“What’s pointing at it?”
“I’ve got victim receipts of purchase from stores in the Destiny mall, plus admissions from the husbands that they were there, dating a month to four months prior to the murders—”
She felt the doubt in his silence.
“It’s more than coincidence,” she said. “I’ve got Archer and Payton. Brandon Spence says he was there a month ago. Blake Haig says he was followed. And there’s more going on with Haig. He’s been meeting with Danica Payton’s brothers and they’ve been running their own surveillance on the mall.”
“What about Archer for it — the gun?”
“I haven’t had a chance to tell you — rifling came back negative. It’s not Archer.”
“So what are you asking?”
She swallowed. “We need to watch the mall. This is where he’s picking his victims.”
“Kelly we can’t put up this kind of surveillance based on shopping receipts and what some sawed-off angry brothers think. Or what a bereaved husband thinks.”
“The victims are carefully selected and he needs high volume and enough time.”
“Why not anywhere else? A restaurant. Facebook.”
“A restaurant, and he’d have to be eating there every night of the week and would draw attention. Facebook might help him a little but doesn’t tell him enough about routine, doesn’t show him the real people in the flesh, interacting, living their lives. And they’re all going to Destiny, not Great Northern or someplace else. I checked. For fuck’s sake, Jack! She was left dying in a fucking family park. Lying there, bleeding out, until someone found her. I was just in the room with her husband and he practically . . .”
Kelly collapsed against the wall and covered her mouth to keep from saying anymore.
Genarro was right. This was too much for her; she couldn’t handle it. She sat at her desk, entering the minds of serial killers from a safe distance, sipping her coffee. He was out there right now killing women and children and she wanted to gut him like a fish. Take a knife and unseam him from his chest to his balls and let him spill out over the floor.
Still breathing.
Genarro was silent. “Anyone who says there isn’t emotion on a case like this is lying. I know you can handle it and put it where it needs to be put. But I’ve actually got someone ready to go. First we had the thing with you being recognized in the press and I started looking—”
“I’ve established a rapport with certain people. There are witnesses for this last scene. I’m getting somewhere that—”
“Dixon has your most recent summary and psych profile. And you just said you were inching along.”
“You’re talking about Mark Dixon?”
“As soon as we had the thing with the phone and you thought this guy might reach out, I pulled him in, debriefed him. Dixon is set to deploy and can take the reins.”
Lying there, left behind.
“Roth, you there?”
She snapped to attention. “Yeah.”
“Listen to me. Listen up. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“If you want to get a net around the Destiny mall . . . okay. I’ll make it work. It’s going to hurt and I’m going to get shouted down but I’m going to trust you. The deal is, though, you play nice. Dixon comes in, let him take over the operational aspects. Let him work the tip-line, work the surveillance, monitor the public spaces. This isn’t a demotion. This frees you up to do what you do best — figure this guy out while Dixon works alongside you.”
“Thank you, sir. Jack, thank you . . .”
She went back to her hotel. She’d been called in to consult, to help investigate, but there’d been another murder on her watch. It was more than she could handle, but she wasn’t going to give up now. She was in this thing until the bitter end — she wouldn’t stop until she caught him.
* * *
He watched the new family get into the minivan. The little boy squawked about something and the killer raised the binoculars for a better look. The toddler was upset that he didn’t get to open his own door, apparently. The mother opened up and now the kid wanted to climb in by himself.
The fully-loaded grocery cart started to roll away. The older child, in an army-style jacket and a puffy hat, grabbed for it. No dice. She chased it and retrieved it, skidding on her feet. Finished with the toddler, the mother caught up, stopped the rig and the second child from getting ploughed by the pickup truck coming through the lot.
What an ordeal. Jesus, really, what a thing — a sweet little family, death or dismemberment lurking around every corner.
When they finally got rolling, he put away the binoculars and followed them out of the grocery store parking lot and onto the main road. Traffic was thick but a little better now that Thanksgiving was over. It would be crowded again when everyone piled on for Christmas.
A chaotic time of year. He knew people got depressed — from Halloween to turkey day to the big fat guy in the red suit, it was a constant build-up. While the body actually wanted to slow down in winter and conserve calories there was no such luck for modern humans, who gorged themselves with food and sweets and ran around in a consumer-crazed, overscheduled madness. It was a tough time of year, too, for cops to keep their eyes on the ball with so much going on amid family pressures and expectations.
But this family looked happy. He’d always been able to read people and he knew it when he saw it. Some folks stood out, like birds with bright plumage compared to dull pigeons.
When they pulled off into their neighborhood he followed for a while along the oak-lined streets. Long before he’d moved here, when the area was first developed, the trees had just been saplings. In another twenty or so years, they’d be mature. Things were constantly growing and changing; everything was on its way somewhere else with no continuity besides people’s applied illusions. A tree which had been a seed would one day be lumber or dirt.
PART TWO
You are a network of electrical impulses.
An organic machine adapting to an environment.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Sunday, December 2
Mark Dixon rotated back from Iraq three years post-9/11. Dixon and a fresh crop of FBI recruits focused on homeland security and ran numerous ops involving the surveillance of airports and government buildings. He was seasoned. He was also tall, dark-skinned, and quietly intense.
By the end of Saturday there were half a dozen more FBI agents staying at the hotel. Eight, including Kelly and Blanchett. They’d established an operations center at a sheet metal company in Somerville, a huge Quonset hut the size of an airplane hangar with phone and internet connectivity, emptied the space out, brought in chairs and desks and phones, whiteboards and monitors. They’d opened the new, joint tip-line and gone over the call logs from the various departments. By midnight everyone went back to the hotel for four hours of sleep.
At 3 a.m., Kelly was still awake. She got up and dressed and went out into the hallway and knocked on Dixon’s door.
He opened up wearing sweatpants and no shirt, hair messy, gun in hand. A .38 caliber pistol, a two-inch-barreled weapon typically used by criminal investigators and counterintelligence personnel. It was double-action — point and shoot — and it matched his personality.
“What is it? Everything okay?” He blinked a few times, stuck his head out into the hallway and looked around. “Come on in.”
The hospital lights across the street gave the room an amber glow. It smelled like aftershave and leftover dinner. Kelly sat down in one of the chairs while Dixon perched on the corner of his unmade bed, set his gun on the end table and studied her. “What’s on your mind?”
“I want to know what’s on yours.”
“We got a hundred phone calls in the first hour. Rounded up the mail — there was one plastic baggie with a glove in it someone found in a park, with a note saying we need to check it for fingerprints.”
“I saw that.”
“We’ve looked at two hundre
d pictures: every guy sitting alone in a car at a store. Local cops are looking twice at every white Jeep Cherokee and blue Ford Taurus. And we’re going to start checking gun ranges. Local PD ran down a few but did less than stick their head in the door and look around. There’s the Syracuse Pistol Club in Liverpool, the Fayetteville Manlius Rod & Gun in Manlius, The Dewitt Fish & Game Club in Jamesville. More in Bridgeport, Jordan, and Pompey.” He rubbed a hand against the short hair of the back of his neck and continued, “There’s a sportsmen’s club in Camillus, where Jessica Carter-Spence was killed, but that’s pistols only. The place in Dewitt is for skeet shooting. But there’s dozens of places for rifles, including a National Shooting Preserve in Vernon. It’s gonna take twenty people working around the clock for weeks to obtain subpoenas and check all the memberships and video. And in a few hours we put up surveillance on the mall, which is an even bigger undertaking.”
She stayed silent.
“Can I ask why you’re in my room at three a.m.?”
“Things were busy today. We never really got a chance to talk.”
He studied her with wide-set, light brown eyes. “Briefing is seven a.m.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
He sighed and sat back, spreading his hands behind him on the rumpled covers. “How do I feel about it, right? That’s what you want to know. Okay, I’ll level with you. I think that this much manpower, this much surveillance, all based on your psych profile? It’s not where I would go with this, but orders come down and I do what I’m told to do.”
“It’s not based on my profile, it’s based on evidence in custody and witness statements. Blake Haig wrote everything out for Orzo, signed it.”
He looked at her for a moment. “I think Genarro trusts your instincts, and that’s fine.”
She decided that was good enough. “We need to watch Russell and Matthew Harbaugh.”
“I read the report, and we will.” His gaze continued to drill. “What are you really here for, Kelly?”
She took a breath. So much had been going through her mind the past few days, much of which she was fine to keep to herself, some she wished to share with a confidant. The local PD was not the group to spitball with, but Dixon, even if he served a vastly different function than her, was of the BU cloth. He was her people. “I was thinking about Charles Whitman.”
“Okay. Whitman.”
“During training his was one of the first profiles we looked at.”
“Kelly, you know, profiles are not in my wheelhouse.”
“But you remember Whitman.”
“Yeah sure. Texas Tower Sniper.”
“Before he killed his wife and his mother and climbed the tower at the Austin campus he wrote about having strange thoughts — he didn’t understand where his anger was coming from.”
Dixon just looked at her.
“He kept a journal. He wrote that if anything happened to him, he wanted an autopsy. And after the police took him down, the medical examiner cut him open and found the brain tumor pressing against his amygdala, the region of the brain that regulates aggression.”
Still Dixon didn’t respond.
“The Harbaughs talked about David Renz. He was on house arrest for child pornography and he tricked his ankle bracelet, went to the Great Northern Mall, found a girl and her mother and followed them. When they caught him, people said, this is a monster. He even looks like a monster — he’s got that facial deformity. He was bullied as a child, he went through all these horribly painful surgeries. He had one of the worst kinds of childhood you can imagine.”
“Kelly, I’m trying to follow . . .”
“There are physical correlates in the brain to psychopathology — chemical imbalances, tumors — there are neuronal knots of past trauma and abuse. Killers aren’t born, they’re made.”
“So you want to know what made this guy.”
“We thought, maybe he lost his family, but that doesn’t really track. So, something else. He’s got something degenerative, something in his brain. But I can’t see it. I can’t feel it. What it feels like is . . .”
She had it on the tip of her tongue and it slipped away.
Dixon sat up straight and smoothed his hand over the blanket. “How I see it? These guys are like bad weather. I don’t care what caused it, I’m going to protect myself from it. I’m gonna build levees and reinforce the walls and next time maybe I don’t get hit as hard.”
The words came to her. “You find a pattern, you see something in the MO, and maybe that helps you catch him. This guy . . . I mentioned something during my presentation to PD, about lack of love. It didn’t really go over. Everything I’ve seen, everything I’ve been taught — these things always come out of trauma. But today, it’s a different world than Whitman’s, even Billy Bath’s. Loneliness is loneliness, trauma is trauma, but there’s more room for isolation now. Or, it’s different. The social isolation. Didn’t someone say that a city was the best place to be alone? More people, more loneliness. He gets them when they’re isolated because he feels isolated. He reaches out to a captive audience because he’s unheard, he’s unnoticed.”
“He’s just a man, Kelly.”
After she was quiet for a few seconds she said, “We can’t stop this.”
“We’ll find him.”
“Maybe we can find him, maybe we can find our guy . . . but we can’t stop this.”
Dixon looked at her then turned his face to the window and looked out at the low sprawl of the city, the orange lights and the slice of highway, red taillights crawling. He didn’t seem to know what she meant, and maybe she didn’t either. But she felt it.
He kept his back to her. “Everybody gets like that. You’re just thinking about it too much. Focus on what you can, what’s solid.”
She stood up, feeling more dread and loneliness than expected after talking to Dixon. Genarro thought she was losing objectivity, taking it too personal, probably Dixon did, too. And how was she supposed to not do that? It was supposed to be her considerable education and superior pattern-recognition saving the day. But it wasn’t hubris, it was fear.
It scared her a little, the idea of some cold, academic killer — a killer who eluded categorization. Who had no motive other than some kind of darkness of the soul. But that was backwards, wasn’t it? Ideas about evil and demonic possession preceded modern psychology and neuroscience. Maybe her doubts, the sense of helplessness, was a taste of what happened to every other cop eventually; a turning toward gut instinct when every rule you knew had been broken.
“There are the questions you ask,” she said to herself as much as to Dixon, “did he go to public school or was he more likely home-schooled? Is he affiliated with any religious or political or racial movements? Has he been in the military? Did he have many friends growing up? But on this thing I just . . . I don’t know if it matters. And maybe we’re missing something that . . .” She turned toward the windows but the precise thoughts evaded her again, like trying to recapture a dream.
Dixon rose and she saw his reflection in the glass as he stood behind her. “Get some rest, Kelly. We’re back at it in three and a half hours.”
* * *
Local PD had been excluded from Dixon’s morning briefing, it was FBI only. The men and women present held a ready look in their eyes, something she’d become accustomed to in Stafford, something she felt was missing when she’d given her own presentation to the local cops. Now it was the other way around — these people were strangers while Broward and Orzo and the rest were becoming familiar.
“Destiny mall is run by the Apex Group,” Dixon said as another agent passed out printed information. “The owner and his family have been around a long time. They own a ton of property in the Syracuse area, Buffalo, New York City. The core idea behind Destiny is that it’s a destination, a regional mall where people come from all over and stay a long time. There’s even a hotel on the property.”
Kelly read from the documents she was handed as Dixon cont
inued. “Apex used to have its own employees for security, but as the mall increased in size and traffic they outsourced to a private security firm. There’s not a lot of crime, but sometimes you get groups of kids, they tend to come up from the south side and there’s been some fighting between them. As a result, children under the age of sixteen are supposed to be accompanied by an adult at all times. Apex also employs off-duty Syracuse police officers, typically on weekends. They’re armed and in uniform. They’ve been apprised that we’re a presence, and they’re there if we need them.”
He pointed to a bank of monitors that were currently blank. “We’re working with the security firm on getting into the cameras — there are three hundred and fifty between the concourses, stores, skyway, parking garages and outer parking lots — but otherwise we’re on our own.
“We’ll do regular sweeps of the parking lots for a white Jeep Cherokee and blue Ford Taurus. Everybody — you have your procedure if you spot one of these vehicles. I’ll let Agent Roth finish up.”
She took the front. “First — and this goes without saying — we don’t want a single living, breathing soul to know that we have eyes on this venue. As far as local law enforcement, only the original players have an idea we’re watching it, but even they’re not aware of the scale and scope. We don’t want or need them to be.” She gazed over the half dozen agents at the same time she pictured Joel McKenna sitting along Onondaga Lake watching the ducks. “I believe that this mall is the killer’s hunting ground. He observes, selects candidates, and follows them on from there. We’re looking for a male, Caucasian, in his thirties or forties. Chances are he’s aware of the cameras and he could be in a baseball cap. When we factor it all in — his choice of weapon, the range he shoots from — he’s not a big man. He’s not overpowering his victims. He likes to keep a distance.”
A male agent raised his hand. “Why do we think he’s going to be there at all? I mean, now? There’s been big gaps between the murders . . .”
The Husbands Page 15