“It was a present from my father when I was fourteen.”
Something about the way she said that made him want to question her on that. Sammy had never mentioned giving Alex a gun or any other weapon.
“Don’t worry. It’s registered. I have a carry permit and, though I haven’t been to a range in a while, I know how to use it.”
He’d already assumed the first two and was glad for the third, even though he hoped she’d never have to test her prowess. Still, they needed to go. “I’ll be waiting for you downstairs.”
Alex stood in the middle of the room surveying her surroundings. The area had been photographed and the scent of black powder and other chemicals used for lifting prints reached her nostrils, but the room had been left basically intact until she and Zach got there.
Her gaze traveled from the tidily kept bed to the rows of shelving to the huge vat-sized tub over which hung a pair of inside-out industrial-type gloves pinned to a bit of clothesline. There was a small refrigerator and a hot plate that sat on top of a small table in the corner of the room. The presence of these items and the generator found in an alcove to the side suggested the killer had spent part of his time living here as well. Or did he only eat and sleep here when there working on one of his victims?
She wrapped her arms around herself as she contemplated the large metal table that was the focus of the room. Each of its corners was outfitted with a leather restraint. That was consistent with the m.e.’s reports that she had seen, as there were ligature marks on the girls’ wrists and ankles. This is probably where he did it all—from the mutilations to the rapes to the strangulations. He could do it all here with no threat of discovery, no one to hear the girls scream, no one to help them.
She shivered, not from cold, but from the unnamed, unseen presence in the room. She wouldn’t call it evil since she didn’t conceptualize evil in that way. But there was sickness, depravity; probably generations old judging by the age of nearly everything in the room, save for the shelving. That was new.
She wouldn’t call it evil, because killers didn’t spring from the womb; they were made by other humans, formed by abuse and violence or merely neglected into existence. Innate tendencies might explain why some victims of abuse turned violent while others did not, but it couldn’t explain it all. She wondered what had been done to this man, probably in this very room, to give birth to such cruelty.
“Shades of OCD, huh, Doc?”
Alex focused on Smitty, who had come up beside her. She nodded. The highly ritualized killings, the degree of orderliness exhibited here spoke of the kind of obsessiveness characterized by the disorder, which often manifested as a means to make sense and order out of a chaotic environment, a means of asserting control.
“So why’d he let us find this place?” Smitty asked.
That was the question Alex had been pondering since she’d found out that the place where Thorpe had been discovered was directly above his kill site. Although they’d stumbled on the place from what she understood, the killer had to figure they might have found the entrance down here by searching the house.
An optimistic assessment might be that he was giving up. He’d dumped Thorpe and exposed this place because he didn’t need them anymore. But then there was the empty jar on his shelf, the one waiting to be filled. He had one more kill to go, and she didn’t have to reach too far to imagine who his next target might be. That’s why he’d sent her the flowers. The empty jar was a message, too.
To Smitty, she said, “He doesn’t need it anymore. He’s got something else planned.” What that might be, she had no idea, which made the prospect more terrifying.
Zach came over to them then. He’d been talking with one of the CSU guys. “Had enough?” he asked.
“They didn’t find any fingerprints, did they?”
“No.”
“Any traces of blood or fluids?”
“Absolutely nothing so far, but then they haven’t really gotten started yet.”
In other words, the lab guys had been waiting for them to look their fill before removing what they could and examining what they couldn’t here. She didn’t really need to see the techs do their thing. Besides, anything they found would be reported to them whether or not they were in the room. She’d seen enough. It was time to go.
“You’re awfully quiet over there,” Zach said after they’d been driving for about ten minutes. Alex had spent that time staring out the window, pensive.
She turned her head to look at him. “You may think this is crazy, but I was feeling sorry for Walter at the hands of that madman. Sure, he was a scumbag rapist and there would probably be a line of women willing to castrate him, but still. Have they done his autopsy yet?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they found he’d been tortured first, or dismembered while alive. This guy gets off on pain, inflicting it, watching its effects on others. Does anybody deserve to die like that?”
He could think of a few folks he’d like to put in this killer’s path, but he knew what she meant. He recognized her sentiments as evidence of an innate compassion and a loyalty to her patients despite their own illness. She’d done a better job of hiding her tender feelings as a girl, masking them behind an aloof manner and a sharp tongue. As a woman, she didn’t seem so averse to showing them, at least not in front of him.
“Has anyone notified Thorpe’s sister that he’s dead?”
He didn’t know. “I can find out.”
“I’d like to talk with her.”
He thought he knew her reasoning, but asked anyway. “Why? She claimed not to know anything about what her brother was up to.”
“That was while he was alive. She may have thought she’d implicate Walter in some way by speaking. But obviously Walter knew who we were looking for, otherwise why silence him both literally and figuratively? Once she knows Walter is dead she may be more willing to talk.”
Now to the real question. “Why you?”
“You may not have noticed this, but not everyone in society is enamored of the police. You guys helped put her brother away. I on the other hand ended up being his advocate, if not completely by design, then by practice. She might tell me things she wouldn’t tell you.”
He couldn’t argue with that logic. His mind went to the case his brother had been on last year, the one that brought Jon and Dana together and ultimately cost Joanna’s husband his life. A lot of strife could have been avoided if one old man who hated cops had been willing to come forward sooner. But he suspected Alex knew something she hadn’t told him. “Why else?”
“She called me.”
“A few days ago. She wanted me to let you know that her brother couldn’t have committed the murders.”
There was sisterly devotion for you. “Anything else?”
“That they had a pretty messed-up childhood, which I already suspected, and that as far as she knew Walter wasn’t obsessed with mythology, which was neither here nor there. She seemed to believe someone was framing her brother, which now seems to be the case.”
“And now you think she knows more than she’s telling?”
Alex shrugged. “I don’t know, but it would be a good place to start.”
He agreed. Thorpe’s sister might know more than she’d been telling. Getting a trip up to her home near Ithaca okayed probably wouldn’t be too much of a problem. Getting it cleared for Alex to tag along might be another story.
Then again, it might make more sense to get Alex out of the city. Thorpe’s sister wasn’t a suspect in any regard and not considered dangerous in any way. From what he understood, she was for the most part a recluse in the small town where she lived. Alex had told him that the sister had divorced herself from her brother’s activities, declining to come to his trial. He didn’t see any inherent danger in the trip, but still the idea didn’t sit well with him. “I’ll see what I can do.” But first he wanted to see if he could find the man they were looking for
without involving Alex at all.
Smitty was already at his desk by the time Zach got back to the house. “If it isn’t Zach himself,” Smitty said, by way of greeting. “I would have thought you’d spend a little more time enjoying the benefits of the doctor’s couch.”
“Don’t start,” Zach warned. He knew Smitty meant well and that his comment was intended to signal his approval of the arrangement, but Zach wasn’t in the mood. “The sooner I find this perp the sooner I’m sure she’s safe.”
The smile eased away from Smitty’s face to be replaced with a more sober expression. “Can’t argue with that. Where do you want to start?”
“Let’s see if we can find this kid and get a description. I’ve got someone working on the list of screen names Alex came up with.”
Smitty stood and slung his jacket over his shoulder. “Let’s go.”
They found Will Jenkins in the third school they tried. When he realized they wanted to talk to him about the delivery made to Alex’s office, he gestured in an exasperated way. “Man, I should have known that was bogus.”
He seemed to think his participation put him in some kind of trouble, which Zach wanted to assure him wasn’t true. “We just want to know what happened.”
“Man, I was just rolling down on Waring. It got this sweet set of bumps good for tricking out, you know. I see this white dude by a white delivery truck. It didn’t have any kind of name on it, though. He was fiddling with the engine. Then he gets inside trying to start it and nothing. He calls me over, but I don’t go, you know. Don’t talk to strangers,” he said, making quote marks in the air.
“What did he look like?”
“A white dude.” Zach cast him a droll look and the kid continued. “I don’t know, dark hair, kinda long, glasses. He was on the short side, skinny.”
“What did he want?”
“He asked me if I knew where that address was, you know, the doctor’s office. I said sure. We were like two blocks away. So he said he had one delivery left but the van wouldn’t start and his boss was going to fire him if he didn’t get it there and he couldn’t leave the van.”
“I thought you weren’t speaking to strangers.”
The kid shrugged. “The guy offered me a fifty if I would take the box over there for him. Who’s gonna turn down a free fifty?”
That’s what this perp counted on. “What were you doing out that morning?”
“I deliver the papers, the News. Then I hang out. That is, if my mom doesn’t call me and make me come home.”
In other words the kid had a pattern that might be observed. “Is there anything else you can tell us?”
“I told the dude I liked his cap and he put it on me, said I could have it. I felt bad after. I mean, I didn’t mean for the guy to give me his cap, especially after he gave me the fifty up front. I went back to give it back to him but he was gone.”
He’d probably hightailed it out of there the moment the kid rolled off. “Do you still have the hat?”
“It’s in my locker.”
They went with the boy to retrieve it. It was as Alice described it, white with a Rockford Reds logo on it. He’d already checked to find that the Rockford Reds were a girls’ softball league that played for a high school about 150 miles upstate. As far as he could tell, there was nothing remarkable about either the team or the location, but then he’d been too sidetracked to do too much digging.
After securing the permission of the boy’s principal and his mother, they brought him back to the station house to work on a sketch. When it was complete Zach surveyed the sketch. He looked like ... a white dude. Dark hair, dark eyes, and nothing remarkable about his features, complexion, or expression. No distinguishing marks, aside from a bushy mustache, like scars or tattoos. He looked like every other thirty-something white guy out there. Maybe someone out there in the public would see something special in him when the sketch hit the news.
Twenty-one
By noon, Alex had finished calling all of her patients to let them know she wouldn’t be in the office this week. She hoped it didn’t take any longer than that to find out who was committing the murders, but her hopes had been higher before they’d discovered it couldn’t possibly be Walter Thorpe.
Next she’d tackle the files Captain Craig had sent over—so many cases, boxes of them. She didn’t think she’d been at the hospital all that long to have acquired so many. She wasn’t looking forward to it, mostly because she held out little hope she’d find something there. She’d always seen Walter alone, never in a group. If he’d struck up any sort of waiting room friendships with one of the other men, this would be the first she’d heard of it. She’d never noticed any of her other patients fixating on Walter’s crimes in a way that suggested they’d want to emulate him.
Then again, Thorpe’s crimes were part of the public record. Anyone reading the newspapers could have copied him. But then there would have been no need to get rid of him or to sew his mouth shut—another example of overkill. Or did that action serve some other purpose?
If there was one, Alex couldn’t think of it. After a while, she put aside her papers and called Roberta. “How are things in I-Love-a-Lawyerland?” she asked when Roberta picked up the phone.
“No too shabby. Believe it or not, he wants me to meet his mother.” Roberta sighed dramatically.
“When?”
“Tonight. I broke out in hives ten minutes after he asked me.”
Laughing, Alex said, “I’d be happy to go with you as a buffer of sorts, only the cops outside my door might have something to say about that.”
“Don’t you mean Zach’s door? How’s that going, by the way?”
Alex sighed. For once she felt like sharing, but didn’t know how. She blurted out, “We slept together last night. Twice.”
Roberta whooped. “So I was right about you still having feelings for him.”
“Yeah, I told you that already.”
“So,” Roberta prompted. “What was it like?”
If Alex had answered she would have said hot, sweaty, and sexy the first time. But the second time was different, slower, more sensual, more connected in some indefinable way. Afterward, she’d fallen asleep in his arms far more contented than she’d felt in a long time. In other words, she was in way over her head, just what she’d feared. “Let’s just say the man knows what he’s doing.”
“Do you?”
Ever the social worker, that Roberta. “Nope. I haven’t a clue. If I wanted to be honest with myself I’d probably say that sleeping with him was a mistake when we have so much history between us and I don’t know what either of us is looking for. There’s absolutely nothing settled between us. All I know is that I wanted to be with him, so I was.”
“Well then, welcome to the human race, kiddo. You forget I met Devon a few times, that walking stick. He didn’t deserve you and what he did to you in the end was unconscionable. If Zach makes you happy, you should go for it.”
Happy. She didn’t know if that word applied to how she felt. Right now, there was so much going on that it seemed absurd to describe anything in positive terms. Especially when she knew the time would come eventually when Zach would seek answers she didn’t want to give him. But she also knew she couldn’t go back. One way or another she had to free herself from the emotionally barren life she’d exiled herself to.
“We’ll see,” she told Roberta. But for the first time in a long while an alien feeling built inside her: hope.
“What have you got for me?” Zach asked Darryl Ferguson after settling into a chair beside his desk. He’d been surprised to hear from Darryl so soon. He and Smitty had been on their way back to the precinct when Zach’s cell phone rang. Zach had dropped Smitty off and continued here.
“After you left last night, my youngest, a girl, comes and sits in my lap and looks up at me with those big brown eyes. I’m thinking if someone hurt her one day I’d want to know as soon as possible who the son of a bitch was. So I came back in and s
tarted working on it. My wife was ready to kill me. Needless to say, you are not welcome in the Ferguson house again.”
Zach chuckled, but he thought of all the times he’d left Sherry under similar circumstances or those even less pressing. It was easy to imagine that when you were out making the world safe for other people the ones who loved you should always understand. It made a great excuse anyway for doing exactly what he wanted. He hoped Darryl wasn’t on the way to making the same mistake.
While they spoke, Darryl had picked up a file from his desk and opened it. “I subpoenaed the subscriber information from your guy’s Internet service providers, the ones I knew about. Three of them were from one company. That came in. Here’s your problem, though. Four of these guys had free accounts that don’t bother to check subscriber information. You could put down you were Count Dracula from Transylvania and they’d be none the wiser. I did track the IPs back to their originating computers. Two are private homes in New Jersey. One is a library in Westchester.”
Darryl leaned toward him and turned over the top page. “Here’s something interesting, though. Either this is new or your guy missed it. Hercules 912 has a home page and a picture.”
Darryl turned one more page and Zach’s entire body went on alert. Staring back at him was the flesh-and-blood version of the sketch the kid had worked on that afternoon.
Virgil Williams had no criminal record, had lived in the same apartment building on Paulding Avenue for the last ten years, and according to his driving record had never received so much as a parking ticket. That didn’t mean anything. Lots of bad guys were good at not getting caught at anything minor. According to the financial records from his credit card company, Williams had bought a Dell laptop over a year ago.
Darkness had already fallen by the time Zach sat in his car outside the apartment with Smitty beside him. Soon the ESU team would go in first, the detectives after, to bring in Williams and any evidence they could secure to help nail this guy. According to the super, Williams was home, but seemed perplexed why all these cops were interested in him. They were just waiting for Captain Craig to give the go-ahead.
Body of Lies Page 21
