Her TV show was on tonight too, Grey’s Anatomy. Nana loved the series because she felt there were three very bright and true-enough-to-life black characters in the ensemble cast, which she believed was a first for TV. Grey’s Anatomy was one thing that she and I agreed on. We were both addicts of the medical drama, and we were rarely disappointed for our devotion and attention.
Jannie frowned when she answered the phone and discovered, to her amazement, that it wasn’t for her. “It’s for you, Daddy.”
“What a surprise,” I said. “Major upset.”
“It’s not a girl,” Jannie came right back, “so you can forget about that. It’s not Bree.”
I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t what I heard during the next few confounding seconds on the telephone.
“Alex, this is Hal Brady.” Brady was the chief of detectives these days at the MPD, an old friend, the boss of Thor Richter and all the rest of us.
“Hi, Chief.” I managed a few words, but mostly I was in an intent listening mode. The fact that Brady was calling me at home wasn’t a good sign.
“This isn’t about Bree, is it?” I suddenly had a premonition.
“No, no. Bree is fine. In fact, she’s in the office with me now. I’ll let you talk with her in a minute,” Brady said, then continued. “Alex, the reason I’m calling is that Kyle Craig escaped from ADX Florence sometime today. They’re still working out the details of how he did it, but this can’t be good. Not for you, not for any of us. He’s on the loose. They have no idea where he went.”
I didn’t hesitate for a second. “I need a favor,” I told the chief. “A big favor.”
Chapter 35
I’D BEEN OUT to the supermaximum-security prison in Florence a couple of times since Kyle Craig had been incarcerated there. On the flight, I made a few notes about him from the papers I’d collected over the years. Even as I scribbled the notes, I was recalling certain incidents between us. At one time, Kyle had been a friend, at least I’d thought so. He’d fooled a lot of people along the way, and I have always been a terrible sucker for those who seem to lead a good life.
I wrote in my notepad:
Expects to be recognized as superior; has a grandiose sense of his own self-importance; narcissistic to an extreme.
Interpersonally exploitive; complex thinker.
Superficial charm. Can turn it on and off at will.
Sibling rivalry (probably killed one brother).
Severely abused, physically and emotionally, by his father. Or so he claims.
Duke University undergraduate and law school. Top of his class. Made it look easy.
IQ: 145–155 range.
No conscience.
Father, William Hyland Craig, former army general, chairman of two Fortune 500 companies, now deceased.
Mother, Miriam, still living in Charlotte.
Former FBI DIC, trained at Quantico, where he also taught new agents.
Highly competitive, especially with me.
I arrived in Florence, Colorado, around noon the day after Kyle’s escape, and very little seemed to have changed about the supermaximum-security prison. I spent the first hour talking with two of the guards who knew Kyle Craig particularly well; then I interviewed Warden Richard Krock. The warden seemed more shocked than any of us that Kyle, or anybody else, could have escaped from Florence. No one ever had before; no one had even come close.
“As you now know,” Krock told me, “the lawyer went back to Craig’s cell, wearing a prosthetic mask, and then hung himself there. What you don’t know is that we videotaped some of his early visits with Craig. Would you like to see them?”
I sure would.
Chapter 36
FOR THE NEXT FEW HOURS, I sat and studied tapes of some of the early meetings between Kyle and Mason Wainwright. The lawyer hadn’t invoked his lawyer-client privilege until the third week he’d spent with his client. Why was that? Because Kyle wanted us to see something? Or maybe because the lawyer did.
What, though? The first visit was virtually the same as the others that were taped.
Wainwright entered the meeting room wearing a very memorable outfit, which no doubt helped with the eventual escape: cowboy hat and boots, buckskin jacket, horn-rimmed eyeglasses that clashed with everything else he had on.
He and Kyle hugged as soon as they met. Kyle said something that wasn’t caught on tape.
Then came a series of eight questions—always the same ones, or very close.
Some kind of code? Or was Kyle playing games? Or simply crazy—he and the lawyer? I couldn’t tell at this point. About anything, really. Except that Kyle Craig was the first prisoner ever to escape from ADX Florence. The Mastermind had done the impossible.
Finally Kyle and the lawyer hugged each other again. Wainwright said something to Kyle that wasn’t picked up on tape. Was this how they exchanged information—whether they were taped or not?
I expected that it was. We would certainly try to find out.
Next, I went to Kyle’s cell, but there wasn’t much to see in there. Prisoners weren’t allowed many personal possessions at ADX. The small room was neat and orderly, as Kyle was himself.
Then I saw the message he’d left.
A greeting card was propped on the table that was bolted down next to his bed.
It was a Hallmark—unsigned—just like the ones at Tess Olsen’s penthouse.
Minutes later, I was back at Warden Krock’s office. I needed some answers to questions that had developed in the past few hours.
“Visitors?” I asked. “We know about the lawyer, though we have no idea what his real relationship to Craig was. Were there other visitors? Anyone who came around more than once?”
Krock didn’t have to consult his files to answer. “In the first year, there was a persistent reporter from the Los Angeles Times named Joseph Wizan, whom Craig refused to see. Repeatedly. Several others contacted Craig through my office but didn’t bother to come out here because he wouldn’t see them either.
“The only one who did visit, and this was just a few months ago, was the author Tess Olsen. You know, the woman who was killed in Washington recently? Kyle surprised us. He agreed to meet with her. She came here three times. She planned to do a book on Craig, another In Cold Blood, if you listened to her talk about it.”
“You spoke with her, then?” I asked.
“I did. On all three of her visits. Half an hour or so the first time.”
“How did she seem to you? What was your impression?”
Warden Krock moved his head back and forth as if he were weighing his answer. Finally he spoke. “She seemed like a fan. Honestly, I wondered if she and Craig had something going before he was caught.”
Chapter 37
I RETURNED TO WASHINGTON early the following morning, having already passed along the news about Tess Olsen, the Hallmark card in Craig’s cell, and the possibility that Kyle may have had a relationship with Olsen, or even with the killer in DC. But more than anything else, I wondered what Kyle was planning.
Bree had pulled together a small forensic team focusing on the blog leads she was chasing down. An agent named Brian Kitzmiller from the FBI’s Cyber Unit had been assigned to us and was more than willing to come on board. The Audience Killer case had already caught his attention.
Bree asked Kitzmiller for the earliest possible meeting after he’d had a chance to go over the blog. Kitzmiller gave us a four-hour turnaround, which meant he was fast. Another good sign that we had everybody’s attention on this case.
We showed up at the Hoover Building close to three. I certainly knew my way around there, though I’d never done much work with the Cyber Unit and had never met Kitzmiller—I’d heard of him, however, and knew he had a reputation as a puzzle-solver.
“Come on in.” Even seated in front of a work terminal, he was obviously very tall and gawky-looking, with the brightest orange hair I had ever seen in my life.
This part of the unit was a lo
w-ceilinged room on the second floor, a few floors below my old office. Everyone sat in wide stall-like cubicles with their backs to the center, where a large octagonal conference table was strewn with papers, files, and laptop computers. People did work here—good sign.
A glass wall separated the unit from the busy corridor outside.
Bree, Sampson, and I grabbed chairs and sat down in Kitzmiller’s stall. He was about my age, fit, and with that blinding head of hair.
“I can’t really source any of the audio,” he said, “but I did compare the screams on what the blogger calls Channel Two against the videotape from the original crime scene. It’s almost definitely a match. But that’s not quite the same as a forensic link between the blog and the killer. Theoretically, anyone could have posted this.”
“You mean, if someone else had access to the recording,” I said. “We’re all in agreement that the audio is original, right?”
“Sure,” he said. “So it’s either your suspect or someone who was given access by the suspect. Hard to tell about that for sure yet.”
“Let’s focus on one thing at a time,” Bree said. “You told me on the phone that the blog was posted from Georgetown University? Is that right?”
“Or, at least, through Georgetown. That’s the basic problem I’m seeing already, Bree. Whoever put up the blog knew how to cover his or her tracks fairly well.”
“Proxy server?” Sampson asked. His little niches of expertise always surprised me.
Kitzmiller smiled appreciatively at Sampson, but then he shook his head. “Negative. Worse, actually. He used an open proxy. Universities are notoriously easy marks for this kind of thing. Any boob can remotely attach their IP address from anywhere, and wham—you’ve got an untraceable site. All I can get you is a location. Nothing about identity.”
“Any suggestions at all?” Bree asked. “We really need your help on this.”
“Sure. I understand your frustration, Detective. My suggestion is that you get totally involved on your end. Jump in the deep water with me. We’ll keep paddling around here, but you’ll be glad if you do some stirring of your own. Believe me, a whole lot of detritus turns up online. You’d be surprised what you might find.”
“Honestly, I don’t know the first thing about cyberforensics,” Bree said.
“You don’t have to. I’m not talking about cracking code, here. I’m talking about a large community that needs to be canvassed. The whole blogosphere.”
“Blogosphere?”
Kitzmiller started pulling up several new windows at once, layered over one another on the screen to show us what he was getting at.
“First of all, we’ve got everyone who posted responses to the original blog. There was the MY REALITY site, for example. It’s already been taken down, but there were more than three dozen separate screen names for people who had replied to at least one of his entries. So that’s a pretty good start. You remember the old shampoo commercial? ‘You tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on and so on’? Same thing here. Some number of people read this, then turn around and talk about it on their own blogs, and the scope goes up exponentially. Chat rooms too.
“Now add to that the fact that you’ve got a killer who apparently likes to be in the spotlight. There’s a good chance he’ll stay a part of the community in some way. People intersect. You find the right intersection, maybe you solve your case, find your killer, go into the Detectives’ Hall of Fame.”
“That’s a lot of ifs,” Bree said. “I don’t like ifs and maybes.”
People had been talking about cyberspace as the new frontier in law enforcement for years now. It looked like I was about to get my first extensive taste of it.
Kitzmiller ran a simple Google blog search for us to illustrate his point. He searched Audience Killer and got a whole screenful of responses.
“Wow,” said Bree. “I’m kind of impressed already. Or maybe I should say depressed. That’s a lot of detritus.”
Sampson added, “Fuck! It’s an epidemic.”
“You notice he never uses that full title on his own site. That’s probably why you hadn’t found it earlier. Even so, right here you’ve got more than eighty other strands that mention him, and two specifically dedicated to the subject. And he presumably hasn’t even hit three homicides yet.”
“Does the fact that he’s courting the attention speed all this up?” I asked.
“Sure, it does. There’s a voracious audience for all this stuff on the Internet. Most people say they abhor the killing, and a lot of them actually do, I’m sure. What you end up with is a mix of folks with legitimate forensic interest, people who want to know more but maybe for the wrong reason, and then people who just plain get off on it all. This guy is their dream come true. No one’s ever been so accessible, not while he was still this active.”
Bree spoke quietly, working it out in her head. “So . . . he uses other people to help turn himself into the thing he wants to be.”
Kitzmiller nodded and pulled up another window, the “official” Jeffrey Dahmer fan club site. “Pick your poison. He wants to be Dahmer. He wants to be Ted Bundy. He wants to be the Zodiac Killer.”
“No. He wants to be a much bigger star,” I said. “I think he wants to be bigger than any of the others.”
Including Kyle Craig? I had to wonder. How the hell does Kyle fit in?
Chapter 38
I WAS ALREADY FRUSTRATED about the case, plus I was suffering from Bree deprivation. I was concerned that I’d have trouble focusing at work that week, so I decided to tape my sessions. Just in case, just to be safe.
Anthony Demao, the Desert Storm vet, did something unusual for him, which was talk in depth about his combat experience. I sat and reviewed the tape again over lunch at my desk. As I listened, I could picture Anthony: ruggedly good-looking, still in shape—a quiet man, though.
“We didn’t have sufficient support on the ground. The CO didn’t give a rat’s ass. We had a mission. That’s all he cared about,” he said.
“How long had you been there at that point?”
Silence. Then, “Ground attack started end of the month, so a couple of weeks, I guess.”
I was becoming more and more convinced that something really bad had happened to him during Desert Storm, something that could be a key to Anthony’s difficulties, maybe even an incident he’d repressed. The balance in this case was between not wanting to push too hard and a gut feeling that he wasn’t going to stick with the therapy for long, especially if he didn’t think we were making enough progress.
“I did some research,” I said on the tape. “You were Twenty-fourth Infantry Division, right? This was just before you all started toward Basra.”
“How did you know that?”
“It’s part of history. You were part of history. The information isn’t very hard to find, Anthony. Is there anything that happened there that you don’t want to talk about? To me . . . or anyone else?”
“Maybe there is. Probably some stuff I don’t want to get into. I don’t blame anyone for what happened, though.”
His speech was faster now, and clipped, as though he wanted to get past this part.
“Blame anyone for what?” I asked.
“For any of the shit that happened. You know, I enlisted on my own. I wanted to go.”
I waited, but there was no elaboration.
“That’s it for now,” Anthony said then. “A little too much, too soon. Next time. I need to ease into this, Doc. Sorry about that.”
I clicked off the tape recorder and sat back in my chair, thinking. I knew he was losing ground lately, even with the subsidized housing he had. Another month or two of unemployment could be a real problem for him. People like Anthony Demao slipped through the cracks all the time.
I rubbed my eyes hard and poured myself another cup of coffee. There was a lot to think about, maybe too much. I had one more client coming—and then later that afternoon, a meeting at police headquarters.
A big one.
Chapter 39
IT WAS TIME to trade on my reputation and laurels in a way I’d never done before. I knew that Chief of Police Terrence Hoover would take a meeting if I asked, especially since I had cleared it through the chief of detectives first. I was less sure if Hoover would agree to the ridiculousness I was about to propose to him. We’d have to see about that.
“Alex, come in. Sit down,” he said as I stood like a moke in his doorway. A college-wrestling photo on the wall behind him showed the younger Hoover at the University of Maryland and explained where that crushing handshake of his came from. “I haven’t heard from you in a long time.”
“I appreciate you seeing me, Chief. Needless to say, there’s something on my mind.”
Hoover smiled. “So we’re skipping the idle chitchat, huh? Okay. What are you after, Alex?”
“Nothing too complicated. Just a job.”
Hoover blinked and ducked his double chin. “A job? Well, shit, Alex, that is a surprise. I thought you were coming to ask me for something. Instead, you’re here to offer me something.”
That was a relief to hear. “Thanks for saying that, Chief. I guess I’ll keep offering, then.”
“Please do. You’re on a roll. I definitely want to hear the rest of the pitch.”
Here it went.
“Some cops talk about wanting to make a difference. I guess I would say that I believe I can do more good than harm, and that’s a reasonable objective. I want to come back on the force but in a limited capacity. I’d like to work the Major Case Squad, but outside of the regular rotation. Specific assignments only. I’ve been consulting on the Kennedy Center and Connecticut Avenue murder cases already, and if any of this is agreeable to you, it would be a seamless reentry for me. I know the team, and I think I could be an asset.”
Hoover laughed out loud. “I’ve heard some pretty good speeches in here, but that one goes on the short list.” He pointed at me. “You know you can afford to be this cocky ’cause you know damn well I’m gonna say yes.”
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