by Steven James
“Don’t worry. You’re not.” And although I knew she wanted to hear me say those three words outright, for some reason I hadn’t been able to yet.
“I love you.”
“You too.”
That last sentence is just so much easier to tell someone than the first.
And it speaks just as clearly about where your heart is.
Tessa flagged a second cab and as it pulled to the curb I leaned close to Christie. “I know there’s a lot for us to talk about, I know that we need to—”
But she placed a soft finger to my lips. “You need to go. Call me when you get there.”
“I will.”
For a fleeting moment I wondered if I should say anything about the person who’d requested my help in Detroit, but immediately recognized that now was definitely not the right time for that.
Special Agent Sharyn Weist and I had dated eight years ago while we were at the Academy together in Quantico. It was against their policies for New Agent Trainees to pursue romantic relationships, but the chemistry between us had been strong from the start and we’d chanced it, skirting along the precipice of getting caught and expelled.
Thankfully, neither of those things happened. I broke things off right before we graduated, and Sharyn and I hadn’t been in touch since then. A month ago I’d told Christie about dating a woman back when I was at the Academy, but I couldn’t see how mentioning the fact that I’d be working with her in Detroit now was going to help matters between us.
Openness and honesty aren’t the same thing. A lot of pain can come when you confuse them.
Honesty is usually for the good of the other person. Openness, on the other hand, is often only for the benefit of ourselves.
Most of the time when someone says, “Hey, I was just being honest,” he wasn’t—he was just being open and it probably wasn’t intended to help you out, but instead to make himself feel important. I wasn’t about to lie to Christie, but I didn’t need to share something that might drive a shiv deeper between us.
Eight years is a long time. I was only going to Detroit to consult on this case for a few days. Nothing more.
The cab driver got out and popped the trunk.
“I left something for you in your bag,” Christie told me quietly.
“What is it?”
“I’m not telling.” A sly smile. “You’ll have to wait and see.”
“I look forward to it.”
I used my imagination. I liked what I saw.
We said good-bye, but when I kissed her, her daughter scoffed. “Seriously? You’re gonna give her a 1950s-I’m-on-my-way-to-work-dear-Ward-Cleaver kiss? You can do better than that. You better do better than that.”
True enough.
So I did.
Christie didn’t seem to mind.
“Have a safe trip,” she told me.
“I will.”
I stowed my luggage and slipped into the backseat.
“Where to?” the driver asked me in a thick Persian accent.
“JFK.”
As we pulled into traffic, it took me a few seconds to dig the seat belt’s end out from where it was jammed down by the door, and when I glanced back at Christie and Tessa, they were both watching the cab drive away.
Tessa had one hand raised in a statuesque good-bye, but then I realized she was simply holding it up to the light and studying where the shadow slid across her wrist.
I was rolling down the window to wave back to Christie when we turned the corner and the edge of the apartment building cut both her and her daughter off from view.
6
When I boarded the plane, it didn’t appear full, so even though I’d been assigned 18C, I found an empty seat near the back of the cabin where I could study the digital case files Sharyn had sent me without other passengers inadvertently seeing them.
The text was probably too small to read from another seat, but the photos were all too easy to make out, and I definitely didn’t want anyone to see those.
Feral dogs had gotten to two of the corpses before they were discovered, and the dogs had not been discriminating in the parts of the bodies they chose to gnaw off.
Thankfully, only about half of the seats were taken and no one ended up beside me.
Once we were in the air and on our way to Detroit, I opened the files on my laptop.
In the last decade, a third of all properties, both commercial and residential, in Detroit have been foreclosed, including more than eighty-five thousand homes, Sharyn had written in the assistance request she’d sent to Assistant Director DeYoung. Nearly all of them remain abandoned, so these four bodies might be just the tip of the iceberg.
Three female victims, one male. Different ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds. All from different neighborhoods of the metro area. Even the cause of death varied: one was shot, two were stabbed, and one was beaten to death, most likely with a baseball bat, based on the nature of the wounds.
Each had been found in an upstairs bedroom closet, positioned seated, facing the room, a letter carved into his or her forehead. The lab was able to determine that the cuts had been made twenty to twenty-six hours after the time of death.
So, someone was returning to the bodies to mutilate them.
W carved into the first victim. Then O, then R, then another R.
The Rs were carved backward.
Which now made me think of the code on the back of the dead scientist’s hand.
Simply based on the limited number of words that might spell—basically all forms of worry or worried—the working theory was that the next letter would be a Y or I.
Worrit means to “tease.” Maybe he was doing this to tease, to mock, the police.
Forensics wasn’t sure of the type of blade used, but they were working from the hypothesis that it was a razor blade of some type.
The crimes showed a high degree of callousness and brutality.
Coldhearted.
Calculating.
It left me with a chill.
Though no physical evidence connected them, the victims’ positioning and the carved letters were enough to link them.
“I want you there,” Assistant Director DeYoung told me. “If there really is a serial killer stalking the streets of Detroit and he kills again—and we might’ve had the resources to stop him—well, that’s the worst kind of bad on any number of fronts. Spend a couple days. Work up the geoprofile. See what you can do.”
With the Bureau trying to establish itself firmly in the twenty-first century, DeYoung wanted to do all he could to show the public—as well as the Congressional Budget Office—that we were fully embracing relevant emerging technology. Geoprofiling and the type of crime scene analysis that I specialize in were high on that list.
Since I was an environmental criminologist and the lead geospatial investigator in the Bureau, it was becoming more and more common for me to consult with other Field Offices and law enforcement agencies throughout the country.
In a nutshell, my approach had to do with studying the timing, location, and progression of serial offenses rather than looking for means, motive, and opportunity. The process grew out of research dealing with how people perceive and process their surroundings and then make rational choices that lead them to engage in criminal acts.
I don’t believe crime is random. It’s the result of decisions made by people who want something that’s out of bounds—either legally or ethically. We want to do something we’re not supposed to do, or to have something we’re not allowed to have. We covet. We act. We pursue.
Desire precipitates action, whether we’re cognizant of it or not. And that desire involves pursuing pleasure or relief.
And throughout the process, we instinctively try to save time, money, and effort, and avoid apprehension. This affects the location and tim
ing of crimes, and, by working through FALCON, the Federal Aerospace Locator and Covert Operation Network, I can narrow down the geographic area the offender would most likely be using as his home base.
So, I don’t profile behavior. I don’t psychoanalyze people. Instead, I look at the footprints the offender left as he moved through time and space, and then try to let his trail through the past lead me to his location in the present.
The airplane jolted as we hit a pocket of air.
One of the flight attendants came on the PA system requesting that we put on our seat belts, and reminding us to wear them “low and tight across your lap”—whatever that was supposed to mean.
Really, is there any way to wear a seat belt high across your lap?
Her instructions sounded like something Tessa would start riffing on or rolling her eyes about. I just ended up shaking my head.
Turning to the files again, I tried to get a clearer sense of where the crime scenes were in relationship to each other.
Although I’d had layovers at the Detroit airport, I’d never had the chance to venture into the city itself and wasn’t very familiar with it.
However, I did know that Detroit was a city of fighters and overcomers. It’d been on the cutting edge of the music scene more than once, from Motown to street rap. And its theater district was second only to New York City’s. However, the city’s population had been in decline for decades.
The information Sharyn had sent noted that, at just over six hundred thousand residents, its population was a quarter of what it’d once been, and it was continuing to drop each year as more people continued to move out than move in. Fifty thousand stray dogs roamed the streets. Detroit had both one of the highest crime rates of any city in the country and one of the lowest clearance rates. More crimes. Fewer solved. Not a good combination.
The city’s average police response time was currently at fifty-four minutes, compared to the eleven-minute national average.
Thousands of squatters lived in the empty houses that were on sale for as little as $500 apiece—and weren’t attracting buyers even at that price. Scrappers removed metal and sold it by the ton.
They call copper “Detroit gold,” Sharyn wrote. For a while, the scrapping was so bad that the scrappers would go into the restrooms at restaurants, use hacksaws to remove the pipes, and then leave with the pipes hidden in their clothes. And the scrap metal dealers weren’t helping matters. We finally had to crack down and outlaw them from accepting manhole covers stamped with the words City of Detroit.
It was crazy.
It was Detroit.
She noted the trend of killers from neighboring states, including gangs from Chicago, using Detroit’s abandoned homes as dumping sites for corpses. However, since the four victims in the current case were all from southeastern Michigan and had no known gang affiliations, that didn’t appear to be the case here.
In investigations like this, when you’re looking for more needles in a haystack, you have to start somewhere, and typically that means looking in the pockets of those who’ve found the previous needles.
But all the bodies had been reported through the DPD’s anonymous online crime reporting program—which left no one to interview, and an awfully big field of haystacks scattered throughout the city to search through on our own.
According to the Detroit medical examiner’s office, the victims had all been dead for between forty and forty-eight hours when the anonymous tips came in.
The positions of the bodies and timing of the tips clearly indicated more than a coincidental connection—but I don’t believe in coincidence anyway.
If you burrow far enough into the facts, you’ll find that there’s always a pattern. Cause and effect lie buried in the soil of apparent happenstance. Sometimes they’re buried deep, but they’re there.
The key is timing and location.
Trying to establish motive is a losing battle because it’s a conclusion you can never unequivocally confirm.
Why does someone kill? Who knows. But why then? Why there? What does the fact that the bodies were left in those particular houses, in those rooms, at those times, on those days tell you about the offender’s habits and travel patterns? And, in this case, what did the timing of the anonymous tips tell us about the nature of the criminal events or the tipster’s connection to the crimes?
I immersed myself in the research and lost track of time until the pilot announced that he would be turning on the seat belt sign again because of turbulence and that there was a lot of traffic at the airport but he was still confident we would make our “on-time arrival at 7:31 P.M.”
7
18470 Runyon Street
Detroit, Michigan
“You got the pills?”
“Yeah,” Erik replied. “My mom never counts ’em.”
“And there’s enough for all four of us?”
“There’s like half a bottle.” Erik shook the bottle to prove to his friend Canyon that there were plenty.
Ever since the two of them had gotten their driver’s licenses last spring—first him, then two weeks later, Canyon—they’d been driving in from Grosse Pointe whenever they could to explore the parts of Detroit their parents never ventured into. And never would’ve given them permission to visit, either.
Erik had been in abandoned homes all over the city—nearly everyone he knew had. Sure, it was officially trespassing, but with so many empty buildings everywhere, what were the cops going to do about it? They didn’t care. There were too many other actual crimes to solve.
However, Erik had never been to this block before and he wasn’t super thrilled to be here. There were a couple crack houses close by—he knew that much. But from what he’d heard, the stuff here on this street went deeper. Weird. Way out there. Twisted.
“You sure it’s okay if we go in here?”
“It’s fine, I told you.” Canyon sounded frustrated as he led him toward the lawn. “Igazi comes here all the time. He told me the cops never bother anyone on this end of the precinct.”
It wasn’t the cops that Erik was worried about, but he didn’t want to seem scared, so he didn’t bring that up.
Fast-food wrappers from Popeyes, two drained forty-ounce malt liquor bottles, and a discarded child’s tricycle with a missing wheel littered the yard around them.
“And the girls?” he asked Canyon.
“They’re waiting for us inside.”
“Mimi and her friend.”
“Gwen.”
“Yeah, Gwen.” Erik repeated the name skeptically.
“She’s cool. Don’t worry, man. I’ve met her. You’ll like her.”
“You still haven’t told me what she looks like.”
“I’m telling you, it’s all good. Now, c’mon, I don’t want to keep ’em waiting.”
Erik followed Canyon toward the porch.
He’d always thought his friend’s name was a little odd, but sorta cool too. “What kind of name is Canyon, anyway?” he’d asked him once.
“Before my dad went to medical school, my parents were into hiking and they named us after outdoor stuff. My sister—the one who died in the car accident—was named Arête. Has to do with rock climbing. I guess she was the high point. I was the low one.”
++++
Just a few minutes ago, Erik had parked two blocks away and left his car in a neighborhood that had a vehicle in nearly every driveway.
That’s the way it was in Detroit. You might have an entire street that’s abandoned, but a few blocks away every house is occupied. There wasn’t really any pattern. It all depended on when the people decided to bail, cut their losses, and escape the city.
Urban blight, they called it.
Blight—a word he’d learned in English class. Meant decayed, deteriorated, destroyed. The three Ds.
Never a good thing.
Not what you want your city to be known for.
Erik studied the outside of the house as they neared the porch.
Usually, no one took time to board up the windows of the buildings once they were deserted, but this one was different—at least on the first floor. All of its windows were boarded up, leaving only the broken second-story windows uncovered.
The front door had been left wide open, so the house seemed to be giving two contradictory messages: one from the plywood-covered living room windows: “Stay out,” and one from the invitingly open door: “Explore my secrets.”
Explore my blight.
Erik still didn’t like the fact that Canyon hadn’t told him what Gwen looked like. Okay, so Mimi was hot—no question about that—and he took that as a good sign that her friend would be too, but who knows? It was always possible that Canyon and Mimi were playing a trick on him and had invited some girl they knew he would never like. He seriously hoped that wasn’t the deal. He didn’t like turning people down and he really didn’t want to hurt the feelings of some girl he’d never met.
Canyon peered in through the front door. “Mimi?” he called. “Gwen?”
Neither one of them replied.
The two boys walked inside.
The boarded-over windows sealed out most of the sunlight, but just enough of it slid in between the plywood sheets to allow them to see without having to use the flashlights on their phones or the actual flashlight Canyon had brought along.
The sofa was one of those sleeper kinds, and was popped open. One of the metal support legs was bent, making the whole thing slope down toward that corner. The tangled sheets on top of the mattress were raggy and faded and Erik didn’t even want to know what the spotty yellow stains were from.
The two reclining chairs had been knifed open and the white cushiony stuff inside them was spewing out. He’d been deer hunting with his uncle a bunch of times in the Upper Peninsula and the chair’s wounds reminded him of what happened with the guts of a deer when you slit its belly open to field-dress it.