Two Graves (A Kesle City Homicide Novel) (32 page)

Before he was in the doorway for two minutes, someone bustled out and the pictures were creased.

The pictures were too large, too bulky. They would also have to be bound together. Bound in a way that would allow them to be flipped through easily but secure enough to prevent them from being dropped and scattered. A loose leaf binder would be ideal but still too bulky. The killer would stand out if he was constantly checking faces against a large binder. Someone would remember him and Mann knew this killer wanted to remain invisible.

Mann patted his pocket where his own notebook always rested. Yes, something that fit nicely in a suit pocket and where the pages could be removed.

The killer could use something like that. He could slip it out of his pocket and glance at the pictures. Except when it was being used, the pictures would be hidden from view. No large binder to explain to co workers or friends. The pictures could remain the killer’s own secret.

At that moment, looking down at the file folder, it hit him and he hurried back to the warehouse.

*

“So, his pictures are the same size as the ones you provided us?”

“Yes, sir.”

Haynes voice came through with a hollow echo over the speaker phone. The detectives sitting around the conference table all had puzzled looks on their faces. Mann had gathered them together while waiting for a call back from Haynes.

“And you didn’t provide him with smaller versions?”

“We could have but we didn’t.”

“Thanks very much, Mr. Haynes. I’ll be in touch if anything comes up.” Mann pressed the disconnect button and sat back in his chair, a satisfied smile on his face.

“What gives?” asked Kydd, recognizing the look.

“I went out onto the street with the pictures. I was trying to work out how the killer operated. What I ended up with was a bunch of dropped and bent photographs. The things are too bulky to handle.”

“You were hoping the killer had got smaller versions from Haynes?”

“No,” interrupted Greer. “You were hoping he
didn’t
get them from Haynes.”

“Move to the head of the class.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Where would you go to get a smaller version of these?” Mann asked, drumming his finger on the stack of pictures.

Ashdown snapped his finger. “I had a map of this reception hall for my parent’s fortieth anniversary party. It was too big to fit in the invitations so we got it reduced. We used a printer to do it. Made them smaller and cut them for us and everything.”

The implications began to sink in. Several swear words circled the table and everyone pulled their chairs closer to the table. The collective exhaustion was thrown off by the excitement of the new clue.

“I want every available man looking for printers, photocopy places, Kinko’s, hotel business centers, the works. I’ll get Buma compiling a list. For now, we’ll concentrate on an area around the first killings. I still think we have a geographic link for the first killings. If that doesn’t work, we’ll spread out farther. Get on it.”

The detectives filed out and Mann remained seated. He was glad that none of them had voiced the most obvious problem with the theory. What if the killer worked in an office with the proper equipment?

Degget had painstakingly compiled all of Flem’s arrests for his career. The pattern was beginning to emerge and Degget couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Bev was right. It was all in the numbers.

Assuming that the estimates were right and Angelino ran over sixty percent of the organized crime in the city, the arrests should follow the same basic statistics. Angelino ran a good operation but criminals are stupid, no getting around that. And stupid people get arrested. But Angelino’s guys weren’t getting arrested enough.

Sure, there were some big busts, some major drugs off the streets but nothing that really amounted to heavy damage.

Degget walked along the wall looking at the different organizational charts he had taped up of the various criminal families in Kesle over the past fifteen years. They detailed the arrests, deaths and murders of all the players. Most of the other families had arrests and plenty of deaths in the upper echelon. Since Angelino took over, his organization hadn’t seen any of these types of reorganizations. Thorman was the most recent death and he was just a low level number cruncher. Something wasn’t adding up.

Just maybe, he and Mann were looking for the same rat.

Degget started to sift through the data again when his computer signaled a new message.

Degget read the message. He read it a second time and picked up his cell phone, his investigation into Flem instantly forgotten. He was grabbing his badge and gun as he listened to the phone ring at the other end. He walked out the door when it was finally answered.

“Kydd, we got a hit. Ya, I’ll meet you in twenty.”

“He was very impatient. That is what I remember most about him.”

“You do the work in an hour, don’t you?” Mann asked. Tetrault had brought in the owner of Monteith Printing when she remembered a job that matched the description.

“Normally,” Sylvia Monteith replied. “The machine was down though and the service man took his sweet time getting there. Anyway, the guy kept calling and asking if the pictures were ready.”

“And you think you can describe him?”

“I’ll try,” she said, hesitating. “It was a while ago. I do remember he was kinda tubby.”

“That’s all we can ask.” Mann got up to leave as the sketch artist came in. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

“Uh, Lieutenant?”

“Yes?”

“This guy, I mean, like, do you really think he’s the Southside Slasher?”

“He is definitely one of our suspects, ma’am.”

“The guy I saw didn’t look like a crazy,” she said as Mann left. “He didn’t look like anything.”

Mann wandered over to where the detectives were sorting through the records. “How’s it going?”

Each of the detectives and uniformed officers looked up and mumbled something that Mann knew would be better left unheard. He turned to Greer who was slowly working through his pile. “What’s the problem?”

“The problem is the lady’s filing system. It doesn’t exist,” Greer answered. “She just lumps everything together. So far, we haven’t come up with any easy way to sort through them. And for a place with so many copiers, she has never touched a computer for her accounting. Everything is hand written by a dyslexic chicken.”

“How have you separated the piles?”

“I just divided them up,” Tetrault said. Mann had forgotten that Tetrault had brought the information in and was therefore leading the investigation. “The lady does some kind of business. She must be doing two hundred jobs a day. We’re working backwards.”

“Not from the present?”

“No, sir. I didn’t see the sense in that.” Mann sensed the pride in Tetrault’s voice at having been one step up on Mann. “I figured to cut the work down as much as possible. I started the search at the date of the Yeck kill.”

Greer turned to Tetrault with the same look of disbelief that Mann wore. “From the Yeck kill?”

“Yes, sir,” Tetrault said, becoming worried.

“Bloody hell! You mean we’ve wasted the last three hours?” Greer’s big voice boomed.

“Tetrault,” Mann said, barely keeping his anger in check, “get in my office. Greer, clear this out of the way and start at the right date. Work forward from there.”

“Sure, Lou.”

Tetrault was already standing in front of his desk when Mann slammed the door to his office. He took a deep breath to calm himself and leaned against the front of the desk.

“Do you read the updates?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What makes the Yeck killing different from the rest?”

“Overall? The lack of planning.”

“Very good. And, when did the killer approach Haynes for the pictures?”

“After the Yeck killing,” Tetrault said slowly.

“Logically speaking, how would the killer get reductions made of pictures he does not have?”

“Sorry, Lou. I wasn’t thinking.”

“Some habits are hard to break. Go and get some sandwiches. When you get back, get real busy. I don’t want to see you much for the rest of the afternoon.”

“Yes, sir.”

*

Greer’s face said it all.

“OK, this is not good news, right?” Mann said to Greer.

“Nope. We did find the receipt. Bloody bookkeeping is a mess but we found a receipt that matches what Mr. Haynes said he gave him,” Greer said, holding up a sheet of paper and reading off it. “Twenty-three reductions of 8x10 photos. Cash and the same address as what he gave Haynes.”

“Damn it,” Mann swore. “I really had hopes for this one.”

Mann sat quietly for a moment and finally pushed away from his desk.

“I need a Pepsi and then I want everyone in the evidence room.”

Mann walked to the fridge and grabbed a Pepsi, realized it was still warm and dug around until he found a cold one. He popped the top and stood drinking it while he thought about his next step. He watched Deputy Inspector Livermore shaking hands with a tall, lanky man in a three piece suit.

As the man left the warehouse, Livermore came over to Mann. “That was Dr. Arthur Baskin. He’s in private practice but consults with the Donway Institute of Abnormal Psychology."

Baskin has stopped at the outer doorway and was looking back into the warehouse. Mann sized up the doctor. Clean shaven with short, wavy hair, Mann didn’t think he looked like a shrink specializing in abnormal psychology. Mann always thought that those doctors should look slightly scattered, rumpled. More disturbed and confused by what they saw and heard from their patients. “What’s he after?”

“He just got back from an extended tour of Europe. Lecturing about our American serial killers. He offered any help he could give.”

“Keep his number,” Mann said. “We might just need him.”

Taking another drink, he realized the can was already empty. He tossed it in the recycle bin and took another can from the fridge as he briefed Livermore on the latest failure.

*

Mann walked to the front of the room and picked up a marker on the way. He stood in front of the large board at the front and blinked from the bright light of the projector. He looked at the detectives in front of him, noting that a few of the faces he expected to see weren’t there. Degget, Kydd and Blaak were all missing but he saw the same look of disappointment on the rest of the faces. Greer’s discovery of the bogus address had circulated around the room and everyone knew they were back to square one.

Well, not exactly square one, Mann thought.

Mann took the cap off the pen and turned toward the board.

“Lieutenant!” yelled someone at the back.

“Yes?” Mann asked, looking at the kid in the back. He had long hair pulled back in a pony tail, a beard and was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt with “Humans Suck” written across it.

“Uh, sir, that’s the new Smart Board we just installed. You don’t use those markers. Just use that pen there,” he said, pointing to the tray at the bottom of the big white board.

Mann capped the pen and tossed it on a table. Picking up the black pen, he looked at the piece of plastic. It was a toy marker.

“Just pretend it’s a marker, sir. It works the same.”

Mann started writing and was amazed when the words seemed to appear on the screen. He wrote WHAT WE KNOW across the top.

“You’ve all seen the pictures that Mr. Haynes brought in. We all know we have our guy. At least, we know he is using these pictures to find his victims. But our efforts to trace him through the pictures haven’t panned out. What we need is just one solid piece of this puzzle.”

“And I think we have it, LT,” Blaak said from the back of the room. “We got the year book!”

Blaak brought the book up to Mann who quickly opened it and began flipping through. He walked over to one of the boards with the pictures from Haynes. It only took him a moment to see that they did indeed have the correct book. All the other detectives and uniformed officers began to crowd around to see the book.

“Lieutenant?”

Mann looked over at the guy in the black T-shirt.

“Lieutenant, if you give me the book, I can put it up on the screen for you.”

Mann looked doubtful but handed the book over to the young kid who walked across the room to a table. He laid the book under a device that looked like a desk lamp. Suddenly, the screen was filled with the image of the year book. The picture had barely focused when the kid pulled the book out from under the desk lamp, which Mann now realized was some sort of projector. “Wait, put that back up, that was perfect.”

“Just give me a second, sir,” the tech said patiently.

Page after page appeared and disappeared on the screen. In about 3 minutes, the tech shut the book and walked up to the screen. Using just his finger, he started to pull files up on the screen like a regular computer.

“We already digitized all the evidence,” he said, as the pictures from Hayes were lined up along the top of the screen. The tech ignored his audience and began working on the yearbook. Nobody interrupted him, all too fascinated watching him manipulate the images. In less than five minutes, he had isolated and blown up each matching image from the year book.

“This is definitely the book that he used,” the tech said. “You know anything about your killer?”

“I think we can assume he is a student, rather than a teacher,” Mann said. The others in the room murmured their assent. “My guess is he is a member of the same class.”

Again, the tech manipulated the images. On the screen, a five by six grid appeared. Pictures popped into the grid, filling all but two boxes. Each picture had a name beneath the image.

“There you go,” the tech said. “If he was in that class, and not one of the aged photos, one of those guys is your killer.”

Mann walked up to the screen and looked at each image, reading off the names. “All right,” he said, slapping the tech on the shoulder. “I want everybody to take a name and start checking them out. Find out where they are now, who’s still in the city. It has been what twenty-five years? Run them all down and do it now.”