by James Carol
‘I’m wondering about possible victims. It’s a long shot, though. He didn’t keep Sam Galloway for long, and chances are he’s going to stick to this MO.’
‘Even still, it’s a good thought. I’ll make sure that I’m alerted immediately if anyone does get reported missing. How are you getting on?’
‘Sam Galloway was having an affair with one of his work colleagues.’
Taylor was watching me closely, ears tuned into the conversation.
‘How serious?’
‘Serious enough.’
The implications hung between us in hundreds of miles of empty air. Geographically speaking, there was maybe a half mile between us, but our conversation was taking the long way around.
‘I’ll get someone to look into it,’ said Shepherd finally.
‘As soon as you find that crime scene, I want to be the first to know.’
‘You can be sure of that.’
I killed the call, took a final drag on my cigarette and crushed it out in a nearby trash can. We got into the car and Taylor got the motor running and turned the air-conditioning to full. I could feel him staring from the driver’s seat.
‘What was that all about?’ he asked.
‘I was just giving Shepherd an update.’
‘No you weren’t. You were giving Shepherd a motive.’
‘And why would I do that?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. To muddy the waters, perhaps.’
I smiled. ‘By his own admission, Shepherd is a small-town cop, which means he thinks like a small-town cop. A good old-fashioned motive like a spurned wife hiring someone to murder her cheating husband is going to make more sense to him than some sicko who gets off on setting people alight for the sheer pleasure of watching them burn.’
‘This theory about the unsub being a cop, you realise you’re gambling everything on it.’
‘It’s only a gamble when the outcome is uncertain.’
‘Ninety-nine per cent, remember?’
‘This guy’s a cop.’
‘Sam was humming to himself,’ Taylor went on. ‘If he’d been worried he would have been pacing his office or chewing his fingernails, or whatever he did when he got stressed. He wouldn’t be absorbed by his work. He’d be looking over his shoulder, waiting for that other shoe to drop.’
I nodded. ‘That’s how I see it.’
‘So what now?’
‘Now we eat. It’s going to be a long night.’
22
Taylor drove slow and steady, heading back to Morrow Street. We bumped gently across to the other side of the rail tracks, and I made an executive decision to do the driving in future. When you hit rail tracks you wanted to have a bit of speed up. You wanted to feel the car lift off. You wanted to hear the shock absorbers complain. Being a cop gave you driving privileges that your average Joe could only dream of, and ignoring those privileges was both pointless and crazy.
We parked outside Apollo’s, a squat one-storey diner with big windows and a flickering blue and red neon rocket blasting off from the sign that hung the length of the frontage. The diner was right across the street from Hannah’s Place. I could see my room from the doorway. Second floor, second window to the right.
There were rows of empty tables inside the diner and not a single customer. Not good. Empty seats usually equated to lousy food. I glanced up and down Morrow Street. It was like a ghost town. I looked back at the empty tables.
Taylor saw me staring. ‘It’s usually busier at this time of the evening. Sam’s murder has got everyone scared.’
‘Is the food here any good?’
‘Better than good. Would I be eating here if it wasn’t?’
That was good enough for me. One thing cops know are their diners. Which to use, which to avoid. When it comes to greasy, unhealthy food, they’re walking Michelin Guides. Even a rookie would be a connoisseur after six months on the force.
We went inside and a bell jangled above our heads. The smell of fried food hit us the second we stepped through the door. It was grafted into the worn black vinyl seats, the yellowing Formica tables, the once-white walls and the scuffed white floor tiles. It was embedded into the very fabric of the place. Black and white framed photographs from the Apollo space missions hung on the wall. In pride of place behind the counter was a shot of Neil Armstrong taking that one giant leap for mankind.
Because the place was empty we had our pick of the seats. I opted for a window table. Always my first choice since I like to people watch, although on this occasion the pickings were going to be slim. I didn’t bother checking the menu. A place like this, it was pretty much a done deal.
A waitress hustled over from behind the counter. Her hair was piled up into a beehive and her clothes were retro, like she’d been beamed in from the sixties. She looked familiar, but it took a second to work out why since I’d never seen her before. Her big brown fawn eyes gave it away in the end.
‘How’s it going, Taylor?’ she asked.
‘Great, Lori.’ Taylor nodded in my direction. ‘This is Jefferson Winter.’
‘Glad to meet you.’
‘Are you related to Hannah, by any chance?’ I asked.
‘I’m her aunt.’
‘Did your mother own this place, too?’
‘Kind of. My parents owned this place and the guesthouse. This was my father’s domain and the guesthouse was my mother’s. My mother said she liked to be somewhere she could keep an eye on him. After they died I got this place and Cissy got the guesthouse.’ She pulled a pad and pen out of the pocket of her apron. ‘So, what can I get for you gentlemen?’
‘I’ll have a burger and fries and a large chocolate shake. Coffee as well, please. Lots of coffee.’
She scribbled this down onto her pad and turned to Taylor.
‘Same to eat, thanks, but double of everything. And I’ll have a Pepsi. No coffee, no shake.’
‘Coming right up.’
Lori flashed a cheery smile then hustled back behind the counter. She shouted our order through the hatch and a world-weary voice replied that it would be a pleasure. Thirty seconds later she was back with our drinks. I tipped two sugars into my coffee and took a sip. Any other day it would have ranked right up there with the best, but the Blue Mountain coffee on the Morgan’s Gulfstream had raised the bar pretty high.
Taylor had his cellphone out and was checking the website again. 04:52:19. The phone was flat on the table so I could see, too. We watched a couple more stick men go to their deaths, then Taylor slid the cell off the table top and put it back in his pocket.
‘You owe me two hundred bucks.’
‘And how do you figure that?’
I answered with a smile and a name. ‘Alvin.’
Taylor responded with a deep belly laugh that I didn’t like one bit. ‘How much did she take you for?’
‘Your name’s not Alvin?’
A shake of the head. ‘So answer my question, Winter. How much?’
‘A hundred. But you’re down by fifty.’
Taylor said nothing.
‘You didn’t pay her fifty bucks, did you?’
‘No way.’
‘She lied to me.’
‘It happens, Winter. Sometimes people lie.’
‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’
Taylor let loose with another one of those deep, rumbling belly laughs. ‘Loving every second.’
‘I will find out what your name is, you know that, don’t you? From here on in I will make this my life’s mission. My sole reason for being.’
Taylor just smiled.
‘Back to business,’ I went on. ‘So everyone has gone home, leaving Sam all alone, hard at work in his office. The unsub turns up and somehow manages to kidnap him. Now I need you to think back to when you were in Sam’s office. What was missing?’
Taylor thought for a moment. ‘There were no signs of a struggle. If there had been then his office would have been a crime scene.’
‘What does
this tell you?’
‘That the unsub was armed.’
‘He probably was, but I don’t think he went in there waving a gun around and shouting for Sam to get down. I think he was more subtle than that. Okay, what else have you got?’
‘I guess it’s possible Sam knew the unsub.’
‘More than possible. He knew him. And the third thing this tells us is that the unsub was a person in authority. A cop, for example.’
Taylor shook his head and made a face. ‘That’s a pretty big leap, Winter.’
‘Not that big. Put it all together and it makes for a compelling picture. A cop walks into his office, the first thing Sam’s going to do is wonder what he’s done wrong. In a situation like that, even a saint would be trawling his memory for misdemeanours, because that’s how we’re wired. A cop comes up to you and you’re going to feel guilty, even if you’re as innocent as a newborn. Question: what’s the best thing about being a cop?’
‘You mean aside from the uniform and the groupies, and that overwhelming sense of power you get from being out on the streets with the whole weight of the law behind you.’
I laughed. ‘Maybe that does it for you. However, what does it for our unsub is the fact that he gets to carry a gun. It’s right there in his holster for the whole world to see. He won’t want to use it, because that could lead to things spiralling out of control, but he’s got it there if he needs it.’
I took a sip of coffee. Taylor said nothing, just reached for his Pepsi.
‘Okay, now that the unsub has got Sam’s attention, he feeds him a story. Maybe he tells him that his wife has been in a car crash. Maybe he tells him the kids are involved as well, that they’re all badly injured and the paramedics have rushed them over to the hospital in Shreveport. It’s touch and go. Sam hears all this without really hearing. He’s in a state of shock. He’s just realised how fragile his world actually is.’
I paused and waited for my imagination to catch up with itself before continuing.
‘The cop then turns all Good Samaritan. He offers to drive Sam to the hospital, tells him they’ll take the interstate at a hundred miles an hour, the blues and reds flashing. Sam doesn’t walk downstairs, he sprints. He gets in the car, straps himself in, and the unsub hits him with a tranquilliser.’
‘Why bother tranquillising him? He’s already in the car.’
‘Because the unsub won’t be driving like a lunatic, and he won’t have the lights and sirens going. He’ll be sticking to the speed limit and trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible. Dazed and confused as he is, at some point Sam would have realised something was up. The last thing the unsub needed was for that epiphany to hit while he was busy driving. That would get messy. It makes more sense for the unsub to neutralise Sam before they hit the road.’
‘Sounds great. Except for one tiny little detail. This is all just speculation.’
I shook my head. ‘No it’s not. That’s exactly how it went down.’
‘And how can you be so sure of that?’
‘Because that’s how I would have done it.’
23
Lori returned with our food, topped up my coffee, told us to enjoy, then went back behind the counter and picked up a glossy magazine that had a rich, perfectly Photoshopped couple on the cover. We were still the only customers. The way things were going, we’d probably be the only customers for the rest of the night.
Since we’d got here I’d seen two high-school kids disappear into one of the bars, and that was it. I doubted the kids would need their fake IDs tonight. The bar owner would be glad of any customers he could get. This highlighted a major difference between big cities and small towns. Something like this happens in LA and nobody cares, they just get on with their lives like it’s no big deal. Here, everybody had headed for the hills and battened down the hatches.
The amount of food on Taylor’s plate was obscene. Two massive half-pound burgers and enough fries to feed four. He picked up a burger, took a large bite, then another, stuffed a couple of fries in his mouth. He was eating like a man who’d just invented food.
I looked at my meal. The burger and fries, the coffee and the shake. All the major food groups were represented. Carbs, protein, sugar and caffeine. I picked up my burger and took a bite. Taylor was right. The food was good.
‘Assuming for a second that this guy is a cop, how do you know I’m not the killer?’ Taylor shrugged. ‘After all, I’m a cop.’
‘Because back in my room you told me you’d never killed anyone.’
Taylor snorted. ‘We’ve got penitentiaries that are fit to bursting with people who’ll tell you they’ve never killed anyone. Maybe we should take them all at their word and set them free. How does that sound?’
‘You didn’t do it, Taylor. No way. And the real reason is because you don’t fit the profile.’
Another snort, this one followed by a shake of the head. ‘You mean that piece of fiction you told Shepherd back at the station house.’
I tapped my temple. ‘No, I mean the profile that’s up here. Anyway, it wasn’t a complete work of fiction. Two of the details are correct, remember.’
‘But which two?’
I stuffed a handful of fries into my mouth. ‘You’re the head of the Criminal Investigation Division, you tell me.’
Taylor looked around, a puzzled expression on his face.
‘What?’ I said.
‘I’m just wondering where my investigators are. If I’m the head of the Criminal Investigation Division then I’m going to need investigators, right?’
‘Just answer the question. Our unsub is a white male, five foot nine, in his thirties, slim-built, college-educated, which two of those details are correct?’
Taylor ate in silence for a while, thinking hard. His face kept scrunching up into different expressions then relaxing again.
‘He’s a white male and he’s college-educated,’ he said at last.
‘Take a gold star and go to the top of the class. But why are you right? For all I know you just picked those two at random. You’ve got a one in ten chance of doing that and getting it right, which isn’t too far out there. I’ve played longer odds and won.’
‘Sam was a white male, and serial killers tend to stick with their own racial group.’
‘Not always.’
Taylor finished his first burger, licked his fingers and picked up the second. ‘No, not always, but it happens often enough for us to be able to make that generalisation with a fair degree of accuracy. He’s got to be college-educated because of how elaborate and well-executed the murder was. This is not someone who failed their General Educational Development tests. He managed to get through high school, and make it all the way through college. No, this guy is way smarter than your average bear.’
‘I can buy that. Okay, what about the other three things?’
‘He’s probably in his thirties.’
‘Not younger?’
‘Unlikely. This crime shows a high degree of self-control. A younger person would struggle with that. They wouldn’t have the patience.’
‘I can buy that, too. And it’s unlikely he’s older. Suppressing his fantasies up until his thirties is one thing, keeping them in check for another decade is another matter altogether. And before you say anything, Sam was this guy’s first. This unsub is a performer. If he’d killed before, you’d know about it. So what about his height and build? Five-nine and slim? What do you say?’
‘It’s possible.’
I made the noise of a buzzer. ‘Wrong answer. Controlling one person is tough, but controlling two takes it up to a whole new level. Physically he’s going to be big enough to be taken seriously, but not so big that he stands out.’ I glanced over at Taylor when I said this last bit. ‘You’re looking for someone in good physical shape who measures in at somewhere around the six-foot mark. Someone who inspires trust and confidence rather than some black bald giant who’d scare the bejesus out of you just by saying hello.’
<
br /> ‘You saying I’m some sort of boogeyman, Winter?’
‘No, what I’m saying is that there are some people out there who would find someone of your size intimidating. Little old ladies, Girl Scouts, babies in strollers.’
‘And this unsub isn’t intimidating?’
‘Oh, he’s intimidating all right, but the sort of intimidation he employs will be more subtle than using his size to scare some soft lawyer into submission. Size isn’t everything, you know. Okay, any more questions?’
Taylor shook his head. ‘Not just now.’
We finished our meal in silence. Taylor cleared his plate first and nodded to the leftovers on mine.
‘You going to finish those fries?’
‘Be my guest.’
He reached over for my plate and swapped it with his empty one. The fries disappeared in three mouthfuls. Taylor settled back on his seat, wiped his mouth with a napkin, then belched. It was barely audible, an old lady belch. It wasn’t the belch of someone who’d just eaten enough to feed a family of four.
‘I’ve got a job for you,’ I told him. ‘You’ll need to be discreet, though. I want the names of everyone who works for the sheriff’s department. Everyone. I’m talking the sheriff all the way down to the janitor. Same for the police department. Also, while you’re back at the station house, keep your eyes open for anyone acting odd. Even a little bit odd. You can go in there and be invisible. I can’t. I’m the new kid at school. As soon as I step through the door everyone’s going to be looking at me.’
‘If you’re so sure this guy’s a cop, why do you need to know who the janitor is?’
‘To cover all the bases. I’m ninety-nine per cent sure, which is different from being a hundred per cent certain. That unaccounted one per cent drives me nuts. You’ve no idea.’
Taylor was staring across the table at me, a playful grin pulling at the corners of his mouth. ‘What are you actually saying here, Winter? That you might be wrong?’
‘I’m not wrong. This guy’s a cop. I just want to expand the parameters a little. That’s all.’
‘But the janitor, Winter? That’s really stretching things.’
