Prey (4 page)

Mendoza walked out of the interview room, leaving Winter alone. The door closed quietly behind her and for the second time that night he was forced into a situation where all he could do was watch. It was like being back in the diner again, watching through the window as the blonde walked away.

He glanced down at the handcuffs, glanced up at his reflection in the one-way glass. Things were not going how he had imagined, and that concerned him. The way he’d seen this playing out, Mendoza had come charging to his rescue. In his fantasy she’d been pissed and cranky like always, but at least she’d got him out of these damn handcuffs and they’d got straight down to the business of looking into the Reed murders.

Except that hadn’t happened.

Mendoza hadn’t told him where she was going, or why. She hadn’t said anything. She’d just got up from the table and left the room. And why shouldn’t she? Winter had been on the other side of the table enough times to know how this game was played. Right now, she was watching from behind the mirror, planning her next move. And while she did that all he could do was sit here getting more pissed off and frustrated with every passing second.

It wasn’t a complete surprise that she was acting like this. One of the first things he’d learned about Mendoza was that she didn’t take things at face value. For the most part this was a good thing, but not always. What was happening here proved that.

Mendoza was still pretty much a mystery to him. He’d done some digging, but hadn’t come up with much. Everything he’d discovered so far was connected to her work. He hadn’t found out anything personal. Again, this highlighted how good she was at compartmentalising. She’d been careful to keep her work and personal lives separate.

One thing that everyone seemed to agree on was that she was a good cop. Winter had first-hand experience of how thorough she was. The work she’d done on the McCarthy case had been exemplary. She’d joined the NYPD after she left college and Winter expected that she’d stay until she retired. He’d met a lot of cops over the years. Some did the job for the money and some did it because it was what they were born to do. Mendoza was born to do this. No question about it.

He replayed Omar’s murder in his head. He was looking for something he might have missed, something that might help him to get out of here, but whichever way he approached it he came up empty-handed.

The interview room was feeling much smaller than when he first got here, the walls beginning to close in. He wanted to stand up and pace. He wanted to go and study the mirror. He wanted to bang on it with his fist again. He wanted to do all the things that he’d observed time and again from the other side of the glass. Even though he was innocent, he was beginning to wonder. That was the effect this room was having on him, which was as it should be. This was a place designed to encourage guilt. It might say ‘interview room’ on the door, but make no mistake this was a cell, albeit one without a bed or a toilet. In fact it was worse than a cell. It was more like limbo. If things went south he was heading to hell. If they played out how they should then he would soon be a free man again. The uncertainty was like torture.

His father had been in prison for two decades before he was executed. Winter had occasionally wondered how he’d kept going for all those years. If their roles had been reversed, he doubted he would have survived. He might have managed a couple of years, but at some point he would have taken matters into his own hands. A life without freedom was no life at all.

The door finally opened and Mendoza came back in carrying a laptop. He expected her to sit in the same seat as earlier. She didn’t. Instead, she put the computer down on the table and came around to his side. He gave her a quizzical look, but she wasn’t giving anything away.

‘Show me your hands.’

He answered with another look, and when she didn’t respond he lifted his hands up. She produced a key and unlocked the cuffs. Winter rubbed his wrists and watched her walk back around to the chair on the other side of the table. He waited until she was seated then gave her a smile. ‘Thanks. You have no idea how good it is to have those things off. So what happened to change your mind?’

Mendoza answered him by opening the laptop and hitting a couple of keys. She turned the computer around so that he could see the screen. The video that was playing had the low definition of a cheap CCTV camera. The picture wasn’t great, but it was good enough.

According to the time stamp, the film had been shot at eighteen minutes after one this morning. The screen was taken up with a distorted blurry wide-angle shot of a store that was on the same street as the diner. A couple walked past, arms wrapped around each other. They were laughing and clearly having a good time. Nothing for almost a minute then a woman appeared. She was walking fast, her eyes fixed on the sidewalk ahead. Nothing for another thirty seconds then the blonde walked into the shot. Because of the angle, Winter could only see part of her face, but he recognised her from the way her shoulders rolled as she walked.

‘That’s her,’ he said.

‘That’s what we figured.’

Mendoza leant over the top of the laptop and hit another couple of keys. A new video started playing. The time on the screen had jumped forward to three minutes to two, but everything else was almost identical to the first film clip. Same street, same store, same angle. One second passed, two, three. A man walked in front of the store.

‘And that’s me.’

Mendoza hit another couple of keys and a third film clip started playing. The clock in the corner of the screen had jumped forward to twenty-one after two. The woman walked past the store again, this time in the opposite direction. Mendoza hit pause, freezing her in mid-stride.

‘On the basis of this Lieutenant Jones thinks we should give you the benefit of the doubt.’ Her voice was flat and lifeless, her face tense.

‘And you clearly disagree with his decision. So, what? You’d rather I was a murderer? Then again that wouldn’t reflect well on you, would it? It would mean you missed that one the whole way through the Ryan McCarthy case.’ He smiled. ‘You’re not going to Vegas, are you?’

Mendoza glared at him. ‘The good news is my forced leave has been cancelled. The bad news is that until we have this woman in custody, I’ve been ordered to assist you in apprehending her.’

‘That’s good to hear.’

‘No it’s not. There’s nothing good about this situation whatsoever.’

‘You get to go to Hartwood.’

‘I’d rather go to the dentist.’

‘And just so we’re clear here, that’s a joke, right? You don’t really want to go to the dentist. I mean, nobody in their right mind wants to go to the dentist.’

Mendoza shot him a dirty look. ‘Okay, you need to tell me what happened again, from beginning to end. And I want the full story. Everything. Don’t leave anything out. Got it? Not a single goddamn thing.’

Winter went through the whole thing again, only this time Mendoza broke up his narrative with questions. Poking, prodding, clarifying. As far as he could tell she didn’t get anything new. Omar’s murder was seared into his memory and he’d covered everything in full the first time around.

‘You seem pretty convinced that this woman murdered the Reeds,’ she said when he’d finished.

‘I am. What she did to Omar proves that she’s capable of killing. And why leave that newspaper behind? She was pointing us in the direction of the Reed murders for a reason. It’s the only reason I can see.’

‘Makes sense to me. Okay, so let me make sure I’ve got this straight. This woman was here when you arrived, she came over to your table, spoke to you, stabbed the cook, then left. And the attack was completely unprovoked.’

Winter nodded. ‘She accused me of not taking her seriously, but, yeah, I’d say that the attack was unprovoked.’

‘And you’ve never seen her before?’

Winter shook his head. ‘Nope.’

‘And she used your first name?’

A nod.

Mendoza frowned. ‘So she was waiting specifically for you. Which means she’s been tailing you and you didn’t notice. Which means you’re losing your touch.’

‘This has nothing to do with me losing my touch and everything to do with her being the real deal.’

 ‘
The real deal?
’

‘We’re agreed that most criminals are idiots, right? After all, that’s how they get caught. Every now and again, though, you come across one who’s smart, one who plans everything down to the last detail. These are the ones who love what they do, and want to keep on doing it. That’s what we’re dealing with here.’

Mendoza laughed and shook her head. ‘Of course you’re going to say that. I mean, what’s the alternative? That you were outsmarted by an idiot?’

Winter ignored the dig and shut his eyes. She was trying to push his buttons and that really wasn’t helping. He went through everything in his head again, trying to see how it all fitted together. The camera added a new dimension. He opened his eyes.

‘Go back and check the camera footage. You’ll see that she followed me to the diner on Monday night, and Tuesday. She would have visited a third time as well, possibly during the day, to scope the place out. Because I’d been there two nights running she assumed that I’d go there again tonight and timed it so she arrived before I got there. We’re looking for someone who’s around five-nine, but if she’s wearing heels she’ll appear taller. Chances are she won’t have blonde hair during her earlier visits, and I doubt she’ll be dressed in jeans and leather. The hair was fake. Eye colour, too.’

Mendoza considered all this for a second. ‘I’ll get someone to look into it.’

‘I wouldn’t bother. It’s a waste of time.’

‘But it was your idea.’

Winter shrugged. ‘And now that I’ve had time to think it through properly I’m telling you it’s a waste of time. All you’ll do is prove that she’s methodical, and that’s something I’m prepared to take at face value. It’s a tangent we could do without. We need to focus on the road ahead, not the one that’s disappearing in the rear-view mirror. She’s given us Hartwood and the Reeds, and she’s done that for a reason. I want to know what that reason is.’

They fell silent and Winter glanced over at his reflection in the one-way mirror. In his mind’s eye he saw the woman cross the street and disappear around the corner. He heard a ghostly echo of Elvis singing ‘Suspicious Minds’
.

‘Where do you stand on the nature versus nurture debate?’ he asked.

‘I think both arguments are valid. Some people are born bad, some are made bad.’

‘I’d agree with that. And in my opinion this one was born bad.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

Because I looked into her eyes and saw myself reflected back.
The thought flitted through his head but didn’t reach his lips. Instead, he said, ‘Do this as much as I have and you get a feel for what flavour of crazy you’re dealing with. This woman’s a psychopath. Omar’s murder was all about control and manipulation. She’s toying with me. Basically, she’s saying that she owns the board.’

‘Okay, I can buy that. So, the next question has got to be why. Why is she’s doing this? From what you’ve told me, we’re clearly dealing with an organised offender, right?’

Winter nodded. Broadly speaking, serial killers fell into two categories, organised and disorganised. Dr Harold Shipman was one of the most prolific murderers in recorded history, and a perfect example of an organised killer. He was intelligent, ruthless and manipulative. He’d been active in the UK for more than two decades, and during that time it was estimated that he killed more than two hundred and fifty of his patients. Disorganised killers were a lot more chaotic in their approach. As a result they tended to have smaller body counts and were usually caught more quickly.

‘So why target you?’ Mendoza asked again.

Winter shook his head. ‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Okay, assuming that she was following you, surely you would have noticed. You would have seen something, in your peripheral vision perhaps, or picked up that something wasn’t quite right. Even if she was using a disguise, you’re too switched on for that not to have happened.’

He met her gaze. ‘Was that a compliment?’

‘No, I’m just stating a fact.’

‘The reason I didn’t notice was because I had no reason to.’

‘Explain.’

He took a deep breath. ‘Okay, I found the diner by accident a couple of nights ago. Because the food was good I came back again last night. Ditto for tonight. Three nights in a row establishes a pattern. Now, counter-surveillance 101 dictates that you mix up your schedule. If you’re going somewhere on a daily basis, you never go the same way two days running. And you never eat at the same diner two days in a row, never mind three days.’

Winter and Mendoza locked eyes for longer this time. She nodded for him to go on.

‘But the Ryan McCarthy case wasn’t the sort of case where I was going to be targeted, and I’m not in the habit of employing counter-surveillance techniques just in case. That road leads to paranoia and lunacy. If needs be, I’ll up my level of vigilance, but there has to be a credible threat. Ryan was a shy boy. He had his fun in the dark and the shadows. There’s no way he’d be brave enough to go after the people hunting him.’

Mendoza studied him. ‘It’s okay to admit that you screwed up, you know.’

Before Winter could respond, there was a knock on the door and Hitchin came in. He was flushed and breathing fast, and he was carrying a small notepad. If anything, his suit looked even more crumpled than it had done earlier. His face was just as forgettable, though.

‘You wanted to know as soon as I heard back from the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office.’

‘What have you got?’ Mendoza asked.

‘Okay, I can confirm that Lester and Melanie Reed were the victims of a double homicide that took place six years ago in Hartwood, a small town upstate, twenty miles from Rochester. I can also confirm that as far as the sheriff’s department is concerned, the case is closed. The murders were carried out by a local kid.’

‘So they’re not looking for anyone?’

Hitchin shook his head.

‘And you’re sure about this?’

Hitchin laughed. ‘As sure as I can be given that it’s the middle of the night and I’m talking with someone who lives out there in the middle of nowhere.’

Mendoza turned to Winter. ‘Bang goes your theory that your mystery woman killed the Reeds.’

Winter frowned. ‘So why draw our attention to the murders? What’s that all about?’

‘No idea. Maybe she’s just screwing with you.’ Mendoza turned back to Hitchin. ‘Have you got a name for this kid?’

The detective flipped his pad open. ‘Yeah. Nelson Price.’

‘What can you tell me about him?’

‘Absolutely nothing other than he was twenty-one when the murders took place. That’s another downside with it being the middle of the night. I’m talking to people who are accessing computer records rather than people who were actually involved in the investigation.’

‘Any idea where Nelson’s being held?’

Another shake of the head. ‘Sorry, I wasn’t able to get that information.’

‘Who was the lead investigator?’

Hitchin consulted his notepad again. ‘The person I spoke with said it was most likely someone called Jeremiah Lowe. He was the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department’s number one go-to guy in homicide at the time. Unfortunately it doesn’t really help since he’s dead. There is some good news, though. Hartwood’s Police Department was first on the scene, and the same chief of police is still there. Some guy by the name of Birch. I tried their number, but got diverted to the answering machine. No real surprise there. Hartwood’s tiny. They probably operate on office hours.’

‘Anything else?’

Another shake of the head. ‘That’s it for now.’

‘I need you to get someone to take another look at the camera footage. We think that Winter was under surveillance.’ She smiled across the table at Winter. ‘Roughly what time were you there on Monday and Tuesday night?’

‘Around two.’

‘On both nights?’

‘On both nights.’

She turned back to Hitchin. ‘She might be in disguise, so bear that in mind. Also, get someone to check the daytime footage for Tuesday and Wednesday as well.’

‘Will do. Anything else?’

‘No, that’s all for now.’

Hitchin left, closing the door gently behind him.

‘You’re wasting your time,’ said Winter.

‘Okay, here’s how this works: you butt out and let me do my thing, and I’ll do my best to butt out and let you do yours. Understand?’

He answered with a smile.

‘I’m serious.’

Winter waited for her to continue, but she was done for now. He gave it another couple of seconds to be sure, then closed his eyes and pictured himself back in the diner again. He replayed the conversation with the woman, looking for something he might have missed and coming up with nothing. He could hear the tone of her voice, the pitch, the slight whispering tail-off at the end of her sentences. He could see those bright green eyes studying him from the other side of the table. What he couldn’t see was what the hell she was playing at. He opened his eyes and saw Mendoza watching him across the table.

‘What’s going on here, Winter?’

‘I was just asking myself much the same thing.’

‘And?’

‘And I’m pretty sure that we’re not going to get answers sitting around here. I vote we head on up to Hartwood. If we leave now we’ll miss the morning rush.’

Mendoza was staring at him like he’d just suggested two weeks in Vegas.

‘It’s only upstate New York,’ he added. ‘It’s not like you need shots and a passport. If we leave now, I reckon we’d get there by ten, maybe half-nine if we really push it.’

‘Jesus, you’re serious about this. You heard Hitchin. Nelson Price did it. Hauling our asses up there will not change that fact. Believe me, I’ve got better things to do with my time than this. Read my lips: I am not going to Hartwood.’

‘Is this the point where I have to remind you that Lieutenant Jones has ordered you to assist me?’ Winter smiled. ‘You want to know what would help me out here? What would help me out is for you to get your hands on a really fast car.’