The Love Killings (5 page)

CHAPTER 8

Matt flipped the business card over and glanced at her name and title printed on the front: “Kate Brown, Assistant Agent in Charge.” Slipping the card into his pocket, he watched her drive off until she vanished around the corner on Twenty-Second Street. The sidewalks were nearly empty, and he noticed the silhouette of a man walking toward him two blocks away. Matt waited for him to step beneath a streetlight, then grabbed his bags and entered the building.

It wasn’t his shadow. It wasn’t the man he’d seen on his flight and at the airport. His hair wasn’t black, but blond, and he carried a knapsack and had the build, at least from a distance, of someone who worked out in a gym.

Matt found the elevator and listened to the cables creak all the way up to the fourth floor. As he stepped out into a dimly lit hallway, he could hear the sound of someone’s TV bleeding through their door. Apartment 4B was just down the way on the left. After unlocking the deadbolt and the handle lock, he switched on the lights and walked inside.

The place was nicer than he expected. Much nicer. Whoever furnished the rooms had taste and seemed to know that the people staying here were away from home. The kitchen was to his right directly behind him. Someone had stocked the fridge with milk and eggs and almost anything he might need for a day or two. He grabbed a beer, twisted off the cap, and took a swig. Then he checked the cabinets and found cereal and coffee. As he walked through the living room, he noted the large bay window and gazed outside at the square across the street. From four stories up, it looked like a very cold and lonely place. Like an arcade on a Jersey boardwalk that was closed for winter and wouldn’t open again until spring.

He turned back to the room and took another sip of beer. The art on the walls, the black-and-white photographs, all seemed so familiar. One of the three photographs was by Minor White. It was an incredible shot of a road heading toward the hills and lined with white poplar trees that looked as if they were burning. An actual print of the same photograph hung in the Blackbird Café, one of Matt’s homes away from home in LA.

He stepped away from the window. There were no hallways in the apartment, each room opening to the next. He could see that the front bedroom had been converted into a study and shared a bath with the rear bedroom. Matt walked into the room, checked the mattress, then passed through the door into the living room.

Everything felt good, and he was more than grateful to be here instead of a hotel room.

He tossed his duffel bag on the bed. When he came back for his laptop and briefcase, he heard the elevator and looked through the peephole.

It was that man he’d seen on the street. The man with the knapsack. He was walking down the hall, searching for a key on his key ring. Matt watched him unlock the door to the next apartment and announce to someone inside that he was home. When the door closed, Matt got out of his jacket, found the remote, and switched on the TV.

CNN had just cut to a string of commercials. Matt muted the sound and set his laptop up on the coffee table. Then he pulled his shaving kit out of his briefcase and ripped it open. The gunshot wounds were beginning to blister through his chest, the real pain probably an hour off. He sorted through his medications, passing over the Vicodin and opening the bottle of Advil. But as he knocked back two capsules with a swig of beer, he glanced at the TV and thought he might choke.

It was his father, M. Trevor Jones.

Matt grabbed the remote and turned up the sound. It looked like the media had caught up to him as he exited a building in New York and tried to get to the limousine waiting for him in the street. The building was set back from the sidewalk and had an unusually large open-air entrance, so reaching the limo wouldn’t be easy.

Within a few seconds, Matt caught the gist of the story and stopped listening. He already knew why his father was being hounded by the media and didn’t need to listen to a newsreader from CNN repeat a story that had been in the papers for weeks. His father was negotiating a financial settlement with the Department of Justice, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Reserve Bank for an unspecified amount that many believed would exceed one billion dollars. His father’s bank had been caught playing games with mortgages to veterans and active members of the military. Overcharges, hidden fees, and improper foreclosure practices had forced thousands of people out of their homes. The investigation had been completed, and now it was time for dear old Dad, the King of Wall Street, to pay up.

But something else was going on here. Matt stepped closer to the TV. The camera was handheld and bouncing up and down in the chaos. Matt looked at his father’s face—the man’s teeth were clenched, his arms up, his head down—but it wasn’t his father making the push through the crowd. It was the two men beside him that were clearing the way. Both of them were wearing suits and appeared hard and tough, the reporters poking his father with their microphones completely outmatched.

Matt took another step closer to the screen.

What concerned him wasn’t their appearance or physical strength. It was the fact that both men were armed. Their jackets were open, and Matt could see the pistols strapped to their shoulders.

His father had hired a pair of bodyguards. Armed bodyguards.

This was new, and Matt didn’t believe that it had anything to do with his father’s financial troubles. His bank could easily afford to pay a billion-dollar fine. This was about Matt. His father knew that he was coming. Matt could sense it. His father had begun to prepare.

CHAPTER 9

The FBI’s field office occupied most of the federal building at 600 Arch Street. It was a ten-story low-rise building that shared underground parking with the federal courthouse and had been named after William J. Green Jr., a beloved congressman from Philadelphia who died young and fathered a son who would later become the city’s mayor.

Matt breezed through security with his new ID. The special task force was housed on the eighth floor with Violent Crime. Kate Brown was waiting for him and eyed the badge clipped to his belt as he stepped out of the elevator.

“Any trouble downstairs?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “It was easy.”

“You need to meet someone before Dr. Westbrook gets started.”

He nodded and followed her down the hall to a large corner office. Ken Doyle was standing by the desk with a man Matt assumed was Wes Rogers.

Doyle smiled. “Glad you made it, Jones. This is Wes Rogers, special agent in charge. I think you’ll like working with him.”

Matt met Rogers’s even gaze and shook his hand.

“Good to meet you, Jones. Welcome to the task force. We’ll get you squared away after the briefing. Sound good?”

Matt nodded. “Thanks.”

Doyle rested his hand on Matt’s shoulder. “Brown gave us an update on your walk through the crime scene, Jones. You’re already paying off dividends, and I’m glad you’re here. Now let’s get down to the Crisis Room.”

Doyle led the way out of the office. As they started down the hall, Matt kept his eyes on Rogers. The truth was that the special agent in charge came off like a forty-five-year-old version of the actor James Earl Jones. His voice was deep and throaty like the actor’s, his complexion on the medium side, and he had those steady eyes that seemed to sweep your way and lock in. He was a big man with a firm handshake. Matt couldn’t help but be impressed by his demeanor and presence, his confidence.

The Crisis Room was around the next corner at the very end of the hallway. Rogers held the door open, and Matt entered and took a quick look around. His first thought was that the Feds had money. Everything appeared to be ultra-modern and high-tech, including the media wall at the head of the room, which housed three massive video monitors. Below the screens a lectern with a lamp had been set on a low built-in stage. More than twenty members of the task force were sitting in chairs, waiting to be briefed by Dr. Westbrook. Behind them Matt counted twenty-four desks pushed together in pairs so that they faced each other. He looked at the laptop computers on the desktops, the matching desk lamps, and the conference room in back enclosed in walls of glass. Everything appeared to be new and up-to-date. Clearly, he wasn’t in an office anywhere near the Hollywood station right now.

“Let’s find a seat,” Brown said.

Matt followed her over to the last row of chairs, gazing at the monitors as they sat down. The video feeds were different on all three. The first screen was switched to a cable news station and muted. On the far right screen, someone had put together a clip that depicted Dr. Baylor’s face as it had been six weeks ago, cut against what he might look like today if he’d made any changes. One shot after the next showed the doctor wearing a moustache, a beard, eyeglasses with different frames, a change in hair color, and a variety of common hats.

Matt found the clip impressive—the Feds had money and they had time—but it was the screen in the middle that grabbed his attention.

The feed was paused and darkened, yet the image still had impact. It was video from the Strattons’ second-floor landing, and Matt couldn’t take his eyes off it. Last night he could only imagine what had happened on the night of the murders. Now, looking at the victims as they were found, everything changed.

“Their eyes are open,” he whispered.

Brown leaned closer. “Wide-open like they’re still alive. That’s one reason why it went from local to county so quickly. The first responders freaked out.”

Matt nodded slightly, his mind fixated on the center screen. He was wondering how he would have responded had he been the first one to enter the Strattons’ home and discover the crime scene. How anyone would have responded. He looked at the father sitting between his two daughters. The mother staring at her son, and her son gazing back at her. Matt found the image so disturbing that he could feel his skin crawling. The photograph Doyle had shown him in LA had been a wide shot of the entire landing. The victims’ faces had been cast in shadow and stained with blood, the detail lost.

“What’s with the bullet holes?” he said. “When I saw the crime-scene photo, they looked like gunshot wounds. Now they don’t.”

Brown lowered her voice as the overhead lights dimmed. “At some point during the process, Baylor taped over them. We’re not sure why.”

“What kind of tape?”

“Gaffer tape,” she whispered. “They use it in the movies.”

Matt took a deep breath and exhaled. Wes Rogers had just stepped behind the lectern and was testing the microphone. He took a sip of water, covered the mike with his palm, and said something to a man standing in the shadows with Doyle who Matt guessed was Dr. Westbrook. After a brief exchange of words, the special agent in charge was back.

“Before we bring out Dr. Westbrook,” he said, “I’d like to give everyone a brief update. We have a new member of the task force today, LAPD Homicide Detective Matt Jones. We all know his story and what he’s been through. Without Jones’s good work, it could have taken months if not years to put these murders together. He should be a reminder to all of us why we’re here and what we need to accomplish. Oh, and did I mention that Detective Jones received the Medal of Valor? Matt, why don’t you stand up? Everybody, let’s give him a hand.”

Matt nodded and raised a hand to the applause, but his mind was still focused on the gunshot wounds. Why had Baylor taped over them?

Rogers checked his notes. “We’ve got news from the Bureau of Forensic Services,” he said. “A good portion of the semen sample taken from Mrs. Stratton became contaminated by her son’s blood when he was placed on top of her. Everyone at the lab is aware of the problem. A second run is underway as we speak. It’s a smaller sample, but thought to be clean. They’ve promised us a preliminary finding sometime tomorrow. Also, we’ve got a ballistics report. Of the five shots fired, three were through-and-throughs, the slugs mangled beyond any value when they hit the wall. But the last two were soft-tissue strikes retrieved by the medical examiner. They’re in good shape. Details and results will be posted on the web as they come in. Now let’s bring out Dr. Westbrook.”

Everyone in the room applauded one more time as Westbrook stepped over to the lectern and shook Rogers’s hand. Matt had heard about him, but never actually seen him. He wasn’t a very tall man and needed to lower the microphone. Matt guessed that the psychiatrist and profiler was in his midfifties. His face was heavily lined, his black hair on the long side and streaked with gray. But what stood out were his eyes. They may have been dark and the glasses he wore may have been thick, but his eyes sparkled like a pair of headlights in the night. Matt still didn’t understand why a briefing by a profiler was necessary. They already knew who they were looking for. But here it was—

Westbrook loosened his tie and pointed a remote at the first screen on the media wall. The feed switched from the cable news station to a photograph of Baylor’s third known victim, Brooke Anderson, exactly as she had been found on the night of her murder just below the Hollywood sign. Matt had been with the first group on the scene. The girl’s clothing had been removed, her body staked to the ground with her face resting on a mirror. Matt could remember the moment he knelt down beside her body with his flashlight and strained to see her face through all the blood. The mutilation had been hideous, her cheeks bloated, her features so deformed that it looked like she was wearing a mask made of pulp. It was an image that he knew he’d never be able to shake.

Dr. Westbrook tapped the mike with his finger and gazed into the audience.

“In my thirty years as a criminal psychiatrist with the FBI, I have never seen anything quite like the work and terror raised by Dr. George Baylor. We all know who we’re looking for. But after screening the video of the crime scene shot by the Forensic Services Unit here in Pennsylvania, I thought that it was essential for me to convey to you exactly what’s at stake. I thought it was essential that every one of us see the crime scene the way Dr. Baylor wanted it to be seen.”

Westbrook picked up another remote and pointed it at the second video monitor towering over his head. Once the images brightened and began playing, Matt could feel the air in the room deaden.

The victims’ eyes were open, but it was more than that. Worse than that. Just as Brown had said a few minutes ago, the Strattons didn’t look like they were dead. Instead, they appeared dazed and exhausted. Looking at each other. Watching each other.

The horror of Baylor’s act seemed to reach a fever pitch.

Matt heard Dr. Westbrook begin speaking again. He tried to look at the man, but his eyes rocked back to the video monitor. The camera had moved in and isolated Stratton leaning against the wall with his two daughters. After about ten seconds, the image widened to include Stratton’s wife and son.

“None of us were at the crime scene,” the psychiatrist said in a voice filled with dread. “None of us were there, but let me tell you something—Dr. Baylor won’t stop killing until we lock him up for the end of time, or until he’s dead. Look at these images. Look at the crime scene the way the doctor left it. The way the doctor wanted us to find it. He won’t stop killing because he likes it. The act of raping a victim gives him power. And the act of murder gives him even more power. Now he’s graduated to mass murder. It gives his life purpose. Compare what you’re seeing on the first two screens. Compare and remember that only a few months have gone by between these two murders. The doctor’s lost his precision in favor of size and scope, but he’s still creating a spectacle. The spectacle is as important to him as the kill. He’s using the same theme, going after and punishing an identical target. But now he’s wiping out the target’s entire family. My guess is that he started killing a long time before the murder of Millie Brown. What Detective Jones discovered in LA was what Baylor wanted him to discover. But there are others—there have to be others—a string of murders that no doubt began in his teens. A string of murders we will never hear about. Never know about. But here’s what you need to understand. Except for the fingerprints he left, he doesn’t make mistakes. This man does not panic. He’s methodical. Steady. He wants what he gets, and gets what he wants. What you’re seeing isn’t a meltdown on Baylor’s part. It’s an evolution. A monster, becoming.”

The dread in Westbrook’s voice turned to doom and had a certain shake to it. When he switched off the video, no one moved or said anything. Everyone just sat there with the lights dimmed. Matt glanced at Kate Brown. Her eyes had lost their focus and were turned inward.