It was disgusting.
Shakespeare, by no means tech savvy, had let his girlfriend’s son, Tommy, set up Facebook and Twitter on his phone so he could ‘experience the twenty-first century’. He had taken the opportunity only this morning to check out what this monster had been posting through his mother’s fingers.
“Be seeing you all soon!” was the last thing Shakespeare had read on the Twitter feed.
Shakespeare’s eyes shifted and he shuddered as he caught Cooper staring at him, a strange look on his face—eyes glazed over, the muscles on his face slack, his head tilted slightly to the side, the left half of his mouth opened a tad more than it should be.
They said it happened during birth. Forceps had damaged his facial muscles, and according to the defense, had led to a life of bullying and heartache. A life of living at home, going out only for school where he was constantly taunted, and church where he was constantly stared at. He rarely left home, except for his morning job of delivering newspapers, which is how the prosecution had tried to show he had met his first victim.
Claire Russell.
She was one of the newspaper’s longtime subscribers, and described as a saint by those who knew her, including her brother, Stephen Russell who sat amongst The Seven, her husband dead just months before her murder. But the defense had blown the newspaper link out of the water, able to show his delivery area ended one block away, and there had been little if any chance he would have ever met her what with him being a near shut-in.
Leaving another widow with no link to her killer.
Shakespeare’s chest tightened even more, leaving him thinking of his own impending doom. If he were to marry Louise, would he leave her a widow in just a few years?
You’re not dead yet. Let it go!
He took in another deep breath as he stared at Cooper, the killer’s attention now on the proceedings that were droning on. Seven victims. Six widows. It had earned Cooper the nickname of “The Widow Rapist”. Splashed across the headlines of every major rag the city had to offer, vile banners like “Widow Rapist Strikes Again!”, “Widows, Lock Your Doors!”, “Widows, Remarry Now!”
Only Sandra Gray, the last victim, had been married, her husband Carl, a mailman, had come home early in the hopes of surprising his wife. Instead, he walked in on the crime in progress.
And it had caught Cooper off guard.
In his rush from the house he had left his gun before getting a chance to put his customary bullet in the back of her head, something he did to each victim at the end of their ordeal, despite them already being dead. They ran the serial number directly from the crime scene, and traced it to an Eileen Cooper. Detectives Walker and Curtis were immediately sent to the address, and Shakespeare, the lead detective, took charge of the gun, realizing it could be the key to solving the case and linking them all together. All they needed was to fire the weapon in their lab, and match the ballistics to the bullets from the other six crime scenes.
Walker and Curtis interviewed Eileen Cooper as the crime scene continued to be processed. Of course the gun couldn’t be produced, to which she pled ignorance, claiming she never owned a gun. Further interrogation revealed she had a son, Wayne, who lived in her basement. They ran his name and found he was on the sex offender registry, where Cooper had a conviction for propositioning a fifteen year old girl when he was twenty-one. He had spent three years behind bars, and that night was nowhere to be found.
They knew they had their man.
But the gun had been stolen, the only link between all seven crimes.
With the gun stolen, the arrest warrant was denied as the gun evidence was tainted, ‘fruit of the poisonous tree’. So Vinny and his crew had returned to the scene and scoured it again from top to bottom, eventually finding the DNA on a piece of tape holding a broken door jamb in place. And with Cooper in the sex offender’s database, with his DNA on file, they had a match, and the charges were laid.
But for only one murder.
The gun had been used to shoot the first six victims in the head after he had raped and stabbed them repeatedly, his fetish sickening by any standards. But without it to perform ballistics on, they couldn’t prove the link. He hadn’t left any other evidence at any of his previous murders.
And today that single, vital piece of evidence, the lone, solitary link between Cooper and the crime scene, was being tossed due to two transposed digits.
Shakespeare heard the gavel drop and cheers erupt from the other side of the courtroom, along with angry shouts from behind him.
Wayne Cooper stood, a smile on his face as he stared at Shakespeare, mouthing the first words Wayne Cooper would utter as a free man, the system having once again failed the innocent.
“Thank you, Detective.”
Sam Bishop sat in his car and waited.
It had been two hours since Cooper had been released, and he had yet to make an appearance. The front steps of the courthouse were filled with supporters, protesters and the press. Bishop knew Cooper could have gone out any number of exits, but he was counting on Cooper’s ego to take charge and have him exit where the press was.
But two hours?
Bishop shifted in his seat, his bladder demanding attention. He had assumed Cooper would sign some paperwork and leave, which was why when the verdict was announced, he had left the courtroom immediately to get his car.
When he left, his motivation was clear. He was going to follow Cooper home and kill him. Justice had to be served. But as the rage cooled, the fantasy encounter in his head, where he surprised Cooper and beat the living shit out of him before killing him by stabbing him seven times, one for each victim, turned. The fantasy began to change, and Cooper would gain the upper hand, and Bishop himself would be the one killed.
It had been enough to cool his jets.
Now the plan was just to find out where he would be staying, then report back to the others. Together they would decide what needed to be done. He sighed, closing his eyes. The group. The Seven. He had heard them called that. Initially at the trials there had been a large number of people for each victim attending the trial, but it had dragged on, and when the charges were tossed due to lack of evidence for the other six victims, most had left in outrage.
But not The Seven.
They had been more than seven initially, even after the dismissal of the other six cases. There had been about twenty of them, but over the months it had dwindled down to the seven of them, one person determined to keep the attention on Cooper for their respective loved one. And over the years, the five long years, they had become close.
Very close.
They were their own support group. No one could understand what they had been through better than each other. When one was feeling down, feeling lost, feeling scared, a message merely needed to be sent on Facebook and immediately the others would stop what they were doing and begin to chat online. Or if someone really needed that human touch, a text message, a phone call, was all that was needed and they could count on the other six arriving to help them out.
They had become friends. They had become family.
Several had even moved to New York to be closer. New York, being the type of city it was, attracted people from all over the country, and the world, so seven random victims had little chance of all being born and raised in New York.
He was fortunate in that he lived here. He had moved in with his twin sister after the death of her husband in a freak accident to help her get back on her feet. She had been devastated by his death.
A feeling he now knew too well.
His chest tightened.
Pam!
His eyes burned with tears as they escaped and ran down his cheeks. Desperately he tried to remember her face during happier times, but he couldn’t. All he could picture was her naked body, lying half on the bed, her legs draped over the side, her backside exposed, and the dozens of stab wounds to her back, some pre-mortem, some perimortem, but most post-mortem.
Her hair
had been matted in blood, her face turned to the side, away from the door. When he had entered the room and found her body, he had rushed to the bed and flipped her over. Her face was covered in blood, her features almost unrecognizable from the beating she had taken before the rape had begun.
He had collapsed on the floor, holding her, trying to clean the blood and hair from her face, screaming for someone to help him for almost half an hour before the police had stormed into the house, a neighbor finally having called.
They had to pry him away from her, and in one last indignity, had handcuffed him and placed him inside a cruiser until the detectives arrived to sort things out.
And now, even after five years of staring at family photos, wedding photos, vacation photos, candid photos, he still couldn’t picture her when his eyes closed, without seeing the bloody corpse he had discovered.
And for that Wayne Cooper had to pay.
He had no idea if the death of Cooper would allow him to move on, to put the past behind him, but he did know one thing for certain. As long as Wayne Cooper was a free man, any hope Bishop had for recovery was lost.
He opened his eyes and looked at the steps of the courthouse and felt his heart leap into his throat. His hand darted for the keys, shaking so hard it took him three attempts to actually turn them enough to start the car.
Wayne Cooper was halfway down the steps, talking to reporters.
With a smile that left Bishop livid.
“Mr. Cooper, Aynslee Kai, WACX News. Now that you’re a free man, what do you plan to do?”
Cooper fixed his eyes on Aynslee, and she felt her skin crawl. This guy’s a creep!
“I was thinking of having dinner with my mother,” he said, then leaning in, added, “but if you’re free tonight, I’ll happily change my plans.” His tongue darted out suggestively. Several of the other reporters groaned in disgust, but Aynslee didn’t take the bait.
“Is that an offer for an exclusive, Mr. Cooper?” His eyes opened slightly wider, and he paled just a tint. Not so confident, are we? “Should I pick you up at your place tonight, Mr. Cooper. Say six o’clock?”
He took a step back, then was grabbed by the arm and hurried down the steps toward a waiting car by his lawyer. Aynslee lowered her mike and signaled for her crew not to follow the creep as he beat a hasty retreat into a waiting limo, probably financed by one of his fans. Steve Davis and Mike Parker, her camera and sound guys, lowered their equipment.
“Christ, Aynslee, you’d think after what you’ve been through you’d try not to bait guys like that,” scolded Steve.
“What? Creeps?”
“No, serial killers!” exclaimed Mike.
“Serial killer? I’ve met serial killers, and this guy’s no serial killer.” She stopped, her eyes narrowing. She looked at Mike then Steve. “Did I just say that?”
“Say what?”
She smiled at the sound of the voice and turned to look up the steps at the lumbering form of Detective Justin Shakespeare and his once nemesis Vinny Fantino.
“Justin!” she said, stepping up to give him a hug. He returned the hug, still a little awkwardly for her liking, and she let him go. She looked into his face and he seemed a little—she searched for the word—off. “Are you feeling okay?” she asked, lowering her voice.
Shakespeare appeared surprised. She didn’t know him that well, but he had saved her life twice, and over the past couple of months had tried her best to repay that by getting to know him. In fact, she had just last week asked him out for dinner, something she wanted to make a regular occurrence if he’d let her. It had been so cute. His reaction when she had asked him was almost school-boyish. The awkward ‘ahs’ and ‘ums’ quickly made her realize he thought she was asking him out on a date, and she had been forced to stifle a smile and save him by adding, “please invite your girlfriend, I’d love to meet her.” Before she said it, she wasn’t sure if he had a girlfriend, but it had immediately eased the tension, and the ‘date’ was on.
“Yeah, I’m okay. Just not happy about this case,” he said.
“That’s putting it mildly,” muttered Vinny.
Aynslee put her hand on Shakespeare’s arm. “Still on for tomorrow night?”
Shakespeare smiled, and nodded. “Absolutely, looking forward to it. We both are.”
“Great, I’ll see you there.”
Shakespeare shuffled down the steps, followed by Vinny who gave her a smile and nod, looking a little confused at the conversation. Aynslee watched Shakespeare climb into his beast of a Cadillac and roar off the moment Vinny’s foot cleared the pavement.
I’m glad those two have patched things up.
“Aynslee, the ADA!”
Aynslee turned at Steve’s announcement, her game-face back on as ADA Turnbull rushed down the steps then stopped to face the cameras. “I have a brief statement to make, and will be answering no questions.” She took a deep breath, and turned slowly, giving each camera equal face time. “Today was a travesty of justice. A guilty man walked free due to a technicality. Someone screwed up, and I will do everything in my power to make certain they pay for their mistake. But the person who truly needs to pay walked free today, and that needs to be corrected. The District Attorney’s office will reopen the investigation into all seven murders, and with God as my witness, we will bring Wayne Cooper to justice!”
With that she gave a nod to her entourage who immediately surrounded her and escorted her down the steps, keeping the screaming hordes of reporters away from her.
“Where to now?” asked Mike.
“I think there’s only one place to go.”
“Where?”
“The Cooper residence.”
“So what now, Shakes?”
Shakespeare stood in ‘the pit’ at homicide, case boards and large flat screens showing pictures of each of the victims and the crime scenes. He perched himself on the corner of a desk, preferring a chair, but figuring to retain some semblance of authority, he should at least keep some of his height.
“We start from the beginning. We know he did it, we have his DNA, but that’s been tossed.”
“Sorry guys,” offered Vinny.
“No apologies today, though I’ll offer up mine now for what happened to the gun.” He paused, wondering if he should come clean on what had really happened. Not the time. “The gun, which we have the serial number for, was found at the scene of the seventh victim, the same scene where the DNA was found. We know ballistics tells us that the same gun was used at the first six scenes, but because Cooper was surprised by Sandra Gray’s husband returning, he never had a chance to put his customary bullet in the back of his victim’s head. If he had, we would have been able to link all seven crimes, and with the DNA, all seven murders to Wayne Cooper.
“But that didn’t happen. Instead, we have no link between the final murder, and the previous six. We know the serial number from the gun traces back to Wayne Cooper’s mother, so we know he’s our man. But, the judge tossed all the gun evidence because we couldn’t produce the weapon. And now, with the DNA evidence tossed, we have absolutely nothing.” Shakespeare clapped his hands together. “So where does that leave us?”
“Up shit’s creek,” said John “Johnny” Walker.
“Agreed. But let’s try to keep the self-pity to a minimum, and move forward. If we were investigating a serial homicide, what would we try to do? What’s one-oh-one on something like this?”
Detective Amber Trace, Shakespeare’s new official partner, raised her pen. “Connect the victims?”
“Bingo!” said Shakespeare. “We need to find out what the connection between these victims was, or how Cooper was connected to these victims. He chose them for some reason. Even if they were random, he chose them from somewhere. If we can figure that out, then we may be able to find someone or something that shows he had a prior relationship with the victims.
“We need to come at this from two fronts. One is to try and reestablish the case against Cooper for the
last murder, and second, we need to link him to just one of the previous six murders. The ballistics does the rest for us. Just link him to one of those murders, and we link all six. Even if we can’t prove he did the Gray murder, he’ll be doing life for the other six.”
Shakespeare turned to Vinny. “Vinny, I want your team to be going over all the evidence again, using any new tricks, techniques, equipment, whatever, that you have now that you didn’t then. Look at everything fresh, see if there’s something you missed.”
“Got it.”
“Nonkoh, I want you to go over every unsolved rape and murder case going back from the time our boy was fifteen. See if there are any cases out there with anything similar. He may have done more than these seven, and we just missed it.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Kowalski and Jenner, I want you to go over your notes, read the case files, and try to retrace these women’s routines. Their lives. Go back as far as you can, see if you can find some link between them or Cooper. There has to be something we missed.”
“You got it, Shakes.”
“Walker and Curtis, you switch off with McKay and Clement from the nightshift. I want round the clock surveillance on this guy. I want to know where he goes, who he meets with. Everything.”
Walker stood. “We’ll take the first shift. Where do you think we can pick him up?”
“Call Officer Richards.” Shakespeare handed him a card with Richards’ cellphone number. “I already had him and his partner follow Cooper from the courthouse.”
Walker smiled as he took the card. “Seems you thought of everything, Shakes.”
Shakespeare ignored the compliment, instead flicking his wrist at Trace. “Trace and I will re-interview the families, and Cooper’s neighbors.” He pushed himself off the desk. “Let’s get to it!”
The room broke, everyone splitting off into their separate assignments. Trace walked over. “So, where to first?”
“I’m thinking neighbors. I have a feeling talking to the families today won’t be very productive.”
Redeemer (A Detective Shakespeare Mystery, Book #3) Page 2
