by Greg Enslen
She continued to pore through her printouts and after a while the computer beeped to let her know the search was done. She slid the mouse out from under a pile of paperwork and clicked on the SEARCH RESULTS - GEOGRAPHIC DISPLAY box. The screen cleared and a full color map of the United States popped up, followed by a sprinkling of dots of many different colors. A legend at the bottom defined the years for each of the 21 colors. Julie and Chris had found that the search patterns took less time if the data was sorted first and then displayed graphically.
She moved the mouse up to the top of the screen and clicked on ZOOM. Instantly, the monitor cleared and redrew the map, this time moving in on the northern states and the border with Canada. Different colored dots sprinkled the states, all of them dating from the late 70’s, and Julie could easily see the pattern, moving slowly across the northern states.
Clicking on the scroll bars at the bottom of the screen, she followed the loose pattern of colored dots back across the nations’ midsection, moving into St. Louis and Chicago, then on to Indiana and Ohio and Pennsylvania. There were not as many dots as out west, and this information was consistent with a possible serial killer - they teach themselves the best ways to operate, and they grow in knowledge and experience, growing more confident and taking more lives as their careers continue. There were also dots of the same colors that were far away from the other concentrations, and those cases could probably be eliminated from Julie’s search patterns. If there were a killer out there, he could not have gotten around that much. But by eliminating the geographically distant cases, Julie could see a pattern.
The screen centered on Virginia and Pennsylvania, and she saw several cases in the Pittsburgh area, murders that had never been solved, but they did follow the same general pattern as Julie’s Black Diamond Killer. There was a smattering of other cases, and she worked to eliminate them from the pattern, either by showing that they occurred to far apart to be committed by the same person, or by showing that they didn't follow the collection pattern.
She clicked again to scroll down the coast to show all of Virginia and was surprised. There were only three dots, colored the pink of 1978 and centered in a little town northwest of Fredericksburg, Virginia. The cases showed April dates, and in each case a portion of the victim had been taken from the crime scene, or the cases would not have been included in this search.
Julie reached over and grabbed her comprehensive printout, flipping through until she found Spring 1978. There were about forty-seven cases from all over the United States (this printout listed them chronologically), but only a few on the east coast caught her eye. She scanned for the mention of Virginia, and finally came up lucky.
Both killings had occurred in a little town called Liberty.
Local police reports showed that someone had killed three of the townspeople before presumably leaving town, and in two of the cases something of the victim had been removed. The third death was that of the Sheriff responsible for tracking down and almost apprehending the killer - evidently there had been some type of gun battle and the killer had shot him, fleeing town in the Sheriff’s squad car.
One of the town’s deputies had been physically assaulted by the man and had given a very good description to the county’s police sketch artist. That picture had been tacked all over town, and the authorities in Liberty estimated in their final case report that the pictures all over town, coupled with the Sheriff’s death, had forced the killer to move on.
Julie ran a hardcopy printout of the latest national map, saved the map into one of the Cray’s massive storage units, and pulled up another menu, selecting the option that would give her direct access to each of the files stored in the Cray. She typed in some instructions and clicked on the appropriate buttons with her mouse, and soon the case file for the murders in Liberty were displayed on the screen in front of her.
The first murder had been that of a young boy in early April of 1978. The body of the boy was found and it sent the small town into a frenzy, from the police reports filed. The investigating officer was a Sheriff William T. Beaumont, and he wrote good reports, summing up the facts and clearly separating them from the speculation that inevitably works its way into police reports. The crime scene investigation seemed to very good, as far as Julie could tell from her quick scan of the case reports, especially considering that it had been done 18 years ago and out in the sticks. The autopsy, carried out by a county coroner in Fredericksburg, had determined the method of death as strangulation. He also noted the distinct absence of the smallest toe on the boy’s left foot, and in the report the coroner speculated that it might have been removed post-mortem by animals - the body had been dumped outside and not found for several days. Julie guessed that the coroner hadn’t even entertained the idea of a “collector” back in those days - maybe the Black Diamond Killer was really ahead of his time.
The second killing occurred a couple of days later, and by this time Sheriff Beaumont had thrown up the usual small-town reactions to a murder: extensive questioning of outsiders, roadblocks, and a dusk-to-dawn curfew. But that hadn’t kept the second victim, a city councilman with a family and a successful business, from being killed. And one of his toes was also removed. His body had been found near the town’s waste treatment plant, and from the tones of the report, Sheriff Beaumont was having trouble keeping his townspeople from lynching every stranger they could get their hands on - it was a credit to his abilities to keep them in line at all.
The case report on the second killing also included information on a suspect.
The Liberty Sheriff’s Department, led by Beaumont, had set up a sting operation at a local supermarket in an attempt to catch the killer, and this surprised Julie. In most of the cases that she had read, a small town’s police department usually didn’t take a pro-active approach on these type of cases. More often than not, they usually relied on a curfew and other actions to drive a menace away by giving him no targets. It didn’t happen that many times, but in the few cases she had read, she’d never come across a small town police force that tried to catch the killer instead of just scaring him off.
Well, the sting had worked and the killer had almost been captured, barely escaping after wounding three deputies and the sheriff himself. One of the deputies, a woman posing as a woman shopper at the supermarket, had been grabbed by the man and she’d gotten a good look at him, later describing his face to a police artist. Julie saw a copy of the sketch had been included in the file, scanned into the computer.
A frightening face stared at her from the monitor, a black and white drawing of a very scary looking man. His face was lined and somehow aged looking even though the reports said he couldn’t have been older than 25. Long scraggly black hair framed the face, and dark eyes stared out of the screen at her, pinning her to her chair. The eyes were the worst part.
The rest of the file was in a different hand, completed by a different person. Sheriff Beaumont had tracked the killer and set up a roadblock, and the confrontation had left the Sheriff dead and the killer gone. A gunfight on a lonely stretch of I-95 north of Fredericksburg had taken the Sheriff’s life, and a newly appointed replacement Sheriff had finished the report. Follow-ups on the members of the investigative team showed that most of the deputies who had worked under Beaumont were either passed away or moved on, leaving Liberty and the painful memories they must’ve had. Of the few that remained, the name of Deputy Norma Jenkins was the most recognizable; she was the female deputy who had seen the man and given her description to the sketch artist. She’d left the force shortly after.
She continued scanning the reports of the killings in Liberty and those in a dozen other small towns up and down the east coast, all of the murders occurring in the mid- or late 70’s. In no other cases was there anything like a description or a police sketch of the murderer, but there were reports of what the killer had done, and those methods all matched: in each case some small part of the victim’s body was gone. And it looked like the folks in
Liberty, Virginia had come closer to catching this man than all the other big town police departments on the East Coast. If it was the same guy, he was a mean one, and very dangerous. And if he wasn’t dead already, he would be a smart one, too.
Julie was starting to scare herself.
Chris came into the Computer Center after a two-hour nap to find Julie hunched over her reports, a cold cup of coffee forgotten on the table beside her. She was staring at the monitor, which showed a map of the U.S. sprinkled with scores of colored dots. The legend at the bottom showed years from 1988 to 1996, each marked with a color.
“Any luck?”
She turned, looking tired. “Uh, yeah," she said, nodding. "Unless I’m crazy, it looks like with the parameters we were using, the same killer or killers has been working all over the country for at least twenty years.”
Chris was stunned, speechless. “That is crazy.”
She nodded, her eyes bleary and red. “I know. But the m.o.’s and dates all match up. He started out in New England somewhere in the middle 70’s and is still out there, as far as I can tell.”
She turned and clicked on the screen a couple of times, bringing up a map of the United States. The map’s colored dots had been replaced with a full spectrum of colors, each color marking a bar for each year. Short blue bars covered the northern and Middle Atlantic states, followed with green bars across the northern states to Seattle, marked in yellowish green. Yellow bars were followed by orange ones all down the coast to LA and across to Texas, ending up in Florida as a long red bar that stretched from Texas to Florida’s Gulf Coast. The colors were confusing, too much for him to follow. “What does all this mean?”
She pointed at the screen. “This guy has been traveling the country for over twenty years, killing and killing and never getting caught. He came close a few times, but he never got caught, no one ever stopped him. He was the Black Diamond Killer, and a dozen other aliases, famous and infamous around the country. And he is still out there, as far as I can tell.”
It was too much for Chris to believe, and he was shaking his head. “Bullshit.”
He glanced through the frosted windows of the Cray room and saw the main unit itself sitting up on its raised pedestal, lights blinking along its front, and wondered if any of this could really be true.
"Aren't we just supposed to be testing the database?" he asked.
“I can’t believe it either,” her voice came from behind him, and he turned around to face her. “But I’ve been going over and over the cases for hours, and it all fits, as crazy as it sounds. The only reason he hasn’t been caught before was because all of the files were from cases in towns all over the country, and there was no reason for the jurisdictions to communicate. And the binding factor, the fact that the man was a collector, that didn’t get a lot of publicity in most of the cases because it’s just too gruesome. It was buried in a lot of the case reports or not even mentioned except in the coroner’s report.”
She was looking at him with red, bleary eyes, but he could see excitement in them, too. She thought she was on to something. “Oh, and I’ve got a picture of him.”
Chris looked at the screen as the colored map disappeared and a black and white sketch of a man’s face popped up on the screen.
“Ugh, he’s an ugly sucker.”
“Yeah,” Julie said, looking at the man’s face for the hundredth time in an hour, her eyes drawn to his - they looked so deep, so full of knowledge, even in the sketch. “He was almost caught in 1978 in a little town northwest of Fredericksburg, Virginia. They didn’t catch him, but they did get a good description. They came closer to catching him than anyone, even the Black Diamond Task Force, who spent all that money and had all those detectives and investigators. Of course the guy had just been starting out, but the Sheriff in Liberty came close. Ended up getting killed for his trouble.”
Chris thought about it. It might be possible, but wasn’t all of this just supposed to be an exercise? Nothing was supposed to come of all of this - he guessed that someone had forgotten to tell this woman.
“Um, well, what are the chances that this guy is still out there?” Chris didn’t think it was very likely, but it was hard not to get caught up in her enthusiasm.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I keep looking for holes in this data, but I can’t find any. The search algorithms we’re using are doing a good job of sorting out the irrelevant cases, and almost all of the positive returns have turned out to be relevant. And the sheer computing power of the Cray has reduced the search time by a factor of 10,000. A team of researchers would take two or three years to put all this together, and the Cray did it in under a week.”
She stared at the reports and suddenly looked up at the clock. “Damn, 7:30. I guess Wallace has already gone home.”
Chris’ eyes widened.
“Whoa, why do you want to talk to him?” He had an idea what she was thinking, but he wanted to hear it.
She looked up at him, and giggled when she saw the look on his face.
“Don’t worry, Chris - I’m not going to try and convince him that we’ve got anything for sure here. I just want to show him what the Cray came up with and see if he wants me to look into it further.”
Chris exhaled before he even realized he’d been holding his breath. “Good. It’s not that I don’t think we’ve got anything here. Far from it. But I don’t think any of it would stand up in court, do you?”
Julie thought about it, then shook her head. “No, but it can’t hurt to show it to Wallace.” She turned and booted up the inter-office email system, sending a message through to Wallace’s mailbox to request an early morning meeting. As she finished, she glanced over her shoulder at Chris. “And at least he’ll know we’ve been working down here.”
Several hours later, David’s mind raced with the tidbits of information given to him, and parts of his body ached from sitting too long. He’d been driving for too long, and the coffee and Big Gulps that fueled his racing heart were betraying him now, the caffeine high fading. He’d toyed with the idea of getting a hotel room or something tonight, but he was well into Kentucky, the green signs obscured by the rain that fell in sheets across the highway, and he was making great time.
He had hit the leading edges of the hurricane’s outermost storms a couple of hours ago, the arms of the storm reaching all the way to Ohio from the East Coast. The rains and winds were not bad this far away, nothing more severe than a summer storm, but the rain still obscured David‘s already blurry vision and made it even harder to concentrate on the road in front of him. He was looking for the exit sign to the highway that headed east out of Lexington, Kentucky. He’d pulled off the road a couple hours before, right after he’d hit the rain, and he spent a few minutes trying to figure out the best way into Liberty, coming from the west. He never thought he would be planning the exact opposite of his dream trip, but here he was, parked on the side of a rainy highway, trying to figure out the quickest way INTO Liberty after years of daydreaming of how to get out.
I-64 led through Kentucky and east into southern West Virginia, heading for Richmond. That was the way he had gone when he’d been traveling west, but going through Richmond didn’t seem like a good idea with all the weather-related traffic and accidents. There had been reports on the radio of massive traffic jams and multiple-car accidents as people fled the low-lying coastal regions, moving inland to avoid the brunt of Hurricane Mandy. And to David, avoiding that kind of traffic snarls sounded like a good idea.
So he thought he would leave I-64 and go northwest through the Shenandoah Valley before crossing the mountains and heading into town from the higher country. It looked longer on the map but a lot less likely to be packed with traffic, and that was good enough for him.
David saw a rest stop coming up at the point where the Interstate headed east out of Lexington, and he was unsure if he should stop or not. The rest would do him good, but he wanted to get back as quickly as possible. The town where he had g
rown up was going to hell, and he needed to be there for Bethany. And for himself. He’d left her alone, he’d caused Lisa Stevens to be out that night, probably causing her death. And he’d left his Aunt all alone, something that had undoubtedly contributed to her death. He needed to get back fast, but he needed to get there in one piece.
He rolled down the window a little and cold, wet air played across his face, waking him a little. It would do no good if he tried to drive all the way through to Liberty and ended up in the ditch somewhere. No, maybe he could stop in West Virginia somewhere and grab a few hours sleep. Then, he’d be ready to drive the rest of the way without stopping, putting him into Liberty late on Friday afternoon. And if the weather cooperated, he might even get in earlier.
“Hurricane Mandy continues to move up the coast of North Carolina, having made landfall less than twenty-four hours ago. High winds and heavy rains have caused severe damage in the Cape Hatteras region, and some residents who had ignored the National Guard’s original evacuation orders are fleeing beach homes being destroyed by high tides and twelve-foot waves. Officials said that although most people did evacuate the Cape Hatteras area, many people refused to leave and are now trapped by rising water...” The voice on his radio wavered in and out of clarity, and David fiddled with one of the knobs as he went behind another mountain, trying to get the weather report back in. He was in eastern Kentucky and it was much hillier than he had expected, and the hills were breaking up the AM band and making it difficult for him to get anything to tune in.
That and the fact that he was in a very bad mood. It was very late on Thursday night; it was the 11:30 news update that was fading in and out. The car had been making bad noises for about an hour now, and he knew he was pushing it too hard. He had gotten her looked at before he had left Liberty and the mechanic had assured him that the car would make it all the way across the country if David was careful and didn’t push it too much each day. He’d topped off the oil and checked all the fluids, but there hadn’t been any time to get the brakes fixed or the exhaust system checked, so David knew that these sounds coming from under his car were probably not good sounds. He was driving it too fast and too hard, and the sounds made him wonder if the car would even make it.
