by James Carol
‘No way, Winter. I’m driving.’
I laughed. ‘Taylor, what you do can in no way be described as driving.’
‘I’m not giving you the keys.’
‘Look. You’re only the head of the Criminal Investigation Division, so by default that makes me the sheriff around here, which means I outrank you. Also, my guess is that Shepherd ordered you to help me out in any way you can. And right now I would find it really, really helpful if you gave me the keys.’
Taylor dropped the keys into my palm and we got in the car. He racked the passenger seat back as far as it would go, wriggled around a couple of times in a space that had been designed with an average-sized man in mind.
I dumped my jacket on the back seat and started the car, goosed the accelerator a couple of times, letting the engine scream until the rev counter was slamming into the red. Then I flicked on the lights, checked one last time to make sure the street was empty, rammed the car into gear, jammed my foot down on the gas pedal, and squealed away from the sidewalk. The amount of noise the car made, there had to be at least twenty feet of melted rubber left in our wake. A long black eleven and the stench of burning rubber.
‘Jesus, Winter! Slow down!’
I slowed down when we reached the end of Morrow Street, checked the road ahead was clear then hit the gas again. Taylor was fumbling with his safety belt, trying to get it into the slot. We hit the train tracks at fifty, fast enough for all four wheels to lift off the ground. The car landed hard, the shocks grinding and complaining. Taylor was gripping the passenger seat, knuckles tight and shiny. We reached an intersection and turned left onto Main Street, heading south. I eased my foot off the gas and brought the speed down to a more sedate forty.
‘You’re going the wrong way,’ he told me.
‘And that statement is based on the flawed premise that we’re going to the station house.’
‘We’re not? So where are we going?’
‘Judging by Main Street, my guess is that Mayor Morgan has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to the homeless. No bums, no hobos jumping from the midnight train, and any vagrants are shot on sight the second they step inside the town limits. Does that sound about right?’
Taylor nodded. ‘Yup.’
‘So, if you wanted to find a homeless person, you’d have to look elsewhere. Any suggestions?’
‘Shreveport is probably your best bet. It’s the closest big city. This time of day, it’ll take about half an hour to get there.’
‘Half an hour, you reckon.’
As soon as we reached the interstate, I switched on the blues and reds and stepped on the gas and watched the needle flick up past a hundred. We had both lanes pretty much to ourselves, a long, straight road heading west.
The old abandoned refinery appeared on our left. Dark, shadowy buildings that seemed darker than the night surrounding them. The facility was huge. It could have been a parish in its own right. It had been built back in a time when land was cheap and plentiful.
It looked totally different to when we’d flown over it earlier in the Gulfstream. Back then the harsh sunlight had made it look innocent, just another place that had outlived its usefulness. Now it looked sinister. There were plenty of places to hide a body, plenty of places to set someone alight without having to worry about the screams. Lots of hidden, secret spaces. Shepherd could send every man he had in there and it would take the best part of a month to search the place. Even then, they’d still miss something. Particularly if someone involved in the search wanted that to happen.
‘How did you know Sam Galloway drove a Testarossa?’ Taylor asked. ‘And I want a straight answer, Winter. None of your cryptic bullshit.’
‘I played the odds. There are more Testarossas on the road than any other Ferrari, so there was a higher probability that that’s what he drove. Also, if you think of Ferrari, what’s the first model that comes to mind? The Testarossa, right? Sam was more interested in the statement the car made rather than the car itself, so the chances were he’d go for a Testarossa.’
Taylor looked over, an incredulous expression on his face. ‘You guessed.’
‘If you want to put it that way.’
‘You guessed,’ he said again.
‘And I guessed right.’
‘But you could have guessed wrong. What if this had been something important? Like life-and-death important? This isn’t a game.’
‘Look. What we do is an inexact science. The operative word there is science. Science isn’t all logic and facts and empirical observations. Yes, those things are important, but some of the most important discoveries and breakthroughs have come about because some scientist in a lab somewhere looked beyond the facts and had the courage to take a leap of faith, a giant step into the unknown. Einstein once said that imagination is more important than knowledge, and I fully subscribe to that line of thinking. Sometimes you just need to believe that two and two can come together to make five, then you need to find a way to make that happen. Then you need to work out a way to make the rest of the world believe. Not so long ago people thought the earth was flat and that the sun revolved around it.’
‘But you guessed.’ Taylor shook his head in disbelief one last time, then went back to watching the road unfolding in the headlights.
Nineteen minutes later we passed the sign that marked the Shreveport city limits. Taylor had been born and raised in Eagle Creek and his family’s roots ran deep. But Eagle Creek would have been too small a town for a teenager, particularly one who was the star football player. When Taylor and his buddies went out looking for weekend fun, I guessed they would have headed to the next big city. They’d know exactly where they wanted to hang out and they’d know which areas to avoid.
‘I’m going to need you to direct me.’
27
Ten minutes later we hung a right into a post-apocalyptic version of Morrow Street. All the buildings were boarded up, and this wasn’t a new thing. They’d been boarded up and abandoned for decades.
The streetlights were all out, too, the bulbs smashed. Either the city hadn’t got around to replacing them or, more likely, they’d given up because every time they replaced them they ended up smashed again. Grey, people-shaped outlines moved through the darker shadows. In places, the darkness was broken by flames licking up from oil drums that had been lit to provide illumination rather than heat.
We cruised slowly along the street, the eyes in the shadows tracking our progress. Halfway along I pulled up to the sidewalk, but kept the engine running. Not that I expected trouble. The car was covered in Dayton Sheriff’s Department livery. The cops come calling in an area like this and everyone suddenly turns invisible and develops a bad case of amnesia.
‘What now?’ Taylor asked.
‘I want you to go out there and talk to people. Find out if anyone’s gone missing in the last forty-eight hours.’
Taylor gave me the look. ‘You’re kidding, right?’ He stared at me, saw I was serious. ‘It’s a complete waste of time, Winter. Nobody’s going to talk to me. And who says this is where the unsub snatched his firestarter from anyway? Maybe he went east instead of west, headed over to Monroe.’
‘Just humour me, okay?’
Taylor shook his head and got out the car. There was a hefty dose of attitude in the way he slammed the door shut behind him. He walked around the front of the car and was momentarily lit up in the headlights, all six foot six and two-eighty pounds of him. Dressed in black and striding through the gloom, he looked more like a cop than ever. He moved like a cop. He walked like one. The people who hung out around here would smell him a mile off.
He walked up to a woman pushing a shopping cart that was overflowing with bottles and cans. He asked her a question and she shook her head. He asked another question and she started gesticulating wildly. Taylor crossed the street, heading towards one of the fires. A group of men were huddled beside it, passing a bottle in a brown paper bag. By the time he got there they’d all fled.
I
shut my eyes and slid into the zone, imagined myself into the shoes of someone who got their kicks from watching flames burst and crackle, and skin melting.
Being a cop was this unsub’s biggest asset, and also his biggest problem.
He could go to a thrift store and buy some clothes. He could rip them up and drag them through the dirt, and douse them in cheap whisky and urine. He could do all of that and he’d still never get mistaken for a homeless person.
There were a hundred details that would give him away. He’d be too well fed. He’d look too healthy. His teeth wouldn’t be rotting away to stumps. Alcoholism and drug abuse showed up on the skin, and he wouldn’t have any of the tell-tale signs. The jaundiced pallor and exploding capillaries of a drunk would be missing, the grey complexion and sunken eyes of a junkie. Being homeless was a way of life. It was not a part you could just step into.
So how did he do it?
He needed to separate his victim from the pack, and he needed them to go with him voluntarily. No fuss, no drama, nothing that would cause anyone to remember or take notice.
Maybe he pretended he was gay, a white-collar worker looking for a cheap, anonymous release. He’d be acting panicked and jumpy and sending out mixed signals, but that was nothing the people around here hadn’t seen before. He could try to disguise the cop in him under a cloak of nervous ambiguity.
Except that wouldn’t work either.
This guy was all about control. There was no way he’d relinquish that control, not for a second. He was confident enough to work with two victims at the one time, and he was confident enough to predict the time of his next murder right down to the last second. There was no way he could make a convincing submissive.
So, maybe he pretended to be a drug dealer.
Straightaway, that felt better. It was a more comfortable fit. Around here, dealers were practically cops anyway. They carried guns and laid down the law. It wouldn’t be that big a stretch for him to step into that role.
He would choose his victim carefully. They needed to be desperate enough to go with him when he told them the good stuff was in the trunk of his car, but they couldn’t be too desperate. Someone whose addiction had spiralled out of control wouldn’t work. They’d be too jittery to play the part he had written for them, too unpredictable. He needed someone who still had enough of a grip on reality to come across as confident and in control when the camera rolled. He needed someone who cared whether they lived or died, since that’s how he controlled them. Do what you’re told and you’ll get out of this alive.
The unsub would have gone straight to the trunk and popped the lid. He would have taken one last look around to make sure nobody was watching, then injected his victim with a powerful sedative. Firearms wouldn’t work, nor would a stun gun. With both those methods, the unsub would need to restrain his victim with duct tape, and that would take time. The longer he was out in the open, the more likely it was that someone would see what was happening. It had to be a sedative.
So he drugged his victim, tipped him into the trunk, slammed down the lid and drove off, and nobody was any the wiser.
Taylor climbed back into the car and pulled the door closed. His expression was stern. Part pissed, part perplexed.
‘A complete waste of time. Just like I told you. But you knew that before you sent me out there, so what are we doing here?’
I ignored the question and said, ‘Acquisition is the riskiest part of any abduction because the unsub is out in the open. There was a double challenge here because our guy is a cop. You saw the reaction they had to you. These people can smell a cop a mile away.’
‘So how did he do it?’
‘He pretended to be a drug dealer.’
‘Wouldn’t people be suspicious if a new dealer suddenly turned up?’
‘But this unsub’s a cop‚ remember. How difficult would it be for him to get the names of dealers who have been arrested around here? He drops a few names and people are going to be a lot less suspicious. Also, these are junkies we’re talking about. At the end of the day they want their next fix‚ they don’t really care where it comes from.’
Taylor thought this through, then nodded to himself. ‘Yeah, I guess that could work. Okay, what now?’
‘Do you know the way to the Shreveport Police Department’s headquarters?’
28
Missing Persons was located in a small windowless basement office. The clock said twenty to ten, but without any sky to provide a reference point it could have been a.m. or p.m. This was one of those places that was permanently trapped in the Twilight Zone. The room smelled of scrubbed linoleum and unscrubbed people. It smelled stale. The striplights were dulled by dirty covers, dead insects dotting the plastic.
A wooden counter split the room in two. One third was on the public side, two-thirds on the business side. The woman behind the counter was Hispanic and in her late forties. Her shoulders were hunched, as though life had compressed her into submission, just squashed her right down and kept on squashing. Her name patch said Gomez, and she had sergeant’s stripes, but considering her role and attitude it was unlikely that she was going to climb any higher.
We walked over to the desk and Taylor flashed his ID. Gomez glanced at it, then looked at us, eyes narrowed, giving us the once-over. She lingered on my white hair and the dead rock-star T-shirt.
‘How can I help you gentlemen?’ Her voice was harsh and grating, nicotine rough.
‘I’m looking for someone.’
She gave me a wry smile. Her top teeth were too straight and white to be natural, and her bottom teeth were too crooked to be anything else. ‘Take a ticket and join the back of the queue.’
‘White male,’ I went on. ‘Thirty to forty, around five feet nine. He went missing sometime during the last forty-eight hours.’
‘Anything else you can tell me? Name? Last known whereabouts? Star sign? Anything?’
‘He’s homeless.’
Gomez laughed and shook her head. ‘Yeah, that really helps.’ She nodded to the ranks of tall grey filing cabinets behind her. ‘The number of homeless men back there that match your criteria, I can maybe count on two hands if you’re lucky, and that’s going back years. Homeless teenage girls I’ve got more of, but that’s because they have family that comes looking.’ She shook her head. ‘A homeless white male in his thirties, you might as well be chasing the Invisible Man. Yeah, they might have family out there, but by the time they’ve got this far down the road, they’re just a memory in a photograph. Occasionally someone will come looking, a brother or sister, sometimes a parent. But that’s the exception rather than the rule.’
‘Can I see all the missing person reports filed in the last seventy-two hours?’
‘Sure. But I’m telling you now, your guy’s not in there.’
Gomez pulled open the top drawer of the filing cabinet positioned nearest the counter. This cabinet would contain all the active cases, the ones they needed to get their hands on quickly. She reached into the drawer and pulled out a wad of brown Manila folders, brought them back over and dumped them down. They made a satisfying slapping sound when they hit the counter. The top folder had MISSING PERSONS and the Shreveport PD logo printed onto the cover.
‘This got anything to do with that lawyer who got burnt alive in Eagle Creek?’ She shook her head and made the sign of the cross. ‘That was a bad business. I’ve got a cousin over there, in the police department. He told me there was a film, some sort of snuff movie. He hadn’t seen it, but he knows someone who had. It was pretty nasty by all accounts.’
‘We’re working a different case.’
‘And you expect me to believe that? Nothing ever happens in Eagle Creek, so when something does happen everyone’s going to jump to it. There’s no way you’re going to be out looking for some homeless guy unless that guy has something to do with the case.’
Gomez had her right hand placed protectively on the folders. She wanted information, and I wanted a look at those f
olders. It was a negotiation, plain and simple. Everything in life was a negotiation.
‘Can you keep a secret?’
Gomez nodded. ‘Sure.’
‘I don’t work for the Dayton Sheriff’s Department, I’m with the CIA.’
She grinned. ‘I knew you weren’t a cop.’
‘The lawyer who died, he was working for a Colombian drug cartel that we’ve been chasing down for years. He tried to rip them off and, like we both know, our Colombian friends do not take too kindly to that sort of thing.’
‘And the homeless guy?’ Gomez’s eyes were wide with childlike wonder. She was hanging on my every word.
‘He was the lawyer’s partner. He got wind that the Colombians were after them and did a runner. Last we heard, he was hiding out on the streets.’
I nodded to the folders and Gomez followed my gaze. For a second she looked at her hand like she’d never seen it before, then her brain caught up and she jerked it away from the folders.
There were seven files in total. Four females and three males. Like Gomez had said, none of the males came close to being a match for our firestarter. There was one guy in his fifties who’d been married for almost thirty years. He’d told his wife he was taking the dog for a walk, and had never returned. He’d left the house with the dog one evening and just kept on walking, out of one life and into another. His disappearance had coincided with their youngest child going to college, and my guess was that it was motivated by a reluctance to pay alimony.
One guy was the right height and build. The problem was that he was Asian. The unsub had been careful to make sure the firestarter didn’t show his face, but he hadn’t been wearing gloves. The hand that had carried the jerry can had been as white as mine.
I pushed the folders back across the desk, waited until Gomez met my eyes, then mimed a zipper closing my lips shut tight.
‘Not a word,’ she promised.
‘Thanks for your time.’ I headed for the door. According to the clock on the wall it was just after ten to ten.
