Chasing Constellations (The UGS Constellation Series)

by HA Fortman

  Elisa watched as David spread out the papers he had collected for her from the lobby floor, a smile slowly spreading over her face as his registered complete shock at what was revealed.

  It was like a land mine exploded all over the table; photos, maps, and even sketches! She even had the ciphers and all of the letters to the various newspapers!

  Excited at the find, she watched as he rushed out into the hall screaming for others to join him. Elisa listened in stunned silence as his dress shoes created an odd thudding echo that followed his path up and down the hallway.

  The rest of the task force eventually filed into the room, Elisa realized that she was right. As they came in, the men began to introduce themselves to her.

  FBI Special Agent Mike Monroe was tall, the tallest of the three men that slowly sauntered in, and it was obvious under his tailored suit that he wasn’t a slouch in the gym, his close cut blond hair matched the severe cut of his chocolate eyes.

  Next to him came San Francisco’s Captain, Allen Campbell, who was of average height and build and would have been unremarkable if it weren’t for the scar slicing his left eyebrow lengthwise. The jovial smile didn’t fool Elisa either, she could see he used it to put others at ease until he went for the jugular with ruthless abandon and it was probably what lead to his being made Captain. His shaggy red hair, cut just at the nape, lead to the image of a relaxed businessman out at the bar. Helping with this image was the tie just barely holding the unbuttoned shirt collar closed.

  The last to enter the room, and pushing an enormous corkboard on wheels, used for demonstrations, was Detective Sam Whitehorse. His willowy frame was mostly hidden by the loose suit, but the ease with which he pushed the heavy board spoke of a strength many would over look. Elisa was immediately mesmerized by the coal black eyes that peered through hair so black it was nearly blue and easily reached his waist.

  “They got all jumbled up when that man crashed into me, I’m sorry. I can quickly put them to rights if you want.” Elisa spoke as she slowly stood and reached for the scattered piles on the table. Mindful of her sore ribs, she kept one arm wrapped around herself and carefully turned that side of her body away from the table.

  “Well, you’re not what I expected to see, such a tiny thing. David, why is she here and why were you screaming like a loon down the hallway?” The Captain’s voice was a deep, rich baritone that would have skittered in a silken caress down her spine, if Elisa had been interested in men older than her own father. She’d always been a sucker for a deep voice.

  “Guys, this is Elisa. She’s got an interesting twist on this case and I thought it would be in our best interest to see what she has.” David said before he nodded to Elisa and moved around to the other side of the table, “Why don’t you grab your things there, sort them on the board for us and tell us what you have.”

  Gathering her papers, and trying to put them into some form of order, Elisa nodded and moved to the board. Once there she began to talk about what brought her out to California. While she told them of her past, what started as a thesis paper, and how she started piecing things together from a different angle, she began to organize the papers on the table before her. At home she used the wall, but here she had the cork board and plenty of push pins. Gradually she started to fill the board. As she did, her thoughts became more organized by the timeline of activities.

  She started with the first of the murders of the two young teens; Daniel Forrester and Leanna Jacobs and ended at the present day.

  As she lined up the ciphers with each accompanying letter and newspaper article, she started to fill in the rest of the officers, “What I’ve noticed is a few other murders that weren’t tied in with the ones you added to the case. These ones fell in the lulls of the others. They all follow the lines of the killer’s path, but the way they were done is different. They were written off as accidents, and that didn’t make any sense. They were never reported in the paper, other than as obituaries. But if you look here at the map, you’ll see it’s the same segmented circle with a tilted X, or a target. They all lay out in the same design and I think San Francisco is the epicenter. Which is why I think this is where the next murders are going to be.”

  Elisa listened to the stunned silence that met her declaration, but she wasn’t prepared for the men to burst out in questions all at once.

  “How do you know that? And what makes you think these ‘accidents’ weren’t really just bad, unfortunate casualties?” The captain shouted above the din of the others, his body tight with tension as he stood over the table and leaned forward.

  His movements pulled Elisa’s attention from the board she was still busily putting papers on, the final picture of the man from the lobby of the station caught between the first finger and thumb of one hand.

  “There’s a pattern. If you look at the letters in the papers, he says he killed seventeen people, but I know there’s been more. According to the records from the surrounding counties you’ll see that there have been eight other murders that weren’t tied into the ones already known.” Elisa shuffled her pages around that hadn’t made it to the board until she found the ones she was looking for, and then spun the sheet around until it faced the Captain on the other side.

  She arched a brow as the man read the paper, then passed it off to the others that were straining to see over his shoulder.

  Captain Campbell commented about it with a voice laden with sarcasm. “And what makes you think these are all tied together? Don’t you think we’ve looked into all recent murders from a certain time frame?”

  With a short, brisk nod Elisa returned to her board and pulled away a coroner’s report before turning back and slapping it on the table.

  “Murders, you looked at murders, but did you look at all recent deaths? Did you look at accidental or even natural deaths? What about killings from alleged self-inflicted gunshots? Or anything else that wasn’t the known motive or means of killing that the suspect had been using already and tied to the other murders?”

  A flick of her wrist sent the paper sailing across the table as she turned back toward the rest of the men, her arms crossed defensively over her chest. “Look, I know you don’t want the help of a woman, much less someone that’s only twenty six, but I know what I found, and I know he’s going to kill again and again until he’s stopped. I can’t let someone else go through that kind of pain and fear of never knowing, with never having closure!”

  Elisa knew what the men saw as they peered at her report in David’s hand, then back up to her. She didn’t seem to be much of anything, barely reaching the shoulder of the shortest man there in the room with them. She only stood five feet four inches at most. Her sensible black two inch heels and the gray pencil skirt that reached just past her knees, along with the slightly baggy white blouse hid any attributes she might have possessed, gave her the look of your typical librarian.

  The fact that she had her light reddish-brown hair tied back into a bun didn’t help matters, nor did the thick black cat eyes glasses that fairly hid her emerald green eyes as they perched precariously on the bridge of her nose.

  She had thought that by dressing in such a down played manner the detective might take her more seriously, instead of wearing something a little flirtier. But she suddenly realized that it didn’t matter if she’d worn nothing but a cloth across her waist, the men would have seen her the same way.

  She was nothing more than an amusement to break the monotony of a stalled out murder case, one that they were just going to treat with indifference while they humored her.

  Tempting as it was to slam her left foot onto the cracked black and white tile floor; Elisa barely managed to herself and instead huffed softly. She realized she would need to pull out all of the stops and convince these men that she knew what she was talking about. Apparently they hadn’t caught up with the women’s lib movement and were stuck back in the stone ages, where only the men worked and the woman took care of the home.

  “You do
n’t believe me. I get that. I don’t understand it, but I get it. I know what I’m talking about. But at least try to hold back your sarcasm and judgment until after I’ve shown you everything, OK?” Elisa didn’t even wait for them to respond before she turned her back on them as she started to point out the timeline again.

  She took the time to show them how each additional murder that was labeled as an ‘accident’ flowed between each of the known murders. “You know about the first murders, those of Daniel Foster and Leanna Jacobs.”

  She waited until she received a nod from all of the gathered men before taking a deep steadying breath and plunging on, “That time he used a nine millimeter handgun. What you don’t know is that before those poor two teens were killed, another couple was in an ‘unfortunate auto accident’. Which would have been written off as viable since the conditions that day was poor because it had been raining all day and there was a lot of fog on the roads; however that’s not what really happened. It was later discovered and pushed aside because, let’s face it, too many cases go unsolved. Back in the wheel well behind the rear passenger-side tire was a perfect circular puncture hole. It was later agreed that it could have been made by the same .22 caliber handgun. The same gun that might have been used to kill the two teens only ten miles away from the parking area where they were killed in Vallejo. Misty and Harold Dwajeck never stood a chance, but the police chose to ignore the forensics and say that that hole was the result of stress in the metal accentuated by the resulting crash on December twentieth.”

  Chapter 2

  Elisa realized they weren’t convinced yet as she watched the various reactions, most of them were filled with doubt. “On July fourth, Stephanie McLean and Matthew Sterns were both shot with a nine millimeter handgun, and we know that Stephanie expired from her wounds, but Matthew survived and was able to give the only known description of their attacker.”

  “Now if we broaden the search out we find Alan Farenze, who was found in his apartment not ten miles away, and died not more than four hours after Stephanie, that was ruled to be a suicide. Never mind that all of his friends and family claim that he would never do such a thing and instead realize that they never found the weapon. How is someone that allegedly commits suicide not going to have a hold of their nine millimeter handgun after he pulls the trigger unless someone else is there to take said weapon with them when they leave? It had to have up and walked away, because we all know guns can kill people without someone else’s hand attached and pulling the trigger.” She paused to take a breath after rushing through the facts so they couldn’t interrupt her.

  “I know this is a lot to take in, and you’re probably not going to believe me, but I promise if you look into these ‘accidental deaths’ then you’ll see the same pattern I’ve seen.” Elisa said.

  Her sarcasm was thick enough to cut through the tension that had grown in the room, although David and Sam both had a slight curling of the lips as they attempted to hide their laughter.

  “You’re right; the weapon in a suicide doesn’t just up and walk away. Is this all that you have or is there more?” David said as he took the report from the Captain’s hands, his head shaking the entire time he read it. “We can’t officially bring you into an open investigation, but we do appreciate you coming forward with this.”

  “You have the ciphers, and I know that one of them was even broken by the Harrison’s. You know this killer enjoys doing what he’s doing. And you know he’s not going to stay in one place very long, which would only increase his chances of being caught. It’s obvious that he enjoys the attention because he’s started coining himself the Zodiac, and he’s writing letters to all of the major papers. It’s only a thirty minute drive, maybe a little longer with traffic, for him to come from there to here. There are a lot of potential victims for him to attack on the way.

  “And you have a sketch of what he looks like, although there are a lot of potential suspects. Now, what if the sketch was wrong? It’s common for a victim to not remember what their attacker looks like. It could have been someone they’d seen just prior to the attack or someone they had an argument mixing with the memory of being knifed.” Elisa paused and looked at the rapt attention of the men.

  “There are all sorts of reasons why they mix it up. But if you look at the photos of the crime scenes in the paper, and I’m sure you have better ones than I had access to, you’ll see one thing in common with them all, or rather, one person in common.” Elisa rushed to say this as she moved around the table.

  Once she was back across from the gathered men she grabbed a stack of photos and slid them across the waxed surface to the men. She leaned back and waited for their reactions with her arms crossed, her hip leaning carefully against the wood.

  Each of the men had a photo in their hand and looked between each one as much as they were able to before setting them down on the surface of the table. In one of the photos was a group of spectators with a bright yellow “Police Line Do Not Cross” tape reaching across their waists. Each of the gathered individuals showed various stages of concern, except for the man standing in the middle with his hands clenched at his sides and a look of anger caressing his features. Remarkably the man in the photo was someone that could have, and obviously did, get overlooked all of the time. Even with him being taller than the rest of the observers. His dark hair was closely gathered at the nape of his neck and gave the hint of being longer than typical. It was hard to distinguish what color his eyes were, as the photo looked to be the one from something larger that had been zoomed in and was slightly blurry.

  Without a word, Elisa pointed to two other photos across the table. Each one showed the same man in different stages of anger and obviously at different crime scenes. In one he held the tape to his waist with a tight grip; the other showed his arms crossed tightly over his chest with a slight smile creasing his full lips. The pull on the plain T-shirt he wore showed a very fit physique. Finally, Elisa flipped over an extreme close up of the man in question, one where it appeared to have been taken when the man was in the process of turning to look over his shoulder. Ice blue eyes, so pale they looked nearly white, glowed from the depths of the photo, a stark contrast to the man’s dark blond hair. “The only thing that changes is his clothing and his hair color, but that man has been seen at each and every crime scene, even the accidents that weren’t accidents. His name is Chase Ricter.”

  A short gasp pulled from David’s lips as he slammed the photo against the table, “The guy that charged you! Do you know him personally?” At Elisa’s nod, he went on. “No wonder you were so stunned. I didn’t think, even someone as small as you, would be hurt badly by some thug knocking you over. But what makes you think he’s the killer? It could be just some jackass whacko that gets a kick out of seeing places where a murder happened. There’s more isn’t there?” At Elisa’s mute shake of her head, he tilted his own and lifted the photo once more to study it.

  “Yes. My dad had connections in Detroit. They were able to help me get an ID on him, but that was all; there’s no history of this man. We found a driver’s license, but other than that, nothing; no social security card, no past work history, no school records. He doesn’t exist according to any public record, but yet he’s in every single crime scene and now… now he’s here in one of your jail cells.” While she was speaking, the men’s faces turned from skeptic to doubtful and finally to shock as they realized that this small woman had done something they hadn’t. She’d found a ghost in their cells, one that had haunted each and every place that the Zodiac left his calling card. “I don’t know if he did them himself, but from where I’m standing this man is definitely someone you need to talk to!”

  Chapter 3

  Sitting in his cell after the oh so joyous process of being booked by the less than happy officers, Chase fiddled with the side of his left middle finger, pressing and rubbing against what appeared to be a callous on the side of his last knuckle near his nail. They’d taken everything from him
, even his clothing, and forced him to strip down to his underwear in order to put on an obnoxiously bright orange jumpsuit and cheap disposable flip-flops. The things weren’t comfortable, but they were better than putting his feet on the ice cold plain white tiles, and kept him from having to step on who knew what was living in the cracks.

  He knew the charges were trumped, that he’d pissed off someone when he told them so. He had only been searching the crime scenes after the police had removed their barricades and tape. He suspected it was the other that had convinced them to arrest and rough him up, making it look like he had intentionally been fighting them when that was the farthest thing from his mind.

  A soft buzzing drew his attention; a sound he knew no one else could hear, the man canted his head to the side and listened to the random beeps and clicks. He shook his head before the random brushing of his thumb turned into a set number of taps against the hardened skin. Glancing through the Flexi-glass bisected with crisscrossing wires front of the cell, his icy blue eyes flashed a soft red before returning to normal. No one heard him utter the soft sounds of his tongue clicking against his teeth as he listened to yet more dulcet tones. No one saw that when he dropped his chin to his chest and snarled something else dropped with it.

  Spinning in place in the middle of the cell he began to move, four steps to the back of the cell and eight to the front, again and again in a slow methodical pace. He constantly ran his thumb along his finger, the only thing that gave any indication to his mood other than the pacing, but in a jail cell such behavior was quite common and went unnoticed. For hours the man paced his cell, tapping and muttering softly to himself. He stopped only when someone passed in front of him, then he would lift his head and stare at whomever was there, never moving more than just his eyes and even then he never once blinked.