Hush Little Baby (6 page)

‘This has been fun. We should do it again sometime.’

‘If you ever need someone to talk to, I’m a good listener.’ She met his eye, made sure that the message got through. ‘And think about what I said earlier. The FBI needs someone like you. Hell, forget about the FBI for a second. The victims need you.’ She lowered her voice. ‘You need it. You’ve still got that scorpion on your back. It doesn’t matter what you tell yourself to the contrary, it’s there just waiting to sting you.’

Winter laughed. ‘Wow, we almost managed to spend a whole evening together without you talking about my father. That’s got to be some sort of record.’

‘I’m being serious.’

The laughter faded into silence.

‘There’s no doubt in my mind that both you and your father are psychopaths. However, the big difference is that you’re capable of empathy. I saw that when we were hunting Valentino. You didn’t just get into his head, you
became
him. To do something like that requires a level of empathy that goes way above the norm.’

Winter said nothing.

‘You talk tough, Jefferson, but if you don’t deal with your baggage it will destroy you. You need closure.’

For a moment she believed that he was giving some serious thought to what she’d just said, but the moment passed and he gave her another of those lazy salutes. ‘Goodnight, Special Agent Tanaka. And thanks for the whisky.’

A second later he was gone, the door clicking gently closed behind him.

Yoko was awoken by the annoying chirp of her cellphone. She opened one eye, then the other, rubbed the sleep away. The drapes were backlit with sunshine and it was clearly later than she thought. She grabbed the cell off the nightstand and checked the display.
UNKNOWN NUMBER
had flashed up onto the screen. According to the clock in the top corner it had gone seven thirty. She rubbed her eyes again, took a deep breath, then connected the call.

‘Agent Tanaka?’

The voice was too perky, too full of caffeine. It took Yoko a second to work out who it was. ‘Sergeant Dixon,’ she responded in a voice that was much brighter than she felt.

‘I haven’t woken you, have I?’

‘No, I’ve been up for a while. So, what can I do for you?’

‘We’ve found him.’

Yoko came fully awake in an instant.

‘We’re going to arrest him now,’ Dixon went on. ‘I’ve sent a car. It will be with you soon. I thought you might like to tag along for the takedown. Particularly since it was your profile that helped to nail him.’

‘Thanks, I’ll be waiting.’

Dixon hung up without saying goodbye, leaving Yoko staring at her dead cellphone. Definitely a good way to start the day, she thought. With any luck they could get things wrapped up here by the end of play today, and she’d be able to catch a late flight and actually sleep in her own bed tonight.

She padded through to the bathroom and did a quick sink wash. Then she brushed her teeth and went back through to the main room to get clean clothes from her suitcase. The clothes were more or less identical to the ones she’d worn yesterday, and the day before that. A white blouse, neat black pants and a matching jacket, sensible flat shoes. She locked her room and hurried next door to Winter’s. He didn’t answer when she knocked, so she tried again, harder this time. Still no answer.

‘Come on, Jefferson. It’s time to get up.’

Still no response. She glanced over her shoulder, noticed that the Chevy had gone and her heart sank. Even though she knew it would be empty, she still patted the pocket she kept her keys in. She tried the handle and the door swung open.

The bed was made and the room looked as though it was unoccupied. The only evidence that Winter had ever been here was the suit on the bed. It had been laid out as though the person wearing it had dissolved. The shirt was neatly arranged inside the jacket near the head of the bed, the tie knotted inside the collar. Down towards the bottom end were the trousers. The shoes were on the floor, positioned side by side. Once again, she couldn’t help wondering if Winter was in fact a potential serial killer.

The message being sent was easy to interpret. Winter was gone and he wasn’t coming back. She must have pushed him too hard when they were talking in her room last night. She’d told him that it was a free country, that he could leave whenever he wanted, and that’s exactly what he’d done. He had made his bed, laid out the suit, then climbed into the Chevy and headed back to Sarasota. She almost hadn’t mentioned his parents, but the conversation had been flowing and she’d thought what the hell. In hindsight, that had been a mistake.

Except that didn’t quite work, because how did he get the car key? He must have stolen it when she went through to the bathroom to get the plastic cup. That was the only time he’d been left on his own in the room. Which meant that it made no difference how hard she’d pushed, or what she said. He’d clearly made up his mind to leave before they got back to the motel.

As to why he’d done that, there could be a dozen reasons. This was Jefferson Winter she was talking about. Who the hell knew what was going through his head? Maybe things hadn’t been exciting enough and he’d gotten bored. He had the impatience that came with youth, and the low boredom threshold that came with a genius-level IQ, so it was more than possible. If that was the case then he’d bailed out at the wrong time. She had a feeling that things were about to get a whole lot more interesting.

The whoop and screech of a cop car turning fast and tight into the Lucky Star’s parking lot got her moving again. She ran outside and waved the car over. It was a marked Tampa PD 4×4, identical to the one that Dixon had been driving last night. The driver spotted her and sped across the lot. He skidded to a halt and she got in.

The driver was in his early twenties, not much older than Winter, and he was wearing the short-sleeved version of the police department’s uniform, which made him look like a boy scout, albeit one who was dressed in black as opposed to tan and green. The name patch said
COOK
. He reached into the back for a Kevlar vest and passed it to her. She put it on and adjusted the Velcro straps. It was hard and unyielding and uncomfortable. Even so, she’d take a little discomfort over a bullet to the chest any day.

‘Best buckle up,’ Cook told her. ‘Sergeant Dixon said she wants you there as soon as possible.’

‘And where exactly is “there”?’

‘Tampa Heights. It’s not far.’

 Yoko put on her seatbelt and Cook swung the 4×4 into a tight turn and screeched out of the lot. He switched on the roof lights and siren when he hit the street, put his foot down. The early-morning traffic scattered out of the way to let them through.

‘Where’s your partner?’ Cook asked. ‘Dixon said I had two to pick up.’

‘He’s got food poisoning.’

‘That’s too bad.’ Cook launched into a monologue about a bad experience he’d had after eating at a seafood restaurant. The way he was talking, he reminded Yoko of a cab driver. She tuned him out and watched the traffic out the windshield, vehicles darting this way and that.

Ten minutes later they arrived in Tampa Heights. As far as Yoko could tell, this neighbourhood wasn’t that different from Seminole Heights. The streets were wide and there were plenty of trees. The clapboard houses were painted in muted shades of grey, blue and yellow. There were plenty of brick buildings too, old factories and warehouses. Like Seminole Heights, this neighbourhood was on the up and there was evidence of construction work on every other block.

Cook pulled over next to a boarded-up red-brick church. There was a sign out front boasting about how it was going to be turned into a complex of luxury apartments. Four unmarked cop cars were parked at the kerb. By the looks of things the whole homicide department had turned out. Yoko didn’t blame them. They’d worked hard for this. They deserved the credit. Dixon was holding court in the centre of a crowd of detectives. Her body movements were as animated as her voice had been when she’d called earlier.

Lieutenant Perez was nowhere to be seen, which raised Yoko’s opinion of him even further. The homicide chief could easily have muscled in on the arrest and claimed all the glory, but he hadn’t. She’d met plenty of men in his position who would have done just that.

Yoko climbed out of the car and walked towards the detectives. She heard Cook pull away. The roof-bar lights were off and the urgency had gone. He drove past her, stopped at an intersection a couple of hundred yards further up the road, then hung a right and disappeared from sight. Dixon spotted Yoko and came over with her arm outstretched. They shook hands.

‘You got here just in time,’ she said, the words tumbling out in a hyperactive rush. ‘You can ride with me. I’ll fill you in on the way. Where’s the rookie?’

‘Ronald Young lives in an apartment in a converted factory near the river, and we’ve had visual confirmation that he’s there now.’ Dixon was in the passenger seat, one arm resting on the top, her upper body twisted so she could talk over her shoulder. While they drove, Yoko fitted the earpiece that Dixon had given her. Their car was the lead in a four-car convoy, and they were speeding through the streets. ‘His apartment is on the second floor. The first two victims lived a couple of blocks away. The route the kid and her mom walked to school took them right past his front window.’

Yoko felt that tingle in her scalp and neck that she got when she was on the right track. Her mother had called it the goose-on-your-grave tickle, and she thought that pretty much covered it. It was easy to imagine Young peeking out through a crack in the drapes, watching the first two victims passing by below.

Serial killers were fantasists, and the fuel for those fantasies often came from the things they saw in their everyday lives. How long before the murders had the first two victims appeared on his radar? It would have been months, maybe even a year, or longer. The first murder was always the hardest. It took nerve to cross the line and make the fantasies real. And all that time he would have been seeing that little girl and her mom passing by. Until one day he couldn’t take any more and the fantasy became reality.

‘Young fits the profile perfectly,’ Dixon continued. ‘It’s like you were standing right beside him when you came up with it. He’s a white male, thirty-two years old. He went to college, got a degree, got married. He had a couple of office jobs but kept getting fired.’

‘Anger-management issues?’ Yoko suggested.

‘Got it in one. And it was his temper that finally ended the marriage. He used to get drunk and beat his wife and daughter. That story gets played out too often for my liking, but at least this time there was a happy ending. Well, happy so far as the wife was concerned. She managed to find the courage to get away, and stay away. She moved into a shelter with the kid, then moved to Orlando. These days she works in Disney World.’

‘Has anyone checked up on them to make sure they’re okay?’

Dixon nodded. ‘You bet. I got someone from the Orlando PD to look in on them. They’re happy and healthy, and most definitely alive. Anyway, the divorce was a car crash. Even though it was never going to happen, Ronald Young tried to get custody and, surprise, surprise, the judge sided with the mom. Young goes postal, calls the judge every name under the sun, and ends up in jail for contempt.’

‘And now he works as a van driver?’

Dixon was nodding again. ‘It was the only job he could hold down. And the only reason for that is because his brother owns the company.’

The convoy split into two at a set of lights. The front two cars went straight ahead, while the two cars at the rear peeled off to the right. Nothing had come across the radio to indicate that this was about to happen, so the move had clearly been discussed in advance, probably when the detectives were in a huddle back at the boarded-up church.

They drove on in silence for a couple more blocks before pulling over. The tension could be felt all around them. Yoko had witnessed plenty of takedowns, and they were all much the same. Static tension, a short burst of furious action, then some sort of resolution, for better or worse. The uncertainty was the biggest problem. It didn’t matter how good your intel was, you didn’t really know what you were up against until you were actually there.

Dixon pressed a hand against her earpiece. Her knuckles were tight, her breathing shallow. In her own earpiece, Yoko heard a crackly disembodied voice state that they were in position. The voice presumably belonged to whoever was in charge of the other half of the convoy. Dixon gave the ‘go’ order and their driver hit the gas. The sudden movement took Yoko by surprise and she was thrown back in her seat.

They turned left then right, driving hard. Up ahead, she could see the other two cars from the convoy speeding towards them, getting larger in the windshield. The driver waited until the last moment before hitting the brakes and hauling the steering wheel hard to the left. They skidded to a halt facing a large red-brick converted factory building.

Yoko pushed her door open and jumped out. She could smell the nearby river, and she could smell the promise of another hot day hanging in the air. Dixon was already six yards in front, running shoulder to shoulder with a burly cop who was clutching a battering ram to his chest. Two other detectives were sprinting ahead of them towards the building entrance, guns already drawn. Another two peeled away to the left and sprinted around to the back of the building.

 Dixon entered the building and came to an abrupt halt in the entranceway, her arm held up high to indicate that nobody should come any further. She was huddled into the edge of the staircase, far enough back to stop a gunman getting an angle from the floor above.

A voice in Yoko’s earpiece said ‘clear’ and she looked up. One of the detectives was aiming his gun towards the second floor, while his buddy sprinted past him. The running cop stopped at the top of the stairs and checked the corridor, his gun indicating the direction he was looking. Left, right, left, right, both ways along the landing, double-checking just to be sure. Another voice said ‘clear’ and the first cop ran up the stairs, ran past him and disappeared to the right.

Everything had gone still and quiet. The silence was unnerving, the tension building. Everyone was looking up towards the second floor, nobody saying a word, nobody moving. Yoko counted off the seconds in her head. Four, five, six. She reached ten before the ‘all clear’ came down from above.

‘Go!’

Dixon dropped her arm and sprinted up the stairs, her Glock leading the way. Yoko’s gun was still in her shoulder holster. There was no point taking it out. If Young did anything stupid there were enough firearms drawn to kill him a dozen times. She hung a right and hurried along the landing. Young lived behind the third door. Dixon was standing to the left of the doorway, the cop with the battering ram was off to the right. She banged hard on the wood.

‘Police! Open up!’

No response.

Dixon banged again. ‘We know you’re in there, Ronald!’

She gave it a couple of seconds, then nodded to the cop with the battering ram. He stepped up to the door and got himself in position.

‘What do you want?’ said a voice from the other side of the wood.

Dixon put her hand up and the cop with the battering ram stood aside.

‘Police! Open the door!’

The chain rattled off, the lock disengaged and the door swung open. Young was standing there dressed in a black delivery driver’s uniform. He glanced at Dixon’s gun, glanced at the arrest warrant she’d just pulled out from her pocket, glanced at the cops crowding his doorway, then he put his hands up in front of him and stepped back.

‘Turn around. Hands behind your back.’

Young complied straightaway and Dixon took out her handcuffs. She snapped them onto his wrists, then started reading him his rights.

‘What the hell is this?’ Young shouted.

Dixon ignored him and finished her breathless recitation of the Miranda Warning, ‘Do you understand your rights as I’ve just read them to you?’

‘Sure I do, so how about you answer my question?’

‘Let’s start with the murder of three kids and their moms, and work from there.’