by David Grace
“Great, then you’re buying us dinner,” Kudlacik told him. “And I pick the place.”
Virgil and Kudlacik ordered steaks. Denny went with the fish.
“Did the docs say when you’ll be able to come back to the squad?” Kudlacik asked for the second time just after their meals arrived.
“He already told you that he doesn’t know,” Denny interrupted. “Let him have a few days to get his strength back.”
Kudlacik gave Virgil a sidelong glance and noticed his drooping eyes and the thin sheen of oil coating his skin. “Yeah, sure. Sorry.”
“I’d be back tomorrow if they’d let me. What am I gonna do? Sit in that apartment and watch TV all day?”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Denny said with a little smile.
“It does to me. I need something to do to keep my brain working.” Virgil struggled to suppress a cough.
“I’ll send you a book of crossword puzzles,” Stan volunteered.
“You could take a look at my whodunit if you’re feeling bored,” Denny offered.
“He’s not going to work your case for you. Jeez, Denny!”
Virgil thought about that for a moment then held out his hand. “You got a card you can give me?”
Ivers pulled one out and scribbled something on the back.
“Business phone is on the front. I wrote my private cell on the back.”
“Give me a day to get settled in,” Virgil said, pocketing the card. “I’ll call you when I start to get bored.”
“You got it.”
“He’s supposed to be on medical leave, not working your dead body for you.”
“He can do both,” Denny shot back with a little smile. Kudlacik looked down and angrily began cutting the rest of his steak.
It was almost ten when Denny drove them back to pick up their cars.
“Hang on a minute,” Quinn said after Denny had pulled his Chrysler into the hotel’s loading zone. “I’ve been thinking about our case. Stan, have we followed up on the victim’s families after the crimes?”
“Followed up how? They’re all dead.”
“I mean with the rest of their families – parents, grandparents, siblings. Have we checked with them to find out if anything else, anything unusual, happened in their lives?”
“Anything like what?”
Virgil shook his head in frustration. “I don’t know. I’m grasping at straws here. It’s pretty clear that financially these robberies don’t make a lot of sense. I’m just wondering if they’re tied into the families somehow. Inheritances or maybe the perps got their bank passwords and looted their accounts or made them sign deeds or withdrawal slips before they killed them. Have we checked to see what happened to their real estate and stock portfolios over the month or two after they died?”
“Shit!” was all Stan said and all he needed to say.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The waiting room stank of alcohol overlaid with a faint sweet smell that no one wanted to name. Elaine had begun driving her mother to these twice-weekly appointments a couple of weeks ago and the routine was always the same.
Phyllis would be taken to the treatment room to be given various shots and infusions while Elaine waited with the loved ones of the other patients who were slowly poisoning themselves in the hope that the drugs would kill their cancer before they killed them. Every few minutes the door would open and another patient, pale and sagging with pain and exhaustion, would emerge.
At a quarter after ten a Filipino woman barely five feet tall wheeled Phyllis into the waiting room. When the nurse surrendered the chair she gave Elaine an embarrassed smile as if Phyllis’ discomfort was somehow her fault, then she quickly retreated back through the door.
“How are you, mom?” Elaine asked.
Phyllis closed her eyes and whispered, “Home.”
Elaine got her mother belted into the car and cautiously maneuvered out of the hospital lot.
“When we get home I’ll make you some tea, mom. Would you like that?” Elaine spoke more to fill the silence than anything else. About halfway there Phyllis’ head began to swivel as she tried to focus on the buildings slipping past.
“Where are we?” she asked in a breathy voice.
“We’re on Stateland, almost home.”
“All your father’s fault,” Phyllis muttered, a constant refrain when she was exhausted and reeling from the drugs.
“I know mom.”
“He never loved us, you know that don’t you?” Phyllis said as if talking in her sleep.
“I know mom,” Elaine repeated without even thinking about it.
“You’re lucky I got you away from him.”
“I know mom.”
“Big-time policeman. He thought he was so smart, but he never found us.”
Found us?
“Wait, you said he was dead,” Elaine said glancing across the seat. Phyllis’ head had slipped back against the window and her eyelids were fluttering. A thin line of saliva dripped from the corner of her mouth and Phyllis drew a shaky palm across her chin.
“He’s dead to me. Dead. Dead. Dead,” she said and smiled.
“Was dad looking for us? Is he still looking for us?”
“Don’t worry. He gave up years ago. He never cared. Never.” The last syllable was drawn out then slipped away as Phyllis’ head lolled to one side and she drifted into sleep.
“Mom. Mom! Wake up! Is dad alive or not?”
Phyllis’ eyelids fluttered once then drooped again.
“He never loved you. Don’t worry. I saved you,” Phyllis said in a whispery voice then her lids closed and she began to snore.
Elaine stared at her mother then slammed on the brakes an instant before she smashed into a truck. Shaking, she pulled into a shabby strip mall and tried to think.
Is dad alive? Was his death all a lie? What about the drug dealers who were supposed to have killed him and who were after us? Were they a lie too? What did she mean about dad never loving me?
Phyllis was snoring softly, and Elaine half extended her arm to shake her awake, then pulled back.
Have the drugs so addled mom’s brain that she’s lost track of time or was everything she told me about dad a lie? If it was, then what? What should I do? What can I do?
Elaine stared at her mother, but, eyes closed, Phyllis slept on.
Chapter Thirty
Virgil’s sleep was fitful and punctuated by night sweats and menacing dreams. Flames reached for him; ropes of smoke snared his arms. In the background were sirens and yells. Finally, a little before six a.m. he staggered into the shower and tried to lose himself in the pounding water and steam. He spent another hour buying Kleenex, towels, shampoo and the other random things that came with a hotel room but weren’t provided with a furnished apartment. By ten-thirty he had unpacked and stocked the apartment and was trying to figure out what to do next. He stared at his laptop but couldn’t bring himself to endure the frustration of spending more fruitless hours searching for Nicole. He found himself fingering Denny Ivers’ card.
“Do you still want me to take a look at your Limping Man file?” he asked when Denny picked up the phone.
“Bored already? You bet.”
“OK,” Virgil said, looking at his watch, “I can be at your office in about half an hour.”
“Let’s do this the easy way. I’ll give you the case number and my password. Your apartment’s got Internet access, right?”
“Not the fastest, but yeah, it works.”
“OK, let me know when you’re ready to write down the password.”
Virgil got himself another cup of coffee and ten minutes later he was ready to log in.
* * *
Novi, Michigan sat at the twisted intersection of Interstates 96, 275, 75 and Michigan 5, a tangle of roads that suited Richard Alvin Yellen perfectly. He paused at a stop sign on Twelve Mile Road and mentally flipped a coin which way to go. He’d spent almost an hour prowling the Twelve Oaks Mall but it didn�
�t feel right. He’d picked the place because with a Macy’s, a Nordstrom’s and a Lord & Taylor he figured it would be filled with easy-target high-income soccer-moms. And it was, but nothing else felt right. The mall cops paid too much attention to him and the clerks looked at him like he was a bug, stuck-up bitches!
Was it his shoes? No, he told himself. Half the men in the place were wearing sneakers. Sure, maybe they were fancy, hundred-and-fifty-dollar Nike’s instead of his ten-dollar Belmars from Walmart, but that was no excuse to treat him like he had a disease. He saw it in the way they looked at him. He knew what they were thinking: low-class white-trash loser. Ten dollar haircut, ten dollar shoes, Chinese watch with a plastic band. He doesn’t belong here. What’s he doing hanging around someplace where successful people shop?
Fine! he thought. I’ll leave, but I’ll be back.
On the way out he spotted a Mercedes S350 blocked from the security cameras by a shiny new Town & Country van. Impulsively, he pulled in next to it just long enough to slim-jim the door then pop the trunk. A small black bag with lots of zippers lay in the corner. He grabbed it and was heading for the exit less than half a minute after he had parked. Driving one-handed he managed a quick peek inside the bag. A Nikon D750 with extra lenses.
Jackpot! he thought. I can get five, six hundred for it easy. The bastard probably won’t even know it’s missing until tonight. So, where to next?
He checked the map. Not one of those Google things but a real map which always made more sense to him. West on the 96 was Brighton. He liked the sound of it. It sounded rich and quiet and full of holier-than-thou uptight assholes who deserved to be robbed.
He pulled onto the westbound ramp and, as usual, it took the VW Transporter forever to get up to speed, which again started him thinking about getting a newer vehicle, maybe a Honda Odyssey or a Kia Sedona, except that they both had windows and he didn’t want anybody to be able to see inside.
Sure, he could block them off, tape black garbage-can plastic bags over them, but people would notice that right off, and they would remember it. He’d removed all the emblems from his 2000 T4 and nine out of ten people didn’t even know what it was, just an anonymous black commercial van, and that was just the way he wanted it. Maybe if he made a big score he’d get something a little faster, maybe a Chevy. What was that, the Express?
It was late afternoon when he exited the 96. He spent twenty minutes cruising the town, getting a feel for it, and he liked what he saw. Clean, quiet, not a lot of cops, good old-fashioned white-bread suburbia full of assholes who figured that they deserved a perfect life and that nothing bad could happen to them here.
He pulled into the lot in front of a Kroger and lazily pushed a cart through the aisles. He noticed her right off. About forty with a lot of jewelry and a pinched expression on her face as if everybody needed to get out of her way.
He got in line ahead of her and paid cash for a loaf of white bread and a package of sliced ham. She used a fancy charcoal gray VISA, which was a good sign, though he almost never used stolen credit cards because they were too easy to trace and the ATMs all had cameras.
He waited outside and followed her through the rows of parked cars. He’d paid attention to what she bought – Weight Watchers and Stouffer’s frozen entrees, the kinds of things a busy woman who lives alone might eat. She got into a silver 7 series Beemer. Real estate broker? Lawyer? he wondered.
He hurried over to his van as fast as he was able, his left leg hurting, his limp becoming more pronounced with each step. He thought again of the bastard who had wrecked his knee and smiled at the memory of how he’d fixed him, fixed him good.
Yellen followed her through the end-of-day traffic and watched her pull into an upscale house on a large lot. The lights only came on after she entered which told him that he had probably guessed right about her living alone. He figured he’d come back after it was full dark and cut his way through one of the back windows. Then he’d see what he could see.
He cruised past the house, grabbed some burgers at the takeout window and ate then in his van. By the time he returned to her neighborhood it was almost full dark. All he needed was someplace nearby where he could stash the van and— Who the hell is that? he muttered when an Audi turned in front of him and pulled into her driveway. He slowed just long enough to see her open the front door and give the male driver a big hug.
Fuck! he thought, and set off in search of some quiet place where he could park his van and sleep away the night. Tomorrow was another day.
Chapter Thirty-One
It didn’t take Virgil long to skim through the file Denny Ivers sent over. The victim, Dale Atherton, was a twenty-three-year-old male, hit in the head with a blunt object, probably a piece of rebar, then stabbed several times after he was down. His money, watch and phone were missing. The killer hadn’t taken his credit cards or ID. No prints, no fibers, no witnesses.
A killing of opportunity, Virgil thought. Nobody plans to murder someone with a rusted steel rod. That meant that the killer and the victim probably didn’t know each other which meant there was nothing in the victim’s life that would provide any clues to the murderer’s identity.
A search of the neighborhood turned up a few passing videos of the victim but he was alone. Certainly, no one appeared on any of the recordings with the words “Psycho Killer” tattooed on his, or her, forehead.
Virgil stood and a sudden jolt shot through his chest. He hunched over and put his hand out to steady himself. He paused there for half a minute, eyes closed, listening to his breath wheeze in and out until, slowly, the burning in his lungs died away. He straightened up and shakily made his way to the kitchen for a glass of juice. The clock on the stove read a quarter to four. He looked around the empty apartment and thought, Now what? For lack of any better plan he returned to the computer and ran an NCIC search for the phrase “limping man.” Nine case numbers, all still technically open, appeared.
Virgil opened them one-by-one in the order listed. They were all different and all the same. The victims were all over the map – as young as sixteen and as old as sixty-two. Male, female, black, white, and Hispanic. Some had been hit in the back of the head, some in the front. One had a torn diaphragm and another a shattered knee. Most had been stabbed but a couple had been strangled.
In the narrow sense there was no signature, but when you stood back from the crimes an overall pattern began to emerge: a random encounter between the victim and the killer; the victim is incapacitated by blunt force from a weapon of opportunity, a rock, a two-by-four, a piece of rebar; after he, or she, is down the victim is either stabbed or strangled; the stolen property is limited to cash, jewelry and cell phones. In four of the cases valuables that were supposed to be in the victims’ vehicles – an iPad, a laptop, a camera and gun – were missing, but the vehicles themselves weren’t taken.
All this told Virgil that the killer, if it was the same person and not nine different people, somehow encountered the victims and for some unknown reason decided to kill them. He ambushed them, murdered them, took whatever they had that was easily convertible into cash and left in his own vehicle. Three of the female victims were sexually assaulted but no semen was left behind which meant he used a condom.
He was careful and either reasonably smart or very experienced. He never took vehicles or credit cards, both of which could be traced back to him. In each case the batteries had been removed from the victims’ cell phones and laptops so that the phone could not be traced via GPS. None of the phones, laptops or jewelry had been recovered from pawn shops or found on eBay. To Virgil, all that meant that the doer was no kid looking for easy money so he could score drugs. Virgil figured the perp was over thirty maybe over forty. Given the varied locations, he wasn’t an organized guy with a home and a job.
Virgil charted the dates, the days of the week, and the times of the killings and they also appeared to have no pattern. Serial killers enjoyed the hunt and the crime, taking a victim, then remembering
it, then thinking about the next killing, planning it, then doing it again. They tended to have semi-regular intervals between kills, time frames that often accelerated as it became harder and harder for them to reach the desired level of excitement. This guy’s crimes were nothing like that. The periods between them were apparently random, varying from days to months with no pattern of acceleration or deceleration.
What was he then? Virgil asked himself. A drifter, male, thirties or forties, not physically imposing, a back-stabber not a fighter, someone who appeared non-threatening, angry, reasonably smart but probably poorly educated, with a low sex drive or one that had been sublimated from sexual release through intercourse to satisfaction through killing, a sociopath with some kind of a trigger that caused him to kill. Given the random victimology Virgil had no idea what that trigger might be.
None of which did him the slightest good in actually identifying the killer, leastwise giving Virgil a clue about how to find him. Quinn looked up from his notes and the screen seemed to waver as if seen through warped glass. He blinked and closed his eyes and the room appeared to dip.
“Not as over our little disaster as you thought, are you, Virgil?” a woman’s voice whispered from behind him.
Virgil spun around and the movement triggered a pain like a ragged tearing in his chest. Janet stood in front of him, her feet seeming to float a quarter of an inch above the floor.
“Hey, partner. Miss me?” The words were slightly out of sync with the movement of her lips.
“Janet,” he tried to say but her name came out as a whispered hiss.
“That doctor said you might have a few hallucinations,” Janet said, smiling. “Here I am.”
Virgil shut his eyes for a count of two, but she was still there when he opened them again, except that now he noticed that this was not the Janet of a few days ago. This was the Janet from their time in the Marshals, almost ten years younger, with longer hair and that lopsided smile she used to give him when he did his impression of their old boss complaining about their reports.