Criminal Minds (6 page)

She nodded. ‘‘Just making conversation.’’

‘‘You don’t have to go out of your way to be friendly with me, Emily. I like you.’’

‘‘Gee, thanks.’’

‘‘By which I mean, I respect you. You’ve done well.’’ He returned his eyes to the swarming traffic. ‘‘But you figure Hotch is still testing you.’’

‘‘Why would he be testing me?’’ Her voice sounded a little defensive. ‘‘It’s been over a year, and I wasn’t exactly a novice when I joined the BAU.’’

Morgan grinned. ‘‘Hell, Emily, he’s still testing
me
. I’d say he’s still testing himself. He’s the team leader. That’s part of his job. And just maybe you’ve noticed he’s wrapped tighter than a new spool of thread.’’

‘‘He lacks confidence in me.’’

‘‘Why do you say that?’’

She shrugged. ‘‘Hotch knows I know Chicago. But he had
you
drive.’’

‘‘Maybe he thinks it’s a man’s job.’’

‘‘Are you kidding?’’

‘‘Yes.’’ Morgan laughed. ‘‘Is there a possibility you’re overthinking this?’’

She smiled again and looked away as they crossed the Chicago River. He had to pass the street they wanted and exit the expressway at Thirty-first Street, then work his way back to Twenty-fifth. He went west on Thirty-first for a block, turned north on Wentworth and followed that through the light at Twenty-sixth, taking a left onto Twenty-fifth, only to find that the street was blocked by fireplug-sized columns of cement after about a car-length, turning the street into a cul-de-sac, leaving Morgan on the wrong side. Still, an alley ran back south and that would keep him from having to make a U-turn to get out.

‘‘Of course,’’ Prentiss said, ‘‘
I
would have known not to do that.’’

‘‘Are you kidding?’’

‘‘Yes,’’ she said.

The first building on the south side of the street faced Wentworth, the alley running behind it. Across the alley to the west, the first thing Morgan saw was a set of four concrete stairs with wrought-iron railings, the stairs leading to thin air, the building they rose to long since demolished, going nowhere except to overlook a stretch of grass and weeds, surrounded by a four-foot cyclone fence.

Prentiss gave him a look. ‘‘Stairway to heaven?’’

‘‘If it is,’’ Morgan said, ‘‘next door you’ll find the stairway to hell.’’ He looked down the block at the next residence from the building-less stairs.

The house with 213 stenciled on the mailbox next to the front door was a dirty beige two-story. From his angle parked at the northeast corner, Morgan could see that something drastic, probably a fire, had happened to the huge structure once upon time.

The front half of the building was the dirty beige siding; the back half was old, bronze-colored brick. A door on the east side split the border of the two halves, which would be the entrance to the middle apartment, and where the alley curved around behind the building would be the entrance to the rear apartment. The length of two normal houses, the ungainly structure might have been constructed half from LEGOs and half from Lincoln Logs.

‘‘Weird damn building,’’ Morgan muttered.

He drove down the alley, then turned west on Twenty-sixth and then right again on Wells, taking one last right, coming around on Twenty-fifth, then pulling up to the building in question.

He parked in front.

They were in the heart of Chinatown, the part tourists never ventured into. Chinese-American pedestrians strolled up and down the street and through the alley; several others sat on back porches of the three-story building that faced Wentworth, many smoking as they watched the strangers in the fancy SUV climb out into the late afternoon swelter.

More sat on stoops along Twenty-fifth, all with their eyes on Morgan and Prentiss. The old cliché about Asians being inscrutable was contradicted by the faces whose eyes were trained on the two FBI agents—reading the distrust and suspicion there didn’t take much in the way of profiling skills.

Prentiss, trying out a smile on several of the neighbors, asked, ‘‘How did a killer get that barrel into the apartment with this many witnesses?’’

‘‘My guess is it’s a little different at night,’’ Morgan said. ‘‘Chinatown’s always been a closed community to the Bureau. What happens in Chinatown stays in Chinatown.’’

‘‘You mean, ‘Forget it, Emily. It’s Chinatown?’ ’’

‘‘Something like that.’’

‘‘Well, according to the report, the police thoroughly canvassed the neighborhood.’’

Morgan glanced at her. ‘‘What did they find?’’

‘‘They got exactly as much information as you would expect.’’

‘‘Meaning nothing.’’

‘‘Meaning nothing.’’

Using a pocketknife, Morgan cut the crime scene tape. Then from the pocket of his slacks, he withdrew a key Lorenzon had given him and unlocked the door.

‘‘After you,’’ he said.

Prentiss smirked; she was a good-looking woman and even her smirk wasn’t hard to look at. ‘‘I don’t care what anybody says, Derek Morgan—you’re a gentleman.’’

They entered the dark building, each using Mini Maglites to help find their way through the shadows. Even though the windows lacked curtains, the glass was so grimy that little light made it through.

Using her Maglite, Prentiss searched and finally found a light switch. She flipped it, but nothing happened.

‘‘Not a surprise,’’ she said.

‘‘No wonder no one saw anything,’’ Morgan said. ‘‘If we can’t see out, it’s a good bet nobody can see in.’’

‘‘Where was the barrel situated?’’

Morgan glanced around in the gloom, getting his bearings.

‘‘Over there,’’ he said, pointing to a hallway that led to a bedroom.

The layout was fairly simple: a living room led into a small kitchen with an eating area and a tiny bedroom down the hall, which led to the second floor and two more bedrooms and a bathroom. Morgan walked the whole thing and got the feeling no one had lived here for a long, long time—nobody but an occasional homeless inhabitant, anyway.

Once he was back downstairs, he found Prentiss shining her light around the edges of the windows.

‘‘You read the report,’’ Morgan said. ‘‘When was the last time someone lived here?’’

‘‘Three years ago.’’

‘‘No one since?’’

‘‘Squatters maybe, but no one on the books.’’ Morgan nodded. ‘‘What do we know about the corpse?’’

‘‘Other than he’s a John Doe?’’

‘‘Yeah.’’

Prentiss lifted one shoulder in a tiny shrug. ‘‘He was stuffed in the barrel postmortem. The UnSub poured lime in to keep the smell down, and to hasten decomposition—of course, that means the UnSub doesn’t know that lime actually helps
preserve
a body. I don’t know why people think lime speeds decomposition.’’

‘‘Old wives’ tale. Nasty COD?’’

She nodded and raised a pale hand to her throat. ‘‘Cause of death was strangulation.’’

Morgan watched Prentiss move to the next window in the front and start poking around the edges with her flashlight beam.

‘‘What are you up to?’’ he asked.

She stopped and turned to face him. ‘‘One thing that wasn’t in the report was how the UnSub got inside. The door wasn’t jimmied and that barrel got in here somehow.’’

Morgan nodded. ‘‘Right. He had to either have a key or he came in through a window and unlocked the door, so he could wheel the barrel in.’’

They were already referring to the UnSub as ‘‘he’’—these murders seemed a man’s crime, nothing about it indicated a rare female serial killer, although the lack of sexual assault left that open.

‘‘If the UnSub had a key,’’ Prentiss said, forehead creased with thought, ‘‘where did he get it?’’

‘‘Or if he came in through one of the windows,’’ Morgan said, gesturing toward one, ‘‘why didn’t anybody see him?’’

She put both shoulders into a shrug. ‘‘Late at night, probably. But with that barrel, he had to have it somewhere nearby.’’

‘‘The cops haven’t explained it?’’

Prentiss shook her head. ‘‘I know it’s not supposed to be up to us to gather the evidence, but how this UnSub got into the place might tell us something about him.’’

‘‘Agreed,’’ Morgan said. ‘‘You keep looking here— I want to check something out.’’

He went into the kitchen, where he turned the knob on a door he thought might adjoin the middle apartment; but he found a short hallway with the middle apartment’s door on the right, at the far end, and nearer, on the left, a stairway leading down.

Shining his light ahead of him, he descended ten steps into a dank basement redolent of urine and mildew.

No wonder nobody checked down here,
he thought.

Cobwebs drooped everywhere but in the stairwell itself, where they had been removed. A thick layer of dust coated the floor, the furnace, and a few scraps of worthless furniture. He shone his light on the floor and saw footprints in the dust.

He used the light to follow them back to a half window on the far wall. One of two panes had been broken and the latch opened from there. The window was only about twelve inches high and twenty inches across.

Now they knew something about their UnSub: he was a lot of things, but overweight wasn’t one of them.

Morgan went back upstairs, told Prentiss what he’d found, and told her not to step on the floor. He had left the door open just in case, by some miracle, prints might turn up on the basement side.

He got out his cell phone and called Hotchner and detailed to the team leader what they had found, and suggested Lorenzon get his crime scene team back right away.

Dr. Spencer Reid felt a little bit like the kid who had been dumped on his older brother for the day. He rode in back of the SUV with Rossi and Tovar up front. The Chicago Heights detective was behind the wheel, even though it was an FBI vehicle.

Up front, the two men were discussing baseball, the Chicago Cubs in particular, an area of expertise not among Reid’s skill set.

Rossi was saying, ‘‘You really think this is the year?’’

Tovar nodded as he drove them south. ‘‘They won the division last year, didn’t they?’’

‘‘Then got spanked by Arizona.’’

‘‘Yeah, but the pitching’s better now.’’

Rossi shrugged. ‘‘Believe it when I see it.’’

From the backseat, Reid watched the neighborhood change as they cruised farther south from mostly Caucasian to mostly Hispanic to mostly African-American. By the time they reached their destination, however, the neighborhood had become a middle-class melting pot of variant homes and blacktop streets with no curbs and no apparent storm sewers.

Tovar drove through a neighborhood of well-tended homes that varied from ordinary single-story boxes to brick-faced two-stories that looked like they had fallen off the mansion truck and landed beside the road in the wrong neighborhood.

‘‘Odd mix of houses,’’ Reid said.

‘‘Yeah,’’ Tovar said. ‘‘Some of the old houses are being bought up, torn down, and replaced by newer ones. Other oldies are getting the renovation treatment.’’

‘‘Gentrification,’’ Rossi said. ‘‘Gotta love it.’’ But he clearly didn’t.

‘‘Oh yeah,’’ Tovar said. ‘‘The neighborhood’s changing.’’

Reid asked, ‘‘For the better?’’

‘‘Matter of opinion,’’ Tovar said. ‘‘Certainly isn’t better for the Andrews family.’’

The Chicago detective pulled the Tahoe to a stop next to a plain but well-maintained one-story tan house surrounded by trees and bushes. ‘‘This is where the daughter was parked with her boyfriend when they were shot to death back in April.’’

Reid looked around, trying to get a feel for the neighborhood. The houses were not terribly close together and they all appeared well cared for, a fairly typical middle-class neighborhood. Across the street, a park spread out before them, a parking lot on the far side of the block.

‘‘Quiet,’’ Reid said.

‘‘Too quiet, like they say in the old movies,’’ Tovar said. ‘‘No crimes to speak of, here.’’

They climbed out of the SUV, each taking a moment to survey the area. Reid couldn’t take his eyes off the parking lot across the park. Trees shaded the cars that were nosed in, facing this direction. To see who was or was not inside those cars from there was impossible without binoculars or a high-powered camera lens. The powerlessness gave him an uneasy feeling.

Rossi asked the Chicago detective, ‘‘Did the boy and girl park alongside the house and make out, you know, as a regular thing?’’

‘‘They had been dating for a while,’’ Tovar said.

‘‘I think it’s safe to say that night wasn’t the first time they’d sat there and necked, yeah.’’

Reid nodded across the way. ‘‘That park would give someone an easy place to surveil the victims.’’

‘‘Of course,’’ Rossi said, ‘‘but how did he know they would be there on this particular night? Nothing indicates whether this was a randomly chosen couple, or one that the killer had selected and watched over time.’’

Reid agreed.

Tovar looked blank.

Rossi said, ‘‘The boy, Benny Mendoza? His coach had taken Benny and his girl to the White Sox game that night. Benny was a promising young ballplayer. Anyway, the game got rained out late. The boy and girl didn’t get back till well after midnight.’’ Rossi made a face at Reid. ‘‘How the hell could the UnSub have known that?’’

Reid considered that for a moment; then he put some pieces together. ‘‘Let’s suppose he was indeed stalking the couple.’’

‘‘Suppose away,’’ Rossi said.

‘‘If he’s re-creating Berkowitz’s crime, it’s the street he’s most concerned with—Hutchinson Avenue. What if he was stalking more than one couple along the street, and this one, Andrews and Mendoza, was the couple that happened to show up at the right time?’’

Tovar said, ‘‘Wrong time, you mean.’’

Rossi was looking at Reid, hard. ‘‘You’re saying it could have been anyone along the street?’’