by James Swain
“I want to hear about the nightly phone calls you’ve been making to Broward County for the past twelve months,” Linderman said.
“I ain’t been making any calls to Broward,” Eric replied.
“I’ve got a phone log from Verizon that says otherwise,” Linderman said.
“You’ve got a what?”
“A phone log. It shows the calls you’ve been making. There are several hundred to Broward county area codes.”
“You really don’t know what’s going on, do you?” Eric replied.
Linderman pulled up the chair a little closer. He’d learned never to tell a suspect what he did, or didn’t know during an interrogation.
“There’s a bag in the cab of my pickup. That’ll explain things,” Eric said.
Wood went outside and got the bag, which he brought into the house. Inside the bag were half a dozen Nokia Cell phones. Then it clicked what Eric was doing.
“You’re renting cell phones to inmates inside Starke Prison,” Linderman said.
“That’s right,” Eric said.
“Who’s getting them?”
“I’m not really sure.”
“Stop lying, or our deal is off.”
Eric shifted uncomfortably. “All right. I deal with one inmate. His name is Raul Martinez, but everyone calls him Thunder. I rent the cell phones to him, and he doles them out to different inmates who he has agreements with. I don’t ask questions because it’s none of my fucking business. Thunder gives me the phones back every morning when I end my shift, and I bring them home, and charge them up. That’s the deal. You want to know who’s calling from Broward, talk to Thunder.”
Taking his iPhone from his pocket, Linderman got onto the Internet, and went to the FBI’s computerized index of criminal justice information in Clarksburg, West Virginia. He punched in a six-digit password to gain access, then went to the criminal record history information section, and looked for Raul “Thunder” Martinez on its search engine. Within seconds, a rap sheet and mug shot appeared on the iPhone’s screen. Martinez was from the Little Havana section of Miami, and had run with a street gang called the Latin Kings. His mug shot showed a man with no neck and a mouth filled with gold teeth.
Linderman signed off from the site and folded the phone. Eric was telling the truth. Sort of. He leaned forward in his chair. “How long has this been going on?”
“’Bout a year,” Eric said.
“How much is Thunder paying you?”
“Two hundred bucks a week per phone.”
“Who is Thunder renting the phones to inside the prison?”
“I told you — I don’t ask questions.”
“You’re lying. You know who Thunder is renting the cell phones to. It’s the only way you can protect yourself. You don’t want some inmate saying something crazy over the phone, and having it get back to you, so you make sure Thunder rents them to guys who aren’t off their rockers, or stupid enough to get caught. Tell me their names, Eric, or the deal is off.”
Eric fell back on the couch and shut his eyes. Linderman guessed he was fighting with himself. If he ratted out Thunder, he’d pay for it down the road. Men like Thunder never forgot the people who betrayed them.
Linderman stood up, his chair scraping the floor. Eric’s eyes snapped open.
“Last chance,” the FBI agent said.
“The list of names is in the glove compartment of my pickup. I keep it with my registration.”
“Does it contain all the names?”
“Yeah.”
Linderman headed for the front door. The female FBI agent he’d talked into playing dead came down the hallway and entered the living room.
“Hey — you told me she was dead!” Eric said.
“I lied,” Linderman replied.
Linderman walked outside. The pond on the front lawn was a breeding ground for mosquitoes, and he battled an angry swarm on his way to the pickup. Opening the driver’s door, he hopped in.
The pickup was old and showing its age. He popped the glove compartment and an assortment of papers and manuals fell into his hands. He sorted through them until he was holding a transparent plastic folder containing the registration. A piece of notepaper was tucked into the bottom of the folder, which he pulled out. Written across the top of the notepaper were the words Thunder’s Guys. Beneath that, the names of six men.
Alba Johnson
Claude Ricks
Ervin Gunnells
Humberto Lopez-Ortiz
Leon Kradlak
Crutch
Linderman needed to check the names, but didn’t want to type all those letters on his Iphone’s tiny keyboard. He went to the van and retrieved his laptop from the floor of the passenger seat and powered it up. Soon he was on the FBI’s web site. Using the search engine in the criminal record history information section, he pulled up the criminal file of each name on the list, and read through them.
The first five names were of prominent drug dealers. Alba Johnson and Claude Ricks had worked for the South American drug cartels and run major cocaine operations out of Miami; Ervin Gunnells had sold heroin and speed in the Tampa Bay area; Humbero Lopez-Ortiz had run a major ecstasy business in the Ocala, while Willie Kradlak had been a drug kingpin in Pensacola. This made sense. By having access to a cell phone, these men could talk to their partners on the outside, and continue to run their operations while serving out their sentences.
That left the sixth name on the list, Crutch. The name was not on the FBI’s data base. Nor did it appear when Linderman searched the “nickname” section of the site, which contained the various aliases and nicknames used by different criminals. Crutch was a mystery man.
Linderman weighed what to do. He could press Eric, but he had a feeling that Eric was not going to play ball anymore, especially since he’d already caught him in a lie. His other alternative was to call the warden at Starke Prison. As an FBI agent, he could call a federal prison at any time, and be given full access to any information that he requested.
He got the prison’s number from information, and punched it into his cell phone. An operator answered. He identified himself, and asked for the warden.
“One moment, sir,” the operator said.
He was put on hold. The mosquitoes had invaded the van and were circling for the kill. He glanced in the mirror, and saw one attached to his forehead. He squashed it with the palm of his hand, leaving a blood stain on his skin.
“Warden Jenkin’s office. This is Carol,” a secretary answered.
Linderman identified himself and asked to speak to the warden.
“Warden Jenkins is currently in a meeting, and asked not to be disturbed. May I tell him what this is about?”
“I’m calling about an inmate who may be involved in the abduction of a teenage boy in Broward County,” he said.
“An inmate in Starke?”
“That’s correct.”
“Please hold on.”
As Linderman waited, he stared at Eric Drake’s list of names. He felt certain that Crutch was the man he was looking for. Mr. Clean was a serial killer, and there was no reason for him to be talking to the other five men — all drug dealers — on the list. By process of elimination, that left Crutch.
“This is Warden Jenkins,” a man with a booming voice announced.
“Special Agent Ken Linderman, FBI. I need your help, warden. A name has come up in connection with an abduction, and we think this person is an inmate in your prison.”
“How can that be?” Jenkins asked.
“It appears this inmate has had access to a cell phone, and was talking to his accomplice on the outside.”
“How did he get a cell phone?”
“One of your guards has been bringing cell phones into the prison, and giving them to an inmate named Thunder Martinez, who was passing them out.”
“A guard? Which one?”
“His name is Eric Drake.”
Warden Jenkins delivered a stream of obscenities
into the phone.
“Drake brought six cell phones into the prison,” Linderman went on. “Five of the inmates who received the phones have been identified as drug dealers. We haven’t been able to identify the sixth man yet. We have a name, but think it’s a nickname.”
“What is it?”
“Crutch.”
“Crutch? You mean Jason Crutchfield?”
“Perhaps. Is he an inmate?”
“Yes, he is, but I find it hard to believe that he’d be involved in your case. Crutch is a model prisoner, and is coming up for parole in January. He does data processing in our records department, and has never caused any problems. Why, I just saw him an hour ago. We had a nice chat about the weather.”
“Could it possibly be someone else?” Linderman asked.
“Perhaps. We have fourteen hundred inmates.”
“Would you mind checking?”
“What exactly am I looking for?”
“Anyone with the word Crutch in their name.”
“This could take a while. We’re not totally computerized.”
“How about if I call you back in an hour?”
“Very well,” the warden said.
Linderman ended the call and got back on the Internet. Warden Jenkin’s reluctance to accept that Jason Crutchfield might be involved in wrongdoing was bothersome, especially considering the source of the information.
He returned to the FBI’s web site and pulled up Crutchfield’s criminal record. Jason Richard Crutchfield had been arrested in Melbourne, Florida in 1999 for the kidnaping and rape of a woman named Lucille Moore. His mug shot showed a diminutive man with glasses perched on the end of his nose, thinning hair worn in a feeble comb over, and feral-like features too small for his face. His head was tilted sideways, his eyes staring at the camera with distrust. The report was long and meticulously detailed, and Linderman read each word feeling like he’d stumbled upon a dark and terrible secret.
Chapter 12
There are monsters, and there are monsters.
On a drizzly October morning in 1999, a thirty-three-year-old woman named Lucille Moore crawled naked down the sidewalk inside an upscale housing development in the town of Melbourne, Florida. Handcuffed and weakened by a severe loss of blood, Moore waved to passing cars until a good Samaritan came to her aid.
“Please don’t take me back to that house.” Moore pointed to a sprawling property at the end of the street with beautiful landscaping and a large swimming pool. Her rescuer wrote down the address and drove Moore to the hospital.
At the hospital, an emergency room doctor spotted bite marks on the side of Moore’s neck, and ran a series of tests that showed half the blood was gone from her body. No one at the hospital had ever seen anything like it before.
As Moore recovered, she told the police about the polite little man with the plaid sports jacket and red bow tie who’d offered her a ride home from a bar one night. Once in the car, the man had thrown a nylon rope around her neck, and strangled her unconscious.
Moore had awakened to find herself handcuffed to a shower, her kidnapper standing naked beside her. A video camera was set up, along with bright lights. With the camera rolling, her captor had raped her, then bitten her on the neck, and sucked down several pints of blood. Finished, he’d told her how delicious the blood had tasted.
Several hours hour later, the bizarre ritual had been repeated. Growing weak, Moore had realized that if she didn’t do something, she would die. Her captor had left the bathroom with the promise to be back soon. With the last of her strength, she’d ripped the showerhead out of the wall, and escaped through a window.
Moore’s abductor was soon identified by the police. Jason Crutchfield, age thirty-two, an MIT grad who worked as a computer engineer for a local NASA contractor. No criminal record, although he’d been a suspect in his college girlfriend’s slaying in Massachusetts a decade earlier, but never formally charged.
A team of policemen were sent to Crutchfield’s house armed with a search warrant. Crutchfield had greeted them at the front door wearing a satin smoking jacket and holding a pipe. When confronted, he’d claimed that he’d paid Moore for sex, and that nothing unusual had happened. He’d continued to embellish his story, and displayed all the classic signs of a sociopath.
Crutchfield was arrested, and a number of items of interest were seized from his house, including a video camera, a collection of S&M video tapes, and a stack of women’s necklaces hanging from a tie rack in his closet.
Crutchfield had refused to cut a deal with the prosecutor, and his case had gone to trial. He’d taken the witness stand in his own defense, and presented himself to the jury as a mild-mannered, soft-spoken man who listened to baseball games while tinkering with electronic gadgets in his basement. He’d stuck to his story about Moore being a prostitute, and claimed that Moore had told him she often sold her blood to raise cash.
To counter Crutchfield’s testimony, the prosecution had called Linderman’s mentor, FBI profiler Robert Kessler, as an expert witness. Kessler had worked on several cases involving human vampires, and was considered an expert on the subject.
Kessler had presented a different side to Crutchfield. He’d told the jury that the extreme physical and mental injury to Moore showed that Crutchfield was a sadist, while the presence of a video camera in the bathroom said the crime was premeditated. The manner in which Crutchfield had bitten Moore and extracted her blood indicated that he’d done this before, and the presence of the necklaces indicated there were many other victims. Clearly, Jason Crutchfield was a danger to society, and needed to be put away.
Kessler had made a strong argument for sentencing that exceeded the guidelines mandated by the court. The jury had agreed with Kessler, and had sentenced Crutchfield to fifteen years in prison, with a chance for parole in ten.
By the time Linderman had finished reading the record, the mosquitoes had returned, and he spent a minute swatting them into oblivion.
He knew that Jason Crutchfield was the person he was looking for. Crutchfield was a sociopath, just as Mr. Clean was a sociopath. The only people sociopaths trusted were each other. They were talking to each other, and he needed to find out why.
He decided to call Bob Kessler, and see what other insights he might have on Crutchfield. He pulled up Kessler’s number from his cell phone’s address book, and heard the call go through. Kessler answered sounding out of breath.
“Hope I’m not getting you at a bad time,” Linderman said.
“Not at all, Ken. I was out on the lawn practicing my golf swing.”
“How’s retirement treating you?”
“It’s great until I run out of golf courses to play.”
“I need to pick your brain for a few minutes.”
“Sure.”
“Tell me about Jason Crutchfield. His name has come up in another case, and I wanted to hear your feelings before I questioned him.”
“You’re going to interview Crutchfield in prison?”
“That was the plan, yes.”
“Jason Crutchfield is the prince of darkness. Take my advice, and tell him as little as possible about yourself when you interview him. Otherwise, you’ll start getting postcards from him, like my family did.”
“He contacted you?”
“Yes. Right after I testified against him at his trial. He somehow got my home address, and my children’s addresses as well. For several years he sent us hand-made cards during the holidays. They were sick.”
“Were you aware he was coming up for parole next year?”
“What? Who told you that?”
“The warden at Starke Prison. He made Crutchfield out to be a model prisoner, and said he was coming up for parole. It sounds like they’re buddies.”
“Did the warden bother to read the report I sent him?”
“I don’t know, Bob — what did it say?”
“It said that Jason Crutchfield was one of the most dangerous serial killers I’ve ever enco
untered,” Kessler said. “While I was on the witness stand at his trial, Crutchfield kept looking at me and grinning. I’ve seen that look before. It was like a cat that’s just eaten a canary. It told me that he’d committed crimes more heinous than those he was being tried for, and enjoyed that I didn’t know what they were.”
“What did you do?”
“I started digging. Crutchfield was a suspect in his college girlfriend’s slaying ten years earlier, so I used that as my starting point. I contacted the cops in the town where he lived while he was in college, and asked if they’d had any unsolved homicides around that time. Sure enough, they had. The bodies of four naked young women had been found in a remote wooded area, all of them having been raped and murdered. Unfortunately, there was no physical evidence linking them to Crutchfield.