No Place to Die (8 page)

I left the Collins home a little after three
A.M.
and got to the nursing home fifteen minutes later. I kissed Julie hello and dropped, exhausted, into the chair next to her bed. A vase brimming with carnations had materialized on the table next to the bed. The card leaning up against the vase had been signed by Julie’s sister, Denise, expressing her love and assuring Julie that she was in her sister’s prayers. Shaking my head, I set the card back on the table. Apparently neither Denise nor Elizabeth was aware of the fact that the carnation had been perhaps Julie’s least favorite flower.

Sitting there, I thought about the complicated relationship between Julie, her mother, and her sister. I also found myself thinking long and hard about the question the lieutenant had posed earlier in the morning.

I’d wanted to be honest with him, and I didn’t want to let him down. Even more important, of course, I didn’t want a deranged psychopath running loose in the city, shooting and kidnapping defenseless citizens because I’d been distracted and had missed a vital clue or had failed to make a logical deduction from the little evidence that we had uncovered.

I desperately wanted to believe that even though Julie never left my thoughts, I could successfully compartmentalize the pressure and the pain of my life off duty, and thus prevent them from compromising my ability to lead the investigation effectively. Nonetheless,
in moments like this, alone in my solitude, I sometimes wondered if I
was
up to the job.

And what if I wasn’t? Would I ever be able to admit it—even to myself, let alone to the lieutenant? I felt like I’d aged five years in the last eighteen months. I was sleeping only fitfully and even then for only a few hours on most nights. Even though I continued to exercise on a regular basis, I wasn’t eating as well as I should, and that too was beginning to take a toll.

My social life, which had once been fairly active, was now nonexistent. Before the accident, my circle of friends had consisted almost exclusively of other couples that Julie and I had hung out with. For the first few months after the accident, they had all been genuinely concerned for my well-being, and they continued to call and to show up at the door with the occasional casserole.

They also attempted to include me in their activities, but on the handful of occasions when I accepted an invitation to dinner or to a party, the relationships seemed increasingly strained and awkward. Beyond expressing their sympathy, no one knew quite what to say, and I had little or no interest in the topics of conversation that even a few months earlier would have seemed so normal and compelling. Fairly quickly I began declining virtually every invitation, until the invitations stopped coming altogether.

The focus of my entire world had now narrowed down almost exclusively to my responsibilities to Julie and to my job. And the truth was that, with Julie lost to me, the job was the only thing keeping me sane. In any given day it afforded me several hours of relatively normal human contact. It provided some sense of structure, logic, and purpose in a world that otherwise seemed increasingly chaotic and devoid of meaning.
And I was clinging to it like a drowning man. Without it, I would be lost.

By four
A.M.
, I was no closer to a resolution of the question than I had been thirty minutes earlier. And so, reluctantly, I pulled myself out of the chair and kissed Julie good night.

Beverly was sleeping fitfully when the siren came screaming down the street in the middle of the night on Thursday.

McClain snapped awake about ten seconds after she did. As Beverly sat up, he bolted off the bed and stood in the middle of the darkened room, listening as the siren moaned and died, sounding as if it were only a few yards away from the bedroom. McClain turned back, grabbed Beverly by the throat, and threw her down on the mattress. Squeezing the breath out of her, he whispered, “Do not move from this bed, Beverly, and don’t make a single fucking sound. If you do, I will kill you in a heartbeat.”

With that, he released her and raced from the room, leaving the bedroom door open in his wake. As ordered, Beverly lay quiet and still on the bed, her heart pounding so hard she could almost hear it. Thirty seconds later, McClain stormed back into the room with a pistol in his hand. He grabbed Beverly’s arm and jerked her to her feet. Moving behind her, he circled her waist with his left arm, pinning her arms to her sides, and pulled her tightly against his own body. He tapped Beverly’s right ear with the pistol and whispered,
“Walk with me, Beverly. And keep perfectly quiet.”

With that, he began pushing her in the direction of the bedroom door. The cable that was tethered to Beverly’s ankle trailed along the floor behind them, and halfway across the room, McClain accidentally stepped on the cable. Beverly nearly tripped to the floor, taking him with her, but at the last second he regained his footing and righted them. Guiding her more carefully now, he took her to the open door, which was as far as the cable would stretch. Still holding Beverly’s body tightly to his own, McClain leaned back against the doorframe and listened intently.

From somewhere to their left, Beverly could hear the sounds of footsteps bounding onto what was apparently the front porch, and then the raised voices of at least two people talking to each other. She strained to hear, but could not make out what the voices were saying. Then someone pounded on the door and shouted, “Police! Open up!”

Behind her, Beverly felt her captor tense. He laid the barrel of the pistol against the right side of her head. Into her ear, he whispered, “I don’t know what the fuck is going on here, Beverly, but if you make a single sound, or if those assholes attempt to get through that door, I’ll blow your goddamn brains out.”

Again, someone hammered on the door. Her mind racing nearly as fast as her pulse, Beverly weighed the option of crying out for help. She had no doubt that the man would kill her as he had promised. However, she was fairly certain that he would ultimately kill her anyway, and at least by dying now, she could be sure of the fact that David’s death as well as her own would ultimately be avenged.

But, she thought, what if the police did have the house surrounded? Perhaps she still might be rescued
and saved. If it ultimately became clear that he had no hope of escape, perhaps her captor would surrender and allow her to live, rather than killing her and making things even worse for himself than they already were. Perhaps she still might survive to see the bastard pay for murdering David, and that was now the sweetest revenge she could possibly imagine.

Desperate to hear what was happening out on the porch, Beverly leaned forward, as though straining to close the distance between herself and her potential saviors by even the slightest couple of inches. For a long thirty seconds, only silence issued from the porch, and then came the sound of a voice saying something about “the wrong address” and “the house next door.”

Beverly heard the sound of footsteps shuffling off the porch and she opened her mouth to scream. But as she drew in the breath to do so, McClain clamped his hand over her mouth. Beverly shook her head violently and attempted to bite his fingers, while at the same time she tried to kick back at him. Unfazed, McClain simply tightened his grip on her mouth and slapped the right side of her head with the gun.

McClain listened as the sounds retreated from the porch. Then he dragged Beverly back in the direction of the bed. She fought him every inch of the way, but he was simply too strong, and when they reached the bed, McClain threw her down on her stomach, straddled her back, and pressed her facedown into the pillow.

Leaning forward, he used his chest to keep her trapped in that position, barely able to draw a breath, let alone to cry out. Beverly heard the sound of fabric ripping and a moment later, McClain pulled her head back and stuffed a rag into her mouth. He tied a second strip of cloth around her head, holding the gag in place, then shuffled backward so that he was now straddling her thighs. He grabbed Beverly’s left wrist, tied a piece of cloth around it, and then bound her left
wrist to her right. He tested the knots and then, apparently satisfied with his work, he leaned forward and said in a low voice, “Stay perfectly still, bitch, or you’ll be even deader than your fuckin’ husband.”

With that, McClain moved off of her and she heard him leave the room and close the door behind him. Despite his threat, Beverly struggled against her bonds, but in doing so succeeded only in making them tighter. Working feverishly, she tried to cup her hands in a way that would allow her fingers to work at the knots that bound her wrists, but it was impossible to do so.

Weeping out of a mixture of anger, fear, and frustration, Beverly inched her way forward on the bed, placed her face against the wall, and attempted to use the pressure of her face against the rough surface of the wall to push the gag away from her mouth. Fifteen minutes later, McClain opened the door and slipped back into the room. He closed the door, walked across the room, and turned on the lamp next to the bed to find Beverly sobbing and still attempting vainly to free herself from the gag.

McClain stood beside the bed and watched her struggle for another thirty seconds or so. Then he touched a hand to her leg, sighed heavily, and said, “Sorry, babe. Close, but no cigar. Fortunately for the both of us, the cops weren’t here to rescue you. They were called out to a domestic complaint next door and wound up on the wrong goddamn porch.”

McClain removed his hand from Beverly’s leg, and a moment later, a knife slashed through the torn pillowcase he had used to bind her hands. “You can finish untying yourself,” he said, sighing again. “I need a fuckin’ drink.”

At ten o’clock on Friday morning, I got a call from a tech in the crime lab, indicating that the same weapon that had been used to kill Alma Fletcher and David Thompson had also been used in the shooting of Karen Collins. I’d just hung up the phone when Chris Doyle walked through the door, plopped into the chair next to my desk, and said, “Martin says I’m supposed to work with you and the girlfriend on the murders you caught. I know that you’re the lead, and I can live with that, even though I was working cases like this while you were still trying to cop your first feel in the backseat of your daddy’s Oldsmobile. But I hope I don’t have to tell you that I’m not taking orders from Aunt Jemima.”

I looked at him and shook my head, not even trying to hide my disgust.

Doyle was, without question, the unit’s premier example of the negative consequences of the protections afforded by civil-service law. He’d rarely ever helped resolve a case of any real complexity, and the few killers he had caught as a member of the Homicide Unit had mostly been poor, stupid mopes that he’d found standing drunk or stoned over the bodies of their spouses, the murder weapon still in their hands, just waiting to confess to the first cop who came walking through the door.

As long as I’d been a member of the unit, Doyle had been skating close to the line of getting his butt kicked out of the department. But he put in just enough hours
and did just enough work to avoid crossing over the line. He was eighteen months shy of taking his pension and made absolutely no secret of the fact that getting there was the only thing about the job that still motivated him.

For a number of years Doyle had been teamed with Randy Wandstadt, another troglodyte who shared Doyle’s general views about gender, race, politics, and the world as a whole. Wandstadt had finally retired a few months earlier, leaving Doyle as the only single in the squad when Maggie won her transfer into Homicide. The lieutenant paired them together, but their partnership was a disaster from day one, and after the first week, Maggie could have easily filed a complaint accusing Doyle of both racial and sexual harassment.

They were any number of witnesses who could have confirmed Doyle’s pattern of behavior and who doubtless would have happily offered evidence against him. Maggie realized, though, that making such a complaint would have branded her forever and would have greatly frustrated, if not destroyed altogether, her ambition to be accepted as a team player and a valued member of the unit. So she stuck it out, giving as good as she got, and demonstrated by her own conduct what a miserable excuse for a human being her “partner” really was.

She endured the situation for nine weeks and then, figuring that she’d proved her mettle, went to see the lieutenant. He granted Maggie a divorce, no questions asked, and given that my partner had just transferred over to Burglary, the lieutenant put us together. I’d admired Maggie’s work during her first two months in the unit, and was impressed by the way she’d handled the situation with Doyle. I counted myself lucky to be teamed with her, and we’d settled almost immediately into a very comfortable working relationship. Thus far, we’d also had a very good run of clearing cases, which
certainly seemed to validate the lieutenant’s decision to put us together.

However, while the lieutenant might have been happy, Doyle was anything but. Perhaps it was because Maggie was new to the unit. Perhaps it was because she was a woman. Without question, it had a great deal to do with the color of her skin. But Doyle had simply assumed that Maggie would—and should—have been grateful for the opportunity to break into the squad under his direction.

The fact that she wasn’t was a huge blow to Doyle’s massive ego, and in the wake of their separation, he pouted like a third grader who’d just been the last kid chosen for somebody’s dodgeball team. He missed no opportunity to needle Maggie and anyone who defended her. And the fact that virtually every other member of the unit had invited Doyle to take his opinions and stuff them up his butt had deterred him not in the slightest.

Since the split with Maggie, Doyle had been partnered with Bob Riggins, a guy so tolerant and easygoing that, to all appearances, he could have worked in tandem with virtually anyone. But even Riggins was losing patience with Doyle, and the rest of us assumed that it would only be a matter of time before Bob followed Maggie’s trail down the hall to the lieutenant’s office, asking to be relieved of the burden.

I leaned forward in my chair, waited until Doyle finally met my eyes, and said, “Look, Chris, we’ve got a fuckin’ maniac out there and a missing woman as well, and none of us has time for your usual crap. You need to drop the attitude, pitch in, and do the grunt work along with the rest us. And if you aren’t willing to do that, then go and tell the lieutenant that you need to be reassigned. Because if you won’t, I will.”

He shot me a look but raised his hands in mock surrender. “Hey, no problem, compadre. I’m more than
happy to help out. I just wanted to let you know where I stand.”

We spent the rest of the day checking phone records, interviewing Karen Collins’s friends and acquaintances, and reinterviewing those of the Thompsons and of Alma Fletcher. But we still found nothing that seemed to connect the growing list of victims in any way.

Meanwhile, the media had gone into warp drive, exploiting the killings for every last possible ratings point and whipping the public into a frenzy. Not surprisingly, an aroused citizenry demanded an immediate arrest of the killer, along with the rescue and safe return of Beverly Thompson, wherever she might be by now. Reported sightings of Thompson continued to pour into the department from across the state and beyond, but none of the leads had panned out.

Since we had not yet found anything to connect the victims, I was beginning to fear that perhaps nothing did connect them, which was a very scary thought. If the victims had simply been chosen at random and murdered by some amoral thrill seeker, the difficulties in catching him would be multiplied exponentially, especially if the killer were as careful as this one appeared to be.

Without some thread winding through the victims’ lives that might suggest a direction in which to search for their common killer, we were left working virtually in the dark. We had no idea why the killer had begun this spree, we had no idea where to look for him, and we had no idea where he might strike next. Most important, we had virtually no hope of capturing him unless he made some stupid mistake and got caught in the act, or unless he bragged about his exploits to the wrong person and someone ratted him out. There was still a small chance that the little physical evidence we
had collected at the scenes might point us in the direction of a suspect, but I was not holding out a lot of hope for that, either.

The one anomaly in the entire case was the fact that the killer had kidnapped Beverly Thompson. In murdering Alma Fletcher and Karen Collins, the killer had apparently taken pains to ensure that his victim would be home alone at the time of the attack. Why had he not done so in the Thompson case?

Of course we still had no idea which of the Thompsons had been the killer’s target. If Mrs. Thompson was the target, why had the killer struck at a time when her husband was obviously at home?

It was entirely possible, of course, that David Thompson had been the target and that his wife had simply arrived home at exactly the wrong moment. But if that was the case, why had the killer kidnapped the woman rather than shooting her as well?

Almost certainly, he had not taken her for the purpose of extorting a ransom out of someone for her safe return. But then, Beverly Thompson was a very attractive woman. It was possible, I suppose, that if she had arrived on the scene unexpectedly, the killer might have made an impulsive decision to abduct her for some sexual purpose. And if that was the case, was he still holding her or had he already killed her and disposed of the body where it had not yet been discovered?

It was all enormously frustrating. But at this point, there was nothing we could do other than to push the investigation in every direction we could think of, hoping that somewhere, somehow, we would finally get the right tip or discover even a small piece of evidence that would point us in the direction of the clever son of a bitch who was now running us around in circles.

At eight o’clock on Saturday morning, I climbed the stairs to the Homicide Unit and found Frank Bohac,
the chief of police, pacing the floor in front of the lieutenant’s desk. Bohac had been back on the job for only two months following a serious heart attack, and the look on his face suggested that he might be ripe for another. Holding the editorial page of the morning paper in his right hand, he waved me into the office and said, “Have you seen this piece of crap, Richardson?”

I nodded and he said, “Yeah, well so did the mayor and practically every other asshole who’s got his name on a plaque glued to a door over there at city hall.”

Looking from me to the lieutenant, he continued, “The mayor called to ream my ass about it, and so I’m over here to ream yours. Where in the hell are we with this mess?”

“Practically nowhere,” Martin sighed, “unless Sean’s come up with something overnight that I don’t know about.”

I shook my head. In a voice that conveyed the frustration we were both feeling, the lieutenant said, “Look, Chief, I know that the media is killing us and that you’re under the gun here. But we’re working the case as hard as we can from every angle we can think of. The problem is that so far, we can’t find anything that links the victims in any way, save for the fact that they were all shot with the same gun. We haven’t got a single decent lead to follow, but it sure as hell isn’t for lack of trying.”

Bohac stopped pacing and perched on a corner of the lieutenant’s desk. He looked briefly to Martin and said, “Are we sure about that?” Turning to me, he said, “Look, Richardson, I understand your personal situation, and I do sympathize. I know you’re going through hell right now. Still, I can’t afford to have the lead detective on this case distracted for
any
reason, no matter how important. I need somebody who can be focused on the job twenty-four-seven, and given the way the
fucking thing is racing out of control, I’m frankly wondering if you should still be the guy.”

I took a deep breath while he stared me down. “With all due respect, sir, my personal situation has not in any way compromised the way in which I’ve handled this case. The team is working it full out, and it’s got everybody’s undivided attention—mine included. But as the lieutenant says, there’s no discernable pattern to the crimes. There’s no apparent connection among any of the victims, and the guy is leaving us nothing to work with.

“The one thing we do have,” I said, “is the little physical evidence that we’ve collected at the crime scenes, including some DNA. It’s at least possible that our guy is a prior offender and that his sample will be among the ones that have been analyzed and cataloged into the database. But it isn’t helping that we have to wait our turn over at the lab. If you could order those guys to jump our samples to the head of the line, that would be a huge help.”

“You think there’s a chance in hell?”

I shrugged. “We won’t know until we try. But every hour between now and the time the techs get to our samples is one more hour that this asshole is out on the streets.”

For a long moment, his eyes bored into mine. Then he sighed. “Yeah, okay. I’ll call over there as soon as I get back to the office and tell them that your case takes precedence over everything else they’re working on. Then we can all get down on our knees and pray that this cocksucker is on file. But either way, you need to show me something here, and you need to do it soon.”

He pitched the paper into the trash can and rose to leave. As he reached the door, he looked back to the lieutenant. “Keep me up to the minute on this, Russ. And for God’s sake, bring me some good news soon.
I’m tired of looking like an incompetent idiot every time some fuckin’ reporter throws a question at me.”

I left the lieutenant’s office and walked down the hall to find Maggie sitting at her desk, drinking a cup of coffee and reviewing some paperwork. Theoretically, it was her day off as well as mine, but in the middle of an active investigation, there was no such thing as a day off. She was wearing jeans and sporting a Metallica T-shirt, and to look at her, it seemed pretty clear that she hadn’t gotten any more sleep over the last few nights than I had.

Even so, I noticed that her gym bag had been dropped into the corner of the office and that her hair was still slightly damp from the shower. Obviously she’d sacrificed some time this morning that she might otherwise have spent in the sack so that she could go to the gym and put herself through what was always a very demanding workout. As I dropped into the chair next to her desk, she looked up from the report she was studying and wished me a good morning.

“Like hell,” I countered. “I just ran into the chief in the lieutenant’s office. He’s got a burr up his ass about our lack of progress on this case, and he’s wondering if the lieutenant shouldn’t assign the lead to somebody else.”

Maggie sighed heavily and shook her head. “That’s what you get for coming up the front stairs, Richardson. How many fuckin’ times do I have to remind you that if you’d come up the back way like I do, you wouldn’t walk right by the lieutenant’s office and you wouldn’t keep getting your ass in a sling like that.

“I swear to God, I think you’re learning disabled. But for that matter, if that’s what he’s thinking, then so is the chief. Maybe he could turn the case over to Doyle. Christ, I’ll bet that dickhead can’t even spell
Beverly Thompson
. And the thought that he might help us find
her sometime during this millennium boggles the imagination.”

“Yeah, you’re no doubt right about that. So what do you have there?”

“The phone records from the furniture store where Jack Collins works. He told us that immediately after the prospective customer called him at the store saying that he wanted to come in and look at bedroom furniture, Collins called his wife to tell her that he might be late getting home. The call from the store’s number to the Collins home was made at eight thirty-four. Three minutes before that, there’s a call to the store from a number that goes back to a gas station/ convenience store on Glendale Avenue. That’s gotta be the call from the alleged customer. I was thinking that we should get over there with an evidence tech and have him dust the phone and the area around it. I know the chances are between slim and fuckin’ none, but we might just get lucky and raise some useful prints.”