Redheads

by Jonathan Moore

  “There’s no organization,” Westfield said.

  “Maybe we can take something away from that,” Julissa said. “Maybe he’s not travelling all the time, from country to country like some kind of…I don’t know…Lonely Planet backpacker who murders people. He has a home. He travels to kill, and then he goes home.”

  “That makes sense,” Chris said. “If he were travelling all the time like a backpacker, you’d think we’d see a whole string of them on one continent for a couple years, then on a different continent for a few more years.”

  “On the other hand,” Mike said, “he can’t be travelling just to kill. Or at least, not all the time. I mean, if you’re only interested in finding redheads, why go to Nigeria, or anywhere in Asia?”

  “That’s true,” Westfield said. “He’s probably traveling from a home base somewhere, but he must be traveling for some other reason. Trips to Western countries, maybe he’s trying to find a victim. But the others must have another reason. Like business.”

  Chris got out one of the dry erase markers and went to the white board.

  “Let’s write down things we know. Maybe we can put that in one column. Then we can have another column for things we suspect.”

  He turned to the white board and in neat letters wrote, Tries to hide his DNA in the column he marked Suspected. Underneath that, he wrote, Has a home base. He shrugged. It was a start. But the column labeled Known was empty.

  “Here’s something we know: he’s male,” said Julissa. “The semen pretty much solved that mystery. If there ever was one.”

  Chris wrote it on the board.

  “Victims are all redheads with green eyes,” Westfield said. Chris wrote, Redheads / Green Eyes on the board.

  “Rapist,” Julissa said. “Cannibal.”

  “He’s strong,” Mike said. “I think we know that.”

  “It’s fair to say we know he’s at least middle aged,” Westfield said.

  “And we suspect he’s probably older,” Chris added. “Aaron and I talked about that.”

  Chris wrote all this down. He looked at them. Now they were all thinking, and that was good. Julissa was writing on a pad of hotel stationery. Mike was scrolling through files on his laptop. He thought if they could fight and move just one foot forward along the killer’s trail, it would be easier to take the next step, and the one after.

  “If we’re talking about suspicions,” Julissa said, “let’s talk about why all these things happen near the water. That seems like our best lead by far.”

  “And if we’re going to talk about the water connection,” Westfield said, “I want to tell you what I did this morning.”

  They all looked at him. Westfield reached into his jacket pocket and brought out his FBI badge. He tossed it on the table.

  “This is a fake. I bought it at a flea market in Seattle. Reason I’m wearing the suit is I went down to the shipyard across the channel from Allison’s condo and spent the morning interviewing the nightshift crew. They got welders working on a rig over there twenty-four hours a day. Thought some of them might’ve seen something.”

  “You found someone?” Chris asked.

  Westfield told them Jimmy Hutchinson’s story, ending with Hutchinson’s guess that the man was swimming twenty miles an hour.

  “You think Jimmy Hutchinson is credible?” Mike asked.

  “Credibility sounds like something you need in court,” Westfield said. “I wouldn’t bring Hutchinson to court. I wouldn’t ignore him either.”

  “Also,” Chris said, “it fits with the Vancouver case. At least a little.”

  He turned and looked at Mike. “Wasn’t there a police theory in Vancouver—the young girl on the boat—that the killer might’ve come there by swimming across the channel, since no one saw anybody going down the docks?”

  Mike nodded. “That’s right.”

  “You think Jimmy Hutchinson actually saw him?” Julissa said.

  “It fits. It’s a strange thing to see. We can’t directly connect one strange event with another on the same night, but it seems like too big a thing to ignore,” Chris said.

  “Maybe we can find other witnesses,” Julissa said.

  “I’ll try,” Westfield said. “There’s a fishing pier out at Seawolf Park. If he swam that way, maybe someone would’ve seen. If anyone was fishing that night. As for Hutchinson, I believed him when he told me. He probably had a thing for Allison, but he wasn’t a drunk and he wasn’t a nutcase. And he didn’t seem to think the story explained anything. He was just giving me what he had.”

  “But nobody can swim that fast,” Mike said.

  “Especially someone over fifty,” added Julissa.

  “Maybe he was wrong about the speed. It was dark, he saw a guy in the water moving fast. Maybe there’s a tidal current through there that helps with the speed,” Westfield said.

  “Or maybe your question about the electric scooter was right. That could give him an extra five or six miles an hour. If he held it under his chest, Hutchinson wouldn’t see it,” Mike said.

  Westfield shrugged.

  “Escaping by water would be a good route, if he came here on a ship and planned to leave on a ship,” Chris said. “Imagine it. He thinks the neighbors might’ve heard. The police might be on their way. He’s probably covered in blood. The water’s an easy way out.”

  “I can think of a lot of better things to do besides swim in the ocean at midnight while covered in blood,” Mike said.

  “I can think of a lot of better things to do besides everything this guy does,” Julissa said.

  They all looked at the white board, and after a while, Chris got up and wrote Swimmer in the column for suspicions.

  They took a break after that. While the others moved their bags to the rooms he’d reserved, Chris descended to the lobby, found the hotel’s business center, and printed the thirty-six files he and Mike had assembled. They didn’t have one yet for Allison. He made four copies of each and went back upstairs to the conference room.

  Mike had showered and changed clothes and was back at the conference table with his laptop. Julissa was out on the balcony with Westfield, but they came inside when they heard Chris.

  Mike cleared his throat and looked at them.

  “Before I came here, Chris asked me to take a look at the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, see if I could figure out why there isn’t an international manhunt on for this guy. Everyone familiar with VICAP?”

  Julissa shook her head and Mike explained the network.

  “Thing is,” Mike said, “VICAP should pick up the similarities in all these crimes. All these murders—at least the ones in the U.S. and Canada—should be in the system. I mean, they all fit the profile. Unsolved, extremely violent rapes and murders that are totally random. It’s exactly what VICAP was made to pick up. Chris and I wrote a simple search and filter program and found thirty-six of these just by going through Internet news stories. You gotta figure the FBI’s program is more sophisticated than ours. If it had these cases in the network, it would’ve linked them in about a second. So I borrowed a friend’s login and password and had a look at what VICAP is showing.”

  Chris felt his arms break out in goose bumps. He sensed what Mike was about to say, and what it meant. If they were chasing a rabid dog, it was either incredibly smart or incredibly well protected. Or both.

  “I found only one murder on VICAP we’d expect to be there: Allison. All the others are gone. And you may think it’s just police who are too stupid or too proud to work with the FBI, so they don’t enter the data. But that can’t be true. I was on HPD when Cheryl Wilcox was killed and I uploaded that case to VICAP myself. And it’s gone.”

  Julissa scribbled on her pad and looked up. Chris could see she was drawing a flow chart.

  “That leaves us one of three places,” she said. “One: the killer’s in the FBI, maybe works at Quantico, has access to VICAP, and erases each old case before he kills again so there are never two
cases in the system for the computer to connect. Two: the killer has protection from someone high up with access to a person who can change the database. Or three: the killer, either by himself or by paying someone he trusts, is sophisticated enough to hack into the FBI’s database and alter it.”

  Mike looked at her. “I think that about sums it up. I thought about it all night on the plane and I couldn’t think of anything else.”

  “If that’s true, we better make sure the FBI and the police never find out what we’re doing. Our investigation has got to stay secret,” Chris said.

  “Why?” Westfield asked.

  “Because no matter which one of Julissa’s options you pick, the FBI’s compromised. The killer’s one of them, or they’ve got a mole, or the killer can hack their system. And it’s clear he doesn’t want anyone looking for him. So if he gets word of us—”

  “He’ll erase the data and then come after us,” Mike finished.

  Chris nodded. “That’s the way I see it. And this isn’t necessarily a bad development. If he’s in the FBI, it gives us a suspect list. And if he’s well protected or capable of hacking—that at least makes the pool a lot smaller.”

  Julissa’s phone rang. She took it from her purse and stepped out onto the balcony. The men watched her through the glass sliding doors. When a few moments passed, Westfield cleared his throat.

  “What’re you guys thinking for the next step?”

  “I have some ideas. I thought we should all talk about it and agree. So none of us repeats what someone else already did,” Chris said.

  “Divide up assignments,” Westfield said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you project a map of Galveston?” Westfield asked.

  Mike nodded and typed at his laptop. A few seconds later the projection screen showed a satellite image of Galveston. Westfield went to the screen and pointed at the fishing dock at Seawolf Park.

  “People on this pier might’ve seen a swimmer. Unless you guys have other plans for me tomorrow, that’s what I’m going to check for. Anywhere else you think I should look?”

  “What about these other two shipyards?” Mike asked. He circled the laptop’s mouse arrow around two industrial yards on Pelican Island northeast of the one which lay directly across the channel from Allison’s condo.

  “I checked. Neither one runs a night shift anymore.”

  “How about the yacht basin on the other side of the channel?” Chris asked. The yacht basin had four long rows of covered slips and an uncovered fifth row, for sailboats, directly facing the channel. “Fireworks that night were on the Gulf side of the island. People might’ve gone over on their boats to watch. Maybe someone coming through the channel afterwards passed him in the water.”

  “I’ll check.”

  The glass door slid open and Julissa stepped inside. She’d been crying again.

  “My parents finally got off their ship long enough to call home and check their messages,” she said. She went back to her chair and sat down.

  “They coming home now?” Mike asked.

  Julissa nodded. “Day after tomorrow.”

  She put her elbows on the table and held her head in her hands, her fingers lost in her red hair. Chris thought of Cheryl, sobbing at the kitchen counter when her father died of cancer. The muscles in his legs tensed, ready to carry him over to her so he could kneel at her side and take her into his arms. Instead he stayed in his chair and looked at a blank space on the table. Julissa raised her head, wiped her nose with the back of her hand, and pushed her hair out of her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Talking with them—it made it real again.”

  Chris nodded and Westfield murmured something too soft for Chris to hear.

  “I’m still with you guys,” she said. “I think I can probably help on the FBI hacking angle. At the very least I might narrow it till we can say for sure whether the files are getting erased from inside the FBI or from somewhere else.”

  “What would you need to do that?” Chris asked.

  She bit her lower lip.

  “A computer I pay for in cash. A dedicated Internet connection, nowhere near Austin. That’s about it.”

  “All right,” Westfield said. “So I’ll follow up on the swimmer. Julissa’s going after the FBI angle. Mike, what’ll you take?”

  “I can get the IDs and background of everyone who works in the VICAP unit. It might be hard, but with some careful footwork I can probably do it in a week.”

  Westfield nodded. “Chris?”

  “I’ll follow up on the evidence I collected from Allison’s apartment.”

  Mike looked up and raised an eyebrow in question.

  “What evidence?” Julissa asked.

  Chris nodded. It was time to tell them.

  “The thing I know about him, that I didn’t write on the board yet, is sometimes he comes back to where he killed a woman. He did it with Cheryl. I didn’t realize at first. After the murder I didn’t go back into my house for three weeks. I stayed at a hotel in Waikiki through the funeral and until everyone in our families left. The police were finished with the house after four days. A detective told me I could call a cleaning service if I wanted, because they were through with the forensics. I called the next day, but it still took weeks before I went in the house. Even that was just to get a few things and leave again.”

  “What’d you find?” Julissa asked.

  “Nothing. I didn’t realize it until maybe a month later. I only saw the crime scene for a couple of seconds before they pulled me out. But I saw it in dreams. The dream was like studying a photograph with a magnifying glass. Every awful detail, a bit at a time. And then one morning I woke up and realized when she was killed, the countertops were bare. We had these new granite counters. Cheryl would polish them until they were like black mirrors. Except for the blood, they were like that. Bare and empty. But when I went into my house finally after three weeks to get some clothes, there was no blood anywhere, but there was a plate on the counter, and a frying pan on the stove and a fork and steak knife in the frying pan.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Julissa whispered.

  “I know. I didn’t put it together when I saw it. I just left with my clothes. Maybe a month later, I decided to get rid of the house. At first I was going to sell it, and I had a realtor list it. She probably washed everything and put it away, thinking she was going to show the house. But she never showed it. Instead I called a friend at the Department of Planning and Permitting and got a permit to have the house demolished.”

  Westfield looked up. “How do you know it had anything to do with him? It could’ve been one of the cleaners, even a sloppy cop, who cooked something from your freezer and didn’t clean up.”

  “It came from the freezer all right,” Chris said.

  Thinking about it again made him feel cold all over. What chilled him most was the idea he’d been sharing the small island of Oahu with the killer for days. They might have passed each other on the street, or stood next to each other in the hotel elevator. Maybe they’d looked into each other’s eyes.

  “I don’t know why I even found it. Movers were supposed to pack everything and put it in storage before the demolition. But there were some things of Cheryl’s I wanted to get myself, so they didn’t go missing. I went into the house to get them, and I was standing in our bedroom, looking in our safe for some of her jewelry. She didn’t always wear her engagement ring. She was a surgeon. The ring wouldn’t be good under a latex glove, so she took it off a lot. I couldn’t find it in the safe. I remembered her joking about her grandmother, always hiding cash and stuff in the freezer. So I went downstairs and had a look. She usually kept the food she wanted to eat on the bottom shelf. Vegetarian frozen dinners, Lean Cuisines, that kind of stuff. There was a pint-sized container of vanilla ice cream at the back of the freezer. It had been there about a year. Maybe even two. I’d never thrown it out because it was hers.”

  He told them, speaking very quietly, about t
aking the carton out, prying off the frozen lid, and looking inside. It hadn’t been full of jewelry. A lump of frozen red flesh had been stuffed in there. Unidentifiable, horrifying. Drops of blood and ripped tissue were frozen to the waxed cardboard sides, the pooled blood frozen into a round puck at the bottom. This was the last he ever saw of his wife.

  “What I think now, and I’ve had a lot of time to think about it,” Chris said, “is he eats his fill sometimes. He can’t choke down any more. But he isn’t satisfied, isn’t done. And he doesn’t want to walk away from the scene carrying anything.”

  “So he hides it where it won’t be found, and comes back later, in his own time,” Julissa said.

  “Yes. And why would a forensic team look in the freezer if there’s no blood trail leading to it, no prints on it, no connection? Why pull off the lid from an ice cream carton, or open a half-empty bag of frozen Brussels sprouts, if there’s no reason to? They don’t have time to turn over every stone. Just the ones they think they need to.”

  “He did this to Allison?” Julissa asked.

  Chris nodded.

  “That sick fucking son of a bitch.”

  “What’d you find?” Mike asked.