d brought her suitcase out to the car, she had looked over the rest of the list of people who had volunteered to go after the missing killers. It had contained some names she had expected: Ray McClellan, the ATF agent who had come back to town to retire and worked a few nights a week bartending at the Parkman House because he liked the company; Marjorie Clay, whose family owned the hardware store but who had been working as a private investigator in Denver; and her business partner Kristen Green, who often served as bait in traps because she was strikingly beautiful. There had been some surprises, including a man named Kenneth Long, who had never been to Weldonville but whose ex-wife had been born there. She had moved back to town with their son and daughter and all three had been killed on July 19. He owned a security company in New York that she’d actually heard of. They provided protection for important people. She had torn up the list, put the pieces in her garbage disposal, and washed them away before she’d left. Taking those people along would have been a terrible waste. She had always been a great homicide cop. She didn’t need anybody’s help to commit a few murders.
7
The drive was over a hundred miles along Interstate 76, heading over low, flat plains that slowly rose in altitude until the Denver airport. It was late night now, and much of the other traffic on the interstate highway consisted of long-haul tractor trailers grinding along at a constant speed. There was no rain and not much wind, so the trucks would probably make good time and be able to get into safe spots where the driver could park and get some sleep, then drive the last few miles into Denver to unload. Leah would hold out until morning and sleep after the plane took off.
As she drove, she thought about the men she was hunting. She knew most of their lives by heart. All twelve of the men she was looking for were transfers from one or another of the 122 prisons in the federal system. They came over a period of about a year, most from different prisons, and none of them at exactly the same time.
She had compiled a great deal of information about these men from their prison records and their trial records and the joint FBI and police investigation of the July 19 prison break and the crimes they committed that night. Weldonville Penitentiary had supplied fingerprints, DNA, photographs, and medical records of the inmates. They’d kept track of the names and addresses of the people who wrote to them, accepted telephone calls from them, or visited them. If they committed infractions in prison, there were investigation records. The Justice Department’s original trial records contained the names and testimony of witnesses, and she had paid special attention to defense witnesses. The police and FBI investigators had filed reports, including the names and addresses of everyone they’d interviewed. Leah had been collecting these things and studying them for two years.
The man she had selected as her first target was Albert Weiss, age thirty-seven. He had been convicted of federal kidnapping and hostage-taking charges five years before the prison break. He had actually committed the same crime twice before he was caught, and each time received a million dollars in ransom. He was caught only after his third attempt. At the time of his arrest he was suspected of conspiracy to commit murder but not charged because the actual killing of the kidnap victim occurred after he had been arrested. Evidence that he had planned the murder didn’t meet the conspiracy standard. He was originally sent to Terminal Island in California, but after two and a half years he was moved to Weldonville to ease overcrowding.
Weiss had been the one to build the radio signal jammer and use it on July 19. DNA showed that at some point he was wearing the guard uniform of Harry Costa. The Costas were a big Weldonville family, the children of two brothers, each of whom had four or five kids. Harry was a son of the older brother. When the group of twelve inmates broke into the guards’ locker room, Weiss changed into Costa’s clothes. He took Costa’s car keys and stole his car, but since the car hadn’t been recovered and tested, there would probably never
be any proof. He had done so much of a more serious nature that it didn’t matter.
The FBI had pieced together what happened during the prison break using the fragmentary video from the surveillance cameras, witnesses from among the prisoners who didn’t try to escape, and times when the electronic locks on doors and gates were opened and jammed. Albert Weiss was certainly a participant in the murder of Harry Costa, because he touched both Costa and the handles of the ligature used to strangle him. Costa’s body was found wearing Al Weiss’s prison jumpsuit and placed on the bed in his cell.
Weiss’s prints and DNA were also present in Costa’s house. Costa’s eighty-one-year-old father was found unconscious from being beaten with a blunt object, and he died in the hospital a few hours later. Weiss had sexually assaulted and killed Costa’s wife, Megan. Costa’s car left town, heading south past the cameras on the Parkman House restaurant and the gas station at the Stillwell interstate entrance. No police agency had reported a sighting of Albert Weiss since then.
Leah wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw in the mass of information about Weiss a vulnerability. When he first entered the prison system, he filled out a form listing the people he wanted to be allowed to visit him. On the list were his mother and five women who weren’t relatives. The FBI had this information, interviewed each of these women a few times, and came to no conclusion. At first, the FBI had a thousand escaped prisoners to capture and investigate, charge and prosecute, so they were stretched thin, and even when the number was down to twelve, they had hundreds of other leads to follow.
In the investigation of Weiss’s mother, the FBI learned she had never lived anywhere except Naples, Florida. The records showed Albert had lived a few other places for brief periods, but had always returned to Florida. His crimes had been committed in Florida. All five of the females on his list of visitors to the prison had provided addresses in Florida. Where was Albert Weiss likely to be after two years? She had a guess.
Al Weiss decided it was late enough at night to go out to get some air that hadn’t been through an air conditioner. He had been born in Naples, and had always succeeded in staying on the Gulf side of Florida when he wasn’t imprisoned. July had a daytime temperature of ninety-three and a nighttime temperature of seventy-four, which he had always thought of as right, and every other climate as wrong. July was also the rainiest month, with an average rainfall of over nine inches, but he didn’t mind that either. It gave him an excuse for carrying his special umbrella. The steel tip was ground down to a point and covered by the end of the hollow steel shaft from an old umbrella that he’d fitted over it like a sheath. A six-inch spike was better than a gun to a fugitive because it was silent and nearly invisible.
He could feel the humidity building even as the breeze from the Gulf brought the cooler air in over the city. He knew that if Mother had been awake and aware that he was going out, she would have told him not to, and she would have been right, of course. The July rains could be torrential sometimes, and a man walking around in it was asking for attention. Weiss would stay out tonight at least until things got definitely wet. It was the only time he could go out for a walk. During the day, people were always watching and staring at everyone on the street. Walking around was risky.
He had excellent fake identification in the name of Michael Hooper, but if somebody recognized his face, having identification in another name was not enough to protect him. The cards he had for the purpose were more than two years old now, so he couldn’t be sure they were so excellent anymore anyway. False identity cards should not be too fresh and unworn, bearing new starting dates and expirations far in the future. But they shouldn’t be too old either. States changed the formats of their licenses, and credit companies modernized their logos, their safety features, and their designs. The photographs of the supposed driver that had been taken three or four years ago and had seemed fine two years ago could suddenly look ancient. Worst of all, the debit card accounts that had started with big deposits a couple of years ago could die from starvation. It didn’t matter that the card was genuine if the genuine account was empty.
The reason Weiss had gone to a federal prison was that members of his crew had botched a kidnapping. He had already executed two perfect kidnappings and collected the ransoms, but the third had netted him nothing, and defending himself in court had cost a large portion of the money from the first two.
Weiss had begun to think about working again. He didn’t have an immediate, desperate need for money, but the way money had been drained away from his savings in the past two years had alarmed him. He had been living almost entirely from his mother’s accounts for a while, and that could not go on forever.
His walk wasn’t one of the most scenic. He couldn’t openly stroll along Fifth Avenue in Naples, a street filled with shops, restaurants, and bars. There was too much light, and too much life. He was hoping to go down to walk along the beach for a distance, as he sometimes had, but there had often been drunks and street people lurking down there, and he didn’t want to have to stab a couple of them to get home. He also didn’t want to be on the sand in the open when the ocean breeze brought the rain.
His kidnappings in the old days had been well planned. He had spent time out in the nightlife scene looking for rich people who weren’t observant or well protected, and shopped for victims at real estate open houses, nice hotels, oceanfront bars, and even golf courses. When he had selected candidates, he had put in the time and effort to learn all about them: Who could be expected to pay a ransom for their lives? How much money would that be? Where did they live? Who else lived there, and what were the security features? It had gone on and on.
Now that he had been to prison, he couldn’t do it that way anymore. If he wanted to get back into kidnapping, he would have to think much smaller and operate without his helpers, who had been unreliable anyway. He would have to do it all himself. That meant working by stealth and taking someone who was sure to be unarmed and unable to put up much of a fight. The best place to find someone like that would not be in bright sunshine by their pool or at their country club, or in the bright lights of the nightclubs or on the streets in front. It would be in the dark parking lots behind the buildings very late at night.
What he envisioned was a lone girl walking out to her car in a lot after an evening of heavy drinking. As he formulated the idea, he further defined the victim he was imagining. It would probably be a college girl. That was the age when a girl might be alone late at night and drunk. He could perform something like a screening process by walking in the lots behind bars and nightclubs, searching for a suitably expensive car that had been a present to a young single woman. It would be something small and a little bit sporty, but not hard to drive. It wouldn’t be a Lamborghini or Ferrari. It would be something like a small Mercedes or BMW with an automatic transmission. It would be painted a light color. It probably would have a license plate holder or a window sticker with the name of a college. It might even have a vanity license plate that said something like PRINCESS or CUTIE. He could stay nearby, waiting to see who came to claim it, and simply take her away.
Other refinements began to occur to him as he walked. He could abduct her and not contact her family for a few days to give them the time to imagine terrible things were happening to her, or even longer, to persuade them that she might be dead. Then, when they heard her voice, they’d be delighted to pay whatever he asked. The circumstances would dictate whether he freed her or actually killed her, but that would be a decision for after he had squeezed them for money.
As he strolled beside the parking lots, he raised his eyes to the rear corners of the buildings that faced Fifth Avenue. Electronic devices had always been his special talent. He would use his skills to make the recordings from security cameras disappear, or maybe the opposite. He could take control of the system to send the security footage to the parents as proof that he had their little girl in his possession.
The first raindrops arrived with a slight i
ncrease of the wind, so he put up his umbrella and turned his steps toward his car. Probably he would kill the girl. That was always safest. But before he did, maybe he would take the pleasure of making the parents’ bad dreams come true.
8
Leah Hawkins, like other cops, had spent years of her life doing surveillance, so she knew how to make the job easier. The apartment she had rented was on the Gulf shore side of Mrs. Alma Weiss’s house, so the afternoon sun was behind her and not shining into her eyes. In the morning, from the back windows of the bedrooms, a person could see the Gulf of Mexico and the beach.
The beaches here were among Leah’s favorites on the continent. Their white sand looked like sugar, with tall swaying palm trees along the margin. From this apartment house a person could simply stroll down the sidewalk for two blocks to the west, where the street ended in a narrow path through a stand of leafy trees. After no more than twenty feet on the shady path, she would emerge on the sand, looking out over the blue water at tiny, distant white clouds just above the horizon.
Leah had known that she would have to do much of her reconnaissance after dark. The person she was interested in was likely to be nocturnal, and the landscape of a town was often markedly different at night. In hot places, some buildings that during the day seemed unused and unoccupied had people coming in and out all night. Bars and restaurants that had few customers in daylight were teeming once the sun was down. Even in a prosperous residential city like Naples, there were sure to be places that reached full liveliness after midnight. The man Leah Hawkins was watching for knew that he was being hunted, and that it would never stop until he died. He had done too much, and committed the wrong kind of crimes, for the interest in him to end. He would be reluctant to show his face at any time, but particularly in daylight.
