The Program (Jack Carpenter series)

by James Swain

  Linderman went to the window and parted the blinds with his finger. A few hundred yards away, a line of inmates were walking down a wide concrete walkway. He tried to find Jason Crutchfield in the line.

  “Give me your camera,” he said to Wood.

  Wood passed him the camera. Linderman extended the zoom and had another look. He found Crutch near the back of the line. Their suspect was small in stature, with thinning, neatly parted hair. He wore wide-rimmed glasses which sat perched on the end of his nose like a librarian’s. His orange jumpsuit was spotless, and without creases. He looked about as threatening as an accountant.

  Lowering the camera, Linderman glanced at the warden. Jenkins had come in on the coattails of a scandal, and was about to become part of another.

  “Ready when you are,” Linderman said.

  The three men crossed the prison grounds in one hundred degree heat. There was no breeze, the air dead and still. The prison had no tall buildings that offered an escape into the cool shade. Soon they were dripping sweat.

  Two uniformed guards met them at the front door to Crutch’s building.

  “Take us to Crutch’s cell,” Jenkins told them.

  The guards walked them down a short hallway to an electronically operated door, which had been left open. The door led to a large cellblock.

  “Which cell is Crutch’s?” Jenkins asked.

  “Last cell on the left,” one of the guards replied.

  “Is it open?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Stay here. Both of you,” Jenkins said.

  The guards took their positions outside the cellblock. Linderman entered first. The odor inside the cellblock hit him hard. Shit, piss, desperation, and fear, a combination of odors that no room deodorizer could erase.

  “God, is that foul,” Wood said.

  Crutch’s cell was at the end of the block. Linderman wondered if corner cells in prison were the same status symbols as corner offices in the outside world. He stopped at the cell door. Small and tidy, the cell contained cardboard shelving units lined with paperback books, music CDs, and an assortment of knick-knacks, including packs of gum, a deck of playing cards, and a stack of index cards wrapped with a rubber band. He removed a pair of rubber gloves from his pocket and fitted them on.

  “I’ll search, you shoot,” Linderman said.

  “Got it,” Wood replied.

  Linderman started by taking the sheets off the bed, and checking the mattress and box spring for hidden pockets. They were both clean, and he remade the bed so it looked just like before. Then, he took the index cards off the shelf, removed the rubber band, and dealt them individually onto the bed. Each card was covered in a tiny scribble of writing. He stood back, and let Wood photograph each card, making sure that his counterpart shot them in the same order they’d occupied in the stack.

  Next were the paperbacks. Linderman leafed through them to be sure they didn’t contain hollowed out compartments, then laid them out to be photographed. Their subjects ranged from true crime books by Ann Rule, to criminal psychology, to a short story collection by Stephen King entitled Different Seasons. One of the stories, Apt Pupil, had been underlined in several different places.

  Then came the CDs. His earlier hunch had been correct: Crutch favored classical music. His shelves were filled with piano works by Bach and Beethoven, sprinkled with early Herbie Hancock. Linderman opened each CD pocket to check on its contents. Satisfied, he laid them on the bed to be photographed.

  The last items were the knick-knacks. A tin can filled with buttons, some yarn, a book of stamps, several unused envelopes, and the playing cards. They were not the type of items that typically held clues, but he laid them out anyway.

  “What are those?” Wood asked, pointing at the cards.

  “Playing cards,” Linderman replied.

  “They look like a pack of cigarettes. Take them out of the box. I don’t want to be confused later when I look at the photos.”

  Linderman took the cards out of the box and fanned them on the bed. They were dog-eared and worn. Their back design showed a drawing of the state of Florida with a gold shield superimposed over the state. Printed in bold letters inside the shield were the words Florida Association of Crime Stoppers. Below that, a quote from Voltaire:

  “To the living we owe respect; to the dead we owe the truth.”

  The truth. Sometimes it was hard to find the truth. Linderman had seen these cards before. Printed on their faces were photographs of fifty-two people who’d been murdered or had gone missing in Florida. Each card contained a brief bio of the victim, along with a toll-free phone number to call. The cards were distributed to Florida’s prison population in the hope they might lead to tips or information in cracking the cases. He knew about the cards because Danni’s case was featured on one. Danni’s card was the Queen of Diamonds, which she would have liked. Beneath her photograph were the words 18 Year Old White Female followed by a sixty-five word description of how she’d disappeared while jogging at the University of Miami.

  “All done,” Wood said.

  Linderman scooped up the cards and found himself staring at the dead and missing. In the margins of each card Crutch had written cryptic notes in pencil, sometimes several sentences long. The printing was tiny and needed magnification.

  “Find something?” Jenkins asked, standing outside the cell.

  “There’s writing on these playing cards,” Linderman explained. “I want to keep them, if that’s all right.”

  “Take whatever you want. Just make sure you take things from the other cells as well.”

  Linderman slipped the deck into his pocket. He supposed he should have leveled with Jenkins, and told him about Danni’s card being in the deck, and how he wanted to see what Crutch had written in the margins. But he decided against it. He’d stopped believing that anyone truly cared about what had happened to his daughter except he, his wife, and a handful of his friends. So he rarely talked about it, and never with strangers.

  Linderman grabbed a handful of items from other cells. Wood met him in the center of the cellblock when he was finished.

  “All done?” Linderman asked.

  “All done,” Wood said.

  Chapter 15

  “Having a little cougar-time?” a voice asked.

  Vick turned away from her computer. DuCharme stood in the doorway to her temporary office at police headquarters, holding two cups of coffee and a bag of pastries, his body reeking of cheap aftershave.

  “Excuse me?” she replied.

  DuCharme bit his lower lip. As opening lines went, it was a real stinker.

  “You’ve never heard of cougar-time?” the detective asked.

  “Afraid not.”

  “It’s a popular expression with the kids.”

  “That’s nice.”

  She went back to her computer. The police department’s server had been down, and her web site had just gone live. She was monitoring the postings on the site’s blog, hoping Mr. Clean took the bait. There was technology which would have enabled her to read the site’s blog on her BlackBerry, only no one in the building knew how to use it.

  “Those coffees must be hot,” she said.

  “You bet they’re hot. They’re burning my fingers.”

  “Put them on the desk and have a seat.”

  DuCharme put the food on the desk. He grabbed a chair and sat so their legs were nearly touching. Shredding the bag, he removed two huge Danish pastries dripping with sweet cheese, and offered Vick one.

  “No thanks,” Vick said.

  “Aw, come on. They’re really good.”

  “I was raised never to eat anything bigger than my head.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, Roger, I’m sure.”

  DuCharme inhaled the first Danish as if it were his last meal, gulped down his coffee, then attacked the second with the same gusto. The crescendo was a deep belch which he smothered with his fist.

  “You’ve piqued my cu
riosity,” she said. “What’s cougar-time?”

  “It’s when older women pursue younger men,” DuCharme said, licking the sugar off his fingers.

  “And why would that pertain to me?”

  He pointed at the photographs of Mr. Clean’s three victims lying on the desk. “Those are three good-looking boys,” he said.

  “Those are our victims. In case you hadn’t noticed, Mr. Clean is picking good-looking teenage boys to kidnap and kill. I was studying them.”

  “I thought Mr. Clean was picking them because they were punks.”

  “Punks?”

  “Yeah. You know, trash.”

  “Why do you call them that? Because they’ve killed?”

  “Damn straight.”

  “They’re still victims.”

  “Society’s better off with them gone, you ask me.”

  No one asked you, Vick nearly said. She stifled the urge to blow him off, and tried a more tactful approach. “Society treats young people who kill differently than adults. Young people, especially teenage boys, often act impulsively, and don’t fully comprehend the consequences of what they’re doing.”

  “What … we should let them skate?”

  “No, just give them another chance.”

  “Why do that?”

  “So they can be rehabilitated.”

  DuCharme pointed at Wayne Ladd’s photo. “That boy stuck a bayonet through his mother’s boyfriend’s heart. He got right in his victim’s face, and looked him in the eye when he killed him. There’s no changing punks like that.”

  Vick wanted the conversation to end. A new posting had appeared on the web site’s blog. Reading it, the skin on her scalp turned warm and prickly.

  The police are never going to catch this guy because the police don’t know what they’re doing. They’re fucking assholes. They look at things, and only see what they want to see. How can people that fucking stupid expect to solve a crime. Answer: THEY CAN’T!

  Someone with real anger toward the police had written this. The claim that the police would never catch the killer was also troubling. Vick typed a command into her computer that allowed her to access the filter on the site. The author’s IP address appeared on her screen, along with the physical address of the author’s computer. The posting had been made from a computer terminal at the Broward County main library.

  Vick phoned the library and spoke to the sheriff’s deputy in charge of security. She asked the deputy how many cops were on duty.

  “I’ve got five officers in the building,” the deputy said.

  “Get them together, and go to where the computer terminals are located,” Vick said. “Have your officers hold whoever’s sitting at those computers. Our suspect is a large Cuban male between thirty-five and fifty years of age. He’s armed and extremely dangerous. I’ll be right there.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the deputy said.

  Vick hung up and grabbed her purse off the back of her chair. She was halfway out the door when she spotted DuCharme frantically punching a number into his cell phone. She paid it no heed, and hurried down the hallway toward the elevators.

  The Broward County library was an imposing six-story structure on the corner of Andrews Avenue and SW 6th Street in downtown Fort Lauderdale. A covered walkway protruding from the building’s second floor led to an elevated parking garage across the street, which also serviced the nearby courthouse. Vick had planned to park in the garage and use the walkway, only there was a problem. The front of the library was jammed with police cars, both marked and unmarked. Unable to maneuver around them, she put her FBI decal on the dash, and parked in a bus zone. She turned to DuCharme, who sat in the passenger seat.

  “Is this your doing?” she asked angrily.

  “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking,” the detective said.

  “What if Mr. Clean was listening to the police patrol car conversations on a scanner, and heard your distress call go out? You didn’t say our suspect was a serial killer, did you?”

  “I may have…”

  “You idiot.”

  Vick jumped out of the car and slammed the door. She ran up the steps while pinning her FBI badge to her jacket lapel. The library’s head of security greeted her at the front door. His name was Deputy Murphy, and he had snow white hair and the weary gloss of an older cop. She waited until they were inside an elevator before speaking.

  “Tell me what you’ve got,” Vick said.

  “We detained four people who were on the library computers using the Internet,” Murphy said. “I spoke to the librarian who monitors the computer area, and she said they were the only patrons on the computers at the time you called.”

  “Describe them.”

  “Suspect number one is a retired postman in his late-seventies. Number two is an overweight white male in his late teens. Number three, an expectant housewife. Number four, a smart-mouthed teenage girl.”

  None of them matched Mr. Clean’s profile. Yet one of them had written the angry post on the web site. Vick needed to find out why. The door parted with a hiss and they got out on the sixth floor.

  “Is the teenage girl giving you a lot of crap?” Vick asked.

  “She won’t shut up.”

  “Cursing?”

  “Quite a bit. It took me by surprise. She’s clearly upset about something.”

  “That’s the one I’m looking for. Let’s put her in a room by herself. I’m going to grill her.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  DuCharme appeared as Vick was preparing to question suspect number four. He was out of breath, and had been searching the building for her. He tried to apologize, and Vick cut him off at the knees.

  “You get in trouble every time you open your mouth,” Vick said.

  “Look, I’m really…”

  “Shut up.”

  He nodded compliance. Vick grabbed the doorknob and twisted it. The room was windowless, with a round conference table and eight chairs. Plastered on the walls were posters of Dr. Seuss characters promoting National Reading month. A sullen teenage girl sat in a chair at the end of the table. Deputy Murphy stood behind her, his arms crossed.

  Vick cleared her throat as she entered the conference room. She heard DuCharme shut the door behind her. That made him good for something.

  “Hello,” Vick said. “My name is Special Agent Vick, and I’m with the FBI.”

  The girl’s mouth dropped open and panic lit up her eyes. She was the complete package. Luscious face, full bosom, hypnotic eyes, small waist. The kind of girl that boys dreamed about late at night, and fought over in schoolyards. Her clothes were suggestive, and showed cleavage and plenty of well-tanned skin.

  “What’s your name?” Vick asked.

  “I haven’t done anything wrong,” the girl shot back.

  Vick came around the desk so fast that the girl pulled back in her chair.

  “Answer the question,” Vick said.

  “But I haven’t,” the girl said defensively.

  “Not cooperating with an FBI agent is a crime, young lady. How would you like to go down to police headquarters with me?”

  The girl’s eyes welled with tears, and she shook her head.

  “You went onto a police website this morning, and posted some unpleasant things on a blog,” Vick said. “I want to know why. Let’s start by you telling me your name.”

  “Amber Spears.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Do you have any ID?”

  “No.”

  Vick removed a pen and notepad from her purse and placed them on the table. “I want you to write down your name, your address, your home phone number, and both your parents names. While we’re talking, I’m going to have my partner check you out. If I find you’re lying to me, I’ll run you in.”

  Amber wrote down her personal information on the notepad. Vick tore off the sheet and crossed the room to where DuCharme slouched against the wall.

  “Make yourself useful, an
d check this out,” Vick said under her breath.

  DuCharme left. Vick grabbed a chair and sat facing Amber. The girl’s nostrils were flared, her breathing accelerated. Vick touched her wrist, and Amber lifted her eyes from the floor. Their gazes locked.