by Robert Ellis
“You need to meet someone before Dr. Westbrook gets started.”
He nodded and followed her down the hall to a large corner office. Ken Doyle was standing by the desk with a man Matt assumed was Wes Rogers.
Doyle smiled. “Glad you made it, Jones. This is Wes Rogers, special agent in charge. I think you’ll like working with him.”
Matt met Rogers’s even gaze and shook his hand.
“Good to meet you, Jones. Welcome to the task force. We’ll get you squared away after the briefing. Sound good?”
Matt nodded. “Thanks.”
Doyle rested his hand on Matt’s shoulder. “Brown gave us an update on your walk through the crime scene, Jones. You’re already paying off dividends, and I’m glad you’re here. Now let’s get down to the Crisis Room.”
Doyle led the way out of the office. As they started down the hall, Matt kept his eyes on Rogers. The truth was that the special agent in charge came off like a forty-five-year-old version of the actor James Earl Jones. His voice was deep and throaty like the actor’s, his complexion on the medium side, and he had those steady eyes that seemed to sweep your way and lock in. He was a big man with a firm handshake. Matt couldn’t help but be impressed by his demeanor and presence, his confidence.
The Crisis Room was around the next corner at the very end of the hallway. Rogers held the door open, and Matt entered and took a quick look around. His first thought was that the Feds had money. Everything appeared to be ultra-modern and high-tech, including the media wall at the head of the room, which housed three massive video monitors. Below the screens a lectern with a lamp had been set on a low built-in stage. More than twenty members of the task force were sitting in chairs, waiting to be briefed by Dr. Westbrook. Behind them Matt counted twenty-four desks pushed together in pairs so that they faced each other. He looked at the laptop computers on the desktops, the matching desk lamps, and the conference room in back enclosed in walls of glass. Everything appeared to be new and up-to-date. Clearly, he wasn’t in an office anywhere near the Hollywood station right now.
“Let’s find a seat,” Brown said.
Matt followed her over to the last row of chairs, gazing at the monitors as they sat down. The video feeds were different on all three. The first screen was switched to a cable news station and muted. On the far right screen, someone had put together a clip that depicted Dr. Baylor’s face as it had been six weeks ago, cut against what he might look like today if he’d made any changes. One shot after the next showed the doctor wearing a moustache, a beard, eyeglasses with different frames, a change in hair color, and a variety of common hats.
Matt found the clip impressive—the Feds had money and they had time—but it was the screen in the middle that grabbed his attention.
The feed was paused and darkened, yet the image still had impact. It was video from the Strattons’ second-floor landing, and Matt couldn’t take his eyes off it. Last night he could only imagine what had happened on the night of the murders. Now, looking at the victims as they were found, everything changed.
“Their eyes are open,” he whispered.
Brown leaned closer. “Wide-open like they’re still alive. That’s one reason why it went from local to county so quickly. The first responders freaked out.”
Matt nodded slightly, his mind fixated on the center screen. He was wondering how he would have responded had he been the first one to enter the Strattons’ home and discover the crime scene. How anyone would have responded. He looked at the father sitting between his two daughters. The mother staring at her son, and her son gazing back at her. Matt found the image so disturbing that he could feel his skin crawling. The photograph Doyle had shown him in LA had been a wide shot of the entire landing. The victims’ faces had been cast in shadow and stained with blood, the detail lost.
“What’s with the bullet holes?” he said. “When I saw the crime-scene photo, they looked like gunshot wounds. Now they don’t.”
Brown lowered her voice as the overhead lights dimmed. “At some point during the process, Baylor taped over them. We’re not sure why.”
“What kind of tape?”
“Gaffer tape,” she whispered. “They use it in the movies.”
Matt took a deep breath and exhaled. Wes Rogers had just stepped behind the lectern and was testing the microphone. He took a sip of water, covered the mike with his palm, and said something to a man standing in the shadows with Doyle who Matt guessed was Dr. Westbrook. After a brief exchange of words, the special agent in charge was back.
“Before we bring out Dr. Westbrook,” he said, “I’d like to give everyone a brief update. We have a new member of the task force today, LAPD Homicide Detective Matt Jones. We all know his story and what he’s been through. Without Jones’s good work, it could have taken months if not years to put these murders together. He should be a reminder to all of us why we’re here and what we need to accomplish. Oh, and did I mention that Detective Jones received the Medal of Valor? Matt, why don’t you stand up? Everybody, let’s give him a hand.”
Matt nodded and raised a hand to the applause, but his mind was still focused on the gunshot wounds. Why had Baylor taped over them?
Rogers checked his notes. “We’ve got news from the Bureau of Forensic Services,” he said. “A good portion of the semen sample taken from Mrs. Stratton became contaminated by her son’s blood when he was placed on top of her. Everyone at the lab is aware of the problem. A second run is underway as we speak. It’s a smaller sample, but thought to be clean. They’ve promised us a preliminary finding sometime tomorrow. Also, we’ve got a ballistics report. Of the five shots fired, three were through-and-throughs, the slugs mangled beyond any value when they hit the wall. But the last two were soft-tissue strikes retrieved by the medical examiner. They’re in good shape. Details and results will be posted on the web as they come in. Now let’s bring out Dr. Westbrook.”
Everyone in the room applauded one more time as Westbrook stepped over to the lectern and shook Rogers’s hand. Matt had heard about him, but never actually seen him. He wasn’t a very tall man and needed to lower the microphone. Matt guessed that the psychiatrist and profiler was in his midfifties. His face was heavily lined, his black hair on the long side and streaked with gray. But what stood out were his eyes. They may have been dark and the glasses he wore may have been thick, but his eyes sparkled like a pair of headlights in the night. Matt still didn’t understand why a briefing by a profiler was necessary. They already knew who they were looking for. But here it was—
Westbrook loosened his tie and pointed a remote at the first screen on the media wall. The feed switched from the cable news station to a photograph of Baylor’s third known victim, Brooke Anderson, exactly as she had been found on the night of her murder just below the Hollywood sign. Matt had been with the first group on the scene. The girl’s clothing had been removed, her body staked to the ground with her face resting on a mirror. Matt could remember the moment he knelt down beside her body with his flashlight and strained to see her face through all the blood. The mutilation had been hideous, her cheeks bloated, her features so deformed that it looked like she was wearing a mask made of pulp. It was an image that he knew he’d never be able to shake.
Dr. Westbrook tapped the mike with his finger and gazed into the audience.
“In my thirty years as a criminal psychiatrist with the FBI, I have never seen anything quite like the work and terror raised by Dr. George Baylor. We all know who we’re looking for. But after screening the video of the crime scene shot by the Forensic Services Unit here in Pennsylvania, I thought that it was essential for me to convey to you exactly what’s at stake. I thought it was essential that every one of us see the crime scene the way Dr. Baylor wanted it to be seen.”
Westbrook picked up another remote and pointed it at the second video monitor towering over his head. Once the images brightened and began playing, Matt could feel the air in the room deaden.
The victims’ eyes were
open, but it was more than that. Worse than that. Just as Brown had said a few minutes ago, the Strattons didn’t look like they were dead. Instead, they appeared dazed and exhausted. Looking at each other. Watching each other.
The horror of Baylor’s act seemed to reach a fever pitch.
Matt heard Dr. Westbrook begin speaking again. He tried to look at the man, but his eyes rocked back to the video monitor. The camera had moved in and isolated Stratton leaning against the wall with his two daughters. After about ten seconds, the image widened to include Stratton’s wife and son.
“None of us were at the crime scene,” the psychiatrist said in a voice filled with dread. “None of us were there, but let me tell you something—Dr. Baylor won’t stop killing until we lock him up for the end of time, or until he’s dead. Look at these images. Look at the crime scene the way the doctor left it. The way the doctor wanted us to find it. He won’t stop killing because he likes it. The act of raping a victim gives him power. And the act of murder gives him even more power. Now he’s graduated to mass murder. It gives his life purpose. Compare what you’re seeing on the first two screens. Compare and remember that only a few months have gone by between these two murders. The doctor’s lost his precision in favor of size and scope, but he’s still creating a spectacle. The spectacle is as important to him as the kill. He’s using the same theme, going after and punishing an identical target. But now he’s wiping out the target’s entire family. My guess is that he started killing a long time before the murder of Millie Brown. What Detective Jones discovered in LA was what Baylor wanted him to discover. But there are others—there have to be others—a string of murders that no doubt began in his teens. A string of murders we will never hear about. Never know about. But here’s what you need to understand. Except for the fingerprints he left, he doesn’t make mistakes. This man does not panic. He’s methodical. Steady. He wants what he gets, and gets what he wants. What you’re seeing isn’t a meltdown on Baylor’s part. It’s an evolution. A monster, becoming.”
The dread in Westbrook’s voice turned to doom and had a certain shake to it. When he switched off the video, no one moved or said anything. Everyone just sat there with the lights dimmed. Matt glanced at Kate Brown. Her eyes had lost their focus and were turned inward.
CHAPTER 10
Rogers glanced at Matt, then walked around his desk and sat down.
“Close the door, Jones. Take a seat.”
Matt watched the special agent in charge empty the contents from a manila envelope onto his desk.
“Here’s the key to your car. The space number is on the tag. You’ll have to sign this form.” Rogers slid the sheet of paper over and handed Matt a pen. “You’re gonna need the access card Brown gave you last night to get through the gate at street level. You’ll use it again to open the security doors between the garage and the elevators.”
Matt sat back in his seat and watched Rogers slip the paper he’d just signed into a file folder. After setting the folder down, Rogers checked his credenza, spotted a blue three-ring binder, and picked it up.
“You can use the desk across from Brown’s in the Crisis Room. She’ll give you the password to the website. County detectives are keeping a murder book, which is online as well. Here’s a hard copy of what we’ve got so far. It’s up-to-date as of an hour ago.”
Matt took charge of the binder. “I met two agents in LA,” he said. “Jeff Kaplin and Steve Vega. I was wondering where they are.”
Rogers’s eyes rose from the desk and settled on his face. It was a hard look, a dead look that seemed out of place and came without warning.
“Listen, Jones. We need to get something straight. Okay?”
Matt nodded carefully. Something was wrong.
“Your background check,” Rogers said. “You passed, but I’m not sure why. Had it been up to me, you’d still be in LA, and you wouldn’t be wearing that badge.”
“What happened?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
“The woman you call your mother, Julie Clemens. That was her maiden name, right?”
Matt nodded again, still confused, still trying to get a read on a man he barely knew.
“The special agent in Westwood found her death certificate, Jones, but couldn’t locate her birth certificate.”
“That would have been a long time ago. More than fifty years.”
Rogers’s eyes were still drilling him, still searching his face. “The woman you call your aunt, the woman who raised you. Abigail Clemens.”
“Aunt Abby.”
“The same thing is going on with her. We’ve got a death certificate, but no record of her birth. Their pasts aren’t documented, Jones. There’s no history or record that your mother and aunt even existed until they reached the age of twenty-one. We can’t say with any certainty that they were related to each other. We can’t find their parents’ names or anything that comes close to a family tree. On your father’s side, things get even worse. There are two hundred and eleven men in the United States who share your name, one of them quite famous. Have you ever heard of M. Trevor Jones, the New York banker?”
Matt paused a moment, then shook his head slowly. “No,” he said finally.
“Well, he hasn’t heard of you either,” Rogers said. “None of them have, at least the ones we’ve been able to reach. Are you still claiming that you don’t know who your father is?”
Claiming?
Matt became very still, not wanting to show anything on his face. When he spoke, his voice was low, but steady.
“I was a boy when he left. My mother was sick. I don’t understand where this is going.”
“Where it’s going, Jones, is that when I see loose ends like this in someone’s past, I begin to think I’m looking at bullshit. It’s got that vibe of being manufactured and overprocessed.”
“But what you’re talking about happened a long time ago. Records could have been destroyed or misplaced.”
Rogers flashed a mean smile. “Yeah, sure, Jones. Somehow everybody around you winds up getting misplaced. You know, I said those things about you at the briefing because I run this place and that’s what I was expected to say. But you’re Doyle’s project, not mine. I don’t want you here. From the very beginning I thought it was a bad idea. After reviewing your background check this morning, I don’t know who you are or where you came from, and I sure as hell don’t trust you. Do we understand each other, Jones?”
Matt didn’t say anything. He knew that if he spoke, the things he’d say would get him thrown off the case. He still wanted Baylor, no matter how difficult the circumstances might be.
“Do we understand each other?” Rogers repeated.
Matt got up from the chair with the murder book. “What do you want me to say?”
“That you’ll stay out of my way. That if you have anything to contribute, you’ll work through Brown. That if you screw up, you’ll go away.”
Matt gave Rogers a grim look and exhaled. The special agent noticed.
“The last thing I need is attitude, Jones, so wipe it off your face. As far as I’m concerned, your background check is a work in progress. I intend to keep digging until I find out what you’re hiding. Now take the murder book and get out of my office.”
Matt walked out of the room dazed and confused and trying to understand what just happened. His first impression of Wes Rogers, the image he’d formed when they met and shook hands, had been the wrong one. Wes Rogers, special agent in charge of the FBI’s field office in the City of Brotherly Love, was a shithead.
CHAPTER 11
Matt pulled himself together and tried to think it through. He knew full well that the shock he’d just endured had nothing to do with who Rogers turned out to be. It was more about the thoughts he’d dredged to the surface. The memories.
Matt entered the Crisis Room and spotted Brown seated at her desk, typing something on a laptop. Doyle seemed to have taken over the conference room. Matt could see him standing over the long table w
hile leafing through an array of files and speaking with someone on the phone. A TV mounted to the wall at the head of the table was switched to CNN.
Matt crossed the room and sat down at the desk that had been paired off with Brown’s. When she looked at him, her eyes widened.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
She smiled at him. “Were you with Rogers?”
Matt noticed that the laptop on his desk had already been powered up. He could feel Brown’s eyes still on his face.
“What’s the password?” he said. “Rogers told me to ask.”
“You know, he’s not as bad as you might be thinking he is. He gives everybody a hard time. Once you get to know him, he’s a pretty good guy.”
“I’ll bet he is. You got that password?”
She flashed another sarcastic smile his way, then wrote a series of letters and numbers on a pad, ripped the sheet off, and pushed it over. Matt found the FBI’s website and logged in. Then he took a moment and tried to clear his mind and ignore what had just happened in Rogers’s office. It wasn’t easy, but he needed to catch up on the case as quickly as he could.
He found Dr. Baylor’s file, then clicked through the screens until he reached what was essentially a live, digital version of the chronological record in a murder book. When any member of the task force learned something new or had a thought or question that seemed relevant to the investigation, it was added to the record beside the time and date, then stamped with the agent’s electronic signature. For all intents and purposes, this area of the site worked like every other blog on the Internet. Everything about it was fluid, everything current, except in this case, everything was validated and a matter of record.
Matt skimmed through the timeline, surprised by the lack of progress that had been made over the past month and a half. He read through an entry made by Jeff Kaplin and realized that he and Steve Vega had just left New Orleans and were heading back to LA. A tip that Baylor had been staying at Le Pavillon Hotel in the French Quarter had proved fruitless. The doctor had covered his tracks, his trail ice-cold until the Strattons had been found murdered in their home.