No Place to Die

by James L. Thane

  However, while the lieutenant might have been happy, Doyle was anything but. Perhaps it was because Maggie was new to the unit. Perhaps it was because she was a woman. Without question, it had a great deal to do with the color of her skin. But Doyle had simply assumed that Maggie would—and should—have been grateful for the opportunity to break into the squad under his direction.

  The fact that she wasn’t was a huge blow to Doyle’s massive ego, and in the wake of their separation, he pouted like a third grader who’d just been the last kid chosen for somebody’s dodgeball team. He missed no opportunity to needle Maggie and anyone who defended her. And the fact that virtually every other member of the unit had invited Doyle to take his opinions and stuff them up his butt had deterred him not in the slightest.

  Since the split with Maggie, Doyle had been partnered with Bob Riggins, a guy so tolerant and easygoing that, to all appearances, he could have worked in tandem with virtually anyone. But even Riggins was losing patience with Doyle, and the rest of us assumed that it would only be a matter of time before Bob followed Maggie’s trail down the hall to the lieutenant’s office, asking to be relieved of the burden.

  I leaned forward in my chair, waited until Doyle finally met my eyes, and said, “Look, Chris, we’ve got a fuckin’ maniac out there and a missing woman as well, and none of us has time for your usual crap. You need to drop the attitude, pitch in, and do the grunt work along with the rest us. And if you aren’t willing to do that, then go and tell the lieutenant that you need to be reassigned. Because if you won’t, I will.”

  He shot me a look but raised his hands in mock surrender. “Hey, no problem, compadre. I’m more than happy to help out. I just wanted to let you know where I stand.”

  We spent the rest of the day checking phone records, interviewing Karen Collins’s friends and acquaintances, and reinterviewing those of the Thompsons and of Alma Fletcher. But we still found nothing that seemed to connect the growing list of victims in any way.

  Meanwhile, the media had gone into warp drive, exploiting the killings for every last possible ratings point and whipping the public into a frenzy. Not surprisingly, an aroused citizenry demanded an immediate arrest of the killer, along with the rescue and safe return of Beverly Thompson, wherever she might be by now. Reported sightings of Thompson continued to pour into the department from across the state and beyond, but none of the leads had panned out.

  Since we had not yet found anything to connect the victims, I was beginning to fear that perhaps nothing did connect them, which was a very scary thought. If the victims had simply been chosen at random and murdered by some amoral thrill seeker, the difficulties in catching him would be multiplied exponentially, especially if the killer were as careful as this one appeared to be.

  Without some thread winding through the victims’ lives that might suggest a direction in which to search for their common killer, we were left working virtually in the dark. We had no idea why the killer had begun this spree, we had no idea where to look for him, and we had no idea where he might strike next. Most important, we had virtually no hope of capturing him unless he made some stupid mistake and got caught in the act, or unless he bragged about his exploits to the wrong person and someone ratted him out. There was still a small chance that the little physical evidence we had collected at the scenes might point us in the direction of a suspect, but I was not holding out a lot of hope for that, either.

  The one anomaly in the entire case was the fact that the killer had kidnapped Beverly Thompson. In murdering Alma Fletcher and Karen Collins, the killer had apparently taken pains to ensure that his victim would be home alone at the time of the attack. Why had he not done so in the Thompson case?

  Of course we still had no idea which of the Thompsons had been the killer’s target. If Mrs. Thompson was the target, why had the killer struck at a time when her husband was obviously at home?

  It was entirely possible, of course, that David Thompson had been the target and that his wife had simply arrived home at exactly the wrong moment. But if that was the case, why had the killer kidnapped the woman rather than shooting her as well?

  Almost certainly, he had not taken her for the purpose of extorting a ransom out of someone for her safe return. But then, Beverly Thompson was a very attractive woman. It was possible, I suppose, that if she had arrived on the scene unexpectedly, the killer might have made an impulsive decision to abduct her for some sexual purpose. And if that was the case, was he still holding her or had he already killed her and disposed of the body where it had not yet been discovered?

  It was all enormously frustrating. But at this point, there was nothing we could do other than to push the investigation in every direction we could think of, hoping that somewhere, somehow, we would finally get the right tip or discover even a small piece of evidence that would point us in the direction of the clever son of a bitch who was now running us around in circles.

  At eight o’clock on Saturday morning, I climbed the stairs to the Homicide Unit and found Frank Bohac, the chief of police, pacing the floor in front of the lieutenant’s desk. Bohac had been back on the job for only two months following a serious heart attack, and the look on his face suggested that he might be ripe for another. Holding the editorial page of the morning paper in his right hand, he waved me into the office and said, “Have you seen this piece of crap, Richardson?”

  I nodded and he said, “Yeah, well so did the mayor and practically every other asshole who’s got his name on a plaque glued to a door over there at city hall.”

  Looking from me to the lieutenant, he continued, “The mayor called to ream my ass about it, and so I’m over here to ream yours. Where in the hell are we with this mess?”

  “Practically nowhere,” Martin sighed, “unless Sean’s come up with something overnight that I don’t know about.”

  I shook my head. In a voice that conveyed the frustration we were both feeling, the lieutenant said, “Look, Chief, I know that the media is killing us and that you’re under the gun here. But we’re working the case as hard as we can from every angle we can think of. The problem is that so far, we can’t find anything that links the victims in any way, save for the fact that they were all shot with the same gun. We haven’t got a single decent lead to follow, but it sure as hell isn’t for lack of trying.”

  Bohac stopped pacing and perched on a corner of the lieutenant’s desk. He looked briefly to Martin and said, “Are we sure about that?” Turning to me, he said, “Look, Richardson, I understand your personal situation, and I do sympathize. I know you’re going through hell right now. Still, I can’t afford to have the lead detective on this case distracted for any reason, no matter how important. I need somebody who can be focused on the job twenty-four-seven, and given the way the fucking thing is racing out of control, I’m frankly wondering if you should still be the guy.”

  I took a deep breath while he stared me down. “With all due respect, sir, my personal situation has not in any way compromised the way in which I’ve handled this case. The team is working it full out, and it’s got everybody’s undivided attention—mine included. But as the lieutenant says, there’s no discernable pattern to the crimes. There’s no apparent connection among any of the victims, and the guy is leaving us nothing to work with.

  “The one thing we do have,” I said, “is the little physical evidence that we’ve collected at the crime scenes, including some DNA. It’s at least possible that our guy is a prior offender and that his sample will be among the ones that have been analyzed and cataloged into the database. But it isn’t helping that we have to wait our turn over at the lab. If you could order those guys to jump our samples to the head of the line, that would be a huge help.”

  “You think there’s a chance in hell?”

  I shrugged. “We won’t know until we try. But every hour between now and the time the techs get to our samples is one more hour that this asshole is out on the streets.”

  For a long moment, his eyes
bored into mine. Then he sighed. “Yeah, okay. I’ll call over there as soon as I get back to the office and tell them that your case takes precedence over everything else they’re working on. Then we can all get down on our knees and pray that this cocksucker is on file. But either way, you need to show me something here, and you need to do it soon.”

  He pitched the paper into the trash can and rose to leave. As he reached the door, he looked back to the lieutenant. “Keep me up to the minute on this, Russ. And for God’s sake, bring me some good news soon. I’m tired of looking like an incompetent idiot every time some fuckin’ reporter throws a question at me.”

  I left the lieutenant’s office and walked down the hall to find Maggie sitting at her desk, drinking a cup of coffee and reviewing some paperwork. Theoretically, it was her day off as well as mine, but in the middle of an active investigation, there was no such thing as a day off. She was wearing jeans and sporting a Metallica T-shirt, and to look at her, it seemed pretty clear that she hadn’t gotten any more sleep over the last few nights than I had.

  Even so, I noticed that her gym bag had been dropped into the corner of the office and that her hair was still slightly damp from the shower. Obviously she’d sacrificed some time this morning that she might otherwise have spent in the sack so that she could go to the gym and put herself through what was always a very demanding workout. As I dropped into the chair next to her desk, she looked up from the report she was studying and wished me a good morning.

  “Like hell,” I countered. “I just ran into the chief in the lieutenant’s office. He’s got a burr up his ass about our lack of progress on this case, and he’s wondering if the lieutenant shouldn’t assign the lead to somebody else.”

  Maggie sighed heavily and shook her head. “That’s what you get for coming up the front stairs, Richardson. How many fuckin’ times do I have to remind you that if you’d come up the back way like I do, you wouldn’t walk right by the lieutenant’s office and you wouldn’t keep getting your ass in a sling like that.

  “I swear to God, I think you’re learning disabled. But for that matter, if that’s what he’s thinking, then so is the chief. Maybe he could turn the case over to Doyle. Christ, I’ll bet that dickhead can’t even spell Beverly Thompson. And the thought that he might help us find her sometime during this millennium boggles the imagination.”

  “Yeah, you’re no doubt right about that. So what do you have there?”

  “The phone records from the furniture store where Jack Collins works. He told us that immediately after the prospective customer called him at the store saying that he wanted to come in and look at bedroom furniture, Collins called his wife to tell her that he might be late getting home. The call from the store’s number to the Collins home was made at eight thirty-four. Three minutes before that, there’s a call to the store from a number that goes back to a gas station/ convenience store on Glendale Avenue. That’s gotta be the call from the alleged customer. I was thinking that we should get over there with an evidence tech and have him dust the phone and the area around it. I know the chances are between slim and fuckin’ none, but we might just get lucky and raise some useful prints.”

  An hour later, we were standing outside of a Circle K convenience store as Dick Holmes, the evidence tech, dusted the area around the phone that was attached to the outside wall of the building. “I sure as hell hope you don’t have your expectations set too high here,” Holmes said. “You know I’m going to raise about forty different sets of prints from this phone, and the chances that we’ll be able to identify any of them are around one in a million.”

  “We know that,” Maggie countered. “But even at those odds, it’s worth the effort.”

  I poked Maggie’s arm with my elbow and directed her attention to a video camera that was mounted on a light pole in the parking lot and aimed at the front of the store. She looked up at the camera and said, “We couldn’t get that lucky, Sean. Keep your fingers crossed.”

  Leaving Holmes to go about his business, we walked into the store and asked to see the person in charge. A Middle Eastern man of indeterminate age was on duty behind the counter and indicated that he was the manager. We flashed our shields and asked him how long he kept the tapes from his video surveillance cameras.

  “We keep them for a week,” he said, with no accent whatsoever. “Then we use them over again.”

  “Great,” I replied. Pointing back at the camera outside, I said, “We’d like to see the tapes from that camera for last Thursday night.”

  “Should I ask if you have a warrant?”

  “No, you shouldn’t,” I replied. “You should just cooperate like a good citizen and volunteer the tapes. And you should probably also stop wasting so much time watching mindless cop shows on television.”

  The guy shrugged. “Okay. Watch the counter for a minute. If a customer should accidentally wander in here, tell him I’ll be right back.”

  With that, he locked the register, stepped out from behind the counter, and disappeared through a door at the back of the store. A couple of minutes later, he returned and handed me three videotapes. “These are the tapes from all three cameras from six P.M. last Thursday night to six A.M. on Friday morning. But I don’t know what you think you’re going to see on them. If I can trust my night manager—which I don’t—we sold about six hundred dollars’ worth of gas and miscellaneous crap that night, and nothing out of the ordinary happened at all.”

  We wrote the manager a receipt and promised to see that the videos were returned when we finished with them. The guy handed them over and shot me a look, suggesting that he had little more confidence in that assurance than he apparently did in his night manager.

  Back at the department, Maggie grabbed a cup of coffee. I dug a Coke out of the small refrigerator in my office, and we settled into the conference room to look at the tapes, beginning with the one from the outside camera.

  The call to the furniture store had been made at 8:32 on Thursday evening. A running clock was embedded in the videotape and I fast-forwarded to 8:25. We started watching the tape at regular speed, and just as the clock hit 8:31, a man in a battered cowboy hat walked directly under the camera’s position and stepped up to the phone. He was wearing jeans and a jacket with the collar turned up, but in the black-and-white video, it was impossible to determine the jacket’s color, which looked to be somewhere in the neighborhood between black and navy blue.

  With his back to the camera, the guy picked up the receiver and plugged two coins into the phone. He dialed a number, then lifted the receiver to his left ear.

  For the next two minutes and twelve seconds, Maggie and I stared intently at the screen, willing the man at the phone to turn, even slightly, so as to expose his face to the camera. Ninety seconds into the call, Maggie pounded a fist onto the table. “Come on, you asshole. Give us a look!”

  Despite Maggie’s encouragement, the guy remained stock-still with his head down, looking in the direction of his feet. He then hung up the phone, pulled a handkerchief from the right-hand pocket of his jacket, and wiped down the receiver. Still using the handkerchief, he returned the receiver to the phone, then turned and walked away from the phone box, staring intently at the ground ahead of him.

  Through it all, the guy never once looked in the direction of the camera to allow us even a partial glimpse of his face. The cowboy hat was pulled down low over his eyes, and as he walked away from the phone, we couldn’t even see his chin, let alone any other distinguishing features. Without much hope, Maggie and I looked at the other two tapes, but neither of them allowed a view of the phone from inside the store, and so in the end all we knew was that our caller—and prospective killer—was a white male who appeared to be of average height. The bulky jacket he was wearing made it impossible to make an educated guess at his weight; we could tell only that the guy was not obese.

  We ran the tape again, in slow motion this time, but saw nothing more than we had at regular speed. As I rewound the tape, Ma
ggie shook her head and said, “Shit! Is this guy that good, or is he just fuckin’ lucky? We’ve got the bastard right there in front of our eyes, but he gives us absolutely nothing. He could be any one of a million guys.”

  “I know, Maggs,” I sighed. “Jesus, you’d think we could catch one decent break in this goddamn case. But we’re not gonna get him from this.”

  I called Dick Holmes and told him that he needn’t bother sorting through and trying to identify the prints he’d gotten from the phone. Maggie and I then decided to chase down a couple of leads that had come in on the tip line. We were walking down the hall, headed for the stairs, when Chris Doyle sauntered out of the conference room with a cup of coffee in one hand and a half-eaten sandwich in the other. He grinned at Maggie and pointed his sandwich in the direction of her T-shirt. “Used to a terrific band,” he said. “But the last CD was a pale imitation of their earlier work.”

  Maggie shook her head. “Let me guess, Doyle. The music critic for Rolling Stone just died and Jann Wenner was so desperate that he gave you the job?”

  Doyle laughed. “Believe me, sweetheart, he could do a helluva lot worse.” Turning to me, he said, “Where are you whiz kids off to?”

  “We’re checking out a couple of tips from the hotline,” I replied. “How are your interviews coming?”

  Doyle took a bite out of the sandwich. Trying to talk around the food in his mouth, he said, “I’m still talking to Collins’s friends and neighbors, but none of them knows a fuckin’ thing. I’m just spinning my wheels.”

  “Well, stay on it,” I said. “This case is going to break somewhere, and you never know who’s going to have the key piece of information that will finally send us in the right direction.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about me,” he replied sarcastically. “Once I’ve finished my lunch, I’ll be back out there giving this case a hundred and twenty percent of my time and effort, just like always.”