Prey (22 page)

Winter watched Griffin and Barney disappear into the ground. He took out his Zippo, clicked the lid open, flicked up a flame. For a moment he just stood there watching the fire dance, then he clicked the lid shut.
Click, flick, click.

‘You’re doing that thing with your lighter again,’ Mendoza told him. ‘The thing you do when you’ve got something on your mind.’

‘I was just thinking about the question I asked Griffin. Why involve me?’

‘Yeah, that one again. Still no thoughts?’

Winter frowned. ‘Not really.’

‘Maybe that’s because you’re too close to see things clearly. Okay, here’s an idea. She’s read on the internet that you’re the best there is when it comes to hunting serial criminals and she wanted to prove you wrong.’

‘I guess, that’s one possibility.’

‘Okay, I’m sensing you’re not convinced, so try this on for size: could you be looking for reasons that don’t really exist? Overcomplicating for the sake of overcomplicating? You know, chasing shadows?’

Winter gave a wry laugh. ‘Mendoza, I spend most of my life chasing shadows. It’s what I do.’

‘Even so, my question stands. You know, more often than not the simple explanation
is
the correct one.’

‘And what if this is one of those occasions where the complicated explanation is the correct one?’

‘So what does that look like?’

Winter sighed. ‘I don’t know.’

‘In which case, we go with the simple explanation. She wants to go toe-to-toe with the monster catcher.’

Winter kicked at the earth and said nothing.

‘You’re still not convinced, are you? You know what this is like? It’s like the Ryan McCarthy case all over again. Even when we had that asshole in custody you were still tugging at the threads. It’s like you go out of your way to make life difficult for yourself.’

‘That’s not it. I just don’t trust things when they look too neat. Reducing this down to some sort of competition smacks of convenience.’ He switched to the voice of a WWE announcer. ‘And fighting on the side of evil we have Amelia Price. And marshalling the forces of good we have Jefferson Winter.’ He switched back to his real voice. ‘Nothing’s that clear cut. Nobody’s a hundred per cent good, and nobody’s a hundred per cent bad. It’s like yin and yang again.’

‘Your father has a lot to answer for.’

‘And what the hell has my father got to do with this?’

Mendoza met his eye. ‘He’s the reason you’re so damn suspicious of everything. You thought he was one thing and he turned out to be something else entirely. Even now, all these years later, you still haven’t forgiven yourself for calling that one wrong, have you?’

Winter didn’t respond for a while. Mendoza was right about one thing. He had gotten too close to this case. He was too emotionally involved. Amelia had made sure of that by killing Omar.

‘My relationship with my father was a sham from start to finish. You think you know someone, but you don’t really. Nobody does.’

‘Is that your way of saying that I’m right.’

‘No, it’s my way of saying it’s complicated.’

‘No, Winter it’s actually quite simple. You hate being wrong and I’m guessing you’ve been that way since birth. What’s more, the fact you were wrong about your father kills you. That’s what this double guessing is all about. Admit it.’

Winter kept his mouth shut.

‘Newsflash: sometimes you actually get things right. Like you did with Ryan McCarthy. But sometimes you won’t know all the answers. It’s called being human. I know you like to think you’re better than us mere mortals, but the truth is that you’re flesh and blood, too. If I cut you, you will bleed.’

They drifted into a long, deep silence. The only distractions were the chirping of the birds and the gentle shushing of the wind blowing through the branches. Winter wanted to know what Amelia was up to right now. He wanted to know where she was.
Who
she was.

One thing was for sure, she wouldn’t be using last night’s disguise. Right now she’d be trying to merge into the background. That meant dull hair and dull eyes and boring conservative clothing that no one would look twice at. But not too boring. Go too far in that direction and people might take notice.

As for where she was, that one was tougher to call. At a rough estimate, six to eight hours had passed since she broke into his room back at the guesthouse. If she’d run, she’d be using the interstates to get as far away from Hartwood as quickly as possible, and she’d be careful to stick to the state speed limit of fifty-five miles an hour because she wouldn’t want to get pulled over.

In eight hours she could easily have covered more than four hundred miles. By now she could be in Pittsburgh or Philadelphia or two-thirds of the way to Chicago, which was as good as saying that she could be anywhere. And the bad news was that with every passing minute that area was getting bigger. Then again, maybe she was still in Monroe County. Not that that helped. Not really. Monroe County might be out in the middle of nowhere but there were still plenty of places to hide.

Wherever she was, and whatever she was doing, she’d be planning her next move. He was sure of that. Yes, she might decide to disappear completely, but he didn’t think so. Not quite yet. She was clearly intending for their paths to cross again, and he figured that would happen sooner rather than later. The longer she waited, the more time there was for him to regroup. As for where their next encounter might happen, he didn’t know. What he needed was to engineer a scenario where they crossed on his terms. Right now, she was calling the shots and he was playing catch up. So how could he turn the tables? It was something to think about.

He zipped up his sheepskin jacket then sat down cross-legged on the grass and got settled in for the long haul. They were heading into the lull. Every investigation suffered from this phenomenon. Everything you could think of had been done, the bases were all covered, and there was nothing left to do except wait and see how things played out. Only then could you plan your next move.

Winter hated the lull. He hated waiting, hated having to be patient. It had been that way since for ever. Even as a kid he had always been doing something to keep his mind occupied. When his brain was idling, that’s when the problems began. His thoughts would chase themselves down dead ends and get stuck there. He’d start to obsess over things that he had no control over.

For instance, what if someone had worked out earlier what his father was? How many young women’s lives would have been saved? And these were young women who would maybe have gone on to get married and have kids. Sometimes when he closed his eyes he saw golden threads running out from their hearts, spreading out into the future, splitting and separating and multiplying. Then, in the next heartbeat, they’d burst into flames and it would be like they’d never existed.

Of course, when he asked that ‘What if’, the real question was what if he’d worked it out? Ultimately, the question was pointless. It didn’t matter how he answered, nothing changed. Those fifteen women were dead, his mother was dead, and his father had been tried and executed, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about any of that.

Then there was the question of how early was early enough. If he’d realised at victim number eleven or victim eight or victim four, would that have changed how he felt? The answer was no. Even one victim was one too many, which rendered the question invalid. His father had started killing before he was born. Winter was only eleven when he was caught. He’d just been a kid. What could he have done to change things? Yet here he was, all these years later, still trying to make amends.

He understood the futility of this way of thinking, but couldn’t have stopped himself even if he’d wanted to. He’d made an uneasy peace with himself years ago. This was what he was. This was
who
he was. There was nothing he could do to affect the past, but he could do something about the future. Every time he took down a killer he was saving lives, and that had to mean something.

The sound of footsteps on the stone stairs broke into his thoughts. A couple of seconds later Rosalea Griffin appeared, rising out of the ground. She was wearing latex gloves and her good eye was twinkling.

‘Was it natural causes?’ he asked her.

‘You’re stretching the definition to breaking point, but yes I’m pretty sure it was natural causes. Obviously, that’s just my best guess at the moment. I’ll be able to give you a definitive answer after I’ve examined the body.’

Winter motioned towards her hand. ‘What’s that?’

Griffin held up a crumpled seven-by-five photograph. ‘I thought you might want to take a look. I found this wedged between Eugene Price and the mattress.’

The ME was talking, but Winter couldn’t hear a word she was saying. Mendoza was talking, too, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying, either.

The photograph had been taken in front of the Alice in Wonderland statue in New York’s Central Park. Amelia had her arms around a man who was an inch or two taller than she was. The man was smiling like he’d won the lottery and his head was turned towards Amelia as though he’d just kissed her. She was smiling, too. It was a smile that lit up her whole face, a smile that made her look just like a normal person.

Anyone looking at this photograph would conclude that these were two people who were very much in love. It would be easy to build a whole story based on that assumption. Maybe they’d met at college, or maybe they’d bumped into each other in a bar, or perhaps they had met online. They’d hit it off straightaway, and quickly discovered they had loads in common. They thought the same way about things. They finished each other’s sentences. They even owned the same DVD box sets.

The future was as easy to divine as the past. Marriage, kids, and their Golden Years spent living down in Florida because the heat was better for your arthritis, and watching the sun set was more pleasant than watching the rain. Two people this much in love, you just knew you were looking at one of those couples who would end up dying within days of each other.

They’d probably saved for a while before booking their vacation to New York, and while they were saving planned exactly what they were going to do when they got there. They’d have wanted to do all the tourist things. A trip to the top of the Empire State, a visit to the Statue of Liberty. Shopping expeditions and meals out and a Broadway show. And, of course, the obligatory stroll around Central Park.

It was easy to imagine things playing out this way. Except that wasn’t what had happened. There had been no Broadway shows or meals or shopping trips, and there had been no slow-burn evenings where they’d shared a bottle of wine and dreamt about what they were going to get up to when they finally hit the Big Apple. And there would be no kids, or twilight years spent wishing away the sunsets in Miami or Fort Lauderdale.

‘What the hell?’

Mendoza’s voice pulled Winter’s attention away from the photograph. She was standing at his shoulder, shaking her head from side to side and biting her lip. There were frown lines on her forehead and tiny crow’s feet at the edges of her eyes.

‘This makes no sense, Winter. No sense whatsoever. Why would Amelia Price be hanging out with Ryan McCarthy?’

‘Who’s Ryan McCarthy?’ Griffin asked.

‘Ryan McCarthy’s the reason I came to New York,’ Winter answered. ‘He preyed on young gay men who were visiting the city on business. He’d hook up with them then go back to their hotel rooms. Instead of a nightcap, he raped and dismembered them.’

‘If he was doing this in a hotel room then he probably wasn’t using power tools. Even battery operated ones. Too noisy.’

‘The markings were consistent with hand tools,’ he confirmed.

‘How small were the pieces?’

‘Small.’

‘Yikes, that’s going to take time. How did you catch him?’

‘We worked out that the victims used the same websites to arrange dates while they were in the city, then we created an online avatar that ticked all of McCarthy’s boxes and went fishing.’

‘And once you got a bite, I’m guessing you got dressed up in your tightest pair of jeans and went out there to reel him in.’

Mendoza laughed. ‘That was never going to happen. Winter doesn’t like getting his hands dirty.’

Winter frowned at her. ‘For the record I have no problem getting my hands dirty.’

‘Yeah right. Anyway, we sent Greg Behringer out to meet him. He’s one of my colleagues in Homicide, and the closest match we could find to McCarthy’s victim profile. He was white, the right age group, and with a bit of work we managed to get it so he looked the part. And it worked. Before the clock struck twelve, McCarthy was in custody.’

For a moment the three of them just stood in silence, everyone lost in their thoughts. A plane was cutting through the blue sky, heading towards Canada, a long white contrail flowing in its wake.

‘I guess it’s time to discuss the white elephant that’s just walked into the clearing,’ Winter said. ‘Where does Amelia Price fit into all of this?’ He turned to Griffin. ‘Can I see the photo again, please?’

‘Sure, but before you ask there’s no way you’re getting to touch it.’

Griffin held the photograph up by the edges to make as much of the picture visible as possible, and Winter and Mendoza leant in closer to get a better look. All he saw was the obvious lovers’ story he’d seen earlier, which, in light of everything else he knew about Amelia and McCarthy, was clearly a fabrication.

The more he looked, the more questions the picture provoked, but the one question he kept returning to was how had Ryan McCarthy’s and Amelia’s orbits collided? What circumstances had conspired to bring them together? Right now the only solutions he could come up with involved fate or coincidence, which was as good as having no solutions at all.

The idea that they just happened to be in the same place at the same time was too big a coincidence. Sure, people met every day, and some of them would go on to spend the rest of their lives together. But Amelia and McCarthy weren’t your everyday people, they were psychopaths, which meant there was little to no chance of them bumping into each other in the street. The odds of that ever happening were just too long. Compounding this was the fact that serial killers didn’t tend to advertise themselves, which lengthened those odds even further. So how did they meet?

Winter found his cell phone and took a quick snapshot of the photograph. He studied it again, but no matter how hard he looked, no matter what angle he came from, there were still too many questions and nowhere near enough answers. The crunching of twigs interrupted his thoughts. The sound was coming from the path leading to the house.

Mendoza and Griffin had also heard the noise and were staring towards the path. As the footsteps got louder and closer, voices floated into the clearing on the wind, dislocated fragments of sentences that made little sense. A moment later Birch appeared from between the trees, along with a dozen men from the Monroe Sheriff’s Department.

The guy at the front talking to Birch was obviously the sheriff. His hat was cleaner, his buttons shinier. This was someone who didn’t get out of the office much, and when he did it wasn’t to go traipsing through the woods. The body language was interesting. Birch was overcompensating, trying hard to get taken seriously, while the sheriff wasn’t trying at all.

Griffin walked over to meet them, and Winter sidled up next to Mendoza. He leant towards her ear. ‘Unless you want to spend the rest of the day sitting in an interview room, we need to get out of here,’ he whispered. ‘You know how this one plays out. We found Eugene and everyone will want to know how. There are much better things we can be doing with our time.’

‘Like getting our asses back to New York so we can talk to Ryan McCarthy,’ Mendoza added in a low whisper.

‘Exactly.’

‘So, what’s the plan?’

‘I’m going to make like I need to use the bathroom. Give it a minute or two then make your excuses. Everybody’s going to be more concerned about what’s happening underground to worry about us at this point. But they will at some point, and before that happens I want to be long gone. We’ll meet at the car.’