Redheads (9 page)

Chris saw that Mike was looking at him. He nodded slightly. This was news to both of them and he would bring it up.

“The surgeon speculated she was still alive for about ten minutes after the rape. Based, I guess, on the amount of internal bleeding. But by then she wasn’t conscious anymore. She probably died when he ripped her stomach open and took out her liver. The skin and muscles were ripped and not cut, so he likely just tore her open with his bare hands. You want me to go on?”

“No,” Julissa said. “Oh god.”

She got up and went to the sliding doors, stepping to the balcony. Chris could see from the movement of her shoulders that she was sobbing. Mike Nakamura went to follow her, but Chris held out his hand.

“Leave her alone, Mike.”

Mike sat down. Chris looked at Westfield.

“You say they found semen?”

“Yeah. I know. I guess I hadn’t focused on it until just now. There’s been none at the scenes I’ve investigated since ’96.”

“And the bite marks.”

“That too,” Mike said. “The victims have all been savagely attacked. But probably not with his teeth. So the one in ’78, the murder of your wife, is different. We’ve never seen that.”

“Why would he change his style?” Westfield asked.

“If it were just the semen missing, given the time that’s passed, I’d say he was impotent. But it’s the biting too. I bet in the last fifteen or twenty years he heard about DNA testing,” Chris said.

There was a knock at the door and they all jumped. Julissa came back inside. They were all looking at the door.

Chris walked over and looked through the peephole.

“Just room service.”

At first none of them would eat.

Chris was hungry and he suspected Mike was too, but Julissa hadn’t even looked at the room service cart when the waiter pushed it in. Westfield looked embarrassed. Not that he should have been, in Chris’s opinion. What had happened to Tara Westfield needed to be told. Maybe some good had already come from the telling. They knew the killer changed over time, adapted to avoid capture, learned from newspapers and paid attention to technology. For years Chris had imagined him as simply a raving beast, incapable of thoughts or plans or even fully conscious of anything other than his own blood lust. This was better, Chris thought. Some people might pity a rabid dog, but not this. No one would blame them for what they were going to do.

Mike, Westfield and Julissa were sitting at the table again. Julissa had found a tissue in the bathroom and was wiping her eyes. Chris went to the map and, from memory, marked the thirty-six cities in twenty countries from which he and Mike had culled news reports of linked murders. When he was finished, the pushpins were clustered in Scandinavia and along the east and west coasts of North America; they were scattered across Western Europe, and more thinly, across the Pacific and Asia. There were three in Africa: one in Alexandria, one in Lagos, and one in Cape Town. There was a lone pin in South America, in Buenos Aires. Other than the fact that each city was on the water, there was no connection between the dots on the map. Putting the locations in a chronological context didn’t help at all. Mike read out the date and location of each victim, along with her name. Chris wrote each date on a small post-it note with a black marker and affixed each tag next to its correct pushpin. But this added nothing. The killings skipped from Asia to Denmark to Canada to the Caribbean. They had all come around the table to look.

“There’s no organization,” Westfield said.

“Maybe we can take something away from that,” Julissa said. “Maybe he’s not travelling all the time, from country to country like some kind of…I don’t know…Lonely Planet backpacker who murders people. He has a home. He travels to kill, and then he goes home.”

“That makes sense,” Chris said. “If he were travelling all the time like a backpacker, you’d think we’d see a whole string of them on one continent for a couple years, then on a different continent for a few more years.”

“On the other hand,” Mike said, “he can’t be travelling just to kill. Or at least, not all the time. I mean, if you’re only interested in finding redheads, why go to Nigeria, or anywhere in Asia?”

“That’s true,” Westfield said. “He’s probably traveling from a home base somewhere, but he must be traveling for some other reason. Trips to Western countries, maybe he’s trying to find a victim. But the others must have another reason. Like business.”

Chris got out one of the dry erase markers and went to the white board.

“Let’s write down things we know. Maybe we can put that in one column. Then we can have another column for things we suspect.”

He turned to the white board and in neat letters wrote,
Tries to hide his DNA
in the column he marked
Suspected
. Underneath that, he wrote,
Has a home base
. He shrugged. It was a start. But the column labeled
Known
was empty.

“Here’s something we know: he’s male,” said Julissa. “The semen pretty much solved that mystery. If there ever was one.”

Chris wrote it on the board.

“Victims are all redheads with green eyes,” Westfield said. Chris wrote,
Redheads / Green Eyes
on the board.

“Rapist,” Julissa said. “Cannibal.”

“He’s strong,” Mike said. “I think we know that.”

“It’s fair to say we know he’s at least middle aged,” Westfield said.

“And we suspect he’s probably older,” Chris added. “Aaron and I talked about that.”

Chris wrote all this down. He looked at them. Now they were all thinking, and that was good. Julissa was writing on a pad of hotel stationery. Mike was scrolling through files on his laptop. He thought if they could fight and move just one foot forward along the killer’s trail, it would be easier to take the next step, and the one after.

“If we’re talking about suspicions,” Julissa said, “let’s talk about why all these things happen near the water. That seems like our best lead by far.”

“And if we’re going to talk about the water connection,” Westfield said, “I want to tell you what I did this morning.”

They all looked at him. Westfield reached into his jacket pocket and brought out his FBI badge. He tossed it on the table.

“This is a fake. I bought it at a flea market in Seattle. Reason I’m wearing the suit is I went down to the shipyard across the channel from Allison’s condo and spent the morning interviewing the nightshift crew. They got welders working on a rig over there twenty-four hours a day. Thought some of them might’ve seen something.”

“You found someone?” Chris asked.

Westfield told them Jimmy Hutchinson’s story, ending with Hutchinson’s guess that the man was swimming twenty miles an hour.

“You think Jimmy Hutchinson is credible?” Mike asked.

“Credibility sounds like something you need in court,” Westfield said. “I wouldn’t bring Hutchinson to court. I wouldn’t ignore him either.”

“Also,” Chris said, “it fits with the Vancouver case. At least a little.”

He turned and looked at Mike. “Wasn’t there a police theory in Vancouver—the young girl on the boat—that the killer might’ve come there by swimming across the channel, since no one saw anybody going down the docks?”

Mike nodded. “That’s right.”

“You think Jimmy Hutchinson actually saw him?” Julissa said.

“It fits. It’s a strange thing to see. We can’t directly connect one strange event with another on the same night, but it seems like too big a thing to ignore,” Chris said.

“Maybe we can find other witnesses,” Julissa said.

“I’ll try,” Westfield said. “There’s a fishing pier out at Seawolf Park. If he swam that way, maybe someone would’ve seen. If anyone was fishing that night. As for Hutchinson, I believed him when he told me. He probably had a thing for Allison, but he wasn’t a drunk and he wasn’t a nutcase. And he didn’t seem to think the story explained anything. He was just giving me what he had.”

“But nobody can swim that fast,” Mike said.

“Especially someone over fifty,” added Julissa.

“Maybe he was wrong about the speed. It was dark, he saw a guy in the water moving fast. Maybe there’s a tidal current through there that helps with the speed,” Westfield said.

“Or maybe your question about the electric scooter was right. That could give him an extra five or six miles an hour. If he held it under his chest, Hutchinson wouldn’t see it,” Mike said.

Westfield shrugged.

“Escaping by water would be a good route, if he came here on a ship and planned to leave on a ship,” Chris said. “Imagine it. He thinks the neighbors might’ve heard. The police might be on their way. He’s probably covered in blood. The water’s an easy way out.”

“I can think of a lot of better things to do besides swim in the ocean at midnight while covered in blood,” Mike said.

“I can think of a lot of better things to do besides everything this guy does,” Julissa said.

They all looked at the white board, and after a while, Chris got up and wrote
Swimmer
in the column for suspicions.

They took a break after that. While the others moved their bags to the rooms he’d reserved, Chris descended to the lobby, found the hotel’s business center, and printed the thirty-six files he and Mike had assembled. They didn’t have one yet for Allison. He made four copies of each and went back upstairs to the conference room.

Mike had showered and changed clothes and was back at the conference table with his laptop. Julissa was out on the balcony with Westfield, but they came inside when they heard Chris.

Mike cleared his throat and looked at them.

“Before I came here, Chris asked me to take a look at the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, see if I could figure out why there isn’t an international manhunt on for this guy. Everyone familiar with VICAP?”

Julissa shook her head and Mike explained the network.

“Thing is,” Mike said, “VICAP
should
pick up the similarities in all these crimes. All these murders—at least the ones in the U.S. and Canada—
should
be in the system. I mean, they all fit the profile. Unsolved, extremely violent rapes and murders that are totally random. It’s exactly what VICAP was made to pick up. Chris and I wrote a simple search and filter program and found thirty-six of these just by going through Internet news stories. You gotta figure the FBI’s program is more sophisticated than ours. If it had these cases in the network, it would’ve linked them in about a second. So I borrowed a friend’s login and password and had a look at what VICAP is showing.”

Chris felt his arms break out in goose bumps. He sensed what Mike was about to say, and what it meant. If they were chasing a rabid dog, it was either incredibly smart or incredibly well protected. Or both.

“I found only one murder on VICAP we’d expect to be there: Allison. All the others are gone. And you may think it’s just police who are too stupid or too proud to work with the FBI, so they don’t enter the data. But that can’t be true. I was on HPD when Cheryl Wilcox was killed and I uploaded that case to VICAP myself. And it’s gone.”

Julissa scribbled on her pad and looked up. Chris could see she was drawing a flow chart.

“That leaves us one of three places,” she said. “One: the killer’s in the FBI, maybe works at Quantico, has access to VICAP, and erases each old case before he kills again so there are never two cases in the system for the computer to connect. Two: the killer has protection from someone high up with access to a person who can change the database. Or three: the killer, either by himself or by paying someone he trusts, is sophisticated enough to hack into the FBI’s database and alter it.”

Mike looked at her. “I think that about sums it up. I thought about it all night on the plane and I couldn’t think of anything else.”

“If that’s true, we better make sure the FBI and the police never find out what we’re doing. Our investigation has got to stay secret,” Chris said.

“Why?” Westfield asked.

“Because no matter which one of Julissa’s options you pick, the FBI’s compromised. The killer’s one of them, or they’ve got a mole, or the killer can hack their system. And it’s clear he doesn’t want anyone looking for him. So if he gets word of us—”

“He’ll erase the data and then come after us,” Mike finished.

Chris nodded. “That’s the way I see it. And this isn’t necessarily a bad development. If he’s in the FBI, it gives us a suspect list. And if he’s well protected or capable of hacking—that at least makes the pool a lot smaller.”

Julissa’s phone rang. She took it from her purse and stepped out onto the balcony. The men watched her through the glass sliding doors. When a few moments passed, Westfield cleared his throat.

“What’re you guys thinking for the next step?”

“I have some ideas. I thought we should all talk about it and agree. So none of us repeats what someone else already did,” Chris said.

“Divide up assignments,” Westfield said.

“Yeah.”

“Can you project a map of Galveston?” Westfield asked.

Mike nodded and typed at his laptop. A few seconds later the projection screen showed a satellite image of Galveston. Westfield went to the screen and pointed at the fishing dock at Seawolf Park.