Redheads

by Jonathan Moore

  “Why can’t you reach your parents?”

  “They’re on a cruise in Turkey. Will you stop asking questions and please tell me what the fuck is going on?”

  “Can I get dressed? I wasn’t expecting anybody.”

  “No. Maybe later. Right now I want answers.”

  He moved his hands up—slowly, so she wouldn’t think he was reaching for the gun—and ran his fingers through his hair. Then he rested his elbows on the table and put his forehead in his palms. His reconnaissance from the night before might as well have been on network TV. How many other people had watched him?

  “Six years ago my wife was murdered in Honolulu. She’d come home early from work to jog on the beach. No one ever found the killer. He—I’ll spare you the details.”

  But her eyes said he couldn’t spare her, that no gap in his story would veil what she already suspected. So he told her.

  A police officer came to his office in Honolulu, and told him his wife had been found.

  Found? He hadn’t known she was missing.

  He went with the officer, all feeling receding from his body. He rode in the passenger seat of the cruiser, up over the Pali Highway and down through the tunnel in the mountains to the other side of the island. It was raining by the time they got to the pass, and came harder on the windward side.

  He’d asked too many questions. How had they found her in the house? Why were they looking? Who said they could go inside? The officer had been evasive, then finally gave answers Chris wished he’d never heard.

  A neighbor reported screams.

  Dispatch sent a unit to roll past the house and the cops saw blood on the front steps. The door was unlocked. No one answered when they called, so they went inside.

  Later, disoriented by grief, Chris would think he’d sabotaged his last chance. She hadn’t really been dead until then. If he hadn’t asked the questions, it could have all been taken back.

  But that chance slipped away, if it had ever been a chance. They came to the house. The yard was a parking lot for police cars, evidence vans, unmarked detectives’ cars, all of them sinking into mud beneath the soaked grass. He could see the blood on the threshold of the door, still bright and wet. A man wearing plastic bags on his feet was taking photographs of the doormat. Someone took Chris’s elbow and looked at another officer.

  “This the husband? The fuck they bring him for?”

  Chris shook off the hand, pushed past the detective, past the photographer. Inside there were more of them, technicians everywhere with bagged feet, gloved hands, and shower caps. He called Cheryl’s name. Halogen lights mounted on tripods filled the living room and illuminated the kitchen.

  “Grab him, don’t let him past.”

  He made it to the kitchen and saw her on the floor in front of the oven. They dragged him away a second later, but by then he’d seen enough. He could, and would, replay that single second for days at a time.

  He hadn’t recognized her face. Only her hair. One eye was gone; the other stared straight up. Her breasts were cut off and gone. It looked like an animal had chewed off her vulva. Her fingertips were missing at the first knuckle. The skin of her stomach, upon which he used to lay his head, had been ripped off and her intestines hung in loops over the knobs of the lower kitchen cabinets, as if thrown there in a hurry to get to something else. Much later, he learned her intestines had been tossed aside to get at her liver, which was never found.

  They dragged him outside.

  Other people—line officers, forensic technicians—had already vomited next to the bushes where he knelt retching. Six months later, when the police hadn’t found a single suspect, he began his search on a simple premise: anyone or anything capable of something so awful had done it before and would do it again.

  His search took him first to Mike Nakamura and then all over the world. He told her the last six places he’d been: Vanouver, Manila, New Orleans, Sydney, Vladivostok, Stockholm. And now Galveston.

  “You think this is what happened to my sister?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many has he killed?”

  “Thirty-six I know about. That’s going back ten years, the definite ones. I don’t think I catch them all. And he’s been doing it a lot longer than a decade.”

  “When you find this guy, you’ll kill him?”

  “Yes.”

  The young woman turned the gun away from him. Then she asked a question he didn’t expect.

  “You still live in that house?”

  “No. I had it torn down. Sold the vacant land. I bought a different house in Kaneohe. I thought I should stay close, because I thought I was looking for someone close by. Then I learned that wasn’t true, but I stayed in Kaneohe anyway.”

  “Since he’s everywhere, it doesn’t matter where you live.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What do you do?”

  “This.”

  “What about before?”

  “I was a lawyer.”

  “What’ll we do next?” she said.

  “You could tell me your name.”

  “Julissa Clayborn.”

  “I’m Chris Wilcox.”

  He held out his hand, but instead of shaking it, she took it and held it. She looked dizzy. They just sat that way for a moment, their hands together on the table. Her hand was so warm, the skin soft. How long had he been huddling by the memory of Cheryl, as if that could sustain either of them? He turned away from her green eyes, feeling naked. He went to the bathroom, took off the towel, and changed into jeans and a polo shirt.

  When he came back, he told her about the meeting with Aaron Westfield and Mike Nakamura.

  “I want to be there,” Julissa said.

  Westfield was right—they could have been sisters, all of them.

  “What I’m doing isn’t legal. And it isn’t safe.”

  Her eyes dropped and he followed her gaze to the pistol on the table between them. It was a match grade Sig Sauer. The chrome plating was worn on the barrel from coming in and out of its holster in a hurry.

  “You lost everything and took this up because you had to,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “My sister was my best friend.”

  When he didn’t say anything, she picked up the Sig Sauer and put it back into her handbag. Then she looked at him again.

  “When you told me, you brought me into it. We both know there’s no way back. And I could help you more than you think.”

  She reached into her handbag and brought out an ID card in a clear plastic holder. She slid it across the table and he looked at it. This time he nodded again, his eyes closed. She was right. There was no way back.

  He’d wasted enough time looking for that path.

  “We’re meeting as soon as Mike gets to Galveston.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “I need to sleep,” Chris told her. “I’m sorry.”

  “Can I stay a bit? I’m not ready to drive anywhere.”

  Chris nodded to the room’s other bed, which was still made. “Sure.”

  He remembered what it was like in the first few weeks of shock. Nothing was strange. He’d just gone from one event to the next as if dragged on a rope. He got into the bed closer to the air conditioner and pulled the covers up to his shoulders. Whatever Westfield had shot into his neck was having secondary effects. That, or the adrenaline was wearing off. His face felt leaden. He was half asleep when he heard Julissa turn back the covers on the other bed and switch off the lamp on the table between them.

  She was asleep when he woke that night. Her ID card was still on the table, face up. He looked at her face in the photograph above the slightly raised seal of the National Security Agency and the nononsense corporate logo of Advanced Micro Devices. He turned the ID facedown and went out quietly.

  Chapter Seven

  Mike Nakamura arrived at the airport two hours ahead of schedule. He sat on a bench in the Japanese garden underneath the triangle of walkways lead
ing to the Hawaiian Airlines gates. With the koi pond behind him, it was the best place in the airport to use a laptop computer without someone walking behind him and seeing the screen. He was researching VICAP; what he was finding scared the shit out of him. He looked around again to be sure he was alone, then checked his watch. Ten hours to Houston was a long time.

  He couldn’t believe he’d never seen this before.

  The FBI ran the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program out of its training school in Quantico, Virginia. VICAP was an electronic clearing house for unsolved murders and sex crimes across North America and Western Europe. Law enforcement agencies could input data from their unsolved cases and search the database for similar murders. VICAP sought cases where the victim appeared to have been selected at random, and where the killing was motiveless or sexual. All cases were kept in the system indefinitely, and were electronically checked against each other to compile lists of possibly linked killings. The program could identify serial killings by matching the signature aspects of each crime.

  Mike knew VICAP fairly well. He’d been a Honolulu Police Department detective before Chris gave him a fulltime job working on the Cheryl Wilcox case. He uploaded Cheryl’s killing into VICAP himself.

  After talking to Chris, he’d called a friend who was still with HPD and asked for a favor: to borrow a Law Enforcement Online password for a couple of hours. Once he’d gotten to the airport, he’d logged into VICAP to find out what the FBI knew. In the database, he entered search parameters that would surely have picked up Cheryl Wilcox’s file. A search as simple as “*victim sex: F*victim hair color: red*loc: Honolulu*MO: cannibalism*” would surely have brought up Cheryl’s file and no other. But instead, the system came back with an even simpler response: No results. Please enter new search parameters and try again.

  He searched for all cold-case murders in Hawaii and scrolled through the results. Unsolved murders in Hawaii were vanishingly rare. VICAP listed five, going back to 1988. There should have been six.

  Cheryl’s case was not in the system.

  He searched for the New Orleans case. The young woman there, two and a half years ago, had been a Tulane student named Robin Knappe. Robin’s landlady found her in the gingerbread shotgun house she’d rented for two years on Magazine Street near Audubon Park. Both of Robin’s breasts, her left buttock, and her lower jaw and tongue had been missing and were never found. Even a police force as beleaguered as the post-Katrina NOPD would have entered such a case on the VICAP network. The most rookie detective would’ve taken one look at the case and thought to do it. But Robin Knappe was missing.

  New Orleans had the highest murder rate in the country, even after Katrina when a third of its population never returned. The city accounted for over a hundred and thirty cold-case murders on VICAP, and Mike scrolled through them all to make sure he hadn’t missed Robin somehow. She was simply not there.

  The girl in Vancouver was a seventeen-year-old high school senior, supposedly spending the weekend with her girlfriends. In fact, she was camped out on her boyfriend’s father’s sailboat at a marina near Granville Street. Her boyfriend walked to a brewpub near the docks, returning forty minutes later with takeout dinners and a growler of beer. Jill Moyers was completely dismembered in that short span. She bled so much the sailboat’s automatic bilge pump switched on. The boyfriend dropped his bags and sprinted to the boat when he saw the slurry of blood and seawater pumping from a bronze thru-hull fitting near the boat’s stern. This was in the long-shadowed final light of a northern evening; the harbor was crowded and busy as people readied their boats for winter. But there were no witnesses, and no one even heard a scream. Three people in adjacent boats had seen Jill lounging with a magazine on the boat’s bow around the time her boyfriend was getting their dinner. Police speculated the killer might have swum across the narrow channel under the Granville Street bridge and then climbed the sailboat’s transom ladder. This never went any further than speculation—the killer was never caught.

  And Jill Moyers was nowhere on VICAP.

  The implications stunned Mike. Either police incompetence was more deeply rooted than his own experience led him to believe, or something far worse was happening. He tried to call Chris again, but his telephone was still switched off. He left another voicemail, asking Chris to call if he could. Then he closed his laptop and paced the airport walkways until his flight was called.

  Chapter Eight

  Julissa looked at her watch in the dark. It was four in the morning. She was alone in Chris Wilcox’s motel room. She did the math and realized she’d been asleep about sixteen hours.

  That made sense.

  She hadn’t slept much since she’d learned about Allison. Ben’s call came while she was in a traffic jam on the lower deck of Interstate 35 on her way to work in Austin. She had calmly pulled off at the nearest exit ramp, parked in front of a bagel shop across from the University of Texas campus, and had tried to call Allison at home. The man who answered the phone identified himself as Detective Gonzales, Galveston Police Department. She’d told him she was Allison’s sister, that she wanted to talk to Allison. He asked her where she was, if she was in Galveston. When she answered, he told her to stay in Austin; they’d call her. He took her number and hung up.

  Then she drove to Galveston.

  Her phone battery died somewhere between Austin and Houston. Too many calls, to too many answering machines. Ben didn’t pick up. Her parents’ cheerful voicemail said they were en route to Istanbul. She pulled off Highway 71 in La Grange and bought a charger and adapter for her car’s cigarette lighter at the WalMart on the outskirts of town. As she drove, she called and left messages. She called her sister’s phone number and a different detective answered but she didn’t quite catch his name. Kentwood, or maybe Ken Wood. She got back on I-10 and headed for Houston, hitting ninety on the empty stretches. She’d stopped once in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel restaurant to call Dave Chan. They’d been at AMD’s embedded security division since graduate school. Dave was technically her supervisor, but they ran their division like partners.

  Sitting on the second bed in Chris Wilcox’s motel room, with her knees pulled up to her chest, she couldn’t quite recall what she’d told Dave or how many days ago that had been. He was the first person she’d tried to call who not only picked up the phone, but who actually spoke with her. She was pretty sure she’d lost it. She remembered sobbing and telling him she didn’t know where she was. Allison was dead, maybe. She had to say maybe because it wouldn’t be real until she saw her sister’s body.

  “Take as much time as you need. I’ll take care of everything here. And we’ll do anything to help you.”

  She’d said thank you. Bizarrely, she’d almost told him that she loved him before she hung up, which was odd, because he was just a friend. Maybe it was the shock. Or just the gratitude that someone finally talked to her. She pulled out of the Cracker Barrel parking lot and drove the rest of the way to Galveston, crying and banging on her Acura’s steering wheel.

  If almost telling Dave that she loved him was bizarre, the next three days were surreal. She didn’t have perfect recall, but now it seemed she spent most of the time in her car or on the phone. The police wouldn’t let her up to Allison’s apartment. She watched from the street as the marked and unmarked police cars and forensic vans came and left. She went to the main station and walked in, asking for Detective Gonzales. She waited half an hour and was finally told Detective Gonzales was not in the building, but that he would call her. So she drove back to Allison’s place and just watched the front. Her head was thumping with a headache that part of her realized was probably related to dehydration. She had a licensed Sig Sauer match pistol in her glove compartment and at some point in the last three days she had transferred it to her lap. What could she say? She was a twenty-nine-year-old computer scientist with a Ph.D. from M.I.T., but she was also a Texan and she liked to shoot handguns. But she had never held a gun for comfort before that ni
ght in the car.

  She stood from the bed and went to wash her face. She didn’t like what she saw in the bathroom mirror. Her blouse was wrinkled but the wool skirt was holding up. She took off her nylons and threw them away. She put some of Chris’s toothpaste onto the tip of her finger and did the best job she could at brushing. She wanted to take a shower and go back to bed. Instead, she found her car keys on the bedside table and the Sig Sauer under her pillow, and started towards the door of the motel room. Chris had taped a note to the door. Julissa: You were asleep when I woke. I’ll probably be on the beach across the street. Chris. His cell number was beneath his name. She left the room and went to her car, locking the pistol in the glove compartment. Then she walked over the motel’s gravelly parking lot and crossed the empty street. Chris was on a park bench on the sea wall; he turned at the sound of her high heels on the pavement.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey,” she said, and raised her left hand. “Sorry about that. You probably think I’m nuts.”

  “It’s not a problem. I mean, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you.”

  “Thanks.”

  She sat on the bench next to him and looked out at the waves. They rolled in and broke along the sides of two jetties made of granite blocks. The surface of the Gulf was black except for where the waves broke white and foaming on the rocks.

  “You been up long?”

  “Four or five hours. I took a walk on the beach and then I was just sitting here. I guess I’m awake for the rest of the day.”

  “Up for a drive with me?” she asked.

  “Sure. Where to?”

  “WalMart. I think I’ve been wearing this suit four or five days. And these shoes are getting to be a pain in the ass.”

  She extended her knees and held her feet up, soles pointing to the ocean.

  “Those don’t look like the best.” Chris pointed southwest. “I think there’s a WalMart that way. Couple miles down the seawall.”