Rapes become planned in exacting detail.
Attack time is prolonged.
Victim count quickly rises.
Most likely of all rapists to kill victims.
“Until Lindsey Knapp’s death, the offender hadn’t thought of killing. But now that has happened, he has a taste for it. He will relive that attack in his mind and from this moment on, he will build death into his fantasies.”
Angie looked across the rows of homicide detectives and continued. “The more experienced among you will know that our UNSUB is what we call a mixed offender. Some of his behavior is organized and premeditated, some made up as he goes along. In truth, he’s always had some of the latent characteristics of an Anger Excitation rapist. What’s happening now is that they have surfaced and will become increasingly dominant. My prediction is that he’s enjoying the afterglow that comes with killing and not getting caught. Once that’s worn off, he’ll feel the need to strike again. And when he does, it will be more brutal, prolonged and awful than anything we have witnessed to date. You are no longer hunting a rapist. You’re hunting a fledgling sadist, potentially the worst of all serial killers.”
3
California
The place Shooter lived was special.
It had an invisibility shield.
At least, that’s how he liked to think of it.
It was so run-down, so deadbeat and nondescript that people drifted by every day and didn’t so much as give it a second glance.
It was a lot like him.
Unnoticed. Full of secrets. Brimming with potential.
It was a big space and he’d been surprised to get it as cheaply as he had. Seemed that times were so tough, you could land a real bargain these days.
He’d spent months converting the inside of the abandoned building, creating a beehive of new, small rooms, some no bigger than a prison cell. Each had to be designed to fulfill its own specific purpose and fit perfectly into his grand plan. A high-tech alarm system with remotely controlled security cameras gave him a 360-degree view of anyone approaching from road or sidewalk. The feeds went through to a secure room where Shooter ate and slept.
The outside was deliberately derelict. A spread of blacktop once white-lined with parking bays for staff, deliveries and outlet shoppers was potholed and covered in thick weeds and junk.
Beneath the trash, the old shopping carts and cardboard boxes, a small ring of fresh blacktop flowed like lumpy treacle around the circumference of the stand-alone building. If anyone found it, they’d presume the drains had been fixed or some cables laid.
They’d be wrong.
At strategic points, Shooter had planted homemade explosives and remote detonators, each wired to the windowless, central control room where he now paced the floor.
He had a lot on his mind.
Not yesterday’s kill. That was merely a peep through the curtains onto the stage that awaited him.
Today was going to be the big day.
The biggest of his unnoticed life.
4
Men’s Central Jail, Downtown LA
Jake’s heart sank as he parked about a mile from the Hall of Justice, northeast of Union Station, and headed toward one of the biggest jail complexes in the world.
MCJ was built to hold around three thousand inmates but the country’s hunger to jail offenders meant that these days some five thousand offenders were kept there.
The institution’s primary purpose was to contain high-security and pretrial inmates. Together with the Transportation Bureau, the Inmate Reception Center, the Twin Towers Correctional Facility and the Central Jail Arraignment Courts, it made up what was known as the Central Regional Justice Center and covered more than a million and a half square feet.
Jake reckoned that over the last few years he’d walked close to every inch of the place.
When he’d first joined the FBI, he’d been assigned to an academic research team that ran a project there. Their task was to interview offenders on their backgrounds and crimes. It involved a month of intensive visiting, getting to know inmates, breaking down barriers, winning their confidence and learning not just about what they did and why, but also how they felt before, during and after their crimes.
Jake had picked up a lot. It seemed to him that many young men from disadvantaged backgrounds had been shaped by prison in much the same way he’d been shaped by the army. It was their only anchor in a life full of storms. For some, the warm bed and regular meals were a better option than a life out on the streets with no job, no friends and no TV.
The SKU leader had never imagined coming back here. Nor had he wanted to.
He stopped on the steps and rang Angie. He’d put it off as long as he could. Now he was going crazy.
She picked up sharply. “H’lo.”
“Hi, it’s dumbass here—remember me?”
“Oh, yeah, I do. Big hunk of a guy, great brain, too—just a shame it doesn’t always get used properly.”
“That’s me, Doctor Holmes. Where are you?”
“LAPD. In the restroom actually and just about to leave.”
She sounded mellow enough for him to take his best shot. “Can we meet and talk?”
“Yeah, we can. We need to. You wanna grab lunch?”
“I do. I’m starving and I’m desperate to see you, but I can’t. I’m about to go in the slammer and will be at least an hour.”
“Pity.”
“I’ll be back around two-thirty. We could go to the coffee shop. Hey, I really want to sort this out, Ang.”
“I know you do. Me too. Call me when you’re in.”
He hung up. Allowed himself a smile and a final breath of fresh air before plunging inside and getting hit by the smell.
Eau de Jail-ogne.
The Essence of Incarceration.
An unmistakable and unique odor, drawn from buildings where the windows were never flung wide open. It came from furtive sex, gassy foods, acidic disinfectants, blocked latrines, mountains of filthy wash—and fear. The stench of fear floated down every landing. You could smell it on the rival gangs, on the segregated sex offenders—and most of all, on the jailers.
Memories flooded back as Jake walked the transfer bridge and entered the ten special-security acres that hosted the two high-rise inmate-housing blocks known as the Twin Towers. He waited, as he’d done many times, for new guards to take him to the five-story Medical Services Building and the room where the prisoner was waiting.
Corrie Chandler.
The man who had so nearly killed him was in a burnt orange prison uniform with plain white T. His wrists and ankles were manacled, the top chains looped through a hole in a metal desk bolted to the floor of the holding cell.
The face that Jake had knifed bore blossoms of black bruises and enough plaster to wrap a mummy.
“Hello, soldier.” Chandler’s voice was nasal and slow, a result of the long sedation while trauma surgeons staunched blood and splinted broken bone. “I didn’t think you’d come.”
The FBI man said nothing. He took the empty seat and nodded to the two guards. They slipped out and locked the door. Dead bolts clunked top, bottom and center.
Jake looked at the prisoner and pictured him killing his wife and neighbor in a rage that had started with rejection and finished in their confrontation at the Griffith Observatory.
“What do you want, Corrie? Why’d you ask for me to come out here?”
Chandler nodded. He hadn’t expected to be cut any courtesies. “What’ll happen to my stuff?”
Jake’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“House an’ car. Personal belongings an’ things?”
“Didn’t your attorney tell you all that?”
“Didn’t ask for no attorney. I used my call getting you. I told them I don’t need no representation. I know what I’ve done and I ain’t going to start denying it.”
Jake tried to explain. “The state is going to seize whatever you had. They’ll try you and then after you’r
e sentenced, everything you owned will be sold off to settle compensation claims filed by relatives of your wife and the old man you killed.”
“I’m sorry about them.” He lowered his head in shame. “Both of them should still be alive and it’s me who should be dead.” He rattled the chains falling from his wrists and seemed unable to look up.
“Remind me, what was your wife’s name, Corrie?”
He struggled to speak. “Carlyann.”
Jake had a question. Probably the same one most of America wanted to ask. “I’m just wondering what might have happened if you hadn’t had a loaded gun in the house when Carlyann told you she was leaving.”
Chandler finally looked up. “I was so mad right then, I’d have probably hit her.” He thought on it some more. “Maybe not enough to kill her. But I might have punched her or choked her or something bad.”
There was no need to ask about the neighbor. He’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. If Chandler hadn’t had a gun, he’d still be tending his garden.
Jake sat patiently. He knew there was more to come.
Finally, the prisoner got around to it. “When you was in the army, did you have a stash? You know, a fuck-off fund. Dough you kept hid in case shit hit the fan and you just had to get out of town?”
“Yeah, I did. Not much of one, but there was a little put aside.”
Chandler seemed pleased by the answer. “I got one. Also not so big but I got one.”
“Then you best tell the cops. They’ll be all over your bankbooks and property. Better to tell them now and save everyone a lot of time and trouble.”
“What? And have some dirty lieutenant stick it in his own pocket?” He laughed off the idea. “I want to tell you, not no cops. It’s a thousand dollars, that’s all. But it’s my thousand dollars and I don’t want it going to some A-hole that my wife might have been banging behind my back.”
“What do you want to do with it?”
“The old man next door has a son. Give it to him. He’s called Jacob. Can you give it to him and say I’m sorry?”
“To do what with, Corrie? To bury his father? Somehow I don’t think he’s going to appreciate the gesture. Tell the cops, or write the son yourself and tell him.” He looked to the door. “Listen, I’ve got things to do, shit of my own to sort out. If that’s it, I need to blow.”
Corrie put his hand to his face and bit on a thumbnail.
Jake sensed there was something else. The real reason for asking him to come by.
“I keep seeing them.” He stared straight at the FBI man. “The fuckers I killed.”
“Show some respect—they were your wife and neighbor.”
“No. Not them. The others.” He dipped his head again.
“What others, Corrie?” Jake stretched a big hand across the table and pushed his shoulder. “Sit up and tell me. That’s why you called me here.”
“They’re all lying there, facedown, hands behind their backs and… and then…” Chandler swallowed hard. Sweat glistened on his forehead. He wiped it with the back of his orange sleeve. “I was in eastern Afghanistan, Nuristan province.”
“Go on.”
“Our combat outpost had been attacked by the Taliban. We’d been caught badly. Insurgents hit us from all sides. Pounded us for six hours. It was fucking medieval, man. They hit us with mortars, rockets, snipers. Went down like the bastards had been planning it for weeks.”
“I remember it. Stuff got posted on YouTube. Big shitstorm about how we got caught napping.”
Chandler nodded. “Too fucking true. We took it so bad we ran out of blood for transfusions. Donations were going on during the shooting. No fucking aerial backup.”
“Why?”
“Fighting elsewhere. Fighting everyfuckingwhere.”
Jake nodded. He’d been in the same kinds of scrapes.
“By the time an Apache flew by, we’d got more than forty casualties and ten dead.” He took a beat. “Some that were gone were real close friends.”
“I’m sorry.” And Jake was. He’d seen post-traumatic stress disorder many times and it was always different. Some soldiers fell apart after their first kill. Others never got over the trauma of seeing friends die. “I don’t want to seem unsympathetic, but if you’re going to play the PTSD card in court, you need to call a shrink and a lawyer, not me.” He put his hands on the table and started to leave.
“It’s not that.” There was urgency in Chandler’s voice. He had to get something off his chest. “It wasn’t the attacks on us that I wanted to tell you about. It was the payback.”
Jake sat back and settled in to listen.
“A couple of days after the Taliban hit us, we got word on some of the ringleaders and hard-asses who’d escaped. Four units went out on a sweep. I was in one.” He stopped and mopped another outbreak of sweat. “I was in a four-man. Got split up and hung out just with the sergeant. We came across six insurgents. They were shit scared. Dropped their guns and grabbed the sky. No fight in them.” His face screwed up and he punched the metal tabletop. “Damn!”
Jake let the rage go without comment. He guessed what was coming but hoped he was wrong.
“We shot them.” Chandler nursed his smashed knuckles. “Just opened up and killed them all.”
“You were told to—or you just did it?”
“He shot the first three.”
“The sergeant?”
Chandler nodded. “He turned to me and said, ‘Now you.’ ”
Jake had to hear it. “So you did.”
“Yeah, I did.” His eyes said he was back at the scene. Seeing the fear. Hearing the noise. Seeing the blood. “The last kid had shit himself before I put a round in his head.”
“And afterward? What did you do?”
“Nothing.” He looked alarmed. “We didn’t take no trophies if that’s what you mean. We buried them in the dirt. Literally covered it all up.”
“Well,” said Jake, “now you’ve uncovered them, Corrie.”
“I know. And ’fore you say it, I know what a load of trouble it means. Both to me—and you.”
“I don’t think you do,” answered Jake. “In fact, I don’t think you have any idea what problems this is going to cause.”
5
LAPD HQ, LA
“Spare me a minute in my office?”
Angie was halfway down the corridor, heading for the elevator, when she heard O’Brien’s voice. She knew what he wanted. The mention of race in the case conference would have spooked him. She turned and smiled. “Lead the way.”
It was a short walk. He pushed open a scuffed door to reveal a tiny, dark room that smelled of cigarettes and sweat.
The lieutenant closed the door behind him. “What the hell was that curveball about a ‘racial component’?”
“It was exactly what it sounded like—I think race might be a central driver with the UNSUB but I need to validate.”
“No,” he said firmly. “You don’t. You don’t need to validate or insinuate or do anything that injects the word ‘race’ into a case on my desk, with my name on it.” He glowered at her. “Do I make myself clear?”
She met his anger with her own. “Totally. You’re a fully paid-up member of the cover-your-ass club, even if it means people out there die because you’re afraid of the truth.”
O’Brien took a deep breath and tried to keep his temper.
Angie took advantage of his silence. “Let’s get some things straight, Lieutenant. First off, I don’t work for you and I don’t take orders from you. Second—and here’s the big one—if I believe that race was a motive in this case, then this investigation, that includes your people, my people and the elderly women of LA who are watching the media and living in fear of this scumbag, are all going to get told.”
“That’s a big if.”
“All ifs are big.”
“Yeah, but that one’s Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman big.”
She laughed at him. “I wondered how long it woul
d be before you brought that up.”
He paced and hung his head in frustration. Finally, he turned and faced her again. “Are you really ready to have the media writing headlines about us hunting a ‘Rape Racist’?”
“A what?”
“You heard me.”
Angie felt enraged. “You think the word ‘rape’ gets more frightening if you tag the word ‘racist’ next to it?” She laughed mockingly. “Believe me, you wouldn’t if you were a woman.”
“It sure as hell doesn’t make it any less frightening. And it could get some hate groups spooked into vigilante nonsense. Cut me some slack here, Doctor. Give me twenty-four hours before you start elaborating to anyone on this possible race MO.”
She stared through him while she thought it over. She needed at least that time to convince herself that she was totally right. “One more day, then that’s it.”
“Agreed.” He forced a smile. “Thank you.”
Angie poker-faced him. “After that, we need to start talking about it—even if it’s in a very closed group.” She picked up her purse and was about to head out.
“Hang on. Can I run something past you before you go? It’ll only take a minute.”
She dropped the purse along with a look that said she was clean out of patience. “You’ve got five.”
“Thanks. We received an anonymous call late last night. Came in after Twitter and the TV stations started carrying the news about Lindsey Knapp’s death. It was a woman’s voice, young by the sound of it, made from a public booth in Lynwood.”
“She put the finger on someone?”
“Trent Bensimon. Local boy made bad. Done time in juvie for indecent exposure and assaults on middle-aged women.”
“Define middle-aged.”
“Fifty-five.”
“How old was Bensimon back then?”
“Fifteen.”
A forty-year age gap fitted her profile. “And now?”
“Twenty-two.” O’Brien could see that he had her interest. “Single child. Lives rough. We’ve got a CI says he’s been known to make cash running eight balls on a Bloods’ corner.”
Angie knew an eight ball was street slang for an eighth of an ounce. “He a black kid?”
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