Pop Goes the Weasel (18 page)

SHAFER PARKED HIS JAG on the shadowy street and felt strangely alone and afraid. He was actually scaring himself. The things
he thought and did. No one had a twisted mind like his—no one thought like this. No one had ever had such outlandish fantasies
and ideas, and then acted them out.

The other players also had complicated and very sick fantasy lives, of course, but they paled in comparison to his. Famine
claimed authorship of a series of psychosexual murders in Thailand and the Philippines. War liked to think of himself as the
uncrowned head of the group—he claimed to “influence” the adventures of the others. Conqueror was confined to a wheelchair
and made up stories about using his infirmity to lure his prey close enough for the kill.

Shafer doubted that any of them actually had the guts to play the game out in the real world.

But perhaps they would surprise him. Maybe each of the others was living out a homicidal fantasy. Wouldn’t that be something?

The Cahill women thought they were so perfectly safe inside the ranch house, less than fifty yards away. He could see a green
wooden fence surrounding a stone terrace and lap swimming pool in the back. The house had sliding doors to the pool area.
So many possibilities for him to consider.

He might enter the house and murder both of them execution-style. Then he would drive directly back to Washington.

The local police and FBI would be totally baffled. The story might even make network TV. Two women shot and murdered while
they slept, a mother and daughter whom everybody in their small town admired. No motive for the horrific crime, no suspects.

He was hard now, and it was difficult to walk. That was comical to Shafer, his absurd hard-on waddle. His mouth formed a smile.

A dog was howling two or three houses down the street—a small wimpy dog, from the sound of it. Then a larger dog joined
in. They sensed death, didn’t they? They knew he was here.

Shafer knelt beside a maple tree at the edge of the backyard. He stood in shadows while the moon cast a soft white light across
the yard.

He slid the twenty-sided dice out of his pocket, then let them fall on the tufts of lawn.
Here we go. Playing by the rules. Let’s see what the night has to offer
. He counted the numerals on the special dice. They appeared fuzzy in the dark.

Shafer couldn’t believe what he saw. He wanted to howl like the crazed and bewildered neighborhood dogs.

The dice count was
five
.

Death had to leave! This instant! There could be no murders tonight!

No! He wouldn’t do it! To hell with the dice. He wouldn’t leave. He couldn’t. He was losing all impulse control, wasn’t he?
Well, so be it. Alea jacta est
, he remembered from his schoolboy Latin classes—Julius Caesar before he crossed the Rubicon: “The die is cast.”

This was a monumental night. For the first time, he was breaking the rules. He was changing the game forever.

He needed to kill someone, and the urge was everything to him.

He hurried to the house before he changed his mind. He was nervous. Adrenaline punched through his system. He used his glass
cutter at first, but then just smashed in a small window with a gloved hand.

Once inside, he moved quickly down the darkened hallway. He was sweating—so unlike him. He entered Deirdre’s bedroom. She
was asleep, despite the breaking of the glass. Her bare arms were thrown up over her head, the surrender position.

“Lovely,” he whispered.

She was wearing white bikini panties and a matching bra. Her long legs were spread delicately, expectantly. In her dreams,
she must have known he was coming. Shafer believed that dreams told you the truth, and you had better listen.

He was still hard, and so glad he’d chosen to disobey the rules.

“Who the hell are you?” he heard, suddenly. The voice came from behind.

Shafer whirled around.

It was Lindsay, the daughter. She wore nothing but coral-pink underwear, a brassiere and briefs. He calmly raised his gun
until it pointed between her eyes.

“Shhh. You don’t want to know, Lindsay,” he said in the calmest voice, not bothering to disguise his English accent. “But
I’ll tell you anyway.”

He fired the gun.

FOR THE SECOND TIME in my life I understood what it felt like to be a victim of a terrible crime rather than the detective
investigating it. I was disconnected and out of it. I needed to be doing something positive on a case, or get back to volunteer
work at St. Anthony’s—anything to take my mind off what had happened.

I had to be busy, but I knew I’d lost my ability to concentrate, something that had always come so naturally to me. I came
across a pair of shocking murders in Maryland that bothered me for some unspecified reason. I didn’t follow up on them. I
should have.

I wasn’t myself; I was lost. I still spent endless hours thinking about Christine, remembering everything about our time together,
seeing her face wherever I went.

Sampson tried to push me. He
did
push me. He and I made the rounds of the streets of Southeast. We put the word out that we were looking for a purple and
blue cab, possibly a gypsy. We canvassed door to door in the Shaw neighborhood where Tori Glover and Marion Cardinal had been
found. Often we were still going at ten or eleven at night.

I didn’t care. I couldn’t sleep anyway.

Sampson cared. He was my friend.

“You’re supposed to be working the Odenkirk case, right? I’m not supposed to be working at all. The Jefe would be livid. I
kind of like that,” Sampson said as we trudged along S Street late one evening. Sampson had lived in this neighborhood for
years. He knew all the local hangarounds.

“Jamal, you know anything I should know?” he called out to a goateed youth sitting in shadows on a graystone stoop.

“Don’t know nothin’. Just relaxin’ my mind. Catchin’ a cool night breeze. How ’bout yourself?”

Sampson turned back to me. “Damn crack runners working these streets everywhere you look nowadays. Real good place to commit
a murder and never get caught. You talk to the police in Bermuda lately?”

I nodded, and my eyes stared at a fixed point up ahead. “Patrick Busby said the story of Christine’s disappearance is off
the front pages. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. It’s probably bad.”

Sampson agreed. “Takes the pressure off them. You going back down there?”

“Not right away. But yeah, I have to go back. I have to find out what happened.”

He looked me in the eye. “Are you here with me right now? Are you
here
, sugar?”

“Yeah, I’m here. Most of the time. I’m functioning okay.” I pointed up at a nearby redbrick building. “That place would have
a view of the front entryway into the girl’s building. Any of those windows. Let’s get back to work.”

Sampson nodded. “I’m here as long as you want to be.”

There was something about pounding the streets that appealed to me that night. We talked to everyone in the building that
we could find at home, about half the apartments. Nobody had seen a purple and blue cab on the street; nobody had seen Tori
or Marion, either. Or so they said.

“You see any connections anywhere?” I asked as we came down the steep stairs of a fourth-floor walk-up. “What do you see?
What the hell am I missing?”

“Not a thing, Alex. Nothing to miss. Weasel didn’t leave a clue. Never does.”

We got back down to the entrance and met up with an elderly man carrying three clear-plastic bags of groceries from the Stop
& Shop.

“We’re homicide detectives,” I said to him. “Two young girls were murdered across the street.”

The man nodded. “Tori and Marion. I know ’em. You want to know ’bout that fella watchin’ the buildin’? He was sittin’ there
most the night. Inside a slick, fancy black car,” he said. “Mercedes, I think. You think maybe he’s the killer?”

“I BEEN AWAY AWHILE, y’see. Visitin’ wit’ my two old-bat sisters in North Carolina for a week of good memories, home-cooked
food,” the elderly man said as we went up to the fourth floor. “That was why I was missed during the earlier time through
here by your detectives.”

This was old-school police work, I was thinking as I climbed stairs—the kind of work too many detectives try to avoid. The
man’s name was DeWitt Luke, and he was retired from Bell Atlantic, the huge phone company that services most of the Northeast.
He was the fifty-third interview I’d had so far in Shaw.

“Saw him sittin’ there around one in the mornin’. Didn’t think much of it at first. Probably waitin’ for somebody. Seemed
to be mindin’ his own business. He was still there at two, though. Sittin’ in his car. Seemed kinda strange to me.” He paused
for a long moment as if trying to remember.

“Then what happened?” I prompted the man.

“Fell asleep. But I got up to pee around three-thirty. He was
still
in that shiny black car. So I watched him closer this time. He was watchin’ the other side of the street. Like some kind
of damn spy or somethin’. Couldn’t tell what he was lookin’ at, but he was studyin’ somethin’ real hard over there. I thought
he might be the police. ’Cept his car was too nice.”

“You got that right,” Sampson said, and barked out a laugh. “No Mercedes in my garage.”

“I pulled up a card-table chair behind the darkened window in my apartment. Made sure there were no lights on, so he couldn’t
see me. By now he’d caught my attention some. Remember the old movie
Rear Window?
I tried to figure out why he might be down there sittin’, waitin’. Jealous lover, jealous husband, maybe some kinda night
stalker. But he wasn’t botherin’ anybody far as I could see.”

I spoke again. “You never got a better look than that? Man sitting in the car?”

“Around the time I got up to pee, he got out of the car. Opened the door, but the inside light didn’t come on. That struck
me strange, it bein’ such a nice car and all. Fueled my mind even more. I squinted my eyes, get a better look.” Another long
pause.

“And?”

“He was tall, a blond gentleman. White fella. We don’t get too many of them around here at night, or even in the daytime,
for that matter.”

DETECTIVE PATSY HAMPTON’S INVESTIGATION of the Jane Doe murders was starting to show forward movement and positive results.
She thought she might have something good in the works. She had confidence in her ability to solve the murders. She knew from
experience that she was smarter than everybody else.

It helped to have Chief Pittman and all the department’s resources on her side. She had spent the past day and a half with
Chuck Hufstedler at the FBI building. She knew she was using Chuck a little, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was lonely, and
she
did
like his company. She and Chuck were still sitting around at three-thirty in the afternoon when Lancelot entered the Gamester’s
Chatroom again.
Laughalot
, she remembered.

“He couldn’t resist, could he?” Hampton said to Hufstedler. “Gotcha, you fantasy freak.”

Hufstedler looked at her, his thick black eyebrows arched. “Three-thirty in the afternoon, Patsy. What does that say? Tell
you what it says to me.
Maybe
he’s playing from work. But I bet our Lancelot is a school kid.”

“Or he’s somebody who likes to play with school kids.” She offered a thought that upset her even as she uttered the words.

This time, she didn’t try to make contact with Lancelot. She and Chuck just listened in on a stultifying discussion of several
role-playing games. In the meantime, he was trying to trace Lancelot.

“He’s pretty good at this, a real hacker. He’s built a lot of security into his system. Hopefully, we’ll get to him anyway.”

“I have confidence in you, Cheeseman.”

Lancelot stayed in the chatroom past four-thirty. By then it was all over. Chuck had his name and address: Michael Ormson,
Hutchins Place, Foxhall.

At a few minutes before five, two dark-blue vans pulled up in front of the Ormson house on the Georgetown Reservoir. Five
agents in blue FBI windbreakers and Detective Patsy Hampton surrounded the large, Tudor-style house with an acre or two of
front and back lawn and majestic views.

Senior FBI Agent Brigid Dwyer and Hampton proceeded to the front door and found it unlocked. With weapons drawn, they quietly
entered the house and discovered Lancelot in the den.

He looked to be around thirteen years old. A baby geek. He was sitting at a computer in his shorts and black socks.

“Hey, what the heck is going on? Hey! What are you doing in my house? I didn’t do anything wrong. Who are you guys?” Michael
Ormson asked in a high-pitched, peeved, but quivering voice.

He was skinny. His face was covered with acne. His back and shoulders had a rash that looked like eczema. Chuck Hufstedler
had been right on target. Lancelot was a teenage geek playing with his fancy computer after school. He wasn’t the Weasel,
though. This boy
couldn’t
be the Weasel.

“Are you Michael Ormson?” Patsy Hampton asked the boy. She had lowered her weapon but hadn’t holstered it.

The young boy dropped his head and looked ready to weep. “Oh, God, oh, God,” he moaned. “Yes, I’m Michael Ormson. Who are
you guys? Are you going to tell my parents?”

MICHAEL’S FATHER AND MOTHER were immediately contacted at their jobs at Georgetown University Hospital and the U.S. Naval
Observatory, respectively. The Ormsons were currently separated, but they both made it to Foxhall in less than ten minutes,
even with rush-hour traffic starting to build. The other two Ormson children, Laura and Anne Marie, had already come home
from high school.

Patsy Hampton convinced the parents to let her talk to their son at the house. She told the Ormsons that they could be present,
and could interrupt, and even stop the interview anytime they wished. Otherwise, she and Agent Dwyer would have to take Michael
to FBI headquarters for the interview.