Redheads (5 page)

“I think you got the wrong room,” he said.

“I don’t think so.”

He’d only opened the door enough to poke his head out, but she shouldered past him and came inside. He shut the door.

“We know each other?”

Now that she was in the room, he saw she was holding a pistol in her left hand. She was wearing a gray wool skirt, a wrinkled blouse, and high heels. The pistol looked expensive, and she held it so casually and without evening pointing it at him that he guessed she knew exactly how to use it. As usual, his Glock was on the other side of the room.

“You don’t know me. Have a seat.”

They sat across from each other at the round table in front of the air conditioner. She put the gun on the table and kept her hand on it.

“I saw you go into my sister’s apartment building. You picked the lock. You were inside for fifteen minutes. Then you came out; you got Tasered and kidnapped. You were driven to the south side of the island and I watched you get carried into a motel room. You were there for about three hours. Then, you and the other guy went and had coffee on Strand Street. My sister got murdered last week, her fiancé is in a mental hospital, you’re breaking into her apartment and getting kidnapped, and then you’re having breakfast with your kidnapper at five in the morning before walking back here. So what I want to know is, what the
fuck
?”

“Allison Clayborn was your sister?”

“I just said that.”

“Twins?”

“No. She was a year older than me. Nobody will tell me what’s going on, or if there are any leads; I can’t see her body; I can’t get in touch with my parents; the detective in charge of the case hasn’t returned any of my calls; I don’t know where Ben is.”

“Why can’t you reach your parents?”

“They’re on a cruise in Turkey. Will you stop asking questions and please tell me what the fuck is going on?”

“Can I get dressed? I wasn’t expecting anybody.”

“No. Maybe later. Right now I want answers.”

He moved his hands up—slowly, so she wouldn’t think he was reaching for the gun—and ran his fingers through his hair. Then he rested his elbows on the table and put his forehead in his palms. His reconnaissance from the night before might as well have been on network TV. How many other people had watched him?

“Six years ago my wife was murdered in Honolulu. She’d come home early from work to jog on the beach. No one ever found the killer. He—I’ll spare you the details.”

But her eyes said he couldn’t spare her, that no gap in his story would veil what she already suspected. So he told her.

A police officer came to his office in Honolulu, and told him his wife had been found.

Found? He hadn’t known she was missing.

He went with the officer, all feeling receding from his body. He rode in the passenger seat of the cruiser, up over the Pali Highway and down through the tunnel in the mountains to the other side of the island. It was raining by the time they got to the pass, and came harder on the windward side.

He’d asked too many questions.
How had they found her in the house? Why were they looking? Who said they could go inside?
The officer had been evasive, then finally gave answers Chris wished he’d never heard.

A neighbor reported screams.

Dispatch sent a unit to roll past the house and the cops saw blood on the front steps. The door was unlocked. No one answered when they called, so they went inside.

Later, disoriented by grief, Chris would think he’d sabotaged his last chance. She hadn’t really been dead until then. If he hadn’t asked the questions, it could have all been taken back.

But that chance slipped away, if it had ever been a chance. They came to the house. The yard was a parking lot for police cars, evidence vans, unmarked detectives’ cars, all of them sinking into mud beneath the soaked grass. He could see the blood on the threshold of the door, still bright and wet. A man wearing plastic bags on his feet was taking photographs of the doormat. Someone took Chris’s elbow and looked at another officer.

“This the husband? The fuck they bring him for?”

Chris shook off the hand, pushed past the detective, past the photographer. Inside there were more of them, technicians everywhere with bagged feet, gloved hands, and shower caps. He called Cheryl’s name. Halogen lights mounted on tripods filled the living room and illuminated the kitchen.

“Grab him, don’t let him past.”

He made it to the kitchen and saw her on the floor in front of the oven. They dragged him away a second later, but by then he’d seen enough. He could, and would, replay that single second for days at a time.

He hadn’t recognized her face. Only her hair. One eye was gone; the other stared straight up. Her breasts were cut off and gone. It looked like an animal had chewed off her vulva. Her fingertips were missing at the first knuckle. The skin of her stomach, upon which he used to lay his head, had been ripped off and her intestines hung in loops over the knobs of the lower kitchen cabinets, as if thrown there in a hurry to get to something else. Much later, he learned her intestines had been tossed aside to get at her liver, which was never found.

They dragged him outside.

Other people—line officers, forensic technicians—had already vomited next to the bushes where he knelt retching. Six months later, when the police hadn’t found a single suspect, he began his search on a simple premise: anyone or anything capable of something so awful had done it before and would do it again.

His search took him first to Mike Nakamura and then all over the world. He told her the last six places he’d been: Vanouver, Manila, New Orleans, Sydney, Vladivostok, Stockholm. And now Galveston.

“You think this is what happened to my sister?”

“Yes.”

“How many has he killed?”

“Thirty-six I know about. That’s going back ten years, the definite ones. I don’t think I catch them all. And he’s been doing it a lot longer than a decade.”

“When you find this guy, you’ll kill him?”

“Yes.”

The young woman turned the gun away from him. Then she asked a question he didn’t expect.

“You still live in that house?”

“No. I had it torn down. Sold the vacant land. I bought a different house in Kaneohe. I thought I should stay close, because I thought I was looking for someone close by. Then I learned that wasn’t true, but I stayed in Kaneohe anyway.”

“Since he’s everywhere, it doesn’t matter where you live.”

“That’s right.”

“What do you do?”

“This.”

“What about before?”

“I was a lawyer.”

“What’ll we do next?” she said.

“You could tell me your name.”

“Julissa Clayborn.”

“I’m Chris Wilcox.”

He held out his hand, but instead of shaking it, she took it and held it. She looked dizzy. They just sat that way for a moment, their hands together on the table. Her hand was so warm, the skin soft. How long had he been huddling by the memory of Cheryl, as if that could sustain either of them? He turned away from her green eyes, feeling naked. He went to the bathroom, took off the towel, and changed into jeans and a polo shirt.

When he came back, he told her about the meeting with Aaron Westfield and Mike Nakamura.

“I want to be there,” Julissa said.

Westfield was right—they could have been sisters, all of them.

“What I’m doing isn’t legal. And it isn’t safe.”

Her eyes dropped and he followed her gaze to the pistol on the table between them. It was a match grade Sig Sauer. The chrome plating was worn on the barrel from coming in and out of its holster in a hurry.

“You lost everything and took this up because you had to,” she said.

He nodded.

“My sister was my best friend.”

When he didn’t say anything, she picked up the Sig Sauer and put it back into her handbag. Then she looked at him again.

“When you told me, you brought me into it. We both know there’s no way back. And I could help you more than you think.”

She reached into her handbag and brought out an ID card in a clear plastic holder. She slid it across the table and he looked at it. This time he nodded again, his eyes closed. She was right. There was no way back.

He’d wasted enough time looking for that path.

“We’re meeting as soon as Mike gets to Galveston.”

“Good,” she said.

“I need to sleep,” Chris told her. “I’m sorry.”

“Can I stay a bit? I’m not ready to drive anywhere.”

Chris nodded to the room’s other bed, which was still made. “Sure.”

He remembered what it was like in the first few weeks of shock. Nothing was strange. He’d just gone from one event to the next as if dragged on a rope. He got into the bed closer to the air conditioner and pulled the covers up to his shoulders. Whatever Westfield had shot into his neck was having secondary effects. That, or the adrenaline was wearing off. His face felt leaden. He was half asleep when he heard Julissa turn back the covers on the other bed and switch off the lamp on the table between them.

She was asleep when he woke that night. Her ID card was still on the table, face up. He looked at her face in the photograph above the slightly raised seal of the National Security Agency and the nononsense corporate logo of Advanced Micro Devices. He turned the ID facedown and went out quietly.

Chapter Seven

Mike Nakamura arrived at the airport two hours ahead of schedule. He sat on a bench in the Japanese garden underneath the triangle of walkways leading to the Hawaiian Airlines gates. With the koi pond behind him, it was the best place in the airport to use a laptop computer without someone walking behind him and seeing the screen. He was researching VICAP; what he was finding scared the shit out of him. He looked around again to be sure he was alone, then checked his watch. Ten hours to Houston was a long time.

He couldn’t believe he’d never seen this before.

The FBI ran the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program out of its training school in Quantico, Virginia. VICAP was an electronic clearing house for unsolved murders and sex crimes across North America and Western Europe. Law enforcement agencies could input data from their unsolved cases and search the database for similar murders. VICAP sought cases where the victim appeared to have been selected at random, and where the killing was motiveless or sexual. All cases were kept in the system indefinitely, and were electronically checked against each other to compile lists of possibly linked killings. The program could identify serial killings by matching the signature aspects of each crime.

Mike knew VICAP fairly well. He’d been a Honolulu Police Department detective before Chris gave him a fulltime job working on the Cheryl Wilcox case. He uploaded Cheryl’s killing into VICAP himself.

After talking to Chris, he’d called a friend who was still with HPD and asked for a favor: to borrow a Law Enforcement Online password for a couple of hours. Once he’d gotten to the airport, he’d logged into VICAP to find out what the FBI knew. In the database, he entered search parameters that would surely have picked up Cheryl Wilcox’s file. A search as simple as “*victim sex: F*victim hair color: red*loc: Honolulu*MO: cannibalism*” would surely have brought up Cheryl’s file and no other. But instead, the system came back with an even simpler response:
No results. Please enter new search parameters and try again
.

He searched for all cold-case murders in Hawaii and scrolled through the results. Unsolved murders in Hawaii were vanishingly rare. VICAP listed five, going back to 1988. There should have been six.

Cheryl’s case was not in the system.

He searched for the New Orleans case. The young woman there, two and a half years ago, had been a Tulane student named Robin Knappe. Robin’s landlady found her in the gingerbread shotgun house she’d rented for two years on Magazine Street near Audubon Park. Both of Robin’s breasts, her left buttock, and her lower jaw and tongue had been missing and were never found. Even a police force as beleaguered as the post-Katrina NOPD would have entered such a case on the VICAP network. The most rookie detective would’ve taken one look at the case and thought to do it. But Robin Knappe was missing.

New Orleans had the highest murder rate in the country, even after Katrina when a third of its population never returned. The city accounted for over a hundred and thirty cold-case murders on VICAP, and Mike scrolled through them all to make sure he hadn’t missed Robin somehow. She was simply not there.

The girl in Vancouver was a seventeen-year-old high school senior, supposedly spending the weekend with her girlfriends. In fact, she was camped out on her boyfriend’s father’s sailboat at a marina near Granville Street. Her boyfriend walked to a brewpub near the docks, returning forty minutes later with takeout dinners and a growler of beer. Jill Moyers was completely dismembered in that short span. She bled so much the sailboat’s automatic bilge pump switched on. The boyfriend dropped his bags and sprinted to the boat when he saw the slurry of blood and seawater pumping from a bronze thru-hull fitting near the boat’s stern. This was in the long-shadowed final light of a northern evening; the harbor was crowded and busy as people readied their boats for winter. But there were no witnesses, and no one even heard a scream. Three people in adjacent boats had seen Jill lounging with a magazine on the boat’s bow around the time her boyfriend was getting their dinner. Police speculated the killer might have swum across the narrow channel under the Granville Street bridge and then climbed the sailboat’s transom ladder. This never went any further than speculation—the killer was never caught.