Spree

by Michael Morley

  Instead, he was able to spend most of the morning chasing operational loose ends and calming Danielle down. The news that Angie Holmes had theories on “her” case and had secretly watched footage of the shootings in the mall had sent her into orbit.

  Peaceful hours passed, until the two women came face-to-face at 11:00 a.m. in Briefing Room A. Jake witnessed an exchange of laser-beam glowers across the long dark wood table, and he was thankful their respective bosses, Dixon and McDonald, were there to keep the peace. Jeffreys settled down next to his number two, Katherine Mitchell, a tall, long-faced woman with dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was dressed in an old sweater and jeans, and the discomfort on her face gave away that she had worked most of the night and not expected to be bumped into a high-powered meeting like this one. Opposite her was the immaculately blue-suited Connor Pryce, who as well as being LAPD SWAT was now also Chief Rawlings’s personally appointed liaison officer on the triple joint inquiry with the FBI.

  Jake settled into a seat next to Ruis Costas and kicked things off on a note of solemnity. “I’ve just been told that unfortunately the Sun Western death toll has risen again. Two of the bomb victims in ICU didn’t make it. Total count for both incidents at the mall is now twenty-nine dead. It will most probably clear thirty by the end of the day.”

  Dixon briefly interrupted. “In a couple of hours’ time, there will be public announcements that all known terror groups have denied responsibility for the latest attack. That will let the White House off the hook, as it clearly means the incident is a local problem, not a foreign policy one. There is no country for us to attack, no religious fundamentalist to vilify, so the president will stay out of things—for now. But you can bet your asses we’re gonna get calls from his office, and the mayor’s and the governor’s. In other words, the shit is on our shoes and everyone is going to blame us for the resulting mess that gets spread, so we need to clean up fast.” He nodded to Jake to carry on.

  “Okay, I’m presuming you’ve all read and understood the briefing from the Bomb Squad?” The faces around him said they had. “A clay model put down by a child at the scene contained C4 and a shock wave detonator. Top of our agenda is the question of whether the same man was responsible for the shooting spree and the bombing.”

  Danielle Goodman jumped in. “I think it would be very dangerous to go along those lines. I’ve already submitted a detailed profile on the ‘Sun Western Slayer,’ as the press are calling him. I think psychologically it is at odds with the psychopathy of a bomber.” She pitched to Dixon. “The UNSUB is impulsive and emotional. He is of low intelligence and probably derived sexual satisfaction from killing at close quarters. Watch him on the footage and you can see he is a sexual voyeur enjoying an orgy of violence. While the bomber, well, he is totally different. He clearly has intelligence, know-how and expertise. I think he’d been planning an explosives attack for some time and simply seized the moment. He may even have been annoyed that the Spree got so much news coverage at a time when he was planning to strike, so he sought to use the Memorial Service as a way to upstage him.”

  “Dear God,” Dixon responded, “please don’t tell me there’s a possibility of two lunatics trying to outdo each other in some sick competition to see who can create the biggest atrocity.”

  “Why not?” she answered. “Given their completely different profiles and MOs, it’s the only explanation.”

  Angie could no longer restrain herself. “That’s bullshit.”

  Jake dropped his head. All her promises of staying calm and not winding up Danielle had obviously been forgotten.

  “Say what?” Danielle had a face like thunder.

  Angie calmly locked eyes. “Let’s start with the child and his model of the grandmother. Are you saying the bomber made this model of the dead woman, inserted explosives into it and then recruited a street kid to carry it to the memorial ceremony, all within such a short period of time? I really don’t think so.”

  “It was a clay model and not a very good one,” retorted Danielle. “It looked as much like my grandmother or anyone’s grandmother as it did the dead woman.”

  “Ladies…,” McDonald intervened. “Let’s keep this respectful. Disagreement is good—even vital—for teasing out the basis of theories, but remember we’re all on the same side here.”

  Danielle hadn’t finished her defense. “I think he could have had that model ready as a gift for any occasion and he just adapted it. Let’s be honest, you can get street kids to run any errand in the world these days if you pay them a little up front and promise them a whole lot more once the job’s completed.”

  “That last bit I concede,” said Angie.

  “Good, then you also have to see that there are two different offenders at work here with two completely different MOs.”

  “With respect, I think you’re wrong.”

  “Why?”

  “What about Anders Breivik? He shot up a whole island of kids in Scandinavia and bombed a town center. Maybe this UNSUB is America’s Breivik?”

  “That was politically motivated,” said Danielle dismissively. “He wanted to be caught so he could expound his race hate claptrap. There’s no indication of that here.”

  “Maybe there is.” Jake was glad to get a word in between them. “Maybe that’s what’s behind the note.”

  Danielle jumped in again. “I want to go on record saying I’m unhappy I wasn’t told about this note until this morning. I think it’s unprofessional that I wasn’t looped in earlier.”

  “Duly noted,” said Dixon dismissively. “Now let’s get on with what it might mean.”

  Angie gave her explanation. “I take it to be an anagram of the words Judge and Jury, something the killer is setting himself up as. He wants us to see him not only as having the power to decide who should be found guilty and punished, but also as the person to dispense justice—the executioner.”

  Sandra McDonald wasn’t so sure. “Perhaps it wasn’t an anagram but was the UNSUB’s idea of a sick joke, a piece of bad taste sarcasm.”

  “Could be code,” speculated Jeffreys. “Bombers like codes. It would be interesting to see what the Bureau’s cryptologists make of it.”

  Dixon nodded. “They’re looking at it, Tom. Tell me, from what you’ve just heard, are you feeling that there might be a connection between the shooting and the bombing?”

  “We were already thinking along those lines.” He nodded toward Angie and Danielle. “I agree with some views of both psychologists, namely that the clay model and the hidden bomb suggest long-term planning and opportunistic execution. Maybe even specific targeting of that woman for some reason.”

  “Her name was Tanya Murison,” added Katherine Mitchell. “She was a Christian but her surviving husband is a Muslim.”

  “Extremist?” asked Jake.

  “No, not at all. A kindly man, from what we’ve found. We’re still digging into their backgrounds in case there’s a racial or religious aspect.”

  Jeffreys knew what the group was thinking. “We’ve checked denominations of the dead and injured at the mall. There were only two Muslims in total; the rest were Christians and Jews. That doesn’t rule out the bomber having some twisted theory about punishing Muslims and those who associate with them.”

  “Then I’d expect the note he left to be more religiously skewed,” said Danielle.

  “And I would, too,” concurred Angie.

  An unconnected thought occurred to Dixon. “Before I forget, where did you guys get with the baseball cap the UNSUB was wearing?”

  Ruis let out a long sigh that signaled extreme disappointment. “In short, nowhere. We pulled in some help from the LAPD but they’ve drawn blanks. Actually, that’s a lie. So many of those caps got sold, it’s going to take an age to make matches. They’ve got a team working first on the Lakers’ own outlets, profiling purchasers within our suspect’s age range who visited stores within the last two months. From that pool—and we’re talking hundreds—they’re c
hasing down surveillance tapes at checkout registers and seeing if they get lucky.”

  Dixon rubbed his tired eyes. “Very lucky. Let’s face it, that’s just the start. From there they’ve got to progress to dozens of other franchisees.”

  “Then there are the counterfeiters,” added Jake. “A zillion caps get knocked out for sale on street corners on game days.”

  A blond secretary opened the door and signaled to Ruis.

  “Sorry,” he said to the room as he waved her in. “I asked Jane to bring a report she just emailed me about.”

  The secretary laid down a green file and flushed because people were looking at her.

  “Thanks.” He looked inside and checked a few of the papers.

  “If it’s worth interrupting the meeting, then let’s hear what’s in it,” said Jake.

  “Of course.” Ruis took out a black and white photograph and held it so people could see. “This is a shot of a female cleaner working the mall. It was taken the day before the shootings, in the elevator that our killer escaped in.”

  Everyone studied the print of a fat, old black woman in navy blue jacket and pants. She was carrying a red bucket filled with cans of polish, sprays of cleaners and disinfectants, sponges and cloths. On her chest was a name badge declaring her to be LETITIA-ANNE.

  “The service elevators get cleaned every day,” continued Ruis. “But not by Letitia-Anne. She’s never been seen before—or since. And she’s dressed in a uniform very similar to one used by members of the cleaning company that has the contract—same color jacket and pants—but not identical, not the official issue.” Ruis put down the still and took two more out of the file. “Here she is polishing the steel walls.” He switched to another shot. “Then she produces a glass cleaning spray and squirts the camera. Soaks it good and proper. Only she forgets to polish off the cleaner, so when she walks away the camera is left wet. In time, it dries, but the lens goes foggy in patches. Of course, no one in security really notices or gives a damn. The mess they see on their monitors in the control room could be anything—condensation, spit, spray from a can of Coke opened by some idiot heading out on a break. So they leave it be. Hell, they guess the cleaner will sort it tomorrow.” He pulled a sheet of paper from the file. “Lab report just in. It shows the camera and housing were sprayed not with glass cleaner but with hydrofluoric acid. This stuff is highly corrosive. The king of corrosives. It can even dissolve glass, it’s that strong. The glass cleaner wasn’t the only fake; so, too, was Mrs. Mop—she was our Spree.”

  24

  Skid Row, LA

  Shooter had picked most of the daily papers from the trash cans down on Seventh where the Greyhound buses lined up.

  Back in his sanctuary, he spread them out and then publication by publication went through every report concerning him.

  He highlighted key words with different-colored text markers, and when he was done, sat back and weighed up what the world thought of him.

  The most commonly used descriptions were despicable, cold-blooded, disgusting and inhumane.

  Given time they’d change their minds.

  He’d see to it that they did.

  No one had mentioned the note he’d left at the mall, so he guessed the cops were still keeping quiet about it. Although they seemed so stupid, he didn’t rule out the possibility that they hadn’t even found it.

  All the newspapers mourned the “double tragedy” that had hit the mall, but none were bold enough to suggest that only one person might have been responsible for both. What really annoyed Shooter was that there were almost as many pictures of the kid, Leroy Danziel, as there were of him. The way Shooter figured it, that piece of gutter trash hadn’t deserved a single line of print. The kid had been running crack bags to cruising cars for a corner gang. Shooter bought a deal and with it the boy’s willingness to run other errands.

  USA Today urged people not to forget the victims of the store because of the even more emotive murders at the memorial. It reminded its readers that they were looking for “a black, twenty- to thirty-year-old male, of average build and height, probably living alone.”

  The description made him laugh. He’d worn clothes beneath his oversized T-shirt to appear fatter and broader. He’d been careful in layering up so the cops wouldn’t see creases or other garments beneath the big white T. They’d gotten far more wrong than right.

  He used specialist craft scissors to cut out the report. Then he excised every photograph he could find of himself.

  Not out of vanity.

  Out of caution.

  It was important to know how the world saw him. Who they thought they were scanning the sidewalks, bus seats and grocery stores for.

  Ninety percent of the stills had come from CCTV footage in the mall. The reproductions were mainly grainy and shaky, often out of focus and usually too distant to be really telling. The remaining 10 percent were better. It was the Judy Ju’s footage and in good color and sharpness. But there wasn’t much of it. He had moved around a lot in the store and the camera had only caught his face a couple of times. Studying the shots, it was plain to see that the cops had blown them up because they were pinning all their hopes on someone recognizing the fat-faced black boy in the white Lakers cap with his Afro-American hair tucked back beneath the brim.

  Good for them.

  That’s exactly what he’d wanted them to do.

  The pictures looked nothing like him. Nothing like Letitia-Anne the cleaning lady. Nothing like Old Joe. Or any of the other people he could be. They could search all their lives for that fool kid in his cap and Nike T and they’d never find him.

  He held a magnifying glass over the shots, just as he knew the cops would. There was no evidence that he’d fattened his face with cheek implants, or that he’d dyed his eyebrows to perfectly match the false hair he’d glued to the edge of his cap. Hair he’d collected from the back of a barbershop off East Sixth and Gladys where the black brothers liked to go.

  Shooter felt something approaching pride as he stuck the photographs to black cards and then pinned them to the pegboards in Death Row.

  He turned off the light and walked a few paces to the room next door.

  It was filled with garbage bags, and the stench hit him as soon as he walked in.

  Each bag had been labeled, dated and the contents listed.

  He picked a few up and then found the one he wanted. It brought a smile to his face. Her name always did.

  Shooter had work to do.

  Another shock to prepare.

  25

  FBI Field Office, LA

  It was midafternoon when the knock came on the door. Angie had been expecting it.

  Sandra McDonald walked in, wearing her killer smile, the one she always produced when she was about to behave like a bitch.

  She shut the door with a flick of her wrist and no backward glance.

  Angie watched it hit the frame and bounce a painting on her wall, an acrylic of the ocean that Jake had bought for her. She turned to Chips. “Give us the room for five.”

  He covered the slogan on his green T-shirt that said I USED TO BE SCHIZOPHRENIC BUT NOW WE’RE OKAY and headed out.

  The AD watched him go, pulled out a chair and sat before finally speaking. “I don’t like being disobeyed, Angela. I don’t like being worked around or manipulated. And I don’t like the way you’re causing inter-unit friction with your interest in the mall cases.”

  Angie didn’t answer. She was studying her boss. Her hands were together on the desk and she was controlling her breathing so she didn’t lose her temper. A wiry vein throbbed in her neck and showed her heart was beating like a bongo at an island party. She’d started smoking again. Red nail polish was chipped on her thumb from flicking the stub and she smelled of Menthol Lites.

  “Do I make myself clear?”

  “Perfectly.”

  McDonald sat back. She was a long way from finished. “I’d like you to spend the rest of today and tomorrow writing up your the
ories and your notes. Make three copies. One for me. One for Section Chief Dixon and one for Danielle Goodman. When you’ve done that, I want you off this case. If SKU need you, then they’ll have to go over my head to get you.”

  Angie stayed silent.

  Again McDonald repeated the question. “Do I make myself clear?”

  “You do.”

  “Good.” She slapped her hands down on the table with an air of finality and got to her feet.

  “For the record,” said Angie, “I’ll be making fourth and fifth copies of those summaries. One I will personally deliver to the area director, the other I will be having FedExed to the office of the director general of the FBI. If I’m moved off this case and other people die, then it’s going to be on your head, not mine.”

  “My head?” McDonald laughed over the desk that divided them. “Every death on every case in every unit I’m in charge of is on my head. I go to sleep with those rats of guilt gnawing my conscience every damned night of my life. Get this straight, I call the shots, lady. Sometimes I’m right. Sometimes I’m wrong. But I decide how things get run. I don’t have people like you deciding on my behalf.”

  Angie replied matter-of-factly, “Danielle Goodman’s wrong. Not a little wrong. Badly wrong. And there’s going to be a whole extra nest of rats in your head if you follow her advice.”

  McDonald spotted an open file on Angie’s desk. Crime scene photographs of the Strawberry Fields shootings. She picked one up and shook it at her profiler. “What are you doing with this?”

  “We have had three unsolved multiple murder cases in almost as many days; I was looking to see if there was a link.”

  “Dear God.” She threw it back onto the table. “In the past seventy hours there have been four other gun-related homicides in LA. You want to bundle any or all of those into the inquiry as well?”

  “No.”

  “Then listen. You did a good job on the rape-homicide. Damned good job. Aside from getting yourself busted up, that is. Put your notes in on the mall murders. Take some sick leave and get healthy. There’s a profiling conference next week in Toronto, hosted by the RCMP. I’d like you to stand in for me as one of the keynote speakers. It’d be good experience and it’ll help your career.”