“So it could be someone involved in this mess with Delmer and Delilah,” Oscar said.
Seth nodded.
“I doubt you’ll get the number,” Seth said. “They’re pretty careful.”
“We’ll check,” Oscar said.
Seth started to walk away again.
“You can’t talk to your lady?” Oscar asked.
Seth stopped and turned back toward Oscar.
“You should know that I gave her access to everything in that envelope as a courtesy,” Oscar said. “My tech guy tells me that he ‘accidentally’ gave them access to all of our electronic evidence.”
“‘Accidentally’?” Seth asked.
Oscar shrugged.
“They’ve made good use of it,” Oscar said. “Your lady and her people are fucking brilliant. Better yet, they share. I’d hire any one of them sight unseen. You think I could convince her to come work for me?”
“I doubt it,” Seth said. “Her husband lives in Denver, and he’s kind of an ass. He’d never move to New York.”
Laughing, Oscar walked back to his team. Seth went to the door of the auditorium. He opened the door when one of the uniformed officers jogged up to the door.
“I’m going to wait for you,” the officer said. “The inspector wants to make sure to get your statement as soon as possible.”
“Fine,” Seth said. “You’ll need to be absolutely silent.”
“I went to Juliard,” the officer said with a smile. “It’s an honor for me to watch the great Seth O’Malley play.”
“Do me a favor?” Seth asked.
“Sure,” the officer said.
“Try to keep the audience quiet,” Seth said. “They like to chat with each other and take calls. It makes it impossible for us to get through it.”
“Done,” the officer said.
Seth nodded to the officer and went to the front of the room.
“Are we ready?” Seth asked the orchestra.
The musicians’ eager faces looked up at him. He turned to the audience.
“Once we start, we won’t be able to answer questions or take any breaks,” Seth said. “It’s long — two hours and fifty-three minutes. With the credits, which we have music for, it’s closer to three and a half hours. The singers are here. They will step in when it’s time and sing the pieces for you. We will play straight through. Feel free to get up to use the restroom if you need to. If you’re not using your cell phones to take notes, please turn them off when you’re in the room. If you need to call or text, please take it outside the room. We have a monitor . . .”
Seth pointed to a young man standing at the end of the aisle.
“He will escort you,” Seth said. “We are also taping the entire thing, which you can review later.”
Seth nodded to the cinematic director, and he gave an acknowledging nod.
“We’ll be happy to go over anything tomorrow in conference and the next day in studio,” Seth said. “We will not be able to speak to you or communicate with you in anyway over the next three or so hours.”
He looked up to the projectionist’s booth.
“On my mark,” Seth said. “One, two, three.”
He pointed at the projectionist. The clicking noise of the film began to roll. Seth pointed to the oboist. She began to play. Seth sat down at the piano. They played through the third score to the third movie in the series.
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Fourteen
Ava and her team were standing at the back of the room. Forensic Team leader Special Agent Stan A. Lithus (aka “Spam-a-licious” or the more formal “Spammy”) was standing at the front of the room doing what he did best — advertising some random forensic product. The room was hot and crowded. Most people were working on their late-afternoon coffee. The technicians in the row where Ava was standing were either sleeping or looking at their laptops. Spammy gestured toward Ava halfway through his advertisement for the most fantastic Chinese food he’d ever eaten.
Ava raised her eyebrows to Nelson, and he went to take over the computer controls. Fran and Leslie patted Ava’s back, and she went forward. Bob followed behind her. As she walked, she felt the energy in the room shift. Standing at the front of the room, she was surprised at how many people were crammed into the room.
She swallowed hard against her anxiety. Spammy wanted her to give an overview of the original case. Because this meeting was called the moment she’d returned from Seth’s, she hadn’t had time to submit the letters into evidence.
Spammy gave Ava a glowing introduction, and Ava went to take his place at the front. Bob sat in a chair near the side of the room. He was there in case she needed an “old white male” (his words) to make sure people were listening.
“Hi. I’m Ava,” she said. “Some of you know me as Amelie. I want to say right off the bat, I am married to Seth O’Malley. ‘Ava’ is his nickname for me.”
Someone in the middle of the room gave a catcall whistle and Ava laughed.
“Details!” a woman near the front yelled.
“Well . . .” Ava said. She took a breath, as if she were going to go into the entire thing and then she shook her head. “How about this? I will answer one question about O’Malley every fifteen minutes. How does that sound?”
There was general clapping. Overall, people were more awake than before. Ava caught the eye of Seth’s good friend and her old boss, Captain “Ferg” Ferguson. Ava blinked. She had no clue what his first name was. Seth always called him “Ferg.” She knew that he, O’Malley, and Mitch had gone through the ranks together at the Denver Police Department. Outside of being a good, decent man with a spectacular eye for evidence, she knew very little about the man. She nodded to him, and he winked at her. She gestured for him to come up front with her.
“I want to bring up my old boss at the Denver PD, Captain Ferguson,” Ava said.
Captain Ferguson stood up. People generally clapped.
“He was involved in most of the original forensics, so he can fill in any gaps,” Ava said.
Captain Ferguson moved up to the front of the room. He found a stool and set it out for Ava before getting a stool for himself.
“My teams are here,” Captain Ferguson said. “We have all of our original results and files. We’re happy to assist Ms. O’Malley with the original case overview.”
Ava smiled at him, and he grinned back.
“But I’m not answering any questions about O’Malley,” Captain Ferguson said with a laugh. He made a gesture of zipping closed his lips. “What’s happened in the past, stays in the past.”
Their audience laughed.
“If you worked on this project at the time, feel free to pipe up,” Ava said. “Let’s have a real discussion about what happened.”
When Ava looked out at all of the smart, competent people in the room, she had to smile. It had always been her life dream to do this work. Doing it at this level, with all of these competent people, was truly a dream come true. She took a breath and launched into the case.
“When I was in fourth grade, our class was assigned to pick one news story from the actual newspaper, if you can believe it, and follow that story throughout the year,” Ava said. “That assignment landed me right here, in front of you.”
Ava could feel the crowd move to her side. She smiled.
“My best friend Beth’s family didn’t get the newspaper, so I picked for both of us,” Ava said. “While I don’t think murder and mayhem is what Beth had in mind, she . . .”
Ava felt a wave of sorrow threaten to overcome her.
“Y’all remember that Dr. Beth Baker was killed by that bastard, Saint Jude,” Captain Ferguson said.
Ava could feel the sympathy coming in her direction.
“I’m sorry,” Ava said. “She’s so much a part of this case and my experience with it that we’ll end up talking about Beth. And I . . . miss her.”
Ava smiled. Rather than focus on her loss, Ava pressed
on with the case.
“I want to share that first article, because I think it tells us a lot about this case,” Ava said. She nodded to Nelson, and he posted the article. “You can see the headline — ‘Detectives ask for help with multiple homicides.’ In case you don’t know, that’s O’Malley on the right in the suit and Mitch Delgado on the left. Detective Delgado died from Agent Orange-related Sarcoidosis about ten years ago.
“The article states that they had found eight bodies buried in male-female sets. The unsub . . . Oh, sorry. My team uses the term ‘unsub’ for the perpetrator because we’re cool like that.”
Everyone laughed.
“I’d encourage you to pick it up so you can be as cool as we are,” Ava said with a tug on her grey cap. Everyone laughed again. “As I was saying, the unsub had taken a man and a woman. He’d tortured them emotionally, physically, and sexually. He seemed to relish in his work. When he was done — at this time, they’d determined that the unsub had held the couple captive for more than a month — he beat them to death with his bare hands.”
The gravity of the information caused the room to fall silent.
“At the time, forensic science was just coming into its own. The coroner . . .” Ava nodded to a woman in the front row, “ . . . found plenty of biological specimens — DNA, tissue, semen. Fran, one of my lab techs, said just yesterday that it was like he made no effort to cover up who he was.”
Ava shook her head.
“He didn’t,” Ava said.
“Gretchen? Can you tell us about the condition of the first eight bodies?” Captain Ferguson asked.
Nodding, the coroner got up from her seat.
“I think it’s important to focus on these eight bodies, first,” Ava said. “We can walk through what I know about the logical progression of this investigation. It started with two bodies, and then two more. Two more after that. No clues. No leads. No real definitive, helpful forensic information. Detective O’Malley and Delgado went to the press.”
Ava gestured to the coroner. As the woman passed, Ava said, “Nelson has your slides cued up.” Ava pointed to Nelson, who nodded to the coroner.
The coroner nodded to Nelson, and the image of the first body found came on the screen. The coroner spoke of her findings and the autopsy. She walked them through the injuries and injustice done to each of these bodies. The room was absolutely silent as she spoke. When she was done, Ava led people in a round of applause. Embarrassed, the coroner took her seat again.
A host of hands went up with questions. Ava shook her head.
“Let’s try to get through this first,” Ava said. “Write down your questions. She’ll be right here to help us with the case as we go.”
Nodding, people lowered their hands.
“As the coroner said, the first bodies were found about a year before the detectives asked for help,” Ava said. She clicked back through the coroner’s slides to show the first couple. “No one thought a lot about the bodies when they were found. According to their families, this couple had gone out for a fall hike. They’d left their car in the parking lot with a note that said they were hiking. A snow storm settled in early, so law enforcement assumed that they had been caught in the storm. Their remains were in pretty bad condition when they were found the following spring. It wasn’t until the third set of bodies came through that the coroner’s office re-examined these first bodies.
“The second set of bodies were kidnapped and tortured after the third set of bodies,” Ava said as she posted a photo of all four bodies together. “These four remains were also found on hiking trails, usually after the thaw of some kind of weather event — ice storm, heavy snow, thunder shower. You know how Colorado can be — there’s a lot of severe weather that comes up fast and ends quickly. The bodies were found after the weather cleared.”
“Hey, it’s been fifteen minutes,” a woman in the middle of the room said. She was small in stature, with a round face and round body. “I have a question about O’Malley.”
“Okay,” Ava said. “Shoot.”
“I’ve heard that he plays the piano a lot,” the woman said. “Taught himself?”
“Seth plays the piano four or five hours a day,” Ava said.
“At least,” Captain Ferguson snorted. “Playing the piano is like breathing for Seth. If he’s breathing, he’s playing.”
“It’s hard to say if he taught himself,” Ava said. “He started playing at four years old. He seemed to know how to play. His biological father was around the same age when he started playing the piano, as well. O’Malley’s mother taught him after school. He took lessons from someone at the Colorado Symphony, and then he went to Eastman College when he was ten years old. While he was there, he was tutored by one of the great jazz pianists. Since then, he’s studied with a variety of teachers — most you’ve never heard of. Last year, he wrapped up with a classical pianist who’d spent his childhood in Auschwitz. They spent hours working on finger placement and scales. Unbelievably tedious to listen to. I’m not sure what it would be like to be there, but Seth had a blast.”
Ava nodded.
“Okay, back to the case,” Ava said. “Where was I?”
“You were saying that the bodies were found after the weather cleared,” Captain Ferguson said.
“Some of the bodies had been moved,” Ava said. “Meaning that this unsub went out into the storms to drop these bodies. In one case, the woman’s body was laid out in the snow on top of the shallow grave of a buried male body. They were killed at the same time.”
“That’s the fourth set of bodies,” Captain Ferguson said. “It seemed at the time that this guy was aware of the investigation. That’s why Seth and Mitch came forward. They knew the guy was tracking their investigation.”
Ava nodded to what he’d said.
“This original article asks the question of this case,” Ava said. Nelson switched the image back to that of the article. “There is no link between the couples. One of the male-female sets — number three, I think — didn’t know each other. The detectives found nothing that linked the man to the woman or vice versa. Not a thing. As people, these sets of people were as different as night and day.”
“The press played that up,” Captain Ferguson added. “They made a big deal out of how anyone could be killed by this guy. Anyone. Anytime. The victims didn’t even look like each other. They were different races, different economic classes, a few of the men were veterans, and one of them had leukemia. The papers were right. It could have been anyone.”
“That’s why O’Malley and Delgado went to the papers,” Ava said. “My friend Beth and I followed the case from this article through the trial. Beth wrote her Ph.D. thesis about the childhood of the Cigarette Killer. We’ve send you a pdf copy of the thesis along with all of our slides, so it’s there.”
“What did they know about the perpetrator at the time?” a man shouted out from the back.
Ava looked at Captain Ferguson and then at Bob. Ava nodded to Captain Ferguson.
“What did we know at the time of this article?” Captain Ferguson repeated the question. He thought for a moment. “We knew that this guy would pick up one man and one woman. At the same time. He would keep them for some amount of time before killing them on or near the same day. None of these eight died of hunger or thirst or exposure or anything like that. They died by his hand. We knew that the guy had to be strong enough to carry these bodies into the back country, strong enough to beat them to death with his bare hands. We thought that he kept the people in another location and moved them to the back country, but we didn’t rule out that he did this to the people right where they were found.”
“How the bodies got out there was a big question in the early investigation,” Ava said with a nod.
“That was a point of contention,” Captain Ferguson said. “Did he move these bodies to where they were found? Some of the trails were popular, busy with hikers, motocross, bikes. How did he avoid detection? If he moved the coup
les, where did he keep them? But really, the question we all talked about was — why these people? O’Malley figured that if he could find the link between the victims, the rest would fall into place.”
Captain Ferguson nodded his head.
“The detectives spent a lot of time on the first couple,” Ava said. “Since they were the first, they thought he might have made a mistake. But they were wrong.”
Ava paused for effect.
“They were just the first couple they’d found,” Ava said. “When they had the unsub in questioning, he told them about six, ten . . .”
Ava looked at Captain Ferguson.
“It’s hard to say how many. The accused led O’Malley and Delgado and a group of my men on field trips to find a set of bodies,” Captain Ferguson said. “We brought cadaver dogs. Every place we went, we’d find more bodies. Ones he wasn’t talking about.”
Ava nodded.
“With the news coverage, departments around the country came forward with missing couples,” Ava said. “Or a man and a woman who went missing on the same day.”
“And remains,” Captain Ferguson said. “One of them just had one. O’Malley sent them back to find the pair.”
Ava nodded.
“How did they solve it?” Ava asked. “That’s the big question and one of the reasons we are all here. I can tell you what O’Malley says, but I thought we could watch O’Malley talk about it in his interview with Joselyn Diamond for the Denver Public Library.”
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Fifteen
Ava nodded to Nelson, and a video player came up on the screen. Wearing his usual suit, Seth was sitting at the end of a table, with Jocelyn sitting to his right. There was a recorder and two microphones on the corner of the table. The video camera was positioned over Jocelyn’s left shoulder. You could see both Jocelyn and Seth in the frame. Seth seemed at ease.
“How did you figure out the Cigarette Killer case?” Jocelyn asked. “For posterity. Imagine what detectives a hundred years from now might want to know.”
The Cigarette Killer Page 11