“Credit card history?”
“Last page. She has a Visa. She pays it monthly. In addition to the Visa, you’ll see she has over $20,000 cash actually in the bank and another $50,000 in a tax-free fund that she could draw down if needed—kind of a Suze Orman emergency fund. She was putting the maximum into her retirement account and had a little over $400,000 put away. For what it’s worth, she was in really good financial shape.”
Where she was recently spending her money was of interest to Mac. With Wire and Coolidge looking over his shoulder, Mac scanned through her credit card history of the last four months. There were a lot of charges for stores in DC and the surrounding area. “Don, what kind of personnel resources do we have?”
“Depends. What are you thinking?”
Mac held up the credit card statements. “I’m thinking we need to go to every store she’s charged at in the last, say, four months. We need to go through her calendar, anything that tracks where she’s been. Somewhere Rubens interacts with her along the way. April Greene thinks Rubens is highly educated, has interests in the arts. So did Lisa White. As I look at her financials, there are bookstores, paint stores and museums. For example, the Smithsonian is on here twice. So where would he be most likely to find Lisa White?”
“At a place of their mutual interest,” Galloway answered.
“Correct, a place where she and he would both be comfortable. We need to see if we can find him by looking at where Lisa White was spending her time. We need security camera footage of the time of every purchase to see if anyone is with her. We need to show Lisa White’s picture at these places, especially the bookstores. She bought books seemingly by the truckload, but it looks like she was buying them at small mom and pop stores. I see only a few chain store purchases and not many Internet purchases either.”
“The little bookstores might not have much for surveillance,” Coolidge noted.
“True,” Mac responded. “But in turn, they know their customers, especially someone who is in the store often. So maybe, just maybe, they saw someone with Lisa White.”
“It might have registered with someone at the store if she was there and a man was with her,” Wire noted, nodding.
“Or talking to her,” Coolidge added and then offered, “I can probably get some people to help. The stores must know her a little. We need to talk to them all.”
Galloway looked over the list. “That’s good, Detective Coolidge. This is a lot to cover in a short period of time. I’ll have to liaison with other local law enforcement and get you some help.”
“Good,” Mac answered, “but let’s try to get detectives on it if at all possible, Don. I love the men in uniform, but detectives will have a better feel for this.”
“Understood,” Galloway responded. “I’ll get it started. We’ll be on it tomorrow.”
After Galloway left, Mac stepped back to the whiteboard, scanning the evidence, the facts, the information.
“What else?” Wire asked. “What else are we going to do? I mean, this might not work.”
“No, it might not, at least not yet,” Mac replied. “You have to give it time.”
“Give it time? We’re on a clock. How can you give it time?”
Mac started to respond and then stopped. One thing that he was thinking about all day was the how. How to find Rubens? How to get to him? He thought back to his discussions with Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles, what he’d heard and the investigative approaches they’d taken. All of the men were good detectives who for the most part were overwhelmed by the case, maybe with the exception of Sam Walker in Los Angeles. Mac liked Walker. The man was real police, a pro, and Mac saw a lot of himself in Walker. Walker came close on the last victim because instead of chasing the case, he stopped looking at the clock, ignored his phone and just focused on the last clue. Mac could hear it in Walker’s voice. If he could go back and do it again, he’d have done that sooner. Maybe Mac needed to learn that lesson and play the game differently.
“Mac, how can we just give it time?” Wire persisted.
“It’s a game, Dara. Not for you and I, but for Rubens. Think about the profile April Greene gave us this morning. To Rubens, this is a game. It has a beginning and it has an end and we play up to four. Everyone who has gone up against him has played the game on Rubens’ terms, chasing to the next victim, sweating the clock, the pressure, the phone calls and ultimately the failure. I’m not going to play it that way.”
“But the women? The victims?”
“The way I look at it is I have three more to play with.”
“You have three more … to play with?” Wire looked at her partner as if he’d lost his mind. “Mac, you’re playing with the women’s lives.”
“No,” Mac answered, shaking his head. “No, no, no. Rubens is.”
“Yeah, and that sick bastard is going to kill another woman on Wednesday if we don’t stop him.”
Mac nodded. “That’s exactly how he wants you to think of this.”
“Because that’s exactly what this is,” Wire replied. “We have to find him.”
“I don’t think we can,” Mac answered. “Not before Thursday, not unless we get very lucky somehow. Victim number two is as good as already dead.”
“You’re giving up already?” Wire looked to Coolidge, completely dismayed. “Is he really saying this?”
“Yes, but … I think I get why,” Coolidge replied and then looked to Mac. “The long game?”
“Yup.”
“So you just let the next victim die?” Dara persisted, not yet buying in.
“I’m not going to just let the next victim die, Dara. Come on, you know me better than that. Rubens is already getting to you—”
“Isn’t he getting to you?” she pressed.
Mac sat down in a chair. “This morning he was. I could feel my chest tightening because I was sitting around reading files and I wasn’t out pounding the pavement, looking for leads, sweating witnesses and doing what I’d normally do with a homicide investigation because in your usual homicide the first forty-eight hours are the key.”
“What changed?” she asked.
“The conference calls with Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles. By the end of those it had dawned on me.”
“What?”
“Let me use a track metaphor. Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles treated the case as a sprint, like you want to treat it, like I would usually treat it. They scrambled like mad to find the next victim and that plays right into Rubens’ hands. That is exactly what he wants, and he throws gas on the fire with the calls, the countdown and the clues.”
“So, what, you sit back and watch?”
“No. But I’m thinking of this case as a marathon and we’re just a little over five miles in. Rubens is way ahead right now but with twenty-one plus miles to go, we’ve got time to catch up. We have to play to our strengths.”
“Which are —” The look that washed across her face told Mac she was starting to get it. “The resources of the FBI.”
“The resources of DC. The resources of Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles. And the media as well. They can be an ally in this if used right. This isn’t just you and me against him. He wants you and me to think of it that way, but it’s not. It’s everyone we have at our disposal. We need to let the mass of resources work to our advantage. We need to collect as much information as possible. We need to figure Rubens out, Dara. There has to be a way to catch him. I think to do that we need to understand how he makes his moves so that we can anticipate them when we get to the end.”
“If we chase him from victim to victim, we’ll end up like all the others, having failed.”
“I want the last book written on Rubens to be how we nailed the prick. To do that I think we need to play this differently than others have. In the short term, we’ve got Galloway doing his thing and Linc is doing his thing with his people and maybe we get lucky before Thursday. So in that sense we play it like a normal case. But you and I,” Mac shook his head, �
��we’re not going to play it that way. The next victim is chosen, that plan is already in action and Rubens is already closing the noose. If I put everything into chasing just that—”
“We just fall further behind,” Dara finished. “Still, I don’t like just sitting around looking at this whiteboard.”
“For now,” Mac replied, “that’s exactly what we’re going to do until we understand Rubens better. If we’re going to stop him before he leaves DC, if we’re going to stop him for good, we have to think about this like he does. It’s a game. Before we can make a move on him, we have to understand him better. In the meantime, we may have to be willing to sacrifice another victim to figure out the game, to figure out Rubens and to catch him once and for all.”
• • •
When he got home, he spent five minutes vomiting in the small bathroom off to the side of the kitchen. When he exited the bathroom, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, a robed Sally was waiting for him.
“Are you okay?”
“Just something I ate,” Mac replied lamely as he went to the refrigerator and reached inside for a bottle of water.
“Really?” she remarked skeptically.
“You know, on a case like this—cold pizza, sandwiches sitting out, bad takeout—”
“And a clock counting down to another victim,” she finished, taking the measure of him. She always seemed to know what he was thinking. It scared him sometimes how perceptive she could be. Sally wasn’t buying the food poisoning bit. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”
He shrugged.
“I know you don’t watch the news but it was the lead on the cable networks, the nightly news and the local news. It’s all over the web. This author, what’s his name?”
“Hugo Ridge.”
“Yeah, he’s been on a lot already. Apparently, he wrote two books on this guy.”
“They’re part of the FBI file on Rubens. His books and two by a woman named April Greene who is helping. I have one of her books in my backpack.”
“Anyway, it’s wall-to-wall coverage. Are you guys anywhere?”
Mac shook his head. “Not yet, but … it’s early.”
“There’s more to this than that,” Sally pressed. “How bad is it really?”
Mac tipped his head toward the bathroom. “That kind of answers the question, don’t you think?”
“I’ve never seen a case get to you like that, though,” she replied with concern. “What’s so special about this one?”
“Because of what I think we have to do.” He relayed his conversation with Wire. “I got her to my way of thinking eventually but the idea of … just letting a woman … die so I can learn more because it’s a fucking game to this asshole—” His voice trailed off as he leaned forward over the center island, looking down at his bottle of water and shaking his head. He technically said he had three more lives to play with like it was a new set of downs in football. He actually said that. It shocked him that he could be that cold and calculating. Was he as cold and calculating as the killer? Did he have to be to catch him?
After a moment, he took a long drink from the bottle of water and tried to clear his head. “God, I hope I’m doing the right thing.” He took another drink of water, a long gulp and looked over to Sally. She was the best sounding board he had. She was wicked smart and he trusted her judgment. “Am I doing the right thing?”
“Do you believe this is what you have to do?”
He nodded. “I think so.”
Sally thought for a moment and then nodded slowly. “If I’ve learned anything working in the White House the last two years, it’s that you do whatever you have to do to win.”
“Just win.”
“That’s right,” Sally replied, coming around the island, tipping his chin up and softly cupping his face in her hands. She looked him in the eye. “If this is what you have to do, then by God, you do it.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“I’m thinking … rules.”
Tuesday night, 6:00 P.M.
“Twenty-eight hours to go,” Wire sighed as she looked at her watch while lying on the old orange waiting room-like couch, resting for a moment.
Mac forbade a countdown clock in the room. They all knew the deadline, and it didn’t need to be constantly staring them in the face. But it didn’t matter. The countdown was everywhere. He couldn’t help but look at his watch from time to time. Every clock in the hallway or the one in the break room always caught his attention. People were in and out of the room all day and they were either reporting the time or checking their own watches or cell phones.
It reminded him of the movie High Noon. The movie viewer always knew how much closer to high noon Gary Cooper was getting because in every scene there was a clock in the background, sometimes ticking, sometimes silent but there was always a clock in view. No character ever mentioned how much time was left. You just knew. It was ever present, ticking away hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second.
It was that way now.
That time was passing was palpable.
The only way to block it out was to keep working.
He turned his attention back to the whiteboards.
The two-wheeled boards to the left of the main whiteboard mounted on the wall were the Lisa White murder boards. The one farthest to the left contained a summary of everything they’d learned about Lisa White the person. The other whiteboard was for the crime scene itself. They’d spent much of the last day working on the far left board. The focus was her phones, financials and retracing her steps in her final months.
Like many people these days, she did not have a house phone, only a cell phone. The key time period appeared to be the last six weeks, but the odd part was that it was her work phone and not her cell phone that revealed the contact. The records to her office phone at Georgetown University over the last six weeks revealed eight calls from an unidentified number, which they found to be a pay-as-you-go phone, better known as a burner phone. The problem, of course, was it was a burner phone. There was no identification attached to the phone’s number.
“That’s our guy for sure,” Wire said earlier, reviewing the calls. “There is no way he gets that close to her without some phone time. But why call her only at work?”
“She wouldn’t identify the caller at work,” Mac answered. “If he calls her on her cell, there is a chance she adds him as a contact. If she does that, it gives us a name, a number, something to trace.”
“But if he’s calling at work, she is at least less likely to do that.”
“Correct.”
They thought that in all his time spent in her townhouse after he’d killed her perhaps he’d deleted his contact name from her phone. The phone had been checked and nothing was changed or deleted from it in the hours before or after her death late on Saturday night.
An effort was made to call the burner but to no avail. It most likely had been disposed of or destroyed. A trace on the number revealed it was purchased a year ago at a convenience store in New Jersey, paid with cash. The store actually had surveillance footage of the day of the sale. The phones looked to have been sold to two young men, one Caucasian and the other perhaps Hispanic. Unfortunately, neither the store owner nor any of his employees recognized the men making the purchase.
“Tells you how long he’s been planning,” Mac replied. “Bought the phone a year ago and used proxies to do it.”
“Still, you’d figure that at some point a contact would be put into a phone if he’s calling them,” Wire suggested. “At least one of the victims maybe did that.”
“We should review that. I’ll have Delmonico get on it,” Mac offered. “However, even if a contact was entered, do we really think he’d actually give them a real name to go from? A name to which there was actually an identity on record somewhere that was really his?” He shook his head. “I highly doubt it. He’s way too careful.”
Detectives and agents were still tracking down all of her financial transactions of the
last four months. They were going to each store from which White made a purchase, talking to anyone working that day, showing White’s picture and collecting surveillance footage if it existed. Earlier in the day, Mac had looked through the surveillance video highlights collated thus far. Nothing probative had yet come to light. Problem was that, despite what you would see on television, surveillance footage was not always of high quality and tended to focus on specific areas of a store, especially a larger one. There were plenty of nooks and crannies that someone could hide or walk in that would allow someone to avoid high visibility on a surveillance system, particularly if you were being careful to avoid any exposure. However, it still had to be done. There were more stores to be checked and footage to be collected. They were getting to it as quickly as possible.
The middle whiteboard was for the murder scene at White’s house. Mac peered at it from time to time, seeing if he could discern what the hidden clue might be.
It was there.
Somewhere in the mass of books, pictures, paintings and bobbles rested the clue to their next victim.
Given the time of death until the time of the call, Rubens likely had hours in her townhouse to set it up. Agents were taking turns at White’s looking at everything that was packed into her cramped townhouse, trying to see if they could discern any pattern or find a name to check. If they came up with a name, they ran it through the DMV database and checked the photos. Thus far, ten names had been checked. Four of the women were married, three were high school students, one was a college student and two currently resided in nursing homes. None of the women fit the Rubens profile.
Mac already decided what he would do tomorrow as the clock ticked, and that was go back to White’s and take his crack at it.
For tonight he was focused on the main whiteboard, the one dedicated to Rubens. There were pictures of the twelve prior victims, a new picture for Lisa White, as well as pictures for the clues for each victim.
Under the heading of “Victims,” Mac wrote out all of the traits of the women. The characteristics were important, as was the method. It took Rubens time to get close to the women. The phone records showed eight calls from the suspected burner phone over a six-week period of time. He was slow, methodical and careful.
Next Girl On The List - A serial killer thriller (McRyan Mystery Series Book) Page 8
