I start with “Good morning,” but it doesn’t seem to take. “There’s no chance of that,” he says. “Julie is missing.”
“Missing how?”
“She never came home last night.”
I nod and invite him back to my office. Nate won’t be in yet; he usually comes in at eight. But there’s no need to wait for him; I can fill him in later.
I grab a cup of coffee on the way, but McKinney doesn’t want any. When we get to the office and are settled, I say. “So Julie did not come home last night. Has this happened before?”
“Never. Not once.”
“Do you have any idea where she might be?”
He hesitates, then, “I think she might be with her father.”
That’s what I was afraid of. Julie must have had second thoughts about cooperating with us and instead chose her father. I’m not happy about it, that’s for sure, but I’m not surprised.
“Why don’t you start at the beginning?”
He nods. “Okay, just forgive me if I ramble a bit; I’m pretty upset. Julie talked to me yesterday; she said she was going to give you some of her father’s things. Notes or something.”
I just nod, more as an encouragement to keep him talking than a confirmation of what he is saying.
“I said that was a good thing, that it would be best for everyone if she did that. I said whether he was guilty or innocent, the running needed to stop, that it couldn’t end well.”
He pauses, then, “Well, that set her off. All I was doing was agreeing with her approach, and suddenly I was the enemy. She screamed that I wasn’t being supportive of her or her father, that everyone was against them.
“Then I got upset. I told her that she was damn right I wasn’t being supportive of her father, that I thought he was a murderer. And that I was going to go to the police and tell them what I know. Then she screamed at me and left.”
“And you haven’t heard from her since?”
“No. I kept calling her, but she didn’t answer her cell. Then I went to the office for a little while; there was a meeting I needed to be at. When I got home, I saw that her suitcase was gone. I think she must have come home and taken some of her things. Not nearly all, but some.”
“You’ve tried calling this morning?”
A nod. “Of course. Every ten minutes. Twice while I was standing outside here, waiting for you. Her phone is turned off. I’ve called her friends; I’ve checked some of the local hotels … nothing. I think she might be with her father.”
My worry here, which I don’t share with him, is not that she left him. The health of their relationship is not on my list of concerns. I don’t care if he lost Julie, but I’m afraid that I have. She was going to be my key connection to Phelan, past and present.
“You said you told her that you would go to the police and tell them what you know. What were you talking about?”
A pause, as if he’s deciding how to answer. This could be getting interesting. “I think I know where her father is. Maybe where she is now.”
The door opens and Nate comes in, holding a cup of coffee. “Sorry, didn’t know you had company,” he says when he sees me with McKinney.
“Can you give us a minute, Nate?” I don’t want this conversation interrupted, and I have no doubt Nate will pick up on that.
“Sure. I’ll be in Kinsler’s office if you need me.” He closes the door behind him as he leaves.
“You were saying that you might know where she is.”
He nods. “I have a cabin; it’s up near Great Gorge. It’s been in the family for years, but I hardly ever go there. Technically it’s owned by my brother, but he lives in San Francisco so he never uses it. It’s very secluded, basically in the middle of nowhere.”
“Julie has been there?”
He nods. “Yes. Once.”
“What about her father?”
“I don’t know if he’s ever been there before; I don’t think so.” Another pause, then, “But I think he might be there now.”
“Why do you say that?”
“First I want to know if Julie could get any trouble for this. I mean, if she’s with him.”
“I can’t answer that. I would think they’d make allowances for her situation.”
He nods in vigorous agreement. “Right. I mean, she’s his daughter. She loves her father, no matter what he might have done. She thinks he’s innocent.”
“James, no matter what the situation, it will only get worse with time. You told her that yesterday, and you were right. This has to end now.”
“You’re right.”
“So why do you think her father might be in your cabin?”
“Because Julie told him about it.”
“When?” I ask.
“Last week. You weren’t after him then. I thought it might be a good place for him to get away, not run away. He was under a lot of pressure, and I thought it might help him. So I mentioned the possibility to Julie.”
“What did she say?”
“That he was innocent, and that he would never have to run away. But once he did, there’s a chance he took her up on the idea. I don’t know that, of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“We’ll need you to tell us where it is, and describe the setup for us.”
“I will.” Then, “Julie will never talk to me again.”
I don’t respond to that, for two reasons:
He’s probably right, and, either way, I don’t really give a shit.
This time the note comes to Nate.
It says: “Too bad about your partner. He doesn’t count toward the total … I threw him in as a bonus. Watch your fat ass, Nate.”
Nate and I are reading the copy of it that forensics just delivered back to us. “He was pretty confident he’d get you,” Nate says.
“He didn’t count on the Bobo factor.”
“This could change his MO. Gero was the marksman; we don’t know that for sure about Phelan.”
“Unless there’s a third player,” I say. “They could have a deep bench. But he’s shown flexibility anyway. Deirdre Clemons got her neck broken before the car fire. That was up close and personal.”
“He could come after you again,” Nate says. “What happened last night might just piss him off.”
“The captain already has security around our house, even though I think it’s not necessary. But in any event, the note says you’re the target now,” I point out. “And he’s obviously familiar with you; he knows you have a fat ass.”
Right now James McKinney is off in another office with our tactical team. They are debriefing him on everything about the cabin … location, terrain, access roads, etc. Then I have no doubt that they will do aerial surveillance, probably with drones, to confirm everything. McKinney says that he has not been there in a long time, so we’ll want to make sure that all his information is up-to-date.
We want to move fast on this, but we want to make sure we do it right. The great UCLA basketball coach John Wooden said, “Be quick, but don’t hurry.” That’s the goal here.
Meanwhile Jessie and her team are gathering as much information as they can on William Gero. They had done some work on this previously, but stopped when Nate and I interviewed him and basically eliminated him as a suspect.
I seem to have a tendency to clear suspects who then go on to kill people; that’s probably not a great trait for a homicide detective. I did it with Phelan a couple of years ago, and then repeated the maneuver recently with Gero. Maybe I’m in the wrong line of work.
I know that we’ve already served a warrant on Gero’s rifle range for its records. We’ll want to see if Phelan has ever been a customer of the place; his connection to Gero could be as simple as that. They could have met there and found they shared a love of guns and killing people.
Bradley is giving a televised press conference this morning; he’s started to publicly refer to them as “updates.” He hates doing them, but early on he promised transparency to the pu
blic, and the problem with that is it then requires him to be transparent.
Nate and I are sitting this one out; there is just too much going on here. But Bradley is joined by the police commissioner, who wants to share in the glory that one of the bad guys has been killed. Of course, the news is not all good …
“I know there has been media speculation,” Bradley says as we watch on TV, “that the man who was killed in an attack on one of our officers is connected to the case. I am here to confirm the accuracy of that report. The deceased’s name was William Gero, and pending ballistic and other tests, we believe that he has been involved in the recent spate of killings.
“I do want to point out, however, that Daniel Phelan remains a person of interest in the case. We believe that Mr. Phelan and others at the very least have information that is important to us. So I would like to implore everyone to remain vigilant, and to report anything that seems to be connected to our tip line.
“I wish I could stand here and say otherwise, but we do not consider this investigation to be concluded. Danger remains, and everyone should behave accordingly.”
While Bradley is talking, the report comes in that the rifle and handgun that Gero had last night are, in fact, the weapons that were used in the killings. Of course, there is no absolute guarantee that Gero was the person pulling the trigger in those cases, but it seems like a pretty safe bet.
For now all we can do is wait for the tactical team to finish debriefing McKinney and then come to us with their plans. As the officers in charge, we will have the ability to revise those plans before implementation, but if we do, it will likely just be adjustments around the edges. This is what these people do for a living, and they simply are better at it than we are.
They finally finish with McKinney and send him back out to us to see if we have any more questions for him. I ask him if he knows where Julie stored her father’s material, since she is not around to turn it over as promised.
He says that he does not, though I don’t know if he is telling the truth. He keeps expressing concern about Julie’s reaction to his coming to us, saying, “I hope she understands that I’m just doing what’s best for her.”
My view of this, though it is not one formed from experience, is that a woman is likely to take a dim view of her boyfriend turning her and her father in to the police. It would seem that they have not invented the couple’s therapy that could successfully deal with that situation.
The truth is that I still don’t much care either way. I just want to find Julie Phelan—mostly because it will likely lead us to her father, but also because she might be in danger herself. Phelan may well be unstable; he’s certainly nuts.
I send McKinney off with the admonition to try and find out what storage facility Julie Phelan might have used for her father’s stuff. He says that he will, but I don’t believe it.
I think he’s going to wait and see what comes out of our getting to his cabin, and then go from there.
That’s exactly what I’m going to do as well.
There is only one road leading to McKinney’s cabin.
Actually, calling it a road might be giving it too much credit. It is unpaved, narrow, and being encroached on by the shrubbery along the sides. It is probably better defined as a hiking trail wide enough for a car. Phelan’s SUV, at least before it went up in flames, could probably have gotten through, but not without incurring some scratches.
So setting up roadblocks in a conventional sense is not exactly challenging. More difficult is making sure that if our targets get away, they don’t escape into the dense woods.
The location of the cabin is a bit of a surprise to me, since it is quite a ways from the scenes of the murders at the gas station and library. I would have thought that Phelan would have slipped in and out to commit the crimes, but that is not the case.
Of course, at least in the case of the gas station, he may not have been there at all. Chances are William Gero pulled the trigger, and the job would not have required a second-in-command. The murder of the librarian is a different story; that was a two-person job.
So while we will have officers stationed at various points at the edge of the woods, they are not likely to see any action. If Phelan gets away, he is likely to go farther into the woods, where he will count on his survival skills to … well … survive.
That might be more challenging if Julie is with him, and if he cares about her. Moving with her in the woods, and hiding with her, would be considerably more difficult. Possible, but not ideal for him.
Working in our favor is that there is a considerable clearing outside the cabin on all sides. A lot of trees died in the making of that place. We will have aerial support when we go in, and they will have a clean shot at Phelan if he makes a break for it.
The heat-detecting machine is not an option here; we wouldn’t be close enough to use it before making our move. It also doesn’t really matter; we are going to assume that Phelan and maybe Julie are in there and behave accordingly. If they’re not, then no harm, no foul, and it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve come up empty.
Nate and I are nominally in charge of the operation—emphasis on “nominally.” The SWAT team commander, Lieutenant Morrow, will run the show. I’ve worked with him, and he is as good as they get.
He and his team know the goal: Our first choice is to capture Phelan alive, our second choice is to take him out in a body bag. Julie is to be treated as complicit in Phelan’s crimes until we know otherwise. If there is any threat to the life or well-being of the law-enforcement officers, lethal force is 100 percent authorized.
We move into position along with the SWAT team; in this case that position is on the road about three hundred yards from the cabin. A light rain is falling, but no one seems to notice or care. It would take a lot more rain to make the dirt road difficult to navigate, but even that wouldn’t matter, because we’re going in on foot.
Morrow comes over to Nate and me and asks, “Ready?” It’s a rhetorical question and a sign of respect; he knows that we are ready when he says we’re ready.
And suddenly we’re ready. The team members start running at a brisk clip along the road toward the cabin. Nate and I fall in behind them, and as we do, I can hear the faint roar of the approaching choppers. It will be their role to prevent Phelan from escaping out the back and into the woods.
As we get closer the noise from the choppers is deafening. That’s at least partially by design; it would frighten anyone on the receiving end of this invasion.
Up ahead I can barely hear yelling over the noise, but I don’t hear any gunfire. I’m hoping that means that Phelan gave up rather than that there is no one in the cabin worth shooting.
Morrow and I are carrying two-way radios, and the plan is for Nate and me to wait at the edge of the clearing for the okay to come in. That signal does not come. Instead, Morrow opens the door to the cabin from the inside and gestures for us to come in.
Nate and I head in; if there is any danger, it has long since passed. When we reach the door, Morrow turns and walks back in, and we follow.
It is then that we see the body. It’s a woman, but it’s not Julie Phelan.
Pinned to her chest is a note. It says: “You should understand by now that I am everywhere and nowhere. I know everything and no one is safe. You can tell that to Mr. McKinney.”
The dead woman has been identified as Ruth Dempsey.
She is a resident of Carlyle, a town less than three miles from the cabin where she was found. The cause of death was strangulation; there was no skin under her fingernails and no evidence she was able to put up a fight. It is most likely that she was grabbed from behind and never had a chance.
My guess is that Phelan picked Ms. Dempsey at random; she was a handy victim because of her proximity. Her life was of no consequence to Phelan; he was simply using her to make a point.
The time of death, as estimated by the coroner, is very interesting. Ms. Dempsey is estimated to have been dead fo
r eighteen hours before we found her. If that’s accurate, then she was killed before McKinney even told us about the cabin.
Unfortunately, that decisively implicates Julie Phelan. McKinney told her he was going to go to the police and tell them what he knew. Julie and her father would then have known that the cabin was no longer safe, since we were about to find out about it from McKinney.
The only way that Phelan would have written that note vowing revenge against McKinney is if he learned the situation from Julie. Julie is therefore not a captive of her father, nor is she in danger from him. Whether or not she had anything to do with the previous killings—and I doubt that she did—her entire situation has changed.
Unless her father somehow forced her to reveal McKinney’s plan to betray him, Julie is now part of this.
I call Bradley and tell him to put Julie’s name and likeness out to the media, and he agrees to do so. No matter where they are, Julie is going to be a burden to Phelan as he both stays in hiding and ventures out to continue his killing spree. Maybe that will work in our favor.
Until the moment that we walked into the cabin, I was holding out the ridiculous hope, against all odds, that Phelan wasn’t the killer. It was selfish of me because of my guilt for letting him go at the time of the Brookings killing, but that’s how I felt.
That hope is now effectively out the window.
I call James McKinney, who has not fared well in all of this. When he hears my voice, he quickly asks, “Have you found Julie?”
“Not officially,” I say. “But she is on the run with her father. They had left the cabin before we got there.”
“Shit,” he says, not realizing that the bad news is still to come.
“There was another murder; a body was in the cabin.”
“Who was it?”
“That’s not important,” I say. “Her identity will be announced at the proper time. But there was a message from Phelan; it was threatening toward you.”
“Oh, no … oh, shit. Because I told you about the cabin?”
“I suppose so.”
“Oh, man … how could he have known that?”
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