Comes a Horseman (18 page)

“Often, but everything points to this crime being linked to at least four other murders in two states. Did Cynthia Loeb's husband commit them all?”

“I suppose you never heard of copycats?”

Brady just stared at Lindsey. Alicia was equally stunned. Surely Lindsey knew that only scant information about each of the previous Pelletier killings had been released to the press. In every case, major details had been withheld, including the best evidence linking the crimes: that dogs participated in the murders. How would a copycat, one, know that; and two, mimic it? Did he just happen to own dogs trained to restrain victims?

“I'd still like to speak with him.” Brady said. “You can't stop me from talking to a witness.”

“I can while he's on my crime scene.”

As if on cue, a big engine roared to life on the road.

“That'd be his midlife-crisis-mobile,” Alicia said flatly.

Sure enough, a flash of red identified the rumbling, revving sound as belonging to the 'Vette. Gravel sprayed out from under tires moving entirely too fast.

Brady turned to Lindsey, disgusted. “Did you at least interview him?”

“No. I invited him to my wife's Tupperware party.”

“Could we get a transcript e-mailed to us?” He was trying hard to be nice.

“I'll see what I can do. What's the address?”

Brady produced a card from his jacket's inside pocket. “I'd appreciate it.”

“Least I can do.”

“Detective,” Alicia said, “Agent Moore really needs to look around. It's the reason he got up at three this morning to fly here.”

Lindsey's expression reminded her that he'd been up all night and that he cared as much for Brady's sleep schedule or the Bureau's budget as he did whether Pavarotti ever sang opera again. But he surprised her again by asking, “What is it you want to do?”

Brady spoke up quickly. “My job is to make sure the CSD recorded everything a profiler would need to make an accurate analysis of the crime scene. I've studied the recording Agent Wagner made last night. What I need to do is tour the crime scene as though you asked for a profile and the case warranted my coming out. I'll be looking for anything that may be important that Agent Wagner didn't capture on the CSD. That's it. Very straightforward.”

Lindsey skewed his face and looked up at the sky. You'd have thought he was contemplating bungee jumping for the first time.

A tech in a white lab coat appeared partway down on the stairs leading from the front door. “Detective,” he called. “We need you.”

Lindsey pointed his voice at the officer coming up the drive, having safely escorted Prime Suspect Number One off the property. “Vasquez!”

“Yeah!”

“Got another tour for you!”

Vasquez held up his thumb: no problem.

Lindsey headed up the stairs.

“Thank you,” Alicia called.

“Be outta here in forty, okay?” He climbed out of sight.

Brady turned to her. “What are you smiling about?”

“I can't wait for the Bureau to establish jurisdiction.”

“Can't mix field testing and field investigations, you know. You ready to leave the case?”

“It would almost be worth it to see his face when we take over.” She thought about it a moment. “Almost.”

22

B
ack in the Taurus, Brady began fleshing out the notes he'd made during their tour of Cynthia Loeb's house.

Alicia nosed into the property's drive and backed onto the road. They had seen evidence in the dirt of the Corvette's spinning one-eighty. Brady asked her not to attempt the same stunt.

Now she glanced at his hand, drawing quick lines from one observation to another. She said, “Forty minutes isn't long to study a crime scene.”

“I think I got what I needed.”

“So . . . how'd I do?”

He didn't say anything for a few minutes but flipped forward and backward through his note pad, making connections, scribbling new ideas. Occasionally he would lift the digital camera to check the pictures he had asked her to shoot during the tour. Finally, he nodded.

“You did well. Only a few suggestions.”

“I'm listening.”

She had driven them out of Palmer Lake and through the town of Monument. Now she pulled onto the ramp for northbound I-25. They had agreed to visit the crime scene in Ft. Collins, where three days ago Daniel Fears, the high school coach, had become victim number four. When Alicia had come to Colorado yesterday, it was to make a CSD recording of the Fears crime scene and be ready to record a fresh scene, should the UNSUB—unknown subject—strike again soon in Colorado. The night she arrived, before she'd had a chance to get to Ft. Collins, he murdered Cynthia Loeb. Brady and Alicia were hoping to find some references to repeated patterns there. The more clues they had, the more detailed the picture of the killer would become. It was like creating a mosaic: the first few pieces revealed nothing; clarity came from studying many fragments.

“Tool markings at the point of entry,” he said. “There were scrapes where it appeared the UNSUB used a tool to remove the screen. Close-ups of them would be nice, both on the window frame and the screen outside.” He consulted his notes. “Speaking of outside, next time follow the officer who tracks them. Vasquez said they were unable to trail back farther than a hundred yards or so, but if they had found where the UNSUB had parked or waited, that would be invaluable.”

“For tire impressions?”

“That, and if the assailant waited, it would show a high degree of planning. What was he waiting for? Other people to leave? Darkness? A time that means something to him? What did he do while he waited? Smoke? Carve something in a tree? Stand there with the patience of a Beefeater? If you find where he parked, the location might tell us something about who he is. If it's a long way from the crime, for example, we'd know the guy is pretty good at finding his way through the woods, that he's healthy enough to trudge that far. If it's someplace only a four-wheel drive can get to . . .”

She was nodding.

He continued. “You did a decent job capturing the oddness of her bedroom, all those religious trinkets. It would have been nice to get each of those things individually recorded from several angles. Don't touch them; just move around them.”

“That's a tall order.”

“I know it would take time, and with the cops there, you may not be able to do it on the first run-through. Any reason you couldn't go back?”

“Locals are pretty anxious to get what the CSD has for them and get me out of there. Lindsey's attitude isn't unusual. I could
insist.
” She smiled.

“If we found a similar trinket or image at another crime scene or interviewed an UNSUB who worked where one was sold or made—something like that could break the case. One more thing. You panned around the rooms, but try to dedicate some time and focus on lifestyle groupings. That is, the bookcases, the furniture arrangements, any wall hangings, photographs, artwork.”

“I thought the sweep would pick up all that.”

“Not with enough detail. If there's an open magazine on an end table, zoom in so we can see the publication name, issue date, and page number. Better too much information than not enough.”

“So, missed three?” she asked.

“That's not bad.”

She shrugged. “I suspect the CSD will be a continual work in progress, even after I've moved on. Different people will want different things from it, rules of evidence will change, new forensic methods will become vogue.”

“Does that bother you,” he asked, “working on a project that will never be completed?”

“Nah, not really. Name of the game these days. Imagine being a computer or software designer, knowing the product you're working on every day till midnight will be obsolete a month after you've signed off on it. The CSD's technology-based, so constant upgrades will be the norm. I just want to see it credited with locking up some really bad guy. Maybe watch it become the way crime scenes are approached.”

“Something little like that.” He smiled at her.

They crested Monument Hill, and a long stretch of highway opened up before them. The Taurus rocketed for the horizon. Brady wondered if Alicia measured driving success by the number of cars she passed. He retrieved the laptop from the foot well. He still had to give the CSD recording of the Loeb crime scene a more thorough inspection.

“Any thoughts about the killer?” she asked.

“Still assessing, but we may not be dealing with a serial killer at all. More and more, he's looking like a spree killer.”

“The short downtimes and the way he's traveling?”

“And the apparent lack of common denominators among the victims,” Brady answered. “Although I'm not ready yet to say that linkage doesn't exist. Sometimes it only becomes clear after he's caught and explains himself, if he ever does.”

“What does the frequency of the killings tell you, the short time between each one?”

Brady considered his answer, then shook his head. “Ambition . . . correlation to some other events . . . a developing taste for blood. At this point, we just don't know.”

She said, “Lindsey mentioned something I was curious about.”

He looked at her.

“The eating,” she said. “He was right about that being suggestive of someone who knew the victim or was somehow comfortable in the house?”

“Suggestive, sure. But the human mind is infinitely complex, which makes every person and every motive different.”

“So what
does
making a sandwich next to a severed head tell you about this one?”

“One thing, he's probably a sociopath. He has no sense of morality, no concept of right and wrong.”

“What's
wrong
with cutting someone's head off, huh?”

“Exactly. They know society thinks it's wrong; that's why they take steps to elude capture.”

“Think this guy grabbed a snack at the other crime scenes?”

“I didn't notice that . . . Hold on.” He hooked an arm around his seat back and fished in the satchel on the rear floor for his binder. Using the closed computer as a desk, he flipped open the binder and read. After a minute, he said, “The first vic. Joseph Johnson in Ogden. They lifted two latents on the inside handle of the refrigerator, as though the perp had opened it.” He was turning pages more quickly now. “Here,” he said. “William Bell was killed in the parking lot of his apartment building in Moab. They place the time of death at about 12:05 a.m. from the coroner's report, and that's when a resident said she heard noises in the parking lot. She thought someone was trying to break up a dogfight. But she didn't see anything when she looked out her window, and the noises had stopped. Now get this. Ten minutes earlier, Bell bought a cheeseburger, fries, and a chocolate shake from a late-night burger joint.” He looked up from the page. “He got them to go. The shake was found splattered on the ground near the body. But they never found the burger and fries . . . or their wrappers.”

“So Bell ate in the car and tossed the trash out the window.” She didn't believe it, but detective work was about playing devil's advocate until every possibility had been considered.

“Not likely,” said Brady, reading. “First, the cab of his truck was full of empty beer cans and other trash, including old fast-food bags and wrappers. They examined them, looking for evidence. They were all crusty-old. They did find a hash pipe and a dime bag of weed. Why would he risk getting pulled over for littering when he's got contraband in the truck, especially since he's driving a trash can anyway? Second, he had stopped at a video store before the burger place. The tapes he rented were near the body. Sounds like he'd planned on dinner in front of the tube. The house that Swanson built.”

She thought a moment while Brady continued scanning the reports. “You're saying the killer is taking their food?”

Brady nodded. “I'd bet on it.”

“That's the
motive
?” She was incredulous.

“No, something else. Maybe it gives him a feeling of power. Or in some way it's a symbolic transference of their life force to him, a delusion many psychopathic killers share. He took their lives and he took one of the requirements of life, food.”

“Or maybe he was just hungry?”

Brady raised his eyebrows. “Maybe so.”

There were a lot of maybes at this point in the investigation. Or rather, investigations
.
Each murder was being handled by a local authority, at least until the Bureau stepped in to help compare notes and unify efforts.

The car shot north, not slowing when the speed limit dropped from seventy-five to sixty-five to cut through the town of Castle Rock. Brady looked up from the binder that had diverted his attention from the video walk-through for the past ten miles. He studied the rook-shaped mountain from which the town derived its name. Radio and cell phone masts spired above its plateau. He could just make out the outline of a big star on its side, probably an illuminated, outsized Christmas decoration. What captured his attention most were the layers of strata making up the top quarter of the mountain, stark evidence of the sea that had once filled the Great Plains. Its shores had lapped at the Rocky Mountains and—as it receded—at this jutting plateau. Everything that was then, gone now. As everything now would be gone someday.

23

L
eaving Castle Rock, the car picked up even more speed. As it caught the wind and roared over minor road imperfections, it rose and fell gently like a leaf on a rolling sea. Brady pushed the binder back into the satchel behind his seat and opened the laptop.

Alicia pulled a crumpled pack of Camels from her blazer pocket. She smoked whenever she was impatient, which meant she had a pack-a-day habit, by his calculations. She saw him watching her.