When he was finished, the twenty-year veteran who had recently presided over so many ghastly crime scenes of young women went back up to the bathroom, sat down next to his wife, held her cold, rigid hand in his, and wept.
Chapter Eleven
After she checked out the crime scene with the other members of the task force, Danni went looking for Sam. She found him downstairs in his den with the door closed, sitting at his desk smoking a cigarette. Sam was not a smoker.
When she walked in, Sam stood up and gave her a hug and started weeping again with his head on her shoulder.
“I don’t want anybody to see me like this.”
“They’re your friends, Sam. They understand.”
Sam let her go at that point and sat back down in his chair. “It’s funny—up until a few minutes ago I believed wholeheartedly what you just said. We’re in the business of murder. We understand. The reality is I never understood all those people who were crying over their loved ones. I never got it until now. Now it’s my Alice.” He fought back the tears again. “Twenty-five years we were together. Twenty-five years. What am I going to tell my kids?”
Danni didn’t know what to say so she said nothing, just stood next to him with her hand on his shoulder. They stayed there like that for several minutes.
“We’ve gotta get that bastard,” Sam finally said.
“We will, Sam. We will.”
“If he finds out where your daughter is, he’s going to kill her. You know that, don’t you?”
It was the first thing Danni had thought about when she heard about Alice. “Yes, I know.”
“I should have gotten that search warrant for you. I don’t know if that kid is innocent or guilty, but we can’t leave any stone unturned. I know how you feel now.”
“It’s too late for that, Sam, but we’ll catch this guy.”
Sam wasn’t listening though. He was in his own nightmare.
“I put you off,” he said, standing up and walking around the room. He was such a big man that he immediately made the room look smaller. “I sent you to Jane and then I sent her a memo basically telling her to give you lip service. She told you she was going to go to the judge but she did the same thing with him that I did with her. People are dying out there and she’s sitting with the judge telling him about a hysterical police officer. What the hell were we thinking?”
Danni had already figured out how the search warrant deal had gone down so she was not all that upset by Sam’s confession. She was worried about him though. He was losing it. She stopped him and put her hands on his shoulders as she looked him in the eye.
“Look, you were right about the search warrant. Besides, it’s not important now. You’ve got to pull yourself together, Sam. Your kids are going to need your strength. They’re going to look for it.”
Sam loved his kids. Danni expected him to straighten up when she mentioned them but he didn’t. The head lowered again.
“I don’t know what to say to them.”
“You’ll find the words.”
“I can’t.”
“I’ll help you. Now, I know this is not going to sound that reassuring, but I want you to give me your gun.”
Sam lifted his head and gave her a quizzical look. “My gun? What do you think I’m going to do?”
“Nothing, but I don’t know for sure. Neither do you. Nobody knows how they will handle a situation like this. Give it to me. I’ll hold it for seventy-two hours, then I’ll give it back to you. I’ll tell the sheriff informally what I’ve done so they don’t try to do anything formally.”
Sam knew the protocol. He knew they could put him on leave and ask him for his gun. Danni was trying to save him from all of that.
“I don’t want to miss a day looking for this guy.”
“Come on, Sam. You’ve got to bury your wife. You have to tend to your children. You need at least a couple of weeks.”
“I’m not taking that long.” He almost shouted the words. “I’m gonna get this piece of shit.”
“We’ll see. For now, give me your gun for seventy-two hours.”
Sam took his Glock out of his holster and reluctantly handed it to her.
“I’m sure this isn’t the only gun you have,” she said as she took the Glock.
Sam looked at her again. “Do you want to leave me defenseless?”
“He’s not coming after you, Sam. You’re the wrong sex. Now where’s your other gun?”
Sam reached into the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a key. “I’ve got a few,” he said and opened the door to what appeared to be a closet. Danni watched, expecting him to pull a gun out of his shoebox or something. Instead, he walked into the closet, which was free of clothing, reached down to an almost invisible latch on the right-hand side of the back wall, inserted the key, turned it, and the wall became a sliding door revealing a small room on the other side that contained a mini arsenal. Sam entered the room with Danni right behind him. There was a rifle with a scope (Danni couldn’t make out the model) mounted on the wall with several shotguns, and an AK-47. Sam had built a long thin table underneath the mounted guns. In the middle of the table were some tools, cleaning materials, two high-intensity lamps, and a chair for Sam to sit in while he was doing his work. On each side of the chair, laid out in a row, were five semiautomatic guns: two to the left, three to the right.
“I built this den with my own hands,” Sam said. “And I put this little room in for myself. Nobody knew about it but Alice, and now you.”
“What the hell are you getting ready for, World War III?” Danni asked.
“I’m a collector. It’s my hobby. Rifles, shotguns, semiautomatic weapons.”
“No revolvers?” Danni asked for no particular reason.
“I don’t like revolvers,” Sam replied.
Danni thought for a brief moment about how Sam had dismissed her argument that Thomas Felton might have been a collector of exotic knives, but she let it pass. This was not the time. She put the Glock on the left side of the table to make the distribution even.
“Is that the only key to this room?” she asked.
“It sure as hell is.”
“Why don’t you lock up and give me the key.”
To Danni’s surprise, Sam did exactly as she requested, which made her believe he had another gun hidden somewhere else.
“I’ll give this back to you in a few days, I promise.”
“I wouldn’t have given it to you if I didn’t trust you, Danni.”
Chapter Twelve
Vanessa Brock and Pedro “Pete” Diaz had their own plan to deal with the danger and peril associated with a serial killer loose in the city of Oakville. Vanessa told the plan to her parents, who were insisting that she come home to Missouri. Both she and Pete were seniors and very anxious to graduate and get on with their lives—she as a teacher and Pete to go to graduate school for his MBA.
“We’ll be fine,” Vanessa said. “Pete is going to stay at my apartment and sleep on the couch. He’s got a license to carry a gun and he knows how to use it. He goes to the firing range every week and he says he won’t let me out of his sight.”
Vanessa’s parents knew the sleeping on the couch part was a lie, but they weren’t going to call their daughter out on that one. The rest sounded mildly reassuring. Vanessa had always been headstrong and they weren’t going to talk her out of anything she wanted to do anyway. And Pete was a barrel-chested powerful young man. They had met him several times on their visits to Oakville. So they accepted her assurances.
Except for the couch part, the rest of the story was substantially true. Pete didn’t have a gun permit but he did have a gun that he kept under their bed at the apartment. He did go to the range regularly to shoot and he was not going to let Vanessa out of his sight. That part wasn’t hard for Pete. He worshipped the ground she walked on. Nobody was going to get near Vanessa while he was still alive.
On Saturday night, Vanessa and Pete returned home after watching the fo
otball game at The Swamp. There hadn’t been a murder in a couple of weeks and there was a fairly decent crowd at the bar. It was almost as if everybody had learned collectively to deal with the fact that they lived in a city under siege, so they continued to go about their daily lives—working, going to school, drinking, watching football. Somewhere in the recesses of their brains, however, they knew that murder and mayhem could, and probably would, rear its ugly head again, but that did not deter them. They still had to live and breathe and play.
Pete had had a little too much to drink. He was okay when he stuck to beer but the lemon drop shooters always did him in. Vanessa drove home although she was a little tipsy herself. It was only nine o’clock but they stripped their clothes off in a matter of seconds and practically passed out in bed. Neither one of them heard the telephone ring at ten, or ten thirty, or eleven.
Somewhere around midnight, Pete woke up to take a leak. His head was pounding as he fumbled in the dark to find the bathroom. Vanessa did not stir although he was making a racket on his journey.
Ten minutes later he was back in bed sidling up next to her naked body. She moaned when she felt him put his arm around her and pull her close. She was half asleep as she felt him working his way inside her. It was almost like a dream when they started moving in rhythm although it felt somehow different this time. Pete felt different. Not bad, just different. Then she felt a sharp pain in her stomach and another one. What is going on? Oh my God, what’s happening?
It was already too late. His hand went to her mouth to stifle any scream she might attempt as he stuck the long thin blade one last time through an opening in her rib cage into her heart.
* * *
Danni got the call at five that morning. It came from Allan.
“We’ve got a double homicide,” he said.
“Is it our guy?” Danni asked. This was the first double homicide.
“Can’t say for sure, but I think so. She was a student at the university and they were both stabbed.”
“That’s close enough,” Danni replied. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
When she arrived forty minutes later, there were cops everywhere—and reporters and crowds behind the barricades that the police now knew to set up at each murder site.
“Where’ve you been?” Allan asked. “I expected you a half hour ago.”
“I made the mistake of lying back down in bed,” Danni told him. “Did I miss anything?”
“Absolutely nothing. The mother called the station when she couldn’t get her daughter on the phone. She was frantic, so two uniforms came over to check. They found the bodies just like they are now, the boyfriend in the bathroom and the girl in the bed. He had one stab wound in the back that went right into his heart. He must have died instantly. She had several stab wounds in the stomach and chest. There were no signs of a struggle. Jeffries postulates that the killer was in the apartment waiting for them when they got home. The boyfriend probably got up in the middle of the night to take a whizz—there’s urine in the toilet, probably his. The killer took care of him and then got in bed with her, maybe even had sex with her before he killed her.”
“What a sicko.”
“Goes without saying,” Allan replied.
“So Jeffries is here?”
“Yeah. He must have been listening on the radio. He got here right after the uniforms. He’s outside searching the perimeter right now.”
It had been two weeks since Alice Jeffries died. Since that day Sam Jeffries had taken time off to be with his kids. He’d only appeared in the office once. Danni had seen him leaving in the middle of the afternoon. She had no idea why he had been there.
She also saw him at Alice’s funeral.
“I’m taking your advice,” he told her. “The kids are going to be home for at least a week. I’m not going near the office while they’re here.”
Danni gave him his key back the day of the funeral and had not seen him since. Apparently the kids had gone back to their own lives.
“Anything we can use?” Danni asked Allan.
“Nope. The coroner may come up with something if they had sex but the place is clean as usual.
Just then there was a commotion outside.
“Somebody found something!” Danni heard an officer say. It was a little after six and the sun was just rising. She followed the crowd out of the apartment and into the backyard toward a thicket of woods. The group were all professionals so they moved slowly, not wanting their peers to think they were excited or anything. A few feet into the thicket she saw Sam Jeffries standing over something and directing traffic. As she drew closer, she heard his voice.
“Be careful getting it out of there. If there are prints, we don’t want to smudge them.”
Two men were on their knees on the ground, carefully moving the dirt away from the object. Allan pressed forward to see what it was. Danni followed.
There on the ground, obscured slightly by some plants, was a large bowie knife: The handle was carved in the shape of a gargoyle!
Chapter Thirteen
Back at the station, forensics did the fingerprint analysis on the bowie knife and found a match from the NCIC computer. Five members of the SWAT team accompanied six members of the task force, including Danni, Allan, and Sam Jeffries, to Thomas Felton’s apartment to pick him up at eleven o’clock that morning.
When they were sure all the exits from the building were covered, Sam rang the doorbell to Felton’s apartment. After that, he moved back as the SWAT team positioned itself in place to break the door down after allowing a reasonable period of time—not more than five minutes—to pass. Danni sidled next to Sam just in case. She knew where his gun was holstered. If Felton opened that door in the next minute or so, Sam might decide to just blow his head off.
Felton did just that: Without even asking who it was, he opened the front door dressed in his skivvies. Two of the SWAT team members grabbed him immediately and forced him to the floor on his knees with his head smelling whatever sweet aroma the carpeting was emitting at that moment. Sam had the honor of reading Felton his rights. It was good to keep him occupied.
“Thomas Felton, you are under arrest for the murders of Vanessa Brock and Pedro Diaz. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney. If you cannot afford one, an attorney will be provided for you at no cost to you. Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you?”
One of the uniformed police officers had a small handheld camera focused on both Sam and Felton, memorializing the event. No need to fuck up a good arrest with a procedural violation. Felton nodded his head.
“You need to respond verbally,” Sam told him. For a moment, Danni thought Sam might just kick Felton in the head. He was positioned perfectly and Felton’s head just hung out there like a soccer ball.
Come on, answer! Danni said to herself. Just answer the damn question before he loses it and kills you right here and now!
“I understand what you said to me but I’m innocent,” Felton replied. “I didn’t kill anybody. You’ve got the wrong man.”
“We’ll see about that, dickhead,” Sam answered. “You’re going down. And don’t be fooled: that cocktail they give you up in Raiford—it may be quick but it’s awful painful. They just paralyze you so nobody can tell.”
Danni looked at the officer holding the camera. Unfortunately, he’d caught it all on tape, including Sam’s diatribe. They’d have to explain that away down the road. She slipped her arm around Sam’s as the SWAT guys started to move Felton to a police vehicle.
“Come on, Sam. It’s all over,” she said.
“It won’t be over until that son of a bitch is dead. And it won’t even be over then,” Sam said. “It won’t be over till I’m dead and my kids are dead and all those other kids’ families are dead. Then it will be over.”
PART TWO
Eight Years Later
Oct
ober 2001
Bass Creek, Florida
Chapter Fourteen
Jack, will you get me a beer while you’re down there?” Henry Wilson asked his friend Jack Tobin as he sat in one of the captain’s chairs at the stern of the thirty-two-foot Sea Ray with a fishing pole in his hand. It was a calm, sunny day on Lake Okeechobee. The fish were jumping but they weren’t biting.
Jack was in the galley frying hamburgers for lunch. It was just the two of them, as usual on a Saturday afternoon.
“Sure, Henry. Can I get you anything else, like an extra cushion for your chair or a frosty mug for your beer?”
“Just the bottle will do, Jack, but hurry up, will you?”
“You’d better be careful. You don’t want to mess with the cook,” Jack said as he handed Henry his beer.
“I forgot about that rule. Don’t spit on my burger. By the way, Bobby Flay, when are we eating?”
“Why? Do you have something important to do out here on the lake that I don’t know about?”
The lake was empty. There wasn’t a boat in sight.
Henry took a sip of his beer.
“You never know. It’s kinda like these fish. One of them is going to show up in this boat sooner or later.”
The banter went on like that all day. They were an odd couple, to say the least, and the origin of their friendship was even more unusual. Henry had been a prisoner on death row with eight weeks to live when Jack became his lawyer. Eight weeks later he was a free man. Jack’s wife, Pat, was sick at the time, and she eventually died. Henry had helped Jack through those bad times, and they’d been close friends ever since.
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