“Maybe I’ll get that Pulitzer after all,” Ian said.
“Maybe you’ll get your butt in gear and help us with the research.” Turner stood up.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to check it out.”
“How? It’s eight o’clock. What are you planning to check?”
“If other sports stars have died.”
“And if their balls have been crushed? Would most places know that?”
“I’ll find out,” Turner said.
Turner called Fenwick at home from a pay phone. His partner was as skeptical as he but willing to listen and to help do research.
Fenwick met Ian and Turner on the fourth floor of Area Ten headquarters half an hour later.
Turner was halfway through his explanation to Blessing when the young cop held up his hand, “Already done.”
“Huh?” Turner said.
“Routine in this kind of thing. One of the first things I did when we got all the computer stuff hooked up was get into the NCAVC and VICAP. Too many cops wait too long to get into those systems.”
NCAVC was the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime and VICAP the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. Both were under the aegis of the FBI. Any police department could feed in data or use the data that was stored in the system to help them solve crimes committed in their jurisdiction.
“So what did they say?” Fenwick asked.
“We got no match in method of operation. What we’ve got here is fairly unique.”
“What about testicles being crushed?” Turner asked.
“I sent that through. Let me check.” He tapped computer keys for half a minute. “No crushed testicles,” Blessing said.
“Must not be a common method of execution for serial killers,” Turner said.
“I still think it’s a possibility,” Ian said.
Fenwick said, “It’s not something they’re going to look for. The one you had, Ian, was from before they began to set up the system. And you only found out because you had a connection. I bet there are others. There have got to be others.”
“You’d have to do the research on your own,” Blessing said. “Do you know how many teenagers die each year in this country?”
“No,” Turner admitted.
“Thousands. You can’t eliminate suicides or accidents from any search, because the killer might have disguised them. It would take forever.”
“Got to start somewhere,” Ian said.
“I’ll help for a while,” Turner said, “but if we don’t turn up something quickly….”
Blessing sighed. “We can get some of the newspapers on computer, but for background research you’ll have to do it yourself.”
Ian suggested the main branch of the Chicago Public Library as the most likely to have national newspapers on file. At nine o’clock they rode over. They entered by a side entrance and presented their identification to the head of security, who agreed to let them in.
They walked across terrazzo floors and strode up silent escalators. Turner thought the maple wood used throughout made it seem like the library he’d used as a kid. At the periodicals desk on the third floor, Turner said, “We need to check the national news and the sports sections of each of these papers.” He took the New York Times, Ian the Chicago Tribune, and Fenwick USA Today.
“Where do we start?” Fenwick asked.
“With the most recent and work back,” Ian said. “Any time you find something with a sports star killed, make several copies of it.” One of the security guards showed them how to use the machines.
“We should copy everything that has something to do with teenagers dying under accidental or unexplained circumstances,” Turner said. “Maybe they won’t list stuff about playing sports.”
“Okay,” Ian said.
“It’ll take forever,” Turner said.
“If necessary, we can get an army of cops in here and find every teenage killing this century,” Fenwick said.
After an hour the newsprint that whirled by began to blur together. Turner had to force himself to concentrate. Eventually he got into a rhythm of where to look in the Times, but by eleven he was exhausted. He managed to get the security guards to unbend enough to let them bring coffee up to where they were working.
At eleven-thirty the three of them met at one of the blond wooden tables. Fenwick’s stack of copies was the largest.
“These state-by-state national pages have a few dead teenager things, but mostly accidents,” Fenwick said. “I have fifteen of those, but I’ve only gone back three years. From the sports pages I have three reports, one last year and two from two years ago.” He gave them the copies.
“We have any that match what Fenwick has?” Turner asked.
Before leafing through their stacks of materials, they arranged all of what they had by date. Then they tried cross-matching.
“What are we looking for?” Ian asked.
“A cluster of items that look suspicious,” Turner said.
Ian said, “But if the killer made the one in Spokane look like a suicide, maybe he or she is clever enough to make all of them look like suicides or even accidents. How can you possibly find out if they’re murders at this point?”
“Whichever one of us is the biggest fairy gets to wave the magic wand,” Turner said.
“Leaving me out is discrimination,” Fenwick said.
“Everybody kept all accidents and suicides?” Turner asked.
They all nodded.
“Let’s see if we can get any kind of pattern or grouping besides chronological,” Turner said.
They made three copies of their findings so each one had a stack of items to hunt through. For fifteen minutes they perused their separate stacks. Finally Turner looked up. “This is goofy. You’ve just got a list of dead teenagers. You’re not going to get a pattern. These papers would never have all the deaths we’d need to check. In this state alone there’s a zillion little local papers to hunt through.”
“A prominent athlete would be noticed,” Ian said.
“This is useless,” Turner said.
“You remember what the last tip we got was before Purple Steve?” Fenwick asked.
Turner nodded.
Ian shook his head. “What?”
“It took four cops all afternoon to check. Call came from O’Hare Airport. Some obscure high school sport team was passing through the city for some playoffs in Peoria. Somebody reported one of the kids missing and a suspicious passenger on the plane. We had to track the passengers, half the employees of the airline and the airport, and my great aunt Matilda. The suspicious guy turned out to look like an unreconstructed hippie who was a rocket scientist who has been in Russia for the past three years. They found the kid still mostly drunk but working on becoming very hung over back in East Nowhere, Iowa. What we’ve got here has at least as much possibility as that did of making a connection. We can’t abandon it.”
“Maybe we haven’t gone back far enough,” Turner said. “I’m willing to keep looking for a while longer.”
Fenwick nodded.
“Although we could leave this for uniformed cops to compile,” Turner said.
“I’m staying,” Ian said.
They returned to work.
Just after 1:00 A.M. Fenwick’s bellow broke the silence. Turner hurried down the aisle to see what was up. He met Ian and Fenwick at the end of a row of periodicals.
Fenwick was waving a piece of paper in his hand. “I’ve got it,” he said.
“It better be pretty goddamn mind-boggling at this point,” Turner said.
“Two sports stars in Tucson, Arizona, back six years ago. Look.”
They read the article.
“There was a follow-up,” Fenwick said. “There wasn’t with most of these.” He showed them the next article.
There had been a traffic accident, at first reported as two athletes coming home from a party, probably drunk, who had driven off a dark country road i
n the mountains. The follow-up article said that one of their friends had come forward after a week and admitted he’d followed his buddies with his lights off. He was going to sneak up on them and use his dad’s volunteer fire department emergency lights to scare the hell out of them. Before he could catch up, he’d seen a car trying to shove the other vehicle off the side of the road. He’d witnessed his buddies’ car fly off the road, plunge down the hillside, and burst into flames. He too had been drunk from the teenage trysting in the hills above the city, but had quickly become sober and very frightened. He was afraid the other car might be waiting and that he too might be run off the road. He’d been afraid to come forward, thinking that he might be blamed or get in trouble for being at the party, for which he’d been grounded from going.
The cops had tended to discount the boy’s story, but they examined the burned and wrecked vehicle again. It was impossible to determine whether any of the cracks and dents on the boys’ car had come from the plunge or from being side-swiped. But an enterprising young Tucson cop had found an abandoned car that had been reported stolen. The car had slender lines of paint that could have come from side-swiping another vehicle. A quick check showed them to be the same color as the car that had crashed and burned. The abandoned car had been reported stolen in Phoenix a week before the crash. The owner of the vehicle had over three hundred witnesses to where he was on the night of the accident. No suspect had been apprehended.
“No crushed nuts,” Turner said. “You really think this is connected?”
“Compared to the leads we’ve gotten on some cases, this is fabulous,” Fenwick said. “Did you look at some of the calls we’ve gotten on this case? One claimed Goldstein and Douglas were murdered by aliens from Mars who came to Earth to eat the livers of teenagers.”
“I thought the teenage-liver-eaters came from Venus.” Turner held up his hand to forestall his protests. “ ‘Tucson Teens Murdered’ is a lovely headline, but I don’t see much of a connection here.”
“Waverly, the football player, was from Spokane,” Fenwick said.
“So are lots of people,” Turner said. “Doesn’t mean they’re killers, but we better run a complete profile on this guy. If he lived in Tucson….”
“I want to talk to these people,” Fenwick said. “The kid, the cops, the Medical Examiner. Everything.”
“They’re all in bed by now,” Ian said, “or does their sleep get to be ruined?”
“You’re usually out haunting bars well past this hour,” Turner said.
“Investigative journalism,” Ian said.
“Amazing what you can find attached to a beer bottle,” Turner said.
“If it’s handsome and delectable, it’s in-depth research.”
Fenwick said, “We can assign people to keep looking through these, plus we should try and match up anything else we found in the last couple hours. I, however, am not going to pursue it tonight. I’m going to get a few hours’ sleep. We need more than just us on this.”
“Do we have something?” Ian asked.
“I sure as hell hope so,” Turner said.
Paul enjoyed the fact that he could go home and crawl into bed next to Ben. His lover woke briefly as Paul joined him.
Four hours later Paul awoke from the alarm more energetically than he had any time since the case began. He even found Brian’s broccoli and cauliflower omelet edible. His elder son had been on a health-food kick since he read in an article that one of his sports heroes ate ten different helpings of vegetables a day. Paul balked at the fried zucchini that accompanied the omelet, but his sons devoured all of it. He saw them off to school, talked with Ben for a few minutes, grabbed a large-scale map of the United States from Jeff’s room, and rushed to work.
He found Fenwick in the task force room pinning a huge map of the United States to the floor-to-ceiling corkboard. Turner showed his to Fenwick.
“Great minds run in the same rut,” Fenwick said.
Turner pulled a package of multicolored pins out of his sport coat pocket. He took the sheaf of papers they’d found last night out of his briefcase. “Let’s get somebody to put these on the locations of everything we found last night. As the information comes in, we can pin each city. Might make a pattern.”
The commander entered the room. His shoulders sagged and it seemed to take a great effort for him to get his coffee cup to his lips for a brief sip. “What now?”
Turner and Fenwick explained their idea.
“Not only that,” Turner said, “we can get each incident on computer. We’ll be able to cross-match them easier that way. We can set up a grid by part of the country, city, type of accident, types of injuries, sports kids involved, kind of sport, everything, color of eyes of victims, whatever. When we talk to the different departments we can get any suspicions, anomalies, quirks, and then we can try and check autopsy reports. I’d like to talk to witnesses. Members of the family if possible. We can begin cross-matching all the data. If there’s a serial killer out there, maybe we can find a pattern.”
“Sounds kind of off the wall to me,” the commander said.
“Better than some of the other crap we have,” Fenwick said.
“Take forever,” the commander said.
Fenwick glanced at the people slowly filtering into the office. “We’ve had nearly seventy-five people running around this city like chickens with their heads cut off. Many on crap lots more impossible than this. We’ve got computers. We’ve got communications. I think we can get this stuff.”
“You can get it,” the commander said, “but will it do any good?”
“I think the testicles of the dead kid here and in Spokane being crushed has real possibilities,” Turner said. “It could be the same killer.” He repeated Ian’s warning of the night before: “If it is the same killer, and we ignore it now, we’re in for criticism later.”
Fenwick added, “And if we’re right, we look great.”
The commander sipped coffee. “Okay, for a while. Go with it for forty-eight hours. If nothing comes of it by then, drop it, and don’t put everybody on this. Keep following up any leads in this area at the same time.” He sipped more coffee. “Buck, I talked to the Superintendent about you yesterday. Mr. O’Dell did call him.”
“It’s only good news if I’ve been fired.”
“No such luck. You’ll be around to work on lots more cases, but you’ve made a mortal enemy of Stuart O’Dell.”
“What’s he going to do? Slap me with a regulation?”
“He’s a bureaucrat. He’ll do something mean and nasty and probably sneaky to get revenge. I’d watch my back if I were you.”
Fenwick nodded. He’d been around long enough to know that a direct assault from an enemy in the police department was unlikely. Nothing to do for now but get on with the job.
They dispatched fifteen people to the library to collect more data. They assigned twenty people to begin making follow-up calls. Turner and Fenwick rearranged work assignments on the chart next to their desk on the third floor. Twelve people were at computer terminals on the fourth floor. They sent six uniforms to police headquarters at 11th and State to pick up more hardware. By ten, not counting the people handling the routine calls for the task force, they had 75 percent of their people working on some aspect of the new lead. At eleven, a contingent returned from the library. They had expanded the search to other national newspapers. They dumped boxes of copies. More people were assigned to arrange them by date and area of the country. They sent out for more pins to be set into cities and towns on the huge map.
Task force members took the basic data and typed the details of each incident onto the computers, using the forty-two categories that Turner and Fenwick had agreed on with Blessing.
Between ordering the task force in this new direction, Turner and Fenwick began to make calls on the most likely cases. Turner called the county coroner for Tucson, Arizona, at 9:30 A.M. Arizona time. She remembered the case clearly.
“One of the
boys was burned beyond recognition,” she said. “The other was thrown from the car, which then rolled over him and set him on fire. Crushed all the bones on the right side of his body.”
“I’ve got kind of a strange question.” Turner explained the murder they were working on and the anomaly of the testicles of one of the boys being crushed and the lack of underwear on the victim.
“I think I’d remember that,” she said. “Although, honestly, I don’t know if we checked. It was pretty obvious what killed both boys. Wouldn’t the killer have had to park, walk down the mountain, do his dirty work, and get back up, risking somebody seeing him hanging around the crash or especially the fire?”
“At the moment it’s the only lead I’ve got,” Turner said.
“I’ll have to look it up and get back to you,” she said.
He called the Tucson Police Department. The detective assigned to the case said, “It was a horrible mess. Two of the nicest kids. They’d just had a big write-up in the paper a couple months before the accident. Best baseball players we ever had around here. Each one a prospect for the majors. Lots of attention from the scouts.”
“Anything unusual about the home life?”
“Nice enough kids. One was kind of arrogant about all the attention he got. His folks were pretty well off, but the other kid was from an ordinary middle-class part of town.”
Turner asked about the state of the bodies. They knew nothing about genitals being crushed and no one had noticed the absence of underwear.
At 12:05 Fenwick slammed his phone down and gave a shout. “We’ve got crushed nuts in Odessa, Texas!”
Fenwick and Turner marched up to Blessing’s desk on the fourth floor. Fenwick said, “Match every case we’ve got against ours here, the one in Spokane, Washington, and this one in Odessa, Texas. See if any profiles begin to match. The more matches you get, put them to the top of the pile for follow-up phone calls.”
On the way to Aunt Millie’s Bar and Grill for lunch, Fenwick gave Turner the details about the Odessa case. “Kid from the local basketball team got stabbed. Found by a custodian at center court of the basketball gym first thing one morning. Sometime during the night the school had been broken into and the kid killed. They still haven’t figured out why or how the boy got lured into the school. Coroner recorded one hundred eleven stab wounds. Kid must have looked like a ghastly pincushion.”
Another Dead Teenager Page 13
