by Jeff Carson
Mansor said nothing, just stared at his former deputy with half-closed eyes.
“That wasn’t self-defense.” Attakai wiped his tears and sniffed. “I killed the hell out of that guy. Made him suffer.” He clenched his teeth when he said the word suffer. “And you know what? I’d do it over again in a second.”
They sat in silence for a few moments.
“All right,” Wolf said. “So you killed him. You buried him. And so you went looking into his life.”
Attakai nodded.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I guess I was … I just wanted to make sure it was him, you know? The killer.”
Wolf tapped a finger on the table. “But you said when Fred got out of the car, he was talking about Rose. That’s what set you off and made you kill him by shooting him in the arms, the legs, the crotch …”
Attakai’s eyes bounced around the room, then landed on Wolf. “The guy got what he deserved.”
“I agree with you a hundred percent on that one,” Wolf said. “Personally I wouldn’t have had the patience and would have started with two shots to the head.”
“Damn right.”
“But … are you saying there was doubt as to whether or not it was him?” Wolf asked. “Is that why you started looking into him?”
Attakai spread his palms on the table and stared at a spot between them. “I was maybe a little in doubt. I started second-guessing myself. Wondering if my sister was wrong and I might have heard what I wanted to hear … or something. If my rage hadn’t clouded my mind, you know?”
“We found Rose and your sister’s DNA inside his truck when we pulled it out of the ground,” Mansor said. “It was him all right.”
Attakai closed his eyes, looking genuinely relieved to hear the news.
Attakai’s eyes popped open. “But there’s another guy. I never knew there was another guy.”
“What did you find out about Wilcox back then?” Wolf asked.
“Shit, not much. I found his name and address on his car registration and insurance cards. I checked records, got the name of the landlord and had him meet me at his house. Got my way inside his place.
“Place was a real sty. Smelled like complete shit. I’m telling you, he was like an animal. I searched the whole place, and came up with nothing. I was expecting to open a drawer, lift a filthy piece of clothing, and find a pile of ears and toes. Except there wasn’t anything like that. No collection. No bloody knife. No nothing.”
“What about a broken window?” Wolf asked.
Attakai searched his mind nodded. “Yeah. There was. Why?”
Wolf ignored the question. “You visited his house. Then what else did you do?”
“I figured out from the landlord he worked at the funeral home. So I went and talked to them. I wanted to check his belongings. Try and find the toes and ears. But it’s not like the guy had an office or something. Just a closet in the back and a van he drove around. Neither of them had much of anything inside.”
“Why were you searching for toes and ears if you were going to keep him in the ground and not tell anyone anyway?” Wolf asked.
Attakai seemed thrown by the question. After a swallow he said, “I was second-guessing myself, like I said.”
Wolf nodded.
Mansor cleared his throat. “What about the cell phone we found inside his buried car? Why didn’t you take that?”
“I never saw a cell phone.”
“We found it in the center console,” Mansor said. “Didn’t you check the center console?”
Attakai nodded. “I remember seeing it. I just left it … I was so screwed up that day. After I shot him, I wasn’t thinking straight. I just wanted to bury the body, get the guy in the ground and out of sight.”
“What else?” Wolf asked.
“What else what?”
“Did you find out about him? What else did you do?”
Attakai thought about it for a second then shook his head. “Nothing.”
They sat in silence for a beat.
“Then what?” Wolf asked.
“Why did you leave?” Mansor asked. “Why did you quit the department and go up north?”
Attakai said nothing, just exhaled heavily.
“Shame?” Wolf asked. “Is that it?”
Attakai’s eyes flashed. “Why?”
“Because you got your revenge but you never told the families of the victims about it. You never told them they could rest easy because you got the guy. You just kept your mouth shut about it and moved north. You got to bury the past and start over with a new life. They didn’t.” Wolf watched him wilt in his chair. “Is that it?”
“Yeah, well there’s another guy out there anyway, right?” Attakai shrugged. “There’s another killer. I was wrong thinking I took care of the problem.”
“Doesn’t mean you’re off the hook, son.” Mansor pursed his lips and shook his head.
The gesture from his former boss seemed to devastate Jeremy Attakai to the core. Tears streamed down his face again. “I know … shit … I know. I told my sister to keep it a secret. I told her to not tell anyone.” His eyes pleaded before his words came out. “She didn’t do anything wrong. It was all me.”
“And your cousin Hector?” Wolf asked. “Did he help you dig the hole?”
Attakai shook his head. “No. No, that’s not right. He didn’t have anything to do with it. I called Hector down and he drove my sister back. He didn’t even know what happened.”
Mansor narrowed one eye. “That’s three people with three cars. Yours, your sister’s, and Hector’s. If Hector came down and picked up your sister, how did you get her car out, and yours? And how did you get an excavator in?”
Attakai’s eyes volleyed back and forth.
“Doesn’t Hector work for La Plata Construction Services?” Mansor’s voice was quiet. “Didn’t he also work for them two years ago?”
Attakai stared at the table.
Mansor put a palm on the table, as if to steady the deputy’s world. “Come on, son. It’s time to fess up to all this. To lie more is only going to make things worse.”
Attakai looked at Mansor. “Sir, I buried the body and the truck by myself. Isn’t that a perfect enough explanation?”
“No, son. I’m sorry. It’s not.”
Chapter 30
So the second killer suspected Fred Wilcox was dead? Is that what we’re saying?” ASAC Todd paced the front of the small task force room in the La Plata County Sheriff’s Office headquarters.
The pen board behind him had a new phrase written in Hannigan’s chicken scratch: Fred is dead. Lindsay Ellington’s picture was tacked to the wall as the ninth victim. Otherwise, the place hadn’t changed in their day of absence.
Luke sat next to Wolf bundled in a zipped up hooded sweatshirt that was seven sizes too big for her—a gift from Deputy Wines.
Turning up the heat ten degrees would have been a better gift. Wolf, Mansor, Wines, Agents Todd, Hannigan, Shecter, and Wells all sat or stood with folded arms, trying to retain body heat against the industrial air conditioner jetting out of the ceiling vents.
“Yeah he knew Fred was dead.” Hannigan leaned against the wall at the side of the room. “That’s why he broke into Fred’s place. Think about it. He knows Wilcox might have something that connects the two of them. Like a burner cell phone. Or a stack of ears or—”
“Toes,” Wolf said.
Hannigan blinked, trying to regain his train of thought. “Yeah, or toes.”
“Not or toes,” Wolf said, the edginess of his voice coming without him even trying. ““We have half of the signature missing on Sally Claypool and Lindsay Ellington’s bodies. They both have severed ears, but no severed toes. Why? Because Fred Wilcox was the severed toe guy and he’s been dead this whole time. Mary Attakai’s description of her assailant, her one assailant, was Fred Wilcox. She came out of the desert with a missing toe. Fred was the toe guy.”
“Okay, I’m sorry.” Hannig
an loomed over his shoulder. “Why don’t you stand up and take the floor then.”
Wolf shrugged.
“No. Why don’t you tell us what you’ve been thinking over here with your blank stare at the wall.”
They sat in silence listening to the vent pour crystallized air from above.
“If you ask me,” Agent Shecter said, “it still looked like Attakai was hiding something in there.”
“You still think he’s the second guy?” Hannigan walked to the front of the room. “He was under surveillance the whole night last night.”
“Yeah, and Wolf snuck up on him undetected,” Shecter said. “Not that big of a stretch that he could have done the same thing.”
Todd shook his head. “I don’t see it. It’s miles back into town from Attakai’s house. His car was parked in the garage out front. He didn’t leave last night. It’s not him.”
“Well …” Shecter let his thought go unfinished and shifted in his seat.
“We’ve gotten everything wrong from the beginning,” Wolf said. “We have to start there.”
They looked at Wolf.
He pointed at the pictures on the walls of the women’s faces, all with missing ears.
“Step one: Fred Wilcox is a janitor up at Colorado Mountain College in Steamboat Springs, where he notices Jessica Meinhoff—a student there at the time. He follows Jessica Meinhoff down to Silverton. Rapes and kills her. He moves on, goes south and gets a job at the Buntley Funeral Home. Once there he meets a second person.”
“I wouldn’t call it meet,” Luke said. “I’d say he teamed up with another person and started killing. That’s not just somebody he meets at the coffee shop. Maybe it’s somebody from his past.”
Hannigan nodded. “Or it’s somebody who saw what Fred Wilcox was. Somebody who was already a cold-blooded killer and spotted another cold-blooded killer.”
Wolf put two fingers up. “Step two: He teams up with another killer and they start killing in a very methodical way. They contributed differently to the killings. Fred Wilcox was the rapist. That was his MO. And, like we just said, he took toes as his trophy.
“From the looks of it, the other guy was responsible for the rest of it—the tying up, the slashing, the severed ear, the strangulation and the display match across all nine victims.”
“Right,” Luke said.
“So …” Wolf leaned forward and put his head in his hands. He lined up his thoughts. “What kind of a guy is he? It’s safe to say killer two was a smarter man than Fred. Or at least more concerned with getting away with it. Whereas, Fred Wilcox was an animal by all accounts and didn’t care about anything but the destruction and the sexual release.”
“Killer two was a tamer.” Agent Todd said with narrowed eyes. “A … harnesser …”
“A parasite,” Hannigan said.
“I’d classify the relationship more as commensalism,” Agent Shecter said. “That’s where one organism receives benefits while the other receives no benefit nor harm. Fred Wilcox was the one who receives no harm or benefit. He’s just a reckless killer, out to get women. The second killer latches onto him and gets his rocks off.”
Agent Hannigan raised his eyebrows. “Whatever.”
Wolf cleared his throat. “Back then Fred Wilcox was a killer, going about his life, rolling into town with a murder under his belt forty miles north. And like Hannigan said, the other man would have to know him prior or would have had to recognize that Wilcox was a killer.”
“Our bio paints Wilcox as a supreme loner up until this point,” Luke said. “He had no friends in Steamboat Springs before he left. Every person we talked to at the university was unaware the guy even existed, except for his boss. And his boss was like the rest of the people who knew him—freaked out by him and kept his distance.”
Wolf nodded. “If he didn’t know the person beforehand, then maybe it was somebody who witnessed one of his murders?” He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. “Maybe somebody caught him in the act of doing something with the dead bodies he was transporting back and forth in that van?”
Hannigan pointed at Wolf and snapped his fingers. “Somebody who also has a job working with dead bodies all day. Like that Lurch-looking boss of his. We know what Wilcox was capable of doing with a corpse. Maybe Lurch caught him doing his thing after hours.”
“Terrence Buntley?” Luke asked.
“Yeah. Lurch.”
She pulled her eyebrows together. “We talked to him in Durango the night before Lindsay Ellington’s murder. That means he would have had to keep Lindsay either with him here, which means he transported her all the way down here, or, he kept her somewhere in Rocky Points and drove all the way back up to kill her after we talked to him.”
Agent Todd lowered his coffee from his lips. “They found more of the matching dirt under Lindsay Ellington’s nails. If Terrence Buntley did it, then he kept his victims up in Rocky Points.”
Luke shook her head slowly. “I didn’t get that vibe from him.”
“From a guy that puts makeup on dead people for a living?” Hannigan asked. “I’ll tell you what, from my point of view, there was no other vibe coming off that guy but serial-killer.”
They sat in silence for a beat, and then everyone’s eyes slid to Agent Todd.
He took a long slurp of coffee and nodded. “Easy enough to check the guy’s alibi for the rest of last night, when he would have had to drive up to Rocky Points to finish … the deal with Lindsay Ellington. Let’s check his whereabouts for Sally Claypool’s dates as well.
Hannigan was nodding, looking like a shot of optimism was coursing through his veins and making him fidgety for action.
“We’ll check him … but keep talking,” Agent Todd said to Wolf.
Wolf crossed a leg, got his thoughts back in order. “Going by what we learned from Mary Attakai’s police report and the DNA found in the back of the Explorer, it looks like Fred was in charge of picking up the women. Abducting them.”
Luke nodded. “Wilcox abducts them and calls his partner. Tells him it’s a go. They meet with the victim. Fred gets his turn, killer two gets his turn. They take their prize and they leave. Then they put her on display.”
Agent Todd shook his head. “If Attakai’s not our guy, that means someone else is. So why plant the cell phone at Attakai’s house? He’s trying to frame him? As much as I don’t like this Attakai prick, it’s not him.”
“Because the killer wanted to draw us to Attakai,” Wolf said.
They turned and looked at Wolf.
“The second killer wanted this exact scenario. He wanted us to expose the truth about Attakai. To bring him to justice for what he did to Fred Wilcox. For burying his partner out in the oil fields.”
They sat listening to the howl of the air vents.
“What I don’t get is why Attakai goes north,” Agent Toulouse said. “And then the killings happen up there, too?”
“The killer went north to Attakai,” Wolf said. “Not the other way around. Attakai killed Fred Wilcox, and from that moment forward he knew his sister was safe. Or so he thought. It’s like I said in the interrogation room, he was running north to get away from the truth he had to live with down here—that he dispatched of the killer and kept it secret from the victims’ families. People who would have slept better with that knowledge.”
Luke nodded. “Knowledge that would have come at a price for Attakai. He would have been reprimanded, probably thrown in jail. He was afraid of telling the truth, and so he moved north to get away from the constant reminder.”
Hannigan mock spat on the ground. “Despicable. Meanwhile, now his sister’s in trouble. His cousin Hector. He should have manned up back then. Now they’re all screwed. What a pussy.”
Sheriff Mansor cleared his throat but said nothing.
“No offense, Sheriff.”
“Wait a minute,” Agent Shecter said, “So if the killer followed Attakai up north, why didn’t he just kill Attakai for revenge, li
ke two years ago?”
“Why didn’t the killer cut off his victim’s pinkie toes?” Hannigan asked. “It’s not an academic thing trying to figure these guys out. It’s more abstract art, less math class.”
Class.
Academic.
The two words jolted something inside of Wolf—a thought sent whirring in circles in his mind that was moving too fast to catch.
Hannigan pushed off the wall and it was like a rhino waking up from a sedative. “I got it.”
Todd moved away, giving the big agent space as he paced the front of the room.
“We know Attakai’s not our guy, right?” Hannigan left little space for an answer. “We’ve established that. Yes … think about it. It’s this Lurch-Bunter guy.”
“Buntley,” Luke said.
“The landlord got a visit from Attakai, and he wondered what was going on. It was two years ago, but it was still pretty fresh in the guy’s mind. This guy Buntley? He told us he never knew about Attakai visiting his own place of business? After his janitor disappears and the cops come in looking for him, he doesn’t remember?”
“Yeah—”
“Wait, shut up,” Hannigan said.
Luke raised her eyebrows.
“And come on, who else would have been in a perfect position to see Fred Wilcox’s sick tendencies? He saw his janitor playing with dead bodies. Maybe he had security cameras set up, saw some footage of Fred.
“So he approaches Fred, and tells him, no, you’re not in trouble, in fact, I embrace your sickness. I have it too.” Hannigan put his fists together. “They form a bond. They become partners. The business owner is the smart, careful guy who covers his bases. The janitor is the wild animal who he can throw a leash around and follow on his hunts.”
Hannigan stopped and put out his arms. His jacket opened, revealing pectoral muscles flexing and relaxing underneath his shirt. His eyes were unfocused and unblinking, until they snapped to Wolf. “So?”
“I say we need to check his alibis.”
The big agent looked at his boss, then the sheriff. “You gonna get a warrant? Or just sip coffee like a pansy? Sir.”
