One Through the Heart (14 page)

‘You already know who I am and what I’m about. I’m writing the book I told you about.’

‘Why don’t we take it to another level, Brandon?’

‘I’m ready for that.’

‘That’s going to mean the conversation is a little more challenging.’

‘I hear you and I am your guy, but I’ve got to ask a favor before we go any farther. I need you to call the geek who manages this apartment complex and tell him you were just fishing and that you have an unsolved case I’m trying to help you with. He needs to hear something. Maybe you want to tell him you’re looking at me as a possible suspect. If you do that, let me know so I can get a lawyer.’

‘I’ll call him. I think he left me a message yesterday anyway. Now let me ask you something – why did you move to California?’

‘That’s the best question you’ve asked. So you’re digging. I do a lot of research myself. I know that sense of discovery when you hit on something. Who are you talking to in Chicago?’

‘People who worked the case.’

‘Thanks for the vote of confidence. I made a big mistake with you.’

Raveneau talked on another few sentences before realizing Lindsley was gone. He started to call him back and stopped, decided to wait. He called the hospital and left a message for the doctor treating Lash. She returned his call a half hour later and sounded perplexed.

‘Untreated it may have killed him and could still. In his condition it’s going to be hard. He ingested a liquid with radioactive material in it. That’s not like eating an apple.’

‘Can he see visitors?’

‘He wouldn’t even know who you were, but I’ll try to keep him from dying, Inspector.’

Twenty minutes later he was at the assisted living facility crossing the foyer where a handful of residents were sitting watching a TV, or maybe not. It was hard to tell where their focus was. He watched the elevator videotape a half dozen times with the manager and agreed with her – the man was aware of the cameras and dressed to hide his identity, baggy long sleeved shirt, billed cap, head down until he left. When he stepped outside another video camera caught him by surprise, or seemed to until he took his dark glasses off and looked directly at the camera.

‘Do you recognize him?’

‘His friends call him John the Baptist. I don’t know what his true name is. He’s delivering a message of sorts and I’m not sure what to do with it yet.’

‘Arrest him!’

‘We’ll start looking for him and we will arrest him when we find him. I’ll be in touch. Thanks for making a copy of the tape.’

T
he next morning they got a positive DNA hit on two of the skulls. Raveneau called the Missouri sheriff and once again he got the feeling that it all made sense to her, and would in Cagdill, that a California whacko pilfering caskets stole the skulls. It was a believable ending to the town’s ordeal. As he got off the phone with her, he sat with la Rosa.

‘Radiation poisoning,’ la Rosa said slowly, as if pondering a chess move.

‘Everything in his room was tested last night and they got a strong Geiger reading off a liquid prescription he takes for a stomach problem. The routine is to give him two tablespoons every night before bed, so the working theory is the visitor switched bottles. The visitor is the one Attis Martin called John the Baptist.’

‘Can we just call him John Doe?’

‘Sure. The videotape will need to be cleaned up and enhanced. Coe is on his way here and we’ll give them the tape, but you should watch it first. Coe will make us a digital copy no later than tomorrow and now that radiation is in the mix the FBI is assigning another dozen agents to it. They’re stepping in on that part and the meeting today is about how we’re going to work together.’

‘There’s a first time for everything.’

‘They’ll try to identify John in the photo but when you see the video you’ll see he’s not worried about being identified. That should worry us. I’m sure he was at Grate’s so that when the time came I could ID him.’

When Coe arrived they sat in the homicide detail kitchen where two tables pushed together and covered with a striped tablecloth provided enough room to spread everything out. Coe was bright and quick, and regardless of what he felt about local law enforcement he was always deferential. He and Raveneau had worked well together on a case last year that went to the wire and still woke Raveneau at night.

The FBI and SFPD budgets were far apart and this was never more apparent than meeting here in the kitchen with other homicide inspectors coming and going, putting sandwiches in the refrigerator or getting milk for their coffee.

Coe held a white coffee mug in his right hand as he wrote notes with his left. His image conjured something out of the past for Raveneau, an archeologist in desert shade at the end of a long day, an early-twentieth-century cartographer before the advent of radar, Coe in a white shirt with the sleeves neatly folded back almost to his elbows, his gun tucked in at the small of his back, suit coat draped over the adjacent chair, ramrod straight, and like himself slowly getting locked into a former era.

‘What have you learned about Attis Martin and Ike Latkos?’ Raveneau asked.

‘We got a strange call about her.’

‘What kind of call?’

‘A back-off call, meaning she may have helped an agency somewhere along the line, and with her talents it must have been cyber help. I don’t think the agency was the CIA and I’m sure I’ll be hearing more soon and I didn’t tell you two any of this. We’re not having much luck yet with Attis Martin, but I’ll get you a list today of what we’ve come up with. It’s understood you’re pursuing the murder investigation, but we need some ground rules on the rest of this.’

‘Everyone at the table at Grate’s Place is inside our investigation,’ Raveneau said, and they hashed out all of it now. Fed and SFPD surveillance would coordinate on tracking Lindsley’s movements, but Raveneau would do the talking with him. The FBI would handle the Lash radiation poisoning and find where the radioactive isotopes came from.

Coe leaned forward. ‘Albert Lash contacted us in 2005 about a man named John Algiers. Here’s a photo.’ He turned it so they both could see it and tapped it. ‘That’s him. He attended one of Lash’s book tour events and later contacted Lash through his website. Lash notified us and kept up communication with him for over a year and a half. They had an ongoing conversation about mass killings and how they happened. He was very interested in talking about genocide and Lash’s theory, or what you say was actually Coryell’s theory. He kept up a correspondence with Lash from various places in the world and bounced his ideas for mass extermination off of Professor Lash, including dispersal methods for radiological weapons, though the highly radioactive material he was writing about he was unlikely ever to acquire.

‘Algiers wrote to him in spurts, sometimes three and four times a day for two weeks and then nothing for a month. His understanding of physics was well beyond what Lash knew so we brought in a physicist to help us understand the letters, same with biochemistry. At some point he got frustrated with Lash and in his final communications denounced him as an intellectual fraud and his books as those of a print whore. We have a profile, we’ve made guesses, and I can copy you that. Lash’s publisher still maintains the website. There was a communication that very likely was from him about a year ago. It was an aggressively personal threat to Lash.’

‘All right, so he’s a possible too.’

‘I don’t know what he is, but you need to know about him. From word usage and references we put his age at late forties and we believe he has worked or is working as a scientist and is wealthy.’

‘That can’t be a long list.’

‘It’s not and we have a good idea who he might be and I don’t think he’s in any way a fit here, but he connects to Lash.’

They moved on to Lash’s sister and the documents stored at her condominium.

‘We’re not having much luck getting to those diaries,’ Raveneau said. ‘She might respond to the FBI better than she does us, but I doubt it. She’s protecting her brother and believes we abused him last time. It’s going to take a better warrant than we can write from our end, but you’ve got the terror angle. Maybe the FBI can wrap terror around his diaries.’

‘You have such an inspiring way of putting that, Ben.’

‘Thank you.’

‘How seriously is the Bureau taking this particular mass killing threat?’

‘You were right last year, so my ASAC is sitting quiet. Otherwise, we’d need a lot more to go on than we have now, and frankly, there’s skepticism about the capability of the gentlemen you met. But the new cure-all prescription they wrote for Professor Lash does give them some street cred. Bottom line is temporarily there are more agents but we’ll need some results very soon.’

‘Where are you at on Lash’s hot drink?’

‘We’re working through a list of possible sources and doing that with more than just our field office.’

‘Berge?’

‘We agree with you that the Delaware company making the rent payments is a shell. A Bank of America account was opened over a year ago in the company name and one deposit was made with enough money to cover the lease for a year. It was all done by mail. There’s no video, no record, but we’re still digging. I don’t think we’re going to get anything more from the property manager. What’s her name again?’

‘Lisa Berge.’

‘That’s right. I don’t think she’s got anymore to tell us, and that’s about it. Thanks for the coffee, you two. Let’s talk later this afternoon. Don’t take any free drinks from strangers.’

‘H
ey, it’s me, Missouri, and if you’ve talked to your medical examiner you already know what I’m going to tell you.’

‘I haven’t, so tell me,’ Raveneau said.

‘Four more of the skulls match. You may get me re-elected county sheriff.’

She laughed and her laugh made him smile, but what he heard in her voice was relief and he felt the same. Now at least a piece of the puzzle was figured out.

‘But that’s not the only reason I’m calling. I’ve got a new witness, a young woman who has come forward with a story about how she and her boyfriend were there and saw the skulls taken.’

‘Why did she wait so long?’

‘Afraid of what her mother might do and I don’t blame her. I grew up with her mother. She was out there with her boyfriend. He was about to deploy to Afghanistan.’

‘Is that where he is now?’

‘He is but I know how to get a hold of him and she’s here and still worried about how others will react, so I’ve made a deal with her. We keep her identity secret. Are you OK with that?’

‘I’m fine with it.’

‘I’ve got her statement and I’ll send it to you as soon as we get off the phone, but let me read you her description in case there’s something to talk about. Oh, and I guess it takes you to get the skulls released to us. They said you have to sign off on it.’

‘I’ll do it today.’

‘Perfect. OK, so here are her words. Ready?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘I snuck out of the house to meet my boyfriend. He couldn’t take his car because his dad would have heard it. We rode bikes out to the river road. There was a moon so it was OK and when we got closer there was mud on the road so we left the bikes in trees and walked. Just in time too because there were headlights coming and we hid as a car passed us. Jody says it was a Subaru.’

Different than the farmer, Jacobs, Raveneau thought, but the shape at that distance was similar in some ways.

‘He parked and wasn’t super close to us, but he was pretty close and we could see him put on a light on his head like those things people wear when they go down in the caves. He took this backpack with him, you know, wearing it. He’s tallish and not real big, sort of thin. We couldn’t see his face and he walked this really still way that creeped me out. He was like a zombie. That’s what I remember most and how weird it was with the light on his head when he bent over a casket. We could hear when he opened them and it was freaky. Jody wanted to go stop him, but I didn’t let him do it.

‘We knew he was putting something in his backpack but we didn’t know what it was until later when we heard the news and I’m really sorry I didn’t come tell you sooner. He made like three trips to his car and on the last time he put the backpack inside and drove away. It wasn’t like he was in any real hurry or afraid of getting caught. He was fussing around in the back of the car like he had groceries or something he didn’t want to spill over when he drove away. He cleaned off his shoes and was careful to get everything the way he wanted it before he left. Then he just drove away slowly.’

‘Three trips,’ Raveneau said. ‘Jacobs’ account is at four thirty in the morning. Can you try to pin the time down with her a little more? And what about a partial license plate?’

‘They couldn’t see well enough.’

‘Could she tell if they were out of state or were they Missouri plates?’

‘She says no.’

‘Let’s try to get in touch with the boyfriend. If he knows it was a Subaru, maybe he registered something about the plates.’

Raveneau was standing by the fax machine when la Rosa came in. As they talked, the fax machine began to clack. Raveneau picked up the statement from the teenage witness and handed that to her, and the next fax had a list of the skulls now identified. One of the names on the list all but jumped off the page, yet he still had to read it two or three times before handing the list to la Rosa. ‘Check out the names.’

La Rosa read and then read aloud, ‘Attis Martin. This is a break.’

‘It is except there are no secrets here. They’ll know in Missouri if they don’t already know who has been identified and that’s going to find its way into a TV report or some media. Our guy here, Attis version two, is going to find out.’ Raveneau had another thought. ‘We’ll have to release something here about identifying the skulls and that should shutdown the serial killer talk.’

‘Does this interrupt their plot, if there really is one?’

‘Who knows.’

La Rosa shook her head like she was trying to get rid of something and then pushed her hair back. ‘This is all just too weird.’