Acts of Mercy (7 page)

“You got people to volunteer DNA samples?”

“Yes. There was no problem getting them to swab. Usually you have to beg, but this time they all stepped up to the plate. Said they wanted to eliminate the time we’d waste trying to make one of them fit as a suspect.”

“And no one refused?” Sam asked.

“Not a one.”

Sam stared at a photo of Ross Walker. “As we discussed on the phone, this was well planned, well thought out. It took time to set this up. It’s hard to imagine someone from the mission following Walker outside, strangling him, stabbing him, changing his clothes, and then walking back into the kitchen again without anyone noticing the blood on his arms and face.” He looked up at Coutinho. “The killer would have had a tough time getting rid of all the blood while he was at the scene, but if he left by the back alley, as he most likely did, it would have been dark enough that anyone seeing him from a distance wouldn’t have seen any blood he still had on him.”

“We’ve spoken with Walker’s neighbors, with his coworkers, his family. From every account, he was a real family man. Rock of the community, devoted to his wife. Volunteered at the mission’s soup kitchen as soon as it opened, coached Little League soccer and softball. Like I said, no one knows anyone who’d want to hurt him.” Coutinho stood and folded the file. “We’ve talked to our CIs on the street, we’ve talked to everyone we could think of who has their ear to the ground out there. No one’s heard anything about Walker. There aren’t even any rumors.”

“How dependable are your informants?”

“About as dependable as everyone else’s,” admitted the detective. “But it’s unusual for no one to have heard anything. You can usually count on someone hearing at least one rumor, even if it doesn’t pan out. This time, nothing, which tells me that the killer wasn’t one of the usual suspects.”

“Have you seen anything like this MO before?”

Coutinho shook his head. “Never.”

“Did a report go in to VICAP?” Sam asked.

“Yeah, but it got in a little late.”

“How come?”

“Someone thought someone else was entering the data, while someone else thought the other guy had done it.” Coutinho shrugged. “It happens.”

“I’d be real surprised if this guy hasn’t killed before,” Sam said, almost as if thinking aloud. “He was really organized, really sure of himself. First-timers are usually nervous, they screw up somewhere. I don’t see any screwups here. I see someone who knew exactly what he wanted to do, and did it without leaving anything behind that would lead you to him. I think the burger in the mouth is important. It’s something he didn’t need to do in order to commit the crime. I think he’s done this at least a time or two before.”

“So you’re saying this was the work of a serial killer?” Coutinho frowned.

“Not in the classic sense.” Sam explained, “Very often serial murders have a sexual undertone. I don’t see that here. There was no assault, and no evidence of any sexual activity on or near the body, right? No semen found?”

“Right. Nothing like that.”

“So you don’t have that motivation, you don’t have that element of fantasy you so often see in serial crimes. But you do have other elements—again, the hamburger, for example—that makes you think there’s something more here than a simple murder.” Sam reflected on his words for a moment. “Not that murder is ever simple.”

“So you think there are other victims somewhere with hamburgers shoved in their mouths?”

“Maybe. But I guess if there were similar cases in the system, you’d have heard from the FBI by now.”

“Oh. We did.”

“You did?” Sam’s eyebrows rose. “When? Who called?”

“About a month ago, I guess. I don’t know the name of the agent. Wanted to look over the file.”

“You have the agent’s card?”

“No. I wasn’t here to take the call. My dad died and I was in St. Louis for about a week, helping my mom tie up some loose ends.”

“I’m sorry about your father.” Sam waited what he considered a respectful amount of time before asking, “Who did the agent talk to, do you know?”

“One of the other detectives. Reid, I think.”

“Is he in?”

“Not till tonight.”

“Would you ask him to call me with the name of the agent?” Sam was curious. Sooner or later, he’d have to deal with whoever the agent was. He hoped it was someone he knew well and trusted.

“Sure. If you’re ready, let’s take that ride.”

The ride through Lincoln was a step back in time for Sam, who figured out he’d attended two reunions, both of them within the first ten years of graduating. After a while, it just hadn’t seemed so important, when there was so much going on in his life. Starting his career, meeting and falling in love with Carly. Marrying her. Losing her …

“How ’bout we stop by Pilgrim’s Place first?” Coutinho asked. “It’s not far from here. Couple blocks down.”

“Sure.”

Three minutes later, Coutinho pulled his unmarked car up in front of the building from which several hundred hungry people were fed every week. Pilgrim’s Place sat in the middle of a row of two-story wooden storefronts, its name painted in red on the glass windows with plain white drapes hanging behind them. The store to the left was unoccupied, and the one to the right had a sign that read
SORRY, WE ARE CLOSED
.

“The alley runs behind all the buildings?” Sam got out of the car and looked around.

“Yes. But we weren’t able to find anyone who was in the alley that night. There’s not a whole lot going on down here at night, and by the time Mrs. Walker realized her husband was missing, any place that had been open had already closed up.”

Sam followed the detective through the front door. Inside, long tables covered with sheets of white paper lined the room. A man in late middle age came out of the kitchen. He was tall and thin with sparse white hair atop a broad forehead and a bland round face.

He stopped halfway across the room, a smile spreading slowly. “Hey, Detective Coutinho. How are you?”

“Good, good, Bob. How’s everything?”

“We’re okay.” The man’s face clouded. “You here to give us some news about Ross?”

Coutinho shook his head. “Sorry. There’s been
nothing new.” He gestured in Sam’s direction and said, “Bob, this is Sam. He’s a private detective who’s working for Mrs. Walker. Sam, this is Bob Taylor. He runs Pilgrim’s Place.”

“You think you can find the guy who did Ross when the police couldn’t?” Bob asked somewhat skeptically.

“I’m only going to be working on this one case,” Sam explained. “Detective Coutinho doesn’t have that luxury. So no promises, but I’m going to give it a go.”

“Anything we can do to help. Ross was a good man.” Bob’s head nodded up and down. “A damned good man. Didn’t miss a Tuesday night in over three years.”

“Ross volunteered here for the past three years?” Sam tried for a conversational tone.

“He was one of the first to sign up. Wondered why a guy like him—good family, lived in one of those nice areas outside of town, had a real good job—why he would leave that nice house and that pretty family to drive down here.”

“You ever ask him?”

“Said he’d been really lucky in his life, that any one of these guys, that could be him. Never wanted to take his good fortune for granted.” Bob nodded again. “Like I said, he was a good man.”

Sam glanced around the room. “This is where you feed everyone?”

“Yeah. Anyone who comes in, we’ll feed. No one is ever turned away from Pilgrim’s Place.”

“You have a pretty regular crowd?”

“Oh, yeah. Times have been tough here for the past few years for some folks. We do have some who have been coming steadily, practically since we opened. Others have been able to move on.”

“So you know most of the people who come in?” Sam asked.

“Most of them, sure. Sometimes we get someone who’s just passing through, but for the most part, we recognize or know the names of just about everyone who shows up.”

“How many each day?”

“Maybe forty for breakfast—we got families bringing their kids in every morning—then about the same for lunch. The older kids are in school but the adults who show up for lunch often aren’t here earlier in the morning. Dinner time, we can feed sixty to eighty on any given night. Sometimes last winter, we’d run close to one hundred on the weekends.”

“Do you have anyone on the door, checking IDs, for example?”

“We do have someone at the door, but no one checks IDs. What would be the point in that?” Bob frowned, the idea clearly foreign to him.

Sam didn’t bother to explain. “What does the person on the door do?”

“Just makes sure there’s seating for everyone. If we’re filled, he’ll chat up the next person in line for a while until there’s an opening. We don’t turn anyone away, Sam.”

“So your doorman would know if someone had come in the night Ross Walker was killed who hadn’t been there before? Anyone who stood out, maybe a stranger?”

“We already talked about that, me and Arnie. He works the door. He said there wasn’t nobody he didn’t recognize. As a matter of fact, we were down in numbers that night. Anyone odd would have stood out.” Bob turned to Coutinho, who stood by quietly. “You talked to Arnie yourself. He tell you anything different?”

“No.” The detective shook his head. “I spoke at length with him about who was here and who came in when, when they left. It’s all in the report, Sam. There’s a copy in the file I gave you.”

“Appreciate it.” Sam turned back to Bob. “Mind if I take a look at the kitchen?”

“Right this way.”

Bob led them through an open doorway into the back room, where two large stainless steel stoves stood side by side. Two refrigerators and one upright freezer took up most of the space on the opposite wall, and down the center of the room was a stainless steel counter. The room was, as Coutinho had told Sam, L-shaped, with oversized double sinks in the short leg of the
L
.

“What was Walker’s job?” Sam asked.

“Everyone’s job changes from night to night. The volunteers arrive, they look at the menu, see what has to be done, they’ll just start to work. You come in first, you start the thing that takes the longest, see?”

“What did Walker work on that night?”

“He and Lynne were a little late that night, only maybe by ten minutes, but most of the entrée and dessert work had already been taken up by someone else. Ross started on the salad, washed up some veggies. I think we had squash that night. Someone
brought in a basket of yellow and green from their garden. In the summer and late fall, we get a lot of donations from private gardens,” Bob explained. “Lynne didn’t cook that night. She served.”

“Anyone working back here with him?”

“No. He worked pretty fast on his own.”

“So no one noticed exactly when he went missing?” Sam continued.

“Everyone was doing their own thing. The best we can figure out, when he finished with the salad prep, he put it out on the counter here for the servers to take, and then he must have taken the bag of scraps out to the Dumpster.”

“He always take out the trash?”

“No,” Bob told Sam. “Everyone cleans up after themselves. If you have scraps or garbage, you take it out yourself. At the end of the night, everyone helps out with the general cleanup.”

“The bag of scraps was found in the Dumpster,” Coutinho added, “so we know he made it that far. We’re thinking the killer was hidden behind it, waiting.”

A flicker of a frown crossed Sam’s face as he gestured to the back door. “I’m assuming this is the way?”

“Yeah. He would have gone out here …” Sam and the detective followed Bob through the door. “There’s the Dumpster out there by the fence.”

“That’s where it was that night?”

“That’s not the same Dumpster, but it’s always in the same place, yeah.”

“And the light there over the back door is the only light there is out here at night?”

“Yeah. It’s only about seventy-five watts, I think.” Bob pointed to the brass socket with the bare bulb.

“And nothing at all back there, by the Dumpster?”

“Nothing. It’s really pretty dark out here at night. I mean, you can see the Dumpster, and make out where to toss stuff, but if someone was back there hiding, you wouldn’t see them.”

A worn dirt path ran through the yard of straggly grass dotted with dandelions and chickweed and led straight to the Dumpster, and Sam followed it. He turned to the detective and said, “Show me where you found Walker.”

Coutinho walked around the back of the Dumpster and pointed to a section of fence. “He was here. Back against the fence, legs straight out in front of him. You saw the photos, so you know how he was posed.”

Sam bit the inside of his cheek and scratched the back of his neck, looked back toward the house, then back at the Dumpster again.

“We might be wrong about something,” he told the detective.

“What’s that?”

“I’m not sure the killer came here looking for Walker. How could he have known that Walker would be coming out to the Dumpster that night, or that he’d be alone?”

“I thought we agreed that the nature of the attack, the preparedness of the killer, all indicated that this was personal, a revenge killing.”

“Oh, it’s personal,” Sam told him. “Personal to the killer, but not to the victim. We know that he came totally
prepared to kill that night, but he wouldn’t have known who would be coming out here. I think what mattered was that he was able to kill that night in the manner he’d prepared for. I don’t believe it mattered to him who his victim was.”

“You think he would have killed whoever came out back?” Bob frowned.

Sam nodded. “Yes, I do.”

“But why? You think this guy has an ax to grind with someone here?” Bob was clearly shaken and confused. “We do good things. We feed hungry people. That’s all we do here. Why would someone want to hurt someone—anyone—here?”

“I can’t answer that yet,” Sam said.

“Yet?” Coutinho raised an eyebrow. “You think you will find the answer?”

“If I look in the right place, chances are I will.”

“You sounded pretty sure of yourself back there,” the detective said after they’d said their good-byes and were back in the car.