He stopped the slide show and stared at a picture of Becca dressed in plastic wrap. She wasn’t dead, but waiting. Becca had been the best. Why? Why had he felt complete with Becca and not Angie or Jodi?
Because she wasn’t a slut. She wasn’t like them. She was pure and beautiful and whole.
He needed to find another girl like Becca. Elizabeth Rimes, his MyJournal penpal in Georgia, would be perfect, but she was too far away.
He needed someone here in San Diego.
But soon he’d go to Elizabeth. And they’d have a real relationship, date, see each other like boyfriend and girlfriend. He’d be ready for her then, because he’d have gotten all these strange needs out of his system.
So if he couldn’t have Elizabeth tonight, he knew exactly who could replace her.
Already, he felt better.
TWENTY-SEVEN
IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL SATURDAY afternoon, but Carina and Nick were sitting in the windowless task force room painstakingly reviewing all three autopsy reports for any odd detail or stray piece of evidence that might offer them another direction in which to look.
But there didn’t appear to be anything other than the differences they’d already noted. Until Carina saw something odd in the personal effects record.
“It says that only one earring was found with both Becca and Jodi.”
“Is that unusual?”
“I can see how an earring might fall out, especially with a body that has been manhandled, but one earring in both victims? Angie had six ear piercings, three on each side, and she still had six posts in her ears when she was found.”
“Maybe the killer kept an earring as a souvenir,” Nick guessed.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“It’s good news. It connects him with his victims.”
Patrick walked into the room. “What does?” he asked.
“Angie was missing a navel ring. Becca and Jodi were each missing one earring.”
“That’s creepy,” Patrick said.
“You can say that again. So what brings you down here?”
“Good news, bad news,” Patrick said.
“What else is new,” Carina grumbled. “Give me the good news first.”
“I have proof that Scout used a Sand Shack public computer.”
Carina grinned. “Really? When?”
“Several times over the last three months, usually in the late afternoon during the week.”
“Only three months?”
“That’s all MyJournal has archived.”
“But the time frame suggests that he’s a college student,” Nick said. “He comes by in the late afternoon.”
“Nothing he said using the Shack computer system was incriminating. Most of it was viewing MyJournal pages and surfing the Internet. But I have every private message or public post he made through that server on a grid to see if we can find a pattern or anything that identifies him.”
“We need to talk to the employees again,” Carina said. “Someone might recognize a general description. What about the library?”
“I went there, showed the librarian Kyle Burns’s photo like you asked, and she put on thick glasses and was noncommittal. The woman can’t see more than two feet in front of her is my guess.”
Patrick sat down and slid the files across to Carina. “You think it might be the manager?”
“I don’t know. He loosely fits Dillon’s profile. Under thirty, college student, underachiever.”
“How is he an underachiever? He works full-time and goes to school.”
Carina rifled through papers until she pulled Kyle Burns’s transcript. “I had one of the uniforms pull his transcript. He was in and out of college for three years. His grades are good, not great. His advisor put a note in his file that he aspired to do great things with his life, but didn’t have the focus to stick with any one thing. His strength is management because he’s neat, organized, and disciplined.”
Nick nodded. “Our killer is organized, but I wouldn’t call him disciplined.”
“Still, Burns fits. He lives alone in a small duplex near the university. He has the light brown hair the half-blind librarian noticed. He has access to the Shack public computers. I think we need to interview all the employees again while Burns is off-site.”
“He doesn’t work Sundays,” Nick said.
“So we go there and talk to the employees, then track everyone else down at their homes. I have the files here. We were focusing on friends of Angie, so we only talked to the employees who regularly worked the same shifts as Angie. Now we need to dig deeper. We have a connection with the Shack and the killer—assuming Dillon is right and Scout is who we’re looking for. We focus there.”
“One more thing popped,” Patrick said. He put a printout in front of him. “This is a private message to an Elizabeth Rimes that he sent through the MyJournal server using the library Internet connection. He talks about his cat Felix being hit by a car.”
“And he told Becca that someone shot his cat.”
“When we pulled down messages from the Shack from the last three months, and reviewed all public comments posted by Scout that are stored indefinitely, he’s told several female MyJournal members over the last year that his cat had been killed. Died of cancer, hit by a car, drowned by his roommate.”
“For sympathy,” Nick said.
Patrick concurred. “Women are suckers for a good cat sob story.”
“Oh, stop that,” Carina said. “They sympathized because they didn’t think anyone would lie about something like that. It’s the old ‘help me find my lost puppy’ trick that pedophiles use to lure kids away.”
“Now where?” Nick asked. “Do we have an ISP?”
Patrick sighed, sat down. “Not yet. We know that Scout was in both the Shack and the library. We can get a warrant to search a house or business if we can get a name that goes with the profile—Dillon already convinced the DA of his reasoning, and he’s ready to take the stand on it if questioned. But because the MyJournal site is a free Web page, no one has to give truthful information. We have an e-mail address and it goes to a free e-mail account that is open, but it’s been inactive since Scout registered with MyJournal two years ago.”
Carina stood and walked over to the map. Red pins showed where the victims were abducted, blue pins where their bodies were found. “Angie was last seen more than ten miles from where her body was found, but Jodi and Becca’s bodies were found where they were last seen. Why?”
“He’s taunting us?” Patrick suggested. “He doesn’t care that they’re found.”
“Maybe it’s convenience,” Nick said. “Or he has a personal connection to the places.”
“We know he’s been to the Sand Shack, which is less than a mile from where Angie was found.” Carina placed a green pin on the Shack. “And the library.” She put a pin at the library, right next to the blue and red pins where Becca was abducted and found. “Nick, what’s Kyle’s address?”
He read from the report. “45670 Rupert Street.”
She found it on the map, put a yellow pin there. “Burns lives smack dab in the middle.”
“There were no drugs in Angie’s system, which suggests that she trusted whoever kidnapped her. She didn’t make a fuss, she seemed to voluntarily leave her house,” Nick said.
“And Becca he physically subdued. She was petite, much easier to control than Angie,” Carina said. “Do you think we have enough to ask for a warrant?”
“On Burns? Nowhere near enough,” Patrick said.
“But it makes sense, right?” Carina frowned at the map.
“Logically it makes sense, but you’re making a lot of leaps in reasoning and filling in blanks with theories, not evidence. We need something solid to tie Burns to the crimes.”
Carina knew Patrick was right. “I can still get the tail. Watch him until we gather enough evidence. And tomorrow, when he’s home, maybe we can stop by for another talk. See if he lets us come in, tak
e a look around.”
“If he lets you in, you’re good to go. What does Jim have right now?”
“Nothing yet, but he’s working on it,” Carina said.
They sat in silence, reviewing the logs, when Patrick suddenly exclaimed, “I have an idea!”
“Give it to me,” Carina said. “I’ll take anything at this point.”
“What if we set Scout up?”
“How?”
“He has an e-mail alert through the MyJournal system that let’s him know whenever certain Web pages are updated. One page is that Elizabeth Rimes I told you about. We send an e-mail ostensibly from her to Scout with a redirect to my account.”
“For what purpose?”
“To get him into a chat room. To keep him in one place until we can locate him. If he’s logged on as Scout, I can find him within an hour.”
“I like it. I really like it.”
“Thank you, sis. I aim to please.”
“How long to set it up?” Nick asked.
“A couple hours, maybe less. I want to make sure we protect Elizabeth Rimes, alert the Atlanta police to keep an eye on her. We know Scout is in San Diego, but on the off-chance that he slips through.”
“I agree. I don’t want to jeopardize a civilian.”
“And I need to set up the technical end. I’m going to ask Dillon to chat with him online—he’s good at pulling people into conversations and he’ll know what to say.”
“Perfect. Thanks, Patrick.”
“I’m going to get started on it,” Patrick said, standing. “Sorry to leave you with all this paperwork.”
“I live for paperwork,” she said sarcastically.
Carina and Nick ordered dinner in. The task force room looked like a war zone, and they had come to the conclusion that until forensics came up with evidence they could use, or Patrick got a hit on his trap, they had nowhere else to look.
Carina was about to call it quits for the night. It was Saturday and there was little they could do until they had something to work with.
Then Jim Gage rushed into the room. “Good, you’re still here.”
“Like I’m going anywhere in this lifetime,” Carina said. “What is it?”
He waved a paper around. “I got a hit.”
“DNA match?”
“Almost as good. I have a match to a relative.”
“Explain,” Carina said.
“Mitchell Joseph Burns.”
“Burns,” Carina said. “You matched DNA to this Mitchell Burns? Is he a relation to Kyle Burns?”
“I don’t know at this point.” Jim pulled out a chair and sat. “Nearly eight years ago Mitchell Burns raped a woman in West Los Angeles. He used a condom, but either there was a tear in it or he wasn’t careful. Semen was found around the toilet bowl in the woman’s apartment.”
“And it matched Mitchell Burns? Was he already in the system?”
“He’s a repeat offender. Served four years for two counts of forcible rape.”
“Is he still in prison?”
“No, I’m getting to that,” he said impatiently. “He served his time, then a series of rapes popped up in West LA. When the investigators ran the DNA from the vic’s toilet, it hit on Burns. They went to arrest him, but his wife said he walked out one day and never came home.
“Ironically, the same day he raped the West LA woman.”
Jim let that sink in before continuing. “So when I ran the DNA we extracted from Becca—”
“Wait,” Carina said, “I thought you said you didn’t have anything from Becca.”
“I should have told you, but I was swamped running DNA myself. I don’t have to tell you how shorthanded we are right now.”
“I’m sorry, it wasn’t an accusation—”
“No, I should have said something. Anyway, I found a hair with a follicle in one of the layers of plastic wrap. One hair, that’s it. There’s some other trace evidence—wool from a blanket, some cotton fibers—but this was the only DNA evidence. So I ran it against the database and it popped up Mitchell Burns. But there’s something else.”
“What?”
“Another commonality to our current murders.”
“Glue?”
“No, but close. Burns gagged his victims with a black bandanna and tied them to the bedposts with white nylon rope.”
“White rope is common,” Nick said.
“But black bandannas aren’t,” Carina added. “So he broke into their house to rape them?” Carina wasn’t surprised. It was common, but her fear that no one was safe even in their own homes was deep-seated.
“Yes. Ground-level apartments in low-security buildings. He was a repeat offender, and had used the bandannas in his previous crimes as well.”
“Any particular reason?”
“None that was in the file.”
“But you said he’s not in prison.”
“He’s still missing. LAPD watched his house for a while, but he never returned.”
“Maybe he realized he’d made a mistake and ran,” Nick said.
“That was my thought.”
“Eight years is a long time to disappear,” Nick said. “Especially a wanted man and repeat offender.”
Carina wrapped her mind around the information Jim had given her. “So the DNA matched a known rapist who has been missing for eight years?”
“No,” Jim said. “Mitchell Burns didn’t rape our three victims. But a close relative did. A brother, first cousin, uncle, son.”
“Son.”
“He has two. According to the police reports, he had two minor sons at the time of his first arrest twelve years ago, twelve and five.”
“That would make them about twenty-four and seventeen,” Carina said. “Names?”
“They’re not in the record, but get this. Burns’s wife moved to San Diego six years ago.” Jim handed her another sheet of paper.
“Here’s the address of Regina Burns. She lives in University City.” University City was between downtown San Diego and La Jolla to the north.
Carina gathered the information and checked her weapon. “Who wants to take a bet that Kyle Burns is the rapist’s son?”
No one took the bet.
“Do you want backup?” Jim asked Carina.
“We’re just going to talk to Kyle Burns first, then Mitchell Burns’s wife,” Carina said. “If Regina Burns confirms what we think we know, we need to put twenty-four/seven surveillance on Kyle Burns and fight for a warrant.”
“It’s going to be next to impossible to get Kyle Burns in with what we have. No attorney will allow him to submit to a DNA test.”
“Then we’ll have to find other evidence to give us probable cause for an arrest. Then we can get his DNA.”
“Don’t you need a warrant for DNA?” Nick asked.
“In California all you need is probable cause for an arrest. Everyone arrested for a felony in California is subject to DNA testing.”
With a solid lead at last, Carina rushed from the room, and Nick followed.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Hi Scout:
I’m so sorry about Felix. How awful! If anything happened to my kitties, I would be so upset.
I’ve been visiting my mother for the last week and haven’t had time to e-mail you. My mom’s been sick and we’ve had a hard time with it. I just hope she gets better. The doctors are afraid the cancer has come back, but I’m praying it’s not that again.
If you want to talk about Felix, go ahead.
By the way, I’m really struggling in one of my classes. You really helped me with my midterms last semester, in calculus, remember? Do you think you have time today to help with another problem? I’ll hang out in the private chat area. I have Room 303 reserved and open on my computer. I’ll be studying here all day, so if you can help just pop in.
Elizabeth.
Dillon composed the e-mail from “Elizabeth Rimes” and sent it off to Scout’s public e-mail account through the MyJournal server.
> “Smart kid,” Patrick said.
“Smart enough to not use her real name and to realize Scout was obsessing over her.”
Dillon had spoken to Elizabeth—real name Bethany Eggers—over the phone, and she had told him she’d stopped responding to Scout’s e-mails when she found out he’d lied about his cat dying. She’d found three other messages on the MyJournal board from him talking about “Felix” dying. “It was downright creepy,” she said. “When you’re done with my account, just close it down.”
Because Elizabeth had never responded to the cat message, Dillon composed it in a way to encourage interaction. He had the chat room window open, and Patrick had a mirror of the site on his computer screen.
“Now what?” Dillon asked.
“We wait.”
“How long?”
“As long as it takes.”
Dillon let out a sigh. “I’m a patient man, Patrick, but this tests even my resolve.”
“I’m going to call Carina and tell her we’ve set the trap and to be on alert.”
“Tell her to be careful, too.”
“I always do.”
Carina and Nick arrived at the Sand Shack after the dinner rush. Kyle Burns didn’t look particularly pleased to see them, but he approached and said, “What can I help you with, Detectives?”
“We’d like to talk to you about your father.”
Carina gauged his reaction, surprised at the intense anger that flashed across his face.
“I don’t want to talk about him.” Burns realized he’d spoken too loudly and looked around. Several of the waitstaff looked away. “Let’s go to my office,” he said through clenched teeth.
Carina and Nick followed him back. She assessed the situation. Kyle didn’t appear to be armed, but she wasn’t going to be crammed into that little office of his where he might be able to turn the tables on them.
“Mr. Burns—” Carina began.
“I don’t want to talk about my father,” he said again. “I have nothing to do with him.”
“Well then, maybe you’ll listen. We know that Mitchell Burns was a convicted rapist who disappeared eight years ago while under suspicion for rape. Have you seen or heard from him since?”
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