Stolen (23 page)

A
n hour later Ruby joined me in the interview room. Assuming her appearance mirrored my own, I looked absolutely horrible. I’m guessing we were both just a few notches above roadkill on the beauty scale—dirty, worn out, and utterly exhausted.

More people had joined us, so we went over our stories again, but by this point I’d lost track of how many times. Clegg was in the room, as were Gant and Kaminski. The chief of police, a burly guy named Eric Higgins, joined the party as well. They brought in a sketch artist even though I told them it was a waste of time. They could draw a guy wearing a ski mask and a Super Mario disguise all they liked, but it wasn’t going to help anybody catch a killer. I signed a stack of consent forms allowing the police to take possession of my computers, my phone, and such. I doubted much would come from it, and when I told a tech about the anonymous proxy servers used to avoid detection, the look he gave me suggested he thought the same.

I’d grown so accustomed to referring to our tormentor as Elliot Uretsky that it was a difficult adjustment for me to call him anything else. A couple of times during the interviews I referred to him as Uretsky, and that caused all sorts of confusion.

“The dead Uretsky or the guy you thought was Uretsky?” Kaminski would ask.

The press referred to him as the SHS Killer, but he wasn’t just a media label to me. We’d forged an entirely different sort of bond. I started to think of him not as Uretsky, but as “the Fiend.” My sobriquet befitted the man: a devil, a demon, a person of great wickedness. Uretsky might have been dead, but the Fiend was still very much alive.

The police were asking all sorts of questions, while I struggled to provide them with any useful answers. There simply wasn’t much information to share.

At some point an FBI profiler joined our gathering, introducing herself as Special Agent Andrea Brenner. Agent Brenner was thirtyish, athletically built, with shoulder-length chestnut hair, arched eyebrows, a pronounced nose, and wide brown eyes that could not conceal her enthusiasm for this case. Honest-to-goodness psychopaths weren’t an everyday occurrence, even for the FBI.

“How do you think this person found out you stole an identity he’d already stolen?” Brenner asked me.

“The Fiend, you mean?”

“If that’s what you want to call him.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m guessing he contacted UniSol for some reason. Maybe he was trying to use Uretsky’s insurance, same as we did. Maybe he was just trying to close up loose ends and found out someone was using the insurance. That would have raised a red flag because he had already killed Tanya and Elliot.”

“What do you think he wanted from you?” she asked.

“I told you already. He said he wanted to teach me how to become a real criminal.”

“Do you still think that’s true?”

“No,” I said.

“What do you think he really wants from you?”

I took a moment to answer. “I think he wants to see how far he can push me,” I said. “He’s curious to know what sorts of things he can make me do. He once asked me if a good man could be pushed by circumstance into committing evil acts. It’s like an experiment to him. He wants to inflict the maximum amount of torture on me as possible. He gets off on it.”

“In a sexual way?” Brenner asked.

Ruby looked exasperated. “You’re the expert,” she said. “We’re just his victims.”

Gant pressed his palms against the table and leaned his body between Brenner and me. “I know it’s a challenge for you to find out what makes this guy tick, Agent Brenner,” he said. “But we need to figure out who this guy is first.”

“We have the same goal,” Brenner said.

“I already gave you two names of people he could be,” I said.

Kaminski nodded. “Yeah, the purse snatcher from the Brookline bar and”—he glanced down at his notes—“this Carl Swain fellow from Medford.”

Ruby flashed me a look—one that said she still hadn’t ruled out Clegg as a possible suspect. I guessed her theory held even more validity, in that the Fiend could be anybody. He could be a priest, a gas station attendant, a teacher, a purse snatcher, a level three sex offender, even a cop. He could even be a friend. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to believe that Clegg was involved.

“Any luck tracking down either of those men?” Chief Higgins asked Clegg.

“We’ve got detectives on it,” Clegg said, checking his watch. “It’s three in the morning right now. We’ll go see them in a couple hours. The purse snatcher is Edwin Valdez. He lives in Everett with his girlfriend. We’ve got Swain’s address in Medford.”

“A couple of hours?” I said, sounding incredulous. “What are you talking about, a couple of hours? Go get these guys right now. Go search their homes! Tear their places apart, and start with Swain, because that’s our guy. The more I think about it, the more sure I am. His neighbor told us he was watching Tanya Uretsky every chance he got. He lives on the same street as the Uretskys. He has a criminal record, for crying out loud.”

Clegg kept his composure, though my outburst had rumpled his suit just a bit more. “We can’t go get a search warrant based on your suspicions, John,” he said. “We can go talk to him. We can ask for his cooperation. But we have no probable cause for a search warrant. No evidence. Nothing we can give to a judge. I’m sorry, but that’s not how it works.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I shouted.

“Take it easy, John,” Ruby said, gripping my arm.

“No, I’m not going to take it easy!” I knocked over my chair as I stood up. “One of these two guys, Swain or Valdez, took my mother-in-law and tried to get me to burn her alive. He used the fingers of four people, four now dead people, to parody some proverb. He kidnapped women. He threatened their lives. He murdered. There is a monster out there who wants to keep hurting people, including my wife and me. So I’m not going to just take it easy. You guys need to do your jobs and go get this fucker. Now!”

Higgins went red in the face. “May I remind you, son, that we can still arrest you for the felonies you’ve confessed to committing? Do you know how thin and tenuous a thread you’re currently dangling from? You do as we say, or our cooperation ends right here and right now, and off to jail you go.
That’s
how we do our job.”

“John, it’s late,” Clegg said. “You’ve been through a lot. Trust us, we’re going to investigate.”

“It’s interesting,” Agent Brenner said, “that with John all the victims have been women, but he killed a man. He killed Elliot Uretsky. Why? What significance does that have?”

Blank stares all around.

Chief Higgins rose from his chair, his knees creaking as he stood, his face reverting back to the less threatening shade of pink. “Get someone to drive these two back to their home—wherever they live. But I want you both back here at this station at nine o’clock tomorrow morning to work with Special Agent Brenner. It’s not a request. It’s an order.”

“Yes, of course,” Ruby said. “We’ll be here.”

“I want two patrols put outside their apartment,” Higgins said.

“Right on that,” Gant said.

“We’re going to put a task force on this,” Brenner said, addressing Ruby and me. “So they’ll be quite a few more agents involved starting tomorrow.”

“That’s fine,” Ruby said. “Whatever you need from us.”

Chief Higgins turned to Clegg. “I want you to release the identities of the two victims to the media. Thanks to some freaking leak in our department, the press already knows that the body parts recovered from the Fells are linked to the other two murders. The SHS Killer is getting a lot of attention, and rightly so. We might as well get as much information as we can from the public. Who knows what it might bring?”

Clegg nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said. “We’ll get right on it.”

We stayed another fifteen minutes or so while more plans were being hatched to get the public messaging and communication strategies in order. Meanwhile, I was making plans of my own. I was thinking about how I was going to get the police the probable cause they needed to execute a search warrant on Carl Swain’s house.

M
aybe we slept three hours that night. It wasn’t restorative sleep by any means, but nature had plans for us we simply couldn’t refuse. I don’t know what I dreamt about in those few restless hours, but Ruby woke me several times to stop my screaming. We hadn’t heard from the Fiend since the discovery of the Uretskys’ bodies—or heads, to be precise—and that was more than a little unsettling, like knowing we were swimming near a ravenous shark but having no idea where in the murky water it lurked.

We weren’t trying to hide from the Fiend. No, we wanted him to call us. In fact, the police gave us back our phones, hoping that he would call. Clegg told me that they installed some application that would help to triangulate the signal and track him down. Basically, to keep that shark metaphor going, they were chumming the waters for the Fiend, and using me as bait. They tapped our home phones as well, both in Brookline and in Somerville.

Speaking of Somerville, the Spanish professors who were renting our place had decided to move out, not surprisingly. Poor skittish Spaniards didn’t even bother to ask for their security deposit back.

Our names hadn’t been released to the press, so we were able to return unmolested to Harvard Street. For the moment, at least, we were unknown equations in an escalating manhunt that had every Boston resident glued to the news reports. Patrol cars were stationed outside our apartment, and the police were keeping a close watch over us, hoping the Fiend was doing the same. Funny, though, even with all that extra attention we were getting, neither Ruby nor I felt very safe.

To say the SHS Killer—I’m using the media’s name for him here, not mine—was a major news story didn’t do the coverage any justice. Every few minutes—my perception—television broadcasts were interrupted with late breaking developments or safety tips for the millions of citizens on edge. Most every report included the smiling faces of the SHS Killer’s four known victims: Rhonda, Jenna, Elliot, and Tanya.

I don’t know where they got the pictures of Elliot and Tanya. Perhaps they were photographs released by the police, maybe taken from the couple’s home. Their images filled me with incredible sadness. He was a normal-looking guy—curly dark hair, nice smile, friendly eyes, a bit on the geeky side. She was shy-looking, and the way she dressed, floral blouse underneath a sweater vest, reminded me of a class picture from the 1970s. I knew I wasn’t responsible for their deaths—not like Rhonda or Jenna—but we were still connected and in a very profound way. Though I never knew the Uretskys personally, we had grown close. Seeing their pictures humanized the tragedy, as if two friends of mine had been killed.

We got a ride back to the police station early the next morning, bleary-eyed and logy, but ready to get to work with the FBI’s newly formed task force. The meeting got off to a late start because the unit chiefs from the Behavioral Analysis Unit-2 (Crimes against Adults) and the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program were flying in from different states. A supervisory senior resident agent from the Boston office was on hand, as well as other agents too numerous to remember and name.

After several hours we were able to work up a preliminary profile of our killer. What this accomplished in the grand scheme of things I couldn’t say, but we were there to cooperate and answer as many questions as possible. We decided the SHS Killer (the Fiend) wasn’t a dysfunctional loner. He was highly intelligent, and had not just tech smarts. He’d shown himself to be supremely organized, disciplined, too. This guy understood human nature—for instance, he knew how to lure Winnie to Boston and was well aware how hard it would be for Ruby to prostitute herself to a stranger. Ruby nearly broke down when Winnie’s name came up in conversation. Her mother was still in a coma and might very well become the Fiend’s fifth known victim, which would make me an unwitting accomplice to her murder.

The profiling work continued. The Fiend could be hiding in plain sight, married, perhaps even a father. He liked games, and liked computer gaming especially. He could blend into his surroundings. He didn’t stick out. Winnie trusted him for a reason. We knew he was a white male because I saw the color of his skin, although not his face. He wasn’t motivated by sex. Instead, he satisfied his urges by seeing how far he could push people, and then took delight in their killing, using their body parts to make a statement. He enjoyed inflicting unconscionable suffering and pain and didn’t end his victim’s agony quickly. He certainly wasn’t ending ours. He preferred his victims to languish in their misery, though we didn’t know why he’d killed only one male—that we knew of.

This question continued to bother Agent Brenner.

We agreed he took enormous pleasure in watching his victims suffer. Brenner postulated that he used Boston as his anchor point, and that most if not all of his killings happened in this state. That gave everyone an added sense of urgency to make a positive ID of Tinesha, because she might still be in danger.

“He has impulse control,” Ruby said at one point.

“Why is that?” Brenner asked.

“He hasn’t called us back since we dug up the Uretskys. If he couldn’t control his urges, he would have tried to get in touch with us.”

Brenner seemed impressed. “Maybe he knew we tapped your phones.”

“No,” Ruby said. “He’s smart enough to get around that. There’s a reason he hasn’t been in touch. Like he’s planning something.”

No one disagreed with Ruby, and by the looks of it, nobody liked what she had to say.

We came to some other conclusions in the roughly three-hour session. For interpersonal traits we listed glibness, superficial charm, and a grandiose sense of self. But all this profiling meant nothing to me. It’s hard to care about narrowing in on a killer’s motivation when he’s got you in his sights.

“Could he be a sex offender?” I asked, thinking of Carl Swain.

I’d seen Swain’s mug shot, so I knew what the guy looked like. Square head, hard-pinched face, short hair, and beady, close-set eyes. He looked meaner than his mother, which surprised me.

“There’s nothing in the profile to say he couldn’t,” Brenner said, “but we don’t think the attacks are sexually motivated.”

“Maybe he has a different motive for adults than he does for children,” I suggested.

I took a glance around the crowded second-floor conference room and saw some head nods and an equal number of shoulders shrug.

“Could be,” Brenner said. “We’ll add that to our profile.”

The FBI agents broke into a discussion about “agenty” things. They brought up the need for a preplanned task force model—no idea what that meant—and a robust information management system to track tips and leads. Agent Brenner thanked us for our time and escorted us out of the conference room.

We returned home—back to Harvard Street—like Atlas supporting the heavens on our sagging shoulders. Clegg was coming over any minute to give us a progress report, and after that we were going back to the hospital to visit Winnie. I wanted to know if they had interviewed Carl Swain yet, and what, if anything, had they gotten from their chat with Edwin Valdez, the purse snatcher? Did Ruth Shane offer up anything helpful? But mostly I was interested in Swain—the guy with a cancer of the soul.

“I’m glad the profile we worked up doesn’t rule Swain out as a suspect,” I said to Ruby.

“Nothing we discussed today rules Clegg out, either,” Ruby said. I shook my head in vehement disagreement. “So he’s killing strangers because he blames me for all the problems in his life?”

“No, John,” Ruby said. “He wants to inflict the maximum possible punishment on you.”

“Do you really and truly believe that, honestly?”

“If I had to rank our suspects, I’d put Swain at the top of the list, too. But it’s just that I’ve been having this gut feeling—”

“Ruby, the universe doesn’t always give us the answer we seek.”

“It’s worked for me every time,” Ruby said.

I was about to say that I thought she was way off base when our apartment buzzer rang. I pressed the intercom, expecting to hear Clegg’s voice.

“Hey, John. It’s Officer Walker,” said the policeman parked outside and assigned to keep watch over the apartment. “I’ve got a guy here named Henry Dobson. Says he knows you. Says he’s an inspector from UniSol Health and he wants to come up.”